and at some point he says, mr. hudson, are you a democrat or a republican. and i had never even asked him and he said that i am a democrat. so the next democrat was on the rubber who was dazzling. and he holds his hand up and says i'm a democrat just like that. and the last guy was just one who is head of the bureau of labor statistics and arthur burns who is very close to president nixon and so i thought, okay, finally we have a republican. so the same guy stands there like a cow chewing its cud and then he finally says, well, i guess you have to say that i am an independent. so anyway i get back to my hotel room and the phone is ringing off the hook and the labor

committee is saying, don't you know there's an election and i say i have cleared these names in the white house and anyway, all my guys did just terrific. they were confident, they were competent, even some of the people who had objected called and said we love you guys and jim was the secretary and he later became our ambassador of japan and he went over, he was president of northwestern university. sophia had ruled all of these people out because they were registered democrats, i would not have had the confidence. i'm not saying that i shouldn't have asked the question. but anyway. if you have competent people,

they are going to do much better than if you don't. the first job is to form your team and give people who are competent. .. if something happens that is surprisingly good to my would like ted know about that, too. we can learn from those things. you have got to give people leaders and objectives and hold

accountable. accountability is very important . economics or governmental systems. i've been fond of sports as a teacher of accountability. in my books have some pictures of sports. but the american people love sports, but i think one of the reasons is the sense of accountability. there you are standing on the green. you have the putter. there is the ball. there is the cup. you hit the ball. and where the ball stops rolling, the result is unambiguous. that is the picture of golfing. he was the referee. it was ronald reagan and i had that new year's eve gulf came every year. one year lee trevino and tom

watson show up as our golfing team. very fun. >> host: george shultz, and issues on my mind you read a better time as secretary of treasury. why did he resign? >> guest: well, the atmosphere became rather discouraging, even though at had a lot of really great experiences. one day and sitting in my office, and the director of internal revenue, the commissioner of simi. his name was johnny welders. he said, i just had a visit from the president's counselor. he hands me this list of 50 or so names of people to do of full field investigation of their tax returns. that is a very unpleasant process, i would say. what do i do? you don't do it. what do i tell john dean? >> tell me report to me, and if he has a problem, come to me.

>> it was interesting, later on i heard him discussing this with john dean, very basically said who the hell those blue eyes the key is not doing what we want, but they never had that bear to put it to me because if i resigned refusing to do something improper with the internal revenue service, that would not be a very good story. anyway, i inherited the price controls which i proposed originally but was not in my domain. incidentally the to field running for mayor were don rumsfeld and dick cheney. we were in the process of trying to get rid of them, against my advice, president nixon reimposed them. i said, well, mr. president, it is your call. you i the president. i think it is a mistake, and you should get yourself a new secretary of the treasury, so i

resigned. certain policy issues. >> host: mr. secretary, did you have a -- >> guest: that also illustrates something i think, in these jobs, they are very rewarding. you have a chance to deal with really major things, often you can really make a difference. so they tend to enjoy them. but you can't like the job too much. the haft said the church yourself. i felt if i stayed under the circumstances of this decision, i would not be true to myself. so you can't let the job have too much control. >> host: mr. secretary, did you have a good relationship, or what kind of relationship did you have with president nixon?

>> a very good relationship. of a lot of really constructive things together. one of the first things i did the secretary of labor was in philadelphia and the skill construction trades there were no blacks at all. yet there were blacks around who were skilled. we decided, i decided that we should book this. so we devised something that became called the philadelphia plan and told them he had got to have some firing. the have to find people who are capable people, but nevertheless get more people there and let's have an objective and let's have a timetable and get going.

as you can imagine, it was very controversial. i was secretary of labor and all of a sudden in this controversy. i am called to testify in the summit. somebody is saying, you are trying to impose a quota system. i said, i am trying to replace one. i'm trying to get rid of one. what do you mean? the quota is zero. it has been very effective. so we went back and forth. back-and-forth in the senate. the republican leader gave me the statements in the book. we won by ten votes. a very bipartisan vote for and against. it was traumatic. it was my first battle, and i felt good about it because i felt i was in a sense morally on the right side of the issue. incidently, whether to of one of the players voted differently was ted kennedy. did not think.

different views of things. we got along well. it was a good colleague. >> use still in touch with don rumsfeld and dick cheney? >> dick was over in london. i had the privilege of being the leader with jim baker of the american delegation. when dick showed up there. his wife. there were good friends. so we had a chance to see him. he is amazing to me and he went. i said, you are looking great. three very hard years, our replacement and someone. he is looking great, feeling great. catch up with these people. >> host: what about secretary rumsfeld? >> guest: i don't see a lot of them, but i am in touch with him. he has a new book coming out.

i wrote a little blurb for it. it is unknown unknowns and no knowns and that stuff. interesting book. >> host: what was your relationship to margaret thatcher? >> guest: i had a really good relationship with marker. often we argued. she is a pretty fierce argue were. when she does not like something people to say, oh, yes, margaret. we would go at it. the underlying way of thinking about things was similar, so a lot was constructed by the reagan-thatcher relationship, and i was glad to be a part of it. i was glad to get to her funeral because i had been close to her book before i was in office and after we left office.

we still had times when we were together. i was glad to have a chance to go pay my respects because i think it is of their statement that between margaret date -- margaret thatcher and ronald reagan, they change the world. history was changed. >> host: pace 245 of "issues on my mind," you write that in my view the most striking trend now is something else. it is a growing cohesion and cooperation of like-minded nations that share an important set of positive goals. >> that is what i think with u.s. leaders we managed to do after world war ii. remember, there were some really great statement -- statement in the administration when this was

carried on. these people look back. what did they see? they saw two world wars. the first one settled in terms that helped lead to the second. to the second world war, 70 million people were killed. and untold others displaced. this on the great depression. the protectionism and the currency manipulation. they saw the holocaust. they said to themselves, what a crummy world. and we are part of it, whether reelected are not. so they set out to construct something better. they saw the soviet was aggressive to deal with. institutional structures like nato. the brentwood system in economics, the trading efforts

that cannot construct a successful effort. the security efforts. over a time. each successive administration, the contributions. security and economic in comments. people were treated to it. it was u.s. leaders without a doubt. i think it is fair to say that without u.s. leaders constructive things seldom handle. that does not mean that people do what we want. it means that when the u.s. is there with ideas as an effective participant it helps to get things moving. i have seen that personally on many occasions. so that has been a great achievement.

i can remember the early 1980's, i was in china. he said, now china is ready. he said, first of all, we open the movement of people within china and opening within china. what is the second? the second is an opening of china to the outside world. there was a reason like o'hare world. so that is what i was referring to. that's the right now. this was being torn apart and changing. >> host: how should we view china? >> guest: it is abcaeight country. a lot of talented people. it has had remarkable economic renaissance.

it has a very large problem to contend with. notably new, in modern times in . an actor on the same. so i think we better have a close working relationship where we talk through problems with them. that is the way we need to go about it. >> host: do we have that ability now? >> guest: i hope so. i'm not part of things. i was a part of a group that henry kissinger organize that has a spraying seven chime in here, seven or a device. about a year ago we were in china. the man who is now the president, he gave a dinner for arrests. a lot of discussion.

the next day we spent about an hour-and-a-half with the new premier. i thought -- and that check this out with henry kissinger. i said, you know, a collaborative relationship with the united states. that does not mean we don't have problems. it means that we can talk about the problems. maybe we agree to disagree. my first meeting with the chinese, i said -- and they like the idea, my counterpart, you put on the table everything you want to talk about and i will put on the table everything a watchdog about. let's make an agenda like that. and let's agree, i will come to

china once a year at least and you come to the u.s. once a year at least. probably three or four places where we both come to a meeting of some kind. it set aside three hours or so just for us to work through this agenda. and that served as well. identified opportunities, saw problems which we did not -- could not deal with, but on all -- and we developed the same where they did say to me, i no you're trying to get this way. we can handle that. if you will come around like this, maybe that could work. so that is the way. if you can develop our reasonably trusting relationship

with the other party so i think that undoubtedly big disagreements with china right now. the cyber area. the way to do it is to sit down and talk to each other. be realistic. be strong. have an agenda. the ready to engage. >> host: or you ever ask for did you ever want to be secretary of the military and defense? >> guest: that is a tough job. i was never asked to do that to my dad did not think about it much. i know it's a very hard job. the president asks you to do something that you can -- i think you have an obligation to do it.

i consider myself still to be a marine, so i am still in the military forces. the secretary of state, had a lot of dealings with the military. i said to my counterpart one time, i said, according to the statute, the national security council consists of four people, the president on the vice-president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. and it says in the statute coming each member is entitled to military vice. and he said, well, you know where uniform. i want to talk to the guy who wears a uniform. so eventually what happened to my found out that the joint chiefs like to play golf. i've been a member of augusta national golf club for a while in no golfer ever turns down an invitation to go. i invited him down for weekend,

so we get to know each other. but it is important to have direct military advice when you're trying to conduct diplomacy over and there's something happening. >> host: did you have a direct line to president reagan when u.s. secretary of state? >> we had a system where he and i had two private meetings a week. obviously whenever he wanted to talk about was first. i had always brought an agenda to talk about. and we had sort of an understanding. we would never try to make a decision in those meetings because those should be argued out in a broader context, but i would go and say, look, here is this problem. it is a gathering storm. you can see it on the horizon. we don't know just where it is going, but here is the way we're thinking about it. here is what we're trying to do about it. what do you think?

and we would go back and forth. and he was a union leader at one. two love to talk about bargaining and negotiation. and i had my experiences in the labor arena. so we would swap stories back and forth. i got to have a really good understanding of how we thought about things. so i felt i was important. i am representing him. people sometimes said to me, well, what about your friend? and i would always say, i don't have one. my job is to help him formulated and get it out. it is his foreign policy. he is the guy who got elected, >> host: from what you observed and has the role of the secretary of state james since you were there in the 80's? >> well, it looks to me as though there is not the same

kind of relationships that i had with president nixon board let's say jim baker had with george bush because -- i don't know exactly the reason, but i said, for example, the other day, the national security adviser went to moscow to meet with the russian president has started arranging a relationship. if i was secretary of state would not have tolerated that. that is my job. and as national security adviser , you're a staff person, not a principle. i remember when general powell got the role. he understood. he came around to me and said, i am a member of your staff. obviously the president is my main guy, but my job is to staff the council. and so i think that is beginning

to get out of kilter. in my book have quite a lot to say about the structural governance and how it is going, i think, in the wrong direction. >> host: secretary george shultz, a couple more issues on your mind. number one, demographics. you're worried about demographics. >> guest: i'm not worried. an observant. i see that the demographics of the world had changed and are continuing to change rapidly. the developed countries basically have no fertility. they are getting to be older societies. that has an impact on their outlook and capabilities. the russians have a demographic catastrophe and enhance. longevity is a little better than 60. women live 12 years on the than men.

yonder, talented people emigrating. they have huge problems in the caucasus to deal with. that is a long border with china. a lot of people have one side and hardly anyone on the other. the demographics underlying this devastating. in some ways the most interesting demographics. around 30 years ago fertility dropped. that meant for quarter-century china has had as a growing labour force and a declining number of people with the labor force to support. colleted demographic dividend. now those cohorts and the population now moving. and this situation is about to change. suddenly they're going to have a

declining labor force and the rising number this time over that the labor force us to support. a big change. meanwhile you have a north africa and middle east country. still very high. the longevity. cities a very young society is. and some how many of them have been organized in such a way the yen people don't have much to do. there was information of the information age which i talk about in the book. nowadays the people in charge have a monopoly on information ability to organize. that is entirely changed. so in the middle east uc the arab awakening and this park, it was only a spark, but it was a spark.

all he wanted to do was start a little business selling fruits and vegetables. and the regulators wanted to get something and it got squashed. how they expect to make a living? did just wanted to work and it does a lot for you. work, you get some income from work and feel, i deserve that. i get something. pay for it and deserve it. and i think the turmoil there seeing in the middle east, that will settle down. people have something to do that is constructive effort. there are many other kinds of issues that a tearing away at it, but that is a fundamental one that comes. you concede many take a look. >> host: tied into that, you mentioned another issue you talk

about, technology in the use of technology. >> guest: as i was saying to my don't think people quite appreciate the depth and the meaning of the information and communication revolution. it has changed the process of governance. it is particularly hard on autocratic governments that have been afro while. but in democratic governments people are customs of paying attention to what people want, but nevertheless it shortens the distance between the people who are governing and the people being governed. and it is changing because people anywhere can find out basic information. they can also communicate with each other through cell phones and organize. so we are seeing now over the place. and of course it has been

prevalent in the middle east, but the russians have been struggling with it. the chinese struggle with it. it is a phenomenon. >> host: final issue, domestic, international, the drug war. what should be done about drugs in the u.s.? >> guest: first of all, we have to be willing to discuss the issue. it can't be a typical issue. right? do you agree? are you willing to talk about it? >> host: i'm just listening. >> guest: furlong time no one will discuss it. we have had a war on drugs. i remember in the nixon administration we were worried brightly about the damage that drugs to to an individual and to society. so i am very, very much of the view that we need to figure out how to deal with that problem

adequately. and there was the idea, and pat moynihan, counselor in the white house thought one of the things to do would be to fix it so that drugs are just not here. he had this program. the purpose of writing a to camp david, pat is in a state of euphoria. he says to me, don't you realize, we just had the biggest bust in history? i said, congratulations. but this was in marseille. we have broken the french connection. that was the problem of the time. that's terrific. i suppose you think that as long as they're is a big profitable demand for drugs in this country there will be a supply. i looked at him and said, one hand, there is so free of. but this effort to keep drugs

out is a complete failure. and the problem of drugs in the united states is relatively great compared with many other like-minded countries. so we ought to at least discuss this and see what other people doing. i think there is a lot to be said for decriminalizing use on small-scale possession, position only for use. if you do that you don't get thrown in jail if you go to a treatment center and try to get some how. and you also keep details from being full of people who are caught smoking marijuana or something. throw people in jail and all you do is make criminals out of them. amazingly, they're even getting

drugs in jail. so we should take a different approach. it is so vitally important for people not to take these drugs. it's bad for society. and you can do things. like it will we've done in this country. there still people. but much, much less than before because we have had a fact based campaign, not just advertising, but a campaign to persuade people not to smoke. i remember the day when they have the advertisements. i'd walk around. a pretty girl saying something. right now if he sees somebody smoking you think there's somebody wrong with them -- something wrong with them. so the whole atmosphere is

changed. that can happen. all kinds of things can be done beyond what we're doing. earlier spending gigantic amounts of money on this floor, and one of the results of it is huge violence in other countries in mexico over the last five or six years some 5,060,000 people have been killed which is more than the wars in afghanistan or rock. so a huge cost. >> for think it's a mexican problem. the money come from. where the guns come from? >> these start wars often have better equipment and a better organized than the government. it seems to be 45 -- starting with that. when ade said say we have to do something about it.

