♪♪ in partnership with the library of congress, c-span brings you books that shaped america. our series explores key works of literature that have had a profound impact on the country. in this program, milton rose friedman free to choose a personal statement published in 1980 as a companion to their ten part pbs series, free to choose advocated free-market capitalism. both studied at the university of chicago where milton leaders served as faculty in the

economics department for almost 30 years. they cowrote several books together into the relationship was described as an extremely close intellectual fellowship. in 1976, milton friedman won the nobel prize in economics and 1988 was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by ronald reagan. influencing public policy debates he served as an advisor to both president ronald reagan and british pre- minister margaret thatcher. afraid to choose argued for constitutional restraints on the power of government to interfere with free markets and criticized what they saw as wasteful government spending on welfare and other social safety net programs. the book was one of the best-selling nonfiction books of 1980. >> host: and welcome to books that shaped america on the c-span series that looks at how books throughout our history have influenced who we are today. and partnership with the library of congress, this ten week series has been exploring different areas, topics and

different viewpoints and we are glad you're with us for this walk-through history. tonight it's a look at the economy, the role of government, how we teach children and other policy issues, and it's all through the eyes of milton and rose friedman. in 1980, they developed a series for public tv called "free to choose" and turned that into a best-selling book. many of the friedman's ideas were controversial and sparked he did the debate, but there becae influenced political figures and others for decades. our guest tonight, to help us understand the impact of free to choose is lanny a continuing lecture at uc santa barbara and also the author of this book "milton friedman a biography." let's start with some facts and figures about the u.s. in 1980.

the population was about 226 million about 100 million less than it is today. the president was jimmy carter and of course he lost to ronald reagan later that year. the inflation rate, 14% compared to about six to 9% today. the unemployment was at 7.5%. today about 3%. a 30 year fixed your mortgage about 14% and climbing. there's been a recession in 1980 and another one was to come. how did the economy feel to people in 1980? >> i think the economy was the number one issue in the 1980 campaign between jimmy carter and ronald reagan. there's no question that ronald reagan was very significantly influenced by milton friedman in his policies and program. he ran on the economy for bill

clinton put forward it's the economy stupid, ronald reagan was asking what do you think about inflation and about unemployment. inflation was the issue of the day. the united states had not experienced double digit inflation in peacetime may be ever virtually as far as very shortly during the control of prices after world war ii, but they have in a general peacetime economy double digit inflation and a declining economic growth, the era of oil embargo, the loss of the war in vietnam. these were troubled times f the united states and i think many people felt that america's greatest days were behind. effective there was inevitably going to be a larger role for government and society that economic growth would diminish and freed men from an intellectual perspective and reagan from a political

perspective tried to trumpet a different direction and that was where free to choose comes in. >> host: what were milton and rose friedman advocating and free to choose? >> guest: essentially, they were advocating a rollback of the role of governmenthat emerged first in the great depression and thenve more during the great society programs during the lyndon johnson administration. their opposition was to the expansion of government. they defined freedom as the most limited amount of government possible. they recognized the government has an essential role to play in establishing a free society and establishing a free-market order. but they wanted that society to have as little government as possible. they were in favor of government when it was provided to be at a local or state level rather than a federal level. if they thought that voluntary

associations should be the primary provider of social welfare functions and families as individuals should be strengthened in an order that society would operate in the most productive and harmonious manner. >> host: did their book have an impact on the reagan campaign? >> no question. free to choose was published first in hardback with the series free to choose public broadcasting in 1980 which was the year of the campaign. the 1981 was a paperback edition ich is the addition that i have. reagan has the first one-word endorsement of the book on paperback edition after he became president. one-word, superb. they first met when reagan was

governor of california. they campaigned on a number of issues. so these ideas of friedman in particular you've got to control the inflation rate as economists distinct from a public intellectual, friedman emphasized monetary policy theory above all else and if you have inflationary circumstances in an economy that in the long run is going to lead to less growth and during these inflationary 1970s when no one seemed to know what to do about inflation and this seems often to be the case people don't know what to do about inflation, friedman would not agree with of the current approach of the federal reserve of trying to control inflation and changing interest rates. for friedman. without batting an eye he said

inflation is a monetary phenomenon. the reason was too much money was being produced and printed by the government in the karma f currency. it wasn't a matter of interest rates too high or too low or access business profits. it wasn't a function of excessive demands but the supply of money. that is the line that he took and reagan adopted and became a lion adopted around the world for the next several decades. i think friedman would argue that was a large source of the economic prosperity of those

decades. >> host: saying that, lanning ebenstein, is free to choose on that list? >> guest: no question. both milton and rose friedman their influence in putting forward ideas consider himself to be a libertarian philosophy but a republican in politics. in 1964 when he was the republican nominee and the leading advisor to richard nixon in 1968 a 1972 he was the leading advocate of an all volunteer army tt was implemented during nixon's administration and then he was a leading endorser and supporter of reagan when reagan was elected in 1980 and 84.

i want to be clear about this as i'm trying to present friedman's views but many people would argue that his views on government were not the right approach. >> host: let's quote from a free to choose this is one of the conclusions at the end of the book. we are as a people still free to chhichay we should go ethe we continue along the road have been following to everr government or to call a halt and change direction. >> the initiative and all of his work and at the public intellectual particularly in the last0 years of his life after he retired from the university of chicago.

if there is an inflation in the society that's going to be detrimental to an economy there for the first thing the government has to do is maintain a stable money supply. the second thing that an economy needs to do, the government needs to work with an economy to ensure that there are relationships and contracts to adhere to individuals. there was an important role to play in defense. he supported some social services, but his basic approach and i think that it may surprise viewers to know he had to the idea of a negative income tax in the 1960s which is very similar to the idea of universal basic income now about we won't have a whole panoply of social welfare programs and different

sorts. we won't have large government employment. rather, we are going to give people the funds directly to spend. he thought that would be a more effective way of running than the government programs. in the area of education he thought that vouchers would permit parents to choose their children's education, what schools they would attend and what programs they want. that would be a way to increase competition and education. >> these are all policy issues we are talking about today? >> guest: they remain topical to this day. there is low tariffs, index, tax rates, so many policy reforms that can be traced in part to milton and rose friedman. >> host: let's go back to free to choose. economic freedom is an essential

prerequisite for political freedom. >> that is one of the court ideas is there is a strong connection between economic freedom and political freedom. they are not distinct. you can't say that you can be politically free if government is running all of the economy. both of the declaration of independence came forward and to smith's fall to patients published in 1776 and they emphasize we need to have the economics of adam smith and join that to the political idea in the declaration of independence everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of

happyness. therefore a free-market system free market systemis the centrao a.m. economic system but it's also central to a political system. >> uc santa barbara, another idea we are still talking about today is a quality in the freedom and this again is free to choose. in the sense o equality of outcomead of freedom will end up with neither equality and freedom. to achieve equality will destroy freedom and of the force for urposes will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.

>> saw as an explicit end of government he felt that individuals are different, they have different tastes, different abilities, different experiences and wants, desires, education. for that reason in a just society it's not going to be a perfectly egalitarian society. this is also important by not making a quality indirectly sought after goal one that just emerges from the market but in fact a free-market capitalist system to have more equal outcomes than the economic systems.

if you value freedom and also have a good deal of inequality. here's a portion of it talking about free markets. >> there's not a single person in the world who could make this. remarkable statement, not at all. the wood from which it is made comes from a tree cut down in the state of washington to cut down the tree it took a salt and to make this all it took steel, to make steel it took iron ore. we call it lead but it's really graphite. compressed graphite. i'm not sure where it comes from, but i think it comes from mines in south america. this red top up here, the eraser, router, probably comes from land where the rubber tree

isn't even native it was imported from south america by businessman with the help of the british government. i haven't the slightest idea where this came from or the yellow paint to make the black lines were the glue that holds it together. literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. people who don't speak the same language and practice different religions. you are trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all those thousands of people. what brought them together to cooperate to make this? sending out an order from the central office it was the magic of the price.

of the impersonal operation of the prizes that brought them together and got them to cooperate so that you could have it for some. that is why the obligation of the free market is so essential not only to promote effective efficiency, but even more, to foster harmony and peace among the people of the world. >> that is a classic milton friedman story. >> he is a great teacher and uc it to their. a great human being and as someone that had the opportunity to interview him on occasion, i was truly impressed by him and his wisdom, the warmth of his personality and the genius of his mind. he's able to explain things so clearly and succinctly and

persuasively and when we talk about the importance of the market, what he is saying is that prices are you central to a properly operating market and what the prizes do is register supply and demand. if you only have government control it's going to be inefficient. von mises in an earlier 20th century economist that talked about calculation and socialist economies, how is a government planner going to know if they want to build houses. if you don't have a way to compare the relative value of different goods, then you don't

have rational economy so that is what leads to the production is the ability to fluctuate. that is a very different idea that most have taken through history. the view has been in the period preceding adam smith that milton friedman criticized as far as adam smith did even more so. what it's going to be produced and how. the argument of friedman and other capitalist oriented economists. their primary argument is for the government to make these sort of decisions and efficient

manners. it is to say that in general productivity, maximum productivity at the large free-market economy and on that argument i think that friedman and his friend have won the argument. >> host: as i mentioned at the beginning, in the series books that shaped america is in partnership with the library of congress and about ten years ago the library of congress came up with 100 books that shaped america and milton friedman free to choos was on that list. there are all books that have had an impact on our society. with that said about this book, this is what the library of congress wrote in their description of free to choose. economist lton and rose friedman published this book in conjunction with their pbs series that a spouse to the

virtues of capitalism versus other economic approaches. some of those other economic approaches of course communism and some others, but there's there isalso john kenneth galbrr john maynard keynes. what were their approaches and how are they different than milton friedman? >> to look at the systems the communists or social systems and other types of systems, i think fast it's that friedman's real opposition was to communism and socialism in the form of government production of the means of economic production. and he said the classic examples of this are germany and korea. before the end of world war ii, both germany and korea had been united countries and if anything, the more industrial and at the developed part of germany was at the eastern part

of germany and the more developed part. you had a sort of controlled experiment which is difficult to do and they had won a sort of system in the other part of the country and there is no question that west germany was far more productive economically and had a higher standard and that south korea had a higher standard of living at was more productive than north korea so i thought those were the classic examples, so his great opposition was to very significant government

control of an economy. when it comes to john kenneth galbraith or john maynard keynes, he didn't consider them to be merely as negative as a full-fledged socialist or communist system in this sense in the means of economic production. in the case of keynes, friedman's opposition was mostly to the idea that in an advanced capitalist economy there tended to be over saving. the marginal propensity became economically more advanced and therefore you could have an economic equilibrium and less than full production and employment and therefore the government had to borrow excess funds from the private sector

engaged in deficit spending in order to maintain full economic acvity. there are vast sources of excess saving. together it doesn't borrow money from the private sector. it's going to have to spend that money so the keynesian economic theory in the activity and in general so he was opposed to that. galbraith was probably the most well-known economist popularly.

friedman by no means thought that he was a socialist or communist. maybe they hedged a little bit of direction of socialism but his main concern was they didn't recognize the inherent inefficiency of much government activity a continuing lecturer at the university of california santa barbara. he's been there since about 2005 and is the author of a couple of books, milton friedman a biography and chicago economics which we will talk about in a minute. he's helping us understand the impact of milton and rose friedman's free to choose. the (202)748-8902 if you live in east and central time zones,

748-8921 if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones and if you can't get through and still would like to make a comment, try the text number (202)748-8903. that's for text messages only. please include your first name and a city if you would with your questions or comments. also want to let you know that we have a comni website to the sie there are teacher lesson pns and a vwe tab, related videos, the library of congress is 100 books that shaped america are all contained in that website. c-span.org/books that shaped america is the website. just a little bit about milton and ros friedman. he w born in new york city and

went toutrs the university of chicago and receivedis phd from columbia. the tasury department from 1941 to 43 during fdr's presidency. and he taught at the university of chicago from 1946 to 1977. rose friedman lived from 1910 to 2009 and was born in ukraine. she attended reed college in oregon, the university of chicago where she did phd work that did not do her disstaon. she collaborated on free to choose, the tv series andhe book. she cowrote oerconomic books and memoirs all including capitalism and freedom that came out in 1962 and cofounded the choice with milton friedman's promoting school vouchers. i want to show the original copy of the book that came out in

1980. here is the front cover. but you can see they are both listed on it. but when you flip it around, there is where you get rose friedman on the back. >> i think that rose was from a family of economists. her brother was a leading member of the chicago school of economics in the post-world war ii period at the university of chicago. she herself was an economic student at chicago when they would also be graduate student there. they were students of frank knight at the time who w free market oriented economist, and i think that her role wasn't significant in milton friedman's work and technical economics. she was more involved in the

later work in public policy and books such as you mentioned free to choose, capitalism and freedom and other works later after he retired. >> let's hear from some of the viewers before we continue looking at free to choose. this is tim and pearl city hawaii. you are on c-span. great discussion. did milton freeman have any thoughts about the constitutional amendment or how did he think about deficit spending during wartime or national crises. did he have any thoughts on that? his thinking in this area might surprise you. during wartime i would say who therules that might generally ay should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, so i wouldn't say that he would

oppose deficit spending. however even during peacetime, his view was that the deficits were to be preferred to more government spending. he would rather see the government spend a trillion dollars and have a 500 billion-dollar deficit of them government to spend $2 trillion and have them in a deficit at all. so his focus was the amount of spending rather than the deficits and he is really the one that introduced the notion that deficits don't matter. they don't matter economically.

you have an increased money supply. it isn't a keynesian idea. it supported a balanced budget amendments but only if it was in the context of the reduction government spending. not on deficits and as it happens i think that that is also a legacy of his that some may criticize the reagan administration of non-focus on deficits being an important or of government policy and something that is continued to the present even during the last years of the clinton administration. >> host: please go ahead with your question or comment. >> caller: thank you for taking my call.

looking at the philosophy i think time has proven and it was a complete failure. in the american dream -- >> host: thank you very much. talk about the issues that alan mentioned. one that prevents friedman's position and as opposed to offer critique of it and what i guess my view is the strength and his fault and also great weakness. i think that with respect to monetary policy, he was accurate with of the importance of low but not necessarily no

inflation. the lack of focus on deficits would not be helpful to our society. with respect to did reagan economics lead to the decline of the american economy, i think that we were talking earlier about the late 1970s were a period of high inflation in the united states, high unemployment in the united states, high interest rates in the united states and that at the time it was considered a relative boom in the economy in 1890s as deflation decelerated. i think that you have to take a balanced approach to friedman's record and as i say, i think that the idea of less government and government inefficiency is a very important idea that i think those who don't recognize government inefficiency, they

are making a mistake. >> host: along with the companion website, we have a companion podcast looking at the lives of milton and rose friedman a little more in-depth. a little bit more from this podcast that as an economist and offering to the founder of the libertarian freedom vest. >> friedman would always advocate less government then more government because it meant it wasn't that it was a negative approach but it was a positive approach because he would say listen, this means that you have your own responsibility in making your decisions rather than someone else telling you what to do and that is essentially an american perspective. we don't like people telling us what to do whether it's during a

pandemic, whether it's in a war. we want to make those decisions ourselves so i think that is the ultimate legacy that milton friedman had. >> you can see on your screen the little qr code. get your phone out and snap a picture of that and then you will get to the entire podcast. the guest talking about milton and rose friedman. claire is in santa barbara. please go ahead. >> caller: hello professor ebenstein, me and my fellow students are cheering you on from santa barbara. my question to you is the young economists that you are teaching, what advice do you have for us or what do you think friedman would have for us in today's current economic state and what do you think policymakers could suggest?

>> host: are you a student at uc santa barbara? >> caller: yes i'm professor ebenstein's student. >> host: and what do you think of milton friedman into the different economic theories, give us a sense of what you think. >> caller: i think that he would be more fe market. hyou might think the government should haveess say in economic affairs and i'm notur if you would agree with how the government is treating inflation and the housing crisis into the homeless crisis. i'm not sure. that's why i met asking. >> guest: thank you for calling in. i really appreciate it. i think your questions are really good. i think that friedman's approach was basically a monetary approach and one thing we talked about earlier in the program is

the late 1970s were and the era of challenge for a number of reasons and although it seems hard to believe now, the soviet union at that point in time seemed to be ascended into the world and the idea of a much larger government role in society advocated by many economists as the inevitable direction and friedman's perspective on that was that was the wrong approach and that as we discussed earlier, the problem with more economic control by government is that it will also erode political freedom. you can't have political freedom without economic freedom or an effective economy without a significant degree of economic freedom. i think friedman would advocate

really considering the advantages of a market economy in trying to evaluate the appropriate societies. that's a question that deserves a lot of discussion and friedman recognized reasonable people of goodwill can draw the line on the appropriate level of government differently and it might be different in different places into different times. in his years as a public intellectual after he retired from the university of chicago he tended to become relatively more doctrinaire in he is no government approach. and from my standpoint, his work as a technical and practical economist where he discusses the disadvantages of government

involvement in monetary policy and other areas is something that is the stronger aspect of his work. i don't think that the underlining philosophy as an economist where he thought he made the greatest contribution was necessarily quite as one-sided as his career as a public intellectual, so as an economist i tried to emphasize his thought during his career which he valued more highly. >> host: as we mention free to choose the best selling book came out of free to choose, the highly rated pbs series. let's return and hear a little bit more from milton friedman. >> the fact is most people enjoy

the early stages. in the swinging 60s, there was plenty of money around. business was brisk, jobs were plentiful. everybody seemed happy at first. but by the early 70s as the good times roll around it started more rapidly. as soon as some of these people were going to lose their jobs. ♪♪ the party was coming to an end. ♪♪ the story is much the same in the united states only the process started a little later. we've had one inflationary party after another, yet we still can't seem to avoid it. to make us think that we are

getting a tax break they are able to do it while at the same time actually raising our taxes because of a bit of magic. that magic is inflation they reduce the tax rates but the taxes they pay have to go up because they are automatically shoved into higher brackets by the effect. a neat trick taxation without representation. the reason we have inflation in the united states or for that matter anywhere in the world is because the accompanying with their counterparts in other nations by growing more rapidly. the truth is inflation is made in one place in one place only here in washington. this is the only place there are places like these. this is the place the power

resides to determine how rapidly the amount of money. what happened to all that noise that's what would happen to inflation if we stop setting the amount of money so rapidly. >> host: we want to thank free to choose media providing the media tonight from the series. we've seen cases in argentina and brazil and some other places where inflation is at 202000% because money is being presented. do we have that issue as bad as

milton friedman made it sound? >> guest: sure and i remember that segment from free to choose very well, this year he is i myself was an undergraduate at that time taking courses in economics. the whole idea of why is there inflation. is it a result of changes in the interest rates? again is it to high profits, too much union demand? in terms of friedman's answer, it was clear and unequivocal. at that segment that shows the printing of dollar bills by the treasury department really makes the point from his perspective which is inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. he would argue that the reason why we've had inflation in the united states in recent years is not because interest rates were too low at some point in time. he wouldn't say it's because during the coronavirus recession perhaps for appropriate reasons as a result of the extreme

exigencies of that circumstance. again, he was not dogmatic with respect to an emergency circumstance for the measures whether they are right or wrong is a different issue but the point is that is not the main point with respect to the inflation we are experiencing now, he would say that when the deral reserve didn't borrow for the trillions of dollars sent to american individuals and businesses and when the federal reserve didn't, congress didn't tax for those dollars but simply the federal reserve increased the supply of money engaged in quantitative easing to the tune ofrillions of dollars, that's the reason we have the inflation now. the reason that inflation has decelerated the past year is because friedman thought that there was a lag time between the increase in the money supply and the degree of inflation and likewise there is a lag time

between when the money supply stops increasing as a deceleration of inflation. we've now basically gone through that cycle. it's not surprising that inflation has dropped from eight or 9% to three to 4% and that it will probably continue to drop to two or 3% in the next number of months irrespective of the federal reserve interest rate policy. friedman would have condemned the curtain federal reserve policy of raising interest rates in order to control inflation. he thought that that was a myth, didn't have anything to do with the rate of aggregate prices. his focus was undoubtedly quantity of money. that's the reason there was inflation. if you want less inflation you stop the printing presses and stop increasing the supply of money. it's not a function of interest rates primarily.

>> host: gym in new york city you are on books that shaped america talking about free to choose, please go ahead. >> caller: thank you very much. i appreciate the conversation. my question is on monopolies and oligopolies. first of all what was milton friedman's attitude towards that, and are they created by the government themselves and i will wait for your answer. >> guest: that is a really good question. and friedman's thinking on the issue of the monopolies and oligopolies evolved over the course of his career when he was a young economist in the 1930s and 40s, he basically endorsed the prevailing economic models, which soul a significant amount of monopolistic activities in the economy and this required a large ro the government cae the theory of the free market and its effy is that no one is a price setter,

everyone is a price taker and that doesn't exist in the oligopoly or the monopoly, but the period after world war ii together with the others at the university chicago as i mentioned, the director, also george stiegler and others, they examined the american economy closely and they came to the view that there doesn't appear to be much monopolistic activity and the american economy, the view that also tended to become more generally accepted in the economic profession and public policy. that really undercuts the argument for much government activity. so from friedman's perspective, we are not in a keynesian system where we have to have government borrowing and eig role in that way we are not a monopolistic situation where you have to have the government regulation for those reasons either. so he later became not overtly

concerned about monopoly into the private sector. he did think the government is very wasteful. it's the monopoly we have to worry about in its inefficiency in the problem. >> host: text message from michael in hastings nebraska. please compare and contrast the philosophy of milton and rose friedman and ayn rand. you have about 30 seconds for that complex question. >> guest: i would say that the friedman's were much more of the view that there is an appropriate but limited role to play in society whereas ayn rand thought there was no role for government to play in the society. i think that the friedman's fault that there was human diversity and didn't think that there is a basic human equality that individuals have spiritually. i think that the view very much emphasizes great human inequality and i don't believe that was the friedman perspective.

>> host: milton and rose friedman in 20000 were on the booktv program. here's a portion of that program. >> the guest here on our program from san francisco on booktv, doctor milton friedman and his wife who is also here on the cover of free to choose which i guess is your most successful. what do you remember about working together on this particular book? >> it was very easy. we already have the television program notes, and the book is written really from that. so, we each started with one chapter and then handed it to the other person to go over the chapter. we went back and forth that way. in the end we really don't know who wrote which words which is true about all the books we've written.

