the young man in the >> we have corporal punishment, just horrible. i'm kind of nervous. does bring up a lot for me. i was never hit at school, but i was at home. and just as a headline, this morning, i do not have a chance to look into the article more, because i'm busy watching c-span washington journal, but that south carolina security officer, that slammed the female student to the ground while he was at

her desk, no charges. so, for me, i feel like it is going to go on, we are never going to have a supreme court ruled. host: just a note for the viewers, the panel in the video was not the one used for the student in mississippi. it will get our guest's last thoughts. illinois, going support. port of corporal punishment. in the 50'sew up a privatend went to school. we got paddled and had nuns, but we had respect for these people. the public schools, they have no respect for the teachers. parents are no good. public schools should have addressed code. it is absolutely baloney about

these public schools. host: chris watson, your final thoughts and sarah sparks as well? guest: i would like to give folks with a few numbers. and corporal -- in schools that use corporal punishment, the rate is about 6% overall, highest for african-americans at 9%, males at 9% and students with disability at 8%. research can be great at pointing to challenges and some nuances, by think we have to go further. it does appear that certain groups are overrepresented. the question is why. some colors brought up anecdotes that suggest there is cultural bias or racism in some cases. whether that is behind it, we don't know. i think it is a warning five. we need to take a closer look to

understand why that is happening. just say, this is a very emotional issue in education. that this ise something that does not have a lot of formal guidelines or training, it is something that has been done in talking about it can be an uncomfortable thing. i think schools that are interested in doing this, it is worth having a conversation tout why, and what you hope announcer: live, every day with news and policy issues that impact you. sunday morning, donald trump's campaign manager kellyanne

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go to book tv for the complete schedule. announcer: now, a discussion on america's foster care system. tv and film producer peter samuelson is president of first star, which helps abused and neglected children get into college. he talked about his work with journalist soledad o'brien at new york university. this is about an hour and 20 minutes. gabriel: welcome, everybody. welcome. thank you so much for being here, on such a beautiful day. my name is gabe brodbar, the executive director of the nyu reynolds program in social entrepreneurship. our program has two goals. the first is to scour the globe , find the best change making talent, and help them transform themselves into social entrepreneurial game changers.

and the other goal is to build the global community to prepare the people for the many roles that a true system change requires. i am thrilled to be welcoming all of you to the 10th anniversary of our social entrepreneurship in the 21st century speakers series. i want to say a huge thank you to cavendish global for cosponsoring tonight's event. i also want to say thank you to tiller communications for their welcome all of those joining our live simulcast. tonight's event is titled "voiceless children: the civil rights struggle that never began." and our guests are peter samuelson, a self-described recovering movie producer. and a really extraordinary serial social entrepreneur that has founded an organization called first star, helping foster kids get into and be

successful in college. also with us tonight is soledad o'brien, a deeply respected journalist who is doing work through her star fish foundation. i think the conversation is going to be informative, and inspiring, moving. and when you leave here tonight, our hope is that you will leave with a much, much clearer understanding of the challenges that are facing foster children, but also quite frankly, how mad as hell and truly committed to being a part of the solution. now, to be sure, i know there are extraordinary people in this room who either have had, myself included, or are currently working tirelessly on this issue. and are indeed making extraordinary progress and truly commendable impacts. but despite these heroic

efforts, i think we can all agree that the foster care system is fundamentally broken. and what we need -- [applause] gabriel: thank you. well, what we really need is a dramatic pivot how we think about, see, serve, treat some of the most vulnerable and voiceless among us. the 400,000 americans that currently make up our foster care system. these are children and young men and women that were simply dealt a very bad hand, when it came to the challenges that their families faced. and they are entitled to, they deserve, all the same protections, opportunities, support, and love that those of us who have been dealt a different hand have enjoyed. now, we spend about $80 billion

a year, all in, trying to provide that support. and what do we get for it? about 25,000 of these children will age out of the system each year, meaning the foster care system has raised them. 18thometimes between their birthday, they are told we are done with you, good luck out there. good luck out there in the world. half of them will not complete high school. 25% will become homeless. another 25% will find themselves incarcerated. half of them will not be able to find a job. and 97% will never complete a bachelor's degree. the message we are sending, and they are kids, we do not care, you do not matter, you cannot be successful. and that is a horrible life

sentence to impose on anyone. i would suggest there is nobody in this room that is capable of exceeding the expectations they have set for themselves. it is impossible. it cannot be done. every decision we make from, what am i going to do today, to what do i want to be in life, begins with a very simple question. can i do it? can i do it? am i valuable enough to be able to do it? and for those of us who have not spent time in the foster care system, imagine for a moment how you might answer that question hadn't had a family to nurture you, to support you, to pick you up even into young adulthood during the inevitable slips and failures. and that is one of the things

that is so extraordinary about peter samuelson's academy. it is a real, honest to goodness, forever there family. and when you have a family you are in a much better position to answer yes to that question. his model is also incredibly cost-effective and scalable and replicable, and proven by data. and all of those things that we in the social entrepreneur space get excited about and focused on. it is an extraordinary solution to an unconscionable societal failure. and tonight's conversation is really all about the civil rights movement we need to try to rectify the situation. i am incredibly grateful and incredibly thankful that all of you have chosen to come here tonight to talk about this. we really do want to make it a conversation and hear from you, . to you can tweet

@nyureynolds throughout the discussions. and for those of us in the room, please jot your questions down on the index cards. we will collect them at about 7:20 and get them to the guests. and with that in mind, please join me in very warmly welcoming peter samuelson and soledad o'brien. [applause] soledad: thank you. welcome, everybody. and thanks for taking up this conversation, which i think is so important and so rarely had, certainly as a journalist it is a conversation that we as americans do not really even discuss, as much as we will say it is a population we care about deeply. full stop. never really do anything about it. so, let us begin by starting at the beginning. you, as you said, a recovered movie producer.

what first got you interested in call asue, the issue you civil rights issue that is never really gotten up the ground? peter: i grew up in london, in a boorish family. and i had an english teacher, mr. lund. i am sure he had a first name, but i never knew it. [laughter] and he said, see me after school. this was the 11th grade. he said to me, you know, if you work twice as hard you could go to a really good university. and i said, that is ridiculous. my dad left school at 14. and i don't believe there is anyone in my entire family that has ever been to a university. and he said, well, it is even better, because you will be the first one. and what he said came true. the second thing is that i learned about the american dream, what is written on the base of the statue of liberty. give us your huddled masses.

and i thought i could be a huddled mass. [laughter] peter: and i came to america. i tell that the american dream was the most wonderful thing. there is no german, british, spanish dream, but there is an american one. and it says we do not care about your parents, do not care even if you have parents. we care if you work hard, because if you will, we will get you educated, you will have a worthwhile job, raising healthy families, contribute to america, pay taxes. you, too, can be happy. that is transformative. those two things are where i am from. the idea for the academy was not mine. dr. kathleen reardon, professor at usc, phoned at 5:00 in the morning. i cannot do her irish accent, but you will have to imagine it. she said, i have been up all night. i think it is a huge idea, but

maybe it is stupid. you have to be the reality check. so, all of the experts say that the kids that you cannot find good families for for foster care, that would be the teenagers. if you have a little eight-year-old girl, you will find her a family. 16-year-old boy is going to a group home, and got d bless, we know the outcome stats. you heard gabe say that. actually, two thirds end up incarcerated. half end up homeless. and the little one that is not talked about is the high proportion of the girls get sex trafficked. and, in fact, in los angeles county, of 109 kids rescued by the fbi from sex trafficking, 73 of them in the year last year had been recruited directly out of group foster homes. so, kathleen says, i have had this idea. if you have to house these kids and put them somewhere, why would we put them somewhere

helpful? i said, where would you help? she said, what about the campus of a four-year university? i said, how old are the kids? >> ninth, tenth graders. 11th, 12th graders. i said that is a huge idea. all cap kids want to emulate ups in age, but it has never been done. we have two grad students. we said, we will pay you a stipend, figure out where it can be done. historically, whether it can be done or not. they came back three weeks later and said, we really hope we can still have the stipend. [applause] peter: but we do not believe this has ever been done. so, i went to meet the chancellor at ucla and the vice chancellor. and they said yes. in the room, they said it is only the last six months we know who the ex-foster youth are. on our campus, because the

