>> once again we are live object this friday from the atlantic council here in washington. as a discussion on leadership changes in saudi arabia is about to get under way. among the speakers will be former officials with the pentagon, state department, and energy department. should start in just a moment. here live on c-span. >> i think we ought to start, folks. if i can have your attention. i think we'll begin. there will be a few more drifting in i'm sure as we are talking. good morning everybody.

and welcome to the atlantic council. we are pleased to have you here this morning to discuss this very timely and important issue in the world of energy, geopolitics. and i think the importance of this issue is emphasized by the large crowd that we have this morning and i think it's also a credit to the incredible panel that we have. today's event will focus on the recent leadership changes in saudi arabia and what these changes mean for global energy markets, as well as regional stability and security. and i'd also like to mention that today's event is a cross center collaboration between three of the centers here at the council. i guess i should have introduced myself, i'm dick morningstar, founding director of of our global energy sector. we are involved in this

program, but also the rafik hariri center for the immediate, and frank richard former ambassador to turkey and to egypt is the director. will be part of the panel. and the

focused on things like education or many other areas that really matter in the kingdom. but what i have seen is an awful lot of structural consistency. and you do have very powerful institutions. you have budgets. you have plans that have a drive impact on a lot of what the kingdom does. and i think that the shift here frankly it was time,

really time that you had a younger prince, and it's not really that young made crown prince. you needed a figure that could handle the transition, handle the security issues, that was strong enough to lead and provide some degree of bridging. so i think in the case of muhammad you have somebody who had proven his capability in what today in the kingdom may be the most critical focus, which is its immediate concern with security rather than internal development or the structural problems i think that frank will get into. the most serious shift had already taken place. he had become minister of defense. he had displaced vandar.

you have gotten rid of a much more risk approach to dealing with syria than was the case under muhammad. you had less focus on taking a kind of independent and somewhat risk oriented security structure. all of that happened long before this sudden shift. putting a relatively young man in as minister of defense -- well, the problem is when you look back at this, it has always been a very odd job in saudi arabia. because the ministers of defense have always had something else to do by way of appointments, or they have been somewhat transitional and the decisionmaking structure has, in many ways, been techno

contractic and professional within the services, or it has moved up into a more consensus oriented structure. remember if you go back to -- certainly did review all major decisions, procurement activity, and so on, he was not at the same time by any means a micromanager. his son did not become the minister of defense. he was followed by someone, who again, did not emerge as a strong central controlling figure. and that has been a pattern which may or may not continue. we'll find out if several ways. one of them is going to be what happens in the areas where the kingdom faces immediate

security challenges. iraq, syria, dealing with lebanon, dealing with yemen. the whole problem of relationships with jordan, egypt -- these are issues where at any given time relatively young man may be confronted with some serious defense oriented decisions. but my guess would be that these will almost immediately move upwards and into a kind of royal court, senior leadership position. now, one thing that will be a major change is the shift to a foreign minister. i don't think there's anyone who would challenge the personal competence of the minister, but he's not a member of the royal family. one of the key questions will be when the first real crisis

arises, what will the role of the foreign minister actually prove to be? and that may be a matter of influence as much as a matter of competence. and we'll find out because in the real world that's what happens when you have a shift in leadership. now, there are a whole host of other shifts in leadership. when i looked at the actual announcement that came out of the palace and then the next three days there's something like more than 30 people who were affected one way or the other by these shifts. and a lot of the them really mattered in areas like education, health, we'll hear about energy later. what i didn't see was anything which would address the fundamental structure of how the department or rather the kingdom deals with defense. i didn't see a major shift that

would affect the national guard, although that may come. i didn't see a solution to creating a meaningful national security council equivalent because there's been this building and then you try to figure out what the hell actually happens at these buildings, and it seems to be somewhat personal and not where the decisionmaking is structured. saudi intelligence is going to be i think an open question. we'll see whether that emerges as better organized, more advanced. we have problems of our own in dealing with this region. and it certainly isn't simple. so i'm not in any sense particularly in a place where i would say ok, we had one very

dramatic midnight event and it's fundamentally going to affect the security of the kingdom in predictable ways because of personalities. i don't think the midnight event was anywhere near as important as the changes that took place in the intelligence and national security structure before this. i have no way to know whether a young man is going to emerge as a more proactive, successful, or failed minister of defense in a system where the minister of defense's role was always a little anomalous in terms of actual exercise of tolerance by the standards of other governance. one thing i am sure of is that when it comes down to actually allocating money that's going to be a critical issue. we'll hear about that in terms of oil revenues.

we'll hear about it in terms of how the kingdom has to deal with the other security issues we are going to discuss. but you spent about $81 billion a year of the kingdom's budget directly on defense. you steadily expanded internal security to the point where it now in many ways is a counterpart to the ministry of defense. the ministry of the interior is as important to saudi security in a lot of ways as the ministry of defense is. how that will play out in an era of declining oil revenues, i don't know. the other issue is that when you look at this you're also having to absorb something on the order of $90 billion worth of new arms orders from the united states alone over the

next three to five years. and that is an immense challenge, and it is only the beginning. since you're talking about $12 billion to $18 billion worth of arms orders a year. if you would like me to bet on which royal wins or which royal succeeds the last royal, david, i'm going to have to give up because quite frankly you could write all the opeds on one page summaries of this you want, but let's go back to the fantasy football image. those of you who are lucky enough to get it right, if you ever bothered to play that game congratulations. david: i won't ask you to predict the future but let me come back with this decision on crown prince. it did seem that some of these

questions were foreseeable the leadership decisions were foreseeable. did something happen between january and april? something in the external environment? some greater sense of urgency? was it a greater sense ever mortality on the part of the king that led to that shift? it does seem anomalous even taking what you say into consideration about the renalt of the rest of the leadership changes. anthony: first, there hadn't been a deputy crown prince before. second, for all this talk of the group that was supposed to review, the selection, that was king abdullah. guess what? there is a different king. i think many people were very surprised by the appointment in the first place. given the pressures on the kingdom, again the need for stability, for change to go from an old king that does have

some health problems to a stable succession at a time you face serious security challenges on all of your borders, i think if i had been suddenly shifted from crown prince to king, i would have done something very similar and done it very quickly. david: jean france with a, turn to you and talk about some of the changes in leadership in the oil sector. if you could take us to the changes at ramco and the ministry. and i think what underlines that, what's the connection between these changes in leadership and any likely change in saudi oil policy? are we also looking at steady as she goes? jean france with a: i total -- jean francois: i totally agree with dr. cordiesman.

in the case of the oil policy, i think we are seeing a very, very strong technocratic structure in place. in my view somewhat reinforced, unlike what we have seen in the press at times whereby some people are saying he's just king trying to put his sons on each side of the saudi ramco and the minister who then will -- could become minister and then chairman of saudi ramco. it's not what happened. the changes was that the minister of oil that's the big changes the one who's been controlling oil policy in saudi arabia the past 20 years he's been replaced. he's been trying to resign for a long time because he wants to right-side tire change he's 79 years old. but he has been removed from

the board of directors. he's still minister of oil but it has been announced that oil will no longer be handled by ministry of petroleum and minerals. so the industry of petroleum and minerals is becoming the ministry of minerals. and energy in general, i suppose. but the c.e.o. of saudi ramco has been named minister of health, which is a very difficult position in saudi arabia. a huge budget. somewhat dysfunctional ministry. and his responsibility is to make it work. at the same time, they named him chairman of saudi ramco. now saudi ramco is technocratic. it always was. the board of directors doesn't have a single print. so the minister of oil no longer the chairman,.

in terms of the change, the big change supposedly, it's now a supreme council for saudi ramco which is supposed to be this sort of committee that sort of handles major decisions at saudi ramco. that's been presented as being something very new. it was not new. in fact, there was such a committee last year already. before that there was a supreme oil petroleum council which was chaired by the king co-chaired by the crown prince, with the minister of foreign affairs as one of the major princes in charge of the committee. that committee never did anything because everybody's too busy and never had the time to do anything. today, the council for saudi ramco, the supreme council is now controlled chaired i

should say by muhammad. and that is viewed as a very important position, which it is. but the fact is muhammad has very little time on his hand to really manage oil policy, especially since it is so technocratic, so difficult to handle. however the manage in charge of this council is really the secretary-general of the council is a commoner. a doctor who is basically in my view in my view, handle the policy. the committee is supposed to be composed of 10 people, five from the board of saudi ramco the prince and i don't know who else will be there yet. i haven't read it even if it has been announced i haven't read it. what i'm saying is that nothing much has changed. and therefore i don't expect policy to change very much, either.

