time he was actually brought in by mary todd lincoln to address the presence of body as he was killed, almost like an undertaker would today. and it was an amazingly close relationship that had not been fully clarified and i hope i have taken some steps in doing that. he's a very important figure in history of the white house. i just wish we knew more about him. >> host: you've done such a fabless job with this book. it's fully intriguing and as i said can i was jealous when literature bibliography that you got to read all of those phenomenal book. this is a great addition to the body of knowledge about presence and african-americans and something was important for us to take a look at. thank you so very much for this phenomenal work. >> guest: thank you so much. ..

>> now david brooks looks at how our unconscious mind shifts are character, intelligence, and biases. this is just under an hour. >> it is a great pleasure to be here. more or less in my hometown. i went to the high-school about 13 miles west of here, and so it is always good to be back home in this area. because i know philadelphia and its, i know you did not come to hear me speak.

you came here to hear your help -- yourself speak. [laughter] i will try to be brief. get out of your way. it is a pleasure to be back. try to think of what my high-school teachers around here would have said. i was not a big man. i was actually stuffed into lockers by big man. tom wilson who played biff in the back to the future movies, and another one was just warming who chases tornadoes and was one of the subjects of the movie twister years ago. so they went on to lead exciting lives, and i went on to talk. [laughter] now, a lot of the people i talk with our politicians. so when i was given my current job at the time i was given a

good piece of advice which was to interview three politicians every day. it from spending that much time around them i can tell you that they are all emotional freaks of one sort or another. they have what i call logorrhea dementia, which is they talk so much that the drug themselves insane. but they do have incredible social skills. when you meet them by and large they will stand close to you, and it your personal space, rub the back of your head, caress your cheek. dinner with the republican senator, he kept his hand on my five the entire meal. [laughter] several years ago i was up in the senate press gallery watching dan quayle and ted kennedy greet each other. they gave each of these big hugs. their faces are so far apart. they're laughing and groping. hands are roughing up and down each other's backs. grinding away. i was like, get a room. i don't want to see this.

another story i saw, which is a bit of name dropping. going through a hotel in boston. bill clinton comes out of one of the elevators and starts praising me for a column i have written praising him. particularly astute column. as he is talking people see bill clinton in the lobby. the suspect in up. they can all hear what he is saying. within a few minutes he is 80 feet away. he is just talking to me, but just embracing the crowd. another court -- another case, i was following mitt romney around while he was campaigning. he was campaigning up in new hampshire with his five perfect sons, biff, said, risk, except . he goes into a diner and starts going around the tables of the diner and introducing themselves to the families and asking what village from new hampshire they

are from and describing the hall beyond in their village. he would go around from table to table. he meets 30 people. on the way out he first names almost everybody has just met. okay. that is a profession i will be going into divvy it finally just a few weeks ago at the national institutes of health i was shown by a narrow scientist a video of a young girl with williams syndrome. it looks like reverse autism. the low growth is 18 months old. in a room with 12-year-old boy, the son of the researcher. she only wants to look into is eyes. the boy is struggling and knocking over stuff. no interest in the physical objects. she only wants the social connection. she gets close and stares into his eyes minute after minute. i was watching the video thinking, this is every senator i have ever interviewed. so they are socially attune creatures. the odd thing is when they turn their minds the policy all of

that social sophistication damages and they start thinking like cbo reports, computer models. i have covered a series of failures in my life, a lot of which have to do with the overly simplistic view of human nature. i covered the climate of the union. recent economists and they're with privatisation plans. but the rally lacked were social trust. we were blind to that. as a result they stole everything in the country because they had no social trust. i covered the war in a rock. we sent our military and and leaders were oblivious to the cultural and social realities and unprepared. we had a financial system and regulatory regime based on the assumption that bankers or rational, self interested tracers -- creatures who would not do anything stupid on mass. that turned out not to be true. most importantly for 30 years i covered education tried to understand by 30% or 20 percent of kids drop out of high-school

