who years ago. the ice cap got a bigger in the winter, smaller in the summer. there was a cycle. for the last 15 years, ice cap on greenland lan-based ice cap has lost 200 billion tons a year that has not been replaced. if anything that trend is accelerating. and antarctica, the ice sheets on an arctic can were stable until a few years ago. there is the one sheet that is losing 200 billion tons a year. there is another ice sheet we believe is beyond saving. . .

and i will give you the best information nasa has about what is going on with climate and it is not my place to argue about the politics of it. so you know the attack on what a scientist is you know, are we not allowed to be human? am i not allowed to go on television and say i'm scared. it's not that i'm going to tell you what to do but i can tell you my emotional response. it has become very apparent to nasa scientist that delivering more and more data about with god the oceans. i can say the isotopic ratio of the carbon dioxide released human activity is doing this and

it's not the sun because we've been studying the sun very closely for 30 years. so all of these data are not helping in the debate. so instead, we try to drop back into storytellers as people and human beings trying to tell the story. i will wrap up with one quick anecdote. if you ever wonder how much of an entertainment value people get out of this very debate come i appeared on fox and friends this year and steve ducey had done a huge 10 minute piece a couple days before about how to nasa scientists were lying about the climate change record how there is a temperature point for 1934 in a move to a nevermind about the long-term climate trend of the united states. this was immediately rated as pants on fire lie because what happened in 1934 as we calibrated a number of station

and they became more consistent as to what time of day they took weather measurements and calibrated for the height difference in altitude difference. almost 6000 feet. i went not to the cbc show at their invitation and before cameras roll, steve ducey was talking about the facts, climate change data and just like alessio, very friendly and nonconfrontational and paid your money pays my salary. came here to helping clarify the situation. the cameras rolled. we were on there appear to give me a softball question and got me off wouldn't even let me talk. so they are not interested in telling you what the facts are. they are interested in the entertainment, the clicks selling the ads on television shows. it is one of the things we have to decouple. what have you heard about climate change and why are you

skeptical is something we have to delve into. thank you. [applause] >> so for those of you not familiar with the conference on world affairs will hold questions and tell each the panelists have spoken. the next feature is richard alley. i'm trying hard to not stand up and give michelle innovation. we used the nasa data. nss and noaa do fantastic things. in the previous they were talking about water. there are places we get food by pumping water out of the ground so fast that is changing satellites. people get that. i'm a climate scientists on one

of the people who got the occasional e-mail that says you are an evil liar. i'm trying to get you fired. i hate you. i know where you are. i've also waded waded into the evolution issue is and is editorialized on that. did you not want to see evolution. so i'm a geologist and i do climate and i.q. ice and ice sheets falling in the ocean. if you come back at 3:00 i will tell you how we can solve some of this. i am going to tiptoe and then he will straighten me out later. michelle gave me such a beautiful opening here. there is some research on the many wellsprings. i will show you a piece of art not the whole thing.

first of all i would like to make you think when you've ever been in one of the great cities of the world london, paris new york whatever. or seen somebody on the car. for the great cities of the world. how many of you have the impression that the great cities of the world are uniquely and beautifully designed to be absolutely optimal for moving the modern mix of traffic. [applause] and there's a number of reasons for this. one of the reason is the great cities of the world are designed for an ox are coming to market a thousand years ago. they have the underpasses and

overpasses. now i want you to think of their baby a 1-year-old 2-year-old and how fast they learn and what they learn. by the time they are one or two they have a naïve physics. if i said this in midair and will fall down. if i sat in on something that will stay there. it is not rotating around 24 hours going 25,000 miles on spinning nurse. you know and i'm a baby in certain things come out of me that require my taper be changed. but a gaseous emission is not one of them. and i am learning who was a reliable source in who takes

care of me and have my people are and so forth and i get a view of the world that works but a puppy grows up to be a dog and if i throw something at his swearing through it. i go off to school and start learning science. this could actually go through at the same time. i am spinning through space all around the place and falling towards a center of mass all the time. the gases that come out of my rear end and the other one that come out of your tailpipe are going to change the climate even though i know they don't matter because they don't have to change my diaper. if you watch the puppy grow into the dog can you do that long enough and there's a reason that affects survival you'll get something which is different.

none of that makes any sense. none of that is the ox cart laid down in my brain when i was one. so you go to a 7-year-old and they've been told the world is round and people have experiments. they have troubles with as many of them. they draw the world round where you live for a little tidbit in and maybe 99 or so before you get that. eventually all of us with a small number of exceptions, eventually almost all of us get that. but we get it because all of the trusted authority figures in our world tell us that. and we have trusted authority figures. we have dealt a very young

hierarchy of who are going to believe and where we take our information from. when all of our trusted authority figures say the world is round we get it. but when some of our trusted authority figures say nasa is lying to you from the satellites. they are making up the data. they are at making it around. now the idea that gas doesn't change the world because they don't have to change my diaper. maybe you can stick with it. you don't have to believe scientists. what we have seen is this rise of authority figures who say that two of us are evil liar's. right? so in some very real sense we can go into a medium bowl and we can go into our cultural bubble

and stay there and in some very real fans media bubbles are ascribing reality. i think i will pass that along to chip and see what he does to that. [applause] >> haiku for climate change. reality by as the levels keep rising, water and it's our feet. [laughter] [applause] so if you have authority figures there has to be a space that listens to the authority figures. i will argue that matt space has been groomed since the late 1800s to reject science coming to reject what they call collectivism and big government all of which is evident as they

are not agents of. okay you can get over it. it all starts with evolution the big lie of science. the catholic church and most mainstream denominations in each country make an accommodation by saying easy out right? what happens unfortunately it's about the same time the accommodation is happening, and there is the rise of organized labor in the united states which is a form of collectivism and is determined by a handful of protestant ministers to be a satanic distraction from the rugged individualism that allows you to have a direct relationship with god. and so they become concerned with what are the fundamentals of christianity and they

actually write a series of hooks called the fundamentals and they are known as fundamentalist and that's where the term comes from. one of the fundamentals is science is a lie because if you believe it is evolution you are reject in god. if you're a bible believing butter list and god is a very centered part of your life this is not something you brush aside. it becomes ingrained in your worldview for the doctrine of your religious ideology or theology. okay. let's go through the recent days. how does this involve corporations today who are offending sign deniers to go on tv and say things. in the 1890s labor unions. 1920s as bolsheviks and

anarchists which give us the palmer raids and 7035 to 45 roosevelt and a massive corporate funding an antigovernment, anti-labor union around the country. one of the most massive campaigns launched in the united states. the 1950s we have the red scare against godless communism. in the 1970s we had the christian right which a number of scholars of religion points out when you have the collapse of the soviet union what happens is the scary threat becomes internal. just like the red scare. the internal subversives now are people who want you to embrace science and reject her biblical understanding of god and they've taken positions of high office

both in the political scene which happens to tie into one of the most significant aspects of evangelical fundamentalists that is distinct in europe which is the idea we are living in the apocalyptic end times during which time trusted political and religious leaders will lie to you. so that puts scientists as the lackeys of political and religious leaders who were in line to you. know who it possibly believe this? first of all roughly 75% to 85% of the united states claim they go to church on sunday. let's not go there.

