of african art, and friday night on cspan 2, authors talk about war and the constitution. saturday night at 10:00 on become tv's afterwards, author heather cox richardson, and live at noon, on book tvs, legal affairs and editor in charge at reuters and supreme court biographer. friday at 8:00, on american history the on cspan 3, historians and authors talk about world war i, 1 one years 4r5er9. and former fbi director on catching -- the 100th anniversary of the panama canal. find our television schedule at cspan.org and let us know what you think about the programs you're watching, call us at inñg 202-626-3400. e-mail us at

comments@c-span.org. like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. know a conversation on technology and social media, and we'll hear from an executive from lincoln and the founders of change.org and the magazine mental cross, the atlantic and the aspen institute co-hosted this hour-long event. please welcome to the stage megan garver, christina lewisid halperin and nicholas missoula. >> hi. >> hi. >> good morning. >> good morning. >> today it's my honor to welcome this great group of people. i want to get right to the conversation. so i'm going to do a lightning introduction of all of them. to my right is christina lewis

halperin. next to her, the senior technical manager at aol, who he both manages product and team management. howard has also been coding since he was 14 years old. and last but not least, nicholas who ask a sophomore at the early technologies high school in brooklyn, and he has been on the robotics team. i would love to start with christina, can tell you us a little bit about program code and also in particular why you wanted to focus on young men. >> sir, all star code is ---we attract, prepare and place young men of color by teaching them

computer science and coding in one-stay workshops as well as an intensive 10-day program. we feel this is the recipe for success in job growth in this country and it reveals extremely undiverse. it features 3% of our workers are black and latino and fewer than 1% of startups have an african-american on the starting team. we give them extra skills and intensive career training so we can place them in our career pipeline. we will give them other guidance in choosing their path in an advisory role. the reason we're focused on boys, this program is so successful, there's already two

national programs working with girls in the states. i spoke with the directors of those two organizations and they felt that minority boys need programs like this too and there's no need to duplicate their efforts. we have been open two months and are piloting our first summer program this year in new york city. we just selected our first class. >> nice. how many people? >> 20 students and we got over 130 applications. >> wow, that's amazing, that's let's talk about some of the particulars of the program. nicholas, can you tell us a little bit about your experience, did you have a favorite of the four you have attended? >> i have only been to one so far, and from it, i received a whole bunch of education when i went, they showed me how they took a problem and used coding to solve it in a way that was unknown to me when i went, they stay stated the problem to a

whole group of people and they decided how they would use -- they would use this certain apis to solve the problem and it was just cool, i have never seen anything like it. >> that's really awesome. application program interface. >> what we can offer these students is exposure to the tech industry, even students like nicholas, who already gnknew he wanted to go into tech and is studying it at his school and is on the robotics team, have so little access to fall technology professionals, has never visited a technology company in new york. in fact the first company that we brought you to was spotify and nicholas said i thought spotify was just overseas in europe. he didn't know that they have their u.s. headquarters is5m he in the city. and that's where we can really make a difference. because if you can't see it, if

you can't see how and understand how what you learn in school can be used in the real world, and that path, we feel that you can't dream it and you can't follow that path. so that's what we expose our students to. >> awesome. let's talk about this idea that you do hiring. et cetera, at aol. >> care and feeding. >> care and feeding, yes. let's just, i guess, dig into this idea of sort of net working, and what net working itself, i know that's a dirty word and maybe rightfully so in some perspectives, but it can be also beneficial? >> absolutely, a lot of what attracted me to the program was net working these kids with professionals. i found that i benefitted a lot from mentors in my own social and professional network. so i thought it was intriguing to be able to offer that to

these up and coming technologists. >> mentoring is so restrictive, it's mostly about being available. and that's one of the things i enjoy, let me bring you to the different teams, let me explain some of the things that give you quizzical looks, it's interesting because you're not quite clear about what you know and you can convey until you're asked about it. >> that's awesome. what's been your favorite moment of mentorship so far? >> i have found when teams have that internal spark, it's limitless what can be created, so when you see that spark in the kids, you know they're on a particular path and there's very little that they can't accomplish at that point. >> nicholas, i know this might change like tomorrow or in a year, but at this point, what do you want to do later on?

