>> but from the audience point of view it is criticism of the news. but i am was riding because of an awareness how little the media in falls the

business of looking at news. someone will have a shot to tell us what pictures to influence us literature and drama or poetry what does it mean? what does it do to us? [laughter] still one of the early generations with the systematic attention in the 18th century the promise of news was enormous with the idea if you have information about the workings of government and of other countries and a free throw one dash free throw of information that

you will have flourishing entry. for what news was meant to be. even if it did not deserve the workout that way but now it seems if you try to keep the population confused confused, supine, unsure how to go across the space you have two options. the first is from north korea. you stopped anyone getting from any information. but the other way is much better if you keep things as they are to flood people with news. so much so they could figure out what was happening last week. you don't know because cleverly it is not ignorance but we are flooded with information so much we cannot hold on to the things that matter so the physical

agenda has no said the constituency for those important challenges we face. it is said nations become modern when they stopped going to church stop see religion as the authority of. for the right and wrong the place to influence the masses to deliver a feeling of what we should aim for in life is no longer church but the thing that replaces it. the news replace says religion. we are way past it now i think in the united states, the u.k., europe, and as firm believers, agnostics, if yes also when it comes to the news. if you start to ask

questions the will run into accusations of heresy. with the questions you raise of the media but you would have gathered from my toe and i am the more skeptical not a full atheist but definitely a little skeptical. nevertheless it is the unparalleled power. whenever anyone wants to start a revolution where do you go? you don't attack the homes of the novelist or the social scientist that is important but nobody cares about them you always have and keep doing that. that is where the sense of reality falls. ended controls the mind of the population. what i want to do tonight is

take you through a number of areas to go toward a slightly better resolution. i want to try to make a better. one of the things someone will immediately tell you is there are important issues out there because if they are too prominently on the front page the architecture of news has broken down. but first the the biggest audience would be attracted but that would not take up too much. but now the froth comes to the front now if you want a big audience you put on someone like this. this drives serious people crazy. crazy.

it is a challenge definitely. your high minded but then take to the hills and decide we have entered the era of unparalleled decadence. the catholic church has important things to tell people how to live according to the gospel with jesus christ. they thought very hard how to get that message across. and those altarpieces had done interesting things that to put them in the hands of this fellow carrying a heavy book it is not that appealing but guys with have

a truce are not appealing to an early. [laughter] and but he knew how to do. and sex cells but with the world that we with thin but with attractive people it is not necessarily so bad but to sell the wrong thing and this is the problem. the judge had one solution and arguably they could be selling their right thing but a steady bond involved has to face the collapse of architecture of the boring and popular. over a generation held steady. that is no longer hear the case.

we need to face up to that one of the most important goals is popularization. what is that? the capacity to take a complex and important idea to a wide audience. there is no more important skill them back. it is assumed that is what journalists know how to do. that is why we get the tensions between the two. that there is too much information were too many stories there really is not that many there is lots and lots of incidents but if you boil down the emotional core in my book i say there is the same stories that keep going around and around

everything is always knew in the news but things already come around to just like the prices and the ukraine. then again a few decades later and it keeps happening because everything has to be new so as the audience we have to get better because they reduce to cdu to certain truths that hold together a wide variety of incidents to make clear but let me show you something this is really only one story it is part of it and another part and another part but it is only one story. it is really a story about someone important and aside

from that activity is the emotional charge in the audience. so we have a british member of the royal family and the prince and he is using a car seat to. [laughter] that is special. and it is amazing. [laughter] a very important person who was born in a stable. it could have been a palace. but we have to get the experts of the archetypes' because we have a lot of news to read. there is much less out there than rethink. these are the eternal

stories. moving on what are the promises? the promise of the news was we find out about life over the hill in another country that increases in make a brotherhood of man and peaceful grain across the earth that was the original promise now from foreign news or world news but 200 people died in the democratic republic of congo. you don't care at all you did not even know. the reason is not the you are monsters but obey the news has presented it to. how could you care about the existence of 200 whose existence you had not

suspected? you have to know they are of life before the deaths is striking. we are all sympathetic. we could see up play of "king lear" and to be crying over a guide to did not live. '' or we could hear about the death in the democratic republic of congo like a news but bulletin then we are half asleep. it is a way in which the information is presented to us. the news industry works all the time with fed data with an information base model how our minds work. they believed if you collect data that is accurate to put it before the audience it will sink into the hearts and minds. that is why we can tell people people will die here

or a landslide over there then we find an audience but it repeatedly does not. we don't care. the reason is in order for something to matter it has to engage our imagination that requires the discipline parts is the name but it is the intention to try to get important ideas and truce into the mind that it stays there. the news that is most calculated eye and a philosopher by training but the clivias constituency by far they are a very sad and depressed bunch. everybody has forgotten about them.

there are photos of everywhere. >> the need boiled this down. all what it really has to do is sesotho that advance use your knowledge. not really confirming something but itself the bearer of new and original information. i was thinking of this by the pulitzer prize winner stephanie sinclair on child marriage didn't yemen. we think we know a lot but i

learned so much for example, it is not actually children dead girls are not children. these are live told ladies the trauma of what they go through is extraordinary. the men are not then they are lost boys it is more confusing than we thought here is a pate picture of advancing your knowledge there are so many others the developing world will come across. is bad because it doesn't teach you anything toward financing knowledge. the this is a good photo because we're learning stuff you know, the esteemed president lies to get elected. that is not news but could he light in order to please the son of the stafford

pretending to be spider-man. full of insights with the block posted every week but most newsrooms the argument of good photography is a knife edge. there are few people understand that and want to pay for it. i emigrate fan of the media and it pains me how little good photography argument is being made. when we are consumers of the news coming use seem very nice and people up there are nice so genuinely they are friendly so we go below the line and then you read the

comments then you suddenly realize they're crazy, a vicious, uh vindictive the ending three about everything. looking at the average age article the man who runs the britain and exchequer left there is an article about him and there were 400 comments and some wanted to kill him, kicking him what is going on? are we crazy? i think it is the version of keeping a journal. it is a bad day you pull it out in to write down how with feels at that moment. i have had enough. you are writing with tears and a little autobiographical.

