>> talking about interconnectedness and automation, our next speaker has such a complicated unique cd i will just read it to you. one of the world's leading inventors, the principal creator of the first flatbed scanner, optical characteristic, print to speech reading machines for the blind, text to speech synthesizer, music synthesizer capable of re-creating major orchestral instrument and

commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition software. he is received a second grammy award. national medal of technology, 21 honorary doctorates and honors three presidents and authored 5 national best-selling books. director of engineering at google heading up a team developing machine intelligence at natural language understanding and futurist who has a 30 year track record of accurate predictions. just saying. please join me in welcoming ray kurzweil and andrew ross sorkin to the stage. >> a privilege to be here, thank you for having us. it is a treat for me to have the opportunity to spend time with

ray who -- i'm a little starstruck myself in terms of the future, this is someone who is not just an author but thinks about the future in ways i can't possibly comprehend so thank you for being with us. i want to start the conversation here which is you talk about the idea of physical immortality and say this is going to be possible by 2045. explain your self. >> i can never come on stage and say i have done it, i lived forever. i talk about three bridges to life extension. written a few health books, bridge one is what you can do right now, stay healthy the old-fashioned way so we can get to bridge 2. a key idea of mine is

information technology progresses exponentially. medicine is information technology. i was enabled by the general project which was a perfect exponential and it cost $1 billion, not just collecting this object code of life, it is progressing exponentially, to understand, model and simulated and reprogram it is growing exponentially. we are now getting applications of biotechnology, you can fix a broken heart. it will take a few more development in virtual technology but half of all artifact survivors can reprogram old stem cells, we are regrowing organs successfully, installing them, we will do it in human soon. we could talk all day about these examples of. what is a trickle will be a flood by twee 10 years. that will get us to bridge 3

where we will have medical nano bots the size of blood cells who will finish the job of the immune system. we have intelligent devices. our t cells evolved thousands of years ago, it allows us to live long. they don't recognize cancer, we can finish the job with these medical nano bots, detailed designs how to go after every disease once we have these devices. that is the third bridge. ultimately we are going to merge, we can talk about that, the singularity. >> i went to bring this up, the idea, to under klein understand what the future actually looks like, part of that are in your

mind is something known as the singularity. >> we start with the idea of extending our life capacity with ai. we have already done that. you misplaced your cell phone this morning so you are not enhanced at the moment. a lot of people if they leave their cell phone feel they are incomplete. they are not inside our bodies and brains but that will be routine in the 2030s. another application will be to connect our neo-court tracks to the cloud. if you remember to million years ago we got the large 4 heads, walking around with a slanted brow and no frontal cortex. we got this additional neocortex and what we did with it is put it at the top of the neocortical high-ranking. then issues become more interesting and more complex and that is the enabling factor for

humanoids to advance, newspapers and conferences, no other species does that. it was a 1-shot deal the skull couldn't keep expanding or childhood would have been impossible. our neocortex wirelessly connected to the cloud the way your cell phone does it and most things you do with that, connect to the cloud, the cloud is pure information technology, it is doubling in power as we speak. we will then connect to simulated neocortex in the cloud and just like we did 2 million years ago to our neocortical -- it will not be a 1-shot deal. it is pure information technology expanding exponentially and so we will be a hybrid of biological thinking and nonbiological thinking which is already started and we will become smarter. by 2045 we will expand our intelligence 1 millionfold in

such a profound transformation, we call it a singular change in human history. >> the number of people in this audience are creative people, this is a creative business, they are creating whether it is product or marketing that product. how does the singularity, augmentation of technology change the way we think. >> >> it has already transform the world and i talk a little bit about it. if you hire an orchestra to hear and orchestral composition, conversations on the phone or raising money, to hear his own composition, you can do that with a keyboard, everybody in the fashion industry is using all kinds of graphical tools to expand our creativity. creativity and art and design

and music is what happens at the top, primates, have almost as big a brain but don't have as big a narrow finish neocortical hierarchy, don't do any of these things, don't have language or art or music. every human culture we ever discovered has music. we will add more to the neocortical hierarchy when we can augment it with artificial neocortex and we will become more creative, funnier. >> there i ask does the computer ever become more creative than us, there's a fantastically interesting project going on in london where there is a computer that is drawing a new picture every week, it reads the newspaper, tries to capture the sentiment of the way people are feeling and draws a different