so, yes, indeed, he's not directly involved in saudi polcy, this may a good thing in the long-term. and halil much more of a technocrat will be handling some basic policies. the new c.e.o. is a temporary c.e.o. he's now on the board of sawedy ramco and senior vice president, and he will be handling the day to day relations, day-to-day business at saudi ramco. what's interesting to me is that halil is known for having put saudi ramco into chemicals. he has negotiated petrol which is today a $20 billion company, it was $10 billion.

it doubled the size, $20 billion company. mostly the big joint venture with dow chemical also a $20 billion project. those are very advanced chemicals. it's putting saudi arabia in a totally different pattern of production. it's making saudi ramco look a lot like exxonmobil. i'm not sure the saudis would like to hear that, but i think that's what's happening. in fact it's a very good thing. that may bring a lot of changes in the kingdom in terms of running the economy because the company which is now the second largest chemical company in the world after b.s.f., they have lost their chair, c.e.o. the c.e.o. is now working in the minister of defense. what he's doing there, i'm not sure. i believe and perhaps dr. cordesman would know better, i

believe he's working on appropriations and things of this nature. which means it's part of the professionalization of some of the problem ministry health and ministry of defense. so i would not be surprised if there was some reorganization in saudi arabia of maybe saudi ramco becoming much more of a chemical company because of him. or on the other hand maybe take the chemicals away and put them into sabic. in terms of the ministry itself now that the ministry's not supposed to be supervising saudi ramco, they still have to supervise the rest of their purview, which is the minerals. a very important company in saudi arabia, still relatively small, but it is one of the largest fertilizer manufacturers in the world today. and it's doubling production.

that is also a joint venture today and with mosaic of the united states, i think there will be a lot of reorganization at that level as well. making it much more professional and we'll see how that develops. the purpose of all this is to end up having this large state companies provide facilities for smaller companies to create jobs. one of the key issue of course is security as has been mentioned, but the second biggest issue, if not the biggest in saudi arabia today, is creating jobs for their young saudis. i would not be surprised if muhammad is now in place because the need to create jobs for 60% of the population, which is the age of 30, so they provided one job already. they need to -- i think that's what's going to happen.

david: let me come back to you. i could read the moving of the deck chairs in two ways. one is raud saudi ramco will be more auto contractic and look at increasing solar, less of the oil for power generation, finding ways to access gas. the other way to read it is that there isn't a c.e.o. of saudi ramco yet, the chairman has never been traditionally the leader of the organization and he has two jobs. the role of the ministry is undefined. and muhammad is at the top of the chain with indetermined leadership. you wrap that together, who really is in charge, then of oil policy in deciding how low can you go? jean francois: i think the policy, which was in my view, anyway, defined the past few years will continue. i don't think they have to make much of a decision at this point. i think the saudis have decided

that they were going to keep producing in order to create -- impose its will on the markets and basically on the noneffect producers and not just chair but mostly russia, but we have talked about this in the past. they may not concede. but that's the policy, i think. who is going to make future policy? i think very much a combination of halid and prince muhammad. definitely. i think that's where the policy is going to be made. frankly, that's not much of a change. david: prince abdullah is not really a player in this? jean francois: if the minister of oil resigns leaves, the ministry because of age, and so on maybe could be replaced by prince aziz who has rank of minister as deputy but he doesn't have oil. by removing the ministry from

saudi ramco, they remove him just as much. i think there will be almost no change. i would agree, though, that maybe he might be named to the council of 10 people. it is not a huge position. yes, i would agree that the ministry may go to other things like solar. bought it's very big and trying to do more. nuke leear -- nuclear, maybe, maybe increase prices on natural gas. a few odds and ends which would create a lot of issues in the kingdom. but it's still a bit unsettled. we'll see a lot more changes as i started hinting in terms of changes at least in the industry side of things. but also on the oil side. david: we have been warned by tony not just to focus on the royals. and we have seen a bit of a generational change. you're back from saudi arabia and i think you have seen a little bit of this generational change up close. can you tell us about what you saw and think it means?

frank: i can. i'd like to start by confessing to the people in this room, particularly not only this panel but in the front row here, people like ambassador cutler and others who have forgotten more about saudi arabia than i'll ever hope to learn. and making probably only my sixth trip to the kingdom over the span of a career doesn't make me an expert. maybe more typical of what i was, a foreign service officer who can sometimes be a mile wide and inch deep. sometimes we flip and go the other way, we get very deep in a particular subject. i'm not deep in saudi arabia, but i have strong impressions. because what i saw there was so counter my prejudices going in. i had followed the kingdom mostly from ringside seats in egypt or iraq or elsewhere in the region over a number of years.

all of us tend to think, all of us americans of saudi arabia is the most change resistant, most conservative of all the gulf states. among those conservative of all the arab players. we watched the center of gravity of the arab world in so many fields business, education, art science medicine, ideas communications, media shift from the -- my beloved cairo and increasingly toward the gulf. we explain yes of course, money will do that. all those petro dollars. why is the kingdom evidently so resistant to change? we make so much when a ruler goes and this son or that person gets named. we speculate so much about the role of individuals. i came with a lot of questions. one of the conceptionual

frameworks that used to bring to the great privilege of the service i had as an american diplomat foreign service officer was sort of crystallized in a book about 15 years ago that probably most people here have heard about called "the tipping point" malcolm gladwell. the job of diplomats, good businesspeople good analysts and think tanks, is to look for trends. much as the changes are happening but one of the changes that are going to happen. not just the threats of instability and revolution when we think about tipping points, but the opportunities. where are tomorrow's explosive trends and fashions and business opportunities going to come from? if you think about the work of malcolm gladwell, there's been some writhing over the years, things like the law of the few. there are things that hide in

plain sight. often trends are counter intuitive until they become obvious and break out. one of them is the law of the few. it doesn't take a majority of people starting to think in a certain way to make the trend. by the time it's the majority, the trend is well under way. so there's a few people that he calls them the mavens or the salesmen, connectors, people are passionate about something, see something, want others to understand. in a short visit, such as i had there's no hope of having a representative sample, ok. that wasn't the point. the point was to expose me, to educate me to some interesting things going on. the proximate reason to go there was something that i thought would be very stayed. it was something called the institute for diplomatic studies. a bit of a relationship with the atlantic council. principally heretofore through the scowcroft center.

going to the saudi institution and usual ways of dealing with them. i had my expectations firmly under control. we went, several day conference very well organized , more than just older guys. people speak -- four women from the council, very outspoken, very articulate. not just saudi officials. people from the world of business, private sector. and a really rich interchange respectful, but not inhibited in the way that i expected to find. a lot of interesting ideas and banter and so forth of -- i had been to the kingdom before, but it was just fresher and bert. i thought, this is a positive impression. one swallow doesn't make us drink. i had been in touch with the prince. he wasn't available so i met with his son who is one of the

leaders of something called the king ficele center for research. in islamic studies. he pointed out to me that for research was added to the title. it used to be the king fisel center for islamic studies. they collect venerable copies of the koran. but what he wanted to talk about, and one of his scholars wanted it talk about was their research. it was research a stack ever publications, which i actually looked through to assess how they stack up what we do in washington, they were in english, strikingly. they do some in arabic as well. i thought they were pretty good. pretty interesting. including assessments on american foreign policy in the region. it was pretty insightful and thoughtful. and assessments on, as you would expect iran, syria

egypt, the region. not simply justifying the kingdom's outlooks on things, but really pretty thoughtful, legitimate scholarships. the conversation itself was wide ranging interesting, very probing in the way of the prince himself. i could see the father and the son, prince ton educated. -- princeton educated. that was again just positive. not another swallow making this right. finally i went to something that was startling. even in its very title, even after the title my expectations were this can't be for real. the title of this institute, which is at a university all male campus, they haven't built a female campus yet 70%

majority of female students on that campus, that was interesting for me, intermingled. not visibly segregated to me. there is an institute called the institute for the study, in english they call it the study of innovation and government. and ours is even more startling than that. it's governmental creativity. governmental innovation, had a, had a, had a. how impossible. how counter. something like that. it started for when the prince oman center for inin vation in government. and -- innovation in government. and i met about a dozen people. i think all americans were

women. i will mention two women in my remarks here. one of them is an american named ann hadibi, who is a real management consultant in organizal change. she has her own consultant, she's from harvard. goes from boston and riyadh to do this work. oy think it's called, one world, all the world. all worlds live network. serious professional, long established track record working in the field in the united states. they hired her of all people to lead this effort. she brought in other people who had experience with deloitte and maybe the -- different management consulting firms. but it wasn't just these few americans. there were then the thing that gets to the point about a

tipping point that makes me wonder maybe come back and ask my staff to do more research, and i put it out here for anyone else in -- i wanted to do research on the question of is there a tipping point happening or several in different fields in the kingdom as well as across the gulf, perhaps more broadly? i mean a positive tipping point. i don't mean a tipping point toward revolution. osh not negative. political revolution. i mean positive revolution. that is this. there were over half a dozen, i'll say about eight saudis, ranging in age from their 20's into probably approaching 40. one of them had come back from study at oxford. the others had all come back from study in the united states. one was a woman, didn't cover her hair amongst the other men in the room. much less her face.