how often do you really go to church? you have to ask the questions i get them to admit that it turns out once a month christian easter. i'm a christian so i get to tell these jokes, so don't get mad at me. i'm the kind who likes science. so now, what happens is this becomes the single largest voting bloc in the republican party's conservative fundamentalist and evangelicals to reject science because it interferes with their relationship to god. and so it then becomes part of an alliance which includes corporate profiteers who really want to keep making money because they will finish their château mature before the earth turns into a testbed covered by water. so no big deal. just like taking any industry

stripping it and living the high life. so they are researchers on the gravy train already mentioned. there are the media and explaining politicians. i wrote the song yesterday so i'm totally agree with you. there's a total group of anarchy libertarians to read websites. don't yell at me. i know there's a distinctively significant larger proportion of conspiracy theorists in the world. happy to talk to you. the biggest are these conservative evangelicals who are convinced we live in a time when satanic age will try and get you to abandon god. so this is kind of tough. if big government are part of's plan their routes of the corporate manipulation

it is a theme in all major religion. not just this idea of serving the planet is seeking justice and there's similar ideas in islam and other faiths. i end with the note that if we want to convince the mass base that there is something wrong we have to encourage people to work on a way of dialogue that gives them a backdoor to get out of. pushing them against the wall is not going to work. [applause] >> good morning. i thought i was going to be the only christian on the science panel. i feel little less alone.

there's three of us. there are 21 points i make and i've got 10 minutes. nine and a half minutes so i want to rush of them briefly. first, when we talk about science and nihilism, we need to talk about this in context because what we are seeing is not just denial of the reality of global warming and the fact that the climate is changing. that should be seen in the context of a nation where they now embrace what i call a designer fax where we have given ourselves permission along political lines and conservative political lines to reject any quote unquote fact that does not comport well with chosen to believe. i want to tell you brief story.

i wrote a few years ago about henry johnson. he stood about five feet four inches, weigh 150 pounds. this one observation duty one night in 1918 when this post was overrun. no one knows the exact number but that low count of the dozen the high count is close to 30. the miracle of the story of henry johnson and his colleague outnumbered the germans. henry johnson was wounded 21 times. and lets the rest of his life with one foot. it became kind of like a seal flipper. an amazing story called the battle of henry johnson if anyone wants to look it up. this very site african-american man who defeats a word of german. i wrote that story and got an e-mail who told me all of that

one-man defeats the dozen nazis stuff is just pc bug. one man defeated a dozen nazis. remember we are talking about world war i it is pc bunk. it's an amazing story so we sent him -- what am i looking for? proof. we sent him the proof of what is happening. there is a quote from teddy roosevelt talking about henry johnson's bravery. the story was covered in contemporaneous news accounts in the saturday evening post in a number of history books end up on the web. mr. thompson was not convinced. mr. thompson refused to believe

even though we overloaded him with all the verification we could think of and this is one of the first incident that helped me clarify what was going on in this country. we've reached a point where we no longer have a pool of facts and common. we have a pool of facts and common assuming we are all of goodwill trying to solve what the problem is. we all make our arguments whatever we are trying to make and i interpret the pool in one way and you interpret another way but it's all the essential pool of fact. what has happened with the rise of the internet and the rise of conservative news media and designer fact area is we no longer have the same pool of fact. i have a pool of facts over here and someone else over there. in a real sense we talk past one another. you don't just see this with science and nihilism of climate

change. what else do we think that there is some was about. we talk about a presidential candidate, now president who was born in a u.s. state whose birth was attested to not only by birth certificate update notifications into contemporaneous newspapers. and yet there is this whole cottage industry and fox news appearance and radio appearance and all the rest of the style of debating whether barack obama was born in this country. well, the obvious fact is there is a need for some people to believe there's something other about him were foreign about him. designer fact. that is the context in which we are swimming. the other points i wanted to make as one of the worst things that ever happened to science

and religion i think is when anti-science became seen as a religious value. i want to read to you from a column i wrote. this is a few years back when the state of kansas was launching one of its schemes to allow the teaching of creationism in school in a sort of sums up what i would like to begin with. here's the thing i keep coming back to. why did those except every bible passages little truths if you know what you know, why do you need to be second in the knowledge by anyone much less an agency of government. if you know what you know, it seems he would be serene in the celebration of it but in the roughly 20 years since the christian right: if this political force in the time slot by hook and crook to make the least a lot of the land serenity is a match or beat. it is not too much to say it

marks the more curiously enough is an abiding lack of faith. no faith in their ability to survive unaided in the marketplace of ideas and what they say they know no faith in their ability to pass knowledge of their kids. only the fear conflicting ideas and competing beliefs posed imminent threat that they and their children must be cap scale because opposing views are simple questions is destructive to convictions. for what it's worth that never proceed -- and theory is incompatible with religious faith. it contradicts genesis gas but not the answers. permit confirms the essence we are not accidents. there's enough there to this work. we are told humans and apes evolve a common ancestor and before this there were dinosaurs and before that the primordial planet formed a massive explosion, that marked the universe.

who lit the fuse on the bang? what existed prior to the beginning and what will be here after the end? one name suggests itself to me which leaves me marveling at the creed espoused by a believe so flimsy it totters inquest at the first gust of contradiction. if their guy is so small he can be threatened by charles darwin? mine is not. that is a column i did i guess in 2000. [applause] you know i have long felt trying to use science to understand faith or safety of science is like using algebra to understand poetry or strongly to understand motown songs and why we love them. they serve different man from a different name and the whole idea science must be hammered

into conformity with the letter of genesis or accidents or whatever is to start date. it is pestering to science, but ultimately it is destructive of religion because what he says to people like me and lots of others as you've heard again in faith, abandon logic. all ye who enter here. i refuse to do that. i believe there is that which speaks to my soul and what my heart needs and understand and there is that which speaks to my intelligence my intellect and i don't see those things necessarily in this life or death struggle christians seem to feel in the weakness in what they called their faith that if they really looked at it they would be embarrassed by. i am not threatened by science.

i am enlightened by science. [applause] >> i want to thank you all. before we get to the question. from the audience i would like to offer to the panel members the opportunity to respond to the others. richard. >> we had one of these sufferers to teach false problems with evolution in pennsylvania and before i waded into that any public way i dropped in on our pastors. we are methodists. i showed them what i was doing and he said that is fine. what's happening there as they were trying to teach the so-called intelligent design the people who are not biologists say that biology teachers to

tell people they believe in an unnamed intelligence because someone who is not a biologist claim that biologists cannot explain something. my pastor said you know some income you are unhappy with the lack of science and not. we are more unhappy with the lack of religion in that. they said this may be bad science but is worse theology. you are completely correct. [applause] >> the thing that amazes me with regard to faith's approach to science and faith approach to a lot of things is how often people of faith give themselves a get out of jail free card from doing the hard interior work with the hard personal stuff we are required to do. i've always understood my faith has an obligation to do for not a license to hit somebody over the head. not to take it to sunday school, but if you've read the sermon on the mount and the stuff you are

required to do you could spend the rest of your life trying to live up to that. i've never lived up to that. you could spend the rest of her life and be a much better person for that and you would never have time to call a scientist admit that dress on the telephone. turn the other cheek. if a man takes your share, give me a close. if you take my share we are fighting. that is still where i am. really is fascinating. the same holds true sometimes when i look at the more extreme proponents of islam. you know, islam and the torah both save variations of he who saves one person saves the world and tiger. why are with literal about? [applause]

>> a little social science backchat. there is no social science data that fundamental christians are any more or less intelligent or crazy than people in their own neighborhood. they tend to reflect the background demographics up and down the scale. if you hear on liberal left radio and tv programs for the little envelopes from the dnc that these people are scary, crazy, ignorant people. it's not true. just like science denial is a lie to get you to send money to washington rather than organize and talk to your neighbors. [applause] >> when they throw out one question. nothing any of you said has made me feel any better. [laughter] okay now it is time. how do we go from here to improve the situation? >> it is getting a little bit

better. when the internet first became a really really prevalent part of my day five, 10 years ago were getting lots of e-mail facebook i had a greater volume of people they would say were killed by the asteroid or the history channel a star will explode and kill us. they did seem to be a recalibration, especially among any young people that which are redundant and are not as very little bearing. this is anecdotal. i'd be interested to see data on how people respond to this. there was this barrage of interest above his apocalyptic theories coming out and not as calm down a bit. we had a large asteroid passed by two weeks ago. i was amazed. it was perfectly safe. we need the orbit absolutely. i've actually seen a bit of wariness that is very

encouraging. i think that is anecdotal but there may be a cultural shift because the internet may be the spreading of these ideas so tempting and so easy at first that we are better consumers to some extent. >> if i may follow one for just a moment i have here my smartphone. it's turned off. it is a fascinating exercise to take this into a high school class and say what is that. what is it. i've done this very recently. how would you make it? what is a circuit board? this is about that much sand through the silicon in the class and not much oil for the plastic and almost the right rocks. and what have you.

that is all it is. and, oil and rocks. if you were to take the oil and the rocks into the senate and say make me a smartphone. make me a smartphone. this is science and engineering. einstein is in here. without relative calculation your gps will drop you in mexico in about a week. and simon and heisenberg or you can't design a computer with out quantum mechanics. this is the same routing transfer in the climate. there are people in the world who will take this and send a message and say scientists don't know what they're talking about.

