♪ .. >> he recounts his tenure and reports on the reforms made during his three years as president obama's regulatory czar from improved labels on food products and calories listed on national restaurant menus to streamlined student loans and mortgage applications.

this is a little over an hour. [applause] >> thank you so much. it's a pleasure to be here, it's an honor to be here, and gonna tell you a little bit about what i did in the obama administration and a little bit, also, about what the next generation might look like. but want to emphasize what a privilege i had to have the job i ended up with. when i was first dating or almost dating or hoping to date my now-wife and mother of two young children, she asked me -- and i think this was a test to see if it maybe could be a date -- she said, if you could have any job in the world, what would it be? and i subsequently found she was hoping i would say play center field for the boston red sox or be in the e street band with bruce springsteen. and instead, and i kind of remember this, though she does a

little better than i do, i got this starry, faraway look in my eye, and i said, oira. and she said what the heck is oira? and she might have used a four-letter word other than heck. and amazingly, i got that, i got a second date. my job in government was to held oira which is the office of information and regulatory affairs. and that office, um, i'm just going to tell you a little bit about right now. it oversees, basically, all of federal regulation. so if a rule is sought by the department of interior or the environmental protection agency or the department of state, unless it has an exemption and exemptions are unusual, it has to go through the oira process. what that means is an an expensive regulation involving

safety on the highways or air pollution or our educational system needs to be, um, approved by the office of information and regulatory affairs. now, of course, that office isn't an independent actor. it's part of a white house team. and if i ever thought to myself i don't like this rule but everybody else loves it, i would think i'm probably mistaken, it's probably pretty good notwithstanding the concerns i have. nonetheless, oira since president reagan, it's survived republican and democratic administrations, has been the kind of court of last resort within the executive branch in terms of the issuance of regulations. so that's the basic idea. and it is the case notwithstanding a lot of concerns about regulatory costs, and i share those concerns, that in the obama administration there were fewer rules than in the first four years of the bush

administration. bush administration is not thought of as the regulation champion. but it had more rules than the obama administration. and over the past decade, the highest cost year we have on record is not any of the obama years, but 2007 under president bush. he had the highest cost year. and to his credit, president bush's highest cost year was not as high as the clinton, reagan and bush father years. so bush had the lowest highest-cost year. but obama is lower than that. so we haven't seen anything like an explosion of regulatory costs, and that's partly testimony to the direction i had from the president to avoid overloading the system. especially in a time of serious economic challenge. okay. going to tell you a little bit, and then i'm going to give you some pictures. the human mind, it turns out,

has two systems of operations in it. system one, charmingly named, is more intuitive and automatic. that's the part of the human brain that homer simpson often is listening to. as, for example, when he's trying to buy guns at a local gun shop and he's told if his state there's a five-day waiting period, and he responds, a five-day waiting period? i'm angry now. [laughter] if you saw a large german shepard on the street or a, an angry tiger in the zoo behind bars, system one tends to be automatic and intuitive and sometimes error-prone. system two is the more deliberative or call chative system. we have in our minds a machinery. this is evolved a little later,

where we can run the numbers and think that the risks associated with large dogs are typically small and in zoos the creatures are typically behind bars and not threatening to us. here's a finding from social scientists that i think is extremely revealing and kind of testimony to what a 21st century government should be like. some of the errors to which system one is prone, some of the mistakes that we make, homer simpson-like mistakes, not calculating probabilities, getting too upset and exorcised, being too complacent when there's actually reason for fear, some of these errors go away when we answer questions in a language not our own. we err in our own language and don't in a foreign language. why is that? that's a mystery. part of the answer, i think, is that when you're speaking a language that's not your own but with which you have some familiarity, you're working

hard. your automatic system, your homer simpson self, is in retreat because the language is unfamiliar. system two is in the fore. your deliberative, nonautomatic, nonintuitive system is operational. cost benefit analysis was one of my guiding principles under the president's direction in the obama administration meaning look at the human consequences of what you're doing. if it's an environmental rule, is it going to save a lot of lives or few? if it's going to impose costs on small business, are those large costs or small? the cost benefit calculus is, in a way, a foreign language. it's not how we ordinarily think or intuitively think about rules designed to protect safety on the highways or rules designed to protect food safety. but cost benefit analysis is a useful tool for disciplining both the harmful effects of lobbyists and well organize toed

groups who are pretty self-interested and of disciplining the homer simpson part of the brain. okay. we know that human beings are prone to err in multiple ways. if you tell people you really ought to get a flu shot, the season's going to be bad, people are more likely to get a flu shot. but if you tell them you ought to get a flu shot, and here's a map of where to go to get one, then the likelihood that people get a flu shot leaps up dramatically. maps are very important because system one needs maps to furring out what to do, and system two is often preoccupied with other matters. complexity is often a terrible problem, and the reason is that people are busy, that the people who produce complex instruments or documents often are specialists, they aren't sufficiently attuned to the fact that the area in question is unfamiliar to the people handling them. and i can say in government i

often saw the following: people who were designing rules involving the environment or permits or forms for taxes or something else who would produce the forms in complete good faith thinking that they would be manageable by people, and they were surprised that the thing turned out to be very hard to navigate. it's a little like if you go to a town that's not familiar to you, and you ask where's the gas station, and they say turn left, turn right, go two miles, then it'll be a red building on the right, you can't miss it. and i at least always miss it. [laughter] and people in government are sometimes like that. the local who's not helping you typically isn't mischievous or cruel, they're not trying to get you lost, but they're not attuned to the fact that you are not familiar with the context in the way that they are. okay. i'm going to have something to

say about default rules in a little bit, but what i want to emphasize right now is that if you think of your cell phone, your mortgage, a rental car that you get for a vacation, a relationship with -- that you have with multiple people who are, you're contracting with, there are default rules in place in the sense that these are the rules that determine what happens if you do nothing. your computer has various settings, privacy settings, other kinds of settings about what comes up immediately. these are default rules that determine what happens unless you expend effort. if you look at taxis in large cities these days, they tend to have touch screens which have default tips of 20, 25 and 30. those are a bit higher than the average before the touch screens were in place. those screens have produced a

