fourth generation folks from colorado all the sudden being targeted, and they say i'm american. that's where with the whole of idea united we win, we need to have this conversation because there's more people on our side than there are on the other side. ..

>> is there a better suggestion they are not doing enough on it or not paying enough attention attention you like them to talk about more in health the tones? is that perhaps what you're trying to say that we should talk about it more? >> yeah i think what's happening right now, we had this conversation so many times as with the rhetoric happening at the state and local level as you are creating an otherwise american where all of a sudden a latino goes into the room and literally people question whether or not that person is american. and the fact that hear the politicians here have basically felt immune to it, talk about the bigger issue, there's no leadership saying that we have big problems in the country and we can't marginalizing and escape route the group that has been foreign to us. >> i know the most exciting thing that you're doing while you are in b.c. d.c. but maybe number two is the visit to the white house yesterday. if you could tell what happened

there. >> we were invited by the president to come and speak about immigration and other things we had an informal conversation around the latin vote, and what we are doing and what they are doing and, you know, it was very fascinating and i had an opportunity to meet president barack obama when he was still senator when he was president-elect and now a couple times since he's been president. it's been an interesting journey and all along the way see what we are doing and you are talking about earlier like what is the difference here and what people perception of him and we were even talking about it yesterday because there's a couple of people talking about are you worried about the fact latinos are such a huge supporter of u.s. now the numbers are dropping and he's like i'm working on the issue. those things come and go, those holes kind of come and go and depending on gas prices, people's perception of the economy comes up and down but he was much more concerned about some of what we were doing and that kind of just some felt exciting because we really -- we've spent a lot of years

trying to get people to listen to these different issues we have been talking about and as was said earlier the latin vote you have to pay attention to it, not just happening in hollywood but it's happening in a huge way in america and we have to address it because it is the largest growing population and franchise. we were the first to get hurt in the job last to get compensated. the dropout rate is really strong and these are the people that are going to adopt our country we are not going to be in place can be globally competitive. these are american issues. so we were happy to hear his concern on those issues, not just on immigration that actually really looking at with the demographic of america's potential can be ten years from now and 20 years from now when this population grows into it if they're going to be educated, getting politically savvy of the will be prepared to run the country because this is the issue, the big sleeping giant that is in the country is that latinos in this country represent a trillion dollars worth of revenue. this is our largest emerging market. and when we talk about other

countries coming up and possibly going to take over america and kind out showing us it's like that's because we are not dealing with the fact we have people right here excited about the american dream was median age is what, 27, 29? they have to get jobs. they have to be getting an education for their kids. the really want to be here and want to make this country great and we can have that potential and do wonderful things with the country. >> what was the president like? how did he look, how did he feel? >> well, we just kind of locked in and -- [inaudible] it wasn't like that. [laughter] there was a bunch of latinos in the room and we were talking and going off into our thing and at some point by the end of it -- >> i think was a very unusual conversation. [inaudible] [laughter] and i think it allowed for an honest dialogue, because i feel he's used to everybody running

up and he's like you want to talk? okay. but i think what was most impressive is that he understands what's happening in the larger picture and he also realizes not everybody is going to like him and he is okay with that. like i have to make hard decisions and very rarely do you walk into a room where a politician will be that straightforward with you. >> i love that we kept talking so much that he is literally like okay, you can speak one more time and then you and then i have to go and announce the secretary defense, so i've got to really go. [laughter] >> did you get the sense that this would be action on immigration legislation or what sort of lie did you get from him? >> absolutely. it is a critical issue, and we are seeing that even karl rove understands the latin vote is important and very much related to the immigration. the issues people vote on and really tried them in the polls

has education, job reform, health care but they actually go to the polls and it tends to be immigration. and so it was very fascinating to see just sort of on their side with the are doing about registering. the numbers are real and they are important and they will be the deciding vote in this election, so it will be ridiculous not to three estimate actually karl rove is aware of the congressional republicans that were not willing to act on immigration. how badly do you think that set back the republican party? >> a couple of weeks ago i was talking to pat buchanan, not necessarily the friendliest -- >> [inaudible] >> he's like i'm writing a book and i'm writing a book that if republicans can't figure of the latino vote to there is not going to be a majority party for the next two or three election cycles. that's powerful. so i have a couple of ladens i introduced him to.

>> on the heels of the white house visit it seems that when celebrities come to town it is every journalist will come, we get to plug in and ask what the first to the questions we want to ask. i'm curious to know how effective it is sort of behind closed doors with the lawmakers because barack obama the celebrities all the time. so, the sort of influence having a celebrity and actor coming in -- >> i think what we discovered is jesus intimately involved. she literally goes in and locks on doors and talks to people and really motivates them to register because she understands the mechanics of it but then is able to translate that to politicians and they are not used to having you back to the understand the issue and you are holding me accountable and you actually talk to people in colorado who lost their home or talk to people in l.a. that can't find a job that i think changes the equation and she's

incredible and sincere. estimate also part of it is i'm not just showing it as an actor going okay how can i just talk about this and in a different way just yesterday that is one of the things we were remarking about afterwards as we were the only ones in the room that represented an organization in that sense. i wasn't just coming as a celebrity, i was coming as a founder of the organization and that makes a big difference in all the meetings we've taken over the years and as an activist and advocate for a long time i was trying to -- i was lobbying in sacramento we've got to get rid of and i got them to use reusable bags and show up and be like the environmental justice is a real thing you can't try to be making the legislation move forward on the environment without including people of color that's ridiculous. so it's like i really grew up and the lower east side, i am a new yorker and so like for me

this is like i am the political junkie of love coming in to b.c.. this is my favorite thing and it's vitally important. when i showed that these different meetings sometimes i do get the opportunity to come and walken as a celebrity but i think i tend to walk out. >> do any play books have questions? a microphone will come to you. i have to ask you that patrick devin and president obama. who else would you like to beat? [laughter] >> for you know, i've never met joe biden, vice president joe biden. i've met michele and a couple other people but i would be interested to meet him especially because i'm on the board for the antiviolence organization started and having come back from the congo and i just would be very curious to

talk to him because he has been very forward on women's rights and antiviolence issues and another recent legislation to go into the schools and anti-discrimination and all that kind of stuff so i'm just curious is their anyone you want to meet? >> i would like to meet first lady michelle obama. she is incredibly graceful and president obama was in the president i would see her moving into being president herself. >> we had an interview in today's paper and you said that you -- i asked his impression being in new york and he said the one thing that he thought that average americans felt about this week was sort of uncomfortably and just west between the politicians and journalists. it's supposed to be a heavy wall between the two and they come together and use it sometimes

americans find that a little bit different. i want to see if you agree or disagree. >> maybe they should because that is the reality. this is my fourth white house correspondent dinner and that is one of the things i think is the most remarkable is that we were talking about that earlier so present barack obama is your and seeing that obama fatigue and what is happening and everyone expected to serve change the figure and that is and how it works. d.c. is very interconnected and when you change a couple of people, it's going to take much longer than you will see in two or three years and so that is the thing that i always sort of confronted by and i think is very fascinating and it's a great people are paying attention to that fact is that yes there has been a lot of interest risks that come down here in d.c. and you're not changing everyone will have a new president coming in.

there's a tone that changes absolutely. from the democrats and republicans or republicans and democrats, but in general it is still a lot of the same players and they've been working together for a long time and so it is in the same way of hollywood and that is where i think i see a lot of similarities with is that it is going to take a lot more than just one election and that is a lot of what we do with the latinos like it would be really awesome if we could solve all our problems with one vote every four years but that isn't what works and thick plastic change the next couple of years as we continue to see more and more people seeking seats in congress and in the senate and having the local elected -- elections and governor is starting to represent more of what america looks like and when we start to see that happen that is when we are going to have the legislation behind it and start to see the key critical changes we are looking for. >> i think there's a microphone running around here. agreed.

>> you have a question? jump in. >> while we are waiting for that, tweet, rosario dawson. i wonder your view of how the social media is increasing the view for people to either purchase of the or make your job, how does it make your job easier, where do you see it going? >> absolutely it makes it incredibly easier. that is one of the things we did in 2006 we did voter registration protecting. we have an ability to especially the very small organization to be national and be able to reach that many more people we are able to have immediate response to what's going on on the ground. >> what's been incredible about water is of a sudden we are able to span the conversation of people so that's not just latino, we have various things we did then we also have someone that sees something by another artist and then calls and wants to volunteer and i think that is the translation.

what is the impact? we had rosario dewey tweet and contact the office in of a sudden she's like i can do the census. i can really do the census. she basically said of three laptops and had her church fill out the consensus. she was 17-years-old. by all the purposes from washington, d.c. was able to see the impact of the celebrities and translate it to herself locally. >> you also shared the concern that he also has a downside or the proliferation especially on hot topics like immigration that anybody can write anything on a blog. how does that play into the issues in the work that you do just one person spreading a bad rumor or sort of poisoning the conversation? >> just distract the conversation and it becomes high school. you can go down the route people

are twittering each other or facebook and making comments and you can spend all day doing that rather than following up on the issue properly and not just looking at blogs. i just wrote a blog and it was awesome and really great but it's like that's not just sort of the only way to communicate with each other if and how to diversify that especially in your communications on these issues it's important to the bait and important sometimes to disagree. that's an absolutely okay and we are losing the ability to disagree with each other and educate each other we are just are doing. >> there has been first it started as the anti-immigrant rhetoric or it didn't matter of what was reporting was true or not. no one is holding accountable and now with his extended through for its one of the reasons that is done. that's not just him but also the executive saying it's okay the and not following the fact and i think that's where we have to have a serious conversation

about the media and the responsibility. >> a question right here. go ahead. >> thank you for coming today. and if you don't have a date for tomorrow -- [laughter] >> enough about maria. being realistic it's tough to see immigration legislation being pushed forward in the next two years and who out of the republicans do you worry the most to match up against president obama that would push back more and more in regards to pushing it forward if they were elected? >> will be interesting because the next two years a lot would ever position people have might change because the numbers are in and there would be anyone

that is when to be trying to ostracize the vote would be shooting themselves in the foot. >> it's not just republicans. we had the possibility of passing the dream act for example in the senate and there were four democrats the were not with it. so when you start looking at the examples and opportunities i always look from utah he is a republican attorney general and all of a sudden the first one is like okay we have indoctrinated people with our community we need them to work with are they going to do? you're going to provide the working permit if they pass the background check and to learn english. these individuals all of a sudden are free to say there's the case for a sample of the gerry who is 17-years-old she came here when she was too. the was the incident of domestic violence and her mom called the cops. now all of a sudden she's getting fast-track deportation

but that doesn't make sense. >> from progress. here in d.c. after the republicans need a really large gains in the election last year the debates are shifted towards getting more tax breaks to large corporations or tax cuts to the rich. bankamerica for civil paid the corporate income tax last year and now we are debating the paul rye in a budget plan that gives large tax cuts to upper-income earners. do you think that the celebrities or people with college and need another tax cut? >> we pay more taxes than exxon. >> with a something you recommend to young people, the first job, summer jobs, how does someone become you?

