>> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." >> president obama ordered limited air strikes against isis militants in northeastern iraq on thursday. it was in response to a potential genocide.

the strikes achieved their initial goal of liberating 20,000 yazidi refugees who are trapped. the iraqi president named a replacement for prime minister maliki. he's the deputy speaker of the parliament. he has refused to step down accusing the iraqi president of acting unconstitutionally. president obama addressed the situation earlier today and here is what he said. >> this new leadership has a difficult task. it has to regain the confidence by governing inclusively and taking steps to demonstrate its resolve. the united states stands ready to support a government that addresses the needs and grievances of all iraqi people. we are also ready to work with other countries in the region to deal with the humanitarian crisis and challenges in iraq. mobilizing that support will be easier once the new government is in place. >> joining me is jeffrey goldberg, an author and

columnist for bloomberg view. seth jones, director of the international security and defense policy center at the rand corporation. and peter baker, white house correspondent for "the new york times." with me is kevin sutcliffe, vice news' head of european news programming. let me begin with peter. we want to talk about what is going on in iraq. we have now a change in government there. tell me how you think at this moment the obama administration sees iraq and its decision to go ahead on humanitarian reasons and to prevent a genocide. >> iraq is the ghost that will never quite leave this president. he wanted to get out and get the country out at the end of 2011. yet, he keeps finding himself drawn in. some say it is mostly his own fault for not leaving troops in 2011. he says this was not anticipated and the iraqis did not want the troops anyway. he finds himself once again

authorizing airstrikes and humanitarian airdrops. the rationale for it continues to evolve. it was originally to protect american who were stuck in the consulate and to prevent a humanitarian disaster. now, he is saying we will coordinate more strongly with this new team to route and bring down isis or isil, the islamic radicals who are threatening to take over. the worry this is a slippery slope. some people think they need to slip a little further. >> seth, talk about the risk of this and also the urgency of it and the necessity of it. >> i think when you take a step back and look at the role of the islamic state of iraq in the regain, they retained control of territory in parts of eastern

syria. they have expanded their control in multiple parts of iraq and now threatened kurdish areas. i think there was no question at this point that there needed to be u.s. participation to prevent even more expansion by them. i think this is serious. i think the risk the president is facing is that he has now entered the war in iraq on narrow humanitarian grounds. generally in support of kurdish forces. isis is much bigger than kurdish areas so on the one hand, he is going to get a lot of pressure to expand into other parts of the country where isis is entrenched and on the other hand, there is still a lot of uncertainty about the future of political situations, particularly with maliki. >> what about maliki in baghdad

with this new announcement there will be a new prime minister? >> it is unclear at this point whether he accepts that outcome. there are some concerns and that he has reached out to some of the security forces within iraq, including baghdad for support. he may be bluffing in a sense to see how solid support is moving forward. there is a risk that we have several power centers. there has been growing concern across multiple organizations about a coup. >> vice got in to see isis. tell me what you discovered and how you got there. >> vice has been covering syria for the last year. we have been inside syria several times. we have been able to contact them and work safely with them and bring stories out. we have met jihadis before. this time, we reached out to isis several months ago to try to understand what is going on

and whether we can get inside. when we did that, they were a very much a smaller organization. that changed. by the time we got there, they established the caliphate. they got bigger and grew bolder. they started to move out of syria into iraq dissolving the border. >> how did they do that? >> they did that by, i think, the sunni population in iraq did not necessarily support all their methods, but because of the way they were repressed by the shia government, they allowed space in iraq. when they came back inside, they acquired money and weapons. they robbed banks. >> what did american intelligence know about isis? did they see this morphing into something much larger and more dangerous?

