as well. especially the housing market. are we racing towards the next bubble? if so, is it time to rethink homeownership? i'm abby huntsman. if you are unsure about whether to rent or buy, our friends at the "new york times" will show us a simpler way to crunch the numbers. >> look, speaking of numbers, invest a few minutes in today's barometer. i'll make a case for why bankers aren't all bad. i should know. i was one. you are the first class to graduate since 9/11 who may not be sent into combat in iraq or afghanistan. a question each of you will face is not whether america will lead, but how we will lead? as we move to a train and advise mission in afghanistan, our reduced presence there allows us

to more effectively address emerging threats from the middle east and north africa. it has been our willingness to work through multi-lateral channels that kept the world on our side. >> president obama told graduates at the u.s. military academy at west point that our reduced presence in afghanistan allows washington to redirect resources towards the changing face of global terrorism. the commander in chief laid out plans for a $5 billion counterterrorism partnership. it's intended to help train other nations in coordination with the state department. >> we will work with lebanon, with turkey, with iraq, with jordan, with others in order to do a better job of being able to

counter a rise of increasing numbers of terrorist groups. >> the roll-out comes just days after the president announced his plan to end the war in afghanistan by the time he leaves office and just days before he leaves for another overseas trip. this time to europe. that trip is all about foreign policy. the president is traying to convince nato allies he will stand by them in the face of any possible aggression from russia. he will also meet with the g-7 for the first time since exiting russia from a from the group. before he leaves, the president is under intense pressure here at home to use a heavy hand. >> none of us who will worry about americans' national security and have lived through these crisises for many, many years want to send americans into harm's way, but we do want to have a strong and steadfast america. it not that we're weak. we're not. it's a matter of our reliability, and around the world they believe we are

unreliable. >> let's start with today's commencement speech with retired u.s. army colonel medal of honor recipient and west point professor colonel jack jacobs. colonel, the president is talking about the end of combat operations in afghanistan, but he is also talking about nearly 10,000 u.s. troops staying there after the end of the year. what does it mean to say the war is over if we're leaving 10,000 troops in the country? >> well, it's a very good question indeed. we've been there for a long, long time, and in actual fact, haven't accomplished a great deal. we've gotten ourselves to the point where we decided that the only way we're going to satisfy ourselves with the mission is to leave. in actual fact, if you look at it in the military standpoint, you are going to need somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 people if you want to accomplish what the president and the national command authority german joint chiefs of staff really expect to do, and that is to train the afghans so they'll be able to protect themselves, be able to feed themselves, be able to take

care of all the logistical requirements and so on, and we're not going to do that. the country is war-weary. we're going to take 30,000 out right away and leave a relatively small number of people where -- it's not going to accomplish the mission everybody says it is. when we get out in 2016 my guess is, and everybody else's guess is that the country won't be any better off. it may be actually much worse off. >> colonel, stay with us, please. let's bring in howard fineman, editorial director of the huffington post media group. the usual suspects. the overall reaction from republicans has been pretty muted. senator bob corker, the republican ranking member on senate foreign relations, issued a statement saying, "i applaud the president's announcement today that he will support the size of the residual security forces requested by u.s. commanders. howard, has the bipartisan consensus in washington come

around to getting away from an indefinite commencement to afghanistan? >> i think for the most part, yes. it's the longest war in american history. as colonel jack said, it's a murky story with no definitive conclusion. not the kind of war americans like to fight. while we may be at risk of allowing afghanistan after 2016 to not really fulfill our hopes for civility, i think the political consensus here is pretty clearly with regard to afghanistan enough is enough, and the president, don't forget, got elected back in 2008 offering a different take overall on the use of massive military force in places like iraq. he did support the surge in afghanistan for sure, but i think he and most of the american people, and most of the republicans have had enough with afghanistan. colonel jack, he was a rather strong and stirring speech about

the value and importance of sometimes not fighting. let's learn a little bit of it. >> since world war ii some of the most costly mistakes came not from our restraint, but from our willingness to rush into military adventures without thinking through the consequences. u.s. military action cannot be the only or even primary component of our leadership in every instance. just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail. >> how do you feel as a military man -- how do you feel about the commander in chief being so fervently in belief that we need to be restrained? >> military people have been saying that for a long time. the military instrument of policy has been, but should not be the default instrument of policy. one of the reasons we have used the military to the exclusion of

