Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20130815

And thanks to the town hall for putting on this amazing series. Its so terrific that there is Science Education going on especially in a time when funding is being cut to sciences at the National Level so we need to keep pushing for as much Science Education as possible. So i just finished writing an optimistic look about the apocalypse and it didnt start out that way at all. I really did not realize that this book was going to have a happy ending and it actually started because i have been really fascinated my whole life with stories about destruction especially massive Global Destruction and a apocalypse is and everything from kind of the underground cannibal apocalypse to zombie stories and godzilla stories. Godzilla is one of my spirit animals. I wanted to a couple of years ago when i was thinking about this i thought while, how could i write a kind of nonfiction version of a godzilla movie and what would that look like . We delved into the scientific literature and what history has to teach us. What would need the equivalent of some kind of mass destruction caused by a force that we dont understand, and i came upon the idea of mass extinctions which are indeed the worst kind of disaster that could ever happen to the environment. The more that i researched them the more that i read scientific papers and talk to scientists, i realize that actually one of the main characteristics of the mass extinction is the there are always survivors and that was when i really began to change how i understood what this book was going to be about. So let me start by telling you a little bit about the destruction. A mass extinction is actually a scientific term of art which refers to any events where more than 75 of all species on the planet right out and usually these take about a million years. And so when you look at them, that they are taking place in geological time. They are not a quick thing that we can see in a human lifetime. One of the things that links massive extinctions in their and five in the past half a billion years or so is that most of them are caused by Climate Change. Usually there are some horrific events that sets off the Climate Change, and maybe an asteroid hits the planet which is what happened in the most recent and perhaps the most famous mass extinction which the dinosaurs 65 million years ago when an asteroid slammed into the planet but of course when that happened actually it wasnt like a michael bay movie. It wasnt like a big rock hit the planet and there was fire and dinosaurs were being barbecued. Although that sounds really cool there were no lasers or anything like that. What actually happened was where the asteroid hit there were horrific fires and dinosaurs were killed by the thousands but over time the asteroid worked its way into the atmosphere and change the climate over the long term. Actually what happened was most dinosaurs died out from the subsequent Climate Changes. This is the case with like i said nearly all the mass expansions. So let me tell you a little bit about my favorite mass extinction to give you an idea of how these work. Everyone kind of has a favorite mass extinction if you talk to geologists about this. They have a gallows humor about it because you know these are horrific mass slayings of creatures. So my personal favorite is the one that comes at the end of the permian. And if you look at this chart here of geological periods you can see it kind of down at the bottom. There is a little thing that says gigantic extinction right next to the permian. This is about 250 million years ago and at that time the planet due to plate tectonics of the continents were completely different than they are now. They were arranged into one giant supercontinent pangea so you have to imagine a supercontinent stretching all the way from the north pole down to this sort south pole. That was when in the north basically in the areas that eventually became siberia began to turn into a super volcano. What happens in a super bowl can know is not a scientific term but it basically refers to a massive massive volcano. This was a volcano caused by a very large area where love is being released in multiple places. So you have to imagine great extends opening up an earth. Its not like a mountain where it is blowing out of the top. Its big fence opening up like the iceland volcano was so recently. They just start extruding lava, big waves of love is so its not explosive. Its just lava oozing out of these huge fence and there are multiple events. In this Northern Area of pangea, this event went on for about would say a thousand years. So it was a thousand year in corruption. What happened was over time the gases and that were released from that ill can make every option were kind of like a super Industrial Revolution. They were releasing so much carbon into the environment that the climate for started to cool down and then it heated up to a super greenhouse and the oceans became very acidic and creatures died out in incredible numbers. It was the mars worst mass extension that the planet has ever seen. By the end of that billion year period 95 of all species on the planet had died out. Even in sex died out which is unusual to see in a mass extinction that it was Sea Creatures land creatures plants, everybody was screwed by that volcano. But there was one survivor on land who kind of is the creature that actually turned me around on mass extinction and take me think about it in a new way. And it was a creature who is related to a group of animals that later evolved into mammals so it was kind of a memo like creature. Think of it as the uncle of humanity. Not a direct ancestor. It had a couple of traits that made it an excellent survivor in this incredibly difficult time in earths history. Its somewhat small about dog sized. It was about 3 feet long by 3 feet long and looks a little bit like a and a little bit like a blizzard. You have to imagine them getting back to burgers birds and roots and they probably burrowed in the evenings. They would take a burrowed and they had very powerful front legs so they were digging out holes and living underground a lot. So for the lystrosaurus it was kind of awesome when the volcanoes started going off because the whole world was kind of transformed into lystrosaurus heaven because they were used to being underground and breathing kind of that 30 air anyway. They had a great lung capacity which possibly they were able to get my oxygen from dirty error than from other creatures that were similar in size and the other thing about the lystrosaurus was a lot of its natural predators died during the early period that followed the permian. So it had no predators. It had dirty error. All of its food sources were mostly underground so the sunlight is blocked and temperatures are changing that food sources probably going to be mostly unharmed by that transition but one of the other things the lystrosaurus did was scattered across the southern continent treated so remember this is a huge supercontinent. Lystrosaurus moved from them more Northern Region all the way down to the south area this is over a period of millions of years and scattered across that continents be seated in other words evolved into many different species possibly four possibly more and adapted to new ecological dimensions. It did two of the things that i talked about in the title of my book. Scattered and adapted. It fled from the source of danger which is the super volcano and learned how to live in new places and this humble little weird faced guy sort of became my mascot when i was working on this book. I guess i traded in godzilla is my mascot and pick up lystrosaurus because this creature as they said was very humble and yet nevertheless it managed to make it through the toughest time in earths history while all of these other creatures around it were suffering because their food webs were unraveling. This is a major cause of mass extinction. The food web is just a way of talking about the networks of basically who eats whom in an ecosystem. What happens is you have a food web where a lot of creatures start going extinct and it causes extinctions among other creatures who fte met them so if your food source guys youve dyed to match. That is one of the way that mass extinctions get started raid you have new dieoffs and then you get these knock on mass extinction events that caused the 75 numbers. So there is one thing that we can do as humans that lystrosaurus cant really do are probably couldnt do. So we have the ability in a crisis to basically do what lystrosaurus did which is adapt to new environments. Humans have been terrific at doing that. We have managed to a different points in history leave from danger. We have been lucky but we also have a form of memory that goes way beyond just remembering what happened yesterday. It goes way beyond remembering hey if i want to go to sleep tonight they need to dig a hole in the ground the way the lystrosaurus did. Humans can remember not just their own lifetimes but we can use history to remember the whole of our civilizations history. We can use scientific fields like anthropology and geology to actually look back and consider the whole history of our evolution as a species as well as the evolution of the planet and look at all of the disasters that have happened and learn from them. That is a very profound survival skill. Like i said its something that as far as we know is fairly unique to human needs is a species. We havent found any other species that seem to be able to do that yet and so part of my hope in sort of the Center Friday and this book when i realized it wasnt going to be all destruction and there was going to be some hope of survival is that we actually have the traits of a survivor species like lystrosaurus plus we have this added ability to plan for the future. That is really important and i spent a lot of time in the book talking about ways that we can start planning for the future basing those plans on what we know of disasters that have already happened to humans but also disasters that have happened to the earth. That is important in planning, learning from history and learning from the great experiment that is the evolution of human civilization. So let me put this in perspective for you. Human beings are mammals which is why we are so cute and furry and we have live babies and all those good things just like these cute cats up here. The typical species lifespan for a mammal, in other words the typical amount of time before the species evolves into another species or dies out if a million years. That is a typical species lifespan and humans, homo sapiens evolved about 100,000 years ago possibly 200,000 depending on where you sit in the anthropological debate over this question. The fact is either way we are early in our species timeline. We have only got 900,000 years left to go. So when we are thinking about planning for the future as a species planning for our survival as homo sapiens we need to be thinking not just of what we are going to do next month or next week at how were we going to set things up so that we have good experience living for another 900,000 years. What can we do now and what can we think about doing us a species and what kinds of projects can we take on to make those 900,000 years really awesome instead of living like cannibals underground and turning into zombies . So in my book i talk about two kinds of very longterm plans that we can start working on now and that we can share with coming generations for the next several millennia and more. The first area that i am most interested in is cities and City Building and city planning. The reason why is right now the vast majority of humans, the well not the vast majority, the majority of humans come to more than 50 live in the cities and the u. N. Has done some predictions on how that trend will continue and if things go pretty much as they have been we are looking at possibly as many as 67 or 70 of People Living in cities in 50 years. People are becoming more and more urban. The majority of humanity is going to be located in the city so as we are thinking about the future a good place to focus on ways to make our lives more survivable is the city. There are different ways that we can tackle making cities more survivable. First of all, we need to be thinking about how do you make a city robust against a disaster and there are a lot of Different Things we can do from better earthquake engineering and that is one thing i talk a lot about in the book where in San Francisco we deal with earthquakes all the time. Seattle probably should be thinking about earthquakes a lot too trade we also need to be thinking about things theyre a little bit more ephemeral and social. Like how do you organize the citys evacuation plan in a flood or how do you organize how to respond to a pandemic in your city. That may not have to do with how you engineer the city but it has to do with how you engineer the social infrastructure of the city and it turns out there are a lot of myths about how to handle in a city and that was interesting to me to find out about. One of the really interesting areas and this is going to get a little bit futuristic, i really think they could help cities become not just more disaster proof but also more sustainable is a movement that has just started now that is called living architecture. It goes by some other names to match like bioarchitecture and its basically a combination of Architectural Design of nature but also material science that creates new kinds of Building Materials that behave like living substances or actually partly made of living substances. One of the best examples of this is something thats called self sowing concrete. Again not a scientific term but a lot of phrase that is used for a lot of different substances. What you can see here on the flight is one experiment done a few years ago by some students who invented a substance that was partly made from bacteria. These were genetically modified bacteria that when they were put into a crack in the concrete there was sort of on the left side there is the crack and this is magnified by the way. They put this substance that they referred to as the scylla filling. Im glad you are laughing because you are a science crowd. Basically this but. A that the pacelle would go into the crack and it would extrude this a proxy as well as some other calcium like substances and eventually it would fill in the crack holding onto the concrete and leaving behind this scar that actually looks like a living skin that is healed up. Of course all experiments with Synthetic Biology architecture is that bacteria are set up and engineer to die when they are done after filling in the crack so there is a failsafe mechanism. They fill it in give their lives to heal the concrete treat this as one example of the selfhealing material that could be used in