background and reagan having playeplayed cowboys and thing enforcement at heart at that develop that develop even stronger as the years rolled by. >> the authors of "mac baldrige." thank you both. >> do you want to watch this program again? visible tv.org to watch any of the programs you see you online. type the author name or book title in the search bar at the top of the page and click the looking glass. you can share any of the videos on our website by clicking the facebook, twitter osha icons on the bottom right of the video box. booktv since 1998, all the top nonfiction authors and books all available at booktv.org. >> [inaudible conversations] >> good evening, everybody. welcome to politics and prose and thank you so much for coming out fortunate accident. people get going i'd like to quickly talk about some housekeeping items. i'm sure many of you have heard this before. if you turn off or silencer cell phones that would be greatly appreciated. for the q. and a pleasure member to step up to one of the microphones we have set up so we can all hear and partake in the conversation. we are being filled so take that as a great opportunity to make lasting memories. lastly, after that it would be a great help if you could fold up chairs and leaned them against the nearest wall or bookshelf. with that out of the way my name is michael triebwasser come on the books over here with politics and prose at a map of the owners and staff, i'd like to welcome you all to tonight's event. as i'm sure many of you know politics and prose has so much to offer concluding the book a month program. if you have start think about gifts for the holiday season or if you can wait until the last minute, book a month program is an excellent present for the avid reader in your life. you can cite them or yourselves up on our website at politics-prose.com. once a month to receive a book that's been collect -- carefully selected. you can check out the reviews about the program from previous subscribers. but ontbut on to the main event. i'm excited to introduce matt ridley, a graduate of oxford was work of the site editor, washington correspondent and american editor with economist before becoming a self employed writer and businessmen. his previous books have sold over 2 million copies and has been translated into over 39 which is. if that was amazing it is also a member of the house of lords. his seventh the latest book "the evolution of everything: how new ideas emerge" has been called an ingenious study. at times called a compelling argument, fast eddie work. -- "the wall street journal" called it his most best and important work today. the idea that he tackles in his book reminded me of the debate. actually undermine the fears ago. he was a proponent that we are now in such firm control of everything from our bodies right into her jeans to her technology to nature itself that effectively had in any sort of influence that any underlying our outside processes might have come and i was quite astounded. i said that's quite a bit. i remember, we debated for quite a while. he was an excellent debater somewhat shy action when. my very first thought a few weeks or when i thought national i saw this book was coming out, i said i thought i wish i this book back in the. let's get onto the good part. please help me in welcoming matt ridley. [applause] >> thank you, michael, very much indeed. i did take part in a formal debate three or four nights ago in toronto on the question of whether humans is times like ahead or behind. it's on the web. i must debate. we just wiped the floor. actually that's not really true. we started before the debate with 74%, 71% in our favor in which ended with 74%. we gained. it's the first time on a formal debate format of that kind. as michael said something my previous books have been about evolution. the evolution of sex, evolution of sort of virtue to my second book and have written about genomics and so been dancing around the topic of evolution for quite a time. average income of the world, two-thirds reduction in child mortality, one-third increase in life expectancy, where that's coming from and why it's happening. i argued it was all about innovation and innovation comes from the meeting and mating of ideas. i began to get more interested in the idea that human society evolves. by evolves i mean changes inexorably, changes gradually, incrementally, and moves kind of under its own steam without really anybody being in charge. and produce outcomes that are quite complex, sophisticated but without having been planted. that's what this book is trying to extort. it's a bit crusty. that is to say, i try and squeeze every aspect of human behavior and human society to fit my thesis. sometimes i succeed, maybe not always but she be the judge of that. i think darwinian, charles darwin's idea of natural selection is one of great ideas all times. it's still a difficult idea. a lot of people have difficulty with it particularly because at this point that it seems to produce a fit between form and function without anyone having a plan in mind. we look at the human it's designed to foresee in some purposeful sense. it's purpose is to see and yet that purpose, that plan was never in anybody's mind before. that's