tv Today in Washington CSPAN April 10, 2010 2:00am-5:59am EDT
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personally i don't think light rail is one of them but the way it is written in the constitution that you are given a compensation so it is a changing of wealth not government owning your wealth to begin with. i personally don't agree with the idea as it now stands in modern it may go interpretation the idea that the government has the right to take over any time in a place which is common interpretation of mainstream legal thought to it is a matter of your interpretation of eminent domain where the duke interpret the traditional constitution as read through the eyes of the framers when you read the minutes of the
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constitution of james madison that it is supposed to be the exchange of wealth the government doesn't already own your house but you are exchanging it for a fair sum of money and it should be used for real public necessity not public transit. and for the public good which is in the constitution. we need to find with the public good means. does it mean that it will make -- it is projected to make a profit of x amount of dollars or does it mean it's good for five people. what does that mean? i think personally public transit doesn't get profit at all is not technically in the public good. >> do you regard rhodes as public transit? >> when i talk about public transit rhodes do actually benefit the majority of people
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depending on where they are. the bridge to nowhere for example in alaska is not something that benefits. maybe we need a strict interpretation of public good as something that benefits -- it needs to be -- there should be more limitations i think on the public good. >> que support eminem domain for the creation of roads? >> it's constitutional. but in the original constitutional way that it was written it wasn't meant to be the same way that it is being interpreted so often now. if you are going to aim at the big high we debated the are trying to create the people are saying there is a tie with it is going to be created from mexico to canada if that is what you are aiming at there are people who do that and i've had that question before and look, there are certain places where the roads are necessary to have eminent domain because there is no other way -- there's no other
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way to build the road. there is just no other way to do it. so do i completely agree that eminent domain is necessary? yes but always, absolutely not. but the natural, expanding it, the metro is find weekdays. you want to make a profit off of it and want somebody to make an actual profit, start selling it off to private businesses. i think we should privatize a lot of the systems because they will start making a profit because you can publicized them and we have the same debate in atlanta with marta and the jacksonville airport as well. ..
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the main problem the conservatives it will face in november is a fact that there are some people on the far right and there are some people that don't want conservatives and a tea party movement to be part of the republican party but that's a small majority but i think they will. they will make big gains in congress and we have a good chance of winning nevada seat and have a chance winning a line -- illinois and i think there is a fine chance of beating barbara
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boxer in california. there are seeds one back for the republican party that we didn't have a chance along time ago. c. scott brown in massachusetts as example. i think republicans will make a great comeback and the most important factor is what i was trying to get at, the problem is we would wealth i will focus on conservative values and what the people want to now such as the road map for america that is being supported in by an abrupt budget hawks in the united states congress. are going to support things like issues american people want to address, are we going to try an appeal to -- try and do what we tried to do last. go all over the world and try to find her voice. we know what the american people want to hear, conservative values, they want to hear things that create jobs, the main thing, want to hear things that cut the deficit, they don't want
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to your health care, they want to hear things that benefit them on everyday life level. frankly there are some conservatives that aren't addressing, they sank i can be conservative and win but in the grand majority in the republican party is doing a fine job and i think in november probably we have a chance of winning back the house, i don't think we will win it back entirely but it will get close to having a full majority. one. >> you know so much. if republicans do have a majority, does pelosi still have to stay? >> no, the speaker of the house is always selected by the majority in congress so nancy pelosi would be not to be speaker again unless the democratic party has a majority then she would be at reelected, yes,. >> i don't believe we have a government out and that's why
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the people are the only hope, the tea party is really hope but you think a third party, they would help the democrats. >> absolutely the third party is dangerous absolutely 100% because that's what i was saying in new jersey, 11% in the polls having chris christie sweating bullets and that's because been he had a snowball's chance of winning, he had no chance of winning whatsoever but because he was relieved with being a kind of a pushover and just came in the race for too long. you want to win an election you want at least the closest thing to conservative support the republican candidate who has a chance of winning and gets out of the race and lose the nomination. >> exactly right and the majority of the people i talk to don't want to become the
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republican party. every time i talk to them anybody in the conservative movement there are 10 percent may be less or more a fringe movement in the tea party. the majority, the vast majority, the strong majority believe that their republican party needs to become more conservative and will support those candidates. there are hardly any of them will support a tea party candidate. >> i was wondering if you have any goals right now besides being 14? >> of course, of working on future books and that's something i would continue to lie to do. the book presently at this time, i don't know in this band, but as of february 11th but 4th best-selling conservative book in the nation and third best selling conservative author in the country so i do have things, i'd like to write more books and
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not just like this a philosophical but policy books and to address is used in a greater depth. it's hard to do that in this setting we're talking about as opposed to writing something for you have time to research. i would like to do more of ads and i really enjoy that. of course, of my to go to college and get back. >> out of the web. i'd also like to may be essentially have a ready -- radio show or tv show where i can share my views physically. i don't necessarily agree with people so i can't read them and have a conversation just like having today because i enjoy hearing people's views and addressing policy issues and that's one of the problems of being my agent a lot of people think that's you need to address this issue because you are a 14 year-old in can talk about this, i can talk about just about every issue and have a strong opinion on everything from education to dominance in domain while i have opinion on it.
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some saw leslie i have a lot of things i'd like to do. projects i have been working on and things that will hopefully hit the ceiling soon. we will see what happens. >> i just want to know your opinion and maybe give us your thoughts on why you think president obama was elected in 2008. what were the reasons that you feel he was elected over senator mccain and governor sarah palin. what made him the better candidate in the eyes of the people who elected him. >> well, i don't -- it was really because he was the better candidate, not because he was the better person when it came to his policies. he was certainly a better candidate 100 percent. first and foremost he was advocating for change from the
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old um, i think it was called out of touch in the name of the ad about john mccain was out of touch, he's just like bush, he has a country club. all country people are bad. so he's a member of a country club, he rides a golf carts, he's a bad man, john mccain is like bush, the old white male. that's what the republican party was seen as an he had a great job saying at the same time and that's, i agree to change washington for the better, he said a change you can believe then and the great thing is change can be interpreted as progress or if can be changed for the worse and he's used the term change. he really has changed a lot of things and he changed his use of a lot of things such as national
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defence, take everybody out of afghanistan and iraq. he was not able to do that because of bob gates and other seven that so not able to do that without winning the war first. this of the reason he was a better candidate was because he was a better speaker, much better charisma, and he really was able to appeal to people's emotions of how washington is. even people who generally might not vote democrat or at all such as a lot of college students. more mesmerized by him because they heard him say he was going to change washington, going to change from the old white male to the younger fresher face and be a new kind of voice for the people. that's what appeals to people like that he was going to change things and also appeals to people that he wasn't a republican and people were tired of president bush and tired of republican party.
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and i wanted to give something else a try. i think they really started to believe in this idea that if we can have health care, health care for everybody if we can have a stimulus package that's completely and utterly comprehensive, if we can have cap and trade, if, all this is he was saying, then we can have a better world a better country. if we talk to iran than we can have peace. they heard him say he's gone to change the policy is to create a whole new kind of ideology analyst alan washington. i think it was really that message of changing for the way things used to be to create a new kind of idea that appeals to people. any other questions? great.
