tv Charlie Rose PBS October 20, 2017 4:00pm-5:01pm PDT
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>> jeff: welcome to the program. i'm jeff glor of cbs news filling in for charlie who is on assignment. we begin tonight with a look at the rise of bitcoin with catherine wood, paul vigna and lily katz. >> it's so resillient is the interesting thing at least in the last year so i mean you had it split into two different currencies. you have bitcoin and bitcoin cash, and people were really scared before this happened and the price of bitcoin dropped and then it bounced right back up and then china banned these initial coin offings and then it bounced right back up. >> jeff: we continue with rich cohen. he has a new big called chicago cubs story of a curse. >> the cubs fan thing is people ask me why i'm a cubs fan. i don't know it was given to me as a kid but it's become so intense you try not to put your head through a wall during some
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of these games. >> jeff: we conclude with heidi ewing and her new movie one of us. >> we began with an organization called footsteps and footsteps has been helping people transition into a more secular life-style. they guard it ferociously and they are not listed on the website and it's a private space where people thinking of leaving come for help. and so we started talking to footsteps and took them about six months to agree that we could come and hang out in their lob e and in the inside footsteps with no camera and talk to people. and through those months and months of showing up and talking to people, we were able to find it. >> jeff: bitcoin, the chicago cubs and the netflix documentary one of us when we continue.
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>> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. bitcoin, the world's first significant and most popular crypto currency set records this month. prices soaring nearly $5900 before falling as much as 9% in the past few days. bitcoin's meteoric rise is the worldwide debate over the future of digital currency. here to discuss bitcoin are three experts, catherine wood is the founder ceo and cio of ark investment management, paul viggo yeah is a reporter at the wall street journal and co-author of the age of
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cryptocurrency how bitcoin are challenging the global economic order, and lily katz is a reporter at bloomberg news. welcome. paul let me start with you. there's been a lot of bitcoin talk recently. where is it right now? >> where it's at right now, i tell you it's probably in oh god, catherine you probably know too, probably the fourth or fifth kind of wave of interest of this thing. throughout its history it's waxed and waned in terms of the speculative fervor and the attention in the mainstream. certainly in terms of just price and dollars, this is the biggest move it's ever had. in terms of interest, probably the biggest, i mean i don't know if you could say it's totally in the mainstream but it's much further into the mainstream than it has been. >> catherine, is it still in hype phase? >> well right now the market cap we call it network value of bitcoin when he include both bitcoin and bitcoin cash a
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little esoteric is a little over a hundred billion dollars. so it's come up, it's come very fast but it's at a fraction of apple's valuation of amazon's valuation and we think it's a much bigger idea than either one of those. >> certainly a small fraction of the overall economy. >> yes a very small fraction. i think the market cap is like 180 billion last time i saw. there are like a thousand different digital coins. it was 12 billion a year ago. so it's been pretty wild the last year. >> the global economy is tens of trillions of dollars worth of value. >> but bitcoin is far and away the most popular. >> it's more than half of the total ecosystem at a hundred t if you would.e back a little bitcoin is invented in the wake of the global financial crises by and how?
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>> released in the original white paper sort of announcing the concept was released in october of 2008 sort of at the height of the financial crises by something calling themselves nakamoto. to this day we don't know who that really is. whoever that person was had been working on it before the financial crises. the christ hits. they release the white paper. january 2009, they launch the software. it's an open source software project. so nakamoto put the software out there for the world and anybody who want to adopt it and work on the project. so he starts in 2009, the economy's in the tank, the financial system has collapsed. the central bank had to pour in and put money into it and save it. it was kind of, not kind it was, it was geared as an alternative for the banking system. and at another time i think if he had released that paper and that idea might not have taken off but because he did it, i say he, it could be a she, it could be a they, it could be a group of people.