darwin argument. without anyone having intended it to be forcing it has emerged as a thing for seeing. if that's the case for biological structures, if that's the case for human eyes and could that be the case were structural, social structures backs the we organize our society, the way our technology changes, could it be when we have well-designed systems of politics or morality or culture or religion or something like that, but they have emerged in the same way? they've gotten a sophisticated and it's a good fit between form and function but they had never been designed by anybody. so i think that there as far as i go. i make the argument in the book, and i got this phrase from a friend, but darwin's idea is the specialty of evolution just as einstein had the special theory of relativity. as a general theory of evolution is that any information system that is subject to recombination and selection will produce evolutionary change. that it happens everywhere and anywhere. the crucial ingredient of an evolutionary system is trial and error, that that's a different word for natural selection but you don't come up with one solution. you come up with lots of solutions to problems and then you pick the best one. i think that's a vital ingredient of human culture is a we do of trial and error. if you look at the design for earlier points in the first 20 years after the airplane was invented you find there's an enormous number of different designs being tried. tail plane in a different place in a different shape with a propeller in the front or the back, a number of wings, et cetera. it isn't the case we go from one site to the next. we do lots of trials and then we select one from each. if i'm right that spontaneous order, complexity can emerge in this weight in human society without anyone being in charge, perhaps we are all making a bit of a creationist mistake when we look at human society. that is to say that creation is the mistake in biology is to see order and assume it was a designer, and intelligent design argument. are we all of the intelligence design of the human society? to we look at it and assume so has to be in charge and assume someone has to decide it? when, in fact, we can let the solution to our problems emerge. there's a wonderful phrase, the skyhook to describe this issue. i skyhook is a hook you a catch to the sky in order to build a building from the top down. would be immensely convenient if one could do that. the phrase originated in a newspaper from the first world war of autopilot who was in an airplane who was told to stay up to because we don't need you for the moment. the ripple i'd this machine has not faded with skyhook. according to the dictionary that's the origin of the word. it's an imaginary device. it doesn't exist. that taking i come back to throughout the book are quite often when a look at an aspect of human society we think it is team designed from the top and what effect it has been designed from the bottom up. let me give you a couple examples to get you thinking about the kinds of things and thinking about. music. we can decide so-and-so invented a new genre of music but if you look at the history of music you chose very clear that modification. you can see gods clearly show that sent to modification. they start off as tibor to upset and always squabbling with each other in the bronze age and the gradually become disembodied neville the spirit of singular nature as they are today. you can trace this progress of something like a god. governments in. governments start out back in the stone age as a sort of protection racket. monopoly on violence. i will impose peace in your society you let me have the monopoly on violence. you can see this happening come use example of prison gangs today as an example of how a monopoly on violence within certain aspects of the present life is emerging, as if it was a form of typical government. edifact it's quite common for terrorist movements to turn themselves into governments when they get a monopoly on violence, things like the mafia. cities change as they grow. they have protectable features about how they grow, about what kind of things they did as they grow, what kind of relation, ratios between different measurements in cities. very, very predictable. you write rules about how cities grow. that's not because o of his imposing the rules. it's because that sort of in the natural order of things, becomes inevitable at a certain point. these are things that are the result of human action but not of human design. this microphone is a result of human action and human design. the weather outside is neither but in between there's a category of things that adam ferguson, a scottish blosser put it, or the result of human action but not of human design. we don't have a word for it. i call them fergusons because of adam ferguson. think about the english language. the english language is man-made. a result of human action but it's a the result of human design. ridiculous to say anyone plan the english language, anyone invented it. or indeed anyone is in charge of it. there is the chief executive, no central committee, thank goodness. it would probably be but very messy affected. you can see the history of the english language