to beat we have tried for 30 years to try and raise high-school graduation rates. most of those efforts have been disappointing because be rearranged the bureaucratic boxes while skirting the central issue which is the individual relationship between a teacher and student. people learn -- people learn from people that they love. if you talk about love that a congressional hearing they look at you like you are oak brook. they don't talk in that language. the question is, why is the most socially attend people honored, why are they completely dehumanized? i can to deter people to buy the conclusion that this was not a political problem, but a broader cultural problem. we have in our society this inherent you that we are decided cells and have risen over here and a motion of your. the two are at war with one another. on a seesaw. if you are emotional you are not

rational. if the irrational, your not emotional. society progresses to the extent that reason, which is trustworthy, and suppressed passion which is not trustworthy. so this bias has led to a view of human nature that we are fundamentally rational individuals to respond interest -- straightforward ways to read it has led to academic disciplines that try to study human behavior using the methods of physics emphasizing what they can count and model and ignoring all the rest. it has led to an amputation, a shallow view of human nature. it ignores and is in a to kill it about the things down below. it has created a culture in which we are good at talking about material things, but bad about emotions. health and safety and professional skills but the most important things like character, integrity, we often have very little say. alistair mcintyre, the great

philosopher, said we live in a system where we still have words for important things like virtue and honor and vice, but we don't have a basic understanding of how they all fit together. he said, imagine you hear words like neutron are gravity, but we did not understand how does its work, how they all fit together. that is where we are. i do think that we have this amputation which blows us in a certain way. it blows us in the direction of this prevailing breeze that we are not always satisfied with. i mentioned, i went to high school and my folks still live in when pencilling in just west of here. you see that parents there and in many places around the country are trapped into a certain style of raising their kids. stuck there on the ground. we want them to study and do homework and get ready for the harvard admissions test. they get picked up by a audi's

and all of those. the town is socially acceptable to have a luxury car. [laughter] they get raised and picked up by this creature. how highly successful career women take time off to pick sure their kids get into harvard and with less than their own children. they are doing but exercises during the moment of conception in the delivery room cutting the umbilical cord themselves. the baby pops out. commander in flashcards. and so they turn them into the achievement machines, s.a.t. prep. they're not really happy. they don't think this is the most important thing. the tiger mom down the street is doing it, and they feel trapped into a system which the ridiculed but cannot renounce. and they are often in a system

where they sort of intuitively have morale and character, but they don't have of what can be very. when people talk about morality we often talk about shopping. you know, we have be a ice cream company on foreign policy. i'd jump in one of my books that been injuries should make the pacifist toothpaste doesn't kill germs. just acid believe. a whole foods market. they look like they are on loan from amnesty international. we buy seaweed-based snacks. mom, i want a snack. it will help prevent colorectal cancer. [laughter] and so, you know, i think -- i think this is sort of the world we are trapped and. be realized that is actually not all there is.

there is more to life and more that we should be experiencing. so i was thinking about this problem and gradually i became aware of this other sphere of life where they were looking into some of the deeper things. oddly, it was not theologians. it was not philosophers. it was people who study the human mind. this incredibly exciting time in the study of the mind being done all across a wider range of skiers but neuroscience, cognitive science, behavior, economics. people are looking into the human mind. it is a revolution in consciousness because when you synthesize their findings across these many different spheres you start with three key insights. the first is that while the conscious mind write the autobiography of our species, most of the action and the most impressive action is happening unconsciously below the level of awareness. one way to think about this is the human mind can take in

roughly 12 million pieces of affirmation a minute of which it can consciously process about 40. all the rest is being done without our being aware of it. a lot of the things going on are somewhat odd. my favorite research finding from the university of buffalo scholar is that people named dennis are disproportionately likely -- likely to become dentists. unconsciously we gravitate toward things that are familiar, which is why i have named my daughter brooks. and some of the things going on unconsciously are impressive. it is not the tangled web of sexual urges that freud imagined. some of it is really just a different way of understanding the world and often yielding superior results. if you have a tough decision and cannot make a combined, tell yourself you will decide it by a coin flip. flip the coin, but don't go by

