♪ announcer: from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." charlie: we begin with late breaking news from the white house. in a remarkable development, president trump has fired fbi director james comey. the white house said that the president acted on the clear recommendations of both the deputy attorney general and attorney general jeff sessions. the sudden firing raises a host of questions, including whether the firing is an attempt by president trump to influence the russian probe. it brings to an end what has been a turbulent year for the fbi chief and one-time career prosecutor. here is a report from cbs

evening news with scott kelly. scott: this evening, president trump fired the director of the fbi, james comey. he was leading the investigation was -- into whether associates of mr. trump colluded with the russian government to influence the u.s. presidential election. late today in an oddly worded letter in which the president declares his own innocence, mr. trump told comey yes concluded that comey is not able to effectively lead the bureau. comey, who is well-known known for integrity, was appointed by president obama and had another six years to go. on a 10 year appointment. recently, he has been controversial with both democrats and republicans, leading the investigation of hillary clinton's emails and the russian election tampering probe. charlie: joining me from washington is margaret talev of bloomberg news and phil rucker of "the washington post." i am pleased to have them join

me for this remarkable story. margaret, tell me what you know, where is this going, and what is the context we look at this? margaret: the context in which we're looking at this comes after director comey's most recent spate of testimony before congress and several weeks after he did confirm publicly that there are active investigations for collusion between trump associates and the russians. this was a big deal not only has he said more in that public venue then folks expected him to, it was widely believed that after he put that on the record, president trump would not be able to make director comey go away until the conclusion of that investigation if he were so inclined. it comes maybe a little more than two weeks after the senate did confirm rod rosenstein, the deputy intern -- attorney

general who ended up writing the letter explicating why he believed director comey should be forced to leave his position. charlie: let me read the letters that we do know about. this is from the attorney general and the deputy attorney general. "i am committed to a high bluff discipline and rule of law. based on my evaluation and for the recent -- reason expressed i have concluded that a fresh start is needed at the leadership of the fbi. it is essential this department of justice clearly reaffirm its commitment to long-standing principles that ensure the integrity and readiness of investigations and prosecution must be someone who follows the rule of the department of justice and sets the right example for law enforcement officials and others in the apartment. i recommend you remove dr.

james, and identify an experienced and qualified individual to lead the men and women of the fbi." i have accepted the recommendations and you are hereby terminated and removed from office effective immediately. phil, what do you make of this? phil: it is a pretty explosive del valle met -- development. the testimony is based on comey's handling of the clinton email investigation and things that happened last year, the july 5, 2016 press conference where comey had that long run of commentary about clinton's use of the private email server and his subsequent letter to congress in october.

it leaves open the question of why president trump has decided to terminate comey at this point today. there is no connection with the clinton email and it braces questions about whether trump was influenced to make this decision not because of comey's handling of the clinton email probe but because of the continued probe of the connections between trump associates and campaign officials and the russians. charlie: but say the president wanted to -- that investigation, not knowing where it is leading. would the firing of the fbi director be the right way to go? phil: it certainly could. i do not know what the president was intending to do but it is in his interest to do that. and firing the fbi director, we do not know whether this investigation is going to continue, who will be leading it, well the for comey be some sort of trump loyalist like rudy giuliani, or is trump going to tap some independent, someone who has been at the fbi for long-term eyes credibility across the aisle who will continue the russian probe question mark do not have answers from this white house. margaret: for now we know that the deputy director of the fbi mccabe is able to fill in that

position but he is not expected to remain there long-term. phil is right, and certainly it matters who the fbi director is. there are other factors to consider. the reaction on capitol hill, overwhelming outcry in the house and senate from democrats likening this to the saturday night massacre forcing out, the watergate comparisons about renewed calls for a special prosecutor, one is saying this is an abuse of power. pat leahy the senator from vermont said it is nothing less than nixonian. foster publicans we have heard

from so far in these early hours since this has begun unfolding have stood by the decision for comey to go saying he had been a lightning rod and contentious figure but one notable exception on the republican side, senator john mccain saying that while trump has the power to do this he is disappointed in president trump and on -- this underscores the need for a special congressional committee. while this certainly affects internally how the administration moves forward, it is like throwing gas on the fire in terms of the congressional reaction. charlie: one point which you just referred to, the president does have the authority to fire the fbi director for any reason. there is also this comment from richard durbin, who is a ranking democrat in the u.s. senate. he said "any attempt to stop or

