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 cat listicals -- >> 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 differences 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 dot com or the person who is sharing that piece

information on facebook or on twitter? so that the sharer becomes somewhat synonymous with a publishing brand. >> that's exactly it. the sharer is becoming much more important than the actual source of the information. do i trust this person? how do i feel about this person? if this is one of my most trusted friends and they post something, the chances i read that and think highly of it are greater than if it's 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 want to make cheap, quick video. 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 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

surprises i think for us 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 content, let's 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 passing out

at 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, there are a 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 twitter is the home page of news. the facebook news feed was 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 under- realized or sort of viewed 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 sites. things that are focussed exclusively on one audience. lot of sites that are specifically catering to 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 view the 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 ]. our campaign 2014 coverage tonight features two governors debates. mary fallon debates joe dornan at oklahoma state university in stillwater live on our companion network c-span at 8:00 eastern. on c-span2 at 8:00, democrat chuck hassellbrook and republican pete ricketts face off in lincoln, nebraska. here's a look at some of the ads in that nebraska race. >> you know, all across our state, i see people facing the same tough challenges. nebraskans just want a fair shot, and that's why i'm running for governor. i stood up the for family farmers and ranchers and we helped 10,000 small businesses and secured tuition assistance for young nebraskans. as governor i'll invest in our future by expanding early childhood education and training

nebraska workers for good paying jobs. i'm running for governor because when nebraskans work together, we succeed. >> typical politicians are at it again. they're losing. so they're falsely attacking pete ricketts, but pete, he's staying positive, a proud nebraska business man endorsed by sarah palin with a plan to cut property taxes. >> typical politicians don't get it. i'm pete ricketts. when i started with the family business we had 150 people working in omaha and now there's more than 2,000 here in nebraska. i know how to create jobs, set priorities, and produce results. and that's what i'll do as governor. pete ricketts is making false attacks, but ricketts tried to avoid paying his own taxes. but his organization proposed a plan that would raise taxes for family farmers and 80% of nebraskans. ricketts would lower taxes for corporations like the one owned by him and his family. ricketts wants higher taxes for us but lower taxes for rich people like him.

nebraska needs a governor who fights for the middle class, and that's just not pete ricketts. >> the nebraska i grew up in expects people to take responsibility, to treasure faith and family. those are nebraska values. >> pete ricketts. >> my faith guides me, from raising my family to running our business. i believe god gave us fundamental rights and our constitution protects them, that we have to be a culture that protects life and inspires responsibility. i'm pete ricketts. as your governor i'll work to make you proud and lead nebraska with our shared values. >> the nebraska governors debate live on c-span2 at 8:00 eastern. more now from this year's new york idea festival with conversations on mars exploration, american culture after 9/11, and looking far cure of cancer. from the "atlantic" magazine and the aspen institute, this is 50 minutes.

we're going to talk about mars for the next few minutes. this is adam steltzner who is an engineering fellow in pasadena california at the jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena, california. 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 landing? >> yeah. well, great. couple things. no one person ever invents anything. it's always a great team effort and actually that's one of the beauties of engineering it's a collaborative art. the ideas for many, many people combined to make these great things that look breakthrough and look crazy but are fantastic come out of the minds of many folks. so what i've been doing lately is working with a new group of -- a different group of great people, which is fantastic to me

because i always love the interaction with new groups of bright talent. and we've been working on developing a system to sample the surface of mars and containerize it very safely for potential return to earth at a later date. so, for our investigations to date on mars, we have packed the science instruments into miniaturized form and taken a lot of effort to get them on to the surface of mars. we think, or certainly the science community believes, that to answer the final questions of mars we'll probably have to do it backwards, which is go and package mars and bring it back to earth to use the science instruments and the various scientists on earth to do the investigation. and i'm helping develop the first piece of that puzzle which is the sampling system. >> that's great.

what are the final questions of mars? >> is it alive? was it ever alive? are we alone? those are some of the questions that we're asking of mars. >> and why do we ask those questions in particular? it seems like, you know, when it comes to space travel, space exploration we could take so many roots and justifications, we could say we want to explore for exploration sake, we want to, you know, get a broader scientific understanding of the universe, why do we focus on life itself? >> well, i think life is very profound question, right? we see life all around us on earth, but when we look out into the stars, we don't see it as obvious certainly and we don't really see it at all and could we really be alone? could all of this, all of our experiences be a unique moment in a unique location in our universe? it's a profound question, it has religious implications. it's something that we've considered perhaps the dawn of our self awareness.

so we do explore for many reasons. i think we're driven by our own curiosity to explore. exploration is a fundamental expression of our humanity, but the question that we tend to ponder more frequently than any other is, are we alone? >> right. and what if we find out that we're not? >> well, i kind of am already there just on the math of the thing, right? just on the billions and billions to, quote, good old carl seguin. i think for various people -- i mean, it is, i hope we're not alone, it would be -- if we were alone, i would immediately freak out. everybody stop doing everything, right? we might break it. we might be the only thing that the universe has got. so, it would be good for all of us to have a chance to

acknowledge whether there's life in other places in the solar system and to understand that life can evolve in other places and may also help us understand our own evolution and some of the processs that support us here on earth. >> along those lines, what do you think of the idea of terraforming mars or basically making a home on other planets in our own image in some sense? >> right. that's a great question. you know, folks ask that a lot, space exploration, where is it going? will we go to colonization. when people talk about that with they're worried about what we're doing to this earth. that's the terraforming paradox for me. the skills, the engineering, the care, the discipline necessary to shape a planet for us are the same skills and engineering and

care needed for us to keep this planet good for us. so, i don't think terraforming is a solution to our own lack of discipline or our own lack of care and understanding. now, there are other risks to humans other than ourselves. we are by far the greatest risk. but, you know, if you think very deep, long time horizons, you can imagine threats the sun going out, billions of years from now, black hole wondering into our solar system, there are astronomical threats to the human species. so you can imagine in deep time us thinking about diversifying our real estate portfolio, but for right now, for solving the threats that we pose to

ourselves, i think we should not consider that as a solution. >> okay. okay. well, when it comes to the actual work that you're doing with the sampling of mars, i want to get back to that a little bit. how do you sort of -- because you're essentially retraining yourself for a new mission, right? >> right. >> how do you go about that? how do you sort of go about the educational aspects of it as well as the sort of social aspects? >> great. great question. i happen to love doing different things, so this is -- previously i was land -- helping the team developing a landing system and now we're talking about sampling system, very different set of physics involved it's not burning up in the atmosphere, it's drilling holes into rocks and preserving the science that's found within it. i love that. i love learning about new fields, learning about new areas of intellectual endeavor and i do it sort of by reading, by talking to people, by talking to people smarter than myself and by assembling a team of people who hopefully are smarter than me and we learn together about this new field.

i try to make the team environment full of play because my daughter -- i have kids and i notice they learn through play and i think actually you can choose to never stop learning through play. so that's how i try to do it. and it makes it a little more fun for me and i think it makes it fun for the rest of the team. >> that's awesome. how does that manifest. >> not taking things of great gravity too seriously. >> no pun intended? >> and enjoying each other. word play. trying different techniques of looking at a problem, trying to think about all of the opposites. you know, sometimes when i -- when we're in a development and team members want to bring an idea forward or a change to

something that we're doing forward, i ask them to come with the through central reasons for the change. >> okay. >> and the three central arguments against the change to sort of help separate yourself from the ideas you're bringing forward so you can be warm and respectful to each other but brutal on the ideas you're playing with. >> yeah. q4$o÷ >> by having that objective distance. whole different techniques we use to try to make it fun and make it fertile for innovation. >> how does that fit in with the overall sort of infrastructure of jpl and nasa? is there a bureaucracy to be dealt with or do you have a lot of freedom? >> there's lots of folks who work at nasa. many, many, 5,000 people who work at the jet propulsion laboratory and doing something like building curiosity and getting her safely to the surface of mars required 3,000 of those folks at the laboratory and about 10,000 people spread over 30 different states the better part of a decade. you cannot do all of that in free association word play frolic. there's a time in the beginning

where you're developing ideas, you're understanding what you're going to do and that's when that open time exists. that's when you want to use those tools that bring in ideas from all sorts of different directions. and then there's an implementation phase where you have the thing you're doing and you have to make it happen. that becomes much more structured. much more regimented and more higher archal and involves lot more people and fair number of dollars. >> a fair number. yeah. what about the public facing side? i mean, i think to me one of the things that was so striking about the curiosity landing was just how much of a spectacle it was in the best sense and reminded you how much all this advanced technology is so fundamentally human and this was one of the first times that we've had such sort of intimate access to you guys as engineers

