[inaudible conversations] if i could have everybodys attention we would like to get started. I am brian anderson, editor of city journal and i want to welcome you on behalf of the Manhattan Institute. It is with pleasure that i introduce john tierney, a value contributing editor of the journal and coauthor of the fascinating and useful new book the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it. It is on sale outside the room here. John has long been one of the nations leading voices on the intersection of science and Public Policy and make no mistake, however calmly, reasonably expressed, his is a very contrary and voice. Ons New York Times column the big city which ran from the mid90s until 2002 that made me a fan of his work, he took on any number of prevailing miss from the efficacy of rent control to the root causes of homelessness to environmental policy. One remarkable column was born from johns irritation that Rosie Odonnells ruling was public or schism of Rudy Giulianis use of Law Enforcement to get the homeless off of new york city sidewalks in the 90s, how would the wealthy new york suburb deal with a similar problem. He let his beard grow a few days, didnt shower and dressed himself up in dirty clothes and worn parka and headed up to nyack where he sat on a sidewalk in front of odonnells mention. Within minutes, of course, Security Guard was aggressively confronting him asking him to move along or threatening him to move along and the cops arrived and he wound up being taken to the station. It proved a sort of elite hypocrisy which we now call virtue signaling. Another loose fact, recycling is garbage, whose title captures its provocative argument. Both the record for the most hate mail ever generated by a New York Times article. [applause] johns journalism has appeared not just in the times but in the wall street journal, the atlantic, new york, Washington Post and many other publications. John has continued to illuminate and enrage, writing about among other things the counter productivity of anti v va[ping drug measures, the left is waging war on science in the latest issue, a piece that is guaranteed to drive everybody in the same, why plastic bags are better for the environment than all of the alternatives. This piece like his other work shows his talent for exploding widely accepted views as fallacies. The john stossel broadcasting city journal video based on johns essay has had more than 2 million views since we released them. s new book the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it focuses on willpower in which it sold an impressive 350,000 copies, released a couple years ago. It is so popular you can find it at airports. Has established or will be true soon of the the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it the previous book explored the biological and psychological aspects of human will. The new book it is useful studies negativity bias. The human propensity to focus on unpleasant events, emotions and bad news, the reason one word of criticism can seem more powerful than a paragraph of praise. As john and roy argue the irrational side human nature has its uses but it can be crippling and lead to in a couple actions in life and in Public Policy. The good news is it can be mastered and the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it shows how but i dont want to anticipate johns talk so i give you john tierney. [applause] thanks very much. Is this good . Thank you for those kind words and great working with you. I want to thank the Manhattan Institute for holding this lunch and Everything Else they have done. When i started writing bigcity columns for the New York Times i found this was the one voice of sanity on urban policy and i have always given city journal and the Manhattan Institute the lions share of credit for turning around new york city. Im so impressed with them, i think they will save us from the current mayor. Today i would like to suggest how to save the rest of the world. A mission that involves the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it is about a fundamental fact of life that is just now becoming clear to scientists. It is the universal tendency of bad events and bad emotions to affect us more strongly than good ones. In short, bad is stronger than good. That was the title of a famous paper by my coauthor, the social psychologist and since he published it there have been hundreds of studies looking at the impact on all parts of our life and in the book, we wrote this book to show people how to deal with it and how this negativity bias in our brains affects romantic relationships, parenting, education, religion, business, mass media, social media and just about Everything Else. We argue the negativity effect underlies the most important problem in politics and Public Policy, the problem that has bothered me since i got my first inkling of it in one of my first jobs in journalism when i was a summer intern at the philadelphia bulletin. As the low man on the totem pole i got the dread assignment to write the weather story. There was a heatwave in philadelphia that weekend, not exactly an unprecedented phenomenon in july but i had find something new to say about it. There were a lot of