>> you have to ask questions of yourself and try things. for me you are not always going to win or find the right path to get. if you're going to fail, single epic and put yourself out there. i'm a very earnest person and sometimes it's gotten me a weird sort of criticism but i had before it so go for it. >> thank you very much. [applause] >> thanks for coming. appreciate it. you recognize him from top chef and your new restaurant is hiring, you're just about done building at and you think early

summer. >> very early, yes. right around the corner. a couple of situations with the liquor license and everything. >> seasonal, but is an artisan mulkey de? >> my artwork on top of it. [laughter] know it's not really the classic. it's we work with the product that we have to kind of keep it the changing and evolving every day something you wouldn't regularly see at the pizzeria. >> is it like the pot john's pizza with kate and will? is that an artisan of pizza? >> we are not meeting the classic pizza and that's what i consider poppa john's is more of a classic pizza so it's a little bit different, different types of crossed, different flower and sauce and garnish as. >> since you're here in b.c. as

you know the fighting child obesity is a big because and you talked about as well. talk about your take on what the white house is doing and what you want to do arm that and what the implications are of not doing anything. >> i think this has been obama has had a huge push on working with the tools and the chef and farmers' market kind of promoting all those types of things to help educate kids and school systems and parents and teachers about akaka with the right things are to eat and growing up in a broken family with my mom working and it wasn't the easiest to go in the garden and pick some food so he would probably be nice and easy and cost of money and it's more of the education and getting involved with it and for me working with the farmers and

trying to buy as much as possible because the more that we buy from the farmers the price will become because when you look at the big picture to go buy something that is formed local or fresh and these are things we have to work within -- >> why is that? is that a result of subsidies and policy decisions or simply -- it's a big scale small-scale 100%. when you buy begin at the store where they are crowding all of the pigs in the corral that is what is going with an organic type of animal which is running around locally and feeding it and a growing longer and feeding them corn and different kinds of feed it becomes expensive so they have to charge you to make the money back and that is part about working with of a grain product of local product is it will cost more money and the more we work with the farmers the more we work with, you know,

the schools everyone can get on board with it and our point is to get all the prices sustained so that you can eat healthy every day and get good stuff at the grocery stores because a lot of it isn't the best for you and it is hard to shop. >> you are not just opening a restaurant headquarters, you live in the headquarters as well. you went to d.c. in 2007. how is the culinary scene changed since then? >> dramatically. being a part of the growth was something i came to d.c. for a. >> ulin york, new jersey? >> atlanta all the arab east coast could begin to lay out my home and i took over couple of years ago and it's been like you meet all these great people, you know, it's been a growing city and when i moved out here it was a little intimidating because it is a tough city and everyone lives outside the city and i moved to arlington so as you live here for a while you kind of realize there's more condos

growing in the market's coming up and a lot more restaurants and chefs coming in from around the country. so for me the scene has been growing huge and more and more places to go every day and i'm excited to be part of the growth. >> there is a narrative of that because obama's boesh's for not begun until local restaurants but there is the notion that obama's boosted the scene to go out. is that true that there's a sort of a definitive cause and effect when they go out -- kafta has a positive spin? >> i think it has, i really do. i know i've cooked for michelle obama many times and to know that the president and first lady are going to these restaurants to eat on a regular basis chose something positive and i think it does help sales and i do think it keeps the city

interactive and more of a family oriented type of place and it's like a very successful to the country for politics and getting involved is the biggest thing and that's part of everything getting involved with kids in schools and the president getting involved in the city and to me that has been a huge part of everything and i'm one of the biggest fans. >> i thought i had a big dinner last night at ray's. you had 21 courses according to your tweet? >> the other night i was there and rivers not familiar with that he's pretty much booked a year out of the tasting table but it was phenomenal. its course after course after course in this flavors and a couple pastas mixed in and those are my favorite because i'm italian, but so it was an amazing meal. an amazing meal and he's doing great things out there.

>> tell us about one of the dishes that is intriguing. >> there's a couple of them. i liked how he started off with a cocktail he made in front of me with liquid nitrogen, it's frozen and smoking in the palm of his cocktail's and then he got this new hostile where he put all this vegetables and purees and mix pasta out of the vegetables which tasted right of the garden. >> do in the playbill covers have questions? i would be curious to get your thoughts on the vegetarianism and the reason is that i think -- >> are you a vegetarian yourself? >> i try very hard but there is a thought that there is a policy side to that meeting that it requires a lot more resources and gas and fossil fuels and i think folks have argued for more

of a reliance on foreign oil, huge benefits etc., etc. what is your take on that? do you think that is a strategy that you endorse the to be significantly reduces their meat intake? >> yes, i do. i grew up with my mother being a vegetarian and as she got older she had to start eating certain meats and proteins and things like that to keep herself up but i do and have the menu is vegetarian so i definitely endorse it. i don't eat red meat much. maybe once a week. when i do eat meat it's more of a chicken or lamb or fish but i definitely recommend staying away from me to as much as possible but obviously i love it. i'm always going to have it. but it's just my focus is it's not even just staying away from

meat once a week spinning the -- getting the best product you can raised locally organically and that is a big part of it, too because feeding them correctly not injecting them and there's no chemicals on the grass they are living on and those are the type of things that also once you start working with the product that yes i definitely think you don't need to eat meat every day and i don't think everyone does. i really don't. that would be a lot of meat to eat if you eat every day. that's my take on it. watching the type of meat to eat. >> if you introduce yourself. >> hi, i alley and i was rooting for you -- sorry. i was just wondering you've lived in such major u.s. cities like new york and the atlanta, how to use the washington compares with the availability of the fresh local organic ingredients and restaurants? >> tooby i think the kind of compete with pretty much everyone out there. new york as its own entity.

they have a ton of stuff around here but i don't think we have much different, if the farms in virginia and pennsylvania that come out here saturday, sunday, thursday, friday successful could -- the have more than we do so it's a little bit different, but i definitely think that we push it. if you go to philadelphia i don't think the market there is as abundant as hearing and with the other parts of new jersey so for me i think we have a great thing and it's great to go like the street market or the white house market i guarantee whenever i go there i always see the chefs and that is a great part of everyone is getting involved with it but i think we have agreed, a lot of great sources. >> question right here. >> it's me again. aren't you worried about the safety of the food supply with the oceans being polluted and the high level of mercury and pesticides and antibiotics?

i know organic and locally grown is super fabulous but most people can't afford that and they aren't aware of it. do you worry about that? and are you active and others like yourself and safety and all that that seems to be not really a big concern and should be. i hate to be such a downer. >> it is true. it's about the fish. like before the products were going in but yeah, eating certain farm raised products and, and i thought, yes and a majority of my men you. donley imports may be 10% of the stuff on my men you everything else is east coast domestic so we are a very big part of that but yes it is tough and it's working with it and it's getting back and working with communities and with the

organizations to try to stay on top of it but it is a topic we need to support from everyone else around us. we feel the majority of the chefs do it but it's trying to teach everyone out there how to get the right food and products and know who the companies are to order from. >> [inaudible] >> i agree 100% and the price is higher and a little bit more expensive, but it's -- it takes time and it has come down a lot from four years ago getting stuff from the farmers and compared to the regular market. so as we create more small markets, more farmers markets and stores you kind of pushout the smaller places not good products, sugar based on a chemical waste products its growing and the more we do that it's helping everyone around us.

>> over to try to get a bit of candor from you. some of the power spots as they are called like the palm or a cafe i think i know the answer but i want to hear you say at what is your view from the food perspective? serious food users respect those places and the quality of food or is it simply a place where we have seen to use your expense account? >> there's different types of powerhouses that you mentioned i don't think our in the chef world are highly anticipated and respected as a great meal tonight and the problem is to go there and get stake. what type of meat they are using and what type of products, are the local, probably not, and the cafe i've never eaten there before to tell you the truth so we don't have the answer to that to say good or bad but when i think more of the powerhouses i would think of places like jose

in three years or wolfgang puck and all these guys working with the farms and, as a national sheffer of the area the connections are amazing. so for me those are the powerhouse tide of chefs focusing on working with the local organic places like the palm and they are really not so that's the way that i feel about it. >> where do you go for the non-power plants? where do you go for something quiet and low-key? >> a quiet meal? it keeps growing and getting busier and busier. if you go to a good restaurant it's usually not quite i usually enjoy going sitting in the dining room. it might not be the cheapest but it's a great product. i think it is a little bit of a hidden gem the. vinegar and everything and i

think it doesn't get too busy and then 14th street has nice places. it will get a little bit this year but there's a lot of great restaurants out here. all over the place and for me it just keeps on moving forward so it is tough to find a quiet places. >> let's pull back the curtain a little bit. what happens when the cameras are gone? what is it like to work with them and behind the scenes? >> there's not a lot of times the cameras are off it is usually when you're sleeping but it's very time consuming number one. uae burly of the morning between the want you there very early not lead and this and that and you're kind of control lot. can't talk, listen to music, listen to magazines or read books -- >> no e-mail? >> the all-star was a little different to give a little bit more leniency and had business so we got 15 minutes a day or every other day so that was a

big help but honestly we kind of chill out on the couch and have a glass of wine or beer and its to chill out and talk a little bit and keep your spirits up because it is tough sometimes mentally. >> i'm going to get in the hook. we talked of how your staffing up. what do you look for in people by you how your? >> one of the biggest things i look for is experience where they work. it become from a place that recognizes restaurants or to become from somewhere that is out city or state where i am not familiar with the restaurant and that information on that it's more of the mom-and-pop they don't have the right steps on the staffing and those are the types of things to look for in experience levels and it's unfortunate to be in d.c. a little over four years and the kitchen is coming back with me that left me over the years and

stuff like that so that is a big help in my style of cooking and recipes and line mentality why run the kitchen but i always look at where they've worked as a fork in good restaurants. >> i want to thank my political colleagues who've put on this event and the c-span audience for the myett stream audience, those of you on a twitter and think you all for coming out early this morning. great questions. good luck with the restaurant. >> thank you. have a good one. [inaudible conversations]

coming up next, booktv

presents "after words," an hourlong program where authors are interviewed by guest hosts. this week former middleweight contender rubin hurricane carter talks about his room full conviction for 20 years he spent in prison and his work for the innocent since his plane 25 release. he talked with veteran journalist juan williams. >> host: rubin carter, thank you for joining us on this wonderful day. how old are you now? >> guest: i will be 74-years-old in may and that's dr. rubin carter. i have to honor very doctorate degrees, one from australia will school in 2003 and one from new york university, 2005. as of its rubin carter. >> host: both of australia?

canada. your book is called on the of the hurricane might have from darkness to freedom with a foreword by nelson mandela in your co-author. let me read to you you said here my main purpose writing this book is to share with you that i have discovered the truth to be the truth. >> the love of truth is the spirit of man. given where i was and how long i was there this is incredible. i have no business have all been here now. >> guest: that is absolutely correct. >> host: you see that you were in jail 40 something years. what you mean by that? >> guest: well i was in jail 47 years and the fact that we are born into a prison, we are born as perfect beings, perfect means complete with all of our possibilities in tact but we are

also born into a world of sleeping people, the level of on conscious human insanity where heat and war and death and destruction and inequality remains free so we are actually born into a prison so why was in that prison for the first 40 years of my life until i was able to wake up and get out of that prison and realize why really am. >> host: let's come to you are in the second but for the viewers sake say that you were incarcerated in prison for about 20 years, 1964. >> guest: 1966. >> host: 66 to 85, and the charge was having murdered three people and wounding one in ogbar. >> guest: it's just not having murdered somebody. to be a murder is bad enough.

but to be accused of being a triple racist murderer -- and that is what i was accused of being, troubled racist murderer. >> host: why racist? >> guest: because all white people were killed. >> host: and was a charge to targeted them because of their race? >> guest: because it lacked bartender had been killed by a white man and another part of town that might push they felt this was a racially binged motive. but you also have to realize at that time, 1966, early 60's when the country was still segregated, when black folks were allowed to eat in restaurants or go to school or ride on certain parts of the buses or a waterfront and or even have equal voting rights at the time, that is what was going on in this country at that time,

which was a terrible thing. and so that is what i was accused of being a triple racist murderer. >> host: in the book you write about growing of a racist household that was violent and difficult, facing your father across the room with shotguns >> guest: my family life wasn't violent, it was outside of family life that you have to realize that and they will be 74 years also leather and father come from a generation where they thought if a child put his hands on his parents or even threatened and they will take you out of as well. there was a type of society i grew up in. >> host: describe to the people watching you might want to be dubbed the to -- read the book when he would be chasing him with a shotgun.

>> guest: well, because i was a very angry young man and i confronted my brother. my brother who was a highly successful at it going to harvard and was one of the youngest to graduate from harvard university with a ph.d. read he later became the superintendent of schools of boston and i was in and out of reformatory schools so my father had this sort of to choose between which one he was going to support and i confronted my brother because when i came home from the military in 1956i heard that my brother was hanging out with homosexuals, that he had known when we were children growing up. now, when we were children folks

used to dress up like women and they looked better than the women on the streets, you know? but now he was on vacation from harvard university and doing the same thing so i confronted my brother about that and we started to fight and of course i beat him up and that is when my father got involved in this, and my father jumped me because of that. and i pushed my father away and told him don't put his hands on me, that i would allow no one to put their hands on me in a ander anymore. and so my father ran and got his shotgun and i ran and got my shotgun. this is the same thing that happened to marvin gaye and his father. and that's why marvins father shot him, tell him, and had it not been for my mother my father would have killed me as well. >> host: because your mother intervened and said you should get out of here.

