Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20240622

And we talk to Orville Schell Steve Rattner and james fallows. The real problem is not so much that its going to affect the economy directly although it will have a ripple affect. But that it is kind of dissonance in terms of the party and the governments ability to manage things which of course they pretend to do in a rather perfect manner. So here is an example of something which should not be managed cannot be managed and yet they have tried to manage it and by failing, which i think it comes increasingly clear they have failed it makes them look less able less omnipotent and less in control. We conclude this evening with yuri milner russian entrepreneur and tech investor and is effort to reward science tests and publicize their efforts. This is the biggest priz in the world. We give it in three categories mathematics fisks and life sciencesment we give eight prizes every year and theres 24 million. There is probably more than all other academic prizes combined. And the idea behind this prize is to create a platform for the best minds in the world to become celebrities of sorts. Its not a secret that we dont celebrate intellectual achievement. If you take top 100 celebrities, there will be not one scientist there. And this is not where you want the mankind to be to have a billion dollars of revolution, years of evolution. Rose tom brady the chinese stock market and yuri milner when we continue. Funding for carlie rose is provided by american express. Additional funding provided by and by bloomberg a provider of multimedia news and Information Services worldwide. From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose we begin this evening with the new england patriots. They struck back today in response to ongoing deflategate scandal. Team owner robert kraft add messed the media in a press conference this morning. The decision handed down by the league yesterday is unfathomable to me. I want to apologize to the fans of the new england patriots. And tom brady. I was wrong to put my faith in the league. Rose tom brady also spoke out in a same posted on his Facebook Page am he expressed disappointment in the leagues reluctance to eliminate or reduce his suspension and declared there is no smoking fun am joining me is ken bellson, an nfl writer for the new york times. He has been reporting extensively on this story including a frontpage story in todays new york times. I begin with what happened today. Today we have moved into the angst part of this. We have robert kraft, one of the most powerful owners in the league striking back at the officials. Rose that was strong language. He was said to have great love and affection an understand stood what the league had meant to his own success with the patriots. Yes, an he had gone through his venting at the time of the super bowl holding a very unusual press conference where he called the league out for leaking information. Then he fell on his sword after they were finned a Million Dollars an said i wont pursue it any further. And now the decision on tom brady has come down and he is once again back front and center criticizing the league. Thats very unusual. We havent seen the likes of this since perhaps al davis when he ran the oakland raiders. Thats unusual. Tom brady posting on his Facebook Page his own disappointment. I think this case has turned into a much bigger media circus than you typically see. And all sides weighing in. And now weve moved i think essentially this afternoon with the Players Association filing their own grievances in the minnesota federal court. Were moving into the lawyers taking over. Theres been some jurisdiction shopping, i assume. Very much. The league yesterday trying to preempt the union, filed in the Southern District of new york. And the Players Association went to minnesota which is generally perceived to be friendly to labor or union. Rose okay, so weve got lawsuits in play. Weve got tom brady basically giving a defense saying i did this. I did this. I tried to cooperate this way. A whole litany of things that he thinks are exculpating if his own defense. Right. Rose exculpatory evidence. Yes, the league excuse me the union on his behalf will argue that there is nothing in the agreement this collective Bargaining Agreement that says you shall get four games with tampering with footballs. So they say goodell was making this up. How can you have an agreement where the player in question doesnt know what the penalty is and then suddenly be penalized for it. Rose the same is true whether you are attacking your wife in an elevator i assume. Yes. Well thats a slightly different thats a criminal investigation. And that reflects poorly on the league. Rose but there is nothing in whiched league says if you do this some criminal action against your spouse, that you will be suspended for these number of games or whatever. Yes. And thats why Roger Goodell came out last summer after the uproar of rea rice getting two games and said for from now on anybody who commits Domestic Violence will get six games on first offense. The so now the league is trying to patch together its personal conduct policy as it goes along. And they will argue that that is fine Going Forward but tom brady shouldnt have been penalized the four games for a penalty that didnt exist at the time. Or at the very least it should have been a fine as there are fines for other things like putting stick dum on your hands and dpraes on your uniforms, those kinds of violations which he would say would be equivalent. Rose and that might have happened if he hadnt immediately began to incooperate and didnt destroy his cell phone perhaps they would have been more lenient. That is the supposition, yeah, that if they had shown some bend, if you will some remorse, perhaps of at least public remorse that yes, i didnt know it was a penalty but i will take responsibility for it. That the commissioner would have had a little more leeway to go easy on them in this case. Rose the commissioners actions are all about protecting the league. And as well they should be. The integrity of the game as they like to say is paramount. Because once people think that there is cheating going on it undercuts the belief ability of it. I mean many people think spit