public sphere because the president's personal ratings are much higher than his rating on to the handling of the economy. one of the things his advisers are arresting 20 taliban is the appeal of the obama union. in the obama's have learned how to go out there together in public and do this kind of public foothold performance together that has on texas city. you saw it the meeting of the white house that is designed to earn votes. i don't know that i can answer it definitively for them, you know, that you're asking exactly the right question, which is coming up, can some day be shared with the world so totally, and used for political gain and then can he take it back and make it private -- entirely private again?

.. >> i'm not sure that's the attitude they have taken, but it's one they should take. it's a complicated portrayal of the obama and their marriage. >> let's go to the floor, and if anybody wants to come up, there's two mics in the aisles. >> hi. how are you?

>> hi, i'm great. >> a quick question. what do you think michelle will allow president obama to do after the presidency? >> great question and that's a source of suspense because quality has been a real issue in the obama marriage. the best question i've ever asked either of them is in the oval office, and my colleague helped me write the question that said how's it possible to have an equal marriage with one person's president. you can go read the answer in the "new york times" magazine, but the president couldn't answer the question, and he ended up saying, actually, my adviser's care more about what michelle thinks than about what i think so, you know, i think that there is a real question -- especially since, you know, this is the clinton history too; right? that bill clinton after the

presidency decided that it was sort of hillary clinton's turn. i don't think michelle will run for public office, and if she does, i'll eat every page of this book, but i do wonder what the next step is in the future. >> in the bush administration, senior staff was with the two bushes at a state visit, and george w. bush was bored and wanted to sneak around to check out the palace. [laughter] he said to this guy, let's go, let's get out of here to sneak around. laura said, don't you dare move. do i obey the president or first lady, and he said-not even close. he stayed there. [laughter] >> i wondered if you could talk more about the relationship with rahm and how that affected the

presidency and now starting on the third chief of staff, has the inability to find a chief of staff that he can really relate to affected his ability to accomplish things. >> glad you asked in part because i think david, you know, probably has his own honest opinion on the issue, and we have not talked about it, but it would be interesting to contrast it. what i would say is that the partnership with emanuel was strategic from the beginning, no pretense these men were exactly alike with the same philosophy, but the president had an ambitious an -- agenda and chose emanuel in order to pass it. the first couple of months of the presidency -- maybe nine months of the presidency when the legislation is really moving ahead, you know, it worked pretty well. there's managerial problems, but

he can be quite abusive, and that has a real effect in the white house. a lot of white house aids told me there were things they just continue come to him on because they were worried he'd blow up on them so it had an effect on him as a manager. there was not a clear management structure where everybody reported exactly to him and then upwards, but the real stress comes around the time that scott brown wins that seat because even though they squeaked health care through, some of the presidency becomes last of like the forward legislative drive, and it becomes something else, and at the same time, the midterm elections are coming up, and that puts tremendous stress on the relationship because emanuel had been the chair of the daccc and, you know, his recognition before he was chief of staff was getting democrats

in congress, especially in these really competitive districts and keeping these people in congress, and yet, you know, in the presidency, you kind of have a different agenda. you have to make members of congress take really hard votes, so, for example, i mentioned immigration as a sore subject. one of the sore subjects between them is the president really wanted to push for immigration reform even though there was no legislation on the table, and that was a really big problem for emanuel in the summer of 2010 because he was acutely feeling these vulnerable cracks, you know, especially in border states, and so the relationship did eventually become quite complicated and strained. i mean david, you know, even by the summer of 2010 felt that rahm should leave. interestingly, once he ran for mayor of chicago, the

relationship improved. it was like the burdens and strains of the relationship lifted somewhat. >> i would just add the long national nightmare of having a non-jewish chief of staff is over. [laughter] several times, several months going back. [laughter] >> given the setting, i'll start with a confession. i have not read your book yet. >> we're thrilled to have you here. >> they are for sale. [laughter] >> i'd like to comment on something i read or heard and that is you did not interview president obama or michelle? >> yes, for -- >> is that true? >> oh, well, yeah, absolutely. i interviewed them a bunch of times over the course of writing about them, and i had a big interview with them in 2009, and when i started this project, you know, i was clear with my publisher that, you know, i didn't know exactly how much access we were going to get, and i pushed for interviews throughout, and they eventually

said no, but, you know, what i really found in the reporting is that their friends and aids were able to tell all kinds of stories that presidents and first ladies just don't tell. i mean, if you saw the way mrs. obama gives interviews, and yesterday was an exception. usually it's a limited interview on a subject like child obesity for like 20 minutes at time, ect., ect., and one thing i feel -- i basically write profiles for a living for the time, and one thing i believe in very strongly is that you can't have -- [inaudible] you can't let whether or not somebody will talk to you, govern whether or not you're going to write about them because none of these leaders really want to talk to journalists that much anymore. fewer and fewer of them give interviews, and they are giving -- they are giving interviews that are less and less in depth than they used to

be, so you can't let the question of whether or not somebody will sit down with you for 20 minutes control the entire story. >> i know you touched on this earlier about how you were surprised about the white house reaction, and, you know, i saw you on the "today" show, and they didn't really dispute any of the facts, but since then they have, you know, especially with the halloween party that they didn't try to cover it up, and that, you know, they point to all the media coverage of the party and whatnot. what's your response to that? >> so the halloween party situation is this in that the "washington post" did a great story about this a day or two ago that was entirely correct. just to give everybody the context, this was in the fall of 2009. it was the first halloween in the white house, and so there

was an outside component to the party that was pretty public. it was a lot of washington area school kids who were trick or treating and the president and first lady were there and there was a reporter. the thing they kept quiet is the party inside the white house, and it was a flashy party with tim burton and johnny depp there doing the "alice in wander lant -- wonderland thing, and it was distorted because papers made it sound like it was for kids, and they were trying to do a nice thing and the kids invited were kids of people serving in the military, but the white house was very nervous about anything seen as too hollywood and too flashy, and so they kept the inside of the party very quiet. they didn't distribute photos. they didn't acknowledge burton

and depp's contributions. >> but i think i read a white house blog where they called it like gossip in wanderland -- it was a spokesperson -- >> they respond in part -- like the new york post went for this story for days and days and days and actually published over the top pictures of the president dressed as the mad hatter. now, i don't want to speak for the white house, but remember that that's -- they're focusing, you know, as much on that, i think, or more than they are on what's in my book. >> it's more of a reaction to the media -- >> yeah, i mean, that's -- that's what dave said and what people have told me that they're worried a couple of white house people told me they are less worried about my book itself than, you know, sort of nationalized coverage that i

described accurately. >> thank you. >> sure. >> sure. time for three more. one here. >> okay, great. >> so -- hi -- >> hi. >> you spoke about kind of the transformation that obama made to kind of accepting the political side of things a little more and operating in that style more, which is kind of at the same moment that his lightive agenda kind of stalled because of the, you know, scott brown and the midterm elections and everything else. if -- do you see, you know, this continued transformation continuing to happen and, you know, on the political side of thing, do you think that that can contribute to him maybe being more effective publicly? i mean, he's been seen as being kind of weak compared to the congress, so do you think that

that can -- that transformation can happen? >> i think you're asking the right question because i think a very big question i have about this president is how creative his conception of presidential power is; right? we know what literal presidential power is, and he's lost some of that, both because of legislative and economic circumstances, and so part of his challenge is to come up with a more expansive and creative and flexible sense of presidential power, and that's part of why i -- this was a sort of unexpected contrast, i think, that started developing in the first interview with the first lady because the first lady doesn't have any official power, and so she has to be extremely creative in a way of establishing influence over the

public for herself. i can't answer for you how he's going to do that, but i think you're asking the right question. >> hi. with this transformation that you're talking about from being very personal and authentic to being more political as a person and as a politician, do you think that voters, as they are today, are going to be turned on by that ability to kind of take control or the seeming eighty to take control and make change, or is it going to sort of alienate the young and maybe able voters that really came to the forefront in his first time around? >> well, good question because -- like, i remember you wrote a column around the spring of 2010 when he was becoming much more overtly political, and i can't remember specific examples you said, but i remember the st. patrick's day

thing where he met with john boehner, and he went over to capitol hill for the st. patrick's day luncheon and he called this jolly story about how, you know, we wrestle over issues in the day, but at night we're friends, and i was like, woah, like, i've been covering this guy for a long time, and it just kind of doesn't sound like him, and so i think part of what you have to do is find a way to satisfy the political requirements, but in a way it's authentic in like you say appeals to the people who found him to be an original and unique voice in american political life. >> thank you, both, for coming. i feel like everyone is almost kind of asking the question i wanted to ask, so i hope it's not repeating, but i also wanted

to ask about obama's political instincts because my impression of him in reading about him is he's even intellectual like a law professor and how he approaches policy issues, and i was wondering -- and you also see stories in the news about questioning what is the obama legislation looking for in common threads policy-wise, and so i was wondering if you could just talk about how he -- how he approaches policy issues and particularly with his relationship with very politicized aids like emanuel who might be looking to the political effect. >> well, the thing i really saw in the story about immigration reform is about how frustrating the kind of irrationality of politics can be for him because, like, if you -- so, you know, the story in the book is that he wants to give immigration reform

a push around june 2010. he gives a speech in july, and emanuel thinks it's a terrible idea for the reason i mentioned, but he really wants it to happen, and, you know, i've seen this not only with a series of problems for him, but there's a series of problems in the world that have very rational solutions on the table, but those things are not -- the solutions are not happening for political reasons. like immigration reform. there's been a consensus in the country for what? pretty much ten years for a basically reasonable solution would be to fixing our immigration system. basically revamp the system so it's more fair and you do better enforcement, but ask to have people have a legal way in, and republicans agreed on that in the past as well, but it's not happening for political reasons,

and another example that's totally different is the israeli palestinian conflict because in the same way, there's been a road map for peace in the conflict on the table for ten years now, and maybe the border goes here and maybe the border goes here, but everybody basically knows; right, you know, what a potential deal looks like, and yet it's not happening and can't for political reasons, and r and, you know, talking to white house aids and watching the president talk about that on tv, i think it's really hard for him because he's such an analytical person that he's the solution to the problems and it's no mystery, and yet somehow we can't make it happen. >> okay, thank you, jodi, the book is "the obamas," and the author is jodi kantor.

>> and thank you, dave, for -- [applause] >> folks, thank you -- if you want to get your book signed, we'll line up on the far hallway, my right, your left. books are for sale in the front of the store in the lobby, and jodi's book, and we have copy of david's book as well. thank you for joining us. have a great evening. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> you can see this event again this weekend on booktv, saturday at 11 p.m. eastern and sunday at 7:30 p.m. eastern and any time at booktv.org.