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unfamiliar faces as well. thanks to wgbh and c-span for covering this. i'm very grateful. i want to make a note of one person in the audience, bob, the curator of the nieman program. i am a nieman fellow at harvard this year and probably would not be standing here were it not for bob's encouragement. this e zandt is also a meaningful to me because in many ways launching of the book while at harvard has brought me full circle. the origins of this book began from reporting that took place at harvard five or six years ago and so i have a sense of completeness in completing the circle and coming back here at the time of its launch. it's also the case that harvard university has contributed enormously to the intellectual content of this book and i think it's fair to say that without this great university this book would not exist today. i'm hoping to give you a very quick overview about the book
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and then maybe read a little bit from one of the chapters in the book and then take your questions. theories about the unconscious mind go back centuries. philosophers and theologians and scientists. there has been a host of tools that have been developed that have given new windows into the hidden brain or what i call the hidden brain. most of these tools are in that discipline of social psychology but some of them are also neuroscience and economics and sociology. and the picture they paint of the unconscious mind is different than the conventional picture we have about the unconscious yet so in contrast to the on conscious that is filled with seating impulses and powerful forces, the unconscious mind that has been under the recent studies is rather
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mundane. the analogy often like to use is that the unconscious mind that has been recently discovered is very much like the auto pilot function that we have in a plan or the cruise control that we have in a car. it was a very useful function but it's problematic when you are driving through a thunderstorm or flying through a thunderstorm on autopilot instead of on pilot said the analogy between poly licht and although piatt is a metaphor to think about the unconscious mind and it's a way to think differently about the unconscious mind than previous theories. now, the hitting green is a term i claimed. it does not refer to a secret part of the karina this is we had been. it is a metaphor much like the salafist gene and its used to describe every large range of forces that affect us in our everyday lives from romantic relationships to financial decisions to the way we think in disasters to our moral judgment to the way we think about
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politics. now, using the term much like a selfish gene as i said but the fact that these of by a cs are mundane, the fact that it is a monday and mechanical thing in many ways should not suggest that its effects are mundane. its effects are extraordinary. they are profound. the book is organized in plight office concentric circles where i started a very small and simple with symbols of the head and brain at work and i filled out word that show the effect of unbiased criminal system and presidential politics and the way we think about genocide, moral judgment and risk. i will start with something really simple so in one of the opening chapters i describe a simple example of the head and brain at work. there was an office in england where a psychologist decided to conduct a simple experiment. the office have something common in office is in the world over,
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a beverage station where people could make their own coffee and tea and there was a little on our box people could drop their money into this box after making their coffee and tea. the beverage station was located in a portion that was not visible to anyone else so if people were honest and paid for their tea and coffee will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @b d k
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to begin to get this very small change produced a giant affect in people's honesty and paying for their tea and coffee. on the week's the picture showed a pair of watching all eyes honesty levels soared. [laughter] on the week's the picture showed daffodils and tulips honesty levels plummeted. now it's as simple books and with the unconscious mind at work and its striking, it's amusing and striking because what it shows is not only that there is a part of our mind that process sees things we don't think about consciously but a part of our mind that the influences us and our behavior. i taught in a subsequent chapter
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how they began very early in life. the head and brain is active right from the time that we are born and did please -- it can be measured from the time children are 3-years-old which is about as early as researchers are able to study anyone to get meaningful results. a set of experiments conducted a day care in montreal a psychologist showed children as young as three we're all ready categorizing of the world according to racial terms and making positive and negative associations between faces that were white and faces that were black. when we hear these results, the first thing we ask ourselves is whether the parents of these children are indoctrinating the children with racist or bigoted views because it doesn't make sense to think of a three-year-old child as a bigot and the child doesn't know how to tie her shoelaces yet. it turns out the parents actually were not indoctrinating their children with bias and in fact parents were so afraid
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their children would become racially intolerant that they didn't discuss the issue of race or body is at all. they made no mention of it and what is disturbing about this research -- it's actually a step up from the kafeel experiment -- it shows people conform -- children can form on conscious diocese without anyone intending for them to happen. not the parents of the children are the teachers of the children were the children themselves. so how do they form cracks around the time i was reading the chapter my own daughter turned three and we would play this game called dr. where we bought a kit and she would check up on her stuffed animals using a stethoscope and magnifying glass and she would ask me to play the role of the doctor and she would play the role of the nurse and we did this for a couple of days and then i suggested we switched roles and she was willing to play the role of the doctor but wasn't willing to let me play the role of the nurse and this went on for two weeks and i pushed and pushed and she resisted and resisted until i asked her why it did was i couldn't play the role of the
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nurse and it's surprising she was able to articulate this because i don't think most people were able to articulate where the assumptions are coming from him if she said she had never seen a story book where a nurse was played by a man and it's true when i thought about it i had read her dozens of children's stories and all of the stories invariably the nurse was played by a woman. now there was no act of conscience bias on the part of the storyteller of the story, there was no act of conscience bias on my part or on her part and hit by age three she formed what is a stereotype that nurses are supposed to be women and doctors in general are supposed to be men. much of the book or a big chunk of the book talks about the nature of prejudice. but i try and argue in the would prejudice is actually a special case of a much larger phenomenon that is fundamentally cyclical in nature. much of the book talks about the problems of the head and brain, the problems caused by on
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conscious bias and one of the automatic reactions we have is if we could do away with a head injury and we would all be bias-free. it turns out it's not that easy. the human brain plays a positive role in our lives much of the time, and one of the chapters in the book i talk about what happens or what might happen if we were actually to be deprived of the hidden price and if we were to do all of our thinking intentionally and consciously, and i shook that would result in us not becoming enlightened figures but profoundly disabled in many ways. i tried throughout the book to try to find ways to link the research conducted, the scientific research with the real world and i do this for two reasons. one by one the book to be accessible to people who may not have a direct interest in science but sick and that is where the research belongs. it doesn't belong in laboratories, a wonderful fellow harvard is it belongs in the real world where people are
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wrestling with issues of the time. one of the chapters of the book i try to discuss the issue of unconscious sexism in the world and i will get too specific examples. the case of hillary clinton during the democratic primary in 2008 and of a woman some of you will be familiar with, lilly ledbetter whose case went to the supreme court a couple of years ago. lilly ledbetter worked for the goodyear tire and rubber company and she worked here for two decades. she worked the night shift and was that the level of four manager and there were four of the people who did similar work and all the others were men and one evening when she got to work she found a torn piece of paper in her mailbox and when she looked at his of paper she never found out who left the piece of paper in her mailbox she found out if listed her salary and the salaries of the managers of the shop floor doing identical work and it turned out she was being paid substantially less than them. i won't go into the details
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about the case that happened and how the case found its way to the supreme court. but i use this example and the example of what happened to hillary clinton to ask the question of whether we can tell whether unconscious bias, in this case on conscious sexism, caused the effect that we see. and i try to show how and real life it is difficult to draw the kind of conclusions you control in the laboratory because of the one hand, it is true that hillary clinton may have seized on conscious sexism but did she lose the democratic primary because of her on conscious sexism or did she lose the democratic primary because of her views on any number of issues? did she lose the primary because her associations with bill clinton? there are hundreds of variables and everyday life that make it difficult to say this caused that. the same goes for lilly ledbetter. dewey no xm ackley what happened at the goodyear tire and rubber plant? had an intuitive level i believe that lilly ledbetter and hillary clinton were the victims of the
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unconscious bias but if you were to ask me to prove this, it cannot prove it with scientific certainty. the issue of course israelite doesn't provide us with control groups. scientific experiments provide us with control groups. as i was working on the chapter though i realized there was one population, one group of people who could provide us with a control group by themselves when it came to the issue of sexism and that was the group of people who are transgendered because transgendered people are men who were once women or women who were once men. they made the transition from male to female or female to male and the effects of what we're seeing in gender are true and what we should see is everything else being held constant, a person's education and professional background and experience and skills, if they make the transition from male to female or male to female we should see a difference and it turns out that there is research, sociological research in this case, that shows that is exactly what happens. that when a man in and make a transition to win in a report losing all kind of privileges they didn't know they had and
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when women make the transition to them and they gained privileges that they never knew the existed. pond lawyer who made the female to male jensen reported somebody had another firm reported that he was delighted to be working with the new lawyer without realizing of a new lawyer was the same as the old lawyer and the gender had changed. many of these examples are anecdotal. the most compelling part of the research comes from evidence that shows win minn vacca transition to women that hourly salaries drop quite precipitously as much as one-third and when women make the transition to being an their salaries on average rise and it's an example of how impossible it impossible as it may seem making the transition from male to female or from a female to male has a profound effect on how we can function in everyday life. there are several other chapters to discuss what unconscious bias
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tells us about the way we make moral judgment and judge genocide. there's one chapter that looks at how would new research shows about the process by which young men and women are recruited to become suicide bombers and the sort of unconscious biases of suicide bombers. there is another chapter their looks specifically at the 2008 presidential election in the fall and talks about the result of the secret experiment conducted that ll that try to ask the question are there ways we can disable unconscious bias in the course of an election campaign. some of the results of the experiments i am happy to discuss it if it comes up in q&a but many are these experiments that are counter intuitive the ways you go of a disabling unconscious bias on all the ways we would conventionally assumed to read the chapter i'm going to read from is called the siren's call and it looks at a separate dimension of bias. what happens to human beings in the context of ongoing disaster has disasters on fold.