>> guest: get away. >> host: what's interesting here is you just described yourself as tactically having been in jail for 20 years, 66 to 85. but the violence and the whole world of hatred that you described, that has been a jail for review for 40 plus years until you discover yourself. let me read again from your book. this is an interesting moment because you see that you're going to be 74-years-old. you've been in jail and the right eye was a prizefighter at one point, soldier, a convict at one plant, a jailhouse lawyer at one point. he said you were the executive to lecture of a group that was called association defense of the only convicted at one point. today you're the ceo of the innocent international group. and it says if i had to choose an epitaph to be carved this is

hurricane carter speaking it would simply read he was just enough. now this came because somebody in a high school audience ask you where you would want for your epitaph and known you are giving a bob dylan wrote a song about you. nelson mandela has written the foreword to this book and has spoken about you. nelson mandela loves boxing and talk to me about boxing and then he talks about someone like him who was in jail and has come a lot of it. so here's nelson mandela, bob dylan, even tony bennett, muhammad ali. these people of all known you'd know it comes time for you to speak about yourself and for your epitaph it should say he had enough courage to stand up for his convictions no matter what problem his actions may have cost him he was just enough to perform a miracle to weaken the diskette the universal prism of sleep to regain his humanity

and living hell. he was just enough. just enough. so when people hear justified sure they're going to be thinking to themselves well, just enough to get off or just enough to escapes or survive, why not to make something bold? >> universally we are all just enough. that's what that means. we are all universally just enough. we are born with everything that we need to wake up and to become conscious. that is just enough. >> host: you define contest in the book as loving the world. >> guest: yeah. the love of truth is actually the spirit of man. the love of truth is the spirit of man and if you know the truth, the truth is that we are miraculously and beings, were

oculist creatures with everything not already within us to do whatever it is that we can possibly do on this earth. what ever we can believe in the end comes even our minds we can do it b. scott recapped and to wake up you have to defeat that monster that is within us with false personality guarding the essence if we really are. we are born when your -- we have nothing to do that. we have an absolutely nothing to do with the parents that we were born into or what financial situation or what the religion was. we have nothing to do with that. but we take those things on. we take those things on ourselves and then we begin to live life like it reveals. but the fact i went to prison and was able to be taken of the

herd and was able to look and see what the people of union of your doing and what i was doing while i was running with that heard of humanity gave me the opportunity to wake up and say i'm not that. i'm far different than that. >> you said this happened to you in jail. that's when you woke up. we had to literally go to jail to we got. you describe your brother is extremely successful coming out of the same family situation but in a family situation you had a lot of hate, a maker and you said you had a lot just inc's ayittey. >> guest: absolutely because first of all, for the first 18 months of my life, 18 years of my life i couldn't talk. i stuttered badly.

very, very badly and people laughed at me because of that. it wasn't my fault that i stuttered, my father stuttered he probably started probably my great-grandfather, to that. it was hereditary but i didn't know that at the time. everybody else could talk, so why couldn't i? so i felt really, really dumb. i felt stupid. and so when people laughed at me and made fun of me, the of the sound they would hear in reply would be the sound of my fist whistling through the air and if you're going to attack someone every time they laugh at you, you better darn well know how to fight or you will get beaten up pretty bad so that was my situation. i learned how to fight. i could fight. if i couldn't do anything else, i could fight, you know what i mean? so that's the reason i did that. >> host: now did this kind of

anger that you had a new lead you into first the military and then -- >> guest: the linker also came from the fact that in this country at that time the wall of the land, 1856, the dred scott decision, the chief justice of the united states supreme court ruled that black people as they call us and we call ourselves today are only 3/5 of a human being. and that we have no right that a white person must respect or obey. that was the society that i grew up in coming and therefore i was very angry about that. you know, about people thinking based upon the color of my skin that i had no right or anything else that anybody had to

respect. >> host: you graduated from high school? >> guest: no, i didn't, i dropped out at the eighth grade. >> host: and then you went into the military. and when you got out of the military, how did you get into boxing? >> guest: well, i didn't get into boxing because when i got all of the military i was still angry and i committed a crime. i did the most diabolical and in my life that i have ever done. i snatched a woman's pocketbook and i was sent to prison for that, the state prison. and i was in the state prison for that i said i'm not coming back here anymore. i'm going to use my talent, my fighting ability. so for those five years i was in prison, i trained every day, i fought every single day, i knew that i had committed a crime and i knew that that is where i

should be, in prison. so i accepted that and so i worked to struggled in the prison in order to become a good prizefighter. so when i got out of prison in 1961, i immediately went into the professional fighting and as -- if you want to become the leader or boxer you have to build an image, you know what i mean? and what was going on in this country that time, i had build an image of defiance. my hero in boxing was jack johnson, one of the first black heavyweight champions in the world dakota so i shaved my head and a crew a fu manchu mustache in defiance and so that's why i became the hurricane, you know what i mean? >> host: now the hurricane, where did that come from?

>> guest: it came from a fight in jersey city, new jersey, while i was still fighting preliminary fights and i was just meeting people real quickly, locking them out in one or two rounds and they need me the hurricane. no i didn't like that name. i didn't like that mean at all. i didn't want that name because there was a hurricane before me, hurricane jackson, heavyweight who couldn't break an egg actually. [laughter] but he was a very busy fighter and that's why he was named the hurricane so when they devotee the hurricane ike didn't like that. but that was the name that has stuck with the. >> host: the same time we had a yondah muhammad ali coming on to the scenes. >> guest: very young cassius clay and that's when cassius clay and i got into it because the state of new york was trying to decide whether they are going to abolish boxing in the state of new york and mohammed when he

was cassius clay at the time was asked to testify in front of the senate committee as the gold medalist of the olympics and i was asked to testify as a former convict who needed boxing in order to make a living. and so we were standing outside of the senate chamber in albany, and a little boy walked up and asked cassius clay for his autograph and at that time cassius clay's image was that of dr. gandy carrying a black walking stick and cassius clay mocked the paper out of that child's hand, and i told cassius you are a big point, nothing but the pump and from that moment on, we didn't get along. he was in the stable look trying

to get all of them to both me. another one was jimmy ellis who became the heavyweight champion of the world but, you know, this was a thing between cassius clay and the hurricane, to images clashing together. but after that, after that, when mohammed became mohammed and we became the best of friends, mohammed was one of my strongest supporters in getting my case overturned. he would do anything that i would ask him to do. that was because he refused to go to vietnam or to join the military. and so, they gave him a five-year sentence for that, which eventually was done away

with, and so that was the i don't know the word -- >> host: but it led you to the bond. i noticed that you mentioned in your book that the person that helped you with your stuttering was the man who then gave you and islamic name and that's your name? what was the name that he gave you? youtube in arabic name and much like muhammad ali. >> guest: yes i did. >> host: but you never known as that in the ring. >> guest: no. >> host: you said that you connect that and often in islam with stuttering? >> guest: yes, i do because it was who stumbled upon me while we were getting ready to jump

out airplanes, it rather than just stumbling away, this person stopped and maybe realize i had a problem, that my inability to talk and my feelings of frustration and sense of low self-esteem or inextricably linked, so he engaged my entire being and in many respects he became my teacher, he became my career counselor. the first thing he did to me is to help me understand myself. he helped me to put my house back in order. he enrolled me in one of the first course is given at the institute of economics in germany. he helped me to channel my energy in positive directions. he introduced me to boxing as a discipline career rather than simply as a way out pent-up anger and frustration.

so, through any kind of a beinecke or hope that deals with my life wouldn't be complete without mentioning. >> host: so this moment and you never become the champion of the world, but you are always the number one contender for the middleweight boxing crowd. then comes the episode in new jersey when you are charged and convicted with murdering three and wounding one in you go off to jail. >> guest: that's correct. >> host: it all of the support from the likes of bob dylan, all lee and others to get you out. >> guest: but you've got to understand this, when i went on trial in 1966 and '67, we were tried for the death penalty. and this was who during the turbulent years in america when all the major cities in the country were on fire, when africans in america or black people as it came across

standing up against the institutionalized patrons demanding equal justice, equals opportunity, equal voting rights, equal jobs, equal housing and equal respect. that was the society that i grew up with at that time. ..

s. >> and as he was walking up to this bar and grill, he said the saw me and john ardis coming around the corner, laughing, me carrying the shot gun, and john are ardis carrying the pistol. this was a little fat boy. he was about 5'7". >> host: that was the basis of the conviction. >> guest: that was the basis of the whole conviction, and the reason why that all-white jury said, that can't be so. i mean -- >> host: obviously they convicted you. tell me about it being overturned. >> guest: awe. well, it was overturned because of the very same thing. the new jersey state supreme court heard where the police

promised these convicts $10,000 to spout their lies in court, as well as not convicting them for robbing the dead bodies in this ball, as well as one of them was the motel bandit who was robbing motels up and down the coast of new jersey, and would have gotten 90 years in prison. that's the reason why these two people testified, and for no other reason. it was no forensic evidence, no eye witness evidence, none of that was ever found. and so the only thing that brought us to court was these two jailhouse snitches. >> host: you now have -- after you were released, you went on to a very successful boxing career. but you move to canada, country without the death penal. >> guest: i refew to live in a country that hat the death penalty.

especially every narrowly escape the death penalty myself. had that jury felt as though i had anything to do with that crime, as i said -- >> host: when you think about this, you continued your becoming career in the united states. >> guest: no. no. no after i got out of prison this time? >> host: yeah. no there was no more boxing for me. after i got out of prison this time, i was 49 years old. >> host: not -- wait. back in the '60s. that what time talking about. >> guest: 1961. >> host: you went to prison in '66. so you had been boxing in the ute until that time. >> guest: oh, absolutely. in the united states. >> host: then you got out and said no more boxing and no more to the united states. >> guest: that's correct. >> host: now we are on the same path. you got out and got involved in this group trying to establish innocence of people, the

association in defense of the wrongly convicted. you were the executive director there for 13 years? >> guest: 13 years. >> host: now you're running this innocence international. one of the things that struck me in the book, you said anybody involved in prosecuting someone who is innocent should themselves be put in jail. >> guest: that is absolutely correct. you know, the thing that interests me the most is that if you're not a lawyer, or you have not gone to school or studied the law, when it comes to the criminal justice system, you are brain dead. you don't understand a thing that is going on in that courtroom. because in that courtroom, a courtroom is not there to demonstrate the truth. the courtroom i not there to melt out justice. a courtroom is not there for those things. a courtroom is the for lawyers to win or lose, to be

successful. that's what a courtroom is all about. no matter even if a defendant or the general public don't understand that. >> host: you say here that it's to white wash. >> guest: absolutely. it is indeed. >> host: white wash what? >> guest: to white wash themselves. to white wash themselves. a lawyer -- see, a lawyer is a professional liar. based on what side of the story you happen to be coming down on. that what courtrooms are all about. it's not about truth, it's not about justice, not about those things. atat it about success. successful police officers are promoted. a successful prosecutor becomes a judge. a successful judge goes to the higher court, even the united states supreme court. a successful judge in our system of jurisprudence are prudence judge and a careful june, not

necessarily a wise one but a judge that is rarely reversed on appeal. >> host: when you're in there and you're saying this is about a whitewash, do you think there is justice? the united states? >> guest: sometimes there's justice. sometimes if you got a good lawyer, but sometimes if you got a decent judge -- there are good lawyers and decent judges, but not most of the people. it's a job. it's a job for people. >> host: you think you got unfairly imprisoned by this whitewash system. >> guest: absolutely. i mean, there's no doubt about it. >> host: ever met a gate man? >> guest: oh, yeah. oh, i've many many guilty people. i spent 20 years in prison with guilty people who have done the most horrible things. oh, yeah. they are guilty people. no question about that. but there are also innocent people, and i say to you, sir,

that innocence -- there is no place for innocence in a prison. no place for innocence. if you proclaim your innocence in prison, there's no chance for work release, none of those plays can take place if you continue to proclaim your innocence. in fact, the murder who has confessed in the cell next to you will go home before you do because he has admitted his guilty and you are still maintaining your innocence. so i say that in a system like the united states, that has more people in prison than any other country in the world there must be a place for innocence in prison. must be. we have two cases right now that innocence international is supporting. one case is david mccalum in new york state. as a 16-year-old teenager, he has been in prison 6 years for a