[applause] but i actually think most of them know better now because this honest-to-goodness essay and oil and rocks in science and engineering. [applause] >> without further comments from the panel we'll turn to the question. am i me remind you of their students who would like to ask questions, please allowed them to go to the front of the line and also remind you that there are two microphones all questions at come from one of the others of the new microphones. feel free to line up behind the people dare to ask questions and finally let me remind you not to make statements. we have an expert panel hearing these are questions to allow the panel members to expand on the

subject. >> is he a student? a >> it is very hard for us to see you for my peer. very bright lights. student first go ahead. >> here is the question. you commented on the profit motive of the corporate driven anti-climate change. would you comment on the profit motive of the cottage industry among religious right leaders in their science denial. >> he is one of my pastors. >> i've been to his church when i come to the conference. he's an old friend and one of the first tuba to write write about the danger of the religious right because it turns out many leaders of the religious right with a very lavish lifestyle and they raise tens of millions and hundreds of

millions of dollars to build a little empires. you know when it is supposed to reject them and the profit motive as a core element it has always been remarkable that the leaders of the christian right have in fact been extremely clever practitioners of this kind of rapacious form of fund raising and scare mongering and christianity. >> the only thing i have is the politicization of faith. why they may be in the short run and the long run it is proving to be damaging. the acronyms than and i wrote about this a couple years ago. religion is by some measures on

the decline and they designed themselves as christians. the percentage of people who believe in god is not declined. so i think in a lot of ways by making the church of whatever denomination seemed to be wholly-owned subsidiary of the republican party, a lot of these folks do themselves a disservice because people go looking for the convert and the genuineness that they find in church nevertheless don't want to be identified with what seems to be identified as church in media these days which is paid olin science denying and not very good. ultimately the church faces a challenge from it both are some of the more extreme numbers the whole idea of god as a political candidate who pours the climate

science is really not a good business model. [applause] >> so, people who are discrediting science is that coming from the human race becoming more bold bold for the internet an easier way to learn any kind of knowledge, whatever it may be. is it coming from our politicians having such radical believe that we believe them because they are authority figures? is that coming from interpretation of religion differently? >> there is nothing new under the sun. 1906 the earthquake knocked out san francisco. the real estate developers are beside themselves. now the people of the east are

scared to go to san francisco. said the scientist says that released the worried now they promote that. a scientist says there might be another monday hold back down. they set up early warning systems when the next quake hit you can call boston and washington and say there is no worry. they start this campaign it wasn't an earthquake. it was a fire. so what happens? they break the electric line. the earthquake takes the water lines and you can put out the fires and the wood element in the city burns down. so was the fire but that's not 100% whole story. the business when people feel they are living with their beliefs or threat, they tried to defend them and they try to defend them with the tools available to them is not new. what i think is new i was officially this is done.

>> so it's a dynamic relationship but the corporate profiteers, researchers get paid to lie to do serious research that contradicts what people say. the media profiteers and what you end up with his subcultures that live in information science though. the information silos aren't penetrable except with face-to-face communication and that is not how the democrats work anymore. they don't organize people anymore. they don't go try to convince people to change the way they think about something. they say republicans are and scarier and are going to remove america and as a nation we don't talk to each other and discuss ideas like we do at cwa.

[applause] >> i am a retired medical research sign says and one of the interactions i had was finding the amish would come to the hospital for their children with meningitis, but they would not vaccinate their children for the same disease. i sense a resident who was mennonite out to define what the problem was and she found each parishioner at a very different insight. my question is the following. if you are religious right it is almost mandatory that when you are dying from cancer you would show up to the medical profession and get the latest.

said that obviously has a major difference of opinion. can you speak on that? we are all mortal. what is it about death that brings us back to science? fear? [laughter] [applause] >> is a one-word answer. yeah it is fear. >> to a very real extent you can reject science and still benefited from this nation up to some level. some of the science denial is very low cost in some communities. at the point where life is on the line the cost went way up. >> i hate to advertise another panel but they put me on a panel about science and religion tomorrow which i'm driving because that is not actually my

expertise. i don't think the two intersect very much. one of the things people don't understand about science is we do not believe we have found truth. as amazing as the equations of all but einstein and i've studied graduate-level mechanics we cannot find one deviation from the laws set up 100 years ago. when you measure around the sun, einstein is absolutely correct. we know it's not the be-all, end-all truth. einstein's theories don't work inside an atom and that the loss of quantum mechanics contradict them. when you are a scientist you give up the idea of there ever been an answer and never be the truth. that does influence my view of spirituality. i live in a world where you learn to swim in doubt in

beautiful complex, getting towards the truth but not ever getting there. there is a beauty to trying to lose your ego in now. people often think scientists don't respond emotionally and i don't think that's true. this is still a row. we are fairly short time does not exist the way we think it does. it is not a simple progression. the modern laws of physics almost require that cannot be true. in some other dimensional view you can see out my life from beginning to end because we believed the bid they mostly created all of time as well as all of space. not only the space created by from start to end, whatever that means it's very temporally based. i say to my husband sometimes

because we expect to die and not have anything after death. when the universe began i was holding your hand when the universe and ensign will be holding your hand. there's another way to swim in doubt and still find beauty. [applause] >> i hate to come back to prosaic after that. it is worth keeping in mind and are science and practicing minds we have given up the idea we have reached truth. our job as educators is to make sure we promote the students who will find the things we missed and we still educate. but the practical parts, this building was not built with constant way functions. the practical parts of science

we do not overthrow when we change the big picture. when einstein came in miscalculation or had to make this beautiful building standup did not go away. you'll find people that say science is not absolute truth therefore everything about climate change will change tomorrow therefore we shouldn't believe you. they tested parts tend to go on. i'm an applied etonian physicists in a lot of ways and newton is still fine for design in this building. [applause] >> i actually want to cosign with what michele said a moment ago about swimming in doubt. that is not just science, but as i have lived faith. that has been my experience as well. there asserted this misconception bad-faith drives

out now. the only people who don't have questions or people who are not thinking. i don't care what your religious background is. it is truer to say for me and secretly a lot of folks that they end out side-by-side. one of my favorite verse is their stories from the bible has a man approaching she says seymore keough my son if you can and jesus takes offense and says if i can. that meant that in order to leave. help my unbelief. [applause] >> i'll wrap it up by saying i very much understand that. it is a great lie that people of science are not of great faith. there's a huge range of interpretation of the universe and the approach to god that scientists have. going back to what we were

talking about about how doubt if anything means you don't know anything. this is something thrown at us a lot in the debate where you are going to publish a paper is when you disprove something or find out some new. your career is on the hairy edge of what we know. that doesn't negate the huge amount of stuff we do know. for the climate not to respond to what we do with that would break the law of physics. there is a lot we know and they will say this may surprise you. we only made the first actual measurements of global precipitation. we launched a satellite that could measure up to precipitation around the globe at once. i was the first time we ever made that. there's a lot we don't know about the climate system. how much rain is falling how much snow is falling? should we worry more about methane, worry more about other gases. lots and lots of things we have to find out.