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and this chapter would have bearing in the fire alarm were to go off right now in this room. what we do? how would we be if? or the unconscious factors the would affect us in making judgments about how to react to a warning of disaster? has sided with many of the other chapters, with this chapter i began with scientific evidence and then i try to find a nellis to the fixable from real life that could show and dot i's with the scientific evidence had found. in 1993, a bomb went off in the underground parking lot at the world trade center. it didn't bring down the tower is the they were ordered evacuated. a sociologist went in and announced a simple question. he asked how quickly people were able to exit the covers and what factors influenced how quickly they left the towers. he found something very surprising. he found it did this a matter what the people were on the 20th
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floor or the 16th floor. in other words you did in to get out of the building sooner because you're on the lower floor. what mattered, what was decisive was the size of the group that you belong to. if you belong to a large group it to que much longer to fix the building. if you belong to a small group you were quicker to exit the building. it research has been backed up by many other strands of research and one of the ideas that comes out of this research is that when a crisis unfolds, and we are not sure what happens, human beings turn to one another both to try to figure out whether other people know what's happening but also something else very important to develop a shared meredith about what is happening. it's important when we are in a group not only to know what it is to do but to try to get a shared agreement where everyone says i agree this is what we should do and this is what we have to do and the process of arriving at consensus took longer for a larger group than a smaller group. the chapter begins with a
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terrific case which i am not going to read tonight that took place years ago in detroit where a woman was assaulted on a bridge that connected the trip with an island called the ballan elbridge and the assault took place in full view of probably 200 people, maybe more than 200 people. and like the story i'm sure many of you are familiar with, no one can to the woman and hardly anyone called police. so the woman eventually giving no one was going to come to her help and uncertain what to do she leaped off the bridge. she didn't know how to swim and she eventually drowned in the river. i'm going to start reading a little bit from the end of that example and then go on to the section of one to read for you. what you think happened on the bridge that might? from the outrage that followed you would think that she had
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been surrounded by the only people in the world who would not help a victim in distress. everyone else for they would have come to her aid. children in schools told reporters they would not have sat idly by. the right course of action was obvious. step forward, do something, think for yourself. this was my own view of the tragedy by first heard about it as a reporter. it wasn't until i started learning about the handling and but i realized there was an entirely different way to think about what had happened. the more i learned the more i can to see that the bye standards i describe what happened to several by standards to and the bridge incident, the bystanders did not really have insight into their own behavior. my research to the tragedy of the bridge let me unexpectedly to a beautiful september morning in new york in 2001. six years after her death, a young equity trader at a financial service investment banking york went to work on a sunny tuesday morning in
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that is when they heard a terrible modeled malaise. it was as if an earthquake that struck. it was 8:46 a.m.. according to an account pieced together by the man who would later become the head of the firm, the muffled explosion brought the chairman of the company running out of his office. jesus christ, he shouted, what the hell was that? is the architecture of the bridge produced a situation where her options or physically state were tragically limited, the muffled explosion that fetch and the others heard created a similar situation. what mattered in this case however was not the physical structure of the town were but the architect of time. fetch and his friends didn't know this but their own lives were in deadly danger. they had one opportunity for a skate, a sliver of a window that had opened by an event hundreds of miles away. earlier that morning the united flight 175 from boston had seen its takeoff to lead by 14 minutes at logan airport.
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that delay created a small opportunity for fetch and his friends to survive, but of course the employees here did not know that. when fetch and his friends heard the explosion in the north tower that tuesday morning they did not know the united airlines plan was 16 minutes away from crashing into their building. the impact of the united plan would tear a diagonal negative in the south tower that would stretch from the 77 to the 85th floor. virtually every person still in the building above the zone of impact would die. the overwhelming tragedy that was unfolding in the united states hardly anyone noticed something strange happened that morning, a puzzle. the investment banking firm was actually spread over two floors in the south tower, the 80th floor and 89th floor. the escape routes from both floors would be severed by the impact of the united airlines plane but when the survivors were accounted for, it turned out that nearly every employee of the '84 escaped and survived.
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fetch and nearly everyone else who worked for the same company on the 89th floor stayed at their desks and died. john duffield became the ceo after the tragedy and her son was among the employees who died told me that 120 employees were spread over the 88th and 94 that morning. of the 67 people at the firm who died 66 worked on the 89th floor. only one person who died worked on the 88th floor and as we will see that death was the result of a conscious act of courage. accounts pieced together from telephone calls made from the 89th floor and accounts from a few survivors sure that fetch and the others did not know the explosion they heard was caused by a plane crash. the tower was not directly visible from the trading area in the south tower but from the scott base all smoke and thousands of paper to across the sky. one employee would say that it looked like a parade, confusion broke out. people raced to windows for a
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better look. senior staffer called what happened during the terrorist attack of the world trade center in 1993. those who tried to leave got stuck for hours and elevators. the emerging school of thought in disaster management was that rather than try to get everyone out of a big building like the world trade center, it made sense for people not affected by the problem to stay inside of their workplaces rather than wonder out into danger. this wisdom filtered down to every old timer in the building. put yourself in the shoes of the people on the 89th floor you have no idea what is happening. a muffled explosion from an adjoining town work, smoke and drifting pieces of paper is all the information you have. the idea that 19 hijackers have taken control of four airplanes and and then at the nation's prominent landmarks including the building you work is not just beyond the realm of comprehension, it is beyond the realm of imagination. fetch and his friends also had won a nervous eye on the clock, trading on the stock market was about to open in a few minutes
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at 9:00. the chairman dispatched someone to check with building officials about what to do. meanwhile, family, friends and colleagues who heard about the explosion on television started calling to make sure their loved ones were okay. the calls had the unintended effect of keeping employees at their workstations. meanwhile the united airlines plane after initially going southwest from massachusetts connecticut and the jersey please see you turnover pennsylvania. a subsequent recrimination of its flight path showed the plane drifted southeast at first than the 90-degree left turn at the new jersey border and headed northeast toward manhattan. some of speaker of's colleagues wandered over to the windows that offered a few of the north tower. others settled into their desks to get ready for the start of trading and advised their slacker friends to do the same. officials in the building finally announced over the public address system people in the south tower could stay where they were rather than risk exiting the building where they could get hit by falling debris from the north tower.
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fetch saw the burning tower from the window with a good view, the site shook him up when he saw someone leaping from an upper floor and falling hundreds of feet. it was horrible. he didn't realize something even worse was about to happen. united flight 175 was plunging 10,000 feet per minute and aimed at the southern tip of manhattan. fetch did what anyone else might do in a situation what most people around him were doing, he picked up the phone. he called his father at work after a brief conversation he hung up. the united plane was only moments away. fetch donald another member. he wanted to reassure his mother he was all right. very pleasant and so fetch left her a message. he said a lot to tell you the plane hit tower to a and i am in tower one and i am alive and well. she recalled in an interview. he said was pretty frightening because i saw someone fall from the 19th floor all the way down. there was a long pause. he cleared his voice and said give me a call.
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i think i will be here the rest of the day. i love you. seconds later fetch's building shattered with the impact of flight 175. no one on the upper floor knew that once the building survived the crash nearly every one of the zone at impact to dentes date within the 16 minute window perished. i wanted to read a little bit more that shows, gives a little bit more since -- this is a teaser right now because i've described what's happened but i haven't actually told you phenomenon that drove this. so i'm going to read a little bit longer. it might take another five or ten minutes. there is a way for us to labour the workings of the hit in the brain and disaster situations but it requires us to suspend our model of people as autonomous individuals. let me show you what i mean through to get samples of a single employee who worked for
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the ill-fated 89th floor. like everyone else interviewed at the firm, he was a clearly above average and social skills and smarts. you don't get to work a place like this unless you are pretty bright. with will's permission however, let us stop thinking about him in the usual way for a few months. for the purpose of illustration in fact let us exaggerate of rolled his head and brain. instead of seeing -- let us imagine he has nothing but a hit in the brain and sort of seeing him as a smart and handsome young man with a smile that lights up the room imagine him as a note at the center of a web connections rigi from him in every direction. a slender cord runs from his brain to new york where he grew up and his parents live and another goes to south bend indiana where his brother, the catholic priest lives. and another to new jersey where his sister lives and still another to long island to his other brother. if you have to the diagram of
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his life in this way before the morning of september 11th, 2001 you would see cables running to his jim, the golf courses and beaches he liked to frequent and his high school friends. wherever will went, new cables sprang up around him. a stretch to acquaintances, others to strangers. summit with thick and strong and others slender. some came into existence and snapped off in moments as he passed someone he didn't know what his way to work. others endured a great edisons and distances. the bond of love, loyalty of longing that make up life. after graduating from cold spring harvard law school he attended motor dan and worked a couple of years for the bank of america in chicago before returning to know dirtying to help coach the men's lacrosse team. he joined july 31st 2000. he got married six weeks before september 11th, 2001. he and his bride went on the honeymoon to the caribbean island of st. martin. christina defazio and jessica
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worked on the firm's back-office grip on the site of the ninth floor closest to the north tower. the course that connected will to the more slender because he didn't know them well. cliff worked in the firm's insurance group. he was a good office acquaintance. eric fourth and bradley were close friends. they knew about biases's propensity frank sidey. college friends used to call him crisis the way for blowing things out of proportion. rick and maddock regularly played practical jokes on will. sitting across on the 89th floor was carroll, an event coordinator and administrative assistant. she had a bubbling personality and changed her hair color regularly from blond to brown and back again. another nearby employees was chris hughes and arbitrage trader. will's jalabert forced him to speak to countless people each day. he sold stock, research people let the cliff produced. like a scene from a science-fiction movie, the
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hidden cables snake about will growing and feeding. on monday september 10th, 2001, will moved desks to in his new location he happened to be the member of the group closest to a little corner door that led to a solid metal door. the door opened into a hallway and then the stairs. employees need a pass to unlock the door. on tuesday morning september 11, biases jumped on a train from his home in westchester on 6:15 a.m. and a subway from and manhattan. he attended the meeting at the firm and then drifted back to his desk. like everyone else, and he heard the explosion at 8:46. it was more of a rumble than a bill, like an earthquake tremor or the sound of work and rolling something very heavy on the floor above. as we go through the next moments remember that we are not thinking of will as an autonomous human being. we see him instead the center of a complex web of inter connections with thousands of cables tugging him in different directions.