balls have been used for years. All sorts of other shenanigans. In fact even deflating footballs has been around awhile too. But i think at that level the commissioner does have to get involved. Whether its a four game suspension is another question. Rose has there been a response by the league to what robert kraft said . Not yet. I think theyre giving him space to say what he wants to say. And what are they going to say. They will say what they said yesterday. Well stand by the commissioners statement and fine. Rose what about bill belichick. Weighs there with robert kraft. Bill belichick pulled what he normally does which si dont want to talk about it. Appropriate skouls. It was notable that he was wearing a hoodie on a day when it was approaching a hundred degrees. But no he held his ground and just said look its been talked about by other people. I think hes exhausted by it. And obviously when your best player is being sidelined its got to be troublesome for him. But i think hes leafing it the ownership now and the lawyers. Rose what is likely to happen in the courts. The first thing is they have to decide where to try this, you have jurisdictional issues. In sther ree you could have both courts making parallel decisions. Even if minnesota judge takes it on there and agrees to hear the case, then you have a question of can the union get an injunction to stop the suspension while the league while all the legal elements play out. Because in a couple of weeks brady will be suspended for the first game of the season. So you can get into this weird scenario where he might not be playing and he might win in court. Right. So that will be their first step i would assume. So therefore you have also a Relationship Issue here between an owner and Roger Goodell. Is this permanently impaired or is this a case where an owner and a commissioner who in fact works for him. Yeah, its an interesting theres layers here because robert kraft was instrumental in having Roger Goodell chosen may back when. And rose to his defense when he was under fire. During the ray rice affair. Hes on the broadcast committee which is considered the most powerful committee in the nfl amongst the owners. So he is not just any owner. Also hes the owner of the super bowl champions, four of them, yes. Soess not a ran done random one off owner, he is 20 plus years in charge of his team. You have that, you have the personal relationship which theyve had for a very long time it is a bit of a fatherson relationship, if you will and that maybe goodell is spurning his. Rose so you think its impaired or is it simply too men who agree to disagree . No, i think its rough around the edges now. Rose it may suggest that. The body language and the literal language to have an owner get on tv and say im mistaken for trusting the league to do the right thing is pretty strong language. Rose did tom brady make any points that are worth listening to in his case that he put forward on his Facebook Page. Yeah, one the things he said was basically the cell phone records the cell phone destruction issue is a lark. That they already had the Text Messages from the other people involved in the investigation. So they didnt really need it anyway. The fact that it was destroyed is a red herring. Rose in other words they had all the Text Messages on the receiving end so they didnt need them from the passer. Right. And therefore really what they were after was him admitting guilt. Which they could have asked him. But so he said the destruction of the phone which they have listed on the front of the ruling yesterday was really just a way to make him look guilty yet again. Rose does very a case. He has a case on the issue of whether the tampering is allowable, an allowable issue in the cba. That issue, i think is a sidebar issue. I think judges dont necessarily get into the nittygritty of the ruling. They get into whether the arbitrator has jurisdiction to rule on issue which the league has already tried to establish that the commissioner can be an arbitrator. And they will rule on whether the commissioner in his ruling has gone so far out of bounds in what he has done. I think brady will have an uphill battle here. To make sure that this doesnt damage his reputation thats the uphill battle or the battle to get back the games that he has been suspended from. Well, i think to win his case which if he gets an injunction will allow him to play. If the judge vacates the ruling he can be back on the field immediately. Whether he is branded a cheater in the future or continues to be that is for other people to decide. But i know and you are a reporter and not making a judgement here but at the same time i what i want to know is in a sense, is there what about the other coaches and the other owners in the league where are they on this. There is no love for the patriots so i dont think some owners mind watching the patriots swing in the wind a bit here there have been several owners that are very much behind Roger Goodell. There are traditionalists if you will, and want him to protect the integrity of the league. Who are they. Rooney and mara, the steelers an giants are considered the old guard the owners of the bears. These are teams that have been around a long time been through multiple fights. And in some cases have fallen on their own swords when theyve been in the limelight, if you think back to ben roth listbergers case a few years ago. He served i six game suspension, was never arrested. It was knocked down to four games this he lost their star quarterback for an infraction that was to the on the books. What was the infraction. He was involved in a bar scene with a woman. So you have a case there where nothing was ever proven in court and he still served a four game suspension. There was no 5 million investigation into the matter but clearly it was a serious matter. An at that point roth list roth lissberger apologized for it. From the begin sfing. Not from the bin beginning but clearly in closed door meetings he did. And then apologized to the fans. Some owners say we cant have two sets of justice here. We paid our dues why shouldnt the patriots as well. Rose but when you look at this, somebody who understands the National Psyche could explain this, i assume. But regardless of whether its he four games