and to sort of that technology? how do you kind of think about the social side or do you not at all? >> no, i do. you know, what's interesting, i worked on -- we put a pair of rovers -- twin rovers on the surface of mars in 2004. and i worked a lot on that landing system. and in 2004, social media existed a little bit but not really. and we were the -- on the top news stories for cnn until frankly britney conspiracy got out of a limousine wearing or not wearing something and all of a sudden we fell off the list. in the era of nightly news, they tell you five things. if you're thing number six that happened that day, you didn't happen. now, this era is very different. social media, many different

multiple parallel paths of information transmission mean that people can become interested and spread the word themselves. and i've noticed huge difference with respect to curiosity, her landing, her landing system was even wackier looking maybe and she is big by the way. the version downstairs just in case everybody knows is half scale. the real curiosity, might be third scale. i can't quite tell. the real curiosity's head sits slightly above the george washington bus that sits down in the lobby. you can go and look up at george washington and get a sense of the real size of her. so she was huge. she was a little bit outlandish in the way we -- in the way we landed her. >> just a little bit, yeah. >> but more importantly i think there was a whole bunch of conduits, parallel conduits for information and contact with the engineers through social media and i think that's made a huge difference. >> that's great. is that something you think of on an on going basis? how do we portray this work that's not in full existence yet

but how do we get the public excited about it? >> so i don't. my strategy, which i hope is a good one, it's slightly dangerous, is to just be honest. and available. because i think that connecting with the public, who frankly are paying for these efforts and giving them insight as to why we do it and what drives us and who we are who do these things is important and useful. >> right. >> i think the idea that we engage the youth of this nation, which we do, i can tell you that i'm engaged all the time by young kids, young adults across the country who are motivated and turned on frankly by curiosity and exploration. i think it's one of the greatest services that we provide to the nation. and so, i believe in it. so i welcome opportunities to share.

>> yeah. do you think that's common throughout jpl, at least? >> in general, i think there's a lot of folks who understand the value of it. i can tell you it's quite frightening to share yourself openly with people. >> yeah. >> and so to the degree you can be less guarded varies from person to person. and i may be on the oversharing side of that spectrum. >> would you ever want to go to space yourself? >> so the more i look at space and the more i am involved in building robots that virtually explore space for all of us, the more i think of how delightfully warm and loving this planet is. i've got a very nice garden in the backyard of my house. i have two lovely daughters. and i'm very happy to stay right here.

>> that's wonderful. and i want to circle back you call curiosity she. can you just explain why you do that? >> yeah. that's a good question. um, i'm not the only one. we tend to do that at the lab and it may be that sort of the tradition of ocean-going vessels, naval vessels or it may be that we think of her in sort of a protective way -- >> interesting. >> i certainly do. by the way, curiosity is the better name for a girl than the boy, don't you think? i do. so, yeah, some collection of that we just organically, unintentionally without organization call her a she. >> interesting. very interesting.

i think the social media team was run by women as far as i know? >> yes, it is actually all women. that's true. >> this is going to have to be our last question. what's next for space exploration? >> great. right. there are other places to explore other than mars. there's the outer planets of jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, et cetera, those places are quite interesting. they're harder to get to. they take a longer time to get there and they have some interesting moons about jupiter and saturn. europa, titan, these are places that astrobiologists think might have the conditions that would allow life to exist today. maybe great examples for us -- great places for us to go search for signs of a living universe. and so i'm hopeful that we will be doing some work not only at mars, i love mars, been doing a lot of work on mars, but also beyond mars to the icy moons of the outer planets. >> wonderful. thank you. actually i think we have one more question. yep. from mr. steve clemens here.

>> hi, folks. i'm steve clemens. i've been obsessed with having you here. i am so excited. this is not a commercial for seemens but i'm thrilled we were so obsessed. when they brought curiosity here and said they will do it, i've been obsessing -- what's the pipeline like of younger adam steltzner ins out there? is the country getting it right in doing that? semens donated a few billion of dollars of this software you used to do the landings. they've gone to cleveland, ohio. they're going to richmond to try to give young people an opportunity to play around with this fancy software that you used. it made me think about is the pipeline of young talent like you there and what should we do to enhance it if it's not what it should be and then we'll wrap it up and then i get to interview the next guy on the next stage. so megan, thank you. >> you're welcome.

>> great. great question. i think for me, the key to making more people like me -- actually i do that -- not cloning but my wife and i have a whole program based on that. but i'm sure my wife tricia is loving that right now. oversharing, right? i think the most important thing that we can give our young people is a thirst, a drive to search for that which is awesome, that which brings awe and wonderment to them. whether they find that in the visual arts, in music, in politics, in literature, or in the sciences and engineering, i'm not very concerned because our nation, filled with inspired young people who are driven to see what they can do will be a great nation and will make the world a better place. so, to the extent that our efforts, exploring mars, putting

a rover named curiosity as our curiosity helped touch that in youth. it makes me very happy and very humbled to be part of it. so i look forward to any effort that we put forward to create awe and inspire our nation's youth. >> awesome. thanks so much. [ applause ]. please welcome to the stage, steve clemens and anand giridharadas. >> nice to see all of you again. >> how are you doing? >> great. >> i think we should bring this conversation back down to earth. >> thank you so much for joining us today.

i don't know if all of you have noticed, but in the lobby, not only do we have curiosity down there, but we have copies of anon's book, the true american murder and mercy in texas. it's a deep -- it is a deep book. i know i had mentioned to you before for me it was kind of a life of pie meets truman capote's in cold blood. can you give us a quick overview of what the true american hits and what it's about? >> so all of you remember 9/11 and the feverish days after 9/11 when we were all kind of in a frenzy and that loop of the planes hitting the towers was over and over again on the tv and you will also remember that

in the weeks after that, a few unsophisticated, perhaps deranged, angry people went around arab hunting, as some of them called it. and this book is about one of those self-styled true american as he called himself arab slayers. and he went to three different gas stations in dallas, texas, shot the clerk behind each of these three counters in the month after 9/11. two of them died. and the third one was spared by a bird-hunting gun that blinded him in one eye but spared his life. and this book begins with that and -- >> his name is rais bhuiyan. >> and mark stroman is the attacker. and the reason it's a book is ten years later inspired by his own ability to rebuild america and realizing the man who shot him actually came from this very different america that had failed him in a lot of ways, rice re-enters the man's life by publicly forgiving him and then fighting a legal campaign against the state of texas, the

governor of texas, rick perry who was announcing for president that month and fights to save his attacker from the death penalty and get him commuted to a life sentence. >> you know, there is -- it's a fascinating story -- >> and a true story, i should say. >> when i was reading it and thinking about rais' real obsession with saving him. i mean, it's not that he just tried casually to save him. that would have been an interesting story. he was in tears constantly trying to explain saying that he couldn't feel whole as a person unless he overcame this by both having an encounter with stroman so that he could understand when stroman was there taking lives and about to take his own life what was in his mind and whatnot and being able to forgive him and move on and have that encounter.

and they did have -- there's a time here where he had had a conversation he said, rais kept replaying one moment of a phone call he had with stroman in his mind. once he said that word, i love you, bro, i could feel already my tears were coming out of my eyes. the same person ten years back he wanted to kill me for no reason for my skin color, because of my islamic faith and now after ten years this same person is telling me he loves me and calling me his brother. it's a profound story. when i was thinking about it, you write the letter from american column for "the new york times." i asked myself, is this a beautiful boutique story that has no echo effects? what are we supposed to gain and what are the echo effects you're hoping to gain from this story? >> in a way, it was the opposite. i was not particularly interested in texas. i wasn't interested in the death penalty. i wasn't interested especially in these crimes which were

actually ten years before my getting involved in this story. i was really -- i had been in india for several years as a foreign correspondent. i gone back to the country my parents had come here from and was in india in a time of optimism and came back to america and found in a way the reverse process happening here, this loss of faith in the american dream. that was the thought swirling around. and i found in this story, two men who embody an america that actually still works better than it has ever worked and better than any other place in the world has ever worked. for all the declinist talk, a lot of it is hogwash. you know, most of the people in this room, whatever they're doing, whatever institutions they're part of are probably functioning better than they have ever functioned and that any other country has produced. but a lot of us don't live in this america. in a shooting, in a weird way, it was the victim of the shooting who came to see

himself, despite being an immigrant, despite being shot, despite being half blind as part of a fortunate america that still works and still works for people like him and still allowed him to rebuild a life, get a job at the olive garden, learn i.t. and make six figures. the man who shot him belonged to america that stopped working a long time ago. in this particular case, a white-working class, ex-urban, texan existence, where we may use the word family but nobody would recognize it as a family, every dad is gone, a lot of moms are in prison or addicted, everybody is raised by grandparents or great grandparents, jobs are scarce. and there's just no fabric left. and once rais got to know about the world that had produced that man, his argument actually became that this man's life should be saved, should not be executed because he didn't have the same shot despite being born here at the american dream that i did as an outsider. >> so tell us a little bit about mark stroman. i hope i'm not stealing his story.