>> my understanding is that american intelligence officials were keeping pretty close track of the numbers of attacks. that had roughly quadrupled between 2011 which is the last year that u.s. forces were in iraq. and roughly quadrupled again by 2013. violence levels were increasing. there was concerned that american analysts had with the quality of iraq's security forces as well as grievances by the sunni community. by early summer 2014, there was growing concern among u.s. analysts about the growing level of violence by isis. the weakness of the maliki government and some fractures within the security forces community. by june, we really started to see isis move. there should've been little

surprise that isis was trying to increase its control of territory. potentially, some dispute over the timing over when they would make that move, particularly to mosul. this should not have taken anybody by surprise. >> last year, the outgoing end of the dia was warning that isis was keen to expand territory. none of this was a secret to the white house. >> isis, they routed the iraqi army much faster than we expected. once they take on the kurds they find a much more capable force which didn't turn out to be the case. they have underestimated the strength of our allies. >> what is interesting about that is that if isis were headquartered in pakistan or afghanistan or yemen, it would've been the subject of american drone attacks for the last year or two. but because its center is in syria, the obama administration has a hands-off policy in syria.

they have been allowed to operate unmolested and that has had obvious consequences. >> that brings me to your hillary clinton interview. was she ready to talk about this? she knew she had to be more specific about policy. she understood that. give me a sense of the context of this and why she chose to make this link to syria and a decision made by the president as well as the really provocative statement about having an operative policy or an organizing principle. >> probably like you and peter, i assume hillary clinton does not say things by mistake. if you read the whole interview, i posted it on "the atlantic" website, the entire interview. there is nuance and complexity and there's a -- on the one

hand, obama said this and on the other hand, he's great -- there is a lot of complexity in it. but, i think she feels and certainly i know people around her feel that the last couple of weeks, the things that have happened in iraq and syria and lebanon, have vindicated the view that the united states should have tried much harder three years ago to build up a moderate opposition in syria that was potent, to shape the nature of the opposition. she said very specifically and very straightforwardly that the failure to be involved at an early stage in building that kind of opposition created a vacuum. into that vacuum came isis. that goes to a broader philosophy or a philosophical difference with the president. one of the more interesting things she said to me in the interview was that she started framing the struggle against jihadism in cold war terms.

she refracted this current struggle through the prism of the cold war. that is something that i do not think president obama is happy to do. he does not -- he talks about we have a struggle against an organization, al qaeda. we decapitated the leadership of al qaeda. he does not frame it in cold war terms and she is doing something here that is very interesting. she is saying this is big. this is hard. this is ideological and it will require us not to make believe the things that are happening in iraq and syria are not happening. >> i think that is exactly right. that is not the way president obama frame this. he said he wanted terrorism to be a challenge, but not the singular challenge the way secretary clinton indicated. he has said the tide of war is receding.

we need to think about the ultimate end of this war on terror someday. she doesn't seem to see it that way. she seemed to see it more of a long-term existential threat closer to, in some ways, the way the previous president's administration. i am sure both sides would not like to talk about that comparison. >> triangulating, to borrow a phrase from a previous presidency. she is not bush or obama. >> what is it that isis really wants and how far do they want to expand and what they want to do with the state? >> we found it in the film of that they are ideologically and religiously driven. it is chilling the brutal way they go about establishing a growing and expanding state. it pushes outwards to other countries. they want to keep expanding and sending their message. the people we came across, we

interviewed were very clear. you are with us or you are dead. they are really straightforward about it. >> does that come from islam? >> absolutely. in one of the episodes, we go through the court system. we see the brutality and crucifixions. they are very clear that this is how life should be led and this is how people who will live on to them will live this way. we see their religious beliefs walking around enforcing this. this is an extraordinary thing that is happening. what is also an issue is that it is attracting people in, it is drawing people in. it is drawing in foreign fighters, europeans, americans to join this jihad who share these ideological goals. >> seth, how do you stop them? >> i think the most significant way to stop them at this point is to do two things. one is to address the grievances

in iraq that many sunnis have. we talk about iraq as an isis movement. there are many sunni groups that are opposed to the maliki government and have come together with isis on the battlefield like the islamic army of iraq, like the 1920 revolutionary brigade which are not committed to an islamic emirate. there are some sunni tribes that have supported isis for the moment. one issue is the put together an iraq government that is more acceptable to sunnis. the other is to break away some of the sunni support base for isis because many of these groups and individuals, including tribes, do not support a long-term -- the long-term vision of isis the way we have heard described. that is not their vision. as we saw in 2006 and 2008, what

we call the awakening against al qaeda in iraq and other provinces, to ensure, to promote, to support a groundswell of opposition. this is much different than back then. they are better equipped, they have more money and they're going to be harder to dislodge from some of these places that they have now overrun. >> peter, do you think the president is counting on other countries to help him? >> i think he would like that. i don't think history has shown there is a lot of evidence of that. he knows that the united states is uniquely responsible and capable of doing things that we wish our allies and wish our regional partners would do. yet, they seem to continually operate sometimes at odds with us. he is on the phone a lot these days with european leaders and

