world is different and those sort of larger principles are the most valuable things to learn as opposed to the specific kinds of ingredients of innovation that they are of the time and place but thinking long term in attacking the big problems are essentials, and yes i think it is an energy and biotechnology and maybe not in information technology. >> thank you for taking us bacmd engaging us in our own version of time travel back to the bell labs the idea factory in the great age of american innovation. jon, thank you. [applause]

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♪ >> if we turn away from the needs of others we align ourselves with those forces which are bringing about this suffering. >> it is a bully pulpit and we ought to to get a vintage. >> obesity in this country is nothing short of a public health crisis. >> i think that the of antennas that point up and tell when they have another agenda. >> i think they serve as a window on the path to what is going on with american women. >> she becomes the chief confidante. she is in a one of the only you can trust. >> many of the women of our first lady is a lot of them are writers, journalists that wrote books. >> they are in many cases more interesting as human beings than

their husbands if only because they are not first and foremost by political ambition. >> volley was socially and politically savvy. >> dolley madison loved every minute of it. the absolutely hated it. >> he said you know, you cannot rule without including what women want and what women have to contribute. >> during the statement you were a little breathless and there was too much looking down and i think it was a little too fast you might want to change the pace. >> yes, ma'am. >> probably the most tragic of all of the first ladies. >> she made a note in her memoir that said i myself never made any decision. i only decided what was important and when to present it to my husband. now, you stop and think about

what that is. it's a lot of power. prior to the battle against cancer is to fight the fear that accompanies the disease. she transformed the way that we looked at these and made it possible for people to survive and flourish as a result. i don't know how many presidents had that kind of impact on the way we live our lives. >> just walking around the white house grounds, i am constantly reminded of all of the people who have lived there before, and particularly all of the women of >> first lady's influence and image of a new series on c-span produced in cooperation with the white house historical association coming in to be

wary, 2013. up next, an interview with jack hitt, author of "bunch of amateurs." from benjamin franklin experiment with electricity to mark zuckerberg social website in the current crop of individuals working in their kitchen, basement and garages. this is about 45 minutes. >> i grew up in charleston south carolina where history and identity form part of the place. when i hit the age where you start asking yourself who am i and why am i here? 16 come 17.

all of my friends can claim to be descendants of robert e. lee charles coats or something like that. i didn't hear of the family house that we had many famous relatives and so i began to ask my mother about it. my mother grew exhausted with my testing and sent me to see an ancient cousin and a much her genealogist prime when curiosity at her elegant and a limb, hot summer day. after i used he and pleasantries i was presented with a large sheet of paper bearing a set of concentric circles. in the center, she wrote my name command in the immediate outer circle divided in half, she wrote the names of my to parents. and in the next circle divided into four she rode the names of my grandparents and we felt about as far as we could in every direction. and in that area where her father and mine converge, her life's work. a seemingly unbounded which flew backward to scotland and england

until my ancestors were hobnobbing with william shakespeare and mary queen of scots. this line, mary said, pointing to one of the ancient british we could claim leads in the direct line of the way to charlemagne. this revelation was too much to absorber and too much pride to process. i wanted to ask her with the holy roman emperor had left me in his bill. [laughter] but her tone was solemn, almost religious. understand you are the direct descendant of the king, she emerged. the room fell still as the rest of the universe yield about around me just like on a piece of paper. needless to say i cut quite a swath through charleston after that. i became quite adept at sort of dropping this enormous chunk of

self-esteem in any passing conversation. it is as good as some folks north of here are so good at saying things like yes, i lived in cambridge for a while. [laughter] and you know, history matters to all of us. we are all amateur geologist. our personal history matters. when bill was elevated to the majority leader of the senate in 2003, he just self published a book. its title cries out as much with this anxiety as it does with pride. this is the book title. good people they get good people, genealogy of the first family. [laughter] the truth is this anxiety can never be quelled. almost three years after, i was in a college calculus class when the teacher made a point that factor in large numbers. he decided to dramatize it by giving an example from the real world explaining how redundancy affected genealogy in a process

called pedigree collapse. he noted if you run your line back to 1800 the number of ancestors that he would have on average is about 562 trillion. that is half a quadrillion people which is more than 5,000 times the number of people that have ever existed on the plan that. how can this be? when one goes back in time ancestors expand out medically. to agree in appearance, for great grandparents, but soon enough one of them assume reduplicate places on the tree otherwise the provision creates a kind of crowding problems. the number of ancestors one has by 1200 is just over two entered 68 million people. roughly the total population of all humans on the planet at that time. beyond that year of course the whole thing starts to collapse inward, and in a rapidly implodes through super redundancy into the smaller population that existed back then.