>> guest:. we wanted it to be available in the program was shown, so we started on it in march of 1799 and we got a publisher they got it published by january when the tv program started. >> host: when you are working on these projects what does she do that you don't and what does he do that you don't? >> guest: we both tired. we use the computer now. >> we talked about aging, both of you 88-years-old. are you surprised at how well you do for those that can't to see these two people, they move around as well as anybody -- >> anybody says when you're bouncing around, i don't feel like bouncing around frankly. many things i can't do today

that i use to be able to do. i don't have the energy i use to have. getting old is no fun. >> is there any advice that you have if they live to be 88 that he would do differently? if you knew you were going to live this long is there anything you would do differently? >> i think we would have lived more extravagantly. we were always saving our pennies. my brother used to say we were saving them for a rainy day that never came. i was saving. i saved my pennies. >> he would say you're saving them for a rainy day living in a perpetual -- [laughter] >> host: just wanted to give a sense of rose friedman as well as milton friedman. edward in dover delaware, please go ahead. >> caller: i want to mention the book capitalism and slavery. thomas soul, i'm reading his book now called social justice

policies and he seems to imply people are poor because it's their fault. and i wanted to ask why are so many poor people in the united states and why are there poor nations as far as capitalism is concerned? what is the relationship between capitalism and slavery? >> host: what you say eric williams and tom soul have the same philosophy? >> guest: that's an excellent question because i'm an anti-thomas soul person because i am an african-american. he's very conservative and i'm relatively little. >> host: what are you getting out of the book that you are reading? >> caller: when he said poor people, it's their fault, i sort of i can't go along with that. >> host: thank you for calling in. >> guest: i'm not familiar

with the williams book but thomas soul i'm very familiar with. he was a student of milton friedman at the university of chicago and he tells the story that when he went to the university of chicago, that is thomas soul, he was a marxist but after being around milton friedman and others in chicago for several years, he shifted to a more free-market view. i don't believe that it's the case that either thomas soul were milton friedman or rose friedman would say that the problem of poverty resides in poor people. i think what they would say is the problem resides in the system and that if you have a system that's more effective, then people experience less poverty, which they certainly supported. with respect to slavery, slavery is the exact antithesis of the free-market system because the free market system because the

free market system in ten that every individual has freedom to exchange as they wish. it's the exchange and function, the ability to exchange as you wish. adam smith's idea the magic of the market and the idea for prizes to direct production in an effective manner that leads to greater economic prosperity for all. i think that they would argue that the period of the capitalist economy, the 1800s, the 1900s to the present are a time of increasing commiseration, the greatest period of prosperity in all history for all people into andstandards of living have been greatly increased. so, i think that they would argue that their goal is the same as yours. they want a higher standard of living for everyone. how you get there again is a

question that reasonable people of goodwill can differ. with other works by friedman and others in his school is that the idea that the government can run an economy which was prevalent around the world before free to choose, that lady that is utterly discredited at this point in time even people that think that there should be more government than milton friedman at this point in time or not advocating complete government control of the economy. bernie sanders is no socialist as socialists were in the 1930s, 40s and 50s were advocating the government should own and run all the aspects of the economy. i think those are some comments. i think you raised some very good concerns and as i say i think the issue of poverty is something that friedman and soul is best accommodated through the free-market economy. >> host: the shock doctrine came out in 2008.

naomi klein, canadian author, activist. here's a little of her criticism of milton friedman. >> who's the most angry? >> milton friedman is pretty angry with the shock doctrine because the book is pretty tough on milton friedman. i would say i think there's probably still the people that are most annoyed with certainly my book. >> host: why did you pick on milton friedman? >> the shock doctrine tells an alternative history of how we ended up with the kind of market economies that we have that's been globalized around the world, and it's a pretty fundamentalist version of the market economics that pretty much everything should be privatized you to the media for the regulation. we have seen on wall street. so the shock doctrine tells the story of how we got here and

milton friedman played a pretty important role in the story mainly because he was the movement prime popularizer not because his ideas were so original. he was certainly part of the chicago school tradition but he took that to the masses. he was the one with the column that did the ten part series. he had that incredible talent from writing economics and bringing it to a popular audience. so he played a very important role. he was a political advisor. but the focus of the book is much less on him personally than on the university of chicago and the particular role the university of chicago played internationally because the university of chicago had a very aggressive program of attracting

students particularly from latin america and this had nothing to do with milton friedman. it wasn't his idea. it was actually a decision that came out of the state department where there was a lot of concern in the 1950s that latin america was moving to the last and moved further and further. the idea was picked up in the head of the program for what became the usaid that they would bring sponsored groups of students to study at the university of chicago economics department precisely because it was so conservative and in fact in this time it was seen as very out outside of the mainstream because the uni ted st the factates, in this time, in 1950s, it was seen really outside mainstream of economic discourse, because the united states was still in the grips of keynesianism, harvard, all the ivy league's really, had keynesian economics department.

the university of chicago was different. they had this program to bring eventually hundreds of latin american students to study under friedman and his colleagues. that had a tremendous impact on the politics of latin america, because when there were a series of military coups in the 70s, there were teams of economists that were ready to work with those military governments who did not have any expertise in economics, so they formed kind of an alliance or partnership with the military andes university of chicago training economists. >> naomi klein, part of her critique was about chicago school of economics. you have written a book called " chicagonomics." what will we get from that book? >> i don't want to appear to be a militant and for that reason. i just think it is possible to take a different intellectual view and i will briefly try to

argue all of that. in latin america, in china, in india, as they moved to a free-market economy, they have greatly increased the standards of living for hundreds of millions, for millions of people around the world, and at the same time, there is more democracy in latin america, then there has ever been. india has returned to a more democratic system and china is a far freer country than it was during the communist regime, again, underscoring the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom. so, i ink that the criticism at economic freedom does not lead to political freedom is contradicted by the facts. >> other milton friedman books, "a theory of the consumption function" came out in 1957. "capitalism and freedom" in 1962, "a monetary history of the united states," 1963 that was cowritten with anna schwartz

. "tyranny of the status quo. " that was in 1984. carlos, please go ahead with your question or comment. >> thank you very much for taking my call, i am enjoying the show. you have been thinking a lot about government inefficiency, yes can exist to a point, even though i think it has gotten better. what about business or corporate inefficiency? what would be friedman's perspective on that . take the american car industry for that, or the american film industry, i would hardly consider them to be efficient. yet, they still exist. also, there's this philosophy of some of these corporations are too built big to fail and you have to bail them out, which is propaganda. >> thank you for that question. public policy isn't perfect. i don't think treatment would argue there's always a right solution at any point in time. in general, if a business is

failing at a local level, or at a subnational level, it will go out of business or redirect its activity. the prophets mechanism is something that rewards efficiency. that is the virtue of it. whereas, with government, you can have a great deal of inefficiency, and there may not be that sort of tendency for those government programs to out of business. i think from friedman's perspective, the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. does that mean that the private sector is always efficient? no. does that mean that the public sector is always inefficient? no. it does mean that as much as you can you should try to privatize government functions. he was very much in favor of greater privatization of government activity. >> lenny even start in the pro series, you talked about washington and economic power.

>> every time i come to washington, i am impressed all over again with how much power is concentrated in the city. we must understand the character of that power. it is not monolithic power in a few hands the way it is in countries like the soviet union or read it china. it is fragmented and a lot of bits and pieces with every special group around the country trying to get its hand on whatever bits and pieces it can. the result is that there is hardly an issue in which you won't find government on both sides. for example, in one of these massive buildings spread, scattered all throughout this town, field to the bursting with government employees, some of them are sitting around, trying to figure out how to spend our money to discourage us from smoking cigarettes. in another of the massive buildings, may be far away from the first, some other employees

equally dedicated, equally hard- working, are sitting around, figuring out how to spend our money to subsidize farmers to grow more tobacco. in one building they are figuring out how to hold down prices, in another building, they have got schemes for raising prices, prices farmers receive, or import prices keeping out cheap, foreign goods. we set up a enormous department of energy, 20,000 employees, to encourage us to save energy. we set up an enormous department of environmental protection to figure out ways to get cleaner air, involving or using more energy. now, many of these effects cancel out, but that doesn't mean that these programs don't do a great deal of harm, and that there aren't some very bad things about them. one thing you can be sure of, because the costs don't cancel out, they added together. each of these programs spends money, taken from our pockets, that we could be using to buy

goods and services to meet our separate needs. >> now, lanny ebenstein, milton worked in the fdr administration in the treasury department during world war ii, did that influence his later views? >> it is ironic, but when he worked for the treasury department during world war ii, he was actually on the team that developed withholding its source on the income tax. it would have happened without his involvement, but he actually was an early engineer of that expansion of the tax code. but i think that friedman's views when he was a young economist were basically set by the higher ups in the department and he took the line that he was working for them. i think that was an early phase of his development, but not one that endured. >> a little bit about milton friedman's legacy. he won the nobel prize in 1976,

presidential mel of in 1988, he was an advisor to president rager and prime minister thatcher, recognized by the economist as the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century, possibly all of it. jasmine, santa barbara, california. jasmine you are on "books that shaped america" one c-span. >> i was wondering, how can inflation ever be good for the economy, especially with how it is measured versus the 50s, 60s, 70s, to now, and how technology has changed it both significantly-- yeah. >> thank you. jasmine, are you a student at uc santa barbara? >> i am. >> thank you for calling in. is she one of your students? >> yes, she is. glad that you are watching. friedman's thought was that inflation has a temporary stimulated effect to the economy. that is like his perspective

was, if you are in a depressed economy, you want to increase the money supply, but that in the long run, if you continue increasing the money supply, but then, inflation will begin to have a negative effect on economic growth. so, he thought that the best policy was to have a low inflation rate at all times, and a stable two to 5% increase in the money supply every year on a year in, year out basis. he did not favor fetid changes in policy, and raising and lowering interest rates. he thought that was disruptive to the economy and was not helpful for price stability. >> and dan is in bridgewater, new jersey. i hope all of these students are getting extra credit for watching. go ahead, dan. >> i had the tremendous pleasure of going to

friedman's. i don't want to comment on economics, because to me, economics is somewhere between political science and cosmology. what i want to point out, the friedmans were very empathic and some pathetic people. they seemed to care about the people on the short end of the stick . it was a vexing problem they talked about extensively. i think that should never be forgotten, because he is perceived by many people as a right-wing person who did not care abt us, but he had the jewish ethics, open-heart thin toward other people and he was very, very upset, escially during the civil rights movement. >> now, dan, how did you know the friedmans ? >> i was at berkeley, you know, got all involved in that and i met him after that. >> thank you for calling in. there were other people who knew the friedmans, respected

the friedmans, this is from the c-span archives . here are some well-known politicians, talking about milton and rose friedman. >> winner of the nobel prize, milton's technically mastery of his profession is unchallenged, more essential to his work is his moral component. an idea of human freedom in which man's economic rights are as vital as a civic and human rights. >> we are entering the information age at a time of sweeping change in the economic and political spheres, the decline of communism is an economic philosophy, and the tide of democratic governments that is changing the face of the world, all based on the right of the individual to be. and milton friedman's resounding phrase, read to choose. >> there is a great statement by milton friedman and he said, nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as their own. >> milton and rose friedman.

>> milton friedman. >> we discussed milton friedman. >> i grant becker, friedman, all those guys. >> milton friedman, a concerned economist back in late 80s said, there's only one obligation a corporation has, that is to their shareholders. they have an obligation to their employees, the community they live in, the place they support. >> it is an honor for me to be here to pay tribute to a hero of freedom, milton friedman. he is has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision. the vision of a society where men and women are free, free to choose, but where government is not as free to override their decisions. >> well, besides president biden

, that was quite complimentary of friedman, where would he fit in today's gop, in your view? >> that is a very good question . friedman had a very unusual constellation of abuse, because he was not a social conservative. he thought that abortions should be legal. he was for gay rights, he was for drug utilization. those are not typical positions one would associate with the republican party today. on the other hand, he very much thought that government could be inefficient and that it was important for government to spend less and to do list. so i think that those positions too are less common in the republican party today. it is hard to know where he would exactly stand on the spectrum at this point in time. i will say that i very much agree with the caller who said that one can disagree with friedman's views, and he himself changed his views over his lifetime. he emphasized the discussion importance of debate. i don't

think you could question where he was coming from in the sense that he really was trying to increase human freedom. capitalism and freedom, free to choose. when writers are talking about freedom in the title of their books, it is really important to them. maybe he did not get it right entirely, but that was his goal. >> lanny ebenstein is a continuing lecturer at uc santa barbara. we have heard from a couple of his students this evening at throughout the series, we have been checking in with teachers to see how they teach the books that we have been talking about. here is patricia cunningham, nazareth area high school where she teaches ap courses in economics, government, and politics. >> in "free to choose" , he really takes a chapter by chapter approach, breaking down difficult concepts, making them very right palatable for students to know and understand, and see how they

are important to their daily lives. the first chapter, he is tackling the role of markets, voluntary exchange, adam smith, the invisible hand, all of those concepts could be difficult and uninteresting, but he takes them and makes them fascinated fascinating by applying real world examples and real-world scenarios and making them easier to understand, even though there are some things i would say are easy to understand here, there are also some challenges when it comes to some data included in the text. obviously, this is written in 1980. we are looking at 40 plus years ago and some of those data sets are, well, how data outdated. what i like to do with my students is have them update the data themselves, put on their economists had and say, here is what friedman had to say about the relationship between unemployment and inflation, what does the current right data say about that? we will pop over to the bureau

of labor statistics and look at the price index, look at the unemployment rates and compared to some of the data sets he has in the period in which he is writing. that allows them to say that these theories aren'tju there for a moment in time, but they are there overtime. even though that is a struggle at 1st for students, it empowers them to use the tools we have available today to actually apply the economics and to use that current data. what i really love about this piece is that, it is going to allow students not just to know and understand the economy, but to know and understand their role within it. how do they see the operations in their workplace? how do they see the operations in terms of getting that degree, or not getting that degree, and how that affects their productive capacity? a lot of what we see in this text canapply directly to students, mang it one of my favorite pieces to acin the

classroom. >> i want tothk patricia cunningham of nazareth high school and nazareth, pa for sharing some of her teaching methods for "free to choose." if you go to the website, c- span.org /books that shaped america, at the top, you will see teacher resources. there are lesson plans, and additional videos for each of the 10 books in the series. i recommend getting on our website, especially if you are a teacher. john in toms river new jersey, please go ahead with your question or comment. >> i was wondering, what would you think mr. friedman would say about how china is now, our supplier for steel industry, wood industry, all kind of industries, especially even now food? if you look at places like pennsylvania, pretty much encino where the steel mill used to be in pittsburgh steelers, hardly any still coming out of pennsylvania, if any and all the raw materials, what would he have done? thank you, john, we got the

idea. >> great, a really good question. again, you may not agree with friedman's perspective, but another area he was very influential in, he was a free trader. he is truly was that if china is going to be able to make goods more effectively than in the united states, it was beneficial to allow chinese to make those goods more effectively in the united states and that the united state should not have high tariffs on. he thought that you were going to have a more peaceful world if people were trading with one another, and you had specialization in different areas, and his theory was, as nations specialized in the areas that they are most productive in, and all nations would collectively have the most production. i appreciate that that does not feel like that is the case in western, pennsylvania in areas that are unemployed, and in the

long run, his view was, the advance of technology was the driving force of economic process and free trade was the best possible policy. he was not in favor of tariffs. >> let's follow that up with denise from california's text messages. would you comment on how you think milton friedman would see how the internet has affected society economically? >> he lived long enough so that he could see the start of the internet revolution in the early 2000. he was completely in favor of it . he thought the growth of knowledge was something that is exceedingly valuable to economic activity, whatever encourages people's ability to in exchange information is good for the economy. the internet allows us to send information instantaneously anywhere for nothing. it is a great boom to economic activity, he was totally in favor of it. >> the library of congress in 2013 or so came up with a list

of 100 books that shaped america. again, not necessarily all bestsellers, not the best well- known books, but bookhave had an iac, and that is what r series has been about this last nine weeks and again next ek. if you go to the website, books that shaped america is the website. if you go there, there is a you are input button, two steps. you can send us the book you think shaped america or had an impact on our society. here are some of the submissions that we have received. >> my name, sophia bon jovi, i am from northern virginia and the book i think has shaped america is "letter from birmingham jail" by martin luther king junior. not only does it truly define our understanding of what racial equality looks like, but it speaks to the millions of america's that stood up and advocated for what they believe is their right to place in the nation, which i think is beautiful. thank you. >> my suggestion is "

simulation." it is a great philosophical work, ascribed nature of america, median america, institutions that remove and estrange some civilians from what drive deems the real or substance in nature of the world. "substance of a simulation" certainly a book that has shaped america. >> my name is all of, i am from ukraine. if i'm thinking about books, what shaped america, for me, it is "white fang." it is an amazing book about native american. for me, it is something right. >> hi, my name is michelle. i am from hollywood, florida and the book that i think shaped america is "know my name" by chanelle miller. my

reason for picking this book is , you know, everyone knows the case against rock turner. i think she did an incredible job of talking about a side from the victim's perspective that we don't normally see, talking about the tribulations she went through. >> hi, i am jenny from denmark. the book i think shaped america is a book called "thomas and daniel." thomas has a nail on his fingers , of course, and when he gets water, he will become in touch with aliens. and i think that aliens are a big part of the story of america. again, i am from denmark. >> my name is rebecca. i am from mississippi. the book i think shaped america is "their eyes were watching god" by zora neale hurston. my reason is, the way that she talks about love and heartbreak

using real people's nguage and dialect is something that is very innovative. >> and if you go to c-span.org booksthatshapedamerica you will see your input at the top. two quick steps and you can send us a book you think shaped america. we may use it on this program. william in florida, please go ahead with your question or comment about free to choose. lanny ebenstein is our guest . >> thank you very much for taking my call. friedman used to say he was a libertarian, not a conservative, is that right? >> he considered himself a libertarian in his philosophy, but a republican or conservative at the time in his political registration. >> next call is caches in stone mountain, georgia. cassius, we are listening. >> hi there, thanks for taking

my call. i have a two part question, the first is, what in your opinion would be mr. friedman's perspective on where our economy is right now? what would you say would behis remedy to reducing thmoney supply >> thank you, sir. >> if milton friedman were to give advice right now, it would be to stop raising interest rates, and lower interest rates. you don't cut inflation by lowering interest rates, you simply hammer the economy. i think he would say that we should focus on money supply, rather than interest rates on the monetary policy, and that the federal government should try to reduce its spending to the greatest extent possible. those would be the two courses i think he would favor. >> eric in lava solstice, wisconsin sends us this coming one of the aspects of the pbs religious program are the debates in the second half of

the episode, some of the luminary debates, did milton friedman personally choose a guest? did he know them all personally? >> he did choose the gas, whether he knew them all personally, that i can't answer . a number of the guests, he had interacted with over the years, and they had a wide ideology. he had john kenneth goldberg i believe was a guest. michael harrington was a guest. he was a well-known socialist at the time. he did not have merely conservatives or libertarians speak, but he tried to give francis but begins another liberal at the time. he tried a wide range of views. he thought that following john stuart mill, knowledge and truth are further when we have active discussion and debate. he recognized, people aren't perfect. you make the best decisions you can. >> lanny ebenstein, what were

your interactions with milton and rose friedman like? >> i tell you, i really benefited from my interactions with milton and rose friedman. i remember the first time i went to milton and knocked on his door, i had set up an appointment with him when i was writing on rita kallick who had been a colic of his at the university of chicago. i asked if i could interview him, he said, sure, come up. the first thing i asked, do you mind if i take tape the conversation and the first thing he said, i have a single rule, what i said to one person, i say to everyone, i never say anything off the record. that is a principal, if you can live on, that is a moral principle. as i said, that greatly influenced me. he had an incredibly warm personality, whether you agreed or disagreed with him. he really cared about other people. he had a great sense of humor, huge energy, creative, extraordinarily fast in his intellect, even in his late 80s

and early 90s, great memory. he was someone who, across the political spectrum, he was the most popular professor at the university of chicago. more students wanted to do their phd's with him than any other teacher there, because of the type of human being he was. he was really a great man. and rose was no slouch either. she gave me some papers she had on frank knight, because she has had been a student of frank knight at the university of chicago to use for my work. they were a wonderful couple and did their best to make our country a better country. >> and lanny ebenstein graduated from the london school of economics . let's end where we began. what is the impact of free to choose, and why should it be included on the books that shaped america list? >> "free to choose" is a really important book, one of the really important books in american history because it signaled the move away from vernment is the solution to our problems to, we need to

reform government. that is what even bill clinton was saying during the 1990s here this is not necessarily a strictly partisan issue. so, the general trend toward relying on the market, and for a time, a focus on inflation that said, quantity of money is the most important aspect of inflation, those were all important issues i should say too much friedman was not a very highly in the form of dissonance in the form of communist countries in the soviet and eastern union your. he is someone that inspired many people to seek a more free society. and again, his bottom line was, you can't have political friedman freedom without economic freedom, and that is a part of the argument for economic freedom. yes, it is more productive, but it leads to a free society, generally. >> lanny ebenstein of uc santa barbara , we appreciate you being on "books that shaped

america." we certainly appreciate your input at home. we will see you next week. thank you. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ if you are enjoying book tv, sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on the screen to receive the scheduled upcoming programs, authored discussions, book programs, and more. book tv every sunday on c-span 2, or online at tv.org,

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span2 with television services . our club is home to legendary explorers and it is a difficult treasury of those stories of those that have expanded the margins of knowledge. tonight, we are privileged to welcome a first rate chronicler of such stories and such explores. a historic author and journalist, including editor at large for "outside magazine" and paralympian's under circumstances. to the marine, and his book, "ghost soldiers" to the marines children during the korean war. we explore carson in his book "carson." his powerful work on martin luther king on his trail. he has previously elected lectured here at the explorers club under the kingdom of ice. he is here tonight with his wife, ann, a journalist and

editor of note. we are excited to welcome to our monday night lecture, the historian arthur and journalist, hansen sides. hello, hello. so wonderful to be here tonight in new york city. i think the only place that captain cook did not go to, but if you did go here, he would have come to this place, i'm pretty sure, and hung out in this amazing institution. he was not a pit helmet guy, he was more of a tri-corn had. this would have been his hangout, i am sure. thank you. it is great to be back here. i was here i think it was nine years ago. apparently, i did not offend too people because i have been invited. i can't think of a better place to talk about one of the

greatest explorers of all time, captain james cook, at the explorers club of new york. i was hearing about the bar and we actually got to experience the bar. you have to go down there, if for no other reason that instead of nuts or pretzels, what they have is crickets, like crunchy crickets, protein. it is good stuff. only at the explorers club. so, so great to be here. i mean, that was nothing like the kind of food they ate on captain cook's voyages. a little bit about this photo as you were wandering in, not photo, this piece of art. this is depicting the moment when captain cook first arrived in hawaii, and was greeted by the king of hawaii. these two cultures met for the first time

in a pretty profound way, two profound cultures, that exciting moment of first contact when everything is possible. before there is tragedy, before there is missed cues, ms. conceptions, and missed communications, there is this moment when cultures collide and have at least a possibility of truly understanding each other. this is a painting that is painted by a native hawaiian, an amazing man named her carne, who does a series of historical paintings. just really kind of gets to the heart of what this book is about. it is a nautical tail, has all of the attributes of a nautical tale of woe, also has this electric moment of first contact , when anything is possible and when there is a splinter me there is a majesty. it is just

like any kind of thing could happen. that is really the moment repeatedly throughout the book that i tried to capture. let's talk a little about captain cook. how many of you know a lot about captain cook? it is an explorers club, come on ! not a lot. here is the captain. captain james cook, who i am going to argue tonight, and have argued while i have been on the book tour, was truly one of the great explorers of all time, possibly you could argue i think quite convincingly the greatest, in terms of the quality of his observations, in terms of the number of nautical miles that he traveled, in terms of the wealth of knowledge

that his voyages produced around the world, in terms of the beautiful art, engravings, and the knowledge of plants and animals that were circulated around the world, and also in terms of the first encounters that his voyages produced with native people that never, never seen europeans before. he is certainly in the pantheon with magellan, alexander von humboldt, who was, marco polo. he, at the same time, i think many americans don't really know much about captain cook. we've talked a little about that . first, i want to talk about this painting. a painting by william hodges, who traveled around the world with captain cook on his second voyage. it captures, i think, more than

any other visual the intensity of captain cook, his methodical mate nature. this was first and foremost a great maker, a very, very intense dude, very methodical, not the kind of guy you would want to have a beer with, but someone who, and it is capturing, i think so many other paintings about captain cook are official portraits, where there is clearly a pose going on and it is fake and artificial. you see this as a guide that is somewhat lonely, somewhat i think trying to work out a problem. he is a problem solver, a puzzle solver. what is interesting about this painting, it was painted in 1776, just before the american revolution, and it

was probably lost to history for centuries, was found in the 1980s somewhere in ireland. it really captures, i feel like, ures of cook. captain cook r is mixed up with a lot of other captains, real and imaginary. just very quickly go through this. captain kidd, a buccaneer, not a very good looking guy, of course, captain kirk. captain hook, and i can tell you have any people have told me while i have been researching this book to me how is the book coming along with the pirate guy with the parent on his shoulder? not captain hook. and of course, the greatest captain i think of all, i think we all

could agree as a bunch of explorers, we can agree, the greatest captain of all, captain crunch. somebody likes it. do you remember captain crunch had this thing called crunchberries and they tore the roof of your mouth open? it was terrible. no more laughing, it is serious now, very serious. captain cook, this is the official portrait. it really shows all the accoutrements of exploration, also painted in 1776 as he is getting ready for this third voyage, the subject of my book. i think that captain cook is someone who really belongs in the pantheon, is very much in the pantheon of great explorers come about is very much controversial today. he is controversial for a lot of reasons, but mainly because of this, where didn't captain

cook go? these are his three voyages. the blue voyage is the blue dotted line, the third voyage subject of the book. he went everywhere from nearly to antarctica, to the arctic from the realm of ping was, to the realm of polar bears and everywhere in between. because he went everywhere, and because he was such an amazing map maker, such a meticulous map maker, you put these places, many of them very isolated places, on the atlases of the globe for the first time, really in a sense broadcast the locations of these places to the world. so, they are very resentful, because that accelerated the process of colonization in and an

unbelievably fast way. today, captain cook is quite controversial. his monuments have been splattered, vandalized and hacked from this point. paper people asked me my position on that. i feel like in many ways, i certainly understand where it is coming from, because colonialism, imperialism, the whole mindset behind these voyages was complicated, and ravaged these very agile island societies, but in some ways, cook was just the message of modernity. he was just the guy, the first one to arrive. he was the exploiter. he was the mapmaker, someone who did not leave anyone mind, he was not a colonizer. in fact, incredibly for his

time, quite pathetic to the cultures that he encountered and wrote about them brilliantly in his books, in his journals. anyway, it is a complicated subject, i am sure we will talk about it a little in question and answer. his statues are coming down, he has been canceled across the pacific and this interesting development, which i kind of leaned into in the book, i kind of understand where it is coming from. i think it makes it more interesting that this guy, 250 years old, this stodgy old british explorer is kind of controversial. he animates people, he agitates people, i think that makes it more interesting. this is the place where he was killed in hawaii. spoiler alert, he dies. okay? and he dies in a very graphic

and i think very violent way i think most americans if they know anything about captain cook, not captain hook, captain cook, he died in this very graphic way. this is the place where he was killed. when i was visiting, this is what isaiah. you see, he is a lightening rod for many larger forces going on in the world of culture. so, why do we care about captain cook? what is important about him? what should you know about his voyages? very quickly, i will run through his first, things he ran through first, or his voyages encountered first. his voyages were the very first to make use of this amazing navigational tool called the chronometer, which was many decades in the making. i know there is a lot of explorers club geeks in here that probably know all about the history of this thing. it is an amazing tool that

allowed explorers to know where they were precisely particularly in the question of longitude, a question debated, studied, puzzled over for a long time. i will not go into the science, but basically, this seagoing clock is essentially just a clock, one that is manufactured to withstand the bumps and bruises, and the vicinity of the sea would tell you exactly what time it was in greenwich, the reference point, greenwich, we have greenwich mean time, now, we know exactly where we are in the world that makes a huge difference. earlier explorers like tasman, from the netherlands, he had been to new zealand, but he could not tell you where it was. you sail about four weeks this way, and maybe three weeks that

way, and you might find it. now they knew exactly where it was so cook could return to it the next time. he had the chronometer on the second and third voyage. it is-- the chronometer i showed you is called the k-1, invented by a guy named harrison, but a guy named kendall figured out how to make it cheaper and better. it is here the national maritime museum in greenwich, an amazing place. how many have you been there? a lot of people, not as many hands as i would have thought. extraordinary place, the best maritime museum in the world by far. other first, captain cook is believed to be the first explorer to cross the and arctic circle. and he did so on his first and second voyages in order to find, or perhaps not find, a mythic, super continent that was widely believed to exist by all the leading scientists of the time.