philadelphians going to the beach so i called the Police Station at the jersey shore and asked for news from the desk sergeant. There is nothing going on, we have heavy traffic. Is the traffic unusually heavy . And he goes and he goes no. It is always like this on friday. I was just a young reporter, very inexperienced at this point but some primal journalistic instinct told me that this was not the right answer. So i started calling Police Stations asking them is this the worst traffic you have ever seen and they kept telling me know, it is friday night, july is always like this. After half a dozen phone calls, one desk sergeant said to me, i guess it is the worst i have ever seen. It was the guys first week on the job but that didnt matter. I had my lead and my headlines and the story got great play in the paper so i considered it Great Success but i also felt guilty. I knew how sleazy this was. Why did i fabricate this traffic crisis . Why did people want to read this story . I kept wondering about these questions, writing about supposedly crises, population crisis, the Energy Crisis, the cancer epidemic crisis, the recycling crisis. Whenever i looked into them i kept seeing that these were basically grander versions of my beach traffic story, reporters would find some isolated problem and go hunting for some alleged expert who would declare this the moment of a global catastrophe. It didnt matter how often these doomsayers had been wrong before, they kept getting quoted. I kept wondering why do we journalists keep crying wolf and why do people keep listening to us. I never could get a satisfying answer in till i read that is stronger than good. He wrote after previous researchers noticed and had reported people cared more about financial losses than financial gains, a bad First Impression has much more impact than a good First Impression. What gives bad the power in those situations and looked for counterexamples from situations where good was stronger and scoured the research in all kinds of disciplines and to his surprise he couldnt find any counterexamples but by accident almost he stumbled on this major phenomena and that extended into so many fields that no one noticed the overall pattern. Bad was relentlessly stronger than good. A word of criticism had so much more impact than praise. The penalties are more effective in motivating people than prizes. A bad employee has more impact than a good employee. Bad parenting can seriously hurt children but being a really super great parent doesnt make much difference. That is the good news. Be a good enough parent, you dont have to be perfect. The success of marriages depends mainly on not just the good things they do but mainly how spouses deal with negativity and that holds true for other relationships. We pride ourselves on many good things we do for family and friends, going the extra mile for customers and clients but what really matters is what we dont do, avoiding bad is much more important than doing good. You dont get much extra credit for going beyond what you promised that you pay a big price for falling short. In the book we explain how to harness the power of bad when it is useful and how to overcome it when it is not. We offer guidelines like the rule of four which is a rough guideline but pretty useful that it typically takes four good things to overcome one bad thing so if you are late for one meeting you are not going to make up for it by being early the next time. If you say one hurtful thing to your partner you better plan on a lot more than one complement to make up for it. There is an upside of the negativity effect, the power to motivate and teach. You can see this clearly at schools in new york and other cities that have been inspired by educational reform that started at the Manhattan Institute, abigail and stefan your term who had an alternative to everyone gets a trophy for educational assessment, the kind that was causing schools and high schools and colleges, grade schools to inflate grades and illuminate penalties for failure. The reformers started a movement called no excuses schools where both students and teachers pay a price for poor work. Charter schools like success academy, these students come from the poorest neighborhoods in new york city and outscore every School District in the state and it is proof, there are various reasons, they are harnessing the negativity effect, they are using prizes instead of penalties, penalties instead of prizes to motivate kids and kids are learning faster and more. The downside of the negativity effect is its power to warp our perspective and skew our decisions. It leads to what i consider the most prevalent form of addiction which is addiction to safety. This is why football coaches make the same stupid decision week after week. When faced with fourthdown and short the analyst tells them they should go forward but over and over they refuse to go forth, they punt because they are so afraid of failure and so afraid of being blamed for failure. In the book we talk about one High School Coach in arkansas who used he took a rational look at the numbers and made a decision never to punt even on his own 1yard line, fourth and 30, he goes for it and his team wins the state