>> believe it or not, and i know most people do not, violence has been in decline for a long period of time, and we, today, are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. the decline to violence has not been steady, has not brought it down to zero, and it's not guaranteed to continue. nonetheless, it's a per sis tent historical development new on scales from my len ya to years, wars and jen sides, to the spanking of children and treatment of animals. this evening, i'm going to discuss six major historical declines of violence, their immediate causes in terms of political historical events of

the era that a historian would single out, but also the ultimate causes in terms of general historical forces interacting with human nature. the first major decline i call the passification process. until 5,000 years ago, humans lived in anarchy without central government. what was life like in this state of nature? this is a question on which people have had opinions for many centuries. thomas hobbs in 1561 said in a state of nature the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. years later, another countered that in the state of nature nothing can be more gentle than man in his primitive state. both of the mens spoke from the armed chair and neither knew

about what life was like in the state of nature, and today we can do better. there's way to measure death rates in non-state societiesment one is forensic archaeology, a csi method. basically, what proportion of skeletons have trauma like bashed in skulls, decapitated skeletons, arrow heads embedded, fractures on bones -- the fracture you get when you hold up your arm to ward off a blow, and mummies found with ropes on your neck. this space doesn't accommodate visual, but i have a graph of 20 prehistoric archaeological sites in which they are trying to find skeletons with signs of violent trauma ranging from 0% to 60%

with the average of 15%. let's compare that 15% figure with those of some state societies. for example, the united states and europe in the 20th century, the comparable rate of death was about 1%. if we try to get the worst possible figure by throwing in all the war deaths, the death from father and famines, all the death is 23%. the figure for the world in 2005 for the most recent decade on the graph is invisible because it's far less than a pixel. it's about three tenths of one tenth of 1%. the second way of estimating the rate of violence death in non-state societies is by examining vital statistics. that is, what percentage of

people living in recent nonstate societies, tribal societies, die at the hands of their fellow humans? again, the graph i would display, the graph ranges from -- here i spotted them in the criminology scale of violent deaths per 100,000 people a year, and the death rates range from 0 to 1500, but the average is about 500 deaths per hundred thousand people a year, that is one-half of one percent. again, let's compare that a bit more than 500 with the corresponding figure for states, and, again, we'll stack the deck against states by choosing thee

most violence state in the most violent era in the history like germany in the 20th century, the two world wars, the figure is 150, a similar figure to what we have for russia in the 0th century, which had two world wars, a revolution, and a civil war. japan in the 20th century was closer to 60. the united states in the 20th century was less than 3, and the world in the 20th century is about a third of a death per hundred thousand a year. that's the world in the first decade of the 21st century. the world in the 20th century throwing in all of the world wars, jen no sideses and manmade famines is 60 to a year. what was the immediate cause of this change in rate of violence

death? it's the rise and expansion of states. students of history are familiar with those who are posed by an empire, the -- and when a state imposes control over a territory, it tends to try to stamp out tribal rating and feuding. it's not because this comes from a benevolent interest in the welfare of the subject people, but rather all of this raiding and feuding is a nuance to the over lords because they just settle scores around them and there's a net loss to the lords who just would rather keep the people alive to tax them and just as a farmer has an interest in preventing his cattle from killing each other because it's just a dead loss to him, so

emperor or war lord will try to keep the subject people from killing each other at a loss to himself. second historical transition in violent is called the civilizing process referring to the transition between life in the middle ages, and i have a lovely wood cut here of cutting and stabbing and daggers through peasants and the early modern period. in parts of europe, homicide statistics go back hundreds of years to the 13th and 14th century. if you plot statistics over time over the centuries, you find they plummet from an average rate of 35 per 100,000 a year to the contemporary european rate of one per hundred thousand a year, a decline by a factor of

35. this is one of many graphs that i'm going to ask you to imagine, which consistents of a jagged line that meanders top left of the graph when statistics were kept for the violence and goes to the bottom right of the graft representing the era we're now living which is true for homicide in europe. the immediate cause of the european homicide decline was identified by the german sociologist in the book called "the civilizing process" and namely from the transition of the middle ages to moo dearnty, there's a states and kingdoms with principalities and thieves. as a result, criminal justice was nationalized, and a life of

feuding war lords, called knights, but then war lords, were replaced by the king's justice where a genius had the idea instead of the family of a victim collecting blood money from the family of a killer, if it was the state that collected that money, it would be a constant revenue stream. [laughter] in fact, the king sent a representative to every town to tally the number of homicides so the king could collect compensation from the family of the perpetrator. this agent of the crown was called the corn nor which is why we still call the official who assesses causes of death the coroner. aside from the transition of states, the moo dearnty saw a growing infrastructure of commerce. institutions like money and finance and contracts that could be enforced and recognized

within the boundaries of the newly consolidated states and technologies that lubricated trade such as transportation, better roads, better bridles for horses, instruments of time keeping, and other technologies. the result was that zero-sum plunder where the plunders' gain was the victims' loss was increasingly replaced by positive-sum trade where both parties to a voluntary exchange can benefit. the third major transition can be illustrated by methods that the early states used to impose on their kingdoms and breaking the wheel where the victim was tied to a wagon wheel and the executioner smashed arms and legs with a sledge hammer at which the victim was hoisted on the wagon wheel left to die of

exposure and shock. burning at the stake, sawing in half from the crotch up, impalement through the rectum, and iron hooks. in a narrow slice of time centered in the 18 #th century, torture as a form of punishment was abolished by every major country including the united states in the famous amendment of the cruel punishment, part of a global movement to abolish torture. the 18th century also saw the abolition of other institutionalized forms of violence that we now consider barbaric like the death penalty and england had 22 capital offenses on the book in the 18th

century like poaching, counterfeiting, being in the company of gypsies, and strong evidence of mall las in a child in 7-14 years of age. this was not just theoretical, but was carried out with relish. samuel johnson talked about a 7-year-old girl being hanged for steeling 5 petticoat. the list of crimes was down to four in 1791, basically a high treason murder and other variations. there was an enormous list of crimes in the colonial and independent period. there's a graph of american executions for crimes other than murder, and it meanders from close to 100% in the colonial period down to pretty much zero. it's the only crimes against people that are punishable by

execution other than murder are conspiracy to commit murder. the death penalty itself was on death row starting in the 18th century, and it began a gradual wave of abolitions of capital punishment, nowadays, the united states is the only western democracy that even has the death penalty and even then only in two-thirds of the states, and even to say that the united states has the death penalty is a fiction. if you look at the number of american executions today, proportion of the population, it has been plunging, and so now the graph hugs the floor, and nowadays about 50 people are executed every year in a country that has close to 17,000 homicides, so even here in a back water of deet penalty abolitions, the death penalty is a shadow of its former self-.

others in the humanitarian revolution include witch hunts, religious persecution, dualing, blood sports, debtors' prisons, and, of course, slavery where the end of the 18th century saw the beginning of a wave of abolitions of slavery, and the united states, again, a bit behind the curve, not until the 1860s, but today slive ri is not legal anywhere in the world, and it used to be that slavery was legal everywhere in the world, and, indeed, endorsed as part of the natural order of things by the ancient greeks, by the bible, and just about by everyone else. what would the immediate causes of the humanitarian revolution? i looked at a number of candidate, and the most plausible in terms of something that happened before the humanitarian revolution was advances in printing and literacy.

printing was the only industry that showed an increase in productivity prior to the industrial revolution in the 19th century and the cost of printing a book plinged in the 16th and 17th centuries. the result was an exponential increase in the number of books that were published in european countries, and there were more people who could read them in the 18th century and for the first time people were literal. why does that matter? causes that we abbreviate the term the enlightenment. knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance. those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. as your society becomes smart enough to debunc hogwash like jews poisen wells, witches cause

crop failure, children are possessed, africans are brutish, and so on, it's bound to create violence. also, literacy can be part of a general current cosmopolitan and ships that allow the easy movement of mixing of people, and it is plausible as people spend more of their life reading fiction and history and jowrnism, they start to see the world from other people's point of view, and therefore, developing more empathy and less cruelty. if you try to imagine what it's like to be some other person, maybe you're a little less likely to enjoy seeing them disemanuel bowled. [laughter] --

disimbowled. it's a development that borrowing from the political scientist i call the long piece, and it speaks to the common conception that the 20th century was the most violence in history. interestingly, people who repeat that claim never back it up with numbers, and it's highly likely that claim is fallacious. it is true that the second world war was thee deadliest event in human history in terms of the number of people killed. on the other hand, the world had a whole lot more people in the 20th century than it had in past centuries, and we record and care about war deaths more in the 20th century than those who did in previous centuries. if you try to estimate the death tolls from atrocities in past

centuries and you scale them by the size of the world's population at the time, it's not so clear that the 20 #th century was the worst. i've taken figures from several atroughs -- ring atrostologist and he has a book listing horrible things people do, and what happens is world war ii comes in in 9th place, and world war i doesn't make the top ten. atrocities like the african slave trade, annihilation of native americans, and basically every time a dynasty fell in china there could be tens of millions of people killed, and if you look at the worst

atrocities, they pretty much form a cloud. if you zoom in on the last 500 years and rather than just plot atrocity, we can add them up for the centuries, the political scientists jack lee has done that for a particular category of mass violence, namely, great power wars. wars that embroil the 800 pound gorillas of the day, the largest states, and those who do far more damage when they get into a war more than the little wars combined. if you plot the number of years between 1500 and 2000 in which the great powers of the day fought each other, you see a curve in which for the early centuries, the great powers were pretty much always at war. there are many points on the conserve that hit 100% of the

years in a quarter century. now the great powers are virtually never at war. the last great power war was the korean war that ended in 1953. if you plot the duration of wars involving a great power on at least one side, the duration goes down, we used to have things like the 30 years war, the 80 years war, the 100 years war, and in the 20th century, we had the six day war. if you plot the frequency of wars involving a great power, that is how many new wars are started every year, and again, there's a curve working its way downward from 1500 to the present; however, there's one curve going in the opposite direction. 23 you look for most -- if you look for most history, if you plot the deadliness of wars involving a great power, that is not how many wars that are started, but how many people are killed once a war begins, that goes in the other direction. that goes upward.

that is nations got better and better at killing larger and larger numbers of soldiers until 19 # 45 does an abrupt u-turn, and since then, wars have been both less numerous and less deadly per nation year of war. if you then combine these two figures, you combine the numbers of wars by the deadliness of each war, you get a curve, but the crucial point is the last point on the curve represent k the last -- representing the last 25 # years, and the last 50 years hit all time lows over the last 500 years. this is called the long piece. namely that the last two-thirds of the century, since 1945, there's been historically unprecedented decline in

interstate wars, wars between countries. to be exact, and here's some statistics easy to convey. they don't need a graph because they all consist of the number 0. there were no wars between the soviet union and the united states, which may sound unexceptionable today, but every expert predicted world war iii was inevitable. they grew up with the experts assuring us it was just a matter of time before the u.s. and ussr duked it out. now nuclear weapons have been used and as i mentioned, there's no wars between great powers since 1915, probably the longest span of time without a great power war. there's no wars between western european countries. again, your first reaction might be to say, well, ho, hum, of

course that happened nobody expects france and germany to go to war. what a concept. [laughter] or sweden and russia. of course, any student of european history knows this was the rule, not the exception until the precipitous decline of interstate war after 1945. there's been no wars between developed countries. that is the 45 or so countries with the highest gdp per capita. what about the rest of the world? well, there is a fifth major decline of violence i call the new piece that refers to the rest of the world, so what happens -- what happened if we set aside the great powers, the european countries, the rich countries, what was the rest of the world doing? well, there was a decline in the number of interstate wars where one country declares against another. however, there's been a huge

increase in civil wars. it mainly exploding starting in the 1960s when newly independent states where governments were challenged by insurgent movements, and both sides were armed and financed and egged on by the cold war superpowers. however, since 1991, even the number of civil wars has declined with the end of the cold war, and when -- if the number of interstate wars went down, the number of civil wars went up, which killed more people? the answer is very clear. interstate wars kill far more people, or at least they have since the late 1940s. there's nothing like a pair of great powers chucking artillery shells, bombs cities, sending tanks to do battle to rack up high body counts in a hurry. in comparison, some teenagers

armed with ak-47s make life miserable in the area in which they work, but they don't do the same amount of widespread damage. again, i have a graph showing the deadliness of interstate and civil wars over the last 55 years. the number of deaths in interstate war per year of war has plummeted for civil wars, it just is a slight increase followed by a dxz. if you add up deaths from all sorts of war, that is interstate and civil wars, there's a bumpy decline for peaks with the korean war, the vietnam war, the iran-iraq war, but in the last ten years, the figures hug the floor. they are basically bearing a little strike, just can't see the picture that i'll describe in numbers, but during the worst years of world war ii, the death

rate from war was about 300 per 100,000 a year. during the late 1940s and early 1950s, it fell to about 22 per 100,000 a year. in the last -- this past decade, it's been at one-third of a death per hundred thousands people a year. using a constant yardstick of battle deaths, and this is the phenomena. it wiewb a bit -- it would be a bit of an exaggeration to say the dream of the 1960s folk singers is welcome coming true, and that is the world is almost putting an end to war. what's the immediate causes of the long peace and the new peace? well, one intellectual hypothesis came from one in 1795 in his essay "perpetwall peace"

proposing democracy, interstate trade, and an international community would drive down the likelihood of war. lately, a pair of political scientists have tested this hypothesis by measuring these factors showing first of all that all of them have increased in the second half of the 20th century, and all of them are statistic predictors of peace. the number of democracies exceeded hi toke sighs around 1990, and the amount of international trade skyrocketed after the end of the second world war, and the membership in intergovernmental organizations steadily increased throughout the 20th century, and especially since 1990 there's been a huge increase in the number of international peacekeepers, soldiers with blue he he --

helmets and don't always reignite hostilities, but do more often with no peacekeepers. finally, the sixth historical decline is the right's revolution referring to the targeting of violence on smaller scales against minorities like racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. during the post-war period, the civil war -- the civil rights movement put an end to lynchings which used to take place at a rate of 150 per year. that went down by the 1950s to zero a year. hate crime murders of blacks have been in the single digits since they were first recorded and have since then plunged to about one per year. nonlethal hate crimes against blacks like intimidation and

assault since declined, and the attitudes that in the past would license births of violence like genecides have been in steady decline. if you ask would you move that if a black family moved in next door? do you think the income gap between blacks and whites is due to lower ability or lower productivity? many have fallen so low, the pollsters dropped them from the surveys. the women's rights movements saw an 80% decline in rape since the early 1970s when the stats were first kept. also a precipitous ce cline in -- decline in domestic violence.