fafsat aid a form, the form, asks on the form. have you ever been a foster kid? we have been trying to help them ever since. we give the meal tickets, sheets, towels, that sort of thing. textbooks. she says, what was much trickier is the psychosocial. the first time they fail a quiz, they have no friends, no study skills. they feel fish out of water. they run away. we cannot even find them to get them back. and she said, if you do this, or we do it together, this will be the farm team for the big leagues of the university. and i said, yes, i think that is exactly it. so, we just started five years ago. and we now have the eight academies across the country, about a dozen more in development. it is really a phenomenon. 10% of american foster kids go

to college, and 3% earn a degree. 12th graders nationally this june, 90% of them went to college. so -- [applause] soledad: that is huge. so, with that, let us take a moment to show a video clip, that will show even more about the organization and the programming. roll that. ♪ >> a quarter of foster kids are homeless, after they age out of the system. a third of our girls and two thirds of our young men end up prison after aging out of foster care. roughly a third of american 12th-graders go on to get a bachelors, but the comparable stat is 3% of foster kids.

> i have had>, personally, 12, maybe give or take. 12 places. >> i want to say more than like 10. places, houses, homes. >> this was my fifth foster placement in three years. and each time, it was a different house, different school, different friends. i had to like start over. >> the hand i was dealt was just different. >> my name is justin. >> my name is sarah. >> my name is mike. >> linda, lynda. >> basically, if we are ever going to improve the statistics, we have to make them believe that along on the college campus, and also give them the tools to get there. >> we are an academic program,

and we are trying to get students to college, but i think the foundation of our program is that we are family. >> we can dramatically increase the number of these kids who go to college and thrive in college. >> these kids are our responsibility, and i feel that this is one of the few organizations that really respects them, honors them as full citizens and humans. as they are given the rights and protections that we are lucky enough to have. >> where i would be? first, a family. ♪ bethe people inspire me to where i want to be, and go to college, because they inspire me to be open, to be able to share, to be all that you can be. >> i feel like they do not want me. but when i came here, it felt like family. for the first time, i had

something. >> the first star academy focuses on education, life skills, self aptitude. >> all of these people have people they can look up to. people can help them find that strength themselves. started believing myself. >> when i first started, i was terrible. now, i have a 3.8 gpa. >> i want to become a lawyer and be an advocate for foster kids who want to be heard. >> we have work to do. >> i will be attending humboldt state university in the fall. >> the university of california, riverside. >> spelman college. >> i will be at ucla. >> and allows people to care about so much, it is amazing.

everybody has a chance to do whatever they want, a community, that you don't have to worry about it. ♪ [applause] soledad: thank you for raising the lights for us. so, why has this been a civil rights issue that has never really taken off? why do you describe it that way, and what do you mean by it? peter: i think it is a confluence of unfortunate things. first of all, the prior civil rights struggles, not that any have been easy, but think of it. suffragette, people of color,

brown versus board of education, the voting rights act, cesar chavez and the working farmers, gay and lesbian and transgender folks, the americans with disabilities act, always adults. so, at least they can make some noise. they could march. but these are children. you will never read an op-ed buy foster kid.e they are not going to march. they will not chain themselves to the railings. they do not have lobbyists. and so, why would it change? because in america, you have to make noise. you have to be loud. i think what has been missing here is loudness, and what i hope we can do is as we graduate kids using education to pivot them, they become self advocates and ambassadors for their victim class, and they go out, make a difference, we make noise, we

make change. there are some specific things that we need to change, and we should change them. soledad: we will talk about specifics in just a moment. do you think most americans understand how bad it is? peter: no, i do not. i think it is human nature, first of all, when something is just intrinsically sad, we tend to turn away. it is too horrible. really? this child has been burned with cigarettes? really? this young woman has been raped by a relative? this boy has been beaten with a tree branch? how do we deal with that? how do we process? the great thing about first star, yes, that is where our kids are from. but what we are all about his is education, so that they become a transformed, high potential human being. so, we are the happy bit, the silver lining in the cloud, and that makes it much easier to talk about.

it does not take anything away from the tragedies, but i think the biggest lesson that is there is nothing the matter with them. horrible things have been done to them, but they have triumphed over there. they are now going to be happy, professional, successful, middle-class americans and be part of our greater society. and and it is not just them, it is the children they are going to raise, their children's children, an ever widening wedge of responsible, invaluable adults, because we use education to pivot them. soledad: what did you learn from that first year of that first program? what did you realize you are doing well, and what did you realize you had not figured out when you went in? what worked? peter: so, the thing that snuck up on us, the kids did the heavy lifting.

themselves, that maybe 2-3 weeks in, it was like watching flowers open. that you could look at these 14-year-olds, oh, the stubborn about, they warned are still stubborn, but stubborn to get academic work done, and stubborn they're going to be someone, amount to something. and these kids seem to have become a family. a big revelation for us was who we should hire as the mentors were ex-foster youth who got into college and were now undergraduate or graduate students. because they realized all young people want to emulate older young people. and by giving them excellent role models, you see it at dinner, you would see the 23-year-old sitting with a 14-year-old, come on, jose, you really want to work at mcdonald's the rest of your life? why do you want that? i am going to be an architect.

do you think i am smarter than you? i am not. let me help you with homework. there is a game on sunday. there is a concert. it is not just a t-shirt. it is extraordinary, but only one person can choose to climb up, and that would be you. and we realize that they are into it. they have tested us, all sorts of naughty things. will these be the latest in a very long, consistent line of grown-ups who kick us out? and of course, the kids joke, you really would have to burn the building down to get kicked out. you would pick up a lot of trash across the campus if you do some thing wrong, but you do not get kicked out because this is a place that cares about you. and that picks you up when you fall, and helps you succeed. a few weeks in, that as we when we started replicating to other campuses, because it

was quite clear this was a no-brainer. i don't think it is even rocket science. i don't think there is anything we do. we simply use the power and the community of a large university to replace what these poor kids have not had a family to do for them. them, givehem, teach them role models, and show them where that ladder is. soledad: walk us through the structure of how it works. and replicating, i think you said you have one opening in new york city. peter: yes, here is the announcement of today. city university of new york, staten island first intake of youth is september. the job posting for the director position went up this week. and so, that we our first new york academy, the first of many because it is part of our arrangement with cuny that we make a success of this, and they would do it on all the campuses.

we are very delighted. and are about another 1 >> we are on a roll. we are replicating. soledad: congratulations. give me the setup. >> the curriculum is one third academic, one third life skills made up on the back of an envelope. how to brush her teeth, sexual education, std's, financial literacy, videography, self-assertion, anger management, and a high level.

because what do they have any university? they know how to teach. where using the power of their professional pedagogic capabilities to raise the kids. the other one third of it is what you have at a university. not just the t-shirt, what the t-shirt stands for. on the calendar, the kids, the students i should say, live on the campus in the dorms with those are mentors who are undergrads four-six weeks each summer. ninth grade, 10th, 11th, 12th grade. the rest of the year the dorms are full of undergraduates. we bring the kids back one or two weekend days as date students. that would not be enough so we also have a moderated, controlled, online clubhouse where the kids go after school and they can upload their videos since we teach them all videography, post reports cards, their grades. someone can put up they got in a

and 40 other people say yes, , we'd know you could do it. terrific. a lot of tutoring. we get everybody up to grade level. soledad: what kind of grade level? what is your average student? peter: they are often behind. there are kids to say to me, i really love english but my teacher reads the newspaper most of the time in class. these are kids attending very often disproportionately poor kid schools. poor kid schools, some a re wonderful, a few, most are not. one of the things we do is we go a hand advocate for our students with their high schools so we have our lawyer go and say to a high school administrator, why is this young man with no longer in algebra one? you know he needed to get his

a-g so he can go to college. the administrator will say, he's not going to college, is he? and our advocate will say, why do you say that? and for school administrators says he's a foster kid they , never go to college. it will say, put him back and knowledgeable and we will get him into college. it becomes a self-perpetuating thing and what makes it worse is it is so siloed. these social workers in the knowledge of the youth they have is not necessarily shared with the educators in the high school. most of the high schools in the united states do not even over know who the foster kids are in their midst. you can tell because in a classroom, the only kids with no technology at all, that is the foster kids. day one of ninth grade in our academy, everybody gets a laptop, everybody gets a suite of software, everybody it's taught how to use it well and safely and they get

conductivity. that is how they communicate. we also, one of the things we have learned by trial and error is that teaching self-assertion is very rare unprecedented in , their lives, and is of enormous value to them. so we teach videography. you do not have to teach any millennial, foster kid or not, how to press the buttons on the camera. they know all of that, but we teach them storing storytelling and we teach them edit.d i soledad: i think we have a clip. >> we're going to show a clip of linda. let me introduce it.