that's why we have 20 satellites up there doing this measurements. none of that trying to figure out the details he gave the fact we know this is happening. that is really well established. that is another mystery they may worry about when people talk about what scientists are doing. [applause] >> next question. >> thank you. amen to michele and leonard. my question comes from reflecting on what is at least to me a new insight that this panel has expressed an especially leonard that anti-science is a statement of religious faith which is religious faith in a week god. and this is a circumstance of personal fear and perhaps pathological cultural fear which ends up as an expression of a

feeling of helplessness. our national escape from matt is material consumerism and financial development. i wonder if you all could comment on that connection of a week god with a cultural fear and sense of helplessness which then promotes escapism. [laughter] >> i have heard it said that the west --- i'm not sure if this will answer your question or not but wisdom begins when instead of wanting -- having what you want you want to want what you have. i don't know that it ties into a week god but there is

definitely a sense in this country that satisfaction can be found at the mall and that joy incompleteness and whatever. the attraction of faith is that there is a sense -- one of the attractions of faith as it offers the possibility of complete as in the possibility of being satisfied within your own self and i i think that a sordid antithetical to consumerism in this country because consumerism is to make you feel that you are in complete. you are not doing so well but if you buy this car, you know, if you get a soda pop and by the spring of whatever, your life will be complete. the trick is it's always the status and completion because

there's always something else to buy. i have an iphone side i guess it is. the latest is a six. i've got the previous model. let's put it like that. there is a multimillion dollars campaign out to get me to upgrade to whatever the next model is even though this works perfectly fine for me. the leonard, you are in complete until you get the next iphone. it is a constant shell game which to whatever degree i'm able, i decline to buy into. i do not believe consumer goods will make me a better person. [applause] >> it is not something trained for education to do with these questions. the interesting thing is how much that is changing. we work with people and alan alda at suny stony brook and we are literally working the

storytellers and psychologists and people from cultural traditions. this is an odd one a true story. a meeting at nasa headquarters six months ago talking about advertising strategies and the people hosting is that mars. i thought okay will talk about the mars rovers and how it can communicate about discoveries on mars. it turned out to be the mars candy company. only at nasa headquarters that can happen. they've happen. they brought in advertising executives and they were talking about how they design and advertise campaign. as a federal agency that cannot advertise. it is starting to behoove us to understand more how the strategy works and how this is done. i'm sure i'm not saying i think mars would not want me to say. this is advertising 101. the thing that shocked me as they were talking about the candy bar campaigns in the way they design their campaign has

nothing to do at the candy. we are selling self-esteem. there were ones they were talking about advertising a body spray for young men. the immediate first line of the campaign is adolescent male and security. that is what we shoot for. they identify our psychological tendencies and they know they are not selling candy. they are addressing those then obligated to buy the candy. i speak as somebody who likes a snicker bars every now and then. they did say how they market penetration was more than return customers. not so much of which are candy bars but how many people initially by the candy bar. like i said not part of the training of the scientists. when it comes to what they sell us was very simplistic reviews of religion, right, wrong,

believe in god don't. anybody who asks me, do you believe in god? if i say notice that mean we believe the same thing? that is not an answer. it not a word. we did become more easy consumers and things are simplified and going after a neat insecurities about fear of body image and all these things. [applause] next question. >> so what would be steps that everybody can take to eliminate the belief that like scientists aren't like liars and like basically bring science and religion together and just eliminate the anti-scientific believe? >> there are some very simple solutions. you've heard this before and it sounds really cliché.

i spent a lot of time in congress lot of time on capitol hill. i spent a lot of time in the actual offices. i am amazed by how much they respond. they all come in and say what are people saying? they really do pay attention to your letters. e-mails and written letters and phone calls. depending on the ease of how you do it. the other thing is i'm really encouraged by some of the public figures in science. neil degrasse who i've known a little bit for probably 20 years now. neil is going to get his own television program. neil is a really, really good public presentation of the scientist. he's funny snarky, come a good dancer. i love dancing. i'm a dancing fuel. at the same time i find him very very authentic as a

scientist. my only criticism is that neil was not giving script writing credit. when i saw the show it seemed like a tribute to carl sagan who i've loved and it didn't have neil's bite. it didn't have neil's humor. i wish they would've given more free range. there are some wonderful role models coming up and also put pressure in your politicians. they feel it. they will listen to that. here i am a scientist at nasa. i will respond to weird e-mails. why do i respond to that one person when there's thousands of people. they got to me. they sent me an e-mail. [applause] >> yep. this has been an excellent panel. my only regret is there is not a science denier on the panel.

a lot of what you said has gone to religious faith and its effect on science denial. but i think there is another more cynical component to it. assize trailer at the movies the other day for a term called emergence of doubt that talks about the people that are paid to cynically plant doubts in our minds about all of these things. via cigarettes or automobile safety or flight safety or climate change. ..

came up with the same conclusion that nasa scientist did. there are cases where studies sponsored by oil companies produce useful data but that's why we have peer review. it sounds, it's funny that sounds so ivory tower-ish. people say you're a scientist, i had a great idea for a new type of jet engine. won't you look at? i will tell them that is a process for this. there is a process for submitting papers having discoveries, having people replicate a result, look for your data. there's no way. they said i don't want to do that. i do want to take the time to i want to provide over. that's why we have a process. i think there needs to be a

course of course a lot of transparency but is being supported by companies. that is one of the things about being a fully federally funded scientist. we are not allowed to do that. i'm not allowed to take money from anybody. i gave a talk at a local astronomy club last week and they gave me a $100 check and i had to give it right back. from the discovery channel, all those tv appearances not a penny. i can take a thing from them. but if the the koch brothers sponsored climate study and the data is good bring it on. i am not afraid of real observation, real data and real debate. >> but that doesn't go to the issue of we live in a society that claims to be a democracy based on informed consent and there's an industry of lying to people for political profit. we live in a society that has abandoned the idea that we have that pool of shared knowledge and that we have an ability to

debate these things because we don't anymore as we live in an antidemocratic oligarchy heading towards learning to grow fins. [laughter] [applause] >> next question. >> doesn't make sense to you to be a science believer when it comes to climate change science and besides deny when it comes to vaccine safety? >> not sure who you're talking to but i would bet there are many people in this room who are very seriously engaged in making sure that vaccines are safe, and that this is done with science and it is done with literature and that we actually know a lot about it and vaccines that same -- vaccines have saved a fantastic number of lives of. [applause] >> there is no good science that says vaccines are not safe. i'm sorry. that's done. the entire study was

discredited. that person was on the payroll of a drug company trying to do different sort of vaccine. we know the whole story. it is one of the things that i do have to say do have to say it shocked me a little bit coming to boulder. i have met some wonderful excellent people here who are not in favor of vaccinating their children and i'm very much in the spirit of civil discourse. i'm very polite. i'm very very frightened. [applause] >> my question sort of rides on that one a little bit from science that we sort of pick and choose. we've been talking about people accepting science or fixed anyways just some quick examples. we have fiscal margin and a few letters switch your mind and now we have a gluten thing that's scary and things come out that's wrong but people take things. what i'm wondering is how do we

influence the people that are taking data, taking it and then refusing to switch when new data comes out? >> signs, we're supposed to look for the next new thing. we are supposed to try to break what was in there and find something. the next science paper, maybe the next new thing, and it may not be. when paper is not science, agenda this group also i'm preaching to you. but governments have worked out ways to find out what the scientist know with the public watching in the public good. it's a fantastic story, during the civil war lincoln signed the document the national academy of sciences that makes them the advisor to the nation on matters of scientific come and now we have national academy of engineering at the institute of medicine as well. you know, the civil war breaks out. i'm sorry i'll do three minutes here.