picture, they are okay and i assume they will get better. >> my views is not us versus them. we have seen that in a lot of dystopian futuristic movies. ai versus the human for control of humanity. we are very mixed up. we don't have one or two ais in the world. we have several billion. they are connected to the cloud. we create these tools to extend our reach. we build a skyscraper with our muscles but we have machines that leverage our physical ability, a kid in africa accessing human knowledge with a few keystrokes and connect the neocortex expanded and add to the hierarchy, that is where we design the fashions so we will

be mixed up with it. doesn't mean conflict will go away. different groups of humans augmented by our machinery and artificial intelligence that will continue but we are going to extend our creative reach, we are doing that already. >> when you think about the future of the economy in an ai augmented world, there are some people who think it is going to be great for society and others who think most of us won't have jobs. >> jobs are an economic system we have used to meet our needs. 3.2% economic growth, the economic growth statistics completely ignore the increased value of the dollar. i spent a few hundred dollars for this device on my belt and

it counts as a few hundred dollars in economic activity despite that it was $1 billion circa 1980 or $200 million second 1965 of computation and communication, billions of dollars of economic activity as a teenager i saved up thousands of dollars for the encyclopedia britannica, a few thousand dollars of economic activity is another one account is nothing. so okay, that is the strange world of devices and so on, you can't wear it, you can't live in it. all of that will change, we will print our clothing, pennies per pound with 3-d printers in the 2020s, we are not there yet, it is improving at a rate of 103 and we will get there by 2020. >> the idea that we can 3-d

print every product for pennies on the dollar. >> as the technology gets more sophisticated, and increasing variety of products will become feasible. >> what about the commodities? i still have to pay the data. >> we are going to be able to increase the types of products including the types of materials we use. clothing is already less expensive than it was 100 years ago, 200 years ago the luddite movement was formed because we had these new technologies emerging that could automate the making of clothing but now the common man or woman could have a wardrobe, but this will revolutionize manufacturing. you will have open-source versions of products and proprietary versions, so let's take several energies that have been transformed, information products.

if i want to send you a book or movie a few years ago i would send you a fedex package, or email, millions of high quality free documents and books and movies and songs and you could have a very good time with media products but people still spend money to read harry potter or read music from their favorite artists, the coexistence of proprietary and open-source markets and what happened to the revenues of those industries? they have gone up, not down, fueled by the ease with which those products are distributed and marketed, you are going to like this movie based on what we have noticed, the same will happen to the fashion industry. there will be hot, cool designs for the latest designers, manufacturing is going to be transformed but if you took at the impact on unemployment the

perception is entirely opposite the reality. if i were a futurist in 1900, 38% of you work on farms, i predict 100 years that will be 2%, 25% work in factories, 8.7%, you will be out of work, don't worry, you will get jobs doing design on the web creating new websites and applications for mobile devices and chip design, nobody would have any idea what i am talking about. in fact, i would say we are going to create new jobs to replace the ones we eliminate? really? what new jobs? my answer would be i don't know, we haven't invented them yet. it is the reality. that really has changed. it is different this time.

look at the types of economic activity that didn't exist 5 years ago. people creating apps for mobile devices and websites and new applications. >> most of the companies, instagram being one of the great examples of the country - a company that gets sold for $1 billion that in the digital world things that can be digitized are different from tangible goods. >> we have gone from 24 million jobs in 1900 to 142 million jobs today. what about the percentage of the population? 31% to 31% so what about the wages of those jobs? they have gone up per hour 11fall over the last hundred years. has it happened the last 5 years? the answer is yes. all these economic activities that didn't exist before mobile devices. >> we will not be living in a luxury -- or leisure, or become part of the leisure class?