one time when i was in office nancy reagan had her just say no program. she understood this. and she went to the united nations. invited to give a speech on the subject. she said very directly, solutions to this problem start right here. doing something about people taking drugs. it was a beautiful statement. >> host: in your book you include a letter from nancy reagan. >> guest: also a nice picture. at any rate she had a lot of pressure from the drug bureaucracy not to say which is said. just like her health, that is is going to say. she did. the impact in the world was just the drug bureaucracy. people responded saying, rape.

so refreshing to hear that you understand that. >> are you still in touch? >> i talked to her just the other day. i gave her report. >> to find out questions. you mentioned earlier, mr. secretary, your father. >> i thought you said earlier you had two fathers. >> is a just to file questions in general. earlier in the interview you mentioned your father. you were your parents commander did you grow up? >> in the inner city. in my parents know best inglewood new jersey which is a little better community my father worked. and my parents were just wonderful people. my father grew up on a farm in indiana. somehow got himself to deploy and universities. the first member of his family ever the of a college.

and when he was asked, the ways of the stock exchange, he would train people. he started that school, the new york stock exchange is to. the clarifying institution. and he take most days, nobody works on saturdays and more. he would take me into new york when i was a kid. afterwards we would go to this place called the deasy sandwich shop. then i go up to a football game. he take me there. played catch with me.

just a wonderful person. she said very high standards. so i was very fortunate to have voting, talented, wonderful parents. i have pictures of them all around. >> host: here at the hoover institution at stanford university, another secretary of state is located, your colleague, ms. rice, what would you think of if secretary rice ran for president? >> guest: she's a very capable person. and i have not ever talked to her directly about that, but i know that she understands the political process. it's different morning for an office than being a person even

and the ire of the sec's secretary of state. with issuant to indulge in that of the. >> host: did she ever run for office? >> guest: no. when i was in effect at mit, the school had only a few students per class. massachusetts had a program for regional schools. in at that there was a good idea so people said, what you run for the school board, so i did. and my brothers and there was some turned down the regional school but elected me by an overwhelming margin to a non existent. so i ran. >> host: for the past hour or so we have been talking with former secretary of state, labor, and treasury, the george shultz. "issues on my mind: strategies for the future".

you're watching book tv on c-span2. >> coming up here on c-span2, retired general stanley mcchrystal talks about what lies ahead for pakistan after the u.s. leaves afghanistan. then book tv in prime-time featuring books about the future. first, thursday book tv in prime-time. at 8:00 p.m.

>> on the next washington journal bride woodhouse of americans united for change discusses his organization's issue advocacy and agenda during the august congressional recess and more about issues and preparing for the house and senate to return with the club for growth vice-president. and after that citizens for affordable energy president john hofmeister what's that recent developments in the u.s. and global oil industries. president obama's upcoming decision on approving the keystone akzo pipeline. plus, your e-mails, phone calls,

and tweets. washington journal live at 7:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> what i you reading this summer? book tv wants to know. >> well, i have a lot of history and biography. the book m rating currently and about halfway through a is indispensable, when leaders really matter, but by a harvard professor. it is an excellent book on different styles. it basically has this filtration theory. pilchard leaders, well-known politicians. then there are others who are obscure have come through who are going to be predictable as a result because there not as well-known. lincoln was such a leader. had only one term in congress.

was an obscure figure from illinois. so when he got to the white house he was unpredictable and yet, of course, proved to be one of the best leaders in the history of the united states. that is not always the case, but it is a fascinating. where he applies his theory to a number of leaders like jefferson and wilson and winston churchill it is a great read. so books i recently read, a great writer and a great buy rover. his theories in this book, eisenhower was not as appreciated as he should have been. he had nothing to his madness. though he might have seemed to be bungler and not in charge, secretly he actually was quite shrewd and very much in charge a new what he was doing. i happily, having read the whole book and being open to the theory, but actually he does not mean to, but the kind of proves

the opposite. this book pretty much tells you that eisenhower was often as sick man, very serious illness, heart disease, and was often very disengaged from his own cabinet, a lot more to his secretary of state. so it is an interesting book, but i actually think he disapproves his own pieces, which is kind of fun when you think about it. another book the last great senate. doing what he thinks is a golden age in the senate in the 60's and 70's and some of the 80's, characters like ted kennedy and jacob javits and have got things done, reached across the aisle. willing to break with their own party orthodoxy, kind of

bemoaning, but we don't do that very much anymore. how much had done with that spirit of collaboration and compromise. the book by charles freeman, and it is a fascinating account of history in which he posits that the notions of christian orthodoxy and heresy really were imposed not bind church views but by leaders from the stage where the state directly intervened in convening and insisted on certain precepts of orthodoxy and found that flow the concept of what constituted heresy. and it was the emperor of the best use in 381 who really insisted on that. change the course of history from our framers point of view. it kind of silence to and

squelched the church about the competing theories of theology and led to the prosecution of people in deviated from orthodoxy over the centuries. so is really a fascinating account of history and the consequences that flow from the actions of the emperor of the those use it was a westerner originally. has written a wonderful new book called the general. the offer to the other. what went wrong. a brilliant book. this one is a historical book about how general -- generals were made, promoted, and demoted from world war two until the present. ceases -- the pieces is essentially that george c. marshall is served as the joint

chiefs of staff under fdr term or two, moved many, many generals from the battlefield. he insisted a performance. he would give them a second chance sometimes, but with impunity removed people until he found the right person for a ride chubb. that culture of accountability and accountability has very much been deleted and subsequent times such that by vietnam performance seemed to be a very small criteria when it came to appraisal of generals. and there were very few consequences for a poor performance and poor outcomes. the pilots of general westmoreland in charge of vietnam, a quintessential example of that.

and he argues that right up until the present day the same is true. it's very curious to the performance of the military and has real implications in terms of u.s. defense and national security policy. very thought provoking and worth reading. our book that i recently read is a book called conservative assault on the constitution by an attorney who practices. and in this book he really documents the conservative assaults on many facets from education to a civil rights to personal liberties to corporate law. and his theory is that this is the concerted in the logical assaults on liberty and on constitutional principles. ironically many of the folks on the conservative side hold up to

the constitution. it actually makes the obvious argument that they're in danger in constitutional liberties. many of the precepts we care very much about as a country. finally two books i have not yet read. one is the guns of glass light. the third book in the trilogy of world war two and the eric -- finally as the western post. his first two volumes or extraordinary. a book on the north african campaign and the american involvement. the second is essentially campaigns that went right up until 1945, brutal parts of the war. the third is about our involvement from the invasion of

normandy, the day come right up to the liberation in 1945. so next on my list this summer to read. the book by a colleague called the founding rivals, the rivalry between madison and monroe. a little-known piece of virginia history, but actually madison and monroe ran against each other for the united states congress. and the district has been prior to favre james monroe. madison tried to test it and beat james monroe who, of course, was a friend of his and succeeded him as president. this is quite an interesting book and contends that because he was the winner of the election we get the bill of rights. a great champion. so great consequences.

not a well-known piece, but a critical piece. it gives us this book very much like for to reading this summer. >> let us know what you're reading. tweet us, posted on our facebook page, or send us an e-mail. >> i remember so well after the march was over, after dr. king had delivered the speech president kennedy invited us to the white house, stood in the door of the oval office greedy each one of us. he was like -- he was so glad that everything had gone so well. he said, you did a good job. he did a good kid -- he did a good job. he gets amarna ticking in said, you had a dream. >> the jfk presidential library and museum a look back with a panel discussion in conversation . the pure chance to colin and comment.

>> wednesday former illinois representative jesse jackson jr. , 30 months in jail for misuse of campaign funds. the former congressman and his wife sentenced to one year were found guilty of misspending approximately $750,000 in campaign funds. the former congressman reports to prison on november 1st and his wife will serve return following the completion of his sentence. former u.s. commander in afghanistan, stanley mcchrystal, sat down with former ambassador to the u.s., al qaeda, to discuss what lies ahead and the u.s. withdraws forces next year. this discussion from the annual aspin ideas festival is about an hour.

[applause] >> thank you. thank you. someone said to me, the only time you really tell the truth is in your novel. so i am afraid am stuck with that. this is a fascinating opportunity for me as a journalist to talk to really the two people i most like to quiz on with that country is going. i am grateful for the opportunity to do that, and i want to start with in a sense the fundamental question that makes all of us cared deeply, anxiously about pakistan. summon up with the phrase that many americans use that this is potentially the most dangerous country on earth in terms of the potential risk of nuclear weapons getting out, absolutely catastrophic events. and so i want to ask you to start, and we will get to some

what more detailed questions later, but i would ask you to start in saying, first, did you think that assessment of pakistan is correct? second, how overtime would you see u.s. policy reducing that danger? what would a relationship with pakistan ten years from now looks like where it wouldn't say that? would not say pakistan, exit to a threat in the same sentence. >> thank you. thank you for letting me be here. a grown-up and i was a an officer reading his novels and took comfort in the fact that when we went into the real world it could not be as hard. he understated. i think the question of whether pakistan is maybe the most dangerous place for the world, the answer is yes in my view, at least right now, but it is not of pakistan's fault, not a series of bad decisions.

part of it is geography and part of it is history. if you look at that location, particularly going back to that great cain and post 1947 as an independent nation, its relationship with india has been difficult, but in its neighbors are not particularly easy to be around either. where it fits in the world is difficult. then there are a number of underlying problems that that there no matter what. economic problems, problems of water, problems of the electricity that can be faxed but still a difficult problems and would be for any government in any country. there are new or problems and an internal set of insurgencies. more than one, the existence of al qaeda. there is the pakistan me taliban and internal political challenges that pakistan faces sitting at this critical but session with about 180 million people.

the nexus between obviously india and in much of the rest of the region. and so i think that -- and then, of course, you turn a clear weapons on top of it. even if she turned a clear weapons away my answer would probably still be yes. o we need to do is make sure we look at all the factors. pakistan is a complex system, very complex equation that i could never solve. too many variables. if he tried to grab one and say the problem is the army, the problem is al qaeda, your way oversimplifying. i think that as we go forward as americans, what we need to do is deal with pakistan in a complex way. one of the things they used to discipline me is we would go in 2014, 2005, to deal with the president and go in the talking points in just 88, al qaeda, al qaeda. and pakistan niece, very close friends of mine would say we

have a bunch of problems. al qaeda is about ten. help us with all of them so that we can help you with that one. >> let me turn to the ambassador has brought -- thought as deeply about his country as anyone i know. when you hear american say it, as they so often do, what do you think? do you share that evaluation? i will ask you, maybe the general could come back in on this. it is sometimes said that nuclear weapons are under much greater control, much better command-and-control than americans rail lines. to that extent we should ratchet back our anxiety of little bit. this is a better control symptom structure and we think. >> the first question is and do believe that pakistan is a dangerous part. my second part of that is not for the american -- reasons the

americans think it is. general michael gasol and many other generals, american diplomats going back to john foster dulles, and they believed pakistan officials. america's problem. pakistan's problem. and why is pakistan a problem? here is the reason. a country that was created with very little prior discussion in the matter. people forget. in egypt for 5,000 years. several centuries, millennium. twenty-one to 66 years old, so therefore it has essentially a lot more than it has actual challenges. i understand that the pakistan is concerned about india, but as a pakistan and like a history.

i know that the american relationship with history is very unusual. the only country in the world where some be says that history, he means that development. [laughter] -- important to understand. it has not been dispensable. let's be real about that. afghanistan is too weak and too poor. so most of the problems that pakistan sees itself and is a psychological rather than real. the real problems are we have amelie 180 million people, to london to million according to this morning's estimates based on the population growth. highest population growth rate in that region. half the population is below the age of 21. one-third of them will never see

the side of any school. many school. one-third. one-third of the population is below the poverty line. another one-third is just above the. and yet the country, and i'm the only pakistan the who has had to say that look, the new clear weapons should have made as secure. we are now like the guy who keeps buying guns to try and protect itself. then i can't sleep because i'm afraid someone will steal my gun . some now pakistan has created this new site. so the real fight is essentially from syria to come to terms with this charter fee in history and having a direction for it

nation. a new vision for pakistan. tune in focus in words. it -- they get into school. keep the knicks. sign up with some type of international agreement that will make sure that bleeped are not looked upon as a pariah. they make it available to us and we will use it. that insecurity makes people think the al qaeda, well, how can we use them against our enemy. that is why we have the into related problem pakistan. so americans sometimes don't. >> i was worried before. now i'm really worried. i mean, you cannot be ambassador just described a country with a deep psychosis.

it has nuclear weapons. the question that a generation of american policy makers has been asking is how we talked to a country that has this kind of psychosis, this anxiety about its relationship with america, its mission to put in the of. so many different ways have been tried. ..

here is what i don't think we should do. i think we have engaged with pakistan and its best mudlick way so what happens is 1971 we have a relationship earlier during the cold war because pakistan's geography and the fact that they were essentially on our side made them very good partners there. when we wanted wet henry kissinger wanted to go into china they were useful to help him get into china secretly and then we pulled back whenever we had something else to do or encountered frustration and so it's spasmodic. when we go back and each time we go back in with a fairly narrow temporal set of objectives and we try to engage in that without understanding are trying to build a wider relationship. we have done if you really painful things. the press club when it was implemented after the pakistanis

went publicly nuclear stop the interaction between militaries essentially so there was a decade when pakistan military leaders didn't come to united states for training. how big of a deal is that? i would go to pakistan when i dealt with pakistani military leaders. they were layered. those who engage with the americans had one view and comfort level and then there was a whole group that had just incredible suspicion and frustratifrustrati on. i don't believe that what we should do is immediately put our arms around them and say whatever you do is find nor do i believe we should recoil and say because you are dangerous and because you are frustrating our way to not deal with you is to ignore you. it's kind of like covering our eyes and hoping pakistan goes away because when you take your hands off what is there it still is. i think a longer-term, more consistent very realistic policy as the ambassador said we can't solve pakistan's problems but we are a part, sometimes we can be

a confidence builder to them to help their confidence with their relationship with india and whatnot so i think we can. >> ambassador haqqani i am remembering the period that you were ambassador seems like pakistan was on the front age every day and part of that was you had a kind of livewire very high-visibility pakistani ambassador in washington. well you know i want you to talk about the but my question really is this. as we think about a stable and enduring, less, less neurotic u.s.-pakistan relationship is turning the heat down a good idea? if you had to do it again would you turn the heat down be more remote from the pakistani-u.s. news media? when you think about the right

way to play that role of ambassador. >> he first of all life didn't do anything wrong. pakistan's point of view and pakistan concerns and america's views about pakistan had to be put out there. what we need is a honest discussion. for example the pakistanis have a legitimate question when they say why has american policy been so spasmodic? the pakistanis have another question when they say you sometimes give us private assurances that you do not keep. on the nuclear issue let me be very honest when pakistan assumed that line diamond we could go ahead with it, they immediately enforced all the sanctions. many administrations allow congress to regulate the relationship rather than being upfront in saying hey this is not right because the general show the kind of finesse and

then in the end afghanistan was over and the congress had to be implemented. have an honest dialogue but then pakistan has to have some honest answers pretty can't say we are not making a bomb and then say by the way we just tested the bomb last weekend. we can't say all some of the blood never heard of him and then have him in pakistan. i think what we need is more candor in their relationship and is in basinger i did ring that candor. those it islamabad who think that keeping this relationship in the realm of shadows the cia to isi relationship and military-to-military relationship a more functional relationship rather than an understanding of what are we all about. korea has seen less bilateral aid in pakistan and pakistan is the largest recipient of american aid since 1947.