trying to rally the traditional allies, but it is an american-iraqi situation with some help from the turks. >> my impression is that the saudis have basically said to those sunni groups and sunni tribes as they did in the awakening, split off from al qaeda then but split off from isis now, that they are actively urging them to do that. >> the role of several of the gulf states -- it has been clandestine or covert. that is the case for some of the governments in the region -- their support. that is where we think we are seeing some support for u.s. policy which is largely covert and that is reaching out to some of the sunni opposition groups. i think that is where they can be most helpful. that is where i say the u.s. role can be most helpful is

supporting some of the airstrikes with clandestine special operations and intelligence forces on the ground. i think it would be a mistake for the u.s. to start engaging this with a larger number of forces on the ground. >> you say that they do not fear the bombing from the air. you think they can take it. they may want it because it attracts more attention to them? >> i think so. they are very sophisticated. they think this will help their cause. they are extraordinarily sure of what they are doing. what we found was this certainty, the ideological certainty of their mission. we heard earlier the iraqi army disappeared. everybody was suprised they couldn't fight. it is because these guys are so certain that they will die for this.

>> they have more equipment and more money than they ever had before. >> that makes them even more frightening and scary. i think they welcome the attention, they welcome this fight. >> this is not a good time for the president. he realizes something has to be done because it approaches genocidal nature yet at the same time he is reluctant to being dragged into this. he knows this will not be over in a day. >> this is going to be a long-term struggle, trying to prepare the country to an idea of this is not just a one-off humanitarian airdrops and get the country comfortable with that idea while still reassuring the public that he doesn't plan on having a repeat of 2003. he doesn't plan to put ground troops in there. and to try to define what his goals are. the definition of the goals have been somewhat elastic. it did start off as humanitarian and now with this new government emerging, it sounds more ambitious or potentially ambitious in terms of rolling back the gains isis has made.

he defined it originally that we were going in to protect american diplomats and personnel on the ground. we have a lot of americans in different places around the country. most specifically in baghdad. that becomes the definition for a fairly expansive field of battle if you are going to drop bombs. the question is how far is he willing to go? how much is he willing to invest and i don't we don't know that. >> peter, how much division within the administration at the national security council, at the state department over the options the president had or should exercise? >> it has been relatively -- they tell us, relatively consensus driven. there were people in the administration who wanted to do this earlier and thought they waited too long. they say they should've gone an earlier. they captured mosul in june.

this is not a new thing here. for the moment, you don't have as many voices on the other side saying do not do it. there is a belief there is not much choice inside the administration even if some other friends in the democratic party elsewhere believe they should not. >> thank you, jeffrey, peter, seth. thank you. back in a moment. stay with us. ♪

>> keith olbermann is here. he became a household name in the 1990's as an anchor on espn's sportscenter. he jumped to politics for eight years and he hosted "countdown," the political news show on msnbc. his program made waves for his outspoken opinions and journalism. in august 2013, he returned to espn where he hosts a nightly show. it is simply called "olbermann." i'm very pleased to have him here for the first time. >> it is good to be here, finally. >> it is about time, by the way. i say this to you -- charles at cbs used to say when somebody walks down the hall and they know how to write, you stop and salute. i don't know of anybody in sports journalism who writes as

well as you do. >> thank you kindly. >> i really mean that. it is a gift to be able to do that, to express yourself so well. none better than tony gwynn. >> unfortunately, i had a lot to work with under those circumstances. the life of tony gwynn. to me, preparing something like the obituary of tony gwynn, get out of the way of the story. that one tells itself. sometimes you have to apply yourself and really write it and think about it. if you tell him what you know about something. particularly, if it is personal and not full of statistics and anything but an attempt to convey to the human being was, it will resonate with people. i am always flattered when someone mentions it. i attribute whatever people felt