or two games, for if to be played out like this does it do irreparable damage to tom brady . I think absolutely, yeah. Its tough for him to ever regain his squeaky clean image, his superstar. I mean hes great on the field. I think now outside of new england. Rose superstar of life. Lifestyle. Rose much add mirred. He was the model player. Him and Peyton Manning the two of them together you know, they are the poster boys for the league. You know, plus the fact that he was an underdog. Payton manning was the number one draft pick. Soess one of these boot straps players who proved hard work can work. Rose finally this. When people know, who know tom brady, is it true to his own character. Cuz they know hes a tough competitor. To say im to the going to take this lying down. I dont know that for a fact. I would assume that this could have been settled if he was willing to take the blame early on. This could have played out very very differently. Rose but thats with in the in his dna. That seems like it wasnt. Remember it happened right before the super bowl. Dow want to fall on your sword right before the super bowl and potentially not play before the super bowl there were all sorts of consequences of coming clean at that point. But he could have the day after the super bowl brought somebody aside and say all right, lets settle this quickly. Instead it paid on for months. Rose finally this, is there any perception developing that the nfl itself you know, does not deserve as much admiration as we want to bestow on it. I think its been severely damaged in the past year already because of the handling of the domestic. Nd this is just more of the same. Unfortunately, there being equated, people are saying well, greg hardy got four games for Domestic Violence infractions. And this is also four games. And people are trying to draw parallels t just looks messyment dow want as you are about to start training camp, people are supposed to be getting excited about imgas and all the newspapers and news outlets are talking about court cases and tom brady and reputation to your best players and whether the commissioner is pushing things too far. Rose thank you for coming. Sure, thanks for having me on. Rose back in a moment. Stay with us. Rose . Massive volatility in chinas stock market and economic shockwaves across the globe this week. On monday the shanghai composite dropped by nearly nine percent. The one day selloff was the broadest since 1997. Shares plunged again on tuesday by 5 . Before recovering for a modest loss. Today the index finished with a gain of more than 3 . Gyrations come after the government has already implemented various emergency measures throughout the summer to stem stock market losses. Yesterday afternoon we taped a conversation about china. Joining me in new yorks with Orville Schell the director of the center on u. S. China relations. And Steve Rattner, a chairman of Willett Advisors and a former coner to the treasury secretary under president obama. From washington, jim fallows he is a National Correspondent for the atlantic, and has written extensively about china. I am pleased to have all of them here. Jim since you have awe been there in the last two months tell me what is going on and why . I think the market as orville and steve know well and as you have discussed on the program, is different from other developed World Markets and it isnt really a market it is very thinly invested in by the population at large. It doesnt have any kind of institutional tradition. And so the good side of this when there is a market crash as there is now and there was eight years ago in 2007 we were living there too it doesnt really pull down the rest of the economy the way the 2008 and 9 crash did in the u. S. The bad side is the fundamentals there are not like developed World Markets. And so the government has been selling, trying to buy stocks to prop up their value. The question is what that does to the longterm goal of trying to make this a normal transparent market. Steve, how much of this is anticipation about chinas lack of Economic Growth . In terms of what is happening in the stock market. Yeah. Rose . The stock market have you to put in some context. The stock market was very depressed the last four or five years. It really became the cheapest major stock market in the world. Then it suddenly took off for a variety of reasons we can talk about. It more or less doubled and now its come down 20 or 25 from its peak. So you have to put that in that kind of context of a bubble that was allowed to get out of control, a whole variety of reasons and then a reversal of the bubble. And then as jim said, the chinese have done about Everything Possible you could do wrong in order to create transparent liquid markets. Rose what have they done wrong . Well, first they in effect encouraged individuals to get into the stock market from a base of very few new accounts there were 12 million accounts a month opened in this chinese stock market this strength. 25 of the chinese investors have an elementary schooling education. Five percent are illiterate. 90 of the market is individuals. As swrim said there is almost no institutions and now most importantly, just to underscore what jim said theyre trying to manage the decline. You cant manage markets. You really have to allow markets to function as markets so they mismanaged it on the way up theyre mismanaging it on the way down. Rose what should they be doing. They should sently have and there was also a lot of margin debt incurred by the chain ease as part of the runup. They were trying to open hong kong and shanghai connect, as it is called where you can buy stocks in both places. What they should do at this point is step out of the market. Some of the stocks are way overvalued they need to find their own level. Somewhere to the that expensive and traded pretty well throughout this. But the goal is to become part of the world stock market endis indices and this is getting in their way at the moment. Orville. I think the real problem is not so much that its going to affect the economy directly although it will have a ripple effect. But that it is the sews. Dissonance in terms of the party and the governments ability to manage things. Which of course they pretend to do in a remember perfect