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there are all kinds of theories. because of the timing that nakamoto chose the thing really took off first in the sort of hacker hobbyist software developer communities and then it started to get out a little more little more, kept growing through 10, 11, 12, probably 12 or 13 it started kind of really step into the mainstream. >> this is one of most intriguing parts bit is the speculation over who nakamoto is. >> yes. several people came out and claimed to be but his or her identity has not been confirmed. >> hasn't been outed. >> people have come out and said this is nakamoto and that pepper says -- person says no i'm not. >> there's where you don't need a third party like a bank. they sort of conceptualize this world where transactions are cheaper because you're not going through a bank and they are more
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secure because these transactions are happening on the block chain which is this shared ledger of transactions. >> which is why the bank don't like it which is in part why jamie diamond slams bitcoin. sort of back tracks a little bit but there's been a lot of discussion. >> lot of discussion. this actually is increasing the public's interest in it so you have jamie diamond very public figure, very well-known along with howard marx of oak tree all negative. interestingly the following week after jamie's comment, james goreman coe of morgan stanley and blankline were speaking about it in a very different cone and i think it's because they're beginning to see trading opportunities. >> they're not endorsing it, they're just saying we're interested in finding out more about this because our clients lloyd in particular said this
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because our clients are asking bit. >> yes, yes. >> so started introducing more folks tight which leads to the question i don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves because there's much to talk about paul but it then leads to questions of regulation and not just potentially banks and financial services firms being involved but the government being involved. >> yes. and that's a very dense topic actually. but broadly speaking, we have a couple different moving parts there. one you have the people working on bitcoin itself and that project, another because there are crypto currencies that are like it. and initially a lot of them were very anti-government, anti-regulation, you know, the whole thing was designed as a hacker project. we're trying to go around the system and say create a network that you don't need these middle men. and then you started having businesses come in saying we could build a business on top of this and if we want legitimacy we need to be regulated. they started reaching up to the regulators.
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the last four or five years you've had this demic where one group is anti-government, anti-regulation and another group that says look we want to build this and bring this into the mainstream and this has value for people in their every days lives let's build regulations around this and then you have every regulator on the planet is now at the point where you have to figure out what this is and what it means to their economy and how they are going to address it. >> so explain this to us then because jamie diamond was very critical of it but also did say he believes the block chain technology is legit legitimatet is that? >> so basically the concepts behind bitcoin, the concept behind the software have broadly come to be called block chain technology. in this sort of broad set ideas essentially taking, creating a network where anything that can be digitized could be traded between two people directly.
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i have an asset i want to give you. let's say a mortgage deed, actually. you could take a mortgage deed and i could digitize it, stick it in a transaction on this software program, send it over to you. that gets time stamped in the network. and the idea is just that it's a weight, it's like e-mail actually. it's like trading e-mails but instead of just sending an e-mail back and forth what i'm sending to you and you're sending to me is something that represents value. that's really all the block chain is. when you get into bitcoin versus the block chain, bitcoin is this open soue permissionless network anybody can join, anybody can become part of it. what the banks are trying to build something they control. >> because it's verified publicly. >> yes. it's what you were talking about before, the open ledger. what happens with bitcoin every computer on the network has a copy of this ledger and every
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transaction gets updated on every ledger at the same time. so that it can be verified. and that process which puts everything out into the open make it all transparent. that is actually what kind of make the banks unnecessary because previously you needed a third party tracking all those transactions and keeping the books. >> in the original white paper they talk about proof versus kroammaryt. the system we have right now is based on trust. you trust a bank to keep your mind secure. this bitcoin system is based on proof because you have these computers solving these really complex math problems to verify the transactions. >> it could be a mortgage, it could also be a cup of coffee. >> yes it could. we're seeing more business to business these days. when people think i don't see this happening with cups of coffee, they can't conceptualize it but there's one way we have helped our investors conceptualize it. remember when technology experts said voice is going to be free one day.
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we had trouble understanding that. i did back in the day. and of course today we have voice over ip. what this is, is money over ip. so voice over ip is free. the transmission of money over ip will be free. again like the e-mail analogy there. and then this distinction block chain bitcoin. when we first started studying doing research in silicon valley, we heard a lot of companies say i like this block chain but i don't like bitcoin. we were saying wait a minute, as we were studying this in terms of the bitcoin block chain, you can't have that unless you build it out and incentivize the miners with the bitcoin. so you can't separate them unless in jamie's case, he wants a walled garden trusted network. he doesn't want what is called permissioned. the bitcoin block chain is permissionless. >> the argument on his behalf is
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that it's too vulnerable to hacking, it can't be controlled, there's so much, there's already volatility when it comes to the prices this bitcoin to be sure. but those who criticize it say it's just, it's dangerous. >> this is the same criticism we heard about the cloud when it first came about. everybody said well that can be hacked. that's true, anything can be hacked. but what the cloud was an open source system. when you've got a lot of eye balls watching a system as we do with the bitcoin block chain and a lot of people's livelihoods and businesses dependent on it. we've got a lot of people watching it from a security point of view and we're seeing when a hack starts the news travels really fast and it's stopped. so we actually think the permissionless block chains are very robust and very secure relative to the permission ones. >> i think the real argument
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isn't even that it is vulnerable to hacking or fishing scams, everything is. you look at some of our existing architecture, we'll use some techie terms, look at all the hacks that have happened. look at equifax. the systems we have built up over the last few decades are extremely vulnerable to hacking. hacking is not the real argument against bitcoin. the real argument against bitcoin is that it is a system that authorities cannot control. they don't control the money in it, they don't control who is using it and what they are doing it for. what regulators have to figure out for themselves, somebody like jamie diamond doesn't want that because that cuts into jamie diamond's business. regulators have to figure out is that something we have at least enough control over it's not going to destroy the economy.