undermine the fbi investigation would raise grave constitutional issues." are we being thrown into some kind of constitutional crisis this evening by this action? phil: potentially we may be. there are a few democrats including senator evan who have alluded to that in their reaction statements. i think at this point we are still in the fact gathering mode. we are trying to figure out what happened, why did the president decide to make this decision today, what is he going to do to ask phil comey, what happens to this investigation, is a going to be a special prosecutor? do the congressional investigations continue as planned? there are a lot of unknowns and we are trying to navigate through that. margaret: some timeline points i would know. recent testimony by comey where he said he felt not -- mildly nauseous if he had impacted the outcome of the election but saying he it would -- he would have to make the same choice again.

perhaps the president has last onto in terms of the finality of the decision-making. trump's treatment of comey since his inauguration, i was in the blue room on genuine 22nd, two days after his inauguration as president trump tethered these law enforcement folks who had been part of the security procedures for the inauguration to thank them and he infamously cold -- called jim comey and gave him this sort of bro hug and seem to be praising him, showing a sense of confidence in him and up until a couple of days ago has consistently when asked or when his aides have been asked, said that he continues to have confidence in jim comey. in terms of public signaling he has only been in the committee a couple of days we have seen signs might be moving in this direction. charlie: the next step is where we will learn all the facts we

can and see what further the president has to say about this. one intriguing question is the role of the deputy attorney general. jeff sessions had removed himself from the investigation into what happened on the transition because he had been involved in the political campaign. here we have the deputy attorney, why is that significant and what does that say? phil: i think it is significant that rod rosenstein was the one to write this letter in part because rosenstein has such credibility across the aisle in washington. he had been the u.s. attorney in maryland, is widely respected by republicans and democrats alike, he is not considered a trump lackey or campaign loyalist in the same way that jeff sessions is and therefore, he can speak with a little more credibility

in making this argument about comey. have no doubt, this is a personal decision by president trump to fire jim comey. this is not a normal step for president and one thing that underscore that is that president trump dispatched keith schiller who is his longtime former body card -- bodyguard, he is the white house director of oval office operations, the person who hand-delivered the firing lever -- letter to comey's office at the fbi headquarters at washington. charlie: that suggests to you what? phil: it is a situation that trump is keeping personally and keeping close to the vest. he did not deploy the white house counsel or reince priebus. he turned to a trusted loyalist, keith schiller is almost like a family member and the fact that he hand delivered the letter is telling. comey is out of town today. he was not at his office to receive the letter. but apparently it was bred to him over the phone. charlie: thank you so much.

charlie: mike schroepfer is here from facebook. its ambition is to one day connect the entire world. mark zuckerberg and other ceos underscored the roadmap for facebook. along with connectivity, the company reiterated it continues to invest heavily in artificial intelligence and virtual reality

to expand its existing platform and explored new frontiers. i am pleased to have mike schroepfer at this table for the first time. what does it mean to be the chief technology officer, you're in charge of all the technology? mike: i have two jobs, making sure our engineering teams have what they need and the other foot is in the future trying to build our 10 year mission, connect the world and build a and virtual reality systems. charlie: there is a mantra around facebook, move fast, break things. what does that mean? mike: it means and not be afraid to bring the future forward. in order to do that, some things may break and you may make some mistakes and if you try to do everything perfect you will the remake progress. charlie: you said over the 10

year plan, connectivity, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality. mike. ai is taking information and making judgments and make reasoned decisions. they can help us with lots of tasks around the world. charlie: virtual reality. mike: it is a technology that makes it feel as if you were somewhere else. you put a headset on or a pair of goggles and you have been transported to an alien world and -- or maybe to visit your family member who is thousands of miles away. charlie: connectivity. mike: most people do not have access to the internet. we want to bring it to them. charlie: when it is such a

central part of our lives. mike: can you imagine living without the internet? this is a place where technology can help because what are things that we can do to radically reduce the cost of delivering the internet? we fly a carbon fiber plane that is powered by the sun. we use wireless access points that can be attached to power poles. if these technologies work they can take the cost of living internet down by five or 10x. charlie: anybody can be empowered to share with the one with anything else -- anyone else. mike: we want to have people connect with others. charlie: what will the world look like by 2017? mike: what we hope is a lot more people are connected to the internet. we hope that technologies like vr, do you have family members that live far away? charlie: yes, north carolina.