the other thing we do for self-assertion is we teach public speaking. you have got these kids have been so beaten down, literally and figuratively, they can be incredibly shy. not look you in the eye. we tell them early to become public speakers, we encourage their creativity not only musical, we encourage them to write, especially to write poetry. so spoken word, in other words a poem written by the youth and then performed by them is a double whammy. so you are about to see linda. linda came to us in ninth grade as the shyest possible young lady and she graduated last june from our academy at ucla and she is now a freshman at san francisco state university. this was done when she was in the academy. this is linda. [video clip]

linda: let go of my hair, mommy. you are plainly like a fool. who would ever knew? mamas were so powerful. i cannot trust you. i was one of those little girls . as a matter of fact i was a baby , girl she was a red rose, wearing those fine -- but she knows how to shoot me down by the third bullet to i learned how to stand my ground. life ripped me away from your arms and put me in front of a gun. i see him here and there. i see the change in you. so no matter where you were, i still love you. day, mommy.'s

i wrote a song for you. i sat with the soul of mind, mommy. it is the only way i can get to you. a song like no others. you are simply being a mother. it has been a year since i have seen you. i miss the sound of your voice and all the mothering that came with it. it is not like i had another choice. senior year i had multiple bullets. take my fears and not have tears . i heard about what happened. everybody is talking about it, grandma. how could you leave him? he was your baby. theaby brother left like rest of us. i forgive you once mother. i don't know if i can forgive you are again. you tell me you would not be like my father.

you wanted to be a chola like the old days. i wish you were here, mommy. they said yes to me. you were supposed to be in that memory, but you are walking the streets of east l.a. living the dream. i thought we were your dream. you know what? i thought we were your dream. have time for your own flesh and blood. well, home i feel. it is like i have a hill something that shouldn't have been there from the start. you make it so hard. you are breaking my heart. but i'm not going to beg and hold on to leg. i hear your voice and my soul. you are missing all the -- that

it holds. saying, mommy. like mother, like daughter. i promise you, mommy, i will not be like my mother. will cut the routes and grow my own tree and plant my own see. i got off the bus. i decide who i am. thank you. [applause] [end video clip] peter: a couple of things from that. all children are magnificent. these children are just as magnificent as anybody else. given the opportunity, they thrive. secondly, you are watching up because we got an order to permit us to teach videography,

videotape our students, show those videos, allow the press to interview them. that is very, very rare in america. the institutional sense is that everything to do with foster care must be secret. now, absolutely there are circumstances where the dignity of a child has to be protected but we do that with the victims , of rape in a rape trial. adults. we don't allow the press to reveal the identity of the victim. but what the press can always do in an adult rape trial is come to court look at what is going , did the right about police it do a good job? did the da do a good job? what is going on here? only the identity of a victim is protected. and yet with foster kids, there

is two thirds of this country, everything secret. blanket secrecy. one third of the country, it is open but protecting the , identities of the kids. guess who is the best outcome stats? the power of the press is not available to help foster kids get their civil rights because the press is stopped from covering this stuff. that is one of the things we need to change. soledad: you mentioned's changed earlier. what else needs to change? we started the conversation with this idea that people will hear this and be mad. what do you do with that anger? what has to change? what should people be advocating for? peter: i knew you would ask me that, so i thought there are actually five things. one, we need to flip the presumption of secrecy, conceal the identity of the victim, but everything else, all the

institutional everything, should be open to the press so they can write about repetitive inapt failure andcratic so forth. secondly, one size never fits all. these are individual human beings. they all need a lawyer. in two thirds of this country, they do not hit a lawyer. in one third of this country they do get a lawyer. , it is not just binary. it should be their lawyer, they should have confidentiality. it should be their lawyer not the courts lawyer. it needs to be the same lawyer. there needs to be adequate prep time. because it is through that lawyer that the absurdity of a hearing where everybody in the room either has a lawyer or is a lawyer except the subject of the child and mays a be eight years old. they need lawyers. so that is one and two. three, four, and five are education, education, and

education. because it is through education that we can pivot this family line of repetitive abuse, neglect, poverty, abuse, neglect, poverty that rolls down generations. we can pivot it into high-achievement, a good job, a happy life, children who are raised by their parents well and who go on and have grandchildren who are also well-raised. so that would be it for me. lawyers, flip the presumption of secrecy, education, education, and education. aroundabout specifically child protective services, which is very different around the country depending on where you are. what would be an effective change there? peter: i think that it depends on where you are in the country. i have a lot of time for the

administration for children services here in new york. to us.e very close they are actually one of the sponsors of the cuny staten island academy. i think that gladys who runs it, the commissioner, is very much open to innovation. she certainly gave me the time of day. a year and a half ago, i met her at a conference and here we are. we already have an academy at cuny. there are other places that are just benighted. what is extraordinary is there are 2200 jurisdictions in the united states. you talk to experts, when i was doing my research years ago i would say, tell me somewhere good, and the judge or whoever would name a city and i would , say, why is that good? they would say, it is not rocket science. about 20 years ago the mayor called a meeting with the chief of police, head of school

district, head of the children's hospital, etc. and the head of , children's services and they , decided to do a better job with weekly meetings. they do joint triage. they share software, etc. and i would say that make sense, tell me about a close-by city. the same expert would say oh no, , that is a terrible cesspool of bureaucratic failure. i say, had you do so much of a good job? can we borrow your three ring binder? can you send someone down to help us? and they would say they don't do that. and i would say, why not? because they don't do that. yes, but why? well, because, you know, it is human nature. nobody wants to be told how to do their job at her. so you have the shining spots of good practice, and then you have another 2000 where it is as if

it never existed. imagine that in business. you would have to believe that any big american fortune 500 starbucks, 7-11, fedex. they sit there on monday morning and say look it is taking 40 , seconds longer to make a delivery in cleveland and in cincinnati. send the cincinnati people to sort it out. what are they doing it wrong? raise your ships with the rising tide. we do it for cardboard boxes, for venti lattes, for 7-11 would . for our children? we need to do better. soledad: tell me about the transition into college. how does it happen, what kind of support do you student get and how to they do on the student campus? peter: so far so good, they are hanging in there and thriving.

we try hard to have them go to colleges where there is a guardian scholars program. it is sometimes called "renaissance." in other words, the university puts its arm around the foster youth to help them thrive socially and in material things. we try to point them out those universities and colleges, by no means all. secondly, we try to do a buddy system where we send them in twos and threes and fours to the same place because they feel like siblings, and in a real sense, they are. they can support each other once they get there. we go visit a lot. we are now, remember we are a , five-year program. we're just now getting our heads around what does it look like once they are in our alumni group.

we are standing by them and helping them. we are a college prep program. that is how we want to be , they arebut we also our family so we have to be , there for them. >> i want to remind folks that if you have a card and want to hand it, let's everybody handed to the last person in the aisle and someone will grab the cards. we will have someone, and grab the card from you so we can have some questions from the audience in a few moments. what are the biggest obstacles? what is the thing that keeps you up at night? what is the big problem you are wrestling with? peter: money. soledad: what does it cost? is it scalable? peter we start with a cohort of