>> in 100 years you were happy if you had a backbreaking job that put food on your table, today not everyone but increasing percentage of the population get their definition and identity and gratification and self-actualization from their careers. the idea that you are going to just study for a trade and have one type of job you keep for 40 years or 30 years and retire, that model has already gone away. the perception is quite different. there was a poll of 24,000 people that asked has poverty, worldwide poverty gone up or down and by how much? 87% thought incorrectly poverty had gotten worse. only 1% correctly identified it had gone down by 50% or more. there is similar disparity between perception and reality

in every other economic area. part of the reason is people can see the writing on the wall. if you are driving a truck, use self driving vehicles it makes you nervous. part of the reason people think things are getting worse as information about what is wrong with the world is getting exponentially better. i like to point out stephen pinkerton, the better angel of my nature, the best time in human history. are you kidding? the incident yesterday, last week, something happens halfway around the world and we not only hear about it but we experience it. it can be a big battle that wiped out the next village 100 years ago, you never hear about it. in that area democratization if you count the number of democracies a century ago, count the number of democracies two centuries ago, not every country is a perfect democracy but in

all these areas, democratization, human freedom, peace, economic activity, this is the most beneficial time in human history. we had no spatial -- social safety net into we put social security -- >> you don't think in 20 or 30 years we will need a universal income? so many people will effectively be out of work? >> we will redefine the nature of work. >> people thought -- talk about inequality. >> we had 52,000 college students in 1870. we have 20 million today and another 5 to 10 million, it is 30 million people, 10% of the population of the united states, 20% of the workforce and what are they doing? studying poetry, history, mathematics, music. that is considered a useful thing to do. we are going to redefine the nature of work.

you have people creating creative apps for mobile devices, could give you a list of 100 activities that didn't exist 5 or 10 years ago. >> does this create more or less customers for the luxury market? what happens to any quality globally? >> we are becoming wealthier. a lot of our activities, gratification in terms of creativity. if you look at the statistics of the fashion luxury fashion market it has gone up. it used to be a very small percentage of the population, it is now of universal interest. we will be very wealthy. >> everyone will be wealthy? >> when i point out the exponential growth of the value

of information product say you can't as i said before you can't information -- 8 information products, or where it or live in it, 3-d printing of clothing, we will be producing food very inexpensively using critical agriculture, artificial intelligence, controlled food production at very low cost. there is already a demonstration, snapping together modules printed out of 3-d printers like lego bricks, very low cost in three days put together a three story office building, that will be the nature of creating structures, houses and buildings in the 2020s. the physical things we need ultimately will be provided through ai-controlled 3-d printing at low cost and we will have the physical resources to provide a high-level standard of living for everyone in the world and we are well on the way towards that. poverty in asia over the last 25 years is cut by 90%, south

america and africa are not only somewhat behind but are moving in the right direction so we are wealthier but our perception of what is wrong with the world is increasing because a lot more information about the threats to their economic security and that is what we saw in the election, people are better off but their perception of their economic security is infused with more knowledge of the change in the world. we adapt very quickly once these new things happen. we think it has always been that way. >> that is the rosy picture. let me give you other people with a less rosy version relating to ai. your friend elon musk and bill gates say ai, artificial intelligence represents our, quote, greatest existential threat >> i started writing about this

in the 1990s, i wrote the age of machines about the grave intertwined promise of artificial intelligence technology and biotechnology. there was a big cover story in wired magazine, why the future doesn't need us talking about the dystopian future he got from my book and i talk about three phases people go through when they look seriously at the potential of these new technologies. one is inspiration, these technologies have the potential to overcome age-old problems with poverty and disease, short lifespans, then year at the potential dangers of these technologies and finally a balanced view that these

existential dangers exist but we have means of overcoming them. i will give you an example where we have done a very good job. we don't yet have existential danger from artificial intelligence but we do from biotechnology. the same technology we are using to regrow brand biology away from cancer and disease could be used in routine bioengineering lab to reprogram a benign virus like the flu virus into something deadly, communicable, that was recognized more than 30 years ago at a conference the talked about this promise versus parallel, how can we get the promise and contain apparel of biotechnology and they came up with guidelines in their conferences and these have been refined and updated over the years, much of it baked into law and the track record so far is

we are now getting as i mentioned the first applications in clinical practice of biotechnology that will become a flood over the next decade in the number of people who have been hurt by abuse either accidental or intentional of biotechnology, so far is 0. that doesn't mean we can cross off our list, we took care of that one, technology is getting more sophisticated, just talking before we came on here about prisoners. we need to update these guidelines but it is a good example, blueprint for how to deal with these technologies. there are ways we can create ethical standards and guidelines to keep these technologies safe. it is a complicated discussion, not foolproof. >> when do we get to designer babies? i ask because i spent time in berkeley working on a gene editing tool. here we go. you think that is realistic?