dressed in sort of black robes. and the conversation was was really insightful, full of passion for what they are doing. they really wanted us to understand what they were about and how important it was. so this king solomon center for innovation and government started as an idea in 2013, refed up -- reved up in 2014. 2015 they published a catalog of the 227 agencies that they found of the kingdom's government. they fought to actually survey what is the government here? what does it look like? then they took, i don't recall, about 30 of those, and dug down into how they were working. best practices compared to worldwide management best practices. what's working, what's not working? e-governsance, apps, how is it serving the people? what's working, what needs to

be thrown out. what needs to be abolished consolidated? who are the best leaders. how to hold them to account. they published on this and they are doing more work, and these young saudis are fired up. and evidently feel released and empowered to do it. again, the day tum -- data that i think merits some analysis, some gathering of analysis come from the work of the other -- just touched upon by a small piece by one of our staff. a young lady, stephanie, who couldn't join us today. she's off. i don't know whether anna is in boston or the kingdom at this moment. perhaps we can have her come here. it is about the numbers of saudis who have studied in this

country or europe and gone back. if you go back to gladwell's work you see the different things matter in examining and analyzing trends, tipping points before they reach the tipping point. one of them is numbers do matter, but they don't have to be really great. they just have to reach a certain threshold. in 2005, king abdullah and president bush got together at his ranch and decided to have a major scholarship program to send people to the united states. they sent 5,000 or 6,000 the first year. by now there are about 100,000 saudis actively studying in the united states, many of those now over this decade have returned. similar stories across the gulf. the numbers were small in earlier years, they grew, grew, grew. it is quite a trend, a fashion, a movement if you're a

well-to-do person in the gulf to send your kids not just to the west but to the united states and typically very ambitiously for the best places. and then they come back. they are not all immigrating to the united states. they are going back, running the family businesses. they are not going -- famously a lot of employment in gulf is maid work. get it. the people i saw were not those jobs. they were fired up. they weren't working for their pay. they were passionate about what they were doing in the way that people at the atlantic council are or other institutions around the united states. i guess that's the area for further study to look at. not just the demographics. we all know there's a youth demographic across the arab world, particularly in places of the gulf. that starts to taper off as they urbanize. but what is the subset who have studied not visited tourism lived among americans british,

and i choose the english speaking world advisedly why? that's how the link the world to the internet and ideas and you read everything that's out there. some are going to france and other countries in the west. what are those numbers? david: major occurrence of modernization. frank: what are the channels there? how many are they? where are they concentrated? surveying them, what are their experiences? we get a lot of episodic stuff, foreign service officers when they report. get some data, but a lot is impressionistic. you talk with three, four, five people and make some vast conclusions from these things like i'm doing here. i'm saying it should be tested. look at the numbers. and are they reaching a tipping point where people are coming back, male and female, and having an impact on institutions of civil society and even government. and big companies. famously been in the oil

industry over a long time of course. i put that question for further research. stephanie is doing it with us. i just was blown away by the work that ann is doing in saudi arabia. david: thank you. tony? tony: i have to say that having done some surveys it's always interesting to be sent by the saudis to places where saudiization is supposed to have occurred. it is also a fact that no five-year plan from the last four five-year plans has reflected a serious improvement in saudiization. you've got, i'm going to give you the c.i.a. figures, approximately 11 million people in the labor force. it's hard to estimate. 80% of those are foreign. approximately 600,000 saudis reach job age every year.

youthful employment among saudis, 24 and under is rated at close to 30%. now, you have a lot of money going in to job creation, economic cities. but you also have the oddity that more women graduate from secondary school and university and they take far more serious courses because it isn't dominated by religious instruction. you look at those demographics and you take them into account because, yes, we have those people. we also can look at significant parts of the kingdom where that development hasn't occurred, where there are constant security problems, where there has been a difficulty with al qaeda in the arabian peninsula, and now rising attacks that have begun to emerge from the

islamic state. not all of them are out in rural areas or the border. there are serious security problems in areas like riyadh in the kingdom -- and the kingdom has had to react. yes, we need to get to the numbers, but -- and there are a lot of positive trends, but i think we have to be very, very careful about the demographics here. and this is a country that's gone through an incredible amount of population pressure. it's technically more than 84% urbanized going from something like less than 10% in 1950. and you get an idea of the stress involved. so, yes, there are tipping points but i think we need to be very careful. they can tip in two directions. david: let's talk about yemen and iran and come back on oil

policy before we open it up. we have seen sort of a new level of engagement by the saudi military in local conflict. in particular the air campaign in yemen may not have gone as well as soferse they intended. i wonder if you could talk about what this means for saudi's role in the region? is this a vulnerability? muhammad has been the face of this campaign. he's been more personalized maybe than is traditional in saudi politics, but if it goes badly, is the vulnerability for him? and is it an opening for further iranian aggrandizement if it looks like the campaign goes poorly? tony: i think we need to be careful in looking at this. it's an air campaign which has begun. looking at the claims it's very difficult to figure out what has actually happened. but certainly they have hit quite a number of military and security targets.

what if anything they accomplished in dealing with the huties and shiites is hard to determine partly because it's a very mixed population the area in the y.a.r. 35% of the population of yemen, roughly, nobody knows precisely, is shiite. part of a much broader movement and the head of state, remember, was a shiite. for many many years. dancing on the head of snakes was done by a shiite. not by a sunni. the other side of this is at the end of this did they seriously think they could bring the previous leader back? i don't think that was something you can blame on the minister of defense. and i'm not sure anybody thought they could.

if the bombing campaign is followed by some kind of political deal, and by buying off the right amount of power brokers and calling a -- call yemen a democracy is, shall we say, one of those spending -- one of those americans supplications that does not reflect reality, it may be somewhat successful. but the broader problem in yemen is -- what you do not see reflected in the bombing campaign is, for years they have been debating whether there should be a truly massive barrier defense along the border. the answer no scenes to not only be yes, but to try to create a buffer zone on the you many -- on the yemen side to try to block the flow of illegals. but it is mostly to try to contain the problem while

essentially insuring you do not have major iranian influence. the saudis have a much more negative view of iranian influence in the booth the -- in the houti movement than the u.s. we do not see that level of arms transfers or presence. but we can agree there is a bombing campaign. i think it is fair to say that yemen is one of the few countries in the world that most people who are development experts have given up. there is no way to deal with the population pressure, the failed economy. the other factors involved. it is going to be unstable and a mess indefinitely into the future. and that is something that has gotten lost in this focus on the air campaign which seems to

have been, incidentally, for what they were trying to do, reasonably effective which is a message being sent. it did reveal some other problems which had nothing to do with this young minister of defense. saudi arabia needed to turn its red sea fleet into a real fleet for the last 20 years. they have not done it. they need to give their fleet in the gulf the same level of modernization that they have given their air force. they have not done it. these are basic structural problems that affect their security, that need solution. whether this has anything to do with the appointment of a young prince is an open issue. they have a major problem in their military cities, which are reorganizing by trying to put a new one in yemen combined with the newport, but they tend to be static.