buried within the fossils of it. the k. at the beginning of the word knife is a fossil, living fossil of a different form of language. it's very much something that evolves. i reach back 2000 years to get inspiration for the origin of this idea. it was through its teeth and greenblatt's wonderful book that i started to understand this extraordinary palm written around the time of caesar and cicerone, on the nature of things. apparently he died mid-stanza because it comes to the rather abrupt ending. it talks of how the world is made up of atoms. nose. no, no gods, no essences. even living things are made from the same kind of vitriol is not living things. it's just recombined in different ways. which we now know to be an incredibly accurate atomic description of the world. he says by recombined image of the ways one can produce different forms and he gives a figure close to getting the whole idea of evolution by natural selection. this poll was suppressed by the christian church for many centuries until we discover and working 17 and a library in germany and it became an enormous influence on many other great thinkers of the renaissance and enlightenment. to put it all together and come up with coherent example of something emerging through human action but not through human design is adam smith. in 1759, he writes exactly a century before darwin which has a subversive idea, around is something we worked out between ourselves by calibrating our behavior against the reaction of others. from the reactions of others we learn what is right and what is wrong. what you can get away with and what you can't. he's essentially saying that morality isn't something decided by priests and headed down to us to get something we've negotiated among ourselves. it's very much at bottom of the of the world. he goes on there to make the same argument about the economy, that there is a system by which we all supply and demand products, goods and services among ourselves isn't unplanned, spontaneous system which produces really quite spontaneous order. and, therefore, for example, in a city like washington there are 10 million people, i don't know, you have to be fed everyday and nobody is in charge of feeding them and yet they get fed. it would be a disaster if some of was in charge of trying to feed them. as dataset put it in "the wealth of nations" the sovereign is completely discharged from a duty and in attempting to perform which you must always be exposed to the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient. the duty of superintendent the industry of private people rather than directing it by civil interest of society. i think there's quite a direct analogy between biological evolution and economic evolution, or social evolution. a tropical rain forest with every species having its own niche is like having a language of edward having its own use, and it's grown organically to this great complexity. this idea is the complete opposite of social darwinism. one or two reviewer's have not quite at that point. i want to make that point the social darwinism essentially set in order to help the progress of society we should help, assist biological evolution and we should do this by telling people whether they can or can't breathe by sterilizing them if necessary and even by killing the courses like to eugenics and the holocaust. i'm saying no, no, no, we are not interested in biological evolution anymore. that's a slow process of no significance for human society. what counts is to get competition going amongst ideas so bad ideas can die, so people don't have to. there is now a very sophisticated theory of cultural evolution developed which i touch on in the book, which essentially argues, use the thought of this was the main idea of richard dawkins that should have kind of particles of culture so they could compete with other particles of culture, just like your genes that can be with other genes. they argued instead of actually it doesn't matter if there are are not discrete units of culture. what counts is there is some degree of replication of ideas, the ideas get spread about. and some degree of error to produce communications under some degree of selection. you will inevitably and inexorably a rhythmically get an evolutionary results. -- algorithmically. it's a bit anti-elitist. i can assure you, it's a very powerless institution and in a very small cogs in a. it's not totally, still all a bit of hypocrisy but nevertheless i'm kind of doubt on the great man theory of history, for example, the great man theory of history is what really counts is named changing or women changing history, whereas in fact the opposite argument is that history changes man. history produces great men. the french revolution produced napoleon rather than the napoleonic wars. great men argued about them. i think the 20th century proved him right. the people at the history by the scruff of the neck did so in the wrong direction. this leads me to particularly when think about the evolution of technology, which is very clearly something that shows this pattern of descent with modification and pedigrees and family tree and gradual change. it leaves me to say that perhaps we don't need a great theory of invention either. when you think