>> yes. certainly there are genetic cases where we would want to edit out that a devastating diseases and we are beginning now making exponential progress in understanding of the genetic code and causes of these diseases. you could edit that out of your child's genome, you would want to do that. that is much less significant than augmenting intelligence through artificial intelligence, make us vastly more intelligent far beyond what we could engineer by optimizing our biology. >> final question and i will throw it to the audience, this is news you can use. ray happens to take a 90 different pills a day because he plans to stay alive a very long time. walk us through your regimen. >> people say you take all the

supplements and other pills, enabling you to live hundreds of years, the answer is no. that is just to get to bridge 2 and bridge 2 is not far away. according to my models 10 to 15 years from now we will be adding more than a year every year to your remaining life expectancy. life expectancy is a statistical phenomenon -- >> how old are you now? >> i looked pretty good for 95. i am 68. >> tell us what you take. >> that would take us all day but i will give you one example of an actual prescription pill meant for men, diabetes drug number we have known for years all the people that take it, there are millions, it is the most popular diabetes drug have much lower cancer rates. i did some research with some it scientists and discovered why. it kills cancer stem cells which are the real cause of cancer.

people don't take it optimally. you need to take 500 mg every four hours to maintain a level that -- >> is that what you do? >> no but even people that take one every 24 hours have some protection. we see dramatically lower cancer rates as a result and caloric restriction causes the same changes that eating less causes. i recommend anyone over 50 take that. >> we all want to call our doctor, tell us what else is on the list. then i will give it over. >> you can buy it at health foods, 90% of your cell membrane, that substance, that lipid is reduced by 90% or 95%

by the time you are 90, that causes organs to work less well, that is why your skin is less supple, baby skin is so soft and smooth, you can reverse that by supplementing with that substance. there are a lot of different stories i have written several health books about this. >> thank you. let's open up for questions. there are probably many in the room. go ahead. wait for the mike. >> you talked a lot about so many interesting things but i haven't heard much about humanity and how our emotional intelligence evils as these other parts of the world evolve. can you talk a little bit about that? >> emotion and intelligence or two things which we have the old brain that provides basic

motivations is the neo cortex is around the old brain, really the great sublimate or. i may have ancient motivation for aggression and conquest. my neo cortex turns that into writing a book about the future or talking at a conference to leading fashion executives. no other species does those type of things. the neo cortex is organized hierarchically. at the bottom i can tell that is a straight line at the top, something is funny or ironic, someone is pretty, and we added additional levels to the hierarchy when we got these big 4 heads. that was the enabling factor enabling us to develop for example music, no other primate species has music, every human

culture has music. that is at the top of the neocortical hierarchy. having brain surgery, talking about a reaction to different things, you can do that because pain receptors in the brain whenever stimulating a particular spot in the neo cortex, to laugh. at first they thought they discovered a laugh reflex but quickly realized they had discovered the ticket in the neo cortex, she found everything hilarious whenever they stimulated the use, you are so funny standing there, with a typical comment, and they weren't funny. they found point in the neo cortex, discovered humor. we have additional levels to the hierarchy when we can expand the neocortex by connecting the synthetic neo cortex in the cloud so we will become funnier, better at expressing loving sentiments. those types of emotions we regard as the finer qualities

exist at the top of the neocortical hierarchy and we advance as we increase our brain capacity. let's get a question over here. the microphone. >> the idea of radical life extension is exciting but on a planet where the population is growing increasingly exponentially, talk a little bit about resource utilization and sustainability and how to solve those issues. >> as you know the first thing that happens when nations get wealthier is the population growth rate goes negative. when we significantly reduce the death rate the population will go up again. we have far more resources than we need.

take energy. and had exponential growth. and the ceo of google, grant by the national academy of engineering and energy technology, growing exponentially for 25 years doubling every four years. half of 1% of the world's energy, nice thing to do but a fringe player, ignoring exponential growth from 100%. it is 2% growing, doubling every two years. in the book the chosen, that progression, presented this, in my class from the 1970s, do we have enough sunlight, 10,000

times more than we need, once we get our energy needs from solar we will be using one part of 10,000 sunlight, that is existenceproof because it is -- wind and so on. we have thousands of times more energy than we need. i mentioned vertical agriculture that will provide food at low cost for the entire population. we will be able to print the other physical things we need with advanced ai-controlled manufacturing technology by the 2020s, we will meet the material needs, talked about snapping together 3-d printed lego modules and we are all crowded together, we are crowded together because we created cities as early technology so we could work and play together. now -- not competitive with real reality by becoming more so, we