this image shows-- you can see at the very bottom of the world, there is this massive continent, these huge place that was so widely believed, they put it on maps and said it was populated by millions of people. it had to be there, because if it was not there, preponderance of landmasses in the northern hemisphere would cause the planet to spin out of control into outer space. don't laugh. yes, we have two left, because it is such silly science. that is what the view was at the time. captain cook went down there and decided, it is not there, it is a myth. there is no such continent. yes, antarctica, which he came very close to discovering is big . yes, australia is a big continent, but nothing like that. he became what they call a hero

of negative discovery, meaning, he didn't discover anything that was widely presumed to be there. moving on to other first, it is a nautical tail. we have to have some scurvy talk. this exhibition, though, i regret to tell you, those of you who have not read the book, there is no scurvy at all. captain cook, all three of his voyages, there was never a single case of scurvy. this is another reason why he was hailed in his time as being a great explorer. they thought he had conquered scurvy. he, of course, did not understand that scurvy caused-- was caused by a lack of vitamin c. what he did understand in his regiment of food that he made his sailors eat, that you had to have fresh

fruits, fresh vegetables, fresh meat. this soft pork and a hard tech diet was not going to cut it. he knew instinctively that it was unhealthy and he forced this food down their throats, practically. sometimes, they would not want to eat it. scurvy of course was a horrible malady. it caused all of these weird sores on your body and cost your body officially to disintegrate from within. it caused your gums to become spongy, pull back from your teeth. it caused the death of millions of people, sailors over the years and was almost considered an occupational hazard of long- distance voyaging at that time. now, with scurvy basically conquered, the crown realized, hey, we can do more long- distance voyages. we could go all around the world, conquer the world to beat the spanish, beat the dust

dutch and portuguese at this game of imperialism. that is one of the reasons captain cook was so famous after his first and second voyages. so, captain cook during his third voyage snapped this wonderful photograph of surfing , obviously not true. his voyages, this particularly, this third voyage, we would get this sport of surfing. you cannot believe how just amazed is officers are who writes about this thing. first of all, most english people back then, most people in the navy did not know how to swim, which is amazing in and of itself that they were not required to learn how to swim, let alone serve. they tried to break the biomechanics down, you would not believe. they get on this long board, they stand up and glide across

the waves for miles across the ocean. it is this unbelievable what they are seeing. they can't believe it and they don't believe that the english back home will believe it. we get our first description of the whole concept of taboo, going to the temples of tahiti, what is allowed, what is not allowed, the weird rules and regulations, kind of quasi religious, also legal system of laws like such things as, if the shadow-- if your shadow were to fall upon the king, you could be killed. more women aren't supposed to eat certain species of fish, all kinds of very extremely delineated specific laws. this concept of taboo very quickly enters the lexicon of english society,

within a few short years of his voyages. we talk about, that is taboo, we can do that, whatever the taboo might be. so, massage is another thing that we get from his voyages. tahitian massage is something nearly all of his explorers, all of his sailors experience at some point. captain cook himself was suffering mightily from a condition called sciatica, an incredibly debilitating thing. he was skeptical, he did not want to be touched. he is british. he undergoes this treatment, a whole army of masseuses descended upon him, worked on him for 3 days in a series of

treatments and his sciatica is completely cured and is very skeptical captain writes in his journal about how wonderful this was, and this takes off after these things are published back in england. what else? we get a first description of a human sacrifice, which had been rumored to be aging all over polynesian, and tahiti in the third voyage. cook and his officers encountered this. and of course, tattooing. tattooing is a big thing all over polynesian. cook's men immediately want to have themselves tattooed. it seems like a cool thing to do. of course, when they get home to england, everyone wants a tattoo. it goes viral and becomes this thing. if you are a nautical guy, if you are a sailor, you have to have a tattoo. these were a few of the first emerged from cook's three voyages. so, doing these books, in some

respects, is a lonely enterprise. you are just staring at a lot of monographs, manuscripts, going to archives, sitting in a room writing for years. one of the joys of doing them is to meet the scholars, the people who have devoted their lives in some cases to the age of exploration, to understanding these various characters, to understanding the anthropology, the archaeology of these places. and i will say, i could not have done this book without some of these folks who i met along the way. a quick shout out to some of them. the first thing i had to do was get this thing right here, very important , i am a card-carrying member of the captain cook society, which publishes a monthly log called "the captain's log."

they are called cookies and i bring this up, partly because they really were just hugely, hugely beneficial to my research, but also just to research indicated that there is this enormous body of literature, this enormous body of knowledge that cook's voyages produced. it is almost like people that know all about the civil war, or all about the revolutionary war, you name the topic. captain cook's three voyages, his biography, stories of all the officers that served under him, it is an extensive body of knowledge, and it can take a person the rest of their life to master all of that information. without these guys, here are some of them, i could not have done it. they have excellent patient facial hair. two past

presidents of the society, the guy on the right, huge shout out, this is a guy named cliff thorton, president of the society and someone who, the left probably well-known american writer, horwitz, who wrote an amazing book called "blue latitudes" if any of you have read it, maybe a few. cliff thorton popped up in that book and he is still at it all these years later, an amazing, amazing guy who helped me with a lot of misconceptions and kept me on the straight and narrow, for sure. they are all over the place. some of them-- they are mostly guys, but there is women, polynesians, of course anthropology, archaeologists, maritime historians, all sorts of people who are members of this amazing society. that is where some of the research comes from, for sure. there are also the collectors,

captain cook's voyages produced all kinds of relics and artifacts, which somehow ended up in newseum's in england, australia, new zealand. many of these artifacts, maybe some of you saw on the news recently, a bunch of seers were recently returned to the aborigines of australia here there is all of these artifacts. this is a sphere of cook's third voyage, i believe it is true, this is a very reputable collector in honolulu, who has got all of the prominence on it , andrew, got to hold all of that. anything, this is an artifact that captain cook himself held at one point. kind of a cool part of the research. the last thing is, you meet a lot of book collectors, prayer book and manuscript collectors, including this guy. a guy named lou weinstein lived

on maui and has this rare collection of captain cook original volumes, all kinds of stuff. to hold them in your hands, the quality of the printing of those days, the beauty of the art, the engravings, the maps. these are folio sized books, these are huge, huge books. and you realize, it is a direct connection to history, which is pretty cool to enjoy. so, going back a little bit justly understand a little about who captain cook was in his early life. he was from yorkshire. he came from poverty. he came from nothing. his father was a farmer. one of the things i love about captain cook is, the royal navy at that time, most people had got to that level where people with connections, people with money, people who knew the right

people. captain cook did it by sheer ferocious work ethic, by an incredible skill for astronomy, and map making. he worked his way up from literally nothing. this is eaten, the town he grew up in, kind of the morris of yorkshire and he lived in this beautiful area, but he was bored out of his mind. he was a young kid, about 7 years old, at least so goes the legend, that he climbed this place called rosemary talking topping . he climbed to the very top of this small mountain, or high heel, which i did with my wife, ann . by the way, ann is here. shout out to ann, my wonderful wife . we got to the top of it,

and the reason i show it, because at least according to the story, captain cook at number seven years old, first saw the ocean 12 miles away. rca farmer and he's like i get i get to go over there and he does and he very quickly goes to this town place called whitby in the us, you know, just just on the of here. he saw a very circumscribed life for himself as a farmer and he was like, i've got to go over there. he does. he very quickly goes to this town, a place called whidbey on the coast of the north sea and he apprentices to some shipping interests there and learns the shipping trade and he learns how to navigate the very complicated coastline of england, bringing coal from newcastle down to london. he goes all over the baltic,

all over the north sea. he masters the trade and he does so in these ships. this is an early, early photograph of one of the whidbey cats. they are called cats. they are not sleek. they are not beautiful. they are not passed but they are stout and solid and nearly bomb proof and they can carry huge amounts of stuff inside. they have a square stern. these are the ships that he learned to navigate and these are the ships he used on all three of his voyages around the world. that is why i showed that photograph. >> the voyage itself was designed to find something that the british had been obsessed with for centuries, finding the northwest passage, a shortcut over canada from the atlantic to the pacific in order to facilitate trade with the east

indies, with india, with china and also, while they are at it, avoid the spanish. the northwest passage was something that i think most of you in the room know a little bit about. things did not ever go well for the british. they got stuck in the ice. pretty soon, they are starving, scurvy, they are eating their boots. they had always tried it from the east, from the atlantic side and nothing had gone well. the idea for this voyage was to reverse the whole thing and go around alaska, a place -- this is a modern map showing the possibilities but the idea was to go around alaska, go up through the bering strait, the part of the world that was not very well understood at all and try to find the northwest passage from the pacific side.

they never seemed to talk about, why aren't things going to go horribly wrong from that site just like they did from the other side? but, that is a whole other story. so, captain cook voyages, in particular this third one, which is the subject of the book, it is important for you to understand that these were not captain cook had an idea, i think i will go on a voyage like dora the explorer. he had the might and the money and the brainpower of the entire british empire behind him. i want to talk about who some of those were, starting at the top, king george. king george the third, king of england, was really into t captain cook, really into his voyages , big supporter. he is famously mad king george but he's not mad yet.

he is not mad yet except that he is starting to go a little bit mad because of certain things that are starting to happen in boston at this time, 1776. but, his other thing was he is really into animals. he loves farm animals and he had this idea of bringing to tahiti a bunch of -- i don't know, polls and cows and goats and sheep and peacocks and all kinds of things so they could v create a proper form. they needed to have a proper english farm. consequently, this voyage, in addition to being a voyage of exploration, is a noah's ark experiment chock full of animals that cook has to somehow deliver to tahiti. we get that farmer george, they call him. another entity behind this is the royal society, which was

the preeminent intellectual fraternity, going back to sir isaac newton, philosophers, doctors and all kinds of gentlemen scientists were behind this voyage and behind all of cook's voyages. put up money for it and put up the expertise, including this guy, a very famous botanist named joseph banks who, anyone who knows anything about botany, knows about him. not to be confused with the guy, whoever that guy was that came up with the cheap suits that you can get at the mall. joseph banks was a very amazing writer who went around the world on cook's first voyage ng with the endeavor and he plays a big role in the book. last but not least, this guy,

probably the most powerful man in england besides king george himself, he is the first lord of the admiral team. the earl of sandwich. a very powerful guy, someone who loves cook, was quite a good friend of cook and a good promoter of his voyages. this is his estate north of england -- north of london, excuse me. he got to know board sandwich. he is famous for many, many things but most famous for being the inventor of the sandwich. he is a busy guy. by the way, this story checks out. he was busy. he was a workaholic. he was a gambler and night. he was in a hurry. he got this idea of sticking a

roast beef between two slices of bread and eating it on the fly. thus, he became known as the inventor of the sandwich. i think it is actually true. okay. the voyage itself -- something is going on out here. i think there is a big protest happening. >> so, the voyage. this gives you a sense of -- this is his third voyage, the subject of the book. again, the ambition of it, the sheer scopey of it, the crazy kind of contours of it, all of the things going on is almost impossible for me to distinctly tell you about what is going on here and what they were trying h to do but they leave from plymouth on july 12, 1776, july

12, 1776. they did not have cable or any kind of telephones or anything. they did not know this was happening in philadelphia. what is interesting is they leave and they are in perfect ignorance of all of these developments for the rest of the voyage, all four years. yet, it is a constant theme on the continent where they are exploring. they are exploring alaska and the northwest coast of north america and all of these things are happening for thousand miles away. important, recently to say, this is not by any means a biography of captain cook. it is an ensemble story about 180 men who left in these two ships in july 1776. i'm going to pluck out three of them who are -- this is getting intense out here. is it something i am saying?

so, three interesting people on board the ship. the guy on the left becomes a notorious character in his own right some years later. he is a master of the resolution at the time, a guy named william bly. some people have heard of the bounty. he has this incredible ability as a navigator but he is also an insufferable personality. even on this voyage, you begin to see the seeds of his mutiny coming many years later. people can't stand him. but, he is very, very talented. the guy up in the right is vancouver george. he also becomes a great explorer some years later. he is a midshipman and then the guy on the lower right is john ledger, an american, who i quote a lot in the book.

he was born in connecticut and went to dartmouth. after cook's voyage ends up exploring all of eurasia, all across the extent of russia on foot, just to say there is a lot of voices. there is a lot of different characters that i am trying to bring into this story. cook is really interesting but he is a little bit -- he has to be very careful what he says because everything he is writing, he is writing for the mlt. bringing in these other voices makes the story more interesting. after leaving plymouth, they go around to take him briefly and then they go to a place called the kerguelen islands. i show this to a group of the people at the explorers club and it was the first place he

had to stop, way down there in the southern indian ocean, halfway to antarctica and the reason he had to go there is because it was rumored that the french had gone to this place. anything the french did, the british had to do it, go check it out and after weeks and weeks of incredible terrible seas, they find it. here is what they find. it is very remote. there is a very great emperor penguin upstairs, by the way. you got to check it out. he decides very quickly, leave it to the french. it is, to j this day, a french possession. then they move on to tasmania. again, they are rumored that there is a great anchorage there somewhere. he goes to this place which is

just incredibly beautiful and he has his first encounter experience with in this case that the native people of tasmania, the expedition artist go to work. they paint these beautiful paintings which become engravings. everything goes according to plan. they have peaceful exchanges in both directions. there is no sexual encounter. there is no spreading of venereal disease. he is there a little over a week. he writes eloquently about these people. what is interesting -- i show this because exactly one century after cook's arrival and brief stop at bruni island,

the people are virtually extinct and this photograph was taken of the very last full- blooded palo alto person, or at least believed to be. the woman was photographed and she died almost exactly -- i show this to demonstrate, the reason why cook is so resented all over the pacific is not so much for what he did or what he saw or what himself brought into the cultures but the entire imperial kind of thing that ensued immediately after his voyages, which was the occupiers and the alcohol and the missionaries -- the british hunted these people for sport. it was just unbelievable that the entire people who had been there for millennia were nearly

extinct within a century. there is that story. moving on to new england, the next stop on his voyage, i won't go into it. i don't really have time. it involves cannibalism. i will just leave it at that. i had to do some difficult research along the way. al hardship, research i had to do when i was down there. there is a lot of research on this voyage but there is also a decent amount of research. beautiful places that he anchored. this is a place called ship cove in new zealand where you spend a while -- my wife and i hiked all over the place. one of the few monuments that has not been splattered with red paint. then it goes into the tonga

island group. finally moving toward tahiti. another absolutely gorgeous place that was famous among all the sailors of england and all over europe for being a beautiful place, beautiful women, great food, great place to get some r&r. half of the sailors signed on so they could go to this incredible spot in tahiti. this is from my iphone. don't hate me for the fact that i had to go to these places. he was not just their for r&r -- there for r&r or fun, he was they with the mission, a very particular mission. that was, it had to do with some guy, a polynesian young man, a major character in the

book, a guy who would come to england on cook's second voyage and had become the first polynesian to set foot on british soil. he had an amazing experience. he learned english. he learned being an aristocrat. he played backgammon and chess. he was vaccinated for smallpox.o he met king george. he met boswell and all of the individuals at the time and was held up at a paragon of the noble savage. overall, he had an amazing two years in england. the early part of the book is telling exploits and adventures in england. after two years, he is homesick. he really wants to get back to tahiti and king george says, we will get you back.

king george says captain cook is a guy who will get you back and that becomes the first errand of the voyage, to return him to tahiti with his belongings. he has now accumulated weird belongings like a full suit of armor, a jack-in-the-box electrocuting machine, all kinds of other things including a bible and horses, lots of horses. they have to bring the horses back to tahiti as well. sir joshua reynolds, the finest portland -- portrait painter, this was painted in 1776, considered his masterpiece, his favorite painting of all of his

paintings and a painting that was recently sold to the getty museum in los angeles for $62 million. he is famous even to this day, you can go see him in l.a.. right now it is at the portrait gallery, the national portrait a gallery in london. so, mai, that is another part of this story. it is a long story but the real reason he went to england is because he wanted guns so he could fight against the people of bora-bora, who had stolen his land and killed his father. he had this scheme behind the whole voyage, the reason he wanted to get those guns. i won't go into it anymore but there is a lot going on with u mai. that is a big part of the book . he leaves mai across the pacific ocean , expecting next up is oregon.

instead, he stumbled across this place. it is part of a much bigger island chain. it is a very interesting experience there. everything basically goes well. another kind of first encounter experience he realizes is not on any of the maps. you get the idea. this is also a native hawaiian painter who is trying to describe the first encounter. the british can't believe it. the hawaiians can't believe it. there is all some -- also some thoughts that they were god,

perhaps that they were features from out of space, some oral history about what was going on. what captain cook is starting to realize, by the time he gets to hawaii, is that there has been an enormous spread across the pacific ocean, the polynesian diaspora. he has been to easter island. he has been to the cook islands. he has been to tahiti. now they are all speaking more or less the same language. they are the same people. how did they do it? what is their technology? how are there ships that had no medal? they did not have anything like

european ships. they managed this incredible migration all across many thousands of miles and he is really the first european explorer to begin to understand that and question the ship architecture and how do they accomplish this amazing feat? >> he reaches the pacific northwest at a place here called cape foul weather, named by him. one of the great things about captain cook, he did not name anything after himself . there are many things named after him but he did not come up with those names himself. he was very literal in naming things and if he did not know the indigenous name for it, he just said the weather was foul today so, cape foulweather.

these are places you can go to, all with his names on them. he is working his way up the coast of the northwest of america. he is now beginning to look at every possible inlet, every bay, every river. could this be the northwest passage? is this it? on vancouver island, where i went with some of my family, i met the last living you quite villager, the first nation's elder, got some good stories ce from ray. i went past saint alliance. i keep going, keep going many

of you have been to alaska and know these names. me and my wife go up to cook inlet which, again, not named by cook but named by the admiralty, a place that has the second largest title differential in the world. they nearly get stuck here. this is not the northwest passage. the poke through the aleutian islands and work their way all the way up the west coast of alaska, charting the coast the whole way, encountering ice. they get through the bering strait up to the area that we would call barrow, alaska, way, way at the top of alaska where he encounters ice and he encounters an impenetrable wall

of ice, he encounters polar bears, a walrus, i think most people think of captain cook as being a south seas guy, polynesia, warmer weather but he spent so much time in the arctic and the antarctic and this shows that there is a hunting walrus. they are trying to hunt them to eat them but they are terrible eating. absolutely terrible. they kill them, they toe them overboard for two days, they bring them ashore, they boil them for three days, they fry them in greece and it is still not edible. anyway, that is the arctic experience. he realizes he cannot pass hiov canada to the atlantic. he realizes that there is no

northwest passage. this is an unusual thing. instead of going home, why don't we wait an entire year, come back next summer and do it all again and maybe the ice will be different next summer. that is what he decides to do. so, i show this before and after photo of his arctic experience. this is a map showing -- this is the map that captain cook had to work with on his voyage up there, sort of came out of the bering explanation but it is very, very wrong. it shows alaska up there as a little island in the upper right corner. i don't know where to begin to say that it is wrong.

captain cook discovers that a bad map is worse than no math at all. to the right of alaska island, there is a waterway and that is what the admiral really wanted him to check out more than anything. may be that is the northwest passage. well, ofit wasn't. this is what he was given and this is what his expedition produced. this is a german publication of his english map but you begin to get the contours of alaska. how he did this in the fog, the heavy seas, never coming ashore, doing it from his ship, we guess some sense of what it really looks like. this is his greatest quality, his ability to produce these

maps on-the-fly while moving past over the coastline. he decides, we are going to go out and do it again and go back to that amazing place that we stumbled upon, the hawaiian islands chain. so, he does. he circum-navigates the islandsl and he comes ashore at this extraordinary place. best snorkeling in all of hawaii. this is the scene. this is what did more or less looked like. he arrived at a festival to celebrate the god mono and, apparently, this has been debated endlessly by anthropologists. apparently they thought he was the god. he happened to arrive during

the festival in the right direction with big ships and big sales and there was this unbelievable energy and rapture around his arrival. e they bowed down to him. they called him lono. they brought him into the temple and worshiped him, it seems like . that is the story that happens for the first couple of weeks. his expedition artists, sure and they do these amazing pieces of art. everyone is happy. everyone is happening a good time. that is right where things go badly for captain cook. then, three weeks later, we get this. this is how i end the story. i want you to read the book ands buy the book. i don't want to tell you how we get to this spot but the question is, how is this the most disciplined of explorers n ending up dead on the lava flask of the big island of

hawaii, this guy who has legitimately prided himself on his understanding of polynesian culture and polynesian behavior and polynesian ways? how did he demonstrate such bad judgment that he ended up in this situation? a story that has been documented and become part of the exploration, hawaiian artists, english artists, they all try to capture this moment. that is the last 50 pages or so of the book, trying to tell you how this all happened. what kind of miscommunications escalated to create this result, which is an incredibly violent story of where first contact goes awry.

with all of that in mind, how are we doing on time? >> we've got about -- i would love to take a question. >> thank you for the talk. with all of the material on captain cook, what drew you to the story of the third voyage, in particular? >> i realize that captain cook's third voyage was by far the most dramatic, the longest of his voyages, in terms of duration and miles, and also the most american. with an american publisher, an

american writer, i was trying to figure out what does an american have to say about this quintessentially british story? realizing that they left in s july 1776 and they had all of these americans on board and the officer who ends up bringing the ship home to england in 1780 is from virginia and he has to decide, and i american or am i english. they finally get the news of what has been happening with the revolution. that is part of it. also, it is one of the classic stories that needs to be revisited every so often by vi different generations of riders -- writers because i am interested in the reckoning that we have been seeing around the world in terms of getting the indigenous point of view across. and every place in this book, i tried to bring in the oral history and the anthropology.

we begin to get to the best of my ability a sense of indigenous polynesian point of view and indigenous alaskan point of view of this story which has been underserved throughout the literature. it is a voluminous body of literature. it is both a blessing and a disguise. i just developed an aneurysm trying to absorb all of this stuff and trying to understand what is my contribution to literature. thank you. >> thank you for your great presentation and revelation a grout -- about this great story. welcome all of the visitors to

our club. it is a place where our ideas are exchanged. they may confirm that before he left portsmouth on his third voyage, he complained about the royal navy shortchanging the ship's expeditionary supplies, rigging the pitch line, even sailors would go over and deal with the rebels. had he been properly equipped, he would not have to go back from the arctic to hawaii. he would have had to take on nba governor of society and made better of the consequences. in eno way, -- in a way, it is

our fault. we are re-rigging and outfitting and the pairing ships that are going to put down the revolve in boston and that is true. the resolution got short changed. it was not properly caulked, the masks were -- masts were rotten. the focus is somewhere else. this is wonderful. they said they were clearly preoccupied with other things going on. if he had waited a couple more b weeks or a couple more months, they may not have gone at all. i think there is something true about what you just said. let's blame the americans.

benjamin franklin put out this thing to all of the captains of all of the british ships that if you encounter captain cook anywhere, let him go. don't arrest him. captain cook's voyage is so important. just let him go. he had a free pass all over american waters. we may sign some books out here and one more shout out for the bar. this brand-new bar is really good. >> two questions. by the way, great story. great book. one of the questions i had is, these are very good voyages.

what was the reaction of the crew going through some of the ordeals. while they were doing the voyages, it might be hard to keep everyone in line. what you were saying -- maybe you already answered the question about how hated captain cook is today. obviously he left a good legacy and he helped a lot of people understand that the world was wide open. what was their first reaction? if you look back at history, what imprint -- how do they see him through history instead of

through what they think happened ? >> those are some big questions there. the first one is, these voices were very long and include was famous for being quite fair but by the third voyage he was showing some cruelty. something was wrong with captain cook on his third voyage. that is something i did not talk about. what was said? was that sciatica that i mentioned? was it a parasite that was causing him to have mental illness? some people may describe it as bipolar disorder. of course, he did go to the arctic and the enter nick so by definition he is bipolar. sorry. there was something wrong with the captain who was much quicker to dispense the typical

justice that you had back then in the navy. the captain was the master and commander as soon as he left the shore. he was famous for not being tyrannical in his first two voyages but by the third, you start to see some changes. the other part of your question is much more expansive. it sounds like you are asking, essentially, when you take away the current criticism that we are seeing of cook around polynesia and around the world, what were his true contributions? what was his legacy? >> we are in a room here, in explorers club, a place devoted to the idea of travel and the idea that it is good for us, hopefully good for the people that we visit, a cross pollination of knowledge and

ideas. i believe in that. i have always believed in that. i think we can also probably all agree in this room that it is innately part of the human condition, part of our dna to explore. what is next? what is over the next hill? what is over the horizon? i think captain cook believes in that and i believe the polynesians believed in that. they, of all people, where the great voyageurs who populated the entire pacific. i i think you could ask a question legitimately, captain cook came and some very terrible things happened after his touching of these islands but it was going to happen one way or another and i think that what you have with captain cook is that he was a messenger of modernity. he was the guy who brought the modern world to these very

distant places for better or for worse. could have been a person who is much less sympathetic, much less humane, much less understanding of the cultures but it happened to be this guy, captain cook. although i understand where the protests are coming from, i certainly understand that we have to think the whole -- rethink the whole imperial mindset. in some ways, they got the wrong guy. it is much easier to pin it on one dude than it is to pin it on an entire system, a whole paradigm. i ended up defending captain cook from his biggest detractors. i think he was an extraordinary explorer, extraordinary thinker and if we want to understand the modern world and how it got to be the other way, we have to understand these explorers. this is the golden age of

exploration. you could argue captain cook was the greatest of them all. i will end on that note. i will send some books and i hope to meet you. thank you. >> in conclusion, real quick, i just want to thank all of you for coming here tonight. as you mentioned, bringing this history to life is part of, it is important that we re-examine the stuff in each generation and when you look around the room, i love how you are talking about polynesia. that is the cold tiki flag that is a flag in the corner. these are all great artifacts but they only have meaning if we are here to do it. thank you for bringing it to life. on behalf of the club, thank you to all of you for bringing

this to life. if you are enjoying book tv, sign up for our newsletter using the qr code on your screen. to receive a scheduled upcoming programs, open discussions and more, book tv, every sunday on c-span 2 or any time online . television for serious readers. friday night, watch c-span 's 2024 campaign trail, a weekly discussion on how the presidential senate and house campaigns have progressed in the past week. two reporters join us to talk about the issues, messages and been striving the political news and to take a look at the week ahead. watch c-span's 2024 campaign trail friday nights at 7:00 eastern on c-span, online at www.cspan.org or download the podcast on c-span now, our free mobile app or wherever you

get your podcasts. c-span, your unfiltered view of politics. c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by america's cable-television company and today, we continue to take you to congress and other public policy events in washington, a d.c. and around the country. c-span, powered by cable. yashica dutt is an accomplished writer, speaker . her book, coming out as dalit won awards. it is the national academy young authors award. i would like to also share with you that this event will be monitored by our friend, soumya shailendra, who is a scholar of haitian languages

and literature at northwestern university. we, as a caste , would like to celebrate the month and we want to celebrate it on the anniversary. on here on display, you can see the book. it literally changed my life. i was the man who came here. that book changed my life. it demolished me and help me to build myself once again. this is the book and our wonderful friends, journalist, editor and the wonderful work is on display. i would recommend you go to these books. they are just amazing. a quick plug.

we are looking forward to start a reading service on the south side of chicago where we will be discussing ideas and the great leaders who talked about human liberation and human emancipation in a fundamentally radical new way. without further ado, i would like to welcome yashica and thank you for coming here. >> [ applause ] >> so, yashica is going to read to us first and then i have a a couple of questions and then we will open that up. this is the flow of our next sort of two hours that we will spend together. do you want to take us to your

book and read and then i can follow that up with questions? >> yeah. >> good evening, everyone. i am so excited to be here. the fact that all of you took time out of your monday to come and listen to me really means a lot. thank you to each and everyone of you. i hope you take something from this conversation that stays with you for a long time and you learn about anti-caste politics and you think about how solidarity is the connector. i am going to read from coming out as dalit. this is the latest edition. this is not the hardcover, this is just what i had. this is a new edition that was published only in the united states. i published this book in 2019 in india and that is where it won -- it took me five years to get this book here. that should tell you something about how difficult it is for

stories to find a home on a global stage, even in the united states where the narratives of life are so prominent. >> i am going to read a little bit from the prologue first that hopefully sets the stage. the prologue talks about what it feels like to live with a hidden identity and a little bit into the life. a 26-year-old college scholar who was forced to take his own life because he was calling out institutional discrimination at his university. it is a really pointed conversation especially to be had right now. i will start with the prologue and i will go a little bit into the new chapters that have been specifically added for the u.s. edition. is two extra chapters focus on the united states.