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it's not going to up end the government that we can collect taxes on it. or are we willing to like accept some amount of for better or worse dark net type transactions. i mean bitcoin is relatively anonymous currency. cash is a completely anonymous currency. there's a lot going on riot -- right now. this is in its infancy and lots have to be figured out. >> it's not just the money, it's the technology. we've got three forces coming together here. you've got financial services and the regulators don't want to impede the technology. they don't want to be accused of preventing the next internet. so they are stepping lightly. and we're even seeing very recently, actually within the last week, scc and the cftc beginning to agree on what bitcoin versus other crypto assets are. some should be regulated by the sec and some should be regulated by the cftc the commodities exchange. and other thing that we see going on from a regulatory point
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of view is a fear on the part of regulators in the developed world they're going to prevent innovation so they're stepping lightly. >> what do you say to the investors when they look at the volatility what is it a thousand or so all the way close to 6,000 in the span of nine or ten months. not the first very dramatic swing up or down. it's happened. you don't think that's going to end any time soon. >> as i mentioned, we've sized it. it's about a hundred billion for bitcoin. that is a very small market right now. it's captured a lot of people's imaginations. we are going to go through hypes and then shakeouts. hypes and shakeouts. there will be regulatory news, there will be hacks. all of these things have already happened. we call this anti-fragile. it's being battle tested almost every day.
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china banning it, russia bang it. this is all tests bit has gone through and it dips and comes back. >> it's resill yept at least in the last year. you've had it split into two currencies. you have bitcoin and bitcoin cash. people were really scared before this happened and bitcoin prices dropped and then bounced right back up. >> is the big question right now how long the battle testing happens before it settles, paul. >> no. because i think that is together to continue for, i mean until bitcoin is at some, assuming it gets to some point -- >> that's not going to happen any time soon. >> that process is going to go on for a long time. when you talk about the price, there are a couple things, yes it's extremely volatile but there are people who love that kind of volatility. they're called traders. and they, you know, a lot of wall street traders are interested in this now because
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it is volatile. because you can make money trading it and the guys who are bitcoin traders who have been doing this for a long time, they are total keyboard cowboys. they love thing. they stay up all night and trade and they tonight care if they go up or down, they're just looking to make some money off it. part of bitcoin's attraction to that group is the fact it's volatile. the other thing that's important to keep in mind when you're talking about prices, this is still a very small groups and lot are holding it because they believe it's going to 10,000, 50,000, whatever price. in some ways i really think about it coin is a one way trade. it's a lot of longs in there, not a lot of shorts and not a lot of ways to short it. to some extent i think the price is, you know, it's not like a mature market. it's not like stocks where stocks are going down you know people are selling because they think there's something wrong with the company. it's not quite like that yet.
