right into the heart of the arctic. that means exploration for natural resources, oil and natural gas and minerals. that is going to attract, it already is, great powers. that there's a security dynamic to that. as the oceans increase, it will affect our basis. it will affect islands but it will affect security across the world. so just from my narrow perspective, what i have responsibility for, that's happening now and we have to be prepared for that. the leadership as much anything else estimate in this room knows is to prepare the institution that you serve, that you lead for what's coming. and so we have laid out a new arctic strategy. i did that first in halifax last

november. i was just in south america about a month ago to lay out the roadmap and how we are dealing with this. i just sent this morning one of our deputy assistant secretaries to iceland for a conference the next two days. this is critically important that we pay attention to this. bottom line is, with all the crises of the moment, and that's part of my job, to manage immediate crisis, we also cannot lose sight of the strategic longer-term challenges that face our country either. and this is one that we got to be smart in how we handle it. spent behind the political figures who would resist and argue about climate change respond differently when it's coming from the pentagon? >> i think there is sometimes more of an awareness and edge put an issue it comes from the pentagon. only because the military, the

pentagon has maybe at least perceived by many people in more serious look at the world. and doesn't mean the state department that series or anybody else, but when you talk about the military, i remember, jim, when i was in the senate one of the committees i served on was the senate select committee on intelligence. john warner and i introduced legislation a number of years ago to project and bring up in the intelligence committee authorization bill, a study on climate change on how it would affect our national security. and this was quite a few years ago. so i wasn't the only one thinking about the john warner, john kerry, and bipartisan, a lot of people thinking about it. >> you were in china, is place where i've lived a long time coming country many people think could be the next competitor in some way to the united states. how from your perspective do you

fear, not fear, pay attention to china and to details about your aircraft carrier visit there? >> well, i've been secretary of defense about two years now, and i have taken six long asia pacific attracts. and one of the visits was a four-day visit to china as you noted earlier this year, and the chinese gave me a tour of the retrofitted the training aircraft carrier that they bought from ukraine. that was an interesting experience but as i had an opportunity to visit other facilities, and i have over the years have some relationship with china. i first went to china in 1983 as a businessman. that relationship is one that as i said earlier in more general terms that we need to make sure we get right.

we are not going to agree with them. we don't in everything, but we should be focused, they should be focused, and i think we are in many ways, on where we can cooperate. they are great power. they will continue to be a great power. we are a great power. we have made a point on the asia-pacific we balance, that was not about trying to contain china. or to cut shine of short. we don't want that to happen. we are a pacific are. we been a pacific power. we have strong obligations and treaty obligations there in that area. our economic interests are in that area. we can cooperate. we want to make sure the air and maritime channels are free and open. that's clearly in her interest in the interest of the world, not just economic interest of the world. so yes, we are going to have differences. we do have differences but we have far more areas with we can agree and that's where we should be focused. >> as a volunteer observation, i

often saw the connective tissue between his military both actively and some retirees with our chinese counterparts which was an understanding tool between the countries i thought. >> i just met with state council gang when user a couple weeks ago, and when i was in his and i got in all their ambassadors well and was there a number of times. i've got some personal relationships that up and helpful, and we all know that nations are always responding in own self interest, that's predictable. that's good, but personal relationships are the looper got, just like in congress. if we could develop a little more of a personal relationship basis, the lubricant, it makes it less difficult. it doesn't change a policy but it makes it better. >> in our last minute or two of want to ask a personal question. as the president noted when dominating you, your first enlisted veteran of your sort to lead the pentagon, ask you what

your personal hope is in the remaining two plus years in this job. and also that time in which you serve, it was a very bitterly divisive vietnam area. you're not in the volunteer force anywhere a tiny fraction of america is serving while the rest of us are not involved. how does the experience of your vietnam service affect the we think about this ongoing service like this 1%? >> jim, we all are products of our experiences. and yes, it affected me. i was there in 1968, which was the worst year. we sent home 56,000 dead americans in one year. 2000 that today is unbelievable. -- 2000 that today assembly the. i learned an awful lot like anybody does when you go through that. but it helps and i think in many ways to do this job and if

nothing else, it has always made me aware of, be careful of unintended consequences, be careful of good intentions, always think through a whole sequence of questions. what happens, where's this going, what's the end result? and what could go wrong? and i wish are smart enough to have all the answers, i don't, but it's made me cautious. now, cautioned to appoint is okay but nothing you've got to make decision to get asked about the next two years. what i would hope the next two years we can do is bring this country back together to work together, to address these big, big issues coming at this country that will long-term consequences for our society, for our next generation. that's what help we can do. i will do everything i can to continue to do that. we will have differences, okay, should debate those, that's okay but we've got to get the big

things right and come together. >> well, please join in thanking secretary hagel forest service and for coming here >> defense secretary hagel from yesterday, and we join the washington ideas forum live now with an interview with michigan senator debbie stand now. we join it -- stabenow. we join it in process. >> it impacts those cutbacks, impacts -- >> right. >> that we don't see every day but have tremendous impacts on our lives and our quality of life going forward. and nih is at the top of the list. >> well, thank you so much for sharing these thoughts on mental health. ladies and gentlemen, senator debbie stabenow. thank you. [applause] >> thanks so much. >> thank you, senator stabenow. we have to get that piece of our health system right. now it's my pleasure to introduce houston mayor iowa niece parker, the first open toly lesbian mayor of -- openly

lesbian mayor. she got a lot of attention for her stewardship of the controversial houston equal rights ordnance which extends nondiscrimination protections to gay and transgender people. parker found herself in the headlines again recently when she tweeted to complain her daughter was denied a driver's license because her documents listed two mothers. the atlantic's contributing editor is here to talk about all this. thank you. >> thank you. it's a pleasure to be here with you, mayor parker. i wanted to start with the equal rights ordnance which produced a lot of controversy, maybe some demagoguery amongst some national republican politicians and commentators. >> never. >> never, right. which forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation and other criteria. what did you learn through that fight about the politics of promoting lgbt rights in a red

state environment? >> well, first, i started out as a lesbian activist back in the '70s. i'm dating myself now. but, so what i was reminded of is that a lot of the things i went through back then i am going through again. but the world has changed profoundly in those decades. when we started the efforts to pass an equal rights ordnance for the city of houston, we were really late to the dance. we had no nondiscrimination, local nondiscrimination ordnance, so we weren't doing what most major cities have done in the last few years which is go in and add sexual orientation and gender identity to an existing ordnance, we started from scratch. and when people say how did it happen in houston p, how did you get it passed, it's because we e had an inclusive ordnance that including all of those covered by statute as well as some

additional categories, and we were able to do it in a way that had two-thirds vote of the city council to make it happen. >> and do you have a prediction about when you think texas will allow gay marriage? >> when the supreme court forces it. [laughter] certainly in my lifetime and my life partner of 23 years and i got married in, last january. we went out to california, and i had hoped that while i was still mayor of houston i'd be able to be legal in the state of texas. i don't think it's going to be quite that soon in and out long after. >> -- soon, but not long after. >> you say only when the court forces. do you see a significant change of -- >> it's opinions across the united states, and the dominoes are falling one after another, and they're all falling in the same direction. that war has been won, it's just there's a few ballots left to fight. >> i know you have a background in the energy industry, and you serve on the president's task

force on climate change. i'm wondering coming from a city which is so heavily connected to the energy industry but also, obviously, a port city, very potentially affected by climate change itself, how do these issues of climate and the relationship of energy look from houston? >> i spent 20 years working in the oil and gas industry. in fact, i worked for republican oilman robert mossbacher for 18 years. and what i tell people, oil and gas are going to fuel the world for decades to come. but that doesn't mean we need -- we don't need to look at other forms of energy. and the city of houston is the largest municipal purchaser of energy in america. we've made a commitment because we think it's the right thing to do in that we're trying to lead by example. i also serve as a steering committee member of the c40 which is a coalition of global megacities focused on climate change. we need to recognize that

there's no easy solution to this, there's no -- we can't suddenly stop fueling, as i said earlier, the world with oil and gas. but we have to be looking to the future and recognize that even -- whatever our power source, we can do a better job in reducing grebehouse gas -- greenhouse gas emissions, and it's not quite the same conversation. most of us in texas who are engaged in environmental issues don't spend a lot of time arguing things. i don't want to argue about whether climate change is a product of human action or not to. i certainly believe it is, but i don't spend a lot of time arguing about it. i just focus on what can we do to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, what can we do to become more energy efficient? guess what? almost everything we do is good for the bottom line. that's very houston, it's very texas. we go back to practicalities.