how the point comes up, go buy your and the russian reaction. are you happy or sad. that is your unconscious mind having made the decision and telling you what it thinks. the third area is the most important excess -- successful or unsuccessful life. a lot of that is happening unconsciously. the second insight is that emotions are not the enemy of thinking, but the center. people who have strokes and lesions and cannot process a motion properly are not super smart. they are super dumb. emotions a sign about you and tell you what you want, about you, don't value. if you don't have that evaluation device you cannot make rational decisions. emotions are not separate, they are the foundation. now, i'm not comfortable talking

about a motion particularly. one of the scientific experiments i ran into, but it gets that a truth which is that they took a bunch of middle-aged guys, but then and fm our eyes, brain scan machines. they have them watch out or movie and had them describe feelings toward their wives. brain scans were the same in both circumstances. sheer terror. i know what that is like. my wife says to me, it's like don the writing a book about plot need. it is not natural. emotion really is at the center of how we perceive the world, valued the world, the center of how our brain organizes. 1945, an orphanage out west studied by a psychologist named renee smith. they decided to keep kids healthy, keep them germfree. they gave them food and good health care, but they did not handle them. they separated them. those kids die by age two.

a 37 percent mortality rate. they stopped naming children because they were not living long enough. that is a sign of how emotions the tralee physically are necessary. and so the motion is something that you just have to get comfortable. you are not only seen me, we are reenacting what we see each other. deeply interpenetrated, and there are all sorts of communication methods through which we are communicating and in ways we are not even aware. there is one story about a psychology professor who wandered up and down the stage from side to side. his class played a trick on him. and he is over here we will let him. and he is over there we won't. within two minutes he was out the door over here and felt better over there. they took gauze pads, take it

under people's arms. have some people watch of horror and somewhat to comedy. other people's nest, presumably well-paid after seven the gauze pad where what they comedy or horror movie. people could tell way above average who saw what the be it women, by the way, were much better than men. so we are deeply into penetrated. so these findings really give us a different story of how life works and a different story of who we are. in many ways we are children of the french enlightenment believing that reason is the highest of our faculties, but this research confirms some of the british were scottish enlightenment. reason is weak and sentiment is quite strong. and it gives us a different view of who we are, and a different view of human capitol, what it takes to lead a fulfilling life. when we talk a lot human capitol, we often talk about

things that we can masher, great, degrees, s.a.t. scores might use. there are other qualities which are more important which are both emotional and irrational. so one of these talents is this thing called mine site, the ability to enter other minds and learn and download what those mines have to teach you. babies come equipped to a great to see -- degree. he leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes old, liked his time, and she'd like to turn back. babies, even at a phenomenal the early age are built to merge with mines the come into contact with and absorb models. by 18 months 55 percent of american babies have established a 2-relationship with -- to wayde relationship with

mom. they know how to build a relationship. those kids have a huge leg up. researchers can take a look at kids who are 18 months old, how they attach to mom, and predict with 77 percent accuracy who will graduate from high school. if you go into a school at three or two or five and know how to relate to teachers you have a better shot of doing well in school. 20 percent of kids are what they call avoiding the attached, kids to have been sending out signals, but not much has been coming back. a teacher described one of those kids coming into a classroom to acting like a cell boat into the wind wanting to get close, but not knowing how. those have less activation in the reward areas of their brain during social interaction. they get less of a kick. by age 70 they will have your friends and others. something that happens at 18

months does not determine the life course, but it dampens of the pathway which can be either confirm or does confirmed by later experience. somebody with a bad attachment can discover a mentor and it can all be changed. these are some of the skills that you learn early on. a second still is what you might call it "boys, the serenity and maturity to look inside your own mind and be aware of your own weaknesses. for example, the unconscious have many skills, but some weaknesses to be overconfidence machines. 95 percent of college professors believe they have above average teaching skills. 96 percent of college students have above average leaders get bills. time magazine, 19 percent of americans are in the top 1 percent of earners. shoemaker and rousseau gave executives about their own industry and ask them how confident they were. advertising executives said they

were confident that they get 90% of the answers right and that 60 percent wrong. computer executives are the most over competent -- confident industry. 90% right, but 80 percent wrong. a strongly trait. so men drown at twice the rate of women because men think that they can swim across the atlantic, especially after they have been drinking. and so have the ability to correct your own biases, open-minded in the face of ambiguity, adjust the strength of your conclusion to the strength of your evidence, be modest in the face of things that you don't know, invented modesty devices for yourself. peter drucker had a great one. write-down your reasoning, seal it in an envelope, and open it in nine months. you will discover one-third are right, a third are wrong, third are in between, but in most cases it's completely irrelevant. these are all skills that are