10% increase in new york city in tips. that's equivalent to a very welcome raise for cab drivers. who get the money just because of the default. defaults are everywhere. they're all around us. and they help determine what happens, because nothing is often exactly what we'll do. google in new york had a cafeteria that was making its employees quite obese not long ago, because the foods that were readily visible and there were really fattening. and people were kind of defaulted into choosing them. there's a new design of the cafeteria in new york where they have the healthy foods visible and up front and the unhealthy ones available but not so salient and immediate. that's resulted in a significant decrease in candy consumption. the basic idea is with respect to so many things that help

determine our future, the default determines exactly what's going to happen. and we need to be very self-conscious about designing very good defaults. i'm going to say one other thing about the operation of system one that is the intuitive part of the brain. for most people unrealistic optimism is a, is a, just a fact. about 80% of people tend to be unrealistically optimistic in the sense that they think they are less likely than most others or more likely than statistics warrant to be immune from pad things. un-- bad things. unrealistic optimism is part of the human species. that's good in many ways. it helps us. if you think you're able to do things, chances are increased that you will even if it's going to be tough. now, unrealistic optimism has

many virtues, but it also has a downside. about 90% of people have been found to think that they're safer than the average driver. that's unlikely to be true. [laughter] if you take a couple and ask each member of the couple what percent of the household work do you do, and if the total once you add the two up isn't over 100%, you have a most unusual couple. [laughter] that suggests both unfairness in the household context typically the guy is not pulling his fair share, and risk taking in the context of driving savings and other behavior is because system one is cheerful and upbeat, and system two -- which is nervously saying let's take precautions or be a little more honest about allocations -- system two is trailing behind system one. okay.

two systems in the mind. i have a little daughter who's about that age and looks a little bit like that. that's not her, but you can see here that one feature of modern technology when it's working great is it's extremely easy to navigate. now, it isn't the case that what lies behind a tablet that's easily navigable is itself simple. so the affordable care act is really complicated in the sense that the law has many pages. but it's possible that some or even many aspects of it will be easier to navigate than the length of the law suggests. just as modern technologies often are child's play for people even though they are themselves immensely complicated. so if i have one idea for you to remember, it's that even if government's inputs in a sense, the laws, the regulations are

themselves lengthy and detailed and not in plain english always, it's possible to implement them in a way that makes the user experience a lot more like that of modern technology. so an example for you is that there was and is a financial aid package for -- the federal government makes available for poor kids who are trying to go to college. the forms used to be immensely complicated and hard to navigate. they're not exactly child's play now, but they're a lot easier. so simplification is for customers and citizens a great friend, and complexity is a potential adversary. we need to make government a lot more like the this picture. like this picture. okay. four concepts for you. simplicity is a very important path because of the harms introduced by complexity. a few years ago i did a book

with economist friend called "nudge." the idea of a nudge is an approach that is freedom-preserving meaning people can go their own way, but it's also paternalistic in the sense that it tries to give sense and benefit a little help. so an example of a nudge is just information where people know before they owe in the domain of mortgages. it's a nudge. if they want to get a mortgage that's maybe by the expert judgment a terrible deal, they can. but at least they'll know its ingredients. another nudge is a design of a cafeteria so that healthy foods are easily available and visible, and the others are there, but you're kind of nudged against them. the idea of choice architecture is probably the central idea in "nudge" and in my new book,

"simpler." and the notion here is that our choices all have an architecture behind them even though it's not readily available to us in the sense that we didn't help design it, and even if it's -- that's not how we think about it. so if you go on a web site that's selling books or in a grocery store that's selling food or in a record store that's selling cds, there's an architecture there, and it's going to affect your choices. if you're filling out a form, its length and order will affect what you do. there are recent studies suggesting that if people sign a form at the beginning, they're more likely to be honest, less likely to cheat than if they sign at the end. the reason is signing at the beginning is, concentrates the mind on honesty, and you're on the line. there's also evidence that if a candy is in a green wrapper, people are more likely to think it's healthy regardless of

whether the greenness has anything to do with it. the fourth and final error is, final point has to do with human susceptibility to error which has a lot to do with system one. the brain is an extraordinary thing. it can outperform computers, even the fanciest, on many dimensions. but i've noted the tendency toward unrealistic optimism. we also don't do great with issues of probability. if an event has occurred in the recent past -- a flood, an earthquake -- we often exaggerate the risk that it'll occur again. if a risk hasn't occurred in the recent past -- a flood, an earthquake -- we tend to downplay the risk and think it's low. the use of that can -- [inaudible] as it's called, that something happened recently, isn't crazy, but it can lead us to be complacent in circumstances where there's a real risk and lead us to be fearful in circumstances in which system

two will tell us you really don't have to worry a whole lot. sometimes people disregard the long term, and here's a study that kind of proves this. if people are saving for retirement, often they don't do so great. long term is a foreign country, laterland, and they don't know if they're going to visit. but if people see digital photographs of themselves getting older and older over time, if their own photograph is aged, then they're more likely to save for retirement. and, in fact, merrill lynch has recently taken advantage of this empirical finding to have something where you can just age your own face and see it over time. merrill lynch is thinking not only will people be sad -- in my case, i was a little surprised -- but people are more likely to save because it

becomes real. that's evidence that the long term often seems illusory and imaginary to us. we don't care a whole lot about it. also there are a lot of things in situations that the human mind just doesn't notice. system one focuses on what matters and is most salient. there may be other features. let's say the energy efficiency of a refrigerator or the fine print of a mortgage that basically aren't on the view screen, and system two isn't going to work hard enough to put it there for people to notice. okay. now i have ten ideas for you, and they're going to go pretty quick. ten proposals for greater simplification. and each of them is meant to be like a little short story. number one, savings. americans don't save great for retirement. this is a potential problem for people who struggle when they get to retirement age. what can you do about that? well, here's a little chart that

shows what happens if people are automatically enroll inside a savings plan. enrolled in a savings plan. in many parts of the country, people have to sign up. it's easy, frequently, to do it, but people don't. why not do it tomorrow? why not do it tomorrow if you don't have to do it today? and tomorrow never comes. people automatically enrolled, we're seeing a massive increase in savings. in fact, a study shows -- this is a stunning fact, i think -- that the effect of automatic enrollment increasing savings is significantly higher than the effect of big tax incentives in increasing savings. automatic enrollment doesn't cost a nickel. tax incentives cost a lot. the automatic enrollment policy jumps savings more significantly than big tax incentives. a lesson there about how making things automatic can have big

social benefits even more so than using a lot of taxpayer resources. they're the happy employees who are content with their automatic enrollment plan and not opting out, interestingly. they opt out in very small numbers. two, this is the old united states department of agriculture food pyramid. you may have encountered it. it's been around for a good while, and it's designed to help people. it's a numbing to make nutritious -- it's a nudge to make nutritious choices. you can see from the pyramid that there's someone -- unclear if it's a man or woman, maybe you can tell the gender, i can't -- who's walking to the top of the pyramid. now, is that thinness, that white thing? is it purgatory? is it moral goodness? it's very unclear where he or she is walking to. there are a bunch of foods bunched at the bottom of the food pyramid. if you look on the far right, that brown thing looks like a

shoe. did the person lose his or her shoe? are you supposed to eat the shoe? if you're a teacher or a parent or 11-year-old looking at the food pyramid and trying to figure out what am i supposed to eat if i want to eat healthy, this is confusing, is it not? so in the obama administration we got rid of the food pyramid and replaced it with the plate. and in the government i had a slogan which i kept in my head, basically, all the time. and it went: plate, not pyramid. when you're working with citizens or one another, don't create ambiguity and complexity. plate, not pyramid. often when people are responding with negativity to an idea, it's not that they don't like it, that's that they don't know what the idea is.

