>> thank you so much. >> and now david brooks looks at how our unconscious mind shapes our character, intelligence and biases. this is just under an hour. .. it is a pleasure to be back, try to think of what my high school teacher would think if they saw me addressing crowds in philadelphia. i was not a big man on campus so

i was stuffed into lockers by some of the big men. one of my debate partners was a guy named tom wilson who is in the back of the teacher movie and another was charged wormman who chased tornadoes and was subject of the movie twister. they went on to lead exciting lives and i went on to talk. a lot of people i talk with now--when i was given my current job and was given a good piece of advice to interview three politician today and for spending that time around my continue their raw emotional freaks of some sort or another. they talk so much they drive themselves in sane. but they do have incredible social skills. when you meet them they will

stand close to you. they rubbed the back of your head and caress your cheek. dinner with republican senator a couple years ago, at my side all meal. several years ago i was in the press gallery watching dan quayle and ted kennedy give each other in these big hugs and their faces were so far apart, they were groping and hands rubbing up and down each other's backs. i was like get a room. i don't want to see this. another story echo. the column reporting. going to a hotel in boston a couple years ago and bill clinton comes out of one of the elevators that starts praising me for calling my rude written praising him which he thought was particularly astute.

as he was talking he starts backing up so they can all hear what he is saying so within a few minutes he is 80 feet away but just talking to me but just embracing the crowd. i was following met ronnie around in the last election cycle. he was campaigning in new hampshire with his five perfect sons. he goes into a diner and starts going around a table of the diner introducing himself to families and asking what. in new hampshire they're from and describing the home he owned in their village and would go around from table to table meeting 30 people and on the way out he first name is almost everybody. so that is a profession i won't be going into and finally a few weeks ago i was the national institutes of health shown by in this video of a young girl

with williams syndrome. it looks from the outside like reverse autism. the little girl is in a room with a 12 year-old boys. the son of a researcher and only wants to look into his office. the boy is juggling and looking everest of. she had never interesting physical objects. she only wants that social connections and she gets close to him and stairs and his eyes minute after minute and i was watching the video thinking this is every senator i ever interviewed. they're socially attend creatures. the other thing is when they turn their minds to policy all the social sophistication vanishes and they start thinking like computer models. i covered a series of failures in my life. a lot of which had to do with overly simplistic view of human nature so i cover those and we sent economists in with privatization plans but when they really lack was social

trust and we were blind to that and as a result they stole everything like social trust. i covered the war in iraq. our readers were oblivious to the psychological realities in iraq. we had a financial system and regulatory regime based on the assumption that bankers were rational self interested creatures who wouldn't do anything stupid on mass and that turned out not to be true. most importantly for 30 years i covered education trying to understand why 30% of kids drop out of high school and we have tried for 30 years to try to raise high school graduation rates and most of those efforts have been disappointing because we rearrange the bureaucratic boxes and skirting the central issue which is the individual relationship between the teacher

and student. people learn from people they love. if you talk about love at a congressional hearing they think you are oprah. they don't talk that language. the question is why the most socially attuned people on earth are completely dehumanized when they talk about policy? i came to the conclusion this was not simply a political problem but a broader cultural problem. we have this inherited view that we are divided selves. we have reason over here and emotion over year and the two are at war with one another. if you're emotionally or not rational and if your rational you're not emotional and society progresses to the extent that reason which is trustworthy and suppress the passions which are untrustworthy. this bias has led to a view of human nature that we are fundamentally rational individuals who respond in a a few ways to incentives. academic disciplines tried to

study human behavior using the methods of physics and emphasize what they compound and model and ignoring all the rest. it has led to an amputation or shallow view of human nature where we emphasize the rational and accountable but review the things that a down below. it created a culture in which we are good at talking about material things but that talking about emotions. really good at talking about health and safety and professional skills the about the most important things like character and integrity we have very little to say. the great philosopher alastair mcintyre said be live in a system where we still have words for the important things like virtue and daughter but we don't have a basic understanding of how they all fit together. he said imagine if we had science words like neutron or gravity but didn't understand how a physics works or how they all fit together. that is where we are. so i do think we have this amputation which blows us in a