my: wouldn't it be great if i told you we had this technology and if his like you are at the home of your family -- it feels like you are at the home of your family. vr hopefully in 10 years will take us there. ai has the power to transform our world in so many ways. it starts as basic things like helping me communicate in different languages, we translate to billion posts in facebook and 45 different languages. i hopefully be able to go to a foreign country and put a pair of glasses on and instantly read every street sign as if i spoke the language and read the language and strike up conversation with someone on the street as if i was a native. that is the sort of things that are in our reach with ai. charlie: this is in your bailiwick because you have to find the technology or enhance

the technology you have to do that. my: it looks like we can get there. charlie: what is it that you need to get there? mike: these things are built on such a foundation. ai is underpinning all these things and ai is advanced because our computers are getting faster, we are able to train on larger data sets and the exciting thing is the science, the algorithms, the way these things work are addressing to quite offense -- quite a fast extent. when you think about virtual reality or augmented reality, the vision of having these glasses that have these superpowers, there's a lot of hardware problems to solve, getting light into my eyes and making it light enough to wear all day long. charlie: often you talk about the big five, facebook, google, amazon, is your competition snapchat? mike: this is one of the things we talk about at the company. our discussion is about culture. it is about realizing we have to always change and adapt because

the world does and if we do not people will use something else. charlie: i remember conversations with mark zuckerberg and other people as well. it is the power or the revenue that facebook got that when you found out they will be advertising on mobile's. there was a big question about that. mike: prior to that no one had had a big advertising business. people say you do not buy things on your phone, it is too hard to type in the credit card. that is one of those examples where we jumped in and people say people are using mobile phones, we have to build the business. we imported all our apps and put our company toward mobile and we figured out how to make an ad

business work. charlie: where is 3-d and all of this? mike: it is a huge part of vr. when you look at a screen it is 2-d. everything is 3-d. one of the magics of the are is you put it on and you are in a 3-d environment. watching people sculpt in vr is amazing. we have seen medical professionals train and understand human anatomy using vr. the human heart is a complex item and it is very three-dimensional also having health care professionals, people understanding exactly how it works is something easier done in 3-d then on a piece of paper or a model on the table. it does have the power to transform a lot of things. charlie: a lot of things you thought had to be carried out in the cloud can be carried out on your iphone. mike: even in last year, what is amazing is the ai algorithms that are advancing so quickly, run on big servers that use a

lot of power and are very powerful, we have been figuring out how to crunch and run down on your phone. instead of sending information up to the clouds, processing it and sending the results back down, you can do it on your phone. people are working on diagnosing cancer, skin cancer with ai and you can imagine a future not too long from now we can do that without internet access, with a cell phone app and take a picture and gives a doctor anywhere in the world the power to be one of the best in diagnosing different diseases. that combination of ai and the advances and putting it on your smart phone is something i think a lot of us have been surprised about. charlie: you live in a world in silicon valley where everybody and anybody is in business but you have not developed a phone. is that a not yet question? mike: our products are used by almost 2 billion people. they are used by all sites -- sorts of different phones, we want to bring them to where people are. where happy to bring the service

there and a lot of what i spend my time on is what is next after the phone? charlie: tell me. mike: it will not be a little rectangle in your pocket. charlie: that is an amazing idea. mike: you are starting to see the beginnings of it today. i will tell you the most exciting aspects. if you have used amazon alexa or something in your home and you have spoken to it and asked it to play music. what is amazing about this that most people miss is that it is starting to get technology to be in the background rather than the foreground. if i want to the music i put my phone, i stare at it, i and completely removed from this conversation. i have dropped out of the real world to do something on my computer. when i can talk to an agent i can still look at you and say, can i listen to the red hot chili peppers? done. that is your today. it is in the beginning stages. mike: you can turn out your lights and reorder things you

have bought. this agent that can accomplish a lot of tasks for you. maybe i have a pair of glasses that allows it to display information. i have some notes and opponents that are happening next and a cheering message for my wife showing up on my screen, all without having to pull my phone out and remove myself from this conversation. that is the thing we're most excited about. charlie: who has the competitive advantages? mike: it is a competitive field. charlie: you have amazon and then google coming in. mike: you have to build it, that is why it is so exciting and that is why we are invested. charlie: what is augmented reality? mike: the ability to take us today and augment -- augmented. i can have an overlay of information sitting next to you, i can do anything i want. i can make my house look like a harry potter castle if that is what my kids are into.