namely the killing of wives and husband, although here, i must add the decline has been far steeper for wives killing husbands than husbands killing wives. the women's movement has been very, very good for men. [laughter] the chirp's rights movement has seen a steady decline in the number of american states with corporal punishment or paddling, and a decline in every western country in the agreement of spanking, a decline in physical abuse and sexual abuse of children since stats were first kept, and a decline in school like fighting and notary public-fatal crimes. the gay rights movement has seen an increase in the number of states that have decriminalized homosexuality, both states worldwide and american states. a decline in anti-gay attitudes like whether homosexuality is morally wrong, should be made

illegal, or whether gay people should be denied equal opportunity, and a decline in anti-gay hate crimes. the animal rights movement has seen a decline in hunting, a rise in vegetarianism, and a decline in the percentage of motion pictures in which animals were harmed. [laughter] well, all of this raises a question. why have all of these graphs meandered downward over the course of history? why have there been so many different declines of violence on different scales of magnitude and time? one possibility is human nature changed and somehow people lost inclinations towards violence. i consider this an unlikely explanation. [laughter] for one thing, toddlers continue to hit, kick, and bite. little boys continue to play fight. grown up boys and many girls enjoy various forms of vicarious violence like murder mysteries,

tragedies, video games, ice hockey -- [laughter] and movies starring a certain ex-governor of california -- [laughter] and a number of social psychologists assessed the prevalence of homicidal fantasies and asked people the question have you ever faint sized about killing someone you don't like? well, it turns out about 15% of women and a third of men frequently fantasize about killing people they don't like. [laughter] more than 60% of women and three quarters of men at least occasionally about killing people they don't like, and the rest of them are lying. [laughter] a more likely possibility is that human nature is extraordinary complex compromises both inclinations towards violence and inclinations that counteract them, what was called the better angels of our nature, to which i

took the title from my own book, and historical circumstances increasingly favored our peaceable inclinations, our better angels. well, what are these forces in conflict? fighting it out inside the skull? i think that violence is not a single psychological category. we have a number of psychologically and even neurobilogically very distinct motives that result in violence. there's sheer exploitation, the use of violence as a means to an end when some living thing is an on the -- obstacle in the wayth path of something you want. very different from that is the quest for dominance, the drive for individuals to climb the pecking order and be alpha male and the drive among groups for ethnic, racial, national

supremacy. the very large category of revenge and moral violence which is in rough justice and cruel punishments, and perhaps the biggest category are consistent of violence pursued in quest of an ideology such as militant religions, nationalism, fascism, naziism, and communism because there's a cost benefit analysis. if your ideology holds out the prospect of a future world that is infinitely good forever, well, what are you entitled to do in order to attain that world? well, you can commit just as much violence as you want, and you're still making the world a better place by this cost benefit analysis. also, imagine that you have been

a faith to which there's a utopia of which you can strive, and there's some people who hear of this utopia, but they just stubbornly reject it. well, how evil are they? well, you do the math. arbitrarily evil, and that's why the tails of the distribution of massive violence tend to be pushed outward by utopian ideologies. well, what do we have on the other side to counteragent the motives for violence? what's the better angels? there's self-control, the ability to anticipate the consequences of our behavior and inhibit violence impulses. there's empathy, the ability to feel others' pain. there's the moral sense, which is a family of intuitions, some of which, like tribalism, authoritarianism, and puritanism can increase violence, but at least one flairve of --

flavor of the moral sense, the drive of fairness is counteract violence, and then there's reason, the cognitive faculty allowing us to engage in analysis. if we have then these inclinations towards violence on the one hand, the against viebles on the other, what's brought out the better angels throughout history? the first possibility was proposed in the book, and it referred to a state and judicial system with a monopoly on the use of violence can eliminate the incentives for exploited attack by pun european european -- punishing it, and reduce the need for vengeance, circumvent the biases in which both sides in dispute always believe they're on the side of the angels and that the other side

is wicked or stupid, stubborn, or all three. people we know in social psychology research say the adversary's benevolence and exaggerate their own innocence that can start cycles of revenge unless there's an objectionable third party who decides. the force consists the first two transitions that i talked about, the passifying and civilizing of states and we can watch movies in reverse where violence can re-erupt bike -- like the wild west, in failed states, collapsed empire, and mafia and street gangs dealing in contraband and cannot settle the disputes using the state,

file a lawsuit, or dial 9-1-1, because of the nature of the work they do, and so they use rough justice resulting in the vendettas. other evidence at the international scale includes the effectiveness of international peacekeepers. the second historical force that draws out our better angels, i suggest, is gentle commerce, the idea that plunder is a zero-sum game, but trade is a positive-sum game in which everybody can win. over the course of history, as technology improves and allows the trade of goods and ideas over longer distances, among larger groups people at lower cost, more and more humanity becomes more able to alive rather than dead. there's not a lot of affection between the united states and

china these days, but it's not terribly likely they'll go to war. among other things, they make too much of our stuff, and we owe them too much money. .. unfortunately, by default we quiet only to a narrow circle of friends and family that over the course of history you can see these circle of empathy expanding to embrace not just the family, but the village and

the klan, the tribes in the nation and then extended to other races, to both sexes, two children and eventually to other beings, other species. this begs the question of what expanded the circle and as i hinted earlier, technologies that increase cosmopolitanism may have that effect. the growing appreciation of history, literature, media, journalism, growing opportunities for travel and we we know from the social psychology laboratory that if you get a person to adopt a perspective of some other real or fictitious person, they are more sympathetic to that person and they are more sympathetic to the category of people that individual represents. historical evidence includes the fact that in the 17th and 18th century, there was an expansion of literacy and travel, the so-called republic of letters which preceded the

humanitarian revolution. it may not be a coincidence that the second half of the 20th century, which had their race revolution was also the era of the electronic global village and it's often been speculated that the rise of internet and social media has assisted the color revolutions and the arab spring. the final historical force i called the escalator of reason. the possibility that the growth of literacy, education and public discourse has encourage people to think more abstractly and more universally. they get into the habit of rising above their parochial vantage point, which makes it harder to privilege her own interests over the interests of others. it in courage is you to replace a morality based on tribalism, authority and puritanism with a morality based on fairness and universal rules. it encourages people to recognize the futility of cycles

of violence and increasingly to see violence as a problem to be solved rather than as a contest to be one. what is the evidence? well, one intriguing piece of evidence is that abstract reasoning abilities as measured by iq tests, believe it or not come increased over the course of the 20th century. throughout the 20th century and all over the world iq increased by about three points a decade, the so-called flinty effects. how could this have affected violence? other studies have shown that people and societies with higher levels of education and a measured intelligence holding all else equal, commit fewer violent crimes on average, cooperate more in experimental games, have more classically liberal attitudes such as opposition to racism and sexism, and are more receptive to democracy. why have i ended up with this

list of four very different, seemingly different forces? why are they'll pushing the same direction towards less violence? the closest i think we can come to an overarching theory is that violence is what game theorists call a social dilemma. that is, it's always it tempting to an aggressor to engage in predatory or exploited violence but on the other hand it is quite ruinous to the victim. in the long run all parties are better off if violence is avoided and our dilemma as humans, our pickle, is how to get the other guy to refrain from violence at the same time as you do. if you are the only one tube beat your source into plowshares then you are a sitting duck for invasion by the bad guys. one can see these forces as cases in which human experience and human ingenuity gradually solves this problem, just like

other scourges of nature like petulance and hunger that we have dealt with, and that all of these forces have increased the material emotional and cognitive incentives of all parties to avoid violence simultaneously. regardless of the correct explanations for violence, think its implications for understanding the human condition are profound. for one thing, they call for a reorientation of efforts toward violence reduction from a moralistic mindset to an empirical mindset. instead of asking, why is there were? you might be better off asking, why is there peace? instead of, what are we doing wrong? you might ask, what if we been doing right? because we have been doing something right and it sure would be good to find out exactly what it is. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you very much, stephen

pinker. this was a fantastic presentation. already people are lining up for the questions. i am going to ask again, i know i'm never successful but i'm going to still keep trying. i would like you to keep your questions really brief, and so everyone gets a chance and steve and i would like to keep your answers brief. [laughter] so it works both ways, and if you are comfortable, please say your name. >> i am dr. caroline poppel is. my question is germany. it was the most cosmopolitan, the most highly educated, society arguably in europe, and they did the most horrible crime. >> well, it's a little misleading to say it is there were sectors of germany that

indeed were cosmopolitan and educated. there were also sectors of germany that were more tribal in their mindset, deeply anti-semitic. even among the german elite, there was a widespread rejection which was dismissed as that french business and rather than an acceptance of the idea of universal rights and an emphasis on being flourishing individuals there was a lot of primitive blood and soul -- soil by tribalism and granted you are certainly right, there was a flourishing of cosmopolitan sentiment in some sectors of the german population. the problem is, they were all murdered. so the general answer is that, when it comes to an entire society, it's important to see how dynamics can lead to competition among the various sectors and it's only if you

have a robust democracy, which the cosmopolitan people are not murdered, that it can affect society as a whole. >> first i commented then a question. i think they -- was the great spanish filmmaker and perhaps the cleverest of all. as he was dying he said in his autobiography, if only in 10 years i could get up out of the grave and get a newspaper and keep in touch with what is going on in the world. your presentation, in terms of overt violence, is extraordinarily impressive. on the other hand, there is a containment in one sense in the proliferation of violent games starting with kids as young as two and three and a tremendous compulsive preoccupation with

violence in all the media, in football and so forth. i would call it a kind of externalization, not a sublimation. but contained, and part of it i think is, freud spoke of the pervasive violence and its aggressive drive. and you can kind of identify with people who are suffering and say thank god it isn't me. but even more important, murder mysteries. i can fantasize that i have done this murder, but somebody else is going to be discovered and i can go conscience free. >> i agree that pleasure taken in violent entertainment is a great constant of human experience. i don't believe that violent entertainment causes violence.

the huge expansion of violent video games has been accompanied by the great american crime declined in the early 1990s. i'm also not convinced by a hydraulic model that if you get your violent urges out through violent entertainment you are less likely to commit it in real life. i think that it's a guilty pleasure that people of all eras have had. if you look at titus andronicus, if you look at the dreadful's, the old testament, you look at the lives of the saints, there is a lot of really gruesome stuff in there. people enjoy for interesting reasons i think including the ones that you mentioned. >> i would think very few people watch an execution in terms of the total population and now it's a large part of populations. >> well people came out and brought her whole family to watch really stomach turning public executions, burnings and

breaking zen strangulations and disembowelment so in the past it was possible for an entire population to be overcome by a collective sadism. >> one last comment, notice there was laughter in twitter when we talk about disembowelment. >> folks we have a long line, and i would like everyone to get their chance. >> good evening and happy new year sue those where it is applicable. i wanted if any -- [inaudible] the question and is this an by the way it was very much impressed by your presentation. i have always wanted to meet you. no bizarre fantasies -- fantasies here. [laughter] believe me i'm very passive but the question is this.