ambiguity can be a great barrier to helpful suggestion. if you clear things up, success. i had a friend not long ago who was in the government, he was involved in a very important negotiation where a period before the negotiation it looked doomed. the negotiation couldn't work out, because the other side was implacable. i called the friend up and said on the day of the negotiation, how did things go, and her answer was great. which was not expected. i said, how come? and her answer was plate, not pyramid. by which what she meant is the reason the person seemed implacable on the other side is they didn't know what was being suggested. and once she was able to specify the sought terms, the negotiation went extremely well because the vast majority of them were agreeable.

plate, not pyramid. idea number three, here's a long line at an airport. many of us have experienced this, and this is a natural and widely appreciated response to various risks after 9/11. but it's not very pleasant, this long line. okay, here's something you may have seen, and i want to draw to your attention. this is an obama administration initiative that department of homeland security has had the lead in. there is something called the global entry program now which is meant to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to the system of screening and to have a more risk-based approach so that if someone is clearly an american, clearly not a security risk, you go through a very thick process but not a horrific process by any means.

a lot of people have gone through it. you can get global entry. which means when you come back into the united states as an american citizen, you don't go through a line, you go through a kiosk. it's much simpler, and people are benefiting from it bigtime already. there's a domestic analog which you may have seen which says if you're qualified for global entry, there's a good chance you're going to be in the tsa preprogram also which is risk-based rather than one size fits all. and under this you don't have to take your shoes off or your computer out. the line moves very briskly. this is an effort to reduce the difficulty of air ralph in a way that's -- air travel in a way that's more finely tuned to the actual security situation. idea number four, waiting for taxis so caseally awful, and there's a picture that exemplifies that. and especially if you're stuck someplace that isn't taxi filled at midnight or two in the

morning. you may have some trouble. you might not even go to that place, because there isn't going to be a taxi available. that is, indeed, the batmobile. and here's the general idea, that often life is made difficult and complicated sometimes in a way that imposes significant social costs because searching and matching is arduous. we have to search out something and find a match, and that imposes frictions on the system in individual life. there's a company in san francisco, you may know of it, called ub with er which -- uber which had an idea which is why shouldn't everyone have a batmobile? everyone's not going to have batman's abilities, but why shouldn't everyone be able to order the equivalent of a terrific car when they want? and the app is called uber, and the idea is you download the

uber app, and you can order your batmobile which is frequently a limousine. it's a little more expensive, sometimes a cab that's not more expensive, and they'll come get you in accordance with a schedule that they'll tell you about. it's typically very short, sometimes three minutes, sometimes four minutes, sometimes nine minutes, and you can actually see the car that's coming to get you on your screen, you can see where it is, how far away and how it's coming toward you. okay, i think the profound lesson of uber which is idea number four is that matching and searching often is a real burden and a complexifier in human life. let's see if we can use modern technologies to try and simplify it. okay, idea number five. here's a confused person. and that person could be confused for any number of

reasons, but let's just say the reason the person is confused is that he's trying to deal with the united states government with respect to taxes. and the documents that he's trying to understand are just not in plain english. here's a fact for you. the united states government imposes over nine billion hours in burden hours on the american public annually, nine billion hours. if you took a city larger than philadelphia or san francisco, had a population bigger than philadelphia or san francisco, put them in a new city larger than philadelphia and san francisco, asked everyone in that city to spend ten hours a day every day including saturday and sunday for the next year, at the end of that year all those people will, in aggregate, have spent billions of hours fewer on government paperwork than the american people do every year.

it's a staggering number. part of the reason it's staggering is that it's not in plain english. george orwell, author of "1984," wrote a great paper called -- well, basically, on plain english. urging to use a short word rather than a long one. use short sentences rather than big ones. he had a bunch of tools which government is moving toward using to try to simplify language so that the public can interact with it better. in fact, the -- in 2010 congress enacted the plain language act. isn't that great? there is such a law. i was charged with issuing guidance to insure that agencies move in its direction, and we are seeing a quiet revolution in favor of greater clarity on the part of government. okay, no jargon. jargon-free zones.

idea number six, this is a very unhappy high school senior trying to apply to colleges. and this is an unhappy high school senior, but my guess is that a very significant percentage of americans have in one or another way been struggling with applications whether it's for a small business loan or for a mortgage or for some benefit that the government entitles you to. when are applications easy? i referred to the financial aid form which has gotten much simpler, and i'll just tell you two bits of things that make it simpler. one is fewer questions. and another is in code on the form data that government already has so that high school seniors and their parents don't have to do it. and the key thing here is to ask a high school senior to produce a lot of tax information from their parents isn't the easiest

thing to ask them to do. the parents might not have the stuff available, it might be a little awkward for the high school senior to see this stuff, and the kid probably doesn't have it. what we did was to insure the irs and the department of education worked together so if the irs has the information, just puts it on the form. makes things much easier. in fact, that initiative has eliminated 5.4 million annual hours in paperwork and reporting burdens placed on the system. application easy is the, is the way to go. the health care system can benefit greatly from this. i'm not sure how many of you -- i hope very few -- have been to doctors of late. but the number of times one has to tell the doctors exactly the same information, it's completely duplicative. it makes patients look a little like that high school senior. application easy.

seven, here's someone drowning in paperwork and red tape. regulations can be burdensome by virtue of their costs and numbers. that can impair growth. one of the things the president asked me to do was to oversee a government-wide review of all regulations on the books in order to take away those that are outmoded or just unjustified. this was not exactly headline news, but it is a very big deal. i'll give you a couple of examples. it used to be that milk producers were at risk, and this is often small businesses, farmers, of being subject to the same sorts of regulatory controls that are placed on oil producers when they're transporting their goods across waters. think about that for a moment if you would. oil spills are very bad.