certain way. it blows us in the direction of a prevailing breeze that we're not satisfied with. hy went to high school and the folks still live in pennsylvania just west of here and you see the parents there aren't many places around the country sort of trapped into a certain style of raising their kids so you go to an elementary school and third graders come out wearing 80 lb backpacks. the wind blows them over there like beetles stock on the ground because we want them to study and do homework and get ready for the harvard submissions test. they get picked up by saab and audi's because it is acceptable. and their brains and picked up by this creature about who are highly successful women taking time off to make sure all their kids get into harvard and they weigh less than their own

children. and doing little exercises in a moment of conception in the delivery room cutting the umbilical cords themselves. they're flashing the mentor and flashcards to learn chinese and so they turn them into little achievement machines. they're not really happy with this the. they don't think this is the most important thing but the tiger mom down the street is doing it and they feel trapped into a system which they ridiculed the can't renounce. the are often in a system where this sort of into it character and morality but don't have a vocabulary for it so when people talk about morality we talk about shopping. so we have the ben and jerry's ice cream co. on foreign policy. judge oakes in one of my books that been and jerry should make pacifist toothpaste.

doesn't kill germs. fast relief. a whole foods market where of a cashier's would like they work for amnesty international. my household we buy their steamy face -- for kids this that what a snack that will prevent colorectal cancer. and so this is the world we are trapped in but we realize that is not all there is and there is more to life and more we should be experiencing and so i was thinking about this problem and really became aware of this other sphere of life where they were looking into some of the deeper things and of the it wasn't theologian's though our read a lot of theologians. it was people who study the human mind. where an incredibly exciting

period in the study of human mind being done across a wide range of spheres like neuroscience, behavioral economics the digital people are looking into the human mind and really is a revolution if you want to put it that way because when you synthesize their findings across these many different spheres you start with three key insights the first is that the of the conscious mind rights the autobiography of our species most of the action is happening and consciously below the level of awareness and one way to think about this is the cumin and can take in twelve million pieces of information and minute and cautiously process about 40. all the rest is being done without our being aware of it. a lot of those things that going on are somewhat of. my favorite research funding from the university of buffalo scholar is people named dennis unlikely to become dentists. people named lawrence of

disproportionately likely to become lawyers because unconsciously we gravitate toward things that are familiar. i name my daughter president of the united states broke south. something's going on unconsciously are impressive. not the tangled web of sexual urges that sigmund freud imagined. the unconscious is just a different way of understanding the world and often -- one of the tips i read about is it you have a tough decision you can't make up your mind. tell yourself you are decided by craigslist and flip the coin but don't go by how the koren comes up. go by your emotional reaction. are you happy or sad it came up that way. that is your unconscious mind having made the decision, tell you what it thinks. the third area that happens unconsciously is the most important. how do we relate to people. how do we understand situations. how we perceive the world.

the fundamental factors of whether we have a fulfilling or unfulfilled life and that is happening and consciously. emotions are not the enemy of thinking. people who have strokes and lesions and can process in motion properly are not super smart, there a superdumb. emotions assign value to things. they tell you what to value or not value-added you don't have that valuation in place you cannot make rational decisions. emotions are not separate from reason, their foundation of reason. i am not comfortable talking about a motion. one of the scientific experiments and ran into which is they took a bunch of middle-aged guys and put them in brains can machines and had the mark a horror movie and then they had to describe their feelings and the brain scans were the same in both

circumstances. sheer terror. and the work that is lake. my wife is writing a book about emotions is like white writing a book about gandhi. yet emotions really are the center of how we perceive the world. how we value the world. the center of our brain organizes itself. 1945 verizon orphanage out west where they decided to keep the kids healthy they would keep from germfree so they gave them food and good health care but did not handle them. they separated them. those kids die by age 2. a 37% mortality rate. they stopped naming the kids because they were not living long enough. that is a sign of power emotion is physically necessary. emotion is something you have to get used to. the third insight is we're not primarily self-contained individuals. we're a social animals with the

penetrations to each other. it is not only i am seeing you in your seeing we but we are reenacting what we see inside our own mind. we are deeply penetrated and they're all sorts of communication methods for which we communicated and in which we are not aware. there was a story about professor who wandered up and down the stage from side to side and his class played a trick and and where they said if he is never here we will look at him and when he is a rather redundant in two minutes he felt better over there. another experiment done in germany, under people's arms some people what they were moving and some people watch a comedy and other people who were well paid, was a comedy or a movie and people could tell it was above average that chance. women were much better at this than men.