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if you prefer, think of will as a cork bobbing in the ocean passive, acted upon by every riptide and wave and a drop of film. carroll yelled was that? after a moment, chris hughes the arbitrage trader exclaimed there was an explosion and the other building. oh my god, carol's voice was panicked. oh my god! the explosion itself was just a side of will's peripherals division but when he looked through a window that normally offered a spectacular view of manhattan, he felt his stomach turn. the empire state building and all of midtown manhattan had vanished. in its place was black smoke and thousands of sheets of drifting paper. it gave will the sense of the magnitude of what happened. the smoke and debris was to travel 50 or 100 yards from the other tower to so thoroughly obscure the view. people were jumping up, sere leaped like a contagion. calmed down, calm down, chris
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shouted, it is in the other building. like a vacuum, the windows drew will and brad and frick. the harvick spectacle of the smoke and the breach was irresistible. but as the tide of people drew well to the window and knocking came to the door through the small hallway. it was a decisive moment. i can't believe someone forgot their past, he thought. the desperate binging escalated. the connection demanded his attention. will didn't want to answer the door but he happened to be the one closest. it placed the obligation on him. his connections with his friends called him towards the windows but the plea from the door pulled him in the other direction. it broke him away from the tide. he went to the hallway and opened the door. as he left the main area of the for the connection he had to the people he left behind weekend. when he opened the door new connections spring up between him and the two women who stood outside in the hallway. christina defazio and jessica.
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like a robot, will repeated what chris just said, calmed down, calm down. it's in the other building. defazio and slaven were so afraid they couldn't speak and then quit can charge of the hallway on another part of the ninth floor. he had been sitting with his back to the window when his room filled with a terrifying blue light and blasted him right out of his chair. he ran out into the research departments screening get out. the bond between a will and cliff sprang to life. there was a stairway exit outside of the door where he was standing. nicklaus and the two women made straight for it. will glanced back once installed on by the weakening connections he left behind. to his good fortune, the architecture of the hallway that submitted the door from the trading floor obscured most of the room he left behind. he couldn't see his friends. and for people from his own office, bill, jeff, andrew and amanda came charging at him in a
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pack. when will leader reflect on the moment he realized he made very little by way of a conscious decision. you do what you do, he said. you are right there. you see people running down the stairs, you see people running at you, you go down the stairs. wilfong himself running down the stairs so quickly@ @ @ @ @ @ @ b to connections sneaking back to
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the 89th floor tugged at will. if it turned out this wasn't a big deal and no one else had run rich and brad would have a field day. this was the kind of episode that would ensure a full amount of jokes at wiltz's expense, something minor happened and crisis boy had taken off like a rabbit. will persuaded quiff to wait and see if others can trickling down. they stood in the stairwell. united flight 175 was probably over new jersey by this point. the minutes ticked by. no one else from the 89th floor appeared. will and cliff sheepishly started climbing back up the stairs donner as ever by the cables that connected them to their comrades. they climbed two floors and they were right at the edge of the zone of the impact of the coming plant. it was yet another decisive moment. what saved the day with people from other floors were now coming down the stairwell. they were strangers and formerly weak connections with will's hidden brain but there were many of them. besides it is getting difficult
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to climb against the tide of people climbing 15 stories against that kind of traffic was crazy. will and quick turn around and went with the flow. the results to get out of the stairwell and take an elevator back up. luckily for them every door they tried was locked. the stairwell was now a tunnel leading them out of the building. doors could be opened by anyone inside the building but were locked against intruders trying to enter offices from the stair well. we are going to go back and get left out so much, he fretted. well and cliff were in the stairwell on the 54th floor when they received the ultimate confirmation that the overreacted. building officials made the announcement people in the south tower could remain in their offices. there was a lot of noise in the stairwell and the announcement was not heard clearly but after people shushed one another, the announcement was repeated 30 seconds or a minute later. but by now the stairwell was so crowded it was impossible to go back up. just as well was resigning himself to the weeks of humiliation at the hands of his
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jokester friends, the united air plane crashed into the south tower. the stairwell shook. it actually undulated like a snake. will recall seeing people on the landings three or four floors above him. he clutched cliff. this is it, he thought, the north tower took over and hit the south tower. he was going to die. there was no way he could have known at that moment that he was actively supreme the lucky. the cables connecting him with friends and strangers had conspired to spring him from the track in which he had been encased. his hidden brain extricate him from the zone of impact. the south tower would stand long enough for him to get out. nearly everyone from the office on the 89th four who survived a state within the first moments after the explosion of the north tower. those who stayed behind would have found it increasingly difficult to leave because the hid and brann were anchored to other people who were staying put. it would have required enormous delivered if ever for an individual to overcome the strength of the ties or for the
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group as a whole to reach a consensus. many of the victims who stayed behind of the 89th floor were not tracked by the kind of self doubt that plagued will. once the united airlines planes struck at 9:03 a.m. they have less than an hour to live. thank you. [applause] i am happy to take any questions. usually is at this stage where another side of the hidden brain kicks in which is that nobody puts up their hand. but the moment one pe puts their hand, others will join an, which is a small and trivial example of the phenomenon i just read to you in this chapter. >> where were you wanted to agree with ed? >> i was in washington, d.c.. i was just hitting in to work on
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that morning and i lived at the time in arlington and so the impact i don't know if it was the fourth or fourth panora pentagon could be felt in my home, i wasn't home at the time. then i went and worked all day at the post. it was a surreal experience. yes. >> [inaudible] >> the question was to talk a little bit about what the new research has found about the hidden brain and suicide bombers. when we think about suicide terrorism, invariably we think of the individual personalities of the suicide bombers. we ask what is it about these individual people that promise them to be willing to kill themselves for a cause. every often we pick up on religion, religious fanaticism as being an explanatory factor
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for suicide terrorism. when you study the matter systematically and scientifically, however, we find the intuition is not supported by the evidence. it turns out that religious belief is not only not a necessary cost for suicide terrorism, it is not even a sufficient cause either. there are many silicide bombers going back 50 or 100 years who came from entirely secular background or even atheist and had nothing to do with religion. and a lot of the research that is looked up the phenomenon of suicide terrorism from a scientific perspective has looked once at the psychological makeup of the people and the specific elements of their ordeal local background and looked at what is common between suicide bombing across the ages, if you look at what the japanese did on the closing days of world war ii against the allies or with the sri lanka in tigers did in the 1980's or if you look at the use of suicide her bosom and
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a variety of theaters today, what we find is the process by which people become suicide bombers is common across the different cultural and national context. suicide bombers tend to be in situations where they are largely cut off from the outside world for a variety of different factors. some liberal, some not deliberate and is small group psychology, the ability of small groups to leave right to the norms of human behavior that makes the phenomenon of suicide to durham some possible. when we ask how is it people can do these abominable things what we are doing is examining the phenomenon from the outside of the tunnel. we are often not able to understand is that within the tunnell of the creation of the suicide bomber the norms have been turned upside down and so the people who are volunteering to be suicide bombers are not doing it because they are evil or deprived, they are doing it in the same way that young people who you and i know might
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want to be rock stars or might want to be book authors. it wins then the spotlight and attention. the norms have been turned upside down in the suicide bombers tunnell and once you turn them upside down you have to do very little to go out and recruit people because they will come to you. >> does a person act differently or changed to different behavior if the workings of his or her hidden brain as pointroll? >> not necessarily. inside is an important first step dealing with his brain. it is a necessary condition but i don't think it is a sufficient condition so there are people who are aware. for example to because my daughter again, the fact that i mentioned this, the fact we talked about why nurses can be women, don't have to be women or can be men it doesn't mean that the unconscious associations picked up from the time she was very young disappear from her mind so it's not as of the
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unconscious mind stops working just because the conscious mind knows something different. one of the things i'm trying to get out in the book is the conventional way we have to approach prejudice is preached to people to tell them the prejudice is wrong and that might be successful. i'm not sure it is successful but it might be successful when prejudice is conscious because then you have an argument with people all about whether prejudice makes sense or doesn't make sense but when the prejudice is on conscious going out to someone and say and i think you're being homophobic produces nothing because when they look in their hearts they don't see prejudice, they see themselves as being on prejudice and what it produces is defensiveness. in the chapter where i describe the experiments that were conducted in the 2008 election looking at how you can dibias people, one of the things that has come out of that is actually it shows that will be obama campaign did in the election i don't know whether they'd this consciously or unconsciously but they found ways to take the issue of race off the table without confronting it directly
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so there were many people for example who said explicitly they would never vote for a black man in the 2008 campaign. but whenever barack obama or michelle obama or anyone from the campaign spoke the never drew attention to the fact people were using race as a metric of voting. the obama campaign always said america has transcended race. we are better people, we have moved past this. we have had a long and difficult history but we are better than we are and better than we used to be. so rather than confronting the bias directly with the obama campaign it is called people to their better angels and a lot of what the research suggests and is counterintuitive is you might be less successful at calling people out on their body is precisely for this issue which is that even when you are conscious of the unconscious bias within you would doesn't necessarily change behavior. in the back, yes. >> i'm curious about moving this to a different look about scott
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brown for example and kind of what the redials about the human brain and how massachusetts most liberal state in the union [inaudible] what's that about? [laughter] >> the short and honest answer is i don't know. i think in some ways this becomes a parlor game where you would try to apply the bias to the situations and i can toss out hypotheses and give you my impressions but i should start by saying we are doing right now this is not scientific. we are theorizing. i think for many people, democrats included felt that martha didn't care enough to run a very hard campaign and it didn't really tell you the vote hard enough to want to campaign for it. i know a lot of people who are
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not republicans who understand why people would have voted republican and so at some level people in some ways want to have their ego stroked and the sense politicians are speaking to you. i think it interesting dimension of the human brain when it comes to politics as we often seek to have personal connections with politicians and is an odd thing because most of us will never meet barack obama or most of us will never meet george w. bush so the fact this person to be someone who would be fun to have a beer with is irrelevant because we are never going to have a beer with them and yet when it comes to our decision making we often w. and overvalue the personal connection we feel with people or the disconnection we feel with people and so in ways when it comes to politics, one aspect of bias that cuts across not just the city election but many elections is the over rnce replace on personal relationships with these people with whom we actually do not share a personal relationship at all.