championship year after year. He is still pretty much of an outlier although you may have noticed during the super bowl the Kansas City Chiefs coach did help win the game. I feel confident he must have read our book. These coaches are following the basic strategy we advised for everyone, use your rational brain to overcome the irrational power of bad in your personal and professional life and how you look at the world. By any rational standard we are the luckiest people in history. Every measure of Human Welfare has been dramatically improving except for one, hope. We are lucky but we feel cursed. The healthier and wealthier we become the gloomier our worldview. International surveys, people in the richest countries find the most sadistic, global rates of poverty and hunger and disease and violence have been plummeting the most people in the United States and in europe think they have gotten worse. We are blinded to the progress going on because of the negativity bias and we are bombarded by bad news, by what i call the crisis crisis, the neverending series of hyped threats that leave the public needlessly frightened and angry. Nearly half of americans worry that they or a Family Member will die in a terrorist attack. The actual odds, your saver climbing into your bathtub. Children cant walk by themselves to school because, they cant go to playgrounds by themselves because their parents have been so frightened by stories about stranger danger but the actual risk of a fatal addiction is lower than the risk of being struck by lightning. Apocalyptic predictions have become so common there was one survey of preteen children in america asked what the world would be like when they grew up, but the earth would be like, nearly one out of three of the children said they feared the earth would no longer exist. This was before anyone had ever heard of greta thunberg. There are some real problems in the world is the coronavirus is a new threat but city journal just pointed out in a rare piece that actually offers some perspective the threat from this new virus to americans is minuscule compared to the threat from yearly ordinary flu virus. It is how quickly responding to it. It used to take decades to develop a vaccine. Now they are talking about one in several months. We dont see that progress because of the brains negativity bias. We focus on scare stories and worst Case Scenarios we keep seeing in the news. That is the crisis crisis. It is promoted by journalists, politicians, with the help of academics and activists and other special interests. There is a whole crisis industry, merchants of bad as i call them and you find them on the left and right side of the political spectrum. They start moral panics, stoked fears about new technologies, foreign enemies, drugs, immigrants, environmental threats, whatever will instantly trigger the brains alarm circuits, promote class warfare, tribalism, poison politics, like demagogues. I call the merchants of bad but i dont mean they are in it for money. Many of them are genuinely alarmed. The most effective doomsayers are people who believe their own prophecies. Chicken little was truly convinced that the sky was falling. The issue wasnt her sincerity but her interpretation of this acorn that fell on her head and her plan for dealing with it. She and the other animals sought shelter from the sky crisis by going to the den of the fox who probably made a meal of them. That is the cautionary lesson from that fable and it applies to the crisis crisis. There are a lot of hungry foxes out there. They know just what emmanuel meant, you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Over and over they hyped threats in order to promote their own careers, promote policies that help special interests, the power of Public Officials while causing general harm to the rest of us with a few examples. The Energy Crisis of the 1970s, the fear mongering about Nuclear Power led to policies, the creation of lots more coal power plants and the result is we now have more Carbon Dioxide in the air. In iraq we were so afraid of an imaginary danger, saddams weapons of mass distraction, we fostered the chaos that allowed a real danger to happen, the spread of isis. The last summer muchpublicized depth of people from vaping had nothing to do with nicotine cigarettes like juul but they caused such a panic as put out so much information that most americans have come to believe that these cigarettes are worse than smoking and the result is millions of smokers have been dissuaded from making a switch that could save their lives. What is most i could give examples like the plastic panic, what is most damaging about the crisis crisis is not one thing but cumulative impact, the continual crisis monitoring leads to a condition known as demo sclerosis which the brilliant psychologist mansur olson identified as the greatest obstacle to freedom and prosperity in democratic societies. It is the clogging of the economic arteries by the gradual accumulation of favors and subsidies and regulations that benefit special Interest Groups to slow down Everything Else. As olson said it is death by 1000 cuts. Here in new york city for instance, developers used to be a will to build homes for the