the environmental consequences are to be avoided. milk spills just aren't that bad. to treat milk producers the same as oil producers doesn't make any sense. so we took away that rule which is saving people a lot of money to which they would otherwise be subject. you may have seen the gas stations, the nozzles that have a lot of technology in them including air pollution control technology. in some states the nozzles have air pollution control technology that is duplicative because the cars already have the technology. so in terms of environmental benefits, the nozzle adds nothing. it's dollars without environmental gain. the epa under the regulatory lookback as we call it got rid of the nozzle requirement. that's a lot of millions of dollars saved. the biggest winner thus far in

terms of numbers, not a lot of publicity. everyone knows about the affordable care act x there are things that are being issued that are regulatory there. no doubt about that. but in the same period, the department of health and human services went over the universe of conditions of participation imposed on hospitals and doctors and nurses and eventually patients and found a whole bunch that just don't make any sense. and took them away. that's saving $5 billion in costs over the next five years as part of this package, by the way, one that didn't save a huge dollar amount but is having a real impact, the restrictions on telemedicine such that doctors couldn't through the internet or telephone help patients at remote rural hospitals. that was a restriction which had a point. it was designed to make sure that there wasn't any, you know,

fraud or unqualified doctoring going on. but it's, with modern technology, the problems are easily manageable without a flat prohibition. we took away that restriction so there are patients in rural places that are getting great medical care through a telephone or through the internet, and that's making them healthier as well as saving money. okay. there's me with the president right outside the white house. that's valerie jarrett, his senior adviser. and the picture is of relevance to the present discussion because in that very discussion we were having there, he was emphasizing the importance of the regulatory lookback, of simplifying the system, of eliminating unjustified regulations and asking me what are you doing about it. and i've given you some examples of what we've been doing. okay. eight, here's someone who's dealing with paper, and here i

want to use paper for the first time in the literal sense, not paper as a pet forfor -- as a metaphor for burdens and forms. and there's, i hope you know who that is, the poet laureate of the 1960s, bob dylan, and he did something that got a lot of attention in the 1960s, created a bit of a stir: made pete seager, great folk singer, very angry. and this is what he did. he went electronic. what we need to do -- electric, actually with, but close enough. what we need to do is in many areas replace paper with electric or electronic filing. in the tax system, we can cut some of the billions of hours imposed on the american public by allowing electronic filing. and, in fact, the irs has moved

very much in that direction. that needs to be better understood ask used more -- and used more. some of the things i worked on which involved disclosure requirements to insure that consumers and workers know about what they're getting into, companies came to me time and again and said we get it, we'll do it, don't make us send out paper to people. it's very expensive, and they're just going to throw it away. let us use electronic notification, maybe let the people who want paper opt out and ask for it. but let us save millions of dollars in costs which we'll eventually have to impose on consumers by going electronic. okay. here's an idea i'm particularly excited about. many people, even if they're frugal, don't have a clear idea about how much they spent on energy last year. many people, including if they

care about money, don't have in their head or even an easy, a very easy way to find how much they spent on credit cards last year. many people don't have clarity about what they spent on health care last year. utility companies know how much you spent on electricity last year. your credit card companies know how much you spent in annual fees or late fees or whatever last year. your insurance provider knows how much you paid in health care last year. shouldn't you? the initiative we developed is designed to insure an apples-to-apples comparison so people can see cash here, cash there, cash there and know what it is. we call it the smart disclosure initiative. this is an obama administration initiative. which in the fullness of time, being followed in the united kingdom as well, has tremendous potential for saving people money and making markets work

better. if there are hidden fees that you've ended up paying, that you never quite saw or at least you didn't see them collectively, you should have a right to see that so that you can decide whether the plan you're in is the right one for you. maybe you spent 10% or 20% more on your electricity bill last year than you needed to. maybe your own consumption habits could have been a bit different, you saved significant money, maybe it could be with a different provider and save money. and this is true in countless domains. the idea here is the power of information disclosure. if it's simple, not if it's buried in complexity -- plate, not pyramid -- the idea is there's a way of making consumers smarter. it's not by requiring them necessarily to have some complicated financial literacy, just give them the information and then let them make their own choices.

complexity is an obstacle to informed choice, simplicity is like an onramp. okay, ten and last, here's an unhappy family. and if i can tell the tale, this is why they're unhappy. this is a made-up tale. they're unhappy because everything in this family is just too complicated. they don't have rules announced in advance, they're negotiating everything every day, they love each other very much, i'm pleased to report, but the kids don't have clear standards that decide who does what when. the dad hasn't laid it out. so negotiation is the stuff of daily life. and that makes this family not work so well. here's another family. they're pretty happy. here's why. simpler begins at home. it's a family value.

and the basic idea is that complexity is often, i hope, increasingly government's past, not its future. with respect to the private sector, simpler is customer-friendly and a winning economic strategy increasingly. but also in our daily lives our interactions with one another, with our spouses, with our friends, with our children, with our parents, the real problem is not that we don't care about each other, it's that we haven't laid down clear understandings of what to do in cases of disagreement or conflict. often if you have a is simple rule that establishes what's going to happen in various circumstances, the negotiation is entirely unnecessary, and people can enjoy their lives. a good time to start on simplicity both in the private and public sector may be pretty

early in 2013. thanks. [applause] eager for questions and comments. >> thank you. the electronic question seems to be a generational one though. i'm thinking of a very good friend of mine who is my age and very smart who refuses to do the electronic business because she's read that all sorts of bad things can happen, plus she doesn't want to reveal private information; social security number, etc. so is this something only applicable, effectively, for the younger? >> that's a great question. um, here's something one cabinet department did in the last few

years. they send out paper salary and wage notices every month or every two weeks to employees. that costs taxpayers money, to send it out. they thought that probably wasn't a great idea. what they said was we're going to start sending it out electronically. but if you don't like that, if you want the paper, you get the paper. so the idea would be to notify people, i think, in the context you're describing when there are a lot of people who don't use the internet or don't rely on it for the relevant interactions, notify 'em by paper that we're going to switch to electronic, that you have a certain reasonable period if which to request pape -- in which to request paper. so you're completely right that there are a number of people who for various reasons don't like electronic interaction. and in cases where we want to respect their preferences, there's a way of doing that without saddling either customers or taxpayers with the

expense of unwanted paper which a lot of people are subject to. >> thanks for the talk. i spent many years and still do regulating pharmaceuticals both at fda and since, particularly around safety information. so two questions related to that or two issues. issue number one, where's the intersect between liability, meaning tort laws, and making things simple? the average package insert for a pharmaceutical these days when blown up into 12-point type, 12-point font is 20 pages long. it has over 2,000 discreet facts. three-fourths of them are safety. whenever one tries to simplify that label, the other side -- i'll call that lawyers for pharmaceutical companies -- goes the other way because of their duty to warn. so that's question one.