that is what work -- we are excited about, taking the digital and the power to -- to do it wherever you are. charlie: what happened to google glass? mike: i think it was early, too early in the market. the technology was not ready. charlie: how do you know when the right time is? mike: it is hard to tell sometimes and you only really know once you get a product in the market and you see how people react and that is the real challenge. i was talking to [inaudible] at airlab. he was too early. these things are the things that underpin the revolution. charlie: the other components were not ready? mike: he did not have the competition of power. the ideas 20 years later are like magic. charlie: is social media right

for transmission from all this because of ai, because of machine learning, the whole range of things? mike: you think about the bases of what we are trying to do, connect you to the people you care about, the information you want to see. the challenge probably you have is what i have is there is too much information online, too much to consume. charlie: too many things to do and not enough hours. mike: if i said i had this magic technology and it knew what you wanted to see, it was a like -- it was like a friend who stayed up all night drinking red bull and preparing updates. every instant you had access to this, that is the sort of thing ai can do. it can make sure every moment we spend -- charlie: is it taking command of our lives then? mike: i can take a break.

my friend is having a hard way, i want to call them. and making sure i have that data at the moment and do not ever miss it. charlie: how far away is that? mike: that is years away. charlie: what is the limitation? mike: we are talking about things that understand people better than any of our systems today. they are good at understanding things. understanding what is important to me requires a much more nuanced understanding. charlie: how much time do you and mark spend the he about how people are missing using -- misusing technology, whether it is fake news or anything else. mike: we care a lot and mark has talked about it in his community letter. people can get access to what they want but they have accurate information and the tools they

need to understand what they are reading. this is a big part of what we do and what we work on every single day. charlie: how will you correct the problems we have seen? mike: it starts in a couple different ways. false news is something that the whole industry is challenging, there's different forms of it. there are people out there trying to make money off of this. that is the first easy thing to do is disrupt that, it is not right for people to make money to do this and we can disrupt it with ads and things like that and we can get better tools to people to understand what third parties may say about this article or understand a wider, broader views on this topic than the one they are seeing to make sure people are better informed. this is a long problem that something we are in the -- we end the industry are working on. charlie: let's think about big

ideas, what is the big ideas from facebook other than what we talked about, connectivity, and we talked about virtual reality, tell me where you are thinking in blue sky stuff. delivering language through skin, the brain going directly to text. mike: i think all this fits in the category of unlocking human potential. the speed at which we are talking is hundreds or thousands of times slower than the brain operating. this is a slow -- did you ever use a dial-up modem? our brain is going like a gigabit internet connection. charlie: the more we learn about the brain the more we can enhance their velocity of change by machines. mike: i think so. being able to build machines that are smarter and can better do what we want and building ways for us to communicate without having to type or in

some cases even talk to rightly -- directly, talking through thought. that will unlock a whole new set of applications. charlie: the whole idea of film acres using virtual reality to with the actors. mike: virtual reality is so powerful, you may have done the demo where you are standing on the ledge of a building. i have given that hundreds of times. barely anyone can walk off the ledge. their knees are shaking. charlie: they forget for the moment that in fact this is virtual reality. mike: they get lost in the story, in the scene. charlie: what is amazing is some of our best news organizations are beginning to use it extensively. mike: talk about empathy. this is the ultimate empathy

device, what is it like to live in this part of the world, to be in a refugee camp, to be in a war zone, to be going through the elections? vr is one of those technologies that can transport you there and get you as close as you can to be there. charlie: are we starting to figure out how to do this? mike: we are in the floppy disk and hall size computers phase. there is a lot more to go. we are in the beginning. charlie: what have you been caught off guard by, what has surprised you? were you surprised in any way by how people were livestreaming violence and pornography, cameras in their bedroom and all that stuff? mike: obviously that is terrible and that is something that the events themselves are being broadcast are also terrible. mark talked about another --