middle class and the poor but today they can afford only to build for the affluent because so many regulations and obstacles have built up over the years. The biggest obstacles are the rent control rules which originally passed at the end of world war ii as a temporary measure in response to a housing emergency but after the war ended, after the emergency ended regulations never went away and that is typical of what happens in the crisis crisis. The economist robert higgs documented this in his book crisis and leviathan and he showed how what drives government growth is it expanded during a crisis and when the crisis is over it never shrinks to its former size. That is why i see the crisis crisis as the greatest problem in Public Policy and politics. Im not trying to exploit the negativity effect by telling you it is a brandnew threat to human survival. People have always been vulnerable to crisis monitoring of. The modern barrage of negativity is especially intense, we see a 24 7 on our screens but people have always been vulnerable. In 1980 long before cable news and the web, journalist h l mencken described Public Discourse as a combat of crazes and he diagnosed the fundamental problem in politics. The whole aim of practical politics was to keep the populists alarmed and clamorous to be had to safety by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins most of them imaginary. This is a tough problem that is always going to be with us. The negativity bias is wired into our brains. I dont expect my fellow journalists and other merchants of bad will not put themselves out of business voluntarily but there are ways to deal with it. We propose some policies to reduce the financial prophets of doom and we think the rise of social media offers promising alternatives. Contrary to what you heard social media is less negative than mass media and there is a way we can use that to curate what we see and go on a low bad diet. However you get your news we advise looking at the news today with three principles in mind. Number one, the world will always seem to be in crisis. Number 2, the crisis is never as bad as it sounds. Number 3, the solution could easily make things worse. I would be happy to go into more detail in the queue and a blue i dont want to end on a negative note myself. For all the problems, we really are optimistic for the longterm. We expect the world to keep getting better, we think the earth is still going to exist when kids grow up and we want more people to see that. The negativity effect isnt going away but the more we understand it the more we learn about it, the more capable we become dealing with it. Bad will always be stronger than good but we are confident that good will ultimately prevail as long as enough people buy this book. Thank you. [applause] thank you. We have time for plenty of questions. Why dont i start right here . Identify your self. Steve, is it possible the negativity bias has evolutionary origins . In early man it was very important to be aware of all possible threats, could that be a basis . You are absolutely right. There is a very good adaptive reason the negativity bias evolved. Ancestors who survived on the savanna paid more attention to threats because as we say in the book life has to win every day, death only has to win ones. It is more important to Pay Attention to poisonous berries and enjoy the good ones, to be on the lookout for predators and it still serves a purpose. Bad does teach you more. It motivates you more and it is in lots of places but the comparison we make is it was adaptive on the ancestral savanna to fat not during lean times to survive but when you are surrounded all day by fattening food and junk food it is not so adaptive and that is the situation we are in today, we are surrounded by skilled merchants of bad who figured out good ways to scare us and manipulate us but there are great uses of the bad. One thing we think about in the book is young people are more sensitive to the negativity bias because it is more important when you are younger to learn. As people get older they use natural defenses against bad. We have a chapter called the pollyanna principal. Older people make better decisions because they dont focus so much on the bad, they learn to save are good moments, like nostalgia, to make, to be more positive about life and enjoy it more. This way for the mic. Heather mcdonald, fantastic talk. How do you distinguish between a real crisis and manufactured crisis because clearly in the last 200 years there have been some very real crises, whether it is the rise of anarchy is a more communist ideology, fascism, the Chinese Culture revolution. At the time one might have thought anyone raising alarm about that was exaggerating the threat and this would all go away, some of the things we are worried about today whether it is divisive poisonous identity politics are manufactured or civilization changing. How do you tell . Two ancestor that. One is in general, there is a health problem, the important thing we are running out of energy the way everyone believes in the 70s, the best thing is to look at the biggest picture you can, the longest term, when you look at longterm trends, they have improved. In the 70s, the