-- with the new port, but they tend to be static. yemen is today's headlines. they have been deeply involved in the syrian civil war from the start. but they say that prince bandar was a bit of a disaster. it was an open contest as to who could do the worst by trying to intervene in syria. the obama administration -- there is a great thesis to be written on comparative incompetence, if any of you are trying to have a doctorate. [laughter] david: you have the problem of iraq where i think we have done better and they have been too isolated unwilling to engage. but iraq is on their border. it is real. and the islamic state, the al nusra front they are real threats. they are active. they have attacked. they have a very effective, i

think, counterterrorism force, but they also have terrorist. -- terrorists. you have very weak partners. nobody wants to talk about oman, but it has a very weak, ill head of state, growing security problems, its own demographic and economic problems. they are caught up with bahrain where you have a deeply divided royal family that paralyzes movements toward real reform. you have qatar, which seems to be a little more balanced, but frankly depends on us for real defense. it is not really part of the gulf cooperation council in an integrated sense. you have a q8 -- a kuwait with

its own divided royal family less visible, which is undergoing its own internal political problems and is right on the border of iraq and iran. and from a saudi viewpoint whatever you may think of yemen understand that if we solve the nuclear problem the way we are planning to, what we are really saying is we will keep them at something approaching the breakout level, with about two years morning, indefinitely into the future. -- about two years' warning indefinitely into the future. we will not solve a massive buildup of iranian missile capabilities, a major buildup in asymmetric warfare capabilities in the gulf. we are not going to deal with the expansion of iranian influence. let me say, in all of these issues, which when i talked to the saudi's dominate their perceptions of securities --

security, along with their own internal shiites and internal security problems, focusing on the age of the current minister of defense and focusing only on yemen is not terribly realistic. and one problem we need to remember is, yes, this is a long way away from us. it is right on their borders. on all their borders. and these are debates which go far beyond all of this focus on the leadership. and when i think there is a lot of continuity, but no good answers. none of these problems seem likely to go away in the next half decade, and that is probably optimistic. anthony: on that happy note, -- david: on that happy note, jean

-francois, it does not look like accord is much in the offing. how does this play out? in the pt plus -- the p5 plus 1 agreement, late in 2016, iraq is reported to be able to deliver one million barrels of oil a day if the revamped takes off as planned, which is in question. how is this going to play out, given the challenges in the regional dynamics? is this a race to the bottom? or does revenue maximization trump everything else and we will see a production cut at some point? jean-francois: not very easy questions, but i think in this question to bring back the yemen issue, i think that one of the reasons the saudis are so intent on making a show of force

in yemen is really to show to the iranians that they exist as a military power. maybe not very strong, but they exist and they have to be accounted with in any kind of settlement. if the p5 plus one arrangement takes place, i would not be surprised if there is an arrangement between iran and saudi arabia on many other subjects, because i think everybody understands that you cannot fight the islamic state just with saudi arabia alone. you have to have a saudi-iranian arrangement. if that does not happen, the islamic state will continue to survive really well. so if the arrangement works out and the saudis move forward with the iranians on developing a more stable situation in syria in particular, and in iraq, i think a lot of things will happen at the same time. if terms of the oil production,

definitely the iranians can produce 600,000, 700,000 barrels more in a year or two years, and the saudis have time to deal with that. let's remember, i think that -- and there are people in this room who know this much better than i do, anyway. but i think the focus of iran is really on natural gas. if saudi -- if iran can find some capital to reestablish their gas yields, they can start producing. today, iran is a net importer of natural gas, and it has the second-largest reserves in the world. they could start exporting their gas to pakistan and through turkey to europe. there is an enormous amount of possibilities for iran. they could develop their liquid natural gas industry, which is nonexistent at this point. a lot of people would be quite happy to help them develop this if the gas can be produced. so i think the gas angle of this

could be one of the part of the deals they work out with the saudis. so i am not too worried about a race to the bottom in terms of price. art of the deal is the saudis could reduce a little bit to make up for an increase in iranian production targets. iraq is a problem, as iraq has much more capacity to increase production if there was some kind of arrangement with iraq. today i was reading in the middle east economics and -- survey yesterday i think kurdish territories are unhappy with iraq because iraq stopped paying according to the agreement they made in january. the kurds are basically being pushed out again. they could start producing not big production -- we have our own companies up there. they have their own pipeline to go to turkey.

it is not huge amounts of oil, but it could mount to have a million cup -- half a million, maybe million barrels over the years. iraq is in trouble. they do not have the security arrangement completely worked out. i do not see much risk of iraqi oil. last month, they were producing and exporting board -- more than ever, but that was with kurdish oil, and with a field indicated by the kurds. maybe i should not, but i actually discount iraq as a problem in terms of the race to the bottom at this point. if the iranian-saudi deal never takes place, there might be some arrangement in iraq, who then could produce more. what we are talking five years down the line, an eternity in terms of oil. david: let's turn to the

audience. we can start with ambassadors row, and we can take two or three questions at a time. everybody, yes? >> i am on the board of the atlantic council. one thing not mentioned in this discussion -- king solomon -- king salman comes to experience -- comes to power with more experience in domestic policy than his processors. she has worked with the u.s., with arab countries. he was governor of riyadh. he has excellent relationships with the tribal community. this should be emphasized. you have a king who is experienced. you have a king that has traveled. you have a king that has good relationships with many leaders in the arab world. that is something that should be

emphasized. david: let's take a couple more. professor heller? >> very interesting discussion. i go way back with saudi arabia, and managed to experience it once in a while. i go back to the days when king slalman was prince salman, governor of riyadh. what is a governor? he was much more than a governor of the capital or the province. he was on the inside of policymaking in the royal family for years and years. at the same time, crown prince, then came, philip -- then king philip he was the number two. i tried to keep in touch with him. i thought, this bedouin -- how

can he ever run a country? i was astonished to see how he took over. she had hardly traveled outside the arab world. and i think instituted a lot of very important reforms. some people can say they were not enough, but whatever. i think the leadership is very good. let me go to the one question which you raised, and that is education. saudi arabia has done marvelously on educating. in the 100,000 saudis who are studying in the united states, it is very good for our bilateral relationship and for the country. but it does relate to something called jobs. we just had the president of tunisia here last week, and he made that point. in tunisia, he said, under the president and then afterwards, there were two reforms -- women

and education. women is ok, but now we have so many educated people without jobs. i think obviously this is a risk for saudi arabia. you mentioned the whole idea you have to get away from having this ship of state run by a crew of people from other countries. it has to be done. when i was there, we tried hard, and i think since then, we have helped them with establishing a vocational training program working with your hands. it was not very successful. i think there is this tipping for. i hope it is going to be a positive one. last point -- yes, you have two very young future leaders there. and i think that is a good thing. i think basically all that i have heard is that look, that

is good. we can now look ahead not just for a couple years with a leader , but maybe a couple decades. there is a feeling of, keep us safe, and maybe this will. random thoughts. david: thank you. let's take a couple more. right here in the front row. and back there. >> ok? david: go ahead. >> particle dictates? david: introduce yourself. >> sorry. i'm out of practice. to a guy that is getting ready to go in a couple of days to the king in a role i am still trying to grasp as ambassador -- specifically, it is going to be in a training and advisory role with the saudi arabian national guard. advice counsel?

we do not need to bore the rest of the scholars here, but i would like a few minutes afterwards if either of you gentlemen would be so inclined. david: ariel? ariel: ariel cohen atlantic council. excellent presentation. thank you very much. can you please drill down a little bit about the saudi-iranian dynamics in view of possible agreement on the saudi -- on the iranian nuclear program? specifically to what extent the saudi counterpart of a nuclear program can appear, and where will it go? and on a separate note, in terms of the yemen scenario, to what extent do you think they affect shipping of oil around the peninsula and to the red sea?

thank you. david: we have got king salman's pedigree, education and job risk. tony, you want to start? anthony: first, i think there is no question you have a king who is both proven and a very competent technocrats. -- technocrat. but something i am not sure and i think we all need to worry about is, saudi arabia is not the only problem with leadership. you look around and you have obvious uncertainty in the region. there are fewer questions, but certainly the saudis are concerned about both. you do not have a stable leadership in iraq. i think we have underestimated our problems in oman.

there is a study by brookings that at least surfaced some of the issues, but it has been something of a black hole in terms of actual coverage. problems in kuwait, problems in bahrain -- these are very real. the failure of initiatives to bring the gulf cooperation council's together -- councils together into an effective security party or deal with these issues, issues that king abdullah took -- these have continued. i have been listening to good ideas raised since the early 1980's. and to the extent i have seen efforts at integration into the security structure, they have largely been a technocratic earlier and a waste of money, some of them extraordinarily expensive. so the problem for the saudi leadership is a lot water. -- broader.

the tensions locally are bad enough. one area where i have seen improved cooperation is dealing with the syrian opposition. i hope that continues. it is still now a high risk because you are talking. so exactly what is the relationship between saudi arabia and syria, or iraq and lebanon? that assumes we can ignore safely the palestinian and israeli issues, which do not lead me to that. so i get worried about the idea of continuity here. i get worried about how well the kingdom can deal with a king, a new foreign minister, and the security issues. it is not that i have any pessimism about it, but i have concerns. i think we have to be careful. let me go back to a couple of other issues.