>> at this point, i would like to do a little web design and i would like to start learning a little bit more about photography. >> oh, awesome, cool, cool, and integrated within technology? >> yes. >> that's great, awesome. one of these ideas that i would love to get your perspective on, this idea of sort of culture fit, it's a term we use a lot in hiring in the silicon valley and tech in general. it can be a good thing because people want to hire people who can work well with the team and who can integrate and work well and that kind of stuff but at the same time it can be sort of an excuse to hire people that look likes you and act like you. so what sort of, a, is the ideal hiring approach that you guys would like to see and b, what do you think of this particular idea of culture fit? >> my idea was originally as a professional journalist, i reported for "the wall street journa journal", i was very familiar

with different businesses, but i was not familiar with the tech industry until i went to a convention a couple of years ago. it was a different world with a different set of expectations from the corporate world that i need. so culture fit is indicative of that. and i saw at the same time that there were very few minorities. and i could see that things like culture fit, an emphasis on technology, an emphasis on being a self taught learner, is something that black and latino students weren't familiar with and needed exposure to. things like culture fit are a fact of life in the tech industry and what we're doing is supporting our students in educating them so that when they do pioneer into this and we fully expect our students to be able to do that, they won't feel so different when they arrive. >> yeah. >> so we have to prepare them for -- can i talk a bit about the inge picture ration for all

star code? >> yes. >> well, my father, regional lewis was a pioneer on wall street, he was born in 1942 and in 1942, in segregated baltimore and went to all black schools all his life until he went to an early prep program that was run by harvard law schoer֍ and tha program opened the world to him and gave him the education and credentials to springboard him on to wall street, where he went to the law firm and ended up being extremely successful as a finan financeir, which was a typical white boys club in the 70s and 80s. because of that, i have firsthand experiencing on seeing how early access programs can have a huge affect on the lives of interested in talented

students if they're exposed to a stage where they can really take advantage of it. that's why i feel confident that with this program, our students can innovate and pioneer into >> that's wonderful. >> my father unfortunately passed away 21 years ago. this is a wonderful tribute to him, i think. >> wonderful, well, this idea of sort of education in general, you know, it had come up a lot. and what would you guys like to see about sort of the education system as it currently stands, what should we sort of change if there could be something changed about the way that we sort of approach teaching skills versus teaching approaches. ? >> everything in our teachers and in our mentors is project based, in terms of our learning, our students are taught ---are exposed to video game design, to wearables to of course web

development, mobile apps and a focus on a final project. and our students demo what they have learned and actually put together a product instead of working one-on-one where a teacher assigns the students work and they do it, they work informally in teams, so that they always understand that they have to collaborate, workingr"d formally put something together and i think that -- and many people feel that schools have to do more of that with their students in terms of lab work and other things that help students give them the skills, the holistic set of skills. >> what was your final product? >> final productx:,z in all sta code? >> yes. >> before we started working on the robots, we worked on -- they gave us three problems and i believe i chose -- yes, i chose the problem that there's a rundown park in the neighborhood and what are you going to do to

get your community to come and fix the part? and what my team and i did was we photo shopped a bunch of posters and we said we were going to put it all over the neighborhood and get the word spread. >> awesome. >> i was going to talk about tom from the first workshop. >> spotify, we had to build a place where people could lempb about music and learn about the knew music that is coming up. and so i coded a website and it was basically a prototype of what it would look like, and it was a whole bunch of articles where you could talk to the or pianists and learn what they're trying to make. >> that is amazing. >> that site is live right now? >> i have it, but it isn't up on a domain. >> i hope it gets up soon because i could totally use that

site. thank you for sharing your time, this has been wonderful, thank you. >> thank you. please welcome to the stage deep nashar.,z3 >> thank you. wow, that's loud. it's great to see everyone here÷ you know, i was a little worried getting on the stage because for those of you who were here at 9:00 a.m., you saw the -- then you had theebñ fountain water g. has anyone done moderation, any

of your friends phone it? there was one in california this past weekend, and i saw some pictures, it's pretty gruesome. the thing that people pay $100 each, not only slide through mud, but at the end, you have to go through a wall of live wires. you actually get jolted with electrical shocks. some people will go to any extremes. so i found that i had to notch it up a bit. i will talk about not economic empowerment, but bare hands and feet rock climbing with 50-pound knapsacks on their back. that's my next multimillion-dollar business idea. no, i'm just kidding. i do climb for fun. but that's not what i'm going to talk about today, i'm going to talk about economic e0#ñempowe.

i'm going to bring you back a few years and talk about a communication device that is quite expensive. you're awake in line for a long time to get one and it was only available in one color. can anyone guess what that is? i heard someone say the iphone, you had to wait in line for months. there are friends of mine who waited in line for about 48 hours or so in palo alto. i'm talking about the big black board. anyone remember this. it's going to be an exhibit at the museum. this phone was a very important device, when i was growing up in india, it was one of those phones that made that sound, and it goes by, the rotary dial. it was a very important device.