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>> we've done a study on the volatility, you can measure it. if you do it on a 12-month moving average basis and i know that's, you will see it had come down quite significantly. we had compared it to twitter's stock price. it actually dipped below that and it dipped below goals of volatility last year before this next round up. so the volatility has, compared to where it was in 11, 12, 13 has come down quite significantly though it is volatile. >> which is a natural progression of things one would think. >> sure. >> so really, what's the difference between buying and mining? >> so buying a crypto currency is just literally paying money to have a coin. mining is i like to think of it people sitting in their basement on the computer and it's called a mining computer and you have the computer run all these
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complicated math problems to verify the transaction happening on the block chain to digitally time stamp and make that are she's no double spending happening. you can think of it like if you have someone counterfeiting you can have two. >> tell me the ditches between bitcoin in 2eubg. >> because we're in the public market and can only buy financial securities there's one way we can get registered export to bitcoin and it's only bitcoin we can access and that's through and over the counter security called gbgt we're trading in the stalk market that trades over the counter. you may know more about the fees. >> so the fees have changed over time for bitcoin. one of the biggest debates recently has been people call the scaling debate and basically
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people are concerned that bitcoin transactions are getting too expensive and slow. and that is actually why bitcoin split in two was these two sort of rival camps could not come to an agreement and the slowness of the network so they moved some of the transactions off of one network basically. >> if i'm buying a cup of coffee for a couple bucks i pay with a credit card, mastercard and very is a will take a couple points, american express will take more. where is the money going? obviously the money's going to starbucks or wherever you buy that cull cup of coffee. who else is taking. >> with bitcoin initially when it was designed one feature was there was a fee. everyone thinks bitcoin transactions are free. they're not actually free there's a very small fee associated with it. that fee goes to the miners.
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it's part of their work for processing transactions. in the early days, the capacity of bitcoin to process transactions is capped. how many can do per second. it's just a design of the network. in ther days the transactions were so small that it didn't matter and that fee which is a voluntary fee that i as a the transactor would offer the miner you didn't have to offer them anything because there was no strain on capacity. this year because there were so many more transactions you're starting to get bottle necks. what people were doings they were offering higher fees to get their transactions put to the front of the line. >> some countries are em em embg it and some are banning it. >> china. >> china is like -- north korea might be stealing it, south korea is starting to embrace it. over in europe, they are pretty
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pro. switzerland is pro. uk is interested in it. the u.s. i think, we're pretty positive. when you talk to regulators and government types, they see there could be some value there and something they want to help build out. so you're right, every country kind of is at the point where they are trying to come to grips witness. >> they're doing it at two points of view monetary policy and power, that way. i think that's one reason china did it, you know. this was a way to get capital out also. they were trying to control that. regulators are thinking about policy, monetary policy and capital movements. but the technology is where they have to do a double take because they're saying wait a minute, who banned this then we are banning this potential engine of innovation like the internet was. this is where the worldwide web was in the early 90's. do we want to do that? no. especially in the developed
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world. just a very careful analysis. it was interesting, christine laguard of the imt she believed is going to be extremely disruptive and came out saying so a few weeks ago because she during late 09 gained such credibility for calling a spade a spade. i think a lot of people sat up and took notice. >> cryptocurrency. more conversations to come. catherine wood, paul vigna and lily katz, thank you all very much. >> jeff: rich cohen is here. he's an accomplished writer and editor and the co-creator of the hbo series vinyl and a life long fan of the chicago cubs. his new book, the chicago cubs, story of a curse, tells the team's story from its founding in 19 18 0 through the 2016 triumph at the world series. the book blends memoir, reporting, history and baseball theology to explore what was the long held question why can't the
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cubs win. i am pleased to have rich cohen back at this table. welcome. >> great to be here, thanks. >> life is great. you can die in peace, the cubs did win. >> basically as a cubs fan your identity is being on a road trip that never ends and the road trip kind of ended for me a little bit. >> you still want to win this year. >> more than ever. the cubs fan thinking is people ask me why i'm a cubs fan. i don't know it was just given to me when i was a kid but it's become so intense you july try not to put your head through a wall during some of these games. >> i may mention by the time this interview may be out but the dodgers are. was it as satisfying as you thought it might be. >> it was disorienting because cubs haven't won in 108 years. the con's announcer had a great line everyone is entitled to a bad century. losing became so regular and so
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intense and happened in such great ways we turned it into a kind of religion. i always thought being a cubs fan made you kind of better because cubs fans are kind of like buddhists. you've given up the whole idea of ambition, you were just enjoying the game. when you wore the cubs hat you told the world my kingdom is not of this world. we won and it's sort of like the red sox fans went through the same thing the whole identity changes and you realize your children grow up in a very strange world where they think the cubs are a great baseball team. >> you said it was never a curse or a voodoo it was just a fear. >> i think one of the last interviews for sports illustrator, the biggest, the point where the curse became really serious was 1969 where they had this incredibly great team up by like seven games in september and they slapsed. i asked ernie banks and he said what's the curse. he said it's not voodoo it's fear. basically when you've never won and your team never won and