the upshot, the teacher explained, is that nearly everyone living on the planet can claim, and he paused with emphasis to be the direct descendant of charlemagne. [laughter] the vroom felt still. the rest of the universe slowly creep about me on its direct laughing. the mathematical distinction that the teacher added would be to not have charlemagne as you're direct ancestor. [laughter] when i first started looking into this, this story let me to a host of anxiety about identity and history. and i stumbled into this for the story of kenny wittman. we found a skeleton, people found a skeleton on the banks of fervor in washington. a local amateur archaeologist

was the first to get. he laid it out on the table and the first press person that was in your shot at him announced that the skeleton had, quote, caucasoid like features. this one single feature rolled down the hill of the modern media and turned into one of the greatest snowballs of amateur genealogy and history. every magazine that you have probably ever heard of wrote a story about how they're now tended to be a pre-native american population on this top continent. a caucasoid like population that predated the native americans. now, the common assumption today is that the fossil record shows the clovis points, the spearhead that date back about 12,000 years. that is around the time that we think that the asian populations crossed through alaska the burly and streets and eventually became the americans. these people are doing, or at

least this word seems to suggest that there was a population already here when they arrived and that some of them left -- overlapped and a diet, this is the skilling solution that left a few thousand years into the new era before being wiped out by the native americans. this concept took -- got so much traction. the new yorker had an article about this spigot time, newsweek, everybody did one. playing off of the claim that there was an earlier population. when i started looking into this it turned into this enormous hoopla the native american indians under the federal law had the right to claim any skeleton found over a few hundred-years-old. the scientists claimed no, no, we want to look into this because of caucasoid like features. this might not be a native american. so, this as you may know what

all the way up, it went up to the high court's it was finally resolved on the scientists face took the seven years ago and you'll find it in that box indiana jones has a the end of the movie. we've never heard from them again. after all of that i called and called to try to find out what did we learn about the caucus will like features? no reply. no answer. and the truth is that this single word i went and asked an anthropologist. what does this mean? a4a caucasian. but caucasoid, what does that mean? and the professor told me it is just a more science sounding word for caucasian. so understand that this one guy said akaka zoey---

caucasoid-like features and it exploded the last ten years. i start with that story because i don't -- i want to be frank which is that most amateurs are fools and make mistakes and most amateurism is extremely amateur- ish. i couldn't quantify them. the book i wanted to write was a lot creativity and innovation. and i wanted to unlock all of the keys and write that book so that i could put this all back together. and then i would be great. my publishers really wanted that book. but i couldn't write that book. first of all, some ward and professor rights that about every six months. it's about entrepreneurialism and innovation and creativity.

i think communication is one of the big things always. but what i found is the sort of random chance of playfulness is about the only common denominator that we have and we are reminded in the great line what goes on. i'm a great believer. the more i work the more i have of it. is it, anyway i started following the stories and i realized that in this country especially amateurism exists everywhere in the world, but here has a special quality in part because we are such an amateur -- we are the nation that began in a kind of amateurism but instead of breaking down of creativity was, what i found was a bunch of stories, and the stories led one way or another into these various rabbit holes that i found absolutely thrilling. so, for example i was researching synthetic biology. that is the fancy word for fiddling around with dna. i was on one of these message

boards and a couple of the folks were talking about this and ensure biologist out of san francisco trying to insert the glow in the dark plasma from a jellyfish in to come back to reassure them cultivated to the glow and the darts yogurt. okay. so i called around a little bit and i found her. she's married to a thirtysomething woman pushing 510 in a butch leather jacket. she wears the kind of glasses slightly pinched at the tip like a cat's eye to finish her with a 50's girl murdered. on the way to trader joe's to pick up some plain yogurt to extract dna we talked about her tattoos all of them relating somewhat to her sense of herself as an off the grid scientist. on one arm is her favorite anime story, revolutionary girls to read on the vice it is the iconic image of atlas holding up the heavens and keeping the burden tightened is the page of