the civil war breaks breaks out. would've been the u.s. navy is now splintered. some of the ships sail out of the south to the north. some of them get burned. one of the ones that got burned was the virginia, the merrimack, steamship. she doesn't have a superstructure because they burned it. the confederate racer, cover her in iron and they trashed the unit they fight to a draw in two weeks every need in the world is building ironclad ships. wanted it done? you just put giant slabs of muscle next to your compass to your out night in the middle of the night here which way is north what they call the national academy of sciences and the national academy of sciences and sit idly by north? the academy says these people are trying to so you this committee doesn't work. this one does. and to this day what does the academy do? it gets the full range of use scientifically. gets them to sit in the public eye for the public good without paying them as to what we know that a solid, what's speculative

and what a silly? in the mid '70s people say will get warmer or colder? "newsweek" ran a rather inflammatory piece on getting colder and the government said to the cabinet what's going to happen but probably warmer but you should do a little research. in the late '70s it will get warmer. they have said it will get warmer ever since. george w. bush was elected he says the academy tells what's going on. they get a panel that includes the most prominent scientist who has been publicly skeptical about this. that panel including the prominent skeptics as we are making it warmer. so the difference between one paper and the assessed site is coming out of the national academy of sciences, the royal society, the intergovernmental panel on climate change, be wary of the next paper, look for the voice of science pulling together what is known in the public eye. [applause] >> so i'm sorry for the people who did not get to ask their

questions, but we are out of time. i would just like to thank this fabulous panel. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> a number of patriot act provisions including electronic collections record expire sunday at midnight and he is a sin is meeting sunday afternoon to see if they can change that.

roll call is reported senator rand paul could force the provisions to expire by blocking senate efforts on sunday by objecting to there is motions. it all begins at 4 p.m. eastern on sunday with the votes possible starting at 16 feature in its extend expiring provisions fail before congress left for the weeklong memorial day recess. majority leader mitch mcconnell could move on sunday to bring the boat up again. live coverage on c-span2 beginning at 4 p.m. eastern. >> could you paint the picture for us of what happened to the former speaker and? spear an d >> caller: sure. some some people are kind of summed this up as an apparent blackmail plot him to put it plainly. what is going on is the federalplainly. grand jury alleged yesterday he to agreed to be somebody from his hometown $3.5 million to keep quiet about what is called quote

past misconduct against this person. and from june 2010 to april 2012, the former speaker began, he made 15 withdrawals from banks $50000 began providing this money to the individual every six weeks. again, this is according to the indictment. but the feds come after that triggered some questions from the bank employers because of these because transactions involving more than $10000 these reports go out to dash across network and asked him about the money, as we begin making withdrawals of less than $10,000. he ultimately made $1.7 million in cash to this unknown person. but what is actually being charged with he's charged with two counts and what actually involves a technical violation of the rule of trying to make

his bank withdrawals and/or to avoid these reports. so he was making these withdrawals of less than $10,000 then a second count relates to his interview with the fbi. they asked him if he is doing this because he simply didn't trust the banks. he allegedly said yeah, i kept the cash. that's what i'm doing. sebelius charged with these. >> host: as far as the unknown person or the unnamed person is a typical to have someone not named? >> caller: i think at this point it is. and this could be somewhat strategic on the u.s. attorney's part as well. this indictment is done in and raises a lot of questions and perhaps, you know not the u.s. attorney's office is hoping mr. hastert will enter a plea rather than let some of the

details come out about who this person is and what apparently went on. we do know that the indictment says that this person and as individual a has been a resident of yorkville illinois and has known john dennis hastert most of his life. we know that. we know that the feds found a fitting to include the first paragraph of the indictment that mr. hastert was a high school teacher and coach in yorkville from 1965-1981 then going on to become a public official and speaker of the house. >> host: so as far as you're looking into this come you said this raises questions. what questions questions does a raise in your mind looking at this case? >> caller: it raises questions about who this person is what is alleged to have gone on how did this arrangement come to be between mr. hazard and this person? there's also questions about the conduct of the unnamed person in

the indictment. people are asking why they have been charged with extortion, has this person been declaring its income on their tax returns, you know, things like that. i mean, we could probably go on but those are the ones that are the top of our mind i think. >> host: you kind of hinted at this but what are the options for mr. hastert now? >> caller: welcome is going to be a rant in chicago at a date that last i checked, has not been set. is going to come in and he's going to be arraigned and so he'll be talking with his lawyers unsure are pretty good, i mean he could plead guilty to the charges or he could take it to trial. if he were to take it to trial then i that could be potentially embarrassing to the former speaker. clearly according to this indictment he was willing to pay $3.5 million to keep something from the past hidden.

so perhaps that could come out at the company can this is a very technical charge. really, all they have to do for the first count is shown that a structured these withdrawals so that they were not record -- were not triggered to deport at the $10,000 mark. to think of it is that probably won't be for difficult for the feds to prove. as far as lying to the fbi i've heard some people suggest maybe he was trying to argued he was just making a joke with his comment. i don't know what else went on in that fbi interview where it happened, when it happened if he had deserted within. so we don't know what the circumstances are but it will probably be difficult to avoid these two may just eventually pleaded guilty. of course, that speculation. we don't know. >> host: what's the ultimate build if he does and if he is found guilty treachery my understand is five years on each count. so ultimate maximum of 10 but i

don't know that we would be looking at that in the end but five years in prison on each count house of representatives jon seidel with chicago funds -- chicago since time to put this indictment against former house speaker dennis hastert. thanks for your time. >> caller: thank you. take care. >> booktv prime time during the congressional memorial day recess instinet with a look at some of this years book fairs and festivals.

>> here's a brief look at what you will see tonight. >> it's worth noting that none of us really know anything about the future and we surely don't know anything about how economies perform in the short term, let alone the long run. we live in a messy, dark, scary, uncertain world. but i think the economy is -- [laughter] >> with that said. a scary dark uncertain world? >> that is the normal state of mankind. said but true. in the context though i do think the u.s. is gradually getting speed is slightly less dark, slightly less scary speak with we are a very resilient country.

i think a much stronger country than any other major economy. and if you look at the challenges we faced in the country they're pretty stark challenges that our politics are terrible but i think you'd rather have our challenges and the challenges of really certainly any developed economy and i think the major emerging economies around the world. >> facebook chief operating officer sheryl sandberg also talked with former treasury secretary henry paulson and robert rubin at the milken institute annual global conference. you can see it tonight at eight eastern on c-span. on c-span3 american history tvs real america series which takes viewers on a journey through the 20th century with archival films on public affairs. starting at eight eastern with a 1945 documentary the true glory on events in europe.

>> that's tonight on c-span3. >> midsummer booktv will cover book festivals from around the country and pop nonfiction authors and books. this week and we're live at book expo america in new york city with the publishing industry showcases their upcoming books.