i don't spend a lot of time in theory. i try to convince people based on hard facts that focus on the bottom line. >> david brooks had a column recently in which he talked about houston's economic success and the model of houston as a city, contrasting it to san francisco. he mentioned that houston has been number one in job growth per capita since 2000. he also mentioned a very livable city particularly for people with children. what's at the root of houston's economic success over the last decade or two? >> first, it's the underlying sectors of our economy. we are the oil and gas capital of the world. and we're in a transformative period in the oil and gas industry with unconventional gas development, the so-called fracking shale gas play. we're america's largest import or/export port, and port

business has really been doing well. houston has the texas medical center, the largest accretion of medical facilities in one place in the world. and then we are one of the fastest growing manufacturing regions. we still, we have a very -- i don't want to sound like rick perry. we have a business-friendly environment -- [laughter] we have, we are low tax, low regulation state, and we have lots of room to spread out. and so all of that has helped fuel houston. but we also have five four-year universities including two tier i universities. we're a major research hub, we have nasa, we have the second highest number of engineers per capita in america. and all of that has helped. however, let me tell you something that most people don't know about houston. one in five people is foreign born. i have 92 foreign consulates in houston. the world comes to houston. we're one of the most

internationally-focused u.s. cities. we're better known across our borders than across u.s. state lines. there's still a lot of folks up here who think about houston, and that's that cultural wasteland that's hot and muggy, has a lot of mosquitoes. yes, it -- yes, yes, yes. [laughter] however, we are a, we are a global megacity, and we attract the best and the brightest from around the world who come to houston because of the industry that we have, the economy that we have and the welcoming nature of the city. you know, that comparison between houston and san francisco that you referenced, they always start off with about how beautiful san francisco is. i have -- this is not an exaggeration to say there are 100 high-rise office and residential towers going up across the greater houston community. that may not be beautiful to some people, but it's awfully

damn beautiful to me. laugh. >> you mentioned houston is a very welcoming city to people around the world, and yet in the larger political climate, there's obviously a tremendous amount of fear and anxiety about immigration into the united states. you see a lot of people's first response to isis as a threat is, you know, shut down the border. when ebola comes up, people say stop the flights in from west africa. how do you manage the politics of making the case that owl this immigration -- all of this immigration-increased diversity is good for the city when it's clearly producing anxiety around the country? >> i think we have to separate two things. one is that texas is a border state, and we have the issue of undocumented immigrants coming across our borders, and is you will find that all -- and you will find that all of the border states have a pretty pragmatic attitude about that. as a mayor of houston, i'm not involved in immigration enforcement.

people come, they want to work, they want to contribute to the economy, they want to pay taxes -- which they do -- they don't break local laws, i'm focused on running a city and having a cooperative relationship with everybody who is in the city and being able to, you know, we want them to bring their kids to clinics and get immunized, and we want them to cooperate with the police when there's an issue. that's just practicalities. and every state on the border has some -- or the cities in every state along the border have that attitude. but houston has a number of ex-pats and immigrants from other places around the globe. and so from that aspect, we're focused on, as i said, the best and the brightest come to houston for a lot of reasons to build their future. we want to make sure that america is able to benefit from

that migration. and it's a balancing act. obviously, the united states must at some point come to grips with undocumented um grants here across america. immigrants here across america. and whether we want to do what would be completely necessary to seal our borders. and we're all frustrated that the federal government hasn't tackled that yet. from a local perspective, i would have some significant crime perpetrated by illegal immigrants. i use that term deliberately, and i've been using "undocumented" before. because our view is that if you're living peacefully in houston, we want you to live peacefully in houston. you broke the local law, we will arrest you, turn you over to i.c.e.. but if we have deported you and

you're back again, deported you and you're back again, that's the definition of insanity right there. you're doing the same thing over and over again, and that's what frustrates people, i think. >> and how toxic politically is it in houston and more broadly in texas to talk about amnesty which seems to be the -- >> it's not toxic at all. >> and yet you have senators like ted cruz who seem to be militantly opposed to the kind of immigration reform that -- >> i do my best not to talk about senator ted cruz. [laughter] [applause] our business community and, in fact, this is going to be the second time i mentioned my governor, you know, he has been, again, the state department of public safety and the city of houston's police department have exactly the same policies in dealing with the undocumented. and we all -- the business community of houston, our greater houston partnership

clearly on record saying we need a path to citizenship. >> so why are they -- sorry to belabor this, why are the poll picks in the state -- politics in the state so tough on that issue? >> again, i don't view them as so, as so tough. the rhetoric in washington is not reflected in the practicalities of governing the city, governing the state and making sure that human beings who are, in fact, on the ground are able to live together and work somehow cooperatively with each other. >> you mentioned before we came out on stage i think of the cities in america with more than one million people, there have only been ten female mayors. >> two in houston. >> first of all, why so few? what is it about the mayor that you think maybe creates unique political challenges in terms of a glass ceiling for women candidates, and then i'm also interested why houston has been

able to be a bit of an exception to that? >> as mayor of houston, i represent more people than the governors of 15 states. it's a ceo position. i run a $5 billion corporation, and it's a lot like running for a position as governor. it's big money, big league politics. but i'm also commander in chief of our police department, our fire departments, in charge of emergency response and so forth. and so we, while america's getting better about that, first, i think you have to have women who are qualified and capable and in the pipeline to run for those positions. but we still have a step to go to view women as that ceo with, commander in chief. it's certainly still an issue in the business community as well. >> and why has houston been an exception to that? >> well, houston is -- >> aside from the fact you have

great candidates like yourself. >> yeah. they have a wonderful, dynamic mayor, yes. [laughter] people don't understand the mindset of houston. it is -- and it's the attitude in texas as well, and that is that we don't really care. as we say in the south, it's who your people are. we don't care where you're from, we care what you can do, what you bring. now, in my own election i had already been elected city wide in the city of houston six times. i was elected, everyone's like, oh, my gosh, how could this happen in houston? well, it already happened six times. i was a familiar candidate, and i was coming out of the controller's office. we have an elected controller because we're a strong mayor system. the only other woman mayor of houston was elected out of the controller's office, and she, too, got to preside over a terrible economic downturn. there's, we elected -- i mean, it was a benefit to come out to have controller's office.

who do you want in a time of economic crisis? someone who knows where every dollar in the city is. there's no mystery. >> mayor parker, thank you so much for being with us here in washington d.c. [applause] thank you -- [inaudible] thank you so much is. >> edward snowden's name is back in the news with the release of a new documentary about the former national security agency contractor. his revelations sparked a national debate about what information should be private and what should be public. those questions and the challenges they surfaced remain, and today we address them with two of the world's leading minds in the field, dmitri -- [inaudible] the founder of crowd strike who's in the business of protecting client data from hackers, and morgan -- [inaudible] director of security at first look media, a hacker now working to protect journalists and their work from government censorship. leading the conversation is mary

louise kelly. >> good morning. we're here to talk about cyber surveillance, cybersecurity as steve just mentioned. a subject never far from the headlines. this week particularly interesting, there are reports of a major cyber attack on the white house computer network. there seems near daily reports of attacks on banks, and lest any of us think this is a subject that only effects the government and big banks. according to the fbi there were something like 500 million attacks on financial institutions and attacks on actual just normal people like you and me paying with a credit card at a store, going online on our phones. the fbi this month warned not a matter of if, but when you will be hacked, have a plan. well, fortunately, the two men on stage with me this morning have a plan. welcome to you both. >> thank you. >> and, morgan, i have to start

with you because you made the hair on the back of my neck prickle yesterday. you were here at ideas forum live tweeting this event all day yesterday, and you were finding, as i think you put it, interesting and suspicious activity on the sell you around network -- cellular network in this room. and i should point out that you were tweeting this right around the time the national security adviser and the defense secretary were up here on this stage yesterday. so how worried should we be? should we all be powering off our phones? >> yeah. so i use a spatial type of phone which is not so great for instagram and taking selfies, but is reasonably detecting anomalous network activity. and so yesterday during the forum it threw an alert which said there was a possibility, basically, the alert was that the cell tower my phone was connected to had no neighbors. that's a strange thing.

and so it was alerting me to the possibility that this actually might be an attempt to listen in to my phone calls. now, what seems more likely, actually, is that it was detecting the presence of sensors used by people who do protection for attacks against their assets. again, nonetheless, it was actually sort of a reasonably interesting example of the sort of cat and mouse game in surveillance that actually occurs. >> and this is literally something you can watch on your phone like a bar that's shooting off the charts -- >> graphical representation of this, so i showed up at this event with red bars, red bars, red bars, and then i left and walked just down the road, and it was green, green, green, green, green. [laughter] so there is literally this area -- if anyone else had the same sort of phone, they'd be seeing the same thing. i think someone important is speaking after us. so --