economist Jillian Simon who looks at longterm Energy Trends everyone said we will run out of oil by 2000, jillian looked at longterm trends and said oil is going to be cheaper in 2000 than it is today. Thats one way to evaluate problems like that. Political problems i would argue things like the cultural revolution or communism, karl marx talks about the crisis of capitalism. He invented this crisis that income inequality, today we see income inequality is a crippling problem we have to deal with. If you look at the data how much inequality there is, how people feel about it you can see the average person under capitalism around the world, life is getting much better. We dont need to drastically reengineer society. We dont need these revolutions to do it. Revolutionaries are the ones who love to look at crises and say we have to completely redo society. The culture revolution, like communism, politics can stop progress. We have this great enrichment the last two centuries but it stops when people discover the crisis of capitalism, we have to throw it out. Why dont we go to the back of the room. Just identify your self. As part of the negativity, political ads all negative, none are positive and yet we still listen to it or going back to the population bomb, one thing that made the worst miscalculations in history but is still getting audiences to listen, how does that happen . In the book we talk about paul ehrlich and john holden who predicted mass famines in the 1980s from overpopulation and food shortage and when famines didnt have any predicted in the 80s by 2020, 1 billion people would be dead from Climate Change. During the nomination hearings, obamas science adviser said it was still a possibility. It is shocking when you look back at what they were proposing they were advocating saying the government has the right and the duty to limit family size. They talked about proposals like when young women reach puberty they should be implanted with a sterilizing capsule that could be removed only with official permission. It is shocking anybody would do that and that is one of the things about the crisis crisis and doomsayers they rarely pay penalties for their mistakes. Holder was wrong about one issue after another, he advocates denying a fundamental human right and we look over because there is a certain codependency between journalists and doomsayers and professional courtesy we extend, we know they were all wrong before but we need their alarmist predictions to make story so we tolerate it. Wait for the mic please. National review. You mentioned the incentive structure for journalists as a reason they might be pushed toward reporting bad news. Is there another incentive at the other end . The pessimistic personalities of the journalists working at the newspaper on eighth avenue might push them to seek out and celebrate bad news . It attracts people to write about bad news, i think it directs people most journalists in the Mainstream Media tend to be liberal and i think liberals tend to want to expand the government and have lots of problems solved. You want to say there is a crisis, you dont want to let the crisis go to waste. There is that incentive. Whether journalists are more just more negative in general, not sure about that. In roy same uss paper they noted psychologists suffered from extreme negativity bias for the First Century of psychology, publish twice as many papers, twice as much space in textbooks to analyzing peoples problems rather than looking at ways for people to become happier. They said just because psychologists are masochists or sadists and enjoy studying problems. Their explanation was the reason psychologists did this was bad is so much stronger than good. It is easier to measure bad events, much more visible and so easier to study them and get significant results. The main reason journalists do it is it is a marketdriven thing, the easiest way to get attention. That is especially true in the mass media because when you are trying to reach a mass audience the easiest way to do that is to appeal to something, this universally motion. We all share the same basic fears of dying, of sickness, of violence. It is easy to appeal to that. The reason i am more hopeful about social media is i talked to george gilder, he was really optimistic. Everyone else was saying the new internet will be so trivial, it will be terrible. He was saying peoples it tends to be negative and prurient because everybody shares those with peoples taste for excellence, cultural achievements, history, science, those interests you can appeal to a mass audience but on facebook you get some groups and on youtube you have things that will appeal to peoples positive interest, the desire to share knowledge. There is some hope there to go with social media. The other thing, social media gets a bad rap for the vitriol that is there, the twitter wars, that does go on but it is not the norm. People on social media Share Positive stories more than they read negative stories, they dont send their friends photographs of School Massacres and they Share Positive stuff. There interesting studies who gets followers on twitter, tweeting positively gets you more followers, positive tweets dont get retweeted