cities. I talked to architects and designers for this book about much more futuristic ideas on how these kinds of materials might be used. Selfhealing materials of course make housing more sustainable because instead of tearing tearing down old structures the structures might heal themselves and they can make things like bridges were safe to guess when they develop cracks they may be able to heal themselves to for a real disaster happens. So we might be able to have selfhealing structures that are maintaining themselves just like living organisms and the city itself can become a living organism helped by this biological innovation but also of course helped by things like a smart grid that really works. If you have a smart grid that really works where say of building takes just enough power from the grid to supply what it needs while other buildings that dont need power dont take any power from the grid you are creating an organism where the wings are kind of talking to each other on the grid and who is going to get power when and you start having almost like a body where different organs are getting blood or getting nutrients when they need them. So its my idea and the idea of a lot of architects and designers working in this space map the cities are going to slowly become more like organisms. This will allow us to have hopefully carbonneutral or carbon negative cities where we are ultimately using alternative fuels and maybe growing fuels. Maybe cities would be full of algae fats or only every home would have its own algae fats and you can use that for fuel and you might use it for lighting. You could have algae that glows in the dark. I talked to one designer and she said you know in 100 or 200 years we might be cultivating moles in our houses and not killing it. He would be exchanging recipes with your neighbors for how do you get the best mold to purify your water and light up at night lex our cities might not be as much in contradiction with nature and in contradiction with the environments where they are. One day you might look out on your city and see something that looks kind of like a ruined or like a treehouse and he would come across this kind of crumbling structure and realize actually a crumbling structure a structured covering fines might really be a living place. It might look like its crumbling because it had been selfhealselfhealing so these buildings would be covered in scars. They wouldnt look all smooth like downtown seattle does now but they might be a lot more sustainable and a lot that are for the people in them and the environment. Ultimately, and again looking further into the future even further than biological cities we might start extending our ability to farm our cities and build our cities and start actually farming the atmosphere and when i say farming the atmosphere i choose those words because farming pretty much transform the surface of the earth. We now are kind of shepherds of almost everything that grows on the planet except for some areas and even those areas are falling under human control. Alternately if we want to maintain the climate at a level we prefer we are going to have to start thinking about how are we going to control the climate . Its not going to be enough just to cut carbon emissions. Obviously we need to do that and thats a great start but the planet goes through carbon cycles naturally as i was talking about with the permian period. There is actual absolutely time with a plan thats going to create the results of the Industrial Revolution without any help from us. Its going going to have megaball cannot send carbon will be introduced into the atmosphere in heat rings up all by itself. You dont need to be there to do it so humans are going to have to take on the burden or take on the project of actually keeping the environment in a state that we preferred. Having those icecaps on the north and south poles that is great for us. We love it. All the animals and plants in our environment are kind of set up and they fall for that but its actually weird in the history of the planet. Most of the history of the planet there have been no icecaps in the polls. Things have been a lot warmer. The atmosphere at times has been much more carbon rich. Sometimes its been much more oxygen rich so its quite a natural for us to be hoping to keep the planet in a state where its nice and cool the way we like it. Eventually over time if we want our species to enjoy life on earth we are going to have to think about what kinds of technologies we can invent to draw carbon down out of the atmosphere when it actually starts getting in there either through stuff that we have done which one argues is not very natural or through the natural carbon cycle for the planet. So those technologies are geoengineering technologies, waste of engineering the entire geology of the earth. And i do talk about that in the book as well. Trust me its a long way off. There have been some geode engineering experiments that happened actually quite recently. There was a road geoengineering off the coast of canada who did an experiment trying to talk down carbon from the atmosphere by doing iron seeding in the ocean and so far doesnt seem as if it worked out. The ideas you put iron in the ocean and it attracts microbes that like to eat iron and those microbes also drawdown carbon when they die into the autumn of the ocean and take the carbon with them. The problem is they dont tend to sink all the way to the bottom of the ocean so you end up with fluorocarbon. Thats just a start and geoengineering is really in its infancy. Finally, if we really want to look longterm beyond biological cities compact beyond geoengineering theyre still going to be problems with earth. For one thing, we have this habit of running into giant rocks in space because we are a giant rock hanging in space. There are other rocks out here with us and gravity brings us into contact sometimes. We also of course have a planet which is full of magma, and volcanoes happen sometimes for really long time and sometimes really catastrophically. So if we want again to have a awesome 1 million years and hopefully beyond we need to be thinking about how to get off the planet. We need to think about how humans can have backup cities and new civilizations on other planets and maybe other structures in space because if something catastrophic happens to the planet we need to have a place where we can go. Maybe we are all going to be refugees at some point. Hopefully the venetian government wont mind. I heard there are a lot of jobs on mercury but now. Its like saskatchewan. Come on, we will take any refugee. The thing is that when we think about space travel and then i think about colonizing space, it may turn out to take a little bit longer than we think. We are kind of taking our first baby steps toward space travel but let me give you a quick example of how the timeline might work. Looking back into human history, humans 50,000 years ago used reed boats much like the one you are saying over here are, to get from asia to australia. 50,000 years ago we crossed an entire ocean in reed boats but it wasnt really until about 500 years ago that you had International Travel using boats creating a global culture. It was not until really the advanced a few no tremendous amounts of capital being poured into shipping as part of the colonization of the planet that you really got like i said a global culture. That is a lot of lag time between the first use of boats to go from one continent to the other to creating a culture where humans are traveling all the time between continents. So if you think of this first boat here as the rockets that we have used to get to the moon and the rockets we have used to take the robot friends to mars, we may be pretty far away from a time when we are jetting between mars and earth all the time. I hope its not going to be 50,000 years. I dont mean to suggest we are going to have to wait that long that it may be a lot longer than we hoped. It may not be the next decade or the next century that we have a city on mars. It may take as us hundreds of years before we really have a civilization. It may look nothing like we expect. We may not be using rockets to get off the planet. We may be using Something Like this space elevator here. A space elevator actually its great that im in seattle because every year there is a space elevator conference in seattle where people who want to build it, and discuss their ideas. Since the 1990s when nasa actually worked on a model for this but space elevator and thought through some of the things we might need to create one nasa has actually had a in annual price offered to anyone who can build part of this elevator that doesnt exist yet and i will tell you about that in just a second. As you can see this image is actually from nasa. What you can see here is the elevator card. There is earth very far in the background. The idea of a space elevator first of all is answering a basic question which is how do you have sustainable space travel . Right now we are using rockets which require rocket fuel which is expensive, heavy and polluting and theres a limited supply of it. So its not a good longterm solution. We cant keep using rockets so what would we use . How would we have the kind of train into space that would be completely able to be used over and over again, something that wouldnt pollute the environment said the space elevator and this is how orcs. So you have a platform on earth. You have an elevator platform somewhere along the equator and then you have a very very long tether attaching that elevator platform up about 60,000 miles so you are part way to the minute that point. At the other end of the tether you have a counterweight in that counterweight is in geostationary orbit so its orbiting the earth but also attached by this tether and i will get to the tether in a minute because the tether is kind of the problem. Right now we actually have the technology to do a lot of this. A counterweight not so much. The counterweight might be a captured asteroid he might yet happy version of a death star. Basically what its going to be is a port. Its going to be a destination for people to get due in space where they can get onto a spaceship that would take them somewhere else. The space elevators just to get you out of the gravity well into space and then on your merry way. Well take you about three days to get up to that counterweight or port so that car isnt really like an elevator as we think of it today. Its more like a trained sleeper car. Youre probably going to have a bunkbed that will cost a lot of money but hopefully it will be much cheaper than the amount of money it costs now. Of course you can use the elevator car over and over again and you can have people going constantly up and down and of course supplies going up and down as well. The elevator car would climb of that tether using robotic arms of the kind that exist now in industrial factories to build large machines so you have your robotic arms pulling this elevator car out of the gravity well and into space. The big question is what would you make the tether out of . It has to be flexible and then. It has to withstand weather. It has to withstand micrometeorites better zooming around in space. It has to withstand the space junk that we put into the abyss where all that maybe by the time we do this we we will have the space vacuum to take out all the space junk or we will have robots out there collecting space junk here and its suggested that it might be made out of carbon nanotubes but its unclear whether carbon nanotubes could be used for Something Like this. Every year nasa has a contest where they offer up to 1 million to the person you could come up with a substance that would be light enough and Strong Enough and so far no one has won the full amount although people are with you on the carbon nanotube angle. If you have an idea for it you should go to the space elevator conference and see if you can help create the future of space travel. Point is things in the future might not look exactly the way we expect. We have got like i said 900,000 years to change and develop new technologies that will hopefully make the future a place where we can survive, where we can survive disasters from everyday stuff like earthquakes and tsunamis to really mass extinction causing disasters like super volcanoes or encounters with asteroids from space. The thing is that as i said no matter what happens humans are probably going to survive. If we look even dispassionately at geological history and that human history, that we see that humans do have all the traits that are required to survive even a really horrific as mr. Mr. Even a mass extinction. The question is how we are going to survive. What kinds of projects will be start taking on as a species to make our survival something that is enjoyable or something that is sustainable and not turn into a horrific scenario where we have to live underground being worms all the time. Humans have a survival instinct like every other creature on the planet. No matter if we are good to the planet or bad to it we are going to survive. Its just a question of how weird its going to get how different is going to get and at some point i think we may evolve into an entirely different species after that million years is that. Say we wind up as part squid part creature living on the moon or saturn. That is a win for us. We dont have to be human at the end of that journey. We may change a lot over that time and hopefully our progeny will look back at us and say good job you guys. That was a great path that you took to help us survive and now we have an awesome home on titan. Again like i said that as a win for us and i think its going to get weird but we are going to make it through. Thanks very much. [applause] so we can do to you and they if people want to line up at a mic at the corner of the room. See the space elevator you said there would be robot arms pulling out more power. That is a good question. The model that nasa worked on and i think that i dont think you can see it in this picture is it would actually be laser powered so that there would be lasers on the surface that would be powering it basically sort of a version of solar power but with lasers beaming at receivers on the elevator car. The question is again how do you do that with weather patterns interfering and how do you make sure that your laser continues to power it in space . Once you get into space it can probably use solar. Thats still a big question so the answer now is laser. Its an exciting answer to the question. There are a lot of factors in building the elevators so that tether is a great question. Weed at death scatter and remember but im sure there are people reading books on these things. What happens when the power goes out. What happens to the books in the libraries. The libraries are made of paper. There are a lot of answers to that