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you're getting into these high pressure games suddenly you don't know how to win and you kind of choke. what the owner of the cubs said to me is interesting he thought the reason they didn't win you build a baseball to win over 162 game season and then you get in the play offs and it's a crap shoot. in order to increase your odds you have to go back multiple years. and the cubs never repeated in the play-offs since the early 1900's. this year, whatever happens, i'm reminding myself to be grateful because they broke the first and i lived to see it and a lot of people didn't. this is their third straight appearance in the nlcs which is not since 1906, 07 and 08 and gives themself a chance in the end. >> it's a fear among the players, ownership and fans. it's pervasive. >> it's like a psychosis and the one thing that was hard for me is the fames game where a fan reached for the ball and the
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cubs fell apart very close to the world series. and the fans at wrigley instead of taking it out on the fans turned on bartman the fan. it seem to me kind of a self hate like it's our fault for what's happening. as a cubs fan something is happening and you don't know what you did to deserve it. >> i'm a bills fan. we're winning to get over that hump. take me back to the genesis of the team. i mean, why, how did the cubs come to be and it certainly wasn't the same way back then that it is now. >> right. i'm not really a sports writer. interestingly because it's american historyion down to where you can understand it. in this book, and i always feel like if you tell the story of the cubs correctly you're telling the story of america in a fun house mirror.
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basically baseball came out of the civil war in a way as we know it. there are a lot of town teams and local team. in cincinnati they -- they beat the crap out of the great chicago teams. it so angered the chicago businessmen. if you know chicago, the attitude with a do they think they're better than us and they put together even a better team of ringers. that's the cubs. they were originally call the white stockings as opposed to the red stockings and they beat the crap out of the red stockings and went on and became the con and their history is completely entwined with the history of chicago in america. their really first great stadium burned down in the chicago fire. they built, the great shame of them and the real source of the curse their captain who really created the color line in baseball. then they built this great team with the famous double play combination tinker ever to chance in 1906 they won 116 game
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in a 154 game season. they were like the yankees became in the 40's, 50's, 60's. they dominated. >> how did they go from like the yankees of the 40's, 50's and 60's how did they go from that time to filling off. >> they stayed good. if you look at their record they won like 700 games in like eight seasons or seven seasons. they stayed good up through world war i. they would be in the world series but lose. william wrigley acquired the time and what happened is it's kind of a corporate thing too. you have a he were corporate culture. sports doesn't make sense as a business unless you love the sport and want to win. william wrigley wanted to win and his son didn't really care about baseball. when asked his favorite sport this is kind of a famous thing he said craps which i didn't think was a sport you know. he sort of made this -- is it a
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sport? maybe if you move your arm back and forth you can break a sweat. he said i'm not going to put money into the team. didn't care about baseball. i've got to give fans a reason to come out so he made wrigley field the gem and jewel and became trapped in this kind of beautiful museum where we didn't have winning but we had wrigley. >> what a tree post season in terms of the teams the biggest cities in america, new york, la, chicago, houston all competing here, three of them have fantastic pedigrees, what happened with houston and hard harveys and base be is pretty pleased with what they've seen this fall. >> not only that. i think personally is better than it's ever been. like the quality of it. the games are maybe a little bit too long. i have little kids and you have little kids and it's move away from football and where are those kids going to go. baseball, they are so athletic
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now. that's a great thing about the cubs, it's almost a throw back to the dead ball era of baseball and how athletic the teams are. >> even with all the excitement and my son is big and huge into baseball right now. i was in my local sports store the other day and he said that football stuff still outsells baseball stuff ten to one. >> really. i think it's going to change. i wrote a book about the 85 bears. the more stuff you read about the heads injuries, it's just hard to accept as a parent letting your kid damage their brain basically. and baseball always was america's sort of first sport. the cubs are the first sort of pro team in america and it's linked up to american history that there is something special about it. and even the bears, chicago bears. it was started by george hallis because he started as the ride fielder of the new york yankees, failed and then started the chicago bears who played in rickly field and were named the bears just to distinguish them
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from the cubs. they've been intertwined and base ball is the first sport. >> what weren't they able to do for a hundred plus years. >> what he said was are you willing to let this team get bad so bad you won't be able to have dish out in chicago. that's how bad they have to get. the team was owned by the tribune company and they were airing the tbaims and they always the team to seem like a plausible contender. so they never let them truly fall apart. rick said he wouldn't have bought the team if they won the world sees. he want to be the one. because he knows in chicago if you broke the curse you basically go to heaven without any stop in purgatory, you know. he want to be the guy that did that and he signed on to that. if you were watching the cubs in those years they were some of the worst teams in cubs history lost over a hundred games. i think they never really let the team fall apart like that.