only tangentially related to iq. mental character, not mental force that has to do with your emotional equilibrium. a greek word which we might call street smarts. the ability to look across the complicated scene and pick up a pattern to arrive at a jest. there was a great story in my newspaper about soldiers in iraq who could look down the street and tell if there was a bomb. they could not tell you why. they just tell the coldness. some people had sensitivity to the landscape, and that is a skill that comes from practice, close observation and practice. most of that perception is unconscious. the fourth thing you might call sympathy, which is sensitivity to an emotional and social environment. can you pick out what other people are feeling? this comes in extremely handy working in groups. most of us working groups because groups function more

effectively than individuals. you give a group of card test and individuals. the group will solve it better. the capacity of a group to call -- solve the card trick or math problem is not related to the high iq or median iq. it is related to how well those people read each other's emotional signals. how often do they take turns? that is how well a group does it. face-to-face groups do better than groups that communicate electronically. they give some people math problems, give one set of probst ten minutes to solve the problems face-to-face and they did very well. give another set of cribs 30 minutes, but they had to communicate by e-mail, and those groups could not solve the problems. beware of teleconferencing. some people have the ability to read those things, and some don't. the fifth trade is called

propriety. the ability to set up scaffolds to control some of your impulses. the most famous experience in this whole field is called the marshmallow experiment done by a guy named walter michele. he took 4-year olds, put them in a room, but marshmallows in front of them. i'm going to leave the room. if you have not even the mushmelon, i will give you two. he showed me videos of the kids trying not to eat the marshmallow. a little girl banging her head on the table. an oreo cookie. the old guy picks up that oreo, carefully eats up the metal, carefully put it back. that kid is now a u.s. senator. [laughter] the scary thing is that ten minutes the kids who could wait, 20 years later they had much

higher college educations and incomes. the kid who could only wait one minute, much higher drug and alcohol addiction and incarceration rates because some children grow up in homes or actions lead to consequences and the develop strategies to control their impulses, mostly by pretending that the marshmallows a cloud or not real. pretending that temptation is not really there in front of them. and so kids to can go to school with that self control will find school and less frustrating than kids who cannot. these are traits that are really the baked in early or encouraged early and happen unconsciously for the most part. the final trade i will mention is not so much a tray, but more of a motivation. i call it lawrence. the conscious mind hunters for money, success, fame, recognition. but the unconscious mind hunters for the most is those moments when the self fades away and b's

: fades away and we call -- find ourselves lost it is those moments when a naturalist feels that one with nature. a believer feels consumed by god's love. love in one another and lose that sense of self. irrational and emotional. so when we see somebody we might potentially fall in love with one of the things we are doing is measuring that person and always. we tend to marry people who have nose with similar to our own, i would, complementary immune systems, which we can sell -- tel by smell, married people have the maximum status symbols that we can

get. so women, unfortunately, tend to admire a man who are taller than they are because the average inch and high in america equals $6,000 a year. one study i came across suggested a guy who is five-foot six can get as many on-line data on the offers as a guy six but so long as he makes $172,000 a year more. so some of this is rational and cold and calculating. but some of it is quite deep and mystical. you would say by great phrase called crystallization. he describes of miners who would take branches and wrote it into a salt mine. they come back a few weeks later and the branches would be covered with these crystals. they would glamor in the sun. that is what we do to our

beloved. they imagine they have these crystals around them. we become addicted to them. the brain scientists say that love inside the brain looks very much like a cocaine addiction. not an emotion so much as a state of need and desire to become completely fused and that loan with another. i tell high-school students at every course they should take in college should help them decide who to marry. that is the only important decision that they will make. if you each -- a good marriage produces the same happiness' gain as making $100,000 a year more. if you have a good marriage and a bad career you will be happy to read a bad marriage and a good career you will be unhappy. every course should help you. in those courses and in that desire to fuse with one another we get this sense of essentially who we are. / skill, consciousness.