the tarot card figure is simplifies the internal students patterson tells me it officially described as, quote, a young man who stands alone in the field is full of fresh lee blossom and flowers unaware of anything around him other than the golden coin which seems to float in his hands. patterson shows the blow in the dark next to some frozen chicken wings and a baguette eggos. i thought would be cool, she said, to go to a rate was below six you could eat. so to insert the gene, she said, we will meet in the electronic device. she tells me it involves bacteria to a high voltage electrical field and in this case, 2,500 volts a standard wall socket is 120 volts. essentially, she said, we are going to taser them. her lab is on the table right in the front room.

her first was a salad spinner and her autoclave is a pressure cooker. the incubator is a sharper image tailgate she bought at a yard sale. one of the chemicals you need is glycol and she tells me that hers comes from astro glide, the sex lube. the committee use store-bought suppositories for their glycol. i'm sure there are brilliant cultural observations to be made about the amateurs instinctively improvising the sex lube while the east coast are messing around with enemas. [laughter] don't want to ponder these distinctions long enough to find out what it is. so, later on, by the way, in this experiment we blew out some fuses and set off the lights and have the building of this, but these -- one of the things i found out is that meredith and some others that i interviewed around the country are all a part of the sort of body of

hacking phenomena that are turning up in various cities and forming clumps coming and one just opened in new york. there was a piece about it in a new york times. the first one was in boston that i went to visit in san francisco and now they are popping up in all the cities. it turns out i started looking at the clubs, and of course there is a great rich american tradition of the clubs that goes back almost to the beginning. as you remember we learned about steven jorned about steven jobs and his career with the computer club in san francisco that was the close of the 70's everybody joined in the 80's and 90's was robotics clubs. we spent a lot of time at the hartford robotics club which might be the first one and it turns out like they've been reading the clubs for years for good talent. before computers there were a remote control clubs i don't know if you remember when i was a kid there was always a crank

like a remote control sailboat or plaine or something. before that apparently there were a combustion engine clubs and radio. sort of amateur clothing has been a great tradition in american history, and right now we are watching one emerge. it's synthetic biology. it's tinkering with life the way that we tinker with robots and computers and radios. already you are going to get wind of the controversy that will come that hasn't happened yet. but you know it's on the way. there's going to be some story that is going to set off some kind of panic among people that know very little about synthetic biology. and probably these clubs will be targeted in some way. hear the kids trying to rewrite, creating rules of the road and ways of doing things, sharing the common equipment creating their own set of ethics. i remember 25 years ago when i first started writing i covered

a lot of computer hacking and i don't know if you remember this it was a huge panic that a group of that. they were able to crash the phone system and takeover and get inside of the pentagon. many of my sources and 16 year old kids from new york city were arrested and imprisoned. these were the ones trying to write. the ones the were stealing your credit card, the law never touched them. that is the low hanging fruit is much easier to go after. so my fear is here we have a wonderful sort of moment in american history where the amateurs are sort of convening in their weekend clubs forming a kind of foliage if you will somehow the homeland security kind of era that we are and i fear that the best intentions of these kids coming together in these clubs is going to be misconstrued by some overzealous prosecutor and we will be

hearing about another version of this story. so each of these chapters, i found is that amateurism like i say sort of gathers around some sense of playful. i don't really know how else to describe it. it's the term that often cannot when i talked to these people. that there was just kind of something charming and lovely about going into the garage and being by yourself and pursuing some idea without any effort to produce anything other than what you were sort of ultimately dreaming of. but even in the studies where many managers are trying to bottle this that sort of not feeling the pressure of the business concerned or the threat of a paycheck or the lack of one creates a certain higher creates a certain higher creativity than being paid.