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you have a question, sir. >> there are two surgeon and local concept [inaudible] are these concepts woven into this notion of the hidden brain or are they a distinctive category not much related to this notion of the peter connected [inaudible] >> my book is not a book about 40 in psychology but it's in for my think by the center inside of the freudian psychology which is that the unconscious plays a role in our lives. so, where freud may have spoken of defensiveness, the new research would talk about the phenomenon of motivated reasoning which is when we are asked to make a judgment about something we tell ourselves we are carefully weighing out the issues and making a judgment when in reality what often happens is we have preconceived opinions and we look for the
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evidence the would back up the preconceived opinions. i mentioned an interesting experiment that may be tangentially related to what you're asking about. in the course of the 2008 election people conducted this experiment where they asked where they measured peoples on consciousnesses seasons between barack obama and whether they felt he was american. and they found that an unconscious level people thought barack obama was less american than was tony blair. in other words people fought tony blair was more american than was barack obama. what is striking about this research is if you asked people at a conscious level with the barack obama were 20 blair was american they would look at you funny because they would say obviously tony blair is a british competition and barack obama is an american. and the reason this research is interesting is that it found that when people who were more likely at an unconscious level, not conscious level the unconscious level to think of obama as being four men are much less likely to support him in
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psychologist but where it parts with empirical evidence might bias is to go with empirical evidence. >> the time for one or two more questions. >> go ahead. >> what percentage do you get two free will if any? >> it is quite powerful and plays a strong role. one of the questions that often comes up after the book has come out is if i am saying that the hidden brain does all these things does that mean that there is the end to personal responsibility because i can say i didn't do it, my hidden brain made me do it and i try to make the point -- several points in the book when it's true we will always have control over our unconscious mind we are still always responsible for our actions and behavior regardless of the association's positive for negative four in our mind we are ultimately judged on what we do and how we act so in other words whenever the algorithms may be in the auto pilot
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function it's finally flying the plane for which we have personal responsibility so when the responsibility of tritium conscious mind where they are deliberately or not we are responsible for that action. we can't turn over the control to the all the pilot and say i'm not responsible for crushing the plan. i tried to show several techniques and ideas in the book about these people can become aware of there by as he's and what they can do once they become aware of their biases. koret symbol to the back to my daughter when of the things i do when i read stories but now is to try to pay more attention to the choice is the author of the story but we have made and i try to say well why did the author of the story but make the streets? why is this a man or a woman? why does this person have to be black? could the story have turned out differently? and the goal was not so much to get my daughter to agree with me as much as to try to move more of the conversation from the level of the unconscious assumption to the level of conscious dialogue.
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day as president, would we really want to see this woman growing old before our eyes? tucker carlson, i think, on msnbc every time on hillary clinton on hillary clinton on tv i cross my legs and everyone equated her everyone's first wives standing outside of probate court. they were overtly sexist things that were said about hillary clinton. at the same time it's not clear to me what effects this actually has on the outcome of an election. this sort of goes to your question which is that if i'm a democrat and i'm hearing rush limbaugh saying these things are hillary clinton does that make me more likely or less likely to want to vote for hillary clinton? you know, if i'm a democrat and i'm hearing this person beating up on someone whom i'm weighing, i would think be more inclined to vote for hillary clinton. now, that doesn't account for the fact what my unconscious biases might be about sexism. so that's why i try to come back at all times of the idea of the unconscious.
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in some ways i personally have less of a problem with overtly prejudice things. because it's out there. i have much more of a problem when the conversation is unspoken. when people feel they are making decision entirely based on policy, entirely based on the merits of the candidate and then they're coming to a conclusion that is actually unconsciously bias. and the reason it is powerful it's not just that it's insidious. it's a bias that's shared among the vast majority of people. and so even though the amount of bias in each person might be small collectively it can have gigantic impacts on our national behavior. one last question at the back. did you ask a question before? >> there was a recent article in the globe about something that was called cognitive fluency. and it has to do with the fact that people like things that are simple. that they can process easily.
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the headline was easy equals simple. so i'd like you to speak a little bit about that in terms of the unconscious brain. is that really the way it is? that basically sound bites include us in ways that we don't know? because our brain is constructed to like those? >> sure. i think you can find any number of examples actually that our brain is wired to find -- to find simplicity appealing. one of the early chapters i write one of the experiments that was conducted on the new york stock exchange where the researchers looked at companies with easy to pronounce names. and easy to pronounce stock ticker codes. so the stock ticker codes such as k.a.r. is easy to pronounce and a code like r.d.o. is difficult to pronounce. obviously the name has obviously no bearing on what this company
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does and how they will perform. what the experiment found easy to pronounce names vastly outperformed companies with difficult to pronounce names for the first year when these companies were new entrants into the stock market. at an unconscious level people use the fluency with which they were able to say the company's name or the stock ticker code on a purely unconscious level. and they associated this ease of pronouncibility with the riskiness or nonriskiness of the company. you had a question. >> you compared the hidden brain to the auto pilot. and i can't listen to you speak in reading the book in which the author is counseling us not to believe in our theories of causation. in other words, we too perform a scenario we think we understand what's going. -- going on.