[laughter] >> you've been warned. dmitri, let me turn to you and tackle the big news about the white house, their computer network gets attacked all the time, apparently, a significant one this week. and the thinking is this was out of russia. >> shocking, right? >> shocking. i was going to -- >> the russians want to know what the president's thinking. can't imagine. no, but these attacks are occurring all the time not just in the white house, but really the story that has been reported over the last couple of years is that the commercial sector, the companies that are building innovation in this country -- [inaudible] all of them have been coming under very sophisticated attacks from china, from russia, and i'm talking about not criminal actors, nation states, the pla in china, the fsb in russia. and they're trying to steal our intellectual property so they can give it to their domestic industries so they can compete better in the marketplace. they try and steal our trade

secrets, things that would help them build out their products better, things that would help them compete by stealing negotiation strategies for particular business deals. and it's really going on on an absolutely unprecedented scale. >> and when you say this is nation-states, how can you tell? because it's not always that simple to know whether this is a government sanction, government-approved, government-organized job or whether it's somebody who happens to be working in that country. >> this is actually one of the big misconceptions, i think, about this industry that a lot of people say attribution's to hard. it is hard, but it's not impossible and, in fact, every major cyber attack over the last 30 years has been attributed pretty definitively. not all of that's been done publicly, but we know very well who's behind these attacks. and, in fact, it's a lot easier these days to do attribution in the -- >> your company. >> we unveiled attribution of one particular group in china

that's been going after the satellite industry, and we attributed it directly to a building in shanghai that is the headquarters of the 12th bureau of the people's liberation army which focuses on satellite intelligence which makes sense because that's the companies they were going after. >> and is it always clear what they are going after once they get inside the network? sometimes it seem like with the jpmorgan attacks, the attacks on jpmorgan chase that we've all been reading about in recent week, they were just sending a signal, hey, we can do this? p p. ..

to the people affected, they said you should get credit monitoring. it came out later that the organization did the hacking was the chinese military. the chinese military is not interested in committing identity theft against these people. what the government agency said they're at high-risk of being recruited and blackmail and should be given counter intelligence training, not credit monitoring because the chinese will not steal their credit. >> morgan, you're working right

now so much with institutions whether big companies or government but helping to protect individual online, human rights dissidents, act to have its, security journalists. i've been working with glen greenwald and who have been household names because of involvement with edward snowden. you left a hotshot job at google to take on that project. why? >> the last piece of public research i released prior to leaving google was actually about the targeting of journalists and the same ones that dmitry was describing. talking about state-sponsored actors and intelligence apparatus. journalists are very interesting targets because interesting people talk to them. they become a source of intelligence, right?

the research i released, of the world's top 25 news organizations, 21 had been targeted by state-sponsored actors. the ones had not, predominantly sports and entertainment focus. you can draw your own conclusions on that. what i've seen is that journal ists talk to interesting people, given interesting information, attract different types of actors yet there is asymmetry in this game yet a lot of corporations have a lot of funding, they can afford security teams and so forth whereas journalists up until recently were quite unaware of the threat they actually faced. >> give us some perspective here. i'm a journalist. i'm sure there are many journalists in the audience today. if i had called a source on my cell phone in the taxi in on the way here or emailed a source,

how easy if somebody wants to know who i'm talking to find that out? >> that largely depends on how well funded your adversary is and how dedicated they are. so you can offset being cash poor by being time rich obviously. >> right. >> but i, i think, depending on what you're working on, you frequently know, you have an idea of what your adversary might be. your risks, it bears to think about, i find journalists frequently recently aware they haven't had i guess know how to engage with security resource typically. which i think that big business people that have regularrer to incentive are forced by law to have audits and engage with people in the security industry actually know how to absorb security resource where

journalists haven't known. there is local example. there is a satellite television company just outside d.c. that was compromised by a foreign government. the software that was used to compromise them was this offensive intelligence software known as remote control system, very descriptive, which enabled to remote attackers turn on microphones of journalist computers, hear what was going on in the office, take screen shots of the cameras journalists laptops and so forth. this software even works on cell phones. it has this groovy invisible microphone capability. someone can turn on the microphone in your cell phone, you act as a audio sensor as you walk around. >> this software gets into your phone how? >> there are number of way ways they can do there. there are clumsier ways which

attempt to trick or social engineer someone installing something. this update. this is usually something you want. there are silent methods doing this. the particular company i am talking about sells plans to governments where they install isps. what they did, they waited until people watched youtube videos and either prompt you to update your flash or actually hit with you a software exploit which would silently install software on the computer. these are quite expensive and they require some coercive power over internet exchanges and isps right? you have to be a government actor and state actor of some variety. presumably in this country you would need a warrant. in other countries you might need list or more depending on the regulatory status. the interesting thing is that this, this software that was used to target this d.c. satellite company is sold by

italians and documents that were released today actually, on intercept by first look media actually show that they're being used by u.s. law enforcement as well. this actually goes to the commercial nature of the surveillance market that exists right now is that you have software being sold by european company being used to target u.s. citizens and also being used by u.s. law enforcement. >> you know, i've covered the nuclear industry for years and they talk about dual-use, and this sounds like classic dual-use. this is software helpful for u.s. law enforcement, law enforcement anywhere, tracking legitimate bad guys, terrorists, pedophiles and drug dealers, whoever else, also in the wrong hands without proper oversight be used to target journalists, dissidents, anybody else. >> yeah i think the issue here, the software is specifically

advertised to defeat encryption and monitor geographically outside the monitor -- specifically created to target people you might be interested in that -- in certain countries they have very rigorous state surveillance apparatus. for instance, some of these people may end up in d.c. how do you continue to monitor them? it is this type of sort of targeted surveillance that, i mean it is the same stuff that dmitry was talked about. espionage software and state-sponsored hacking. >> these are intelligence agencies with massive amounts of budgets and they're persistent. they are like a dog with a bone. so if you're doing story on private resources of chinese leaders and wealth they aaccumulated for nefarious purposes i guaranty you 100%, put money on the table that

you're infected. they are targeting you and not relent to get into your computer. find out where you are getting information, who is feeding you private confidential data from the chinese main land and so they can go after those people and bring them some harm. >> let me introduce two words into the conversation, edward snowden. what did, somebody with y'all's background and level of expertise from this, what did you learn from the documents released? >> it is interesting. people are shocked by the revelation. people dealing with the industry a long time. what surprising how unsurprising it is. anyone who thought for five minutes without background on how you would do the surveillance activity, more or less with high level architecture. i was personally not surprised

by anything disclosed. >> what about you, morgan? >> i could disagree with dmitry on a couple of points. i think people in the security industry a long time we have a apparatus with massive government funding. they have interesting capabilities and if they didn't they wouldn't be doing their jobs. on other side of things a lot of people were very surprised at the scope of some of the surveillance that was occurring on american citizens. i think the verizon metadata revelation that showed that all of the verizon's customers had their call records that were being handed over wholesale to the nsa under 5-i. i think that was very surprising to people. that was the very first one that came out. people were somewhat scandalized by that and i think justifiably so. i think it was probably poorly understood that, nsa's ability to spy on u.s. citizens on u.s. soil. i also think that the prism

revelations, involvement of silicon valley with the state intelligence apparatus was also something that, i mean, i think one of the reasons why these could be surprising someone like me who has been in the security industry for a long time because in many ways these are legal questions, not question of technology or capability. so i was certainly surprised that about the sort of amount and scope of date that was being harvested from u.s. companies for intelligence purposes. >> that points to one of the key points of tension that i think snowden revealed is that, relationship between companies, between industry and the government. i mean the government we hear over and over when the nsa talks and the fbi saying, cooperate with us. we can only fight cybercrime, the cyber villains if we work together. if you share what you know with us. do you buy it? >> i think this is difficult double-edged sword, right?

i think there are industries paid with taxpayer dollars and probably hear from i do pay u.s. taxes and live here so i do think that, these entities are paid to protect us on live and protect us from cyber attacks and such and worry about cyber spying and so forth however we notice there is economic impact, as mentioned before i used to work for google, there is different impact for silicon valley companies when foreign nations know that the u.s. government is actually harvesting large amounts of data from these sort of silicon valley companies. i think it is a double-edged sword there. i don't have any great answer to that problem. >> there is no question there is a big impact on u.s. industry, right? it is not just in countries like russia and china may be outraged by what is going on but in europe, for example, a lot of individuals, a lot of governments say we'll not do

business with american companies because all this date can presumably go to the u.s. government. that is real policy issue we have to address. there is a big legal case in the course with the justice department suing microsoft. what they're trying to do on the merits, it is completely legitimate case because they're trying to get records from an email account of a drug dealer they're pursuing. the problem is that the data that microsoft is holding is held in ireland. >> right. >> the justice department is trying to get them to release the data on the individual because he is an american. but microsoft is saying this data is held overseas, when we store data overseas and other jurisdictions if u.s. government can get access to as an american company no one will do business with us overseas. that is an issue the government is not thinking through very quickly. >> last question, if i may, to each of you, i will quote you morgan, this was an interview you gave a couple years ago to the morning r "new york times" and you told them, i can't wait for the day i can sleep in and

watch movies and go to the pub instead of analyzing malware and pondering the state of the global surveillance industry. >> wasn't that just yesterday? >> my question to each of you, is that day ever going to come? is that a fact of life in the twenty-first century? we are a wear of anything question put online in any form is vulnerable. >> this is espionage. espionage has been around for thousands years this is not going away. this is new medium to do, a lot more companies have capabilities to do so. it is not going away. as long as there is interest in your data, your company's data someone will go after it. this is human problem, not a technology problem and we need to start thinking about it as chess. any move we make an adversary will have count irmove and move a few moves ahead. >> morgan? >> i was recently hopeful i was with that, future morgan is