>> virtual reality pioneer jaron lanier and artificial intelligence technologies sebastian thrun discussed the work of douglas engelbart commander lee computer and internet engineer who invented the computer mouse that helped develop hypertext a networked computers. this took place at stanford university. it is about an hour and a half. >> welcome your yes welcome again to a conversation about our digital future with jaron lanier and transit spirit go to start over introducing our speakers. after that i will briefly introduce the demo and start the conversation with just the first question. there will be plenty of time and as a template of microphones later for your questions so be prepared for that. okay so let's move onto her

speakers, jaron lanier was next to me is a computer scientist composer, artist and author who writes on numerous topics including high-technology business social impact of technology, the philosophy of consciousness and information, internet politics and the future of humanism. jaron has been on the cusp of technological innovation for sometime as a pioneer in virtual reality, a term he coined founded vpl research the first company to sell the our products. for medicine can decide and numerous other fields. he is currently interdisciplinary scientist at microsoft research. his critically acclaimed book, you are not a gadget, a manifesto, and who owns the future? remain international bestsellers. he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by "time" magazine. sebastian thrun come at the

incoming ceo of udacity, a google fell and bp, and research professor at stanford. he has published over 370 scientific papers and 11 books and he is a member of the u.s. national academy of engineering. foreign policy touted him global thinker number four. [laughter] >> all right. his revolution transportation education and mobile devices. and 2011 he was a recipient of the first prize given by the association for the advancement of artificial intelligence and of course named after stanford computer science professor. at google he founded google x which is home to projects like the google self-driving car and google glass. okay, we hope of course our

conversation will get you in the mood for this evenings performance of the demo by michael. few of you might be wondering what is this demo what demo are we talking about? the performance work the demo was inspired by douglas engelbart 1968 demonstration at the fall joint computer conference of a system that is gripping they felt at the stanford research institute. denouncement described this event and i'm quoted, as a presentation on a computer-based interactive multi-console display system used as an experimental laboratory for investigating principles by which interactive computer aids can augment intellectual capacity. the demo introduced to us the computer mouse videoconferencing, hypertext, networked collaboration and much more. again this was 1968 okay? all of us in 1960.

the demo was spectacular, surprising, and it was influential. it is often called the mother of all demos. angle part project reward thinking about how human beings might benefit from computer technology. he changed the conversation from being about improving computers as tackling machines to the ways in which human beings could use computers to improve individual capabilities and work collaboratively with other human beings. some want to start with a quotation from an oral history interview, one of several that it did with doug in 1986. i was talking to doug about his work and asked him why he called his laboratory the augmentation research center. so the question was what had you use it is worth augmentation in the 1960s to describe his research on human and computer interaction or i'm going to quote and then ask sebastian and

jaron for some thoughts. is what doug said. you are just augmenting basic human capability. there already is a fantastic system. we have to augment basic human capability. but the computer was just another artifact. so that really jolted me. i cannot begin to realize the unusual characteristics that computer and communications technology were offering and just plain speed and quantity of iodine enough work on scaling effects realize that the whole qualitative nature of some phenomenon can change if you start changing the scale of some part of it. i began to realize in how many ways and how directly the computer could interact with the different capabilities that we've already got. it began to dawn on me really a clear picture, that the accumulation of all those changes would make a big impact. the very large thing that came out of that, probably the thing that made the biggest difference

in my perspective was the realization that you really go after the value that was there you needed to look at all the candidate changes in the existing human system. okay. so sebastian canonical to start with you and ask what you think of this idea to work on technology is fundamentally about changing human beings in some way about augmenting human capabilities speaker i would say we have been in the human augmentation business for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years. so take the book and augmentation of our memory digital come and it works incredibly well to carry information from one person to another over generations. take early agricultural machines. they used all work in the forms. now we have machines that make us very strong. take the plane that carries us across the oceans. all of the sudden we can run

faster, fly higher and go for the. the computer is one step in that journey. it's a massive step. they will have enormous ramifications in our life. it changes society faster than any other invention before yes, i think innocent of all our we the people. i've always believed as i've never played in a vision of replacing people, i believe in the vision of empowering people. >> so you're in the field of artificial intelligence, and sometimes artificial intelligence gives this rap for being only about improving machines. this is your chance to correct about i guess. >> some of my colleagues would rather get rid of people. i actually like people. [laughter] there's a reason why i am not particularly eager to replicate people because it's easy. it takes about 15 minutes a lot of passion. we do this a lot time. [laughter] spent 15 minutes and 21 years spent let's leave it at that.

[laughter] not the point i want to make. but on top of it if you look at successful technology and i love the idea of looking at it from a perspective because when we zoom out beyond iphones and the self-driving cars and the google glasses and look at the hundreds of years we can understand what's happening today. i always found that the successful technology are completely complementary to people. we generally have lousy memories. we've -- we don't run for a car -- run professor koh is a good invention. if we build a machine that looks like us and behaves like is, first of all i do for my dishwasher to say not today. i want it to work. but if you just that look like us and walk like us and behaves like us once the point? so i think it's not about replacement. it is entirely about augmenting uzbek if you don't look as if you believe and look at the

close you are the food you become the electricity from the safety and all these wonderful things about you the transportation. all these things are human augmentation. >> jaron, what are your thoughts about this augmentation paradigm? >> i knew doug engelbart many years and he was important to me in my early career and i kept up with him for a long time. on many different levels but he used to just wander. the first virtual really started actually in under to the land just off the campus or along the stream and now there are condos and god knows what generic stuff is there. he used to wander by and pick flowers from the field by the cottages. he was such a lovely guy. i just have to say that. when i was really a kid when it was a teenager probably my most important mentor was one of the founders in the field of artificial intelligence named marvin minsky. he and doug used of these arguments all the time.

if i can characterize and then it went like this. martha would say we will we will do this and this is for machines. duck would say but what are you going to do for the people? which is getting back to this divide you are asking about. what i really think it boils down to was that for doug the idea of progress made expecting more and more from people, not creating conveniences for people, not creating superpowers for people, not creating science fiction scenarios but rather expecting more and more from people on many levels. he expected people to be up to take more responsibility to be more ethical or consider interactions. he expected them to gain virtuoso capabilities with technology. but what i think went wrong, i'm not sure it's hard to get a real overview of his eye think since we've been living in this regime of moore's law for every is getting cheaper and more plentiful and more powerful all the time, we never had a chance to really become virtuosos within a particular technology. becomes obsolete so fast and

there's the better thing and a new design. so that speed of change has caused us to become a little lazy anyway because there's always this new thing. so now there's a button to play short toilet paper a fairly. i think doug would've hated that thing. what doug wanted was for everybody to know more math, more intimate, be able to do more and more and more big idea was he wanted people to expect more and more of ourselves with each passing year. and people are very good at things like trying to manipulate their reputation online or detect cat fishing all these weird intricate things are trying to avoid being manipulated by algorithms are going to manipulate them remotely. there's a strange disco amid we are becoming virtuosos of but in terms of the direct little skill i think when they been doing it as much as doug would've wanted.

>> you know i'm sure all of you who are seeing the performance that was he does. there's a moment in the demo itself right at the beginning when doug talks about what he's going to do. he wants to talk about the responsiveness of the machine to the human and has little bit of a glitch bodystocking. he says responsibility in that moment. that's always stuck with me is something about doug this notion of responsibility of the machine at his creative human being but conversely the human being back to the system in some way. so could you talk a bit more about these ideas of responsibility for either one of you. whoever feels compelled to go. >> well at the time, if we go back to the late '70s and 80s a lot of the concept of responsibility for people who have technical skills related to nuclear arms race him and there was a strong feeling that people who are technical has to be able to step up and act as if ethical

and moral agents in the work to prevent our intentions from destroying everything, and i was like a very present idea. we've backed away from that a little bit because a lot of things have actually turned out pretty well, but also worry, i can't imagine if doug was with us today. and it's very hard to really try tototo imagine what you to imagine what he would pick up some things but i will give you an example of a sort of thing i think he would be skeptical of. there was this tremendous outpouring of pride in silicon valley when the first egyptian revolution happen and all these kids in the square and arab spring using social networking mobile devices. but then it starts to go wrong we don't take responsibility for the. there's a way which would include selective in tallying our victories. i think he would be pretty upset by the he would say no if you're going to be an engineer

you have to be empirical. you have to really measure what effect are having on the world producing your creating a more free society, measure it to get a card is a site where more people are more economic options and opportunities, measure a particular setting at the same time the middle-class is declining at a lot of people are feeling their living more on the edge then you're failing it might not be your fault. there might be explanations but i think he would demand we give much more to close the empirical loop. i think you would tend to resist a kind of way of talking that we can do. at the same time we have had tremendous success as. site think he would just demand more realism and more balance and self-assessment. >> did you want to say anything speak with maybe a look at related question, this idea of collaboration and using computer systems to help human beings work with other human beings. is that an inspiration for you or is it may be an expression you'd like to talk about with