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would you in general say we should have a lot less on the pilot and more on the pilot? >> i think it depends on the context. i think there's times in our lives where the auto pilot serves us well. in the blog posting that heather mentioned on the blog, the hiddenbrain.org. i write about new research conducted where people in love usually overestimate the qualities of their partners. they idealize their partners and they think their partners are better than they are. they think their partners more closely match their own vision of the ideal person and the estimate of the partner is much better than the partner's own estimate of himself or herself. in other words, people in love do not see reality accurately. however, it is the case that people in love who have this illusion tend to have much more stable relationships. and tend to be much happier in their relationships, okay? so at a functional level, this is an example of where a hidden bias is completely useful. and to do away with bias would
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result in vastly increasing the divorce rate because we would see our partners as they are. [laughter] >> what you're saying is true where there's an nefairious effect of the hidden brain. i think it's really contextual. i'm not arguing that we should live all our lives consciously or unconsciously but try to make more of the decision about whether to do something consciously and unconsciously at a conscious level. >> do you think we're entering a historic time where we ought to -- cede less control to the automatic pilot and start thinking in a -- in more broad paradigms? >> my personal sense is that these biases have probably been with human beings as long as there have been human beings. but it is true that i think that human beings today can cause more damage to other people than they might have been able to do 200 years ago or 300 years ago. and so the -- our biases are no
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best solutions. book review in long island new york hosts this 45 minute event. >> you know, let me begin by telling you a little about how i got involved in politics. i got involved in politics when i was about 9-years-old because of an attempted the democrats' filibuster on judicial nominees and really interested me to know what people were talking about. it's not a word many people use every day. filibuster and as a nine-year-old i didn't really know the word meant so i had to begin to listen to both sides of the aisle both conservatives and left and i wanted to know but both sides of the aisle were talking about and what their
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points of view or and begin to form my opinions on issues and learn that my views and personal opinions were more in line with conservative values than anything else, and it really -- i began to learn more and more about my own views and for my own opinions on different issues as time went on. and as time progressed, i began to realize a lot of people were using the term conservative and didn't really know what they were talking a. the begin to use the term conservative for some any different things and in many cases conservative was used by the left as a slur for a lot of angry political slogans. the conservatives are bad, greedy people, angry people, they are for big corporations and all fees angry leftists who use it as an almost anchor anger provoked ideology. and conservatism isn't provoked by anger. it's not some angry group of people out there to promote big
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corporations or businesses. conservatives are about very easy to understand ideas come strong principals and strong values that translate into equally and strong and equally valuable policies and that's what my book is about. my book is about, the date code four basic principles. the constitution and law will fall in general, not just the idea the constitution is a good document and it's great for america. both sides believe that. what we as conservatives believe is unique and to the constitution of the united states is important to the preservation of our society. the way that it is today. and preservation of a good society. a good valued moral society. and i can talk about that at more length leader. second thing is respect for human life, the dignity of human life. and i get all the time from the left he's just trying to provoke people about the abortion issue. that's not what it's about. really the way you view life in
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general, what's the purpose of life, what is the value of life, how would we value life, what is life itself is something of the epitome of ideology and shows what you believe as an individual. whether you respect life as a bite of the individual or respect life as a state of being. that life is essentially something of life as george hagl said. it all depends where the basis is or it comes from the basis of your own ideology and i will talk about that at more length leader. the everything is limited to government or minimalist government. limited government -- and this is the other myth of the left has that limited government means no government. we don't want any government interference. that is an absolute lie. as a conservative, and i get a lot of flak from this from people, i do believe there is a necessity for the federal reserve. i don't believe we need to abolish the system.
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that is absolutely absurd. we already have a system that worked for a long time. we don't need to change it and throw everything out the window and start anew. there are changes that, yes, need to be made in the federal reserve and we can talk about the was when i do the question and answer session, but the federal reserve itself is an important aspect of the regulation of the private sector and yes, they're needs to be regulation of the private business sector because we need to enforce the ability for all businesses to have free competition and enforce the ability of businesses not to cheat other people out of their money and we can -- and there are so many different ways we can do that, not just major federal regulation like the federal reserve. another thing is personal responsibility and individualism. that's something i believe wholeheartedly because personal responsibility and individualism really stems from that idea of inherent rights. i'm about to get to that in a moment. but the idea of individual, the individual's personal
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responsibility, the responsibility for their own self tyson to the idea of limited government. if the government is limited, then the people need to take more responsibility for their own actions if for example as some people -- excuse me -- especially my side of the idle suggest we cut welfare programs what people need responsible to get the money they were getting from the welfare programs to pay for their family and to fund their own flight squawks so, for example, if people need to be more responsible in their own actions clich villisca grumet is responsible for their actions the more they need to be responsible for the same actions and the less government is responsible for attempting to create more jobs the more the private sector needs to be for creating the jobs. as a personal responsibility is tied into all of that. now, i mentioned by the swing to direct a few things at the beginning. one of the first things i would like to revisit is this idea of human life as at the abortion
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issue and how human life translates to your whole ideology. the way i see it, if human life is seen as a right of the individual, then that translates into the -- that translates back into your idea of the rule of law that all individuals are in doubt by their creator with certain inalienable rights and of all individuals are created a better individual to the creature with certain inalienable rights that means the government doesn't have the ability to take those rights away, in other words that translates to the editors and natural law become a natural standard of society that is not manmade or is not given by the government, but given by god to read that this is an inherent -- this is inherently natural and independent of the from and that all individuals have these rights to begin with. they are not given, they can't be taken away. and in that manner we get the idea of life as a inherent right. and those people that believe as i do that life begins at conception or in most cases in
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all cases life itself is an inherent right of all individuals no matter the range or where they are from. now, the idea of life as an inherent right is the other -- the importance of understanding what that means is -- what means is life cannot be taken away no matter what stage or at and we see this debate in a lot of cases on the national level on health care and other countries also much america but other countries. for example, there was an article in newsweek on the cover and i talked about this in my book called the case for killing granny. first of the reason i don't want to kill granny is i don't want to kill my grandmother. the other reason is because philosophically and logistically and logically and morally it is completely unethical to take somebody's life away as the author of the article made the case for the, quote, economic benefit of society.
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that is and what we are aiming at. that's not what we believe as americans. if it is then i must have been left off the ship but as americans i believe as the declaration said all individuals are in doubt by their creator with certain inalienable rights that are among them life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. killing grannie to save money on health care which is what the author's case was is not the best way to save money. it's not the best way to preserve those rights. and for that reason, using get people on the left especially the extreme left that believe as george hagl, the basis of the marks and thought that, life is essentially something alive. the prostate mcgeorge hagl's career, life is essentially something alive. it doesn't make much sense to most of us. it's simply a state of being that you are here. you are living because you are and in order to fill that void that you were just here the government comes in and makes
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the value for your life that government is here to make things better for you. the government is there to make to prosper to help you be more responsible. the next najaf i would like to talk about and this is one thing i want to clear about my book. i mentioned by go into a little detail about this. limited the government is not just ditching of the government altogether. it's not. first and foremost, the government is necessary to preserve the peace of the most basic level. the government is there to preserve the peace and for the common defense and the general welfare. the government is there to make sure things run smoothly and we can all live prosperous we in the greatest country in the world. that's why we have a form of government in the constitution to make sure the government doesn't go beyond certain boundaries. but the problem is there are people especially on the far left and especially the left who
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believe as karl marx the society is a changing crystal. that everything changes. society will not stay stagnant for ever, that everything must change and of society changes in our view of society must change thus the laws must change and the way football is today, the constitutional standard must be a defeat could become a living standard and then we get into the fought and oliver wendell holmes statement that the basis of the law experience, not logic. so if we have this idea as homes and president obama has said that we need to base the law on empathy and meet our legislative standards on being empathetic towards others, we need to base it on how we feel for each individual and a given courtroom that we get to this idea of legal privileges and positivism not that law is king or as referred set but that the king is law therefore you have the
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opposing views, the conservative view that is king of the government or the view that government is the king of the wall. which of those do we believe in america? in my book i make the case we believe that law is king. in america we believe the constitution is above the government, the constitution is under certain standards a certain limitations in countries such as sweden or france or other countries where they have taken on a more positive for relative standard of the law it seems to be the king is law, the government is the king. the government is still law of the land with the government says those. there is no checks and balance for government. oh-la-la is what it is. in my book and a taste of the conservatives believe that of the law is a necessity and that
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the law itself and for what law is good that doesn't mean the conservatives at the same time believe all laws are good. thus we make the case and i make this case in my book that the law itself is to be based on certain values and principles which are outlined in the constitution and i won't -- we can talk more of this in the question and answer session. so now i've dissolved the myth that conservatives don't believe in this view that government should be abolished and we should run away from what we have today and there should be no laws whatsoever for the private-sector that is a total lie and that is absolutely nonsense. but when it comes to the conservatives even programs are certain aspects of the government that is true for example its absolute insanity going on in washington right now especially on one count, jobs.
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let me clear up the mess. there is so many people out there saying president obama saved a lot of jobs with the stimulus package or he will create more jobs or he saved all these jobs and if he creates and the package we will save a lot of jobs. on an plan that was supposed to stop the stimulus package at 8%. that is what it was supposed to stop. now it's 9.7%. that's absolute insanity. that is a lot of people out o work. the other thing about that though on a more policy oriented level is president obama's idea of creating and saving jobs are creating temporary worker jobs such as the 8 billion-dollar life real program in central florida. let me tell you something about the 8 billion-dollar program in central florida. first of all, the light rail program goes from tampa to orlando.