manager. So here is an example of something which should not be managed. Cannot be managed and yet they have tried to manage it and by failing which i think becomes increaseingly clear they have failed, it makes them look less able less omnipotent and less in control. Rose but do i hear all of you saying this is not about chineses Economic Growth, or lack of growth or slowing down growth t is just a market mechanism of that many people getting in the market and all of a sudden prices went skyhigh and then when they dropped they lost it . Its not about chinas Economic Growth. But that is the bigger problem, actually that faces china right now. Which is the state of their economy. So the two arent completely connected. But the fact is that what is going on in china from a growth standpoint is woreisome. They claim they are growing at 7 . Nobody i know including very smart investors actually believe that. They think theyre growing 3 4 5 . When you look at that it slowed down that much. To be saying were breauxing at 7 but only 3 to 4 . They make up the numbers. How can anybody make sense of what they are going to do if they are not in command vlt numbers. This is all part of the transparency problem that china has and becoming more of a developed country rather than a developing country but when you look at things like their use of iron ore when you look at Commodity Prices in general gold copper oil certainly. That whole deflation that is going on out there in part reflects fears about what is happening with chinas growth that is more scary frackly than what is happening in the stock market. Rose jim. Yes, so i would say this stock market volatility and crash doesnt mean what it would mean in the u. S. Or germany or france or some other developed economy where it would signal a really profound economic problem. Again as it did for us back in 2008 2009 because the stock market is so disconnected from the fundamentals of the economy. But i think it is a signal of a larger challenge china is facing in other areas as steve and orville have said. In the long run they want to get to a transparent market which means one the government doesnt prop up and some kind of economic fundamentals involved in it. But getting there from here is difficult because it mean as lawing these kinds of crashes. So too most of the other reforms that xi jinping has talked about putting in the last two or two and a half years involved difficult times of relaxing control. And so far this is, i think its significant for china in general because its one more sign of a promised reform that in fact has been going the opposite direction in the past two years. You raised the question of xi jinping what does this do for the leadership and confidence for the leadership . One of the key planks for this Economic Reform Program and remember, there really is no commit call reform program. What was to let Market Forces play a more Critical Role in allocating resources. An here we have the government intervening in a very heavy way into the stock market. So its a direct sort of contravention of that intention to marketize more. And to let and to become more like the Global Economy around them. Rose plus hes been under more the scrutiny anyway over the last six months or so because of he is in many other way as certing controls over other aspects of society and the economy. And so this failure to be able to prevail and the stock market i think becomes all the more stark. But of course we know why hes doing it. He is doing it because part of the implicit deal between the leadership and the people is were going to bring economic prosperity. Were going to make you rich so people suddenly find their 20 or 30 less rich than they were, it creates political and soes instability so they then compound the mistake by trying to prop it up. But look, i think just to put this all in some per spec perspective and i dont go to china as often as these guys but i go a couple timesi year. There is still enormous energy in the private sector there is enormous innovation it is still one of the most exciting places for us to invest in on the plan elevator it is still probably the most exciting place to invest in on the planet. So i would take the over in terms of china finding its way through this but they are at a tricky point in time. Rose so what is the worst scenario . The worst scenario is that the economy the problem is that theyre trying to get people to consume more, to replace the investment boom with a consumption boom. For whatever set of reasons and the stock market thing is related to that a bit they have failed. The worst scenario is that the invest. Boom ends there is no consumption boom and the economy continues to desell rit, decelerate, decelerate and you have a recession and perhaps political and social swationss which these guys are much better equipped to talk about than i am. Because in fact what we see is the government reinvesting in the stock market, exactly at a time when the government by its own acknowledgment was seeks to retreat from the market. So theres also another political overtone too here steve was talking about the fact that if you had a more profound economic problem you could have political ramifications. There have been some signs of that already. One has been the sort of lectures from some of the state media about trying to find the traders who have been shortselling and getting out of the market. Making this not an economic decision but a patriotic one. Also an extraordinary interview a couple of days ago about the head of the Chinese Aerospace corporation mr. Lyn saying this was part of an american plot to undermine chinas rise in the world. You could trace all the market manipulations to the fact the u. S. Was somehow trying to rig the market. That was happily debunked by some other chinese pem saying this is crazy am but i think it is a way that the next tool that would probably be at hand for the above the if things got worse economically would be revving up nationalism against either japan or the United States, the two most convenient targets. Who would ref up the nationalism . The government. Yes. And in terms of creating conflict or in terms of making advances with respect to islands or doing what . Well, i think theres been a number, again the dilemma