about it, pretty well everything center or discover his dispensable. if they had fallen under both before they made the discovery some else would've come up with a. so edison came up with the light bulb in 1870s by 23 people came up with the idea of the incandescent lightbulb in that decade independently. in britain we give the credit to joseph swan. and russia they say someone else. et cetera. nobody is wrong that everybody is right. the idea was right, it was ready to be discovered. the component technologies of the lightbulb were all there. it just did one or two people to put them together. the same is true of the search engine which is one of the most useful inventions of my lifetime. we use it everyday. i'm sure many of you do, google gets the credit but if you go and look for about 20 search engines on the market when google came into existence. we would not use the word google as a verb if the google had not exist but we were still have the concept. charles darwin discovered evolution and then was shocked to get a letter with exactly the same idea, so he rushed into print or even einstein was the only meant to come up with special relativity by the to go back and read what people were saying and think at the time, it's clear henry laurens would've gotten a very quickly if einstein had fallen under a trance instead. indeed, there's a document what technology wants. we know six different defenders of the thermometer, three of the hypodermic needle, for of vaccination, five of the electric telegraph, three of logarithms, five of the steamboat, six of the electric railroad. railroad. those are just 19th century inventions. does that mean we don't need scientists or inventors? know, serving a. somebody's got to make these discoveries. they are going to happen in the right place at the right time when the conditions are right but it does mean there's a sort, the technologies choosing its inventors run the other way around. francis crick two i wrote a biography of this rather well. he said i rather think this by making the makeup dna made watson and crick. there's some certain truth in it and because of the lovely smell of the paragraph where he says if watson had been killed by tennis ball, i know i would not have discovered it, but who would? very obvious files its people who would've gotten within a year. so this evolutionary theory of technology is not meant to disrespect scientists or inventors but just to point out that there is an evolutionary agent, you can't cheat it. this comes up quite well i think in the law of gordon moore developed in the 1960s for describing a sunday little data, describing the rate of improvement of computing power. he said it's a very regular and it's going in this direction. you would think once he would think once you discover that we could show that insight in that case by 2000 we should be there so let's get there now. it turns out you can. we are still on track 40 years later, improving computing at the same rate despite the fact we know we can do at this rate. you would think we can therefore figure out how to do it faster. so for me the biggest and most obvious example of an evolutionary system in our lifetimes, has come into existence and most of our lifetimes them is the internet. the internet, it's ridiculous to say that somebody invented the internet. it came from lots of different places, lots of different people. when you identify the people get credit for part of it, actually they only played very, very small parts, and most of the protocols that we use without knowing it when we use the internet actually come from anonymous people. they come from ordinary people, they come from peer-to-peer networks, often sharing for no financial gain, as steven berlin johnson puts it, the internet is not even a bottom up think because it had no bottom, no top. just a network. if something that is simply grown. this is a hindu ordinary people as the source of most innovation if you like. where is it going next? i don't know. nobody knows. but i have a sort of suspicion that log change is a technology to keep your eye on next. this is the technology behind bitcoin, and it's essentially a method of self-deprecation, an open-source ledger that enables you to prove you are who you are, you've got the value you think you've got them something. i'm getting a bit annoyed at this point because i don't fully understand it. i'm not sure anybody does. a beautiful thing about and the thing i love about block chaining is we still don't know the name of the man who launched it on the world. he is called that okamoto. he has a german web address. he uses british english. he uses east coast american powers. is probably in california. with preshow we know who he is now but he stil is still denyin. i think it's rather beautiful. the reason is denying it is because if you invent a potential rival to government currency, they don't like it and they come after you. he thinks it's worth retaining his anonymity. and good luck to him i say. the point is he just started the ball rolling. there's lots of people working en bloc chaining now. taking interactions nobody expected. i think i will stop there. at getting a taste of some things i talk about in the book. there's lots more. it's called "the evolution of everything" so there's a chapter literally on everything. i would love to take some questions and tried and should them. but no promise i'll be able to. [applause] >> i was wondering there's official selection with animals. would be an equivalent with all the other forms of evolution a sort of directed evolution? >> of cores in one sense everything, evolutionary change on june cycle the artificial because we are the ones doing the selecting which is by what i think this process is essentially benign, is were able to select the good and reject the bad. but yes, there are certainly cases where you can imagine a policy, a public policy being, to encourage experimentation and then choose the best results. so, for example, the longitude prize. the famous 18th century admiralty prize which the kind of screwed up because they refused to give the prize to the meant who deserted but essentially saying go out there, did experiments, find out who to measure longitude and come back and we will give a huge prize to whoever has the best. that's a deliberate stimulation of an evolutionary competition if you like with a deliberate artificial selection at the end of it, a bit like reading a champion pigeon or whatever artificial selection is. >> i know the recently published book that has a good deal of similarity to yours. maybe a little narrower. our youth away without? >> i don't think i've read that. >> seems a little narrower. just makes the case that not only do i logical systems evolve but economies especially evolve and social systems and so forth. i have the book sitting right there. the second half of the time is the evolution of everything, not of everything, sorry. anyway, my question was going to be whether you had any differences -- >> the evolution of order. i'm going to read it. one thing i can say is just as i said, 23 people came out with the idea of a lightbulb. [laughter] roughly 23 people seem to be coming out with this idea. brian arthur's book, the nature of technology. kim arthur's book, berlin johnson, how things -- can't remember the rest of the fellow. there are about five books kind of making this point at the same time. so it does seem to be in the air, seems to be right as an idea. this is my take on it. it's not a book of the 30. at the book of anecdotes about what the world looks like from my point of view. >> yours is closer to the general theory of evolution everything. >> i'm definitely going to buy this. [laughter] >> i'd like to ask you to reflect a bit on potential application of the theory of everything. that is the idea of basic income. it's getting a lot of attention and the rest of the world from in england they call citizens and come. it sank let's provide everyone has right to the basic income to ensure that we have food and shelter to live our lives and explore and experiment. it seems to be a marvelous example of taking what you are presenting and generalizing it in a sphere of social evolution and economic policy and politics and democracy. just wondering if you have any thoughts. >> i have to think about it. i haven't got anything intelligent to say. it's not anywhere close to being applied in britain as far as i know. >> at it is close to being applied in finland and brazil and a few other places. a number of cities throughout europe. >> the issue is, i mean, it's not this summer to the idea you talk about income to locate people, something we're in a model -- a model. subsidized supermarkets so people pay less. to our rivers consequences so i'iwould have to think about it. it feels to me like it's sort of a one size fits all policy which a don't think an evolutionary policy would be. evolution would say let a thousand flowers bloom and see what happens. >> my sense is way to ensure that everybody can participate in letting the flowers bloom. >> right. >> how would you reconcile the notion of the inevitability of the technological development with the fact that there was no real transport in the americas pre-columbian? >> with a good point, well done. i would cling to my point by saying that the invention of the wheel and the invention of the road kind of had to go together. there's not much point in inventing the wheel and less your also inventing forms of -- wheelbarrows? true, okay. on the whole i find it hard to think of examples of technologies and we should have invented a long time ago but didn't. the one i came up with was the wheeled suitcase. why didn't we invent that 50 years ago? i thought that i said hang on. lightweight aluminum wheels wouldn't have been around 50 years ago. we would've had big, heavy cast iron things. so they would have had a lot of it to the suitcases. airports were smaller and train stations were full of reporters who have barrows which but you did have to put wheels on the suitcase. may be the wheeled suitcase did come on along the right time. the history of the guy who invented the wheeled suitcase is he was turned down by from after from before you find one that did. but arguably by the time they did find one that did, his technology effort to the point where it really was worth doing. or something like that. i don't think, there's not that many examples of things that get left on the shelf. you're right, no