the reason was it cost 10,000 rupees to get, it was in the '80s. that's about six months salary for an average person in india at that time. we had to wait in line sometimes for five to ten years to get one. and it was only available in the color black. this phone was so important that most of the time it would be under lock and key, it would be in available. it was a very expensive, hard to get, important device. '800s mumbai where i grew up, looked like this, lots of tenement housing, i grew up in a place like this. me and my parents and -- we shared an outside toilets with a bunch of other tennants that shared the same floor. you got running water for 30

minutes every evening between 9:00 and 9:30, we would fill it up in a bucket so we could use that water for the next 24 hours. in other words we had a very happy existence, in the 80s, that's what middle class used to be like. most of us also aspire to go do something different. and as i was growing up, in the early '80s i was in high school. and i was a science major, and one year that i really wanted to do for the science fair was to create electricity out of geo thermal energy. and my concept was the following. there's a lot of extra energy that comes out of the earth. a lot of eruptions, geysers, i wonder if you can harness this energy and use steam turbines and convert that into electricity. and the way i wanted to

demonstrate that is to have a little light bulb glow. my partner and i spent six months making this work. we spent months of research at the library, there was no internet then. at practice sessions, all this was working. and finally the big day arrived, the judges came by, we're presenting our project to them. and then that exact moment happened, about showcasing the demo. i knew that i was going to become an engineer. because i had that moment that every great engineer has, at least once if not multiple times in their life. their demo fails at the big moment. the light bulb did not light up. and i was crushed.

thankfully, the judges saw the power of what we could do, they were excited by our enthusiasm and we placed second. and not only did we place second, we showed up in the national newspaper the next day. i was famous. loved it. i never got over the fact that the first place winner was some kid who copied a popular mechanics thing about creating a robot from bicycle chains. i'm like, really, people? i'm just kidding. i was on cloud nine, if i only had one regret, it was that i did not parlay this fame into a hot date. because i went to an all boy's school, couldn't really do anything like that. the person who was behind a lot of this work was really my middle school and high school science teacher, let's call her

mrs. j. mrs. j. not just taught us the principles of science inquiry, but she also was a disciplinary, she was the person who brought you back on track. she would make you think about the problems you were facing. she would try and connect the theory that we learned in the classroom to what we were trying to do in our projects. to teach us why on paper the geo thermal energy project, which always worked flawlessly, but in reality is implications and the uq not always what the books tell you and it didn't quite work. she went a couple of steps further. our school was crowded, we didn't have space or time sometimes to work on the projects we were doing. she literally opened up here home and we would work on the project on evenings and weekends

and holidays in her living room. she enabled us to go beyond where we were. once i had a bunch of questions that she couldn't answer and she said, why don't you go call someone? here's the person, here's the number, go talk to her. you can imagine, i'm 12, 13 years old. i barely use the phone, i didn't have one at home. there were only two such phones in our entire school. one was on the principal's desk and the other one was in a drawer with the school clerk under lock and key. so i go up, i go to the school office, i ask the school clerk, mr. dyers, i said i need to make this call, he reluctantly hands me the phone, i make the call, a short call, i get my answer. and something changed for me. for this scrawny little -- as i

walked out, i felt an inch suddenly i found a connection with the world that was beyond the 1 kilometer radius between my home and my school. it's almost like mrs. j, the mentor in my life had shown me the art of the possible. beyond the confines of where i lived, and where i studied. and she did this not just for me, but for hundreds of other folks like us. and we have gone on a lot of us to become doctors and lawyers and in some small way tried to make the world a better place. she gave us the key that opened the lock. i have been thinking about this quite a bit recently because even as the world is becoming increasingly connected, and nowadays, this is a cybercafe in

my old neighborhood, i can walk in there, you know, kids like me, 30 years ago and walk in there and instantaneously be connected to all sorts of information, all sorts of people around the world. you still have a fundamental disconnect. and the disconnect is what andy mccaffrey who is going to speak this afternoon, i highly recommend listening to him. he talked about the second half of the chess board. what we are teaching our young people these days is about how to sol technical problems, the challenge is, the computers are already soling these technical problems, what we need to teach them is also how to construct these problems together. and that is something that needs to be really embraced through something called steam. steam stands for science, arts

and -- we need to learn how to construct the right problems. if you can't construct the right problems to solve, you're not going to solve them correctly. and at the same time, computers are becoming better and better, technology is becoming better and better, and we can solve these problems very easily. the phone we have in our pockets today, has more power than supercomputers had just 20 years ago. but what indeed blue and watson, therybq computers that are the d masters on chest cannot do is they cannot go solve and genetic code. but they were programmed to do a certain thing. but as we programmed computers on each one of these problems, it will solve all of them. we need to bring together the disciplines of science and art. countries that have embraced this, countries like china,

india, israel, they're seeing this economic prosperity, that we're seeing in the growth rates of the gdp. this is important to me personally as well. not justn as the person who ca from mumbai to silicon valley, but also as a father. i have twoaged kids, and as they start on academic and professional lives, the one thing that we all experience, what do they do? will they have a job? will they have a future in this age where all of our skills are becoming quickly obsolete. these problems are not easy problems and they may even feel daunts, unemployment, unequality, poverty. but all of us, at some level or the other have overcome big problems in our lives and we