all the jobs side -- on the jobs side, looking at the five-year plan data, the budget data, and the saudi arabian monetary fund data, and anything else i can find, they are not making progress. and it is critical. i mean, women are a key aspect of a productive labor force when they are more than half of the educated population. the rate of youth unemployment in women is twice the rate of men. that is a lot of talent that is not being used. but young saudi men are not getting the jobs. let me say, and this will get me in trouble with various universities -- there is an amazing lack of correlation globally between education and job creation. education for jobs, when the

economy is creating them, is very valuable. education for the sake of education has almost no historical impact in moving countries toward development. and this is not popular, but it is unfortunately something where nobody trots out numbers to contradict it. and the kingdom has to face this. just to go back to the saudi-iranian issue, let me just say that every conversation i have with people who are involved in defense intelligence, or foreign affairs -- do not see this nuclear agreement as having any positive effect. they are focused exclusively on what they see is the expansion of iranian influence in the region. and they see us, at least, as

partially to blame. a lot of that, i think, is unfair. that they see us as having failed to contain iranian influence. some of the more recent meetings may or may not have helped to deal with this. but i also, when i talk to them and constantly reminded, yes the nuclear issue is very high profile. a lot of it is driven by our focus on proliferation, the politics of u.s. and israeli relationships, by the history of some very key figures as supporters of arms control. but when you go to a different level, the focus is on asymmetric warfare capabilities, missiles, and expansion of influence. and you have to be careful here, because seen from an iranian

viewpoint, they don't see themselves as a successful stable military power in other ways. they realize a hell of a lot of their air force is stuff they were buying when i was serving in iran, and that was for obvious reasons -- the early to mid 1970's. airships, their surface to air missiles, are obsolete and the standards of the gulf. this is a power which has reason to be concerned. and then you look at the rising level of shiite-sunni tension which is only partly related to islamic extremism in groups like isis. and there are serious problems within the kingdom, some of which i think they have perhaps been to strict about dealing with, in terms of the way they treat their shiites.

but these problems are not going away and are not going to be solved by the nuclear agreement. and when i look at that agreement, i think from what i have seen of the tentative structure, i would certainly support it, that it is not going to contain the iranian nuclear capability, and there are a host of things they will be able to do under any of the frameworks i have seen today. and the saudis are aware of this. the practical problem is, if you buy reactors, and you get yourself into a fuel cycle and you then have to create the capability to actually develop and produce a reliable nuclear weapon that is safe to put on a delivery system, if there is no resentments whatsoever to the

kind of nonsense i see coming out of think tanks in washington, which is all based on a specious idea that all you need is enough this'll material, -- fissile material and you have a successful bomb -- as a collective intellectual community, we sort of deserve enough minus -- an f minus for the lack of serious analysis in dealing with this issue. and it is going to be a very major problem for the gulf states. what are the options? people like the prince have talked about, if iranians can have the fuel cycle, we have to have the fuel cycle. fine. that puts saudi arabia into buying reactors and being able to manage its own fuel cycle. i would not hold my breath. and of course that does not move them anywhere toward getting a bomb. they do have missiles, as you know, a strategical missing --

strategic missile force. but it is not something they have the technical background to attack areas and the operators seem to have a fairly heavy chinese presence. there is no other arab country that has capabilities in these areas. so where can you turn? and there is only really one clear place, and that is pakistan. whether pakistan has missiles the nuclear weapons i don't know. they will have significant capacity in fissile material relative to the current nuclear weapons program. fairly quickly, so there is that potential. it would be a dangerous game changer. but it is something that could present us with a real crisis if this nuclear agreement does not take place, or if it is cheated on.

all of which is something we may or may not discover in the next month or so. david: we have just got a couple minutes left. i want to give you an friend swap a chance, and then i will shut up. frankl:: if i can come back to the lack of correlation for jobs, we did something yesterday called hiding in plain sight. sometimes, it you see things. you are looking for something and you miss something else. there is an old joke about a watchman, a guard at the gates of an establishment of a factory, watching a man, with a wheelbarrow every day full of straw. he looks under the straw and does not see anything there. every day, this guy comes out with a real barrel of straw. he knows there is something wrong.

he checks every day under the straw. there is nothing hidden. finally, he interrogates the guy . what is he doing here? you are taking out straw, but what are you hiding? the guy finally admits he is stealing wheelbarrows. by not watching the wheelbarrows, by looking at the straw, you can miss it. i am a product of one of the best things the u.s. senate ever did. i got into global affairs thanks to fulbright. he was famous when i was a young guy for being against the vietnam war. but he established the fulbright scholarships. the educational and cultural exchange that came from that when the u.s. used to fund that sort of thing was hugely impactful on americans and the foreigners who came here. the education, i think, was in

some ways the straw. yes, there is knowledge being transferred. the saudis who are coming here are studying. maybe someone doing poetry and humanities, but many are getting mba's engineering, medicine. all that is important, the tech transfer and knowledge. what is really important, the wheelyour 20's among americans in seeing how they think. for example, they are not going to school necessarily to get a job in government. in egypt they crank out half a million graduates every year that are expected to take government jobs. most americans go to school and they do not go out for government jobs. they are starting businesses. there is this whole different way americans think about work,

education, gender roles, gender participation. so, i have found when foreigners come back from living in the u.s., it almost does not matter what they study, they come back really changed. that is what we are getting too. how many tens of thousands are coming back, what it means to be male, female, and adult, and economic actor, how you run your family, how you engage with the world. there is important stuff from inside the classroom or the syllabi. i do not mean to say that these changes are not real. they are. >> the last word -- you can be

an optimist or a pessimist. jean-francois: for once, a may not agree totally. i think not that long ago, iran and saudi arabia were trying to establish rapprochement. the first visit of king of dello when he became king was to iraq. and there was the sense that things would be improving. frankly, i think this could be arranged in a way, because again, abdulla made a huge effort. i think if the situation overall columns down a little bit, things will start improving, and my experience on shia-sunni

relations in bahrain for many years, and before the prime minister really pushed the sectarian issues the shia and the sunni always had problems and you knew about it, but they lived in together. they got married. i think we can see the same things developing in saudi arabia. i'm not so concerned about that. just a last note on the ministry of foreign affairs, because someone mentioned -- i think the minister of foreign affairs [indiscernible] there was no other one. all of those decisions went to them. you can have someone in the ministry who can actually write

until then, you did not have that. i think that is going to be the most difficult job, to create a ministry with people. >> thank you to our panelists. thank you to all of you for listening. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> monday we are having the director of the international renewable agency -- [indiscernible] thank you.

>> coming up tonight here on c-span, three former treasury secretary's on the obama, george w. bush, and clinton administration. we hear from tim geithner, henry paulson, and robert ruben. here is a brief look. tim geithner: it's worth noting that none of us know anything about how economies perform in the short term or even the long-term -- we live in a very dark uncertain world. but i think the economy is -- [laughter] >> but that said. what was that, a scary dark, uncertain world? tim geithner: it's true.

in that context, i think the u.s. is gradually getting -- chef but slightly less dark slightly less scary? tim geithner: we are a resilient country and a much stronger country than any other major economy. when you look at these challenges we face, they are pretty stark challenges. i think you would rather have our challenges than the challenges for any major developed economy or consumer economy around the world. >> former treasury secretaries tim geithner, henry paulson, and robert ruben tonight on c-span starting at 8:00 eastern. >> here are some of our featured programs this weekend on the c-span networks. saturday at noon politicians white house officials, and business leaders offer advice and encouragement to the class

of 2015. speakers include former president george w. bush and melody thompson. at 9:15 p.m., former staffers reflect on the presidency of george h w bush. then more commencement speeches from around the country with condoleezza rice and philadelphia mayor michael it -- michael notter. book tv will be in new york city with it vents from this weekend's book expo in america. sunday evening at 9:00, professor kenji yoshino which looks at a case that looks at proposition eight, the law that rescinded the right of same-sex couples to marry in california. on c-span3, saturday at the :00 p.m. eastern a conversation on first ladies who have had the

most impact on the executive mansion and sunday, just before 2:00, the life and death of our 20th president james garfield who was assassinated 200 days into his term as president. get our complete schedule at c-span.org. [applause] >> of next on c-span, a conversation on the future of technology. you will hear from computer scientist jaron lanier. this is an hour and 15 minutes. >> welcome. yes, welcome again to a conversation about our digital future with jaron lanier and sebastian thrun. i will introduce our speakers

and then i will have the memo. there will be plenty of time and microphones for your questions, so be prepared for that. let's move on to our speakers. jaron writes on numerous topics including technology, koch's news and information internet politics and the future of humanism. he has been on the cusp of technology goal -- technological innovation for some time founding the first company to sell vr products. he is currently interdisciplinary scientist at microsoft research. his critically acclaimed books remain international best

sellers. he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by time magazine. sebastian thrun at the end is ceo of udacity. he has published 373 signed to pick papers and is a member of the u.s. academy of engineering. foreign policy touted him global thinker number 4. [laughter] [applause] henry: all right. thrun works on revolutionizing transportation, communication, and mobile devices. he was the recipient of a prize given by the society for the advancement of artificial intelligence. at google, thrun founded google

x, which is home to project such as the google self driving car and google glass. we hope our conversation will get you in the mood for this evening's performance, a demo but a few of you may be wondering, what is this demo? what demo are we talking about? the performance work, the demo was inspired by the 1968 demonstration at the joint computer conference of a system that his group had developed. it was described as "a presentation on a computer-based , interactive, multi-console display system used in an experimental laboratory -- where interactive computer aids can augment intellectual capacity."