wheels in the americas is a good one. thank you. >> i think this budget is piggybacking on this one. it made me think of just dialback, the evolution of homo sapiens and science and technology, and run all over again, maybe to 10 times or maybe on another planet with similar conditions. would we have exactly the same technologies or would there be some variations on them? >> okay that's a really good, that's what a nice way to think about it. the answer has to be no. we wouldn't have exactly the same. steve used to make this point about biological evolution, that there's an element of luck in what you end up with. if you hit the earth with a meteorite at a certain time you divert life into one would or the other. there's a source of inexorably about the process towards more and more sophisticated brains. also less sophisticated ones. i'm not saying all brains it bigger, but the biggest brain gets bigger as time goes by and it's got quite a being until the extension of the dinosaurs and then it has to start again from quite a small base and work its way up against until it gets to us. so there's a sort of inevitability that at some point biological evolution would've produced, at some point surely they would've produced a creature that could go technological as we have done. whether it was inevitable that he would take 4 billion years to get to the point, was it could've been done in 1 billion if you rerun the tape, does not depend on how may times you that the earth with an asteroid and have to restart the tape, et cetera? transferring that the human history, there are lots of good failed industrial revolutions, if you like. china gets very close to something that looks like an industrial revolution about the battle of 1100 a.d. they decide they're going to be really bossy and everybody has to do with their told every five minutes and they're rather have the technology under prevented from building a boat and trade is not about. the whole thing shuts down for several hundred years and the torch is eventually passed to europe which comes together. so i think world would look very different if you ran it again, definitely. but you would so to get to some of the same places eventually. >> a broad question, much broader than anything i've heard so far. your book is "the evolution of everything." almost all of your examples and all of the questions and all of the discussions so far has been on the evolution of technology, of science. that's maybe 5% of everything. you also have society which evolves ism with, let's say, a great role for women but that only evolves and maybe one-tenth of the world, not in places like india and china and so forth. there's also an evolution in the field of economics. i don't know exactly where we are evolving to. we seem to be devolving back to adam smith because once upon a time there was either capitalism or socialism, communism. capitalism seems to rule the roost but i'm not sure that's evolution and which direction it's going. what concerns me even more is politics. democracy is the direction of the evolution but, unfortunately, democracy on exit is in maybe 20% of the countries on the earth. democracy doesn't begin to exist in africa -- >> that's no longer true. >> it is still true. to our election but our elections manipulated and sufficiently flawed that we would not call democracy. what concerns me actually most is evolution in the field of religion. people have been moving away from god's who could decide everything, determine our future, so one of so forth. all of a sudden, some of us are evolving back to god for absolute into can be traced to fourth century prophets, plus jesus christ in the purest form. and i don't really see any evolution better. if anything i see, i do know what the opposite of evolution is what is happening in the muslim world, which is a quarter of mankind, is certainly not evolution in the sense that you are speaking of. >> you make some interesting points. i mean, not all my examples even in my talk were taken from technology or science, and just, the list of chapters in my book, i give a chapter on the evolution of government. i have one on the evolution of education. i have one on the evolution of morality and i discuss the changing attitudes to homosexuality over the last 50 years. i make the case that it wasn't laws that changed the way we thought that it was the way we thought that changed the laws. if you see what i mean. that sort of the argument i'm making a most of these cases. i have a chapter on the evolution of religion. [inaudible] >> starting moving backwards instead of forwards. >> it's not clear to me that islam is moving backwards. its concept of god is still a very disembodied, is a very modern concept of god innocents of a disembodied spirit, in fact you're not allowed to depict mohammed and all that sort of thing. what i think is happening is that of fundamentalism is a sweeping through the islamic world with some not nice consequences for a lot of people, just as it did in many of europe and christianity. i expect that will run its course record it will do so quickly or slowly i'm not here to predict. but yes, you're right, not everything is going in the right direction. i actually agree with that. >> do you address