: 30 ninth graders plus or minus that costs about $300,000. about $10,000 per youth per year. when you add a second cohort behind them, and a third cohort, it cuts the per capita cost down so you end up $6,000, maybe $7,000 per youth per year. where that comes from is first of all the universities contributing in kind. i am sure there will be a day where a university will write a big check. i will go to the campus and the chancellor or president will say, thank god you have come. we have so much excess money here, we don't know what to do with it. terrific. let's throw it at this. they don't say that. what they say is, dorm space, sure. take it. the van fleet? ok. catering? ok. so it brings the cost down. then we almost always get money from government.

for example, cuny, acs is paying some. the rest of it has to be raised. i am a volunteer beggar. i go out and i say, come in and and meet our kids. please help make this happen. somehow or other we get it done. >> what is the selling point when you are asking someone to help. what is the thing you say to them that has some say, absolutely. peter: we are living in a very political time at the moment. this is the only thing i've ever done that works on both sides of the aisle. we can talk about blighted lives. we can talk about repetitive generational often is. we can talk about vivid, happy lives children, grandchildren, , so on. the other thing we can do is just talk fiscally. what do we want? it costs this country, the

taxpayer, us $83 billion a year inconsequential cost of foster care in america. about $35 billion is the direct cost of foster care. for those 400-odd thousand kids in the system at any point in time. "b" other 50-billion with a costs,incarceration judicial costs, welfare, and so on. that is the size of the iraq war. why are we sitting here hearing it for the first time? because it is not noisy. it is silent, but it is huge. in the in of the end, we have to get this and doubt because i will die of fundraising at a certain point. i have to say it is now easier because we have our metrics of success. quite how we raise the money before we had graduated any

kids, i am not sure. mostly by appealing to high net worth people. now suddenly with the metrics of success, it is very appealing to well-organized foundations. it is the big idea, the elephant in the room idea that they have , never previously known what to do about foster care. here is a plan. terms of whatk in the students need to return to society? of citizens iss we deliver something back. is that something you thought about? peter: i think they are splendid, obviously. they are like my kids, all of them. they will be excellent citizens as adults. they are completely impassioned with a visceral need to serve. what do they want to be when they grow up? they want to be lawyers. do they want to be corporate lawyers? no. children's lawyers. they want to be social workers, professionals whose life is

helping similarly situated kids. the very first meeting i had with the vice chancellor of ucla, we sat in the outdoor restaurant and were talking about how we are going to do this and who we need to hire. there is a young lady with blonde hair, ponytail, flip-flops, and shorts, and she suddenly in our space. we said, yes? she said i am so embarrassed, i , apologize. i have been eavesdropping. i do not know who you are, but pick me. i have to help you. last year i had my jd in june from the law school. let me help you because i lived in foster care for 10 years. so we hired her. >> that was good eavesdropping. >> it was good if strapping. -- it was good eavesdropping. [laughter]

soledad: what do you believe, if you can solve this if you have the opportunity to solve a much bigger problem in macro? peter: taken to scale, this dramatically changes foster care. by diminishing the number of kids who ever go in it in the first place and by sending an empoweredd, generation of young people out into the world to do good. the only class i teach is called random acts of kindness and pay it forward. we talk about the golden rule, we talk about the second law of thermodynamics. then i say, there is a man in dallas called mort and he loves you and he is giving you $200. no, it is not for you. he is giving it to you so you can give it away. can i giveways says

my $200 to him and he gives his $200 to me? no. to write a 300 word essay and say who you want to give it to. soledad: what is the point of giving them $200? peter: because it is splendid, it makes him feel seven feet 10 feet tall. it makes him feel they have value. everything done to foster kids makes them feel they are worthless. we have this thing where i live called a seven-day notice. it is a three-part form. one part is written by foster placement. one part to child protective services, saying take this person away. i don't want them there anymore. the second copy they keep and , the third copy goes to foster care. we have kids who have lived in 15 houses, 15 group homes and their career in foster care. what happens when everything --

everything -- you know, every teenager acts out. god knows i did. what do we do in a family? you say you are grounded. you don't get pocket money this month. that was a dreadful, unhelpful thing that you did. don't do it again. learn from this. but what we don't do is to say you're gone. , out. gone. i never want to see you again. that does not happen in a family. when it does happen to these kids repeatedly, what is the message of that? you feel like a worm. you are three inches tall. the benefit of us making them into mini-philanthropists is they are 10 feet tall. and they realize, i have power. we had the christmas party and the head waiter came out onto the sidewalk and said this is , after the lunch, he said, so they did not eat their desserts. we have all these icing-covered

muffins. what you want me to do with them? i said, put them in little boxes and give them to the kids. they can take them back to their placements. they are all standing there, we are waiting for the vans because the vans are always late, and i see one of our boys, i will call him bob, i see him sidling away from the group and he is clearly does not want to be noticed. he is walking off. i am thinking is he running , away? what is happening here? and he walks about 120 yards to the sidewalk and there is a homeless guy lying on the ground and he just goes up does not say , word, puts the muffin next to him and then sidles back to the group. we have all sorts of successes, but that is one of the biggest ones. because that young man who when he came to us was very troubled,

, horrible, horrendous things have been done to him and a foster placement, if you can believe that. at that point, i thought he was an angel. soledad: nice story. some questions from our audience. what are some of the most important or valuable lessons you have learned as a social entrepreneur and what advice would you give to students? >> do it. nike. do it. don't worry about step one, step two, and step three. forget all of that to begin with. go and sit on a rock with a yellow pad or with your laptop or tablet, and inhabit what success is like. imagine that it is 10 years from now. all of your wildest dreams have come true. walk around it in your mind's eyes.

who goes? is it a building, a program? why do people go? what do they get out of it to why is it good and what does it feel like and what are the roles color or the walls and so forth? once you know what your goal looks like and feels like, it is infinitely easier to back fell fill and work out how to get there in baby steps. the first one is, inhabit the result. the second one is, be willing to fail. it is not a war of sudden victory nothing is. , it is a war of attrition. be willing to fail. i say to the foster kids, you are inside an envelope of what you are capable of. arehave a pencil and you poking in the dark to see where the edges are of the possible. if you do that once in a while, , you will go through. that's where the edge was. come back, find a different piece of edge.

but if you said in the middle and never poke the edges of the possible, how can you be anything? you will sit in the middle and amount to nothing. you have to be willing to fail in order to succeed. i think there are lessons, get mentors. do a business plan. run out a timeline. soledad: if you had one lesson , one story from the five years you have been doing this what , would you tell someone who said i want to be a social entrepreneur? peter: imagine it. because that is how you will value it. make sure it is important enough to you. go and explain it to other people. ae of the things you learn as film producer is that you are constantly raising money and hiring people and persuading people to be in your film.

which film does not exist yet? you are actually sitting and trying to put into the head of the person opposite you how wonderful it will be and what it will feel like when it exists. that is exactly the skill set a how we co-opt people, the people you need to help you are usually well-trained in saying no. they have practiced it a thousand times. 8001 person they have said no to. how do we subvert people saying no? anna: anna:

we do not do it with endless spreadsheets or pie graphs. you must move their heart. you must hold in the story -- another student lost some of the special olympics in ucla. there stood our 14-year-old, mia, she watched the soccer team came in and burst into tears and said, this is discussing how can they expect them to play and rags? i'm going to spend my 200 dollars to buy them outfits and shoes. what we did not realize, we were standing to the bleachers and 15 minutes later, a hat comes down to the front with $2500 in it in small bills. mia went with the haitian team

measurements and brought them their kits. the phone rang on that sunday and it was an l.a. county's supervisor and she said, can you get the student down because we want to give her the young entrepreneur mefal on monday morning. so we did that. then the phone rang and it was abc news and it was es en. they said this young woman coming your social entrepreneur, can we interview her? then next thing we knew, they said, this is how you do this. social entrepreneurs need a big idea. honestly, no disrespect to moneymaking ideas, it is easier to do it because empathy is so much bigger with a pro-social idea. if you can work out how to move