the demo introduced the computer mouse, network collaboration and much more. again, this was 1968, ok? all of this in 1968. the demo was spectacular, it was surprising, and it was influential and is often called the mother of all demos. the project tree oriented thinking about how human beings might and if it from computer technology. it change the conversation from being about including computers as calculating machines to the ways human beings might use computers to improve individual capabilities and work collaboratively with other human beings. i'm going to start with a quotation from an interview i did with doug in 1986. i asked what he called his

laboratory not mentation research center. the question was why had he used this word augmentation in the 1960's? i will quote here at length and then i will pass to sebastian and jaron for thoughts on this. this is what doug said. you are just augmenting basic human capabilities. there is already a fantastic system. you have to augment basic human capability. the computer was just another artifact. that really jolted me. but then i began to realize the communications technology we are using. i've done enough work on scaling effects to know the qualitative nature of artifacts if you start changing some part of it. i began to realize how many ways and how directly the computer could interact with different capabilities we have already got. it began to gone on me, really a

clear picture for me, that the accumulation of all of those changes made a big impact and the thing that came out of ihuman system. ok, so, sebastian, i am going to start with you and say, what you think about this idea that work on technology is fundamentally about changing human beings in some way, augmenting human capabilities? sebastian: i would say we have been in the human augmentation business for hundreds of years if not thousands of years. take a book. it is an augmentation of our memory and it works incredibly well to carry information from one person to another. take agricultural machines. we used to all work in the

farms. now we have machines that are very strong. the computer is just one little step in their journey. it has changed society faster than any other innovation ever before. but yes, i have always believed in this. i have never believed in the vision of trying to replace people. i have always believed in the vision of empowering people. henry: you are obviously in the field of artificial intelligence and sometimes artificial intelligence is this rap about only being about improving machines. sebastian: there is a debate in my field and some of my colleagues would rather get rid of people. i actually like people. [laughter] sebastian: it is so easy.

it takes a lot of passion. we do this all the time. we are growing exponentially. henry: 15 minutes and 21 years. sebastian: let's leave it at that. [laughter] sebastian: nothing point i want to make. but on top of it, it is the access to technology and i really love the idea of looking at this from a historical perspective. when we zoom out and look at the hundreds of years, you can understand this much better than microscopically. i always find these technologies are complementary. we do not run very fast musso a car is a good invention. if we build a machine that looks like us and behave like us -- first of all, those character traits if we make it look like

us and walk like us and behave like us, what is the point? i think it is not about replacement. it is entirely about augmenting us. if you do not believe it -- look at the food you eat the safety, all of the wonderful things around you, the transportation, all of these things are human augmentations. henry: jaron, what are your thoughts about this augmentation paradigm? jaron: yeah, i knew him for many years and he was important to me for many years. he is important in my early career. on many different levels -- he used to just wander. my first virtual reality actually started in some cottages, and now there are just condos, generic stuff. he used to wander by and pick flowers in the fields by the cottages. he was such a lovely guy. i just have to say that.

when i was a kid, a teenager probably my most important mentor was marvin m ski, and he and doug used to have these argument solid time. marvin would say, we're going to do this and this four machines and i would say, but what are you going to do for the people? getting back to this divide you were asking sebastian about. but what i really think it boils down to was that for doug -- not creating superpowers for people, not creating science fiction scenarios, but rather expecting more and more from people on many levels. expected people to take more responsibilities, to be more ethical, to gain virtuoso capabilities with technology. what i think went wrong -- i'm not sure. it's very hard to get a real

overview of this, but i think since we have been living in this regime of moore's law where everything is getting cheaper and we are getting more metacarpal all the time, we never have a chance to be virtuosos with any particular technology. it goes obsolete so fast and then there is the better thing that speed of change has caused us to be a little lazy and away. so, now there is a button to replace your toilet paper apparently, and i think doug would have hated that sort of thing. what doug wanted was for everyone to know more math, more engineering, more and more and more. he wanted people to expect more and more of ourselves with every passing year. and the sense in which this happened is a slightly perverse one. things where people are trying to manipulate their reputation online or detect phishing, all of these things to avoid being

manipulated by algorithms are learning to manipulate them remotely. there is this strange skill that maybe we are becoming virtuosos of, but in terms of direct literal skill, i think we are maybe not doing that as doug would have envisioned. i'm sure all of you will see this during the performance tonight, there is a moment in the demo itself, right at the beginning when doug is talking about this -- there is a glitch. it has always stuck with me something about doug and the notion of the responsibility of the machine to be human, but also the human back to the system in some way. could you talk a little bit more about that, this idea of responsibility either one of you? whoever feels compelled to go. jaron: at the time -- if we go back to the late 1970's and the

1980's. , a lot of the responsibility for people who had technical skills, there was a feeling that people had to step up and that was a very present idea. we backed away from that little bit, because a lot of things have actually turned out pretty well, but i also worry -- i try to imagine if doug was with us today. it's very hard to imagine what he would make up something, but i will give you an example. i think there was this tremendous outpouring of pride in silicon valley. there were all of these kids into rear square and they're using social networking, but then when it starts to go wrong, you got to take responsibility

for that. -- there were all of these kids in tahrir square. i think he would say if you are going to be an engineer, you have to be empirical. you have to measure the effect you have in the world. if you are saying you are creating a more free society measure it. if you are that and at the same time the middle classes declining and a lot of people are feeling that they live more on the edge, then you are failing. i think he would demand that we do much more, and he would tend to resist the kind of talking that we have. at the same time, we have had tremendous success. at think he would have more realism and more violence. do you want to say anything or -- henry: this idea of

collaboration and using systems, computer systems to help human beings work with other human beings -- is that an inspiration for you or may be an inspiration you would like to talk about with google or projects you have been working on? sebastian: absolutely. doug is credited with having single-handedly invented -- working together. even when i was a student, i thought it was a crazy idea. and today, we do e-mails, we do google docs, we share specialties. we have ways of doing these things in singapore or lebanon. the work together is just beyond belief. how come you go into artificial intelligence if you care about people? [indiscernible] i always felt the technology was

a way to put together. even today, transportation is the biggest invention -- the car in particular -- of the 20th century. maybe television, maybe i don't know -- the car has certainly changed the infrastructure, the real estate, our work patterns our interaction patterns. they also cost over a million lives a year. they are not useful from that perspective. so making them safer is a good idea. google glasses about communication, about being able to be present in a space while at the same time having your digital friends communicate with you. to help communication and interaction. we find in this age of heavy texting and facebook and these wonderful things that the ability to interact with many many people digitally, so many people are so much more in touch with -- so many more opinions i

can see, so much more instant feedback at amazon.com. i would never be able to communicate with these people before. it took maybe 40 years to get to this point. it is now really unfolding. henry: continue with that -- i was thinking a little bit about how virtual reality can be seen in terms of this desire of people to collaborate. jaron: just to clarify -- the first heads-up display was not made by me but made by sutherland, who made the other demo, which may be rivaled doug's demo as one of the amazing demos. it was called sketchpad, if you're not aware of it. it was actually little earlier. the term virtual reality meant having a social version of social worlds were people could see each other in the same world at the same time, see each other's advertisers.