we're deeply interpenetrated. said these findings to as a different story about how life works and a different sense of who we are so in many ways we are children of the french enlightenment of descartes believing reason is the hottest faculty but this research confirms that the hippocampus of the british or scottish movement like adam smith and aaron burr that reason is what they call our sentiments are quite strong, more support and fantasy and gives us a view of who we are a different view of human capital afforded takes. when we talk about human capital we talk about things we can measure. all of that is important but there are other qualities which are more important which are both emotional and irrational and make a hash of these two categories so one of these is the ability to enter other minds and learn and download what those minds have to teach you.

babies are equipped with this tour great degree. a researcher at the university of washington leaned over a baby who was 43 minutes oath and wet his tongue at the baby and she wagged her tongue back. babies at a phenomenal the early age are billed to merge with the mind than come in contact with and absorbs models for understanding the world from who they come in contact with. by 18 months 55% of american babies have established we to blame relationships with mom and dad. they have secure attachment. and they build relationships with parents and adults. they have a huge leg up. researchers can take a look at kids who are 18 months old, look at how they attach to moms and predictive 77% accuracy. if you go into a school, even at 3 or 2 and 5 and know-how to relate to a teacher you have a

better shot. 20% of kids are what they call sending out signals but not much is coming back. a teacher described one of these kids come into the classroom acting like a sail boat into the wind wanting to get close but not knowing how to do it. they have less activation and reward areas of the brains between social interaction. by age 70 they will have fewer friends than others. something that happened at 18 months does not determine the life course but opens up half way which is either confirmed or discomfort by later experience. the bad attachment of a mentor and change but these are the skills you learned early on. a second school i would list is the serenity and maturity to

look inside your own mind and be aware of your own weakness. the unconscious have many skills. we are overconfident machines. 95% of college professors believe they have above-average teaching skills. 96% of college students have above average leadership skills. time magazine asked the un the top 1% of earners. nineteen% of americans are in the top 1% of hers. tests to executives about their own industry and how confident are you? advertising executives said they were confident they get 90% of the and his right. they got 60% of the wrong. computer executives are the most overconfident industry. they get 95% of the answers right and 80% wrong. men drowned at twice the rate as women because men think they can swim across that lake especially after they have been drinking.

to have the ability to protect -- to be open-minded in the face of ambiguity to adjust the strength of your conclusions and strengthen evidence to be modest in the face of things you don't know. to invent modesty devices force yourself. when you make a decision right down your reasoning, seal it in an envelope and open it in nine months. a third were wrong and a third were in between but in most cases it will be irrelevant. these are all skills related to iq. it has to do with your emotional equilibrium. the third rate is a greek word which we might call street smart. ability to look across a complicated scene. there was a great story in my newspaper about soldiers in iraq who could look down the street

and tell if there was a bomb on that street. they couldn't tell you why. they just felt the cold this. some people have this sense to raise to a landscape. that comes from practice, close observation and practice and most of that perception is unconscious. the fourth thing you might call sympathy which is sensitivity to an emotional and social environment. can you pick out what other people are feeling? this is extremely handy working in groups. group's function more effectively than individuals. give up a group -- they will solve much better. the capacity of groups solving card tricks or math problems not related to the hy iq in the group. it relates to how well they related to emotional signals and how often they take turns when

they communicate. that is how it is done and face-to-face groups do better than groups -- the university of -- they gave a group ten minutes to solve a problem face-to-face and they did very well. another set of groups had 30 minutes but they had to communicate by e-mail. we were of teleconferencing. face-to-face is a lot better and some people have the ability to do that and some don't. the fifth is called propriety. the ability to control some of your impulses. the most famous experiment which you probably know is the marshmallow experiment. michele took 4-year-olds and put marshmallows in front of them. i am going to leave the room and come back in ten and tandy have

any marshmallows i will give you two marshmallows. showed a video to the kids with a marshmallow. there's a girl banging her head on the table. and an oreo cookie. he picked up the oreo carefully. that kid is now a u.s. senator. the scary thing is to kuwait 10 minutes and 20 years later, 30 years later much higher income. drug and alcohol addiction problems or incarceration rates. that is because some kids grow up and at home where actions lead to consequences and the strategies to control their impulses mostly by pretending the marshmallow is the clout or not real and the temptation is not really there.