do you think some people are actually biologically have a tendency to be inherently evil. they look as there is a fear of clowns, little children holding scissors behind their backs -- pretty little girls, want to play, want to play? if you get too close, watch out, the scissors will be a nice dagger in your gut. and no matter how you raise them come even if they are adopted by the nicest, kindest people, is intellectually brilliant, there something about them that they like to see others suffer. be the answer is that there is a substantial heritable component to antisocial tendencies and the extreme violence anti--- within

a population the troublemakers, the more callous, more impulsive people, they get that way in part be for genetic reasons because thanks to real-life research that carries out methodic experiments you mentioned, namely compare a adopted children to their biological parents and their adoptive parents so there is some statistical tendency. most extreme are psychopaths. a few percentage points of the population seem to be without the ability to develop a conscience that counts the interest of others. so among individuals, there does seem to be some heritability. >> you never know. >> ethnically need to move on. it's only fair that everyone get a chance. >> hi, my name is noah, and my question is about the backroom boys. is a phrase that was referred to

by the engineers at dupont to develop the napalm do a great effect in the war against indochina. and so in reviewing the records, the backroom boys, noam chomsky, he remarks that there is a distant effect from their actions that these backroom boys in their very technological occupations at. he mentions that this institutionalized violence by rationalism largely technological means had its roots in the prolonged genocidal conflicts that you mentioned have evaded. at that time 30% of the czech republic had just perished by the effects of that war and conflict killed by the -- have declined precipitously. but the institutions seem to

remain with us and particularly this reasonable objective countenance the of extreme violence like these backroom boys at dupont in the 1950's developing napalm and other. effect effective killing agents. >> what i would really be concerned with is when these agents have been deployed and it's interesting bad as contrary to what i often hear, namely as we develop high-tech pushbutton forms of warfare, or that circumvent the inhibitions we have against hands-on violence and therefore would that lead you to expect violence to go way up? i don't think that is consistent with the process of history. those were carried out by pipe men which -- with weapons and bayonets and so on. i think people can very easily overcome their resistance to hands-on violence and in fact it's often the most high-tech

forms of violence that are deployed most gingerly, nuclear weapons being an example which have often been used since not a sake so i think that correlation is much less than people think because it is so easy to commit hands-on violence. >> on this historical link between the technology of violence and that particular you know, patterned, particularly in northern europe, kind of a technologically very rich and devoted culture of violence. you have reviewed this history of violence. how clear is that connection? >> the highest technology of any culture is typically applied to weapons of war, so the mongolian horseback had amazingly -- that could do vast amounts of damage very quickly so that is something that tends to bring out people's ingenuity.

>> i am paul steinberg, a psychiatrist here in town and i am wondering if you could just comment on, you may be dismissing a change in human nature a little too quickly in the sense that jeans are always in a dance with the environment and i know you cite, and i haven't read your book that i know you cite glenn clark and his research is remarkable looking at what happened starting in the 13th century with the royals just being much more fertile than the lower classes, and rate of bourgeoises but it took 500, 600 years for the industrial revolution to happen so we have more people in england who had attention surplus disorder and fewer people with attention deficit disorder, less impulsivity, greater concentration, greater self-control and when a society

moves in that direction you reach a critical mass, that may actually change the way, it certainly is certainly fuels just a change in the culture. >> yes, and i discussed that possibility at length in the book. i end up not embracing at the not objecting it, for one thing lack of evidence. it makes the prediction for example that englishmen, regardless of their culture, should be genetically less prone to impulsivity and violence ban people from other cultures and races. this isn't a possibility that i'm eager to set -- test anytime soon but moreover it may be unnecessary. it is very early in the investigation of the biological evolution but given that some of the developments that i discussed occurred far too rapidly to be attributable to genetic evolution such as the

plunging of the crime rates in 1992 or the rights revolution. something must have happened that was not genetic that could account for that plummeting so on grounds of parse no make -- . >> i am a huge fan so i will try to keep it together. i'm curious about people's relationship and a representative democracy with civilian law enforcement and it is really interesting to hear about declining rates of violence but it seemed -- of the at the same time things like permalink there he fully sourcing and swat teams have gone way beyond their original intention for hostage situations and even famously last year someone breaking into people's homes over college loans etc., so if rates of violence are really defining people, why are the civilian law enforcement seeming to be flexing their muscles in a way that doesn't

correlate with the decline in violence? >> well, we have to look at figures over overtime of government violence portrayed against its own civilians and i suspect that there hasn't been much at all of an increase compared to earlier decades and centuries. and bringing in the leviathan from keeping people from each other's throats, that first transition was a tough bargain because it did lower the rate of violence but then he gave you these bloodthirsty despots to deal with. the democratic revolution and indeed the continuing battle for democracy and civil liberties is an attempt to find that sweet spot where the government is powerful enough to deter predation by one citizen over another but not so powerful that it becomes a menace to its own citizens and that is something that i suspect we are always going to muddle through. c. i'm going to make sure that

everyone in line gets to ask their question and that will be our limit tonight. >> hi, my name is gregory was. i have really been looking forward to reading this book ever since seeing a speech he gave three or four years ago at the ted conference on the same topic. i was however wondering if you could comment on some allegations made in a book i recently read called, i'm going to blank on the name, sex add-on, the prehistoric origins of modern sexuality in which those authors allege that some of the data you present about rates of violence among hunter gatherer cultures, what you call the -- peoples tonight is erroneous. they allege for example that the date at the time it was collected, these people had contact with modern society for many decades, that they are not

in fact nomadic, they are settled peoples. i've just been curious ever since reading that to hear your response to some of those allegations. >> i'm not sure about those allegations but the data that i present our, many of them are from people who definitely had no contact with any europeans such as samples of skeletons from pre-columbian native americans. many of them are also from hunter gatherer and hunter horticulturist people who also had no contact so i don't no, can't respond to these allegations without knowing what they are but certainly the sources that i have consulted make it very clear that there has or has not been contacted, and they span a range. there are some societies that don't have measured rates of homicide or deaths in war, but on average, the rates are way up there and they are from many many societies of different kinds. what they have in common is government, and that seems to

uniform money, i shouldn't say uniformly because there are some in the distribution but on average higher rates of violence and from what i can tell from the archaeological literature, that is a solid conclusion. eyesight many surveys that have the numbers, but they back up that claim. >> thanks for your stimulating presentation. i guess when you are listing factors to the decline of violence in our society, everything from the death penalty to rape, one exception that stood out in my mind would be incarceration. a very high level of incarceration. of course there are violent people that deserved it, but there are also non-violent crimes with huge sentences, people thrown into a situation where in fact prison life is not getting less violent and so i was wondering how you factor

into that the larger picture? >> in historical terms modern american prisons as horrible as they are are much less violent than prisons several hundred years ago where you we could have say prisoners shackled to the floor or wearing iron spiked college -- callers and their family would have to pay for easement to iron so the spiked caller could take it off when there were higher rates of death from disease and starvation in the prisons. this is not to defend american prisons by any means but historically it would be inaccurate to take the current american prisons and say nothing has improved. now the american prison culture of the last 20 years partly was a way of reducing the counteracting, the enormous increase in street violence and violent crimes of all types that had overtaken the united states from the 60s through the 1980s. the homicide rate more than doubled in those decades. the rate of rape, the rate of

assault and so as a rather clumsy countermeasure there was an increase in incarceration, which in part was responsible for the fact that the violent crime rates have plunged back to earth in the 1990s, not entirely because there were a number of other causes of bringing violence to decline but most statisticians attributed at least part of the decline to the increase in imprisonment. in the united states, as with many other of the trends that i have been listing it's a little misleading. is the country on the best and we tend to think of it as representative of western democracies but it's really an outlier, and a lot of the trends that i have mentioned are true for every western democracy but the united states which is kind of pulling up the rear. it's true homicide, churck capital punishment, it's true of willingness to engage in wars and is true of imprisonment

where we draw disproportionately large proportion of our population in prison compared to other western democracies. but certainly in the century scale, which is no comparison between today's prisons and those of the 19th and 18th centuries. >> i was wondering if you could share with us a bit about the methods you used to arrive at the numbers that you talked about tonight? did you do kind of independent testing of statistics, to kind of look at this kind of cost? did this factor caused x to change these things and could you share with us the source of your numbers and how you arrived at them? >> for different periods of history and different kinds of violence, the numbers have different sources so for the state and nonstate contrast, came from ethnography's of accidents tribal peoples and forensic archaeology.

for history of homicide in europe, came from historical criminology such as the unearthing coroners records for every year of a particular town in europe going back to the middle ages. in the case of war, depends on the period. since 1946 there have been meticulous statistics kept in death of armed conflict by scandinavian organizations. before 1946 there was a war project which looked at that from the largest wars, from 1816 to the present. prior to 1816 it becomes, as you can imagine, the farther back you go the fuzzy are the statistics get that there is a line of historians, quantitative historians, that have tried to triangulate on estimates of the death tolls from various wars to come up with best guest estimates. for homicide, more recently, the

fbi keeps reasonably good statistics, least they have since the 1930s. for crimes other than homicide like rape and assault, the best data our victimization surveys which aren't contaminated by people's willingness to report a crime to the police. for still others like child abuse and domestic violence, there are victimization surveys or other social science methodologies so it all depends on the decline in violence. >> do you think the new approach is analyzing the approach? >> in general what i did was i took the data sets in their entirety from other researchers and never second-guess the criteria, either the start date or the stop date, what gets included, what gets excluded because they didn't want to do any cherry-picking to try to favor this hypothesis. so the data sets that i used in -- vary in their quality but none of them were selected to show a decline or manipulated to

show a decline. even when i knew that some of the conclusions were dodgy for various reasons i gave myself the freedom of cherry-picking them. >> thank you. >> hi, i was just wondering, putnam finds a social capitalism has been declining in the united states, interconnection community and i would have thought that would lead to me being more violence, more crime but it seems like we have had a decline in crime despite you know those kinds of maybe troubling figures. have you given any thought to that it had any ideas why the putnam results might be going in a different direction from your results in crime in this country? >> it's a good question because there are other data sets that would seem to suggest that the rate of violent crime depends on

the degree of social interconnectedness and trust in institutions. when i refer to the civilizing process, that was 100,000 per year to about 10 per 100,000 per year and that occurs everywhere the government extends its tentacles, but the further decline that we see in europe and parts of the united states, about 10 down to the single digits, low single digits, seems to depend not on the presence of government but more nebulous process of accepting the legitimacy of the social order that indeed, as you suggest, you expect a correlate of with communal institutions. ..

in cultural attitudes that could filter down to law enforcement to push these up or down. but we are retelling stories post top. >> last question. >> and ms rich potter. i can't wait to read this book. it's a fascinating subject. i am interested in, why is the perception that we live in such a dangerous and violent era? why's that so pervasive? it is amazing how discordant that is. >> is indeed an intriguing

question. i think one reason is what the media reports and what they're getting better and better at reporting. not only is there the programming policy. media programmers know that just as people enjoy violent entertainment, people enjoy violent news. we are better and better at finding thailand's. now anyone on the planet with a southbound canteen video footage of violence all over the world. and psychologists note that the human mind estimates risk and likelihood by the ease with which we can collect samples. if you can think example, they must be dangerous. were not as good as calculating denominators. and the medium of courts to report to nominators. millions of people alzheimer's and cancel in heart attacks. if vladimir was doing it killed over from a heart attack, there

isn't a camera crew filming it. if vladimir gets shot by a two-inch postal worker, then it will be on the evening news. the final reason is they care more about violent now. a lot of things that didn't even counter violence, now we consider to be heinous crimes. the most poignant example is genocide. it's all over the old testament that it didn't seem to be a problem with anyone. there were many colonial ministers and politicians who thank god for wiping out the news. there's a change in sensibility that has gone further and further down the scale to isolate behaviors that before were okay. my favorite example being the recent targeting of bulleting. no less than the president than the president of the united states give apostasy and chest on what to do about oil and playground. 25 years ago this would have been an episode of the simpsons. it would have been absurd. boys will be boys.