$40 billion. what does pakistan have to show for it? the koreans have led the economy because they open their economy. pakistani and american officials me to say to them you know what, the reason we don't come to your country is not because the american government stops them. what is right is you haven't created an environment for them to come. you open up and become less secure in your way of thinking and you don't reap the benefits in that candor has been missing because of the need-based relationship. we need them for having bases. ironically the pakistanis never gave you the bases. the big basis that the merrick and military -- he let the big picture gets foiled in the

process. >> general mcchrystal, we do now have a moment where the page has been turned in pakistan. we have a new government under prime minister nawaz sharif and a whole new set of personnel and a new party and a new way of looking at the u.s. pakistan relationship and some new ideas about india. i would be interested in first your sense of nawaz sharif as the pakistani leader. i'm going to the ask ambassador haqqani the same thing in your thoughts about where the particular opportunities are in his next period with the leadership in terms of the u.s.. >> i do think we are in a pretty important inflection point driven by a number of circumstances to include the recent election which was the first election in pakistani history from his civilian government to a civilian government. they have never been able to complete a term before so being able to start a tradition of

civilian leadership is critical. pakistan in my view cannot continue with on-again off-again military taking over leadership of the country. i think it's simple important inflection point and i think if the role of the military can be shaped into something more appropriate pakistan's military became viewed by many pakistanis with great respect within the military became viewed as the essential organization. we think of george washington as the essential man. the pakistani military and terminally fused itself is the essential bulwark of pakistani sovereignty pakistani pride in pakistani freedom and there is much less regard for the effectiveness of civilian pakistani government than we would like in a good islands. part of that is because pakistani civilian government has not been -- but now nawaz sharif has the opportunity to potentially like erdogan has done in turkey or other leaders have done to reshape that balance again.

now he is going to have to do it not just by controlling the military. i believe and i may have a different view from the ambassador when i deal with general kayani or other military leaders in the pakistani i don't see duplicitous honorable people. i see patriots who see their world through their lens and trying to do the best for their country. it may be different than what is viewed via others but i view it is pretty genuine. he's going to have to shape than a way that brings us to do a better connection. the question is i don't know him personally. i have read the histories of him when i was spending a lot of time and pakistan. he was not in a position to be around. but we are asking an awful lot of the guy who has a questionable background. >> so, ambassador haqqani one great thing about ambassador

haqqani is he knows everybody in pakistani politics and chances are he worked for them at one point in the past so i want to ask you you know a lot about nawaz sharif. what does would you offer about how he can develop a civilian government can't do make it work and in particular what advice would you have about how to deal with the problems that general mcchrystal said. how does he speak to the chief of army staff general kayani or his successor and make clear this pakistani military isn't going to call the shots now. we have a civilian governmengovernmen t. how does he do that? >> not within e.'s. first of all you must understand that american generals look at pakistani generals and see soldiers. pakistanis especially those imprisoned by generals at one point or another look at them as politicians in uniform. it's a very different

perspective. nawaz sharif has to move very carefully. on the one hand he wants to establish civilian supremacy. he used to move two steps forward 2.5 steps backward because he understood the military does have far more influence. for example the pakistani military runs businesses in the american military does not. the pakistani military runs media and has -- that the american military probably does not. [laughter] >> wait for snowden next week. >> and so the pakistani military knows pakistan's parliament and what pakistan's national interest is. the american military is part of the process of defining american international interest but all of you are part of that process as well. in pakistan the military wants to monopolize the definition of national interest and that is my problem with it.

other than that they are very decent people. my father served in the pakistani military. generals who think they can actually determine national interest and they alone can determine that are going to be nawaz sharif's biggest problem. as he tries to -- which personally i think is not necessarily priority but he wants to do it. when he does that he will run into some problems but the pakistani military soviets to move carefully on that front. >> why would he do that? that is kind of a classic revenge play. the man who kicked me out went to go after him. why did you do that? >> because he is nawaz sharif. that is who nawaz sharif is. i worked with him and when i did not agree with him and left his side he put a black mark i might name and when he got a chance he tried to get even with me on that as well. he's a provincial politician who

became national just because there was no alternative at that time. the pakistan will in -- pakistani military and the isi. the supreme court supports them. the fact is that he ran for office in 1990 and that is like a presidential candidate in the united states running for office with cia funding. you would never let that happen or at least not easily. [laughter] >> so this guy was the military propped him up and then he wanted to secure authority from the military which made him and general musharraf rivals. i think it's a mistake. his priority should be pakistan's internal problems, the economy, the educational system, scaling down the hatred that pakistanis learn from their schools can't the hatred against hindus. there is no such thing as an

ex-essential -- existential threat. there might have been a time when the americans are fighting but guess what now the americans are figuring out how to -- that is how the world moves. pakistan, this view that somehow india will always be our enemy is a wrong view. we need to open up on that and those are the things nawaz sharif should focus on. >> just a quick question to both of you. nawaz sharif is associated with india in the past with the idea of opening to india's famous diplomatic opening and a visit to lahore. a lot of people thought that's the area where you might see significant movement. the relationship between india and pakistan already is better than i think most of their country lies. what do you think about that?

is there an opportunity to quickly try to do something? >> my quick answer to that is there is a lot that can be done. as long as the narrative is that these guys never wanted us to be a country and will never let us be a country and their our existential enemies there won't be a move forward. nawaz sharif will be pulled back as residents zardari was. zardari opened up to india in a big win that beginning in the way it works is you must start floating conspiracy theories start coming. the overwhelming majority of pakistanis to this day did not accept the official version of what happened on 9/11. they are conspiracy theorists and they believe 9/11 was an inside job. they're people who don't believe the americans actually kill bin laden. and i'm talking about 15 to 20%

of conspiracy theorists that you have in this country as well. i'm talking about large numbers, 60%, 70%. that needs to be changed. policy change in relation to india otherwise we will have a lot of shaking of hands come to hugging some policy decisions and they will all fall apart within it up with years did a little incident on the border come for some guy got shot and it all falls apart. this time it needs to be on more solid footing. >> i agree with ambassador, i think he needs do the steps first because they think the additive in the nerd -- attitude and narrative will follow that. there has been talk about lowering our tariffs for india and pakistan on the condition that they increase their trade between the two countries. i think if you force interaction , i don't think you first convince somebody to like like some but he also then they will hang around them.

i you forcibly to deal with them and you change attitudes in time. >> i want to change gears just a little bit and i want to ask general mcchrystal to step back to the time that he was the isaf commander in kabul in 2009. as we know general mcchrystal put together a comprehensive strategy that we called the coin counterintelligence strategy for dealing with the taliban insurgency and stabilizing afghanistan and part of the -- what drove the policy was if we can get afghanistan right we will stabilize pakistan as well. i would like to ask you general mcchrystal, look back at that honestly and critically and we have now had four years of experience with that strategy and i think we would all be really interested in your evaluation of what went the way

you thought it would, white as you look back would you do differently, and obviously where do you think we are now as we head toward 2014 and the departure of american combat troops from that country and afghanistan flying on its own? >> first on the counterinsurgency strategy. i have been in afghanistan from 2001 on and had special operating forces going after al qaeda. before he took over in 2009 i spent most of my time in iraq. i had come to the conclusion from my iraq experienced in my years in afghanistan that the only way to be successful was not to be just enemy focused and killing people because the russians killed 1.2 million afghans and that didn't work. so i became convinced that we had to get something that won the confidence in the support of the afghan people. i had studied it for years but it was proven right in front of

my eyes in iraq. i came in the summer of 2009 and the psychological situation in afghanistan was devastating. philosophically we have been there for eight years and these huge expectations which many afghans had we were going to sort things out, had not been met. some of them weren't realistic that the reality was with the west have been able to do was not very effective in what the afghans have done for themselves was not as effective. so by 2009 they had grown cynical. they were losing hope in the taliban were leveraging that to say luck this thing is not going to work and we are about to do that. the taliban were not popular and they are still not at the very weak sense of government and weak other institutions and the police and militaries gave the sense of gloom and doom. when i took over in december 2000 if that we had to do several things. first we had to change her strategy so we could implement counterinsurgency, we could start getting the support.

we can't protect them. everything else to them is irrelevant. we need to change people's confidence. we need to start making people believe that we could and should focus off of the great question mark for me was did we have enough time? america was already tied -- tired of that. pakistan had grown convinced that we were likely to fail in the region. so we were trying to do this against this big wall of skepticism and so is aidala the afghans it was really the case can the mets win the 69 -- that's a question actively. we have to first prove he could do things on the ground in certain areas and we had to try think age people particularly people like the pakistanis and say things that we can do this. it's in your interest that we succeed because the taliban run afghanistan is the worst possible outcome for pakistani stability. i don't think any of that was wrong. i still believe that assessment

was absolutely accurate read what did we do? we went and we pushed. i spent a lot of time in pakistan with general kayani and other leaders to get them to believe that i think and maybe i am pollyanna-ish, i think i've been moving to where they thought we had a chance to be successful but in a one-on-one moment general kayani looked at me and i laid out my strategy and he laid out his and he said stan i think it's right but i don't think we have enough time. it's the only thing to do but i don't think you will succeed because i don't think you have enough time. what other option that i have except i have been given permission. where did i think it fell short? one, i think a heck of a lot of that succeeded. i think actually afghanistan is a much better place than people think he they can solve their other problems and that the album is credibility and politics. they will achieve that themselves. we can't do that.

but we did make some mistakes. i made some mistakes. as we pushed forward one thing is the american people and others like quick successes so if you come in and say you've got to believe i get a call the next day and say did you do it yet? so you just have to believe i can do at, we will do it come cannot that it's done. so there was an expectation that if it didn't happen but that it wasn't going to work and that was one of the weaknesses of this. that was the problem. i personally didn't navigate d.c. very well as we went and asked for additional forces. when i first got there did one additional forces. we did this big assessment and my staff and i've played it and all kinds of computer games and we laid it out and said the only way he can pull this off as you've got to have enough additional foreign forces to be a bridge force until you build the afghan military up. there is no other way.

so i knew going to d.c. for additional forces wasn't going to make me mr. popular but we did that. as we did that, that was very difficult political time in the fall of 2000 as you know. a new administration. it wasn't a popular war. we pushed the throughput as we push that through and were successfully make in that argument i think there were already people who were skeptical about here we go again. were going to have another iraq. we are going to have another vietnam, whatever they wanted. i don't think we were as convincing to all the other constituents and supporters as we needed to be. so i think it's got a great chance right now. unfortunately i'm still -- [inaudible] >> i want to turn to the same that i want to push back on one thing which i think any people who like you visited afghanistan often, which is that there was a

way in which you are building on quicksand because of the corruption and incompetence of the karzai government and building on quicksand isn't a viable strategy. how would you respond to that? my favorite movies monty python and the holy grail. [laughter] do you remember the scene where they go into the town and they say we built this castle and its tank in a swamp so we built another castle. we built the seventh castle and estate trade i guess i would respond i didn't have a choice. you couldn't fix every problem at once. we were trying to fix corruption and trying to fix government but we didn't have a lot of time so i thought what we had to do was first convinced the afghan people it was going to get better. provide enough security to convince people hey it's different this time. i absolutely knew we were

standing on quicksand because people believed the money was was going up the backdoor as fast as you put it in the front door but the same time it takes a long time to fix those problems. those are cultural as well as fiscal so dave rodriguez and i, one of the officers, we used it in my office and look at each other and say can we do this? he's an old west point football player and he said we will have to pass on every down and then we have a 50/50 chance. then we looked at each other and said that this is our mission. so that was the mindset that i had. >> i have to rise to the defense of president karzai. part of the problem was also the expectation of american liberals in particular that democracy should be like scandinavian democracy. instead of accepting the fact that there's probably going to be more like chicago in the

1980s. [laughter] and so cut them a little slack. there is a tribal society that says it's still at war. look, but can you imagine any state in the united states being at war for 13 years? one third of their population was driven into -- so coming back to rebuilding and rebuilding political organization and getting people together you know you have to do it in many ways. i'm not supporting corruption and i've never supported corruption but i think sometimes the standards by which afghanistan is measured are a little too high and i think that in that sense afghanistan, if i was running afghanistan i will wouldn't take money for myself but i would probably turn a blind eye to some of the things that are happening because i

need the support of this tribe or that political faction. speak to quick stories. we went on a triple and time down to kandahar in the place where we met the building was not in good shape. president karzai says it really wasn't good shape. the previous government there and pretty well-known to have a fair amount of corruption said he would never let it be like that. one of his ministers said yes or but he would have stolen the money from the federal government to do that. the president looked at him and said we would have just wasted it. [laughter] the other story on democracia's eyes tux senator levin and everybody was upset because they thought it was huge corruption. president karzai was going to win anyway. he could stuff the ballot boxes but the pashtun candidate was going to win it was going to be

him. we went to a village in senator levin and i sat in this room with 50 other big haired guys everyone sitting on the floor and a one point senator levin says you know i got reports that everyone in this village voted for president karzai. how is that democracy? that was translated and one guy stood up and he said, to i don't get it. we all got together, we talked about it, go we decided president karzai was the best person for us why would we split our vote? we are not stupid. he said okay. >> so, before turning to the audience for your questions, let me ask you the baseline issue that we are all going to be struggling with which is as american combat forces leave next year, kia what is

afghanistan going to look like and what is pakistan going to look like? you hear a lot of people who say that for all that we have done, for all the planning and effort and intense struggle and loss of life that general mcchrystal and his forces put in, that afghanistan is going to go back into a civil war. you hear a lot of people ambassador haqqani who say whatever nawaz sharif is saying the pashtuns will go back to gaming afghanistan and using it as a rear buffer in dealing with india and we will have the same crazy stuff we had before. so i want to ask each of you separately, let's take five to 10 years. give me your honest picture of what that country looks like. >> i reserve the right to be wrong. i think and we sometimes use the word muddle along.