have helped to make the world a better place, to our work, to our communities, to our professional work. so as i think about these issues, specifically the issue around unemployment, i feel like there are three distinct problems that together we can tackle, something i learned from my days growing up in mumbai. the first issue is that of the skills gap. we have come out of one of the worst recessions that we have known historically. there are 3.9 politicalon open jobs in the u.s. right now.pfx/ñ even as 30% of young people under the age of 21 in the city of detroit are without jobs. we cannot fill the jobs in silicon valley, there are 30,000 open jobs as we speak there. a new college graduate with a computer science degree is getting $100,000 in signing

bonus alone in skill con vilico today. yet there are tens of thousands of people in america that don't have a job. it's because we don't understand the skills that are needed in silicon valley to what is being taught to all these people whether in high school or in college. we are teaching young people the kinds of things they need to know in order to be successful in tomorrow's economy. we need to do more of that.ññ the second issue is that about greaterbiç thinking, what i was talking about earlier, if picasso once famously said that commuters are useless, they only give answers. and he was half right. they do give answers. they aren't useless, in the

completely useless. but they are giving us answers that we -- this is that left brang and the right brain, this is the scheme disciplines, that is what gives us the iphones, the teslas, the amazon buying abilities. this is what's inherent in all of us that technology cannot mimic, and which have to teach this to our young people. the final thing is dpi versity. -- diversity. most of the jobs, these high paying jobs are held by white males. nothing against them, it's not their fault. it really isn't, they are capable, they are available to get the jobs. the challenge is that since 1984, when we had 38% women representation in the commuter science disciplines in university, we have come down to 12% today. the trend is going in the wrong

direction. if you don't have enough diversity in the universities don't reflect the -- university breeds creativity, there's lots of research that's happening there. this is where programs that folks like the president of the harvey muck college put in place are -- i just put on a discussion with her about how she has actually increased enrollment in the last few years because the education instituti institutions, from 10% to 40% has gone in the other direction. and she's done it using some very well known techniques and following suit. but the challenges clearly are big. the problems are big.

but as i think back on that little backbone and mrs. j, i think we also have possible solutions in our grasp. the first is connecttivity. when you think about the skills gap, the challenges that no one is telling a 20-year-old in detroit, they should not be taking shop class. because a lot of the automotive manufacturing jobs are changing, they're either going to robots, or they're going overseas. however, as we speak, there's a power plant in georgia, that's been delayed because there aren't a sufficient number in that country. we thought ios programming because there are 3,000 devices in the world and there are millions of apps and people want to build more of those.

we also have a disinstinct advantage. we have hundreds of thousands of jobs, over 3 million companies, a lot of professional knowledge. educational institutions, all of these can come together and programically we can figure out where the skills are needed and we can start pointing people, not just individually, but also through pollipolicy, public poln the u.s. we're all right working with veterans, but we can do a lot more. the second, the human connection, i have had dozens of mentors during my 30-year career. and i'm really thankful for that.j1,$@r(t&ho but all of us are paying it forward, all of us could be mentoring the young people. we have to create more institutions like all-star code, like metro net, another organization that we have recently gotten involved at lincoln and me personally.

mary fernandez, the founder and chief executive at mentor net, is a great example of how mentoring can help. she was a computer science student who almost dropped out in college from that discipline and went to do something different. but she found a,h+fñ mentor or mentor found her and said, no, you can do it, mary, and she went on to get her phd, she became a very illustrious engineer and is now taking that body of knowledge and creating a network of

leadership, not just in terms thinking, but in terms of actually doing, things that are happening in all star code. this makes difficult and arcain tech system subjects very, very accessible elsewhere in the world. we also need to use the -- there are 30,000 nonprofit boards right now, they are nonprofit boards that are 30,000 board memberships available that are -- at the same time there are so many folks who have accomplished so much who can give back to the community and they don't know about these cr :,x)euj. we can do the same for any discipline that we choose to. this world is a very daunting world.

it doesn't matter that i was 14 '80s and feeling like the doors were lock ed if you ask any young person today whether they live in silicon valley, whether they live in mumbai or sal palo. they all have insecurities about what the future holds for them. just like my mentors, who connect med to the outside world, who gave me the use of that big black phone, we can also enable the young people in our lives that we want to help and see them, help them see the power of the big, beautiful world full of opportunities in front of them. i hope we can take these ideals back to at least one person in our lives and make the world a

better place, thank you. >> please welcome to the stage, justin brown and ben wrathway. >> well, thank you very much to new york ideas, it's a pleasure be here. my name is justin brown, i'm one and ceo of change.org, which is the world's largest petition platform. they have got over 65 million &háhp &hc% world.