how are kids going to grow up to if you turn them into, but now i think of life from the point of view of the bullied child. there are many, many accounts of the suffering of the tons of bowling and now there's a new category of violence that wants to encounter violence before. clark mark

>> second debate here in washington nbc studios mixed against control. so he brings the level of the temperature turned under 40 degrees. it's a meat locker and kennedy arrives in a period mysore is a mystery for tv guide. refinance abasement and finds the guy at this thermostat. there's a guy standing guard on the thermostat. he says, if you don't get out of there with a thermostat, let me turn that thing up to 65 or 70. i'm calling the police. they had another standoff ended up compromising on the temperature. did they get that to mexican. though ideally suited what nixon to sweat. the nixon people at the notes that are fiercely in the first debate. they all knew was going on. this was about who's going to

america by the way with this stuff is going on. >> next on "after words," an interview with author max hastings about "inferno," his history of world war ii. it focuses on experiences of everyday people affected by the war. he's interviewed by the u.s. editor of the daily telegraph, trainee. this is an hour. >> host: welcome to "after words." i am toby harnden of the telegraph and with me today is search max hastings, former entity you of the daily telegraph and the man who brought the international paper of journalism 17 years ago. max has written a superb single body history at the second world war. it's been critically acclaimed on both sides of the atlantic already.

the "washington post" describes it as magisterial monumental achievements. the london times, gruesome, chilling but quite magnificent. it's got a different title on this site. again, here it is "inferno." >> guest: you have blisters make up their own minds. i chose the title, all let loose in britain because it seemed to me in almost every account you read about what if people experienced in battles and ship sinking and so on at some point somebody telling the story will say it all broke loose. subsequent generations attempted to shirkers benevolently. an important sense does capture would've been in the second world war meant to hundreds of millions of people because their world was to completely destroy around them.

unimaginable things happen to them. my publishers also thought the phrase inferno is because many of them saw suspect to go in picture at the inferno. human beings torn to fragments of selection done and cities collapsed in radical of order communities summoned into dispersed human possible. these are all things. we take so much for granted in our ordinary lives that we take it for granted would be protected from violence. if we pay our taxes returns on the right side of the road and so on. were going to be all right. and of course these are the assumptions of what utterly destroys so many people around the globe. we do the explanation of why he chose the titles, but that's how i came about the title. >> host: you mention it is hard to do a bibliography because they were so many books on the second world war is

almost impossible to include the books yourself on. the obvious question is did the world need another book and why did you decide to do this now? >> guest: i think for two reasons. first of all onto sort of complete my personal cycle about the second world war. i've written about it for many aspects. this is the ninth book. i have written about global command, the pacific war, european born. i want to do two things. first person things i still want to say about the war that i thought were worth saying i'll come to what some of them were in a moment. secondly, i want to answer the question for a great many younger people of generations fortunate enough not to know, what was the warlike? the answer of course it was vastly different if you're an

american paratrooper or british aircrew were chinese councilwoman. no one tries to c. of what it was like. in my text for example, there were no pictures at all. we know about that. this is about ordinary people. this is the war bottom. there's so many things people don't grasp about the global nature of this. >> host: i was staggered by the statistics in the different countries. >> guest: statistics don't tell dancers, a few months ago, what can you tell us that we don't already? i said look, let's start by trying on a few numbers. what proportion of germans would you guess were killed on the eastern front? he said maybe 60%.

i said the true figure is over 90% on the russian front was the defining area, the defining front in the war againstism. in the same way casualties. they also said to my british friend i said, what% do you think the total casualties were british or american? he said at maybe 20% two. a true figure is 2% each. the russians took 65%. the chinese to 23%. a lot of people don't even know china was then. a million yugoslavs took 3% in the story goes on. so the statistics are amazing. for example, if you are a russian soldier community one in four chance of being killed.

if you're a pretty soldier community one in 20 chance. if you're married you had a one and 322 chance of being killed. now, there's something else that's very important. one has to qualify this by saying, it is almost insulting to say to people who went through the experience of the war with other people having worked. lucky people sitting in her television studio to say here at the truth. but if you are agi for a pretty soldier under a mortar garage with your mates blown to bits around you to have some part of that come around the corner in say it's much worse on the russian front. this is insulting. if you're an american or british housewife struggling with rations, did you know they are eating each other quite stitching on east bengal, and the fathers are selling their daughters on a colossal scale?

so, we always have to maintain that sense of humility. we must never forget where we all are 66 years and we can say these clever things. we can never lose that sense. forget about statistics for a moment. anybody who went through the war, went through a monitor things come with your american, british, chinese, but one of the fantastic things about the book is that the anecdotes, personal stories come not just about combat, but life in a broader sense across the world and how you weave this into a coherent narrative, sort of global narrative every six years. he's done a much more so in this book than in previous books. is that some day and you've always wanted to do or is that something you developed? >> i try to put in all things i have done. for example, food.

in this book i have not written in an earlier one. everett entire chapter about the atomic bombs in japan. i've written a lot about food because for most people who live through the war, food or the lack of it was absolutely the defining reality. in many societies, you're absolutely terrified that people went through. mentioned 800,000 people died. 800,000, twice as many as americans or british died in the war. and they were used with 20,000 people dying of starvation every day, every day. these are ordinary educated people. and they find there is nothing to eat. chinese peasants 1942 find themselves eating dried leaves.

i mean, i have quoted at the diaries of british housewife to complain my code because they had to reach him and eggs. >> it was a lovely story of this british jerry lambert. you had your rations, but in addition, everybody try to supplement their rations in a chat to make the equipment. he told the wonderful story how one morning his father looks at a pot that had been put on the table and spread some of that on his breath and tried to it. he turned to his wife and said what was that? carrot marmalade. he picked up the pot and carried it with deliberation and poured it compost heap.

but of course carrot marmalade, if you were a prisoner of the japanese or an asian or russian peasants, dessert delicacies, but everything is relative. the arguments about food and who did well with food companies got more than 100 million feet of me is pekingese died of starvation because the japanese. ministry in vietnam ruthlessly for the interest of the japanese people. an elderly vietnamese afterward that their experience of 1943, 44 cents and get him was worse than the worst of the french of the united states. he was worse than all of the over a million people, some think a million and a half of starvation. food, food of the food. this becomes an obsession.

generally we were lucky because it is pretty. and no one got up and mean in. american housewives are complaining they couldn't buy stake. compared with posts going on anywhere else, other people to do with the germans. there is no significant hunger in germany until may 1945. kepler systematically start the rest of europe in alert to feed its own people. at the same time the germans started getting really hungry. suddenly without hessler they were hungry. >> host: of course one of the most horrific of soaring off the lake of her husband to eat and get to the families unimaginable horror. >> guest: these stories came to grips with this because these are not state secrets or they shouldn't be. but a lot of wonderful material

in russia. at this terrific russian researcher who was for the last 10 years coming up with wonderful staff. and you're suddenly getting these accounts by rations on what happened because after the word, stalin wanted the world to believe that the people had survived the siege through sheer errors. of course it wasn't really. in fact, they had no choice because anyone who tried to run away was shot. but stalin ran up his officers. sue crafter was the one who first of all deployed troops behind the frontline to shoot down anyone who ran away so that the men in the frontline knew if they hung on americans the germans they might well get killed, but if they try to turn them out --

>> host: the russians were than any other army killed their own. >> guest: 300,000 of their own they killed. dereliction of duty quite incredible. that's almost as much as the british army lost in the action of the word. all this stuff is coming out of russia now because all it does is come the old russian myths were being told the truth about the decrease of which compulsion decided this. for example, i've quoted in the book some of these extraordinary secret police reports from the battle of cooks with officers being shot for drunkenness in the frontline command being found when they were supposed to be leading their battalions in the attack, not being patched up with their comfort cam campaign wise.

these are extraordinary stories, which because of all those decades when this sort of stuff was hidden how we're supposed to believe the russians. it's amazing really. i mean, i suppose when i complained to my wife, she says to love it. of course i do. and it is so sterling and his archives are reading the translated to produce. and even now, almost 70 years after the war, we are getting stories for a very long time people were willing to tell just how it was. >> host: in 1945 at the end of the second world war, your father was a war correspondent. so you live the post-world war

ii period, research and writing about the second world war for 35 years. you have an incredible is. how has your perspective changed from comics? >> guest: i grew up as a lot of people in the united states. my father started a new adventures and have a lot of adventures. ivan as a kid in the 1950s used to read memoirs and books about the second world war. and i grew up thinking the whole thing was wrong. my father brought me up to believe they'll be able to become an army parachute. but he said unfortunately the germans aren't available to play their usual on the other side. segura with the ridiculous vision of the war.

it's only very gradually the one sort of grown-up and over the ensuing 40, 50 years, one is learn to understand the reality when i really got to me. and now is when i was writing one of my first book about the second world war when there were an awful lot around. and one evening i was sitting in a suburban home. stalin was still in his 50s who've been in the crew of a pilot who had been awarded a posthumous craft was staying with the aircraft when it was determined. and this navigator sitting in a suburban bungalow said to me can e-mail, always remember the night before the last ship we were all in the apartment and he said we were teasing jamie the

pilot because he said he was 19 years old and it never kissed a girl in his life. and i suddenly, what good does it do a young man to want a posthumous victoria to be dead at the age of 19, never having tasted in his life. that is one of the first moments when you feel a sense of the overwhelming tragedy that yes, there are some fortunate young man who flew mustangs or spitfires are some of the people in this special forces. they thought the water almost extenuating and exciting. at the very least you would separate loved ones. he spent four years on the other side of the road running like about what do your life was pregnant, not worried about and you'll ever see your kids again. it is sort of taken me 34 years to understand that.

it's been a long journey from all of those kids collings to growing up with that. >> host: so much military concentrates on the battle bill. >> guest: is not intended to be. when i finished that manuscript, i went to and i cut out every single reference to divisional numbers are army numbers that could possibly identify without making the story incoherent. although i toured the story that people nowadays don't care whether the 53rd division went right or left. that is what one is try to do. i've made it impressionistic and simple and so on. and this is just trying to tell what it was like for the little people. they knew so little differences in not only the great generals

and war lords ruling you much about anything beyond what they were seeing. and most people even in the united states have propaganda and uncertainty. and if you're in the frontline, let's say, you could get us something about you is winning and how things were going to record your site is moving forwards or backwards by the level of casualties. but even that wasn't a reliable indicator. i remember looking at the memoir of american private soldier named eric taylor, pfc eric taylor and he recited how his unit was cut off from the american army in the philippines for 17 days. what he really didn't understand the predicament of these units until his company commander explained to him after the war is over. and roy jenkins who was a british politician who were

deciphering german codes, terrific job. they are sensational movies about all these people doing the decrypting understand what they're doing. but remember roy saints make him a yes renewable you're doing this important and urgent, but nobody told us anything about the battle or whether it manship scott's son. that's only the moviemakers afterwards to present it that way. so this terrible uncertainty, who can you trust? who is telling the truth and so much propaganda and so much will shed frankly. obviously that was worse if he lived in japan for a few lived in germany. but it was pretty bad even in the united states and britain. you only have the luxury of starting to tell the truth of the war was over.