are spreading out, my workgroup is all over the world and we communicate just fine, that will become more illicit by virtual reality, and more realistic so take a train trip anywhere in the world, you see 98% of the land is not being used. we exploited for horizontal agriculture which will be replaced with vertical agriculture. we have plenty of resources for an expanding population. even when we cut the death rate of the biological population, doubled every 15 years. the power of these technologies doubles every one year. that is the exponential growth i call the law of accelerating returns. >> i could talk to you forever, about the singularity. thank you very much. [applause]

>> today politico editor susan glass on her essay covering politics in post truth america. she outlines how political reporting has changed and whether facts still matter. we are live from the brookings institution at 2:00 pm eastern on c-span2. later google hosts postelection review looking at what digital advertising strategies work in the 2016 campaigns. watch live at 3:10:00 pm eastern. also on c-span2. now officials from the transition teams of presidents bill clinton, george w. bush and barack obama on lessons learned and their advice for the trump transition team. it is about an hour.

>> welcome to brookings. and hard to cohost these events, the miller center. secondly, because the topic, the first year has not begun yet. of the trump administration. and the flavor of what life is like in the first year. there is nothing like a trip down memory lane to try to understand the kind of challenges any administration hosts but the trump administration in particular is

going to face come january 20th when president trump is sworn in. and so we have we have an action-packed program today. will deal with aspects of presidential leadership, domestic to foreign policy. to bureaucratic and organizational challenges. i am happy to have the opportunity to partner with darrell westbrook, one of the scholars at brookings. in particular, the other center of uva, bill is warmed out to is at brookings because in ten years he was the managing

director of this institution before he became the ceo. i am going to introduce him and he will introduce the program's work on presidential transition. bill, before he came to brookings and the miller center, was at the white house where he was director of economic affairs at the national security council and national economic council, his responsibilities include planning and negotiating for the group of 8 summit, the ga summit and also served as deputy director of white house climate change before going to the state department where he was on the policy planning staff and the bureau of economic affairs. bill is very well-equipped in terms of his own experience to

lead this afternoon in terms of presidential first years. welcome, wonderful to have you back at brookings, thank you. [applause] >> thanks, martin, it is wonderful to be back and see so many familiar faces in the crowd and in the hallways too. it is a home away from home. the first year is real. it is a real calendar driven period of time baked into our constitutional system because of an observation lyndon johnson made which is you get one year because after the first year congress stopped thinking about you as president and start thinking about their own reelection which comes one year later. that drives two things in our political transition.

first, it drives the domestic agenda. if you want to pass things legislatively you have to work with congress, whether that is president of a different party of congress or other outsider presidents from one party who control both houses of congress, sometimes succeeded but other times struggled, johnson succeeded famously. other presidents like jimmy carter and bill clinton struggled in their first year. on the domestic side it is a calendar driving issue and on the national security side it is a moment to do significant change in the country's approach to the world but also because of the relative inexperience any team working with one another, a moment of crisis where other countries will test the united states. we saw that in 9/11 and bill clinton's first year when al qaeda attacked the twin towers, the truck bomb was in the first year of the clinton administration or on policies gone astray such as the bay of

pigs, but good the shoe, the shootdown of the spy plane over china or a failed coup in panama which caused the first bush administration by surprise but out of those crazies come learning well, a month after that, reminded that the first bush team adeptly responded to the fall of the berlin wall. that all happens in one year. we had the miller center have been looking at presidential history for the last year and a half, preparing for this moment. i want to show you a short video and get into the three terrific panels we assembled today. ♪