about that piece, i attribute it to tony gwynn, not to my work. >> because you felt that way about that man? >> yeah. >> that man deserved the best thought you could possibly have? >> absolutely. there are very few people who are uniformly loved in any field. who didn't like him? i am sure there were pitchers that held grudges, but i never met anybody who disliked him. you know in that environment that to wear your heart on your sleeve when it happens, when a particular man is taken of that quality and that level of appreciation people had for him and at that young age, just tell what you know and tell what you feel and you cannot possibly offend anybody. they want to know that. people have affection for so few public figures anymore. public figures are there

basically as easily hit targets. that is not the way people felt about tony gwynn and some other figures of his time and others. >> was it the combination of talent and humility? and character. >> there are a lot of guys like that who are also deathly dull they are stoic. all right, here we go again. another person of public note -- derek jeter is tremendously respected and liked and admired, but i do not think anybody would ever think he will win some sort of "america's got talent" competition. just because he doesn't choose to be that way. tony gwynn never lost for a moment the sense that you were doing him a favor by letting him play baseball, that you were doing him a favor knowing who he was, saying hello to him, interviewing him.

whatever it was, he felt honored that he was in a certain environment, he was in a position to be -- to experience the things he wanted to experience. the one story i told in the piece was of the 1998 world series at yankee stadium. i had known tony for about 10 years and one of the things he said as the san diego padres were coming to new york in these days of very limited interleague play. the padres never played at yankee stadium. he said he was delighted to be back at the world series. he said the real thrill was to hear the great yankee public address announcer say my name over the pa system. just to state something like this indicates that what he happened to be was a big fan of baseball who turned into one of the greatest hitters who happened to produce a .330-plus

batting average. i knew bob sheppard and knew tony gwynn and said they had to meet. i arranged for that meeting and tony gwynn talked about names and pronunciations and how do you hold the microphone for half an hour. at the end of it, i got bob sheppard to record the introduction -- "now batting for san diego, number 19, tony gwynn." and put it on one of these little talking greeting card things along with the picture of them and sent it to him. the next time i saw him he said it was in his trophy case next to his trophies for the batting championships. that is literally who he was. this memento of being a major-league baseball player was as important to him as the mementos of winning the batting championships. >> did you love sports at the beginning of baseball?

>> it was instantaneous. if i could go back with a calendar, i would give you the exact date it occurred. a kid named wolfgang levson who i went to grammar school with. on his 10th birthday, i am at his party and the party favors for the kids -- by the way, this is a german-american family from germany. the parents spoke with the accents and everything and they all had the 1960's german look to them. wolf was there and the party favors were packs of baseball cards. everybody's baseball card had in it a special insert that they put out that year. it had a small poster that was folded up inside. it was a picture of willie mays or mickey mantle or whoever. my pack did not have one so i was offended that i immediately took a dime and bought another pack. by the end of that week, after the second pack of baseball cards, i was bugging my parents to take me to the yankee stadium which they did.

i was getting so annoying by the end of the year that my uncle bought me a baseball encyclopedia. i knew who matt kilroy was. i remember it was my mother's uncle who did this and she said to him -- what the blank did you do that for? now we are at this may 1967 to christmas 1967. by the spring of 1968, my parents refused to acknowledge me if i spoke about baseball on even-numbered day. the odd-even system, my parents invented it. i never stopped talking about it since. >> a lot of great political reporters come from sports. the great columnist for "the new york times." there is something about describing sports that gives you the ability to describe political events. >> i think that is true.

it is historically true as well. the name escapes me but there was a -- a daily baseball writer, not that he went into politics. he went into novel writing or short-story writing. it is a great training ground in terms of determining cause-and-effect. a ballgame ends -- somebody lost and somebody wins. >> there is always a winner and a loser. >> you may be able to say at the end of a basketball loss, it was a moral victory. you cannot go in and claim that you won the game. the reason why almost everybody who goes into sports from politics -- you just don't go and cover politics after you've covered sports, you cover it doubtfully because there are people claiming that they won

when they lost. >> you know better. >> it puts those brain cells and that order that says, ok, you are leading, you are leading, you won. refuses to accept anybody you are losing, you're losing, you didn't win. you are not correct on this. that is not what the other guy did. you become all of them. i will include myself in the group. all of us who ever tried this becomes at some degree angry at the politicians who are trying to get away with this stuff. in sports, we laugh them out of the locker room. >> are you more comfortable with sports? >> it is my original language. i was trying to explain this and that if you went to france and spoke beautifully in french and you loved it and people liked it. when you came back here, you would suddenly go and remember -- i can do this three times as