so kids who go to school, will find school less frustrating. these are other traits that are encouraging early and really happen unconsciously for the most part. the final tree i will mention is more of a motivation. the conscious mind hunters for money, success, same, recognition. the unconscious mind looking for a moment when the self fades away and this goal line fade away and we are lost in a challenge or a task. those moments of transcendence at one with nature, when we are subsumed by god's love or most frequently for most of us when we find it in love for one

another. this decision to fall in love like so many decisions is the rational and emotional at the same time. when we see somebody we might potentially fall in love with one thing we're doing and, just the is measuring that person. we tend to marry people with high width similar to our own, with complimentary in the in systems which we can tell by smell. we marry people with maximum status symbols that we can get. so women unfortunately tend to marry men who are taller than they are because the average inch in height in america is equal to $6,000 a year in annual salary but one study i came across a just a guy who is 5 foot 6 can get as many on line date offers on an online site as a guy who is 6 feet along as he

makes $172,000 a year more. some of this is rational and cold and calculating and being done unconsciously but some of it is deep and mystical. and stendhal had a great phrase called crystallization. he described these 12 miners in austria who would take branches and fro into a salt mine and hold them up to the sun and the branches would be covered with crystal and they would glimmer in the sun and he said that is what we do. we imagine they have these crystals and exaggerate their virtues. we become addicted to them. the brain scientists say love inside the brain looks like a cocaine addiction. is not so much an emotion as a state of being. a desire to become completely fused with another. i tell high school students and they don't believe me that every course they should take in

college should help some decide who to marry. that is the only important decision they will make in their lives. a good marriage produces the same happiness as making $100,000 a year more. if you have a good marriage and a bad career you will be happy. if you have a bad marriage and a good career to pursue every course should help you make that decision. none of them do it. in those courses and in that desire to use with one another we get the sense of who we are. we are/skull, consciousness but deep down we went to interpenetrate one to another. that is the highest passing you long for. one of the beautiful examples i found of that was in a book from indiana university, he was married to a woman named carol. they lived in italy and when

their kids were 5 and 2 para looked suffered a stroke. when carol was dead but hostetler was still living one day a few months later he was walking to his bedroom and had a picture of her on the bureau in his bed room and after many days in a row he happened to glance at her face as he was walking through it here's what he wrote in the book. i have strangely glad of that experience. i looked at her face and i looked so deeply that i felt i was behind her i and all let one 5 find less of saying yes tears flowed, that is me, that is me. those simple words brought back many things. the fusion of our soul into one higher level of empathy. the fact that the core of both our souls are identical hopes and dreams for our children. about the notion that those folks are not separate or distinct but just one clear

thing that defined as both, that will lead us into a unit. the kind of unit i imagined before being married. i realize that though carroll had died in a core piece of her had not died at all but lived on determinedly in my brain. the greeks used to say we suffered our way to wisdom. hofstadter suffered his way to wisdom which confirms to scientists every day that there are shared groups that permeate our mind in ways that are much deeper than we are aware. in a less important way policy failures we have seen in educational reform. we suffered our way to wisdom but the shallow view of human nature is an insufficient view. it is important to lead good lives and have a much richer sense of who we are. the good news is we are in this

incredible period where researchers are really giving us a deeper thing. they will pervade society year upon year, decade upon decade and give as a richer sense of new wisdom, not giving us a new view of human nature but reminding us of old philosophies. for me it has been tremendously exciting being around those people the past few years and look forward to all the things that are important to our culture in the years ahead. thank you very much. [applause] >> most of you know how this works.

put your hand up. come down. [inaudible] >> two quick questions. your comment about children, many women work today. how does that affect them. can't touch kids. made a comment about these children should be emotionally tied yet they're not allowed to touch them. >> of the day care. the good part about this research is you don't have to be superparents to be good enough. if you establish good relationships with kids, listen to them and attuned to their needs and if they are nervous

try to calm them down and when they're down try to bring them up and you are aware of who they are in the basic way. you don't need to be supermom or dad. most of them don't do any good. you just have to be good enough. that is sort of relaxing. when you look at this research, quite a lot about this phenomenon. so most parents whether they work or not or attuned to good relationships have done what they need to do on this front. the evidence is mixed because the results are not that firm either way. has an effect on kids. kids who spend -- there is day care -- some are very good and some are not. some are very individually a

tuned to kids and some are not. they have in belgium undergoing the crash where the kids would go and i asked the lady we have a crash so you can relax when you are on vacation. it is like last year? she said no. we do stuff for the kids. on average the study suggests on average and this is not a strong effect that kids spend a lot of time and they care and average to be slightly more aggressive than those who don't. that is research as i understand it. not a tremendously strong effect not on the top of my list of social concerns. as for the touching a spend a fair bit of time in early childhood education and i am not sure what the rules are. teachers touch the kids. and they should. the main thing they do is good one. they just talk with them.