i actually think it's not going to break into a civil war. i think there are enough things link in the country together now that they will together. it's critical that president karzai give up power in 2014 to elect it replacement and it's critical that guy's last name not a karzai. i think they will probably be the pashtuns because of the breakdown of the country but i think what happens is the institutions that have been built are still immature. i think there is enough strength to the other thing, and this i can't mention but the women i go within afghanistan have a tough road to hoe but they are incredibly strong. i don't think they have any interest in going back. the ones that i met are not going to. the young people, the millennials -- [applause] yeah, they deserve a hand. the millennials are disdainful of our generation. they think that people in our generation has made huge mistakes and then corrupt etc.

and they want this generation to move on and they are probably right. a certain point you've probably got to move this generation out so that young people who have gotten a different view on things and they will make a lot of mistakes but i think what happens if afghanistan holds together i think it still suffers from periodic internal insurgencies, little taliban truncated parts of it. i don't think if we are smart that al qaeda goes back there in significant numbers but if they are in afghanistan holds together it will be easier to address. their challenge of course is politics and the long-term. >> i think i share that view of general mcchrysmcchrys tal about afghanistan. i think that in any case the taliban are now restricted to the eastern provinces bordering pakistan so basically there i think we should pay more

attention to dealing with the arsonists. a to think that the taliban -- is a wrong idea. someone supports the taliban in afghanistan because they want to have some influence in politics. that is what needs to be dealt with. pakistan is going to be more complex. i think they're many -- if you look at the election results he has won purely by punjab the votes. he hasn't had the support of any other ethnic group in pakistan. the military hard-line will still remain and the vicar of hard-line that no one wants it pay attention to is the islamist versus the -- so that is something that needs to be worked out. i think pakistan will have

problems. if remains on the democratic course most probably there will maybe it democratic alternative that will emerge after nawaz sharif in the next election that may say enough, these are our real problems and this is what government can do. we are not going to try to conquer afghanistan. we will make friends with whoever is the in afghanistan. yes we have the right but we will not try to get her right now. we will grow our economy. put those kids that are not in school in school and move forward. that may have been five years later but the next five years we will have a mixture of bad news and worse news. >> so, that was an honest assessment. >> that is honest and helpful. let me close this out just by offering it reef comment from

the moderator. ambassador haqqani was careful to speak of the arsonists about being specific as to who that might possibly be. but if you assume that what we are talking about here is whether the isi and the pakistani intelligence service will continue to meddle in afghanistan so as to protect its security interests it's interesting that the isi from what i report has been working pretty intensively and effectively with the taliban negotiators who have come to doha qatar to begin negotiations with the u.s. representative. it's a broad group representatives of the breath of the taliban and has members of the haqqani network who were the scariest people of all who seemed to be included so that is the work of the isi and you look

at that take and save that they are at least now trying to get this peace process a chance. on the question that i put to the two panelists, the idea that afghanistan is just going to fall back in time with so many americans have is this idea that this premodern country will just fall back into the dark ages. don't believe that. in the years that we have been in afghanistan it has become a largely urban society the size of kabul kaunda hard herat all the cities that have doubled and tripled. the electrical connections. when i look at the numbers the one thing i know is it's not going to be the same as it was. i don't know what it will be. let's turn to the audience for your questions. rather than ask bob and everybody else if you go back to those microphones and we will call on people.

there is one here and one here. yes, man. >> shelley washington d.c.. i may national finance cochair for the ready for hillary packed. you have presented on one hand some optimistic viewpoints and on the other hand some perhaps not so optimistic ones but if you had a chance to ask the president current or future in terms of moving and making progress in the region what would that be the xp do you want to direct that at one? >> i would like to hear from either one. >> i think a strategy. what we have not done well enough as to be able to articulate how we would like this to come out. i think we have to be there live live -- realistic. we have to be very humble about

the changes and the impact we have in the region but i'm not sure we sit down ever and for the american people as well as for people we are dealing with painted picture of how we would like it to come out. then the pieces start to have logic. i think sometimes we execute pieces without that larger picture. >> my quick one-liner is don't give the impression that -- when you do that you are encouraging the enemy. the taliban has said we have the time and the americans have the watches. that is a political problem here. they didn't have to announce a date for their final withdrawal because then you're just telling them how long they have to wait. to get the peace process going so well you are withdrawing you

don't do anything else. it could be like if you hung to who engaged in the peace process for a long time while they were planning with the north vietnamese how to actually take over saigon. optimism is a great thing. since i moved to this country have realized there is optimism and then there is optimism based on realism. i think the latter is a lot better. >> hi my name is on mir and i'm an american of pakistani and indian descent. i do a lot of traveling and when i travel sometimes it's more convenient for me to be pakistani than it is to be american because there is a trust deficit in the muslim world against americans. my question is related to this page. what's the growing role of china and pakistan? i feel like pakistan is looking for alternatives and engaging with u.s. and china one of its neighbors is starting to increase its -- and if we are

talking about pathways to resolving some of the complex will will will china plan what is the u.s. perspective? >> you china and pakistan have been closed since 1950 actually and the real thing pakistan needs is a large capital import. i don't see large amounts of chinese money coming because it's a great fantasy. the chinese will -- china does remain engaged with pakistan but the chinese have been engaging pakistan for 15 years now to put down the jihadi's and move on and make peace with india. i think it's the chinese policy and then there's this little romance the pakistanis have about china being the great writ dreamer to come in and help them and i don't think the latter is

all that realistic. >> general ambassador would you address more fully pakistan al qaeda and pakistan taliban? >> pakistan taliban is quite obvious. most people understand it because pakistan -- a the mujahideen groups failed and ended up supporting the taliban so that is the connection. officially pakistan says we have contacts with them but we do not control them. which may be true but if that is the case pakistan does not support them at all because the of contra -- context of people who don't listen to why take responsibility for their actions when you have no control over them? that is how they are brought to doha for the peace process.

it's more complicated and there were too many groups in pakistan tolerate it in different degrees and maybe the ones with and supporting al qaeda and that the government of pakistan. pakistan needs to be with al qaeda otherwise the fact that almost all major al qaeda leaders that have been found have been found in pakistan is something that really does cast a shadow on my country. >> i would add i don't think pakistan, i don't think al qaeda has ever been pakistani in nature. they have been there a long time so their relationships that make it a little stickier than somebody outside that they are still a foreign entity that can be done away with. there is an afghan taliban and a pakistani taliban. inside pakistan the pakistani

taliban is focused really against the government of pakistan. the afghan taliban are focused and they are largely afghan and ethnicity. they are focused against the government at afghanistan. the isi when we talk about the relationship with afghanistan that is largely with afghan taliban. i was in a lot of detainee interrogations and what not in the least popular people to the afghan taliban are isi. so when you think about it there isn't a relationship. it's not one of these things where they are best buddies and they watch sports together and drink there. it is very much one of using each other in coercion and threats and whatnot so it's important to understand that. it's so complex that it doesn't allow it. a very short answer.

>> question what i'm going to ask you for a one-word answer. do you believe that osama bin laden for five years in abbottabad pakistan without anyone in the pakistani military intelligence knowing about it? >> no, don't believe it. >> i'm going to ask you for a 10 word answer. [laughter] >> this is my opinion. i don't think general kayani newdow. i don't think the leadership confab don't think there is think there was a plan of what he was that this was 700 meters from the gates of west point. who knows what 700 meters are from the gates of west point but the reality is it was a distinct compound. it was like the fun house at the end of the street where people didn't at the same as everybody else in the neighborhood in an area where people are not actually trusting so somebody facilitated something. i buy into the idea that the

ambassador and i were talking about. it probably was not official but someone who has a relationship with an official who is providing help. there is a delegate to ask questions that need to be asked. there's a failure of due diligence. >> sometimes if you read new was sharif's book he talks about how the and at that time there were three houses that were al qaeda houses that they discovered. if this was one of those houses why didn't they keep monitoring it subsequently is a big question? that said it's not conducive to my health and well-being to answer this question. [laughter] >> you are an american professor now. >> i'm still a pakistani citizen. that's the only citizenship i have. a think i have said enough. [laughter] [applause] >> john from palazzo.

general mcchrystal thank you for your service and general haqqani thank you for your great sense of humor. i am still scared that it's a pretty unstable society. can you give me any confidence? >> i think you are right. an unstable society should not have nuclear and nuclear deterrence needs a better concept and better practice and not -- last but not least -- general mcchrystal knows many pakistan generals. there are no loose nukes in pakistan. pakistan does have a command-and-control system and it's a pretty stable one.

is it too stable? perhaps not the people would argue is that the only criteria? you can't go in to them away. you couldn't take them way from the soviet union and you can't take them away from china. in the end the best course for pakistan is for pakistan developing the trust of the rest of the world whereby pakistan can have a minimum nuclear deterrent which is security but takes away the fears that you and i and everybody else has about an unstable country having nuclear capabilities. >> general mcchrystal? >> we have time for one last question. sir? 's. >> my question is much broader and directed to the general. it seems to me that presidents,, presidents go. we have the same policy, call it robust, call it continuation of

the british empire where the sun never set. where do you in this government wears this continuous streak of military warfare etc., etc. coming from? where exact way are the -- to continue our robust approach? >> i think i know we stand based on the question. it's in the first floor on the e ring of the pentagon. [laughter] it lies in the fact that america has defined certain interests and the the protection or the security of certain allies and whatnot. we have identified certain interests. we then make decisions to use or not use military force in that case. sometimes we get it wrong. sometimes we think, i'm not sure

we get the interest wrong. it's hard to argue with that they brought interests but the way we go after them, you can ask yourself whether that furthered american interest or didn't and people come down on both sides. i don't make that it was a couple of evil people trying to do world hegemony. i think it was a bunch of good people who gave an assessment they came out with a different conclusion that you might or i might or anyone else. i never buy into the conspiracy theory. i've never gotten into a room where the conspirators are there. >> them conspiring to do something to give her to change the world is difficult to expect. [laughter] here is what i think. the problem does not lie in america having all this power.

in some cases you can use it for a lot of good. the problem lies in the fact that americans of the nation to not know how to do things on a small scale. example when you go to afghanistan and you are trying to change everything such as how they run their schools, president eisenhower used to talk about the military and you also have ngo development complex. when i was ambassador one of my favorite -- used to be that the aid to pakistan include studies on how to run schools in pakistan conducted by americans. why should they do that? why can't you let me the judge of how to run a school in my own country. if that was the case they would be a lesser footprint abroad. he would have more friends abroad and you'll be using your

military a lot more shall we say with less of the fallout that you complain about and everybody feel strongly about. >> one problem and having former officials is that i often end up wishing they were current officials. [applause] i want to thank them for this. [applause]

what are you reading this summer? spoke tv wants to know. >> it happens to be andrew

billingsley's yearning to be -- yearning to breathe free which is a book that i was honored to have written the forward for. it's about the life and legacy of robert smalls. robert smalls was born in south carolina beaufort south carolina in 1839, born a slave. he died in buford in 1915. now the reason i have spent time on this book this year and i have given to lectures on it, is because i see what is happening today here in the country, the supreme court decisions, legislation at the federal and state levels this being sort of

reminiscent of what happened during the life of robert smalls. robert smalls after gaining his freedom by delivering the -- as some of his cohorts and family members so they delivered it to the union forces. they granted him his freedom and gave him the cash for it. he took that cash and with his freedom developed significant will and he became a delegate to the 1866 constitutional convention in south carolina.

that codified for the state those freedoms that have been granted former slaves with the emancipation proclamation that went into effect in 1863. robert smalls did that after getting his freedom and affect convention became a member of the caucus, spend five terms in the congress. he was one of eight african-americans deserved in south carolina before i was elected in 1992. now, smalls was also a delegate to the state constitutional convention of 1895.

in 1895, all of those rights and privileges that had been given back to the constitution of 66 world given back. if you look at what was taking place between 1866 and i guess it was 1876 because it was the 1876 presidential election,, that created the opportunity and the atmosphere that led to the ending of the -- which eventually led to the creation of jim crow-ism and what i often called apartheid in the southern

part of the united states of america. so if you look at what was going on from 1876 to 1895, in that 20 year period we saw the beginning of the end of full citizenship of african-americans in this country. so by the time robert smalls died in 1915, he died april goodhearted and financially not near as well off as he once was. so i spent a lot of time with groups talking about the history

of this. as i used to say to my students when i taught them, if it has happened before it can happen again. we see all the speculation about what the supreme court is going to do with the most important civil rights act to which i think was the voting rights act of 1965. most experts think that -- programs of the front of action are simply means that you're going to take positive steps. he can't be passive. you've got to take positive steps to overcome the current effects of past is grim and ancient.

it's just not going to happen by itself. if you bring back to a close and there are people who are speculating that is about to happen, in fact i saw a few days ago legal scholars in this country who are saying that he believes chief justice roberts planned to be the chief justice and to bring it a close to the civil rights movement as we know it. i don't know if anybody can look at the numbers and see the unemployed -- unemployment in the african-american community runs about twice what it runs in the white community and women are still earning 77% of what men earn in our society and to

think that the glass is full. but glass is maybe a little more than half full but it's not full. full. there is still a lot of work to do. i don't think we are going to successfully navigate through this if we don't understand fully exactly what it is that we are dealing with. they think -- said it best when he said if a people feel to learn the lessons of history, they are about to repeat them. i'm trying to sound an alarm here to make sure that people who have listened educationally and gained gain significant wealth just to remind them to look at the life of robert smalls and you can see all of

that with a stroke of a pen and a few court decisions -- of on was. >> i think mtv was incredibly powerful because they realized they could tap into a generation of future voters and also you know this is the time when you are in your teens, 19th and early 20s we are most passionate about things in their life.

they realized if he could turn that passion to politics it would be incredible force. regardless if i agreed or disagreed if the politics of the people who served are like the fact that they wanted to engage people. i like the fact that they wanted people to express and learn about their own political leanings and feelings and every once in a while i would jump in there and get a little bloody and mix it up with them. i was thought that was for the benefit of all because when you challenge one another, when you learn what what you believe in way believe that it will make you a better person not just politically but all around. >> up next science writer annalee newitz recounts the mass extinctions that have taken place during the earth's