-- for 26 years for a crime he did not commit. not a shred of evidence or anything that would in any way place him near this crime. and yet we have evidence of other people have done that crime. we have forensic evidence. dna evidence of other people. >> host: why couldn't you get him out? >> guest: because the judge do not wish to overturn his decision. that's the reason why. because the prosecutor's are olding on to this conviction. that's why. you see, murder convictions is the fuel in the grist of the criminal justice system. convictions. and that's why we can't get these -- we have who canadian citizens in washington state who, as teenagers, was cricked

by the royal canadian mounted police into false convictions, which when dna came into existence, that cleared the way for a whole lot of people. so now the scourge of the criminal justice system is false confessions. young teenagers with professional interrogators, don't stand a chance. >> host: when you left the association in defense of the wrongly convicted it was over a dispute with your board with regard to a canadian prosecutor who was being promoted to be a judge, and you thought she had been involved in a wrongful conviction. >> guest: that's right. she was involved in a wrongful conviction. the association in defense of the wrongly convicted, was brought into existence because

of the depaul more moran case. he was convicted of killing a young nine-year-old girl, and the dna evidence completely exonerated him. but he went to trial two times. two times. because this one prosecutor was so convinced that he was guilty. at his first -- >> host: in canada, you can be tried twice on the same crime. >> guest: that's what -- that was a red flag for me, because i was looking at double jeopardy. his first trial, he was acquitted by a jury. but because this prosecutor felt as though he was guilty and because of charges of rape have limitations, she appealed this to the supreme court of canada and the supreme court overturned the acquittal, and depaul was put become on trial again.

on the second trial, this prosecutor used jailhouse snitches, falsification of evidence, and all those things in order to get a conviction, and they got that conviction, and then dna evidence cleared him. and then -- and i sat up many nights with depaul's family. the mother, the father, the sisters, praying with them, trying to neutralize their pain and suffering. then when you turn around, the very same prosecutor being elevated to the ontario -- >> host: he was convicted. >> guest: he was convicted the second time. >> host: that's what i'm saying. >> guest: bases on perjury. >> oo but he was convected but you wanted to stop the prosecutor from becoming a judge. theboard disagreed with you and that led you to resign. >> guest: i felt as though as

anybody knowingly convict an innocent person of a crime they did not commit should be convicted of a crime themselves. i mean, what is it to convict an innocent person if not kidnapping? forcible confinement, torture, and in the case of capital punishment, conspiracy to commit murder. but the moran family almost went bankrupt. >> host: but of course he was convicted. >> guest: based on erroneous testimony. >> host: in your opinion. >> guest: no. no in thecourt's opinion. not in my opinion in the court's opinion, because we had inquiries -- >> host: he is still? jail. >> guest: no. >> host: he has been released. >> guest: a long time ago. >> host: there you go. >> guest: because dna evidence completely exonerated him of this crime. >> host: you tried to stop her from becoming a judge given that outcome. >> guest: i knew i couldn't stop her from becoming a judge.

but because our very existence was predicated upon her, then i thought we should protest this particular -- >> but theboard disagreed. >> guest: i didn't realize at the time that the board of 20 consisted of 15 lawyers. when we started, the board consisted of ordinary people, housewives, teachers, things -- people outside the communities, the legal community. over the years, because we were so successful in getting people out of prison, the board became three-quarters lawyers. >> host: you think the lawyers were looking out for their fellow lawyer so this goes back to the legal system being about successful lawyers, successful judges, successful prosecutors, just, as you said, arguing their side of the case. not about truth or justice. >> guest: not about -- >> host: or opinion.

>> guest: that's absolutely correct. >> host: let me ask you, why are you wearing a hat today? well, you know, i was in the military, and whether you in the military or the internal security forces, you should always be undercover when you're armed, and i'm always armed. i'm armed with the love of truth. so i always wear a hat. i'm from the old school where we dressed top to bottom. not just halfway. i come from a family of preachers, a lot of preachers, and they dressed -- and my father used to dress very well, and so i got that from my family, so i dress very well, too. so i wear a hot because i'm undercover all the time. >> host: now, in the book it's mentioned that at the 2000 world reconciliation day in australia, you're there with nelson mandela, and you said there's

quite a celebration between you and mandela because the two of you, two people who love boxing, two former prisoners, spent a good deal of time in jail you said to each other, we're here, we made it, we made it. >> guest: that's what was said to me. i was in south africa in 1965, before most people understood that south africa even existed. >> host: this is before you went to jail. >> guest: before i went to jail, during my prize-fighting years. and mataba or nelson had just gone to robert islanden in 1964 and was persona non grata in south africa, which means you couldn't see his picture, you couldn't even speak his name, and my god -- my guard at that time was a 16-year-old boy called steven bickle, and i

actually listened to what they were saying and i felt at home because the same thing that was going on in that apartheid system was going on in the united states under the guise of segregation. so i felt at home. so i knew about nelson at that time, and so when we met in 2000 in australia, we met -- we just cracked up. we just laughed and laughed and laughed. and that's where nelson said, we're here, man. we made it. we're here. i mean, that was a wonderful thing. >> host: you know, nelson mandela rites in the forward to your book, he writes in a way, rubin's spirit was dead. >> guest: oh, yes. >> host: he said in his powerful testimony, the 16th round, the book you wrote before this one, more than 30 years ago you wrote this, you describe the effects on yourself of racism brutality

of the american prison system, and the united states has more prisoners than any other developed country in the world. >> guest: correct. >> but people would sigh there's a lot of violence, a lot of crime perpetrated by those who are captured, tried, convicted and imprisoned in this country. >> guest: oh, yeah. there's no question about that. because that's what prison does. prison -- the only thing prison does for anybody is to teach you how to survive in prison. it doesn't teach you how to survive outside of prison. prison is the lowest level of human existence that a human being can exist on without being dead. you know what i mean? there is no -- in prison is hate, violence, that's all prison is about. and i think that the united states, being the most powerful

country in the world, being the most -- the richest country in the world, i think we ought to aspire to be like the netherlands. i was in the netherlands a couple months ago in norway, and norway closed down all of their prisons, because the didn't have enough criminals to fill them. i think we should aspire to that rather than privatizing prisons where each prisoner is worth x amount of dollars. when you talk about dollars, justice and truth and goodness goes out the window because now we talking about money, talking about success. >> host: don't you think there's a large criminal class in our country? >> guest: i think those people who are considered to be criminals have been -- no, i don't think there's a large criminal class in our society.

i think there's a large class of people who have been done will, who have been done wrong in our society, but people are not basically criminal. people are basically decent. people are -- if you treat people decently, people will act decently. >> host: but what about people who haven't been treated decently, people from broken homes, dropped out of school, disproportionate number 0 people in jails come from single parent families-didn't complete school, have a history violence in their family's interaction, and often times get involved in criminal activity. >> guest: that's true. that's because of the system that they're born into. if you're born into a system of ghetto, where there's bombed out buildings, graffiti, where there is -- your family living on welfare, you know and all

those -- if you're born into that, that what you're going to grow up with. but if you're borne into a society where people respect one another, where people just look at people and just say, hey, man, you're another human being, you're my brother, you're my family, we're talking about the human family now and not just the nuclear family. the human family. >> host: they're not, you're saying. >> guest: i said, if we had that. >> host: you're saying they're not. >> guest: but they're not. >> host: how do you understand that in the united states, you're approaching like 60% of the people in federal prisons, local prinze, being black and hispanic. >> guest: that's because in the drug laws, the rocker feller drug laws that took placin' 1970s, where people are being sent to jail -- >> host: just talking about murder and robbery, this proportional amount if committed by people of color. >> guest: this is a violent society, my brother.

this is a violent society, and all of the people to get along in this society, they feel they must be violent. everybody's got a gun, and everybody is high, on some kind of drug. when you have drugs and bucks together, there's going to be murders and violence. >> host: more so than white people? >> guest: not necessarily color. >> host: i'm saying in terms of the numbers, who is in the jail -- >> guest: yeah, you see, let me tell you. when i went to prison in 1966 -- >> host: that's when you stole the purse. >> guest: that's when stole the purse. american prison system respected it general population. if, fraternal italians -- if, for example, italians or irish, the percentage of italians and

irish people you'll find in prison. therefore, all of the prisons were white, the vast majority of the prisons was white because black folks only 13% of the population. so we caught hell in prison. there will no black guards in prison, and the prison cell was irish stew on wednesday you know what i mean? they dealt with the white population, and the black folks caught hell. in the 1950s, when africans in america began to stand up against segregation, began to stand up against not being able to eat in restaurants, gave up -- couldn't stand up at lunch countsers, they again allowing the white population to be assimilated back into society, and they began to fill the

prisons up with black folk. you got to realize the strategy at that time. the strategy at that time was, get on these black folks down here in the south, specifically, and sit in, and if they put is in jail so what? we'll fill the jails up. so, this society said, okay, if you want to fill the jails up, that's what we'll do, and they started locking black folks up and letting white folks out. >> host: you think it was a racist conspiracy. >> guest: it was then. >> host: what about today? >> guest: well, people today don't know much about yesterday. >> host: i'm asking you about today, when today, when we see 60% of the prison population made up of people, black and hispanic -- why is it that so much crime occurs in the black community? it's not all directed in your case -- the charge was you had engaged in a racist murder of

three whites in a bar in new jersey. you think about the amount of black-on-black crimes, brown-on-brown crimes, drive-by shootings, young black men involved in this lifestyle, this criminalization, it affects the culture now. you see the kids walking around with the pants hanging off their ass, the do-logs, look like they just got out of jail, and some people talk about going to jail is a rite of passage for young black men. it's tragic. >> guest: it is. >> host: you're someone who has been through this experience. you say you have in fact fled a jail of preconceptions in your mind to find your spirit and find truth. what do you say to young men who simply are like on a -- you know, a. >> guest: collision course. >> host: looks like they're on a mass marketing line in terms of culture, behavior, dropping out, right into the prison system. >> guest: you know, that was --

malcolm x is one of my best friends. one of my very, very best friends. and malcolm used to talk about something like that. malcolm said, if ever another holocaust could take place anywhere in the world, it can only take place in the united states of america, you know? and he said because -- look at the prison system today. like you said, 70% of the prisoners are blank why don't you think that more people of color could be rounded up and placed in these holding cells and prisons and then perhaps eliminated? who would oppose the united states? united states are already opted out of the geneva convenings. it has already got out of the world court. who would oppose the united states? that was one of the tragedies

that we need to address. america needs to address that. >> host: wait. this is what malcolm was saying in the early '60s. >> guest: and it's coming to fruition today. >> host: why would you say such a thing? nobody is saying they should kill the people in prison as a holocaust. >> guest: no. no at it true. nobody is saying that. but you know, one day somebody is going say, what are we going to do with this mass of undeveloped black humanity, who live in our ghettos, who have -- and in the cities, who are the consumers of everything and the producers of nothing? what are we going to do with these people? down in new orleans, after the katrina took place, one of the generals down there said, we're going to take back this city after his soldiers just shot four desperate people. somebody is going to ask that

question. what are we going to do with this mass of black humanity that fills or prisons up. >> host: let in the ask you some. would would you not focus on individual responsibility. you talk about individual responsibility in your own life, about fighting your own demons, overcoming stuttering, about the ability to discover who you are in truth to discover -- you said even in jail you discovered the joy of moment-to-moment. >> guest: moment-to-moment. >> host: why are you talking about some white racist is out there sticking black people in jail? >> guest: atit's never been individual white races in georgia, alabama, mississippi. it's always been the government. >> host: so you think broken general the u.s. government are putting black people in jail. >> guest: i didn't say a thing

about barack obama. >> host: he is the head of the u.s. government. >> guest: don't put that on me, brother. >> host: what are you saying? you're saying the government is putting -- you're saying their innocent and just being -- >> guest: you're talking about now. i'm talking about then. >> host: i'm talking about now. let's talk about now. why are all these young black people in jail? >> guest: i can't tell you that because i don't live in this country. i don't know much about what's going on in this country. i got out of this country. i live in canada, where people have a different history and, therefore, different people. but i still understand what going on in this country. i will not say anything like that. i will not do that i say that the power and the glory of human beings are within the individual. not within the collective. >> host: right.