>> host: there's always been a sense in britain and the united states that it was a good war morley, unambiguous. at the nbc the last line is the alternative. >> guest: the key point of what i've tried to explain if it has been important to all important to all of us, but their parents and grandparents generation and division of the war is a good war. but first a welcome one thing i emphasized to which i think is very important is we are sometimes reluctant to wreck as how enormous the compromise is that we've made. the united states but by the soviet union, leading stalin's tyranny to most of the dirty work. this was a huge moral compromise and it seems to me that except for the one in meredith holocaust, stalin's tyranny morally distinguish these terrible, terrible people.

the soviet union is anything else but a tyranny, which did terrible things. and the results of the war was at the end of the war that stalin demanded his price for having done the lion share of not csm and the price was 90 million deeply unhappy people , czechs, poles and so on. we were all celebrating another of his dancing in times square in parliament for whom the british and french had gone to war. they had just exchanged the tierney for the soviet tyranny. what i said at the end of this book is we just have to recognize that the jury did not

produce universal justice, fairness, freedom, decency. it produce some of those things, portions of those things for some of the oppressed unoccupied people of the world. we can't say that the jury in a new and glorious era. all we can say in certain is it would've been far, far worse for the world. he could never have the complete satisfaction of saying, yeah, we were the guys in white coats at all ended gloriously. history is not like that. ..

and, you know, american gis with italian prisoners in is sicily nobody talking about put egg testimony in nuremberg. >> austrians. >> the austrians got off.

were treated austria as a victim of power. austrian nazis had done unspeakable things, got off scott-free. it is not that i nuremberg or turkey war trials were a mistake. we just have to recognize all these years their limitations. we have to, things, just aren't quite as convenient or quite as black and white as we want, want them to be. but they never are in history. history is not, there is wonderful phrase, one of the great diaries of the war written by a german woman whose name nobody still knows about the april-may 1945 period and she wrote, this is the stuff of history. i realize we're living through history. the story of tales untold and songs unsung but she said, history seen close up is an uncomfortable muddled

burden zombies. tomorrow i will have to go out and try to find some nettles to eat and find some coal to avoid freezing to death. you know, that --. >> all history is local at the time and personal. >> what it means to you. talking about what is happening to other people on the other side of the world. that doesn't matter much. all you know housewife in ohio whose husband has been out in the pacific two years and don't know whether you will see him again, you don't want to hear what a terrible time they're having in china or leningrad or somewhere else. you know this is pretty hellish for you. all one tries to do is explain all these different views, to try to explain how different it was for all these, all this extraordinary variety of people. but one of my favorite hobby

horses i'm always telling everybody, everybody should write biography. don't mean they have to find publishers but to children and grandchildren, especially supplies to those who went through this period of the second world war, it is not surprising sometimes, cynics say, oh we're all too obsessed with the second world war but this was the greatest event in human history. and it was, it was one of the most terrible events in human history of course. it is scarcely surprising we want to try to see what can we learn from it? what can we understand from it. i don't think there is anything in the least sinister the way which we all continue to, to, read about and, in my case write about the section world war. we're just trying to learn more about it. the only thing that can be sinister. there is almost indecent obsession minority cult in the nazis all this business with the nazis you get schiffering feeling the way

people are obsessed with the nazis. secondly those people that glamourize it. there are a few writers that do glamorize it. the only bad review said of my book, i made it all sound too gloomy. the reviewer said, my dad was a submarine commander and he loved it. what does that prove? of course if you were a submarine commander, my father's case war correspondent you had a lovely time. i was -- >> you mentioned your own father and having myself reporting from afghanistan, written a book about afghanistan and also been in iraq extensively, maybe it is in the moment thing but soldiers are, this is what i was trained to do. i'm loving it. almost all their life it is there and certainly their professional life is there for this moment. i mean you do highlight that. royal navy lieutenant who writes back. he can't believe he is on the bridge of a ship and the

admiral is paying attention to what he is saying and it is the most magnificent thing. >> again, one has to be, if you were an advent you arer, every nation had its share of adventurers some ended up as german panzer officers and some ended on the bridge of royal navy ships. if you were an adventurer it was great. a lot of young men do like adventures. for instance another story i quoted we always in brittain made a big thing about soes, special operation executive. british agent who worked behind enemy lines promoting guerrilla war, the equivalent of the american oss. there is a very good quote there from a soe officer in albania called peter kemp. he wrote about how after he and his mates had a wonderful morning staging an attack on a german convoy down the road. they tried to get shelter

from a nearby village and their interpreter said in the end after they, he begged and pleaded with the local villages they slammed door in his face and told him to go away. peter kemp realized we were young men. british. had no stake. all was a great great romp. for these people they knew what we had done the german or tailian punishment, punitive columns would be along within days or probably hours and they were going to burn the village and burn, it was quite likely they would kill the adults. they might well kill the children. they would destroy their crops. they could do, so those local people, they had a stake in what was happening. in the adventures of these soe people peter kemp wrote, we british have this rather selfish idea that other nations that refuse to help with our as wars just don't

understand properly and they don't. if you're an albanian peasant you see no stake in anything except protecting your family or protecting your lifely hood and the little hut you live in all the rest of it. all these huge issues and british and americans are busy fighting for the cause of freedom. same way for indian peasant. awful lot of people in india, yes the indian army remained loyal to brittain to remarkable degree but an awful lot of indians they couldn't see the point of the allies defeating the axis and the war. if they, the indians were going to remain part of the british empire. if they were going to be denied freedom and independence. and i am quoted in the book, nehru, later became the first and greatest prime minister of independent india in 1947. he wrote from his prison cell where the british put him. he said, after pearl harbor

he wrote, he said, if i am asked where am my sympathies in this war unhesitating would be with america, brittain, russia, china. but he said then if i'm asked am i going to fight for their cause, he said how can i fight for a freedom which is denied to me as an indian. because here i am sitting in a british prison cell. it was extraordinary. the british were pretty narrow-minded about this. americans, roosevelt passionately pleaded with churchhill to promise india independence from egypt. churchhill wouldn't have anything to do with it. now there were huge practical problems if india had been granted independence with the middle of the war with the japanese at the gates god knows what might have happened. nonetheless churchhill was myopic he went on expecting

the indians would be loyal serfs of the raj. most indians want the british to go. they didn't want japanese there but didn't want us either. we were pretty stupid in our reluctance to see that. >> you mentioned roosevelt and churchhill, although as you say you don't focus on the war clearly there was strong presences in the book and indeed in your other books. i talked about you not shrinking from truth. with churchhill though you clearly admire him and indeed you say that hard to see britain continued after 1940 without church hill. i guess many young people wouldn't know what happened in the world war? >> bengal famine is the single greatest blot on the war. this is 1943-44. the, as you say, many people have not heard about it.

at least one million, some indian historians say as many as three million people died while they were dying in hundreds on streets of calcutta. while in the british clubs, white saibs were getting unlimited eggs and bacon. this is not a pretty story. what happened is bangor traditionally got most of the rights from burma. japanese occupied burma. then there was a cyclone and appalling weather conditions which east bengal is very prone and suddenly there is famine. the viceroy appeals to the british government in london to divert shipping to send relief supplies to east bengal. churchhill won't do it. he pleading that strategic needs of war. we need every ship we've got for the landing in sicily and italy, for all the other operations we're carrying out. we can't afford to send

ships to relief starvation in india. and it was a shocking story. how much hill -- churchhill did behave very callously and brutally. the british general who became advisory roy, -- viceroy, who was in charge of india, he wrote later when there was starvation in holland, and hundreds of british bombers were diverted to drop food supplies to holland and waverly wrote bitterly a very different set of priorities prevailed in the british government when it is europeans who are threatened with starving to death because some dutch people did starve to death. so it was a very ugly story and, it wag -- was i mean about moral compromises and so on. it would be quite untruthful to say it would have been easy to relief famine in bengal. it would be very difficult in the midst of a world war.

but the fact that churchhill refused to try and that shipping allocations to india and the rest of it were actually cut because of the demand of amphibious operations in other places, it was not as bad but it was famine in mauritius for example which is also a british possession. there were several fam minutes in east africa in which people were very, very hungry. they didn't quite starve to death. and these are ugly stories which 20 or 30 years ago really nobody wanted to go there. and of course the main, the big picture of the war, it is the big battles. it is sirsk, and d-day and all the great battles, the pacific war and so on. these are the big events but we just have to be aware of all these other things that were going on which more people were dying. one absolutely fundamental fact but simple fact but it

is still fundamental, you had a far better chance of coming out of the war in one piece if you were wearing uniform, if you were a serviceman than you did civilians. most of the casualties in the war were civilians. they were mostly innocent people, so-called. they were victims who never carry ad firearm. never shot anybody or anything else. they were simply starved or died of disease whether in china or east bengal or russia. it was you had a chance to be a hero if you were wearing gi uniform or british uniform or a russian uniform but an awful lot of these housewives and children, i mean russian soldiers, i quoted a lot of russian soldiers in that book. what really ground you down was with when you saw tiny children who could do nothing. could play no part, suffering in this terrible fate. the old, god it was tough being old in the war because, in russia, for example,

stalin took the brutal view, the owed can bring nothing to the party. they can't work. they can't do anything. they got absolutely minimal rations. if you were very young or very old you were more likely than not to starve to death. if you were a fit young man you might make it. if you were 80 something years old, then your chances of making it through the war were pretty slender. >> fascinated in the book by your discussion of the different armies. i mean as in terms of efficiency the very mach was -- we are mach, fearless. red army, incredibly brutal. is it easier to produce a better army if you're totalitarian regime. you talk about bourgeois sensibilities. >> it was simple fact british and american troops during the war if they felt they tried pretty hard and other side had them surrounded civilized thing to do was put your hands up

and go into a prisoner of war camp. the notion, so against our culture, moderation and respect for human life, to go for foot tile sacrifices. but the germans didn't shoot as many of tear own people as the russians did but they shot plenty especially in the last year of the war. if you tried to run away and got caught you got shot. i'm very interested in one of my themes that i think is very interesting or certainly fascinates me and i hope it fascinates readers there was sort of a contradiction that, on the one hand the german army to the a lot of its battles brilliantly well. german soldiers again and again statistic right to the end. went on killing more russians and british and americans, than they took casualties themselves but this was completely set at nothing. it was completely by the fantastic stupidity with

which the germans and japanese ran their whole war. in the americans, the british, ran their war machines far, far better than the germans and, for example, we mobilized civilians much better. the, none of the japanese or germans ever gave civilians authority of thwart of running rationing system or running intelligence operations we did. so we mobilized the civilians brilliantly. and both the american and british war machine ended up absolutely magnificently run. i must say my own highest admiration the i think the united states navy was america's outstanding force. i think the royal navy was brittain's outstanding force. the both the more i learn about the united states navy, god they were good. us air was also pretty good but u.s. navy with overwhelming the officer

served by men who had been civilians before the war and many never seen the sea other than taking their kids to the beach. they did brilliantly in the pacific especially. that was remarkable. but, it is this peculiar contradiction that here you've got, you put the panzer division there it will fight a battle brilliantly. then thank god we had hitler working for our side that, the nazis were so incompetent. you find, hear are all the gang sisters, no more, no less. people like himmler or heinrich his sidekick, all those people are just gangsters who were given enormous authority. they were given fantastic control and latitude which they were quite unfit to exercise. only thing they knew huy to do was kill people. thank god we had all the virtues of democracies came to the for the way we mobilized our countries to

organize the war so that american industry did this fantastic job. american industry and american economy was, provided the means for all the allied nations including the russians. the russians marched to berlin on boots that were made in america. why did they have to be made in america? because most of the cattle had been killed in all this terrible fighting. so, american boots, or they traveled in stupid bake are trucks. their radios were most of the them made in the united states. they ate american canned meat. it is what kept them going. so the american and british achievement, economically and industrially was absolutely fantastic. and when one looks how incredibly incompetent -- take one example. japanese, first of all the japanese thought they were ever going to be able to make a successful war against the united states with 10 times their economic power god only knows. then to launch a war knowing that japan was completely