hopeful for the past morgan. this is human problem and greater transparency and dialogue around surveillance now means we have more of a say when we decide how we actually want to conduct ourselves in this area moving forward. >> morgan, dmitry, thank you both. >> thaw. [applause] >> all right. we're good. >> thank you very much. >> thank you. >> let me remind people that on the innovators stagedown stairs you're welcome to go and check out mia burke of alternative designs. and now let me introduce the ceo of yelp. yelpers know him as big papa. his user name on the popular review service. jeremy stoppelman, is a former paypal employee turned customer

review mogul. he run as site you pull up when you need a second opinion on everything from hair parlors to sushi parlors. i'm hoping to learn today how i get my review of my haircutter on yelp. here to talk with him is washington bureau chief for "bloomberg news," jonathan allen. >> jeremy, good to have you here. >> great to be here. >> one of the things i'm really curious about with yelp what the expansion model looks like? are you trying to move out geographically? are you trying to get different types of businesses? what's next? >> turns out the way we've always grown is city by city and has been the geographic expansion that really got started in 2005 in san francisco. started to go there and then went to the other major cities like new york, seattle, boston, et cetera. we finally in the last several years started expanding internationally. we have a real presence now. in fact we have an office in london and dublin and hamburg.

it is really been incredible to see yelp in some different languages. we watched japan this year. so it is very exciting time to see the site really go blossom internationally. >> when you're using yelp, do you have sort of a threshold of a rating where you say, this place is going to be great versus one where you say, okay, versus i'm definitely not going there? i assume if you have zero stars or whatever you're not going but is it 1 1/2, two, i'm not doing that? what is your personal, how do you use it? >> this, okay we're looking for pro tips on how to use yelp. i would say, you know, the outlyers are always interesting. it is pretty difficult to be one or 1 1/2 star business. similarly it is difficult to be a four navistar business with say, hundreds or houses of reviews. when you discover one of those chances you will have a incredible experience. in fact there was a nate silver

publication, a blog post he did where he analyzed yelp reviews and compared it to expert reviews by michelin and he found in new york there is very strong correlation between the outlyers on yelp and the ones that also are outlyers with professional ratings. >> so in terms of the rating system and how all that works, i don't think i got an answer. where do you say, i'm not going? at what level? >> at times convenience takes over and you just go anyways. if it is three as far as i know i'm going to have mediocre experience but i will survive. i'm not afraid after three-star restaurant but i say 3 1/2 is threshold for acceptable. three, you will have a mediocre experience. >> you mentioned nate silver. sports fans know him. political junkies. you have a real interesting data set in terms of the reviews. people have actually been to a

place, not so much perception like political polling would be. who are you sharing that data with? i understand you guys are starting to share that data. how is it used? who are you sharing that with? >> it has gotten a lost pickup. we do have a academic data set and we've given that over to the community that is focused on data mining techniques and machine learning and all that. they have done really interesting projects with it. a lot of them get submitted. we actually run ongoing contests for fellowships with university students which is pretty cool. on the public health side there is interesting research and traction where certain cities, researchers in certain cities picked update tax analyzed it, looking for patterns of suspicious reports around things like, you know, oh, i felt sick, i was throwing up after i went to this restaurant. things that suggest maybe there is some health code issues going on at that business. in fact they have used that

information to then drive investigations. so if you have limited resources of investigators that can go out and do health inspections at restaurants, one useful way to allocate might be to look for reports of that and go after them. that actually has been happening and had really positive results as well. >> so are they able to research words like got sick? >> exactly. they create ad list of words associated with potential health violations like a cockroach crawled across my table perhaps or i was sick, et cetera. they used that then to drive investigations and inspections and they actually found that it was a helpful way to allocate their limited resources. >> you've been part of two pretty successful electronic terms, paypal and obviously yelp. what is your recommendation for folks who are young, looking to get into that line of work? what's the best way to find the right idea or some up with the right idea? >> you know, it's tough.

the way i found my way, found my way to this industry was i started interviewing and i met sea very fortunate, met elon musk. i interviewed x.com and place of 30 people. i found talented engineers and was very impressed and ran into the ceo of the firm elon. the guy was crazy. he was 28 years old. was on his second company. had this twinge kill in his eye and he confidentially told me, at the time we had, no revenue company, maybe early, less than 100,000 users. he said with a straight face, we'll take down visa and mastercard. we'll replace world payments with this service. and i never seen anything like that. i didn't even understand the power that a single person with great ambition, the impact that they could have, the influence

they could have. so for me that was kind of an ah-ha moment about silicon valley and what even a young person could potentially do in their career. i saw that, there was that moment and i just, i was like, i have to sign up. i have to be a part of this. and so it was a leap of faith. the company had a little bit of traction but i really wanted to just learn from this person and then elon became long term mentor and the company later merged with paypal or community as it was called back then and led to all sorts of things after. >> is there stoppelman mafia as you played for people in the same role as elon musk did for you? who should we look at innovators in the future? >> such as vc, silicon valley is small place. i'm friendly with lots of young entrepreneurs and i have invested in lots of companies you probably heard of that are up and comers or now quite

successful. so there is this nice system of giving back. if you do get some traction, achieve success, people come to you and look for advice and it's a lot of fun. i really enjoy the time i spend sitting down with new entrepreneurs, giving them guidance. there is all sorts of gotchas that you can help them steer clear of. i find that to be rewarding part of being ceo that built a company and now has the opportunity to give back to the community. >> depending on issue sometimes you find yourself an ally of google and sometimes you find yourself on the opposite end of the spectrum. >> frenemy? >> exactly. so, what i'm curious about with regard to google, obvious your business relies using them as platform, using search engines as a platform. what is wrong with them promoting their own products, promoting their own reviews over yours? >> yeah. that's the key question. is there consumer harm?

because we all use google products. a lot are free. that is wonderful. searching free. think about a moment where you're looking for a resource, maybe you have a young child who has got the flu and you've got pediatrician and you search for pediatrician on your android phone and it pops up a few results from google plus. turns out that not that many people use google plus and they don't have that many reviews. so you're not actually getting the best information on something actually really important to you. and so this idea that google preferences its content, you know, when we're talking about restaurants it may not be as important. it is not life or death. maybe, you know, you have an unfortunate restaurant experience but you'll live. there are actually things that people turn to yelp for that are more critical and if you can't find the information, if it is essentially cut off, that's a real problem i think for

consumers as well as business owners that are shortchanged. the ones really doing a great job, that doctor takes extra time with your child, you're deprived of that experience and i think that's a pretty serious problem. >> but on the one hand the tech industry, i will broaden it just from your company, on one hand the tech industry says don't regulate us, don't tax us but at the same time in this situation you said, wait a second, you ought to be regulating what google can do in its ability to promote products over ours or there is consumer harm. is there tension in that and how do you resolve that? >> i don't think so. if you go back, what is it now, 15, 20 years to the microsoft case, all of silicon valley, in fact eric schmidt himself was running around washington, rumor is he registered, had to register as a lobbiest at one point but he was at novell and lobbying against microsoft and its monopoly. so i don't think the idea that you have a dominant market

position and therefore other companies express concerns how you're abusing that power is anything new to washington or silicon valley. >> let me ask you just as far as yelp goes, what are the services you want to get into? >> you know, as we talked about geographic expansion but the other areas i think really exciting is thinking about yelp, not just as a way to decide which local business you will patronize or which service but, actually be able to transact and make that action happen. so, for example, if i'm hungry and i want to order food, and have it show up at my door, right now, the obvious way to do that would be go to yelp, look up pizza place. give them a call. maybe they mishear my order, very frustrating. so what we've done is allowed businesses, other third parties to plug into yelp. we have a whole api application, programing interface way for all sorts of businesses to plug in.

and as a result we have now 28,000 local business that can receive online orders. if you're trying to go to a hair salon you can book your appointment. the idea of taking online users to allow them to transact and show up off-line seamlessly is very powerful. remind a me a little bit what amazon has done in e-commerce. we have horizontal shopping experience. you can find just with about anything. you can, majority of the products on amazon are even supplied by amazon. amazon act as platform to allow vendors to plug in. that is powerful idea in the local landscape. you can turn to yelp and seamlessly transact. >> click a button. >> click a button. credit card is saved, information, phone number, address is couple clicks. you booked your appointment or made restaurant reservation or ordered food. >> how do you expand that? you said 28,000 businesses. how do you get from 28,000 to