♪ >> an extraordinary democratic moment occurs with the peaceful transfer of executive power in america. thomas jefferson, in his first inaugural address referred to the presidency as opposed above his talents. jefferson humbled himself before the magnitude of the undertaking. it takes one year for a new president to go from here to here. >> mister speaker, the president of the united states. >> history teaches us a president's first year in office is critical, a time of dangerous

peril and exceptional opportunity. >> a problem for you and forces is controlling this. >> he was wounded. >> i can hear you. >> the real world tests the untested commander in chief and the new president must act. it is also when presidents can enact their enduring policies lucy civil rights act of 1964. >> renewing america's promise at home or making historic frequency on the world stage. as the inauguration day 2017 approaches all responsibility is to look beyond, to prepare for the new president's first year in office. how will our 45th president staff the cabinet, prioritize an agenda and act on it? what risks and rewards dwell on

the horizon? the miller center has launched a nonpartisan effort to research those present challenges and take those ideas directly to the presidential candidates and their staff, to opinion leaders and the public at large. the first year project illuminates the major issue areas featuring public events, digital components and vigorous promotion and communication strategies. we are connecting history with policy and impact. >> hello, how are you feeling? >> pretty good, how are you? >> like hell. >> what is the trouble? >> i got a little bit in congress and a little bit indochina, the vietnamese, a little bit all over the country and i thought i would call you and try to get a little advice

and a little inspiration. >> reporter: the miller center specializes in studying the institution of the presidency. we apply the lessons of history to contemporary public policy challenges helping to understand and shape the modern presidency. our scholars have conducted comprehensive oral histories for every administration since president carter, creating a living network of the most senior officials who have led our executive branch. the miller center brings the lessons of history to life and connect the past to the future. >> to dive into this we assembled three panels today that combined the terrific expertise of our own scholars but also partners like the brookings institution. in putting together this project

we had essays written by almost 10 scholars across brookings particularly from governing studies where i have the pleasure of being a senior fellow, our great thanks to darrell and the team. the first panel includes my colleagues who will look at first principles of a presidential transition in the first year and we are delighted to have the two people who successfully did the last transition from the bush administration to the obama administration, that will be moderated by my friend and colleague barbara carrie and after that we will have a panel on moving a domestic agenda and organizing for global challenges. with that i handed over to barbara and her counterparts for the first panel.

>> our colleagues, thank you very much. thank you for being here today. i was telling bill this is my first visit to brookings. i feel i have been here because as a political scientist time forever tuning into c-span and watching brookings panels. it is such an honor to see moderating a panel at brookings. as you can see from the program we have an amazing group of scholars and practitioners who served in four presidencies which in the case of josh olson, bush xli and bush xliii, chris lou, deputy secretary of labor and in the obama administration

and elaine came her of the clinton administration. we represent four presidencies and we want to dive right into the subject of today, particularly the title of this panel is first principles. all of you have the amazing experience of being part of a presidency in the first year. some of you long after that as well. we want to start off today with that very intriguing question of how a president-elect goes from being a campaigner to a short window of opportunity of being president-elect and start the first year of his presidency? we will start with you. >> i can say generally in one word they do that poorly. >> explain. >> democrat or republican, not a

partisan statement, i will explain with a couple statistics. there are just over 4000 jobs the president has to appoint in the federal government but also 4000, a little over 1000, the big ones that are concerned by the senate and even that is a big number because it is 700 to 800. a lot of those, a couple hundred of those are part-time appointments and things like that. you are looking at 700 to 800 people to run a government and uniformed military of 4 million people. impossible. one of the things a president has to figure out is what is this thing he has inherited? what happens is whenever a big blowup happens, gets who gets

blamed. president obama wasn't in charge of writing code for the healthcare website. i promise you the american people looked at him and said oh marco, you screwed up, jimmy carter did not fly helicopters into the desert but that came back to get him. george bush wasn't the living ice to the people in the superdome in new orleans but that was a big platform on his presidency. what happens is presidents tend to ignore this vast government they run and the government blows up on them and surprise surprise they get blamed because the american people think the president is the boss. the first thing the president should do and rarely do is figure out what this thing is and understand at any given point in time, an organization that consists of several million

people, two things are happening and they are happening simultaneously. something is going very right. they have the right intelligence on this problem, the right analysis on this problem, the right expertise, and at the same time somewhere else something is going very wrong. they are understaffed, something is about to blow up. i will end with an anecdote i to open chapters in this book and it goes back to fall of 2013. on december 13th, two days from tomorrow, 2013, there were two astronauts in space repairing a misfiring heating and cooling system at the international space station. they were floating around in space in spacesuits doing