someone's heart and picture it again in and again, you work it out why pitching it. let me do more of this bit. you made them cry. [laughter] idea, throughofit my cousin, i met a little boy who was dying in a hospital bed. his wish was to go to disneyland, ridiculous because he was in london at the time. and we flew him and his mom to l.a. and did the disney thing. everybody was in my apartment. the epiphany for me was not the trip. the of tiffany was that i -- the epipany was that i had a business lunch with a man from hbo, charges on something and he didn't biden i said -- and he

said, what else is new and exciting? i told him the story of the little boy and the man from hbo cried. i thought, look at this, it is so powerful, i could help other kids. who knows? and that was the beginning of the starlight children's foundation. so, go for the empathy. go for the emotion. over the empathy, the emotion. spreadsheets will follow later. soledad: this is a question for twitter. what about kids with serious emotional disorders who need therapeutic placement? how do you manage their needs? some: so, we can deal with moderately serious psychological challenges. we can deal with ocd, we can deal with things of that sort. what we have now learned we can't deal with is schizophrenia. what we are trying to do in our recruitment is called pedagogically, it is the theory of, we are trying to

ask ourselves, if, from everything we know, we admit this use, will they probably go to college? and if we do not admit them, will they almost certainly not go to college? we have them all, our first year director is here, he dreamed up a fantastic essay question for these missions. please imagine that it is your 100th birthday party and your best friend, who is known you your whole life, makes a toast. what would you like them to say? we look for any spark. we do not look at grades, because if they have been in a group home they may have well have never done homework. they may have no grades. we took some kids with a .7 gpa, who now are amongst those who went to college four years later. so, we looked for a spark. why does my future have to be determined by my past?

i am interested in science, why does the english teacher read the newspaper? i want to be someone. why does it have to be me who got abused? because out of that comes a kind of benevolent stubbornness. so, no, we do not take random admissions. every kid. we are trying not to take the end. the top only 5% and the bottom 25%. we are trying not to take its we cannot help. they need a different kind of program with a much more intense, almost 24/7 psychological counseling. we are not that. we are also, with one or two exceptions, we are not trying to take the rare foster kid who has lived in the same placement for 10 years and professional people in and everybody in the house goes to college.

they do not need us, we should not use the bed for that student. we need the middle 50 percent. soledad: how do you coordinate with foster parents and case planners and everybody else in that child's lives? peter: well, hillary clinton did not invent the saying she used for the title of her book, but she did propagated and make it popular. it is actually an african proverb. and throughout africa, in all these different tribes, it takes a village to raise a child. we believe profoundly it does take a village. what is a university? in some very real ways, it is a village. some of them very big. they are towns, cities, and why the best oft is the city. [laughter] everything else is secondary.

so, we have services, we nurture the foster parents and it is often not straightforward. we try to help them feel supported and networked and to give them skills to do the best possible job for their worlds. the kids they are looking after. it is not straightforward. what if they have their own children of similar age and no one in the household has anyone been to college. now arrives the first foster kid who talks about little else other than going to college? what does that do at the dinner table? some of this is not straightforward. we do a lot of nurturing families and we work with high schools, to have them do a better job. the first staffer who teaches teachers in high school came

back of the other day and said, the college counselor that was in the group that i was teaching burst into tears. why did she burst into tears? well, i said, in the uc system, if you are a foster youth and maintain a 3.0 gpa you'll as anpay tuition undergraduate. and the counselor burst into tears and said, i have been a 20 year counselor here and all these kids i did not send to college because i thought they could not afford it. so we need to raise the tide. we need a revolution. we need awareness. we need c-span. we need tweets and facebook and every kid needs a lawyer and we need to reverse the presumption of secrecy and we need to use the elephant in the rooms, elephants in the rooms,

these universities that have very nearly everything you need to do right by a kid who has been abused or neglected and get them on track to a prosperous, successful, happy, nurtured, life. why wouldn't we do that? why don't we do that more? somebody said to me, how many academies to think there will be? i was making a speech. in the young lady with the headset said, you must stay to your ambition in numbers. i said, as many academies as we can do prudently, as quickly as possible. no, no, no, you have to give it metrics. i am up there talking and i could see her coming toward me like a train at the end of the tunnel at the end of the speech, i did not know what to say. i said, our ambition is within 10 years, 100 academies. and i went and sat down and all the people with me through their bread at me. why did you say that? how could you say

that? i said, i don't know, maybe it is only 50, maybe it is 300. we are ambitious. we are a big component. if we just replicate this, it will put a very large dent in the number of kids in foster care,going into foster but beyond that, every child in foster care deserves their own unique confidential lawyer. properly trained, the same lawyer from case to case. none of this nonsense that i will be your lawyer today. anything you want to say to me? i'm so sorry. we have to go to court. it will come out in the courtroom. not good enough. what is their caseload? did it take continuing education? why does it have to be a checkerboard across the country, where some places are good and some places are terrible? how do we raise all ships with the rising tide? and how to we get every big university to do this? soledad: a little more detail on

the university. how do you sort of sort through who you are going to take. givenr businesses scholarships question mark why are they not going. so, i did talk about the admissions process. theormally sourced through administration, sometimes child protective services. we work through the social worker. they run seminars to teach them. but we also work through the middle schools. remember, only first contact the kids, they are eight greater.

we have to identify the middle school that feed to the high schools and we work through the administrators there and the teachers. there is an admissions form. normally for a cohort of 30, rising ninth graders, we usually have something around 100 applicants and we interview them and they write their essays. the famous essay, what is the toast at your 100th birthday party? and it is an art as much as a science. in terms of the kids we fail, i do not think we fail any of them in the sense it is true 10 or 12% do not go to college. some of them joined the military. some go into a sheltered job. college is not for everyone but it is for most of them. we tried to do right. one size does not all. we try to really shrewdly, as though we were the parents, the village, which we are, work out what is best for this kid and how to we help them get it. soledad: so, we have about 15 minutes left.

and i want to get to this question, because one thing you said that really keeps you up at night is money. i want to get to the urgent question. how do we help? what our partnership opportunities with first star? peter: the undergraduates with the hats come down now, pass the hats -- [laughter] no, seriously, we would not do that. two things.by as for the universities, right now we have bitten off as many as we can digest. what i found is, there's no point in meeting in the middle of the hierarchy. universities, with all due respect to nyu and programs on a university, there is usually only 5-10 entrepreneurs working in the university, usually the chancellor, president, provost, vice chancellor, maybe the dean of something. i have to go in top down.

when i meet middle of, it never seems to catch. but top down almost always works. that is one way. the other one is money. youle here from cavendish, high net worth families. it is 2016, when i talk to high net worth families i say, who were the men who invented the renaissance. what is that mean? the sent the ships to the new world. no one told them they must specialize. doctor, andhad a explorer, a merchant, a painter of botanist,. and they sent all of them. and collaborated seamlessly. tutore medicis, the math looked up at the chandelier, oh, the world is not -- yes, it is

not flat. it must be a sphere. look, i have been all of the castles, all of the chandeliers point at the ground. therefore, the earth must be round. and furthermore, it must be the earth that goes around the sun. he was galileo and the church wanted to kill him. and he was protected by the big powerful family, the medici. so, my message to the high net worth families is, could you please point some of your entrepreneurial zeal, which is exceptional, which does not have to report to some big committee. it is you guys. we would be honored to partner with you. furthermore, you tend to have, because the university is already gotten at you, you have one or more university relationships and that is a double whammy.

a high net worth person who has an alma mater, would like to see one of the academies, i have so many in my pocket. [laughter] you get one and we will talk next week. everybody else, we're up for anything. you want to do a bake sale that contributes to the cuny first star academy? we would love it. fundraising is tricky. raising capital is immeasurably easier, once we have kids in the academy because of we can say, come meet them. the fact that we can introduce is a rare privilege. it takes court orders and great care, but the kids are the best ambassadors. soledad: this question is from jessica, the founder of will go first, a nonprofit for recovery care for kids online. jessica, identify yourself.