500,000 or whatever it is around the world? how are you doing that? how do you recruit people to sign up with you? >> there are all these third parties. one of the ones we work with, for example, e-24, one of the food delivery partners that we have. so their whole business is just signing up restaurants that want to have online food ordering. they're growing naturally. we don't, we don't have to worry about that. they're handling that part. we're also signing up other different companies just like e-24 or in other categories as well some that natural grows through the partnerships we're bringing in. we're just at the beginning of that connection of these local business to the online audience. and so, over time it will get bigger and bigger simply by adoption. this is new idea to able to seamlessly transact with local business so we're just getting started. >> if you guys want a pizza head

over to yelp. have it sent to the hall here. thanks a lot jeremy, appreciate it. >> thank you. applause pleus. >> thank you jonathan allen and jeremy stoppelman, thank you very much. before i introduce our next segment i want to remind people that three of the coolest folks out there, how many of you ride city bikes in town, shared bikes? put your hands up? i do. i do. there are some of you. so the person who created all of that in cities around the nation is downstairs. that is one of the great innovation, mia burke. after that who will be out on stage this afternoon is downstairs for deeper dive. at 10:30. he has a cult following in san diego. probably one of the most famous brain researchers in the united states. people donate their skulls to him at death to serious thing. he gives out cards for skull donations. if you're interested downstairs. finally at 11:00 i will do last interview on innovator stage with john wary, one.

leading genetic design immunotherapists in the country. an eyelash away from major strategic leaps on hiv. thinking about a number of cancers. when i had robert control witch yesterday, he was saying looking into john wary's path, this guy would know how to contend with and deal with ebola. that is our at 11 at deep dive stage. we'll have fun. bill clinton joked right to shout down bill matthews at the 1999 radio and correspondents tv dinner. compared to the parade of political luminaries the long time hard ball host usually guests last laugh. he was number one rated speaker at washington ideas forum. such a pleasure to have back chris matthews. please welcome chris to the stage. >> thank you.

so, thanks for having me back. this son the record. the interview with kerry will be trait by the way. i want to talk about the election next tuesday. what it's going to produce probably, what will come in the next two years as a result of it and how it is going to lead into 2016 and i'm going to do it in 12 minutes so. it is only time in my life somebody told me to talk faster. first of all, it seems to me you've got, i will speak in caricature because both political parties have become karatures caricatures on purpose if you look advertising. the republican party is case of pick your peak. whatever you're mad at, vote against democrats. think of it. if there is anything bugging you the weather, arthritic condition, whatever it is, stick it to obama. because it is his fault obviously. and that is a caricature but it

is so true. it is sort of like a mood ring. if you're down, stick it to this guy. so fit is ebola or worried about or too worried about it seems or isis and our inability to come up with strategy for defeating it or containing it or you don't like the president just period or don't like what hillary clinton said last week about corporations don't create jobs or anything, or you don't like what somebody in the administration said about beebe netanyahu. by the way beebe's feelings are not hurt. he sees his chance. so that is the one party position and it is very profound position in elections, everybody's hero churchhill used to say worst thing to do is defend government in bielection. every anger and complain is addressed to you. that is situation this election coming up. what are the democrats offering as their caricature?

pretty much nothing. i mean this. this is not a comic statement. this is a tragic statement. they're, like a safeway with nothing in it. exempt a couple of point of purchase items as you go past, "people" magazine and rest of it. income inequality, not quite there how this bill will change things. we'll do minimum wage, go for eye-popping number so it will never pass. these are not issues that fill your shopping cart. they just don't. they're issues sort of germinated the last couple months to have something to talk about. something to say because they don't want to talk about obama. and they don't want to talk about health care. they don't want to talk about the recovery from the worst recession since the great depression. for some reason their inability, it has become, inability much democrats to be positive and to sell and be happy. reasonably happy. they're disillusioned. and so to me the, the iconic

statement of the year was that of alison lundergan grimes when she was asked who she voted for. that is an easy one. this is easy. i have voted for obama and voting democrat since i was 18. i was for hillary clinton of course. everybody knows that but i ended up voting for the nominee of my party for nominee of other party which i thought was a better candidate. just say it. wouldn't have been a news story. but for a number of reasons, possible reasons, and i of course, i believe in conjecture, i'm trying to figure these things out like most of us. i don't accept political people's answers. i always assume if it is better than it looks they will tell you [laughter] if it is better than it looks they will always tell you. so always assume the way it comes across is best possible picture they can give you. always assume that. they have flaks all over the place to put out story that isn't correct, if it is worse they will never tell you. i think it's a very good possibility that grimes gripes

is a very honest person -- alison lundergan grimes. wanted to avoid, kathleen parker conservative columnist want to avoid in the post warranted to avoid a lie. answer question was worse if she gave dishonest answer. she didn't want to say i didn't vote for hillary clinton. i didn't vote for barack obama because i liked hillary clinton. we simply don't know who she voted for. there is reason 32.8% of the people in kentucky like barack obama. so dreadfully low that perhaps the more likely solution she just didn't want to say she voted for him. but that is tricky nature of the democratic party going into the election. they don't want to say who they are. they don't want to say who they are not. they don't want to say a statement. they have nothing in the market basket to offer for a positive brand. except what. local issues, let's stick to those. obama is not on the ticket. these are not winning arguments. in fact if you look all references to president, who i like all through the campaign,

only references to him are negative. the only thing people want to hear with $4 billion of advertising in the last year, most of it is attacking obama and silence. about obama. attacking him or silence about him. so what do you think is going to happen next tuesday? voters will go in the booth will vote against obama. so all this clever hiding from him, it was a great line from the american revolution, either we hang together or we hang separately. the democrats should remember that as results come in next tuesday night. i love to make predictions and often imright. [laughter]. -- i'm right. nobody else makes predictions, and i think they could win up to 10 seats in the senate. since we don't know the future even next week, we don't know what the next ebola, next thing, next glistening object. but this, if you watch msnbc that night or watch anybody, basically watch 7:00 and watch results coming in from kentucky. if it says too close to call,

too close to call, too early to call, to close to call is key one. if you're democrat or progressive be optimistic. it means it will be a much closer election than people have been predicting. if on the other hand, the news at 8:00 from new hampshire is too close to call, look out. because that is the high water mark of their hopes, if scott brown can get on his scooter as truck or whatever it is and head across the border and simply assign himself to a new state and win against a pretty popular incumbent, you know what you're looking at next tuesday night. if he wins, look at whole shebang. you can shake your head. we'll see tuesday nights, all experts back there. watch closely. so he is in there. now pulled ahead in polls last couple days. that is to me absolutely unbelievable. so we're going to see. new hampshire is little bit to the right right now. we'll see. but that is the way to look at

it. i always love audacity, right, left or center. people that run when there is no prayer in the world to win. most of those people end up being 30 years later still in politics, managed to fighted tide really are interesting people. biden, whatever biden's problems are, the trouble he says what he thinks is michael kinsey said, that is what happens. that is called a gaffe in washington, when you say what you think. biden won in 1972, the year mcgovern one. ran against two-term incumbent senator and congressman. nobody could beat bogs in delaware. he was 29 years old and losing his hair. seeing a billboard on rehope beth, that guy doesn't have a prayer of beating -- well he did. he beat him putting out a tab a drop, like a "new york daily news" simulated newspaper. on front of it said, joe biden is making impact in the u.s. senate and he hasn't been elected yet, white space. inside was picture.

left side with phil heart. something about consumerism. next page, defense with scoop jackson. next page with hubert humphrey like something else. it made him look-a-like a senator. dropped by volunteer to every house in the state and he won. sometimes he knows what he is doing. working campaign in utah back in '72. we had a guy beat incumbent republican, liberal democrat guy, owens, won the election. there is ego out there where people willing to take a big chance. you will see interesting races. jerry brown, that kid is unbelievable. going for his fourth term and they love him. only governor in the state people look up to on fiscal issues. this guy has it figured out. he was counted out couple years ago. nobody said we need jerry brown back. audacity, ego. key to american political sense. nobody is asked to run for office anymore. there are no parties that really matter. the individual with the id, says

i can do it. that is how politics works in this country. what i worry we're losing some of that. great people aren't running anymore. very thin, thin rank of people running. that is my biggest fear about politics today. people don't have the guts to say damn it, i'm going to run. i may be a college professor at villanova but i'm running. i make them say no to me. it is rare today, because of all the stuff in politics. talk about, after this election, tuesday night. if it's a big republican roll, about three things are going to happen. one is the republicans figure they have it figured out, run against obama. do it again in 2016 all we have to do is be negative. he stinks. he is ebola. he is ebola. you know, they will do -- so limited to the outrage by the way. they will say anything about this guy. they will say he is ebola. probably figured it out. we got it from him. they don't care. some of these guys said i was close to it, really bugged to me. i was close to him. charlie crist how -- he lost.

like cooties. it weird. republican mentality is not even high school level on some of this stuff about obama. i'm serious. let's, why it is funny. the democrats are going to be scared. we'll be, they will be just so scared. oh, we have to run from the president. we got to just go back to the basic groups, minorities his panics. play the usual cards what we got left. little bit left of power. we have to be scaredy-cats. that is awful insting. a lot of democrats when i was in politics reacted to reagan. most movements last day 1/2. anger against obama that will pass because he will pass. you can run against a guy who is gone but they will try because you always fight the last war. republicans are loaded with bear. got them. sticking it to the people. vote against immigration. vote against any kind of deal on infrastructure. we'll do nothing. big no for two years. democrats will be scared.