[laughter] you put in a drawer and you did not tell anyone. because if they did they could not look past it. the problem is these comments are journal entries but they are public. this is a real problem because we have to trust one another and that is hard. so we need to take care that social media is disturbing we're the first generation to face its and it happens every day. so take care of that. this is a man who worked in the cavalry for many years a distinguished military career in the u.k. and he

has an older daughter he took his son in his daughter he put them in the car and stabbed them then himself and found later by a couple walking the dog. it was the most visited of any story in the most popular web site in england. it received a the maximum number of hits. what is going on there? what is it about the news it seems to mesmerize us? it can save as though we are the lowest of the love to take such interest. with human nature way back i am thinking of aristotle. he is politic to analyze the

way there is murder and incest. called the possibility of humankind are not necessarily degrading. they can themselves be an agent of civilization. so with the role to play that is what you find in the poetics. the reason why aristotle argues this what you find is to emotions from fear and pity for the tragic hero is how close you might be to undergo the trauma and torment hall every life is a catastrophe but if we're pushed hard enough and will

be victims of the theory of fate to very cautionary messages included so brief feel pity then how close we are to the tragedies we have witnessed. this is immensely sophisticated the material with which with any all lead to any day to present to us as so often is the case newspapers to the edges deeply interesting but don't do anything with that but abandons us to feelings that are not prone to that process. there is no resolution of the emotions that the news has set that is the

background anxiety that the news creates a kids the ingredients but does not do anything with them. also disaster news where there is a mechanical failure to create a disaster or car crashes. that is popular you know, this will bring the advertisers. but what is really successful nothing beats a airline crash with an american european airlines what is going on? looking for the meaning of life. the middle ages when you were decorating your office to put a scowl on your table what are you doing with the

skull? reminding yourself what was important in life the thought of death which shape us from the assumptions to the waste of time. the thoughts of death as a role to play. now we do not put this call on the desk but we do this. trying to get back in touch. but again the news does not do this for us. it does not tell us of one thing we could draw from the event. it is unresolved and our emotions are therefore extremely unresolved. ultimately the news makes us free and done everything. it never tells us we will survive. we are afraid.

ufos and despised there is always something new to be terrified about. the very basic point is the news breaks out the murders and disasters and tragedies. then the enormous event is the norm. that is why when your car breaks down on a saturday night you have to seek help you know, what will happen. you will talk to a stranger they will have to into small pieces to put you in a truck you know, this because you are a consumer of news everybody is crazy and that is what we know. then we come to the stunning realization everybody is quite nice except for that

1% but that is the normal that is to be here about with a fundamentally distorted picture of the united states. is a country full of crazies. that is what we know because we have read the papers. [laughter] it is in the power of the news to give us that feeling which is so important we choose what kind of country to live live in? we have a very narrow circle of friends and acquaintances to give us face to face what it means to live in the united states. most of the information now is fed by the news. we surrender to the news machine that is a striking surrender what comes back is completely worrying and

there is one area that concerns is very pessimistic apart from the area of of medical science. and it is constantly bringing us fantastic news and lots of new developments. if you eat walnuts you will not get alzheimer's or if you eaton this or lots of things. whatever it is or a new discovery. and then that we will die not win the airliner crashes but the ordinary death. octogenarian hearts will give out in that is the way for most people but the news does not reconcile this it catapults between terror and

extremely thin and the millenials promises to be eternal life. it swings between hope and despair and politics. pope and fury constantly that drive the news machine it is very exhausting. they broke the bad news to us gently. it will come to an end to get ready. think about it. they were gentle with says but it catapults us between hope and despair constantly. something else is celebrities talk to sensible people what is wrong with the world now? we live in a celebrity culture influence seeing the young and horrible.

really? yes. they are everywhere. serious people think celebrity news is terrible. it is very important for that country to have celebrities hatter vital in terms of guiding the nation to guide how to behave. every society has had will models but you cannot have a society without role models. but the problem starts at the top of society serious people do not believe because to be guided by a celebrity i just do it myself than the business of a 19 celebrities that is

where we get our friend. but to get the right sort is what we need. but they did not even see it as a need. this very useful indeed because those who have children or no children it is very boring at the park for a child but it goes on and on as you take your child to the park yes and natalie was there with her kid i am doing what the hollywood actress is doing but it has momentarily shown on the momentum of everyday life. because we do need glamour

we need the right things to make clamorous so naming the patron saint taking the kid to the park. they have seen its for all sorts of things we're very confused about this. get a little more optimistic something else the news does it to us on the weekend it is time for this slow part to sometimes we will sit down on the sofa so to say puris be where so be aware of strobe waiting what they

should be flashing is envy. what do i mean by an feeler? but on a good day people are capable of unbelievable transformation of their origin. but it does have been enough to not enable us to sleep that well at night those who used to be this year used to be boring there were a failing movie star but then they, etc. constantly all around to then i think i am a loser because i have not done anything with my life in hess made with the lawn muskie is 46.

it does not matter regular yogurt how old they are because you think i have time but now i am 44 and elon musk is 46 he started ebay then paypal and he is worth $70 million with tesla now sending men to mars. then it is his wife. [laughter] is going swimmingly but i am going this insane with bitterness angeles the lead partner says everything okay? of course. i don't even want to communicate at lunch. facing the jealousy of elon musk in the article was nice to show us his new home how he recently started to cook pasta himself. [laughter] we need help with envy.

the news when it is bound together with the two are so embedded we need help. we still have schaede judeo-christian background the envy is bad. >> it is just terribly confusing it is a guide for something you need to a advance your life but it is confused. indeed to interpret our envy said to have been envious attack we need to achieve that diary then study it later. what could we learn? a huge opportunity for learning to sharpen it but to think i am envious of elon musk face up to that.

you might want to send men to mars or electric cars or is this lady special? no. fire really analyzed what i envy is courage because he came up with these ideas that sounded crazy nobody believed him over 10 years and he stuck with it you're wasting your time wasting your money and it paid off. he is a st. a vision of courage that is what i am after in him. but what is this about? to realize the news does this constantly. serious news organizations tend to characterize the unserious by the most biased

source in the united states. nobody likes fox news it is very bad. [laughter] and what do we like? we liken pr1 dash n p r and go across the pond. and the bbc. [laughter] and they are not biased at all because they fundamentally believe they will not spoonfeed you they will present you with the intermission as the intentional person you will decide what is right or wrong they do not want to influence and every argument is valid. if the bbc general told mutilation they will find somebody who is against it and for it to balance it out.

anti-genocide and proud genocide just to get both sides. after apartheid they decided it was bad after a lot of soul-searching. that was very sensible. [laughter] it is disaster esparto. they think telling people what to think is bad. that is not a call that fox news ever thought saw all these organizations have these qualms but to think it is patronizing because we are so good it has been since we were three or four picking up on that information your parents said come sit down it is good for you and you say no.

we are good and resisting stories to fight back. it is second nature of what do we think? what do i think? first of all,, to approval of a pipeline from the gulf of mexico what do you think? is it good or bad? i don't know. the news organizations are afraid to give us help. they need to get sharper with their questions and more aggressive with their search for the jurors because -- the truth because the really powerful news organizations the question is that they dare ask

interest rates are higher, unemployment's and the farm roles and meanwhile the population is going insane. then you get an explosion people cannot take any more. the terrible problem with "this is it" is the result of the news because it results of people who have been driven crazy with the current economic situation in our various they want to do something but have no idea what but unfortunately that is a bad place to be. in order to change the world you need passion for good ideas and this has a huge role to play to not provide us with the idea to have a fair chance.