ben, can you help us understand what a petition is by giving us an example of a successful campaign from your platform? >> yeah, thanks and ghareat to here. a lot of people have been skeptical of the power of petitions an i think understandably so because historically they have been run in a way that is not strategic and not effective. and we're seeing a transformation in the efficacy of online torvbú offline moveme. a 10-year-old girl who had cystic fibrosis who had two lungs that were failing and needed a double trance plant to live. except there's this ole archaic law restriction that keeps young people under the age of 12 off the transplant list. she couldn't get the transplant despite the recommendation of

her doctors and many more given her size. so her parents try to go lobby internally, try to change the policy over a number of months, they are unsuccessful 57 it looked like she was going to die. they got 300,000 people to join, got the endorsements of her senators in pennsylvania, then the huge national media covers it and after just a week of campaigning and hundreds of thousands of people mobilized, the government ended up changing the regulations, saves her life and changes it for all kids who hope to experience the same. we see this thing all the time. it's not an option even just a case that it's around government stuff, it's a lot of corporate stuff as well. in fact just yesterday coke and pepsi announced for the first time they're going to remove a very controversial chemical from all of their products. and the reason is because of a 15-year-old girl, literally, this girl sarah cavanaugh last year decides to petition

gatorade to remove this chemical, it's a fire retard danlt, remonthed in japan, but the lobby of the soft drink industry has prevented it from and after just a few weeks of campaigning in the con text of never having addressed the issue, gator announced that they're going to remove the chemical and other kids start campaigns around other coke products and other pepsi products and they changed entirely and removed all this toxin from their soft drinks literally baud of a 15-year-old girl. this seems remarkable to people who don't track the country, but it literally happens every day, thousands of victories jiflt like that every day. >> i think that's absolutely amazing to hear the specific examples of campaigns. what we're seeing today is a real explosion of these campaigns, particularly on

change.org. why are we seeing this explosion and what do you think explains theo04tñ success of these campa? >> you know, historically, one of the biggest impediments to social movements has been the expenls of organizing people together rapidly for a common cause, which is very expensive in time and in money and that has him paided the number of -- structurally disadvantaged, large numbers of people and advantaged small groups of muddied interests. where you have a situation of private interests often times overcome the public good. but what's happening now -- the x times or five times, but hundreds of times of campaigns that ever existed before. and when you have the incredible ease with which to start campaigns, they start to look different as well. instead of campaigns around changing the health care system. it's a consistent campaign around a single girl 10 years

old to -- it's not añç campaigno change and all toxins in all products, it's actually a particular campaign to get a particular chemical out of a particular company's products, coke and pepsi. while they look small, because of the capacity for massive scale, not one or two campaigns, campaigns, you end up having greater national impact than the small number movement that people have tried to run nationally. >> so what would you say would be the specific components of a successful campaign. the most important thing that we see is that the campaign is achievable and specific within a small, short period of time, traditionally, the reason petitions haven't worked online historically, they're mostly targeted at the u.n., the president, and the congress, the )jjr' the c a campaign that's targeting individual mayors or city councils or school boards or

individual counties, that ends up being much more effective, not because of the aspiration of the movement you're trying to run, it's the necessary step to build from person to person to city to city. it's not as if we have innovated on how to run social movements, historically the fact that the most powerfuléq&]s cigarettes movement in american history was started in no small part, narrative speakings because a woman refused to walk in the backs of a buck, there's a spark necessary to move from city to c> so would you say that change.org and the citizen movements leading us towards a direct form of democracy? >> if you look at traditionally speaking how -- there's a very small communication between elected officials and their elected representatives. it's literally some private

communication, e-mail sometimes, but mostly not for most campaigns or most pieces of legislation, and the result is, for every single piece of legislation, there's a lobby group that's up pressed because of muddied interests. but as you have an increasing percentage of the constituencies of every elected representative that are mobilized, we'll have in the next few days, literally half of the voting public on taking action. u you increasingly provide insentives for -- which is a radical transformation regretingly in the world bethink. this is an exciting thing and i think it properly insent vises elected officials. many state reps dofblt don't want to spend -- resources to buy attention during elections which buys votes. and if you can actually more directly go to constituents and

have access to a much larger percentage of your electorate, you actually have insechtives to engage effectively and that's what's going to happen more and more. >> can you provide us an example of a petition campaign on your platform that went directly to elected officials and led to a change in government? >> one of my favorite and it starts with a very tragic story. there's a loophole in the department of transportation authority bill that was passed in early 2000, that made it such that rental car companies were not legally required to return recalled cars. so literally dangerous cars were not required, it's expensive to enterprise and hurtz lobbied to make that change. a pt cruiser had been recalled three months before, was not returned, per the loophole in the law, it ends up catching on fire per the concern of the recall on the highway, hits a