>> guest: only -- >> host: what your message -- >> guest: only the individual create and -- >> host: what's your message to these individuals? doesn't sound like you wants to say, blame the white man or the structure or the government. what are you saying? >> guest: i'm saying, wake up! >> host: as an individual. >> guest: as an individual, wake up! there's an old sudanese story that i was told many years ago about this fat man in the village, who happened to be -- who happened to fall asleep one night while he was shelling peas, and the hut was seriously caught on fire, and the village people rushed to the scene, trying to save this man before the house could burn to the ground. they couldn't do it because the house what too small and the man was too big to move. and so they struggled to save the sleeping man. and the village wise man happened bon the scene some saw the struggling mass try to save the sleeping man.

he said, wake him up. i said we have to wake up individually in order to save ourselves. wake up! >> host: so, it's individual responsibility. >> guest: individual responsibility. that all we can do, is individually. >> host: that what you would say to these young people, here you are at 7 4 , having been through what you have been through, when you talk about the message of the book, it's about the individual waking up. >> guest: yes, it is, about the individual, not the collective at all. the collective human behavior cannot be conscious. it just can't be conscious, and it will always be violent and wars and people struggling against one another. the power and the glory exist within the individual. i found out in prison that when the only thing that we can change in this entire world is ourselves, we can't change

another single thing, we can't change our mother, we can't change our fathers, we can't change our wives or husband or our children, we can't change our an zest -- ancestors. we can't change the government except in maim but we do have the possibility of changing ourself, and the miracles i discovered in prison is that when you change, the world around you also changes. it is in fact the only way the world can change. that's what i -- that my message there. is change. you can change. >> host: you know, it's interesting in the book you talk about a story where you're in an elevator and there's some kids in there, and one of the kid starts smoking dope in the elevator, and you start saying what are you doing some are you crazy? you're going to get yourself in trouble. the kid tells you, shut the blank up, get lost. you tell the kid something smart-mouth it about i'm your

daddy. >> guest: well, the kids -- when he starts telling them, who do you think you are, old man? i looked at him and -- he couldn't have been more than 16 years old, and immediately it flashed possible me, rubin, that's you. that's what you did when you were 16 years old. didn't give a hoot about anybody. somebody say something to you, you just jump right on them. and here it is coming right back at you. you will not deal with this boy. you will walk away from this child. >> host: you wanted to hit him sunny mean that would have been the first thing to do. i said, no, can't do that walk away. as i got off the elevator, his voice intruded upon myself. i said, who do you think old man? i responded, i'm your daddy, boy, didn't your mama tell you that? i'm going to have a talk with that woman.

which was the wrong thing to do the correct thing would have been to keep my mouth shut. >> host: but you couldn't do it. >> guest: i couldn't. >> host: in the book you say you realize there's part of you, rubin carter, that is spoiling for a rematch, you're still look for a fight. >> guest: it's the hurricane that lays dormant. he hurricane will never go away from me. but it's dormant now, and dr. rubin carter exists. that's the fire here. but the hurricane is always there, and always have to be careful. i have to stay awake or be me looking up from the canvas. >> host: nobody erv knocked you out. i remember my dad -- my dad used to train boxers, and we used to follow your career as a young man, and i was just a child. but i know -- >> guest: get out of here. >> host: nobody ever knocked you out. >> guest: never.

i was knocked down three times in any life. >> host: not knocked out. >> guest: never knocked out. never. a great middle weight fighter, and those were the only times i have ever been down. >> host: never won the belt. >> guest: never won the belt it but i would have won the belt and that's the reason why the world boxing council and the world boxing association, for the first time in history, awarded me the belt. >> host: what year was that? >> guest: 1991. >> host: an honorary championship belt. >> guest: just has i have two honorary doctors degrees. >> host: where did they give that to you? >> host: in las vegas. >> host: at a about? >> guest: yeah in las vegas. it was a great day. i am blessed. i am absolutely blessed. even with everything that has

gone on in any life, i am blessed to still be asupply to have songs written about me, to have movies written about me, having somebody like denzel washington playing the part. i am so blessed. i know as an individual you can do anything you whatnot to do. you know, i'm not the person to say -- i'm not a person who you can say, i can't do this, so -- i tell people in prison, look, use this time. this time has been imposed upon you. use this time to better yourself. if you don't know how to write, use this time to learn how to write. if you don't know how to read, use this time to learn how to read. if you don't have a skill, use this time to learn a skill. this is your opportunity. >> host: one thing that

interested me was you don't think much of christianity though. >> guest: i don't think much of any organized religion, not at all. >> host: don't see it as useful. why is that? >> guest: if organized religion was in any way the peacemaker, there wouldn't be all these wars, these religious wars going on in the war. >> host: you said in your family there was religion. >> guest: yeah. christianity. >> host: what happened to your brother? your brother within on to harvard and became the superintendent of boston schools. but he didn't stammer. >> guest: he didn't stammer at all. i was the only one in the family who did stammer. >> host: look at what you have become. more people know you than your brother. >> guest: my brother passed away about 20 years ago. unfortunately. but, yes. >> host: so, for you, at 74, the

bottom line that comes through in this book is just enough. you made it. >> guest: just enough. >> host: what you said to mandela, or mandela said to you, we made it, we made it. >> guest: we were just enough. >> host: just enough at 74. that's what is in your heart. >> guest: yes. see, this book, heart of the hurricane, is for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear, and the ability to understand. and those who don't have eyes to see and ears to hear or ability to understand, it's a good read. >> host: again, the title of the book, "eye of the hurricane." -- rubn hurricane carter, with the first by nelson man della. take care. it's been a pleasure to be with you today. >> guest: it's my pleasure, thank you, sir. >> host: rubin hurricane carter.

>> edward glares glaeser talks about-under -- urban environment, and alert, look at the political activism of hollywood celebrities. >> in his new book, triumph of the stick edwardwayser argues that cities or map kind's

greatest invention. this 45 minutes. >> and thank you so much, all of you, for being here. i've worked on this book for four years, and after spending all that time in isolation working on it, it's just so exciting to find anyone who actually wants to read it, let alone anyone who wants to argue about it. the paradox that lies at the heart of this book is that we live in an age in which its effortless to telecommute across the globe in which we all could canada to fill in some spot that appeals to us and just dial it in. yet, on so many dimensions, cities are healthier and more successful than ever. in the developed world, cities are centers of remarkable productivity. if per capita output levels rose to those found in new york, our

national gdp would increase 45%. the three largest metropolitan areas areas areas in the us producesel% of our output but only 13% of the country's population. it's even stronger in the developing world. if you compare those numbers in a urban numbers, you'll find the urbanized countries are five times richer and have infant mortality levels 1/3 at home and they have people who describe themselves as considerably more satisfied with their lives and jobs, that cities are the path out of poverty into prosperity for so much of the world. we have seen the successes of places like new york not just in terms of their income, they're fun, green, healthy, they're exciting places to be where the magic of human interactions

tends to make a place just so much more exciting. the idea behind this book, the reason, the claim the become makes for why cities have come back, is that cities may to man kind's, to human kind's greatest asset, which is our ability to learn from people around us. we come out of the womb with this rashable ability to learn from parents, peers, siblings, people who are doing things that are smart and people who are screwing up. cities make that happen. cities are the absence of space between people. they're proximities. they're denseness, closeness, and coming to a city like new york you experience this onrush of human experience that teaches you. when we observe the wages of people in cities, it's not as if they immediately become more productive. what happens year best year, they experience fast e wage growth. they become more productive, and

it's compatible with the view that cities are for learning. in dense clusters the mystery of the trade become no mystery but are in the air. that's very much how place like new york and san francisco and london work. and precisely because globalization and new technologies have increased the returns to being smart and innovation, they're actually work for cities rather than against them. while it's certainly true that globalization caused the garment industry to disappear from new york say, they didn't eliminate the value to creating new images in new york because you now sell them on the other side of the planet and produce them on the other side of the plan net and take advantage of all the opportunities in a more globalized work but that requires new ideas and innovations and we get smart by being around other smart people. now, things didn't always look

so bright in new york city. when i was a kid growing up here in the 1970s, looked as if not just president ford but ohio itself was telling new york to drop dead. the city seemed mired in decline and disorder. the decline of the garment industry left the city unmoored. what new york was going through was a process of detrializeation, a dechristian that was in all of america's older cities. one of the themes of the book that the american dream doesn't lie behind a white picket fence and cities have been as intrinnic to our experience as a nation as anybody else. the very birth of mary hat is roots in urban interaction between john hancock who wanted political change, and sam

addooms knew how to conjure a mob, and their connect created -- helped create this great country of ours in the 19th century, the great problem was making the wealth of americans accessible to the markets in the east and europe. cities made that happen. they grew up at node of a network that allowed the rich, dark oil of iowa to become productive. in 1816 it cost as much to move materials over land as to ship them over the atlantaic. it was enorm lousily difficult to access all the wallet in the american hinterland. cities grew up as notes of the transportation network. the cities on the candle. chicago was start off when the illinois canal expand from new york to new orleans, rail only supplemented that transportation

network, and every one of the 20 largest cities ins me -- cities in america were on a waterway. industry then grew up around those transportation nodes. new york's three great industries in then 19th sister were sugar refine, printing and they were tied to the port of new york. there was raw sugar coming into new york, which is how fdr's family got involved in the sawing refining interests. british roots enter feature with his sugar trade. printing and publishing is one of my favorite stories. the big money was in printing pirated english novels but you had to come out with the latest dickens and get it out first.

number's port made that happen. the think that made the harner brothers succeed was they fact they could get the later walter scott novel faster than their come pet temperatures because they were in new york, that enabled them to print first and dominate the market. chicago as well, greatest industry, the stockyards, grew up around its railyard. the stock areas were right next to rail. and in detroit, an even more remarkable events occurred in the rise of the automobile industry, and sewshows cities formed for mundane reasons, to create some of human kind's greatest endeavor. so back to mid-19th century detroit, a city with connects to the outside world and a huge amount of inland trade and have business taking care of engines

on the ships on the great lakes. so detroit dry dock, firm in the 19th century, frank kirby comes there, and they perform a critical role educating young people 0 to work with engines like henry ford. henry ford gets a start with engines in the dry dock. detroit in the 1900's feels like silicon valley in the 1960s, basically an automotive genius on every tree street corner, the fish brothers dodge brothers, innovate and can stealing each other's ideas, all of them trying figure out the new new thing, and they do that and create this amazing thing, the mass produced inexpensive automobile. one of the tragedies of detroit, and fortunately there are going to be several tragedies of detroit i'm going to talk about. the way they figure it out is --

they do something that's fundamentally antithetical. they do it by greating walled off factories that provide employment for less educated american on grand scale. in one level this is great, providing jobs for americans with less education. but nothing could me more antithetical to what makes cities work than the rouge river plant. great walls surrounding the area. little connection with people around them, and for pa while it's wildly productive. but when the economics change, transportation costs raise, the production could be moved to lower cost areas and automobile production can cross the globe, and when those conditions change detroit didn't have the stuff to reinvet itself. it didn't have the culture of ontrip knewship --

entrepreneurialship. the second reason is what detroit needed. the government responded bying in ready to subsidize new structures, first with urban renewal and creating the monorail, the people mover. the pron problem is that a city like detroit, a declining city, already has an abundance of structures and infrastructure relative to people. the last thing you need were more structures in a place like detroit, and yet the politicians were there read to you build village because it's great to have a shiny now building and you can declare cleveland a comeback city but that doing in to address the most important thing, which is to make sure the children have the skills they need to compete in a global economy and should have something that should be a birth right of everyone, the safety of the streets. so we have a people mover that moves over empty streets and we

didn't have the skills that would enable it to come back. by contrast, new york did come back and it came back not because of some government program' but because of private ontrip knewship, because of people coming up with new ideas and createing new change. there are many reasons for this. new york's scale, global connection, cultural ontrip neuralship, and a have vein for people getting a start operating new firms. i tell the story of a. leftcourt, before he declared he was sure that 1930 would be a great building year. didn't turn out well. but he was a great example of somebody who start inside garment and has a career in different industries. the story of new york's comeback is tied to a chain of innovation in finance. cities have always, always

permitted these chains of brilliance, where one smart idea feeds on the other. think about rein nuance florence where one person figures out how linear perspective works, and passed it on to his friend who puts nit a sculpture, and it's passed on. who passes it long to the monk, who passed it along and so on and so forth, one small idea ripping on another one. i think fins like that. my own view of the chain of innovation in finance starts with people, many of whom are at the university of chicago, figuring out how to mathematically about the tradeoff of, and i return. some of that get passed to students and then carried, this ability to think about return to tradeoff make it way to wall street. this has been used by the young michael milken in new york to