we have a fatal weakness of a curious institutional of pedagogical inhibition of news organizations. it is amazing in this city in "the new york times" called the news really? have you checked it out? all the news? all of it? marvelous. it is 2006 there you are in the building you printed all the news anything about the banks or the capital reserves? no. it is fine. absolutely. it is one of the most asinine things it is dangerous not just for "the new york times" but humanity because it is not of real people expect the esteemed organizations like the bbc

or "the new york times" have worked out reality they've really don't know very much. but they make such a big deal. and to we say they must know so it is falling. they don't know they repeatedly have shown they don't know. at the end of the day it is not the news it is some news masquerading as the news but we cannot expect anyone else to get out there to harvest the information to dump it in our lap we have to think for ourselves and it has a role to weaken our capacity which reputedly had in recent american history catastrophic results. people say now you can start

a twitter account. really? so somebody with an audience comes up with the problem but the mass media uses the existence of twitter and facebook to say it is a democracy really is not the us and you could be a journalist. no. there is a news agenda and monotheism to lead to catastrophic errors. one of the causes then news keeps expecting there is bad news there are bad guys that need to we pursued and walked up then they go way. you will see the word watergate still journalists are still in love with the watergate paradigm.

it is a secret nobody knows about it is start and the journalists like james bond will go out to get the secret and through the secret will reveal to the world to change the world. unfortunately most of the things that are wrong with the overall do not fall into the watergate paradigm in any shape or form. we already know it is the public the information is not used properly. you don't have to take edward snowden to get into a computer. it is out there we are not analyzing it. it has nothing to do with a rotten apple but they don't have the right to filter. moving on very quickly, the news is based on the idea of

what is news is important. which is why we need to keep checking the news because there is something new that has happened since the last bulletin. to find the things going on in humanity and it is apparent of the things i have happened in humanity happened a long time ago and nothing to do with the last bulletin put the noose cannot see it because it is committed but is is news if you follow the narrative you will miss out one of the most important books was written by plato called the republic. he said in a great guy writes a book about the branch plant of the state it

would be news in the sense it is important but not news. we need to be so aware of this because it is so easy to except the narrative. also very important why fight is not installed on the airplane so that we could take in the news from ourselves we're narrators of important news. using the news from the ukraine to stifle the news from within. it is the written source of information to give humanity real lessons in there are few people to pick up on that news but if you say to somebody what are you doing

at the moment? i am reading the news. that is serious. please. carry on. if you just say i was thinking when i was 12 i would look at the sky. that is not serious. unfortunately it is prestigious and does not deserve the prestige. there are things going on out there so keep looking out for this and others to sum up my book that is what it is about. philosophers are important people who believe but the problem is no one is listening ever. the average worker seoul's 300 copies made while of

website every day gets 40 million people. checking out for us is 300 people checking out the truth. that is depressing. but do we do about that? a few months ago i thought what happens if you have philosophers and got them to rewrites the web site the same story about smiley cyrus anntaylor swift and etcetera and you simply rewrote with all the things they care about. we came up with the philosophers mail only agree entirely by philosophers. philosophers mail.com are

some great stories. check it out. [laughter] it is the practical application of these ideas i have been talking about. i'd like to do other things as well because i try to get the world better be year against a real challenge it is a beast and i think future generations are still learning how to handle this. i will stop there. we have time for questions. thank you for listening. [applause]

>> [inaudible] >> can the news gets better if it is for profit? i am not an expert the etf people don't want to pay for news is wrong they want to get their credit card out and subscribe for one year. that is a crisis of journalism people would be willing to pay for it but they don't want the hassle. the fate of journalism depends on the micro payment is slightly baffling one micro pavement take so long to crack.

then who cares? that will completely change held the news organizations can make money. anyone can start a news organization a lot of people can make some money. that was fundamentally changing our democracy. so too often they have been confirmed -- concerned with a platform. you need to be able to monetize. >> we do have microphones coming. >>

[inaudible] how is it possible? >> this is something that philosophers work with. we always tried to think what is the ideal version of this thing that is only half? what if it is the alternate version of this thing called the newspaper or the museum or the school, etc.. so very often there is no theoretical reason why things could not get better. to do with the right people meeting people, i have met to a number of people, the

big guys when i meet them my has been struck but they are not committed to being evil but they are quite stiefel to do evil things but not out of the entrenched view but there might be other ways to lack of inspiration think of what the very wealthy do with their money. i will say something shocking but they accumulate all their money then at the end of their life they give it to the opera or the museum. you try to have a good life and make money more leave rather than accumulate then give it to the arts because that is all about morality and ethics and truce. and to make that shiny at the end of your life but tried to lift values.

i am an optimist. you have to be. there are so many good reasons to bathe despairing of yourself. [laughter] but to keep going in is a challenge. it is interesting. other thoughts? >> i was wondering about organizations being remiss to tell us how to think court to show both sides but stopping short getting us to the point where we need to be so what is your opinion of john stuart and stephen cold beer in that equation? buffet are serious. as an art form. added another layer super

imposed it may not look like it but of course, it is a huge amount interpretation going to make a joke so in a sense to say in order for information to become powerful and has to become subject to the process. many news organizations using humor like that is subject through art you could have a tragedy like the sophocles' version of "the new york post" but that version is a humorous but it is striking they are true this that he does not say on cnn but it is more truce but then you say no no-no it is wrong good joke is not the mia it is the edited version

of the troops what cnn serves is the unedited digested neutral free-floating informations that we dismiss because we could not use that. keep going there are those on and the show's doing a fantastic job. >>. >> talk about optimism i read we are at a point we are better off than we have then as a society for hundreds of years to constantly say society will fall and we have all these bad will models but that is

what they have been saying for the last 300 years and plays into the end of the world is coming. >> it is interesting because some people say there is so much bad news why do we hear bad news? i am sure you have the american equivalent with the new news out the fall of good news may be a horse racing festival or produced by pedal power but stories to feel cheerful about but then you're left thinking that i think what decides what is a news item?

so the dancers are still so vague. the dominance interpretation was we are here to hold the powerful to recount. okay. anything else? powerful to account? it sounds serious but that is not good enough my view is it should gather information that is required to flourish not happy happy but sometimes involve to read dark news or hearing bad stuff but it just depends with yields in the sense where is it leading? that should decide so between good news and bad news some good news will

drive us crazy so i would not say because it is not a cheerful it has no use i think some dark truces important. >> [inaudible] >> why does the news keep bashing people? i think it has an idea with the of watergate paradigm run completely amok. because the news has the ada holds the powerful to recount it used to be the president but now it is the schoolteacher anybody in any

position of authority this is a neurosis of a misunderstanding of what it means for good to occur in the nation. we need authority and to respect authority but to have a functioning system who are you? to argue to tell me that? that may not be your view but i grew gold this. it is a mass psychosis partly brought on the watergate paradigm run wild we discovered a holding the powerful to encounter. no papers are as mean as the british but you guys are catching up. [laughter] you have the news outlet now but you give them a run for

their many. -- money because you want to get to the truce by being been. that is not true if you understand the truth about someone or a racist person someone who has stolen money that is a bit of an idiot in show business and you are very mean that cuts you off from the important truth of that situation. to see yourself as the instrument of truce seeking it will have to understand it -- to understand more because of that image of me in this and criticism is the approach to the troops it is modeled.