4.5 billion years this and send how humans can survive the future catastrophic disaster. this is an hour. [applause] >> thanks so much for coming in to hear about the end of the world. and thanks to the town hall for putting on this amazing series. it's so terrific that there is public science education going on like this especially at a time when funding is being cut to sciences at the national level so we need to keep pushing for as much science education as possible. so i just finished writing an optimistic look about the apocalypse and it didn't start out that way at all. i really did not realize that this book would have been happy ending. it actually started because i had been really fascinated my whole life with stories about destruction especially massive global destruction and apocalypses and everything from

kind of the underground cannibal apocalypse to zombie stories and godzilla stories. godzilla is kind of one of my spirit animals. and i wanted to a couple of years ago when i was thinking about this i thought well, for how could i write a kind of nonfictiononfictio n version of a godzilla movie and what would that look like if we delved into the scientific literature and what history has to teach us, what would be the equivalent of some kind of massive destruction caused by a force that we don't understand? i came upon the idea of mass extinctions which are indeed the worst kind of disaster that could ever happen to the planet and that more that i researched them the more that i read the scientific papers and talks to scientists, i realized that actually one of the main characteristics of a mass

extinction is that there are always survivors and that was when i really began to change how i understood what this book was going to be about. so let me start by telling you a little bit about the destruction a mass extinction is actually a scientific term of art which refers to any event where more than 75% of all species on the planet died at. usually these take about a million years. so when you look at them they are taking place in geological time. they are not a quick thing that we can see in a human lifetime. and one of the things that links pretty much all that the mass extinctions and there have been five of them so far in earth's history over the past half million years or so, is that most of them are caused by climate change. so usually there is some

terrific event that sets off a climate change, and maybe an asteroid hits the planet which is what happened in the most recent and perhaps the most famous mass extinction which is the one that distinguished the dinosaurs when the asteroid slammed into the planet but of course when that happened actually it wasn't like a michael bay movie. it wasn't like a big rock hit the planet and there was fire and dinosaurs were being barbecued and although that sounds really cool there were no lasers or anything like that. what actually happened was of course where the asteroid hit there were horrific fires and creatures were killed by the thousands but over time the ejecta from the asteroid worked its way into the atmosphere and change the climate over the long-term. actually what happened was most dinosaurs died out from the subsequent climate changes. this was the case with like i said nearly all the mass

extinctions. let me tell you a little bit about my favorite mass extension to give you -- extinction. everyone kind of has a favorite mass extinction if you talk to geologists about this. they have a gallows humor about it because you know these are horrific mass slayings of creatures and so my personal favorite is the one that comes at the end of the permian period and if you look at this chart here of geological periods it's down at the bottom. there is a little thing that says gigantic extinction next to the permian. this is about 250 million years ago and at that time the planet due to plate tectonics the continents were completely different than they are now. there were arranged into one supercontinent pangea so you have to imagine is supercontinent stretching all the way from the north pole down to the south pole and that was

when in the north of so basically in the north of the area that eventually became siberia began to turn into a super volcano. what happens is a super volcano is not a scientific term but is he refers to a massive massive volcano and this was the volcano caused by a very large area where love is being released in multiple places so you have to imagine the great big vent opening up in the earth. it's not like a mountain where it is blowing up on the top. it's big vent opening up like the iceland volcano we so recently. they just start extruding love of, big waves of love us so again is not explosive. it's just lava oozing out of these huge cracks incense. there are multiple offense.

in this northern area of pangea this event went on for about 1000 years. it was a 1000 year eruption and what happened was overtime contest that gases and ash that were released from that volcanic eruption were kind of like a super industrial revolution. the oceans became very acidic and the creatures died out in incredible numbers. it's the biggest mass extinction and by the end of that year 90% of all the species on the planet had died out and the insects died out which is usually -- sea creatures land creatures and plants come for everybody was

screwed by the above cano. but there was one survivor on land the kind of is the creature that actually turned me around on mass extinction and make me think about them in a new way. it was the creature who is related to a group of animals that later evolved into mammals. it was kind of a mammal like creature. think of it is as kind of the uncle of humanity, to not our direct ancestor and his name is lystrosaurus. lystrosaurus had a couple of trades that made it an excellent survivor in this incredibly difficult time in earth history. it was somewhat small. it was about dog size. it was about 3 feet long, two to 3 feet long. it looks a little bit like a and a little bit like a blizzard and they were roe worse that you have to imagine them eating

tubers and roots. they had very powerful front legs so they were digging out holes and living underground a lot. so for the lystrosaurus it was kind of awesome when the volcano started going off because the whole world was kind of transformed into lystrosaurus heaven. they were used to being underground and breathing dirty air anyway. they had a great lung capacities which means that possibly they were able to get more oxygen from dirty air than other creatures that were similar in size. the other thing about the lystrosaurus is that a lot of its natural predators died during the early try acid the early try acid which is the period the followed the permian so it had no predators. it had dirty air. all of its food sources were mostly underground so if the sunlight is blocked and temperatures are changing that food source is probably to be mostly unharmed by that

transition. one of the other things that lystrosaurus did was get scattered across the southern continent. remember this is a huge supercontinent. lystrosaurus move from a more northern regions although it down to the south. this was over at period of millions of years and scattered across that continent. >> seated in other words involved in too many species possibly for, possibly more and adapted to new ecological niches. it did two things that i talk about in the title of my book. it's scattered and adapted. it fled from the source of danger which is this supervolcano and learn how to live in new places and this humble little weird faced guy sort of became my mascot when i was working on this book. i guess i traded in godzilla is my mascot and picked up a lystrosaurus does this creature was as i said was very humble

and yet nevertheless it managed to make it through the toughest time of earth's history while if these other creatures around it were suffering because their food webs were unraveling. this is a major cause of mass extinction. a food web visit just a way of talking about the networks of basically who beets home in an ecosystem. what happens is you have a food web for a lot of creature start going extinct and causes knock on extension -- knock on extinction so if your food sized dies you die too. that is one of the way mass extinctioextinctio ns get started. you have a few die-offs aeneid get these knock on extinctions that caused the 75% number. so, there is one thing that we can do as humans that lystrosaurus can't really do or

probably couldn't do. we have the ability in a crisis to basically do what lystrosaurus did which was adept in new environments. humans have been terrific at doing that. we have managed to a different points in history flee from danger when we have been lucky. but we also have a form of memory that goes way beyond just remembering what happened yesterday. it goes way beyond remembering hey if i want to go to sleep tonight and i need to dig a hole in the ground the way of lystrosaurus did. humans can remember not just their own lifetimes but we can use history to remember the whole of our civilization's history. we can use the scientific fields anthropology and geology to actually look back and consider the whole history of our evolution as a species as well as the evolution of the planet

and look at all of the disasters that have happened and learn from them. that is a very profound survival skill. like i said it's something that as far as we know is fairly unique to human beings as a species. we haven't found any other species that seem to be able to to do that yet so part of my hope and sort of the center of writing this book when i realized it wasn't going to be all destruction and there was going to be some hope of survival is that we actually had the traits of a survivor species like lystrosaurus plus we have a we have this added ability to plan for the future. that is really important i spend a lot of time in the book talking about ways that we can start planning for the future basing those plans on what we know of disasters that have already happened to humans but also disasters that have happened to the earth exist that is really important in planning, learning from history and learning from the great

experiment that is human evolution and human civilization. so let me put this in perspective for you. human beings are mammals which is why we are so cute and furry and we have live babies and all those good things just like these cute cats up here and the typical species lifespan for a mammal in other words the typical amount of time before the species evolves into another species or dies out as a million years. that is the typical species lifespan. and humans, hopeful -- homo sapiens evolved 100,000 years ago, possibly 200,000 depending on where you sit in the anthropological debate over this question. .. 900,000 years left to go.

so when we are thinking about planning for the future as a species planning for our survival as homo sapiens we need to be thinking not just of what we are going to do next month or next week at how were we going to set things up so that we have good experience living for another 900,000 years. what can we do now and what can we think about doing us a species and what kinds of projects can we take on to make those 900,000 years really awesome instead of living like cannibals underground and turning into zombies? so in my book i talk about two kinds of very long-term plans that we can start working on now and that we can share with coming generations for the next several millennia and more. the first area that i am most interested in is cities and city

building and city planning. the reason why is right now the vast majority of humans, the well not the vast majority, the majority of humans come to more than 50% live in the cities and the u.n. has done some predictions on how that trend will continue and if things go pretty much as they have been we are looking at possibly as many as 67 or 70% of people living in cities in 50 years. people are becoming more and more urban. the majority of humanity is going to be located in the city so as we are thinking about the future a good place to focus on ways to make our lives more survivable is the city. there are different ways that we can tackle making cities more survivable. first of all, we need to be thinking about how do you make a city robust against a disaster and there are a lot of different things we can do from better earthquake engineering and that

is one thing i talk a lot about in the book where in san francisco we deal with earthquakes all the time. seattle probably should be thinking about earthquakes a lot too trade we also need to be thinking about things they're a little bit more ephemeral and social. like how do you organize the city's evacuation plan in a flood or how do you organize how to respond to a pandemic in your city. that may not have to do with how you engineer the city but it has to do with how you engineer the social infrastructure of the city and it turns out there are a lot of myths about how to handle -- in a city and that was interesting to me to find out about. one of the really interesting areas and this is going to get a little bit futuristic, i really think they could help cities become not just more disaster proof but also more sustainable

is a movement that has just started now that is called living architecture. it goes by some other names to match like bioarchitecture and its basically a combination of architectural design of nature but also material science that creates new kinds of building materials that behave like living substances or actually partly made of living substances. one of the best examples of this is something that's called self sowing concrete. again not a scientific term but a lot of phrase that is used for a lot of different substances. what you can see here on the flight is one experiment done a few years ago by some students who invented a substance that was partly made from bacteria. these were genetically modified bacteria that when they were put into a crack in the concrete there was sort of -- on the left side there is the crack and this is magnified by the way.

they put this substance that they referred to as the scylla filling. i'm glad you are laughing because you are a science crowd. basically this but. a that the pacelle would go into the crack and it would extrude this a proxy as well as some other calcium like substances and eventually it would fill in the crack holding onto the concrete and leaving behind this scar that actually looks like a living skin that is healed up. of course all experiments with synthetic biology architecture is that bacteria are set up and engineer to die when they are done after filling in the crack so there is a fail-safe mechanism. they fill it in give their lives

to heal the concrete treat this as one example of the self-healing material that could be used in cities. i talked to architects and designers for this book about much more futuristic ideas on how these kinds of materials might be used. self-healing materials of course make housing more sustainable because instead of tearing -- tearing down old structures the structures might heal themselves and they can make things like bridges were safe to guess when they develop cracks they may be able to heal themselves to for a real disaster happens. so we might be able to have self-healing structures that are maintaining themselves just like living organisms and the city itself can become a living organism helped by this biological innovation but also of course helped by things like a smart grid that really works. if you have a smart grid that really works where say of building takes just enough power from the grid to supply what it

needs while other buildings that don't need power don't take any power from the grid you are creating an organism where the wings are kind of talking to each other on the grid and who is going to get power when and you start having almost like a body where different organs are getting blood or getting nutrients when they need them. so it's my idea and the idea of a lot of architects and designers working in this space map the cities are going to slowly become more like organisms. this will allow us to have hopefully carbon-neutral or carbon negative cities where we are ultimately using alternative fuels and maybe growing fuels. maybe cities would be full of algae fats or only -- every home would have its own algae fats and you can use that for fuel and you might use it for lighting. you could have algae that glows in the dark. i talked to one designer and she

said you know in 100 or 200 years we might be cultivating moles in our houses and not killing it. he would be exchanging recipes with your neighbors for how do you get the best mold to purify your water and light up at night lex our cities might not be as much in contradiction with nature and in contradiction with the environments where they are. one day you might look out on your city and see something that looks kind of like a ruined or like a treehouse and he would come across this kind of crumbling structure and realize actually a crumbling structure a structured covering fines might really be a living place. it might look like it's crumbling because it had been self-healself-healing so these buildings would be covered in scars. they wouldn't look all smooth like downtown seattle does now

but they might be a lot more sustainable and a lot that are for the people in them and the environment. ultimately, and again looking further into the future even further than biological cities we might start extending our ability to farm our cities and build our cities and start actually farming the atmosphere and when i say farming the atmosphere i choose those words because farming pretty much transform the surface of the earth. we now are kind of shepherds of almost everything that grows on the planet except for some areas and even those areas are falling under human control. alternately if we want to maintain the climate at a level we prefer we are going to have to start thinking about how are we going to control the climate? it's not going to be enough just

to cut carbon emissions. obviously we need to do that and that's a great start but the planet goes through carbon cycles naturally as i was talking about with the permian period. there is actual -- absolutely time with a plan that's going to create the results of the industrial revolution without any help from us. it's going going to have megaball cannot send carbon will be introduced into the atmosphere in heat rings up all by itself. you don't need to be there to do it so humans are going to have to take on the burden or take on the project of actually keeping the environment in a state that we preferred. having those icecaps on the north and south poles that is great for us. we love it. all the animals and plants in our environment are kind of set up and they fall for that but it's actually weird in the history of the planet. most of the history of the planet there have been no

icecaps in the polls. things have been a lot warmer. the atmosphere at times has been much more carbon rich. sometimes it's been much more oxygen rich so it's quite a natural for us to be hoping to keep the planet in a state where it's nice and cool the way we like it. eventually over time if we want our species to enjoy life on earth we are going to have to think about what kinds of technologies we can invent to draw carbon down out of the atmosphere when it actually starts getting in there either through stuff that we have done which one argues is not very natural or through the natural carbon cycle for the planet. so those technologies are geoengineering technologies, waste of engineering the entire geology of the earth. and i do talk about that in the book as well. trust me it's a long way off. there have been some geode engineering experiments that

happened actually quite recently. there was a road geoengineering off the coast of canada who did an experiment trying to talk down carbon from the atmosphere by doing iron seeding in the ocean and so far doesn't seem as if it worked out. the ideas you put iron in the ocean and it attracts microbes that like to eat iron and those microbes also drawdown carbon when they die into the autumn of the ocean and take the carbon with them. the problem is they don't tend to sink all the way to the bottom of the ocean so you end up with fluorocarbon. that's just a start and geoengineering is really in its infancy. finally, if we really want to look long-term beyond biological cities compact beyond geoengineering they're still going to be problems with earth. for one thing,s

habit of running into giant rocks in space because we are a giant rock hanging in space. there are other rocks out here with us and gravity brings us into contact sometimes. we also of course have a planet which is full of magma, and volcanoes happen sometimes for really long time and sometimes really catastrophically. so if we want again to have a awesome 1 million years and hopefully beyond we need to be thinking about how to get off the planet. we need to think about how humans can have backup cities and new civilizations on other planets and maybe other structures in space because if something catastrophic happens to the planet we need to have a place where we can go. maybe we are all going to be refugees at some point. hopefully the venetian government won't mind.