they don't want to offend hispanics in really good immigration bill. won't say a word about enforcement for example, because they don't do that so they will chicken out. here is interesting things you might learn here you won't learn anywhere else. there is something in the senate called permanent investigating subcommittee. it is the committee that joe mccarthy made famous back in the early '50s. not that there is a joe mccarthy out there, unless of course ted cruz gets that job. by the way, check pictures, they look so much alike, it is frightening. that is not fair of course. that is why i did it. this guy, chuck hagel got $200,000 from the north koreans, didn't you hear? that is ted cruz. or he might have. that is real mccarthy. he might have. that committee has the power, i just found out this last week, i got all details. that subcommittee is the only panel in either house of congress, all changes chairman of the committee to issue a subpoena. that has complete power and year-round. never ends.

has complete mandate to investigate anything or everything. guess who is ranking member of that committee and become chairman of that committee in january? john mccain. so my guts is, my sense john mccain is serious person. really angry a lot of time. he is serious. not darrell issa. so when he moves with that subcommittee and, if holeds on to that chairmanship he will use it. we may see next year real investigations of irs. real investigations of benghazi. anything that they see on the scope that might be interesting, even in a bipartisan sense to look at they will be going after that. so what may happen the next two years is what happened after republicans grabbed congress in 1946 after long period of new deal. they spent the next two years investigating, which they tend to like to do, as they said back then, begin the morning with a prayer, and end it with a probe. keep it up. this is the republican mentality coming out of this election.

if they win a lot of seats in the senate. win another 12 seats in the house. they're not coming in there to legislate, don't kid yourself. to investigate. that is the strength of legislative body with complete power over subpoena in both houses. this is what nixon was worried about, rightfully so. look at history of presidents who got into trouble, other party that controls the subpoena. controls the subpoena power. look at watergate. democrats had subpoena power. investigated, caught him, taping system. caught it all. same thing with iran-contra with reagan. clinton, when he got impeached. power of subpoena everything, if in other party's hands look out. they know this, exactly what i'm saying. no it a long time. don't have to tell john mccain he has power of subpoena. expect two years of investigations with negative politics. how will that the is up elections in 2016? i assume hillary clinton runs for president. she will do well in the primaries. may face opposition from jim

webb or i don't know who else. the guy from vermont. ben & jerry's country. i'm not sure that will be a big challenge. that will be fun. a little left-wing. elizabeth warren will not run officially but out there offering herself up as attacker of wall street which is popular among democrats because political parties are known by who they hate. republicans hate big government. hate what is left of the unions. democrats don't like big corporations. so that is going to be interesting. hillary clinton has great opportunity to sell herself and win election big but i'm just a moderate democrat. i'm somewhat center left so i have a prejudice. most people don't admit they're prejudiced. i do. i have a prejudice. i'm always for the democrat who is the most liberal on foreign policy and most conservative on domestic policy now i fear that hillary clinton might be opposite sometimes. i feel she is hawkish and at the same time conservative on other stuff. i think a smart move for here, i think she is smart and have smart people around here, it won't be mark penn or some other people, she won't run raceway

she ran it last time because she learns. she is not emergency call like bill but learns and works very hard. what she probably will do is win big, if you win big, 51% and squeak in and other party gets house and senate you're useless. you have to go with a strategy to get the presidency and do something with it. only reason to run, i think. win with 53, 54%, bring house in with you. enough clout and mandate with american people they want to you do something. want to you rule. they want you to lead. don't want to just give you job, power to do something for the country. that would ideal hillary clinton win. grab the center. hold the left. i would think argument i make for her we're sick of men and testosterone and inability to cut a deal. [applause] and i think, the what you have to do is say what this country needs is not so much a shift hard left or hard right. nobody thinks that's right.

great american middle thinks it ought to be successful middle. which means reasonable deals. we have a reasonable deal on immigration. it is called, deal with the people who have been here long enough to consider themselves americans. let them stay through whatever means. number two, tomorrow morning you can't come in this country get a job illegally. this is in the bill. this is in the senate bill. one tough bill. you can't work without an i.d. card, e-verify system. you can rake leaves for somebody or shovel know maybe in the drive driveway but can't have a real job if you're here i will really. that is serious business. that cuts in four years. never hear that from anybody but it's a tough bill. if president want ad bill instead of issue he would say what i'm saying now. this is one tough bill and passes it is compromise. he wants issue. problem with politics problem with both sides we can keep static forever. you don't have a law and right now you don't have a law. if you play to their prejudices

or work with the democrats and what they want to help hispanic people, there is compromise there. there is compromise on infrastructure. there is compromise on lowering corporate rates. plug loopholes. i saw all this done. one second. [laughter]. oh, this works. tip o'neill and ronald reagan, were able to cut deals, lowering corporate rate, individual tax rate to 28%. that is what it was when they left. 28%. they saved social security for all the decades. you can work left and right, make it work. hillary's best case to say i know how to do this thing. thank you. [applause] >> i could listen to chris forever. now let me, now introduce secretary john kerry. there is this spot on the state department's website that shows a running log of everywhere secretary john kerry has traveled. he has logged well over

300 miles, egypt, jordan, saudi arabia, iraq, israel, turkey, afghanistan, lebanon. a testament to the complexity an challenge of his charge. there is another side -- to secretary kerry, not widely known. instead of washington politicians that they are there for you when they need you, not so kerry. despite his schedule he is the first to call family as he did to bradleys last week. first to go to friend or staffer's bedside at hospital. first with small kindness. at age 70 many of us will be resting on whatever laurels we've accumulated, handling our grandchildren, secretary kerry is still spending most of his waking hours serving his country. let us cover 300 miles, 300,000 miles -- [applause] with the atlantic's steve clemons. >> thank you so much, margaret.

[applause] secretary kerry, we have a lot of ground to cover in 20 minutes and i thought i would -- >> we do on one of the most uncomfortable sofas i ever sat. >> that is duly noted. duly noted. i don't know how you could talk about that from the senate chairs you had but i understand. let's start with, i feel like we need to start with page one of "new york times" where mark lander went through and to put mark's article in context, very interesting profile of the national security decision-making process and the players in it and if you contrast it with just a few years ago when you had hillary clinton, you had jim jones and tom donilon and various other players in the department of defense, there seemed to be, they were all on the same page. you never saw people speaking off script. and i'm really interested, you were described in there as someone that wasn't as tightly tethered to the white house. i'm interested in what your comments on the national security decision-making process

are right now. >> i think it is extremely effective and you know this is a chatty cathy town. where -- >> seems to become more chatty cathy. >> i don't want to get, look, we have much more important things to talk about than that. this is, you know, there is always people who make a business out of really trying to i think gossip and tear things down who may be on the outside and to necessarily can certainly tell you, i will be with the coordination and relationship between susan and me and dennis and the team is as tight as i have ever experienced you know. susan was over at my house the other night. we spent 3 1/2 hours of dinner going over the world, working on

things. i have not, i don't think i have missed a national security meeting or prince pals meeting even when i'm on the road. if it is 1:00 in the morning i'm on ctc dialing into washington. so i don't think it is very accurate portrayal and particularly important to spend a lot of time on it. i think we're more engaged in the world than we have ever been. more strategic -- >> more confusing world. >> much more complicated world. >> what does the dashboard look like? what does the dashboard of the secretary of state look like when you see from asia to africa -- >> looks more like an airplane panel, yeah, both sides. look, i'm not complaining about it. i think what is happen something i think result of year of things we looked at and advocated and for and confusing an difficult moment. i don't think we should be

intimidated by it. i think we need tome brace it and envelope it and capture it to the best of our ability and we're working to do that. there is enormous amount of -- you know the workings of the state department and i saw a couple of folks here who have been there, it is like an iceberg. you see the top top whatever percentage, 20% or something like that. there is a huge amount of daily enterprise and monthly, yearly, strategic engagement that you don't see, that frankly doesn't get written about. an example of that, i mean afghanistan is not on the front pages but i will tell you that our efforts to work the election, to know the election was the critical transition moment began the day i came in even before when i was a senator. and, as i came in, we worked the relationships so that as things got difficult, i was able to go

over and work with dr. abdullah and work with dr.gani and so we have a stable policy in afghanistan where there is now a unity government and something nobody thought was possible. that was a strategic outcome. iraq, similarly, it is not an accident we have a new government in iraq. and the president was absolutely correct to hold off getting immediately committed to the isil effort until we knew we had a government in iraq that we could work with and we knew that wasn't maliki but the united states couldn't just crash in, hey, you're out, here are the guys that are in, that is not our, playing into all the worst stereotypes that brought us to the difficulties we're living with today. so we put in place a clear strategy, working with all of our friend in the region,