-- the truth is modeled. hugh a half to pity things through "the new york times." so join me on this. . .

also working in the media. their information will come from looking at photographs and captions. really it's it's watching movies of people want to be told the news in the form of storytelling so it's entertaining. and i wanted to hear your comment on that. >> well look i don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with news as stories. part of the problem is because we are so impatient with the latest development we don't allow many stories to assume the proper narrative proportions because we want to know what happened next so i think to wait to see something as the story is fantastic read for my money one of the great journalists of the 20th century america was norman mailer who was a novelist

of course by training and background and he knew how to tell a news story as a story. he brought many of the skills of narrative, fiction to narrative nonfiction and i think this is tremendously valuable because it stinks so deeply. but you know there have been very few norman mailer's. there have been very few people who are even interested in that example in that sort of thing. people say oh very nice but is still a realm minority so that is what i would say. as for foreign lands, a friend of mine who lived in communism said the great thing about living under communist and you knew the news was lying to you all the time. the problem living here is you kind of don't know. some of it's true in some of it's not. how do you tell? used to be so simple. you used to know that you couldn't trust it and that has become kind of a truth.

i don't want to say that all news is bad at all times are terrible, don't get me wrong. does wonderful things things. every day at those wonderful wonderful things but it also leaves out a lot of things. in a way its very success is a harbinger because once you start to trust something to much you are in danger. there is lots to be grateful for. don't get me wrong. absolutely. what we have in this country and other developed countries are things that humans have worked very hard to achieve but ended huge part that's not the end of the story. we can do better and we deserve to do better and might look is a very modest small attempt to push us towards getting the news that we really deserve. thanks very much. [applause]

>> there are books for sale in the lobby. he will be signing books so i encourage you to pick up a copy and i will see you downstairs. [inaudible conversations] next storm booktv's trip to tallahassee florida would take a tour of the quad pepper -- claude pepper library.

>> the exhibit of senator claude pepper looking in the claude pepper museum outside of the claude pepper library. claude pepper was first united states senator and then the united states commerce one from the state of florida. in its early days in the senate he was the first proponent of the wage and hour bill which established fair minimum wage for american workers. he was also a proponent of the lend lease act which allowed the united states to send arms and matériel to the allied nations fighting the axis powers at the very beginning of the second world war. he was also instrumental in social security reform in the early 30s. he was branded a warmonger by isolationist politicians and was hung effigy outside of the halls of the capitol building in 1941 by the congress of american mothers. they were convinced that he along with all the other

senators who were pushing for american involvement in the second world war were going to inevitably send their sons off to war which unfortunately did happen. claude saw it as something necessary given the rapid expansion of the nazi regime and the japanese in the pacific. claude was one of the more vocal proponents in our involvement in the war so that made him a target that he was with one who was always open to criticisms and in fact kept the effigy in his office for the remainder of the time he was in the senate. up until many years ago we still have the collection that it has since disappeared over the last decade. according to legend claude had dinner one evening with bernard sly grin fred standley who is professor emeritus and initially

his plan was to donate the papers to the franklin delano roosevelt library museum only because he had such a close association with fdr when he was in the senate. president slider and professor stanley impressed upon him that he would have his own stand-alone museum and library. he had a connection to the local area and his law office was located in perry florida. his wife mildred is buried here in tallahassee and on his way up to the sessions in congress you ought to -- he had many connections to tallahassee. that coupled with the fact that he would have his own stand alone may seem and library appealed to his ego a little bit obviously and he decided to donate his papers to florida

state. apart from the museum which is the first thing visitors see when they walk in. we do have a reading room and when we go into the reading room i have some materials from the senate and congressional dates. we are currently in the claude pepper media room. this is our space for research and data collection as well as the other political collections at the house at the pepper library. right now going to start by showing you a few items from the collection created by senator peppered in conjunction with his workings with former u.s. presidents. we are going to start with a box from series 431. this is his memoir series. we have got some telegrams that he sent to the united states senate while he was on the foreign relations trip to germany. when he was over he noticed with

some alarm the rapidity and rapid growth that he not see a regime worth going through. here are the telegrams. all sent urging the united states to enter the war. on both sides of the once of the ones brought atlanta guard duties one of plain and common sense is obvious. we can help in the following ways. one is give planes and more planes and guns and more guns and if necessary what is harder still on -- claude was aware of the fact that armed involvement in the second world war was a matter of not if but when. he was one of those who saw the writing on the wall very early and advocated for the american military industrial complex in

order to prepare for the conflict that was to come. next i'm going to pull one of the items that belong to claude in the united states congress. this was his charm bracelet. it has to pepper shakers on it. and political cartoons throughout his career claude was depicted as a pepper shaker for many reasons. the inscription reads claude pepper salt of the earth, we need pepper for spice so he kept that close to him at all times. thirdly we have got a letter written to claude by franklin delano roosevelt thanking claude for his support during his administration. this letter was sent to claude i fdr thanking him for his support of the roosevelt administration and policies that claude had

supported new deal legislation. this was drafted at warm springs georgia. that was where fdr would go to seek treatment for his polio. the letter was dated april 9, 1945. this was a little less than a week before president roosevelt passed away so this was a very special piece for claude. roosevelt was a strong proponent of him. now i'm going to pull some correspondence between president roosevelt and senator peppered. initially went claude was a young senator he gained the attention of roosevelt. he spoke as a freshman senator which up until that point was a precedent that had not been made

typically senators waited until their sophomore year to speak on the floor of the senate but claude opted to speak as a freshly minted senator coming out in strong support of fdr's policies. this caught the attention of president roosevelt for his oratory skills and sort of cultivated a relationship that would essentially put claude in the position to be his mouthpiece to speak to the southeast. this is a teletype in august of 1940. dear claude i want to send you this note to tell you my personal appreciation for all of you done. your support during these last few months has meant a lot to me. i is sure you'd know even this without me telling you. i could say much about your speech to the convention but will only tell you that to us who are listening to us on the radio it was a refreshing breeze.