the term became popular for the whole general field. for me, it is still a little jarring to keep up with the way people use terms. but that was the original meaning of it. it was very much in the spirit of doug's work, and i remember when we got the first versions working. it was very exciting. it was amazing. it was electrifying. it is fun for me now. i put my eight-year-old daughter in this virtual world at home. it's charming more than i can express. but yeah, i think during the pe riod when i was working in the 1980's, and before and cents, there is a tendency sometimes to expect too much from innovations. i used to think we would totally

transform human culture where we would understand each other and there would be less violence. i remember distinct we giving talks about the notion that if you have more instant awareness of what is going on around the world through technology you would realize how horrible were really was and the world would become more peaceful and in fact the opposite has happened. well the use of media has been used to recruit people for ever more horrific cultures of violence. there is a double trend. and that is certainly not something we anticipated. it is very hard to predict how these tools will really have an effect on the world and is very easy to seduce yourself into only seeing the benefits of what you have done. that is something i struggle with, still. if you are not struggling with assessing their impact, you're not doing your job. you should feel tortured trying

to understand it. it's extra complex. for me, there is that moment of anticipation now where the world is about to be flooded with virtual reality stuff, right? some of it is really good, i think, and some of it is not. i do not know what impact it will have on the world. it is a grand extremity or it i am both thrilled and charmed and also scared and worried. maybe embarrassed. i don't know. i do not know what will happen in the next year or two. it will be amazing to watch. henry: it often happens with someone who invented something as the story unfolds, what happens with their invention they are sometimes not very happy with the way their own work is interpreted. do you see the reality of virtuality -- virtual reality is when you started? jaron: yeah, if you look at the

current oculus development kit and the kind of world's people are developing on it -- aside from that, i mean, this stuff looks and feels so much like the stuff we were doing in the 1980's. it's crazy. i can compare videos with some of the popular downloads from oculist. even the device stuff is very similar and feels very similar and is very strange actually. henry: 2 billion bucks. jaron: 2 billion bucks, too. henry: that's a lot of money. [laughter] jaron: it was less than $19 billion. [laughter] sebastian: [laughter] henry: well, on that note, let me change the subject a little bit. this is going to be a little more personal, i think. so doug and -- had this very

powerful motivation. it was a life's work. and there were specific moments in his life, epiphanies really. there was one very famously when he read vannevar bush in the 1940's. and then when he was driving home on 101 from working -- and i am going to quote from the oral history and kind of let you think about this and ask you about similar things in your life. you told me in the oral history -- i soon realized if i wanted to contribute in some maximum way, i needed to provide a real driving force, so i asked -- i best pick a field that is really something and if i find a set of goals so there is some way i can use the engineering training, then that would be very valuable. but i somehow have the feeling

that more engineering was not what the world's dominant need was right now. i came to realize -- i had a flash, a lot of the complex problems are getting to be too much. the time available for solving problems is getting shorter and shorter, and so the urgency goes up. i put together the product of these two factors, complexity and urgency, are the measure for human institutions. it suddenly flashed that if you could do something to improve human capability to deal with that, then you could really contribute something basic. that just resonated. it then unfolded rapidly. i think within just an hour i have the image of sitting at a big crt screen and then he goes on about this vision. can you relate to this kind of intense personal motivation, this moment that drives someone? sebastian: yeah, several times in my life i have these moments

where i recognize something of importance. i actually always so my students, do not worry about what job you are going to get. your job finds you. but even recently a new job found me that was important to take. perhaps in recent history, the first time was four years ago roughly. five years ago. when i realized i was really good on paper righting. i read a lot of books and economic papers, and i met this guy who dropped out of grad school and started a startup company and did not care about paper writing but influenced, like a billion people. so, we started comparing notes and it dawned on me in all of this competition paper wiririting

at stanford university where i was tenured, it was really hard to draw an arc to what i really care about, saving people's lives. my papers were not that good. not that many people read them. some people read them. enough to continue. so, i decided to go to google to learn how to influence the world , and i started as a middle manager and worked my way up and i quit tenure eventually at stanford. which apparently no one ever does. more recently, i was building up google x, bloons and contact lenses that help you detect sugar levels. very important about launch data , smart things. and then we put this class out in artificial intelligence three years ago. i teach a little bit on the side still. i put an e-mail out saying, hey

you can take this class for free, and all of a sudden we had 160,000 students sign up. that was a pivotal moment for me. well, all of these machines can replace people. who cares about the people as opposed to the machines? you can make machines smarter and their point to take over the jobs of people, but no one is making people smarter. so i thought, my time has come. bye-bye, google. i have to start a new company. and really to this day, i have been influenced by that moment which is important to me. it may not be as obvious to anyone in the audience, but we work to make machines smart. but i care about people, not machines. why not do something for the

many people who need jobs? henry: jaron, what about you? have you had a moment like that? jaron: oh, gosh. i have had a lot of moments like that. wow. if i think back on my career the most satisfying moment was probably helping to build the first surgical simulator, and actually recently there has been criticism there are -- they are being overused. there is some sort of critical point where there is so much simulation in teaching surgery and implanting surgeon, but back in the 1980's it was very exciting it was done in collaboration with the stanford medical school with dr. dre rosen and dark by another people -- and darpa and other people. that was the moment where i felt that virtual reality was good for something. it was good and it was beautiful, that it would be of

any use spirit that was the moment when i went wow this is here. we are making a difference. but earlier than that, wow -- i mean, i will tell you the moment that really got to me was when i was a little kid -- one of our neighbors was talking about pluto -- which is still a planet. i don't care. we can agree that pluto is not a planet when you agree that europe is not a continent. to just be able to change the shape of something and see a globular cluster that was just sitting there was for me the prototypical experience that led me into virtual reality. i still remember that so clearly. just the sense of magic you can

get from an expanding your contact with the universe. there's nothing else like it. henry: ok, thank you. i'm going to do two more questions, so you can think about the questions you have. when we were talking before, jaron and sebastian agree that we should have as much interaction as we possibly could. two more questions appear and then we will do the interactive art. ok, so i'm sure both of you know doug engelbart's project the historical one, in many ways it was a failure. as far as funding -- sebastian: [indiscernible] jaron: i bristle when you say that. i can hear that. sebastian: what a loser. [laughter] henry: as creative people, as inventors, scientists, all of

these missions you are on and all of this, what role does this failure -- however you want to define it -- play and what you do? is it and important aspect or not? sebastian: oh, my god. that is what i hear every night when i come home. just kidding. we all kind of climb mountains we have never climbed before. there is no playbook. if you believe you can figure it all out in your brain and just do it and it works, in all likelihood you are very, very wrong. sometimes we have amazing people like jerry page, mark zuckerberg who look from the outside, have not failed, and went straight to the top. but first of all, they fail a lot along the way. and secondly, for every great

entrée nor, there are 500 knots of great entrepreneurs who massively fail along the way. at udacity we fail. we are happy. i have told my company, i will buy you a fine wine if you can do something that breaks the entire company. these break the entire company. you hurt somebody as the worst possible failure or you can fully project, you fire people -- at some other level, it's the most gratifying thing which makes it amazing. you learn something. you put your best foot forward and you believe this is the way to climb the mountain. one idea would be to go over the summit, but the reality is you learned something that you did not know before.

so, in the space of what you know, you did not fail. you fail if you are able to learn. if you survive on the surprise, you have enriched yourself. you have enriched your work, your team. you will make it to the top of the mountain, there's no question. you always do. you see people wavering along the way. so, when people talk about failure in silicon valley, it's not about this massive 01, we do something that is complete failure in my life is over. we find a moment where you recognize something is essential and what we just learned, it is with you forever. it sets you apart from yourself and the past and anyone who has not done the same failure. henry: jaron, i want to give you

chance before you answer for yourself about the role of failure, say why doug engelbart is not a failure. i think that's important to hear. jaron: well, i -- if you are going to have a manon him -- monomaniacal standard of what a success is then i don't know there is a terrible narrowing. i don't know anybody who really thinks that way. i have never heard anyone in silicon valley described doug engelbart as a failure. that is just year. [laughter] i have never heard somebody say that. -- that is just you. i think someone who unveils innovations in computing, they do not come moguls of it. there have been a few

exceptions, but overall they end up as research types or something. it's a different kind of person. there is a certain kind of intensity of focus and ambition that is different from the kind of exploratory -- i mean, if we have only one criteria for what success is -- that would be a disaster for cognitive university. i cannot accept that. if we think in terms of creativity and influence, there is a world of things, a tremendous success. maybe there is a trend in silicon valley to only focus on that one measure of success. i do not think that is so true. there definitely has been a shift -- i have done the

entrepreneur startup thing. i love it. i love competing in those markets. i love the feeling and the intensity with which you work. the madness of it. i just adore it. but when i was younger, there was this influx of people who play golf and wall street types. there is a different society now. i remember this event i was out with doug and something came up about a fraternity and they could not find someone who had been to a fraternity and none of us knew quite what they were and now they are all over the space and startups are born and it's like a different -- it's more of a business culture than there used to be. it used to be the business just happened, and now it's i'm here to do business a little more often. so, maybe there is a bit of a shift. but i have not detected -- in

fact, we need talk to the people in silicon valley, i think we still respect diversity and the variety of forms of success. i do not think we have gone down that hole, irreparably anyway. henry: so, just in my defense -- jaron: [laughter] henry: i do not think doug was a failure at all. the reason i asked that question was when i first got to know him in the midnight and 80's, -- when i first got to know him in the mid-1980's, i think that he considered his project to be a failure. jaron: yeah, you know what, i think that's true. i think that's correct. i think he did have a feeling of being a little underappreciated. there was kind of a -- some of the people who were kind of creating the new world of computing -- at that time there was a divide between the personal computing insurgency and the old guard.