she has a multi-part? if we don't get to all, i know you will get an opportunity to run up in and ask her. she says, i am one of those kids. her first question is, i am curious about where there is resistance to interagency collaboration. why do you think that is? peter: because grown-ups think in silos. you know, one of the fundamental problems is that when foster care was invented all those years ago, 100 years ago, it was seen as this child is being abused or neglected. we have investigated, validated the allegation, we must remove the child and put them somewhere to be safe. that is the work of social workers, and there is nothing the matter with that. but what there is little training or a attention paid to is education, which is the long-term fix and what we must do better at is

blowing up the silos. there is nothing unique to the foster care area. it is the big problem i believe in our society. is that as human knowledge has grown exponentially, the brain got no bigger at all. therefore, in ordering to though deep, we have to go narrow. but then, how do you answer a multi-faceted challenge in our society? the answers you need generalists in the middle. i had a meeting with general schwarzkopf. years ago, i was saying to him, we have all of these specialists and our job is to keep them focused on the mission. general schwarzkopf said, what do you know about the united states army? and i said, absolutely nothing at all. and he said, well, when you go into the army you don't just get rank, you get a specialty. you are a rifleman, infantryman, driver, cook. whatever you are.

it is a pin on your shoulder. it is a pain on your shoulder, your specialty. it doesn't matter how much they promote you, you have your specialty, until one day if you are a damn fine leader, you give you stars to be a general. in that ceremony, they take away your specialty and because you are no longer a specialist, you are a general. and i thought, that is why they are called generals! [laughter] i am a generalist. i work with people in first star who know more they are in me about the nuts and bolts of the educational side and social work the sociological and social pedagogy. but leadership is best done by a generalist. in the thousands of years of running army, when they put specialists in charge, everybody died. [laughter] so, they learned, we should have a general in charge and that way

we will live. soledad: second question, what is scaling/on boarding of stakeholders over the long-term look like? peter: we try not to be precious. we partner very easily. frankly, anyone who raises their hand and has money are good ideas, we say, come on down. we will find a good way to work together. like a relentless bulldozer, we move forward but we try to do it and as collaborative a way as we can do and if there is expertise out there, we're constantly meeting with people who know more about something than we do and we tried to bolt that on. so, there is a basic program but if there is a good idea somebody knows more about something or

other, bring it on. soledad: i think this will be our final question, a really interesting way to end because it is about accountability for the overall system. what about holding the child welfare system accountable? for the epic fail. first star is doing an amazing job but is it making a parallel process without holding the bigger system accountable? let mefirst of all, correct suck something. it is not broken everywhere, the system. one of the things we do throughout washington is report cards, a through f by different measures of the children's welfare system and they do not all get an f. b+.ou get an a- minus of it is not broken everywhere. the better question is, why do

the bad ones not emulate the good ones? i do not know the answer. bureaucracy is as bureaucracy does. it is not either-or. we are doing education, education, education. the other ones, holding the bureaucrats responsible and so on are also of enormous value. we should be able to patent our head and rub our tummy at the same time as a society. we need to do all the above, not either-or. soledad: thank you so much for this conversation. [applause] peter samuelson. peter: thank you, so much. announcer: this labor day weekend, book tv brings you nonfiction books and authors. here are some featured programs this weekend. on sunday at noon, in depth is

live from hillsdale college in michigan with author and radio host who is the author of "the nine questions people ask about judaism: think the second time." happiness is a serious problem. "why the jews: the reason for anti-semitism the most accurate predictor of human evil." "the 10 commandments: still the best path to follow." join in from noon until 3:00 p.m. eastern on c-span2. and at 8:00 p.m., former white house correspondent profiles the 10 the first ladies since 1960 in her book, first women. the grace and power of america's modern first ladies. she speaks at politics and prose bookstore in washington, d.c. on monday, mary roach on the science used to improve the effectiveness and safety of the u.s. military.

and another author on why the public has lost faith in political leaders. and biographer jean edward smith on the tenure of bush. and senator trent lott and jon meacham talk about presidential politics. go to c-span for the complete weekend schedule. >> for campaign 2016, c-span continues on the road to the white house. ms. clinton: i will be a president for democrats republicans, and independence. mr. trump: we are going to win! we are going to win with education, the second amendment. announcer: live coverage on c-span, the c-span radio app and c-span.org,. monday, september 26 is the first presidential debate live from new york. on tuesday, october 4, vice presidential candidates governor mike pence and senator tim kaine debate at longwood university in

farmville, virginia. on sunday, october 9, washington university in st. louis hosts the second presidential debate leading up to the third and final debate between hillary clinton and donald trump, taking place at the university of nevada, las vegas. on october 19, live coverage on c-span. listen live on the free c-span radio app or watch live or anytime on demand at c-span.org. >> now, the future and privacy of your health care and genetic data. this discussion took place at a conference focusing on the future of digital technology and media, entertainment, lifestyle, and health. it is 30 minutes. >> and the next, we have got a great fireside chat about health the care sharing economy. promise, risk, and reality.

all you have to do is think for one minute about uber and airbnb and what can we do in the health industry to know this will be an interesting conversation. do we have? this will be moderated by david whelan. >> out of curiosity, how many of you have wearables on right now? ok. and how many of you would be ok with, you know, going to the, you know, background, and shifting things around? ok, i see you there. so, we have a great panel right and we'll talk about that right now. >> welcome. excellent. thank you. perfect. hello. these actually work. hi, guys. i am dave whelan, a strategy consultant who has spent many

years at the intersection of health and wellness, working everything from wearable genomics do on-demand nurses, to community building apps. i have built businesses, destroyed a couple, and him am always looking for some to add on the positive side. but as you just heard, if you watch the news recently, which these days is twitter and watching videos on snapshot, you can see a lot of the sharing a economy. sharing our car, sharing our homes, sharing our lives. if you use google you are sharing your information with google incorporated and their advertisers. as my five-year-old son likes to say, sharing is caring. in the health care world, there have been a lot of changes. things like the affordable care act.

which we are continuing to see many changes coming down the line. and i think those have opened a huge opportunity for what i call the health care sharing economy. where, care sharing economy. today, we can share our step count with coworkers. you can share your medical records with new doctors if the system works. you can create a rare disease community overnight with its own hashtag. you can contribute to health research using apple and the research kit. the connection is strong. we were talking backstage with a company called color genomics, which was founded by a former twitter person. they just brought on the former vice president of marketing, chief marketing officer of twitter. this connection is real. anyways, i have two really great colleagues that i will introduce in the second. before we start, a couple ground rules. no buzzwords like big data. we will avoid the presidential election. and absolutely no mention of the

company theranos. >> sounds good. dave: a couple people know theranos. let me start with linda. you are the ceo of we are curious. we met four or five years ago at a conference in new york. so, it's great to reconnect here. in a couple of minutes, tell us who you are and how you got where you are. a little bit about what is going on a curious. linda: great. thanks, dave. great to be here. always fun to come to los angeles from up north. how i got here really came from seeing how research was happening in mostly the academic world, where we saw clusters of studies going on, whether it was autism or chronic fatigue. whatever the disease condition, i was first thinking about this over 10 years ago. you would see these little studies being funded by nih, but typically, they were underpowered. and we were not really able to

get enough people enrolled in the studies or get big enough grants to fund large enough studies. and a lot of that is what led to the founding of 23 and me, a whole new way of doing genetics research through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing. and that was before kickstarter and indie gogo. but it just seemed like a logical way to solve a problem that was not being approached fast enough. and so, 23 and me led to a genetics-forward opportunity. and while i was there, i started thinking about the other data we have on us and around us. with the wearable space starting to boom, it seemed logical that each person should control their own data. and now that we have all this ability to tap into it through wearables sensors and monitors. all these things going on around us, why don't we build a platform for people to do this? that is the idea of we are curious came in.

and our premise is very much that we believe it is your data. you own it and control it. we are helping you assemble and make sense of it. also, add a social layer on top of it. it helps you find other people to have conversations around the data. we see forums all the time. you can you are saying, start a community really quickly around a disease or question or topic. the problem is that a lot of times, these turn into conversations that go nowhere. they have people comparing things. they might have ideas they want to pursue, but they do not have the means to do that. so, what we are trying to provide is a way for people to share questions and say, let's track migraines and what we eat every day. and we start to see a pattern in that? our analytics come in look at patterns and trends and feed those back to people. to say, well, it does look like when you eat this food, the other thing happens.