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and they let this sort of, it's really an interesting thing like it's a story of the power of a narrative. the story of the cubs love of losers actually had an effect on the mentality of the team. i traveled around with them in 2000 for a story to figure out why they can't win. that's what they said. joe jarred or was with the cubs then. look at all the pictures. they are guys celebrating winning together on the mound. i said there are pictures of wrigley field and he sewed yes but individuals celebrating individual accomplishments. >> there's that much psychology to it. >> yes especially baseball which is a weird game. hitting a baseball you see it with the cubs. the cubs i think are a great tam and i think they're the best team in baseball because probably i'm a cubs fan. because the cubs have one really fatal flaw over now and then they stop hitting and their bats go to sleep at once, i picture them in a bed tucked in and i yell at them.
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that's why we were swept in the usls. it's momentum and it's a big deal in baseball. that's why they fell apart right at the end of the season. every cubs fan has the one team that almost killed them. in 1984 that cubs female almost died. that's why i became a bears fan because the bears were penicillin for like a wounded cubs fan. that team was, i don't remember the number, five or six outs away and just things that seemed strange easy plays couldn't be made. and you can see that's where ernie banks is talking about the fear as you approach the finish line almost overwhelmed them. >> who was on that. >> that's harry carry's all animal infield. leon at first, rhino and sandberg at second. larry at short and ron the penguin at third and once every four or five days steve trout n the mound. i remember arguing with my father that the under fielder
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was too soon to tell but it looked he was probably a better center fielder than joe de maggio. my father is a yankees fan. he grew up in new york and that's the thing he took me to my first cubs game. after my first game he promised me not to become a cubs fan. that teen will ruin your live and all endeavor to end in defeat. >> talk about your kids if you can. >> they are cubs fans. i didn't really do it intentionally, i think it's just what they call modeling. there's a point where we're all watching the cubs at my house and they're in their cubs jerseys and their cubs are falling apart and i looked at them and got that cubs feeling and i looked at them and thought oh my god what have i done, i'm a monster. this is child abuse, why am i bassing this on to another generation. >> it's easy for them now after they won. >> yes. the cubs won when i was 48 years old. if they had won when i was 16 i
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would be six inches taller, much more successful, much more handsome. >> how is the dynamic between the cubs and the white socks now in chicago is what? >> it's the white sox fans are going to hate me but basically i feel like from my friends, the white sox fans have a lot of resentment towards the cubs and the cubs fans don't really care. the white sox are incredible franchise too. and the white cox where harry carry comes from and the architect who built wrigley field. they took the name white stockings from the cubs but the white sox will always be the team in my mind that fixed the 1919 world series. >> what was it like, what is it like writing a book like this as sort of an outsider, not the cubs beat reporter. >> that's my whole thing. i don't want to be inside. i don't want access. i want to be outside.
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i want to actually literally get it from the grandstand. i want to be with the fans. i want to be in the bleachers with the guy drinking beer. harry when i was a kid he used to do one week a game every year he would broadcast them from the bleachers. he would get increasingly drunk as the game went on and when there was no way he could see what was happening. he was on feet away from home plate and he was describing everything wrong. one of the gray things watching the cubs games was disparity when what he said and what was happening. but he got the bigger story what it means to be a cubs fan, what it's like to sit in the beachers and the cubs were great. this is a thing the cubs had over the white sox. they had no lights which meant they played all day games. if you grew up on the north side or north shore you could get on the train and be down there after school for the third inning and there was your first taste to freedom and being kind of part of the grown up world. >> it will be nice to see vince call some of the dodgers world
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series. >> they did that with the cubs. they tort of recreated harry carry. see the cubs is a hugely important role for a con. why was mr. ernie banks mr. cubs. he's probably the most skilled player but it was his attitude which is we had terrible teams and you needed somebody to hook your hopes on. the fact that he was so sort of optimistic in all the failure, everybody can about a be gracious when they win the person who can be gracious when they lose is the real aristocrat and has real character. it's how people react when they win but also how they react when they lose. when they lost the world series in game stephen last year i was so excited but my focus immediately went to the cleveland indians dugout to see them because that's who i really identify with. that's the side i've been on my whole life. >> the book is the chicago cubs story of a kurks the author is rich cohen. good to see you.
