Boston in 1721 and led to the first vaccine use to slow the disease. That all happens tonight on cspan2s booktv. Booktv attended a party in northwest washington, d. C. For the publication of Steve Hiltons booktv, more human. He mingled with guests and spoke informally about the book. Prior to the start of the party he did interviews with several news outlets. We are here at Julianne Roberts house celebrating the launch of your book more human. Tell us about the book and where the idea came from. I have been living in america for four years. I have been observing what is going on and i have been involved in the action. If i think that motion of allowing the corporations to accumulate the health and that is a conservative approach. It may not be the approach of the republicans that is a different thing. How are you doing . [multiply conversations] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] in the next couple years steve is going to be allotted u. S. Citizenship. But he is fighting for the u. S. Political movement and being a player in the evolution of the conservative movement as you see it and i will hand it over to steve now. But i could not be more delighted to having him talk about his interests and issues tonight. It feels really appropriate. Thank you very much. I am not sure you want to hear about my issues. I will save that for another occasion. But thank you, very much, for everything tonight. The other thing that is so humorous i had to write down and some may be near. Thank you, juleanna, nicky, and kin kingsberg, i think we are heading for a record where there may be more people hosting the book party than actually buy the book. It is great to be here and great to see much a lovely crew. It reminds me of something i wrote in the book and i will read a snippet i wrote down from the first chapter on politics. When the corporate, politicians, journalist and authors of books like this all go to the same parties or live in the same neighborhoods, an elite participate and regardless of who is in office the same people are in power. It is great to see you all here tonight. The thing is i do have one complaint. When i did my book party in london, the Prime Minister showed up to the party so i am very let down. It is not quite the same stature. Also, what does we have to do that is better than this . He is probably just around the back of the white house having a fight with john boehner. What did i say . You know, a cigarette. What is is the point of being a brit if you cannot make that joke . It did make me think being here and diving into the political debate of being a brit in america and coming at this important time. Many years ago, i moved to another country for a while, and there as an acronym for what i did. It was hong kong. And there is an acronym for people who leave london and go work in hong call called failed in london, tried in hong kong. So i am thinking about my entry here into the american politics. Can you guess . Donald. Dumb britain, america looks desperate. Here i am to help. I hope i can do my best. I dont know if there is much chance of making an impact in the immediate days ahead but i really hope to get involved into the political argument here. I have been here for four years now working on my startup out in california. This book, more human, has just come out. And i dont want to spend too much time talking about it because i would love to have opportunity to hear your questions and respond to those. I will start with the story the book opens up and there is a story right at the beginning of a mothers experience traveling on jet blue. It is a horrible experience, it is detailed in the book. But the conclusion that i draw from it, and it is based on something the mother said when she was interviewed about this experience, and she said why cant we just treat people with kindness like human beings . And i just thought that was a very profound thing to say about not just her experience on jet blue that day but all of our experience in so many areas of life whether that relates to our experience with government, or businesses, or daily lives. So much of it has become, i think, too big and too bure bureaucratic from the scale. It is the systems in place that are the trouble. It reminded me something the political theorist said when thinking about the holocaust and how normal people could behave to people in such an inhumane way. And her argument is there is nothing wrong with them but it is the system that makes people behave in terrible ways. I am not comparing, just in case the lawyers amongst you are getting ready to act, jet blue to the nazis. But i am arguing whether that is how we think about government, how we run schools, how we do health care, help families in poverty, and looking at the way businesses become giant corporations that captured how in such a focused way they can make decisions that are so distance from the people affected by them. We have designed and built a world in these areas that have become inhuman and the central argument for political reform needs to be how we do something about that and how we make the world more human. That is it for the moment. I would love to hear what you think and any questions you may have. [applause] steve, the most great ideas, i love the title more human, most great ideas have to struggle and compete against others. So i am interested in who the enemies of your idea if somebody went out and bought over topic of your book and buried it, who would that be . I think the central theme in many ways of the book is the nature of power and the c concentration of political and economic power. Therefore, really it is those who have the power. What i want to do is take the power out of their hands and put it in the hands of the people. In government that means decentralization, and decentralization of a kind we have never seen, i think. Not just from the federal government to the states which is discussed but down to the neighborhood level. And that affects those who currently hold the power similarly in the economy and the structure of capitalism. I think we have this focus of economic power in the hands of a smaller corporations. I think that literally means breaking them up. Not just the banks we hear all of the time discussed in terms of break up but you have these incredible powerful corporations that abuse the system to their ends. The telecom sector, the Health Insurance sector, look at food and the giant agriculture areas, you have giant businesses that need to be broken up. The ceo to those companies wouldnt like it. So i think the enemies are those who currently hold power. You have to speak in an american accent. I cannot do that. Talk about how this will happen. Someone famous in british said everyone sin favor of the decentralization of power down to the level they currently sit. Yeah. [laughter] steve and i worked together in government and i think our experience reflected that. Governments are in favor of states getting power and county council in favor of county council having power. The problem is who you wish to give the power to. All of the people currently in positions of power want this to go as far down as you want. So talk about the politics of bringing about this change. Such a great question. I dont want to give a the truth is, i want to repeat what you said. I completely agree with our characterization of the problem and therefore and i really reflected on this. I am a practical person, i have been in government and tried to implement change like you have. This isnt a theoreticle book. You will see there is an idea underneath it but it is practical and how we change things. That