question. Humans luckily do have a lot of redundant storage mechanisms. We dont just use terabyte raised like i used at my house for perfect the legal [laughter] we also do have oaks. There are also a lot of groups who organize on line who are working on creating storehouses of knowledge that can be used in the event of civilizational collapse. Theres also the possibility that we could maintain some of those archives and generators. It really depends on what the collapse is because a lot of these disasters, god can we imagine the giant fireball or if any of you are watching the show revolution its going to be like google is going to invent nanotechnology. Dont watch that show. The point is that both of these disasters that im looking at are things that dont happen instantaneously. So theyre kind of a slowmoving disaster that kind of ticks up speed over hundreds of thousands of years and even when you have Something Like an earthquake or tsunami or even a bombing or a radiation disaster those tend to be localized so youre always going to have pockets where people have nation. What humans are great at a sharing information over distances. Even if there is a time period where some people in seattle and San Francisco we dont have the internet and we staff our eyes out because we can imagine what that would be like. There are people out there that will maintain those information stores and we will have libraries and backups. What is the best thing we can do to ensure the survival of. Ive been talking about some of that today. The main question is how do we conceive as what we are doing as part of a longterm pathway to survival because all of these threats take place over many generations. That is hard for us to think about because we are thinking about what can we do tomorrow to fix something next week and these are things we can do in a human lifetime to fix things for People Living 300 years from now. The real question is how do we conceive of a project like rebuilding our cities to be more like biological or burned sums in a way that isnt frustrating because obviously in my lifetime im never going to see that. In my lifetime im never going to be see a space elevator unless im seeing playing a video game. How do we have steps along the way in advanced technology in our lifetime that can add to a future where we have a logical cities. That is why im as excited about things like selfhealing materials which are something that we can invent in a lifetime that we can maybe perfect in a lifetime and could be part of the pathway toward having a more sustainable city. I think that is really the difficult task is realizing we wont get to see the end of the story in our lifetime. We wont get to have a happy moment like i survived because you are only going to know that at the end of the million years they just hope like i said the squid offspring say thanks you guys. The same like we look back at home all erect is like the job, so i think that has to be the hope that we get bite sized projects that we can do in a lifetime. And go to space. I was wondering humans are uniquely able to learn from history but also havent shown much inclination to history so how are you going to motivate people to start down this path with things that would be useful us for us even a thousand years from now . Yeah or even 100 years from now come to write . Iowas it funny that people say humans are so bad at learning from history or we are so lazy. Nobody is motivated to do anything in the fact is that if you look at humans on the acre timeline and look at is this species. Dont look at it like your brother or your professors put an individual person who is a total idiot for their whole life. You have to look at it as a really longterm narrative so again we are very early in that narrative and also just take Something Like Climate Change. When did humanity figure out that the stuff that we are doing with their Industrial Production is causing Climate Change . About yeah if you wanted to be generous you could say 30 years or 40 years. So when our lifetime we figured that out and during that time its become one of the most hotlydebated political issues on the planet. That is pretty good. No we havent fixed it and in fact many would argue that we are screwing things up even worse but the fact is just in the short period of time since we figured out we are screwing up we turned it into something where theres a huge question of how we are going to deal with it so again its frustrating because probably all of us will be dead for we find out who prevailed and what the alternative energy will be that we finally used instead of fossil fuels and will it be corn will it be solar . That is what im hoping for because solar is a Great Technology thats just in its infancy and soberly i think the track record is pretty good. I feel like we have learned a lot from disasters that have happened to start and that we are weirdly pretty agile in responding. Its just that it it is in within a lifetime and if you look back in the last 500 years, there have been really awesome things that humans have done and learned from. Now we have science as an incredibly widely accepted period of dealing with the world cant cannot everywhere but in most places. That was also quite recent. I feel like humans are doing okay. I think we are muddling through. We are not the greatest and sometimes we are but i think on the whole that urge to adapt and the urge to survive does. Out into our politics and into our social structures. Again, got it takes a little time. Thinks. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. Hi. You mentioned that there were committees on line where there are storehouses of knowledge to be printed off in emergency circumstances. Do you happen to know the names of them . I do talk about them in my book. There is one group that is, you are going to have to google this. There are basically three cds Something Like that so basically all the knowledges on three cds and its stuff like how do you do basic medicine . How do you do basic farming techniques . There is also a basic question on how men need the family. There is sometimes a bit of an ideological problem lets there is a group that has they are trying to come up with a fairly small number of machines that you would need to restart civilizations everything from a thrashing machine to a 3d printer so make her bout will survive the apocalypse which is great news. There are other groups doing it as well. You always have to think of the threat model. There seems to be this go to scenario where people say ever things going to collapse and because were not going to the internet anymore and were not going to have any power. I dont know whats going to happen to the cities. They will all be nuked out of existence so we will have to start as men leading the charge into the agricultural economy again. I dont mean to pick on these poor guys and they are trying their best. They did amass an incredible amount of helpful information. But the fact is that there is not a lot of disasters that are like that where we just see a complete loss of every kind of new technology. I think, as i said when i began the apocalypse is a lot more complicated than we think it will be and there will be pockets of people who have access to High Technology and even today on the planet there are people that have access to technology that many in the people dont have access to. The apocalypse may work a lot like the world does now for slightly worse. So we have to be prepared for that. Its just a little bit worse. And very slow. That is why we really do need to be trying to take action now to kind of slowly steer us away from the slightly worse but complicated world. If you find other stuff let me know, other resources. Two kinds of thoughts. One is that if you you focus will bit more on Food Supplies may be as part of the organizing effect of you know losing control of the whole situation. The second thing is are there plans or planned communities that are really good examples of these living architecture people are looking at . Planned communities like types of plants you would use . Lets say mushrooms as an example. Not to use but to look at how they survive in all kinds of circumstances or creatures underneath the sea. These are both super great questions. In response to your question about the food supply that is actually a big concern in my book and i talked about food webs a little bit today but i didnt go into all of the concerns about food webs. I do have a section where i talk about salmon and salmon is actually a very likely result of Climate Change. All of these examples i have talked about for a few examples i have talked about of how mass extinction unfold and take 1 million years part of what is happening there is species are experiencing famines because the more the species die out the more the food supply dwindled since and so that is really what youre talking about when youre talking about death by Climate Change. Some of it is also death by habitat change. Habitat change isnt like wow its way too hot to me to live but its also way too hot for the grass to be that we be not. That is why i think food webs are really interesting way to think about mass extinctions and think about food webs unraveling because that is really where the death happens. Its in the food web destruction. As for the plant question, to i have a favorite plant. Its actually not a plant. Its a bacteria but its kind of like a plant. Bluegreen algae. If anyone was here for the lecture before me, bacteria played a big role in that lecture. It is the greatest survivor on earth. It has survived every single mass extinction. It isnt bluegreen algae. It looks just like sludge and the ancestors of bluegreen algae lived on earth billions of years ago and made it through incredibly harsh conditions and heres how they did it. They did it by evolving photosynthesis. In other words solar power so what made them so adaptable and so able to live anywhere including on snowball earth, including the earth where lystrosaurus was hanging out being all cute and whitley was because it had this ability to get energy and a food supply anywhere it went because it relied on the sun. I actually have a pretty extensive section of the book where i talk about not just the awesomeness of sinobacteria as a survivor species but also how we can learn from it to think about solar power is being the cornerstone to survival. Because hey it worked for signup and. And it works for plants. Sinobacteria may actually be the source of chlorophyll in plants. They may have absorbed an ancestor of sinobacteria to create plant sale so its a really really good survival mechanism. Its great that we finally and we are just in the infancy of imitating sinobacteria. Basically one day you too might be like a terrier. You know when people say humans are like a terrier upon the earth . Its like yeah thats great. We could be like a terrier on the earth. Im going to ask a question question and efforts a little bit from some of the things you have talked about. Most of the people in the room probably share this memory that iq of living in the 70s in and the 80s and we worried about a Nuclear Winter. Do you preclude an event like that . I mean the weapons that exist, that existed then still exist now and that potential still is there for some sort of a devastating Nuclear Exchange among nations and it seems to actually be getting worse proliferating, well given the politics of the world so my question has to do to you include some sort of a set of political disasters that would wiki no create that Nuclear Winter and with that event be sufficient to pretty well kill off most people or where the few that survive actually be able to build something beyond that or would we be going back to mass extinction . I think my answer in order is no and yes and they do talk a lot about radiation disasters and the interesting thing about their winter is its happened before in the planet. When that asteroid hits 65 million years ago that eventually led to this slow dying off of the dinosaurs is caused in the their winter and that is in fact one of the models that people use when they were coming up with the idea of Nuclear Winter in the 80s with his previous horrific set of explosions that happened. So we know for sure in the event of a Nuclear Winter many species to survive so we know its a survivable event. There are is also some evidence to suggest that the first mass extinction that plan that went through 450 million years ago may have been caused by massive radiation bombardment. So again its controversial because it was so long ago and its very hard to say but it seems as if some of the evidence points to the idea that there may have been a nearby supernova and the lat was bombarded with Gamma Radiation that fried off part of the atmosphere and cause a very rapid ice age. We know that life survive that as well so thats a huge radiation disaster. We also know that one good way to survive radiation disasters is to have 2 feet of rock between you and the energetic particles that are bouncing around. I do ever chapter in the book on underground cities because we end up living in an underground city. I think nuclear war is one kind of threat and then there are other kinds of radiation disasters that can happen as well. Radiation disaster is a very imminent threat. Maybe not eminent that is one of the threats. Its definitely a scenario that may cause may have caused mass extinctions in the past. Earlier and you talk you mentioned you think there will be pockets of people with greater access to technology and i totally agree with that. The apocalypse is here that not evenly distributed. I volunteered in a clinic in rural african winch you get past how 30 everything is and theres no touch is that he is fascinated to see how people can do so much with few resources. In your research did you do much looking into how people in developing world are able to deal with the apocalypse . Yes, i dont talk about it directly like that but what youre saying is absolutely true and that is part of why its important to remember that the talk. Complicated and people are incredibly resourceful in those conditions. And as we look to the future its important to look to the developing world as a model because there are a lot of ways in which the kinds of Development Taking place there kind of leapfrogging over some of the mistakes they made with the industrialization could really be kind of a pathway toward a future where we dont have to use also fuels for example or we dont have to have that kind of massive cable and the structure to have internet communications. Maybe we can start fresh in some way. So i think the simple answer is yes. I think that is a really good model and the other thing is that you know some of the disasters that have happened in the developing world like famine is a really big one which i do talk a lot about in the book and one of the things