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>> go cubs. >> jeff: one of us is the new documentary from heidi ewing. it offers a rare book into the hasidic community and one of the former members persecuted, harass and shunned for leaving. it will appear in netflix and in theatres on friday october toth. >> i was living a double life for a little over a year. i called my mom and said hey mom can i talk to you. are you sitting down. i said i'm not religious anymore. she said okay. and she just hung up. and we didn't speak for seven years. i looked in the mirror and saw
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something that's not what i want to be so i chose a different path. i don't know anything. i have to learn how people live. google. i couldn't google how to google because i didn't know how to google in the first place. the more of a questioner you are, the more likely you are to leave. but there's a design in society anybody who leaves ends up in jail, they never make it out there. >> end of the years the spouse would beat me. if you don't show up in court then you lose your children. >> nobody leaves the hasidic community unless they are willing to pay the price.
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>> there's people out there banging down the door and there are adult men outside and i'm alone with the children. >> do you know these people. >> they are my husband's family. >> joining me now is one of the directors, heidi ewing. welcome. >> thanks for having me. >> this is a searing documentay heart breaking. what first brought you to this subject, i live actually in an ultra orthodox neighborhood and rachel adjacent to an hasidic neighborhood. as new yorkers of course we interact in some way. we live, we share the city with the hasidic community. it's a great curiosity about secular new yorkers about this very close this is her group who is very identifiable by their dress. and they are not often making eye contact with us so really it started with a point of curiosity. >> not making eye contact with
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you by design. >> yes. the hasidic community by design does not interact with outsiders unless they absolutely must. >> how big is the community. >> it's about a on, on -- to,00n new york. it started in europe and actually in yearn europe the community wasn't as this is slur as today but the vast majority of hasidic jews were exterminated in the holocaust because they refused to fit n the vast major died in the holocaust. when they came to mostly brooklyn and settled in new york they became much more cloistered, very suspicious about outsiders and the theory
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is this is a community that is traumatized by the holocaust and passes that down generation to generation. and that is really the reasoning. they would like to be left alone. >> you mentioned you followed three different people as they try to leave this community with varying degrees of difficulty. one of them is eddie who has seven children. this is eddie talking about the very strict rules for children in the hasidic community. >> children will never enter a secular library for any purpose. a lot of rules, so many so many rules. my son was in second grade. it's hasidic schools are using
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it. check out all the girls. that's a magic marker. how my son answers, how do you know which is which? reading and education is so deprived in the community; that's how they keep their role. >> how old is eddie. >> she's now . >> she has seven kids. >> that's right. >> when she first had them she was 18. >> that's right. >> when did she know this was not a world she want to be a part of. >> she never planned onlying the community. she suffered a lot of abuse over a 12 year marriage and the children also survived a lot of physical abuse. she want a divorce. she had gone to the rabbi many
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times over the years because it is discouraged to go to secular courts to call the the . she had tried that many times with no success. so eventually she got fed up and she got an order of protection. she went to the force and that was a breach a protocol. that was considered a betrayal the community looked at that as a be betrayal. it was a quick house of cards. she's pushed out of the community and the community awe -- attempts to take her children. she just wanted a divorce. she was willing to raise the kids hasidic. >> she no longer has her children. >> she no longer has her children. >> how did you get to know eddie and get this kind of access. >> you haven't seen a film about
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hasidic jews or hasidic jews are unhappy. how do you know, how do you find people who are going to speak to you. my co-director and i were secular women so we never thought we would make a film like this. however we read an article about this organization called foot steps and foot steps has been for over ten years helping people transition. they guard their membership is he very ferociously and gealously and their address is not listed on the website and it's a very private space people thinking of leaving come for help. we started talking to foot steps and took them about six months to agree we could come and hang out the in their lobby and inside footsteps with no camera and talk to people. through those months and months and months of showing up and talking to people, we were able to find them. >> so footsteps is the organization that shepherds these folks through this process when they decide they may want to leave this community. >> that's right. they are pretty much the only one. >> what sort of threats or
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challenges does footsteps face. >> foot steps is reviled and despised and looked as a threat. they look like an organization removing them from the community. we observe neither of those things to be true. even if someone in the community finds out you've been to foot steps you're on notice. it's not like you'll ever tell anyone you've been inside until you're positive you would like to leave. >> talk about this what happened in to to 11, a speech as it relates to the hasidic community and what the rabbis would like to see. >> this was a mastif an sty internet conference. it's very arresting when we found those clips. we had heard about this through one of our characters ari and