particularly the sunni because the sunni countries have been so angry about the way maliki was building a shia army and linking to iran and creating a sectarian divide. that's why it was dysfunctional. so we worked first to get the sunni speaker to decide not to run again, to get another person who could run, quietly behind the scenes. >> sound like a lot of micro work. >> it is a lot of micro work. our ambassador steve and assistant secretary of state bret mcgirk who practically lived over there in that period did extraordinary job of diplomacy. and we worked it. we worked with barzani in erbil to commit because the kurds were angling towards independence and stay wit. we had a kurd president and with a sunni speaker and kurd president it was possible to --

and ayatollah sistani's comments were very critical to moving maliki were, came out of a coordinated effort. the bottom line is, iraqis made the final choice. we couldn't. so -- >> we can check that off as perhaps a success at the moment. i remember some years ago, i was in your committee room when you were chair of the foreign relations committee with richard lugar, i don't remember who was ranking and who was chair, but you were both cool on either side. david petraeus was testifying. >> we actually talked to each other? >> you talked to each other. and on this day, david petraeus was testifying in his isaf role as head of afghanistan and you and richard lugar quizzed him whether what we were doing within afghanistan fit within strategic framework for the united states where our strategic interests were furthered and both you and senator lugar made the point that there is difference being in silo of afghanistan and what other broader strategic issues

are. i'm interested in whether we're running risk thinking about national today of chasing rabbits and forgetting strategic -- how does iraq and iraq solvency fit a strategic plan? how does afghanistan fit the strategic plan? isis, where does it fit within the kind of broad strategic plan? >> very straightforward. >> yeah. >> let me say to everybody, we're living, the cold war was easy compared to where we are today. and the immediate -- >> putin trying to make it easy for you again, bring it back? >> i hope not. that is a different, no, because he is doing it very differently and in way that is very challenging to the ability to be able to avoid conflicts and begin to harness the energy of the world and move in a similar direction. the world we're living in today is much more, look, a lot of countries have economic power today that they didn't have in

the, you know, in the last century. we wanted that. we have about 15 nations today that 10 years ago were aid recipients from the united states. south korea is an example. today south korea is donor country, doing what we have urged countries to do, which is accept global responsibility. so now you have more countries with more economic power in a globalized world and therefore feeling their oats. they're going to automatically react and say, well, wait a minute now. do we really want the behemoth united states, superpower of the world telling us all the time what we have to do? so you have to approach these things a little differently. it requires more diplomacy. it requires more dialogue. it requires more respect for people, more mutual interests. much more of the world than henry kissinger describes in his wonderful book "diplomacy" where he talks about the state

interests and balance of power. we're much more many ways towards latter part of the 19th century, 18th century, dealing with countries. countries are flexing their muscles and standing up for their own interest and they have greater economic independence and ability to do it. you see the "brics," brazil, china, india you, standing up and saying russia, we want something, a different access in a sense. so we have to work harder at it. my warning to the congress and to the country is really, this doesn't come for free. >> are we getting a good deal? >> american power needs to be projected thought fully and appropriately but if we're not, you know, i will give you an example, prime minister modi from india came here the other day. came here after going to china and going to japan. both of whom gave him double-digit numbers of billions of dollars for infrastructure development. china gave 30 billion.

japan did somewhere similar a little more. we couldn't even do a one billion dollar loan guaranty. the united states of america. now everybody here ought to be shocked by that. we are behaving like we're the richest country on the face of the planet. we're still critical to everything that happens in the world. and we are not sufficiently committing the resources necessary to do what we need to do in the world. >> you're saying american power in the world is living on fumes? >> no, it's not. we're doing better than that. look what we've done. we're leading in everything in the world. this narrative about the united states disengaging and the president not being committed is just, one of the reasons why i'm here today because --. .

of numbers of young people, 65% of countries throughout africa, the middle east and south central asia etc. have

populations under the age of 30, 35. 50% under the age of 21 and down you go. if these kids are left to the devices for their own, which is what is happening, the madrasahs will fill their world, radicals extremism of one kind or another something is going to come along and say the world is disappointing and we are a better alternative how else do you get kids to strap on a suicide vest and think things are better on the other side that's happening. and the fear that i hear from my counterpart in many parts of the world is that the void is and being filled. we talk about democracy and extols the virtue of our way of life but are we backing it up and doing what is necessary to bring power and electricity and

the thing is all of these people have mobile devices. they are in touch with everybody in the world but they don't see themselves being able to reach it or reaching it. and i thought the dream america touched with the most was their ability to be able to reach. we have to help them do that more and that is a long-term strategy. i will share a conversation with you a foreign minister in africa has a 30% muslim population and we did it come when: we went out to dinner he said they were fighting. i asked him how are you dealing with this muslim population and he said the extremists have a strategy. they pay money in the poor areas of town, get the kids, take them out, indoctrinate them then they don't have to pay the money anymore.

those kids become the recruiters or unfortunately the implementors but what he said to me that was most important is that they are disciplined and they don't have a five-year plan they have a 30 year plan. we don't even have a five-year plan so we have to get our act together and that's what the president said at west point when he talked about the focus on terrorism and that's what he is saying in our engagement with asia, the tti p.. 40% of the global economy in asia and europe and the united states we are focused strategically on how to play the long game and it is raising the standards of trade. >> -- the short game in the middle east? >> we are playing a long game in the middle east.

they made an interesting comment about the relationship and we said that relationship transcends individual leaders and it was an interesting comment there has been a lot of talk. jeffrey goldberg my colleague -- >> colleagues -- >> i read the article -- he had spicy words thrown out there but the broader question is what is the long game in the arena that keeps ripping itself apart? >> everybody knows from the investment i made much of last year find a way to bring the parties to make peace in the middle east. we still believe it is doable but it takes courage and strength. both sides have to be prepared to compromise in order to do it. here's what i know and i think all of you know this viscerally and intellectually. and i've asked this question of people in the middle east one of

the greatest challenges for israel obviously is not to be a binational state. it wants to be a jewish state. to be a jewish state you have to resolve the issue of two states. if you don't and you are a unitary state and people have the rights to right to vote and participate as citizens is israel going to have a palestinian prime minister? i don't think so. it's not going to happen. so therefore what is the solution. how do you move forward and what we are trying to do evenhandedly and hopefully thoughtfully strengthen israel's ability to the three of rockets. to end this perpetual conflict in a way that provides the complete security of israel that has the right to be free of

tunnels coming into its country, terrorists jumping out with handcuffs and tranquilizer drugs, no country would tolerate that. >> do you think that it's time for you or the president or someone to be a little bit more evocative in terms of defining what you think a deal would look like? >> we need to work quietly and effectively and come them anybody that uses language such as what was used in this article that does not reflect president, that does not reflect to me. it is disgraceful, unacceptable, and i think neither president obama nor i -- i've never heard that word around me in the white house. i don't know who these anonymous people are that keep getting quoted in things but they make life much more difficult, and we are proud of what we have done

to help israel through a difficult time. president obama is the one who committed the iron dome and made it happen. president obama has consistently -- he was supportive of the right to defend itself in the recent war but at the same time, the president wants to try to nurse the parties together to resolve these differences. now in iraq, if we didn't get engaged i don't know where i i suspect he today. maybe in baghdad. there would be a hell of a war going on there. iran a move in even more to protect the shia interests in the 80% shia country. what happened then with bush are also and the deterioration of isis command even more territory committed with the -- it already is unprecedented as the terror group in the amount of land, money and assets that it controls and it's already

threatened europe, the west and others directly so you have no choice. you have to engage thoughtfully. we build a coalition for the first time ever that brought together five arab countries that have actually dropped bombs in this year and this year he had against the sunni extremists unprecedented. and we are carefully trying to nurse this forward so that the iraqi army does the fighting. the iraqi army comes back is not an army that represents one person or one sector that has a national identity and can bring the tribes to the table to reclaim the country. yesterday we made some gains. in the city south of mosul they took it back. this will be slow and take time. we've been honest with the american people and the world isn't going to happen overnight

but it's the best way to push back against religious extremism coming and we have united all the countries in the region in that endeavor. we are flying airplanes into series and a serious incident trying to shoot them down. we are targeting isis and trying to build a force that can have an impact on the decision-making so we can get back to the table we can negotiate the political outcome because we all know there is no military resolution and serious so that's what we are trying to get back to. we reached up with the russians. there've been conversations we are trying -- >> we are at the end of our time. there are so many topics but i just want to finish, we really are out of time but on iran if i was thinking about walter isaacson's work, we've seen kissinger and walter and he wrote the book kissinger. if he was writing the book kerry

i'm wondering if that entails the deal that you help put together on iran or not. yesterday susan rice gave the deal if 50/50 chance this is somewhat high here than i might have thought that if it deals with iran that is not achieved what does the world look like in your world if we don't go that way because it seems there isn't a nixon goes to china moment to sort of re-creates the sense that america can be scoped to the code -- >> we are living in a different time. the nations were developed and assertive and it isn't a moment like that but that doesn't make diplomacy any less important. it's more important because we don't have the existed that those 70 years or so. we are working and a different

format. the first thing that i would urge walter isaacson and he wanted to do that -- i'm directly involved in negotiating face-to-face. >> as i said to the president i'm not going to expect optimism i'm going to express hope. we have sent a very clear standard. there are four pathways. there's the open enrichment facility and then of course covert activities.