actually sell high yield debt to enable investors to recognize his securities actually carried enough return. the high debt allows leveraged buy-out and it makes possible the securitization wage, and the ability of cities to nurture sustain young talent. my favorite member of this chance if blumeberg himself. and bloomberg is important in so many ways, is his data terminals make this increasingly sew fess tick indicated ability to trade off risk and return possible, and also a great example of how cities create cross city federallallize sayings, create the largest and most successful leaps of entrepreneurial

innovation. he is competing if the guys in silicon valley, but he knows how to compete and outdo them because he knows what the traders wanted. he had knowledge the gained in the city that no silicon valley software engineer could possibly know, and he is able to sort of make this leap. the other reason i like to bring up bloomberg is there's a picture of this in the book i'm very respond of, which is the bull pen in city hall, and that bull pen is borrowed from the bull pens that bloomberg had, and the trading floors illustrate or -- you have wealthiest people on the planet who would sit behind giant oak doors in large protected offices and enjoy all the space and privacy they could have and yet they don't. they choose to be right on top of each other because they're in an industry where knowledge

matters more than face, and that's how cities succeed. heat how new york came back that only was more valuable than space, and there's no industry where knowing just agent more is more valuable, is more important, and that's why there's this very strong tendency of idea oriented industries to be the main stay of urban rein attendance, whether you're talking computers, you're talking about leveraging the urban ability to connect smart people to learn from one another. it's often suggested that computers will make that obsolete but i don't thing that's true. there's something so fundamental below us as people that makes face-to-face contact valuable. we have evolved over millions of years to have rich tools to communicate. the hard part is not knowing your script, not knowing the information you want to claim from on high, knowing your odd

against gets it or whether your ideas are get through and human beings have all these great cues to signal comprehension or confusion and that's -- what new technologies they made ideas ever more complicated and increased the cost of screwing up and not communicating properly, and that's why it's val all to be face-to-face. cities are successful because of the happenstance things, now, the success of new york isn't just about productivity. at it about the revival of cities at place of pleasure as well as burning, and if you go back to the sort of new york of the 1970s, this wasn't clear this was going to happen. you had to pay people combat pay to get them to live in new york. now people are willing to accept lower real wages in new york to just have the fun of living in

the city. that didn't happen by accident, and the creation of liveable cities required vast undertakings, which we're still not down with in the developing world. these their great challenges that actually lie ahead. so if you go back to 1900 new york, boy born in the city could expect to live seven years less than the national average. today it's two years longer. i'm not sure we fully understand this for older new yorkers. some say walking plays a large role it in. for younger new york, it's clear why death read rates are lower, it's modify accident, taking the subway after a few drinks, and lower rates of suicide. one of the interesting thing is while new yorks aren't likely to say they're happy, they actually don't off themselves at the same rate that anymore low density areas do. but that actually required investment, and the local

governments at the start of the 20th century were spending as much on water as the national government was spending on everything except for the mayor and post office, and these investments were real and were important. while clean water required an engineering solution, other problems of urban life don't require engineering so crime has been major challenge. that required serious government intervention. traffic congestion is a problem that is still with us and in some sense the way i like to describe it, new york is essentially running a soviet style transport system. by that i mean in the old soviet unon, groceries were vastly underpriced relative to market prices and given away, and they were allocated in long lines. that's what a new york city traffic jam is, a long line and

a strongout because you're waiting for some guy to turn. the only way to happen this is to price the product. you have to charge something for a scarce base, that's what congestion pricing does. what we know from the dat is that you can't just build your way out of traffic con investigation. there's something called the fundamental law of traffic congestion, which is vehicle miles traveled one for with one highways built. if you build it, they will drive. there's only one solution which is to make people pay for the social costs of their actions. now, the success of cities means that all creates a downside, and the downside if you don't allow supply to keep up with demand city becomes ungodly unaffordable, and that's one of the challenges new york faces. cities like chicago has made it possible for young people without a lot of means to actually live in chicago. new york, under the bloomberg

administration has allowed more construction, but just as prices in the city were rising, the city was making it more and more difficult to build, with an increasing swath of preservation districts. so 15 mrs. of the land area in manhattan, including central park, was in a preservation district, and it's not as if i don't revere our architectural legacies. my father was an architect, but not every glazed brick building needs to be preserved. i draw a lot on the wisdom of jane jacobs in this book, and the understand the magic of sits. this one she got run. so a lot of her wisdom came from wandering around cities and observing, and he observed old buildings were cheap and new ones were expensive, and the way to keep new york affordable is

keep the old build examination not let anyone build on top of them. that's not how supply and demand works. if you restrict building and you have high demand, prices are going through the roof and that is what we have sunshine new york, and particularly in our own hone neighborhood. greenwich village was affordable to middle income couples like herself, he own family. what middle income household can afford a townhouse in greenwich village today? preservation, the vast district there helped make that happen. made it difficult to the free market to supply more hogueing. a great irony progressive states like new york and massachusetts and california which care so much about providing affordable house doing a bad job of it relative to texas which has never advanced any particular take for low cost housing and jet it does a great job of it...

... >> the wind flicked the flames to the grass, and a fire started that grew on the dry timber nearby, and it grew larger and larger. by the time the fire was done, more than 3,000 acres burned to the dust. during this man's time, he was conquered as an enemy.

he was referred to as something pretty damning in 1894. it's hard to think a boston merchant did damage to the environment as much as this young man did. of course, he's the saint of american environmentalism, henry david thoreau. we are destructive species, and if you love nature, it's best to stay away from it. [laughter] when i started acquiring small children five years ago, you can tell i'm an economist, i also moved to the woods, and i also started to do a heck of a lot more damage to the environment. now, it's not i'm taking no stand on the science of global warming in the book, but either you worry about it, or, heck, you worry about the price of gas at the pump that living in compact urban spaces leads to

less energy consumption and even in holding family confidence. one fact is that people who live in single family attached houses use 88% energy compared to apartment housing. a lot has to do with smaller housing units and less a less driving. if you like green space, live in new york. the book that was not fundamentally about urging a person to live in an area they don't want to live in. i'm an economist, not a lifestyle consultant. the point of the book is that america has idolized a certain style of living, and it's a style of living that involves white picket fences in suburbs, and it does not include apartments. we have a bad policy that i want

to be a part of and that's the hope of the book, so just the three apart from this issue of cities doing themselves damage by artificially restricting construction, the three policies that are most obvious and problematic are the home mortgage reduction, the infrastructure spending, and the way we handle schools. in terms of the home mortgage interest reduction, it's problematic in the wake of the great housing issue that we're bribing americans to leverage themselves to the hilt to bet on the housing market; right? we encourage them to buy bigger houses and move away from apartments because 85% of attached houses are occupied and there's reasons for this. renting out a house involves depreciation of representers not take -- renters taking care of it. you can the chaos of a new york city co-op board. [laughter] both reasons say when you

subsidize owning, you push away from urban living. transportation as well. i'm not surprised but disappointed by the feddish for infrastructure in the recent budget. this infrastructure when filtered by the senate is inevitably antiurban. during the stimulus, infrastructure spending per capita was twice as high in the least dense states than the most dense states. that's not surprised because there's more senators relative to people. [laughter] there's little reason why the government should be in the business. america will no longer compete by shipping natural resources and manufactured goods slightly cheaper than our competitors. we compete with our minds and the ideas and the innovations and interneuroship that comes naturally in cities, and i get the third thing i'll end with is so many parents leave cities because of the schools, and in some sense the way we structure our schools undoes the great

urban virtues. if you took new york's restaurant scene which is currently one the great glories of this city maybe of all human civilization ever. [laughter] if you start with that scene and instead of having private up no vaition and lots of people entering and closing, and it turned out that thai german fusion didn't work. [laughter] instead of that, have a single food superintendent dliffing food, and that would be an awful place to eat. that's what we did with the schools. instead of allowing interneuroship to allow for growth in education, we've turned that off. it's hard for anyone to effect change from the top down. i have an admiration for joel cline who tried to introduce more innovation in the school district. the slow movement shows how heavy a lift this is, and i

think we've had hopeful signs from the promised academy this harlem and other results in charter schools allowing some form of competition and innovation that does meaningful things like improving test scores. we're unlikely to have better schools and to have improvements in the area without harnessing the urban vir cues. once you do that, america has the best schools in the world, but will not happen if it's a monopoly with schooling. i'll end there and i'm grateful for your attention and look tbarnd to learning from you in the dense confines of this urban environment. thank you very much. [applause] >> we can have questions. can you wait for the microphone because we are recording. over here.

>> the cities are attracted to brilliant talent and wealth people are not counterup -- counter intuitive, but the question is are cities attractive to people who are poor where the david brooks wrote a series ten years ago talking about how happy people were in rural areas because there's less income inequality let alone the conservative tradition of rural moral virtue in community living. can you address that? >> sure. >> also, will you think about the cities and the urbanism in the third world with problems of over population are dominant? >> absolutely. those questions are connected; right? the new york issue is the hallowing out of the middle class. it's not a lack of poverty in the city. new york continues to have a

high poverty rate like most suburban areas. it's even more evidence in cities in the developing world from mumbai to rio. that poverty is seen as a sign of urban failure, but, in fact, i think it's success. cities are full of poor people because they attract them with the promise of economic opportunity and in the case of the u.s. the ability to get around without a car for every adult. i cite public transportation connected with poverty. when you build a subway stop, poverty rates go up near the stops. are those stops impoverishing the people around them? [laughter] of course not. they are attracting poor people who value the ability not to have to have a car for every adult that needs to get around. now, in the developing world,

cities provide an even more important pass out of poverty. ghandi talked about the future was in the people, but it's the cities that connect with the outside world and where poor indians come to be middle income indians, and, you know, it's unquestionably true that life is difficult, it's a life nobody wants to live for a day let alone for years. there's two reasons why people go there. it beats the depp vaition of the rural northeast of brazil and beats living in a world where time stands still and infant mortality is endemic. this is related to the clean water point that if we're close enough to exchange ideas, we're close enough to infect each other with diseases, and if i'm close enough to sel you a newspaper, i can rob you. that's the point where cities

require a certain amount of well-structured government. they require a government that oversees clean water, a government that handles congestion, handles crime, and the traj ji of -- tragedy of india is its government policies engaged in regulating areas they have no business regulating. they suffered on draconian issues about building up, while at the same time they failed to provide the basics of urban life like the clean water. when i wander around a place like durabi, you are struck by the enormous power of interneuroship. there's a couple guys making bras, and you feel like you're in manhattan a 100 yes ago , and on another corer there'seds, and then there's peopleing olds,

but the other ts are reasonable, and there's still a child dying in the stres. this is the great challenge that , in fact , the -- i certainly push back on the notion there's a lot to like about rural poverty. having cities require management and requires a good, but limited public sector that knows its job and does it seriously. >> let's go over there, erik? >> the central thesis you raise seems very similar to another colleague of yours at harvard, michael porter, in an article wrote in 1990, the competitive avenge of nations, and it seems he spoke about industries and clusters and innovation, competition, and the like. it's similar. i wonder if you had any areas where you part company with michael in your thesis? >> well, i don't disagree with

that. in fact, my first work on cities was done in 1990 as well, and we were influenced at that point in time by his work. one of the facts that came out of the study was the correlation between small average establishment sizes and subsequent urban success. i think that's, you know, seeing the virtues of idea flows in cities, and this is no ideas, al fred marshall was high on the notion 120 years ago is not something that separates us. i think i'm probably less optimistic about the -- his vision for competitiveness in the inner city, and i think actually there was probably too much of an emphasis on what their current comparative advantage is relative to trying to think of more game changing things and actually radically increase the human capital in the areas. that's the fundamental thing, not figuring out how to do low value added services in low

service areas, but to provide the skills and connections that enable both areas to grow, and there's a whole 80% of the book are about things unrelated to, you know, unrelated to michael porter's core interests, but certainly i share his enthusiasm for competition and the value of connecting between people in dense corridors. >> let's go over here. >> hi. the coffer of your book is a -- the cover of your book is a picture of chicago. >> it is. >> people know the city looks amazing lately, it's clean, parks downtown, new skyscrapers, and then the census came out saying chicago lost 200,000 people in the last 10 years, more than expected, and at the same time, the x-urban counties away from chicago were some of the fastest growing in the country. is that a problem, and -- what