for both of them there was kind of a brusque miss. i think that's true. but it did not last. i think by the 1990's, everyone started to recognize how important his contribution was a reward of the things that was really nice, we were able to celebrate his contributions while he was alive. earlier we were just recalling an event in stanford that took place in the 1990's called doug engelbart's unfinished revolution. i do think he felt that at a certain point. but i think we corrected it. henry: good, we are friends again. [laughter] henry: one more question. this is inspired by something that i do in some of my classes, which is putting me in the hot seat and asking students to come up with questions about things i

probably know nothing about, but that's fine. because i just want them to see how i deal with beginning to answer a question. i thought, how could i do that with you and i thought, maybe an out of the blue question i could ask you -- since we're going to see this performance tonight about a demo, what you imagine, if you had your dream come true scenario, what the next demo would be about where technology would go? i realize we cannot build surprise into this so much because you are answering a question, but where would you imagine something like that would happen today, something that would surprise people excite them, get them working on something, point the way forward? sebastian, why don't i start with you? sebastian: i take this to be a question for me about what cool great technology are we going to see in the next two years?

i have been privileged to work on a few of those at google and i'm working on some of them right now. for example, curing many types of cancer by finding ways to diagnose them differently. we had a project with google x specifically to detect cancer before it becomes symptomatical. flying cars are certainly on their way. implantable computers. that may sound icky, but it has a lot of interesting perspectives for people. one of the things that we have invested in society is to focus human memory into books which actually is better than a voice in our brains. possibly our own personality. maybe we can have a demo of sebastian. actually that is not as far off as you think it is.

maybe i stop here? there are some a things we have to still do. all of these technologies, we have only scratched the surface yet. most of these things actually have very strong technical solutions. henry: jaron you ever thought of a demo you would like to see? jaron: wow, i have also spent a lot of time starting crazy projects and whatnot. i speculate about one where there are artificial lands that man can manufacture, molecules for the body and i actually set the narrative of it on a campus kids who use these devices not as intended, and -- the point of that of imagining that, for me was to think about the way it is brought up, the

world can economically influence so much invention, that these things can turn out well or badly. by the way, i do not believe your thing about capturing your personality, because i think you are a moving target and you change yourself in response to the presence of the technology. sebastian: just wait. [laughter] sebastian: my personality is not as elaborate as many other people's personalities. jaron: i believe you are only pretending that is so, but if you pretended enough to make a demo thing to work, you might make it, which is a great danger to you. [laughter] anyway -- a couple of demos. i remember a crazy thing. when i was 20 and we were making this virtual reality sequence of the first time -- and it was scarily long ago. 35 years ago.

we said if we have kids, our kids will grow up in four dimensions and they will be the world's best mathematicians. i had a daughter four years ago and i look to her, and i still -- i have always been curious about trying to build up intuition into higher dimensions and other sources of mathematical reasonings. i am so interested in the math phobias that some any people have and a demo that just enhance human intuition and math would be the thing i would love to visit. that would be very engelbartian. he wanted the intellect to become more and more capable and that would be such a golden example. henry: those answers opened up a lot of topics. as i understand it, there are microphones around. yes, right there is one, right there is another. if you have a question, raise

your hand, and microphone will find you, and we will go from there. why don't we start with the blue shirt over there? >> this is for mr. lanier. 35 years ago -- i think it was 1980, i took my wife to hear you speak on the fourth floor of an unfinished office building. a computer bookstore was the sponsor. you talked about something called the data glove -- jaron: call be what? >> the data glove. and you also talked about your views of the future. if you look act in versus what you're doing now versus projecting forward, how would you compare? jaron: yeah, the data glove was our way of handling things in the virtual world back then. we did not have vast enough processing to do the things we

do today. the first glove was made by tom zimmerman. i should hit him credit. he is at ibm. our brand name was eye-phone. when apple came out with the iphone, everyone in the vr world was confused for about a year. i have been trying to reconcile my view of the world with the one i had in my 20's in the 1980's, and i feel just as optimistic now as i did then, and i feel wide-eyed and enthusiastic -- but i also feel a sense of balance about it but i do not think i had at the time. i think i see the fallacy of utopian thinking. anytime you think that you're on the past to utopia, you are a

almost certainly going to shoot yourself in the foot. it's a guarantee. it's very, very hard to outgrow utopian illusion. it's very painful. it's really growing up. i mentioned before i thought being aware -- of violence, it changes the nature balance. there is less violence overall, but that violence is perhaps more cruel, more cruelly focus perhaps more personal. the result is more complex and it's more of a mixed bag then you might want. i -- i still believe the world is getting better. i still believe people will pull through. but i also recognize how tough that is going to be. i mean, where i find a difference with some of my fellows in silicon valley is there tends to be a believe in some people in the valley who are sort -- everything will just

get better and better and technology will solve all ills and i think actually we will go through some big squeezes and there will be rough stuff. i think we will have a real struggle to define ourselves in a humane and sweet way as we go through a lot of changes. i think there's going to be a lot of deceptive technologies that will have to unravel. i think the interest of entrepreneurs and everyone else are not always aligned. i do not think that's automatic. sebastian: i might actually follow the group of people who shoot themselves in the for it, because i'm actually much, much more positive. what makes me positive about the situation in silicon valley, is we must extrapolate and see what we have done with technology in the last 300 years, from the time we were in farming living

conditions were horrible, the average age was your 30's, and then you died. two today -- we have more peace more longevity. even the bottom has been lifted in terms of living standards. that has all been driven in part by technology. the globalization we have, the interconnectedness. we had hundreds of years of ferocious wars in europe and all of those have disappeared because all of these economies are interacting suddenly. they are doing business with each other. i see no reason why we are at a point where things are different. now, when we ask people how they feel about this, most people are on the negative side or on the balance side because people are not as optimistic as i usually am. i think in part it is because there is a lot of uncertainty.

what does it mean? what does it mean if google takes over? how does my -- how was my life affected by this? i think it is that feeling of fear about what the future might bring gives the people the feeling of something worse. if you look at engelbart's book on war and safety, it has become safer and safer and safer. including the 20th century with two horrible world wars. the perception of reality is limited. jaron: so, the way i think this falls out is technology is a necessary, but insufficient resource for improving the human state of affairs. technology increases the wiggle room for people to create a

better society, but it does not do that. i agree with you in terms of the actual record. i think that things have been getting better. i often find myself on the other side of that argument, with some new age person tell me everyone will be healthier with modern medicine and oh, my god. you can find hundreds of thousands of people very nearby. [laughter] jaron: it blows my mind anyone can think that. we tend to take full credit for the improvement, but what has happened is technology has created the wiggle room in which people have created a better society. yes, the importance of clean water, all of these things are crucial. but society creates the structures to make that happen that was also necessary. this is the thing i think we have forgotten.

we have this idea of some abstract raft of improvement. we will be aligned with human interest automatically and it's not taking responsibility for the very difficult political job of creating a society that actually benefits from these things. i think we have to take the whole picture into account. we agree more than we disagree -- sebastian: [indiscernible] jaron: we agree more than we disagree. we talked on the phone and i said something about how we are so successful and appreciate what it's like for a lot of people and you said something like compared to larry -- but we are successful. sebastian: that was a private phone conversation. [laughter] jaron: i found a transcript on

the google server. [laughter] sebastian: another question. [laughter] henry: ok, i think we better move to the next question. >> here -- henry: that's fine, go ahead. >> i'm here, higher up. hi. i chaired doug engelbart's core planning committee from 2001 until 2004. i want to talk about something henry said about the cents doug had of being a failure. because he had a 200-year vision. he had the unfinished revolution. i just want to touch on that. he felt that we should have a vision of how technology could augment our humanity, and we

still have to live up to that dream. he fought to the last breath. he didn't feel he was a failure even though he had done so much, but because he looks to us to gather in community to honor technology for humanity. that fight still goes on. i like to hear your comments as well thinkers. when i went around with doug that message was very hard for people to hear. you mean we aren't good enough. we're the masters of the universe. yet the 200 year dream of technology can do to help out humanity. [applause]. >> it's interesting to see your comment. i hear two different things now. i never met him in person. you mentioned th