deep down we want to interpenetrate one to another. that is the highest thing that we long for. one of the most beautiful examples i found of that is in a book by a guy named douglas hofstadter. he researches the mind. married to a woman named carol. bar when the kids were five and to herald suffered a stroke and died suddenly. he was walking through his bedroom and had another picture. as he had done many days in a row he happened to glance at her face, walking through. here is what he wrote in his book about that experience. i looked at her face and i looked so deeply that i felt i was behind her eyes. all at once i found myself saying, as tears flowed, that's

me, that's me. those simple words brought back many thoughts i had had before about the fusion of our souls into one higher level entity. the fact that the core of both of our souls, identical hopes and dreams for our children. the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct, but just one hope, one clear thing that defined as both. it will lead us into a unit, the kind of unit i dimly imagined before being married and having children. i realized that core piece of her had not bad at all, but that it lived on very determinedly in my brain. now, the greeks used to say we suffered our way to wisdom. hofstadter's effort -- suffered his way to wisdom. there are shared loops that permeate our minds in ways that are much deeper than we are aware of. the policy failures that we have

seen, the educational form villiers, financial reform, we have suffered our way to wisdom. the shallow view of human nature is an insufficient tubes. that is important if we will design good policies, lead good lives, and have a much different sense of you we are. the good news is we are in this incredible time where researchers from all fields are really giving us a deeper view. i think their influence will pervade society year upon year, decade upon decade and give us a much richer cents. not giving us a new view of human nature, but reminding us of all philosophies, truce, and that means. for me it has been tremendously exciting to be around those people for the past few years and look forward to all of the things that they will bring to our culture in the years ahead. thank you very much.

[applause] >> i think most of you know how this works. put your hand up and wait for the microphone. >> teachers, especially elementary and nursery school, they cannot touch children.

made a comment about how emotionally tied these children should be to teachers. yet they are not allowed to touch them. >> first on the day care. the good part about this research is that you don't have to be a super parent. if you establish good relationships with kids, if you listen to them, attend to their needs, if when you are nervous you try to calm them down, when they're down your bring them up and are aware of who they are in a very basic way, that is the threshold that you need to cost to be don't need to be super mom or dad. most of that stuff doesn't do any good. you just have to be good enough. so that is relaxing for most parents when you look at this research. it was written in virginia. and so most parents, whether they work are not, who are listening or attend, they have done what they need to do, at

least on that front. as for day care, the evidence is mixed. i guess it is next because the results are not that firm either way. it has an affect on kids. if kids to spend -- well, the first thing to be said is there is day care and there is day care. some are very good, and some are not so good. some are individually attune to kids, and some are not. i live in belgium. they have in belgium but something called the crash with the kids would go. i asked the lady at club med. you can relax will you are on vacation. oh, like here? oh, no. we do stuff with the kids. bar but i guess on average, and studies suggest, on average, and this is not a strong effect, but some kids who spend a lot of time in day care tend to be slightly more aggressive than those who did not. that is the research as i understand it, but i would not

say it is a tremendously strong effect and would not be on the top of my list of social concerns. i spent a fair bit of time in early childhood education. to be honest, i'm not sure what rules are, but parents touch kids, teachers touch kids, as they should. the main thing they do, the really good ones talked at them. the flow of words is incredible. one of the differences in our society is between middle-class kids who here on average 480 words per hour and lower class kids who here on our -- on average 170 words per hour. that is over the course of childhood 302 million words which has an effect. if you go to the beleaguered early childhood programs teachers just talk to try to compensate for that. that is one of the important things that they do. >> have to be leveled in order for a lot of these social

policies that we are talking about to be effective ultimately? >> one of the things that we need to a knowledge is that we do have an unequal society. there is a woman, a great book called unequal childhoods. we do not have a continuum, but two entirely different systems. but i grew up with is what she calls concerted cultivation where kids are driven around and prepared for adulthood. the other is what she -- i forget the name, but life is hard. let the kids relax. in some sense this is a more sane and healthy way to raise kids, but it does not prepare them as well for the world we now have as adults. we have to, frankly, acknowledged that. at the most disorganized homes we have kids who are not getting those attachments. we have to have schools, and i am a big supporter of the academies. some of the no excuse schools where you go in and they teach the kids how to walk down the