the evolution of warfare? >> i don't think i do. >> my concern about that is with a nuclear weapon. some of these things you can make mistakes but i think that's one where mistake could be catastrophic. of course, that may be the answer, then we start all over again. >> you're right. there are areas where trial and error isn't a good idea last [laughter] nuclear power is another one innocents. don't want to have to learn from errors particularly. i don't particularly talk about the evolution of warfare in this book but steve does in his book "the better angels of our nature." which i was with him in toronto he just arrived from colombia where he pointed out to me that the peace talks are ongoing to bring to an end the only remaining war in the western hemisphere. and windows peace talks conclude there will be no warfare in the entire western hemisphere. the art in heaven wars currently going on in the world all in the eastern hemisphere. that's slightly more than 10 years ago i think when we were down to for at one point but it's a lot less 20 years ago when we 20 or something. that is a bumpy decline. of the 11, to involve mr. putin and eight involved the prophet mohammed. and one involved neither. just two groups who hate each other. >> i just got a look at your book this afternoon, and was struck by the idea that you may have been thinking about complexity theory, about deterministic, complex deterministic systems. you use some of the language, emergence and so on. do you have something to tell us about how that affected your thinking speak with this. i'm not a great student of complexity to the i've read some of it and follow bits and pieces of it in the santa fe work and so when. i'm quite deliberately not going mathematical in this book. not going into sort of theory of it too much. i'm trying to sort of tell it through example and anecdote. because i'm very bad at math. so i don't go very deeply into any of the sort of theoretical bases. i do the bit on chaos theory which is quite an interesting sort of aspect of the question of determinism and outcomes you get from simple beginnings to complex results. >> will the idea about your book that account was you are flushing out the idea of complexity and chaos and how it shows up, manifests in all areas. yes. although what i'm really flushing out is the idea of a darwinian process in human society rather than those particular -- might influence comes much more from darwinian theory and from complexity theory. but yes, and did you have a future. that's what santa fe is all about. >> this will have to be the last question. >> something more topical, a little wider. you were introduced with your first name met. very democratic, very republican with a small our. -- matt. tell us your title and how you went to the house of lords. was inheritance or were you appointed? was -- will your eldest son succeed to your title? what brought you to all the subjects, your education, your interests? [laughter] >> how long have you got? i got into the house of lords through a secret passage in the british constitution that shouldn't be there but he is. and it's an odd arrangement. i mean, even in five minutes i can't begin to explain. but the answer is i'm an elected hereditary. [laughter] most members of the house of lords these days are appointed. nearly all the hereditary were kicked out in 1999, okay? but 90 were kept on for a temporary. into the did a second phase of reform. are you with me so far? that temporary period got longer and longer and hasn't finished yet. so that when they started dying, these 90, they discovered that the legislation allowed them to replace themselves from hereditary who have been kicked out in 1999, or their sons. are you still with me? my dad died in 2012. that meant i became a writer terry -- hereditary, a low form, it means nothing. but it did mean i was suddenly eligible to stand for a vacancy among these 90 members of the house of lords and become a full member of the house of lords, in theory for life or until they a polish me again. and just about six months later someone died and a vacancy came up and i thought, i'll throw my hat in the ring. i'll never get elected. there are lawyers and accountants and all sorts of people standing for this position. i went along and each of us had to stand up give a three-minute speech, that like the republican debates. there were 27 candidates for one position. 48 electors. a very small electric. i listen to these other guys. went down after that so i had a long way. as i listen to them i thought hang on, i've got a chance here las.