everything else is quite frankly we've not been very good at use saysing other instruments of policy. diplomacy, the economic instrument, and we certainly haven't integrated all three of those into some sort of coherent exercise of our national power. >> one of the reasons for this and not the only one is that there is not yet any real coherent mission of what our strategic objectives ought to be if you talk to people inside the belt way, people who are operators in the military and other establishments. they'll tell you the same thing. we need some guidance. what is it we're trying to accomplish and then we'll tell you what we can do to do it? >> i want to hit on that point, actually, because there has been real criticism. around obama's foreign and national security policies and not just from republicans, but from both sides of the aisle. criticism on his inability to really define what exactly our role is on the world stage, but also on hits his reluctance to intervene and whether that's dealing with syria or his most

limited response. how much is this addressed today is political? if you read through the lines, this plan would allow president obama to claim that he was the one, he was the one who ebbed the wars in both iraq and afghanistan. is this more about obama trying to define his presidency than anything else? >> well, yeah. >> go ahead, howard. >> i think it's partly that. i think it's in some respects it's less a foreign policy -- immediate foreign policy speech with all kinds of new policy directions than it is a sort of legal document like kind of an argument saying i do, in fact, have a foreign policy. what he has done is kind of looked at the last several years and put a shape on it almost retroactively and come up with his doctrine of every -- just because we have a big hammer,

doesn't mean we need the nail -- that every event, situation is not a nail. that's obviously the take-away line from this. i think much of the speech is actually pretty unobjectionable. if you read it carefully, it allows the full range of everything. we can go it alone if we have to. every conceivable oping is included 234 there. the overall theme that we are sort of the conveners in chief, and that america is now the sort of convening power for training, for alliances, for international consensus, and stressing that at the west point i think is as good as a definition that president obama is what he has been about as president. >> colonel jack, to that point, you know, you just mentioned that we haven't always been very

effective, to put it diplomatically, at using other instruments of policy than military force. the president announces specific michigan tiff in the speech today. a $5 billion counterterrorism partnership fund to work specifically with middle east and north african countries. it would help train partner countries. it would help enable allies counter terror efforts. is this the sort of step in the right direction that would enable us to have some of those more effective policy opings where we are not the lead actor, but we're empowering the actors in the region? >> well, certainly one of the things that we need to do in order to keep ourselves safe and our allies safe and prevent the spread of terrorism and all the president was doing was, you know, we're already doing that. we have lots and lots of people in africa doing the kinds of things that already the president was talking about. all he did was say what the initial tag was going to be. those aren't the only things we

need to do. we need to do a better job certainly to be able to counter the economic perceptions and motivations of our european allies, for example, when we say we want to squeeze russia, let's assume we really want to do that. we want to skis russia over ukraine to have the europeans effectively say, no, we're not buying into any of that stuff. we'll do some things to sort of paper over it, but we're want in this with you because we have huge economic relationships with russia, and we're not going to squash them. our ability to exercise our will, forget about the military instrument of policy. our ability to exercise our influence is greatly reduce and we need to do something about it in all areas, not just africa. >> colonel jack jacobs, howard fineman, thank you. up next, his own words with nbc's brian williams. the cycle rolls on for wednesday, may 28th. way to get your fiber. try phillips fiber good gummies.

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we are back with some breaking news. a new call this afternoon for veterans fairs secretary eric shinseki to resign after a pretty damaging initial report from the d.a. inspector general about patient care at their facilities. the report identified some 1,700 vets who were simply left off appointment waiting lists. also, allegations of sexual harassment and bullying by mid and senior level managers. it specifically deals with the v.a.'s phoenix facility which has been at the center of the scandal. the report also calls the problem systemic throughout the agency. there's certainly much more to come where this story is