hallway, how to look at the eye and not when someone is looking. how to say yes, excuse me, thank you, smile. in the morning they have drums and chance. teachers chance. the kids have ted chant back. they learn discipline and order and director and a lot of the stuff that, frankly, middle-class kids it naturally. i think they work phenomenally well because they are explicitly based on this marshmallow type experiment and say we will give those kids those type of social skills. you must technology we have an unequal society. two different systems for kids that have advantages and some who like them. >> another question. >> humanism changed geopolitical philosophy at all? >> i just cry a lot more.

i think it has. i guess i would put it this way. we have been through. of left wing which was socially liberated. be free to be you and me. it express yourself. a more economic individualism, entrepreneurialism, free market, reagan. two resolutions that have emphasized the individual. one of this emphasizes the community. it emphasizes the relationship between people. but i am much more community oriented. what can we do to strengthen communities than i used to be. i wrote a book a couple years ago about the fast-growing suburbs. i am now much more suspicious because the evidence about density suggests that face-to-face contact really is more innovative and productive. cities have advantages.

so there are a lot of areas where i have changed my mind. i guess i see everything psychologically. when i look at egypt and tunisia icy and emotional contagions. i see the quest for dignity the climatic urge. that is when you appreciate how fundamental a drive that is. what happened in cairo does not surprise you. influencing me in all those ways. it has not made me, like, you know, the closer to, i don't know, frank rizzo or rick santorum or anybody like that. but it has had a pervasive influence on how i think to reedbuck. >> ten rows back, the gentleman in the green.

>> david, it said the most important decisions that we make in our lives are made from our values. i am wondering how that fits and with your book. a follow-up on your earlier point, becoming more divergent politically. how do you see us solving the most significant problems facing us, the country with this divergence politically? >> those are two big questions. first on the values. i mentioned the importance of unconscious processes. some of the things have to do with early childhood, but some of it has to do with things thousands of years ago, genetic biases. some of them have to do with these that have been hundreds of years ago, which are cultural. we inherit through our culture, whether it is from the region we live in or are at this stage, we inherit ways of seeing the world. if there has been a lot of research done on how chinese and

americans look at the world. one of the experience -- experiments, the look of the mona lisa. they measured the eye movements of chinese eyes dancing all over the painting. the american eyes were focusing on the eyes and mouth of a lady, much more concentrated. another famous experiment was, they asked chinese people to describe a fish tank. they would describe the relationship between the fish, plan life, and the context of the americans would pick up the biggest fish and describe that. [laughter] another example is they did research looking at people having coffee. they looked at how much they touched each other. if i get the numbers right, i will probably get them slightly off. in real, 170 touches per hour. these are values we shared not only in these things.

some of our moral intuitions were universal. bar we were born with a sense of fairness, a sense of pollution. within this value systems whether jewish or catholic or protestant or muslim, you come and with a whole different category. you have to be aware of negotiations. values can change over time. it's a complicated stew. those things are basically fundamental. i look at why the country does well or why it doesn't. it is a fundamental value thing, not resources. these are to really crucial values. do you believe the future can be different than the present and do you believe you can control your future? these are not universal. in the u.s. we have an exaggerated sense of how much control we have, but it is good

to have. finally, on the polarization, tying it into the theme, our brains register any group and after powerfully. if i see somebody in my group punished my brain reacts violently. if i see somebody in and out croup being punished, and callous. and so we have not essentially -- we have essentially a tribal nature. in washington we have trouble is on stilts, magnified tribalism. the effect of cribs were people to turns. if you want the dictionary definition of the dysfunctional group, that would be the u.s. congress. they don't really listen to each other. the polarization is in part caused by the fund-raising and the media redistricting, but mostly these psychological psychodynamics of tribalism. good people stuck in those tribal hatfield and mccoy