does the flow of words, one of the differents in our society between middle-class kids who here on average 480 words an hour and lower class kids who here on average 70 words per hour. that is over the course of a childhood, thirty two million words. if you go to a good early in childhood program, teachers try to compensate for that. >> grace and power have to be level for social policies that we are talking about ultimately? >> one thing we need to acknowledge is an unequal society. there is a woman who wrote a good book on equal childhood. we do not have continual child rearing but two entirely different systems. what i grew up with is what she calls concerted cultivation when

kids are driven around and prepared. the other is i forget the name she used but the kids were last. in some sense this is a more healthy way to raise kids but doesn't prepare the kids as well for the world we now have as adults. we have to acknowledge that. the most disorganized have kids who are not getting those organized attachments and we knew -- i'm a big supporter of these academies which are around where you go into the school and they teach kids how to walk down the hallway and look and nod when someone is talking to them and how to say yes and thank you and smile and they have these drums and have a chance and teachers -- they have to chant back everything. they learn discipline and order and stuff that middle-class kids get naturally these schools have to teach.

they work phenomenally well because they are explicitly based on this marshmallow type experiment and give those kids those social skills. you have to acknowledge we have an unequal society. we have two systems for kids. >> has your awareness of this human system change your political philosophy at all? >> i just cry a lot more. i put it this way. we have been through two individual revolutions in our lifetimes. socially liberating the individual and free to be you and me and express yourself and a more economic individualism in the free market, we have two

revolutions, and emphasizes the community and study citizenship and the relationship between people. i am much more community oriented. how to restrain from the community? i wrote a book a couple years ago about the fast-growing suburbs in the far >>reporter: of the suburbs and much more suspicious of that because densities' suggests face-to-face contact is more innovative and productive and has some advantages. a lot of areas like that where i have changed my mind. i see everything now psychologically so when i look at each institution and tunisia icy and emotional contingent in the region. i see the quest for dignity and a greek virtue, desire for

recognition and dignity. what happened in cairo doesn't work. influencing me in all those ways. it hasn't made me be closer to frank rizzo and rick santorum or anybody like that. it has pervasive effect on how i think. >> gentleman in a green. >> the most important decisions we make in our lives are made from our values. i'm wondering how that fits in had a follow-up earlier, becoming more divergent publicly, what is the most significant problem facing us in

the country with this divergence politically? >> first on the value of mentioned the importance of unconscious process. some things have to do with early childhood but some has to do with things thousands of years ago, genetic biass and some have to do with things happen hundreds of thousands of years ago with our cultural bias and we inherit through our culture weather from the region we live in or ethnicity we inherit certain ways of seeing world. there's a lot of research on how chinese and americans look at the world. the chinese measured the eye movements, dancing all over it and americans eyes were focusing on the eyes and the mouth. much more concentrated. another experiment was chinese people describe a fish take and

they describe the relationship between the fish, the plant life. americans pick up the biggest fish and describe that. another example is they looked at people having coffee and how much they touch each other and if i get the numbers right i will probably get some slightly of. there were 170 touches and our. in paris it was 120. london it was zero. these are values we share not only in these things but how we perceive justice. some of our moral intuitions are universal. you don't need to tell any 2-year-old anywhere in the world. we are born with a sense of fairness. we are born with deference to authorities. within those values whether your catholic or protestant, american or french.

come in with different categories that you have to be aware of negotiation of those fans. but values can change over time so is a complicated stew but those things are basically fundamental. i look at why country does well or why it doesn't it is fundamentally values, not natural resources. these are two crucial values. do you believe the future can be different from the present and that you can control your future? these are not universal. some places have and some place they don't. in the u.s. we have exaggerated sense of how much control we have but it is good to have that. of the polarization, our brains register very powerfully. someone in my group is punished and my brain react violently to that. is not my group being punished and being callous about that. had trouble major.