fast in english as i do it in french. the politics show was very rewarding. i do not repudiate any of it. in terms of the ease in which you could make your brush stroke and confidently know that you know what you're talking about and you have seen this event occur a thousand times before, it is your natural tongue. >> you went back to sports. most do not go back. >> i have done this several times. to trace the pattern -- it is interesting. i used to have these daydreams when i was a kid that were ridiculous. there would be some television network that showed nothing but news and there will be some television network that showed nothing but sports. i would get to work for both of them which turned out to be literally my career path. i didn't have quite the zigs and

zags planned but i went from -- in college, i did news and sports and then the first job i was offered was sports. i wound up staying in sports. i was offered a news job in 1984 and took it. their sports guy quit and said do sports instead and i said fine. the first msnbc thing occurred in 1997 because i was asked to go and host the world series and be involved in the super bowl coverage. they said we will give you an hour a night on our new cable network msnbc. i don't remember hearing that. when they said hosting the world series -- and sweeping the floors? i mostly heard world series. the next thing i know i am on a desperately bad attempt at a news magazine show and then the monica lewinsky story broke and

we had 2 million viewers a night. going from like three viewers to 2 million overnight and i had to do that all the time. i did news and politics for about a year and a half and then i went screaming into the streets saying to get me out of here. i went to fox and did sports. after that, i went back and did news and then after that, i did sports again. not many people go back but not many people's career paths match mine. >> you don't just leave people angry. i am talking about the people that employee you. >> this is overblown. it is. i was thinking about this the other night. since 2001, these are my employers -- abc, cnn, nbc at msnbc, espn radio, current tv,

and now again, espn television. six employers in the last 13 years, five of whom i previously worked for. i am not saying i'm the world's easiest employee. nor would i want to. the idea that you cannot work him and always has sparks coming out his ears. why would they bring me back if i was that bad? we know they are television executives. they bang their heads against the wall periodically just for the fun of it, but why would they bring me back if it was that impossible? >> the way you express complaints makes them go a bit wacky. >> i would say these are things from the previous century. >> you have been a model citizen since 2000? >> my score of being a troublesome employee is a little bit -- maybe it is a "c-" rather than a "c."

i am in the middle somewhere. >> you would include current? >> yes. we will leave it at that. the story is best not told generally speaking. >> because nobody has clean hands? >> nobody has clean hands. i didn't do the vetting that i needed to do. they didn't do things they needed to do. >> before you made the deal? >> yeah. >> what you thought you would get and what they thought they would receive. >> that is a good summary. to prevent anything further bad from happening. look, the network does not exist anymore. if you are not growing -- some of this stuff. the great line about he didn't just burn his bridges. a guy named mike who i spent half an hour having drinks with

at the sports emmys. we took a selfie and tweeted it out. we put our hands out like in a bridge form and pointed at the bridge like we had rebuilt the bridge. my point about mentioning this is the stuff i did that caused him to make this memorable remark as a corporate pr officer -- that is 1997. that is a long time ago. if i have not grown since 1997 then i'm hopeless. >> what was it that made you the way you were? [laughter] >> you are going to charge me for that? >> what made you the way you were and how were you? you never believe everything you read. you know that every story has two sides. and you know, somebody as smart as you, learns from it, grows from it.

>> eventually. you would hope so. >> when did you come to jesus? >> i began to invest in something called therapy when i was 38 years old. >> previous century? >> i am 55 now so you can do the math on that. i looked at a work situation i was in and said i do not know why i am reacting to strongly to it. i knew in the past, again, i will go back to the first stint at espn and say the things i didn't like about how they were treating me or what we were doing or what i felt was limiting what we could accomplish -- i think they were all legitimate. my inability was to express it properly. keep it in the house, that was all you have to do. i understood i had a problem keeping it in the house.

something else happened at nbc. the whole thing was so discouraging to me that i thought -- let me see if there is someone out there that can give me a fresh perspective. that began the process. the other thing that happened was i got dogs. my mother was deathly allergic to dogs. we could not have one. i didn't have a dog until i was 53 years old. the line that you are not a complete soul until you have loved an animal is 100% correct. >> was it the fact this dog loved you unconditionally? >> i wasn't always sure of that. those his dog love be unconditionally or is it because i have the food?