he was executed. one of the other profound moments somewhere in here is something along the lines that stroman loved all the love that he was getting from rais and everyone and the attention, the effort. but at the same time, he was ready to be done with it and that he secretly hoped rais would fail, that he had come to terms with what he had done and wanted to die. but what was his -- i mean, i sort of sense that happened he involved in this but what was his evolution? >> this is a guy who at one level the book begins with the shooting and almost anything you learn about him at the beginning or maybe even ever makes you say, this guy is just bone rotten, nothing redeemable in him. but the more you learn, you learn something from his trial where in a capital murder trial lot of trial is about the kind of person's character rather than simply what they did. and then through what he writes

when he's in prison, you also learn that -- you kind of learn two different ideas. one is that he's bone rotten. the other is that he had no shot of being anything other than what he was. you have to hold both those ideas. you cannot say he had no shot therefore no big deal, you killed a few people. but we have to recognize that in his social world, almost every young man that he knew whose name i could track down from his childhood also went to jail for violent crimes. this is not inner city, in our movies and culture we think it's black people in the bronx. this is white america in texas. and we need to broaden our sense of where our social fabric is fraying. and he grew out of this world that -- where everybody has no one. and he had no one. and he was abused by the few people he sort of had. his mother told him she was $50 short of the money required to

abort him and she wishes she had it. and yet that never excuses killing people, but for me, it raised profound questions about how do we as a society draw the line between personal responsibility and collective responsibility for people like that. >> you know, it occurred to me that just recently i had written a piece in "the atlanta" on the reaction or the situation where three young guys allegedly killed a young australian jogger in oklahoma and they were out there saying they were bored so they decided to kill someone. and that was also going through my mind as i was reading this and saying, what insights have you gained in terms of deconstructing what was going on in the heads of these various people about the larger social dynamics of what i think you call the undernation, this hurting undernation? beyond this story here, what should we all be doing to be worried about those kids who are

bored so they decided allegedly again to go kill someone? >> in the last third of the book, since you mentioned the execution happened, it did happen. the last third of the book is all after the execution. and it was very important to me to not have this only hang on stroman because he is clearly an extreme figure, so i spend time with his children, his children are much more normal. they've not done capital murder. but two of the three have been -- had felony convictions. they've struggled with meth and alcohol. and they live in a world in which everybody seems to have those problems also. and i think what i learned -- you see today's headline or yesterday's on staten island's heroin problem and that it's now the bottom of the island not the top that was connected to manhattan. you see this thing in vermont where the governor devoted the full state to addiction and those places. this is a sort of different problem, i think, than our inner city crack problems that we've talked about, for example.

this is something where i think boredom is actually a part of it and there's been stories about kentucky. we all know these stories and they kind of come up individually. but there's something going on about a combination of a lack of work, a real collapse of men, a real collapse of men. i mean, a lot of men -- millions of men who require the bodies of men but don't ever leave being boys, who spend their lives rotating in and out of prison, this is such a massive thing going on. it's starting to affect the marriage market. i spend time with, you know, these daughters of mark stroman. and i said, what do you think of this whole -- are people getting married in your community? what do you think of this idea that marriage is going down? in some abstract level i believe in marriage, but if you look at the men in my words, the men i kind of have access to, they are all much more unstable. i'm pretty unstable. they're much more unstable than

me. >> are you okay? >> i'm glad you were so moved by this story. that happens at all the events actually. [ inaudible ]. >> i hope you're okay. can we make sure -- can we get someone over here, please? is anyone on my team here? logan? okay. in any case, go ahead. >> and you have an entire world that feels like it's just imploding. and part of what's interesting is when these inner city problems were the big story, they were three miles away from the biggest media center in the world. this is very different. if things -- if kentucky is just

imploding, it takes a long time before word arrives here. we're just not in it. we're not seeing it everyday the way we saw the bronx everyday. and there's also a lot more people who live in the kinds of places i'm talking about than live in the american inner city. and i think it's -- if anything, kind of grows out of this in terms of documenting something that i hope other people who know how to solve problems as i do not deals with. it's this particularly among white working class kind of just complete fabric fraying. >> this may be a completely unfair question, but what struck me again thinking about this slice of time that you've looked at from 9/11 where there was so much palpable national anger that opened up for people a real rage, and in that, lots of things filled that basket. you know, disappointment and anger about their own personal conditions, you know, you saw this in terms of various other impacts i've seen in joblessness and the anger at the outsider, the other that came on. i think a lot of this is out there.

i'm wondering, if you were to sort of grade this, truman capote's book came to mind. there's other cases of just horrific moments where we've seen this sort of bigotry explode. is the country getting better or is it getting worse? do you have a sense of things that have come in to sort of be useful correctives? there's another way to read this book and say, this story is a naive story that rais was a naive guy that he wasted a lot of time trying to help someone who is an awful cretin escape justice for some vein moment he had and that's not a healthy thing. that's a dark side of reading it but you could read that. >> i think that would have been the correct interpretation if rais' conclusion was mark stroman was a fluke. i think it's completely wrong to think mark stroman was a fluke. he was an extreme expression -- most people don't do this even if they are as angry as he did, but he grew out of something.

he grew out of something that is not working. and in the world he came from, a lot of people's lives are not working. and i think we need to kind of deal with -- you know, if we were having this conversation in the french -- in the paris ideas event at the french historical society, i think the issue would be more a kind of generalized decline of the country, or in most western countries. america is actually very different from all these other western declining countries, in my view. because the capacity at the top, again, lot of people in this room and what you do and the institutions you belong to are actually still world beating and that's not true of even most other western countries. most of the best things that are done at the world in any field are still done in america, for all the talk of china and india and this and that, right? where is that mars thing happening? that mars thing is not happening in a lot of other places. so we have the capacity.

the issue is can we connect the capacity that those of us that are a part of and the institutions of those that us are a part of to the 72% of the americans who are absolutely not a part of that america. >> we're right at the end. is rais comfortable, happy, comfortable with the book? what's his story just today really quickly? >> he is doing great. he is comfortable with it. i was nervous. he was nervous. he read it a few weeks ago right before publication and sent me a note saying he was crying and was stunned that it seemed like i was in the room for some of these things where i was not. in his childhood and his past. it's an amazing gift, i have to say, for both the stromans and rais to allow someone like me to kind of come into your world and not knowing what i'm going to do or say and let your story be told because without that we wouldn't know very much about our condition. >> ladies and gentlemen, check out his book, the true american murder and mercy in texas. are you going to be downstairs signing some copies? >> i will. i will sign copies of this book.

if you prefer other books, i'll sign copies of those books, too. >> sounds great. before lunch, i'll give you a quick rundown of some of my world. i'm a cancer biologist, i'm a genetic scientist. i'm going to run through a few things about cancer, about drug developments, about some of the work that i've been doing that i think you'll find pretty interesting. i'm with a group auto desk, it's normally known for design with a brand new group in that company focussed on bio and nano design. cancer is a relatively straight-forward disease, even though we really accumulated a large body of information on it. strip it all down. it's really cells that have had their dna corrupted. and that corruption allows it to start to grow without the proper restraints. and if it keeps growing and starts to spread through the body, it can crash the network, essentially.