we have learned about famine is that it is a human created disaster. That is something we have learned from looking at how famines develop in different parts of the world. Sure there are Natural Causes for famines especially in africa where irrigation is usually from rainfall to but the fact is all of those famines can be prevented with International Cooperation and the people actually have access to resources and those resources arent overpriced. So that becomes a really good model for us and thinking about the future and how we are going to handle things like food shortages, what works and what doesnt work. So far many things have not worked but that is how experiments go. Our first efforts may not work that we need to be thinking about those regions of the world as places where we are going to have to deal with famine first and how we do it effectively. One more. This is the last question. I dont want to embarrass myself so much because i fully formed this question but im taking the information you gave about the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and how there were certainly terrible deaths. A big explosion. But then it took sometime in the atmosphere and with the super bowl can know at you was down as i understand from my reading compound in terms of geographic or geological time that should be happening pretty soon. Would that be a thing where maybe north america would be wiped out but the population in the rest of the world would have some time to adapt . Or should we have built these underground cities that we can go to . Do you have any thoughts or comments about that . We dont have any control over we dont and of course we should always be working on building underground cities. Please start soon. And actually an underground city would be great if there were a super volcano like we had at the end of the permian. The volcano in yellowstone is actually not the same kind of volcano that ended the permian. Matt. They were called super volcanoes because they would eject a lot of material but the one at the end of of the permian was a very longterm eruption that lasted for at least 1000 years and it opened these big events that were just pouring tons of lava into the atmosphere. Thats another scientific term. Pouring a lot of fashion to the atmosphere. The volcano would be enormous. The caldera volcano is what we are talking about. The caldera would collapse and there would be events that open up and lava but it would probably only last for about a. The main devastation from that would be again entering the environment getting up into the stratosphere and you know they wouldnt really be a lot of burning lava death beyond the boundaries of the park. The main outcome would be crops would just be wrecked for that year. It would be the midwest, so a lot of crimes that are very valuable for food and for export would be ruined. Of course there would be a very expensive cleanup. Probably not a lot of death. It would really be infrastructure destruction, and, again, crop destruction. So and it is possible that Global Temperatures might go down a tiny bit. Theyre is a similar russian in 1812 and indonesia where you had a super volcano that went off and it lowered Global Temperatures a tiny bit so that it would not be like Climate Change situation, but the lowering of the temperature might last for two or three or four years i dont mean to downplay it because it would be warmly devastating, but it would not rack of america. You would not have love it here in seattle which is kind of house i had imagined it would be, but no, sorry. It didnt and would not happen that way. That volcano could erupt any time. Not likely, but a kid. Lets and with that happy thought. Thank you for coming out. [applause] thursday book tv in primetime features books about the immigrant experience. This is a place where you have to know where you are about because there are going to be other people want to tell you what you are about and they dont have your best interest in mind. That is where kind of survivalist man had become an insistent about being what i am an being fixed to what i am. An open question is how much is that unique to prisons, is that how most americans are who are strangely absolutist and pluralist at the same time . Piano, my truth is the one true truth but i recognize your right to some wrong truth . Maximum security prison sunday night at 9 00 p. M. On after it words, part of book tv this weekend on cspan2. Representative greg walden, what is on your Summer Reading list . I just finished a victory lap, political stuff on the side. That talks a lot about persuasion, visual data, and how the world has changed. I am hoping this summer to get to the biography on jefferson which i have, pile. Then i have a new one on roosevelt, teddy roosevelt. A big fan of roosevelt and the Reform Movement and his energy and style. I have one that deals, i think, mainly with this time down in south america, so it should be interesting. Let us know what you are reading this summer. booktv, posted on our Facebook Page, or send us an email. Next, a pioneer in the field of Virtual Reality argues that the rise of Digital Networks contributed to our economic recession and weak and the middle class. This discussion is an hour and three minutes. Thank you so much. Try not to fall off the back of the states. It is bright. Well. That is for cspan. Okay. Is the audio okay . Can you hear me . Thank you for coming out. I used to live here, of course. This is extremely familiar. I used to a haunted when i was young urban so long ago. I cherish this particular store and thank you for supporting it. We just lost the last significant bookstore near where i live. To not have a bookstore really changes things. It is extraordinary. I was like to believe that that makes up for it, but it doesnt. It is is not the same. These are precious places. So this book, the other thing yet to remember is similar to this end of year this paulist time of year. Extraordinary loss of pollen have come over from the ocean. Abcaeight. Thirty years ago or so the, 30 and some odd years ago i was part of the circle of the oven techies, and i bet there are other people from that circle here who were just on fire with this idea of how often were going to improve the world. We were going to get a digital network. You were going to make and tv easy and accessible to everybody fair and it was going to create this huge wave of wellbeing. And remember anticipating this so tangibly that i could just feel, wow, were going to do a wonderful thing for the world. I still believe that we will, and we have a little bit. But in my view and in my experience something started to go wrong and has gone really pretty bad. So i want to explain what that is and you can understand my motivation in hell i came to the position i have now. Wind huge new wave of technological efficiency have appeared in the past they have often been in perfect, often created little Power Centers are disruptions or all sorts of things, but generally the appearance of the interstate highways, plumbing, electricity in the wall, nitrogen fixing fertilizers, vaccines, clean water available with the turn of another near home. When all these things appear what is undeniable and really apparent immediately thereafter is a wave of improvement and wellbeing for people. Vast portions of the population start getting better, also all kinds of things are opened up. I was certain now was going to happen with digital networking, but it is not exactly the way things went. Starting around the turn of the century i started to notice a pattern that was really bothering me which is that my friends who worked in the industries that were most affected by digital networking first, and im thinking of musicians and journalists and photographers, were not finding the world of new opportunity that i had for so long anticipated would appear. Instead i ended up almost every week having to be part of a fundraiser to help somebody get a crucial operation in needed and they did not have insurance or Something Like that. People who are well known and not the unknown, and famous, but wellknown musicians. Ashamed to admit that they needed help. That had not been true before. That was new. But then what really hit me was the financial crisis, the whole developed world. Of focusing on the developed world exclusively for the moment. I will get to the developing world later. All developed world at approximately the same time got itself tangled up in financial absurdity. You had the most powerful countries is in their credit ratings. You had lots of social mobility, jobless recoveries, hollowed out job markets, insanely tight credit, massive waves of financial socked fraud or pseudo fraud. And most of all there was a phenomenon of intense concentration of wealth and influence and a loss of the broader middle of wealth and influence, a decline of what we could call the middleclass. And this happened in societies all over the world, not just year. All of the developed ones. This just blew my mind. Now, when i look at this i noticed something that sent chills down my spine which is that all of the newly powerful elite, all of the people who are really at the center of the game , and i have to mention, i have done pretty well myself. And not talking about other. Me and my friend. I know individuals who have done well in the last 15 years i say. Not some weird aliens. But every single one of us is somehow close to one of the biggest computers on the net. And when i started to realize, in the new system we create, power and influence were accumulating around the biggest computers on the network. This happened in finance. It happened in insurance. Happened in a lecture politics. It happened in media. Happened with nation states. It was happening all over. So i thought back on my idealism from when i have been the anchor. I have been kind of a fire breathing oping culture person for years to help bring up a lot of the rhetoric. And what we have always believed as if we made Information Available it would create so many aborigines and so must efficiency and creativity that we were not sure what happened, but surely the incredible scrubbing of goods and benefits would overwhelm problems otherwise be temporary, but we fail to consider something which is, if you want to create this utopia where you have all these people sharing your information and everything is available, people might be created people, but computers are not. Computers are vastly different from one another. Some computers are giant server farms in utah collecting information for american intelligence organizations. Some computers are giants giant server farms powered by their own power plants and cooled by rivers or blazers. They all need exotic ways. Some of them belong to financial schemes. Some belong the social media were searched companies, some along to finance years. They are all kinds of different ones, some of the rear distributive once the takeover our computers are run by criminal organizations, but theyre all doing basically the same thing. So what happens is if everyone shares equally, whoever has the best computer gets on natural advantages, its advantages that are so profound that they seduce the owners of the largest computers into the well, when you are gifted and privileged, you often dont notice it. It is the thing that is invisible, a form of failure that sneaks into people. And you end up in essentially taking advantage of your position without ever intending to our knowing because it is the most natural thing in the world. One way to explain what it is like, the biggest computer on a network is to go back to the a thought experiment creature from the 19th century. You will notice there would go to the 19th century a lot because i feel the 21st century is, in no way, an echo of the 19th century in a multitude of ways. So there is a creature would like to introduce you to in a town like this it is so educated, most of you probably know. How many of you have encountered this . Okay. You never know. So somebody you will need if you take a class in introductory thermodynamics. No, no. He will talk about physics. Run. Run. No. It is really simple. He had this to a man named after ambushing. Imagine a little demon opening and closing a little tiny door, just an adb door just big enough for molecules slip through. The demon is watching molecules into chambers right next to each other and this little bar connected chambers. Each chamber is still with a fluid, water, air, Something Like that. The demon is watching the molecules approaching the door, and if theyre is a really how one on the left side of the memo led it through the right side, and if theres a rally called one bad game and will let it go to the left side. And just by observing these molecules and opening the store very carefully that timman separates the hot from the cold. Once you have done that, you can do something rather nuys which is open up the bigger door and the fickle than a hot mix again. Then you can repeat the process in the have perpetual motion. Global warming solved. Perpetual motion machines cellmark. Its interesting. The active discrimination, the active dealing in information is real work. Its never purely abstract, or separated from reality. The active opening and closing the little door and observing the molecules and the celtics more power and generates more waste heat then you attempt to save by running the turbine in between sessions. This is also known as no free lunch, and you can never get ahead of the game. Every purported perpetual motion machine turns up to be a demon policy if you understand it well enough. Faugh what happened with that any bad intent, they could pretended they could be the max will the men in obamanomics. Heres how it works. The most familiar example is American Health insurance. That most cherished of american institutions. So Health Insurance use to try to calculate risk and there were professionals called actuaries. They had to write down figures and tables and work with very poor in permission, roughly gathered and in at crude since they would try to set the rates of policy. Their job was not really to exclude people by surprise. That only became possible when there was so much state and so much computational power today you could set to pretend to be at maxwells demand. You gather a statistical correlations to predict to has been needed insurance and an open a little door and say the people unlikely to need insurance gather over here and the people likely to need the benefits of insurance, we put them on the other side of the door. Thereby, by having the biggest computer recreate the perfect investment. We create the perfect scheme that cannot fail because we are only insuring people in need it. We know for sure will make a great profit. Theyre is a story i, perhaps, should not tell. I will tell it without naming names. The editors lawyers cut it. Theyre is a Little