the girlfriend was not there to give food. it could have been just that. to boil it down, here is what it was. going for walks with the dog and to see this dog excited by everything. the joy of the puppy on the walk, down the same block for the thousandth. that metaphors for human life and walking a dog in the streets of new york city are endless because they will give you -- this dog loves everything, loves everybody, treats every incoming dog, person, and empty plastic bag like an adventure of world travel proportions. you are sitting there complaining about -- well, you know, the lighting in the studio

-- just bring somebody over and act like your dog does. hey, we have a great studio! [laughter] how would my dog respond? i am excited to be here. then, you back engineer with your own phobias were and what your own complaints were about life. what does the dog tell me about my past? quite seriously, the introduction finally of dogs into my life -- it is two things i would recommend to everybody. get a shingles vaccination and get a dog. >> you are not including getting a shrink? >> if the first two do not work -- the shingles vaccination may not help you in terms of your own mental health. the dog does not do it -- you and the dog should go see a shrink.

>> for all the analysis you brought to politics -- i remember this great line. i can't remember all of it. donald rumsfeld is either a prophet or something -- i have forgotten. and the next line was he is not a prophet. >> it may have been "quack." >> it was the way you wrote it. do you miss in any way this daily engagement with politics or do you have a way to express that through sports? >> one of the things we were insistent upon -- you asked why we had to have meetings about going back to espn. apart from the history, how do you take someone that has been to an entire generation of now adults has been a political commentator? they don't know about sportcenter in the 1990's. you when i would like to think they are sitting at home with their notepad with our resumes in front of them -- oh, yes, charlie. this was his time in washington.

here are some of the highlights of keith's career and in radio. they do not know. we have no right to expect them to know this. one of the things that we sat down and said -- i was very concerned -- is it going to be a turnoff that the people view me solely as a political commentator? or i don't want to watch him because i love his politics and he is not doing his politics. we had to straighten that out. they gave me latitude -- when politics touches sports, go right ahead. i said i will use that one out of every 10 times it occurs. i will try to avoid it. the washington nfl football name. that to me is a political topic i tried to use and touch carefully and as infrequently as possible.

if the store does not rise to a certain height of importance, we will not put it in the show simply so there is separation of church and state to some degree. they may be next door to one another on occasion but that is the sports show and i want people to know it is a sports show. >> what is it about you that is served you so well? >> it is the fact i have never ever been afraid to say what i think. i might be wrong, but i do not care about the consequences. i also -- i am interested to know the viewer's reaction but i am not doing the show for the viewer. i am not doing the show for a political party. i am not doing it in behalf of a baseball team. i am doing it because i am trying to achieve the best show i can. >> who were you doing it for? >> ultimately, me. if i was not satisfied, it was not a good show. if i feel like i was trying to convey when trying to convey, it

was a success. if people throw stones at me walking out words or weep with joy with what i said -- as much as i appreciate the reaction, i do not factor their reaction into what it is i am going to do. this is contrary to all the advice i have been given. if there is an audience for it, they will find you. if there isn't, go sell tires. i can pinpoint again -- it is like the childhood thing with baseball. there is a moment in which this dawned on me like the skies breaking and a post-it coming down and saying do not do it this way. same scenario. i was in college. i was ripping off the stories from the machine and separating them and broke down the topic was. i put them in piles and try to figure out which order to read the press international copy. nothing was written. i didn't write anything myself other than my name.

the end was thank you for listening. that was all i wrote. i had my 11:00 five-minute sportscast. it was a very slow night. the top 40 station had a 10:30 p.m. sportscast. the guy on there had a list and had a upi machine and had a lisp. i didn't have one. that same night -- i don't know what the top story was. i am holding the copy in my hand and i hear on this little scratchy am radio -- he reads his second story which is the same as mine. his third is the same as my third. at about the fifth that it was identical, i realized we had both been able to figure out what the lead story was and how the stories ranked of importance. this was not some sort of