the problem is -- when you think about it, really, cancer is an infection, not with a microbe or a virus, but with one of your own cells that has gone rogue. and it is a life-threatening disease, like any infection when it happens. 100 years ago we didn't worry quite so much about cancer because it was actually bacterial infections that tended to kill us. small cuts, accidents, et cetera, if we had a bacterial infection that started to colonize, continued to grow, we had nothing really to fight it with. then this molecule is discovered in 1929, penicillin. penicillin was a game changer in the world of medicine. it still took a while to get it up to production at commercial -- in commercial volumes, but once penicillin and its chemical cousins became available, suddenly we didn't

die from microbial infections anywhere near as much. today, it's actually quite rare, unless you have a very resistant bacteria. today we don't even get a day off of work. but this was a major life-threatening disease. cancer is treated in a completely different way. we carpet bomb any cell that's growing fast. the look of a cancer patient, the hair falling out, the iv pole, that's actually the treatment. it's not necessarily the cancer. so, we completely obliterate cells in a nondiscriminate way that are growing quickly. more modern medicines are targetive. medicines like herceptin and gleevec really key in on path ways in the cell. they're very focussed. they tend to be used alongside chemotherapy. but when they work, when those

targets exist in the cancer, it's as phenomenally different in treatment outcomes as penicillin and bacteria. phenomenal response. and bacter. phenomenal response. unfortunately, we don't have a lot of these magic bullets so to speak. we all want more of them. but we're not going to get them. and here's why. this is a 60-year trend in the outputs of drug development graphed out as billions of dollars invested in r & d per new drug. this is an exponential graph, but it's not the exponential graph we like to see in digital technologies. this is actually a negative exponential. what this means is that over the last 60 years, we're getting

dramatically less drugs per dollar invested in drug development. this isn't one company, this isn't one business, this is an industry that is not able to make its products faster and better and cheaper. this is something we expect from every digital technology. even though drug development is very high technology, it's really not giving us the medicines we need. last year, only 27 new drugs were approved. 27, for all diseases, not just cancer. the business model of the pharma companies isn't hard to understand. it's basically the same one used by hollywood. they go out and they find interesting projects. they bring them in-house, they polish them. they get them through sensors. the fda and the case of drug

development. and then they're marketing and advertising teams start to work to deliver it to the public. it's really long, it's really risky. it's really expensive, which is why like hollywood, drug companies choose to seek block busters. when you think about it, targeted medicines are more like those indie arts films. not a big audience. the problem is, it costs about the same amount of money to make a little indie art film as it does to make a hollywood blockbuster and get it through the drug development process. if you're making a niche drug, a targeted drug, it ends up phenomenally expensive. and the harder it is for the insurance companies to pick up for it and pay for it. or an individual to pay for it. . so the best medicines end up helping the fewest people. it's kind of ironic. i started thinking about this a lot. how could this trend be reversed? how could we make a drug company that truly made faster, better,

cheaper medicines? and start to generate lots of cancer drugs? you want to beat cancer, make better drugs. if i see everyone going one way and the whole industry over on this side i go the other way. and i ended up creating an experimental drug company that was completely different than anyone else. completely open source. no money involved. i don't need any money. i don't want any money. that's not the case for me no two cancers are the same. the cancer is your cells infe

infecting your body. no two people have the psalm cancer. i wanted to focus on one person at a time because if you make a drug for one person, all the really expensive and time consuming parts of drug making, getting it through clinical trials, it's irrelevant. risk and benefit reduces to a single individual not a threat. it's simply a drug for one person and one cancer. and that's actually a much easier problem to solve. i also had a big technology in my back pocket. i'm a genetic engineer and it's getting really cheap. can i make the most advanced in the world for the lowest price possible? ideally free?

and don't think free is so crazy. remember, 1995, giving away a free e-mail account seemed really strange and today we all take it for dpragranted. so the challenge for me is i had this tool, genetic engineering. i had this problem cancer that hadn't been solved yet. what drug could i possibly make that was cheap enough to do for one person at a time? and then a friend of mine dropped a paper on my desk. on oncolytic viruses. an oncolytic virus is a virus that breaks apart cancer cells. turns out, there's been about 30 years of r & d in oncolytic viruses. there's a whole library of them. people are developing the drugs during clinical trials. the basic idea of an oncolytic virus is this, it's a really, really weak virus. really weak, quite a common one,

usually. and if it infects a normal cell, the normal cell shuts it down. it's so weak that a normal cell has the viral defenses and just says, yeah, go away. cancer cells are broken cells, they're corrupted. turns out some of those corruptions lead them vulnerable. to weak virus attack. and the virus starts to grow into cancer cell, breaks the cancer cell and releases more virus, which can go on to infect more cancer cells. it's actually hijacking the cancer cells and turning them into little drug factories. now, the problem with this, these are safe viruses, but the problem is, your immune system recognizes all viruses as foreign and tends to shut them down. so the real breakthrough in oncolytic is we learn how to make it escape the immune system. so it can keep fighting the cancer.

and some of these companies developing these drugs are getting a lot of success. really, at the end of the day cancer cells just get a cold. it's really, really gentle. you don't get all of the dramatic effects. but i wanted to find a way to make these oncolytic viruses faster, better and cheaper. >> i was inspired by a nobel prize winner named ham smith. and they showed they could computer design a virus in this case a safe virus, just kills e. coli cells. they could computer design the genome of that virus, they could print out the dna of that virus, and they could boot up that virus to make virus particles. this is essentially the whole protocol. and it reduces down to design of a genome.

the build of that genome and the test of that genome. but this is the part i want you to see. it took two weeks to do this work in 2003. of course, that's with some brilliant genetic scientists. i work with this design company auto desk. we make really cool design software. we've been working on a project called project cyborg. it's for all forms of bionanoknow design. dna, i'm not going to go into that. we started, we took that bacteria, we modeled it. now you can actually see it and play with it. we're really good at 3d printing. you realize they're jigsaw puzzles. but we also used the same tools and technologies that we do for

dna. took these brilliant scientists ten years ago to do and it turns out they could. in some cases they have to push their synthesis machines to the limit. i was able to boot up with some colleagues these synthetic viruses. this is a growth plate wherever you see a spot there, a synthetic virus has booted up and started killing the e. coli cells around it. this is a synthetic genome booted up by a company, a software company because viruses are really little biological software. and i didn't have to go into the lab to do this. it was all digital. so here's what i see happening in the future of cancer.

we already have this digital diagnostics and the ability to get cells out of a patient. that's very straightforward. today we can sequence a cancer genome in less than a day. that's so much information. but it can feed into an auto design program. auto drug. from that design program, it can go to a printer to print that viral genome. and we can get that in two weeks now. for $1,000 in print costs. and that allows us to make a virus that we could actually test on one person person's cell. if it kills the cancer cell, it passes. that could be used as a treatment. we're testing this now. that's our next step. we'd love to do veterinary studies. but we think this type of approach could get into humans very quickly. because there's a foundation in oncolytic viruses. and because we can open source 

the entire design process. it's just software. you don't need a lab to do this. and the amazing part is the cost of writing synthetic dna like the cost of genome sequencing is falling so rapidly that it's actually really remarkable. oh, i'm sorry, it's not going back very well. the cost is falling so low, it costs $1,000 to make that virus. next year, it'll cost about $10. year after that, maybe $1. which allows us to explore new business models in drug development instead of just making one drug for $1 billion and taking 10 or 15 years. why not a netflix model for an individual where you can have all the cancer drugs you want made specifically for you for one low price. change the fda requirements about, you know, approving a single drug. instead prove a drug development process. and if these tools keep opening

up and keep getting cheaper, there's nothing to stop people from actually just making their own drugs. today we see phenomenal amounts of creativity coming into the 3d printing space. all generally starting with one individual. i want to see every drug maker, you know, come from the maker community. i want to see it done fast and cheap. i want to see these best -- these amazing medicines be available for everyone. and i think if we do that, we'll actually beat cancer. we've been fighting it for so long, we actually forget we just might win. thank you. holding the annual conference this week in washington. tonight, president obama is the keynote speaker at the group's awards gala. this is the fifth year in a row

the president has spoken at the event. it gets underway at 7:50 p.m. eastern. you can see it live here on c-span 3. a conversation on islamic terrorism and the causes of extremism. we'll hear from a college professor on what he sees as the 15 causes of terrorism. then a discussion with leaders of the muslim american community at 8:35 p.m. eastern on c-span 3. >> our campaign 2014 debate coverage continues. live coverage of the minnesota governor's debate between incumbent governor, mark dayton, jeff johnson and hannah nicolet. thursday night, live coverage of the oklahoma governor's debate also on thursday on c-span 2, the nebraska governor's debate

between democrat chuck haasabrook and pete ricketts. and live coverage of the montana u.s. house debate between john lewis and former state senator republican ryan zinky. c-span campaign 2014. more than 100 debates for the control of congress. >> we continue with the new york ideas festival on c-span 3 with conversations on the origins of the universe, the future of finance. we'll also hear from executives with chobani yogurt, kickstarter, hbo and donors choose.org. >> and the universe parts. the fabric of the universe unfolds. brian green has written "the fabric of the universe." the fabric of the cosmos, the elegant universe.