i heard there are a lot of jobs on mercury but now. it's like saskatchewan. come on, we will take any refugee. the thing is that when we think about space travel and then i think about colonizing space, it may turn out to take a little bit longer than we think. we are kind of taking our first baby steps toward space travel but let me give you a quick example of how the timeline might work. looking back into human history, humans 50,000 years ago used reed boats much like the one you are saying over here are, to get from asia to australia. 50,000 years ago we crossed an entire ocean in reed boats but it wasn't really until about 500 years ago that you had international travel using boats creating a global culture. it was not until really the advanced a few no tremendous amounts of capital being poured

into shipping as part of the colonization of the planet that you really got like i said a global culture. that is a lot of lag time between the first use of boats to go from one continent to the other to creating a culture where humans are traveling all the time between continents. so if you think of this first boat here as the rockets that we have used to get to the moon and the rockets we have used to take the robot friends to mars, we may be pretty far away from a time when we are jetting between mars and earth all the time. i hope it's not going to be 50,000 years. i don't mean to suggest we are going to have to wait that long that it may be a lot longer than we hoped. it may not be the next decade or the next century that we have a city on mars.

it may take as us hundreds of years before we really have a civilization. it may look nothing like we expect. we may not be using rockets to get off the planet. we may be using something like this space elevator here. a space elevator actually it's great that i'm in seattle because every year there is a space elevator conference in seattle where people who want to build it, and discuss their ideas. since the 1990s when nasa actually worked on a model for this but -- space elevator and thought through some of the things we might need to create one nasa has actually had a in annual price offered to anyone who can build part of this elevator that doesn't exist yet and i will tell you about that in just a second. as you can see this image is actually from nasa. what you can see here is the elevator card. there is earth very far in the background.

the idea of a space elevator first of all is answering a basic question which is how do you have sustainable space travel? right now we are using rockets which require rocket fuel which is expensive, heavy and polluting and there's a limited supply of it. so it's not a good long-term solution. we can't keep using rockets so what would we use? how would we have the kind of train into space that would be completely able to be used over and over again, something that wouldn't pollute the environment said the space elevator and this is how orcs. so you have a platform on earth. you have an elevator platform somewhere along the equator and then you have a very very long tether attaching that elevator platform up about 60,000 miles so you are part way to the minute that point. at the other end of the tether you have a counterweight in that

counterweight is in geostationary orbit so it's orbiting the earth but also attached by this tether and i will get to the tether in a minute because the tether is kind of the problem. right now we actually have the technology to do a lot of this. a counterweight not so much. the counterweight might be a captured asteroid he might yet happy version of a death star. basically what it's going to be is a port. it's going to be a destination for people to get due in space where they can get onto a spaceship that would take them somewhere else. the space elevators just to get you out of the gravity well into space and then on your merry way. we'll take you about three days to get up to that counterweight or port so that car isn't really like an elevator as we think of it today. it's more like a trained sleeper car. you're probably going to have a bunkbed that will cost a lot of

money but hopefully it will be much cheaper than the amount of money it costs now. of course you can use the elevator car over and over again and you can have people going constantly up and down and of course supplies going up and down as well. the elevator car would climb of that tether using robotic arms of the kind that exist now in industrial factories to build large machines so you have your robotic arms pulling this elevator car out of the gravity well and into space. the big question is what would you make the tether out of? it has to be flexible and then. it has to withstand weather. it has to withstand micrometeorites better zooming around in space. it has to withstand the space junk that we put into the abyss where all that maybe by the time we do this we we will have the space vacuum to take out all the space junk or we will have robots out there collecting space junk here and it's

suggested that it might be made out of carbon nanotubes but it's unclear whether carbon nanotubes could be used for something like this. every year nasa has a contest where they offer up to $1 million to the person you could come up with a substance that would be light enough and strong enough and so far no one has won the full amount although people are with you on the carbon nanotube angle. if you have an idea for it you should go to the space elevator conference and see if you can help create the future of space travel. point is things in the future might not look exactly the way we expect. we have got like i said 900,000 years to change and develop new technologies that will hopefully make the future a place where we can survive, where we can survive disasters from everyday

stuff like earthquakes and tsunamis to really mass extinction causing disasters like super volcanoes or encounters with asteroids from space. the thing is that as i said no matter what happens humans are probably going to survive. if we look even dispassionately at geological history and that human history, that we see that humans do have all the traits that are required to survive even a really horrific as mr. mr. even a mass extinction. the question is how we are going to survive. what kinds of projects will be start taking on as a species to make our survival something that is enjoyable or something that is sustainable and not turn into a horrific scenario where we have to live underground being worms all the time. humans have a survival instinct

like every other creature on the planet. no matter if we are good to the planet or bad to it we are going to survive. it's just a question of how weird it's going to get how different is going to get and at some point i think we may evolve into an entirely different species after that million years is that. say we wind up as part squid part creature living on the moon or saturn. that is a win for us. we don't have to be human at the end of that journey. we may change a lot over that time and hopefully our progeny will look back at us and say good job you guys. that was a great path that you took to help us survive and now we have an awesome home on titan. again like i said that as a win for us and i think it's going to

get weird but we are going to make it through. thanks very much. [applause] so we can do to you and they if people want to line up at a mic at the corner of the room. see the space elevator you said there would be robot arms pulling out more power. >> that is a good question. the model that nasa worked on and i think that -- i don't think you can see it in this picture is it would actually be laser powered so that there would be lasers on the surface that would be powering it basically sort of a version of solar power but with lasers beaming at receivers on the elevator car. the question is again how do you do that with weather patterns

interfering and how do you make sure that your laser continues to power it in space? once you get into space it can probably use solar. that's still a big question so the answer now is laser. it's an exciting answer to the question. there are a lot of factors in building the elevators so that tether is a great question. >> weed at death scatter and remember but i'm sure there are people reading books on these things. what happens when the power goes out. what happens to the books in the libraries. >> the libraries are made of paper. there are a lot of answers to that question. humans luckily do have a lot of redundant storage mechanisms. we don't just use terabyte raised like i used at my house for perfect the legal --

[laughter] we also do have oaks. there are also a lot of groups who organize on line who are working on creating storehouses of knowledge that can be used in the event of civilizational collapse. there's also the possibility that we could maintain some of those archives and generators. it really depends on what the collapse is because a lot of these disasters, god can we imagine the giant fireball or if any of you are watching the show revolution it's going to be like google is going to invent nanotechnology. don't watch that show. the point is that both of these disasters that i'm looking at are things that don't happen instantaneously. so they're kind of a slow-moving disaster that kind of ticks up speed over hundreds of thousands of years and even when you have something like an earthquake or tsunami or even a bombing or a

radiation disaster those tend to be localized so you're always going to have pockets where people have nation. what humans are great at a sharing information over distances. even if there is a time period where some people in seattle and san francisco we don't have the internet and we staff our eyes out because we can imagine what that would be like. there are people out there that will maintain those information stores and we will have libraries and backups. >> what is the best thing we can do to ensure the survival of. >> i've been talking about some of that today. the main question is how do we conceive as what we are doing as part of a long-term pathway to survival because all of these threats take place over many generations. that is hard for us to think about because we are thinking about what can we do tomorrow to

fix something next week and these are things we can do in a human lifetime to fix things for people living 300 years from now. the real question is how do we conceive of a project like rebuilding our cities to be more like biological or burned sums in a way that isn't frustrating because obviously in my lifetime i'm never going to see that. in my lifetime i'm never going to be -- see a space elevator unless i'm seeing -- playing a video game. how do we have steps along the way in advanced technology in our lifetime that can add to a future where we have a logical cities. that is why i'm as excited about things like self-healing materials which are something that we can invent in a lifetime that we can maybe perfect in a lifetime and could be part of the pathway toward having a more sustainable city. i think that is really the difficult task is realizing we won't get to see the end of the story in our lifetime. we won't get to have a happy

moment like i survived because you are only going to know that at the end of the million years they just hope like i said the squid offspring say thanks you guys. the same like we look back at home all erect is like the job, so i think that has to be the hope that we get bite sized projects that we can do in a lifetime. and go to space. i was wondering humans are uniquely able to learn from history but also haven't shown much inclination to history so how are you going to motivate people to start down this path with things that would be useful us for us even a thousand years

from now? >> yeah or even 100 years from now come to write? iowa's it funny that people say humans are so bad at learning from history or we are so lazy. nobody is motivated to do anything in the fact is that if you look at humans on the acre timeline and look at is this species. don't look at it like your brother or your professors put an individual person who is a total idiot for their whole life. you have to look at it as a really long-term narrative so again we are very early in that narrative and also just take something like climate change. when did humanity figure out that the stuff that we are doing with their industrial production is causing climate change? about yeah if you wanted to be generous you could say 30 years or 40 years. so when our lifetime we figured that out and during that time it's become one of the most hotly-debated political issues on the planet.

that is pretty good. no we haven't fixed it and in fact many would argue that we are screwing things up even worse but the fact is just in the short period of time since we figured out we are screwing up we turned it into something where there's a huge question of how we are going to deal with it so again it's frustrating because probably all of us will be dead for we find out who prevailed and what the alternative energy will be that we finally used instead of fossil fuels and will it be corn will it be solar? that is what i'm hoping for because solar is a great technology that's just in its infancy and soberly i think the track record is pretty good. i feel like we have learned a lot from disasters that have happened to start and that we are weirdly pretty agile in responding. it's just that it it is in within a lifetime and if you look back in the last 500 years, there have been really awesome things that humans have done and

learned from. now we have science as an incredibly widely accepted period of dealing with the world can't cannot everywhere but in most places. that was also quite recent. i feel like humans are doing okay. i think we are muddling through. we are not the greatest and sometimes we are but i think on the whole that urge to adapt and the urge to survive does. out into our politics and into our social structures. again, got it takes a little time. >> thinks. thanks. >> yeah, thank you. >> hi. you mentioned that there were committees on line where there are storehouses of knowledge to be printed off in emergency circumstances. do you happen to know the names of them? >> i do talk about them in my book. there is one group that is, you are going to have to google

this. there are basically three cds something like that so basically all the knowledges on three cds and it's stuff like how do you do basic medicine? how do you do basic farming techniques? there is also a basic question on how men need the family. there is sometimes a bit of an ideological problem lets there is a group that has -- they are trying to come up with a fairly small number of machines that you would need to restart civilizations everything from a thrashing machine to a 3-d printer so make her bout will survive the apocalypse which is great news. there are other groups doing it as well. you always have to think of the threat model.

there seems to be this go to scenario where people say ever things going to collapse and because were not going to the internet anymore and were not going to have any power. i don't know what's going to happen to the cities. they will all be nuked out of existence so we will have to start as men leading the charge into the agricultural economy again. i don't mean to pick on these poor guys and they are trying their best. they did amass an incredible amount of helpful information. but the fact is that there is not a lot of disasters that are like that where we just see a complete loss of every kind of new technology. i think, as i said when i began the apocalypse is a lot more complicated than we think it will be and there will be pockets of people who have access to high technology and even today on the planet there are people that have access to technology that many in the people don't have access to. the apocalypse may work a lot

like the world does now for slightly worse. so we have to be prepared for that. it's just a little bit worse. and very slow. that is why we really do need to be trying to take action now to kind of slowly steer us away from the slightly worse but complicated world. if you find other stuff let me know, other resources. >> two kinds of thoughts. one is that if you you focus will bit more on food supplies may be as part of the organizing effect of you know losing control of the whole situation. the second thing is are there plans or planned communities that are really good examples of

these living architecture people are looking at? planned communities like types of plants you would use? >> let's say mushrooms as an example. not to use but to look at how they survive in all kinds of circumstances or creatures underneath the sea. >> these are both super great questions. in response to your question about the food supply that is actually a big concern in my book and i talked about food webs a little bit today but i didn't go into all of the concerns about food webs. i do have a section where i talk about salmon and salmon is actually a very likely result of climate change. all of these examples i have talked about for a few examples i have talked about of how mass extinction unfold and take 1 million years part of what is happening there is species are experiencing famines because the more the species die out the more the food supply dwindled since and so that is really what you're talking about when you're

talking about death by climate change. some of it is also death by habitat change. habitat change isn't like wow it's way too hot to me to live but it's also way too hot for the grass to be that we be not. that is why i think food webs are really interesting way to think about mass extinctions and think about food webs unraveling because that is really where the death happens. it's in the food web destruction. as for the plant question, to i have a favorite plant. it's actually not a plant. it's a bacteria but it's kind of like a plant. blue-green algae. if anyone was here for the lecture before me, bacteria played a big role in that lecture. it is the greatest survivor on earth. it has survived every single mass extinction.

it isn't blue-green algae. it looks just like sludge and the ancestors of blue-green algae lived on earth billions of years ago and made it through incredibly harsh conditions and here's how they did it. they did it by evolving photosynthesis. in other words solar power so what made them so adaptable and so able to live anywhere including on snowball earth, including the earth where lystrosaurus was hanging out being all cute and whitley was because it had this ability to get energy and a food supply anywhere it went because it relied on the sun. i actually have a pretty extensive section of the book where i talk about not just the awesomeness of sino-bacteria as a survivor species but also how we can learn from it to think about solar power is being the cornerstone to survival. because hey it worked for sign-up and. and it works for plants.

sino-bacteria may actually be the source of chlorophyll in plants. they may have absorbed an ancestor of sino-bacteria to create plant sale so it's a really really good survival mechanism. it's great that we finally -- and we are just in the infancy of imitating sino-bacteria. basically one day you too might be like a terrier. you know when people say humans are like a terrier upon the earth? it's like yeah that's great. we could be like a terrier on the earth. >> i'm going to ask a question question and efforts a little bit from some of the things you have talked about. most of the people in the room probably share this memory that iq of living in the 70s in and

the 80s and we worried about a nuclear winter. do you preclude an event like that? i mean the weapons that exist, that existed then still exist now and that potential still is there for some sort of a devastating nuclear exchange among nations and it seems to actually be getting worse proliferating, well given the politics of the world so my question has to do to you include some sort of a set of political disasters that would wiki no create that nuclear winter and with that event be sufficient to pretty well kill off most people or where the few that survive actually be able to build something beyond that or would we be going back to mass extinction? >> i think my answer in order is no and yes and they do talk a lot about radiation disasters

and the interesting thing about their winter is it's happened before in the planet. when that asteroid hits 65 million years ago that eventually led to this slow dying off of the dinosaurs is caused in the their winter and that is in fact one of the models that people use when they were coming up with the idea of nuclear winter in the 80s with his previous horrific set of explosions that happened. so we know for sure in the event of a nuclear winter many species to survive so we know it's a survivable event. there are is also some evidence to suggest that the first mass extinction that plan that went through 450 million years ago may have been caused by massive radiation bombardment. so again it's controversial because it was so long ago and it's very hard to say but it seems as if some of the evidence points to the idea that there may have been a nearby supernova and the lat was bombarded with

gamma radiation that fried off part of the atmosphere and cause a very rapid ice age. we know that life survive that as well so that's a huge radiation disaster. we also know that one good way to survive radiation disasters is to have 2 feet of rock between you and the energetic particles that are bouncing around. i do ever chapter in the book on underground cities because we end up living in an underground city. i think nuclear war is one kind of threat and then there are other kinds of radiation disasters that can happen as well. radiation disaster is a very imminent threat. maybe not eminent that is one of the threats. it's definitely a scenario that may cause -- may have caused mass extinctions in the past. >> earlier and you talk you mentioned you think there will be pockets of people with greater access to technology and i totally agree with that.