could chicago do they are already doing? why are we seeing these results? >> chicago is a very successful city in lots of dimensions, and the right thing to do is the level of chicago. chicago has a lot of things in common with other rust belt cities, and if you go back to the chicago i knew when the city was there, when i came to the city in 1988, that city seemed very much to be, you know, on a hinge of history; right? it seemed like it could go the path of cleveland or detroit rather than the pat it's on. it fights against severe trends. there's no better variable that predicts growth than january temperature. chicago's winters can be tough. the chicago also fights against the general move towards car-based living and chicago is a very decentralized city in i terms of unemployment, and that is also an issue with the city. now, that being said, i think you don't want to judge a city

purely by population numbers; right? there's a lot of people moving into chicago as well as the fact there are some areas that are losing population. you also have in many areas depopulation because of larger families being replaced by smaller families. that particularly was most evident in the 1970s with just a huge population loss because of that, but that comets in large -- continues in large cities today. there's more -- fewer people occupying the same space meaning the occupation numbers go down. there's a lot of admirable things, and i think it deserves to be seen as a very successful city as well as a successful metroarea, and it's a mistake to view the straight population numbers as being the only or the primary gauge of success. i mean, you also want to look at the income of the area, the crime rate, both of which have shown tremendous progress under

daly's leadership. >> over here. >> you begin your talk by citing one hard fact that the fraction of national output produced by large metropolitan areas exceeds the fraction of the population. with only a small number of large metro poll tan areas, there's nuances to skew the results. we measure outputs by the dollar or something. if a strawnt meal costs $200 in manhattan, there's value created. there's a number of ways those are matter of opinion than matters fact. for example, with gdp, there's a deflater that applies and applies to the level of the country or state, and people could argue about whether it's applied to the level of the city. for example, if restaurant meal in new york city cost $200, but $50 in kansas. it's four times as valuable, but that's an opinion. the other example is new york

city is dominated by the financial industry and people with argue about whether financial transactions produce value like people claim. are those issues of opinion as both issues of fact? >> if you look at metro poll tan area size, it's a steady curve up. it's not as if new york is on the line and everything else is flat. if you look at particular industries, so you divorce yourself from the locally domestically traded media and turn to the urban industries, and you look at export oriented industries, and you see the same positive relationship between metro area size and per capita per employee output. it is certainly true that there is rarely a free lunch in city choice as in anything else, and the fact that there are higher prices in new york is the price of living in a productive fun place. it's not as if new york is

getting people more productivity without charging people in some sense for them. that's the nature of space, thatst nature of cities, but if firms with respect more productive -- were not more productive, they would not pay the higher cost of the workers or stick around in the areas and pay the cost for being in the areas. there's decades of literature looking at economies in various ways, and all of which, you know, fairly uniformly come down october side there's strong benefits from gathering around other industries in various ways. >> to your point about competition in schools despite joel cline's heavy lift, do you think going forward there's a likelihood of improvement in new york as well as other cities? >> you know, i'm hopeful.

i'm by nature optimistic and hopeful in new york because there's so much talent pushing on vaishes margins; right? if you look at the promised academy, the holland children, there's two things making it possible in new york city for that to happen, and it's much more difficult than other cities. one is the wealth of philanthropic energy which is special in the city making things like that work. it makes the manhattan institute work. i'm strongly in favor of it. [laughter] the other thing, of course, is you can get great teachers; right? there's people who are there willing to work for the promised come which is harder in a smaller, less -- a city with less richness in human capital so -- i'm -- i continue to be quite optimistic about new york. it requires leadership in the sender, and you can have a bad term with the next mayor and things could go wrong, but i think people get, you know, that the energy of new yorkers ensure

a relatively good government outcome going forward and that makes me optimistic about the city. i'm less optimistic about the declining cities with less education. i'm less optimistic they will be able to create change in the area. now, the good news is that you start at such a low base in education some of it the centers of depp vaition in the country that anything will have the possibility of doing good, but i'm less optimistic about ability of really meaningful political change in this area to work, but remember part of the job of being an economist who are not running for office, never plans on being confirmed for any political job is i'm supposed to say things politically impossible because if i limit myself to things that are doable tomorrow, i'm not doing my job to try to push beyond that, so, you know, i'm not really the best judge of what is politically feasible any time soon. [laughter] >> one more question. >> the roar r in --

reporter in new york, and a rust belt city -- >> you have the voice of it. >> radio voice. >> yeah. >> how can we bring the cities back as a city on the great waterways with an innovative center, but the problem they face is the flight of youth and intellectual capital. how do we bring that back and possible solutions or are we all to gather around the cities? >> you know, i think that one of the glories of the united states is that we have lots of different types of cities; right? it's not that i believe everyone should live in a new york city skyscraper, and there's a lot of like in other town, those towns that have once existed because of transportation or the eerie canal and cities lost their way, they are facing enormous challenges now. in the long run, education is

the best fix for these areas, so middle-sized cities that are educated have done much better than middle sized cities that are not. there's no prediction of what rust belt cities come back. as the share of the adult population in that area wages go up for workers by 8% holding their own education constant. it's an enormous value of being around skilled people and it's true in the downturn that education is protective of metro areas and employment and the skills of that area. again, more of a connection than you would just predict from the fact 5% of college graduates are unemployed and 10% of high school dropouts are unemployed. not investing in infrastructure, it's not what the places need. thinking about what else you can do in limiting regulations and in terms of regulartively cheap quality of life up vestments --

investments. we have to attract and train smart people and get out of their way. we want to focus on policies that attract smart people and get rid of the things that get in the way of private enter neuroship. you don't want to chase them away. just once, i want to hear a big city manager say my city's population dropped, but they were well trained and got great jobs in charlotte. [laughter] just once, i want a mayor focused on the people that are their responsibility rather than chasing a population goal. unfortunately, i don't think there's any sort of silver bullet, but i think we can do better than we have been, and our cities deserve that. >> okay, well thank you very much. [applause] >> live saturday, the white house correspondence's annual

black tie dinner starting with the red casht arrivals and later, remarks from saturday night live'sset meyers. we'll have your comments live on c-span, and you can follow online with ore interactive video players featuring goals, video gallery, social clips, comments, and live hd video. >> what i try to do is tell a story with visual rather than words. i write paragraphs with immaimings. >> with four pulitzer prizes, she's a journalist. >> we get to experience so many parts of the human condition on so many different levels. >> she'll talk more sunday night on c-span's q&a, and you can download a podcast of q&a, one of our signature programs online

at c-span.org/podcast. >> before she was a cookbook author and television personality, julia child served in the office of strategic services during world war ii, and jennet conant describes her time in the war in a book called "a covert affair." this is 40 minutes. [applause] >> thank you for venturing out on this rainy spring evening. i think i'm going to start off by quoting groucho marx together effect i have something to say. absolutely everyone asks me is how julia child, six foot two, with that distinctive voice slipped behind enemy lines? the answer is simple. she didn't. we'll get to that later.

despite what you read this morning in "usa today," bon apetit was not a code name. another question i get is how did i come to write about julia child, and more to the point, how did i know that julia child, the popular french chef of cookbook and television fame worked for the country's first intelligence agency? well, i read it in the "new york post," and i happened to see a headline secret recipes of spy, and it reported that julia was employee of the os, the offs of strategic service was set up by president roosevelt in the early days of the war. it is the forerunner of today's cia. anyway, i was in washington at the time. this would have been the fall of 2008, and i was on my book tour for the "irregulars" about a group of british spies in the early days of the oss.

at that time, the national archives released a huge stash of previously classified documents. this was a huge, huge hall of papers, classified records detailing the 24,000 people that worked for the oss during world war ii. these records identified for the first time the vast civilian and military network of operatives who had served their country during the time when it was threatened by nazis and fascists, and some of the people were very notable and unusual and the most unlikely possible secret agents. there was supreme court justice author goldberg, sterling hayden, moberg, and perhaps the most notable was the chef julia child. the news julia worked for the oss made headlines around the country. everywhere i went, people stopped and ask was she really a spy?

what did she do? where did she go? i didn't know the answers to any of their questions, and so i began doing research, and one thing or another led to the beginning of this book. now, like so many wartime secrets, julia child's oss career was not a secret at all. the basic facts of her intelligence career could be looked up as easily as ingredients to her recipes. late in her life she opened up about her past, broken her vow of silence, and talked about the oss and mentioned a few paragraphs in her memoir "my life in france." it was mentioned in various books, one movie about her and paul had a brief bit about it, and it was in the obituaries when she died in 2004. as soon as this huge treasure-trove of archives was released, there was a bit of a stir. after all, the cia had held on

to these classified documents for many decades and had been very reluctant to release them, and it took william casey, the former director of the cia who intervened convincing them to release the record, and they started slowly in 1981. these personnel records of the oss were the very last batch of papers to be released, and julia child's 130-page oss file, a classified document gave the details of her career in the intelligence agency and made for some fascinating reading. now, the first thing that became clear to me as i thumbed through the documents was that contrary to all the newspaper headlines, julia was never actually a spy, but she very much hoped to become one when she joined the agency in december of 1942. like so many young people in the wake of pearl harbor, she moved to washington and determined to try to serve her country. she was single, 30, and unemployed with several failed attempts with a career behind

her and looking for a second chance in life, a chance to remake her life, a chance to do something special. she was the daughter of a well to do rancher, graduated, but spent most of her post-college years as a social butterfly. she spent time playing golf, tennis, attending parties, and having a good time. she was keeping house for her widows father and living a very sheltered life. she was a pretty plain person with no skills. she didn't speak any languages and never been further out of the country other than a day trip. she felt she was bigger than life. she always thought she was destined by big things, but by 30, they failed to materialize. still, she was tall, very athletic, sure she would be a natural for the army or navy reserves. when rejected, the form letters

came too tall, she stated. she was bitterly disappointed. she used family connections and got a job at the war department. it was a low-level secretary job. she was a typist, and she loathed it and was determined to work like a demon to get promoted, she did, was transferred to the offices of the legendary colonel william wild bill donovan, the newly appointed head of the oss, a mysterious and shadowy intelligence agency. the cloak and dagger business was like bread and butter to the young julia finding this glamorous and loved her colleagues and found herself assigned to an experimental research program called the emergency sea rescue section working with a harvard zoo yolings who was the descendent of tom mast jefferson.