thank you very much. i hope to see you soon. as ever yours, franklin roosevelt. here we have an original print of a political cartoon done by cartoonist lynn britain. the caption reads a slight case of indigestion. too much pepper in the alphabet soup. as i mentioned before claude was often depicted in political cartoon as a pepper shaker shaker and. adolph hitler sadly over a bowl of alphabet soup. this was done and support of claude's support and its his allies against the struggle against the axis nation. you also have a little bit later on from claude's house days early on, a print from the memorial service for president john f. kennedy. claude was very devoted to president kennedy. he believed he espoused the

fully thinking ideals that claude identified with as a young senator. so he was very sad as the entire nation was with the passing of president kennedy. the letter to claude from president kennedy thanking him for his support. i will read this excerpt. dear claude i want to take a few minutes to express my deep she shouldn't. your kind and thoughtful or marks with regard to my recent say the union message. i'm appreciative your strong support. our federal aid to education program. i'm also grateful for your comments regarding latin america and their approach to it for you during your years in congress the people of florida in the nation had an outstanding and valiant fighter for the public interest. i hope someday you will consider the possibility of returning to public office. this was shortly before he made his congressional bid for the 13th district out of miami.

in closing me again express my added -- gratitude for your valuable help my campaign last year. sincerely, john kennedy. claude was important to the american political scene for well over if 40 years, very active in the senate and the house and was a proponent of legislation that would help the common american man and woman. the museum and library are very important because it gave researcheresearche rs and those students who were not familiar with progressive politicians a glimpse into his life and allows everyone really to see the scope of his work and appreciate what he did in his time in office.

megan mcardle argues the u.s. is unique in letting its citizens and businesses fail and says this is what has made countries successful. this hour-long program begins now on booktv. >> thank you everybody for coming and welcome to the american enterprise institute. i am tim carney. i'm a visiting fellow here as well as a senior political columnist at the examiner. what i do here is to programs. what is called the culture of competition where we talk about competition. we talk about angst like subsidies and crony capitalism and when competition yields good fruits and when the pursuit of profit may not yield good fruits and the other thing i work on is called the program on human

flourishing where we talk about happiness. both of those topics are addressed in our book we will be discussing today which is "the upside of down" why failing well is the key to success. here to talk about this we have the author megan mcardle. megan is an economics writer at limburg. she has written at the atlantic, the economist, "newsweek". in addition to writing this her first book. a respondent is tyler how one from george mason university. you might know him from his blog marginal revolution and his recent look that great stagnation and averages over. a quick comment about the program before we begin. if you have a cell phone just turn it off. feel free if you want to do twittering stuff about this to do that and we don't want phones ringing during this.

there will be time for audience question. we will and just% and we will have something of a conversation there. if you have a question try to spend some time thinking about how to make it as concise as possible. we will break up at six break up that six-time the 30 for wine and cheese and we we are selling copies of the book outside. megan will sign them. if you like what you hear i recommend you buy them. i'm very much in favor of people buying books that they find interesting. >> me too. >> again thank you for coming. megan i read the book. i loved the book. i thought there were a dozen interesting things, more than that, stories about from all search of things ranging from -- two failed companies to drug addicts. my favorite line that i can remember off the top of my head, if you don't already have trouble with delayed

gratification the best way to get there is develop a drinking habit read i'm probably misquoting it. at no end of interesting stories in the look. what do you think is the most interesting thing you came across while writing it or the interesting thing people will come across while reading it? >> i think we all know that failure is a learning opportunity and often we learn things by failing starting with the way we learn to walk which is a tale of tripping and plummeting and all the way up to how the economy learns. most companies fail and a successful entrepreneur who has done this before has a seven in 10 chance of failing for next time he tries to start a company. the most interesting thing i have actually learned was how amenable failure attitudes are to change. i learned this in my own way. as a writer i have what

psychologists call a fixed mindset which is basically there two ways you can approach a challenge. you can approach it as an opportuniopportuni ty to learn something and expand your brain for you can approach it as a dipstick that is measuring your innate level of talent and ability. most of the latter person. they call it the fixed person. growth set to potentially take on more challenges and tend to learn more from challenges. they do it again and develop more skills. it's a hard mentality to develop especially if you look at the way bright kids get through school. it's easier and you learn from that. success is about finding work easy. you are competing with all the people and you have to have the grit and resilience to first take on things where you really might fail and second of all to learn from them. i was talking to the psychologist who came up with this distinction through

research and i said at the end of the interview i felt like i had to confess. i said i am a total fixed mindset person i totally feel every time i take on a challenge this is a measure of me as a person and if i fail that means i never have what it took. she said me too. it's pretty common. she said that i changed greatly changed and my new height changed when i heard myself saying wow i at this. this is really fun. i thought wow i'm never going to get there. i don't like doing things i'm bad at. over writing the book i did. it wasn't because a lot of it ends up being 12 steps to help yourself through failure. the interesting thing is it was action just reminded myself of truth which is that when we take on things we don't know who to think about learning how to play tennis. he didn't develop an elaborate

theory of tennis physics. if that were the way to learn tennis wimbledon would be one by some guy with glasses from i.t.. you learn about tennis by hitting a ball. it doesn't go the way you think you will for the first 100 times but by accident you headed in the right direction. your brain makes the connection there. that's how it feels. you don't know quite what he did so the next indicated it is going to work but over time you develop that talent for finding the few things that work out of the many wrong ways to hit a tennis ball. and so developing that ability to embrace that isn't a matter of having a 12 step for a-gram. it's just a matter of reminding yourself that this is true and when you say something say to yourself i might not be very good at this. probably i won't. i haven't done before but i can get better and the way i'm going to get better is by doing it and not being very good at it.

similarly with things like unemployment and what psychologists call the fundamental evolution error for you tend to attribute things that happened to the agency of some person. this person when someone is mean to you in the supermarket you say this is a terrible mean person. she probably had a bad day and maybe her mother is sick. just reminding yourself that usually saying her mother is sick people don't randomly walk around snarling at people. that was the most surprising thing that i learn. it's easy to describe the ways in which is hard to fail but i was kind of surprised at how easy it is to really by describing them get better at doing it. >> tyler you have ideas and thoughts on every subject whether it's thai food in suburban strip malls or the unemployment rate or whether inflation is in fact everywhere and always a monetary compound

so when you read macon spoke or listen to what she's saying now what was the thing that struck you in listening to her? >> this is a great book and you should all go out and buy copies. "the upside of down." i learned from this book we should teach young children to play chess at a very early age treaty cannot be good at chess right away so you have to learn failure and furthermore your failure is brutally measured for you see everyone around you failing you know exactly how bad you are but you also have a way of learning how to do better and you can measure your progress. this is one of the most important skills to teach people early on is how to fail. we need to think about this more in educational terms. when i think of failure and how to move towards success i think immediately of issues concerning children. to say that one had a child and you are asking yourself, what