is all about gathering the data, making sense out of it, hopefully getting something productive out of it. dave: you are wearing a cool ring. maybe you can tell us about the ring. linda: sure. happy to. you can see in the graphic that cloud, that sleep is one of the biggest things that people have questions about. we found that on our website. when people compose questions, the great majority are around sleep. we chose that as a topic to focus on when we launched curious. but one of the most important components of that is how can you track sleep accurately? luckily, i have an investor in finland. and i was lamenting kind of some of the wearables on the market. i said, there is no great way to track sleep. and he said, i have a company for you. so, he is also an investor in aura, a ring-based sleep tracker. it is basically a sleep lab of on your finger. of all the technologies i have seen, it is one of the better

ones. so, it tracks deep, rem, light sleep. as well as when you are awake at night. but when you wear it during the day, it has accelerometers. it will calculate, based on your activity, what your readiness is for the following day. so, a kind of takes it to that next level of what you are learning from that. we pull the data from the ring into our platform. you can track things like caffeine or alcohol consumption, things that might affect your sleep. dave: great. ardy ardrianpour, chief business officer of basehealth. i have only known him a couple months. honestly, i feel like i have known him forever. same thing -- how did you get here? you have a great story from early days. what are you working on? ardy: thanks. dave, i feel the same way.

and thanks for having me at ideas 2016. great venue. the drive from san diego was not too bad. got here a lot faster than most people. yeah, so, you know, we live in this amazing era, i think. and you know, the era before was kind of the computer era. the era before that was the industrial revolution. i believe that biology is definitely the era we are going to be living in next. and beyond that, it is about health and wellness, becoming our own health destiny. and the consumer is definitely being empowered in different ways. and i was fortunate enough to be a stupid kid that grew up in san diego, biotech beach. and started my career at the salk institute. and then, from there i was not smart enough to get into research, but i was sharp enough to understand, you know, that

genomics and sequencing and clinical diagnostics, you know, is going to hit every human being at some point. and i have been fortunate enough to be at the ground front of launching, you know, different various next generation sequencing tasks in the market. and that has changed genomics forever. personally, myself, i was one of the first people on the planet to be whole genome sequenced. having my exone done. lots of various different panels done. most people obviously know of genetics and genomics from the consumer side, because of the work that 23 and me did. and on the marketing money that was spent. what people do not understand is that there is so much more information in genetics. and so, i think genomics, even though i am a fan of it, is one piece of the pie. and there is lots of other data

, various different types of data that comes into play. just like you said, sleep data. you know, walking around, how many steps we take, fitbit data. all this stuff is great. but what do we really do with it? and at basehealth, one entity i am involved with, we are into predictive analytics. and so, as we hear more about artificial intelligence and natural language processing, how that is really driving various different decisions, from the predictive analytics side is very interesting. and i believe that, you know, definitely health is the new wealth. and we all strive to get an education, make some money, have a family, and all those other good things, right? but once you really accomplish that, you understand this is kind of boring.

what do i really get interested in? and i think, you know, the key thing is to die healthy. and we all kind of know that, but we do not put enough effort into that. and the only way to do that is if everyone gets involved. i just have a quick question. dave: raise your hand if you have ever had a genetic test. so, about 10 people in the crowd. raise your hand if you have been fully genome-sequenced. i am the only person, i think, here. i think that shows i drink the kool-aid. but we are at the infancy of changing medicine forever. because it is really not just about medicine, itself. it is really about disrupting health care. and how you disrupt health care is, the next time someone asks this question, everybody raises their hand. that is how we disrupt health

care. dave: perfect. and you only use like three buzzwords. [laughter] andy i get a whole class :.dave: . dave: actually, both of you touched on a point, the challenge around access and actually. wearables data is suspect, inconsistent, and not very actionable. right now, if you have a device telling you something, all it tells you is that you have not done 10,000 steps or you have done 10,000 steps. not even why 10,000 is the right number. you know, genome sequencing is still too expensive for most people to be doing easily, readily. ehr integrations are challenging , to say the least. how do we get past these hurdles and get the right tools and ultimately the right results? into people's hands. linda: well, i think it is going to come from these initial insights we are going to have, even if the data is not that

accurate with wearables. we do see that people that have been taking 10,000 steps a day, if they were not active at all, it is a benefit. and so, we are seeing positive signs i think coming out of this extra data space people are entering. because maybe their employer gave them a fitbit. and now, they are wearing it. they are more active. we will start to see these baby steps happen. and the wearables will get better with time. i think that is going to happen. i think we will see a converging of people starting to get more into the market. fitbit has actually done a very good job on the market. i think it will just be a matter of getting the value from the data at the quality it is right now. but seeing as that improves, a lot of these companies in the wearables stage right now are looking forward to the clinical space. so, i think it is a smart strategy for companies to come out, get it into consumers' hands, generate data, and find applications that might have clinical relevance. so i think we are at the very

start of this. the data is not that great maybe right now, i think it is enough that we are seeing positive movement in that direction toward something more clinically relevant. dave: i just saw jawbone. fitbit has done a great job. jawbone, maybe not that great of a job. now that they are going back into the clinical market, levering technology they got -- linda: exactly. dave: they are starting to see the shift. on the genomics side, how do we make access happen, so people can take advantage of it? ardy: it is about education. it starts with education of people actually knowing what they don't have. but what they do have inside. and so, we all have the blueprint of dna inside us. it is sort of locked inside of us. and we have ways of extracting that easily. obviously, with it not just being an invasive manner, but most people that are not

educated and do not know about science and technology do not understand what dna is. they think it is csi. you know, if you ask your next-door neighbor named jennifer or joe. he will probably not know what dna is. he knows what blood is, but not what dna is. and so, i think it is really about educating the consumer. and we have seen that within technology, that has happened quickly. a good example is uber. uber, you never knew you would actually use something like uber. it kind of always existed. you know, you can call someone and maybe get a ride somewhere, but no one really thinks about taxis anymore. right? it changed the whole paradigm. and it is not because uber change the paradigm. it is because consumers changed the paradigm. uber is not advertising on tv.

when you are in d.c. and you want to catch something, you have a friend with the app. you download it and use it. consumers want to know what to do next. that is the key thing. and with health and genomics, it is the same thing. i think it comes out being very scary, having a lot of privacy and has to be hipa-compliant. all of these things. that is super easy. we are doing that with bank accounts and finances every day. so, why can't we do that with personal health? where we actually donate. it is not about sharing. i think there are some companies that share. sharing is great, but that is the tip of the iceberg. you know, i think it is really about getting masses of people involved. if there is a way of doing that, communities of nonprofits, research institutions, pharmaceutical companies looking very as different clinical trials, you know, we all come

from various different ethnicities. and within ourselves, we have various different diseases. and depending on the population you were born into, you have various different genes that really affect your family. and if you want to have offspring, obviously, you are going to pass that down. and so, there is lots of information now within, you know, consumers, where they can drive certain things. dave: you mentioned privacy a couple times. and i think, you know, uber is a good example. because people are concerned about safety with uber or airbnb. your house getting trashed with airbnb. in the health world, you know, people, whether it is individuals -- the government, via hipa and things like that, there are layers of privacy and security. personal health data, your genomic data, how do we get around that in a way that will make it come to life and add value to individuals,

physicians, society, without stepping on the government's toes? ardy: yeah, that is a challenge that is going to involve more than one entity. it is a challenge that, you know, people are going to actually want it and know that you can utilize it. for example, if you can actually monetize and control your own data, it is a powerful thing. i have a stealth company working on this exact same thing. and the key to it is the fact that, you know, you get people that are interested in making a difference for themselves. obviously, there are sick people , that are interested in various different conditions. if you are affected by breast cancer and you carry the gene, well, you know, you are part of a community, whether it is susan g. komen or some other community. you are part of the community.