>> prologue. hiding one aspect of your identity is like leading a double life. you don't feel like you belong anywhere. you create masks to wear in pr your life and switch between the two. eventually, the two blurred together and you no longer remember who you were. pretending to be from a caste , that is not valid. there are so many of us who are living this life. they avoid talking about caste , hoping to somehow find a place in the world of upper that has been forbidden to us. we create upper caste identities that help us gain

entry to a space that subjects us the moment it finds out who p we really are. d we nervously/these ideas any time we are grilled about our origin, those who fear to di exhibit satisfactory signs and those who refuse to are punished for trespassing, for being where they don't belong. discrimination. humiliation. oppression. these are simply for being valid. it is imprinted onto us through the burned bodies of our children, the two sides of our phd scholars and students with young girls and women, asphyxiation and the honor killing of lovers.

these penalties are so routine that they are not even considered worthy of shock and outrage. newspapers either skip these stories or stick them in the back pages between the sports and the city section. they said bye and don't flinch before announcing a music group -- little remorse after being informed about this offensive undertone. >> this next part is from chapter 14, called the reckoning of caste . the history of caste in the united states is in two parts. it is bc and ac. starting from the 1700s when

images from the indian subcontinent first came to this country until 2020, as it existed under south asians was an ancient relic from a remote country that sometimes made the headlines but was often dismissed as a micro dynamic, not especially relevant to everyday americans. however, a single face of work- based discrimination changed that stwhen california's department of fair employment and housing, two silicon valley giants and $61.6 billion systems for failing to prevent discrimination against the pallet employees -- the valid employees. this was earlier from different discrimination. like the taste of arrested in

the year 2000 for sexual slavery and human trafficking of girls, some of them as young as nine years old in india. one of berkeley's richest landlords who owned close to 1000 in the city was known for his extensive philanthropy, exploited and enslaved young girls after bringing them over from india on false pretenses of employment. he forced them into sexual servitude and into cleaning and maintenance of his restaurant and rental properties. the case broke in november 1999 when a 17-year-old girl died from poisoning at one of his apart since. this led directly to california's first law, setting higher criminal penalties for human trafficking and grabbed

national headlines for months as american reporters descended into his native village to cover the story. however, lost in the conversation was the brutal dynamics of caste not only allowed the abuse for close to 14 years between 1986 and the is year 2000, but also led to the inhabitants of even after the abuse was discovered. >> there are deep insights from different parts of the book. personally, for you to share and open the space with. i want to be again this talk by asking you, what brought you to this and what brought you to writing this book, this memoir?

>> i think what brought me to writing was the fact that i wanted to be able to write in english. english is called the colonizer's language in india but the statement carries a tremendous amount of hypocrisy because the entire elite structure in the indian subcontinent -- while there are people who want to caste out the language as something that lower caste people or people from low-income backgrounds should not engage with, they themselves want to keep their me dominance over that. for me to be able to write in english, was a form of resistance. to be able to write in the language that carries an immense amount of respect -- i

come from north india where you just go into the place, people forget what caste you are from. they won't forget your gender but they will forget your caste and you will get into the respect that people receive everywhere they go. for me, i remember growing up and my parents saying, you have to sit down with a dictionary and copy every word onto the page and this is something that a lot of the families did because their parents, whether they speak english or not, they would make them sit with a newspaper and say, copy this article and learn how to language flows, learn how the sentence structure is created. for me, that is how i wanted to write in english because i made myself be good at it. i practiced hard to make sure that i could mask myself as a

dominant person. writing in english with the knowledge that i had gained -- >> i think that is very r interesting because you are saying that you wanted to intervene in some sort of media space but also, you did not choose to write a novel or short stories, you chose to write a memoir and there is a historical reason to that. what was so promising about the memoir for you? >> i don't think i had a choice. as a valid journalist who had only spent two years in the u.s. at that time, was just beginning to write about caste , i was eager to get the word out. some of you might know that i had launched documents of discrimination. it was in the wake of -- he

left this community behind in search of this letter, which i hope each and everyone of you have read and those of you who are listening, i would encourage you to read that letter left behind. in my opinion, it is one of the most significant pieces of literature in english ever written because it changes how we talk about caste on a global level. when i was reading that letter and when i read that letter for the first time, i never realized the impact that would have on me. i decided to create a space where we could have open conversations about what it meant to survive in this dramatic system of caste that we are forced to live in. i realized i needed to come at myself because i could not ask people to share if i wasn't.

who was i, otherwise? i came out as dalit and i started writing a ton of stories. a lot of indian media outlets, since i was a journalist, were interested in having me write more stories. soon, i had a book deal. we know that dalit is not considered experts on trauma. we have to be able to show on display for people to believe us, which is why people end up writing autobiographies and memoirs because who else is considered and skeet expert otherwise? the form that came to me, the proposal -- a lot of folks were interested in finding how i wrote the book. it came to me.

it was proposed as a memoir. they wanted to know the story of my life, which was known to be traumatic, which carried a lot of sadness and, i realized that if i wanted to get my story out there, that was the only way to do it. >> i think that is very interesting. before it was a book, it was a blog and before that it was a facebook post. how do you think that the narrative itself has moved to the different medians that have very different constraints in terms of word limit and ways of interacting? the first form that it took was like fielding stories from people, right? this is also a memoir. how is pf should we call a in that you have written it about your life, but there are several other stories you're telling within it, those of your family, people that have influenced you, and coming into your own sort of consciousness.

how is that process of, shall we call it adaptation, different forms work for you? >> the facebook post happened naturally. facebook doesn't carry a lot of gravity in the u.s., but in india, people still live and breathe on facebook in a very organic way. for me, if i were to solicit stories about caste from village people, this was the way to do it. it was also where some of you i might be aware, i discovered that had to send me a friend request. just a couple of days before he was forced to take his own life. so, it seems like the natural media for me, seeing his profile, looking at the profile photo, remembering and making that connection that i had seen it somewhere before, sort of feeling this, we are from the subcontinent, we believe in these many lives and it felt

like there was a connection that was being made, and that it was almost, i would not call it a calling, but it wasn't really on me. i had to do something about this connection that was out there. that is how i ended up writing the post on facebook. tumbler, i thought, was a great, cheap, freeway to solicit these stories to have controlled, because i was also one of the online editors at the start times when i was in new delhi, and i saw how people reacted to stories about caste, i'll stories about caste would be filled with comments about denial , about affirmative action or reservation, about telling people that delhi people are making up their trauma, lying about their lives . i wanted to create a safe space. i wanted people to not be told

they are lying about the truths of their reality. tumbler was an effective way to do that. similarly, when the book happened, that was a big transition, because until then, the longest piece of writing i had done was 15,000 words, my thesis at grad school. i had to really think about, how do you write a book? i kid you not, i went into barnes & noble at union square and ou picked a copy of "how to write a book for dummies." i had no formal training. i had the stories, but i wanted to make it the kind of that would not be easily dismissed. when you talk about the as different forms that my book has taken, it is memoir, also the story of my family and the story of so many delhi people . i wanted to make this into the kind of book that could not be cast aside because people do not believe it. that is why i decided to infuse it with journalism, to infuse it with the kind of reporting i had just gotten my training in and had spent many years in india doing, so i could collect stories, yes, but i could also show why those stories existed.

i could so that when i was going to an event, or caste related atrocity or trauma, it did not occur in isolation, that it was a universal force that existed in india where delhi people have similar experiences all across the country. that is how i attempted to link it with tex-mex, and analysis, because as i said, i did not want people to dismiss it. i wanted people to write the b language that dominate caste respected. i wanted to make it ironclad, so strong that you could not say, i read this book and i still did not believe caste exist. you have to believe caste exist in india, in india societies once you read this book, that is what i wanted the book to be about. >> the beauty of this, in a way

your career in journalism, at least through the book, was not solely about reporting on caste issues. you have experiences in fashion you have experiences in sort of what the consumption that is considered i guess like lifestyle journalism, yeah, narrative journalism, lifestyle journalism, you formalize that in one way and that becomes this book we have with us. i think that is also just to give a broad overview of the different points in which you have framed yourself as a writer is pretty remarkable through this journey. and i think that brings me to this other question is that, a lot of the discussion in this book is around education and educational institutions. you have an entire chapter devoted to mindel, which i think is one of the most thorough chapters that i have seen in a long time. you have-- and it is actually quite hard to do that because it is relatively recent subject, although the dispersal of that in various forms of violence is something we do not

take account of. yeah. and i think you feel very passionately about what it means to be educated, what it means to sort of use tools and weapons of these institutions mo can give you. so, yeah, how was that-- how were you taught with education institutions? why is that important to you? if we could just hear a little more about that. that is a really interesting question, because we are, at a current time in the world, where institutions are being challenged. and rightly so. their power, their autocracy is being challenged. as a dalit person, coming from the background i come from, growing up in a small town, having access to these institutions when i was a child meant everything. for my mother, and she is one of the central-- she is the central character in this book,

she always told me, you have to go to the best college, because only when you go to the best college you will be taken half as seriously as someone who has gone to nap at college, or a college that does not rank as high. i had to go to saint stephens, one of the elite colleges in india, not because i wanted to specifically be in an elite space, that too, but also because of what it would mean for the potential discrimination i would inevitably face. once i was at the evens, that would go further, and kind of in some way a little bit negate my dell it needs. that was the idea. coming to columbia for me meant the same thing. i never had the opportunities to be able to come here, come to the united states, like what you mentioned. being here for me is a fluke as well. i have written in the book, i did not have the money to buy the ticket to come to the u.s. i was helped out by an editor. finances were a dire issue. nobody in my family imagined that somebody could go and study in america. it meant a great deal to come

to columbia, and to be here, and to be a part of what is known inarguably, or arguably, one of the best well-known journalism schools across the world. it meant something to my mother that i was among the best of the best, that somehow in her mind despite being from a pilsen community, a managing caste community, her daughter was in these institutions, and of course, a maker belonged to columbia as well. that was something that mattered to all of us. >> did you know that when you were applying? >> no, i found that out much later. that speaks to how removed america is from so many of us. so many of us growing up in these communities, where the schools did not exist until very recently, we had no way to access who he was or what his writing was. much like what you said, his writing changed me and changed my life completely.

>> yeah. that is just like-- that is an amazing remark to follow. i know recently, you also commented on the special relationship that a place like columbia has four the dalit community and how heartbreaking it is to be in this time and see the kind of clampdown we are witnessing to student movements. i guess also, one of the subterranean histories is there is a history of student movements, a history of student mobilizing in institutions that is really pivotal to how we are thinking about history. so, i want to now focus a little on the title of the book. it's a very charged title. it has so many different valences. it speaks differently, i think. it has queer residences, it has racial and caste resonances. it specifically i think also

seated in language, specifically situated in english in a very specific way. how did you come to that? but before you answer that, i actually want to say that this is a longer history in dalit biographies. i have with me one of the first autobiographies coming out. i will just read one sort of small section out of it, from the prologue so you all can probably see how sort of yashica is intervening in a sort of literary way. i am a literary scholar, so i am always going to reference like six other texts while i talk, that is just the bane of my existence. so one of the things is-- me one second. he is talking to his shadow in this part of the

more. he is talking to a figurative shadow of himself and he says, i cannot tell you if you will meet this me in the story. the reflection of a man in the mirror and does not know the whole story of a man it is reflecting. consider this, my real name is, you've forgotten that, right? so have i hear that is the name you will see in the school register. no one in the city knows me as that. who knows whether even my s wif and children know this name. since my childhood, i have faded this name. shakespeare may say, what's in a name, but tell me, why should this name all to my lot? it is a smack on which cloud is born. look at your names, which does, which suggests storms. if by some chance someone with a name got them, it would be shot. there is a list of names that requires our name reflect society's content for ourselves.

names signify learning this. suggests valor. can have named after the goddess of wealth. for us, names like the main names that declare a low caste status. i beg your pardon. that was the order for centuries. i just thought it was very interesting that actually there was this like , i don't know if you consciously did that or unconsciously did, there was this whole range of what i meant to come out, was this almost intellectual conversation you were participating in, but how do you come to this term? >> thank you for that reading. that is such a powerful testimony of how universal the experiences of caste are, what our names mean to us, because they carry this immense charge. for those of us new to this conversation one of the ways

we can find out someone caste d is through their last name. the way i was able to pass as a dominant caste person for a very long time is because my family dropped the caste marker from our last name, and adopted these obscure names. my grandfather and my dad had two completely different last names because they had just chosen them for themselves. the power and the charge that names here in the dalit community is imminent . i obviously was taking about it in those terms, because what is the language for experiences of hiding our names? where was this represented in media in indian culture? even around us, where we see stories of dalit people who had changed their identities, and who were living as interlopers in these dominant caste what were their experiences like? that was my experience. i

wanted to identify that. i wanted to give a name to it. i was thinking about what caste means. to me at that time, i am also a queer person . caste looked like a closet. the closet of caste was very similar, part of it, to the closet of sexuality. this is 2016. in 2015, supreme court in the united states had passed the gay law, making it federally legal in the entire country, so the discourse around sexuality, whether it was academic , or journalism, was extremely permanent prominent. we were getting these ideas about what the spectrum of gender and sexuality means. obviously, being here in the united states, having the freedom for the first time to be able to objectively think about my caste made me wonder about these questions as well. and i thought of caste as a closet . i also wanted to evolve , or push back on the idea of

language. you know, in india, we just don't have the right words for so many things. the concept of passing, which is so understood, and mainstream here in the united states, we don't necessarily have that language back home in india, and i don't mean just in academic circles. of course, everyone knows what testing is, but outside of that, people are engaging in this practice without knowing that there are others like them . so, i wanted to name it, give it a name, also identify it, so others who see it, know that there are so many others like them out there. that is why i thought, how do i make this idea of me revealing my caste in a momentous thing? because it was filled with so much gravity, it was filled with so much seriousness, it was almost ceremonial, as far as i was concerned.

i was revealing the secret i had carried with me my entire life through that facebook post that i mentioned. i was telling you, telling the world that i was hiding my caste by living among you as one of you, but i have not. i have dined with you, you have lo dined with a caste person, you have invited manifesting your home and not know about it. i also want you to think of it in terms of a victory in terms of an wow! to you, look at all of you casters, you hate us so much, but here i am. you thought i was one of you, i am not . how do you sort of understand, or underscore, or communicate the importance of this moment by giving it a name? for me, that name was coming up as dalit, which is why i titled my notes, today i am coming out as dalit. >> i actually did not know that was the name of the note.

that gets me to think of, are there ways in which you think anti-caste thoughts and practices in general has queer potential, and there is something anti- caste about queerness itself? >> i think that is a really great idea, and i completely agree . the way we understand queerness, and the way bell hooks has talked about queerness is not just about who you have sex with, but how you are in relation to this world and how you have to create a space for yourself and your constantly in opposition with a mainstream idea of what it means to be a person. in the terms of the indian subcontinent, what it means to be a person is to be an upper- class, dominant caste indian man, the heteronormative in terms of sexuality, whether in terms of caste, that is the model of what exists. of course, they have and upper caste women who are the model for women . you are inherently

wearing your existence, especially if you live your life in opposition to what is deemed as acceptable. so, i definitely agree that being anti-caste is a queer idea in that since . but i also want to mention, this is not an isolated conversation. in terms of dalit art , in terms of dalit literature , that has been inherently queer, because we have been oppositional to the literature and art acceptable in india. look at dalit dance that has come from the country, look at dalit literature. it has always been altouted as being too vulgar, too profane, too filled with abuses. now, that conversation is finally happening. there is a brilliant episode i would encourage you to watch on the podcast that literally came out a week ago, "sacred versus the profane." what constitutes art? if you

look at those examples of dalit art , the inherently present themselves as queer. if you take this conversation and put it on twitter for example, x, when you put it on a social media platform and you said, to be anti-caste is to be queer, you will get so much backlash, because there is also, and sadly enough, laden homophobia within our communities. the word queer carries some amount of disgust , even within us. i tell a straight, dalit man, that being anti-tran13 is queer, can you imagine what their reaction would be ? it could be a great reaction, but it could also not be. when i was outed as queer, forced to admit the fact that i was queer without my consent, i thought of the feedback i got from some older dalit min was,a people, the government should figure out who is queer or not.

you should not be able to have the decision to announce yourself as queer. so, that also exists in and within our societies where we can say being anti-tran13 is a kind of queerness, but how far that will go in our communities is a question we need to think about. >> i think as well, sort of what my caste politics of queer sexuality is worth thinking about. yeah, and i want to bring it back to this edition in particularly, because this is two new chapters that have not previously existed before. they are new terrain for us. you have read from it for us a little bit. you are making an expansion in two ways. first, you're talking about caste and the diaspora , secondly, you are making some kind of comparative gestures to black radical history in the

u.s., and how you have sort of found, sort of cited that at various instances. when you make-- i want to first ask you, what you make of this comparison , which is very predominate in our times. we are hosted by the class and race collector today. i want to ask you first about this collective, and then, how it sort of influence is your take on how to look at caste in the diaspora. >> i think we have to admit as dalit people , that there are incredible solidarity's that exist between caste discrimination and racial discrimination. both are systems of determination that have existed, both have been denied. that is such between one and the other to learn from one another. terms like passing, for me, that clicked that that was already a precedent for this kind of behavior, after i learned about the experiences of black people.

there is so much that we have gleamed and learned from like scholars, because they truly have paved the way about how do we think about the suppression in the society we live in. because of the position allie of the united states is the country it is, which has been first world for a very long time, versus india, which is still struggling to shed its a third world status, there is a lot for us to look at. however, i would also be weary of saying, caste and race are the same, because it flattens the nuances of both. caste is invisible, race is not. caste has a very difficult way of being detected. you have to really be a part of the community to know that caste discrimination is happening. there can be conversations around food habits that can give up based on someone's caste. in the case of the dalit

engineer, going back to the cisco case , one of the ways his managers found out he was lower-class was my packing his bag to see if he had the brown sacred. this is a common practice within text spaces in the united states. they will have pool parties so you can see if men are brown men or not. it sounds ridiculous, but it is true. these nuances might or might not exist in the racial context , which is why we have to position each as individual systems of oppression, and see how we can learn from each other, instead of integrating them and saying caste is race, and vice versa. we can build on similarities in a parallel way without putting one on top of the other. >> i think that is also very important, because you do significant work in sort of calling out the anti-blackness in the american diaspora as

well, which you are saying is feeding into these caste habits, and that is sort of an import of, introspective importance for us. sort of broadly, how we are writing these two chapters different from writing the entire book? was this a strategic move? with this i am bringing it to the u.s., i need two more chapters, or something that developed over your time here that you also thought needed to be in the book the rest the way the rest of it needed to be. >> i think we have to sell books. we are in a bookstore. let's be honest. if i did not have the new chapters, this book might not have had a market, which is not to say there was not an anti- caste movement that had been brewing. we have seen in the past four years the radical changes that have happened. the cisco case happened in july 2020. isabel wilkerson's book, caste,

which put the word caste on the mainstream map since 2020. since then, dozens of universities across the country have included caste as a protected category. the city of seattle included caste as a protected category just last year . fresno did it in california right after. the state of california could have been the first state in the country to have caste protections added . there is a lot of movement and development that is happening around caste. i felt that a book about caste, that is blazing in the u.s. , needed to address those issues, obviously, but i also wanted to bring in a sense of journalism to that aspect, to wh really look into not just-- a lot of journalism around caste, and it is very well-meaning to me but it happens around, let's find five dalit people and ask them what their experience of caste are about. i wanted them to find five dominantan caste people and discuss their experiences with

caste. that can only be erdone in term of a book with new chapters. also, i am a different person. when i wrote this book between 2016 and 2018, i was a different person. since i wrote these chapters in 2022 and 2023 , i am a different person completely. i think i need to register that as well. if you notice in these chapters, a lot of the memoir aspect is not present as much, which i am saving for the next book, because i have to write a new book soon. beacon press has commissioned me two books to write, so i have to start working on the next book soon. i wanted to put this out there because books take a long time and i wanted the text to exist in the world. >> next is a very good sort of segue into my next question, which is, what do you think is the future of the anti-caste movement in the u.s.? and i think i want to push you a little further here and say, is that a horizon for us beyond

representation that we are striving for, and what might that look like? >> i think the future of the anti-caste movement lies with people on the margins of the anti-caste movement. the anti-caste movement is not new in india. it has existed for hundreds of years, but dominated by men . if you look at the anti-caste t dalit scholars , many of them happen to be men. there are spaces that have a lot of men, which are important voices, but i think we need to reduce the number of men and have more representations, and this is just about representation at this point. when it comes to the anti-caste movement , that is where we are. we are at the stage where we have to first fight for the presentation. we need more dalit women, we need more non-binary people ino

those spaces and we need to look inwards. a lot of the movement, in my opinion, my humble opinion, because i am not born in the movement, i've come to it in my late 20s. i think we need to come and see where their ideas are going, where our ideas are going, instead of just being attached to an idea that has ri been developed in the past 30, 40 years. i think we have to be able to move forward. the future of the anti-caste movement lies within building solidarity's for the pro- palestinian movement, it lies with building solidarity with leg movements, with native movements, because we can't exist in isolation. this is a different world than existed in 1919. we are in 2024, global solidarity's matter. i think if we just focus on, there is an idea within some people's minds , we just have to concern

ourselves with caste, and we don't have to focus on anything else . that is not going to work anymore, because silence will not protect us, in the iconic words of audrey lloyd. none of us are free until all of us are free. that is not just a saying. it truly rains true. why should anyone care about the anti- caste movement if you don't care about other marginalized people and their struggles? and speaking of representation, i think we have to obviously go further than that. but we also have to be mindful that we are at this nascent stage of the movement butting in the rest of the world. we have to start with first thing, how we can get our voices there, then we can look at further dismantling the structures. i'm not saying that has to happen one after the other, the representation that comes from trans folks, from

non-binary women, is looking for the structures already, and that goes hand in hand . >> i feel like that session, excellent sort of close to this q&a with me. we would like to open this up for questions, how much time do we have? >> we have a half an hour. >> great! we have so much time for questions. please use the >> when you do so i tried to make them questions, not comments. yeah, just throw them away. yea. thank you so much, sonia >> this must have been an excellent conversation, there are no questions. >> thank you so much, shailendra and yashica. i wanted to shout out before the end the global studies department of chicago and