we have pledged that our goal is to shut off each pathway. sufficient that we know we have a breakout time of minimum of the year that gives us the opportunity to respond if they were to try to do that. >> we believe there are ways to achieve that whether iran can make the tough decisions it needs to make will be determined in the next weeks. but i've said consistently mobile is better than a bad deal and we are going to be very careful, very much based on expert advice, facts, science as to the choices we make. this must not be an ideological or political decision and if we can do what he said as the president said of his policy he said they will not get a bomb. if we can change this dynamic

the world would be safer and we would avoid a huge arms race in the region where the saudi's, egyptians and others may decide that if they are moving obviously it is a much more dangerous world and that is not a part of the world we want massive uninspected and unverified unverified, nontransparent nuclear activities. >> ladies and gentlemen, the secretary of state john kerry. [applause] >> no one knows better of energy than ernest moniz that we are in a delicate crossroads and energy. he sees it with climate change committee revolution in the national gas extraction, traditional fossil fuel supplies in the middle east complicated by geopolitical conflict. he's also known on npr as the

person with the best hair in the cabinet since the 1780s. [laughter] but we introduce secretary ernest moniz who will be introduced by bloomberg jonathan allen. welcome. [applause] >> welcome, mr. secretary. it's to do for secretary john kerry but i'm sure we can do it. let me start with a question i think you get a lot and secretary kerry gets a lot of which is what is the harm in doing keystone? >> as the secretary said, he's hoping to decide that question soon. >> i want to get into you a little bit on tax reform. it's something we probably don't deal with but think about a whole lot. there are a lot of incentives in

the energy market and the energy world that are affected by the question whether the corporate tax rate should come down and benefit breaks should be given. you've promoted to so many energy credits and things like that. what is the cost and is there a cost to not using tax credits for the policy as an incentive for behavior? >> let me show the set of incentives that we have to accelerate the transformation to the low carbon future and we make no mistake about it the president has made it very clear that we are committed to going in that direction so that we give you a couple of examples. first this is not in the tax world that the department of energy has rather enormous loan guarantee authorities. we have $40 billion left in play and we intend to continue the great success with that

portfolio over the last years across the energy spectrum from fossil to renewable to efficiency. on the tax side, senator wyden for example who now chairs the finance committee is hoping to advance significant tax reform but specifically in the energy arena like me give you a good example. master limited partnerships are an area area there's an enormous amount of equity in the market but it's restricted to the fossil energy. if we could broaden that have across-the-board including the renewables these would provide excellent new vehicles for attracting more private capital into the clean energy future. >> would you oppose getting rid of the tax incentives that exist for the renewable energy? >> we clearly support the extension of the current tax credits.

we especially support having predictable incentives. as you know with the wind production tax credit is also leash in overtime directly impact the ability of the firms and customers for that matter to make investments. so why do we leave we need to extend those renewable tax credits and we need to do it in a way where there is predictability on all sides. >> you have a culture in the old energy review coming out and it now has its own quadrennial review. what have you learned about the nation's energy infrastructure in the course of putting that together? >> perhaps saying a word about what it is it is a little bit of inside but guess what we are doing it very different in execution i might say to the quaternion of defense review in that it is a whole of government

exercise because the equities are so broadly distributed so we are working across the administration and that is an important point. second, the first year of focus is on energy infrastructure. we have seen enormous challenges over the last years mainly a set of regional challenges for example the absence of the national gas infrastructure has led to enormous spikes and we have the issue of the polar vortex and propane in the middle west and the only over the lack of infrastructure so that's what we are looking at what we are finding a little bit of a preview in that the level of investment in the infrastructure that we need going forward is out of line with what is happening already.

it's the issue of how do we direct it in a way to help guide it in a way that supports the kind of clean energy future that we are looking for? hell do we introduce the right information technology so those are the kind of policy recommendations that we will be coming out with that in some sense of the rcn already is it is not an issue of the level of investment because that has come up dramatically already in the last years especially in response to the new energy situation. >> this is the direction. how do we guide it to be reasonably and against what we expect to be increasing the bouts of extreme weather against cyber attacks and against

physical attacks and the geomagnetic storms so it is a whole set of risks and we need to invest in this infrastructure in a way that supports clean energy and provides resilience against a broad spectrum. republicans attack democrats attacked democrats and say there is a war on cold. the traditional existing infrastructure. is that true ex-? >> make no bones about it there is a fundamental commitment that starts with the president on moving towards a low carbon future. what we mean by all of the above is that within that constraint we have made major investments in developing the technology into the learning of the cost for using all of the fuel in

that low carbon world. so it means we have to play the $6 billion to advance the kind of integrated coal projects that involve capturing the carbon dioxide most of them involve using that carbon dioxide to enhance the recovery to provide you with a valuable product that lowers the cost. we have a solicitation right now for the loaner program committee to billion dollars for supporting full soul fuel technologies that would reduce emissions so we are working really hard to get those technologies developed, deployed, demonstrated so that everybody understands what the path forward is in the low carbon economy. one other thing also in the

private context, we have to keep in mind that this requires a global solution. we all know we use used somewhat shy of a billion tons of coal into the chinese are at or near 4 billion tons. we need to have these technology solutions that are going to be applied globally. >> the u.s. ban on crude oil exports, where do you stand on that with regard to that right now and do you think that is something that will be lifted? >> well, there are a number of arguments obviously as you know on that, and we have made it very clear that within the administration that involves multiple agencies. first of all there's been no policy change. we do export products of course

and we are examining the issues around the oil production in the united states. i want to emphasize the context of this discussion generally speaking is in the context of ways to import 7.5 million barrels a day of crude oil. we are on the other hand we have become a substantial exporter of oil products so we are exporting those are very important considerations about addressing the question you raised. those facts also emphasized something else very important. we remain linked to the global

market prices for imports and exports. >> let me clarify. we are evaluating all the factors. the arguments are over ventilated at the moment. >> sounds like a keystone answer. >> you decided to go there. after co- >> you mentioned the loan guarantee program. if we were to borrow the analogy earlier. bring us up-to-date with that program has done the? >> $30 billion roughly speaking across the energy spectrum

including by the way i believe a the next speaker on the nuclear project but fossils and renewable efficiency. the portfolio has been a major success. let me give you one good example in solar. in 2009, the united states had zero utility scale projects. by the way in the 2009 pointing back to the financial discussion, the debt financing was not easily available. the loan program stepped in and provided support for five projects successfully. today there are 17 projects greater than 100 megawatts completely with private financing. that is the model of what we want to do. get this kick starter and have the private-sector takeover. now there've been failures.

it's a default. the default. the portfolio had a 2% default rate. i don't know of other investment portfolios that have this kind of success rate. so it is very easy to find the one, two, three projects that have default. it is a 2% default rate. as i said earlier we had $40 billion left during the 30s. is there anything that we can get it done or they targeted opportunity if you're dealing with the chairman lisa murkowski on the senate energy committee next year as opposed to the chairwoman mary landrieu? >> it is the main guide to what we are doing in the energy space

supplemented by energy security concerns and obviously driving the economy through the manufacturing programs etc.. we are exercising all of those programs through existing executive authority. we will continue to do that. >> so you don't want to deal with the senator? >> we have a good relationship with the senator. i think it is very well known that we have worked very well across the aisle and across both chambers. that will continue and we have continued as as world to aggressively pursue our programs with our executive authorities. >> it's a pleasure speaking with you. [applause] next we have the chairman, president and ceo of southern company. next spring a new coal-fired

power plant is being erected in the pine woods of oral mississippi. tom fanning has called the money $5.5 billion counting a bitter pill to swallow. but with these high costs come higher returns. most of the plan's carbon dioxide will be captured and carried underground where it won't impact the client -- acclimate, not the client. tom fanning is here to talk with the atlantic steve clemons of clemons up a costly road he traveled to the first-ever u.s. power plant be designed to include commercial carbon capture technology. thanks tom for coming. >> thank you so much margaret. we don't have a lot of time. we have to get right to work. did you like ernie moiz? if he wasn't fabulous would you say that?

>> absolutely. he's an action oriented guy, smart, comes from a great background, dynamite choice. >> the reason i want to interview you hear is i heard you gave a talk in asp in a couple of years ago in which you talk about carbon and ways to deploy that. you just opened this mississippi plant at margaret mentioned but beyond that you are taking things to china and i'm interested you are one of the big power guy is and you also deploy your energy among the lowest socioeconomic constituencies in the united states. i'm interested in how you get smart energy choices when the economics are not necessarily their. >> there are a lot of issues -- >> you have seven minutes.