and a related question is in writing regulations for pharmaceutical companies and guidelines for them, the finish was always -- the push was always tell us exactly what to do. detail everything, and we routinely said use your judgment. that didn't go down well. so i'm wondering if you'd comment on those two. >> yeah, those are great. so there's a view in washington held by some pretty smart people that is asking for simpler in a way different from the way i'm asking for it. so my model is the ipad. easy interaction. their model, this is call it the other simpler capital o, capital s, the other simpler is common sense rather than rigid specification. so one view is that what ails the united states today is that too many governments -- state,

local, national -- are specifying too much. and instead you should just say, you know, we want people not to get sick from pharmaceuticals or we want the air to be clean. use your own common sense about how to get there. i think your question suggests that that's a, it's ambiguous whether that's a good idea. there's some context where to say use your common sense is good because people know basically what to do, and they can find their own cheapest way of getting there. and if some area -- in some areas that really is right. but there are areas i have the same experience you describe where companies would say we don't know what you're talking about. tell us what you have in mind then we can, a, evaluate whether it's sensible and feasible and, b, we can know how to comply. so the trade-off between specificity and common sense so to speak, it depends on the context. and if regulated actors could evade the law if there isn't

specificity, could be at risk because they don't know what the law means if there isn't specificity, then there's an argument for specificity. on warnings, it's a great question. so as a first approximation as the academics say, if there's a warning that you really want people to see, make it big and don't hide it. system two is, for most of us, that is the cognitive system. it's working usually on the things that it needs to work on like our jobs and not the details associated with a drug that a doctor's prescribed for us. and so the detailed warnings, it may be that there are a number of reasons why that needs to be there in that level of detail. maybe they have some deterrent effect on some doctors making the prescription in the first

place. but if what you really want to do is inform people so they can make a choice, you want to isolate the major things and let them clearly see what they are. so you may have noticed for sunscreens there's a new requirement that for the ones that are not very protective against cancer; that is, not at all protective against cancer, there's a warning that says this has not been demonstrated to protect against skin cancer. it might protect against burning, but not skin cancer. and that isn't hidden in complexity. it's pretty clear on the sunscreen. so that's -- and on cigarettes, of course, you have a simple warning, and the obama administration has tried to have a more graphic, attention-grabbing one. but point taken, exactly. now, there is surely a space for the long list for the experts. might make the market work better. but if you want patients to know what they're getting into,

simplicity has advantage ares. advantages. >> yes. a comment and a question. i assume and i hope you're familiar with the marketing academic literature which there's actually a huge amount of consumer behavior and communications. but a question, many times well-intentioned laws and regulates have unintended consequences, substantial unintended consequences that may not come up with some of the cost benefit analysises because there's a dynamic behavioral response to it. is there any attempt to extend those analyses to try to get some of the more dynamic aspects which can predict the unintended consequences? >> well, there are two things. here's how the cost benefit analysis goes, and it seems kind of dry, but i can sound pretty excited about it, because it's a way of making sure that people's

lives actually are saveed if it's a life-saving rule or the economic effects are not bad if it's a costly rule, or if they aren't good, at least that they are justified by economic or social effects that are really good. okay. so the way it works is before a rule gets issued that's expensive, it is reviewed by what used to be my office which is to say it's reviewed by numerous people who are specialists. so if you rule in the area of highway safety and there's some thought actually it's going to reduce highway safety through one of the unintended consequences, not help, there are a lot of people scrutinizing it including within the federal government, the council of economic advisers. they're terrific. a lot of people in the department of transportation which is very strong specialists, the national economic council, the department of commerce, the environmental protection agency will look at

the environmental effects. maybe it's going to have bad environmental effects. so you have a lot of people looking into it before it's issued, and they are often -- i observe this -- able to identify unintended consequences and get them on people's view screen for discussion. then the rule goes out, if it's approved, for public scrutiny. and what is inspiring to see, this was, i think, the largest lesson i got in government, is that members of the public will often isolate unintended bad consequences even if the specialist within government missed that. so you get from, you know, any number of places local government, from hitting companies, from big companies, from environmental groups, from the u.s. chamber of commerce, from ordinary citizens they say this is going to create something you don't see. and then if it turns out to be true, that can be fixed at the

final rule stage as it's called. now, if the final rule goes out, sometimes it's just as you say. the designers of the final rule either didn't see clearly enough an internal or external concern or just wasn't expressed because the systems, the dynamic nature of the system created a bad surprise. then the president's lookback kicks in. so the lookback is designed exactly for that, to correct the unintended consequence. and if for the milk one and the doctors and nurses and the nozzles, it had that advantage. the lookback's been very important, but if there's a rule that's having unintended bad consequences, often in all administrations it can get attention even if -- and correction even without a formal lookback. that's not to say it always happens, but -- far from it.

but there are mechanisms in place, and they're more formalized now under the lookback than they ever has have been. >> thank you. an addendum to the pharmaceutical issue is instead of telling us which drug's indicated and using the pharmaceutical names, it would be good if it were in english for the brand name so that we would relate to what kind of drug it is. most of us are not familiar with the root name of it and not the brand name. now to ask you, please, a question that really impacts on everything you've said here today. the most important thing for me as a consumer is not to spend all of my time doing what business and the person who is the vendor needs me to do in order for them to continue making a profit. this has has been an overburdeng of even in the united states, and that's where your simplistic

number two system kicks in. i'm busy trying to make a living. when i call a particular credit card company, for example, they're big on what's making it simple for them and make me spend literally the burden of what would ordinarily be employees of the corporation. so you see what's shifting here is all of the time frame. you added up all the time it takes to answer the questions on the forms. these are unintended consequences of where we are today. these are the, it's a very great system of capitalism and the tremendous burden being placed on the average working person to comply with the requirements that corporations make on us, right, councilman? thank you. [laughter] >> okay, great, thank you for that. complexity can create hardship first for people who are interacting with the private sector and, second, people who

are interacting with the government. and you're drawing attention to the private sector, completely right. so the book's subtitle is "the future of government," but the message is much broader than that. insofar as we're talking about the private sector, we have one kind of institution on our side which is the free market. and so if companies are making it a nightmare to interact with them, other things being equal, that's going to hurt them in the marketplace. and what needs to happen is for market forces to work combined with company ingenuity and ahead of the curveness to produce greater simplification. and if you think of the companies with which you most enjoy interacting either because of their products or because if there's an issue you can call them up, and they'll make it easy for you, they are simpler. so the plea for the private

sector is that this is often a winning strategy. it's often cheaper for them even once they get the network up and running. uber is an example where it's just really simple for individuals to interact with it and who knows whether the business model is the right one, but there are other examples. of course, the successful tablet companies' interacting is easy, and i'm sure you can think of where if you have a concern, calling them up is easy. the markets, what consumers have on their side, they're not perfect, and let's see what we can do in the next years. in democracies working with the government, we have something on our side too which is accountability. so a government which is monstrously difficult to navigate is going to take some political heat. and i'm not -- i haven't done a

sufficient survey to know the generality of what i'm about to say, but at least some departments of motor vehicles now are stunningly easier to navigate than they used to be. so to renew your driver's license in many states is just to send in a very short form, and then it comes back. or to renew it when you don't get that benefit, it's a very easy, customer-friendly visit to a place that is well organized. and the fact that the department of motor vehicles in some states so much simpler isn't only, though i'm sure it's partly that, the relevant officials want to fix a problem. it's also because people demand it. and a number of the things that we did in, to simplify the system were responsive to concerns like the one you've

described where people said, you know, with the financial aid form, this is terrible. simplify it. and the occupational safety and health administration, this didn't get a lot of anticipation. but it e limb tated over -- eliminated burdens on employers and worked with employers to think what was burden withensome and not useful. -- burdensome and not useful. another example which came from something like you're describing, truck drivers have to fill out a lot of reports to make sure their trucks are safety. that basic idea is extremely important, and secretary lahood has safety as his number one priority. 2011, by the way, the number of deaths on the highways the lowest in recorded history. a real tribute to the private sector's conscience and ingenuity but also the regulatory system's smartest. but there's an inspection requirement that is duplicative

and redundant so truck drivers have to inspect both in the night and morning and make up basically the same report. it doesn't add anything. and the truck drivers have that anxiety that you're describing. and they took it away, about 1.6 million burden hours. we've got two more. yeah. >> hi. the issue that you raise about incentivizing and disincentivizing behavior, automatic enrollment, the opposite side of which was a fight that i'm sure you remember many years ago over what was called the negative option about places like the book of the month club sending you, sending every which you had to return or else they would send you a call. ..