icarus on the edge of time, which i love. and the hidden reality. the trio of books that deal with multiverses, relativity. we are supposed to within 20 minutes, actually, 18 minutes and 17 seconds, give you the whole story of the cosmos and the universe. so, brian, let's begin at the beginning. how did it begin? >> how did it begin? oh, good question. we don't know. but -- >> but we have some ideas. >> and the ideas that it expanded. >> yeah, so the most refined idea which is by in my opinion no means confirmed is an idea called inflationary cosmology, a more refined version of how did it begin. what was it that caused space to start swelling in the first place? we all believe that the universe is expanding, the observation to support that. what got the expansion started and the inflationary theory says that gravity itself is the

culprit because even though the gravity that we're familiar with in everyday life is attractive, pulls things together, einstein's theory shows that in certain exotic circumstances, gravity can be repulsive. >> so you have a repulsive force that at the beginning pushes things out. does it create space and time as well as particles and matter? it's again a hard question but our best answer at the moment is that space and time needed to exist already for this phenomenon to take place it leverages the preexisting space and time which could be a tiny nugget and turns it into a large cosmos. so it basically takes space and time as an input very small, yields big space and time and matter and energy as the output. >> what happened the day before this happened? >> yes, i knew you were going there which is why i played defense here and said i don't know five times already in the first two minutes. so we don't know but we have ideas, right? one possibility is that the

notion of before is a concept that doesn't actually make sense when it comes to the beginning of the universe. a good analogy is think about the concept of heading northward on earth, right? so if you're heading northward you say point me in the direction of further north. you point, continue to walk, pass somebody else, same question, they point you in the northward direction. if you ask somebody in the north pole, they look at you sort of oddly, quizzically this notion of going further north in the north pole doesn't make sense. >> so going back in time doesn't make sense. >> at the beginning of time, that may be where the concept of time only comes into play and there's no notion of before when

it comes to the beginning. >> how do we get from general relativity to figuring out mathematically and theoretically the notion of a big bang? >> well, that's an exciting and curious story, einstein himself after he fashioned the equations of general relativity, he started to apply the theory to a variety of circumstances. the orbit of mercury being one famous one. the bending of starlight by the sun. but he also noted that if you applied the equations to the whole universe it gave rise toen a unfamiliar, unexpected result, which is that the fabric of space itself should be stretching or contracting. the universe couldn't be static. and that cut against the philosophical perspective of the time, including einstein. so einstein changed the equations to ensure that result

wouldn't come out, that the universe could be unchanging on the largest of scales. then fast forward to 1929 when edwin hubbolt turns powerful telescope to the sky and sees that the galaxies are rushing away einstein smacks himself in the forehead and says why did i change the equations when i could have have predicted this amazing fact about the universe from my own mathematics. >> yeah, calls it his biggest blunder. then they walk the cat backwards. had to evolve in this single point. >> that's right. you basically in the hands of a belgium priest was the person to articulate this most precisely. he used einstein's math, the face value math, not the math that einstein mangled to meet his own philosophical prejudice.

he called it the primortial atom. and the name big bang came later on. i think it was a radio interview with fred hoyle who was a critic of this theory and talking about it on the radio, oh, the big bang. it was a derogatory description, but of course, it's the name that stuck and our best understanding of how things started. >> you mention they get to it by walking the mathematical equations. it's sort of what you do. i don't think people know you're also the professor of mathematics. in some ways mathematics is now your guide post to figuring out this is how physical reality is. for reasons that we can't fully yet understand, math seems to be the right language for describing phenomena in the universe. math is the shining light that can illuminate the dark corners of reality that we've not been

able to access directly. we can't literally see the beginning but we can use the math to peer back using the equations to get some understanding of what happened at the beginning. >> don't we need evidence from physical reality? >> no. no, we do, and it's absolutely crucial. and without that we're just sort of speculating. and the evidence comes from so many places. first, einstein's mathematics makes predictions about things we can directly access like the bending of starlight by the sun which was tested in 1919 during solar eclipse and just as einstein predicted, the stars were slightly shifted in the sky because of the sun's presence. and you know the story well but perhaps not everybody does. einstein gets a telegram

alerting him his ideas had been confirmed through the observation. and somebody asked him, what would you say if the data showed that theory was not confirmed and he said i would file sorry for the dear lord because the theory is correct. this is how certain he was of these ideas. that's just one example. when it comes to cosmology and the big bang, we can use the equations to make predictions for how much residual heat should be left over from the big bang today, the so-called background radiation. and we can make predictions on how the temperature of that heat should vary from one location in space to another. and the measurements agree with the theoretical positions to fantastic accuracy. and that is a breathtaking confirmation that this mathematics is not just speculation. that the math is actually aligning with how the world works. >> give me an example. of that measurement of the cosmic background radiation.

what they go to the north pole or south pole? >> so there are many ways to access it. you can access it through satellite born telescopes, the wilkinson background radiation probe, which has doneés%' a fantastic job at measuring the microwave background radiation. but the more recent one is the one you're referring to, the experiment down at the south pole where for three years a team of astronomers pointed this telescope at a patch of the polar sky and extracted information about the microwave background radiation that, again, bears out a yet more subtle prediction of the theory. >> and this is radiation that actually emanated from the bang. >> yes. so in the beginning, it was hot, right? really hot and as the universe expanded, the heat diluted and it cooled down and you can calculate how could it should be today.

that's the temperature. but you can go one step further. how the temperature should vary from place to place, and the math shows it should vary on the order of 1/100,000th of a degree. and you can do these precise measurements and, indeed see the temperature variation and the patterns that the mathematics predicts. >> what do you mean when you call something the fabric of the cosmos? >> it's a hard question is space really a thing? or is it just a useful concept in order to organize our perceptions of reality. you're over there, you're

further away in space. the table is yet further. is space merely the vocabulary that allows me to articulate locations? or is space really a thing? and nobody fully knows the answer to that. but in einstein's general relativity and different people interpret it differently, i see space as a thing in einstein's theory. >> space, meaning the fabric of space and time together. >> space and time are stitched together. >> and they would exist even if nothing else existed? >> that's right. that's right. and there's been a lot of debate about this. if you were to remove everything from space, the moon, the sun, earth, everything, what would be left? would you have an empty universe with space and time? or would you have nothing? if you take an alphabet, right? and start to remove the letters. z and x and a and b. and when you remove the last letter, what's left? like an empty alphabet? it's like nothing.

comes into existence with the letters that make it up. is that true of the universe? does it come into existence when there's stuff populating it? or can there be an empty stage called space time that would exist in the absence of matter? i think it's the latter. >> there's a wonderful thought experiment, which you deal with in i think your first book. newton's bucket. >> yes. >> explain how that helps you think there is a fabric of space. experiment that isaac newton came up with when he was trying to understand basically if space was a thing. and he imagined taking a bucket and filling it with water. and he noted that as you spin the bucket, the water climbs up the sides of the bucket. i think, you know, even kids do this at the beach, right? you spin it around and climbs up the sides. >> what we would call inertia. >> that's right. the water has intrinsic quality that causes it to resist that motion and when it resists, gets pushed out, goes up the sides. he imagined doing that in a completely empty universe.

there's issues about that. gravity is part of what makes a shape. we actually now imagine taking two stones, same idea, connecting them by a rope and spinning them around. would the rope pull taut? and to newton it was obvious it would pull taut. and therefore he said, what is the rope and rock spinning with respect to -- there's nothing there. no earth, no sun. therefore, the rope and the rocks must be spinning, something called space. space itself must be setting the benchmark, the reference with respect to which that motion is happening. others came along and said, no, we disagree, you remove everything from the universe and take your spiny rock and ropey thing and it's not going to pull taut. it'll just kind of stay completely limp. and it's still an issue that

people debate. >> is there any evidence we could find one way or the other? >> it's very hard to remove everything from the universe, right? that's kind of what you'd like to do. so what you do is you try to find alternate implications of one perspective or another. and i would say today most people haven't done a survey, but i suspect most people say would pull taut. sets the reference frame for a certain kind of motion, accelerated motion, but there are others who are holdouts and disagree with that. >> what have we learned from the super collider? >> we learned a lot. we learned how to build the biggest experiment that our species has embarked upon. these are really, you know, the fantastic temples of the 20th, 21st century. they are our pyramids in a sense. but in terms of the science that we have extracted, the most important thing is the discovery of the particle. i think most people have probably heard something. so there was this particle that was predicted mathematically in

1964 by peter higs and many others who really deserve equal credit for it. but it was just a mathematical idea that was a solution to a puzzle. how do particles get mass? how do they resist being pushed when you want to speed them up or slow them down? and the idea was space was filled with a kind of molasses kind of substance. they experience a resistance type drag force. >> what is the relationship of the higgs field to the fabric of space time? >> well, if the higgs idea is correct, there'd be virtually no distinction between them. this substance would fill every nook and cranny of space. and in a sense, it would be unremovable unless somehow you could recreate maybe the temperatures of the very early universe.

the analogy that i think captures that idea is if -- i don't know, do you have any tattoos? okay. well, good. i don't know where you were looking and i'm not going to ask. but imagine that you start to have more and more tattoos and ultimately if you cover your entire body, then the distinction between the skin and the tattoo becomes kind of meaningless. you are the illustrated man at that point. you're completely covered with tattoos. similarly, space is completely filled with this higgs stuff. and if you can't remove it, there's almost no distinction between space and the stuff that fills it. >> what if they hadn't found it and found there is no higgs field? does the entire standard model of quantum theory go out the window? >> well, that would have been far more exciting for a theorist. less exciting, you know, for peter higgs and others. >> would we have lost mass? and lost weight? >> well, i don't think the

universe cares much about our understanding of the universe. it would have shrugged it off and, you know. but the wonderful thing is the theorist, we would have been sent back to the black board to answer these deep puzzles. where does the heft of the fundamental constituents come from? that would have been tremendously exciting for an idea we thought was the answer to be proved wrong. we are not, there's sometimes a missed perception that physicists or scientists more generally get stuck on an idea they'll hold on to it in the face of evidence that suggest the contrary. no, it's completely the opposite, we love it when ideas we cherish are proven wrong. to come up the next idea that will take place. this example, it was a wonderful triumph of mathematics and experiment where the idea was confirmed.