concerned, and we will, of course, be following all of it for you. now on to the spin. nearly one year ago edward snowden became a household name when he released classified documents on secret surveillance programs. he exposed the nsa mass surveillance operation and how it worked. he is a wanted man. he searched for a safe haven. for ms. he has been in exile in russia. the u.s. has insisted snowden was a low-level analyst, but in an exclusive interview with nbc brian williams snowden lamz his role was much larger than that. >> i have wourpd worked undercover overseas. i have worked for the national security agency undercover yo seas, and i have worked for the defense agency as a lecturer where i developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure in the most hostile and dangerous environments around the world, so when they say i'm a low level

systems administrator, that i don't know what i'm talking about, i say it's somewhat misleading. >> be sure to catch the full interview tonight at 10:00 eastern on your local nbc station. even with the advanced clips, we have seen there's already plenty to talk about here. guys, i watched -- i jetted home last night to make sure i caught this because this is really the third time i've heard edward snowden this week. i know he did something with "the guardian" earlier, but for many people this is the first time people are getting a sense of who he is and how he talks. what really struck me was how wicked smart this guy is. this is not just some computer geek that was on the low totem pole working for the government, as the administration has led us to believe. i think president obama called him a systems administrator, and i guess it makes sense for them to make him sound the least legitimate as possible to make themselves feel better. it's incredibly misleading to the american people, and it's also very dishonest in my opinion, but here's my take on snowden. i think he is putting

self-preservation before his cause. if his goal is to protect the american people, then act like a hero and be courageous and come back to the united states. i mean, what he is doing is simply pulling on the lion's tail and running away. i mean, that's the way i look at it. if you really want to make a difference here, then face the consequences and come talk about it here at home. we are already having a debate, and i think he has ignite thissed debate. have some courage. what he has done is coward esby running away. i think he needs to be here talking about it, and this is something that secretary john kerry has spoken about a lot. most recently, let's take a listen. >> if mr. snowden wants to come back to the united states today, we'll have him on a flight today. we would be delighted for him to come back. he should come back and that's what a patriot would do. a patriot would not run away and look for refuge in russia, cube yashgs or some other country. a patriot would stand up in the united states and make his case to the american people, but he has refused to do that.

>> i think secretary kerry makes a credible point here. i think he is right. >> i don't really care whether snowden comes back to the united states or not. i think, you know, the story we talk about it like it's a story about edward snowden, but really it's about a story about the information that edward snowden released. it led to policy changes. we got congress acting with prohibiting certain collection practices that he revealed. some of the information he released, in my view, was damaging to u.s. policy interests without any clear policy reason why that information should have been made available to the public. information about specific operations, the way that we were spying on, you know, the russian prime minister and such. i think his record is mixed. we don't -- i don't think he is going to come back. we're probably never going to punish him. that's too bad. we should just deal with the information that he brought us. we should react to the things that we learned that were unnerve and change them. >> we talk about him like he is a hero. he can't come and face it. >> if we kept fewer secrets, we wouldn't need so many edward

snowdens, so many people that aren't trustworthy. we have five million people with security clearances, in part because our surveillance state is so large. >> i think you're right. there's two edward snowden conversation that is we need to have, and the discussion that he brings up in terms of what we've been doing collecting information on americans is very valuable. we could make the argument that he was patriotic in that, but the other revelations in terms of what we were doing overseas, that is traitorous behavior. that is immature maifr. it is unconscionable. there's no reason why we shouldn't be spying on foreign leaders. we need to know what they are doing. especially since we leave american soil. there's two sort of conversations. i think what he did in terms of

wreck whatting we do in terms of seas are very difficult to deal with. i also think i immediate to see him come back. i don't really see why he would kwoom back and go to jail. then he couldn't be able to talk at all. >> definitely our facebook relationship status with edward snowden is complicated. i mean, part of the conversation is interesting to me too because i feel like we have this american urge to, like, put him in which box does he go in? is he a patriot or a traitor? he has to be one or the other. there can't be any mixture. to your point -- both of your points, he created this dialogue that i think has been incredibly important, and i also agree with everything he released but because there has been such an encroachment post-9/11, such an erring on the side of everything secret and everything collected by the government, i think that edward snowden was necessary.