can you do to make this child learn the lessons of this book? to me that's really the big question coming out of this book to some extent we have learned these lessons as a nation. i'm afraid we are going to forget them. i'm afraid we are headed toward a future where there's so little privacy and so much measurement may be eventually genetic measurement that we will lose a lot of the upside of down and become a society where single chances are more difficult. i'm also intrigued that the idea that there were some areas where failure is good for you and other areas where failure can be disastrous. some of you may have read macon's blogpost. it is completely gone poof and the money is gone, 13% of all big coin in circulation. is that the number? >> i don't know what the number is but it's a large percentage. >> it's a large percentage. megan concludes that will

dramatically decline bitcoin. doc stamp went through so the point is going to learn something. your properties using return system based on liquidity and common focal point so there you have a case where growth, the architecture and the increasing returns to stay out means that mistakes multiply and accumulate and then things will go poof. to try to think about more systematically what are the cases where we see learning and early learning in the austrian sense and. >> i'm sorry, what did that term mean? >> entrepreneurship. it doesn't matter. what are the conditions where you get one outcome or the other? what should you read for inside and i would say read "the upside of down" and then breed the sequel that upside of up and i believe there will be such a sequel. >> the problem with chess that

i've encountered is that i am teaching my daughter and son to play chess so as a result i always when because they are seven and five and i read them every single time. my brother challenged me to chess and i was afraid to play him. i'm so used to winning i don't know if i could handle it. on a policy front the book ends with a discussion of u.s. bankruptcy court and how it's so different from the rest of the world and in general and in fact the book starts the forward for the comment on how america is unique compared to europe in our approach to failure. the story i was told by a cabinet minister and it might've been angela merkel. this was back in 2004. this german top government official told a group of us traveling something about there wasn't a lot of new business formation. it was declining in the u.s. and

germany. she said well europe has two kinds of people the risk-takers who are willing to fail and the people who do what they're told and want to hold onto what they have. is america different? does that have to do with our character, our founding? >> i think these things build on each other. bankruptcy is relatively a modern invention which most people unaware. it basically comes out of the 19th century as we now know it. they were something that looks a little bit like it earlier in british common law but it comes out of the 19th century in the u.s. because in our constitution says the federal government has the power to create bankruptcy court. one suspects because the founding fathers raffle and that create they were taking up a collection to pay off these massive debts that he could not get out from under. he was a very good writer and

not so good at running a plantation. and that actually ends up showing up i think in a lot of ways. the reason our bankruptcy code is so much more generous. people don't believe it. people are surprised to hear that harsh main america that doesn't care about the downtrodden is incredible lenient if you get into financial trouble. i went to memphis which is the bankruptcy capital of the world. as a journalist. for this book. to go look at what is. memphis is the bankruptcy capital of the united states so we are extrapolated now. if that were normal than all of you would know with two declare bankruptcy sometime in your lives and that's not the case for it i want to memphis to look at this and you would think i was expecting screaming mothers hurling themselves at the feet of judges and so forth. it was like traffic court.

you can't believe how much nothing happens in bankruptcy court. the judge says scientists and indigo way. this astounds europeans. when i tried to explain it to them when we were having our draconian bankruptcy reform and what the new reform but like my colleagues at the economist said obviously you have to report that. that's ridiculous. that's the draconian new reform, not the old system. no other country in the world can you walk up to a judge and say i can't pay and they are like okay you don't have to. that doesn't happen everywhere else. ever rossi or on a payment plan and its harsh and so forth. it's so different that i was in the middle early in this book interviewing an expert on a completely different topic and he just started making fun of the u.s. bankruptcy code's because he thinks it's crazy that we do this. this guy was scandinavian. he thought it was absurd to borrow money and -- but it turns out to be a hidden

strength of our economy because when you look at states, the law is federal but the exemptions or state level and states have more generous exemptions. this is built out of the fact that in the 19th century unlike most places we have a lot of small landholders who have a lot of money back east so in 1898 when we finally set out our permanent bankruptcy code because while the constitution said you could have won it didn't say it had to. all of the people in the west who had two senators like the people in the east said make it easy for me to get out of my depth than they did create that changes to how you declare bankruptcy. in america to pretend to view people not as rich people trying to get out of paying their tailor by people at an enterprise where they took on too much debt for capital investment and then something out of their control like a crop

failure led to the bankruptcy. i think these two things build together and i was asked today could it be genetic? i am sure there is part of that. i was talking to historian john kalb who pointed out the viking strangely were the most violent on things like race and suddenly they turned into suites. his theory was the violent moment left and many of them are in minnesota. so that could be part of it but i think a lot of it is the culture of institutions because you see within the united states when people move to a state that has a high level of entrepreneurship, they are part of that culture and not where they came from. >> i mean if the other side of that though is worries about moral hazard. it any time if you fail you are kind of okay you are encouraging

excessive risk-taking and buy a lot of accountings the financial collapse we had from excess or were sticking when an implicit uber bankruptcy behind these banks. they knew that they would only be able to fail so much so could it be especially considering the crash which is head of the moral hazard of tankards he is causing as much harm as the cushioning is causing that? >> more hazard and a group c. real. you can see it. for one thing todd zywicki who is a great scholar at george mason and i was against it for cicely because of the hunt for sure -- under printer worship. he was forward and he said you will see the rates of bankruptcy drop and he was right about that and i was wrong. i think we can infer from that there were some abuse. yet at the same time most people could then if it by far. percentages many more people

don't use it when they could then do use it when they shouldn't. in general we focus a lot on abuse. we focus a lot on moral hazard because it takes off. ernie made off with should be really angry with because he did something really terrible for but the optimal level of abuse is not there. you talk to banks. they don't really say this but it's widely known in the banking industry that they tolerate some level of embezzlement because the optimum amount of embezzlement is not consuming the resources. you don't want an immune system that attacks every single thing that comes into your system because then you will die of these autoimmune diseases. so do i think there is moral hazard in the financial crisis? yes, i do. i tend to attribute it to a different phenomenon which i

discussed in this book which is the desire and the belief that you have engineered ways out of the system. there's nowhere is dangerous as safe. when i started as a journalist i was reporting on something called the great moderation. whole careers. i was talking to ken rogoff who said poll careers have been built on the great moderation. >> what was the great moderation? >> the idea the great moderation was regulators had gotten so smart and good at their jobs that we would never have another financial crisis again. it just wasn't possible to have been a big country like the united states or the e.u. to absorb a financial crisis the way they did in 1930 and you really sell this reflected in a lot of things. the bankers for example we would talk to them about mortgage bonds and they would say things like yes but for this to be a problem you need a sustained

nationwide decline in house prices and we have not had one of those since the great depression. with the implication that of course since the great depression wasn't possible. i tend to think of the financial crisis mostly as a story of everyone getting the same bad signal from the market. the central bankers thought what they were doing in the regulators of the financial system were easing things up in various ways and what they saw was nothing happened and in fact the economy grew and inflation was level and everything looked great. tankers were loosening credit restrictions and what they saw was it was going down. it wasn't dangerous to make a sub-prime loan for 10 years and every year they inched it later. now we know the reason it was fine with house prices kept rising. anyone who got into trouble could simply sell the house than get into trouble. homeowner saw that everyone they knew had gotten rich owning a house. it was the best deal ever.