this playfulness is something that everybody tried to bottle, and i think here in this country it's always had a kind of special quality to it coming and in part because from the tree beginning when you go back and look at the history we were always thought of as a kind of amateur everything. we were thought of as an usher politicians. obviously by europeans. even amateur people. i was stunned to find the common scientific attitude in europe about americans is the atmosphere made us smaller and weaker, it made the men and women less fertile and our animals smaller and skinnier. the cows supposedly produce less milk. it was a known fact in the 70's and france but the way a snake

fed in north america was to simply lay back on the ground and unhinge its mashaal and wait for one to just fall in their mouth. the famous event where franklin was there with a bunch of other americans coming into this came up, this was the conversation. and the french were making fun of it. franklin who was a tall man asked all of them to stand up and it just so happened almost every american was 6 feet tall. and of course smaller people. but that didn't end the conversation. we have always had that sense that i think the immigrant narrative also reinforces it. this idea that we start from scratch. it's a part of our cultural dna. one of the other characters i have in the book is a woman named claude lopez. i don't know if you know her but she is a woman that escaped nazi germany and came to america in

the 30's. she married a professor and came to new haven in the 50's. the only job she could get was as a secretary. she was going to be the transcriber at something called the ben franklin papers. president truman started these slow scholarship works for all the presidential papers, as we have been franklin and yale and jefferson hamilton is at columbia. it's still going on. they are going through each piece of paper ever wrote on. claude was a trend scriber who basically sat in a corner and listed in the book as being a part of the team. but at some point after reading all of this stuff she realized she had different opinions about them franklin as he started to write books and she wrote these

great books. in fact almost everyone in the room i that you will tell you that ben franklin was a great womanizer and had an insatiable appetite and wasted half a year in france instead of getting money for the revolution so playing chess with the naked women in bathtubs sets the story here. that was true. but they make a really compelling case of that interpretation by a bunch of men. he was kind of adobe guy around women so a lot of that has been interpreted as kind of his rapaciousness. but anyway, she began a great scholar it is a self invented a scholar. one of our great franklin scholars. anyway, i come to that at the end because there are a number of images that i like about franklin. and about this very idea of amateurism. when jefferson was writing the

declaration, he came up with a common phrase, life, liberty and property. that is the phrase the woodring in your year coming and we don't know for sure, but we do know that ben franklin edited jefferson's decoration. so did adams. but we think that ben went through it for some stylistic tweaks. i like to think he put that in there. we don't know for sure, but he wrote a lot about happiness, and a lot about the sort of playful randomness that comes with creativity. the other image like to invoke is the type. he wrote about how the child in boston would lay on his back on the surface and get pulled along by his kite. it's almost certainly fiction. but that image is so compelling and the wonderful sense of a child at play drifting about being pulled by the kite. the images that -- his other usage is a bit more famous. the most famous image from the founding era then flying his kite to produce electricity

existed in clouds and was the source of lightning. several believe that story the kite and the key on a string is also a probable fabrication. i am one of those people. the fact is he had given away his theory of electricity by publishing his ideas and letting others proved his theory by setting up electrical rods. was to put one's muckle near the water during an overcast stormy afternoon and if the clouds were as charged with electrical plasma and as he believed then them to get a nice kick of static electricity and the was proven in europe. proven too well when st. petersburg or a swedish scientist named wittman put his knuckle near the rod when it struck and he was killed. the famous kite story was one that franklin told many years later not at the time that he allegedly performed the experiment. his only witness was his son. his account is on usually ave.

my own suspicion is that he feared that the discovery of electricity was his greatest achievement, which it was, he tried to retrofit the experiments of the history books and give him proper credit. he laid claim to the achievement not by setting up the details of his experiments, like i said, the account is vague. rather, he put in the mind of all of us an image more indelible than the scribbling of the house and historians. he improvised his own writing of history. in other words by conquering the world's first test version of what we might now call a photo op. he did it by invoking an image that is once playful and profound, practically the logo of the amateur child of spirit of liberty of leisure. the emblem of the lightness of being where creativity thrives. it can be american. it is american. not out of nationalistic pride so much, but because this is of our founding and the inheritance of anybody born or driven to come here. we might list the great

liberties and speech and assembly process, due process, trial by jury. the one that goes on stated is the revolutionary decision to abandon once past and self as well as one's culture, tradition and history. to walk away from everything that one is whether it is fleeing the repressive nation for this place or simply at the back door for the garage. that is real freedom. it's a story that everyone that lives here and everyone who comes here recognizes in their gut is true that the amateurs dream is the american dream. thank you. [applause] >> should we take questions? >> if for some reason you don't want to be a part of the c-span program, just make that known.