>> mathematics has led you to superstrength theory of which you're very associated. explain why the math led you there. >> well, since the 1960s and 70s, people have tried to put together einstein's theory of gravity with another theory, the theory of quantum mechanics. and turns out -- >> einstein, on his death bed, he was doing that. >> well, sort of, einstein was trying to put gravity together with electromagnetic theory to build a unified theory thinking that he could do an end run around the uncomfortable features around quantum mechanics he didn't like so much. he was hoping in some sense to go this way and then like do that to quantum mechanics. that seemed to not work out. so we are trying the more straightforward approach and the standard model of physics, hugely successful is unable to put gravity and quantum mechanics together. that leads us to the new approach on paper does put gravity and quantum mechanics together. >> is there anything in the next

five or ten years that you say would help give you a physical test of what you're doing there. >> no. i wish the answer, i can go speculative here. maybe speculation on speculation which is always an uncomfortable place to be. but just to say, we don't believe any of these ideas until they make predictions that we can test. so let's be real clear here. if you ask me, do i believe in theory? absolutely no, i never have and never will until there's experimental data that supports it. having said that, it is the most promising and, i have to tell you, mathematically compelling approach to putting gravity and quantum mechanics together. and that's an important puzzle to solve. that drives us to continue working on it. and the best of all worlds when

they turn the collider back on in 2013, is it possible some of these ideas will make contact. of our dimensions according to the math. we would recognize that by loss of energy. super symmetric particles that we haven't yet seen. we could see microscopic black holes that would decay into a spray of other particles. all of these things are possible. i consider them long shots. when they don't come through it, i don't want it to be, hey, you guys predicted that was going to happen. and then it didn't. no. it's possible, but unlikely. >> is it inevitable in strength theory that there are other universes? >> it's not inevitable. it is one of the very controversial developments over the last ten years.

>> but you believe it's true? >> again, believe is a funny, funny word. so do i believe in other universes? absolutely not. do i find it a compelling possibility and can i see how the math naturally suggests it? and does that compel me to work on it? it does. but until there's observation or experimental support, i don't believe anything. >> and i guess einstein once said that one of the grand questions was did the good lord have a choice? >> yeah. >> the way he invented the universe? explain that and answer it for us or for einstein. >> so einstein asked a very important question, which is could the universe have been otherwise? could the particles be different? did god, did the lord have a choice? or is somehow that dictated by logic and mathematics alone. and we don't know the answer. but if these ideas of other universes are correct, then it's

completely opposite. it may be that every possibility is played out in the grand landscape of reality. so rather than having one unique universe, it might be all possible universes. the truth is probably somewhere in between. >> we've run out of time. let me hit you with a couple of quick things. why does this all matter? >> well, if you ask my mom, it doesn't, right? >> she wanted you to be a doctor. >> yeah, exactly, right. gives her a headache and all that kind of stuff. but i think it helps many people get a sense of how we fit into the larger picture. how we're part of this spectacular cosmos. and i don't consider it making us somehow small and insignificant, although we are. but take into account these tiny creatures walking around on the surface of the earth can figure out what happened a billionth after a billionth. that to me is an amazing story. that is the most exciting drama of discovery we've ever been engaged with. that's why it matters.

>> and for people who want to hear more, there's a world science festival that your wife is doing. >> yes. >> and world science university. give it a quick pitch. >> yeah, world science u is a new online platform that we add the world science festival have developed to try to get these ideas out to the general public, but not just the level we're talking about here, which is interesting and exciting, but the real math behind it in a highly visual way. if you like relativity or this kind of stuff, check it out, it's a fun way to learn. >> google world science u. >> yep. >> and the festival is when? >> may 28 to june 1st. we have 50 events. buy tickets, they went on sale. although a few things are sold out. but 50 events around the city that will allow you to immerse yourself in science. >> brian, thank you. >> thank you. >> we are but specks in the universe, but two interesting

ones. two very interesting ones to come. thank you, brian. >> surprising -- came as a guest of a guest at dinner at my house and lo and behold, i had chabani yogurt in my refrigerator. he is the most interesting person who has revitalized whole section of new york with his wonderful product. he will be interviewed by steve clemens who, one of these days, you're going to open your closet and there's going to be steve clemens. the ubiquitous steve clemens. >> thank you so much. and i want to thank everybody standing in the back, there's some seats open up here. don't be shy, don't worry about the cameras. you know, aggressively ram yourself through those aisles and get a seat. because it's worth it for the lineup we have today. thank you so much for joining us.

>> thank you. >> you were a guy, young man growing up in turkey, you came over here to study business and you said, a ha, feta cheese. we're not even at the yogurt story. but what's that -- you were going to make your fortune in feta. i just need to know why feta? >> well, two things, one is i came to learn english. so i didn't know the word of english. >> and feta was a great english word. >> we don't call it feta, we call it white cheese. the reason i came one the idea is my father came to visit. >> mm-hmm. >> and the cheese, the white cheese is very big in our breakfast dishes. and when i brought the cheese i could find in the supermarkets, my father said, is this it? and i said, yes. said, why don't you make some? because i grew up in a cheese making, wine making. basically my father not liking r the cheese i brought for him for breakfast made me go into the

cheese business. >> all right. let me -- now we need to jump to the real story here. how many of you have lots of yoplait yogurt in your refrigerator? how many of you are dannon consumers? how many of you are chobani consumers? this was not set up. i thought it could go badly for you. >> the only reason i came to make it bigger, more. you've moved into yogurt. and the story's fascinating. i love the tell you, not about why yogurt, but tell us the story about why entrepreneurship and the town and the factory. >> well, i was to make this, you know, to make the story short, i started this cheese business. it was very small, you know, struggling with language, with running the plant, trying to sell, all the small -- all the big issues, the small businesses that go through every day that i did.

and i was going through my junk mails one night in my office. and i saw this ad and said fully equipped yogurt plant for sale. and there was a picture of it on the front side of it. and i continued to throw it into the garbage can still smoking my cigarettes and making garbage. about half an hour later, i went back to that table and took it and now it's, you know, dirty and -- >> and it was a craft yogurt. >> it was a craft. >> i didn't know that craft made yogurt. >> the brand called breyers. >> i see. >> i didn't know it then. but when i went to visit. this was about 90 years old plant, they were making yogurt and cheese. and they said it was the original plant they invented philadelphia cream cheese. >> wow. >> yeah. i said, how old is this? >> everybody knows that. >> i know. so i couldn't believe the price

they were asking for. i thought they were missing one zero. it was 700,000 or 7 million? and i was afraid to ask one more time. i didn't want to look so surprised, so cheap. >> maybe you should asked if you knocked off another zero. >> on my way back, i called my attorney and said i saw a plant i want to buy. he thought i was the craziest guy ever. and he told me million things why i shouldn't get it. one was there was the largest food company that was getting out of the category. this was a plant that they were selling as is. that means all the mistakes and crimes and everything done in that plant, it was on this turkish guy's shoulder. and then he said, i'll tell you one more thing is the biggest problem. you have no money. you haven't paid me for the last six months. it was true, i hadn't paid him. so that was the thing. and i figured it out with a small bank to buy -- >> did you finally pay him? this is on the record because they could be used against you. at confession, yeah. >> he later said, i wish i was a partner with you then.