something for most of us was inconceivable. two months earlier the obama administration was facing the collapse, meltdown in the healthcare website. in october 2013, november and december everybody started writing the government, what a mess, can't do technology, and the same government in the same fashion had these two guys up in space want to ring around doing what they were doing. the fact of the matter is at cms, the centers for medicare and medicaid and nasa, federal bureaucrats had contracted with private sector companies to do a job the government wanted done. at nasa there is a company in western massachusetts, they make spacesuits, go figure, they make spacesuits these guys were

wearing. in other words the press wasn't any different. it was at any given time something is going right and something is going wrong. presidents generally figure this out when it is too late. and then they discover their campaign skills of messaging, tweeting, speechmaking, rallies, your campaign skills don't help you when the government has blown up in your face which is why it behooves presidents to spend less time wandering around the country and a little more time in their first year figuring out what is happening in the government that they are the head of. >> example of things blowing up makes me think of a first-year fiasco, the bay of pigs

invasion. certainly that blue up in president kennedy's face and he went on national television and said i take responsibility for this. i am the responsible officer of this government and his opinion poll ratings stored to 83%. there might be a little bit of a lesson if people are going to blame you anyway go ahead and take responsibility and it might work in your favor. let me go chronological order according to presidents, president bush xliii. a little bit about the fact that you were with him throughout the campaign as head of policy and part of the transition but in a very short window of opportunity because of the bush gore controversy. >> thank you. [laughter] >> thank you for the work you do at brookings and others, it is important.

i had the good fortune of being a part of the bush campaign, the bush 2000 presidential campaign which began at the beginning of 19 $99 two 4 years before the election i arrived at the office in texas as policy director of the bush 2000 campaign. you started early in the obama campaign. that is the first way that you start to build the presidency that can withstand the difficult period of transition every president faces. president bush, then governor bush said something interesting to me on my first day i arrived in office and i met him in his gubernatorial office. and he said do a smart thing,

put all the policy together and he said just remember one thing. i want to campaign the way i am going to govern and govern the way i campaigned. every presidential candidate ought to begin the campaign that way. i doubt whether he used the same words but president obama said much the same thing with what he was telling me, and the rest of the staff, was build a campaign, build a policy structure, something i can take into the white house and implement because what i say on the road is what i am going to do in the oval office. we were blessed in the bush campaign also with having a campaign staff, that was essentially a staff that was itself ready to move into

governance. i was a policy director, became deputy chief of staff of policy, karl rove was political strategist, became a strategist in the white house. aaron hughes was the head communicator. she became the head of communication in the white house. when you have a good campaign team that is ready to move into the white house you are able to mitigate another source of great disruption during transition which is the total changeover in personnel. very often, campaign people are not good governance people, and in building a campaign or building a government, presidents ought to look for both. we were unusually blessed. we had only half of the usual transition because of the

recount in florida and yet i inc. we came in with only 37 days worth of transition. in much better condition to know who would be in government along with president bush and what the agenda was. we had a 450 page policy that spelled it out. my concern for the current transition is they are not in that sort of position. there is not a big policy agenda with details to it. there are inclinations and directions and so on which is what the public pays attention to and worked very well for president-elect trump and there is also not a big infrastructure of people ready to move in with him. it is incumbent on all of us to get through this.

to help what is a difficult situation for the best prepared, those that are coming by. >> that is a perfect link to chris lou and the outgoing bush 43 administration worked closely with the transition team for president obama to make that transition as smooth as possible. >> in every setting like this i complement josh for the tone he and president bush set. >> i tried to show up at these things. >> in 2007 budging for cooperation with the incoming president regardless which party it was and the success we enjoyed in 2008, our transition is in large measure because of the cooperation we received. i was in daily communication working through transition issues, all 77 days. and return president obama

pledged collaboration with his successor and on balance we are doing that. it is challenging. i think it is fair to say there is a play about how you transition from campaigning to governing. this president-elect -- the president is ripping it up. whether it is foreign-policy, tweets, the carrier deal, there are a lot of things that we have not seen before. it will be interesting to see whether changes -- i suspect it will not so this is going to be an interesting ride for all of them. >> be sure. let's turn to governing itself. let's say we got through the transition. you have situations as in the case of president bush xliii where he had a very clear agenda in the campaign and to say i want to govern the way i campaigned makes it seems to me

a fairly smooth transition to prioritization of policy topics and policy issues. i wonder if you could talk about president clinton and his prioritization and what he brought in as a priority and what might have begun to be imposed upon him by events. >> he had a similar saying, that was good government is good politics. ..