community books for hosting this event. my question was about your time in journalism, and if you could share a little about what in the newsroom were like in your time in journalism, and how did you find your voice, or struggle to find your voice with the limitations you face, or even friendships, or ideals you found in journalism? also, another part was friendship, and i would be very curious to hear about friendship as an anti- caste practice as well. those two questions. >> wonderful questions. thank you for that. first of all, my time in journalism was not that long ago. i think in the newsroom, they have evolved a little bit since i was in india, working as a journalist. the way i survived in journalism was to stick to subjects that would not give

away my caste identity. by that, i mean being a lifestyle journalist. lifestyle journalism is often ignored in india. it is often considered a woman's territory, women covered fashion, women cover lifestyle, women cover beauty, makeup, all of those subjects, but also homes, our culture. even though subjects are covered by women. also, those spaces, especially fashion, happen to be overwhelmingly dominant caste. there is no question that in fashion, if a person is either covering a subject, or is a designer, or working in those spaces, they will be dominant caste people . that was a good way for me to hide. the was a good way for me to be concealed in the spaces. of course i stood out for a while in intercell times, and even before that in asian age, i was covering nightlife. it

was really eye-opening to be in these extremely wealthy parties , where people would expand the kind of money that one could only dream of in one night! just entertaining difference. of course, that could be covered in the lifestyle session section. that really built me for the person i am in the spaces, obviously standing out. if you are a lower caste person and you come from a lower income background, you can piece an outfit together with thrift store close, but your identity in india will always be a dead giveaway. i think the way i survived was by trying to put my head in the sand and pretend like no one is looking at me, and keep moving. of course, i was fortunate that i worked with editors who saw the fact that i could do a good job at covering something. and i had to, like dalit people often have to do , work twice as hard to be able to do

that. i was successful in terms of staying away from politics, staying away from serious conversations, staying away from election coverage. those are the beats, the juicy beef that come to people who are almost always dominate test. that is how i was able to hide being in journalism. and then, newsrooms have always been inherently either caste blind, or caste is spaces. the section i was in was caste blind. we just never talked about caste. if you talked about caste, it was about the behaviors of dominate class people, in terms of how certain classes are good at making food, what do the food recipes look like? certain classes are learned. what is their experience with history books? those are the kind of stories we were covering. the second question you asked, which was an incredible question about

friendship as a mode of being in the anti-caste space. i think my friendships have survived me completely, because i have been able to find friends who are queer. a lot of my friends ,, as queer in our 30s now, and we have just been friends for a very, very long time. i think the overlap between queerness and being an anti- caste ally can be very powerful . it is not always the case in india. the queer movement in india has been dominated by the caste who do not want to entertain dalit's presence. in my life, my friendships have been extremely powerful in not just being a mirror to my struggles, also spaces of nonjudgment, where i could be who i was, talk about caste, and not necessarily feel the

burden of being marginalized. but that was because i chose good friends. i've been very, very selective about who i was choosing to let be close to me and in my circle. i can you hea? okay. thank you. i haven't. i was invited here. i haven't read your book, but. but i'm so struck your quote from bell hooks and actually >> hi, can you hear me? i was invited here, i have not read your book, but i am so struck by your quote from bell hooks, and actually about six or so months ago wrote a paper about it, and one of the things i was distilling reading both of their primary works, was how they collect oppression within oprah's communities in such

direct ways, and something i had not really considered in those writings, because he does not dive into it so directly, but of course, bell hooks does within black radicalism, and black urbanism, is how dalit communities oppressed within communities. i am wondering if you could just say more, i am so intrigued, i started taking notes on my phone. it is really the first time i am hearing this particular conversation, the way you are surfacing, or privileging wow! for identity, women's voices, younger voices. if you could go into some of your observations, your own experiences a little deeper, i will take more notes, i will be grateful. >> well, do i have a story for you guys? [ laughter ] yes. i think, first of all, oppression within oprah's communities exist, especially with caste.

dr. baker calls it a descending order of contempt. the lower we go on the scale of caste, the higher the content for the people who live there. and my caste, which is from the minutes averaging community, which i talked about earlier, lies at the bottom of that. inherently, the identity of-- the name of my caste is punky. it is called the b word in india nowadays. it is a slur that means, if you call someone that, you can face jail time, you can face charges you can pay a penalty, you can be taken to court. it is an illegal offense. and that becomes the identity of the people who inhabit it. it also comes with a great deal of shame. it comes with a great deal of being other within other spaces. so, in terms of the story last year in august,

a so on amazon prime called "made in heaven" took my story, my likeness, and presented it on screen without my permission, and also without any credit. the show is about weddings, and it features brides from different dimensions and backgrounds of indian societies. one of the bribes happened to be a dalit woman writer who had studied at columbia, is giving a talk at columbia, has written a book that talks about coming out in the context of being dalit. and is speaking the same things i have spoken in many of my interviews, that is where the similarity ends. she goes on to get married. she is marrying a dominant caste man, i am not married .

that is not my story, but the likeness was mine. i was informed of that because, friends of mine saw the show and started texting me. my dm's started getting billed with, hey, do you know it is based on you? and when they told me it was based on marriage i was like, what are you talking about, i am not married? when i saw the show and i realized, this was my life, and i searched for credits and i found that there were none, that was pretty heartbreaking. it was heartbreaking because of the episode was directed by a dalit person . it was directed by a dalit director. of course, the production house was-- is owned by two dominate caste women, what happens to be a muslim woman, they come from the influential hollywood families, and they epitomize what people in bollywood

represent right now. i expected to be, if nothing else, in the end credits. when i asked for that, the first response i received was an instagram post, where they listed out, rattled a list of references about who that episode could have been based on, and in my name. i just decided, that was not enough, because it took me a lot to put my story out there. one of the interviews i get is when i talked about how my grandmother used to clean toilets. in the same that, that what a public stage is immense. it took a lot of therapy, and a lot of courage to be able to sit among people and admit something, a secret that my mother had tried so hard to protect her entire life. for that to be taken from me

was a will, it was deeply hurtful. and as a response for my demand for credit, the people in the show decided to launch a hate campaign. when you were talking about the dimensions of the coming out as dalit, i was told those words had nothing to do with me , because it was in context before, and while the directors went on media outlets, six, seven of them multiple interviews call me a narcissistic a liar, and opportunistic, because i could not take from the entire community. this was about to be a moment for the entire community, not me, therefore i should forget that my story was stolen for from me. that was a pivotal moment that made me understand, even within our communities, those that lie within the absolute margins may be a delicate woman from a community, i will not be looked at in the same way as someone

else who belongs to a different community and happens to be a man. that is what was instrumental and instructive in me thinking about how the oppression exists within our own. that response, that hate campaign lasted seven to eight weeks, one of the articles that cover the whole piece called it seven weeks of hell in a very dramatic fashion. it talked about why i had been punished so severely. i allegedly was not thinking about the collective good, and i should have been okay with having my story stolen. as writers, we make no money and our life stories and our life's work is all we have. i should have been okay with having that taken from me, because it was good, it was representation. this is where we see the limits of representation. descending scale of contempt really was true. it rang true

for me within those weeks and months of tirade that unfortunately it was coming from some other dalit people , because they felt that this was against the collective good. me saying, this was my story, everyone can see it me can you please add my name there? was against a collective good. i hope that kind of answers the question. >> i think we have time for me i would say like 15 minutes more, probably two more questions? >> thank you, yashica, such a wonderful exchange of ideas. i want to ask this question, before coming to the u.s. i was working with the community, specifically the, and what i found was there was absolute

isolation of the women, when it comes to their narrative, speaking culture. for the people not from the indian context, these are the backwards classes. they have one of the largest populations of india. out of every two, one is. imagine 50%, roundabout mathematics, 50%, five, 6% of the population are the women. what i found so staggeringly aborted, the government of india is not recognizing the caste of these women also nomadic tribes women, the notified tribe women who have this statement of so-called criminal tribes in the colonial era, and also face the caste 's termination. they don't have any documentation. we have zero

data on that. we have no caste census data, including men and women, tingley conducts the synthesis of animals, including pigs, cloud cows, and buffaloes . what i have seen is that our women, the women don't have that kind of language so far to speak up about that thing. what i have found interesting is our progressive female friends from dominate cast, and few delegate friends of ours who happen to be girls, coming from different margins, they can talk about that, they are getting that language. this larger section of obc women are still deprived of that. what we can do as scholars, and policymakers as an artist, what can we do to open up that door/? and when i said obc, it is also

the caste as well, and also women who are a part of caste, they are snatched away from their agencies because of the caste within the household and communities . can you shed any light about what you think of that and how we can be a kind of catalytic to open that discussion within the obc communities and obc women specifically? thank you for that question. as you rightly pointed out, i think there is a huge section of women who don't have access to not just the language, but even the awareness in that the states about how to counter this class patriarchy that they experience in caste misogyny that they experience in their everyday lives. i think what we can do is keep telling their stories. as you mentioned, there are dalit women, some dalit women

we are seeing now, and of course, dominate caste women have access to language . more than language, i think the language we talk about it is not accessible to a large chunk of the women you mentioned, the nomadic tribes. where i come from, understand there is a huge list of nomadic tribes that could be dalit, that have no access to education . that have no way of having access to these ideas that we can speak about in academic circles. i think we start there, we have to think about, how do we reach people like that and come out of our sort of bubbles that we live in we can talk about language here, and if you speak to someone who comes from the community who like dances for money, entertains for money, these are local tribal entertainers, they would have no specific context or what we are saying.

there is the bandit queen of india who is a dalit community . when she talks about how her sexual assault and how she experienced it, and when that story got a lot of attention, for those of us who don't know, was a female bandit from a lower-class, was phenomenal, and who captured the imagination of the entire world at that time in the late 80s, early 90s. finally, she surrendered to the indian police on her own terms and went into politics. she faced an amount of sexual assault in her lifetime, because of the caste that she came from. when she was getting a lot of media attention, she was getting attention from dominate caste people, reporters from the u.s., and they would ask her to describe her sexual assault, and she told him, what you think of

sexual assault is what is life for me. we don't think about assault and rape in terms that other western educated societies think of, it is just the way of being. so we had to include voices from those community be in community with them, and to ask them, how do we make sense of their lives? we have to go give them the leadership. we can't speak for people, folks that have lived those lives, we don't have those expenses, i don't have that experience. i will never be somebody that can say, i speak for them. if i have the opportunity to work in those spaces, i would rather listen to them and elevate their voices. i think what we can do is elevate their voices, and instead of saying, how do we give you access to language, how about we break the mold of language so that they are able to communicate and how their

reality shapes their lives, they are able to in their own words if that makes. >> let's take one last question here. >> we can take two. >> hi, thank you for being here. my question has to do with, this is something i and some time being an international student here. especially given that you are bringing your book to the u.s., i feel i sometimes , some kind of pressure as to thinking about how you want to present your culture, or represent your culture within the context of a western audience, and what people expect to hear, i imagine that that goes much deeper for you, given the nuances of your situation. the question really is, how have you sort of thought to project yourself from that, and

bringing the book here, how do you present yourself from sensational station of your story, and really bringing out the true essence of what you are trying to say, while at the same time, you feel a pressure to conform to expectations of what a western audience takes your experience should be? >> that is a terrific question. i think, like i spoke about earlier, our trauma has to be seen to be believed. there is especially western societies, my angela talked about it, toni morrison has talked about it, how white supremacist cultures need to feel superior to me and they need to feel that they are saving us come in honor for us to any benefit. i think that trap always exists , but at the same time, i see a lot of south asian diaspora people, people who are immigrants, people that have been raised here, trying to imagine what their culture is

for a western consumption, a western audience, so we see a lot reels about defending their culture, depending hinduism, in terms of that it has nothing to do with caste, or trying to negate anti-caste ideas, just to, in order to instill a sense of pride into the culture. one goes so far that you become castist. this is something we are seeing more and more. we see a lot of white women posing as yogis, a lot of indian girls do that. that is fair, a valid and argumentative critique. i think there is such a blind spot that exist around caste, it can very easily go into a territory of denying caste altogether. so, the way that i avoid that trap is to just have an

authentic story. in terms of cessation of lysing, this is the reason my book took so long to be able to publish, because the books that i was seeing at that time had something to do with the imagination of what an indian person is like, mango orchards, cooking, volleyball, merry, those were the tropes. in the end, it works to stick to your guns and being your authentic person. >> we can take two questions. >> simultaneously? you can ask your question. let's take a question and perhaps you can respond to them together, would that work? >> let's take two together and respond to them back to back. >> hi, take you so much for

sharing your story. you mentioned that there is this expectation that you rehearse your trauma when you write these memoirs. when i see your instagram post, your social media presence here today, you exude this kind of joy as well. when we think about anti-caste politics and aesthetics, especially in terms of queer love, what kind of queer love , auntie cast love to you see for yourself? and for everyone here? >> wonderful question. >> maybe i should go for it. my question is about what we have discussed until now, intersection allergies from your introduction to the contemporary times, from the dalit communities , appropriating, with life in

their hands. considering all of this, how do you look at contemporary times, legacy, like was introduced to you until now? >> thank you. two incredible questions. i will try my best to answer. thank you for recognizing my instagram and that i try to infuse it with joy. it is important to me. i feel that my art existence is political. it can't just simply be constructed around trauma. can't simply be constructed around miseries. especially in the community, they talk about, we are whole people, we live, breathe, celebrate. we are not a facing totality we are not just facing

violence. i think the same goes for dalit communities as well. what does anti-caste love look like? i think that-- and i will mention again, therapy has been very, very important and crucial to me in recognizing who i am, and me being able to live that in a complete and authentic way. one of the ways that i think i feel joy is by feeling no shame. a lot of my life, a lot of my existence as a scavenging community person, as a woman has been infused with shame. it has been locked in with feeling terrible about who you are, no you don't have any worth , always trying to be someone else so you can consider yourself where the. now, i truly live my life in this body, which is not skinny, which is brown, you know, in opposition to the norm in many ways might not even shame. i think that it's very important for me to show up authentically

, as i am also understand that not everyone is going to like you. when you are hiding your identity, and you try to pass as a dalit person, you are very interested in having people except you , but also like you. i am done with having people like me. if they do, it is great, if they don't, that is on them. that really works for me. your question about intersection nullity and appropriation, i think that is really important, because now, after the dalit communities across the country, they had kept baker alive, they have kept his legacy alive, whether it is through printing presses, publishing his works, distributing them for free, there are people we know in different communities who will not eat, but they will publish maker's works, and they have

done that for decades. the mainstream establishment in india completely ignored that, but now, when we are at this moment when dalit voice is finding recognition, people who feel that is an opportunity for them to have a stake in this conversation , i think that is important. i think everybody should be about a maker have to be able to understand and recognize the privilege of those communities. some dominant caste communities can about him, call him a messiah, like mentioned , and face the consequences, dalit lacrosse across the country will be killed for carrying a flag that has his name. those consequences of dalit people associating themselves with baker have to be talked about. we see now a biography and his life has become an industry. there have been six to seven

looks that have been published in the past two to three years about his life, and that is fantastic. i applaud that and celebrate that, but at the same time, we also have to understand that not everybody has access to him . i did not have access to him, not just because i did not know about you, but because, if i celebrated, that would give away my secret, that would give away the fact that i was hiding my caste identity. now we are called a slur that people use against us. his identity, when it is used by dalit people has become a slur, but when used by dominant caste people, it is celebrated. very similar to aave when we see it in the united states, when white people engage or speak in ebonics, or in black language, like binoculars they are celebrated, but when, they are son. they have to go switch. it is very similar and i think

what you're seeing right now is this renaissance of him. we have to make sure it that we don't meet dalit have kept the image alive in that. pitch. i just want to pitch that i guess because are here so please like purchase one feels like community of books is like a worker owned coming. i just want to pitch that yashica 's books are here. you can purchase one. we work in a co-op. by buying these books -- i also want to encourage you to support these communities. >> thank you so much. >> yeah.

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book. i really enyed reading it. >> thank you so much. i am excited to talk about it. >> i wanted to start with a quote from the start of the book which really starts off the conversation and what the book is about. you wrote, america's public schools, since their creation have become ground zero for this country's most divisive battles over politics and civil rights from the fights over evolution and segregation to those over sex ed and school prayer and i want to start with, why do americans fight so much over education? >> first of all, i am very excited to be having this conversation with you. i am a big fan of your work and i am grateful to have this platform to talk about the reporting. i guess it makes sense. i came into this reporting looking at the way that national politics was being imposed into local politics all the way down to my hoa in

suburban houston. in the summer of 2020, we were seeing this backlash to the pandemic and to the protest of racial justice. i came to this reporting looking at the ways in which the divisive national cycle was playing out at the local level and that story led me to school because that is where these fights ended up. as we mentioned, the schools are where we, where society imparts knowledge to the next generation. it is where we wrestle with, what is the story of this country? what is true and what is false? what are the important details of our history that are worth emphasizing and memorizing and which ones do we forget?

the schools, repeatedly, throughout our history and now, and up becoming a proxy in a bear fight and the fight is over, what is america? what we stand for? what are we proud of? who are we? that is what we are seeing right now in school districts and state legislatures all over the country. >> i wanted to ask, a colleague of mine told me you were not an education reporter when you started this work. if that is true, i was wondering, how did you find the story and why do you think it was important? you spend four years on it. >> i still don't consider myself an education reporter. i, like i said, i was looking at cultural issues in america. i was looking at how divisive

ugly politics have affected real people in tangible ways, kind of moving beyond the headlines over whatever trump said that day and looking at how those comments and politics and policies were affecting regular people. it just so happened that at this moment in our country's history, once again, it led me to schools and school board meetings and the way i got started on it was just like that. again, in the summer of 2020, if any of us dared to remember that year, there was a lot going on in the country. things were really tense and, in my neighborhood, 20 miles northwest of houston, a suburban little neighborhood --

there is not a lot of controversy or conflicts. on my neighborhood facebook page, i was seeing posts from neighbors that summer, warning that they thought they saw antifa at a nearby sporting goods store and in the midst of all the racial justice protest, antifa was planning an attack on timberlake estates. when i read it, i was like, what are they talking about? people were in the comments replying, maybe they are planning it for the fourth of july to mask the shooting under the sound of fireworks. that was just one example of this really intense fear that was emanating in these communities where there was no tension in the streets in my neighborhood. we had sidewalks. i set out to tell that story, how suburbs, which through your reporting on -- suburbs really

exist, or were created, in some instances, to create an outlet for white parents who wanted to send their kids to school that are not desegregated. there is a whole history of zoning policies and exclusionary zoning that help create that situation but what we have seen in the last 30 years is that these suburbs have gotten much more diverse. they are looking at how the changes in demographics combined with this national politic, turning suburbs into the front line of our ugliest political divide. in the midst of reporting that story was when i got on the phone with chairman -- in 2020, i was asking him, donald trump was going around the country saying, if joe biden was elected, he was going to a

polish the suburbs and let antifa run wild. i was asking, what do you make of that kind of language? do you think that is safe to be telling people? what do you think the impact of that could be? do you think people actually believe it? he said, let me tell you about this town called south way and that was my introduction to this affluent suburban community in north texas outside of fort worth where it turned out that parents there had begun revolting against attempts to address complaints of racism in the school district. i scribbled a note on a post-it note looking at what was happening in south lake and sent -- set it aside for couple of months but that was the beginning of me spending four years becoming an education

reporter, apparently. >> i love the post-it note because so many stories start that way. one of the things i wanted to talk about is why you thought what was going on was important. you could just view it as this one small community and not see it as representing a larger fight. i was interested that you saw that, or at least i think you saw that early on, something that spoke to a larger issue. i wondered if you could talk about that a little bit. >> i think it ties back to what i was experiencing in my own community and my family. some of the best journalism comes from when we feel or experience something in our own life and ask questions about it. in the midst of what i was describing as this acrimony in my neighborhood where things were ugly on the social media

page and the politics were visible everywhere with competing yard signs and in the midst of that, my wife, who is a biracial black woman, put out a black lives matter sign in our yard in suburban houston. at the time, 2020, the protest for racial justice, black lives matter was a brief window, it felt like on the universally accepted as repudiation of systemic racism. it was a small gesture to say we live here to -- too poor for her, i live here too. that resulted in weeks of targeted attacks on my yard where someone was coming and doing donuts and digging up debits in the yard. that felt personal, hearing that rumble of that engine

weekend after weekend in the middle of the night while my kids were sleeping, it felt threatening. i did not realize at the time but it made my life, who has a much different experience than me, feel like, they don't want me here. i don't feel safe in my neighborhood. that is a very stressing feeling. when i started reporting on the story and talking to parents of black students there and students themselves about what they were experiencing, they were saying some of the same things about feeling unwelcome, unsafe. as i had those conversations both from work and at home, i realized, this is something bigger. my hunch going in that what was

going on in southlake was representative of something much bigger and what was happening at my house was representative of something much bigger in the country. i don't think i knew that for sure when i started reporting it. at most, i knew that we had a compelling story about a local fight and those are worth telling. it was not until after we published the initial story about the blowback and the political battles in southlake that my colleague, antonia hilton and i, made a companion piece for nbc nightly news. in the aftermath of publishing those, we realize this was much bigger. then, we were hearing from people and communities all over the country saying, this right over diversity, equity, and inclusion in the southlake school district, that is a story of my town in suburban ohio. or, that is what is happening down here in florida.

we got literally dozens of those messages when we published that story in early 2021. at that time, most people had still not heard of this idea of critical race theory and had not clued in that these fights were coming but we are -- the inboxes were previewing what was happening across the country. then it became, we need to keep going on this. >> that is probably a pretty good sign when you start getting emails from all around. that is powerful. one thing i want to do before we go too far is to define critical race theory and also how that term has been used by conservatives in the last few years. that is important context for people watching. >> maybe some folks watching now has forgotten about critical race theory because it has been replaced in the dialogue, the national conversation on the right.

you are not hearing more about diversity equity and inclusion -- we may remember in 2021, all you could hear about was that critical race theory was being imposed on kids across the country and critical race theory is really just somewhat complex, legal, and the less optical framework for understanding how systemic racism persists in america or in society, even in spite of laws that prohibit discrimination. it ties back to this kind of growing school of thought that emerged out of harbored -- harbored in 1980. why are we still seeing huge disparities? why do racist outcomes persist even though racism is no longer

in the laws and prohibited through the civil rights act and other legislation? >> a great example is what they critical race theorist might look at. one of the things i found in reporting on southlake and other suburbs is, again, in the era after brown v board of education required schools to integrate, and after laws have passed, prohibiting schools and communities from explicitly discriminating on the basis of race, communities like southlake past policies through their zoning code that had the effect of walling black families and other minority families out of the community by requiring homes being zoned on one acre of land and not allowing for multifamily housing, basically ensuring that only wealthy people can live there. in america, wealth is often a proxy for race and southlake

was almost all white. critical race theory means looking at that and understanding how these race neutral policies might lead to racist outcomes. what happened in 2020 and 2021 was an activist seized on that framework, which very few people were familiar with and kind of defined it and rebranded it and describing things what make white people feel uncomfortable. if a school district was working on a diversity, equity, and inclusion plan like southlake was, that plan was branded as critical race theory. they were trying to teach white kids that they are inherently victims. this is what critical race theory -- they also described it as an ideology that says

that race is the most important thing about the individual and the kind of victim, oppressor is a default based on your skin color. it is not about individual race but about examining it at a systemic level. that phrase took off like wild and you could not tune into nightly news without seeing a report from a school district somewhere where parents are upset that some -- somebody in the district was trying to bring in the scary sounding thing to basically indoctrinate kids to, if they are white, hate themselves and hate america. >> it is really interesting how quickly that took off and how successful it was. i had not heard of it before chris made it what it was.

one thing i thought was striking in the reporting he did in the book was, when conservatives talk about diversity and inclusion programs or critical race theory, they are always saying it was indoctrination by the left, teachers trying to indoctrinate kids. in southlake and in some of the communities you wrote about, the efforts to create diversity and inclusion programs often followed very real complaints i students and families about racism and bullying. in other words, it did not come out of nowhere. it was a response by other students. i wonder if you can talk about that for a little bit. it does feel jarring when you look back at some of the reporting that you did and you see really awful things that students were being told or

were hearing or experiencing. >> if you just tuned into the news in 2021 and watched the school board meetings, you got the message that conservatives felt like while they weren't paying attention, some extremely far left people had suddenly come up with a plan to indoctrinate kids with these ideas and that is how it was framed in southlake. the conservatives weren't paying attention in these leftists came in and started doing it. i wanted to go back to the beginning and see the origin of not the plan to create a diversity plan but what prompted it. it really followed a national pattern that i found copied all over the country and the trump era. after president trump was elected in 2016, in a campaign that featured a lot of vitriolic language about

immigrants and it helped usher this resurgence or more open embrace of white nationalism and you saw what happened in charlottesville. that rhetoric was trickling down into classrooms and schools all over the country. you were seeing, if you did a google news search in 2016, 2017, 2018, you will find dozens of articles about kids chanting build the wall at hispanic classmates or someone carving the letter and word and maga next to each other in a bathroom stall. these type of events were increasing. all of these school districts were dealing with that in the era before the critical race theory. what happened in southlake is, in one of these instances where

students found themselves chanting the n word, that was not the impetus for action. what followed the video was dozens of parents of black students, parents of lgbtq kids, parents of hispanic students coming forward to say, my kids have been experiencing these slurs and having these kind of racist jokes thrown their way forever and you will need to address this. that is what led the district in 2018 and 2019 to put together a committee. the whole goal was to try to address these widespread reports that they were getting from kids, real people. they did not make it up. in 2020, when they released what they called the cultural competence action plan into the midst of this very vitriolic's

period politically, what happened was conservative parents who had not paid close attention to the reports of racism and that whole effort, they just saw the outcome. they saw this cultural action plan and they saw it in the context of the protest after george floyd's murder and they completed the two and compared, where did this come from? that was happening, that same dynamic played out in loudoun county, virginia, outside of d.c., the same kind of dynamic where there were incidents that prompted the district to start working on creating a more inclusive culture in 2017 and 2018. did not just spring up out of nowhere. that was important for me to try to put that all in context

for people who were reading. >> i was really struck by it because i think if you just had turned on the news a couple of years ago, you would not have had some of that context and as you said, people were not paying attention and suddenly this devious thing is occurring. one of the things i thought was interesting in southlake as there was initially some support for the plan, it seems and with the backlash, it was not just that we don't agree with this, it was the people on the school board must be marxist. they must be far left activists. a lot of them were actually conservative from southlake. this idea that you could not just disagree about the plan but this person that presumably a lot of people know on the school board is actually your enemy or trying to do something

with this secret plot. i thought that was really striking, in the book, the dynamic. one thing i was struck by is, someone who has covered school board's for a long time, they used to be rather dull places unless there was a sex ed policy or a school boundary change, these were not the most interesting meetings. sometimes the reporter is one of two or three people in the audience. when this idea of taking over school board's became this rallying cry on the right, it was almost jarring. in the book, you say alan west said the most important elected position in the united states of america is school board and then steve bannon made a similar comment. why did not take off? why school board? >> that took off in steve

bannon's case particularly, because they were seeing the news reports. i think, you mentioned this idea of the school board initially having support in southlake for some of these changes. when they initially announced the plans to put together a committee to address these things in 2018 and then in 2019, there were these communitywide gatherings hosted by southlake's mayor and the school board president was there for these and these councilmembers were, yes, we are going to address racism. conservatives across the board, it was a unified response. what followed was really telling. i think about the story of michelle moore who was the school board president, a lifelong republican.

she heard all the students' complaints and helped lead the effort to address these things and had the support from the mayor and members of the council and dismiss leaders. in the aftermath, after alan west declared the school board's most important position in america and the backlash of the cultural action plan was building, people who had supported michelle moore turned on her and accused her of forcing this down onto conservative families. again, she is a lifelong republican. i don't know if she voted for trump but she is conservative. she was being described in the media, in local media as a progressive that is pushing this policy from the left.

she is called a marxist and all of those things. that is a pattern we see across the country. there is this false economy that is being presented in these school board conflicts where conservatives are fighting against liberals for control of school boards but the candidates who are being targeted by moms for liberty type of group often are, themselves, republicans or conservatives who have a different perspective on was school should be to address discrimination and the history of racism in the curriculum and the groups that are rising up to oppose moms for liberty and others are often pretty diverse in political thought. there are moderate conservatives along with very liberal people who are opposing this far right intrusion.