handgun wonder if there's a way out of that. >> some more optimistic and i hope not unrealistically optimistic. i hope i am not showing my own susceptibility to this. in terms of automatic enrollment and its presence in savings across the country, it actually was incentivized by a law that had brought republican and democratic support. automatic enrollment hasn't split people and you are absolutely right for you could imagine forms of automatic enrollment that are not in people's interests. a well designed automatic enrollment plan for savings seems pretty good. it is in workers's interests as long as automatic contributions are so high that there's a

struggle for people every month and if they are that high a will start to opt out so all the other ones we have is automatic enrollment is creating hardship for people who remain in and it is creating a safety buffer for them when they are going to need it. in terms of bad uses of automatic enrollment you could imagine -- i don't know enough about the book to say any more than you did, just to notice there was a political fight. there are actors who will give you something like a hotel room for free. in return for that you are paying monthly fees for the hotel room organization you now find yourself and rolled in and they are counting on people not to notice they are enrolled and pay monthly fees and the federal trade commission has expressed

concern about that. and wouldn't take that to be a lesson about the undesired ability of default rules in general. if you look at your cellphone or your computer it has that kind of default rule on it and they are generally good. not all of them necessarily but they are generally good and they defaulted you into settings that are ill suited to you and they think what are you doing to me and get them on the phone and they would like it very much so the default rules are not dispensable. if you are not automatically enrolled in a savings plan you are automatically enrolled in something else, a system in which 100% of your take-home pay goes to wages rather than 90 or 95. there has to be some allocation against various things and the question is how can the government have allocations that

are good for people? to make allocations that are not good for people and how can our own alertness to the immense power of default rules help as citizens and choosers to have things that serve our interests? one example, often we can design default rules that are going to make life easier for us. a number of people create a situation so that some percentage of their wages go into a funds, maybe a charity, automatically. so they don't have to think every month do i have to give a charity this month, and a certain percentage of my take-home pay every month to going to the savings account not because interest rates are spectacular, they aren't but because they won't have account which is really a savings place, not the checking place and those are individual the designed automatic enrollment systems and

they can make life a lot easier and better and safer. >> with the prevalence of scams on the internet, asking for money from nigeria and all the other places, one of the things the government says, if it comes from the treasury the treasury does not go on the internet, none of the treasury forms, and how do you come back? >> we work closely with the treasury department with no time in government, not quite right to say the treasury department doesn't go on the internet, one initiative that was adopted very much in line with what we are discussing is the treasury department is a slight overstatement for all electronic in the sense that a wide set of

benefits payments, electronically, and saving taxpayers a lot of money for mailing and increases accuracy and the system is pretty good and if paper gets lost the treasury department's is a byproduct morceau probably than any time in its history. i don't know much about this to have a view. if you get an e-mail from the u.s. treasury saying congratulations, you have won a free trip, a tour of the city of d.c. and only send $7,000, your free trip will be -- notes from the treasury department may be part of what the ordinary

experience involved. the treasury department interacts with them frequently, electronic. >> it says it is the treasury, ignore the treasury, does not directly connect with you. >> fine. i just don't know about that. if that is so it is consistent with the proposition that there is a lot of electronic activity by the treasury. just not by e-mail. thank you all. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> what you're reading this summer? booktv wants to know.

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♪ >> let us know what you are reading this summer. tweet us at booktv, post it on our facebook page or send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org. >> going to change how we live, work and think and our journey begins with a story. the story begins with the flu. every year of the flu kills tens of thousands of people around world but in 2009 a new virus was discovered, experts feared it might kill tens of millions. there was no vaccine available. the best health authorities could do was to slow its spread. but to do that they needed to know where it was. in the u.s. centers for disease control have doctors report new flu cases collecting the data and analyzing it takes time.

through the picture of the crisis was only a week or two be kind which is an eternity on a pandemic that is under way. engineers at google developed an alternative way to predict the spread of the flu, not just nationally but down to regions of the united states. they used google searches. google handled freed billion searches the day and save them all. google took fifty million of the most common search terms americans use and compared when and where they research with. data going back five years. the idea was to predict the spread of the flew through web searches alone. they struck gold. what you are looking at now

autograph showing that after crunching for half a billion mathematical models, google identifies that predicted the spread of the flu with a high degree of accuracy, and you see the official date of the cdc alongside google's predicted data from its search query and the cdc has a two week reporting line google could stop the spread of the flu almost in real time. strikingly google's message does not involve a sister beating or contacting physician's offices. it is built on big data, the ability to harness data to produce insights and valuable goods and services. let's look at another example. the company called fair cast. in 2003 computer science professor was taking an airplane and he knew to do what we all think we know to do which is he

bought his ticket on the day of departure. at 30,000 feet the devil got the better of him anti couldn't help but passenger next to him and the person paid considerably less. after a person paid, they both bought the ticket much later than he had. he was a computer science professor, and what he realized, he didn't need to know what are the reasons on how to save money on air fare, something called saturday night stay that would not affect the price. instead he realized it was hidden in plain sight and open for the taking which was to fix

all you needed to know was the price every other passengers paid on every single other airline, everything will route for all the associations for an entire year or longer. this is a big data problem but possible, create a little data and create a high degree of accuracy, and online travel site. and with the should buy it later. to buy or not to buy, that is the question. and is a good prediction. and it is seventy-five billion records. and almost every single slate for an entire year.