divinely gifted skill that i have been given. at the end of it, i was shaking as i realized the only thing i had going for me was a clear speaking voice at that point. i had down well better put something of myself and to the shows or i would never get his job let alone the jobs i wanted to get. at that point, the inclination to want to express yourself in some creative form became a channel to broadcasting. >> howard stern did the same thing, did he not? he expressed himself. >> he and i met in college. i was in high school. i went in to talk to them about their radio program and i got the tour. i went into the radio station and there was an skinny kid with long curly hair. sunglasses on. do not come here, kid, the graduate students control the

radio station. it was him. >> are you good in any sports? >> no, i have not been any good at sports and since i realized a baseball hitting me here and the blood trickling down my face indicated. i was a decent bowler. i was a power hitter in baseball but i struck out a lot. if i were starting now, i could bat cleanup for any team in the major leagues. eight years old now, i could go on that path. in 1967, if you struck out many times in the season, they would not send you to newark. they would send you somewhere far away. i have no skill, no hand eye coordination.

>> is baseball in good shape? >> i don't think so. i worry for it. there was a recent espn poll that indicated -- it was somewhat skewed because what was indicating is that kids liked video games and soccer video games are more interesting than baseball video games. boys -- 15% described themselves as avid baseball fans and 15% describe themselves as avid major league soccer fans. it turned out those suppose it soccer fans were playing the videogame. they cannot name teams in the league. i don't know what baseball does to bring in more fans as time goes by. if you hear kids chanting at a game today, it is a weekend afternoon and there is some kind of special promotion going on. it was kids day. if you go back and listen to a

tape in the 1970's, you would hear a high-pitched chant. it was a kids game and that is why people stuck with it like a marriage. there is nothing like that for kids now because it is wall-to-wall wallpaper. it is like the all-star game -- what is the point? that used to be a chance to see players who never faced each other or whenever on television nationally -- they are on every night. >> do you think football, being the number one sport in america, is in trouble a bit because of concussions and increasing investigations into the level of violence? >> i would love to think so. as somebody who encountered this in my reporting in 1982 -- the football strike. one of the things that made it so angry on the part of the players -- a running back for the new york giants just retired because of bad knees and turned

out he had a brain tumor. we would never know if it turned out to be concussion related. the guesswork would be it would be a heckuva coincidence if it was not. because he retired of knee problems, the nfl did not give him a dime towards his tumor. they had to hock the money to get the operation. this has been an issue for a long time even as medicine has finally caught up to what the issue is. i do not think it will be a killer factor. and may be in terms of participation by kids, but realistically, football fans, even football fans of a particular team find most of the players -- if a linebacker disappeared tomorrow and was replaced by a similar looking guy, how many fans in the stands would know?

this is true in other ways and other sports but this is pertinent to head injuries because of these guys burn out at three or four years because they are hit in their heads on every play, they are not missed in a way that we would see about a baseball player who had been beaned. we had that in 1920 -- ray chapman. and lead to batting helmets and other protective efforts. i don't think the nfl or college football would be in particular trouble, especially if they continue to accelerate their willingness to address this in a way that they have recently. >> i leave you after this hour with this -- this is where we began. all of us, since the time we were young kids, have looked up at people who march with a certain grace, who encompassed in their mood, action, and performance a certain sense of

excellence none better than tony gwynn. we close with what keith said about him in this remarkable piece. thank you for joining us. see you next time. >> when he hit that batting slump in the summer of 1998, it was nothing. he would hit higher in 1999 and 2000. when this happened, i did a piece on him about giving out reassurance. i want to read the end of the piece. when i saw gwynn in the dugout, he was holding a small metallic device in one hand so i asked him about the hamstring he aggravated reaching for cal ripken's double at the all-star game. i pointed at the machine and asked, is that your electric stimulator? is that your stim? gwynn laughed hard. "no, man, that is my mini cd player. will you relax?" what i would not give to have him reassuring me that i am overreacting right now. what all of us who knew him or knew of him would not give to

hear him laugh right now and say, "will you relax?" ♪

>> live from pier three in san francisco, welcome to "bloomberg west" where we cover innovation, technology and the future of business. i am emily chang. first, a check on the top headlines. apple is the latest tech company to release its diversity figures. its global workforce which includes retail is 70% male, 30% female in line with other tech companies, but 11% of apple workers are hispanic, seven percent are black -- that is higher than other tech companies. tim cook says he is not satisfied and is working hard to improve the numbers. twitter is testiid