in washington we have tribalism on stilts. we took turns and communicated very well. the dictionary definition of a dysfunctional group, they don't communicate very well. the polarization that occurs in washington is caused by the media, mostly the psychological dynamics of tribalism. if good people are stuck in this system, icy primarily psychological and moral problems and less a fund-raising problem. >> one political party? >> we need parties that have conversations with each other. >> with her hand up on her right. >> in your column last sunday

you spoke about how we americans overestimate our capabilities in every field. i am wondering if that is an unhealthy thing or unrealistic, and how would you compare that to the opposite, we tiger mom? >> i told this to a group earlier tonight. listening to npr, a rebroadcast of an old radio show and the episode i heard was aired on v-j day and bing crosby was the host of the show and all the big stars were on. he got out and said we just won world war ii but i guess we're not proud. we're just glad we got through it. burgess meredith got out and read a passage from ernie powell war correspondent.

we won this war with great soldiers and great allies. we have blood in material abundance. we didn't win it because we are anything special. we should just be glad of the peace. that tone of humility was so striking on the day they won world war ii that i get home and turn on the tv and watch football and a quarterback tackled a wide receiver and does this victory dance for his great achievement and it occurred to me i have seen greater self puffery after a two yard game and then after world war ii. this is a change in culture of self-effacing and, no one is better than me and i'm nowhere better than anyone else to a culture of self celebration. the polling data used to support this, my favorite one is seniors in 1950, are you a very important person? 12% said yes.

in 2005 after get your very important person and it was 80%. that is just a change. if you look at our math scores, 36th in math performance that number one in thinking we are really good at math. that is the change. this expansion of self has led to a partnership because i know the answers to everything and anyone who disagrees with me is just in the way. it lead to the expansion of debt because why should i pay for future generations? i am here. i feel less connected to the broad change. if you look at societies that have done really well there ones who have least confidence in their own ability. i took a lesson from the research that you should have a slightly above average view of yourself. you should exaggerate yourself a little to make sure you try difficult for things that are

hard for you but we have taken it a bit to the extreme. one of the phrases that is the core of my political philosophy, study of what you know. modesty is modesty. we know little about ourselves and of the world and we should prepare ourselves at all times. >> i should say if you want a recipe for modesty, write a column every 22 weeks. you will think what was i thinking. >> quick question for you. i believe it is the question on everybody's mind. what do you believe -- can you name three things our current

president has done correctly and a dozen things he has not? >> three thin as he has done correctly. he is the best education president we have had. [applause] >> he was right to rescue gm. i could list more. there are some things i disagree with. i cover the president -- i speak to him periodically every day and several times a week and i would say within the white house and i disagree with him but in the white house there is a culture of debate. they try to find the right answers. they're very smart people. half of them are from harvard and half are from yale.

attacks during the harvard yale game were screwed watching the game. there is generally an honest intellectual culture. as for the failures the bridge will when we did health-care buyers thought we had two central tasks. the first was to cover thirty million uninsured people in the second to get our costs under control. we did one. i don't think we did the second. that is one thing i disagree with. he tried too much in the first two years and really pulled the rest of the country more than it needed to be. on a wish he would call members of the opposing parties, someone i'm friendly with his paul ryan from wisconsin. very smart chairman of the budget committee. i know the boat. they have wonderful conversations about the future budget which could lay the

groundwork but obama has never called and asked him, never had a conversation with him. they should at least talk. that is the nature of washington. he is very well equipped to change but hasn't really taken the measures. i could go on. >> four rose from the back. you have other people. further back? >> you spoke about how variables of success in an 18-month-old time period in an effort to close the achievement gap, education achievement gap would you be a proponent of mandatory early childhood education? >> i wouldn't want to make it

mandatory. it gives you political problems. i essentially think the relationship between a parent and child is better, happen especially in a day care center so i wouldn't want to force people to do it. nevertheless there should be much more funding for early childhood education. it should be a right of passage. we should do a lot better job organizing early childhood centers or head start centers so people are actually teachers rather than just people we need to give a job to. we should start earlier. we should start with nurse/family partnerships and businesses ownerses come into homes and give help on how to coach at interfirst year of life the average mother who is 700 hours of sleep interrupted every 20 seconds and on average and sees a decline in marital

satisfaction of 70%. it is tough. little babies are charming but invading your brain. it is a brutal fein. people need help and if you go to certain neighborhoods, babies locked into a car seat eight hour the day, coca-cola in the bottle, there are a thing where people need help and we should be more aggressive and you can stop because at an early age lot of the help fadeout and a lot of benefits like nutrition every day. got to have early childhood education and schools where teachers connect with kids and mentoring programs and they have got to go to college where they feel emotionally engaged. so they think about dropping out there is someone they can care about where they say i am dropping out so they are engaged in the campuses. there have to be concentrations of relationships. at would spend a lot more money on that and i am afraid in our

budget straits that the lobbyists with the big guns, the higher ed lobby and senior citizen lobby pretty pathetic lobbies. i am afraid that is very vulnerable in state after state. >> your predictions for 2012 pleaded we probably won't see you before then? >> i would write another book but it would kill me. i wouldn't bet against president obama. [applause] >> he has an amazing ability -- i have seen in the few times since the last election, amazing ability to sell kraft. he is a complicated person with many different personalities and the downside of that is he rarely commits all out. he is one step back observing.