as quickly as negative ones, cancel culture wars but they spread more broadly. In that sense there is hope as we have less mass media and more social media there could be less negativity. Stanley right appear. Stanley goldstein, people thinking of buying the book may not by it. They got the whole story. You havent read the best part. I left most of it out. I wanted to pick up on Heather Mcdonalds question about identify early on a real crisis. The world of investment theres a group called contrarians. Everyone selling tobacco stocks buying tobacco stocks and they do pretty well. I wonder how we use your kind of analysis to find out when there is a psychology effect and everyone overreacting, and you sense that is very valuable. Looking at longterm trends, Interesting Research in australia looking at Financial Markets but there are a couple measures peculiar to australia. A couple Economic Indicators that come out twice a month. Someone studied how the stock market reacted and they found the negativity effect. When there is bad news, stocks went down. Good news, they didnt want to go up so people overreact to bad news and there is a gut feeling, the gut fear of doing it. That is one example how you could use it. The other thing, there is the effect that economists study that people hate to take losses so they hold onto a stock too long and it takes someone else to say take the pain, take the loss. People hate to admit that. John stossel. My daughter says to me you keep saying these crises went nowhere but Climate Change is different. You have so many serious people really worried about this one. This one is different. I agree Climate Change is different from things like the Energy Crisis in that the Energy Crisis was something the markets could solve, the price of oil goes up people look for new sources. Climate change is a collective action problem and it is a genuine threat. We should be doing more research on it and looking for ways to get low Carbon Energy and a great example of a crisis crisis because there has been predictions that 1 billion people will be dead by 2020 or the one that we have ten years before the earth is going to you know, it is a genuine threat and im confident that in the long run we will come up with new low Carbon Energy sources and adapt the way we have to and the less carbon we put in the industry the better but the other aspect of it is the foxes who are promoting this crisis, the policies they are promoting are awful. They are basically enriching Sustainable Energy they made the statistics that i have seen that the United States has withdrawn from the paris love to have conferences treaties, creates a lot of work for them but you dont see any impact from these treaties. The United States is reducing Carbon Emissions more than germany is because germany signs treaties that have all the subsidies for green energy but they are behind schedule in the treaties. The us is ahead. The reason is we have not succumbed to the panic of starting the closed Nuclear Power plants which germany has done in the main reason we are reducing emissions, unlike socalled green countries, we have fracking and we are switching to natural gas. We led the world last year in reducing Carbon Emissions. That never gets written about because it doesnt fit the narrative of greens that we have more windmills, windmills are fine to build but they want to make a difference in the long run. We need to get new largescale sources of low Carbon Energy. Most of these policies being promoted are not going to do that. At the moment the only practical ways to reduce Carbon Emissions our Nuclear Power and substituting natural gas for cold. Much of the environmental establishment opposes both of them including Democratic Candidates which is insane. They are not doing anything. Climate change is basically an excuse to adopt other policies they like to reward politically correct companies and push an agenda that is not helping the rest of us. In light of that response, say a bit about the plastic bag issue which is fascinating. Stop shop announced they are banning plastic bags. We are all safe now. The plastic panic goes back to the 70s when people like Barry Commoner who wanted to ban the Plastic Products because they knew they were running out of petroleum so we had to conserve our Precious Petroleum but couldnt waste it on plastic. There were new reasons, clogging drains, doing this and Climate Change came along in the latest thing is plastic in the ocean. It is true there is growing Plastic Waste in the ocean and that is a serious problem but it is not because of our throwaway society. In fact new recycled plastic, you increase the chances that you are putting that plastic in the ocean because contrary to what people think there is no market for recycled plastic. An awful lot of it gets sent to the landfill. Some of it, they are shipping it to asia. It went to china, it is going to malaysia and vietnam. These countries do a better job is terrible diminishing their waste and their the largest source of mismanaged waste to the gets into the ocean. Like the Great Pacific garbage patch, more than half of it comes from fishing boats. We should do a better job stopping fishing boats from littering. Almost