>> one important point that you make too is that the education wars are not new, kind of getting back to what we started with in the beginning. i wondered if you could talk about the education wars of the 70s and 80s when there was another buzzword that became this thing that everyone was afraid was impacting the schools and it was secular humanism. defined that, please. >> this was a gap in my education. obviously we know the battles over evolution in the 1920s and 1930s, the fight over immigration and the civil rights movement, we know that schools are often this place where they can play. i was born in the early 80s so i was not clued into this earlier chapter. when i discovered it, i was

blown away. when you go back and read these clips from the 1970s and 1980s about that kind of push by the christian conservative right to defeat what they call secular humanism inside public schools, you could, many cases block out the words and paste in critical race theory into these articles and you would not necessarily know that they were from the 1970s and 1980s. what happened is, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement and an era of change, just like changing cultural norms around gender and the fight for women's rights and all of these things, there was a backlash on the christian right against more inclusive curriculum in schools and a backlash against what they saw as the removal of god from

schools, these rulings of school prayer and prohibiting compulsory bible readings in classrooms. there was this backlash. much like today, they honed in on this secular humanism. it rejects religion as the sole basis of morality and instead, prioritizes relying on science and fighting injustice of any kind and relying on logic to fight injustice. much like today, the terms secular humanism became a catchall to describe any lesson that might offend the christian worldview. you could see complaints that these language arts textbooks that include black writers or if a book depicts a woman not

in a traditional homemaker gender role, that is secular humanism. they went so far as to argue that secular humanism was itself a religion and should therefore be barred from school on first amendment grounds. or, balanced with explicitly christian classics. some of the same language emanating out of the same communities across the country played out across the 1970s and 1980s. there was briefly a federal ban adopted by the u.s. senate by congress that was introduced by orrin hatch in the senate that banned any federal funds through schools that teach secular humanism. just like the way that critical race theory laws today, it was not really defined.

as a result, it left educators guessing at what might counter secular humanism and in many cases, self censoring out of fear. this was happening on a smaller scale. it really previewed what we were seeing and offered some lessons. >> there was a paragraph in one of the chapter is about that that had some of the names that books had been challenged. i thought you could replace the year with any of the last few years and it would read like current events. one of the things that came out of the current backlash is a

wave of republican backed bills to limit how teachers can talk about race and racism and lgbtq history and sexuality. we have seen this wave of book challenges. what has been the effect of some of those laws? you just hinted at it a bit. >> and most republican- controlled red states, limiting how teachers talk about how racism in america mandating a patriotic interpretation of the origin, in some places prohibiting discussion or limiting people of different gender identities or relation of pieces. in some places, that has led to the law.

in florida and elsewhere, trying to comply with the laws, in places where laws have not been passed, there is a culture of fear among many educators today. there is a recent survey that was released earlier this year that showed two thirds of teachers reported censoring how they talk about political issues including issues around race and lgbtq inclusion. that finding was still the case and included teachers who teach in school districts where there are no explicit restrictions. no state laws and no local prohibition especially because those teachers -- they reported that they were worried about if they pulled out a picture book in their elementary school classroom that depicted two

dads holding hands, that the school district might not be able to text then if parents get really upset. there has been a lot of reporting recently showing that the idea that these school culture wohlers will be -- steve bannon this whole thing, it is not really panning out. moms for liberty and other groups are losing in a lot of places. they are not winning suburban voters, they are just taking the issues and superimposing them on local school boards. if you are information leads -- liens trump, you will get information of school board members and if you are electing in the suburbs, it will win

out. they are losing lots of these races but it is having impact because of the state laws and the pressure campaign. what teacher wants to be accused of trying to harm kids or indoctrinate them? in this current moment, we are seeing a lot of fear and self- censorship. >> and, teachers putting away their classroom libraries, which is really sad to think about. or, taking out the books that if the district has made an effort to put in, making a more welcoming environment. one of the crazy antidotes in the book in south lake involves teacher training after one of these laws passed where an administrator tells teachers that they basically had to teach both sides of the holocaust and i think i remember the stories on that when it happened because it was

so insane. i wonder if this is one of the consequences of trying to tell teachers to teach history without upsetting anyone or saying that we have to be neutral. one of the teachers that you quoted said, how can you be neutral about the holocaust or racism? i wonder, is that something that we talk to teachers about, the idea of how we can be neutral when we are teaching certain types of history? >> this strikes to the heart what we talked about in the beginning of this. how do we feel about our story, our history? who we are. that incident you talked about in south lake, it followed -- texas had passed its version of the law. did not mention critical race theory but it was promoted that way. it was a line that had been repeated in the legislation

that said, if a teacher is going to discuss or present a currently controversial subject, then they need to present both sides or opposing viewpoints on that subject. what is open for interpretation is what is currently controversial. in south lake, the administrator gave that instruction of, if you have a book on the holocaust, make sure you have one that has an opposing perspective. which, of course, i had a recording of this moment when i happen. the teachers were like, what? what opposing perspective am i supposed to put up? add a book to my classroom library from a holocaust denier or from the perspective of justifying it?

how does that apply to say slavery? should i have content in my classroom making the case for why slavery was a net positive for america? that is an argument we see on the right today. what was put out in that story kind of flew under the radar in the initial backlash and outrage that spread throughout the country. in the audio, you can hear the administrator respond to one of the teachers saying, what do you mean i have to present both sides of the holocaust? the administrator said, believe me, that will come up. that stands out to me because what is happening in a lot of these cases is, these are not widely held beliefs in society but it does not represent this idea that maybe the holocaust was fake. that is not the majority opinion but it is one or a

couple vocal parents who make it a problem for you, it is a problem for you. these laws combine with the kind of growing visibility in our culture to anti-semitic views, white national views, christian national views. it gives that minority vote a veto power. well, it might offend that parent so we can't tell any of the kids. it will affect how all of the kids learn about these events. that is part of what we see in the cases. with the library book challenges, one parent who is really upset the cause of some of the policy changes has the power to affect what thousands of other kids at that school read.

>> i live in new york and a couple of years ago i had one of my kids' teachers send messages to ask all of the parents ask their ask if they could watch a movie. there is so much less of that happening in new york but i just wondered if this was something that she always did or if it was something that was awareness that maybe it was best to ask on the front end. i did not ask her why but i said, of course i am fine with that. it was interesting to me at the time, just knowing what was going on in the country. one of the things that i thought was heartbreaking and the book was that -- i don't want to give away names or anything for those who will read it but, some of the teachers who objected or raised concerns about these issues really had horrible things happen to them and had their livelihood threatened if they

were going to continue to be able to teach and work. i don't want to give away names but can you talk about that issue of teachers facing threats? >> yes. i guess this is the natural consequence of the narrative that was pushed on the right in recent years, that schools are working to indoctrinate your kids. they want to teach white children to hate themselves and evolving out of that was this idea that teachers are trying to groom your kids into lgbtq lifestyles. they want to push transgender identity onto your kids and get them to change genders. these are not just some fringe allegations. these are things out of the mouths of governor ron desantis

in florida and greg abbott in texas. it only makes sense that if that message is the one being projected out into the world that people are going to believe it and they're going to look for who is doing it. in the book, i tell the teacher and a library and also who became the target of those allegations -- baseless but real -- in terms of how they affect you that, you have books in your classroom that depict lgbtq relationships, even if it is a kid book, there is no sex in it but it shows it and that is evidence you are trying to grm my kid into this lifestyle. you are a predator. you are a groomer. i include in the book -- you

really start to understand some of these things when it happens to you. i include in this book a moment during the midst of reporting on these stories a couple of years ago when one of the validations was about me. i had done a story about library books, lgbtq library books coming off the shelves in a suburban houston school district and i talked with a 17- year-old high school senior who wanted me to know and to share that because her parents are not accepting of lgbtq people and identities, she is not out to them but her school library is the one spot where she feels safe to read books and see herself reflected in what she is reading and now that was under threat. i was just showing the stakes of what was happening in this movement. a day after that story ran, my

phone started exploding with phone calls and text messages and numbers i did not recognize . one of them finally texted, can you get on the phone? i send my email address and this parent followed up who is not connected to the student in any way. she emailed to say, we saw your story, we saw that you spoke with this 17-year-old that her parents' knowledge about her sexuality. she said, this is one of the first steps toward grooming and we feel this is grounds to file a police report with the police for soliciting a minor, soliciting me of being a child -- child sexual predator. we get mean messages sometimes. it is really mean but after nearly 2 decades of doing this, you kind of let it roll off and

when the criticism is in good faith, you will respond but for the most part, you get really thick skin. this hurt me. even though i knew this allegation was nonsense, even though i knew there was no legal basis for their threat and that this would just go away, it knocked the wind out of me. i remember going downstairs and my wife was home and i felt really emotional and just needing to sit down for a while and tell her what happened and i felt sick and i felt, why am i even in this business? that was not they lasting thought but i thought, why am i doing this? i could do something other than this then being accused of being a child predator. later, after i overcame those thoughts, it hit me, imagine how librarians are feeling.

a librarian who wasn't used to hate mail, is not a public figure, who just stocks, sells, and tries to hand kids books that they may like to read. to this allegations affect those people? i just know it must be devastating to them and have a huge impact on their ability to do their job and also make a lot of them think, maybe i shouldn't be doing this anymore. maybe i don't want to be a librarian. maybe i don't want to be in this classroom. that is a lot. that is a lot for everybody. >> it is scary. you don't know who might show up at your house or seek you out at work. you can understand easily why someone might back away from the end of the day and say, maybe i should do something else. you mention something that i

wanted to get back to a tiny bit which is this idea that what started as a lot of conservative claims then morphed over time into being very focused on lgbtq rights and, very specifically transgender rights and chris who tends to be rather candid, he said that the sexuality issues were more explosive politically then race issues. i just wondered, how is that a strategy in many ways to a call back of what we have seen before? >> absolutely. >> while researching the book, we re-familiarized ourselves with a chapter in history that i was vaguely familiar with in the 1970s in florida. there was this push by anita bryant who was famous for being

a spokesperson. she waged an all-out campaign in miami-dade county to oppose the local ordinance that would have required private employers to not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and the year, from her perspective, was that homosexuals would be in my kid's classroom and she and her allies waged a vicious, ugly campaign that spread across the country. it is language that we hear and they softly depicted all gay people as child predators who were out to recruit kids to their lifestyle and she got a

lot of support. in the end, obviously we have grown up in the world where that conversation -- we saw those types of ordinances preventing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation spread across the country. we saw same-sex marriage legalized in 2015. a lot of people gottwald into the idea -- a lot of people thought it was settled. what we have seen in this moment is that it is not. the backlash against transgender people and transgender identities is

reacting to more recent changes in the way young people do gender and how we talk about the society. there has been a seachange in the last few years but the backlash in schools around what books are on shelves is not just about gender. it is also about anti-tran38 commentary, this idea that, how dare you have a book inside this school that shows two male penguins raising a check together. that may say that it is okay to be gay. we see those books coming off shelves. they are harmless books that show the reality in america that some of your classmates do have two moms and we don't make fun of them for that. there is nothing wrong with

that. these are standard things that are in elementary school and the backlash is clearly against that because there is a significant segment of our population that is not on board, was never on board with these changes and they see this as an attempt to take their kids, to push this lgbtq agenda on their children and that is why we see the labeling as parents' rights. it ends up stripping the rights away from parents who absolutely want those kids to learn those things. >> that is one of the things that stressed me, parental freedom, parental rights,

parental freedom. if that was really for everyone, then conservatives who favor school choice and who favor parental freedom would have to be supporting schools that affirm lgbtq families alongside religious schools because that would be the idea of every family choosing for themselves. it seems like that is not really what it is about, this idea of freedom. it is not really freedom if you agree with these views, these he is over here are very clear that we are yelling about the school boards. it is not actually choice and freedom for everyone. >> i don't want to paint with too broad of a brush but our parents can identify with the parents right movement that mean it and just want opt out policies but i can see -- we

can see that not everyone who says they are fighting for parents' rights are committed to it. you can see that in some of the policies. one thing in particular that stands out to me is, we see this proliferated in school districts at the state legislation that says that teachers can refer to transgender children by their birth name and the sex they were assigned to at birth, even in cases where parents have signed forms saying that they don't want them to do that. basically they are giving the teachers' right to ignore the wishes of the parents aced on their religious or moral views. that is not parents' rights. the parents as this is who my kid is a necessary way to refer to them in the school says you don't have to, journalist -- worlds -- words mean something and we need to note when the

language does not match reality. >> that is one of the things, who is the freedom for? there are lots of people who support school choice for a variety of reasons. in the arguments about it in the language where it sounds like such a simple concept, it is not. one thing that i wanted to ask is, this is not an easy thing to have spent years of your life reporting and you talked about the attacks on yourself as a journalist. what is the take away for you and what are you hoping that readers get from it? >> from the very beginning, i wanted to take some of the

temperature down in terms of the allegations and the narrative and to complicate that from the stories of students and teachers and parents who are real people who mean well, who aren't bad people and to show where they are coming from and to show how all of this really toxic rhetoric, and in some cases false allegations, is harming real people in communities and needlessly tearing apart communities. that is a bigger lesson about school politics. the other side -- i don't disagree with them. they are evil. in some cases we are hearing you are being guided by satan, some of the allegations we see. this is dangerous.

it has real impacts, even if it is just words. it makes people feel unsafe, unwelcome in the communities and i don't think that a majority of americans want that. i think if i could just share these stories and people may disagree on it and what is the way to address these things and show that some of these people have been accused of wanting to harm kids, you may disagree with them on their politics or their approach but the politics that they are out to harm kids, i want to show that. >> i want to thank you for

doing your work and also, i think that just by some of the nastier things that have occurred, that you continue writing about education and continuing on education. like i said, welcome to the fold of education reporters. we will never let you go. thank you so much for the conversation. >> thank you for the thoughtful question. if you are enjoying book tv, sign-up for our newsletter using the qr code on your screen to receive the schedule of upcoming programs, author discussions, book festivals and more. book tv, every sunday on c-span 2 or anytime online . television for serious readers.

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is debated and discarded with support of america's cable companies. c-span. 45 years and counting. powered by cable. i bet each one of you came here today already knowing who tammy bruce is. you do. that's why you are here. you watch her on fox news. you read her articles. usa today, new york times, a host of other national publications, magazines, you name it. she has been published about everywhere. most of us in this room are lifelong staunch republicans. and we are conservatives and we are used to hearing at these meetings almost every month a conservative speaker. a republican speaker. today, we are going to have a slightly different perspective. because our speaker today has a slightly different background historically than some of us here in the room. she started out as a staunch

and avid democrat. she worked on the campaigns of two of the most liberal senators in the history of california, boxer and feinstein. we forgive you, we forgive you. she worked on the campaign of bill clinton. you remember that guy. back when democrats actually had people that were just left of center, not so far left that we could not see it anymore. she was a registered democrat. in 2008, she said no more. she became unaffiliated. but here's the thing, even as a registered democrat, she voted for ronald reagan twice. she has voted for every republican candidate since george w. bush in 2000. so maybe registered as an unaffiliated, but she voted her

heart, her conservative values, and then she became a proponent and one of the great champions for the conservative movement. she told me a few minutes ago that as of last year, she is now a registered republican. welcome to the club tammy. tammy is a best-selling author. i think you've seen some of her books out there. the new thought police was her first. the death of right and wrong and her latest work, fear itself, exposing the left mind killing agenda. she is a los angeles native. she majored in political science at the university of southern california. i know we cringe when we hear california but that was all back then. now she is going for a phd. soon she will be dr. bruce and at this point in time i would like you to give a warm carolina welcome to tammy bruce.

>> thank you, thank you. i'm sorry about all that other stuff. i'm sorry about all that other stuff. thank you very much. i am -- it's -- i am a republican now. and it's still because of the indoctrination that occurs, it makes me nervous. i think we have about 30 or 40 minutes here and it takes me that long to say hello. i'm talking and i can't shut up, so i've learned how to make a living at that but i really appreciate being here. carol, thank you very much.

the republican women of greater charlotte. i've never been here before. it's beautiful. you've all been so lovely. i knew it was different when there were rocking chairs in the airport. i thought i'm not leaving, i'm not leaving. one of my first scottish ancestors landed in the 1600s in south carolina. john cooper. many out there, many troublemakers in my line. so it's a pleasure and an honor. yes, primarily, new book, first one in 17 years, and n.l. also not that anything happened last night, and i don't want to take too much time addressing the debate, but also of course as we pay tribute to as carol so beautifully did september 11th. it's a reminder, especially this anniversary, that of course everything can change in a moment. we can't live that way. we look towards each day.

regardless of what we face being these mortal creatures but the fact is that we are blessed with being americans. we are americans first. whether we are in the south, the midwest, the north, the west. california is a beautiful state, but there's been a home invasion robbery of the entire state. so we have work to do. i think that my being here, america has provided someone like myself, having been a cart pusher for the left. still informed by the same ideals, the same values at that time which no i have to say was quite some time ago. i don't know how. look, 40 years ago. it's a long time. my values, i think all of our values, the conservative framework, it's about personal freedom. being able to live lives that best suit us, which requires

being able to at least the middle class and not have the government dictate to our businesses or in our personal lives. what we can and cannot do. the foundational basis of values where we can be trusted. where how we approach life can be trusted. that of course keeps government out of thinking they can interfere with the choices that we make. that is american sensibility. it used to be as we see with bobby kennedy jr., it used to be a democrat value. and then it was hijacked, as we know, so things do change. it's a matter of being nimble and understanding that. i think a few of you here were democrats and are now republicans. is that the case? and so let me start.

my timeline, just a reminder also, c-span is here. the record straight across. there will be a chance for questions and the timeline is short. we will get the direct questions from you. still have not gotten to my point yet. we will -- i'm going to do my best to be as concise as possible. i've been at fox for 20 years now. i've learned how to say things in about three minutes. this gives me -- i appreciate being invited and being here. briefly on the debate, you will see a lot of different points of view. from my experience working on both the left and the right, working with candidates in communications to some degree crisis communications, and then being in media which began in

1993 in radio, my experience with debates is never, with the exception of the joe biden debacle, there is -- some people will have done a little bit better than the other person, right? but what matters is what the impression is. that is true with everything in life, i think. we also will have ideas. last night could be maybe an inflection moment but what i'm seeing is that not going to move the needle terribly. emotions drive the betting markets. what i can tell you is that one survey of undecideds that six are now going to vote for trump or leaning to tromp. three for harris. one still undecided. so when we think about these conversations and we saw this

in the panels afterwards. they have several undecided people in various places. without exception, what was noticed is that she did not into the details of the questions. there's a lot of words, a lot of stuff going on. the very first question, what have you done to help americans be better off in the last four years. are they better off? immediately, she had a canned answer. that's the question on everyone's minds. it's not partisan. it crosses the partisan line. she did not answer it. and i knew what the line would be. the natural follow-up would have been out of vice president thank you but you didn't answer my question. when that didn't happen i knew what the trajectory would be, and what i would hope for and i believe now is that it was so

obvious that it was a distillation of what has already been happening. lots of words. other people saying things for her. flip-flops, distractions, confusions. in the new york times asiana pulled from just a few days ago, a majority of people said we need some details. we need details on these issues. i thought that's when she put up the cut and paste of the biden website of policy onto her policy pages, meaning that they noticed that and they knew, but it still was meaningless. there was no detail. she talks about her plan with no details. my feeling is we are seeing it unfold now. they are trying to move independence and the undecideds that exist. when we think about pennsylvania, is what happened last night -- or taylor swift endorsement, i don't think that

the minors, oil workers, fractures are waiting for taylor's opinion. all of us have an opinion and that's fine. we would have done something differently. there's all kinds of opinions. the bottom line is trump -- one of always said on the air, on the few occasions where i've been able to speak to him directly is that his greatest strength is himself. the thing that separates him from everyone else is the fact that he is himself. you know exactly what you're getting. last night was frankly classic. he talks about all kinds of things. a nice guy. he's portrayed as not being he is. he is doing all of this because he cares about the country. he knows what's that's fake. and i think the emotional reaction as we get now to my book, the emotional reaction is based in what's at stake.

we know our lives are at stake in this election. the freedom of speech is at take . the nature of what the country stands for is at stake. elon musk said we are already in a bankruptcy process, but it's unsustainable and we are hearing in the harris camp no plan. she is part of what has driven us to this point. many things have been discussed and will continue to be discussed but i think when people sit down still, nothing has changed when it comes to average americans not knowing if they will be able to get to work because of gas. not knowing what dinner will be. we are fortunate. many americans are thank god because of this nation. still, too many families are wondering what will the protein be tonight? kids are going back to school. what can i send it with my dad

for lunch? having to decide -- americans have been skipping meals. it's the 21st century. the greatest country in human history and american citizens are skipping meals. unacceptable. and of course, we know trump has history. greatest economy in human history, energy dependence, et cetera. american sit down again tonight and independence -- people say he lost the debate. i think that we need to wait and see how it washes out. i don't look at the betting markets. they go up and down. let me do this. i believe he will win. that has not changed. i think the issues have not changed and they will not change. her style will not change. last night was a distillation of what they've done.

try to busy you up with noise and distractions. pretend to be something they are not. while trying to make you afraid of what republicans and conservatives stand for. that's what their technique is. that's why i wrote this book. first book in 17 years on the issue of fear being used to control society. no matter what happens, even in the election, when we look back and as we look forward, the one thing consistent around the world is using a motion to control the population, and not happiness. not joey. posting up trump is going to be a dictator on day one. it's interesting and it's used because it's successful. engine technique, hundreds of years. it's been used all around the world by people who have nothing else to control you. when you are involved in the

fear framework, your brain stops using logic and reason because you move into fight or flight mode and you react emotionally exclusively. you don't stop to think about repercussions. what's the next day going to bring? you stay in the moment and you're not thinking about what else might be possible. so that has been the left strategy everywhere. in our case, we saw a great deal of that. many people were aware during covid. is there a bottle of water? can i get water or a glass of water? that would be great? americans i think were educated about the nature of how quickly -- thank you very much. thank you, sir. um -- americans, on, we were told immediately we needed to stay six feet away from each other. we needed to wear masks.