systems. and so icy primarily as psychological and moral problem and thus fund raising. >> one political party. >> well, we need parties that have conversations with each other. >> let's see. the hand up on the right. >> in your column last sunday he spoke about how we americans over estimates our capabilities in every field. i am wondering if that is an unhealthy thing and unrealistic and how you would compare that to the opposite, which is the tiger mambo. >> well, i told this to a group earlier tonight, but i will repeat it. a couple of months ago i was driving listening to npr and heard a show called command performance which is a rebroadcast of an old radio

show. the episode i heard was aired on the day that we won world war two. bing crosby was the host. all of the big stars or on. he get out there and said, we just learned that we won world war two, but i guess we are not proud. we just feel humble. burgess meredith got out there and read a passage from a great war correspondent. we won this war because we have brave soldiers to emigrate allies, a material abundance. we did not win it because we are god's chosen people or anything special. we should just be glad and worthy of peace. that tone of humility was so striking to me. i get home and turn on the tv. i'm watching football. the quarterback tackles the wide receiver and does this victory dance to himself for his great achievement. occurred to me i had seen greater self puffery after a 2-yard gain than winning world

war two. i do think that this is a change from a culture of self f basement, no one is better than me, i know better than anyone else, to a culture of self celebration. be polling data used to support this, my favorite one, gallup asked high-school seniors, are you a important person. 12 percent said yes. in 2005 they asked again, and it was not 12%. it was 80%. that is just the change to be if you look at math scores, 36 in the world in math performance, but number one in thinking we are good at math. that is a change. this expansion of self has led to partisanship because i know the answers to everything and everything be disagrees with me is just in the way. the expansion of debt because why should i say for future generations. i am here. i feel less connected.

be by public at this, societies that have done well in math of the ones who have the least confidence in their own abilities. the lesson from researchers that you should have a slightly above average view of yourself. exaggerated richie's to make sure you go up and there and try difficult things. we have taken it to the extreme. one of the phrases that i think is the core of my political philosophy is the phrase appears illogical the policy, the study of what you know boy. modesty is modesty. we should be aware of how little we know about ourselves and the world and prepare ourselves at all times and not think that we are the bee's knees. >> again be. >> they should say a good recipe for modesty.

write a column twice a week. you will read them and think, oh, god, what was i thinking. >> i have a quick question. i believe it is a question on everybody's mind. what you believe. name three things that the current president has done correctly and one doesn't things that he is not appear reedbuck. >> let's see. three things he has done correctly, the best education president we have had since covering education. [applause] to, i disagree with that at the time, but he was right to rescue gm. [applause] i could list more. i do think, and i cover the president.

as beaten him periodically. i speak to people on this staff almost every day. within the white house i disagree with them, but within the white house that generally is a culture of debate. they try to find the right answers and generally have the best interest of the country at heart. smart people. half of them come from harvard and half from yale. if we are attacked during a harvard-again, we are scared. i think there is generally an honest intellectual culture. as for the failures, you know, i thought when we did health care we had to central cat -- tasks. the first was to a cover 39 million uninsured people, and the second was get our cost inflation under control. we did one. i don't think we did the second. that would be one thing that i disagree with. you try too much in the first few years.

it has polarized the country more than it needed to be. the wish he would call members of the opposing parties, someone unfriendly, a guy named paul ryan. as mark chairman of the house budget committee. i know them both. they would get along and have wonderful conversations that. obama has never called him and asked him to the white house or had a conversation. i think they should at least talk. and so that is just a function of the nature of washington which i think he is very well equipped to change but has not really taken the measures. i could go on, but i think that is enough. >> there is a lady for rose from the back in the center. you know what, sir, we have other people with their hands up. further back.

>> he spoke about how some variables of success are based on the 18-month-old time in an effort to close the educational achievement gap, would you be a proponent of mandatory early childhood education? >> i would not want to make it mandatory just because that gives you all sorts of political problems. i still essentially think the relationship between the parent and child is better. it will happen at this date supplied day care center. i would not want to force people. nonetheless, i do think there should be on the one hand much more funding. it should be a rite of passage. we should do a lot better job of organizing our early childhood centers, headstart centers so that people are actually teachers rather than just people that we need to give the job to.