Island that is used by the republican establishment for planning retreats. I wont say where it is, and i had a consulting gig helping the largest american insurance concern figure out how operate the computers when they first got them. And remember this deal of this concern talking about how we really love to not insure people who are going to turn out to the insurance. We should deal to avoid doing that. And at that moment there was this weird like rushing sound and then it was this enormous and it was such a little earthquake. It turns out there was a meteor strikes right next to a and so anyway, those of you who are astronomers interested in me yours who are seeking a device to attract meteors in order to be allowed to study and should really look to the population of Health Insurance executives. You will find unique. And the metaphor of making should be clear. He think creating the perfect business that is all benefit and no risk, but the problem is your radiating his seat, the risk out to the world. And the world is not and can at large. It cant those are the risk or the people in the insurance. So eventually the system breaks. You undermine the system in which it made sense. So its ultimately selfdestructive, but in the immediate sense is more destructive to others. So in a shortterm sense you could say, others are hurt more by me of what ultimately everyone certainly the people trying to run the perfect investment. This has happened to Health Insurance in america which we can see just by looking at the state of our country, but it also happened of finance again and again and again. Some friends of mine who used to work at an outfit called longterm capital. Remember that one. So longterm capital was an attempt to use big computing to make a perfect investment fund. It seemed too good to be true, so in order to create an air of legitimacy they hire a bunch of people who had nobel prizes in economics to be associated with it, and it looked perfect first. When it failed, it failed big. Guess you paid for it . Hello, all of you. You paid for it. There was another one called and ron. And ron was doing whatever the same thing. A great big computer. Lets make a perfect investment because we can predict where risk is. I remember getting a call from enron. They want to buy my idols are up. I thought, no. We dont want to sell. We dont want to sell a little party star of the we love so much to some companies test the strength to take advantage of a competing. Guess who bought it . Cool. I love them. Im sure there are some people here tonight. We would get to that. So then the thing about it is that even though maxwell the many allusions always break after a while, that condition is so great because at least in the first phase it does work. If you have the biggest computer and a connected network you can calculate little tiny ways to improve your game so that other people take the risk could you get the benefit. You just everything seems golden. What happens, finance and insurance, it will happen to Silicon Valley. It will happen to every other area of life of which are organized this way. This is the fundamental pattern that we have to figure out a way to transcend. It is not going to be easy because it is seductive. Ive been on the of a side of it. Its great when it works. It is like heroin or something. Its information heroin, and we have to find some way to yet off of it. I mentioned that time will be returning to the 19th century again and again. I will return to it now. In the 19th century a lot of things happened. There was a whole hundred years there. There was a civil war here. Lots of new technology, lots of new science. In terms of human thought there was a unifying his theme that was so powerful and so presence that the expressions of it remain dominant today, and that theme was robot anxiety. The 19th century was defined intellectually to an amazing degree by ethier that people would be made obsolete by approving improving technology. You might not think of that is the 19th century concern. But let me give you a couple of the signposts. First of all, the riots which were riots by textile workers being concerned that there would be made obsolete by improved textile machinery fell of the improved looms. That was a very ugly early battle that resulted in public executions of one not. That, in turn, strongly influenced the 19th century thinkers and a potential heir to the particular karl marx. If you read the early march, the 1840s marks, he was at that time it Technology Writer concerned precisely with this issue. I realized i was driving on alma listening to kate tsa, but that did not know. I thought it was kqed. It was someone going on about how ever going to lower barriers to Market Access and more going to a capital was going to flow. No, god. Another one of these stupid Silicon Valley startups. It was an actual reading of marks. It was the strangest thing. Oh, my god. I went back and reread it. If you forget about im not a marxist. I think his solution has been proven to fail, but if you read his descriptive work on what was going on with human life in the world of improving technology, he sells contemporary. It really is extraordinary stuff there are not that many songs from the 19th century that are immediately familiar to us, but the ballad of john henry is one about a guy who is in a race with the robot that lies Railroad Tracks and manages to win but dies from exhaustion. It was the sort of tragic, erotic this to five disparate some of the people and raising its machines. The literature of the 19th century is with us today, and recall it Science Fiction. The earliest sciencefiction was directing motivated by a fear of human obsolescence. A wonderful example to of example is hd wells time machine worked humanities splits in the future and just uses pcs, one of which benefits from being the descendants of those who own facebook in is to gramm and google, the rich ones to run the scheme. They eat the other ones. The interesting thing in the vision is that both sides of that divide i made a kind of ridiculous. Absurd. If you look at Science Fiction occasionally it is an alien who makes as obsolete, but it is one of the other. Always a question of whether humans will become obsolete or not, and usually it is our own machines. As the theme over and over again. The Science Fiction started out of robot anxiety in the 19th century. An interesting thing happened. In the 20thcentury we did not see massive waves of unemployment because of improving technology. And of course the reason was that new jobs were created when machines get better and it shows that those jobs are usually more desirable. It did not happen automatically. There is this thing called the Labor Movement which was no small thing, a gigantic, but become a difficult movement. In a sense it was fighting for the right to get paid even if your job is as miserable and dangerous as old jobs. That is something that is often forgotten. So lets imagine for a moment that this bookstore is located in rochester, new york instead of menlo park, california. If we were in rochester we would remember that in 19th century it was that cynosure of the manufacture of buggy whips. It when obsoletes because motorized vehicles gamelan. I love horses. Dealing with horses as a necessity to get around is a pain in the bud. I dont know if he had done it. There is the feeding, the poop, and whose chairman the getting kate, not all of that nice. The whole thing is really a big nuisance. So having a motorized vehicle is not only cool, but it is so fun you wonder why people would not to spit it drive it. So if you have if you ever wonder why the Teamsters Union is tough union, have to be tough to assert that even the lawyer doing is sitting there putting your foot up battle, he still deserves to be paid. Thats why cabbies get paid. And every time they use the job that is not utterly miserable and dangerous but still pays, you will notice something about that job which is that there was in the past some straw vote created some sort of the ratchet or structure that helps as people get paid despite the fact that they are not constantly risking death. There is either a union were academics are something. Always some kind of mechanism. And this is the reason why in the georges century we have better jobs to do a better technology. It was not so much a question of whether people will were still needed but a judgment dammar hardfought for the judgment that even if the new rules for people or more pleasant than the old, you could still get paid for them. That is what happened. So Unemployment Crisis averted. Middleclass strong. Now, at the turn of the 21st century we suddenly decided to read a on that covenant. Recently decided, screw the solution. Who will let people go obsolete. Let me spine allies see this happening. One of the magical little tools that are available for us swimmingly for free is language translation, a proximate language translation. You can up load an essay in english and get it back seemingly automatically turned into a spanish essay. Not perfect, but readable. Google to microsoft and a few others. The First Company to iraq demonstrated was ibm labs, but it is a pretty common thing at this point. So the way that we talk about a service like this, most commonly, is as if theyre is a giant artificial brain and we are privileged to get the services of this artificial brain for free. Isnt it a Wonderful World in which you can benefit from the artificial brain for free . Now, there have been a time when there was a hope that this spring might be created. It goes back to the 1950s when some of the pioneers were never really sure what would be involved than just one of my mentors when i was young, one of the founders of the a i field, he has signed a gradual basis since the summer project seeing if they could translate between math languages. No, that does not work. Famously does not work. What does work is what we call a big data or giant corporation if tension. The thing is it is a matchup of real people who we pretend dont exist. So what were saying is, as this technology progresses and gets better and better, if you were a translator, multilingual, that job of translating is not like being a truckdriver, even though it is not miserable, this time you dont get paid for it because we have a non unwise to a pretended you dont exist to create the illusion of a giant electronic brain. So this is yet another example of what i call a siren server or a maxwell demon where we are creating the illusion that all the value goes to one side. We will let all the value from the transition go to one side and all the people who actually did the work go over to the other side. Were going to try to make the perfect skimmer real mess electronic brain. When big date is involved and you hear the word Artificial Intelligence as Something Like that or even the were automatic what you should hear is instead the word accounting fraud. What is actually going on is that the real people who did the worker being forgotten, being hidden behind a curtain. An active magic, stage magic. As long as we keep thinking this way, if we decide to renege on the covenant that allows employment to continue even with the mystery of jobs reduced and the 20thcentury come every reneged on that cabinet the 21st century will see the realization of the anxieties of the 19th century the people will be made obsolete by machines. Theres no need at this happen. It is based on a judgment about how were willing to a knowledge other. One of hoping you can see here is there a connection between the kinds of roles the people can get paid for and this tendency of whoever owns the biggest computer to naturally benefit from the possibility of trying to calculate a perfect scheme to themselves. Theyre two sides of the same point of. The way it works is a big gathering data from people in the key is that if you have to pay for the data, if there was a market in it. Yet to pay more for more viable affirmation and that sort of thing. Is the fact of the information is really creates the illusion that you could be maxwells demon and information is never free. Thus the we learned basic, ben mimics. Okay. No we are in a cultural situation right now where in order for me to talk about these things i have to speak against the people i like the most. This is awkward because right now if youre on the side of the angel if youre a good person, of course is supposed to love and open culture and open information and all those. Ive been struck at open source code will become the msg of our culture. There is open source software. Use and there were is being collected in poughkeepsie. It sounds like and dont want to click on this. No one to cook on a story. Of read about teeth to many thing. I believe it would be true for so long. That i think the open source people are the biggest problem right now, but they do create this kind of hipness or legitimacy to a problem that is mostly exploited by highly different people. So right now the form of free of permission and disenfranchisement that goes with it that people experience on the daytoday the insists is the kind brought to them by Silicon Valley. And once again you get a free online course. This did things go the other him. But it doesnt mean the course is in wonderful. The particular redo does and do our longterm prospects in exchange for shortterm benefit. You might say all that new information of there, surely all those and people, thats what i thought about now working as long as the benefits are routed whoever owns the biggest computer will gather the benefits. In the book dagata through many a examples of this. That talk about a hypothetical artificial bland that you will be allowed to insert insider tattoos like a little clip accent that will synthesize chemicals to your body in about how that could create a wave of health and wellbeing but at the same time the doctors and pharmacists and chemists in all these people of work depending on how its done because it could be done in such a way that all the real work is demonetize an unacknowledged. Whoever runs the ratting computer becomes instantly instantly wealthy here. The greatest and fastest fortunes in the history of the world are being made around computers which is not what we had intended. So we might ask how we get out of this. What do we do instead . I mention that the way people experience the Silicon Valley company, but the way it has hit hardest so far as a financial world, the world of High Frequency trades, the world of weird leveraged, bundled derivative, as the things. There is actually a whole other class of financial schemes a run of Big Computers that not the familiar. Fantastic adjusted those games that use the computers to move money around a precise moment so as to avoid paying tax anywhere in their interest ever were once. The stand of things are very commonplace. It is didactic at this point. There is an absurdity to