all the rest comes from asia and south america and africa. The other aspect about the plastic ban is when you ban Plastic Grocery bags you are increasing carbony shinzo was all the substitutes, paperbacks, tote bags involve more Carbon Emissions, they are much heavier, takes more energy to support them and ship them. I know calculations that San Francisco band Plastic Grocery bags, may have doubled its greenhouse emissions as a result of that. In the piece, one original contribution, people have written some of this before. The explanation for this, you have to go back to the middle ages, when the nobles passed laws about who could wear what, who could use what and these laws were completely ineffective. The mystery among historians is why do they keep passing the laws they never did any good and the answer was it gave these people a great feeling of power, made them feel virtuous, kept commoners in their place. It is the ultimate thing of this plastic, the modern nobility finds plastic packing and telling other people what to do. In the process they are making life more inconvenient and are hurting the environment. Might have time for one or two more questions, right over here. I fully by your point that is really powerful but isnt there a countervailing force . We have a strong urge to survive, make sure we dont die in most cases and there is optimism in there, that life is good, life is worth living and therefore may be we overemphasize the dangers a bit, but it is for a good reason. That is a great point. There are tendencies, the there are more words for negative things like pain than there are for pleasure. We use positive words more often to boost our spirits. There is also a phenomenon called the optimism bias. The way it works, when we look at the outside world, the negativity effect rules, you overestimate dangers, walk into a room and focus on the hostile face rather than the smiling face, pay more attention to criticism and praise but we also have the opposite bias when we look inward, people overestimate their own virtues. There is a hilarious study where they surveyed people serving time in the penitentiary for crimes and ask them to rate themselves on various things, their moral standards, selfcontrol, consideration for others and they rated themselves above average on every single trait except one and that was the trait of being lawabiding. On that they rated themselves only average. That is the optimism bias that enables us to go forward, people have that feeling i know that most businesses fail but mine is going to work and that does enable us to go forward but this optimism bias is part of the crisis crisis because we overestimate the dangers. The war in iraq and world war i, they cited roys paper explaining world war i, the germans overestimated the threat from russia the way we overestimate the threat from saddam. We also overestimated our own ability to install a democratic government so you get a combination of hyping the threat and overestimating your capacity to deal with it and it makes for disaster. Last question. Listening to your talk i cant help wondering if this addiction to crisis mentality explains the recent halftime super bowl show and by that i mean while i naively expected a celebration of america and its freedom, thank you to the military, what we witnessed was a semipornographic show of debauchery and i didnt know what the connection was to the super bowl. I cant help but think your theory about the negativity and the decline and despair is what we are witnessing on a cultural level. There is a tendency for the cultural elite today to be down on america and western civilization and morality and to celebrate deviancy in that sense. The other thing, the potshots at the super bowl is another basic mass appeal like negativity, people are responding to that. I think we saw that. Thank you very much, john tierney, thank you all for coming. The book, the power of bad how the negativity effect rules us and how we can rule it, is available outside. You will enjoy it. [inaudible conversations] television has changed since cspan began 41 years ago but our Mission Continues to provide an unfiltered view of government. We brought you primary election coverage, the president ial impeachment process, and now the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch cspan public this programming on television, online or listen on our free radio apps and be part of the conversation through the daily Washington Journal Program or through our social media feed. Cspan created by private industry. Americas Cable Television comedy is a Public Service and brought you today by your television provider. Good evening. Im andrew, the director of the scowcrof director of the Scowcroft Institute of International Affairs at the bush school of government here at texas a m university. I would like to welcome ourve special event this evening with kim ghattas who is going to speak on a recent book, black wave saudi arabia, iran, and the fortyyear rivalry that unraveled culture, religion, and collective memory in the middle east i had to suspect the week in reading it. I didnt quite get through it but i t couldnt put it down, it was oh interesting. If you havent read afters