[laughter] anyway, later that day i to call my wife and say, i was just going through the motions. i'm afraid i got the job. so now i just had a message a half hour ago from the with the same, where are you? i need you to vote. that was yesterday. so it's quite hard work. i sit on the committee. i take part in debates commission to. we are not allowed, we are not supposed to turn down significant legislation to the commons has 99% of the power. what we're supposed is scrutinized and approved the legislation by amending it in various ways. at the moment we are overreaching ourselves and we had a crisis a week ago when we could not a significant piece of budget legislation which we are actually not about to do and have i done for 100 years. this is a crisis, and so, but we made is rather popular in the country by doing it. who knows where it will end up? more reform has come and/or 800 members of the house of lords, the second biggest legislative as silly outside of the people's republic of china. you didn't come here for a constitutional lesson. you got one anyway. thank you. [applause] thank you also for coming up. it can remember that years. if you're interested in getting a book signed, you can line up over. if you want to purchase a copy of the book there are some behind the register. thank you all so much. [inaudible conversations] >> booktv is on instagram. follow was for publishing news, updates and behind the scenes pictures and videos. instagram.com/booktv. >> can use of the research of the most in the university of virginia. is also author of a new book called the failed politics from the nixon tapes, the vietnam war and the casualties of the election. what did the nixon administration look like? >> the nixon administration in 1972 was geared completely around richard nixon's a desire to win and massive reelection landslide, and the american people have know if knowing the extent to which nixon-based decision about the vietnam war. life or death decisions on how they would affect his shot at winning a second term. he learned in his first year in office from the cia, the joint chiefs, is a general in vietnam, the pentagon, the south vietnam could not survive without american troops defending it. so we knew they would not going to be able to fulfill his campaign promise from 68 of peace with honor in vietnam. instead he decided to take it. he timed his withdrawal, the military withdrawal from vietnam to his reelection campaign. by the time he started secretly taping his conversation in the oval office in february 1971 he already knew that is going to bring the troops home either shortly before or shortly after the election. he chose that timetable to keep saigon from falling before election day and taking a shot at a second term down with it. so it's startling to hear an american president pays such profound and important decisions that affect literally held lives of american troops just on how, printed on how they affect his own political will been. and is extended to his negotiations with the vietnamese. a negotiator idea with hanoi, secretly assuring them to the soviet union and the people's republic of china that if they waited a year or two after they brought the last american troops home, they could take over south vietnam without fear that he would intervene. so that's another shocking fact i think that people can learn from the nixon tapes into the document that a been declassified in recent years. >> this information is from the tapes that have been recently declassified? >> yes. it's from the bulk of the richard nixon white house tapes. host of the tapes people have heard came out decades ago during the watergate trials and deal with nixon's domestic abuses of power. in more recent decades, the national archives has declassified the bulk of the nixon tapes been more than 2500 hours of them. they deal with everything including foreign policy. we are accustomed to think of richard nixon as a kind of great statesmen who is also, when it came to domestic politics, a bit of a rogue. but the tapes show really there's this one nixon that foreign policy and domestic policy are both geared towards nixon's domestic political triumph. >> you are at the miller center, when you're putting together this book what did you have to do to get this information? how do you access the nixon tapes? >> the miller center has but all the nixon tapes in our possession online so that everyone can hear them. everyone can check my work. what had to do to access them was the same thing as whatever else had to do. just go to the miller center's website, type in the search word nixon tapes, and all of them are available free for the downloading. along with my colleagues, mark silverstone and terry matthews, we transcribed these tapes along with his gigantic team of students and make them available for the book. for this website where as you reading the book you can go listen to the tapes and read the transcripts it and decide for yourselves whether i am presenting the evidence fairly spewed what is that website? >> it's miller center.org. i'm sorry. for that specific book it's fatal -- politics.org. >> ken hughes, his book is also published by the university of virginia press, "fatal politics the nixon tapes, the vietnam war, and the casualties of reelection." thanks so much. >> thank you. >> here's a look at some books that are being published this week. >> "the communicators" previews big tech stories for 2016. then we take you on the road to the white house with ben carson at a volunteer meet and greet in manchester, new hampshire. later, live coverage of a town hall meeting with chris christie in new hampshire, and the senate is in at two p.m. today. they'll debate a nomination over a u.s. district judge for iowa. >> c-span, created by america's cable companies 35 years ago and brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. >> host: and this week on "the