you want to actually help. right? but that is a very small population. what about everyone else who is healthy? i am interested in what i call the healthy genome. because i think we can learn a lot about disease if we study healthy people, not just sick people. -- i think we all talk about physicians and clinicians talk about the sick people. you need to help the sick people. i think how you really help, you know, sick people is by concentrating on the healthy population and motivating the healthy population from a social impact and social dynamic. and, you know, just one quick example -- instagram. it kills me that so many people share so many things on instagram. they do not even think twice about it. whether they are on the beach in a bikini or in the bathroom taking a selfie, they do not think twice about how much private data they are sharing, right?

so, what if you can actually a anonymously share or donate or monetize your own health data in various ways, where it is protected? that would be key in getting, you know, even the government, for example, involved with that. i think it would be key. as we can see from the nih and all the support from joe biden and the cancer moonshot. that is a great example of how our government and other governments around the world are interested in population genetics. and we have to get over the fact that, oh my god, is this really private? we are sharing other things that are way more private. i think. linda: i might just add that the benefits have to outweigh the risk of having access to the information and trusting a company that will store it for you. and keep it safe for you. there has to be a reason you choose to take the risk. because it will always be a risk.

no data in any database is 100% free of that risk. but we have gotten over the hump in the financial world. and people get hacked all the time. credit card numbers get stolen all the time, but people still choose to buy things online because it is so much easier and there is a benefit to that. and i think it is going to be the same with health information. we are going to have to trust that doing this brings a lot of benefit. and we have to be willing to put up with some risk and hope that companies storing the data are doing the most they can to keep it private. so, that will always be the rub in the system, but i think there is a lot of benefit to having access to your information and sharing it when appropriate, either with doctors or researchers. there is a lot of benefit we can get from that. so, that is one of the questions with 23 and me. that is my genetic data. oh my goodness. we were kind of walk people through the question -- someone gets access to your a, g, c, and t's.

what are they really going to do with that? of talk peoplend through that, they are like, i would rather have someone hack my genetic data than financial data. because there are very clear reasons why that could hurt you. whereas from a genetic perspective, it is a risk that may be somebody will figure out you are at risk for a disease, but what will they do with that information? ve to take it to a logical process of what does that mean. i think it is healthy to have that conversation. dave: we are here in los angeles, land of movies. and so, in every good story, there is a villain. so, who is out there who is the , you know, big obstacle? who stands to lose the most from these kinds of shifts happening? the same way elon musk is doing his electric car, and you have big oil worried about what is going to happen. are there companies, entities, someone who is trying to slow

this down that will ultimately be destroyed by opening up genomic data? linda: early on, in the case of brca, it was companies like myriad. they -- this was back when it existed at the time, they were still valid. they were issuing patents around the genes. and they own that. and to me, it seemed ludicrous that you cannot go anywhere except myriad to get your sequence. entities like that i think are going to be disruptive, that were really trying to hold and control information. and certainly the pharmaceutical industry, i think probably everyone on the stage is for prevention and people being on less drugs than more drugs. and when you find the right players who have the same motivations, like i think kaiser permanente is a really good example of one health entity all about prevention, keeping people off drugs because they pay for it. not only are they the doctor in

the provider, they are the pair. the mayo clinic is similar. because putting people on medication is actually not a good outcome, and so anything that can conserve that endgame where we are getting people healthier and preventing disease, i think that i would recall that it preventative health, but i think we are moving a direction where hopefully the pharmaceutical industry will get on board and be supportive of these measures, where we are on to keep people off drugs. i think the food industry as well, there is just a big movement against sugar in some of these dietary things that have just been pushed out of corporate america, and we just have to stand up to that and say no more, we really need to change our view of food as medicine. and i think that is another industry that is going to be pretty threatened the fact people are becoming educated. dave: any villains? ardy: i agree with everything you said. health systems are a big

barrier, because, you know, let us take a scenario. let us say you go to the doctor.and for whatever reason you go to the doctor,, you have a condition, they do some blood work. and they get all your data. and then, they asked the health questionnaire. they can a lot of information about you. right? they get that information. what is happening now when most people do not know it, there is a comedy called imf that actually sells my and your data for $12 billion last year. most people do not know it because you're automatically consenting to certain things, so that someone can take a piece of your health care data and actually sell it.and so , i think the health system itself are a problem, because one, you know, they do not talk to each other. it, if you want your data, is not that easily accessible to

get it. and so, there is a barrier. if they actually let the consumer right away have data, whatever electronic form it is in, or if there is a platform where you can get that, i think that opens up a whole new economy for both researchers, institutions, and of the consumers. and i think the health systems are deftly a barrier. dave: perfect. i love the food example. i think there is a huge movement towards changing the food industry. you were talking beforehand, the food industry was very local, very natural, until about 50 years ago. so, for thousands of years, food work the same way. the past 50 years and when completely commercial and corporate and manufactured, and we are trying to see the shift which i think ties into everything we are talking about here in a big way, a natural way, which gets to the health

you talk about. how do we actually measure the healthy side of things? things to get people on -- furious from a healthy standpoint as well -- we're getting close to time. so, i tend to end things similarly. i am a big steve jobs fan. he always referenced wayne gretzky about the idea you want to speak where the puck will be. not where it is right now.basically a moving quickly . but in 45 seconds each, where do you see this going? where are you seeing it happen? kinda: all about consumers owning health, owning information, which we get a lot of pushback especially from the venture side because there like consumers are not motivated to be healthy, but we would challenge that to say we just have not made it easy for people to figure out how to be healthy. and that is where data comes. a big data, but that is where data comes to play.

they can figure out how to share with others. and the comparative part of here is what my genome looks like, i did really well on this diet. because for you, you are different in some way, but we can start to get that information in the hands of people and they are able to share with others, the network effect will happen. we need to have a social network for health that will rival some thing facebook. and i think it is moving the direction. ardy: i think we are on the brink of an era where we are not going to actually have to pay for genome sequencing. i think we are all on to get it for free. and someone else is going to pay for it. and i am personally interested in having a platform where people can actually, you know, get, you know, genome sequenced, get health information in one central location. because all of the data is siloed. we can take that and put it into one central repository, where all that data actually talk to one another and various

different researchers and clinicians can actually access that on a mass level, that is when you actually change disease, when you actually cure. dave: perfect. thank you both. great to have you. linda, you are flying back to the bay area. thank you for being here. ardy, we would love to continue the conversation. lots more to talk about. so, we will come back next year and do it for an hour and a half. thank you, guys. >> washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. sunday morning, donald trumps campaign manager kelly and conway shares the latest from the campaign, inquiry reaction to his immigration speech following his trip to mexico last week, and his outreach to the african-american community. lowy, transportation

reporter for the associate press, on the limitation and impact on the regulation of commercial drones. watch washington journal, life beginning at 7 a.m. eastern sunday morning. now, defense spending and budget priorities in the next congress and presidential administration. former pentagon comptroller andrt hale, alice rivlin, the president of the committee for responsible federal budgets outlined their recommendations. this is one hour and 35 minutes. michael: good morning, everyone, and welcome to brookings. last week well to the

of summer, depending on how you define it. guess in virginia we are done. kids are still enjoying one more week. hopefully, some of them are watching c-span to celebrate their final week. ,e will be involving you including those on the c-span telecasts, in the second half of our program. we will talk today about the broader federal budget but begin specifically with the pentagon budget and even more specifically than that, the war budget, or as it is more commonly known these days, the overseas contingency operation fund. that is a $60 billion thing. it was close to $200 billion at the peak of the war in iraq and afghanistan. it is still a lot of money but roughly 10% of the budget for iraq and afghanistan. talkind up needing to about the entire federal budget and certainly the budget control act, which has given us the andsures of sequestration such things over the years and

which could still do so again, -- this crowd you probably needs little reminding, but the budget control act would still be in effect for the entirety of the next president's term in office. today's discussion will be about if that is a good thing, if we should revise it, repeal it. that's where we will wind up, and that raises questions about the proper level of domestic investment and national defense spending and the entire federal budget for the united states. that's why we have this distinguished panel with rod ranging expertise. let me briefly introduce each of them. i'm honored and thrilled to have all three of them with me. then we will go to a discussion. i'm going to ask each of them a question or two in broad terms to get things going. andill talk for a while then involve you with your questions and concerns. the lineup begins with former undersecretary of defense robert hale, who is now