st semi, they die. their mom understandably, distraught wants to fight them and she files a civil lawsuit against enterprise and she wins in 2011. but the law has ngn't changed. this was an incredibly obscure thing. and there were a number of lobbyiers that wanted to maintain this. but the momgfé in this case enp starting a change petition gets 100,000 people wan 24 hours, gets on the "today" show and the staid snow calls enterprise for comment and literally after a decade of lobbying for this policy, turns and and announces a change in their position and supports a law which has just recently passed in the names of these two incredible young women. it's an opaque situation that advantaged muddied groups appears in a massive mobilization of people who will paying much more attention in no small part because we are

personalizing issues that once seemed abtrablstract and levera the empathy that human beings have. and that engages them in politics that didn't happen previously. >> creating change all around us in the local context. but i guess there's a huge role for the traditional media, in helping us advance change, can you tell us a little bit about the role of traditional media in the petitions on the website, change.org and how it actually creates these successful campaigns? >> i think there's a lot of members of the media who lament what looks to be their inevitable demise, i think the media has far more potential power than ever before. historically the power of media  been transparency, revealing things that lead ultimately to accountability. but the effectiveness of the

kind of immediate what that is actually trance parent is -- then mobilize to enforce that accountability that it requires. so you used to have a lot of articles that ended up being investigate i reports that÷apons to reveal awful practices, after which the issue adjust falls flat, that's not subsequent action and it just dies. what happens now is you have this reader base mobilize a campaign that ends up extendsing that into a citizen movm that drags it out over a period of time. the one example i'll give here that i love recently is so the guardian has been writing in the past about this tragic issue of female genital mutilation, or fgm, which happens a lot in the uk, largely because of somalia immigrants coming into the country, it's illegal. the guardian had been writing

about it but it's hard to get people really engaged in the issue. so they partnered with a 17-year-old somali born garl wh. she starts a petition on change.org, she gets over covered seven times over the period of that month. she ends up getting it endorsed by ban ki-moon, after ignoring the issue entirely gets a meeting with the education minister, and the next day, in the context of trying to avoid this issue, for many,sa-e many years, because of a 17-year-old girl, announces they're going to educate 100,000 teachers to educate the girls at threat and their friends who can identify a solution for it. and that you would not have happened in the guardian. it would not have happened without the amplification the guardian provided. >> that's amazing. there's been a picture painted of the future in which citizen

engagement, direct democracy and technology are helping us all create that bit of future together. what words would you say to those of us in the audiezdpg tht would like to bring that future a little closer towards us, so that we can a little more active and create that change at an accelerated pace? >> i would say a couple things. one, a very pragmatic level. lot of people in the audience who are a part of members and influences of the institutions that are going to be responsive to citizen movements. while i think it's ineftable this will happen and unfold over time, we do see they're pioneering elected officials and companies that are embracing the reality we now live in a different time consumers and constituents have more power than ever before and they hold the brand of these politicians and these companies in their hands. we started to establish former channels through which elected officials can engage with constituents. elizabeth warren and paul ryan both committed to responding to

their own constituents through their site and companies are now doing the same thing. so to the extent that you work for a company or a politician or a member of the media that can actually start to embrace this new reality, to respond directly to constituents and consumers or amplify those in public, there's immense opportunity there. then the second thing i would say is the remaining thing that we see as a primary impediment to social change isn't actually the tools necessary to make it happen, it's a belief that it's possible. and so one of the things we q%%m5 that people have that everyday people cannot make a difference. and so as citizens, which we are all, as sit chens the passionate belief, the suspension of cynicism and skepticism, the recognition this is not some random change, but the technology is transformative change in the structure of relations between everyday people and large institutions and our belief and our ability and our commitment to engage in

that as citizens and not workers and politicians is powerful thing. i hope to see more people do it. >> thank you, ben. i think we've had a wonderful picture painted is changing the world. we often do hear about social media and how it will lead to massive change. it's really[èww tools that change.org that put these into action. thanks ben. [ applause ]. please welcome to the stage, derek thomas, william pearson and david beersteen.

hello, guys, hello everyone. i hope you find a seat. we're here to talk about young people and reading habits. how young people read and how we ñ screens that are ewe bik kwi us to. david has a difficult job of speaking on behalf of 86 million people, the millennial generation and will and mangash have the easier job of speaking among two people. david is quite good. my first question) mental floss guys. facebook has become the home page of news for news publishers, the atlantic has seen this, facebook now drives more of our traffic than our home page. it is literally our most important page for news. but it's not necessarily a home page for news for most people. a pew study found that just 10%

for the purpose of reading news. and i was looking at a piece i wrote recently a few months ago of the most viral stories of  that were most successful on facebook in the buzz feed network which covers a lot of different publishers. here they are. how y'all use and you guys talk, new york times. two years after she passed away, a woman gives her family an unforgettable christmas, buzz feed. it's thanksgiving so we ask the brits to label the u.s., we're so sorry, america. buzz feed. 30 signs you're almost 30. buzz feed. you go through this entire list. there are practically no news stories. there are, however, lots of interesting stories. what mental floss seems to me discovered very early on, there's something about the curiosity for content, that doesn't necessarily prize timeliness or newsworthiness, the journalistic principles, but rather interestingness. tell me a little bit about how that's animated your philosophy at mental floss and how maybe