you could buy a house put in a pool and granite countertops and you can enjoy the pool and the granite countertops which you could also retire with that. when you think you have gotten to us place where you were safe you are in for a double whammy first of all and it probably means you have reduced the number of the bad things that happened and shocked when you do. it also means you were completely and prepared for it. >> and gives an account that is more of a suspicion that we weren't going to fail that led to the financial crisis. i remember reading the account you wrote a few years ago called the inequality that matters. a lot of bankers were banking on the fact that something like hey they can't let us all caught up as this. that is what you bet on together as unlikely but an unlikely but catastrophic event. do you buy into her i'd her idea

that it was this mass idea that we were safe or was it moral hazard and the idea that they won't that the banks failed? >> i think you have loads of those factors. it's not that banks woke up in 2005 then said i'm going to take this risky gamble. if and when it goes bad someone else will pay. so fat for someone else was going to pay that the pressures the wised up banks would have made them think more critically were never there in the first place. they are not cynically playing moral hazard rate for framing itself is shaped by the existence of moral hazard and the two explanations are fully complimentary. what i wanted to ask megan comes a day in the u.s. as a result of this financial crisis we have this group of people the long-term unemployed. they make mistakes. it seems they are keeping their reservation wages to hide. they're much less mobile than american workers were in the

1980s but somehow they as a group of people have not failed well in the success. how was it that they have been into the story and what is the variable that makes them different then say how it is you ended up with the job as an economist and doing lots of wonderful things? >> obviously when i was in play for two years in 2003 i had intermittent jobs but i didn't have permanent full-time employment opportunity. 2001 although was bad was not as bad as 2008 was. what we are actually seeing now it looks to me is if you lost your job after 2012 basically back in the labor market of 2007 is the people who lost their jobs between 2008 and 2013 who are basically still stuck as they did manage to get out quickly. basically resume ages after six months and you're in real trouble.

even back in 2001 what i observed was you had to group should people basically. this is a bit of a simplification as everybody knows but you had people who kind of freaked out and did a lot of different things and they left the house. they volunteered and whatever it was. i knew one guy who ended up working for his uncle's pizzeria and was opening multiple franchises in 2005. it wasn't what but he thought it was doing but turned out he found a way to make pizza. so it was the people who were willing to do anything and this is often not what you hear people say. i don't want a job at walmart because of the bat on my resume but you also hear stories about people who aren't starbucks and someone says you're good at selling, come work for me. every time you do something you are opening up the possibility

of something that will turn into something better. it's never coming into your bedroom. i guess it did in my case because i was walking in my pajamas but i was still doing something. part of it is moving around. part of it is, i like in unemployment to a dark room. you shut the door and he can't see anything. it's dark and scary and your instinct is to sit there and to wait for things to return to normal but you are not -- unless you are moving. it's terrible and this book does not in any way take the position of failure. you don't enjoy it and it doesn't feel good. when you're unemployed every time you go out and look for work you are basically going out in say hey d. want to reject me and most people say yes i do. so the people who just kept trying anything, whatever it wasn't my favorite story, one of my favorite stories in the luck

was a the senator was a serial failure. this guide, he kept losing jobs. his wife left him and she came back but they got divorced later. in the 40s he finally gets it together and then he has a little café on one of the main highways. duncan hines used to be a person a travel guide before you as a cake mix. they have built so through way that bypasses business. he's 65 years old at this point. at this point he goes door-to-door with a pressure cooker and he is cooking fried chicken for people to show them. one of them took him up on it. is everyone going to be a colonel sanders? obviously not but how do you have the best shot?

keep moving and policywise we make mistakes on that. we now are looking at north carolina's unemployment benefits and i think we do have evidence that unemployment benefits cause people, because it is the worst feeling, not to be moral hazard in the sense that i'm going to enjoy living off of unemployment benefits. i know some people do that but most of it is when i look or a job is in terrified and i can't stand it. when you have money coming in later, it's a lot later but the problem is their resumes over time were scarring. we have could have done a lot better on the policy front. not forever but something that would have capped people the best place to look for a job is from a job. instead we let people get stuck

in his bad equilibrium and we don't not to get them out. on the policy level i have some suggestions and i talk about them in the book but we really need to take that incredibly seriously. the last time this happened the way we fix fix it was world wari and i don't really think that's a good plan for this. we need to be thinking of this personally the main thing to do is keep moving and doing something. take a job at walmart or do something that's going to get you connected to the labor force and work from there instead of waiting for something to happen. on a policy level that should be our number one party right now. this is a phenomenaphenomena lly stupid waste of capital. it's bad for individuals because unemployment is one of the worst things that can happen to in a modern society that also the economy. people are retiring in the workforce. we can afford to have these people out of work. >> it want everybody to come up with a question in a minute but my last question for you to

contemplate from all of your questions. you talk about blame in the book and sometimes how it's almost instinctual for us to blame people. i think it my mind that ties in with kind of the american mindset that made us so upset about the bailouts and about other things is you did something wrong. you want to suffer and sometimes i wonder a lot of my ideological compatriots are conservative and that's part of their opposition to a generous safety net. as herman cain said if you are not rich that's nobody's fault but your own. blame yourself. is that a natural thing? is that an american thing and is that problematic wax don't we have some sort of blame opprobrium? >> the a mistake is saying let's try to make it not happen.

it should feel bad in a specific way. an example of really bad failure feeling bad is prison where you've kind of screwup and you do something wrong 20 or 100 times and suddenly they lock you away for 25 years. it's not a good way. you destroy human life even if they have done something wrong. most people in prison have done something wrong and i've not of the opinion it's all nonviolent drug offenders. i spent a week in the system. >> as a journalist. >> they locked me in a holding cell for a minute and i thought i would do anything, i would be on my knees in front of the judge saying how do i never go back there so it was amazing to me that anyone goes through the prison system twice. it's a really bad way of handling americans. our answer to the crime wave is

to make sentences longer and longer. what would each do be more consistent. it should've happened every time it should've been short and easier to recover from. i think about that with a group c. too. bankruptcy does hurt and there's a stigma. most people in bankruptcy did make mistakes. they don't end up that way because of financial whirlwind came by or they borrowed money if anything it all went wrong. on the other hand many people in this room i will wager to say if they were out of work for a year would not be able to pay their debts because that's generally true of most americans. i'm not talking about you guys particularly. most people live that way and these are the people that got caught living that way. generally it's not that there isn't moral hazard that needs to be done to punish people.