the apocalypse is here that not evenly distributed. i volunteered in a clinic in rural african winch you get past how 30 everything is and there's no touch is that he is fascinated to see how people can do so much with few resources. in your research did you do much looking into how people in developing world are able to deal with the apocalypse? >> yes, i don't talk about it directly like that but what you're saying is absolutely true and that is part of why it's important to remember that the talk ... complicated and people are incredibly resourceful in those conditions. and as we look to the future it's important to look to the developing world as a model because there are a lot of ways in which the kinds of development taking place there kind of leapfrogging over some of the mistakes they made with the industrialization could really be kind of a pathway toward a future where we don't

have to use also fuels for example or we don't have to have that kind of massive cable and the structure to have internet communications. maybe we can start fresh in some way. so i think the simple answer is yes. i think that is a really good model and the other thing is that you know some of the disasters that have happened in the developing world like famine is a really big one which i do talk a lot about in the book and one of the things we have learned about famine is that it is a human created disaster. that is something we have learned from looking at how famines develop in different parts of the world. sure there are natural causes for famines especially in africa where irrigation is usually from rainfall to but the fact is all of those famines can be prevented with international cooperation and the people actually have access to resources and those resources

aren't overpriced. so that becomes a really good model for us and thinking about the future and how we are going to handle things like food shortages, what works and what doesn't work. so far many things have not worked but that is how experiments go. our first efforts may not work that we need to be thinking about those regions of the world as places where we are going to have to deal with famine first and how we do it effectively. one more. this is the last question. >> i don't want to embarrass myself so much because i fully formed this question but i'm taking the information you gave about the mass extinction of the dinosaurs and how there were certainly terrible deaths. >> a big explosion. >> but then it took sometime in the atmosphere and with the super bowl can know at you was down as i understand from my reading compound in terms of

geographic or geological time that should be happening pretty soon. would that be a thing where maybe north america would be wiped out but the population in the rest of the world would have some time to adapt? or should we have built these underground cities that we can go to? do you have any thoughts or comments about that? we don't have any control over -- >> we don't and of course we should always be working on building underground cities. please start soon. and actually an underground city would be great if there were a super volcano like we had at the end of the permian. the volcano in yellowstone is actually not the same kind of volcano that ended the permian. matt. they were called super volcanoes because they would eject a lot of material but the one at the end of of the permian was a very long-term eruption that lasted

for at least 1000 years and it opened these big events that were just pouring tons of lava into the atmosphere. that's another scientific term. pouring a lot of fashion to the atmosphere. the volcano would be enormous. the caldera volcano is what we are talking about. the caldera would collapse and there would be events that open up and lava but it would probably only last for about a. the main devastation from that would be again -- entering the environment getting up into the stratosphere and you know they wouldn't really be a lot of burning lava death beyond the boundaries of the park. ..

the main outcome would be crops would just be wrecked for that year. it would be the midwest, so a lot of crimes that are very valuable for food and for export would be ruined. of course there would be a very expensive cleanup. probably not a lot of death. it would really be infrastructure destruction, and, again, crop destruction. so -- and it is possible that global temperatures might go down a tiny bit. they're is a similar russian in

1812 and indonesia where you had a super volcano that went off and it lowered global temperatures a tiny bit so that it would not be like climate change situation, but the lowering of the temperature might last for two or three or four years i don't mean to downplay it because it would be warmly devastating, but it would not rack of america. you would not have love it here in seattle which is kind of house i had imagined it would be, but no, sorry. it didn't and would not happen that way. that volcano could erupt any time. not likely, but a kid. let's and with that happy thou

>> secretary of state george schultz talked about his book issues on my mind. strategies for the future at stanford university. this is one hour. >> george, what are you doing for a living these days? >> oh, i try to live up to my four great-grandchildren. who to me represent the future. i look at them and say to myself, what can i do to make the world better for these kids. and as a distinguished fellow at the hoover institution, what is it that you do? >> i work on the problem of nuclear weapons and how to get better control of them. i work on economic issues and i work on energy subjects and working a great deal on that.

i have also been trying to reflect a little bit on all my experiences and see if there's anything that can be learned from it. and i actually wrote a book to try to do that. >> that book is called issues on my mind areas secretary, what is the main issue on your mind today? >> the main issue is that the role of the united states had a great deal to do with construction. and we constructed an economic comments that served us and served everybody well. that has been torn apart right now. we have to understand what is happening and we have to be able to react to build a more coherent world.

so i reflect on my experiences on the book that you held up in the different ways in which we need to go about it. we have some real opportunities in front of us. we have some issues and a lot of the things i propose talk about it are so controversial that no one even wants to hear you talk about them. so i enjoy that. >> how is that? >> in the 1980s when i was secretary of state, we had the main threat of the soviet union and their nuclear arsenal and our nuclear arsenal and how we contain that and maybe you remember from those days, nuclear cloud was always somewhere there. well, i think that has been in

terms of russia and the u.s., that the threat is more of a greater disbursement of nuclear weapons and the proliferation of them and sometimes in hands that are not deterrable. in other ways the world is kind of falling apart and this is very disturbing, i think. how should it be handled? >> i remember when i used this in my book. he joined the marines and you think you have it, you survived boot camp and then you have become a marine. i remember the day the sergeant handed me my rifle.

and he said this is your best friend. and never point this rifle to anybody unless you are willing to pull the trigger. no empty threat. it's not going to have consequences, what the administration has in mind, i just don't know, but they basically said it's unacceptable so i don't know what their strategy is. but it better have some

toughness. >> what about the superpowers that have nuclear weapons? russia and the u.s. and china. should there be more talk, should there be less weapons, should they be dismantled? >> one very positive thing has taken place and we have a lot of positive things. we convened this from washington and the object was to see how everybody could do a better job of controlling this material. it is what it takes to make a bonus and that is the hard part. more and more heads of government are involved in that and trying to really get ahold

of that problem and i think that that is a very constructive thing. bill perry and salmon on, they say let that be part of a global nuclear enterprise. and i will say all of these are constructive. >> is going about that and how difficult it is, we know another

part of the intelligence has been difficult. many say they want to eliminate israel and wipe it out if they have a nuclear weapon on the end of a ballistic missile, they could do it. and so i think we have learned from reading mein kampf that when someone makes a statement we should take it seriously. so i think that we have to think about it and i'm not in the position to say that. >> and issues on my mind, you write when it comes to terrorism, we in this country must think hard about the stakes involved if we truly believe in our democratic values and our way of life and we must be willing to defend them.

passive measures are unlikely to devise deterrents and must be considered and given the necessary political support. >> you say if you have a law enforcement approach, you say, okay, another terrorist act happened and then we find out who did it and we try them in the u.s. court and there's enormous appeal and we go to jail. in the meantime, the terrorist factor has taken place. in a the terrorist attack like 9/11 can kill a lot of people. why not stop it from happening? in other words, prevention.

>> it's like a lot of these terrorist acts have been said that they didn't happen because they found out about them for intelligence. >> we are talking about former secretary of state and state of the treasury george shultz about his new book. issues on my mind. mr. secretary, what is your favorite job you ever had? >> you say job. job and buy something you have to do in order to get some money. i always have done things that i found rewarding and interesting. if i wound up finding something like that, i would find something else to do.

but the government, it's a great privilege and opportunity to serve. they had a succession of jobs and all of them had their tough moments, starting with my 2.5 years in world war ii. and there i was, fighting for my country. i didn't have much to do with it, but that was one person. i remember going to mg to my ofe and there was this big office building next to the white house. it used to be called the old state building. anyway, there was an office and when my father who died not too long after that, i took into my

office. and i learned a lot about how you put the statistics together that we talk about all the time. so that was a great experience. then there was the secretary of labor. and i knew the subject matter very well and in the new department well because i had done some things in both the kennedy and johnson administrations that had given me exposure. but washington and politics and the press, all of these things. to come and be a press person. joe had worked for "the new york times" for a decade and he was

the premier labor reporter anywhere, and he was really good. and he said that he would sign on, but he had conditions. and i said, okay, joe what are your conditions. and he said, well, first of all, i'm going to be a spokesman, i would like to know what is going on. i don't want to be blindsided. i'm blindsided, that i'm older. and i said, of course, we could do anything you want. and i said, come on, joe. people come down here, they get under pressure, maybe they don't live, but they mislead not the status line. they have to be straight.

and we will never have a press conference unless you have some news. and i said well, don't reporters kind of like a smooth and around and they say, look, you don't understand. reporters are guys are trying to make a living in the way you make a living if you get a new story with your name on it and it's on the front page of the paper. you call a news conference and the reporter thinks this is much better and he comes and you don't have any news and what are you going to do? is going to start asking questions to make you say something stupid and that is the news. and then he had a whole bunch of things like that. so i learned a lot about the press and while sometimes people don't write in july, on the whole, he constructed the attitude and you helped him to get the facts straight. and you're going to be much better off.

he said never make a promise unless you can deliver on it. as it turns out, it is really hard to deliver all of the arctic. people only deal with you if they trust you. and they trust you if they do what you say you're going to do. so it was a great thing. then i went from there to be the

director of the budget and that was good, and i became secretary of the treasury and there was a time when we redid the international monetary system. lots of dealings with people all over the world. and i learned a lot about how to do something internationally. so that was a great experience for me and i enjoyed it, i enjoyed the people. and of course, when i was secretary of state, the tectonic plates changed. ronald reagan and i took office and the cold war was as cold as it can get. when we left, it was a huge thing to be involved in. >> mr. secretary, in your book, issues on my mind, it you talk about rules for leadership and a couple of those you already

expounded on. the joe loftis rule and your first rule is to be a participant. >> oh, yes. that is what democracy is all about. early on when i was working, ronald reagan gave me a tie in on the tide says democracy is not a spectator sport. so be proud of it. be part of politics and be willing to serve and be a participant. >> rule number five is that competence is the name of the game in leadership. >> well, it's a great start to be competent. if you're not competent, you will get into big trouble and i had a tough experience with that, though. i told you when i went to washington as a secretary of labor, i was kind of innocent of politics and i had a bunch of

political appointee slots to fill and i realized that you're trying to work with diverse constituents and a diverse constituency and i said that i need the best management guy in this labor relations field and everybody told me it was a guy named jim hodgson, and i talked to him a couple of times and we said, well, we have to have somebody who can negotiate and contracts and really does a good job. so we found this guy to do it. and we had to get someone who really knew how to train. so we got that. someone who has worked in the area and how to deal with discrimination in the workplace and a lawyer that knows this labor market. so i get a lot of these people wind up in the president-elect

nixon as well. he shared progress in his administration. and we will have an agreement and we will take it down. so we have a meeting and i introduced the first one, jim, hudson, and we asked him all kinds of questions and he was a real pro and he knew what he was doing. and at some point he says, mr. hudson, are you a democrat or a republican. and i had never even asked him and he said that i am a democrat. so the next democrat was on the rubber who was dazzling. and he holds his hand up and says i'm a democrat just like that. and the last guy was just one who is head of the bureau of labor statistics and arthur burns who is very close to

president nixon and so i thought, okay, finally we have a republican. so the same guy stands there like a cow chewing its cud and then he finally says, well, i guess you have to say that i am an independent. so anyway i get back to my hotel room and the phone is ringing off the hook and the labor committee is saying, don't you know there's an election and i say i have cleared these names in the white house and anyway, all my guys did just terrific. they were confident, they were competent, even some of the people who had objected called and said we love you guys and jim was the secretary and he later became our ambassador of

japan and he went over, he was president of northwestern university. sophia had ruled all of these people out because they were registered democrats, i would not have had the confidence. i'm not saying that i shouldn't have asked the question. but anyway. if you have competent people, they are going to do much better than if you don't. the first job is to form your team and give people who are competent. ..

if something happens that is surprisingly good to my would like ted know about that, too. we can learn from those things. you have got to give people leaders and objectives and hold accountable. accountability is very important . economics or governmental systems. i've been fond of sports as a teacher of accountability. in my books have some pictures of sports. but the american people love sports, but i think one of the reasons is the sense of accountability. there you are standing on the green. you have the putter. there is the ball. there is the cup. you hit the ball. and where the ball stops

rolling, the result is unambiguous. that is the picture of golfing. he was the referee. it was ronald reagan and i had that new year's eve gulf came every year. one year lee trevino and tom watson show up as our golfing team. very fun. >> host: george shultz, and issues on my mind you read a better time as secretary of treasury. why did he resign? >> guest: well, the atmosphere became rather discouraging, even though at had a lot of really great experiences. one day and sitting in my office, and the director of internal revenue, the commissioner of simi. his name was johnny welders.

he said, i just had a visit from the president's counselor. he hands me this list of 50 or so names of people to do of full field investigation of their tax returns. that is a very unpleasant process, i would say. what do i do? you don't do it. what do i tell john dean? >> tell me report to me, and if he has a problem, come to me. >> it was interesting, later on i heard him discussing this with john dean, very basically said who the hell those blue eyes the key is not doing what we want, but they never had that bear to put it to me because if i resigned refusing to do something improper with the internal revenue service, that would not be a very good story. anyway, i inherited the price controls which i proposed

originally but was not in my domain. incidentally the to field running for mayor were don rumsfeld and dick cheney. we were in the process of trying to get rid of them, against my advice, president nixon reimposed them. i said, well, mr. president, it is your call. you i the president. i think it is a mistake, and you should get yourself a new secretary of the treasury, so i resigned. certain policy issues. >> host: mr. secretary, did you have a -- >> guest: that also illustrates something i think, in these jobs, they are very rewarding. you have a chance to deal with really major things, often you can really make a difference. so they tend to enjoy them. but you can't like the job too much.