hiring another 3000 people to respond to that. i am surprised in the positive ways that people have used live. a bunch of people commented and said i was able to see -- my brother was able to see someone's graduation even though he is over sleaze and applied or was able to take a class i was going to miss because i did not have childcare, because a friend streamed it online. you have to look at the other uses of this stuff and hope that there is a lot more of these happening every single day than some of these terrible things that have happened. charlie: how far away are we from the day that some movie maker will want to premiere his movie not at movie theaters but on facebook? mike: i do not know. charlie: 2 billion available viewers. mike: i think we will see a lot of creative stuff. i'm working on the future but it is sometimes hard to tell where this is all going to go. that is the fun part. you build these technology platforms and it unlocks the

creativity of others who thought of things i would never have thought of and that is what we are trying to do, get this technology out and get the creativity of people all around the world to use it. charlie: when you are tapping into the possibilities of innovation and creativity of a worldwide population, the capacity of one person to say something that causes another person to do something and someone else who did not think of a or b sees the possibility of putting them together and making c, that is the excitement of what we are doing. mike: that is what makes it so fun, that is what gets me to work every day. one of the things we do when we work on ai, we open source our code and publish results. it is such a foundational technology, it will be useful for us for lots of things but that same technology is useful in lots of other applications and it is great to see people build on it. charlie: apple is beginning to get a lot of interest in the entertainment world in terms of being able to make or buy

content. does that interest facebook? mike: that stems from all -- people are watching a lot of video and video on phones and we are seeing this huge transformation from the tv to the device that you have with you all the time. we have had a lot of success with live video and people producing their own videos and other things like that, we will see where that goes but it is an area where we are interested in making sure people have interesting things to see and interact with on facebook. charlie: thank you for being here. back in a moment. stay with us. ♪

charlie: sally bedell smith is here. the biographer has written books about queen elizabeth, princess diana, the kennedys, and the clintons. her new book is "prince charles: the passions and paradoxes of an improbable life." prince charles is the longest-serving heir to the throne. he has been serving for 65 years. the book offers an inside look into his childhood, and his life as a king in waiting. i am pleased to have sally bedell smith back at this table. sally: it is great to be back. when he was born 70 years ago in sort of 19th century style, i have an eyewitness account of

when he was three hours old and he was presented to the king's court in the ballroom. charlie: the heir is here. sally: this was given to meet by -- to me by a friend whose father was private secretary to the king. he was there with his nurse with a wimple and it was like out of the 19th century. this is someone who is supposed to walk a straight line and end up sitting on the throne wearing a crown and little did he know how long he would have to wait, or that he would end up creating a role for himself that was different from any prince of wales in history. and that he would, first of all he would have an 11 year marriage and spend 16 years of his life at the end of his marriage and the final divorce that he would spend that in the tempestuous and

mortifying time of his life. embarrassing. also that he would adopt so many fascinating causes and would be so outspoken in so many ways. like architecture, agriculture, against big agriculture, against gmo's, using chemicals on plants, on agriculture, using the health care, he has taken on all these establishments. architecture, medicine for not treating the whole patient. to me he is such a fascinating combination of modern and traditional. people in england found him confounding. they cannot put him in a box. people have tried to pigeonhole him as one thing or another and they have not recognized all the things that he has done.

he had to, he has had a very ad hoc life, he has had to create his role as he has gone along. that is highly improbable if you a basic traditional prince of wales you would spend a lot of time unveiling plaques, unveiling statues. and maybe being a playboy. the fact that he has created a substantive job that stretches all the way from kabul to sierra leone to the galapagos to jamaica where he is trying to build model towns, these kinds of things are improbable. when he was growing up he was close to anne, who was two years

younger and they were a dynamic duo and she got married and they went off in different directions. also his two younger siblings, one is 12 years younger and one is 16 years younger so they are almost like two separate families. he has never been terribly close to either of his younger brothers partly because of the age gap and partly because he is in a separate category as the prince of wales. he is the heir to the throne, he is the duke of cornwall and he has access to this vast fortune that was set up in the 14th century for the heir to the throne so it is worth over $1 billion and he has $30 million a year to support his household and some of his charities, his children, -- charlie: almost as lucrative as writing books. sally: we wish. he has a singular position.