and they were very good indeed. microsoft knocked on its door and sold the company for $100 million. the point here is the data was generated for one purpose used for another. information became a raw material business, it is a new economic and put. >> you can watch this and other programs online. >> booktv recently covered the 2013 gaithersburg book festival in maryland. and brigham young -- dennis prager talked about is of "still the best hope: why the world needs american values to triumph" and to questions from the audience. you can watch that program now. >> dennis prager, author of "still the best hope: why the world needs american values to triumph," assistant professor of religious studies at george mason university in fairfax, va. also author of the campus crusade for christ, winner of

christianity today's 2009 award for best book in history biography. describes his writing as revolving the face of the religion in american history, a subject rarely free from controversy and often full of art. in his first book e is campus crusade as a lens through which to analyze evangelical efforts to restore american politics and the education to their christian roots. is as phase reviews about religion and america have appeared in the new york times, wall street journal, washington post and los angeles times. this portrait of cass sunstein emphasizes his early religious experiences, transforming the affect of joseph smith's murder on his personality and approach to leadership, and his third year battle with the u.s. government for control of the utah territory. the book has appeared on many best of lists probably because while it is well researched,

almost scholarly biography is so well written, so enjoyable to read, makes it very readable biography, maybe john will tell us how he is able to pull this off. have me to welcome dennis prager to the gaithersburg book festival. [applause] >> thank you. i'm going to -- i am going to -- i will do my part. today i am going to introduce you to a man who believed in a plurality of god, plurality of wind, and the unity of power. that was a very explosive combination in mid nineteenth century america. cass sunstein, a man who presided over the colonization

of a thousand miles stretch of the american west, spiritual fire built up and saved a church, whose actions prompted a president to send one fifth of the u.s. army to utah and who married 55 women along the way. his life would be perfectly prosper--preposterous if it were fiction. i want you to first meet him shortly after one of his greatest successes. in november of 1847 brigham young was about 46 years of age. he was at the time a strong barrel chested man about my height with a full head of sandy red hair. the previous summer, young had led 150 mormon pioneers to the salt lake valley. he then returned to a way station on the missouri river.

his next year he would lead thousands of his followers to their new xi on in what became utah. in the meantime young decided to reconstitute what the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints called the first presidency. joseph smith, the founding prophet and first president of the church had been murdered three years earlier. after joseph smith's death the mormon people had chosen a group called the quorum of the 12 apostles to collectively leave the church in his absence. brigham young was president of the 12. now, several years later, he wanted to streamline leadership and after his successful pioneer trek, he asked the other

apostles to affirm him as the church's president. almost all of them oppose brigham young's idea. it would augment his authority at their expense. one apostle, a man named orson, explained that he thought of the apostles, the leaders of the church as functioning more like the house of representatives. young accordingly should act like the speaker of the house, not like the president. that was orson perhaps's idea. this was brigham young's response, shipped on congress. if only mitt romney had made that his campaign slogan last year instead of believe in america, we probably would have our first mormon president. everybody could get behind that.

brigham young used to say that he only swore when he was in the pulpit. that actually wasn't true. he swore at other times as well. i will try not to quote the too generously from him today. young insisted that he would make decisions for his church without any interference from other church leaders. if a rock falls on a man to the king is he not caned? i just will be perfectly untrammeled. he denigrated the apostles who opposed him and he insisted that he stood in a authority over them all. i am the mouthpiece, he said to them. you are the belly. get in the harness or get out of

the way. those were the only two options. the other 0 apostles considered young's proposal for two weeks at a series of meetings about the church's leadership. at a final meeting on the subject, young argued his point with intense spiritual fervor. he saying and he shouted in the power of the holy spirit. glory hallelujah, he interjected into his speech. the other apostles could not resist the sheer force of brigham young's will and they got in line and affirmed him as the president, product, seer and revelator of their church. after the last contentious meetings, the group retired to a

nearby cabin, saying a pioneer song and drank a delightful strawberry wine. the pioneer song is probably now the most famous of mormon hymns, come come use saints. ends with the affirmation that all is well. that was brigham young approaching of the height of his power. 1847. if you had met him back in 1830 when he was nearly 30 years old living outside of rochester, n.y. you would never have predicted that he would have amounted to anything of knows. he was a drifter in nearly every sense of the term. on the economic and religious margins of american society. he grew up for without the benefit of any formal education. his mother died when he was 14 and his father kicked him out of

a home after remarried. as a young man, brigham young moved from town to town nearly every year in search of some prosperity and stability. he never got ahead. brigham young also grew up rudderless in terms of religion. c-span some time as a young adult dabbling with methodism. then 1830 he came across the book of mormon after missionaries' gave a copy to one of his brothers. brigham young read it but he didn't know at first what to make of the gold bible as it was then called. brigham young was a deliberate man who didn't want to be pushed into anything so he spent two years thinking about this new book, this new church, this new religion. and 1832 he saw a group of mormon missionaries speak in an

unknown spiritual tons. for brigham young this was a clear display of god's power, a sign that the church of the new testament was being restored along with most of his relatives, young was baptized and immediately he became a missionary for his new face. brigham young was a fiercely independent man, didn't want the other apostles to interfere with him once he became a church's leader. but he departed from that fierce independence when it came to the mormon prophet joseph smith. being smith's disciple meant following the froth that into all sorts of things. joseph smith taught his followers to gather together, to live in a community with each

other. but when the latter day saints flooded into a new area they always generated opposition from non mormons. in 1830 young had to flee from ohio where he had moved to follow smith to missouri. two years later he had to flee from missouri to illinois. during these years, as the church experienced what was almost crisis after crisis, most mormons' at least questioned joseph smith's leadership and many rejected him. brigham young never did. and smith rewarded that loyalty by drawing young into his inner circle. by 1839 younger had become president of his church's quorum of the 12 apostles, a group mostly tasks with overseeing missionary service and the

growth of the church in various places around united states. after the church's expulsion from missouri brigham young led the other apostles on a mercenary trip to england. i want to spend a few minutes on his experiences there because they illustrate his spirituality and his early approach to leadership. young had been in england for six weeks. there had been scores, even hundreds of converts those in the countryside and in the english city of manchester. one night while this thing was a local family, young and a good friend of his, after words spoke with each other in tongues. that is a quote from brigham

young's own diary. sung sohn and afterward spoke with each other in thomas. since his conversion brigham young had frequently spoken in tongues but he was disappointed at this moment because the converts to the church in manchester had not yet received that spiritual gifts. the previous sunday had been pentecost, pentecost is the annual christian commemoration of the holy spirit coming down like tongue of fire on top of the heads of the disciples in jerusalem, enabling people in the crowd to hear the disciples in their own languages, happened to be tomorrow so it was a good idea to bring this up today. the mormons in manchester, right after that, were wondering if

they could also experienced the spiritual power. they wanted something good. young noted in his diary. a few days later young organized a meeting of church members in manchester, ask for the blessings of the board and get the gift and after a time of prayer and expectation, he wrote, a brother almost got the gift of tongues. almost got the gift of congress. i find that very curious. how could one almost speak in spiritual tons. the gift was, so to speak on the tip of his tongue and he was spiritually tongue tied, i don't

know. to spiritually increase the process brigham young spoke in tongues himself and by fits and starts over the weekend church members in manchester experienced this gift for themselves. early saturday morning a woman called elizabeth clark began speaking in tongues as she slept. by sunday brigham young wrote to rise up in the name of the lord and speak with other tongues and prophesy in the name of jesus. most people that they have any image of brigham young probably don't think of him as a pentecostal revivalist. he healed the sick, spoke in tons, and encourage such gifts.