>> he has been allowed to be used by putin. putin put him on his web cast. edward snowden asked him some pat questions about his -- about the surveillance there and, of course, putin says, oh, everything is above board. >> we all come from different places. i'm excited to see the rest of it later on tonight. up next, the world continues to react this afternoon to the death of a literary icon. remembering maya angelou, and your headlines for the day. that's next. care what age you are.

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maya angelou, one of america's greatest writers passed away this morning at the young age of 86. she was at her home in north carolina. no cause of death was given, but she had recent will he canceled appearances. angelou, a woman of brilliance, grace, and towering dignity came to international prominence in 1969 after the publication of her memoir "i know why the caged bird sings." an inspiring and haunting telling of her youth in the jim crow south in 1993 she delivered the inaugural poem at the swearing in of president clinton. >> on this new day you may have the grace and look into your sister's eyes and into your brother's face. your country and say simply, very simply, with hope, good morning. >> in 2011 angelou was awarded the medal of freedom by president obama.

angelou's final public statement was this tweet. "listen to yourself and in that quietude you might hear the voice of god." classes are back in session at the university of california santa barbara day for the first time since friday night's deadly rampage. a black ribbon hangs at the entrance of campus. it's to honor the six victims killed by a 22-year-old gunman who then took his own life. the father of one of the victims, christopher michael martinez, appeared on msnbc last night. he told ari that the grieving process is nothing if it isn't followed up by action. >> people that were in a position to do something come to me and tell me how sorry they were. as i see it, they're at fault. that includes the president. i don't care. i mean, my son died, and i believe it could have been prevented. contrary to reports, l.a. clippers owner don sterling said he will fight the nba to keep control of his team. sterling responded to the league's punishment for those racist comments calling it draconian. commissioner adam silver has

imposed a life-long ban on sterling and is trying to force him to sell. team owners meet next week to vote on stripping sterling of his ownership, and that is your news cycle. among the many benefits of bringing troops home that the president highlighted at west point today, the ability to redirect the billions of dollars we've been sending on the war in afghanistan. the message our next guest in front of the show sister simone campbell is absolutely on board with. you might remember her famous nuns on the bus nationwide tour where she road with her fellow nuns to promote progressive change in connection with catholic values, or who can forget her powerful speech at the democratic national convention in 2012? now her group is pushing what some, like myself, my colleagues have the agenda calling for pentagon budget cuts, support for low income earners, raising the minimum wage and immigration reform. she recently relike i said a new book entitled "a nun on the bus." recounting her unexpected

journey in politics, fighting for faith, family, and fairness. sister simone joins us now from washington. sister, it's so lovely to have you here with us today. >> delied to be with you, crystal. thanks. one of the things that i loved in reading your book was this sense of the unexpected journey that you found yourself on, and, in fact, the idea for the nuns on the bus sparking the platform of the nuns on the bus came out of a censure by the vatican of the group network that you were executive director of. it's been a really exciting and unexpected journey altogether. >> absolutely. my faith experience as i describe it as it's the whole holiy spirit alive and well and making mischief. it's also our focus to stay focused on a mission. what are we about? that it's not to have the spotlight on us, but it's, rather, to shine the light on hard-working americans who are struggling every day to make a go of it, and in the richest nation on earth, no one should work and still live in poverty.

that's the kind of nation we're not. we need to move forward and create a new agreement among us. >> he has been very vocal about poverty and inequality. what do you make of the way that this pope has engaged with public policy? >> well, i totally delight in it. he has made it very clear, though, that we've got to come together to create some new solutions, and our u.s. partlyance, he is not a democrat or a republican. he says that the free market can't do it all xshgs he also says that the safety net is no answer. we need a new economy that can really reshape how we distribute goods in our society. i admire that boldness. it really is a refreshing breath of air for a hungry people. >> i hear you recently met paul ryan. how did that go? >> well, we had a lovely

conversation a week ago, and the thing that i wanted to learn from him was what is he learning about poverty because congressman ryan has been having these hearings on poverty. i wanted to know what he was learning, and one thing that he has learned is that it takes all of us talking about it, that there is no one fix for the problem in our society which i thought was a really good step forward. then when we started talking, well, what do we do, what's the new way forward, he really quickly retreated to market forces and i told him the story of jason who is an entrepreneur who is upset because while jason pays fair wages, living wages, his competitors don't, and his tax dollars are going to fund his competitors, he realized, because his competitors' employees are using the safety net. jason's tax dollars are paying for the safety net. that kind of left congressman ryan a bit puzzled. he didn't know how to respond. he just thought that, well, the economy will take care of it. the fact is the economy is not taking care of it.