of the last two and a half years of xi jinping many people who follow this whole part of the world thought had a big reform task ahead of him was they needed to sort of control the political system so we could do difficult things so that he could clean out some of the state industries so you could have that war encore ruption so he could marketize the stock mar and do things in principles the country needed to do to get to the next stage of economic evolution and not just be a big outsourcing and infrastructure. So far as orville has discussed many times the trend has been simply the tightening and not yet, the reform. One tool of tightening in countries around the world is to say our nation is being assaulted by its enemies around. Japan has been a very convenient target for that as we see in a lot of these south china sea. But the u. S. Lurks in the background because in a sense the u. S. Is not giving china its place in the sun. Rose or wants to contain it. Which is the same thing. Yes. Rose there is also it seems to me the idea that the chinese have been trying to turn their economies steve mentioned from exporting to domestic consumption and all of us also know on top of that that struggle to do that which is a big shift to turn it around. There is reports of empty Housing Stock, especially in resolution residential, throughout china. Look, theres no question that china overinvested and built a lot of stuff that they didnt need partly to keep the economic boom going maybe some must management, who knows why. But in the great scheme of life compared to the kinds of mistakes weve made in our Economic Policy look back at 2008 in 2007 and our housing problem. That is not their biggest problem. Their biggest chall seng to get people to start consuming more and saving less, they have the highest saving rates of any country in the world. And to manage this migration from the rural areas into the cities and the industrialization of china. And look on balance, they have actually accomplished a lot. They have accomplished an enormous amount and have been quite successful. They are at a tricky point now. And i think what all of us are saying is you cant manipulate markets. You have to let these markets find their level there are a lot of stocks that look like our dot comstocks that need to disappear or come to a reasonable value but there are also big Real Companies trading at reasonable valuations. But are you saying you dont see any contagion. Within the chinese economy. No the no, the chinese economy to affecting other global economies or markets elsewhere. I dont see it i dont see much, as i think weve all said, the chinese star met stock market is reasonably disconnected. Look until fairly reasonable, you couldnt even buy stocks in shanghai as a foreigner so it is still very much a wild west but somewhat isolated wild west frontier. Sometimes you hear the word japan jim i place that you know well that china is japan. I think it has it is a different kind of economy with a different source of problems. Japan was already a very modern economy in that after world war ii and had to rebuild. So its problems were sort of were of transitioning to keeping itself competitive at the high end as it already was. And internationalizing its domestic economy. China is still on average a poor country. Theyre still very few internationalably Competitive Companies there which japan has a lot. So a different sort of challenge and probably unfold in a different way. One thing about possible contagion, there is an aspect of spill over between the stock market against the economy that i think could have ramifications. When chinese families have looked for places to put their money, the place they mainly put it has been Housing Stock because thats been something that is assumed to keep going on. Because that has softened somewhat, the stock market has been a an outlet for that sort of thing. I think we would be more worried about a spread to a genuine decline in the chinese economy, if we saw stock market declines leading to people out of housing that would be a more woreisome indicator. One thing worth noting if, in fact, the stock market portends other problems and remember we have a housing bubble we have lower growth rates now we have a stock market crash jim mentioned this idea of these hostile for enforces. It would not be too difficult for the chinese to begin sort of exporting some of their problems. And that has great implications. How do they do that. You know, its being caused by foreigners. The world is against us. And theres always an incipient degree. Looking for scapegoats. Looking for scapegoats and that would have profound impacts on their ability to get along with the United States which is in some state of uncertainty already. We have a summit coming up in cement between president s. We have Critical Issues like Climate Change nuclear proliferation, pandemics. We would like to see the two countries come together. But if there is this idea that somehow the u. S. Is the hand under the table trying to lay china low, that will not help the process. Did you get a sense of that when you were there . Yes, i think it is a background sense. Orville did a great op ed about this a couple of weeks ago saying that on the one hand relations between china and the United States are better than most people think and better than they have any reason historically to be. If you imagine how enormous this power shift has been over the last 30 plus years of the two companies have managed it relatively well there are all sorts of places they deal together as orville said on climate. Lots of other issues. On the other hand, i think that something that most American Government officials profoundly believed which is the u. S. Does not wish china ill and is better served as it evil dos most chinese officials do not believe they think finally the u. S. Wants to hold them down. And that is always a potential source of tension. It is incredible because they raise that all the time. I mean as a journalist if you talk to chinese officials there is always that sense. You dont know if it just came for a while i thought it just came from the military but now you know its more pervasive. I think as part of national narrative, and that was the narrative of the Chinese Communist