them that is invisible to the people who do them. I have a bunch of bodies to work to out the math for highfrequency trades. Is cool. Its really fun. I could almost see doing it because its a really need to wait. The thing about a highfrequency trading machine is it makes trade so fast that there is not time for the real world, and permission from the real world to get an. It is technically impossible for these things to be optimizing based on events in reality. So this other arguments, optimizing the function of the math of the market itself. And then that i actually think it can be legitimate, but only if there is only one monopolistic highfrequency trade. Because if theyre is a multiplicity of highfrequency trading machines, what they do is read their own algorithms and create residence to 27, so the fluctuations that detector created by each other and they collectively know many of the world rating is still ready. You will find this again and again where there will be a local framework in which would you were doing when you own a big computer seems to make sense, but if you like the Bigger Picture, it never does because there is never free lunch. I could go over many examples of this. So how do we gather this . One way is to say, you know what, this is it. We cant keep the market going anymore. We need some kind of of the way to organize some affairs. Way to get everybody. Finally get socialism. Ive gone down all those roads. I dont think they got a pretty places. There those who disagree with me. One is have a lot of kind of critics ye turn to keep markets of all . I think the problem with that is that politics also oscars over people if its allowed to function on its own terms. I think what happens is politics when. Certain types of unbridled capitalism like to hear a occurs in a purely political weight. Again and again people i remember being a young baby and trying again and again to live and a group tousled. A number of these households were words down the road. Its sides may politics work. The reason is a lack of minutes and that people letter on rate fears of. That tends to believe that a purely political solution is just not going to happen. I think people are sort of perverse and difficult and all over the place. I think the use of market, the use of money should be understood. It is something that balances the tendencies of Human Society to become dysfunctional. Money also can be terrible and concentrate power and lead to terrible and fairness. I think this sort of these dual magisterium of society and economics can kind of balance each others some worst failure modes. They can balance each others torrance to some degree. This is a bit of a complex topic that wont go into, but ill buy treated reasonably in the book. What i am thinking is so we can hope for from Digital Technology google a perfect society. I think in the attempt of perfection in since years. That will work. But sad to this process of balancing the system so that none of them can get too badly. I think of the way america is balance between a legislature in the Judicial Branch and an executive branch. Its an interesting and give weather hope is that each province the other from going off the deep and too much him. And for the most part it kind of works. Sometimes we wish they would work together. So i think we have to think that way about the societys organizing our affairs with. Economics and social process season are a little different because economics is more abstract and more numerical and these two systems can balance each other. Computations a third one. Maybe these three things can balance the tetherball bury those people who have socialist tendencies begun trying to elevate capitalism. Id go see it that way. Let me give you a specific example about of bringing money into the world of information might create balance instead of extreme capitalist evil is something. One of the trends that is concerning me and a lot of people is the proliferation of Cloud Connected cameras. Governments already benefit from having cameras on every corner in densely populated areas. Sufferer because some of which came from outside of what google bought contracts people by face or gate or all kinds of things and all the sudden have a system where governments can know where everyone is and what theyre doing. Wars were fought precisely from the precisely to keep government from getting this power, but now we think its cute that Silicon Valley companies with canada and debbies can do it be read that is problematic. That is really problematic. So how do you and do it . The usual way you try to undo it is you have some sort of Advocacy Group like the Electronic Frontier foundation, and they have lawyers the golan and argue a cover and officials and try to the slight kendis to match regulation. So here i am looking at a bunch of corporate programmers with huge computers and connectivity coming upon a scheme said unlocking a government bureaucrat strange, but prohibitions. I do not see a fair fight. Another example is regulators trying to control High Frequency traders. The way highfrequency trading out rhythms go, if you try to slow the frequency of them are put caps on them are Something Like that, they just adapt and use that as part of the little system that there optimizing against him. So what can possibly be done . You cant use a prohibition wrote regime. You can have some effect. Facades and is part of the solution, such traditionally one of the ways that the people constrains the government or for that matter the other powers, churches, and corporations is that it costs money to do things fess. The comptroller taxes creates a constraint. No taxation without representation. So the police dont get to have three cars. They cant just gutman of a lot and say, what cars from a police department. Out to send them over. They have to argue for taxes to pay for a budget and ago by them like everyone else. If you have to pay money once you recognize somebody, sudden you cant just do it without restraint. Have to stratagem is a prioritized. What it does is instead of an automatic gathering of iteration our scheme it creates a much more on the situation in which youre using it in the matter and permission to create a balance scheme because the cost is real. Permission is never free. Paying for it only reflects the reality of affirmation, which is that it has to come from somewhere. It always comes from people. Information is always people in disguise. That is a philosophical point we can go into in question. It creates at least a baseline netball but does not tend toward infinity of Infinite Power concentration. So i think that monetizing information to a degree is actually friendly to Civil Liberties offs, friendly to creating balance in government. There are seats questions about how do it and i dont pretend to have all the answers. Fifth let me go over a couple little topics about the prospects for permission costing money instead of being free. , does this exclude people from accessing information. A lot of the rhetoric of the free and open information is that even when the poor have access. We tried it and it as an exactly opposite. The middleclass is thinking wealth and power concentrated in smaller and smaller numbers. Serbs every time you tweet account about the 1 to enrich the 1 . So if this is something that is interesting to me. Outcome endeavor mission systems, i see a winnertakeall. Youtube and amazon or a cake starter Something Like that where there is one gathering point of rawness to cycle through, what you get is a tall tower, and may seated neck, and long tail. That is problematic because people are primes want to believe to help. This goes back to a horatios story. The idea that there are a few people who legitimately do well in the system. A lot of other people still living with parents and running and up and there always within a hairsbreadth of that success. They wont get it. This really bugs me. There is a commonly held belief in the sort of illusion of tens of thousands are others of thousands of musicians work they do great because the proposals online. Ive gone out and tied the count musicians doing well since and theyre just anvils. I am struck that even the people at the top of the new regime, considered to be great success, kind of like we used to be considered going into the middleclass. How many people there who general marbles is. A billion hits and youtube. Gideon dating advice for young woman. Not easy stuff to watch for me, but mitt is a cross between steady and martha stewart, some denied that. At china media. Serbs and in her mid20s you can rent a 19 house in l. A. And if you talk like an engineer or Silicon Valley for renting, i huge crown. I think its great for someone in their 20s. The stairwell. Considering how many people are starving. Someone to minimize, but on the other hand, if that is that to the top, think about where everyone elses. We had this incredible lowering of expectations. The thing is for every general marbles there is just a Million People who are only that close. All the people who have 20,000 or 000,000 use an youtube, is so close. A few tantalizing things, if you gates. I could almost make this work. The society based on false hope is one of the cruelest. At some point, there will start to have pretty rough midlife crisis when it did now workout. Its a shame. Its a jazzy waiting to happen for the facebook generation. So let some point the facebook generation more likely kids will say were sick of this domestic of every financial scheme being a giant computer that is trying said who rebate. Basic every bit living have also. I often hear this sort of terror about if i have to pay for a reformation, paid tillichs someone stupid Facebook Page. So you pay to go to a stupid movies and people pay to go to the czechs members is something. People preferred dump stuff all the time. Theyre based on want instead of need. This is what the talked about, this line shifts which i want and need. Cosmetics, professional sports, i dont know. And dont even know where to begin. A vast amount of our economy is based on taste and want and subjective values. Then there is absolutely no reason why there could not be a society as much we do get paid for our social media. Was the part of this. A leap of faith is required. Capitalism can work. Markets can work. Markets work when they start helping people coordinate to create more wealth and more positive effects for each other that they would have otherwise. And when you have a market that grows as a result of that, more people be better in a trading system rather than sharing system. I think that has happened again and again in is a real effect an entirely appropriate, especially for an Information Network. Yes guy you would be paying, but you would also be getting paid. The nature of getting paid would be unlike any other form of payment that people have experienced in market economies before. Used to the idea the paper step more often than you get paid. You only get paid every two weeks is something for your salary or whenever. Always buying your coffee and spending in this world do you paid in little drips and drabs. If you want to get a feeling for how much you want to be paid that is being stolen from twitter. Com booktv information, you concur to the start keeping track of all the discounts you get when you allow someone is planning. Elected your club card when you shop at the treasurys. The differential between what you spend in the year, the frequentflier frequent flyer programs and how much you have to spend a few did not belong to them, and you get stuck to calculate that there is a fair amount of money that it did for real money instead of just a bargain, if you were in control of that money you might be making decisions that would put you into participation as a first class citizens in a market that would be plenty of growing instead of concentrating wealth. If you look at the information that people learn interested in in a network that does not go through a central hub and a thin neck and an emaciated, long tail that you see, you see this thinly connected thing for most people are vastly interested. This is work that has been done, funded sometimes by facebook to try to protect itself some critics were saying that it is a centralizing employed. Is very interesting research, but what it means is who we would see a middleclass home. This is intriguing because it is just possible that a monetize Information Network would yield a a kind of middleclass on in a new way instead of through their wretched systems which are called levees of the book like that taxi medallions and cosmetology license and academic tenure and union. There might be a kind of natural distribution of wealth that would create a thicker metal. I have to Say Something about the middle class because i have noticed that a lot of my hip friends, also have friends and even a little part of me is affronted by the terminal class because it means some kind of bushwa parent branded horrible loss of hipness that is everything we must renounce as a middleclass. And im talking about really a different thing which is very simple which is the issue of the aristocracy that so occupied the founders of the United States. The key thing is that you need to have a preponderance of people kind of in the middle of outcomes of human life who collectively have more influence than any easily tip. The metal has to be able to have clout the tip. You need that if you want a democracy, if there is an elite that can outspend everyone else democracy becomes a sham. I am not happy with what is going on with money in politics and the u. S. Lately. Add on know anyone who is, but furthermore, if you care about market dynamics, if you like capitalism, if your libertarian you need exactly the same thing. The middle. Otherwise you dont have customers. Otherwise you end up with of petrus state or a plutocracy or with oligarchs or some sort of fake, fuel system that is pretending to be a market but it isnt. So that system with a metal is robust is absolutely essential to every humane system of organizing Human Affairs that is ever appeared. You cannot count on something infinitely wise in charitable and the lead. This brings up another point which is, i happen to think that the Silicon Valley elite might be one of the nicest ones judge ever appeared in history. At think we are sweet. [laughter] but the thing is that we cannot let that enter into our thinking. You do not have to you do not have to try to imagine that the captains of Silicon Valley industry are villains or evil because there not for the most part. I still think seriema is great. I still think we were cute. The problem is that over time you dont know who will inherit the power. Exhibit a, the company that started the pattern for all of us and the desire for saying this, and mostly my condolences, but this is normal. This will happen to every human institution. This will