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let's get this straight if you're going to be communing from tampa to orlando every day generally it's not like long island to new york city, it's not the same kind of population. florida is florida. it's not -- it is a different demographic fancher and from long island to new york. when you travel from tampa to orlando that is pretty much a straight line and the majority of people for going to be working in orlando every day going from tampa to orlando they will have a house or condo or something in orlando where they can stay. there will not be travelling every day but the most important part is no blight rail in history has paid itself off. the new york subway system has come the closest but no voluble system has ever paid itself off. i live in a limit to georgia. we have the system. it's absolute insanity. i know people who go on there, my dad exceed was on their everyday but the majority of people commuting from metro atlanta to a land do not use it
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partially because we are americans and we like to use cars. we don't like to climb onto little trains and truck delivery date to work. the other thing is logistically americans come in a lot of cases it is better to travel by car. blight rail systems going down the highway from tampa to orlando they say that it's going to create an easier way to get to work. you want to create a better way to get to work? create more lanes of traffic. the other thing is the jobs created with the programs like the light rail system for example are temporary jobs, so everyday employee is going to be out of work in a few months or if the programs go on as long as the and after about a year so it's absolute insanity. they are pushing money down and hold it is never going to come back. as always -- and will never
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conservatives want to draw three the next ninth i want to kind of just throw out there and kind of to go around for a little bit is the myth that conservatives want to just destroy -- conservatives want to destroy the poor, the conservatives are not for the middle class, we are all for the wealthy, the evil bankers. let me tell you something. the evil bankers as they've been call or these people, i've talked to them, they want to make a profit. is that such a bad thing? if they make a profit, then their company makes a profit in turn and if the company makes a profit they can employ more people but that is a bad thing because we don't want people being employed. we don't want to compete with china who had a 10.7% gdp gain.
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we don't want to compete with that because we want to get people -- we want to penalize the bankers with the banking fee. i think we have penalized them enough. i think we penalized them enough by giving them these bank loans they can't pay back and when they do they are going to be piled on with more taxes. it is absolute insanity. when conservatives talk about preferring business over government it's that business is at a fixed interest in you, the consumer. if you are going to a business such as this fine establishment, book revue, the of the interest in getting you to buy their books. if the government-run it they don't need you to buy the books because they are not relying on your profit, you're relying on your taxes, there for its a totally different the world. the government's job or it should be is to protect the people to make sure they can make a profit.
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the job of a business is to make sure every individual is happy with their product and to make sure each individual is able to succeed. that's generally what the business model is, make a profit by making people happy with what you get three. bonds again, the conservative role perspective on the individual and on the business is not this idea of preferring businesses from the world, is the idea that business is especially small businesses which a vested interest in making a profit by pleasing you, the consumer thereby having a vested interest thereby having a vested interest in u.s. and individual have a better perspective them the government when it comes to the financial sector and the other part about that is who employs people? the government just employed if
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i'm not mistaken more than 1 million people this year. i think .5 million people more in play by the government. that's a lot of people. even if it was 500,000 people employed by the government that's a lot of people employed by one entity and the fact of the matter is do we need all those jobs? do we need to be spending all that money in a period we are in extraordinary deficit -- an extraordinary deficit period? and one of the great exceed those of this is the fact that a great example of why conservatives believe in a business over government when it comes to financial prosperity is president obama's plan to get small business is back and running. i don't know if you listened to the state of the union address but president obama made the comment that part of his progress to take the money the banks are paid back and give
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them to the lenders so they can lend them to small businesses. okay let's think about that for a moment. what should you do with the money that you get back? pay off your debt. if you go home today, if you have mortgaged your house or a few -- let's say you have credit card debt what is the first thing you pay off? that you have, and you don't create new ones. or you don't go lending now. you make sure you settle your own estate. that is what we should be doing with the money, we pay off the debt we already have instead of creating new programs and adding more debt eventually and maybe not getting any money back maybe it depends. that is another point how the government is not the best person, the best role player in the financial sector. the next thing i want to make the case about is why my book is important to americans today,
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why i think conservatism in general is important and defining conservatism is important. the reason you have to define conservatism is because it is such a -- it's become an ambiguous term almost as that term progressive or liberal. a lot of people don't understand what these ideological terms mean. they throw them out there and it's the of become overused. the reason conservatism is important in modern america is it is making a comeback. we see that in the tea party movement they consider themselves independent or tea party values but generally the majority of people in the tea party self-proclaimed conservatives or by default by their values conservative. and conservatism is important to modern america because it has for a long time meeting different and not on the american politics but in the way that americans prosper in the future. i believe ronald reagan's
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leadership in the economic crisis of 80 and 81 first of all of americans back to work and lower taxes for many americans and helped in the cold war with russia all at the same i think that is a good accomplishment. conservatism did a great job in the 80's and it's done great jobs throughout history and we can talk about those leader. but nonetheless, i think that conservatism is important now because while we have big government in washington spending $8 billion on light rail systems that will never pass themselves off we have conservatives such as myself saying wait a minute we don't need to do that we need to be protecting this country from our enemies foreign and domestic and focusing on the national defence. we need to focus on education, competing with china. a recent survey by an international research firm made the case you know what? if americans increase their educations or i think it was 25%
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on average, we convinced our gdp in 80 years by $42 trillion over 80 years. that is a lot of money. now it is logistically not $40 trillion a cumulatively. but the $42 trillion is a lot of money to increase the gdp and i believe that if we increase education standards by a good number the next few years we will be able to have large competition with china. we will be built to have viable competition with the chinese, and our -- and india. that is why i think that conservatism is important because conservatives have values that will solve the problems america faces today. and the final thing is why do i think americans should buy my book? y dwight young de should buy my books first and foremost the average american needs to know
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more about conservative values as conservative solutions are coming forward and conservative views are coming forward i don't want you guys to get caught up in the hubbub of conservatives are just doing this for the big banks with the same with liberals that liberals are just doing it to get votes. i want you to understand what it means to be conservative and leftist and what all these different ideological terms mean and why they are important to understand. so i would like to open up for questions now. >> [inaudible] [inaudible
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conversations] >> do you have your eye on a candidate, republican candidate for the next election? >> the next presidential election? look, i think we need a candidate like mitch daniels indiana who is a 60 something% approval rating in a purple state, between republican and democrat state indiana which is generally more to the right, but nevertheless 60 something% in indiana is very good and he has high ratings because unlike some people in the party -- and i think this is true for a lot of them. sarah palin is one of them who believes that conservatism --
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the only way we can create, we can get a good candidate is if we create this strong ideological barriers that prohibits a lot of people in the middle, the independent from supporting us and we can't do that. the fact of the matter was in new jersey just nearby the candidate they ran, annette chris christi, great guy, he wasn't mr. conservative, he was the most conservative guy in the world in fact the independent in the race took a lot of votes away from chris christi and honestly that's why he was an -- that is why he was tied with the then incumbent governor of new jersey because the independent candidate was taking 11% of the votes in the poll and campaigning as the conservative. so, part of the problem is we don't need to find a candidate that campaigns sincerely as creating an ideological barriers
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or been almost an ideologue. we need to find somebody that is a conservative and beliefs and conservative values that is the same time able to get the independent vote because he's able to appeal to them. that is what mitch daniels did in indiana and new gingrich and 94 and ronald reagan. he was able to get the blue dog democrats and independent to support him and that is why ronald reagan won against carter petraeus wixom like mitch daniels of indiana would be the perfect candidate. some deals? >> i have a question about your view towards not necessarily the money being spent, stimulus money being spent on public transportation but just in a transportation in general. you suggested that as opposed to building a light rail system between tampa and orlando, you suggested the government should expand lanes but from what i took it would be to build more roads. in order to build roads in
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certain metropolitan areas you would potentially have to acquire land in order to do so which in some cases would -- eminem domain, correct. in a city like washington, d.c. where i used to live the population is expanding at an ever-growing rate, one because the government expansion but also because of private businesses in the suburbs of virginia and maryland. in an area for like washington, d.c. for excel they are expanding in northern virginia and expanding the metro in the maryland suburbs. from what i gathered he would be against that do to your idea that public transportation has not yet paid for itself. spikelets affect public transportation in general. now there is one of i will say that has done a fine job when it comes to public transportation if i may say this, this isn't technically public transit but amtrak has been heavily
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subsidized. eight, too, isn't doing well but the route from d.c. to new york is doing fine because it isn't heavily subsidizes more private loans than the other tracks owned by amtrak but also because people use it. but anyhow, i'm sorry. >> my thought with eminent domain or i was going to ask about eminent domain do you support that idea and if so why if that is a government takeover of private land. >> that is a great question and i to address this in my book, i have a whole section of eminent domain and different court cases addressing the eminent domain issue and the conservative view of eminent domain. this to interpretations. there's a more positive argument, the more legal positivism argument for eminent domain which is the government has the right in all cases were eminent domain and then there is the conservative view on kilo verses new london which is the
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idea -- and after kilo there really became -- this i feel it was very polarized and there were a lot of -- the debate became even hotter after kilo versus new london because the conservatives were supporting @ h@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make a case for. personally i don't think that light rail is one of them but the way that eminent domain is
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written in the constitution is your given compensation so that it is a changing of wealth, wealth to begin with. i personally don't agree with the idea of eminent domain as it stands and as it is now -- as it now stands in -- as of now stands a modern and legal interpretation. the idea that the government has the right to take over your land which is a common legal interpretation by a lot of people in mainstream legal thoughts' and especially those embracing the homes iain legal fought so it is a matter of your interpretation of eminent domain whether you interpret in the constitutional interpretation as read through the eyes of the constitutional framers if you read the constitution by james madison which is it is supposed the exchange of wealth, the government doesn't already own your house to begin with it is an exchange of views exchanging
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for a fair sum of money with the government and that it should be used for real public necessity not public transit. but it's something there will benefit the public and really i think that the case for -- the need to be stricter limitations on the government ability to take over your land for the public good which is in the constitution. we need to find with the public good means. does it mean that it will make -- it is projected to make a profit of x amount of dollars or does it mean it's good for five people. what does that mean? i think personally public transit doesn't get profit at all is not technically in the public good. >> do you regard rhodes as public transit? >> when i talk about public transit rhodes do actually benefit the majority of people depending on where they are. the bridge to nowhere for example in alaska is not something that benefits. maybe we need a strict interpretation of public good as
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something that benefits -- it needs to be -- there should be more limitations i think on the public good. >> que support eminem domain for the creation of roads? >> it's constitutional. but in the original constitutional way that it was written it wasn't meant to be the same way that it is being interpreted so often now. if you are going to aim at the big high we debated the are trying to create the people are saying there is a tie with it is going to be created from mexico to canada if that is what you are aiming at there are people who do that and i've had that question before and look, there are certain places where the roads are necessary to have eminent domain because there is no other way -- there's no other way to build the road. there is just no other way to do it. so do i completely agree that
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eminent domain is necessary? yes but always, absolutely not. but the natural, expanding it, the metro is find weekdays. you want to make a profit off of it and want somebody to make an actual profit, start selling it off to private businesses. i think we should privatize a lot of the systems because they will start making a profit because you can publicized them and we have the same debate in atlanta with marta and the jacksonville airport as well. ..