dependent on imports, everything. most of its raw materials. all of it had to be imported. yet they did nothing to, they created all these wonderful aircraft carriers and battleships and god knows what. they did nothing to create a credible commerce defense force that their anti-submarine techniques were miles behind those of the allies. they had better little radar. very little effective maritime air patrols. so their commerce, when american submarines really got to work, they almost had a free run. that, for, in the latter part of the war american submarines were able to operate on the surface in daylight because the japanese were so incompetent. i should say if one is singling out americans always give enormous praise to all their band of brothers and 101st airborne and all that. this is all absolutely just,

that they all deserve all this attention and so on, so forth. but, actually it was one group of people who did more than anything else for the united states. the united states navy submarine service. there were 16,000 men just, tiny force, which manned the submarines. what they did, they made the decisive contribution to the defeat of japan. what they did was fantastic. heavy losses. they lost a lot of people but god they were good. and god what they did was terrific. >> the american experience, you talk about the prepearl harbor heard when americans really didn't want to go to war. roosevelt was sort of ahead of his people. then we've discussed already the relatively speaking the light casualties of american forces and of course the american main land was not attacked and there wasn't sort of suffering that you had in many, many other parts of the world. i was struck by a quotation

where you said, that there was no sense of victim hood among the americans. there was a quotation about americans, i think it was the last time having a hubrisic belief of their own virtue and their own dominance. how did the second world war affect the united states and conflicts afterwards? maybe even after that? that quotation would ring somewhat true today. >> it was extraordinary that every other nation that experienced the second world war emerged with a strong sense of victim hood by they had suffered and they knew it. the british knew that they were utterly impoverished and bombed and rocketed and god knows what and there was the united states, which emerged from the war victorious, richer than it had ever been in its history. its economy having expanded

dramatically during the course of the war. and americans came out of the war feeling that they not only had been virtuous, which indeed they had but they not only had been right, they had also hugely increased and enlarged american power in the world. they felt fantastically good about themselves. and, there was this terrific contrast between the british wanted to feel good about themselves. they felt the generation, british generation that fought the war. gosh haven't we done well? they're utterly broke. they have got no money. they're entirely dependent on american loans to pay the bills and there they are living through this terrible phase of austerity and the collapse of the british empire and so on but the united states it did enter a golden era. no doubt that. the post-war era, the returning heroes, one of the very few cases in history, america's returning histories came back to land

of milk and honey where america prospered mightily afterwards. but it was sort of, it was bound to be that way but obviously meant the shock later when america found it couldn't always get its way in the world, as you mentioned in vietnam and so on so fourth. was correspondingly great. america had this wonderful 30 years after the second world war when everything seemed to go its way. sure there was the soviet union out there. there was the cold war but god, i never forget i first came it this country in 1967 and i came from a prosperous english middle class background but 1967 one was simply awed by the wealth and power of the united states and the confidence of the united states. that was still, that was before the sense of defeat in vietnam came through. and it was before really obviously i arrived just

about the time the whole movement was getting going and things started to go a bit south but i just caught this last glimpse of what it felt like to be americans of that war-time generation which was terrific. >> combination almost, of innocence and confidence instead of american can-do, that americans a lot about the post-war period as you say and -- >> it was extraordinary. one never ceases to be, i suppose, if you believe as i certainly do there is such a thing as the american genius that americans felt, i think more conscious of it and than major postwar era than they have ever been able to sense. obviously in a way they have had to have a reality check because for most of us, most of the time, maybe we in one sense suffer more when things don't go our way because we don't expect them to go our way.

after that post-war period, world war ii, americans expected things to go their way and they damn well did. >> you talked about adventurer and fair to say you've been an adventurer yourself, been a correspondent 11 war zones. most famously the falklands. i don't need to retell the story of taking of port stanley but how is your open experience of war close up and living with truth? in a way in the falklands would be early embed. how does that inform your view of history and the second world war? >> one has to say that everything that i've experienced myself as a war correspondent is nothing compared to what the people went through the second world war. i remember so well after fall land war in which -- falkland war. almost certainly outside britain goose green, where they lost 17 killed.

old british prime minister who served in the first world war and i remember listening to him someone was talking about goose green at the lunch i was at. very old man suddenly says my war. a battalion lost 17 killed wouldn't recognize it had been in a battle. and this of course is true. so we have to keep a sense of perspective what we have all seen in our generation is small potatoes but i learned a lot from personal experience about the ways of soldiers and what it is like. to give you one example. soldiers talk a lot about women but actually my experience, when you're on the battlefield, when you're living, actually ones you really care about give absolutely anything for a bath and a hot meal, and a be able to sleep in a bed, preferably alone. so you don't want to believe all this stuff about how it is sort of thing with soldiers. you have to talk about women but how much you really, there are other priorities. i quoted there, an american marine in the pacific who said, the real thing he was

waiting to get back from the pacific. when he got home, apart from wanting to sleep in pajamas really great thing he would keep flushing the toilet pleasure of hearing water run. >> didn't have to dig a hole anymore. >> what you learn from having been on battlefields you learn a bit, learn how terrifying it is to be under fire. learn how difficult it is to make your limbs move from one place to the other when you're really scared. you learn plenty about that. and you just learn about what it is like to spend, i've spent nothing like the period that people who went through the second world war went through being filthy dirty, utterly exhausted, hungry, cold, desperate for a drink. so you learn a little bit about that. and you learn how soldiers talk and think and you learn about weapons. you've seen shells exploding and aircraft shot down. you learn a little bit that so it helps. but, the main thing you learn is just to be

unbelievably grateful one survived and to be unbelievably grateful for those things did in our parents and grandparents generation. >> yeah. tell me how you go about writing a book like this? one of the things that strikes me about you. you were newspaper editor for 10 years. evening standard for six years. and you've always been incredibly prolific and sort of tales you're writing 2,000 words before brake fast and 6,000 words on a good day. even now you churn out, hope you don't mind me using that term, columns for "the daily mail" and other british newspapers yet you also do this. how do you manage? >> i love to write. it is what i do. i know, a colleague of mine some years ago when we were both young men i said don't know why we do all this business. we were going to be bankers and make pots of money. my friend said to me then, he said, i'll tell you why we do this. it is only thing we know how to do. >> yeah. >> but i can only say the thrill, my father, when i

was a teenager used to talk to me about the challenge of a blank sheet of paper. i didn't understand what he meant when i was a board teenager but i do now. every day when i sit down a screen, blank screen and you feel that excitement, and i love to write. i feel so fortunate and privileged that people are willing to read some of the things one writes. >> the other quotation from a friend of yours, kneel collins, former editor said, you were complaining about something in canary wharf in the old telegraph building and he said, well, beats working for a living, doesn't it? is that also said. >> so many people of the world are unlucky enough to do jobs to pay the rent and don't enjoy what they do at all. you and i were terribly privileged people because we do something that we enormously enjoy doing. certainly a part of it, i can say nothing has given me greater pleasure, and i felt a greater sense of privilege. i traveled around the world

including up and down who knows how many, 35 american states, sitting, listening to very old men talking about the extraordinary things happened to them when they were dashing handsome young men and, i never ceased to be absolutely fascinated by listening to those tales and have the chance it translate all those stories of men and women and children from so many nations and all the rest of it. it is, as neil said, said to me, it beats working. it is, fascinating, if you as we all are, one is fascinated by human beings and how they behave and especially how they behave. what you find in wars and especially in world war ii. world war ii, some people scaled heights of courage and in their ability and others plum beed depth of evil in a way that commands the aura of posterity and certainly commands the aura of myself.

>> and tell me about, tell me about your day. people are always fascinated by how writers get through the day. and you're doing newspapers still. you've got books. >> usually start, i take my dogs for a walk at about, in the summer at 6:00 in the morning. and whenever it is light in the winter. and, then i sit down at the screen. you just start writing. and i think one, people have different techniques. for example, roy jenkins, british historian, who is a close friend of mind, roy would write maybe 500 words a day. then when he was written them reluctant to change them. i work completely differently. i write awful lot of word and change them and change them so that i might write in the space of a morning 6,000 word with a book like that. but very few of those 6,000 words will emerge in the final draft of what i, what i do. but, one is constantly

refashioning it and refashioning it. the miracle of course working with the computer, i wrote my early books in the pre-computer age when you were doing it on typewriter, it is so easy to put things in and take things out. and all the time, but the other skill i think the other thing is indispensable you have to read a huge amount. i'm write a book at home on 1914, beginnings what happened before the first world war and the first campaigns. once pulling together i have to researcher at this minute working in belgrade getting material about the serbian end of it. i had a young german working for me in austria and germany and, i do quite a little of the french stuff myself. so what you end up at the moment i've got about 500 pages of typewritten, typewritten notes and i suppose one will spend next 18 months or two years refashioning all that stuff,

those 500 pages into a coherent narrative. but, you still get that thrill. i mean i just found on my e-mails this morning my russian researcher sent me another batch of stuff, wonderful stuff from a russian memoir unpublished russian memoir what happened to him in 1914. you feel that terrific buzz. a terrific thrill. you think you know that i find this fascinating and exciting to read. you know somebody else will find this fascinating and exciting to read. but it's, i suppose that the hardest part is getting started. writing the first 50,000 words of a book, especially a book like that is tough. because even if you have written, i've written about 23 books all told and when you get started you never really quite believe how often you've done it you will get to the end. and then after you've done the first one, my wife says

i'm terrible to live with through the first 50,000 words. then after that you think, well maybe this is going to work. >> and you talked about 1914 book. is that the in fact going to be next book, is it? >> that's it. >> have you finished with the second world war or have you got more to say? >> i think the important thing i never written the book yet just for the money. i have always sat down and written them because i felt i had something to say. at the moment i feel that book constitute the last big things i want to say about the second world war and it is turn of another generation of historians, perhaps including you to, pick up the battle and take over. but you never know. one may find something, who is to say in a few years you come across something. there are great revelations. somebody read as book sensational relations about world war ii it will be rubbish. it will be a lie. something pops up out of the woodwork that will excite you and provoke you and you

feel there is story i might want to tell. for the moment i'm loving working on 1914. i'm thrilled the reception has been so terrific for the book from readers. i feel from now on it's your turn. up to you to get on the next lot. >> max, this is certainly very exciting and very provoking book. it is incredible achievement. thank you for writing it and thank you for being here today to talk about it. >> thank you for having me, toby. >> chris matthews on the attempted political maneuvering in a second kennedy-nixon presidential debate. >> second debate here in washington, nbc studios. nixon gets control of it. so he brings the level of the temperature of the room down to 40 degrees. it is a meat locker when kennedy arrives in there. with bill wilson my source on thetory story is tv guy. wilson goes racing down to the basement. find the guy in the thermostat. there is nixon guy standing guard on thermostat.

if you don't get out of the way of thermostat let me turn it up to 65 or 70 i'm calling the police. they had another standoff there they end up compromising on the temperature. they get back up to where nixon, the whole idea they didn't want nixon to sweat. so the nixon people seen him sweat profusely in the first debate. they said they will not let this happen again. they knew what was going on. this will be about who will rule america and this stuff is going on. >> this weekend, "abc news" sam donaldson, interviews chris matthews, jack kennedy. on saturday night on "book tv". >> on c-span2 tonight, author lisa randall writes about cutting-edge physics research in the book, "knocking on heaven's door". the a book the obamas. and former head of fbi counter intelligence reviews

significant espionage events of 2011. >> it is interesting. we sort of thought we knew

what the commission's rules might be although i don't know i can go anywhere beyond the bewilderment position you've taken. the commission changes. now we have no idea what the new commission he is perspective may be. >> the commission's, indecency regulations have a safe harbor for programing after 10:00 p.m. and before 6:00 a.m. and the fact is that any broadcaster who is under some confusion in their own mind about whether a particular broadcast would be found indecent by the commission or not is simply to put the programing in the safe harbor. in her book, knocking on heaven's door, lisa randall describes the latest research in particle physics and cosmology and talks about how physicists review the universe. her talk at politics & prose bookstore in d.c. is an hour.