so the first day i bought the plant with an sba loan, small business administration. was august 15, 2005. and i have this cemetery, literally it's a cemetery, waters are dripping and everything. and i hired five people from the 55 that kraft let go. and there was a bar across the street and people who were coming to the bar were bikers. i had only seen them on movies, and it was scary. >> yeah. >> and when i saw them. >> they said come on over. >> and i said if i had seen them before, i probably wouldn't buy it. and that was the first day. and that five people and me and, you know, i could not describe how scary it was. and how lost i was, and everything that the attorneys said, it's true that moment, i did something really, really crazy and i didn't know what i was going to do next. so my first board meeting with

those five people. and they were factory people. and they said, what are we going to do next? and first thing i recognized from the picture and when i went there the first time is the wall our side, it was white, maybe 15 years ago, no longer. it was horrible. and i said let's go to the ace store. and let's grab some white things. and let's paint these walls. and mike said he was retired and then came back to the plant. he's been in that plant for almost 25 years. he said tell me you have more ideas than this. >> well, you know, i just want to ask you. we just had brian green up here, one of the most cosmic thinkers. did you think the universe of yogurt was just a universe -- i remember the yogurt.

i like the yogurt. i remember greek yogurt coming online and taking on more and more. it is interesting that a turkish guy is making greek yogurt. >> only in america. >> yeah, only in america. you go back to istanbul. does that play well in turkey? do they say, wow, our guys have gone out to own the greek yogurt in america? >> yeah, the turks are angry, the greeks are angry. and americans -- >> we were going to come out here, by the way, and take a selfie like ellen and the academy awards and tweet. but in any case, it is a big thing. but how when i began thinking about talking to you today, i didn't know, where did you steal the market from? when you look at the absolute dollars out there, for this sort of product, there's a finite

number. i didn't know whether you were displacing velveeta cheese or yoplait. or have you made the universe bigger? >> you've summarized the whole thing. actually, it's all of it. >> it was an accident if i did that. >> all of it. the market, some of them came from the other categories. and some of them, people start eating more. but when this started, there was greek yogurt by a company who brought from greece ten years before me. talking 11 years, actually. they created this buzz as a greek yogurt in the specialty stores and, you know, some fancy places. someone who grew up with yogurt. it was the simplest thing. doesn't matter if you're rich or poor or live in the city. it's the simplest, purest food. and i couldn't understand why you have to go to new york city,

a specialty store and pay $3 to get a good cup of yogurt. so i work two years to make that cup and then i made it, and i said i'm going to go to the mass market first. so my first store was shop rite. so my buyer went to shop rite and said, well, we have five chobanis to put on your shelf. and he said we're going to charge $30,000 or $50,000 per cup to put on to the shelf. and he said we need that money to be paid and we didn't have that kind of money. and we said, what if we paid with the yogurt. so when you sell, you can take some of it and for the weeks we can pay it off. and then the guy asked a very nice question and said what if it doesn't sell? and we said, we'll give you the plant. we literally said we will give you the factory. but that guy -- >> did they want the factory? >> no, he sold it. actually, he called me two weeks later and said i don't know what

kind of stuff you're putting into this cup, i don't want to know, but i cannot keep it on the shelf. from that moment on, i knew it wasn't going to be about selling, it was going to be about can i make it enough? i'm this tiny guy in upstate new york who worked two years to make this cup. now it's selling and i'm going to make the big guys wake up at one point. this is the destiny of every small food set-up. you start a dream, work hard, don't sleep, you have neck pain, back pain, all kinds of pain, right? you don't go to bahamas. you don't do anything. >> yeah. and he was in the bahamas last weekend. don't feel too sorry for him. >> i was there for two days. >> i was trying to track him down for something, and he was telling me about the roosters on pearl-covered -- pink beaches. he was doing just fine.

you then moved. you've got another plant in twin falls, idaho. are there similarities between this new york, which is a -- chuck schumer loves you for saving this town and these people. but tell me about twin falls really quickly. and that's our clock here. i've got to get to vladimir putin and whether he eats chobani. >> we tried. it didn't work. what happened is from that five people, i launched the brand in 2007. this is something that people need to know what happens. the magic really happens in the small towns like upstate new york. with that five people, we created a brand became number one in five years. and from that five, we have right now 3,000 people. in 2012. from 2007 to 2012. within five years, we went from zero to 1 billion in sales. >> hmm. >> and -- this is, some people said and i haven't seen anything otherwise that some people said this is the fastest growing start-up ever, including all the technologies. one of the most amazing thing is until 2012, 2013, actually. we all did it independently. so we stayed independent. and we invested in that factory

that i bought from 700,000, almost $250 million. and then we built a factory in twin falls for $450 million. and we built it in one year. i and all the people working the company had never had this kind of business experience before. we were never a marketer, finance people or, operators or anything like that. so we figured it out along the way and, you know what it is? not that big of a deal. it's not a big deal as much as people tried to make it as a big deal. and what they do is when you talk about these things, sounds like, oh, you have to go to some kind of school so you have to get it from the big corporations, you have to have this kind of discipline, you have to know all the textbooks and everything. b.s., you need to really be there. and along the way, you figure it out.

>> what was the biggest mistake you made at the beginning? what was the thing? what was the thing. obviously you got beyond your biggest mistake or maybe you're perfect and never made a mistake. but what was the biggest mistake you made from what you thought you would need to do and you changed course? >> the biggest mistake i made is a human mistake is towards -- as the business kept growing, you know, 500, 600 million, two plants, a plant in australia, the people that you start with is your friends. you share the dream together. and as business grows so fast -- >> the dreams become complex. yeah. >> and the capability of being able to handle that kind of business is a different one. >> right. >> you need to change the skin. and you need to bring more people, different people. and, you know, i struggle with it. i should have done it maybe a year or two years earlier. including myself, you know, i could have brought some different people in.

and these are the entrepreneurs and people like us struggle a lot. and i think all the issues are human issues, mistakes that are human mistakes. but i think i've done -- or we have done together, more good moves and predicted what was going to happen in two years of three years in time. so these are way overshadowing the mistakes that we have done. and i kind of try to keep it simple. but it became really big that it wasn't as simple as, you know, so we're trying to make it sure it goes on for a long, long time. >> are there other greek foods? before you answer this question, i was in a green room last week with a young man, he's an entrepreneur out of washington. i don't know, there's a place called cake love. and this guy created something he brought in. he's just created a big thing and he was out there talking about his new product, which is cake in a can, which he's supplying to various large chains now.

it was interesting, and i was thinking about the fact i was going to be seeing you here and he's really moving toward forward. he's struggling, not a billion dollar company. it's been a harder thing, he's worked hard in the community. and i was going to ask on his behalf, what is the biggest thing he can do to get on the -- a road to more dramatic success? >> well, you have to have -- >> other than appearing on msnbc. could hurt him with a lot of consumers out there. >> usually have to have a great product. i worked two years. people said this is good. i said not enough. they said this is -- >> did it used to be crappy? >> it was good, then they made it the first month, it was still better than it was in the marketplace.

my expectations was really, really high. and the cup and there's not yogurt cup in the world i haven't seen. when we launched chobani there was five bags of cups from china to colombia that they took off from my office. you really have to be sick about what the product is. and so once the product is perfect, then the rest is really your capability. i mean, there's a lot of stuff you could do right. >> marketing. did vladimir putin not letting the official yogurt sponsor of the u.s. olympic team. did that help? we're all talking about it. turns out those people in sochi are sanctioned now in the united states and europe. >> we were really heartbroken. the olympians were eating chobani. it was in the kitchen, in the smoothies. all the factory people, it was like a festival. all the community farmers, the kids, everybody in the factory.

we all made this together. we signed. everybody signed. we did this 2012 to london. we were hoping this was going to go and we hit the wall. >> there was a lot of speculation that the change of the uniform for underarmor uniforms affected some of the performance but it was the absence of chobani yogurt, right? >> absolutely. we believe in that and we were sad. but the next olympic we think we will do it while in brazil. but it is food, as people forget, a simple cup of yogurt or simple loaf of bread. or whatever you get from the store. it's available when you're in turkey and greece and italy and new york city. but you go to supermarkets in new york, or twin falls, new york. it's a shame what's in the supermarkets and the manufacturers, they could definitely do better. they can do better. they can take the preservatives out. >> we've got 1:22 minutes. if any of you haven't done it,

you have a great web page. i went on my iphone. you have this thing called "how matters." tell us about "how matters." and about the issue of ingredients. can we really walk away from all of the preservatives and everything out there? >> yeah. >> i think it's interesting, when you go through the stores, there aren't that many foods, i think, that i'm eating that are probably along the lines of the ingredients you have. i'm pretty much of a bad eater. but you're telling me i can get on without all of that? >> yeah, and it's your choice. maybe you live in washington, d.c. that you could -- if you wanted. >> i need stuff that will survive a month in my refrigerator, maybe two. >> but accessibility to natural, good food is, i believe, is a human right. it's a basic rights. so who's going to make this? everybody wants better food. but either too expensive or is not there. so manufacturers like us, big guys, they have to put it in the

center, somebody's going to eat this, somebody's baby is going to eat it, somebody friend is going to eat it. and it goes beyond that. when i started with that five people in that community, the culture of chobani became that everybody come to work and go back to their home and say we did something amazing today. and the promise that a certain portion of profit goes back to community first in our own community and then expand. so i believe business is the best vehicle to solve issues in the community and society. and it's the vehicle that is sustainable because it's a business. but the business has the right mindset that not only the founder or the ceo but everybody in there that when they walk into the plant or the offices that they're going to do something right, and the return that comes in, it'll go back and do something more right.