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that rally made him interested in what they were row hibitted from looking at. it's a cottage industry. businesses in the community that can filter your cell phone, filter your computer so you can only do searches perhaps for a local shopping experience or something like that. and so it's very guardeds. obviously the jean genie is out of the bottle watching any secular films or surfing the internet. >> ari he needs to learn how to google to google. what does he learn then in this community growing up. >> well ari is a very traditional boy, he was large else by a very powerful sect in williamsburg. basically torah, religious studies. his first language is yiddish. they teach it because they must by law but apparently kids leave
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during class and parents don't really care if they study english according to ari. he went to an all boys school where there's no premium on proper education. you come out of a community you're sell, and looking at the internet. that's why more people don't leave. how can you make it out here. >> ari cuts his hair. what's the reaction something like that happens. >> yes. the side curls are an identifying marker for a male in the community. that's a provocative act. it's like a women who removes her ambiguous or who wears pants. cutting off your past is an active rebellion that means i'm no longer with you. >> so has the hasidic community, have they reacted to this? , have they had a dialogue with you. >> our attempts to reach out to the community, almost all of them were met with the response they're not interested in
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participating. if there are any people who left the community represented in the movie they would not speak to us they wished us the best of luck. including the representatives out there in the community. we do have a feeling and a sense of the elders in the community through some the characters you'll see in the movie and one lovely gentleman does sit with ari and you get a sense of some of the camaraderie and kinship that does exist among men and women in the community. we haven't had a dialogue with them. they haven't seen the film. they're not supposed to watch netflix. i can't imagine many people will see it. we reached out but was pretty much shut down. >> eddie believed she was threatened and harmed by those who didn't want her to leave. >> she was threatened by her husband and others. we have a series of phone calls in the film that you hear. she also suffered a very
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mysterious bike accident days after she was told that the bike was not accept, that they saw her riding a bicycle which they consider absolutely bad behavior, immodest behavior. she was stalked, something that came out in the trial. she was followed for many months and basically made to feel afraid, isolated and alienated. her family sisters brothers neighbors, everyone stopped talking to her basically on the same day. she lost everything after she filed for order of protection. >> what's the reason given when the speech is like the one that we saw at city field given, get rid of the phone, get rid of everything that provides any sort of communication to the outside world. why? >> the community for the most part believes that technology and this sort of select ter information -- secular information is a threat to their system. they want people to be born and raiptzed in the community to
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repopulate for the six million that died. the hall calls is -- holocaust is a reference every single day. the outside world will take people's attention away and too ambitious for higher education and put off having children. if you can keep it out you can keep the community in tact. >> how do they make money? what jobs, what are typical jobs inside the hasidic community are what. >> the majority of the community are actually at or below the poverty line. williamsburg in brooklyn is the at sort of have all of theies money and they share that. they pay for the weddings and funerals and charities and those sorts of things. it used to be more of the garment and diamond industry for the hasidic community. now it's actually real estate. a large amount of the real estate and park and williamsburg and other parts of brooklyn, crown heights for example is owned by this hand full of families so they are funding a lot of the community but the
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rest are really relying on social services. >> they make money through rentals of property or what. >> constructions, rentals, buying and selling of buildings. >> what do you hope this documentary does? >> you know, sunlight is important. sunlight is the best disinfect opportunity as bran dice once said and we believe that. we're shining light on the community this is sort of rating in the shad shadows and that ee understands what's going on in the community and talk about the abuses also that are happening. >> how much appreciation or connection do you think there is inside brooklyn from the folks who lived there outside of the hasidic community right now? is there any, i mean you lived there and you see it. i mean, do you say hi? >> now i say hi to everyone.
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absolutely. i learned a little yiddish along the way. the community is not looking to interact with secular people and i think when you go into those neighborhoods you feel that. >> jeff: heidi ewing. the documentary is called one of us on netflix. thaf >> thank you so much. >> thank you. >> for more visit us on pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org
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