>> folks, good evening. we'll get started. if you're just coming in there are some seats up here to my left or you can stand off to the corners or find an open seat towards the back. welcome to politics & prose. thank you all for being here. i'm mike giarratano. i want to start by welcoming you and saying thanks for being here on behalf of our new owners, bradley graham and lisa muscatan. the staff here, collective thanks for supporting bookstore and events series being mere for lisa randall and her second book, "knocking on heavy general's door quote. we're excited about her talking about the book. if you're new here, welcome. i will quickly go over the format. lisa will present her book. talking about her book using some visuals as well.

what we're going to do is leave the lights up because we're recording so if you do want to kind of get to the corners you will have a pretty good view of it. but the talk will go about 45 minutes or some we'll have a little time for q&a, from you of course. we look forward to your input. because we're recording as i said we'll take questions from our audience microphone here in the middle aisle. if you can get to that, that would be a help and we'll field questions from there. afterwards we'll have a book signing up here. lisa will sign both her books, "knocking on heaven's door" and they are available at front of the store. always good to silence telephones and that's how we'll go. so again, really above all, want to say thanks. this is nice turnout and a great crowd and welcome to politics & prose. welcome to lisa randall. her new book is "knocking on heaven's door".

how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the universe and the modern world. she is a physicist in harvard university. she one of the most highly cited an influential theoretical physicists. appeared in discover, the economist, "newsweek", "scientific american" among many others, many other publications. she has been one of "time" magazine's 100 most influential people. as i said, "knocking on heaven's door" is her second book. her first booked warped passages about the universe is hidden dimensions. knocking on heaven's door is talking about the large hadron collider and author's investigation into elementary particles and cosmology into modern physics. from the core knowledge of the smallest objection the outer boundaries the larger outer threshold beyond understanding. this is her book to present. and we're happy that she is

here to do that. and, again, thanks to you for being here. please have me welcome to politics & prose, lisa randall. [applause] welcome. >> thank you very much. it's a pleasure to be here. so first of all i want to make clear that i don't necessarily see this book as just a book about the large hadron collider. i really think it is a book about the nature of science. the large hadron collider and physics i do is about the science i talk about. i try to explain a little bit more, what are the elements, what are the elements of thinking that go into science? that is not to say i don't spend a lot of time talking about the large hadron collider and science going on there and what is going on cosmology and dark matter searches for example. there is lot of more general elements and it's funny because i haven't been to politics & prose before.

am i supposed to give a political talk? i mean i do speak in prose so that part i have covered. but, really, and i do think even in that sense i just think it's really important for people quite generally to start thinking a little bit more scientifically and to understand really what it means in terms of what the role of uncertainty plays in terms of what it means to be right and wrong, in terms of the role creativity plays in what we do. in terms of a lot of things we don't often associate with science. we often think something we plug something in and get the answer but there is a lot more going on than that. when science is happening there is lot more back and forth is going on and understanding uncertainty is really important as well as many other aspects what i'm going to talk about. because it is only a short talk and we don't have time to go through the entire book i actually have two different talks i've been giving or that i'm going to be giving. one is more about the large hadron collider and physics

happening there. another is about one of the concept that is really important in physics and that is the concept of scale. so i'm going to begin the talk by talking about scale. in the process we'll see some of the exciting physics along the way but keep in mind, really what i want to get across why thinking in terms of scale is important not just for physics but all of science and really more generally. so, with that i will actually begin the actual talk. and again, thank you for having he mere -- here. the title is "knocking on heaven's door". my friends polled or enemies polled nine out of 10 like the title. really what i wanted to get across with the title is really what we're doing. i wanted a way to convey the fact we have this very established base of knowledge but we're really trying to go beyond it. we're trying to probe those edges. we're trying to get beyond that and that is what science is doing trying to get a little it about beyond. that is what i had in mind.

when i say how physics and scientific thinking illuminate the modern world i have in mind just that it is really physics for understanding the nature of our universe but scientific thinking has much more broader applications and worth people's understanding. . .

>> it has the eiffel tower in the b.c., a kiosk advertising performance, and it has cars in the street, which is very typical, so it's a typical paris scene. so what do i want to get across here? well, the thing i want to get across is what you see depends on how you look at things, what resolution you have, what scale you choose to focus on. if you think about the eiffel tower, you can look at it from far away, like if you had a map of france, it would not be a way to know about the eiffel tower. you won't know about the aspects like physics until we zoom into

the scale. of course, i could look very close and would see nothing that surveys the beauty of the entire structure, but if i wanted to study the tower, that's an appropriate scale for that, and when used, i don't want to take into account all the little details. of course, i cowrld -- could zoom in closer, but that's not relevant. what i really wanted you to see in the slide, which is, of course, much more important is if you zoomed in, you can see my name on it. [laughter] i'm getting to the point of understanding how my name, i'm a particle physicist, ended up in paris. >> if you look -- >> if you look there, there's my

name. okay. we'll come back to that at the end of the talks. let's think about the scale. one of the reasons i wanted to focus on this is when i talked about war passages. i think a lot of people, even those extremely interested in the science i do, i think there's a misconception sometimes about how does this relate to the kinds of things we see, these exotic ideas of extra dimension, but how is there a continuous transition from the exotic idea that apply to tiny scales and what we see on human scale, and our intuition, of course, is guided by what we see on human scales. when we think -- when we think of other types of physical -- people think it's magical or not real because it's not what they see in their daily live, but anyone who saw an optical illusion knows you can't always trust your eyes. in fact, you can trust things that are measure and recorded

and consistently done so and get the same answer. it's not intuitive in the sense of it's not what you see when you walk down the street, but that doesn't mean it's not there. it's just not obvious to us as human beings. that's important to get across that the physics described in the world whether or not we as human beings see it, and our challenge is to get that information out, to be able to interpret things you can make as technology advances to understand what's going on. in the slide is vision. there's a visible light spectrum. it's relatively narrow, and, of course, if you go to scales that are smaller than the few hundred meters we're talking about, if you go to scales smaller, you're not going to be able to literally see something. visible light will not have the sensitivity to see things. when we see things, we're not seeing it in the way we traditionally do. it's something we consider a

more indirect measure. . the history of measurements from direct to indirect measurements is interesting. even at the time of galileo, it's the first time people used lenses, not using the eyes directly even if measurements before were not. since then, we've had more and more distance, but there's nevertheless a rigid connection of what the devices are measuring and what we see. in fact, the physical universe has a broad range of scales far broader than what we wrap our heads around. there's many interesting scales and things happening on them. before we go on, there's a brief tour of the scales so we can set the landscape just to know what we're talking about. of course, we could start by the large scales. in principles, scales to could be large. we have no idea how big it is,

but we set a size to it by talking about the size of the known universe, the visible universe, the universe we see given the speed of light and length of time the universe existed, and that's the ten to the 27 meters. talking about the universe, be careful because there's two ways things could be smaller. you could be looking into the earlier universe, and on that side, the universe -- radiation was emitted when it was smaller, but we had many objects in the sky, and those objects are various sizes. we can talk about the solar system, talk about the earth's orbit, sun, there's many different sizes, and it's spanning a huge range of scales. one thing that's really interesting, though, about all of the scales is that it's really the same laws of physics applying over those scales. we're not finding we have to adjust the laws of physics as we go to different scales. i mean, density, we might need to use general relativity, but

basically it's the laws of gravity, and laws that we're all familiar with. it's a little bit different in principle if you look at smaller scales because we think of going up -- but you can also did inside. of course, a lot of that is much, much harder to visualize these small scales, and that is the challenge to me as a writer to try to convey what's going on in small scales because it's not as intuitive, and you need ways to think about it. what's also interesting is that you can see -- you're going -- you actually vary the scale, you have human scales we're familiar with, but then you get to scales where physics is a better description or quantum mechanics is a better description so you change the nature of how you describe things. i'm using classical physics to quantum physics. i want to get across what that means. is one right and the other wrong? what's going on there. one scale i want to focus on is

the measurements -- if you wonder, it's a big ring underneath the ground. we'll come back to that later, but that picture is representing the lower collider, and that's the frontier scale in terms of what we can actually look at with experiments. that is the frontier emergency scale for experiment, and that's 10 minus 19 meters, far smaller than we can imagine seeing, but we're about to learn about the distance scales from high energy experiments performed there. in the chart, i talk about some other scales, and they are smaller than the scales of the explorer. there's many smaller scales you can think about. those are not being experimentally explored in the near future as far as we know, but there could be interesting physics happening there, and, in fact, there's probably a limit to the scale we can talk about,

to the distance scales we talk bow. i'll explain that later. there's an enormous range even below -- we're probing a small scale now, 10 minus 19 meters, but that's not even near the end of scales that we might in principle explore. one question to keep in mind is how do you talk about these things with all of these unknowns? how do you reference it with all this stuff not yet known? there's a few striking things there. one is that that's there a lot of information. we're covering the scale. how request we wrap our heads around it? furthermore, there's classical mechanics for some scale, quantum mechanics for others, and if we keep going down, it could be quantum gravity, and it's in a way that works over

the entire range of scales. what's going on? what do we mean by this? we really want a theoretical tool for organizing the information, and that's what we as physicists do. we have a tool for organizing information. it's known as an effective theory. i want to get across to you what i mean by eskive theory. -- effective theory. what do we mean? well, the solution sounds obvious? some sense. there's all this stuff out there, but let's just track what we need to track. let's keep track of the effective quantities relevant to observations. that's to say, if i can't measure something, maybe i don't need to use that in the description, just absorb it, bundle it into the quantities that i can measure, and that turns it into a problem where you are not caught with unnecessary details. so, i think, this is kind of a generally obvious concept that you use all the time without

realizing it. you know, if you're in politics and prose, starting from far away, first find washington, have a map where politics and prose is not showing up on the map on the left. that's a different scale you're looking at there than on the right hand side when you want to know what to do when you're on military road. what you want to do is focus in. in some cases, you keep track of each individual street, but in that description, you're not. you just keep track of the larger, more global structure. that's how we can do it. if we tried to fibbed our way across the country using a street map, that's impractical, but we use the map on the left, but when we need to, we can zone in on the map on the right. i think i'm sure many of you come from different backgrounds, and it's a very general way of thinking; right? you identify the scale for the problem at hand. if you're doing literature, you

know, you might do close reading focus on individual words and what's going on there, or just the big picture, the big story. in biology, i mean, we're now seeing that some people will do molecular biology, but you have to connect that into a larger bigger picture. there might be a system in biology and psychology and every motive thought, you focus in on individual elements or try to put it together in a big picture. it wouldn't hurt to think about what's going on in the world today. let's just take a physics example, the easiest. suppose a throw a ball and i want to figure out where the ball lands. i'm in the going to think of the ball in terms of its atomic structure, and i'm not going to worry about the corks, but i'll think about of as a ball, and that works. that's how physics work. you do effective theory without

knowing it. he didn't say i'm going to be clever and ignore structures hidden inside. i mean, he just figured out what would happen if you throw a ball and the measurements made at the time would never distinguish the fact it's a ball from the fact it's an atomic structure. it would be ire irrelevant, and now that we know about the underlying structure, we don't use it. if we have atoms, we'll use quantum mechanics, but not to find the trajectory of a ball. it doesn't make sense. in a sense, boapt theory -- both theories are correct. quantum is the theory, that's what's going on, and in principle, classical physics is an approximation of quantum physics, but it could be creak in the uses you want to do, and there's the moon using classical physics, so it works. it's effective. if you don't actually measure

anything that tells you the difference, then you're not going to need to use it, but, of course, the history of physics is making progress, so what happens is you finally come to a point where it breaks down, where you do need something different, and that's how you advance. what happens when you do that is the old theory absorbs into the new theory, it's not necessarily wrong, but it doesn't apply to the entire regime of perimeters you can think about. that's how it works. in this, what's important is stating when you make a measure. -- measurement. what's the accuracy and what regime does it apply? it's the uncertainty leftover where there's room for something new. if you don't have the measuring tools and you're not looking, you might not care, but at some point, you'll get there, and that's the way physics progresses. think of the physics we do in that context.