we should not only start earlier, but stuck with the nurse-family partnerships and visits so that nurses are coming to homes and giving mom help on how to coach. in the first year of life the average mother loses 700 hours of sleep, gets interrupted every 20 seconds on average and sees a decline in marital satisfaction of 70%. we will babies invade your brain. it is a brittle thank. people need help. if you go, babies locked into car seats eight hours a day in front of the tv. coca-cola just to keep them quiet. there are things where people need help, and we should just be more aggressive. you cannot stop because if you help kids at an early age a lot of the benefits paid out. it must be like patrician, every day.

schools where teachers are able to connect with kids. the mentoring program. they must go to college where they feel emotionally engaged. if it think about dropping out, there is someone that they care about that they have to tell. they are engaged with the campuses. all through life there must be concentrations of relationships. so i spent a lot more money on that, and i'm afraid in our budgets raise the fact is lobbies with big guns of the k-12 lobby, higher-said, and mostly senior citizens. zero through three is pretty pathetic. >> take us out with your predictions for 2012. >> i could write another book, but it would kill me. i really would not bet against president obama. he is a very --

[applause] he has an amazing ability. i have seen him a few times. an amazing ability to self correct. he commits all of. he is one step back observing. the upside is .. still look at themselves and say, how do i need to change. he does have the ability to adjust. he has political skills. when i like desk out like aetna pitchers. i remember when i saw him in 2005 along time ago. that thought he has the best stuff and will probably be president. alberta column in 2006 on hand called ron, barack, run. and so i still would not bet against him. i'm not sure what he's going to run on.

i doubt they can run the campaign that he ran last time. the transformation of hope in chains bang. can't run on health care, the stimulus package. his administration has been slow to come up with a new, bigger agenda for what to do in the next four years in a country that is still furiously concerned about national decline and furious at government for stirring things up. that will be a big challenge. on the republican side the person i would like to see denomination, i'm not supposed to refer one candidate or another, but the governor of indiana, rich daniels. 5-foot six, look to the ground, in touch with the people. you have to be loath to see things. i think he has been an extremely effective governor at that time when state budgets have been a land and that has gone up 40%. state after state in indiana the debt has gone down 40%.

at the same time a lot of the programs that matter had been improved. wait times of the department of motor vehicles have dropped from 60 minutes to eight minutes. it spent an effective government. pig republicans would do well. i'll less enamored. thought he was a good governor. not quite the excellence. they would be fine. the republicans have two problems. the first is, to their credit, and this is to obama's deficit, they are saying, we have to tackle entitlement which is a courageous step because the country wants more government

than it is willing to pay for. someone must call them on that. being willing to tackle entitlements is the right thing to do. the politically don't know how to sell it. i don't think republicans quite understands not only do we have a recession, but structural problems whichever the middle class decade upon decade. i don't think there is a republican answer to that problem. they face challenges them and they face a talent deficit. i would not bet against obama, but we will eventually get to have the fight which we need to have. here is the money, here is the national wealth, here are programs, here is our debt. how will we figured this out? i would love to think we will have that real serious debate and then end on a pessimistic note. i really don't think we will have that debate. thank you very much. [applause]

>> you are watching book tv on c-span2. forty-eight hours of nonfiction books every weekend. >> we are here at cpac. tell us what this book is about. >> well, this is a war novel about the persecuted church and a rock. my narrator is an iraqi christian interpreter who has worked for special forces. this came out of my work as a journalist. i spend a lot of time in the north of a rock with persecuted christians. i have also gone many times to jordan and to love and on to speak with iraqi christian refugees. i felt as a journalist that the message was not getting out. i wanted to write a novel that would give people a human side of the story so that they could understand what is happening to the assyrian christians who

happen to be the indigenous people and are being forced out. >> were there people that he met while you were there who inspired some of your character? >> yes. we are calling this a historical model. obviously all of the characters are fictional, but i met a lot of antipater's, people who work for u.s. forces. there is a composite figure, that is my narrator. again, but to tell also the story of how christians have lived in iraq for generations. a family saga, a love story, i done a syrian woman who comes to find her roots. the story about st. peter's bones, the relics of st. peter and where they might be. in a monastery in northern iraq. >> have you done any non-fiction work? >> i am the author of ten books. the most recent is called chavanel warriors, traders, saboteurs, and the party of