you've seen an evolution in reader behaviors since social media has really picked up in the last few year. >> sure. well i know obviously facebook has made a number of changes to the algorithm and really trying to feature these interesting stori stories. i wouldn't look at facebook necessary as an outlet for news or conversation around that news. so what we found is an interesting challenge is that when ever something huge is going on, that's what everyone is going to be talking about. so as a news source or information source, if you were to just repost or tell the story of what just happened, you're not going to get any pickup from that. so the key is to cut through the clutter in an interesting way. one interesting example i can give, during the presidential debates a few years ago, you have obama and romney up on stage and the left and the right are bashing each other on social media. romney then brings up sesame street. rather than having any common tear on that or telling the story of why he would have said

what he said about sesame street, our social media editor, jason english, simply tweets the fact that big bird is 8'2", period, end of story. it becomes one of the most retweeted comments of the evening. and it's that -- it's that key that people want to be able to share that most interesting thing that happened that night and it's not usually just the story itself. >> and for mental floss really started as this very selfish endeavor, sfliegt it started in a storm room. it was this mixture of cocky and naive that you were in college and we thought, you know, there's no magazine like this, we'll start it so we started a print publication in 2001, which wasn't the best time to start a print publication. but it was also some necessity, right? this was a gut feeling that we had that you could create a magazine that was optimistic, very encollusive that could educate in a very quick and fun way. but it also hadded to have a shelf life and had to stay on stands for three to four months.

and so we concentrated on interesting. it really was what felt natural to us and what we wanted to read. >> i love the description of a mix of cockiness and nigh yefty. some combination of that. david, you know, there's a sense, i think, that millennials are like this post-human tech utopia when it comes to news habits. and it's weird because there was a pew study that looked at exactly how young people read and it was surprisingly conservative. they were exactly as likely to use their smart phones and tablets for news as 40 somethings and 50 somethings. and 60% of them, the same share they preferred print-style reading experiences over these graphics-rich, snowfallesque reading experiences. so, should this surprise us? tell us a little bit about how we like to consume information.

>> well, you know, it's really interesting because when you think about millennials, one of the sort of suppositions as you said is that it's this generation that is, you know, that is unlike any -- just wants to do things online. and when you think about the tactile experience of leaving through ablp magazine or leavin through a print publication, there's something about that experience that is about a sense of curiosity. and that there's a sense of seriousness that young people want to consume their news with. and i think there's been a lot of assumptions to think this generation doesn't want serious content because we're younger, we're not seeking that. in fact, this is a generation that cares deeply about the world, that cares about importance issues that wants to be engaged with that. they want their experience to mirror that. while we enjoy going on a site like buzz feed and looking at catalyst kals -- >> we do. >> and we certainly do. there's a sense that we really do care about the world. we want to consume that news in that kind of way. if you look at how everybody wants to consume news, the

kindle, for instance, and there's more and more emphasis on trying to emulate the print experience as people read. so when we think about millennials, those trends on how millennials are consuming news are not dissimilar to other generations but millennials do care much more about where that information comes from. and, you know, it's more likely their friends will share something in that format. that's one of the big dirnss that it matters much more to us where the information comes from, who gives it to us and that is one of the biggest changes that that trust is really, really important. >> quickly pushing back. when you say who gives it to us, the publisher, the name between w-w-w and.com oro67ñ person who is sharing that piece information on facebook or on twitter? so that @5sx sharer becomes somewhat sin nom mouse with a publishing brand. >> that's exactly it. the sharer is becoming more important than the actual source of the information. do i trust this person? if this is one of my most trusted friends and they post

something, the chances i read that and highly of it are greater than a person i met one drunken night in college and i friended accidentally. >> right. although they can actually -- >> let's talk about that. can we talk more about that? >> right. you know, pivoting to sort of media strategy, you guys have an extremely successful youtube channel. this is interesting because right now in media, as people are beginning to see that display advertising on regular articles doesn't necessarily scale terrific well, it's difficult to have hy-c pns, they're turning to video as a savior. the trouble as i see it, in order to have margin, in order to make profit on video, you but it tends to look like cheap, quick video. make really, expensive, lux yours youly created video, that expensive, so you lose money on that. where what have you figured out about video that people in the audience working with advertisers would love to know? >> just before we answer that, i