made be think; i literally reflected on your question of how will we change things. The answer i got to was that we need to change the people in the system. We need people who believe in these ideas literally to take over the reins of power. Therefore, the conclusion of the book, literally the very last bit, says if you read this book, if you believe in this, if you agree with me, then this is the first step. This is what you have to do. You have to run for office. You have to run for office if that is what you think. That is the only way we will bring about this fundamental change. That connects me to what i have been doing at crowd crowdpac and that is making it easier for run for office. If you want to run for office or nominate someone, you can raise money and get into the Office Without depending on the big Party Machinery that tends to trap people because they have to argue for the cause of their founders. It is the same power structures. That is why getting a fresh generation of people to run for office at every level i think in the end is the only hope. That may be not much of a hope but that is the honest answer to the question. You know people can take power to give it away. That is right. Lets leave it there. Just following up on that, there is a wonderful quote you had a year or two ago, you were an adjective in government that is one way of putting it. You said it was a bureaucratic essentially where you didnt like them very much and they didnt like dealing with you. It was a mutual divorce in the end when you left. They were still there doing the same thing and, you know, the book i just finished i read a lot about mike bracket. It is very similar to what you are trying to do. He ended up leaving because they were not able to go far enough. When people like you and other said come in to try to push for change eventually the push is like really strong against it and people move on; the reformers. And the people who are trying to protect the status quo are still there. I will give you a couple responses. I can very accurate characterization. As i am pained to say in the book and publically here, almost every single servant i have worked and met in government on an individual level was a good, well intentioned, incredibly impressive serious person on an individual level. Going back to the point about the holocaust, it is the system and the structures that are the problem not the individual people. It is that personal battle with individuals in that sense. It also reminds me of something tony blare told me before we got into the government as part of my, kind of, trying to learn what it was going to be like and think about how we would prepare i went to see people who had been in government including tony blare and his chief of staff and we had lots of conversations and one thing tony blare said is you will not believe until you get there how strong is the sense on the part of the Civil Servants that they really are the ones who are entrusted with running the countgy the politics and their advisors are near today, gone tomorrow, and their job is to wait them out. You will not believe how strong that sense is and you have to do something about it. He said we didnt take that serious enough until i really learned that lesson toward the end of my time in government. This is why i ended up in a position where i reviewed a controversial one, in the end to do something about this. The only serious answer was to drastically cut the number of Civil Servants. Not because they were bad people or underperforming but the sail of the operation scale means they grow the structures and system and bureaucracies they thrive on and their incentive is to make the growth. So there was only one thing to do and that is cut it. My analogy which is a bit of a joke, but i took on a level of seriousness because i meant it, there was a building in london called summerset house, and that was run from this one building in london. It is a very big building and now a civic space with galleries and restaurants and so on. But it did run the british empire. Now you are not talking about the british empire. You are not even talking about britain because it is england. So i said how many people could fit in that building that worked with the empire . And the answer is about 10,000. And the central policymaking was more like 200,000. So what if we actually reduced the number to 10,000 . What would we do . How could we run the modern state with that number of people . It is a thought experiment really. The more time i spent in government the more time i thought that was the answer. We were talking earlier about someone who worked at bp and lord brown who was one of the chief executives and bp was a nonexecutive advisor to the parliament and i told him this is what i think we need to do to reform the Civil Service and that is to cut it back. It is the only way you will get serious change and i believe that and i believe that right here in america, too. [inaudible question] i want to explain this carefully. It is an important point. First all of, i need to declare interest which is my wife, rachel, was formally the head of pr relations at google and is doing that at another company you listed, which is uber so you need to be aware of that. The argument i try to make in the book is this book is not another way of saying small is beautiful and big is bad. That is not what i think. I think scale leads to dehumanization but not necessarily. Similarly, i think that the technology often leads to dehumanization but not necessarily. Where those arguments come together is actually i cannot site by wife being involved and there is a Company Called air b and b and i think it is a brilliant example of a big company, that is a tech company, that made the world more human. It facilitated and enabled an incredible Human Connection and just because it is big doesnt mean you should be concerned. The central argument is c competition and the ability of a company to challenge another or the availability of a big company to distraught policy regulations or whatever else it may be to serve their end in an unhealthy way through the use of lawyers and lobbyist and all the rest rather than competing fairly in the open market. The central concept is not even marketshare or scale. It is barriers to entries. Can a company be challenged . In the tech sector, companies can be challenged and defeated overnight and that is what is amazing about it. It is a dynamic sector. You dont see that happening in other sectors. I think the key argument here is does scale enable a company to exploit policy for its own end to the detriment of Wider Society . Thank you. [applause] stay as long as you want, buy the book, and i hope this gives you insight we so many of us are excited to welcome steve to the global sector of the united states. On sunday, june 5th, booktv is live with steve forbes on indepth. He is the editor and chief of Forbes Magazine and a republican candidate in the 1996 and 2000 president ial primaries. He is the author of many books. The recent titles include power, ambition and gloery comparing great leadards of the ancientworld with modern business leaders. And money which he argues for a return to the gold standard. He recently appeared on booktv to discuss reviving america. The rut we are in today which is having profound implications around the world, bad economies lead to bad politics, we see that everywhere and it comes from mistake. The nice thing about policy errors is they can be corrected. Those errors can be corrected. We are focused on three big reforms. There are others that have to be done but you have to have priorities. So we