he tends to look at himself and said what do i need to change? he does have the ability to adjust and he has political skills. i look at politicians like looking at pictures, has the best stuff and when i saw him in 2005 i thought he has the best stuff to be president someday and i wrote a column in 2006 on him urging him to run because i thought he had the best stuff. i wouldn't bet against him. i am not sure what he is going to run on. i don't think he can run the campaign he had last time, transformation will hope and change thing. can't do that over the last four years. can't run on health care or the stimulus package and his administration has been slow to come up with a new big agenda for what to do in the next four years in a country that is still concerned about national decline

and furious at the government for screwing things up. it will be a big challenge. on the republican side the person i would like to see get the nomination, i'm not supposed to root for one candidate or another but the governor of indiana, mitch daniels. he is 5 foot 6, note to the ground, in touch with the people. you have to be down there to see things. i think he has been an extremely effective governor at a time when state budgets have ballooned and that is up 40%. state after state. in indiana the debt has gone down 40%. at the same time a lot of programs have been improved. even wait times at the department of motor vehicles, 60 minutes to eight minutes. i am impressed by that. it has been an effective government. they would do well to counter programming against disgraceful, elegant and brilliant democrat with a guy who may not be

charismatic but knows how to run things. the other two serious candidates are bit from the end tim valenti. imus in everett with others. he was a good governor but didn't have the excellent of management that i saw with daniels. they would be fine. i would like to see -- the republicans have two problems. the first is to their credit, and obama's deficit, they are saying we have to tackle -- that is a courageous step. a country once more government than it wants to pay for. someone has to call from on that. tackling entitlements is the right thing to do. we have to adjust benefit levels. they politically don't know how to sell it and i don't think the republicans understand not only do we have a recession but we have structural problems in the economy which i hear from the middle-class decade upon decade. i don't think there's a

republican answer to that program. a face challenges. i wouldn't bet against obama. we will eventually get to have the fight we need to have. here is the money, here is the national wealth, here is our debt. how do we figure something out? i will love to think that we are going to have that really serious debate. to end on a pessimistic note i don't think we are going to have that debate. thank you very much. [applause] >> this weekend on booktv on c-span2, panels on science. american history, climate change and the constitution and call ins with walter mosley. just a few of the highlights from live coverage of the los angeles times festival of books.

get the entire schedule online at booktv.org and get our schedules and to your in box. sign up for booktv alert its. >> how would time travel intersect with these ideas? i will simply say this. one of the big puzzles with time travel is you go back in time and affect things in a way that prevents your own existence. kill your parents before you were born and a logical paradox. we saw this in back to the future. hollywood loves this idea. variation on the paradox which comes from the following idea. imagine you travel to the future. imagine i travel to the future and i want to see what happened in string theory, it has been proven or not or go to the library or the floating internet stagehands surprisingly low theory has made a major advance

and the author of that paper is my mom. that is weird because she doesn't like physics. not this kind of doctor. all this sort of stuff. i look in the economic moves to the paper and she thanked me for teaching her all this physics. i'd better get back. i got a lot of work to do. so i use the little machine and travel back and tutored my mother and it is not going well. she is not getting it. year or two goes by. how is she ever going to write that paper? then i say to myself i know what is in that paper. i read it. just tell her what to write. i tell her what to write and she writes the paper and everything turns out as i -- who gets the credit? it is not a question of credit so much as where did the information come from? did she think of it? she thought of it -- she got it

from me. i got it from her paper. ideas just pop in from thin air. what about multiple universes? here's this sensible idea that people floated. imagine when you travel to the past for instance you never come back to your own universe. you come back to a quantum multi first. other copies of our universe. if i go back in time and kill my parents before i am bored i wouldn't be born in that universe but so what? might origin would not be affected because my parents would be an effective. it is a little far afield but some interaction with time travel. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> booktv is on twitter. follow as for regular updates on our programm