he is such an original character. he asked once if it -- one of his cousins which of his parents he resembled the most and she hesitated and she said you may be a foundling. he is not discernibly like either one. charlie: if he closer to one or the other? sally: he had a quite lonely childhood. he had a mother who became queen when she was 25. she was surrounded by all those forbidding courtiers who were passing judgment on her, she had to prove herself through her duty. winston churchill said she seemed incredibly conscientious. she had to apply herself to proving herself in that job. she has turned 91 and she was riding on horseback three days later. prince philip became the head of

the household. he was a very sensitive child and he took it upon himself to toughen him up. he sent him to boarding school at eight and sent him to a tough boarding school at age 13. gordonson where philip had gone thrived because he was a often male and had leadership qualities. charles was much more introverted. it was a school where the older boys routinely bullied the younger boys and he was bullied because he was the heir to the throne because of -- and because of the titles affixed to his thatand he had ears stuck out. he had a tough time. he has a kind of softness about him when you see him. as one of his cousins said, he has a really strong, hard, moral core to him.

one of the mary -- many paradoxes about him. charlie: most people know him about his marriages. certainly to princess diana. what impact did diana's death have on him? sally: he had to rebuild his life. he wrote a letter and said the marriage was 11 years of hell. charlie: why is that? sally: they were such a mismatch. charlie: she was not mean to him or was she? sally: things turned pretty sour early. charlie: she did not feel like she was getting the proper attention or was it because she simply was too young to be in that place? sally: she was emotionally very fragile and had a history of emotional instability, going back to the time when she was six years old and her parents had a very traumatic divorce.

she was altered by that. charlie: why did he marry her? sally: because he was under a great deal of pressure. he was 31 years old, he had been an action man during his 20's, had promised everybody he was going to get married by 30 and he went through a whole series of brief flings with lots of supposedly suitable women, daughters of nobleman, even diana's older sister, at by the time he was 31, he was under pressure from the media, from his parents to get on with it, to settle down with somebody. and produce the next in line to the throne. diana was, they had a 12 year age gap. and the most, the one thing that took me aback was when i discovered they had been to

gather -- been together 12 times before he proposed and only a few of them when they were together alone. he did not really know her and she did not know him. he was very ambivalent about it in his conversations with friends, several friends came to him and said, this is a mismatch, you should not do it but she was under a lot of pressure because the press was writing damaging things about her. his father, this is ample medic of one of the issues -- emblematic of one of the issues that shows how he was almost constrained by formality. his father brought him a letter, he did not sit down with him with a glass of whiskey in front of the fire and say, ok, you have met this woman, what should you do? he wrote him a letter and said, this woman is being ruined by the press, you either release her or marry her. charles felt that he was driven. diana, he made mistakes, he took

a six-week trip after they got engaged, and she was left alone in buckingham palace. charlie: that seems to me his problem, not her problem. sally: it was definitely his problem. he later regretted having done it. she was left supposedly with people to take care of her but they were totally unsuitable, and they were very nice man and one woman but they were way older than she was, they did not understand her, they did not understand what she needed. she was left to her own devices to sort of stew and she was with the other, the other extractor -- x factor is camilla parker bowles. charles met her in 1972 and fell in love with her immediately. charlie: he was in love with her when he met princess diana? sally: he was. he gave her up for the first five years of his marriage to diana.

he is not a cynical man, charlie, he really believed that he could learn to love diana. let's say we all know that she was beautiful, she had incredible charisma. charlie: this is my impression, it shows you how you can be misled by public perception. she was a good mother. sally: she was a good mother. that is one of the things in her life that helped to stabilize her, but it did not stabilize her quite enough. she needed somebody to take care of her, basically. he needed somebody to take care of him and neither of them was capable of taking care of the other. in the way that they required. charlie: bowles, camilla bowles, could take care of him. sally: when she first met him, she has a very warm, effervescent personality, a terrific sense of humor.