first of all we tend to do this thing where we sit down and figure out who did this and how we can get them. that tends to make you overlook the systemic causes. now we fire the guy who is bad and he feels really bad and we have exactly the same systemic problem. and so generally i think it's not that you don't want there to be consequences. unemployment shouldn't feel good even if he didn't do anything to deserve it is otherwise you won't exit quickly enough. what you want to do is figure out are we making the pain the right kind of pain or not? we probably didn't do a great job of that in the financial -- >> those guys are still rich. >> i don't think that's right. if i lost my job and a person in tanzania asked me why i was sad about it. i had to sell my house and i had

to move to an apartment. you have running water and you're not going to be hungry at all and the roof will keep the rain off. you don't think all go well i'm better off than a farmer in tanzania. i guess i don't mind using my job. it doesn't work that way. i don't know how much to pull back. is hard to think he didn't act like an idiot. you act like an idiot like many many many people in the world act like idiots. if it were not for him being an idiot everything would have been fine but i tend to think there would been another idiots who would have done something similar. >> was so private and social -- let's say take iowa g..

most mutations are bad for the individual animal or human being that they may be good for the species as a whole because it allows it to evolve change and develop and so on. failing well in your account overall are you saying it's something that's good for society are good for america and actually bad for people so we need to subsidize them take more chances so they can fail well for mutual benefits which accrue one fails better would be good for most people or are you saying failing well do something which if we enlarged it would be good for us too? we can't do it because we are craven and we hate failing and we need to be nudged in that direction but more feeling well would be good for individuals and equality. if you are seeing the latter is the implications for children and education one thing and sing in your book there is little and about children which i find striking and how one would deal

with a child is a good question for where these margins fall. there you just care about your child and he don't care about the social benefits of what your child might learn. in general what your views are in the wedge between private and social benefits what gets subsidized water to behavioral behavioral imperfections and do imperfections imperfections and dubious pearl itself as individuals want to take the weird pill. that would mean we would take more chances and feel better but have all the gain in the meantime. yes or no shall we take more weird pills? >> we should take more weird pills as individuals. i may not entirely objective here. the downside in of america's just not that far down. as i say the worst thing that happens to most people who lose their jobs as they end up living in a smaller house. it's not that they end up starving to death or the end of dying of some disease that we

know how to cure but didn't bother to. and given that on the margin should be willing to take more risks than we are. we tend to think about this as if we are still out on the else somewhere and if we screw up we we -- siberian tigers. for individuals it is also better to take more weird pills. for individuals that mediocrity median is not actually such a happy place to be because we spend too much time trying to defend our place in it. i think of this with education. i did have a chapter of kids hits on the book was inside don't have kids at the to be in a position that was like hey i have a lot of great parenting

tips for all of the folks who are actually doing it. i looked at the way the educational system works as an example. it's reasonable to say that 60 years ago college education in america was way in which people were acquiring skills and being vaulted into the work were sent actually bettering both predicted that he and chances what we are looking at but also there wasn't nearly as much high pressure. he went to college before to work your way through college. the cost of it was pretty minimal and the upside was pretty good. now college is mostly as far as i can tell about people in the upper middle class. the problem with that as everyone to send their kids to elite schools and there are a lot more kids trying to move through that funnel. when i went to 10 in 1990 it was

a third of the class got let in and now it's under 10% and that's the second highest rate. it's making people act insane. all the parents i know who spend their time being terrified that their children will end up homeless and react to that by spending all of their time shepherding their children to through 97 activities designed to ensure that they are in champion concert violinist and an award-winning soccer player as well as being a straight a student so will look good on their college application. we are now in the zero-sum competition where we are doing more and more things that no one wants to do merely to ensure that we stay in this narrow bend. >> my aspiration is for my kids to lose lots of chess masses -- chess matches. we have a microphonmicrophon e coming into the back row. >> thank you. much obliged.

ms. mcardle i was one of the luckier ones to catch your look. could you survey the gulf. the gulf between failing starting a business and running a business in the united states versus europe? thanks. >> is a big difference. it's interesting we are not the best. there are lots of countries as we should be by the way. we should make it easier to start a business here in terms of the paperwork and finding out if we are illegal. one way in which we are getting worse at this and all of the reason i wrote the book is because i think america is getting worse at this in a lot of ways is businessman exist in the state of radical uncertainty i talked to a guy who started the business and he said he couldn't tell whether he was in compliance. this guy is pretty liberal so he wasn't railing against big government. he wasn't against regulation but he said he didn't know whether

whether -- the payroll company would give him a 100-dollar charge on something and he had no way to see it greedy which is hope they were doing their jobs right as he couldn't tell whether he was in compliance with payroll laws in the state, and it pretty heavily regulated state. on the other hand i do a danish entrepreneur who said they come until you it does look safe and you fix fix it. i'm in there too and i don't want to be unsafe area was at totally different attitude and a healthier attitude is what we are good at is tim told a great story about talking to us was anchors about why they didn't start their own banks and this is something i've heard from other people. they were like you know here it would be like if you knew an 18-year-old kid who is getting married people would be like i hope that works out for you. that's not a good idea. why would you leave a good job with a solid company to try back? they are not as kind to people who have done it and so there

are systematic differences. on the regulatory side we would be a lot better. we are entrepreneurial with businesses but on the cultural side. >> tell the story of the photographer whose business failed and is it saddled him for years. >> he had to lay off a lot of employees in 2001, not a huge number, six or seven but in denmark if you lay off employees you have to pay them between three and six months of their wages. that saddled him with it debt and this is at the same same time their businesses going under so it's usually not a good time to be coming up without money. he was still trying to pay off that debt in 2012. the same amount of debt that basically hadn't gone anywhere. he was on the verge of losing his house because of that. that tying people to old bad decisions.

it wasn't even a bad decision. photography changed. it got a lot more competitive after video cameras came in cost production went down. he is still working as a doctor for her. he can't do anything because he is the debt sitting there and so first thing he has to do. he can't declare bankruptcy because creditors won't let him. >> businesswomen who had failed at their companies. >> talking to an operant entrepreneur who said he wants to hire people who have failed a couple of times. that guy when something goes wrong yeah we tried that and it didn't work. it sounded like it would work. also when things fail generally because they have been through it they don't freak out and start running around like chickens with their heads cut off. they are like yeah we have seen this. here's the way i to deal with it >> more questions?

here in front. >> i want to go back to the higher education issue in particular because it seems that all the political stakeholders involved from the state and federal government have bought into the degree -- at all costs idea. how do you convince all those people that it's about skills? >> that's really difficult. there's a great book which talks about the ways in which states have to make things legible in a systematic way that we can deal with it and that we conceived pretty clearly. in fact that as part of the reason we are getting into these mindless credentials. a degree is something that you can specify an something that google cannot get away from. no offense to the college

professor. he teaches mental skills. and similarly if you are a politician you can say i am proposing we do a million more college -- a year. it's a good number and you can describe how to get to that. it's actually a lot harder than it sounds because it turns out the marginal people tend to be much more likely to flunk out than the people who are already there. ..