this, um, you know, you can visit loved ones were hospitalized. you can't see your family and friends if they are in a nursing home. people died alone. women gave birth alone. all of these strange decisions that we made and where we were willing to go in the midst of that because the government said earlier this year, they admitted the six feet away from each other which we knew was absurd that he did not know where that came from. i think it was delivered by leprechauns. it's hard to say. i think the phrase was just sort of showed up. is that a new scientific theorem? the showed up theorem. and of course, the masks, he admitted maybe 10% efficacy if

worn properly. the and 95, whatever that was called. but putting a bandanna around your face in other words meant nothing. it was not just about covering your face. what is important is that there's no real scientific decision-making or drive to that. it was fear. i think it manifested in this framework of realizing what was possible. and what could we get done? what strange rule would people follow if they were afraid enough? that is where many of these kinds of issues begin to manifest. the book does not just talk about covid. there's elements in there of covid. global warming. the other giant bogeyman which is amorphous like covid. undefinable. it can be whatever it is you describe. canada, though, during this period of time -- it was the

military had decided to see what rural canadians would do if there was a wild pack of wolves on the loose because you know, let's see what they would do if they were afraid. an actual program. they sent flyers out to residents saying watch out for the crazy walls, and then they set up speakers in various rural areas of wolves howling. the government in canada. it was this division of the military that was determined to see how could people be pushed under a framework of fear like this. in england during covid, a whistleblower leaks messages online between government officials involved in the covid response, saying they would hold back news about a new

variant in order to make sure it had the biggest impact possible. and that they needed to scare the pants off of people because the british were not responding properly. so this conversations about using fear, holding news, releasing it a certain time, that what they did was unconscionable, in manipulating the british people over covid. that happened everywhere. governments got excited about how to manipulate people. fear itself, fear per se is not the problem. fear is a gift. a friend of mine has written the seminal book called the gift of fear. i met him during the o.j. simpson killings and trials. she is a security expert. his point is that fear is a

useful thing, but it's meant to be transitory. if you see a train coming, too close to the tracks, you get afraid and you backup. if you see that your door is slightly ajar and you've been out, you know not to go in. you backup. and you take action. if you notice something, your daughter is having problems, and she is not talking to you or physically she has changed or lost too much weight or something is going on, fear is the initial reaction, but then you act. it spurs you to take moves that you normally would not take. right? there's a man walking on the street, a quiet street, you're the only other person walking on the street and he crosses the street to get to your side of the street. i think we've all experienced a situation where our sense, the instinctive fear, also tells us in the moment when we need to

make a change. we need to cross the street ourselves. we need to not presume. the one time i was mugged was in los angeles when i was much younger and i was on the left and there were two young men on the street and i was determined not to be afraid and to give them the benefit of the doubt even though my instinct was don't get out of your car. i got out of my car. and it was a mistake. i was slugged, knocked unconscious, fell, thank goodness, on the lawn of a neighbor's home and as i was coming to, he had been over me and was reaching for -- at the time i carry a bar -- a bag now. grasping my bag but the light came on in the house on the lawn where i fell which means i must have made a noise. i got my bag back.

it was a couple of neighborhood kids who were trying out for the gang. my instinct, and with the left wants you to do is ignore your instinct. they want you to question your values. they wanted to ignore the problems that we are facing. they want you to think that if you're concerned about children or what is transpiring, you're a bigot or you can't be trusted or something is wrong with you, or you're living in the past. i love to live in the past when we have the strongest economy in the world. i would love to live in the past when we don't have world wars breaking out. that's the part of it as well. the fear. chapters about this on the issue of language. fear of being called a name. though woke framework is made to make you afraid of being shunned, canceled, losing your job. it has all become normalized. being publicly shamed. that's

all to keep you quiet. it's a new censorship through fear. by the way, poverty is a powerful sensor. if you can affect an economy where people can't come support their favorite groups or candidates, if you can't afford to travel to go to an event, if you can't afford to live in the neighborhood you want to live in for his school or whatever, you are trapped you are trapped. you can't be heard, you can't support people you want to support. you can't move, you can't leave. that's what the left works for. all of these things rely on the fear. now today the fear is -- this is why people think it is a failed economy. your intention is to keep people trapped. make them not be able to move out of a certain state.

make them not be able to speak up because they will lose the two jobs that they now have to have in order to pay the rent. fear of not being able to pay the rent is something more and more americans are living paycheck to paycheck. that is not normal in our society. in a society of entrepreneurs and free market and capitalism. every 20 years, there seems to be a problem that puts us on our heels economically. funny enough. every generation gets kneecaps a little bit. we are at the inflection point again with the direction that no one talks about when it comes to the economy for next year. the bad economy raises fear. for the left, you saw this in the debate. you see this with the rhetoric. if you are hearing the rhetoric about the border, it's worth being afraid of. the border is open.

we have terrorists on the watch list coming through. we have people being imported into the country that don't embrace the values that are in small towns attacking park wildlife and eating it. things that are so shocking that it's worth fear, but what you are being asked to do when you are being told all these things is not to be afraid and retreat. it's about all right, on the transitory position, what do we do? the gauge becomes as the left tells you -- this is my last point. i know we are out of time. as the left tells you about global warming, there's no real endpoint. there's no real solution. banning plastic straws, i'm sorry, or turning off -- don't use the air conditioner. being comfortable, suffer, don't use cars, fossil fuels,

electric vehicles. of course, where does electricity come from, they don't like to discuss that so much. it's all about a fear that makes you choose strange options or purses you into a dynamic that makes no sense whatsoever. never in endpoint. every 10 or 15 years, there is a new scary thing that the world is going to and in 10 or 15 years. every 20 years, there's some new thing. aoc's thing was in 12 years, the world will end. it's usually 20 years. that's to have you stop thinking critically. we will save the planet. you have to not use straws or drive. and you think okay, whatever i can do. what is never addressed is china and china being the contributor. eight rivers in china, two in indonesia that provide all of the pollution into the world's

oceans. banning plastic straws in the united states is not a solution but of course, it makes you think you've done something and then you retreat from an issue. we all of the environments but it makes you think you've done your part one of us have done our part. that's the issue. and it continues. it will never be solved. fear -- this is about killing your mind on every issue. it is meant to stop your critical thinking. and if you do think critically, there's punishments for acting on that. and then you may even your self comply. punishments if you don't comply her to severe. and issues like with harris where you don't want to talk details, there are no details. the can't tell you how it solves the problem, or with the economy or anything else.

it's an evergreen book. it can be applied anywhere. what happened to cavanaugh and the confirmation hearing. trump. j.k. rowling on the issue of gender reassignment surgeries and children. that all of those are meant as messages to the rest of you. if we can do it to them, we can do it to you. that's my message. pretty obvious message. if we can do it to them, no one is safe, and that's the point. they are trying to find out -- i hope we are wrong, but on issues like can we get them to say that these agents of the state and schools are better for their children and they are? can we get parents to abandon their children? can we get adults to look away when children become objects of sexual politics? that's what it is. sexual politics. sexualization of children, when it is the most innocent time.

irreversible situations. can they frighten you into accepting it for fear of criticism or punishment? that is all of our positions right now. and it's a very weak house. but it can be defeated. and i think we are seeing it play out in the election right now, that you'll be thinking about for the left, abortion and fear. if there is a fear-based message where there is no solution, that's the mind that killing aspect. if there's a genuine thing to be afraid of where there is a solution like with the border, policies, dealing with mexico, building the wall, acting on the solutions. that's a different framework. weapon rising an important aspect that leads our lives. and the left want you to retreat and be too afraid to

engage. all of you here are not in that position. the organization is not in that position. it's an honor and a pleasure to be here. every day, we got to talk about these things. thank you very much and we've got some questions now. >> all right, let me make sure this one was on. >> the c-span -- >> a different microphone out there. >> is great. >> we started a little bit early so we can have extra time with tammy for questions, so we have a little bit more time than we promised her. here's the caveat. all been to the uncomfortable room where the question becomes the speech. we will ask that you ask questions and save comments.

who would like to ask the first question? >> do we have a microphone in the field? >> there we go. >> i won't need one. >> of course, my issue is my answer is 20 minutes long. i'm going to follow that rule, as well, so we can get as many of you here as possible because it is a national audience and i think people generally don't hear from north carolinians. they don't hear from you. it's an important time and they deserve to hear from you. >> i'm jeff. i want to say welcome to the old north state. where cornwallis met a hornets nest. >> there we go. >> my question is what other news media sources away from our beloved fox news do you consider reliable and dependable , where you listen further information?

>> that's a good question. all of legacy media is a problem and we certainly saw that last night. and i think that's going to be the legacy of that debate. people will remember that kind of behavior of the moderators in the meantime. i think right now it really is a lot more active on twitter, which is now x. we would not be hearing about anything that now is valuable. i am very active on there. so many other different layers about articles and reporting. you have to be able to sort through things and control the feed. i am on twitter. those videos now, longform videos. i put one up just before i came here. subscriptions that help

creators make a little bit of money. they are going to be starting up tv. not going to stop. remarkable. so i think i am thinking here. god. oh, man. my column is the conservative alternative to the aarp. they have articles and material, so i'm proud of being associated with them. in all honesty unless there is a major change we want -- people turn to fox and i read about them in the book. they have more liberals and democrats listening to fox and cnn or msnbc because everyone knows they need information. the correct information, a variety of information to decide what you are going to do for your family and for

yourselves. thinking about my browser now online, where i might go. my channel is on fox or it's on hallmark. the magnolia channel. main cabin masters. the true crime. of course, fox nation is in the top 10 of the downloaded apps for information, the streaming service. i have to tell you until we see more and things settle down, right now it's limited and it's social media. >> this could not have been a more perfect day to talk about fear. i met with a group of students last week at appalachian state university and that was their main subject. it was fear about taxes, fear that they would never be able to buy a home, fear that they would never be able to start a family. these are the real fears. so what do you suggest we would

say to them, number one, to have them vote right but have them alleviate their fears so they are comfortable and voting. >> that's a great question. we all have a fear of what's happening. that's what then provokes -- the thing is you are afraid you can't get a house so here she is with money from the government for you to buy a house. california, gavin newsom vetoed it. they passed a bill for like $150,000 for illegal aliens only to buy a house. the moment if they create enough fear or the price controls which we know have destroyed every country that has ever implemented them but the left has to because their policies make prices impossible as we are now experiencing eggs. things are double digits. 10%, 50%, 80%. what is the government's answer? we are going to price control the greedy grocers who are making a 1.6% profit. if you're a prez character, you're very bad.

at least go 10%. come on. it's the excuse to say you can't live your life on your own. government has to save you. the answer to those young people is to talk about it with people, talk about it with her friends, to know that this is not normal. the fear dynamic, not having a child because of global warming. maybe it's your child who will solve the problems. that deep and being able to talk with people to recognize this is not organic, not normal and it's unsustainable. we don't want it to collapse. we want to stop it before it continues to do damage. as young people, they are in the perfect position to recognize they are afraid and it decide. the decision to not be governed by fear, to

reengage your critical mind and then make decisions accordingly and presume that what you are hearing that's making you so afraid can be changed, and that it should not stop you from living your life. it's a decision each day. >> first of all, welcome to the tar heel state. congratulations on your book. fantastic. it's a must read. as we get into the critical stage of the election, all of us are going to have everyday encounters where we might have an opportunity to speak to an independent undecided. if you were to have what you would call an elevator speech moment -- >> that's not my specialty. i have the two hour flight to hear moment. yes. >> an opportunity to share briefly with someone who has listened to both candidates. not political, not following it closely. but you're a republican. you're going to vote

republican, why, what am i missing? >> i would say don't think you are voting a certain party's ticket. people have voted and behaved on certain issues. has delivered what on the issues. forget their parties. kamala harris in the last four years of the destruction of the economy, world wars, israel being obliterated by terrorists on october 7th. we are coming up to a year on that attack in israel. russia and ukraine. the debacle of afghanistan which was the key to making bad guys think they could do what they wanted. i still worry about china and taiwan. it's the decision is clear. if you like the last four years -- we want go back to reagan. if you like the last four years, vote for kamala harris and you will get it on steroids. if you, and thank goodness, trumps success is recent enough

when you can point to trumps success. the strongest economy, literally in human history. energy independence. we were in exporter. there's more oil on the market. the price of oil goes down. russia and iran rely on their income. the gdp is oil money. they can do things when oil is high, when the price of oil goes down, they are not relying on tourism like france. france can rely on tourism. iran can't. it means that's why you have the less adventurism because there's no money for the bad guys unless you send them pallets of billions of dollars. can shut them out. the elevator speeches, it's not about parties. it's about who has done what. you are making the choice about who to go out with for a night out on the town. do you choose the person who

got out of jail and did a home invasion robbery and has general life problems and does not tell you the truth and is always lying to, or do you choose the person who has got a history that proves they are reliable? it's that simple. the left has made you nervous about voting for republicans because of hitler, right? hitler. so if you want more of this insanity, none of this is normal. it was created on a dime by biden and the spending. the green new deal spending disguised as the inflation reduction act. he admitted it a week or so ago, saying we should have called it what it was. that's the inflation. billions of spending. billions for electric vehicle chargers across the country. it was 40 or 50 billion. they built eight chargers. so i'm sorry, that was obviously two elevator rides.

i hope that works. yes, sir. >> welcome to charlotte. i'm charlie dunn. my question is this. a great fear that i have is that the outcome of this election could be dependent primarily on one issue. and that's abortion. and am i justified in my fear? the big issue, still, number one, is the economy. and this is what i've said to republicans, because people got upset when trump took the phrase reproductive rights. to cast abortion in some kind of act of freedom as a lie. 70%, now we know, if they had

the money to keep the child, they would. seven out of 10. abortions are other because they are financially, they believe they are financially incapable of doing this, working two jobs, going to school, or there is pressure from the outside. someone else is saying that. they don't have the financial stability or the personal life stability to be able to resist the outside pressure. usually, perhaps, it would be a man or a parent saying you can't afford this, we can't afford this, don't do this. how is it that having to choose an abortion because you don't have enough money in the united states of america to have a child, how is that a choice? it's not. i was the product of an affair. my mother was 40, unemployed, not a great decision-maker at the time. having an affair with a married man, and she got pregnant.

pre-birth control pills. and he left her. he was involved allegedly with the mob. i think maybe two months along. about $10,000, 1962, a lot of money, when you had to go to mexico or pay a doctor enough to do it. this is okay, here you go, need to get rid of this and she said okay and then she kept the money and she kept the baby. i'm grateful. the but that was a choice. she had the money. that was a choice. don't have the left -- i'm sick

and tired of it. having the left cast women who are living in an economy that doesn't allow them to be able to address an emergency, a health emergency, a pregnancy, a child's emergency, because they don't have the money because they don't have the right jobs, they lost their savings, their house is underwater, birth control failed which it does sometimes. sometimes you're not thinking of things happen. seven out of 10 of those women, though, would say that i want an economy where women can say, and this is what abortions went down during trump's presidency, more than anything else. women could say what a minute, i could do this. i want women to say that on every single issue. you want to have a franchise. wait a minute, i can do this. do you want to move into a house and get out of an apartment in the urban area. wait a minute. i can do this. you're not going to be a millionaire. you're going to just be living somewhere else. you can pay for the move.

maybe everyone is fighting. they don't want school vouchers because the left wants you in the indoctrination center. you can say when a minute, i can do this. i can pay for that school. with abortion, the same situation, when you are there, my mother telling me the story was she got the cash. it's like that's what you're supposed to do and she was a little bit afraid of his group and she had her sister with her and my mother said exactly that phrase, you know, i can do this. and here i am. how many, how many are not here because they did not have a choice, don't believe this pro- choice garbage. reproductive rights is a conservative issue because it's an economic issue, and more women will have more freedom to make that choice but now women are running around to your point. that because everything is so awful, but they're going to give me abortion. even though i can't pay my rent and there's drugs on the street and my cat has been stolen.

what am i going to do? we don't know where we are going to live next week. you have to join the military so you have some money and you're sent off to fight the middle eastern war. what life is that? but hey, it's okay, you can have an abortion. that is certainly not feminist. the truth of that has to be called out for what it is because women do not want the government telling them what they can do with her body which would include forced vaccinations in order to keep your job. we want choices. vaccinations are good. we know the history of vaccinations. we want trials, we want to know the results are, we want to know what's going to happen with vaccinations for children. choices involve information, not government coercion, which is what abortion is now in this country with seven out of 10. that's government coercion like china. which is simply more obvious

about it. our government and the left and the democrats are saying this is empowering. no woman who has had an abortion or miscarried has ever forgotten that child. sometimes yeah, would have been 12 this year or yeah, i wonder what that kid would have been doing. it never leaves you. i've never had to go through that, but i've had many friends who have both experiences and it changes them. they said don't worry. don't have to live in the city, don't have any money, but we can get you that abortion. how dare they cast this is some empowerment. see, what happens when you ask me a question -- i fought on that issue on the basis of a don't think the government should be telling us how to live our lives. that informs my conservative ideals to this day about independence and freedom from an overarching government that

uses all of these reasons to try to ruin us. that's my answer. i'm sorry. i think that's it. but it will be the economy. it's the economy that drives this election for all the right reasons. women understand. if i'm living on the street, that's the issue. thank you very much. appreciate it. yup. we have one more -- somebody who is not following the rules. surprise. >> we are out of time for questions. sorry about that. tammy, thank you so much. that was fantastic. that was really fantastic. come on, a big round of applause for tammy bruce.

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rose friedman's free to choose, a personal statement, published in 1980 as a companion to the 10 part tbs series. free to choose advocated free- market capitalism. both milton and rose studied at the university of chicago were milton served as faculty in the economics department for almost 30 years. the co-wrote several books together and the relationship was described as an extremely close intellectual fellowship. in 1976, milton friedman won the nobel prize in economics and in 1988 was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by ronald reagan. is there is include public policies debate and he served as an advisor to reagan and british prime minister margaret thatcher. constitutional restraints on the power of government interfering with free markets, criticizing what they saw as wasteful government spending on welfare and other social safety net programs. the book was one of the best- selling nonfiction books of

1980. >> books that shaped america. our c-span series that looks at books throughout our history that have influenced who we are today. in partnership from the library of congress, this 10 week series has been exploring different eras, different topics, different viewpoints. we are glad you're with us for this walk-through history. tonight, a look at the economy, the role of government. how we teach children, and other policy issues, and it's all through the eyes milton and rose friedman. in 1980, th developed a series for public tv caed free to choose, and turned it into a best-selling book. many of these ideas were controversial and sparked heated debate, but the book has influenced political figures and others for decades. our guest tonight to help us understand the impact of free to choose is lonnie even stein, a continuing lecturer in the

economics department at uc santa barbara. also the author of this book. milton friedman, a biography. let's start with some facts and figures about the u.s. in 1980. the population was about 226 million. about 100 million less than it is today. the president was jimmy carter. of course, he lost to ronald reagan later that year. the inflation rate was 14% compared to about 69% today. the unemployment rate was at 7.5%. today about 3%. a 30 year fixed your mortgage. 13.7% and climbing. there had been a recession in 1980 and another one was to come. how did the economy feel like two people in 1980? >> i think the economy was the number one issue in the 1980

campaign between jimmy carter and ronald reagan. there's no question that ronald reagan was very significantly influenced by milton freeman and his policies and program. he ran on the economy before bill clinton put forward it is the economy, stupid. ronald reagan was asking what do you think about inflation and unemployment? inflation is really the issue of the day. united states had not experienced double-digit inflation in peace time, maybe ever, virtually. maybe very shortly. the decontrol of prices after world war ii. to have a general peacetime economy wi double-digit inflation and declining economic growth, the oil embargo, the loss of the war in vietnam. troubled times in the united

states. many people felt america's greatest days were behind it. but it was inevitably going to be getting another role in society. that economic growth would diminish. from a political perspective, from pat a different direction. that's where free to choose comes in. >> what were they advocating in free to choose? >> essentially, they were advocating a rollback of the role of government that had emerged first in the great depression, and then even more during the great society programs during the lyndon johnson administration. their opposition was to the expansion of government. they define freedom eyes the most limited amount of government possible. recognizing government has an essential role to play.

establishing a free market order. they wanted society to have as little government as possible. whether it was to be at a local or state level, rather than a federal level, they thought voluntary associations should be the primary provider of social welfare functions and then families and individuals strength and after society would operate in the most productive, harmonious manner. did the book have an impact on the reagan campaign? >> no question. as far as free to choose was published, first in hardback, with the series, free to choose, that was public broadcasting. in 1980, the year the campaign.

the paperback edition which is what i have. reagan has the first one word endorsement. one word, superb. they first met when reagan was governor of california. campaigned on a number of issues together. first in 1976, then in 1980. these ideas of them in particular, you have to control the inflation rate as an economist. monetary policy theory above all else. circumstances in an economy that in the long run leads to less growth. during the 1970s, when we know what to do about inflation, the

case today that people don't know about inflation. people would not agree with the approach of the federal reserve. in the last interview i had with him, what would you want is the epitaph on your gravestone? without batting an eye, he said inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. the reason why there was inflation in friedman's intellectual perspective was that too much money was being produced. and printed by the federal government in the form of currency were being injected into the economy by the federal reserve. and that was the problem. it was not a function

>> that became the line adopted around the world for the next several decades and inflation greatly diminished not just in the 80s but in the early 90s. i think friedman argued it was a large source of economic. >> this series is called books thatshaped america, does ee to choose belong on that list? >> both milton and rose friedman , their influence and putting forward ideas. friedman considered himself to be a libertarian and philosophy but republican politics did that's how he characterized himself. he was a leading advisor to barry goldwater in 1964, leading economic advisor to barry goldtein 1964 when he was a republican presidential none leading advisor to richard nixon in 1968 and 1972 he was

the leading advocate of an all volunteer army that was implemented during nixon's administration. then he was the leading endorser and supporter of reagan when reagan was elected in 1980 and 1984. his ideas have had tremendous lasting influence on public discussion and dialogue. not everyone agrees with them. i want to be clear about that. i am trying to present friedman's views as to what he would say. many people argue his ongovernment were not the right approach. >> let's quote from to choose. this is one of his colusions at the end of the book. we are as a people still free to choose which way we should go -whether to continue along the road we have been following to ever bigger government or to call a halt and change direction. >> i think that friedman's primary initiative in all of his work as a public

intellectual, particularly in the last 30 years of his life after he retired from the university of chicago in 1976, he really wanted to see less government. in terms of money supply he thought that was one of the ways government affects the society the most and the economy the most. if there is inflation in society, that will be detrimental to an economy and therefore the first thing the government has to do is maintain a stable money supply. the second thing that the economy needs to do, the government needs a working economy to do is to ensure there are relationships and contracts that are adhered to among individuals. there is a system of law and order and adjust the system. he believed there would be a police function and he thought government had an important role to play in defense. he supported some social services and his basic approach, i think it may surprise viewers to know

that he had the idea of a negative income tax in the 1960s, which is similar to the idea of a universal basic income now whereby we will not have a whole of social welfare programs, we will not have large government employment, rather, we will give people funds directly to spend. he thought that would be a more effective way of running the welfare system than the current programs. in the area of education he thought that vouchers, which would permit parents to choose their children's education, what schools they would attend and what type of programs that they want that would be a way to increase competition in education and these are policies we are talking about today. >> they remain topical today he was for all volunteer army, drug legalization, many policies. international exchange rates, low tariffs, indexation of tax rates.

there are so many policy reforms that can be traced in part to milton friedman and rose friedman. >> let's go back to free to choose, economic freedom is an essential prerequisite for political freedom. that was one of the friedman's core ideas. there is a strong connection between economic freedom and political freedom and they are not distinct. you cannot say you can be politically free if government is running the economy. they pointed to 1976 during the 200th anniversary of the declaration of independence and adam smith's wealth of nations. the declaration of independence came forward in 1776 and smith's wealth of nations was published in 1776. they emphasize that we need to have the economics of adam smith, the idea of a free economy and join that to the

political ideas of the declaration of independence that guarantee all individuals are created equal and everyone has a inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. they thought politics and economics are connected and there cannot be political freedom. there cannot be political freedom unless there is economic freedom and therefore a free market system is essential, not nearly to an economic system but essential to a political system. >> santa barbara, other idea that we are still talking about today is equality and frdo this, again is from free to choose. a society that puts equality in the sense of equality and outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. the use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom and the force introduced for

good purposes will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interest. >> friedman was not someone who thought that equality of result should be sought as an explicit end of government. he thought individuals are different, they have different tastes, they have different abilities, they have different experience, wants, desires, education, different degrees of risk assess ability and for that reason a just society, it is not going to be a perfectly egalitarian society. at the same time, this is important, he felt that by not making equality a directly sought after goal, one that just emerges through a free market, in fact, a free-market capitalist system is more likely to have more equal outcomes than in other economic systems. by allowing freedom that people

will have the incentive to be productive and that will benefit everyone and that in fact it is not a choice between freedom and equality, if you value freedom, you also have a good deal of equality. >> we mentioned free to choose, the book came after a pbs tv series called free to choose. there is a portion of it talking about free markets. >> look at this lead pencil. not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. remarkable statement? not at all. the wood from which it is made, from all i know comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of washington. to cut down that tree it took a saw, to take make the sod took steel, to take make steel it took ironwood. this black center we call it lead, it is really graphite. i

am not sure where it comes from, i think it comes from some mines in south america. this red top, the racer, the rubber, probably comes from where the rubber tree is not even native it was imported from south america by some businessmen with help of the british government. this brass farrell, i have not the slightest idea where it came from, or the yellow paint, or the paint that made the black lines or the glue that holds it together. literally, thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. people who do not speak the same language who practice different religions, who might hate one another if they ever met. you go down to the store and you buy this pencil you are in effect trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all of those thousands of people. what

brought them together and induce them to cooperate to make this? there was no commissar sending out officers from sending out orders from some central office. it was the magic of the price system. the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate to make this pencil so that you could have it for a trifling sum. that is why the operation of the free market is so essential. not only to promote productive efficiency, even more, to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world. >> that is a classic milton friedman story. >> i think milton friedman was a great teacher and you can see it there. he was a great human being. as someone who had an opportunity to interview him on occasion, i was truly impressed

by him and his wisdom, the warmth of his personality and the genius of his mind. he is able to explain things so clearly and succinctly and persuasively. i think when he is talking about the importance of the market, what he is really saying is prices are essential to a properly operating market. they register supply and demand. if prices can adjust to one another based on supply and demand, then you have the most effective production. whereas, if you have government control of production it will be inefficient. ludvig von mises, a early 20th century economists talk about calculation in socialist economies and he asked how is a

government planner going to know if they want to build houses? are you going to use steel, are you going to use bricks, are you going to use what, are you going to use glass? metal? if you do not have a way to compare the relative value of different goods, then you do not have rational economy. that is what leads to the most production is the ability for prices to fluctuate. that is a very different idea than most governments have taken throughout history. the view has been, this is in the period preceding adam smith that friedman criticized and adam smith did more so was the idea that government should be setting the productive decisions for society and should be directly determining what will be produced and where it will be produced and how it is going to be produced. the argument of friedman and other capitalist oriented economists is that it would not

be desirable in some way for government to do these things. they do not think it would be desirable. the primary argument is that it is not possible for government to make these sorts of decisions in an efficient manner. that does not mean there is no role for government to play with it is to say to have productivity you have to have a large free-market economy. on that argument i think friedman and his friend have won the argument. >> as i mentioned at the beginning, this series is in panership with the library of congress. about 10 years ago the brary of congress came up with 100 bucks that shaped america. milton friedman's free to choose was on that list. these are not necessarily the best books in the world, they are not the best sellers in the world, they are all books that havehad an impact on our society.