proceed. Things go through periods of decadence, corruption. We have to plan a society with that kind of realism that there will not be some internally benevolence pure and intelligent elite. Every lead, the subject of degradation over time. So i am attempting a little stunned broadly in the book which is very experimental which is i making myself vulnerable in order to get a point across. I could have stopped the book halfway through with a scathing critique of how powers are concentrated and then stopped. And i think a lot of cool people as well. Talks about power in many ways and would get it out in a lot of School Courses and humanities departments and would be a lot of french scholars would like it, whenever. It would have this kind of cachet, but i do something thats totally and as that which is talk about Solutions Even though i know for certain that my first pass to solutions cannot possibly be right even though i know that name going to read this stuff myself engineers and think, i was naive. How did i make that mistake . I lay my neck out before you because i think it is essential that we have the courage to be imperfect in our attempts to improve ourselves. Want to be first in line. I think almost all of my friends who are very technical and of one of the run the biggest computers in the world and program and our people of very good will who are open to these ideas. I have found extraordinary warmth from everybody in Silicon Valley who i talked to about this stuff, and even in the centers of finance of electoral politics and the spymasters. All of these worlds a big competition. I think we will one of the good things about this moment is that it is one of the more pleasant believes in history and is openminded, and i think we have an excellent shot at fixing this. We have Climate Science and it is the people that first discern global Climate Change and many emails were leaked and conspiracy theorists have poured over them. Meanwhile, the people that put up these theories in support of us dirty measures in response to the financial scandal, they had to work around bad programming. We have not established that so that people could really hear its method. So as long as we are living with the schemes that are intended to have perfect investments were the perfect scheme with these demonic attempts to make everyone else take the risk and concentrate the benefit, as long as we are living that come we need to understand. We have these people that are recommended by these algorithms. Every time we apply these algorithms that dont work, they are supposed to finance, they might work because people are on the things in the back of our mind, we know that it is all because of this game. It becomes the ability to discern truth and i view this as being connected to the Bigger Picture of how we can make ourselves get through this crazy century. So with that, i thank you so much and i would like to take some questions. [applause] for the question and answer session, it would be so great you guys if you guys could come up to the mark here. Okay. Thank you for coming tonight. I have a question here that i would like to discuss. Rewarding people for putting bits of information into the decision to make the middle class more robust. How does the creation with an informal economies and collaboration shift into this model. Especially this monetizing information, monetizing our assets like renting out our homes, renting our bicycles and our power tools and etc. To have a second income. Does this contribute to your idea of making the middle class more robust . You know, i talk about this in similar things in the book. In general, the informal economy is not a good thing. People in the ghettos of the world are trying to get out of them and into formal ones. Wells is the opposite of an informal economy. The thing youll notice again and again that the people at the center of the things avoid risks. They say that we are at arms length. The problem with that is that the risk is kind of related in this. What is happening is by trying to create this system, no matter what happens on the ground, the people have to take the risks themselves. So you can rent out your place and nobody rips you off and then something happens, that there was no Insurance Scheme and there was no risk pool of people, no planning for it. Very gradually because and just organizing people and taking risk with no planning to manage that risk. You know, there are various ways that can happen in my concern is that when people say, oh, i will create an Insurance Service for people who give each other rides over the internet, those insurance things become another example. It appears again and again. The generalized way out of it is to have it be monetized, and this includes making the leap to this kind of sophistication. Everyone is forced because that is what informal economies are the amount next . I have been thinking a lot about these issues and i want to think about your brilliant presentation. In addition to technology there is also the specter of personal health and education, and what i mean is that you have a population that has not been educated since great one, we all know that the problem in this is dismal and the problem is personal health and the food that we eat and that laws have been passed that make this not so little anymore. If you have a population that is not really that well educated and healthy, how then and that includes twitter or facebook for purely entertainment purposes. I think you need to bring in the heads of google or facebook. Because without that i think that they are not going to see the fallacy like you just said. Theyre just not going to see their own actions. So my question is how do we start to individually talk about this, how do we take those baby steps . You know, i have a lot of friends that are writers. There are a lot of people who write about big issues, those that give you things you can do, like with the things about food and all this stuff. Part of me wants to do that and i havent found a good way to do it. Honestly if i do, i will write a book about it. A lot of the things are addressing this. Because they precisely feed the monster that i am concerned about. Every time you tweet about it, youre running into the 1 . Im working on this problem with what you can do. Of course if youre highly technical, its a different story and you can do all kinds of stuff. If you know how to program, you can operate your facebook privacy settings. And you can probably use all kinds of tools, you can use all this stuff, just as if you want to change the food system, it doesnt really solve the big problem, in the same way that only technical people could take advantage of doesnt really address anything. I would like to solve it many of people have ideas about this. I am so glad to see that you mentioned this. Thank you. The reason i mentioned this is because in u. S. History class i teach, i noted how you go back to the notion of the farmer, that everyone has a chance to get some land, they can become independent and be their own boss. You can grow your own food, you can have a great family. Is this going to be possible with the internet . Can we have millions and what i like so much about your work interest is opposing the question. That america was supposed to be one the first europeans arrived and want to slice and dice it up. As to whether the internet can combat that. Just by clicking on the internet. Oh, my god, there theres so much to say about that. It was monetized, this is ted nelsons work before we knew how to make networks. The original networking included what i talked about it was lost in a series of tawdry incidents described in the book. This is precisely part of the tradition in america and yet i grew up in the west and i grew up in Southern New Mexico where the roads were still dirt and people wandered around with horses in the desert. I can tell you that there is a lot that is not created about a world of people that are selfmade. Because it does favor the strong and it does create a world of mobs and gunslingers and so forth. It is not really a pretty world. What happened in the American West was the land was free except getting through your land, you have to go through these transportation systems. And gradually we lost that romance with the land instead of the freelance. It is safer and creates wealth and coordination. You wrote can you get a new deal . Okay, so there are some other people. I agree that a bottom sub solution to monetizing this scene is very difficult. And so have you given any thought to the meeting of minds of people who own Big Computers and and how big it would have to be in order to make it meaningful. It also helps people who produce quality information and people who consume videos and things like that. Okay. So yes, two questions there. In the book i fantasize that the top actors in the world get together and create a new send system and then they wont put tattoo artists out of work. [laughter] some kind of weird event that happens every weekend or something. Yeah, sure, i propose a few a few different routes to where we can have a transformation. But it is a phase change. Although i have to say how much is financial suffering until people realize that the current financial regime is not currently working . How many times we have to go through this. You know, we did it with savings and loans, we did it with bundled securities and mortgages and now we are going to do it with sovereign debt and again and again. How many times does this have to happen. And its kind of like the song and dance, how many times is a big computer have to fail before we call it crap than your other question is, i get this a lot, are they just a few people that make all of the good information . I dont see empirically if i look at what people are interested in online, interested in each other in a very general way. Where a preponderance of people get a medium amount of attention rather than getting all of the attention. It doesnt happen in a spoke and hub network, but it does happen in a connected graph like facebook. I am not convinced of that. I will remain optimistic. If its really true, everyone uses it. I dont see the evidence, i am actually more optimistic about people. Thank you very much. Its very interesting. You are talking about the 21st century. I think the main achievement is understanding. And this will prove to be the case. If you think about it this way, when we talk about putting the value of information, it is the same thing as the property tax, and you know, so you on things. No, its not. I have friends that have done very well for themselves. New york city is filled with them. They watch what poor kids are wearing and they translate that to expensive fashions. So it is a bit a part of the terminology. But its not so much only the obvious objects. The more 3d printers work were the better it works. I mean, i dont mean the object has become part of this. What you are trying to address is a tactical problem. You were just making a huge logical error. I mean, there are number of things. Of course, i know that. Richard and i were friends and i remember. I understand it is nice to think about a pristine totality and i understand that there is a motion. There are emotions. And that is what this is succumbing to it is quite ridiculous, and everyone knows it is ridiculous. Then we have this thing where we pretend were 10 people exist and we have this sort of monster creature and there is a third alternative, which is every time micro payments go back to whoever wrote their routine. Those are what is forming around those machines come, where they didnt have to pay for the software. We have to try this other alternative. And they wouldnt have had to start the search surgeon that wouldnt have even have been profitable. The internet has multiplied a huge number of times to support things like bittorrent. That is precisely what we are doing under the current regime. I am at microsoft research. I am not one of the big empires come at a and to sort of the community. I have been a chief officer and so i get the map. That is what im worried about. The question is truth versus money. Then there is the version of the truth of the powers that be the data at purgation itself is in the servers of google and walmart. If this was in support of this, it would be in a stadium. So broadly speaking there is a huge bias in favor of power and against the kind of message they are trying to suppress. I dont want to overreach, i think we have time to fix this. We have to fix this before automation gets really good. Before all of this is 3d printed in all of this stuff. I get fairly specific in the book and leave these questions to go forward. You have to keep feeding the monster of these information systems. I am finding a lot of good reception. I hope it works. You have any technology as we go forward . Technology doesnt exist. A martian looks at the computer and they cant tell whether it is a lava lamp or not. Without culture technology, you have to know how to use it and you have to know what it means. It is not a freestanding thing. To the degree we are dependent upon technology. It is saying the same thing. So it is a piece of stage magic, it is important. Okay, the example of the translators. It has been a 20 year gap. It was more than 20 years ago . I happen to be giving a lecture and there was a stanford freshman looking at me saying, you are still alive . You are still here . And that was 13 years ago. Can you speak to the two human qualities. You have kind of touched on this case the to creating this . It is interesting because when Silicon Valley tries to be aired again, we cant quite pull it off. Fundamentally we are sweeteners. But then when we dont think that we are being arrogant and that is one we usually are. There was this recent thing of a Political Action committee and it just kind of talk itself. And so there is a kind of sweetness to this culture. But i think humility is not just a lack of bullying, and actually requires the hard work that we are trying to see and its a constant process that you dont always get to. I am at least trying. I dont know. But its an ongoing process. Are you a parent . Guest. My question for you is trying to figure out what is going on what are your thoughts or advice as we teach our children to be good and loving people. Do you have any advice on what kids are studying in the community. My qualifications as a parent will become known to me and my daughter is an adult, which will not be 40 while. Im worried about how structured our kids lives are. And in a way, i think that the structure is a the play date someone you are a little kid. Everybody goes into this prestructured thing where they are following a group which is less work, this also goes back with those prestructured catlike life. And im a little worried that, you know, i love the way we can teach science you can make your own robot