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the main problem the conservatives it will face in november is a fact that there are some people on the far right and there are some people that don't want conservatives and a tea party movement to be part of the republican party but that's a small majority but i think they will. they will make big gains in congress and we have a good chance of winning nevada seat and have a chance winning a line -- illinois and i think there is a fine chance of beating barbara boxer in california. there are seeds one back for the republican party that we didn't have a chance along time ago. c. scott brown in massachusetts
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as example. i think republicans will make a great comeback and the most important factor is what i was trying to get at, the problem is we would wealth i will focus on conservative values and what the people want to now such as the road map for america that is being supported in by an abrupt budget hawks in the united states congress. are going to support things like issues american people want to address, are we going to try an appeal to -- try and do what we tried to do last. go all over the world and try to find her voice. we know what the american people want to hear, conservative values, they want to hear things that create jobs, the main thing, want to hear things that cut the deficit, they don't want to your health care, they want to hear things that benefit them on everyday life level. frankly there are some conservatives that aren't
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addressing, they sank i can be conservative and win but in the grand majority in the republican party is doing a fine job and i think in november probably we have a chance of winning back the house, i don't think we will win it back entirely but it will get close to having a full majority. one. >> you know so much. if republicans do have a majority, does pelosi still have to stay? >> no, the speaker of the house is always selected by the majority in congress so nancy pelosi would be not to be speaker again unless the democratic party has a majority then she would be at reelected, yes,. >> i don't believe we have a government out and that's why the people are the only hope, the tea party is really hope but you think a third party, they
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would help the democrats. >> absolutely the third party is dangerous absolutely 100% because that's what i was saying in new jersey, 11% in the polls having chris christie sweating bullets and that's because been he had a snowball's chance of winning, he had no chance of winning whatsoever but because he was relieved with being a kind of a pushover and just came in the race for too long. you want to win an election you want at least the closest thing to conservative support the republican candidate who has a chance of winning and gets out of the race and lose the nomination. >> exactly right and the majority of the people i talk to don't want to become the republican party. every time i talk to them anybody in the conservative movement there are 10 percent may be less or more a fringe
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movement in the tea party. the majority, the vast majority, the strong majority believe that their republican party needs to become more conservative and will support those candidates. there are hardly any of them will support a tea party candidate. >> i was wondering if you have any goals right now besides being 14? >> of course, of working on future books and that's something i would continue to lie to do. the book presently at this time, i don't know in this band, but as of february 11th but 4th best-selling conservative book in the nation and third best selling conservative author in the country so i do have things, i'd like to write more books and not just like this a philosophical but policy books and to address is used in a greater depth. it's hard to do that in this
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setting we're talking about as opposed to writing something for you have time to research. i would like to do more of ads and i really enjoy that. of course, of my to go to college and get back. >> out of the web. i'd also like to may be essentially have a ready -- radio show or tv show where i can share my views physically. i don't necessarily agree with people so i can't read them and have a conversation just like having today because i enjoy hearing people's views and addressing policy issues and that's one of the problems of being my agent a lot of people think that's you need to address this issue because you are a 14 year-old in can talk about this, i can talk about just about every issue and have a strong opinion on everything from education to dominance in domain while i have opinion on it. some saw leslie i have a lot of things i'd like to do. projects i have been working on and things that will hopefully hit the ceiling soon.
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we will see what happens. >> i just want to know your opinion and maybe give us your thoughts on why you think president obama was elected in 2008. what were the reasons that you feel he was elected over senator mccain and governor sarah palin. what made him the better candidate in the eyes of the people who elected him. >> well, i don't -- it was really because he was the better candidate, not because he was the better person when it came to his policies. he was certainly a better candidate 100 percent. first and foremost he was advocating for change from the old um, i think it was called out of touch in the name of the ad about john mccain was out of touch, he's just like bush, he
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has a country club. all country people are bad. so he's a member of a country club, he rides a golf carts, he's a bad man, john mccain is like bush, the old white male. that's what the republican party was seen as an he had a great job saying at the same time and that's, i agree to change washington for the better, he said a change you can believe then and the great thing is change can be interpreted as progress or if can be changed for the worse and he's used the term change. he really has changed a lot of things and he changed his use of a lot of things such as national defence, take everybody out of afghanistan and iraq. he was not able to do that because of bob gates and other seven that so not able to do
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that without winning the war first. this of the reason he was a better candidate was because he was a better speaker, much better charisma, and he really was able to appeal to people's emotions of how washington is. even people who generally might not vote democrat or at all such as a lot of college students. more mesmerized by him because they heard him say he was going to change washington, going to change from the old white male to the younger fresher face and be a new kind of voice for the people. that's what appeals to people like that he was going to change things and also appeals to people that he wasn't a republican and people were tired of president bush and tired of republican party. and i wanted to give something else a try. i think they really started to believe in this idea that if we can have health care, health
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care for everybody if we can have a stimulus package that's completely and utterly comprehensive, if we can have cap and trade, if, all this is he was saying, then we can have a better world a better country. if we talk to iran than we can have peace. they heard him say he's gone to change the policy is to create a whole new kind of ideology analyst alan washington. i think it was really that message of changing for the way things used to be to create a new kind of idea that appeals to people. any other questions? great. that's abo
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thanks to wgbh and c-span for covering this. i'm very grateful. i want to make a note of one person in the audience, bob, the curator of the nieman program. i am a nieman fellow at harvard this year and probably would not be standing here were it not for bob's encouragement. this e zandt is also a meaningful to me because in many ways launching of the book while at harvard has brought me full circle. the origins of this book began from reporting that took place at harvard five or six years ago and so i have a sense of completeness in completing the circle and coming back here at the time of its launch. it's also the case that harvard university has contributed enormously to the intellectual content of this book and i think it's fair to say that without this great university this book would not exist today. i'm hoping to give you a very quick overview about the book and then maybe read a little bit from one of the chapters in the
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book and then take your questions. theories about the unconscious mind go back centuries. philosophers and theologians and scientists. there has been a host of tools that have been developed that have given new windows into the hidden brain or what i call the hidden brain. most of these tools are in that discipline of social psychology but some of them are also neuroscience and economics and sociology. and the picture they paint of the unconscious mind is different than the conventional picture we have about the unconscious yet so in contrast to the on conscious that is filled with seating impulses and powerful forces, the unconscious mind that has been under the recent studies is rather
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