and it'll be the, you know, effect of going on and on and on. and i'm proud that chobani every act that everybody does every day, we're not perfect, but we have the right mindset. we're not perfect, we're trying. >> before we thank you and we're right at the end. you just got a $750 million loan to expand. so which food company out there should really fear you? >> big guys. i love fighting with the big guys. you know, i think one thing that message to all the -- especially in the food world is when they tell you oh, these are people they have a lot of marketing money, they have a lot of plants, a lot of people. you will find out that the big size that they have is actually become advantage for you to be fast and smart. and it's really fun to play with them. >> ladies and gentlemen, here, stand up for that.

we're going to do -- everybody wave. we're going to do our selfie. hold on, here. everybody waving. yeah. say hi here. hold on. i'm going to send this to turkey. and here we go. >> send it to greece, steve. >> there we go. there we go. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. >> only in america. my favorite line. and that you can walk into my house one night and i can serve chobani. it was great. thank you. next we have david castenbom of npr is going to tell us what's happening to our money, where it's going, how we're going to spend it, how we're going to pay for things. with jeffrey alberts who is a partner and prior cash man. phillip bruno and nicholas caro who is ceo of block chain. welcome.

>> a few years ago, a reporter colleague of mine, we started hearing about bitcoin, and we said, let's do a story where we started to eat lunch with it. we thought, great, we'll go buy lunch in new york with it. turned out to be incredibly difficult. we thought, great, we'll go buy lunch in new york with it. turned out to be incredibly difficult. took two weeks to buy lunch with it. the exchange you would change dollars got hacked and had to shut down. in addition, bitcoin did something crazy, doubled from $12 to $20. what was the ultimate high? >> the ultimate high was about $1,000 to now $450. >> we had to hand him dollars cash, he then gave us some bitcoins digitally and only one place in manhattan that took bitcoins for lunch and it shut down. my big question is, where are we now since then? and there was also question of whether it was legal for currency and what it was. could you -- maybe each of you could bring us up to date on that and tell us how far we are now.

>> sure. i can speak to some extent to the law, that relates to bitcoin. and the short answer is it is legal. but regulators are all still trying to figure out how it can be used. you can use it legally or illegally. >> buying drugs is still illegal if you do it with bitcoin? >> afraid so. so you've had a couple regulators that have come out and made some statement about certain legal compliance requirements, so made a statement, the irs had certain rulings. >> and bernanke said the word. >> all significant. it is legal, but i think it's going to be a couple years until people figure out how the preexisting regulatory mechanisms apply to it because it's constantly changing. >> nick, can i buy lunch in new york? >> yeah, i would say an awful lot has changed since the last time you probably went and tried that. so i live my life 100% on

bitcoin, my company pays all its employees in bitcoin and we're a bankless institution. so we have employees on four continents and there's an unbelievable amount of capital pouring into projects. so from the last year just in our company alone, we've seen growth from 100,000 users to over 1.5 million. and i think it's really important to remember that outside the confines of even this room, bitcoin is an absolutely global phenomenon. for example, in argentina, there are probably 400 or 500 times more restaurants, bars and services accept bitcoin but here in new york. and that's for fundamental reasons why it's more interesting and approachable financial solution for the people than maybe in the united states. >> is there a restaurant in new york that takes them now? >> yeah, there are several. a bar called ever and in brooklyn, i read that accepts bitcoin and a few others, as well. >> i think what's interesting here, bitcoin is a currentsy or a store of value.

we are see something interest in there. in that regard. do you want to hold your life savings or some portion of it in bitcoin as a means of keeping your money? the other is a medium of exchange. and so that's for, you know, buying lunch and doing other things there. i think what we really find special though is thinking about it as a network, as a way to transact and to send money point to point without involving a financial institution or intermediary. most things up until now have been set up as networks where there is somebody in the middle an all of the transactions go through that. but this new phenomenon is a way to transact that doesn't involve the intermediaries or the fees. >> these are two visions.

so one, there so real currency that everyone talks about how much they have and they use it to buy lunch and other people hold on to the bitcoin. the other is that it is just a way to send money from one place to another, in a cheaper way than the credit card system or banking. right? and you're saying the second one seems like more of a go than maybe the current. >> i don't know how to handicap these but i would put more currency on the second one, which is, the ability to have it as a low-cost exchange vehicle. and as a network. and it is interesting, i interviewed 20 years ago one of the founders of visa. this is when i got into the payments industry. he said, look, internet is going to revolutionize payments. it'll be able to do point to point transactions. i might not see it in any lifetime but you might see it in yours. i think we are coming into that

now. >> it is basically digital version of gold. economists left with right and center would tell you that gold is a very bad system to have. mainly because you can't adjust the amount of money. there is no bank to say, there is a supply or no way to increase population for instance. so you get what is called deflation. everyday that goes by, what you are holding is worth more. that may seem great but it is also a disincentive to spend. if you say, oh, i buy the car today, it is cheaper tomorrow. cheaper the next day. bitcoin has gone up in value. if you were stupid enough to buy a pair of alpaca socks, which were one of the first thing in the day, they are now worth thousands of dollars for a pair of socks. how big of a problem do you see, does that seem to you? that it is finite, digital gold. >> look, i'm not an economist but there is a couple responses to that. one, i think i have the same general instinct that phil does, that a primary value of bitcoin is as a means of payment.

so the criticism that you have is more focused on its value as central currency. the second is that i think we are so far from the notion that bitcoin would actually be like a foundational currency for a country or a large percentage of people but the deflationary aspect i don't think is terribly relevant. it would have to be a high percentage of the economy before the deflation aspect was significant. >> there are two parts of that. one, you can't have a central bank adjust the money. the second one is just that built-in deflation because you can't create more. that's still a problem. you've seen the value of them shoot up for different reasons. >> i would actually challenge this because new research has been conducted on the block chain itself. so we can actually study

transaction velocity in a way that's impossible. >> and block change is whenever you do a transaction, it is the thing that records. >> so a professor at stanford is looking into this very carefully. interestingly, about 50 years with this kind of plot, deflation would cause people not to send it is not accurate and i believe that is a reduction in friction from the payment itself. the speed at which the money is moving the bitcoin economy is at parody with the u.s. dollar. >> you know, the other thing here, we do have to have stability in the value. right now there's been some estimates that 80% of the transactions are actually more speculative than nature. and i think this has to get to a period where we don't have 10% swings in the value a day or moreover the period of a week. people will trust that it is a value. and to get from there to something that is less

speculative and much more for currency and commerce is going to be a messy process to get there. but that's the bet that you would make, if we're to be a story of value in the future. >> it can be used as an investment or as currency. right now, if you believe it is valuable because it allows to you contract anywhere in the world basically for free, in order to ride those rails, you have to have currency of the bit coins themselves. you have to buy credits in order to play in the game and it is a little bit like, imagine if we were having this conversation in 1970 and a bunch of people were sitting around a room saying, man, i've got this idea. we are going to revolutionize the postal system. allow people to send messages to anyone around the world basically instantly, for free. and everyone says that is crazy. but we are doing it. everyone is sending messages to each other basically for free.

imagine in 1970 you had the opportunity to invest in the credit system that lets you use e-mail everyday. that's like bitcoin. that's why there is a lot of speculation. it is totally young. go study it. because the ignorance would be like putting your head in the sand of the future. >> it is like -- stupid people -- we will move upon it is hard to see with the lights. how many people use bitcoin to buy something? just raise a hand. two? anybody in the balcony? three. one up there. okay. anyone want to reflect on that? i mean, my point is just -- i understand the theoretical, but what is the actual -- my credit card works great. >> have you shopped at target recently?

>> well, there is a fee, i don't notice it. it is not a hassle. >> you are bringing up a great question. the target example, there's protection. everyone is protected from using their credit card and it is just fine. no one lost any money doing that. >> there are lots of nice things about it. >> except maybe some of the financial institutions. so bitcoin, the money is gone. what you look for is around use cases. why is it good for you? when i needed to move money to rent a vacation house and i needed to transfer the money to sterling, it's great because there's less friction and it's cheaper. >> tell me what you did again? >> so renting a house. i needed the money. i moved it to the real estate