and actually you can make your own organism everything is prestructured and you dont hit reality. You dont have the mystery of this place that we are indirectly so much. I am totally part of the problem. It is not going to happen. But on this sense, i am denying her something. And i dont know how to resolve that. It really bothers me. The other thing that i want to say is it is filled with Elementary School math teachers. I cannot believe how incredibly crappy the curriculum is. When my daughter was in kindergarten, going to i went to pick her up one time and all the little girls, if i may say so, it is very true. I ensure that i betrayed this blindness, this male blindness. We were really thinking about it and i went to my math teacher and said, all of these where it is. To me, this blows my mind. But this is not something that we seize upon. I dont know what to do about it. You see where the test doesnt measure anything important, all of the things that we see in the dating sites and the finance side, where information becomes unreliable, even as it concentrates power. I know it has been 25 years since we worked with your company, trying to produce a Virtual Reality game console. Is tom here . Yes, tom was an ibm research fellow. Something like that. Were do you see this as a resurgence, coming back . I have been on this for a wild. Virtually there is like this way of and yes, i hope and i think that its really cool. Obviously it is cool that it is not so expensive these days. And i hope they do wonderfully. A bunch of my buddies work on it. Someone asked before and i am absolutely convinced that what im saying is in all of our interests, including the people who are running the Big Computers now. It employed 140 workingclass people, one of them was that one of my place is worth a billion dollars. I love people being really successful, have tons of friends and i applaud that. We should create our success not from shrieking at, but tricking the economy and will actually come to make a perfect scheme. I am convinced that all the rest were actually do better than they are doing because we be part of a growing economy instead of one that is down to a little perfect scheme. So i am on the winners of it. I applaud success. I would like to see more of it. They give are coming. [applause] thursday, booktv in primetime features books about the immigrant experience. Global crossings, immigration, civilization and america. At 9 20 p. M. Eastern, the book brotherhood. A look at individual pounds after immigration. Later at 10 35 p. M. , moving to the u. S. From china and chinese girl in the ghetto. That is booktv in primetime starting at 8 00 p. M. Eastern here on cspan2. History tv features a battle of gettysburg. At 8 00 p. M. Eastern, Carol Reardon talks about Gettysburg National military park. At 9 00 p. M. , the ceremony commemorating the 150th anniversary of the battle with doris kearns goodwin. American history tv in prime time on cspan3. What is on your Summer Reading list . I have the book by matt wallace served on my night table and i have started reading it. I also read a lot of books on meditation and im also reading a book called the buddhist way of meditation. I do meditate and i have done yoga for 30 years. And i am always catching up on that part of my reading. The next book is very much the next thing im going to read, it is called interest things by matt wallace served and it starts with a group of teenagers in an arts camp and it takes them forward to their 40s and 50s. Let us know what youre reading this summer. Tweet us at booktv. Post post on our Facebook Page or send us an email at booktv cspan. Org. Tomorrow night on the encore presentation of first ladies. They were enhanced when he met and married mary todd. She was also very ambitious and said she wanted to marry a man of good mind and hopes for a Bright Future and should also said that she was going to marry a man that would be president. There was something that he she saw the potential for and encouraged it. She helped to showcase what her husband had done and how far he had come. Stating to the world that Abraham Lincoln had made it and he was ready to move on. The encore presentation of first ladies continues tomorrow night. During the program, join in the conversation with belfast history professor at facebook. Com booktv. Secretary of state George Schultz talked about his book issues on my mind. Strategies for the future at stanford university. This is one hour. George, what are you doing for a living these days . Oh, i try to live up to my four greatgrandchildren. Who to me represent the future. I look at them and say to myself, what can i do to make the world better for these kids. And as a distinguished fellow at the hoover institution, what is it that you do . I work on the problem of Nuclear Weapons and how to get better control of them. I work on Economic Issues and i work on energy subjects and working a great deal on that. I have also been trying to reflect a little bit on all my experiences and see if theres anything that can be learned from it. And i actually wrote a book to try to do that. That book is called issues on my mind areas secretary, what is the main issue on your mind today . The main issue is that the role of the United States had a great deal to do with construction. And we constructed an economic comments that served us and served everybody well. That has been torn apart right now. We have to understand what is happening and we have to be able to react to build a more coherent world. So i reflect on my experiences on the book that you held up in the different ways in which we need to go about it. We have some real opportunities in front of us. We have some issues and a lot of the things i propose talk about it are so controversial that no one even wants to hear you talk about them. So i enjoy that. How is that . In the 1980s when i was secretary of state, we had the main threat of the soviet union and their Nuclear Arsenal and our Nuclear Arsenal and how we contain that and maybe you remember from those days, Nuclear Cloud was always somewhere there. Well, i think that has been in terms of russia and the u. S. , that the threat is more of a greater disbursement of Nuclear Weapons and the proliferation of them and sometimes in hands that are not deterrable. In other ways the world is kind of falling apart and this is very disturbing, i think. How should it be handled . I remember when i used this in my book. He joined the marines and you think you have it, you survived boot camp and then you have become a marine. I remember the day the sergeant handed me my rifle. And he said this is your best friend. And never point this rifle to anybody unless you are willing to pull the trigger. No empty threat. Its not going to have consequences, what the administration has in mind, i just dont know, but they basically said its unacceptable so i dont know what their strategy is. But it better have some toughness. What about the superpowers that have Nuclear Weapons . Russia and the u. S. And china. Should there be more talk, should there be less weapons, should they be dismantled . One very positive thing has taken place and we have a lot of positive things. We convened this from washington and the object was to see how everybody could do a better job of controlling this material. It is what it takes to make a bonus and that is the hard part. More and more heads of government are involved in that and trying to really get ahold of that problem and i think that that is a very constructive thing. Bill perry and salmon on, they say let that be part of a Global Nuclear enterprise. And i will say all of these are constructive. Is going about that and how difficult it is, we know another part of the intelligence has been difficult. Many say they want to eliminate israel and wipe it out if they have a Nuclear Weapon on the end of a ballistic missile, they could do it. And so i think we have learned from reading mein kampf that when someone makes a statement we should take it seriously. So i think that we have to think about it and im not in the position to say that. And issues on my mind, you write when it comes to terrorism, we in this country must think hard about the stakes involved if we truly believe in our Democratic Values and our way of life and we must be willing to defend them. Passive measures are unlikely to devise deterrents and must be considered and given the necessary political support. You say if you have a Law Enforcement approach, you say, okay, another terrorist act happened and then we find out who did it and we try them in the u. S. Court and theres enormous appeal and we go to jail. In the meantime, the terrorist factor has taken place. In a the terrorist attack like 9 11 can kill a lot of people. Why not stop it from happening . In other words, prevention. Its like a lot of these terrorist acts have been said that they didnt happen because they found out about them for intelligence. We are talking about former secretary of state and state of the treasury George Shultz about his new book. Issues on my mind. Mr. Secretary, what is your favorite job you ever had . You say job. Job and buy something you have to do in order to get some money. I always have done things that i found rewarding and interesting. If i wound up finding Something Like that, i would find Something Else to do. But the government, its a great privilege and opportunity to serve. They had a succession of jobs and all of them had their tough moments, starting with my 2. 5 years in world war ii. And there i was, fighting for my country. I didnt have much to do with it, but that was one person. I remember going to mg to my ofe and there was this Big Office Building next to the white house. It used to be called the old state building. Anyway, there was an office and when my father who died not too long after that, i took into my office. And i learned a lot about how you put the statistics together that we talk about all the time. So that was a great experience. Then there was the secretary of labor. And i knew the subject matter very well and in the new department well because i had done some things in both the kennedy and johnson administrations that had given me exposure. But washington and politics and the press, all of these things. To come and be a press person. Joe had worked for the New York Times for a decade and he was the premier labor reporter anywhere, and he was really good. And he said that he would sign on, but he had conditions. And i said, okay, joe what are your conditions. And he said, well, first of all, im going to be a spokesman, i would like to know what is going on. I dont want to be blindsided. Im blindsided, that im older. And i said, of course, we could do anything you want. And i said, come on, joe. People come down here, they get under pressure, maybe they dont live, but they mislead not the status line. They have to be straight. And we will never have a press conference unless you have some news. And i said well, dont reporters kind of like a smooth and around and they say, look, you dont understand. Reporters are guys are trying to make a living in the way you make a living if you get a new story with your name on it and its on the front page of the paper. You call a News Conference and the reporter thinks this is much better and he comes and you dont have any news and what are you going to do . Is going to start asking questions to make you Say Something stupid and that is the news. And then he had a whole bunch of things like that. So i learned a lot about the press and while sometimes people dont write in july, on the whole, he constructed the attitude and you helped him to get the facts straight. And youre going to be much better off. He said never make a promise unless you can deliver on it. As it turns out, it is really hard to deliver all of the arctic. People only deal with you if they trust you. And they trust you if they do what you say youre going to do. So it was a great thing. Then i went from there to be the director of the budget and that was good, and i became secretary of the treasury and there was a time when we redid the International Monetary system. Lots of dealings with people all over the world. And i learned a lot about how to do something internationally. So that was a great experience for me and i enjoyed it, i enjoyed the people. And of course, when i was secretary of state, the tectonic plates changed. Ronald reagan and i took office and the cold war was as cold as it can get. When we left, it was a huge thing to be involved in. Mr. Secretary, in your book, issues on my mind, it you talk about rules for leadership and a couple of those you already expounded on. The joe loftis rule and your first rule is to be a participant. Oh, yes. That is what democracy is all about. Early on when i was working, Ronald Reagan gave me a tie in on the tide says democracy is not a spectator sport. So be proud of it. Be part of politics and be willing to serve and be a participant. Rule number five is that competence is the name of the game in leadership. Well, its a great start to be competent. If youre not competent, you will get into big trouble and i had a tough experience with that, though. I told you when i went to washington as a secretary of labor, i was kind of innocent of politics and i had a bunch of political appointee slots to fill and i realized that youre trying to work with diverse constituents and a diverse constituency and i said that i need the best management guy in this Labor Relations field and everybody told me it was a guy named jim hodgson, and i talked to him a couple of times and we said, well, we have to have somebody who can negotiate and contracts and really does a good job. So we found this guy to do it. And we had to get someone who really knew how to train. So we got that. Someone who has worked in the area and how to deal with discrimination in the workplace and a lawyer that knows this labor market. So i get a lot of these people wind up in the president elect nixon as well. He shared progress in his administration. And we will have an agreement and we will take it down. So we have a meeting and i introduced the first one, jim, hudson, and we asked him all kinds of questions and he was a real pro and he knew what he was doing. And at some point he says, mr. Hudson, are you a democrat or a republican. And i had never even asked him and he said that i am a democrat. So the next democrat was on the rubber who was dazzling. And he holds his hand up and says im a democrat just like that. And the last guy was just one who is head of the bureau of labor statistics and arthur burns who is very close to president nixon and so i thought, okay, finally we have a republican. So the same guy stands there like a cow chewing its cud and then he finally says, well, i guess you have to say that i am an independent. So anyway i get back to my hotel room and the phone is ringing off the hook and the