one of her good friends when she walks into the room, you know you are going to have a laugh and charles is by nature a kind of glass half-empty kind of person. some of his friends and made him -- nicknamed him eeyore. he needed someone to bring him up and camilla was in that capacity. she is a warm, laughing, maternal creature with a lot of sex appeal and that is the way she was when he met her. he -- even though he was powerfully attracted to her, he was not ready to get married. he was just starting in the navy. she was at that time madly in love with andrew parker bowles who was this big, strapping,

handsome cavalry officer and she ended up marrying him not long after charles went off to sea and the world navy for his first assignment. but they did get back together toward the end of the decade. charlie: the queen was the star of the royal family. sally: she always has been. charlie beyond the fact that she : is the queen, it is the way she handled that awesome job. sally: as the saying goes, she has not put a foot wrong. the only time she ran into heavy weather was after diana's death. charlie: tony blair had to suggest to her that she needed to be more sensitive. sally: he did. she was getting reports from london, that was unthinkable, there were people from all over the world that were flooding the parks and putting flowers and kensington palace. i always felt that diana resonated with people not only

because she was so beautiful and she had a kind of informality about her, or -- her informality and accessibility did change the way the royal family operated after her death. but there was something about her where people -- she was a vulnerable and sensitive and at times, volatile creature. charlie: she became a star in the world of fashion and celebrity. sally: charles could not begin to compete with her. when she was going out on some fantastic new dress on a given day and he was going out to give an earnest speech on the future of architecture, who was going to end up on page one? charlie: not him. sally: not him. i think that really bothered him because he felt and he was doing a lot of worthy things. charlie: after this and after her terrible death, he found -- sally: he had to remake his life.

he put this sign up in his dressing room that said, be patient and endure. he had to show the world that he was a good father. he succeeded in doing that. it is not that he had not before. it was that diana had out shadowed him and outshone him. she was publicly much more physically demonstrative than he was. been different from the queen? sally: he has a very different style. he had at times expressed the view that he could be more outspoken in a way he has been as the prince of wales. he seems now to recognize that as the monarch, according to walter badgett who wrote the definitive book on the english constitution in the 19th century, the role of the monarch is to be to encourage and to

warn and not to give advice. it is to be consulted where there is a difference to be consulted and to warn. he has given advice because he has had the freedom to do so. not necessarily true that people have taken his advice. when he becomes king, he will have to make a major attitude adjustment, really, and the queen, to her credit since 2008 which i learned when i was writing this book, she has assigned her seniormost advisor, christopher geist to work with charles, to accustom him how he will have to comport himself when he becomes king. he will be heeding the advice of the people around him and people

in the government, and that he will not have that kind of freedom to speak out. he has in the last five years spoken out a lot less emphatically than he used to. he went through a whole naming and shaming period, particularly on architecture. charlie: i was thinking about this, there is hardly a family in the world that you can name the grandmother and the grandfather, the children, the grandchildren. sally: it was interesting to me that one of william and harry and kate's senior advisers said to me that william and harry were like two guys on a raft, that escaped the shipwreck of their family and made it to the other shore and they realized they would need to work as a team. that is what they have done. when kate came along to my she -- came along, she slid in.

you notice when that this campaign in recent months to promote mental health, destigmatize it, it is always the three of them. it is very, very effective and it has helped to lift the royal family and the queen now has in direct succession, she has charles, william, and george. there was a wonderful picture that was taken around her 90th birthday where little george was standing on a stack of books they could be next to everybody else. one of her cousins told me having that succession in place has given, has changed her life, has given her great comfort. she knows there is a succession. charlie: you did not get to talk to him. sally: i did not and it was ok. he has written so many and said so many millions of words over

the years that i had more than enough. plus, he was good enough to allow me access to a lot of his top people who could explain the thinking behind a lot of his initiatives. charlie: what is the key to the biographer's art? sally: persistence, listening, preparing, really, really preparing. anytime i went to interview anyone who had written a book, i would read that book completely and make notes and figure out all the unanswered questions, and i would go to that person. you have to get them to go beyond what they have done, what they have said. charlie: congratulations. thank you, sally. thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪

alisa: i'm alisa parenti from washington. you are watching "bloomberg technology." let's start with a check of first word news. the white house said president trump had considered firing comey. he acted on the advice of the deputy attorney general and others when he decided to fire him. russia's president vladimir putin putin says his country had nothing to do with the firing of fbi director comey. cbs news caught up with putin as he was about to take to the ice for a hockey game. he said trump was working in the constitution when he