was thinking like part of the reason our video works is because it's sort of simple and authentic, i feel. and when you talk about things like snowfall, i think it is this very elegant experience but it's sort of the same learning that you keep getting over and oth over, right? when everyone moved to create websites in '96 and '97, every publisher put all these bells and whistles and craziness. oh, yeah, it's this remembrance that this great story sells. ipad, everyone put these apps and loaded them with craziness. and people are reading the pdf readers over all these applications that you can lift the ipad and see a million bones in a hand or whatever. >> people just want the words. >> right. or the elegance of stories. that's part of what we do with video is that we found someone who relies information in an authentic way. we packaged it in a list of a

bundle. and it's told very simply. and it's just the hooks of good information. and i feel like because people do want to be able to read their -- digest their news in a way if they're standing at a cross-walk they can see a story or if they're sitting and relaxing that they can read a longer piece, you want to give them information any way they can absorb it, are lists on video are, you know, these little hooks where people can break at any point but are engaged enough that they want to watch a nine-minute video. the completion rate on these tremendously long videos in the youtube space is interesting. >> that was one of the biggest in creating these videos is the question of, will people sit down and watch a ten-minute video because that's the average length of most of our youtube videos. what we found is that people are looking to fill every moment of their day consuming content when they have any free moment. whether that's 30 seconds at the

cross-walk, three minutes in line at starbucks, ten minutes during a break at their computer and we look into to find multiple things we can do to fill each of those gaps. when you mentioned the high quality, you know, there's high quality production and then there's high quality content. that's the part that we really focus on is saying, let's not just crank out a-0ñcontent, let focus on doing a great show every week and looking to add more shows to that but each one of those should be very well researched, well scripted and that doesn't cost a fortune to do that. >> who is the mental floss reader? is it college graduates, young versus old, people passings out of the bars. >> i sure hope so. bar exams. mostly passing on bar exams, i think. so, you know, it's really not quite -- there are a number of -- especially as we've done more video, number of teenagers and college students. little bit more kind of the young professional, late 20s, early 30s is who we're finding. it's busy professionals that do have those gaps to spend some time to read.

and so, we're killing productivity across america with mental floss. >> fantastic. >> david, this is a tough question. but i hope a good question. the internet, when it was coming about, was ignored for a while by a lot of publishers and now it's the dominant source of revenues for all sorts of publishers, including the new york times. twitter came along and people said it was stupid and now news. the facebook news feed wasg$< lambasted and now it's potentially the home page for content on the internet. in terms of our reading habits, is there something right now that we think is stupid that five years from now will think we were stupid to think it was stupid? >> well, i don't know if this is something that we think is stupid, but i think it's something that's bd underrealized or sort ofo as sort of not serious. i think there is a difference between being not serious and

being stupid. but it's sort of data visualization and infragraphics. right now we're in the early days of that world of news content and people who have been in traditional news are looking at that stuff is interesting, a novelty, let's play around with that. but i think we're living in an incredibly, incredibly complicated age. being able to break down issues, being able to break things down in a way that's more easily digestible and bringing those experiences right now that are very, very expensive, very hard to replicate on mobile devices, but i think that as that field grows, it's going to become a bigger and bigger part of mainstream news coverage and how we take issues and how we deliver them to people. there's one thing, if i may, is serious now that i think will be silly later, which is sort of niche media t>l+sites. things that are focussed exclusively on one audience. lot of sites that are p young people advertised as young people want to come here and read young people news.

>> feel free to use names. >> i think that that world -- is going to change. lot of these sites that are targeted for a specific audience more and more are viewing ourselves as wants to view3 lñ news that everyone is viewing. that will start to change over the next decade. >> what do you guys think? >> i mean, well, infragraphics are easy, you can see they have a long shelf life. but i think that there's always a good idea in how people are communicating and always a better way to use a medium, even something like gifts, which seem like jokes of a property of like a cat falling or badger waiving or something can also be instructions on how to tie a tie or like things -- >> how to waive. >> but to be able to see complicated ideas very quickly is something that is valuable.

and i feel like people don't always see the kernel or the elegance of how something can be used. >> yeah. it's interesting how they were used for animating animals doing human-like things. now you see a lot of serious pieces actually sort of trying to explain serious issues but animating the serious issue -- >> with sport. you see it talked about on -- >> absolutely. >> i think -- it's whether or not people embrace a platform, more to me than whether or not they're worth in a way of communicating way of information. >> that's great. thank you, guys very much. thank you. [ applause ]. couple of live events to tell you about here on c-span3. reince priebus talks to the rnc

chair. president obama attends the congressional hispanic caucusfó dinner. we'll have his remarks and you can watch live coverage here on c-span3. more now from the 2014 ideas festival in new york. we'll hear from a nasa scientist working on mars exploration, later cancer biology fist talks about medical research technology. the atlantic and the aspen institute co-host this 50-minute event. we're going to talk about mars for the next few minutes. this is adam sneltzer who is an engineering fellow in pasadena california at the jet propulsion laboratory. he invented that crazy contraption that helped to land the curiosity rover on mars. how do you beat that? what have you been doing since the