>> they don't normally watch c-span but they probably are. [laughter] >> so please, questions for jack? >> if anybody has won go ahead. yes, young man. >> should we stand? that's a nice suit, first of all. >> this is a sports jacket but thank you. >> writers are amateurs, too, in a sense which is that they come up with ideas and they don't work and your acknowledgement to even talk about how this book started as something else can you go down these by ways and backed with new topics. i'm curious -- there's been how many years between our last weekend this one? >> i think decades -- >> decades. [laughter] incurious what ideas you came up with and discarded between that book and this book. >> you mean just in this?

>> no camano camano. i'm guessing other book ideas. i'm always curious with a writer with other book ideas? >> well, i would tell you accept i'm going to do some of them. [laughter] >> i will say somebody said that this whole book is an autobiography. it is a massive self justification for a lifetime of freelancing and not really working for a living. so i will plead guilty to that. yes. >> i am very interested in the lack of correlation of creativity and being paid for it or how being an amateur seems to give rise [inaudible] i wonder if you have ideas about the judgment and criticism and

how it plays into that. when people are being paid for something when they are more subject to being criticized, there were criticized or they are working more readily judge, and there's a lot of talk about how creativity blocks the absence of judgment. succumb if you have any -- >> when i was with meredith, one of the things that i noticed that her is that because everything in the lab that she invented she created, she bought and improvised in some way. even like the mrs which is what you used to cultivate the bacteria, she'd gone back to the 1956 magazine article on how to make that stuff. like from the very beginning. so she wasn't spending tons of money going to allow us to buy it. the other thing is because everything that she had on the table was hers -- when anything would go wrong it wasn't even -- she didn't even preceded as failure to be there was just another step towards success. you know, we must have failed 25

times trying to insert that plasma into the bacterium. we stood up 36 hours straight at one point. she was never fazed by any of this. and i think -- the nice thing about not being under the gun of a paycheck is that there is no sense of failure, or if you are sort of liberated from that. in the workplace if you fail then you are fired, or you can be. there is a famous experiment, and i'm going to ask paul to tell me what the ekstrand is because i know he will know it. there is an experiment where -- and i'm just going to describe this broadly. they gave an assignment to children to draw something, and somehow i can't remember what the details were but creativity was the function of the assignment. they named certain children stars after they did -- indicating that they had done well. then on the second round of the experiment the children that got stars did worse because somehow

now it had a direction. the point of faction had applied and had a cause and effect and somehow that kind of lord their enthusiasm to be as inventive as the kids who were not burdened by that. like i said, edward i think his name is pronounced has done a lot on intrinsic motivation which is how we get people to do something. you probably read about all of these. the corporate tracks the try to do. have you seen a bicycle with six seats? used to hover around times square you could rent it. a circular bicycle with six seats invented by a european ceo trying to get his vice presidents out of the building in a sort of weird so they could be created. that whole thing was about trying to get that sense of playfulness out of a bunch of

exhausted and werries fais presidents. or you know about the dress down friday is a lot of companies have you can come in and use their facilities, invent stuff and not have to necessarily give the results to the company. there are a zillion schemes now to try to do this. so, there are some advantages and i will see the hon guided amateur as some by professionalism is often the kind of catastrophe that i was talking about with charlemagne. where you see and badgers work well as when it has some kind of interaction with a professional court to the cocoa port. i have a chapter on astronomy, and i shall have there are several centuries long relationships between the backyard astronomers and the university. and that's been insanely productive for everybody. so, you know, as long as -- if

you going to the garage and you have no connection to any one of sight, you tend to have a perpetual motion machines and the kind of stuff -- you tend to become the neighborhood crank who has the invention of the electric car, the fuel but if you stay connected which is increasingly difficult these days i realize, then it can be a bit more productive. anybody else? >> to people. john. >> would you think the money aside from his professional because he got ten bucks, but the money aside, when does one ceased to become an imager and who was that decided why? i can remember you later on going on television and being,