the haft said the church yourself. i felt if i stayed under the circumstances of this decision, i would not be true to myself. so you can't let the job have too much control. >> host: mr. secretary, did you have a good relationship, or what kind of relationship did you have with president nixon? >> a very good relationship. of a lot of really constructive things together. one of the first things i did the secretary of labor was in philadelphia and the skill construction trades there were no blacks at all. yet there were blacks around who were skilled. we decided, i decided that we

should book this. so we devised something that became called the philadelphia plan and told them he had got to have some firing. the have to find people who are capable people, but nevertheless get more people there and let's have an objective and let's have a timetable and get going. as you can imagine, it was very controversial. i was secretary of labor and all of a sudden in this controversy. i am called to testify in the summit. somebody is saying, you are trying to impose a quota system. i said, i am trying to replace one. i'm trying to get rid of one. what do you mean? the quota is zero. it has been very effective. so we went back and forth. back-and-forth in the senate. the republican leader gave me

the statements in the book. we won by ten votes. a very bipartisan vote for and against. it was traumatic. it was my first battle, and i felt good about it because i felt i was in a sense morally on the right side of the issue. incidently, whether to of one of the players voted differently was ted kennedy. did not think. different views of things. we got along well. it was a good colleague. >> use still in touch with don rumsfeld and dick cheney? >> dick was over in london. i had the privilege of being the leader with jim baker of the american delegation. when dick showed up there. his wife. there were good friends. so we had a chance to see him.

he is amazing to me and he went. i said, you are looking great. three very hard years, our replacement and someone. he is looking great, feeling great. catch up with these people. >> host: what about secretary rumsfeld? >> guest: i don't see a lot of them, but i am in touch with him. he has a new book coming out. i wrote a little blurb for it. it is unknown unknowns and no knowns and that stuff. interesting book. >> host: what was your relationship to margaret thatcher? >> guest: i had a really good relationship with marker. often we argued. she is a pretty fierce argue were. when she does not like something

people to say, oh, yes, margaret. we would go at it. the underlying way of thinking about things was similar, so a lot was constructed by the reagan-thatcher relationship, and i was glad to be a part of it. i was glad to get to her funeral because i had been close to her book before i was in office and after we left office. we still had times when we were together. i was glad to have a chance to go pay my respects because i think it is of their statement that between margaret date -- margaret thatcher and ronald reagan, they change the world. history was changed. >> host: pace 245 of "issues on my mind," you write that in my view the most striking trend now is something else.

it is a growing cohesion and cooperation of like-minded nations that share an important set of positive goals. >> that is what i think with u.s. leaders we managed to do after world war ii. remember, there were some really great statement -- statement in the administration when this was carried on. these people look back. what did they see? they saw two world wars. the first one settled in terms that helped lead to the second. to the second world war, 70 million people were killed. and untold others displaced. this on the great depression. the protectionism and the currency manipulation. they saw the holocaust. they said to themselves, what a

crummy world. and we are part of it, whether reelected are not. so they set out to construct something better. they saw the soviet was aggressive to deal with. institutional structures like nato. the brentwood system in economics, the trading efforts that cannot construct a successful effort. the security efforts. over a time. each successive administration, the contributions. security and economic in comments. people were treated to it. it was u.s. leaders without a doubt. i think it is fair to say that

without u.s. leaders constructive things seldom handle. that does not mean that people do what we want. it means that when the u.s. is there with ideas as an effective participant it helps to get things moving. i have seen that personally on many occasions. so that has been a great achievement. i can remember the early 1980's, i was in china. he said, now china is ready. he said, first of all, we open the movement of people within china and opening within china. what is the second? the second is an opening of china to the outside world. there was a reason like o'hare world.

so that is what i was referring to. that's the right now. this was being torn apart and changing. >> host: how should we view china? >> guest: it is abcaeight country. a lot of talented people. it has had remarkable economic renaissance. it has a very large problem to contend with. notably new, in modern times in . an actor on the same. so i think we better have a close working relationship where we talk through problems with them. that is the way we need to go about it. >> host: do we have that ability now? >> guest: i hope so. i'm not part of things.

i was a part of a group that henry kissinger organize that has a spraying seven chime in here, seven or a device. about a year ago we were in china. the man who is now the president, he gave a dinner for arrests. a lot of discussion. the next day we spent about an hour-and-a-half with the new premier. i thought -- and that check this out with henry kissinger. i said, you know, a collaborative relationship with the united states. that does not mean we don't have problems. it means that we can talk about the problems. maybe we agree to disagree.

my first meeting with the chinese, i said -- and they like the idea, my counterpart, you put on the table everything you want to talk about and i will put on the table everything a watchdog about. let's make an agenda like that. and let's agree, i will come to china once a year at least and you come to the u.s. once a year at least. probably three or four places where we both come to a meeting of some kind. it set aside three hours or so just for us to work through this agenda. and that served as well. identified opportunities, saw problems which we did not -- could not deal with, but on all -- and we developed the same

where they did say to me, i no you're trying to get this way. we can handle that. if you will come around like this, maybe that could work. so that is the way. if you can develop our reasonably trusting relationship with the other party so i think that undoubtedly big disagreements with china right now. the cyber area. the way to do it is to sit down and talk to each other. be realistic. be strong. have an agenda. the ready to engage. >> host: or you ever ask for

did you ever want to be secretary of the military and defense? >> guest: that is a tough job. i was never asked to do that to my dad did not think about it much. i know it's a very hard job. the president asks you to do something that you can -- i think you have an obligation to do it. i consider myself still to be a marine, so i am still in the military forces. the secretary of state, had a lot of dealings with the military. i said to my counterpart one time, i said, according to the statute, the national security council consists of four people, the president on the vice-president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. and it says in the statute coming each member is entitled to military vice.

and he said, well, you know where uniform. i want to talk to the guy who wears a uniform. so eventually what happened to my found out that the joint chiefs like to play golf. i've been a member of augusta national golf club for a while in no golfer ever turns down an invitation to go. i invited him down for weekend, so we get to know each other. but it is important to have direct military advice when you're trying to conduct diplomacy over and there's something happening. >> host: did you have a direct line to president reagan when u.s. secretary of state? >> we had a system where he and i had two private meetings a week. obviously whenever he wanted to talk about was first. i had always brought an agenda to talk about. and we had sort of an

understanding. we would never try to make a decision in those meetings because those should be argued out in a broader context, but i would go and say, look, here is this problem. it is a gathering storm. you can see it on the horizon. we don't know just where it is going, but here is the way we're thinking about it. here is what we're trying to do about it. what do you think? and we would go back and forth. and he was a union leader at one. two love to talk about bargaining and negotiation. and i had my experiences in the labor arena. so we would swap stories back and forth. i got to have a really good understanding of how we thought about things. so i felt i was important. i am representing him. people sometimes said to me, well, what about your friend? and i would always say, i don't

have one. my job is to help him formulated and get it out. it is his foreign policy. he is the guy who got elected, >> host: from what you observed and has the role of the secretary of state james since you were there in the 80's? >> well, it looks to me as though there is not the same kind of relationships that i had with president nixon board let's say jim baker had with george bush because -- i don't know exactly the reason, but i said, for example, the other day, the national security adviser went to moscow to meet with the russian president has started arranging a relationship. if i was secretary of state would not have tolerated that. that is my job.

and as national security adviser , you're a staff person, not a principle. i remember when general powell got the role. he understood. he came around to me and said, i am a member of your staff. obviously the president is my main guy, but my job is to staff the council. and so i think that is beginning to get out of kilter. in my book have quite a lot to say about the structural governance and how it is going, i think, in the wrong direction. >> host: secretary george shultz, a couple more issues on your mind. number one, demographics. you're worried about demographics. >> guest: i'm not worried. an observant. i see that the demographics of the world had changed and are continuing to change rapidly. the developed countries basically have no fertility.

they are getting to be older societies. that has an impact on their outlook and capabilities. the russians have a demographic catastrophe and enhance. longevity is a little better than 60. women live 12 years on the than men. yonder, talented people emigrating. they have huge problems in the caucasus to deal with. that is a long border with china. a lot of people have one side and hardly anyone on the other. the demographics underlying this devastating. in some ways the most interesting demographics. around 30 years ago fertility dropped. that meant for quarter-century

china has had as a growing labour force and a declining number of people with the labor force to support. colleted demographic dividend. now those cohorts and the population now moving. and this situation is about to change. suddenly they're going to have a declining labor force and the rising number this time over that the labor force us to support. a big change. meanwhile you have a north africa and middle east country. still very high. the longevity. cities a very young society is. and some how many of them have been organized in such a way the yen people don't have much to do. there was information of the

information age which i talk about in the book. nowadays the people in charge have a monopoly on information ability to organize. that is entirely changed. so in the middle east uc the arab awakening and this park, it was only a spark, but it was a spark. all he wanted to do was start a little business selling fruits and vegetables. and the regulators wanted to get something and it got squashed. how they expect to make a living? did just wanted to work and it does a lot for you. work, you get some income from work and feel, i deserve that. i get something. pay for it and deserve it. and i think the turmoil there

seeing in the middle east, that will settle down. people have something to do that is constructive effort. there are many other kinds of issues that a tearing away at it, but that is a fundamental one that comes. you concede many take a look. >> host: tied into that, you mentioned another issue you talk about, technology in the use of technology. >> guest: as i was saying to my don't think people quite appreciate the depth and the meaning of the information and communication revolution. it has changed the process of governance. it is particularly hard on autocratic governments that have been afro while. but in democratic governments people are customs of paying attention to what people want, but nevertheless it shortens the

distance between the people who are governing and the people being governed. and it is changing because people anywhere can find out basic information. they can also communicate with each other through cell phones and organize. so we are seeing now over the place. and of course it has been prevalent in the middle east, but the russians have been struggling with it. the chinese struggle with it. it is a phenomenon. >> host: final issue, domestic, international, the drug war. what should be done about drugs in the u.s.? >> guest: first of all, we have to be willing to discuss the issue. it can't be a typical issue. right? do you agree? are you willing to talk about it?

>> host: i'm just listening. >> guest: furlong time no one will discuss it. we have had a war on drugs. i remember in the nixon administration we were worried brightly about the damage that drugs to to an individual and to society. so i am very, very much of the view that we need to figure out how to deal with that problem adequately. and there was the idea, and pat moynihan, counselor in the white house thought one of the things to do would be to fix it so that drugs are just not here. he had this program. the purpose of writing a to camp david, pat is in a state of euphoria. he says to me, don't you realize, we just had the biggest

bust in history? i said, congratulations. but this was in marseille. we have broken the french connection. that was the problem of the time. that's terrific. i suppose you think that as long as they're is a big profitable demand for drugs in this country there will be a supply. i looked at him and said, one hand, there is so free of. but this effort to keep drugs out is a complete failure. and the problem of drugs in the united states is relatively great compared with many other like-minded countries. so we ought to at least discuss this and see what other people doing. i think there is a lot to be said for decriminalizing use on small-scale possession, position only for use. if you do that you don't get

thrown in jail if you go to a treatment center and try to get some how. and you also keep details from being full of people who are caught smoking marijuana or something. throw people in jail and all you do is make criminals out of them. amazingly, they're even getting drugs in jail. so we should take a different approach. it is so vitally important for people not to take these drugs. it's bad for society. and you can do things. like it will we've done in this country. there still people. but much, much less than before because we have had a fact based campaign, not just advertising, but a campaign to persuade

people not to smoke. i remember the day when they have the advertisements. i'd walk around. a pretty girl saying something. right now if he sees somebody smoking you think there's somebody wrong with them -- something wrong with them. so the whole atmosphere is changed. that can happen. all kinds of things can be done beyond what we're doing. earlier spending gigantic amounts of money on this floor, and one of the results of it is huge violence in other countries in mexico over the last five or six years some 5,060,000 people have been killed which is more than the wars in afghanistan or rock. so a huge cost.

>> for think it's a mexican problem. the money come from. where the guns come from? >> these start wars often have better equipment and a better organized than the government. it seems to be 45 -- starting with that. when ade said say we have to do something about it. one time when i was in office nancy reagan had her just say no program. she understood this. and she went to the united nations. invited to give a speech on the subject. she said very directly, solutions to this problem start right here. doing something about people taking drugs. it was a beautiful statement. >> host: in your book you include a letter from nancy reagan. >> guest: also a nice picture.

at any rate she had a lot of pressure from the drug bureaucracy not to say which is said. just like her health, that is is going to say. she did. the impact in the world was just the drug bureaucracy. people responded saying, rape. so refreshing to hear that you understand that. >> are you still in touch? >> i talked to her just the other day. i gave her report. >> to find out questions. you mentioned earlier, mr. secretary, your father. >> i thought you said earlier you had two fathers. >> is a just to file questions in general. earlier in the interview you mentioned your father. you were your parents commander did you grow up?

>> in the inner city. in my parents know best inglewood new jersey which is a little better community my father worked. and my parents were just wonderful people. my father grew up on a farm in indiana. somehow got himself to deploy and universities. the first member of his family ever the of a college. and when he was asked, the ways of the stock exchange, he would train people. he started that school, the new york stock exchange is to. the clarifying institution. and he take most days, nobody

works on saturdays and more. he would take me into new york when i was a kid. afterwards we would go to this place called the deasy sandwich shop. then i go up to a football game. he take me there. played catch with me. just a wonderful person. she said very high standards. so i was very fortunate to have voting, talented, wonderful parents. i have pictures of them all around. >> host: here at the hoover institution at stanford university, another secretary of

state is located, your colleague, ms. rice, what would you think of if secretary rice ran for president? >> guest: she's a very capable person. and i have not ever talked to her directly about that, but i know that she understands the political process. it's different morning for an office than being a person even and the ire of the sec's secretary of state. with issuant to indulge in that of the. >> host: did she ever run for office? >> guest: no. when i was in effect at mit, the school had only a few students per class. massachusetts had a program for regional schools. in at that there was a good idea so people said, what you run for

the school board, so i did. and my brothers and there was some turned down the regional school but elected me by an overwhelming margin to a non existent. so i ran. >> host: for the past hour or so we have been talking with former secretary of state, labor, and treasury, the george shultz. "issues on my mind: strategies for the future".cussion is an hd

three minutes. >> thank you so much. try not to fall off the back of the states. it is bright. well. that is for c-span. okay. is the audio okay? can you hear me? thank you for coming out. i used to live here, of course. this is extremely familiar. i used to a haunted when i was young urban so long ago. i cherish this particular store and thank you for supporting it. we just lost the last

significant bookstore near where i live. to not have a bookstore really changes things. it is extraordinary. i was like to believe that that makes up for it, but it doesn't. it is is not the same. these are precious places. so this book, the other thing yet to remember is similar to this end of year -- this paulist time of year. extraordinary loss of pollen have come over from the ocean. abcaeight. thirty years ago or so the, 30 and some odd years ago i was part of the circle of the oven techies, and i bet there are other people from that circle here who were just on fire with this idea of how often were going to improve the world. we were going to get a digital network.