revolution. That the colonist capitalists had preyed upon china, occupied china, des membered china, and that narrative is still alive. If you want to be paranoid all you have to do is look to the u. S. And vietnam. Yeah. Interestingly enough, the vietnamese are not so paranoid about the United States. And the vietnamese do not have a narrative of victimization. Its very different. We should still be a little bit paranoid about china from an economic point of view because i think all things being equal that economy is still going to grow. Their economic power is still going to be greater. And economic power is an important part of rejecting all kinds of other power around the globe. Rose if they grow three to four percent. A lost faster than we are with four percent unemployment and very little inflation, it is not all so bad. Of course anybody who has been in china has to be impressed by and taken by its dynamism and the million activities you see going on there. I think however if i were a chinese if we were having the counterpart of this program in china and if it were allowed there, one of the concerns would be is china going to develop a sort of high end economy. Is it going to be more than a giant Infrastructure Machine and outsourcing machine. And i think theres an open question about whether its path to develop. As opposed to steady growth is clear so i would for at least the medium term be more bullish about the u. S. Prospects than if i were a chinese economist about their own. What do we foe about the debate within china about its future. Who is on what side or has xi jinping essentially occupied the broad center of power and policymaking . I mean i think whats astounding is how little we know. It really is a black box. And there have always been struggles. And certainly there are now. But exactly who carries the standard for which side we really dont know. Rose and weve got the corruption event. We have that. The people going to jailness any corruption makes everybody incredibly cautious. And we came back to the previous president s staff. Yes. Well, it is very very deep and one of the problems is that here is an economy and a country that wants to be innovative, wants to make risky decisions. Wants to be bold and yet the Anticorruption Campaign is really muted that ability. And i think if you talk to people in china you feel everybody saying but the argue would be also that it would in fact inspire more if they realize that everything wasnt figured arcor ruption corrupt. Well, ultimately maybe that is the case. Right now nobody wants to make a decision. Nobody in the government. Nobody in the government. I would is a say from a business point of view the anticorruption thing has been a big positive. There is much more of a feeling that the government is trying to do the right thing it is partly a consolidation of power on xi part but it has made businesspeople feel better about china progression toward an open economy. Rose my understanding and ck me if i am wrong that there were at least some indications that they wanted to increase the nonstate role in the economy. Well, thats happening. Its happening all over the place. And i think what jim might have been referring to a minute ago is this whole question of whether china will be an innovater or assemble i phones for the rest of your time if you go to shanghai and see what is happening in the biotech to beijing and see the i. T. Area in terms of new Young Companies there is a lot of innovation and excitement there. There is indied a lot of that. Some of these people are doing their work by immigrating to the u. S. Or britain or chartering their firms. In california, there is one difference i was struck by on this latest visit. I think around the time of the olympics, charlie you and i talk actually in china once or twice. And then all of us can recall even though politically it was uninirs inspired leadership there was a sense that things were just opening up. And that china was just going to be sort of more small l liberalizing in all ways month by month and year by year. And the last couple of visits i made there is much more of a hunkered down sense, perhaps for the good reasons of anticorruption but in general sort of a tightening your jacket for chilly winds and i hope that period passes. I know this is two different questions orville but one do we know anything about the influence or any influence at all from zing pour on we know they are behind the scenes and not very favourably looked upon by you had zin ping. You had xintao has vanished although he has people. And jinping assumed much more power than he ever had. Instead of the old con isnt all leadership on the politburo which hu jintao we had not only a prima interparis but even the premier has been demoted to a position where you hardly feel he has a portfolio at all. Thank you. Thanks jim good to see you. Thank you, charlie. Thank you orville. Back in a moment stay with us. Yuri milner is here founder of dse global a Technology Investment firm. He announced a 100 million Global Initiative to invigorate the search for life beyond this planet. The program will kick off with a comprehensive search of the nearest one million stars using three of the worlds most powerful telescopes. Stephen hawking the renowned kos moll gist said to understand the lights on earth you might know about life about minds somewhere in the cosmo intelligence life might be watching these lights of ours, aware of what they mean it is time to commit to finding the answer to search for life beyond earth. Im pleased to have yuri milner at this table welcome. Thank you. So here you are very very very successful businessman. What is it between you and science cuz this is not your First Venture in terms of a scientifically curious mind. Well i was scientist myself for a while for more than ten years. I was trying to address this Big Questions myself. But then i quickly relized is with not good enough and i. Rose not good enough not smart enough. Not smart enough. And i ended up as a businessman and investor. Rose and are you pretty good. But i never forgot about science. And the first project was the prize which is the biggest prize in science. And i am doing this with my partners Mark Zuckerberg serg a brin and jack mar and their