and spiritual fire. young not only spoke in tongues but saying in an unknown tongues. and the singing songs of zion. in 1836 young saying in tongues at the dedication of a mormon temple in eastern ohio, the first temple dedicated by joseph smith and his search. i find that fascinating, in spiritual times. and the book of mormon musical ticket in order to hear brigham young saying in towns that would be quite something. so here is brigham young as of 1840. of man from of spiritual fire and ecstasy, delivered sermons that even skeptical english audiences have a hard time ignoring. he was the man with hardly any

education, terrible and writing, who nevertheless kept a diary and drafted long letters to fellow missionaries across england. he was also at the time a very collegial leader who massaged the egos of his fellow apostles and earned their respect. he worked with men to literary talent far exceeded his own, and he got along well with apostles who is the evangelistic successes outpaced his. there is no sense that he was threatened by potential rivals. in short brigham young at the age of 40 was a man easy to admire and the enjoy. so how do we get from that brigham young, win some brigham

young to the man who browbeat his fellow fossils' into affirming his leadership seven years later? the next several years are the crux of the story, really the fulcrum of brigham young's life. brigham young returned from england to the city of 2 in illinois which became the church's new place of gathering news here brigham young began teaching young the new doctrines and rituals that would make mormonism much more than another idiosyncratic protestant church. smith, toward the end of his life, taught that god who sits enthroned in heaven is a man like and to yourself. god was and exulted human being and righteous men were gods to be. as he was, so are we now, young

explained a few years later. as he is now, so we shall become. in particular, young cherished the belief that men and god continually and the turtle the progress in knowledge, light and intelligence. he also absorbed from joseph smith what latter-day saints came to call the plan of salvation, that all people exist as spirits in the free moral presence of a heavenly father and then come to earth in bodily form. after experiencing both of the joys of creation and the trials of earthly existence, nearly all enjoy some level of heavenly glory. however, only those righteous men and women who passed through the church's sacred ordnances

would rein in celestial glory as kings and queens, as priests and priestesses and to god, to one another through the church's priesthood they formed kingdoms on earth that would persist for e. eternity. for some including brigham young, those kingdoms would be large indeed. smith revealed to brigham young is believed that righteous men had the privilege and duty of taking additional lives. young had one wife at the time, mary and angel. when joseph smith first taught young the doctrine of plural marriage he hesitated. he knew that it would change, possibly destroyed his marriage, and i am sure he knew that it also imperiled the church but

once brigham young committed to something he pursued it wholeheartedly. so it was with his conversion to mormonism and so it was with polygamy. once he was in, he was all in. he married, was sealed to four additional lives over the next few years. another 35 or so before leaving a lawyer for the west. young's wives range in age from 15 to 55. in 1872 he was sealed to his fifteenth and final wife. and the introduction to floral marriage was one factor that led to joseph smith's demise, not surprisingly dissent within the church and group of mormon dissidents began publishing a newspaper critical of smith's behavior.

smith ordered the destruction of the dissenters printing press for which he was arrested and the mormon mob stormed his jail cell and fatally shot him. smith's murders the turning point in brigham young's life. if young was anything in this world was a devoted follower of joseph smith. he was deeply traumatized by smith's death. from that point forward young resolve to do anything in his power to protect himself and the church from the events and forces that led to smith's death. he concluded that dissent within the church opposed a mortal threat to its leader. he concluded mormons could no longer tolerate living under the political authority of the non mormons. so after that point young becomes a very different man,

more fearful, coarser, very concerned about preserving his own safety. so within a few years you see a man who is concerned that he establishes his soul power within the church. joseph smith once described himself as a rough stone rolling down a hill. brigham young was more like a jagged boulder crashing into his opponents and bruising a few friends along the way. still, latter-day saints to this day revere him for good reason. he stabilized and perhaps saved his church after joseph smith's death. he preserved the rich will introduced by smith that still

distinguished his church. he established a sanctuary for tens of thousands of despised and persecuted religious refugees. by the time of his death there were 100,000 mormons living in the utah territory. like his church, he emerged from the obscure backwaters of the american frontier. yawned was an uneducated craftsman who became a millionaire businessman. the governor of a u.s. territory, the second profits of the largest new religion to take roots in american soil. i am going to stop there. there is much more in the book. i would love it if you felt like asking some questions. if you have a question please use the microphone in the back so anyone including anyone watching on c-span can hear you.

yes? >> i was wondering if you could explain who exactly or what characterizeds religious refugees that he welcomed. >> 5 that i mean the mormon people. after joseph smith's death, anti mormon mob forced the mormons to abandon their community in illinois at pain of death. mormon settlements were burned and it came almost to open warfare between mormons and non mormons and brigham young agreed to leave. >> i was at a mormon house watching on tv the waco conflagration and because i respected my landlady i didn't say how was this any different -- the branch davidians, how is this any different from what

joseph smith did 100 years ago successfully? my question is could this happen again or would it be too totally impossible because of the structure and there are no territories in the west? >> you couldn't replicate the nineteenth century mormon experience. brigham young had a sense of humor. that is one difference. i would say also brigham young didn't lead his people into disaster. david koresh ultimately wasn't concerned about the welfare of his people whereas brigham young didn't want to provoke a war that would wipe his people out. i don't think it could happen again. >> many of the secret rituals of a mormon temple ceremony are almost identical to the secret rituals of the freemasons. did you find any background for how that happened or why that

happened? >> joseph smith self-conscious we talked about this, used freemasonry has one of his sources for the endowment ceremony he developed in the early 1840's. he was comfortable keeping what he considered to truth or good doctrines from any source and so he wasn't ashamed to have found some of that in freemasonry. there were some important differences. for instance freemasonry was the male fraternal order. the endowment's chairman was forced to and women so he adapted the ceremony and changed it in important ways as well. >> how accessible did you find all the material you research? >> i had a great time because i was able to gain access to the

entirety of the brigham young papers held by the church in salt lake city so reams of letters, diaries, minutes of church meetings, transcripts of sermons, i was able than a general sense, 90% of the collections i wanted which was wonderful. i experienced a high level of openness. >> good morning. you indicated brigham young was perhaps uneasy about the polygamy decision to adopt polygamy and now the mormon church officially abandoned that to go along with the u.s. government. to you think brigham young, had he been alive when that issue was coming to a head would he have agreed to back off of this doctrine or where is he such an all in guy that he would have thought it to fan mail? >> he did fight it tooth and nail during his lifetime. the u.s. government was already putting pressure on brigham

young and the church. if porche had come to shove i think he would have been willing to abandon it in order to preserve the church. she didn't think he needed to until he died in 1877. he did very much support it. i think ultimately he liked the church later did would have fought to preserve the doctrine of celestial and the turtle marriage divorced from polygamy. thank you for your questions and for being here. love to talk with any of you individually afterwards. [applause] >> booktv is on facebook. like this with the tv guess and viewers and get up-to-date information on events.

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