she was working on a jell to be rubbed on pilots to protect them. they sected bizarre experiments, her julia's speedometer was to go -- responsibility was to go not fish markets early. she loved her work and felt she found her niche, the place where she belonged. the oss for all selectivity was a pretty strange group of people, a lot of colorful personalities with the ideosin karattic atmosphere as college and the odd balls and eccentrics. she heard donovan's idea of the ideal female employee was a cross between a smith graduate, a powers model, and a katie gibbs girl. she had it all. she had a private income that made her appear above reproach. the rumor was that donovan hired people from the io ivy league

and junior league. this did not make him the least bit popular and critics say oss stood for oh, so social and oh, so secret. it did not begin recruiting until after all the other services had their pick, and so donovan had to scramble to find real talent. faced with building a huge intelligence gathering operation overnight, he had to get creative, but he knew the specific skill set he was looking for. he needed someone with the brains to make decisions on the fly, the street smarts when to throw out the rule book, one with self-confidence, and an underdeveloped sense of fear. of course, these staple qualifications could be used to describe any number of dubious characters, and critics charged donovan's lack standards met

dangerous people were employed as spies. still, donovan hired lawyers from his own wall street firm as well as attorneys from other firms and businessmen he knew, recruited a wide variety of comakes from psychologists and anthropologists and mathematicians and others who chased rare birds across asia and hired artists, painters, writers, and inventers. he simplified the vetting process by keeping it all within the family. if an oss'er had a sister or a family member with a decent typing speed, she was guaranteed a job. if she lived abroad, she was whisked off to a secret spy school to start intensive straining. julia became fast friends. with a number of young women training

to be spies, and she was green with envy. one of them was a young woman named jane foster. now, she like julia, was from a wealth, conservative west coast family. she was an adventurous california girl, but there the similarity ended. jane was widely traveled, had briefly been married to a dutch diplomat and spoke several languages including malay. she was everything julia was not, wildly sophisticated, witty, outrageous, bold and daring enough to be true material. while julia was stuck with the files, jane was taking a crash course in espionage learning forgery to the fundamentals of the mori real operation -- morale operations. another oss colleague that became a great friend of julias

eaves bet -- betty mcdonald. she was the first on the scene as a reporter after the pearl harbor attack. she was recruised because of her wartime experience and knowledge of japanese. she and jane would disappear for weeks at a time on orientation courses and small arms courses mastering a submachine gun and a cult 45. julia was desperate to go to france, but after 17 years of high school and college french, she knew she is couldn't speak a word. when the word went out that donovan was looking for warm bodies, any bodies to set up and run a network of new intelligence bases in india, burma, and china, she immediately volunteered. she didn't care where, as long as she got to go. there was a man shortage and the newly oss was woefully

understaffed. it's important to remember that when you think of the oss, you generally think about the military and guerrilla operations getting the glory. you think of images of agents parashooting, the vast majority spent their time writing reports, collecting and analyzing information, planning missions. the fact that the oss activities could be conducted from behind a desk meant women were equally as effective, and so while the majority of women did remain in washington helping to support the oss's far flung missions, a very small percentage went overseas, and a tinier percentage went into operations. the small percent that went

over, they carried out their assignments with the same audacity, self-reliance and seat of the participants ingenuity that donovan inspired in everyone who worked for him. now, julia got her wish in early 1944 joining operatives sent to india. on a month long boat trip, her travel orders were changed and was rerouted because lord louis, the dashing new supreme commander of combined operations decided it would be nicer, not to mention much cooler place for his wartime head quarters. now, candy, a mountain top resort, once a tea planters oh asis was not a hardship coast. it was a good thousand miles from the fighting and picture postcard pretty. there was a lake and you could go rowing with your boyfriend.

the female oss personnel were up in the queen's hotel. it was run down and overrun with rats and bugs, but it looked grand. the office head quarters of the oss was housed on an old tea plantation a little bit out of town, and it was made up of bamboo-plated huts, but the palm trees and neat little paths running between the bungalows made the place seem like an island retreat than a wartime head jr. quarters. julia's job was not romantic. she was put in charge of the registry, the nerve center con taping their most top-secret documents. the military plans and operations, classified cables from the joint chiefs of staff in washington, the code books as well as locations of all of the oss missions around the world and the real identities and various code names of their oss

agents in the field. it was an important job. it carried grave responsibilities, and it came with the highest security clearance. julia joked she developed a top-secret twitch from handling so much highly sensitive material. while she was never an operational agent going behind enemy lines, she became a very able and effective intelligence officer. by her last few months in china where she served in a remote military outpost at the foot of the burma road, she was working through very, very difficult and sometimes dangerous conditions and carried on through a flood that swamped the base, a raging cholera epidemic, occasional outbreaks of cross fire from the chinese evolution overrunning their camp. by the end, she was a seasoned veteran of the oss and would dull out slices of ohm yum to agents from a large loaf that reminded her of boston brown

bread, but which oss staffers referred to as the operational payroll. [laughter] now, julia would say later looking back that the war made me. it was her personal and political coming of age. it infused her with a new cfd and curiosity about life, and it was where she meant her mentor and soul mate, paul child, and embarked on a life altering romance. julia met paul who designed war rooms for the allied generals in the bungalow, and she was immediately smitten. he was 41 and a head shorter. he was somewhat difficult. he colleagues regarded him as moody and set in his ways, not an easy man julia confided to our diary. an artist, paul started out by skipping college and running off to work as a sailor. he studied painting and art in

paris, self-taught photographer, black belt, house builder, and jack of all trade and considered himself a connoisseur of finer things in life, art, food, passion, poetry, women. he romanced the priediest oss officers in their detachment, and after the initial advances were rebust, became the best of friends with jane foster who he described as a wild messy girl always in trouble, always gay, and irresponsible. he doored and add mired her. jane was infamous for her scheme to release propaganda material encased in condoms. her plan was to have a sub release the floating rubbers off the coast of malaysia and indonesia float ashore bearing messages of allied support. [laughter]

donovan was skeptical, but gave her the green light. [laughter] now, during the year they were all in china, jane and paul were inseparable, and julia pined for him. it pained her, but she knew he was not attracted to her and liked a worldly type. she was not wrong in guessing he did not reciprocate her feelings and paul wrote letter to his twin brother, charles, raving about jane's mad cap personality and escapades and julia was a nice girl with good legs. he dismissed her as a grown up little girl and at 31 she was inexperienced, overly emotional and a virgin and trying to be brave about being an old maid. she soldiered on. in 1945, they were transferred to china and jane stayed behind

training native agents and running subversive radio brood casts. seizing her chance, she got paul's attention, went exploring to him in out of bonds -- bounds areas. she ate exotic foods. now, these feasts resulted in days and days of dissen tear known -- disappointed sen tear none as the shanghai shits. [laughter] sorry, can i say that on c-span? she was head over heels in love, and paul, well, pall was still on the fence. they were from different backgrounds and dreaded meeting her right winged father and julia would go back to being a sociallite at the end of the war

and suggested they return to their peacetime lives. they returned to the states and went their separate ways, paul to washington, and julia in california. she embarked on a mission to win him over. she subscribed to the "washington post" and "new york times" much to her father's horror to read what paul read pledget she even took up the novels of henry miller that she found x-rated, but paul adored, and she took her first cooking lessons for paul. after a long distant courtship with a steamy correspondence, paul succumbed to julia's charm and let his head overrule his heart and married in september 1946. in 1948, two years later, the child's moved to paris. paul working for usis, united states information service, a branch of the state department,

and julia continued cooking lessons. they reconnected with jane in paris who was a painter, and they found her married to an odd russian map, but as paul wrote, jab was just as lazy, hazy, and impracticable and lovable as always. the happiness of their reunion was short lived as they were embroiled in the red spy scare. in only a few years after the war, the euphoria of victory was replaced by new fears about the spread of communism and the cold war. after the fall of china to the reds in 1949 when mountbatten. by the end of 1950, spy fever gripped the country. they were convicted of perjury,

confessed, and others were arrested on espionage charges. by 1953 after three years of unrelenting media coverage, the rosenbergs got the chair. all of this seemed to confirm to people in government that there were spies in every nook aerocorner of washington. as a journalist, richard once observed, senator joseph mccarthy was a political speculator who found his oil gusher in communism. he kicked off his anticommunist crew said in 1950 with a speech in wheeling, west virginia claiming to have had in his hand a list of 205 known communists currently employed in the state department. julia and paul were en route to germany when the finger pointing began. works from everyone to their close friends and teddy white who covered china for "time" were banned from the shelfs in

the usis libraries in europe. paul had to take the books off themselves and see they were destroyed. rumors about where mccarthy smeesh tactics would lead spread like wild fire. they watched in dismay as one after another of the career fallen service officers they served with in china, among them some of their very closest friends accused of disloyalty and forced out while still others quit in disgust. somehow, the victory in china was seen as a part of a master kremlin plot enabled by communists in the state department known as the china hands. at the same time, jay edgar hoover, the ambitious head of the fbi was ought to destroy general donovan's reputation viewing as a threat. donovan to protect his former staff started burning the oss records of his former personnel knowing that many of them, like

jane and paul, had been left acenter. julia and paul's letter in this period capture the atmosphere of fear and paranoia permeating their circle. julia considered mccarthy a power monger and believed his campaign of inknew went do -- inknew went do destroyed a country she loved. i'm concerned about mccarthyism. it's frightening. i'm willing to bear my breast, small they may be, stick my neck out, not turning my back on everyone. we'll sacrifice cat, cookbook, husband, and finally self-. inevitably, jane and paul were caught in the red spy hunt. on april 7, 1955, paul was

summoned to washington. their old friend, jane foster, was investigated by the fbi as a russian spy. when she was arrested in paris, the authorities ransacked her apartment and found paul child niece -- name in her address book. they were in the middle of a terrifying nightmare, full scale espionage up vest gages, lengthy interrogations, and a spirited loyalty inquiry. friends, family, neighbors, and former employers were questioned about paul's past, his communist proqifties, lose lifestyle, and blatant hom o sexual. try to prove to the two fbi guys you are not a lesbian, how do

you prove it? they chose to stand by their friends and principles no matter the cost. they had to endure the shame of being accused as well as the taint of suspicion that paul rightly predicted would always place a black mark by his name and curtail his career advancement. ultimately, they would also have to come to a very painful decision about whether jane was a soviet spy or the victim of an overzealous fbi agent. in the point of the book, it was to examine the complex issues this close-knit group had to face in that controversial historical era and explore the intriguing ways that personality becomes destiny and how these two california girls who came to be wartime friends and intelligence colleagues came to

meet different fates, one being a beloved american icon, and the other a lonely exile in france. thank you. [applause] do we have any questions? no questions? great, well that's -- yes? >> how long did it take to write the book? how long did it take you to write the book? >> it took probably about three years. i had done the previous book out the oss, so i had a great deal of material which helped speed up the process, and i was read into the period and the characters, but the last book i did was from the british side, and so this one was more from the american side, and it really is based on paul and julia's

diaries and letters, but there's such a wonderful correspondence between the two, that i had a vast and very colorful archive to work with. >> [inaudible] >> yes, all the families were very cooperative and, in fact, some of the families even of minor characters in the book who were oss colleagues of theirs who were on the boat to india, worked with them in china, people gave me their letters and diaries, so the very vivid descriptions in the book, you get a lot of dialogue and a lot of scenes that make you feel as though you're there, and the reason is they're drawn from so many diaries because i had so many characters that i limited the number of characters i name, but all of the incidents were true and happened, and julia stands out for obvious reasonses, for her height and

vivacious permty, and jane for her time there, and so almost everybody had a story to tell that they remembered. >> that was part of my question as well. [inaudible] >> they were from families. after that, and jape foster's -- jane foster's family offered me letter and diaries, and the huge archives that paul and you'll ya left at harvard and others provided me with letters, and i did a lot of research in the military library and repositories where i found all the telegrams and intelligence reports that they filed, many of julia's memos, jane foster's reports, all their superior's reports about them, so i could tell you what they were and where they were much of the

time, and they stayed close friends exchanging letters throughout the 50s, so after the war, i was able to keep up with them, and they were very frank in the letters, very moving about their fear of losing their jobs and what's happening to their friends, so you can really get a feeling for the time. >> can we have the microphone, please? >> during the time of the inquisition in washington, were people sympathetic? were the american people sympathetic to julia child? is there any record how they responded to her being taken in front of -- >> it was paul taken in for the full loyalty inquiry, and actually because they didn't know what was happening, julia was still in europe living in germany at the time, and there was a telegram someoning him back, and it was vague and they thought he was going to get a promotion, and when he got there, nobody talked to him, meet his eyes or tell him what

he was doing there, and they became clear he was in serious trouble, and then he was pulled in for a very long fbi interrogation, and he cabled julia in germany saying it's kaska-eskue. they were able to reunit in paris, and it was several more months before he got cleared. in fact, they up vest gaited him for the -- investigated him for the next year, so it didn't become public in the sense there were not headlines about it. in fact, the sad thing is hundreds and hundreds of people were under investigation in the 50s. remember, the hollywood 10 happened. charlie chaplin was under investigation for months and fled to europe, so there were

high profile people under investigation every day. paul child didn't make the news. julia was not famous yet, had not published her cookbook yet. everybody in the state department knew and their friends knew, and it was humiliating and paul predicted his career probably would not recover from it. >> was paul brought before the committee itself or just by the committee investigators? >> he was subjected to a full loyalty inquiry that was the fbi investigating him, the united states information service up vest gaited -- investigated him, his past going back 10 years and all that, but not dragged before a senate subcommittee. in the end even though they

thought he was about as liberal you could get without being a communist and thought he was a homosexual and accused him of other no acts, you'll ya -- julia was from a wealth right wing family and her father was an early supporter of nixon, and she pulled every striping in washington she -- every string in washington she could, and he was finally cleared. >> what role did paul play in ore celebrity -- her celebrity? >> that's an interesting and complicated question to answer. if you look at the arc of their relationship, she was really a very insecure, unexperienced girl when he met her, and she turned herself inside out to become someone he would like