that said about this book, this is what the library of congress wrote in their description of free to choose. economtsmilton and rose friedman publish this book in conjunction with their pbs series that espouse the virtues of capitalism versus other economic approaches, some of those other economic approaches , of course communism and some others. there is also john kenneth galbraith or john maynard keynes. what were their approaches and how are they different? >> to look at the three systems, the communist or socialist system and more galbraith the and type of system , or are casein system is that friedman's real opposition is to communism and socialism in the form of government direction of the means of economic production. he said the classic examples of this are germany and korea.

before the end of world war ii both germany and korea had been united countries and if anything the more industrial and developed part of germany was in the eastern part of germany and korea the more developed part was in the northern part of korea. fast forward 40 years as a result of world war ii both germany and korea were divided into separate countries. north korea, south korea, east germany and west germany. you had sort of a controlled experiment, which is difficult to do in the political, social realm. one part of the country with the same history, the same institutions, the same people had one system and people in the other part of the country at a different system. there is no question that west germany was far more productive economically and higher had a higher standard of living than

east germany and south korea had a higher standard of living and was more productive than north korea. those are classic examples. his great opposition was to very signict government control of an economy. when it comes to john kenneth galbraith or john maynard keynes , he did not consider them to be nearly as negative as a full- fledged socialist or economy system, socialism in the sense meaning government ownership and operation in the means of economic production. in the case of keynes, friedman's opposition was mostly to keynes's idea in an advanced capitalist economy there tend to be over saving . the marginal propensity to consume and declined as a society became economically

more advanced and therefore you could have economic equilibrium at less than full production and full employment and therefore government had to borrow access funds from the private sector and engage in deficit spending in order to maintainfu economic activity. that is in anutshell keynes's essential idea. friedman thought the facts contradict that view and the idea that there are vast sources of excess saving that need to be borrowed by government is false. together, the keynes system does not necessarily require more government but if the government is going to require money from the economic sector it will have to spend more money. in history it would lead to more economic activity in the economy in general. he was pod to that.

with respect to culbreath at the time, he was probably the well most well-known economist populate between keynes and friedman, i would not say he had the same reputation among academic economists but certainly galbraith was well known in the 1950s and 60s and somewhat like his criticism of keynes, friedman by no means thought keynes or galbraith were socialist or economist maybe they hedged a little bit towards socialism but his main concern was they did not recognize the inherent efficiency of much government activity. >> lanny eva stein is a continng lecture at the university of california santa barbara. he has been there since 2005. he is the author of a couple of books, milton friedman a biography and chicago nymex

which we will talk about in a minute. he is helping us understand the impact of milton and rose friedman's free to choose. we want to hear from you. if you live in the eastern central time zone 748-8921. if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones and if you cannot get through and the phone line you want to make a comment try our text number 202- 748-8903. that is for text messages only. please include your first name and your cityif you would with thr question or comment. also i want to let you know that we have a companio website to this series it is quite comprehensive. there are teacher lesson plans, there is a viewer input tab, there is related video, library of congress 100 bucks that shaped america are all contained on that website, cspan.org /books that shaped

america is the website. just a little bit about milton and rose friedman. milton friedman, 1912 to 2006. he was born in new york city that he went to tgers, university of chicago and receiv phd from columbia. the treasury department, he worked there from 1941 to 43 during fdr's esency. he taught at the university of icago from 1946 to 1977. rose friedman lived from 1910 to2009. she was born in the ukraine. she attended reed college and university of chicago where she d phd work, but she d not do her dissertati. she collaborated on eeto choose the tv series and the book. she cowrote other economic books and memoirs all with milton friedman including capitalism and freedom that

came out in 1962. she cofounded ed joyce with milton friedman promoting school vouchers. i want to show you the original copy of this book that came out and 19 eddie 1980. here is the front cover. hilton and rosa both listed. when you flip it around there is where you get rose friedman on the back. rose friedman's role. >> i think rose was from a family of economists, her brother was a leading member of the chicago school of economics in the post-world war ii. period shherself was an economic student at chicago when friedman was also a graduate student. they were both students of frank knight, a famous economist at the time who is very much a free-market oriented economist. i think her role was not

significant in milton friedman's work in technical economics during most of his re at the university of chicago. he she was more involved in his later work in public policy and in books as you mentioned free to choose, capitalism and freedom and other works later in his career after he retired from the university of chicago. >> let's hear from some of our viewers before we continue looking at free to choose. this is tim and pearl city, hawaii. hello. you are on c-span . >> aloha. >> please go ahead. >> great discussion. my question is, did milton freeman have thoughts about a constitutional amendment for a balanced budget? how did he think about deficit spending during wartime or national crises? did he have any thoughts ? >> really good question.

his thoughts in this area may surprise you. during wartime i would say that friedman would say rules might generally apply should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, i would not say that he would oppose deficit spending during wartime. however, even during peace time, his view was that deficits were to be preferred to more government spending. he often said, he would rather see government spend $1 trillion and have a $500 billion deficit then government spend $2 trillion and have no deficit at all. his focus was the amount of gornment spending rather than the defici. many people have criticized m on this score. he is the one who introduced the notion that deficits don't matter.

they don't matter economically. his focus was monetary policy, it is monetary policy that steers the economy. if you want a growing economy the way you have the economy grow in the short run is you have an increase money supply. it is not a keynes idea of fiscal policy. friedman supported balanced budget amendments only if it was in the context of a reduction in government spending. his focus was government spending and not deficit. as it happens, i think that is also something, a legacy of his that some may criticize as far as the reagan administration non-focus, to put it mildly on deficits being an important factor of government policy and something that has continued to the present other than last years of the clayton

administration. >> allen is coming in from east chicago, indiana. please call iron go ahead. >> this is more of a comment. looking at mr. friedman's philosophy i think time has proven it was a mplete failure , it gave us reaganomics which in turn gave us high unemployment, recession, a wealth of inequality, it made the rich richer and the poor poorer and it pretty much ended the american dream. >> thank you, alan, very much. talk about the issues that alan just mentioned printed reaganomics and milton friedman lead to those things? >> what i have attempted to do is present his position as opposed to offer critique of it. i guess my view would be that there are strengths and has

thought but there are great weaknesses. i think with respect to monetary policy he was very accurate with the importance of low but not necessarily no inflation. i think in fiscal policy his lack of focus on deficit was not helpful to our society. with respect to did reaganomics lead to the decline of the american economy, i think we were talking earlier about how the late 1970s were a period of high inflation in the united states, high unemployment in the united states, high interest rates in the united states and at the time, it was considered to be a relative buna in the economy that the united states experienced during the 1980s and 1990s as deflation decelerated. i think you have to take a balanced approach friedman's record. as you say, i think the idea of

less government and government inefficiency is a very important idea. those who do not recognize government inefficiency they are making a mistake. >> along with the companion website, we have a companion podcast, looking at the lives of milton and rose friedman more in-depth. we want to play a little bit from this podcast. this is mark, he is an economist, author and the founder of the libertarian freedom fest. >> friedman would always advocate less government then more government because -- it was that it was not a negative approach but it was a positive approach. he would say this means you have your own responsibility in

making your own decisions rather than someone else telling you what to do. that is essentially an american perspective. we do not like people telling us what to do. whether it is during a pandemic, whether it is during a war, we want to make those decisions ourselves. i think that is the ultimate legacy that milton friedman had. >> you can see on your screen the little qr code, get your phone out and snap a picture of that and you will get to the entire podcast. the guest mark talk about milton and rose friedman. >> claire is in santa barbara california. please go ahead. >> hello professor ebenstein this is claire and some of my fellow students we are cheering you on from santa barbara. my question to you is, as young economist that you are

teaching, what advice do you have for us? or what do you think friedman would have for us in today's current economic state and what do you think policymakers could suggest? >> claire, are you a student at uc santa barbara? >> yes i am professor ebenstein student . >> what do you think of milton friedman and the different economic theories? give us a sense what you think. >> i think he woulbe more free-market and he might think that the government should have less say in economic affairs. i am not sure if the government, if he would agree with how the government is treating inflation and the housing crisis and the homeless crisis. i am just not sure that's why i'm asking. >> thank you for calling it

prayed >> claire, thank you for calling in. i really appreciate it. i think your questions are really good. i think friedman's approach was basically a monetary approach. one thing we talked about early in the program, the late 1970s were an era of challenge for number of reasons. although it seems hard to believe now, the soviet union at that point in time se to be ascended in the world and the idea of a much larger government role in society was advocated by many economists as the inevitable direction. friedman's perspective on that was that that was the wrong approach. as we discussed earlier, the problem with more economic control by government is that it will also erode political freedom. you cannot have political friedman freedom without

economic freedom. as well as you cannot have an effective economy without a significant degree of economic freedom. i think friedman would advocate, really considering the advantages of a market economy in trying to evaluate what are the appropriate policies in a society should be. that is a question that deserves a lot of discussion. friedman recognized that reasonable people with good will can draw the line on what is the appropriate level of government differently? it might be different in different places at different times. in his years as a public intellectual, after he retired from the university of chicago, he tended to become relatively more doctrinaire in his no government approach. from my

standpoint, his work as a technical practical economist where he discusses the disadvantages of government involvement in monetary policy and other areas is something that is the stronger aspect of his work. i don't think that friedman's underlying philosophy as an economist, where he thought he made his greatest contribution, was necessarily quite as one- sided as his later career as a public intellectual. as an economist i tried to emphasize friedman's thought during his career which he valued more highly than his later work in retirement. >> as we mentioned, free to choose his best-selling book came out free to choose the highly rated pbs series. let's return to that series and

hear more from milton friedman. >> the fact is, most people enjoy the early stages of the inflationary process. britain in the swinging 60s, there was plenty of money around. business was brisk, jobs are plentiful and prices had not yet taken off. everybody seemed happy, at first . by the early 70s, as the good times rolled along, prices started to rise more rapidly. soon, some of these people are going to lose their job. the party was coming to an end. the story is much the same in the united states, only the process started a little later

we had one inflationary party after another, yet we still cannot seem to avoid it. how come? >> before every election our representatives like to make us think that we are getting a tax break. they are able to do it, while at the same time raising our taxes because of a bit of magic that they have in their kit bag . that magic is inflation. they reduce the tax rates, but the taxes we have to pay go up because we are automatically shoved into higher brackets by the effective inflation. a neat trick, taxation without representation. the reason we have inflation in the united states, or for that matter anywhere in the world, these pieces of paper, and the accompanying book entry or counterparts in other nations are growing more rapidly than the quantity of goods and services produced. the truth is, inflation is made

in one place and one place only , here in washington. this is the only place where there are presses like this that turn out these pieces of paper called money. this is the place where the power resides to determine how rapidly the amount of money shall increase. at happened to e that's what would happen to inflation if we stop setting the amount of money so >> what happened to all that noise? that's what would happen to inflation if we stopped letting the amount of money grow so rapidly. >> we want to thank free to choose media for providing the video that you are seeing tonight from that series.

lanny ebenstein we have seen cases in argentina and brazil and other countries where inflation is 100, 1000% because monies being printed. do we have that issue as bad as milton friedman made it sound? >> sure i remember that segment from free to choose very well and i myself was a undergraduate student at that time taking courses in economics. the whole idea, why is there inflation? is it will result in changes of interest rates? is it a result of two high profit? too much demand? friedman's answer was clear and unequivocal. that segment that shows the printing of dollar bills by the treasury department, really makes the point from his perspective, which is, inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.

he would argue the reason why we have inflation in the united states in recent years, is not because interest rates were too low at some point in time. he would say it was because during the coronavirus recession , perhaps for appropriate reasons as a result of the extreme circumstances, he was not dogmatic with respect to emergency circumstances you have to take emergency measures, whether they are right or wrong is a different issue, that is the point come up with the aspect of inflation we are expressing now he would say, when the federal reserve did not borrow from the trillions of dollars that was sent to american individuals and as this is and when the federal reserve, congress did not tax for those of dollars either, but simply the federal reserve increased the supply of money engaged in quantitative to the tune of trillions of

dollars, that is why we have inflation now. the reason why inflation has decelerated in the past year is because friedman thought there was a lag time between an increase in the money supply and the degree of inflation and likewise there is a lag time between when money supply stops increasing and the deceleration of inflation that we now have basically gone through that cycle. it is not surprising that inflation has dropped from eight or 9% to three to 4% and it will continue to drop to two percent in the next months. friedman would have utterly condemned current federal reserve policy of raising interest rates in order to control inflation. he thought that was a bit and do not have anything to do with the rate of aggregate prices. to say it did not have anything to do might be a slight

overstatement, his focus was undoubtedly quantity of money. that is why there was inflation . if you want less inflation, stop the printing presses stop increasing the supply of money but it is not a function of interest rate primarily. >> jim in new york city you are on the books of america please go ahead. >> i present the conversation pit my question is on monopolies and oligopolies first of all, what was milton friedman's attitude towards that? are they committed by the government itself? >> that is a really good question. friedman's thinking on the issue of monopolies and oligopolies evolved over the course of his career. when he was a young economist in the 1930s and 40s, he basically endorsed the prevailing economic models which saw a gnificant amount of

oligopolistic ammo a ballistic activity in the economy and this required a large role for government because the theory of a free market and its efficiency is that no one is a price setter, everyone is a price taker that does not exist in an oligopoly or monopoly. in the period after world war ii , together with others from the university of chicago that i mentioned, aaron director, george stiegler, and others, they examined the american economy closely and they came to the view that there does not appear to be much oligopolistic and monopolistic characteristics in the economy, a view that has tend to be more generally accepted in the economic profession and public policy. that really undercuts the argument for much government activity. from friedman's perspective, we are not in a keynes system where you have to

have government borrowing. we are not in a monopolistic or oligopolistic we have to have government regulation. he later became not overly concerned about monopoly and oligopoly in the private sector. he did think government is wasteful and is the monopoly we have to worry about and its inefficiency is the problem. >> text message from michael in hastings, nebraska. please compare and contrast the philosophies of milton and rose friedman and ann rand. >> i would say that the friedmans were much more of the view that there is an appropriate limited role for government to blame society whereas ann rand thought there was almost no role for government to play in the society. the friedmans thought there was human diversity, they did think

there was a basic equality that humans have spiritually. i think ann rand's view was and i do not think the friedmans have that perspective. >> in the 2000 milton and rose friedman were on a book tv program in depth. here is a portion of that. >> our guest here on a special death program from san francisco on book tv dr. milton friedman and his wife rose friedman who is also here on the cover of free to choose which is, i guess, your most successful book. >> yes. moneywise at any rate. >> what do you remember about working together on this particular book? >> that was easy as milton has said, we had the television program notes. the book was written really from that. we each started with one chapter and then handed it to

the other person to go over the chapter and we went back and forth that way. in the end, we really do not know who wrote which words, which is true about all the books we have written. >> that was probably finished in the shortest time because we had a deadline for it. we wanted to have it out in time to be available when the tv program, or the television program was shown. we started on it in march 1979 and we got into the publisher by labor day . then it was published by january. that's when the tv program started. >> when you work together on these products, what does she do that you don't and what does he do that you don't? >> nothing. >> there is nothing. we both type, we both use a computer now. >> before we take our first caller, we talked about aging,

you are both 88. are you surprised at how well you do x for those who cannot see these two people, they move around as well as i do. >> everybody says we are bouncing around. i do not feel that way, frankly. there are many things that i cannot do today that i used to be able to do it i do not have the energy i used to have, getting old is no fun. >> is there any advice for people, which you do anything differently? >> if what? >> if you knew you would live this long, would you do something differently? >> i think we would have lived extravagantly. we were always saving our pennies. my brother used to say we were saving pennies for rainy day that never came. >> no -- >> i would save pennies. >> he would say you are saving your pennies for rainy day and living in a perpetual drizzle. >> just wanted to give you a sense of rose friedman as well as milton friedman.

edward from dover, delaware, please go ahead. >> i want to mention two economist, eric williams wrote a book called capitalism and slavery and thomas sullivan, i'm reading his book called social justice fallacies. he seems to imply that people are poor because it is their fault. i want to ask, why are so many poor people in united states and why are there poor nations as far as capitalism is concerned? what is the relationship between capitalism and slavery? >> edward, would you say eric williams and tom soul have the same philosophy? >> that is an excellent question because i am a anti-, sole person because i am a african american and he is very conservative i'm relatively liberal. >> what you getting out of the book you are reading?

>> some things i agree with what he is saying, when he says poor people it is their fault i cannot go along with that. >> thank you, sir for calling in. >> i am not familiar with the williams book but thomas soul i am familiar with. he was a student of milton friedman's at the university of chicago. he tells the story when he went to the university of chicago that is, sole, he was a marxist. after being around milton friedman and others at the university he shifted to a more free-market view. i don't believe it is the case that either thomas soul or milton friedman or rose friedman would say that the problem of poverty resides in poor people. i think what they would say is that the problem resides in the system and if you have a system that is more effective people expense more or less poverty

which they certainly supported. with respect to slavery, slavery is the antithesis of a free market system. a free market system intends that every individual has freedom to exchange as they wish . it is the exchange and function, the ability to exchange as you wish, adam smith's idea the magic of the market and the ability for prices to direct production in and effective manner, that leads to greater economic prosperity for all. i think that sowell and friedman would argue that the period of capitalistic economy in the 1800s, 1900s and the present, far from it being a time of increasing in is a ration on the part of most people, it has been the greatest period of prosperity

in history for all people. standards of living have greatly increased. i think that they would argue that their goal is the same as your goal. they want to see a higher standard of living for everyone. hoyou get there, again, that is a question that reasonable people of goodwill can differ. what is different and what makes this book by friedman and others in his school is the idea that government can run an economy, which was prevalent around the world before free to choose, that idea is utterly discredited at that point in time. even people think there should be more government than milton friedman at this point in time are not advocating complete government control of the economy. bernie sanders is no socialist as socialists were in the 1930s, 40s and 50s who were advocating that governments should own and run all the aspects of the economy. i think those are some

comments. i think you raise some good concerns. as i say, the issue of poverty is something that friedman and sowell believe is best accommodated for through a free market economy . >> the shock doctor came out in 2008, naomi klein, canadian author and activist. here is a little of her criticism of milton friedman. >> who was the most angry with your writing? >> milton friedman fans were pretty angry with the shock doctrine because the book is pretty tough on milton friedman . i would say, i think that there is still people who are most annoyed with my books. >> why did you pick on milton friedman? >> the shock doctrine tells an alternative history of how we ended up with the kind of market economy that we have and that has been globalized around the world. it is a pretty fundamentalist

version of market economics, pretty much everything should be privatized, we have seen the results on wall street, the shock doctrine tells the story of how we got here and milton friedman played an important role in that story, mainly because he was the movement prime popularizer. not because his ideas were original, he was part of the chicago school tradition, but he took that tradition to the masses, he was the one with the column in newsweek, he did the 10 part series on pbs. he had that incredible talent for writing for popular, taking economics and bringing it to the popular audience. he played a very important role . he was a political advisor to many governments. the real focus of the book is much less on him personally then on the university of

chicago and the particular role that the university of chicago played internationally because the university of chicago had a very aggressive program of attracting international students, particularly students from latin america. this had nothing to do with milton friedman, this was not his idea to do this, this came out of the state department. there was a lot of concern in the 1950s that latin america was moving to the left, it certainly was and it moved further to the left in the 60s and 70s. this idea was cooked up between the head of the university of chicago economics department and the head of the chile program and what became the u.s. id which they would bring students to study at the university of chicago precisely because it was so conservative and at this time in the 1950s it was seen outside the mainstream of american discourse because the united states was still in the grips of

keynesianism, harvard, they all had keynesian economics department. chicago is different, they had a program to bring hundreds of latin american students to study under friedman and his colleagues. that had a tremendous impact on the politics of latin america. when they had a series of military coups in the 70s, there were teams of economists that were ready to work with military governments who did not have any expertise in economics. they formed an alliance or partnership with the military and the university of chicago. >> lanny ebenstein , part of her critique was chicago school of economics, you have read the book called chicago not mix. what will we get from that? >> i not want to be one of the people who is a milton friedman fan who is upset with her for that reason, i think it

is possible to take a different intellectual breed view and i will briefly try to make that argument. in latin america, china, india as they have moved to a free market economy, they have greatly increased the standards of living for hundreds of millions for hundreds of billions around the world and at the same time there is more democracy in latin america than there has ever been. india has returned to a more democratic system and china is a far freer country than it was during the communist regime. again, underscoring the relationship between economic freedom and political freedom. i thk that the criticism th economic freedom does not lead to political freedom is contradicted by the facts. >> other milton friedman books, a theory of the consptn function came out in 1957. catasm and freedom in 1962. monetary history of the u.s. in 1963 co-written with anna

schwartz and tyranny of the status quo came out in 1984 and cowritten with rose friedman. carlos and arlington, virginia, please go ahead with your question or comment. >> thank you for taking my call. i enjoy the show. you have been speaking a lot about government inefficiency and certainly it can't exist to appoint, what about corporate inefficiency what would be friedman's perspective on that? take the american car industry for example or the american film industry, i would hardly consider them to be efficient, but yet they still exist. there is also the philosophy of corporations are too big to fail and we have to bail them out, i think that's propaganda. >> carlos, thank you for that question. a really good question.

public policy is imperfect. i don't think friedman would argue that there is always the right solution at any given point in time. in general, if a business is failing at a local level, or a subnational level, it will go out of business or redirect its activity. the prophet mechanism is something that rewards efficiency. that is the virtue it. whereas with government, you can have a great deal of inefficiency and there may not be that sort of tendency for government programs to go out of business. i think from friedman's perspective, the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. does that mean the private sector is always efficient? no. does that mean the public sector is always inefficient? no. as much as you can you should try to privatize government functions. he was very much in favor of greater privatization and government activity. >> in the pbs series he talked

about washington and economic power. >> every time i come to washington, i am impressed all over again with how much power is concentrated in this city. we must understand the character of that power. it is not monolithic power in a few hands the way it is in countries like the soviet union or red china. it is fragmented into lots of little bits and pieces with every special group around the country trying to get its hand on whatever bits and pieces it can. the result is, there is hardly an issue in which you will not find government on both sides. for example, in one of these massive buildings scattered all through this town filled with government employees, some of them are sitting around trying to figure out how to spend our money to discourage others from smoking cigarettes. in another massive building,

maybe far away from the first, some other employees equally dedicated, equally hard-working are sitting around figuring out how to spend our money to subsidize farmers to grow more tobacco. in one building they are figuring out how to hold down prices. in another building they have schemes for raising prices, prices farmers receive or import prices or keeping a cheap foreign goods. we set up a enormous department of energy with 20,000 employees to encourage us to save energy. we set up an enormous department for environmental protection to figure out ways to get cleaner air involving and using more energy. many of these effects counsel out, but that does not mean that these programs do not do a great deal of harm and that there are not some very bad things. one thing you can be sure of, the cost do not cancel out, they add together. each of these programs spends money.

take it from our pockets. we could be using to be by goods and services to meet our separate needs. >> lanny ebenstein, milton friedman worked in the fdr administration and treasury department during world war ii, did that influence his later views? >> it is ironic. when he worked for the treasury department during world war ii, he was on the team that developed withholding it's source on the income tax. it would have happened without his involvement, but he actually was a early engineer of that expansion of the tax code. i think that friedman's views when he was a young economist were basically set by the higher-ups in the department and he took the line that he was working for them. i think that was a early phase of his development but not one that endured. >> a little bit about milton

friedman's legacy. he won the nobel prize in 1976, presidential medal of eedom in 1988, advisor to president reagan and prime minister thatcher. recognition by the economist magazine as the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century , possibly all of it. jasmine, santa barbara, california. >> hello. i was wondering, how will inflation ever be good for the economy especially with how it is measured in the 50s through the 70s to now and how technology has changed it. >> jasmine, are you a student at uc santa barbara too? >> i am a student, yes. >> is she one of your students? >> i am. >> absolutely. i am glad you are watching. friedman's thought is that inflation has a temporary