you know, the letcher expert -- and letcher expert because you've written the book. >> you mentioned when he is debunked. >> hardly an amateur. >> or a drop out. >> the word is a complete nest of contradictions. it's one of the words in fact the difficulties i have is trying to figure out what the word means. it does mean to love. it comes from latin from the french version. it means to do something out of love, not for money. that is the most basic. in europe it has a very specific kind of narrow sense of just being a nonprofessional. but here, if you look at that in the dictionary, i mean, we say -- if i said someone is an amateur art collector, you wouldn't think that they were a bad art collector.

you think that they are a good art collector but if i citizen and as a rank amateur, you would know that person is probably bad at something and if i say that somebody is that amateur it doesn't mean that the arn office. so it can mean green hornet, it can mean bnoob, it can mean, sir. part of the reason it has so many conflicting meetings is precisely because americans feel so conflicted about our amateur status. i have a roof and there about why we love low war and why we love macarthur grants and we love to be sort of recognize because we don't have the sort of -- except for the university we don't have the kind of institutions that europe enjoys being able to sing about somebody. as we have zero words. whatever profession you are in. but in mind we have lots of awards, lots and lots. if you get to be my age and you haven't gotten one you might want to try another field.

but i do think that that is the knowledge of the word that really speaks to our own anxiety about being in badgers. i have another one written in there about how one of the first acts of success that happens after someone has made it past amateurism is to completely erase their amateur past. i noticed one of the figures i talk about is helping the guy that discovered the ruins in newfoundland and basically set back the time of the european rival by 500 years. you know, he was a prank. a total crackpot. veldt the jews had sailed to mexico years ago, and he was over their sort of looking for evidence of that. and he had a number of crackpot theories. he was a lawyer from norway originally. when he died he wouldn't know any of this. it was fantastic. he was the greatest archaeologist of the time and he

had all of these on larry degrees from all of these great universities. so it was like the end of the wizard of oz. he was a credential. [laughter] so any way coming out of nowhere when passes from amateurs and professionals some. but, the word can mean so many different things. like you're talking about. so, obviously no one is an amateur anything, he is the great painter alive right now. but in that particular fight with the cornell sighting of the woodpecker david was definitely an outsider, he was a drop out, but that only speaks to the fact what he spent all of his time in the field looking at birds and painting them. which made him in some ways more of a kind of expert than the official experts. all of the ph.d. s at cornell were the ones that got caught up

in the kind of mass hysteria of the moment, seeing something that they desperately wanted to see and they saw it. they even videotaped it. but, you know, now that it is all over, we see in this most expert occasion a kind of bigfoot phenomena happened. we have to lift the part of every one of these sort of look nice moments. it always involves a fuzzy picture. the ivory billed woodpecker, blurred. picture, fauzi. lockness, fuzzy. evidence to settle of the cognizant triggers if that is we want to see. so it is always a vague a footprint or whatever in the case of the ivory billed woodpecker it was the acoustics confidence of this week it would make almost anything can be cut noise. and then you have the sort of mass hysteria. you have seven provincial

experts from cornell all in the woods together on a secret mission because no one knew about it when they went out there. they were all in this little bubble. we are on a secret mission to see this bird and then they all saw it. and in a couple week period, after that no one ever saw it again. they were led three-year blogs botts the completely undo all of the findings at cornell, and we now know where most people know cornell is still in some kind of denial. but most of us now know that the lens of the ivory bill woodpecker. the reason i wrote that. it was amazing to see how they could construct the fortress of truth and how they are screening banshee and mitscher's could arrive leader and in this case tear it down. did you have a question?

>> one part of the measure is hewlett-packard success eventually. the other end of the scale they never want to do anything different. what filled in that spectrum in terms of what people want to get all of this? >> i did all of them start with the tinkerer. i can upon the story of a i can upon the story of a wonderful 22-year-old woman who is a paleobiologist who is kind of unlaid that she didn't bring her computer plug and was drainings the battery. why don't we have wireless battery chargers? we have wireless everything else. her name is meredith perry. she went to that authority to a source of expert engineering nunes wikip