google or some of the projects you've been working on? >> absolutely. duck is credited for single-handedly having embedded computer supported collaborative work which is active working together as a student i thought it was a crazy idea, it would never work using computer. today we do they know, google docs, google shared spreadsheets. we now have ways to do in fact some unemployed are in singapore or in lebanon to work together is beyond belief. i always thought this was more about people. you want to build a small person to understand whether smart or not and the answers they every smart. easy to breed. i always felt a technology we get people together or even today transportation is perhaps the biggest invention of, the car in particular of the 20th century. maybe television, maybe i don't

know, but cars certainly changed the infrastructure or real estate or work patterns come interaction patterns. they also cost a million lives over a year. so making them safer i felt was a good idea. google+ was about communications, about being present in space and at the same time having digital capability your certain was that vision to help interaction. generally find in this day and age of heavy texting and facebook and these wonderful things that the ability to interact with many, many people did you have been so much enhanced and so many people and touched, so the more opinions i can see, so many more instant feedback. i can go to amazon.com and find instant feedback or to trigger fisa for trips. i never would've been able to indicate with you before. i find this to be the golden age of all district it took maybe 40

years or 45 years ago this point but it is not really unfolding. >> do you want to continue with that? >> i was thinking about how virtual-reality could be seen in terms of this desire to help people collaborate. >> just to clarify the first display was not paid by me but made by sutherland who made the other demo that might be the one rival to doug's a demo as one of the primal amazing which was called sketchpad and it's worth knowing but if you're not aware of it. it was a little earlier. the term virtual reality originally not having a social version of virtual world where people it's each of them into symbols of the same time see each other as avatars of the term became popularly used for the whole general field. so to me it's still a look at the georgia try to keep up with the way people use the terms. but that was the original meaning of it.

it was very much in the spirit of doug's work and in fact, i remember having to go over we got the first versions working. it was very exciting, amazing amazing time to give was electrifying. it's fun for me now when i can put my eight year old daughter in a virtual world and stuff at home now that it's become available and it's charming, more than i can express. but i think during the period when i was working in the '80s, and before and since there's a tendency sometimes to maybe expecting much from these technological innovations. i used to talk about it as a thing that would totally transform human culture and would be less violence. i remember distinctly, for instance, giving talks with the notion that if you could have more awareness of what's going on around the world through

technology you would realize how horrible war really was and the world would become a more peaceful. in fact, the opposite has happened. let me say i agree with stephen king could have submitted of files is declining and just views of me has been to recruit people for ever more horrific cultures of violence. so there's a sort of the doubletree and come and that is what it is something we had anticipated. it's very hard to predict how these tools world have an effect on the world and it's very easy to seduce yourself into wanting to see on the benefits and a full picture. it's something i struggle with still and to think all technologists should public companies are inventing things and you're not struggle with assessing their impact, you're not doing your job. huge deal a little tortured try to understand it because the effects are complex. for me there's this kind of moment of anticipation now when the world is about to be flooded with virtual reality stuff, right clicks and some of it is weaker than some of it is not.

i don't know what impact they will have on the world. it's a grand experiment and i'm both thrilled and charmed and also scared and worried. i will be embarrassed that i don't know. i don't know what will happen in the next year or two. it's going to be amazing to watch. >> and often happened when somebody who hasn't been something come as the story unfolds what happened with the invention, they are sometimes not very happy with the way their own work is sometimes interpreted. d.c. the virtual-reality that we are seeing accelerate now in its development as being the virtual-reality that you started speak with you kind of. it's funny like if you look at the current oculus the public and the kinds of worlds before building on it before building on it is noted on the multiperson thing happening at this point except in isolated incidents, aside from that the stuff looks and feels so much like what we're doing in the '80s. it's just crazy. i can compare videos with some of the popular downloads and

it's come into the device itself looks very similar and feels very similar and it's very strange actually. >> 2 billion bucks. >> yeah you know -- >> a lot of money. >> you. it was less than 19 billion. [laughter] >> what am i going to do? >> welcome on that note let me change the subject a little bit. [laughter] this is a different shift, a little more personal i think there you may both know had this very powerful motivation. it was a life's work the way he saw what he was doing. also on with it and what specific moment in his life these kinds of epiphanies really. there was one very famously when he read vannevar bush as we

think in 1945 and had inspired him. it was a later one, less well known in the 1950s as he was driving home down 101 from working i believe in mountain view and living up north somewhere. and i'm going to quote from the oral history and let kind of what you think about this and did ask about some similar things into our lives. he told in the oral history, i soon realized that if i wanted to contribute in some maximum way, i would need to provide some real driving force. so i'd better first pick a field that's really something and if i find a set of goals so there some way i can use the engineering training, the net would be very valuable. but i somehow had the feeling that more engineering wasn't what the world's dominant need was right thing. i begin to it's a very complex world. someplace the longer i just had this flash that the complexity of a lot of the problems and the meansneed for solving them are just getting to be too much. the time available for solving

other problems are getting shorter and shorter. so the urgency goes up. then i put together. the product of these two factors, complexity and urgency, or the measure or human organizations or institutions. the complexity urgency factor transcended what humans can cope with. and it suddenly flashed committee to give some to improve human capability to deal with that, then you would really contribute something basic. that just resonated. then it unfolded rapidly. i think that within just an hour i had the image of sitting at a big crt screen, it goes on about this particular vision. i will start with you, sebastian but can you relate to this kind of intense personal motivation moment that drives someone? >> yes. several times in my life i had these moments where but i recognize something of importance. it led me to quit my job to be honest it i would always do do my students don't worry about what job you want to get.

your job and find you. but even recently a new job coming to take because it was an important to take. perhaps in recent history the first time was about four years ago roughly or five years ago when i realized i really good in paper writing about a lot of books and academic papers. and then i went to the sky to a dropped out of grad school and started to start up company and didn't care about paper writing, but influence like a billion people. so i had dinner with larry page and we started comparing notes. and it dawned on me and all this competition on paper writing and college, they had to draw the arc to what i really cared about, which was changing people's lives. it required someone else read the papers and like them and then go and implement them but mike peters to put my papers are not the goods and not many people read them.

enough to continue i guess. so i decided to go to google to learn how to influence the world and i started as a middle manager and work my way up. more recently i was building up a googleplex which all kinds of stuff. ..

>> and i felt it's this thing where you can make machines smarter, and they're going to take over the jobs of people; but no one's making people smarter. so i went to certificate day and -- sergei and said, look, my time is has m i've got to run this -- has come. i've got to reason this new company and we understood something which is important to me. it might not be as obvious to anybody in the audience but it was really the moment where i felt, look, i'm an artificial intelligence guy. i make machines smart, but i care about people not about machines. why not go back and do something for the many people who need jobs. >> excellent. jaron, what about you? have you had a moment like that? >> oh, my gosh. i've had a lot of moments like that. it's wow. i think i mean if i think back

on my career, the most satisfying moment was probably helping to build the first surgical simulator. and actually recently there's been criticism that they're being overused and that maybe they've reached some kind of critical point where there's too much simulation in teaching surgery and in planning surgery. but back in the '80s it was very exciting, and it was done in collaboration with the stanford medical school with dr. joe rosen and darpa, a few other people ann lasko. so that's, like the moment when i felt that virtual reality was actually good for something, you know? that it was beautiful and exciting and electrifying. it was clear that it would be of any use was not as clear. [laughter] this is not just subjective we're actually making a difference. but earlier than that, wow. i mean, you know, i'll tell you

the moment that really got to me was when i was a little kid i grew up in new mexico and one of our neighbors discovered pluto which is still, which is a planet. i don't want to get into this. [laughter] you can tell me it's not a planet as soon as you agree that europe's not a continent. [laughter] but at any rate, clyde was the head of optics research at the missile range and he was very kind to me as a little boy and showed me how to make telescopes and be able to change the shape of something and then see globular clusters was, for me, the prototypical experience that led me into virtual reality. i still remember that so clearly. and just the sense of magic that you can get from just expanding your contact with the universe with technology. i mean, there's just nothing else like it. it's the best thing. >> okay, thank you. i'm going to just do two more questions so you can start thinking about the questions you're going to have.