families. And so that that was the attempt to give back to science. Rose what is the breakthrough prize. This is the biggest prides in the world. We give it in three categories mathematics physics and life sciences. We give eight prizes every year. And theres 24 Million Dollars. Its probably more than all other academic prizes combined. And the idea behind this prize is to create a platform for the best minds in the world to become celebrities of sorts. Its not a secret that we dont celebrate intellectual achievement. If you take top 100 sell did celebrities there will be not one scientist there. And this is not where you want the mankind to be after three and a half billion dollars of revolution yearsofevolution. Rose because scientists have made such a difference in our lives. Yes. And why not sell operating the best minds is really the question that i want to ask. And in fact answer. Rose okay. But is the breakthrough prize different simply in the amount of money that goes to the recipient or does it have other distinguishing features that separate it from the nobel prize for example. Yes. So the biggest thing is not the money that we give but rather the recognition and the prize ceremony, for example is televised. And. Rose Morgan Freeman was your. Morgan freeman was our host and kevin spacey and Seth Mcfarland and other distinguished celebrities participated in that. And the idea is to get the word out that these people are changing our lives. And in fact deserve to be celebrities. Rose we should know about them and they should be role models for people who want to change the world by Scientific Research and achievement. I think so. Why not the recipients of the prize whose name is jim allison. He invented a Cancer Treatment that is completely new. It basically mobilizes your immune logical system to find cancer. The drugs that have been developed based on his invention have saved thousands and thousands of lives. And yet, he is completely unknown to the general public. Rose what is so important for him to be known. What is important is for him to be able to do his work and have you know, the funds to do it and have the resources to do what he does. Not that he is a celebrity. Other than he serves as a role model and sow shares the exexcitement of science and discovery, so that the best and bridest care as much about being scientists as they do athletes or entertainers or. Yeah but lets be honest about it. Its also about recognition. Its about what are the achievements that we actually celebrate. Do we celebrate his achievements and then do we celebrate the achievement of the new horizons mission. Or we celebrate. Rose i love pluto. Or we celebrate you know the basketball and the winner of the ten in tennis tournament. I think there has to be a balance in the system. Ill not saying we should son some of favouring one over the other but i think what we have tote is completely out of balance. If you take the top 200 celebrities, there will be no scientists not one. So i think. Rose but things like the time 100 where they recognize scientists and include them on the list because these are considered people without have the most influence t san arbitrary list. Does it make it some perfect list. That is true. But if you take twitter following, or some other criteria, you will see a very different picture. Rose sure. Let me move to what you want to do which is the breakthrough project. We have the prize which is to encourage people to go into science and to encourage recognition of great scientists so they get their due for the work that they do and the results they produce and the influence they have. So here we now have you and Stephen Hawking announcing in london a 100 million Breakthrough Initiative to dramatically accelerate the search for intelligence life in the universe hooray. Thats correct. We wants to know if there is intelligent life in the universe. And are you going to help us find out. Well, we will do something that was never tried before to that extent. Yeah. To be fair people have been doing this for a while. And in the last 55 years there were a number of initiatives. Some of them funded by the government. Some of them funded by the previous generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs like hewlett packard. Sure. And i think its time now for a new major i nirbl difficult which will initiative which will potentially make a difference. So there are three things that makes it so that now is really the best possible time. One is that we all know due to kep letter mission that will are billions and billions of candidates for life in our milky way alone. Billions. Billions. So there are billions of earthlike stars about the similar size with liquid water. Yeah. So those are many billions and maybe dozens of billions. Just in our milky way and our galaxy is one of 100 billion. So there is a lot of opportunity for life to emerge. And there is some opportunity for intelligent life to emerge. Just given so many opportunities. But i mean i have inquired about this a lot as you might imagine. And the interesting thing is that everybody says it would be the height of ar began for us to assume that we are the only intelligent life in the universe, correct . Yeah, possibly. So many smart people have said that. Yes. On the other hand there is zero evidence. Yes. Zero. But the essence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Thats right the corner phrase. So i think that we as human beings have a responsibility to try to answer that question. And i want this committee to continue until such time that we find an answer. Which brings us so what you and Stephen Hawking are doing and the 100 Million Dollars youre going to spend. What are you going to do that is not being done now. We have a lot of big helicopters telescopes around the world looking into the sky trying to find and hear anything they can possibly hear. So what are you going to do thats different. O so now. As much money as you have, you dont have as much money as government. Well, now as we know that there are so many possibilities, the question is what do we do about it. Right. So what we are doing is taking the best of what Silicon Valley can offer for that project and combine this with the power of the best telescopes. So we started with three tell