when we were talking before both jaron and sebastian agreed we wanted to have as much interaction with you as we possibly could. so just two more questions up here, and then we'll do the interactive side of it. okay. so as i'm sure both of you know doug engelbert's project the historical one was in many ways a failure. it succeeded in bringing us many things, but as far as funding and those kinds of issues go, it ended up -- >> wrong metric. >> i bristle when you say that. >> oh, yeah, of course. >> i can't hear that. [laughter] >> what a loser. [laughter] >> but that kind of gets to the question i had though, actually, which is how as creative people you know inventers scientists as all these missions that you're on and all of this, what role does failure -- however you want to define it -- play in what you do? is it an important aspect of it or not?

>> oh, my god. every night when i come home. just kidding. [laughter] so failure is essential, and it is, actually. we all kind of climb mountains we've never climbed before we do something we've never done before. there's no playbook and if you believe that you can figure it all out in your brain and just do it and it works then in all likelihood you're very, very wrong. sometimes we have amazing people people who look from the outside have never failed just went straight to the top. first of all they fail a lot along the way. secondly they get up again and do something else. and, secondly for any great entrepreneur there's also not so great entrepreneurs who massively fail along the way. so the system itself is based on failure. now, when we fail, we throw a

party. we are happy. i have someone gets a bottle of fine wine if they do something that could break the company. what's failure on one level if you break something, you lose customers, you lose enthusiasm, you hurt somebody possibly, as the worst possible failure, or you cancel a project, you fire people. and it's another level. it's actually the most gratifying thing that makes it so amazing which is you learn something. so you went out with your best hypothesis put the best foot forward and believed this was the best way to climb the mountain and you arrive at this false summit and you have to retract. the reality is you just learned something you couldn't know before so you're now a wiser person. so in the space of what you know you didn't fail. you fail if you are unable to learn. but if you're able to learn and keep an open mind and really survive on the surprise then you enriched yourself and you enriched your work and your

team. and if you do this enough you'll eventually make it to the top of the mountain, there's absolutely no question. you always do. it's usually people wavering along the way that don't can reach the top. it's not that the mountain can't be climbed. so when people talk about failure in silicon valley it's not about we do something and this specific thing is a complete failure, my life is over. it's really we have more friendly words like pivoting. it's really a moment where you recognize something really essential, and what you just learned will be with you prefer. and it's -- forever. it's an amazing gift from god. and it sets you apart from yourself and anybody else who hasn't made the same failure. so as a result we celebrate fails. >> jaron, i want to give you a chance before you answer for yourself about the role of failure to say a little bit about why you think doug engelbart was not a failure. i think that's important to hear. >> wow. i mean i -- if you're going to

have a standard of what success is where in order to be successful you have to be a business success, then i don't know that's a terrible narrowing of scope of human affairs. it's -- i don't know anybody who really thinks that way. like, i've never heard anyone in silicon value describe him as a failure. that's just you. [laughter] i don't -- i've never heard somebody say that. i mean i i think most of people who sort of unveil some new frontier of computing don't become moguls of it, you know? there have been a few exceptions but, you know, overall, you know, you're alan kays, your ted nelsons, they end up as research types. it's a different kind of person. it's there's a certain kind of intensity of focus and ambition that the entrepreneurs have

which is a little different from the kind of exploratory mindset. sorry. i mean, you know if we have only one criteria for what success is, then we all have to become the same or something. that would be a disaster for cognitive diversity which would be a disaster for everything. so i can't accept that. so if we think in terms of creativity, influence, impact, just a whole world of things that's a tremendous success there's one very narrow measure by which you might be a failure. now, maybe there is sort of a trend in silicon valley of lately to focus only on that one measure of success. i don't think that's really so true. it's obviously true for some people. i mean, there's definitely been a shift from when -- i've done four start-ups that ended up at google, oracle pfizer and adobe. so i've done the entrepreneur, start-up thing. i love it. i love competing in that market i love that whole feeling and the intensity with which you work and the madness of it. i just adore it.

but i feel like when i was doing it when i was younger silicon valley was a little weirder than it is today. there's been this influx of people who play golf and wall street types. [laughter] there's a different society now. like, i remember -- i was remembering this event when i was with doug at xerox park, and something came up about a fraternity, and we couldn't find somebody in the auditorium who had been in a fraternity, and now they're, like, all over the place and start-ups are born in them. it's a different -- there's a bit more of a business culture than there used to be. it used to be that the business just happened and now there's people who come here to do business a little more often. so maybe there's a bit of a shift. but i haven't detected, in fact, when you talk to the people in silicon valley who are still doing things, i think we still respect cognitive diversity in a variety of ways. i don't think we've gone down that hole irreparably anyway. >> so just in my defense --

[laughter] i don't think doug was a failure at all, far from it. but the reason i asked that question is because when i first got to know him in the mid 1980s i think it's fair to say that he in some ways considered his project to have been a failure at that point. >> oh, you know, i think you're right about that. i think that's true. there's a -- yeah. i think that's correct. i think there was i think he did have a feeling of being a little underappreciated and there was a kind of, some of the people who were kind of creating the new world of computing. at that time there was a sort of divide between the personal computing insurgency and the old guard big iron people. but from both of them, there was a kind of briskness that probably didn't give him enough credit. and i think that's true. but the other thing i want to say is that it didn't last. i mean, i think by the '90s everyone started to recognize

how important his contribution was. and one of the things that's very nice is that we were able to celebrate his contributions while he was alive. and earlier we were just recalling an event at stanford that took place in the late '90s called the unfinished revolution where many of the silicon valley figures came and talked about his work. so i do think he felt that at a certain point but i think we corrected it. >> good. we're friends again. okay great. [laughter] >> yeah. >> so there's going to be one more question, and then we're going to open it up. this is kind of inspired by something i sometimes do in my classes which i call putting me as, you know, a person teaching the class on the hot seat, and i ask the students to come up with questions that i probably don't -- about things i probably know nothing about, but that's fine because i just want them to see how i sort of deal with beginning to answer a question. and so i thought, you know, how could i do that with you. and i thought maybe the sort of out of the blue question i could

just ask you is since we're going to be seeing this performance tonight about a demo what do you imagine -- if you sort of had your dream come true scenario what next demo would be, of where technology would go, the thing -- and i realize it would we can't build surprise into this so much because you're answering a question but what could -- where would you imagine something like that would happen today, something that would surprise people, excite them, get them working on something seem to point the way forward? sebastian, why don't i start with you on this. >> boy i take this to be a question for me about what cool, great technology we'll see in the next few years. i had the privilege to work on a few of those at google, and i'm working at some of -- working on some of them right now. for example, curing many types of cancer by finding ways to diagnose them differently from the ways we diagnose today. we had a project specifically to

detect cancer before it becomes symptomatic. flying cars are certainly on the radar screen up in the air. implantable computers. that might sound icky, but it has a lot of interesting perspectives to people. one of the things we did with the book is to kind of outsource human memory into books where they're actually in many ways much better. to the point of putting our personal experiences entirely into a computer, possibly our own personality. maybe we're going to have a demo at some point where the computer runs sebastian. it's not as far -- maybe not unimaginable, but not as far off as we think it is. it's very doable. maybe i'll stop here. [laughter] i actually do believe in all these technologies we have only scratched the surface. almost everything interesting