scopes. One in green bank west virginia. Onces will you build. No, those are the biggest existing telescopes. Rose so they are good. They are the best. This telescope can hear the mobile telephone conversations from mars. And even if you reduce the signal a million times they will still be able to get that signal. That is very good. Rose if there are people talking to each other on mars we will get it. So there are very good machines sitting there. An also an equally Great Machine sitting in australia called parks. So what were going to do is were going to rent some significant fraction of their time and we will dedicate this time to that particular search. And that is something that was to the done before on that scale. Now you can imagine the amount of information that those telescopes will generate per second. So then the question is what do you do. Now here Silicon Valley comes in the game. And the a very smart group of scientists at berkeley university, have developed and will further develop the Data Processing technology that did not exist before. And we will use the best software and hardware to analyze and process information with the orders of magnitude better than any previous search. We will collect as much information in a day that was collected in a year by previous. The Data Collection is expo tensionly better than its been ever. And processing. And processing. And well also engage the public. There are 9 Million Computers connected in a network which is called stay at home and we will use this network to process this information. We will also do something that was never done before on that scale. We will open all the data to the public. All the data that will be collected will be opened to the scientist and to amateurs who might be able to find something there that we would not be able to find. So in other words the signal can be discovered by anyone who will have access to the data and we will make sure that the data is open. Here is breakthrough lists the biggest science temp, significant access to the worlds most powerful tellscopes 50 times more sensitive than previous programs dedicated to will cover ten times more sky than previous programs span at least five times more practice spectrum in dan tell with radio search will undertake worlds deepest and broadest search for optical laser transmissions and initiative will stand 10 years financial commitment a hundred Million Dollars. How confident are you that you will hear something in the next ten years . No confidence at all. I think this is one of those low probability high impact projects. And i understand why government does not and maybe should not be involved in funding projects with so small chance. But high payoff. Yes. So if you multiply those two factors, i think you have a nonzero result. So i think that because the stakes are so high and the importance of this question is significant, if you will agree with me then i think this effort should be supported and in fact i think we should never stop looking, in ten years we will have bigger machines bigger telescopes better software. We should just keep going and continue the search until such time that we have an answer. Whether its going to be in the ten years or 25 or 50 i done know. But i think we should not stop searching because its one of the existential questions. Are we alone. Yes. How did you get steven involved . Well, i met him for the first time in 1987. When i was a physics student. He came to russia where i was studying at the seem. And i found a picture where he speaks at that particular event. And that was the first time that i saw him and he was my hero since that time. He continues to be my hero. Did you get to meet him at that time. Yeah. You went backstage or. I was one of the many people. The next time i saw him was on stage when i was giving him the breakthrough prize a few years ago. But he kept talking about that throughout the years. And he was a big supporter of this initiative. And i thought that when i was ready to announce we contacted him and he was very kind to agree to participate. Rose is it still his main inquirery the theory of everything. Yes. Well simply put he is interested in the biggest question. And this is one of the biggest questions. So this question is in the center of his intention im sure. Rose anybody involved in technology as you are as i am, knows that at least three of the biggest questions or platforms to three, ecommerce people talk about data big dith and the impact of that. They talk about be mo il and the impact of that. And they talk about the cloud and the impact of that those three things they talk about all the time. What is the most exciting part of technology for you today . Beyond the science of and the computer power that would enable you to do more with these things . Well, its kind of really the same. Because end of the day everything boils down to analyzing the data. And whether you are analyzing the data that you get from the telescopes or analyzing the data that you get from peoples interests or whether you are analyzing the data on the ecommerce plat frm. Or sensors on whatever equipment you have. Its really how smart we are in analyzing this datament we already have google that is really significant part of our human brains already. So google and facebook and Companies Like that is really the beginning of what i would call the emergence of the global brain which is really a combination of all the computers and human minds. Thinking and acting collectively. So i think that the future and this is one of my main interests is really trying to think what are the sets of data that can be analyzed to provide more value to the people. Which is the point after all. Yes. Thank you for coming. Thank you very much. Congratulations on this initiative. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. For more ton this program and earlier episodes visit us online at pbs. Org and charlie rose. Com. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org and their buns are something i have yet to find anywhere else. Im not inviting you to my house for dinner. Breaded and fried and gooey and lovely. In the words of arnold schwarzenegger, ill be back youve heard of connoisseur. Im a commonsewer they knew i had to ward off some vampires or something