we need some new solutions. >> the fact is we're going to stay in touch and we're going to try -- at least i'm going to try to keep sharing stories with him, to keep letting him know about the reality we need. weave got to find a new way forward, and we've got to talk across the aisle. >> you work to promote, as krystal was mention, about us raising the minimum wage. imfwrags reform, tax reform. out of all these, which are you most hopeful about? which will make the most progress on? >> there are good signs that -- once we get through a few more

primaries, it's hope that they could actually bring up a few bills and fet them out of the house of representatives in an intense period of time. late june, july. i hold out hope for both. the big economic issues, we have to have a big national conversation. it's premature for legislation. we talk to each other about it. we, the people, can make a difference on this one. >> we will all be praying that that dialogue does, in fact, occur. sister simone campbell, lovely to see you, as always. >> thank you so much. let's pray. up next, should you rent or buy? a simple new way to crunch the numbers and see what's going to work for you. instead of mailing everyone my vacation photos,

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more than the beach and barbecues. for many it's also moving season when rents rise and many americans consider the age-old american dream of buying a home, but it turns out that is not always a bargain either. depending on where you live, purchase prices may be stagnant or slowly rising, but in big cities they're booming. prices are up 15% or more in a number of metro areas from san francisco to atlanta and even detroit, which is clawing its way back from rock bottom. the price hikes are also soaking fears of another housing bubble. buying a home isn't the bargain it was a few years ago and rents are also going up. what are your options? my colleagues at the "new york times" have posted a calculator that allows you to enter your specific financial and living situation to decide what's right for you. neil irwin has written a number of stories about the upshot as the times correspondent. you are in san francisco today. you have written about san francisco as one of the most overheated markets in the country where purchase prices are way up relative to rent. what's going on in california that's making it so expensive to buy? >> you know, it's a fairly

straight forward story. it's a lot of demand. job growth has been strong. income growth has been strong in san francisco, l.a., california, and even the east coast. supply has not kept up with demand. there's not been nearly as much construction of new housing units that might fill that new demand that's come under the market. >> how good are doc's barbecue skills? >> can we trust him with an open flame is the real question? >> risky. >> i love it. you guys have a list of five questions that you should ask yourself before making a decision to buy or not, and two of the questions are the toughest for me, and i'm sure for a number of other people. that's how long will you be living there, and how confident are you about your income? young people, as we know, are taking more time to figure out their lives. they're into their mid 30s before you have a sense of where they're going to be longer term. if you can't answer either of

those questions with certificate, should you just not think about buying at all? >> you know, there's no certainty in life, but i think you're basically right. if you aren't sure where you are going to live in a couple of years, if you're not sure what kind of living situation you want to be in, maybe buying a place really isn't for you. especially at the valuations we're seeing now. where prices are now that are kind of not a bargain by any measure in a lot of these markets. if you are not sure where you want to be in three, four, five years, you really shouldn't be. maybe you ought to be renting. >> death, taxes, lebron james winning the nba championship year after year. of the five questions, the one that i found the most interesting, can you accept that the future is unknowable? yes, it's very hard for the human mind to contemplate this. people get divorced. jobs are lost. recessions happen. a lot of times i think historically people looked at a home as a sort of shelter

against that sort of unforeseen thing happening, whereas if you are a renter, you can be thrown out almost at any time. >> that's right. that's part of what you are buying when you buy a house or a condo. you're buying uncertainty. you're buying the right to renovate your kitchen or paint the shudder whatever color you want. you're buying so you know you don't have a sudden rent hike or a landlord that wants to turn the willing into something else. that's worth something to people. i own a condo myself, and i like it that way. that said, it comes at a price. especially if you are buying in some of the overheated markets. >> you know, another thing that people have looked to homeownership for is to build wealth, middle class and working class folks in particular. >> put it into a brokerage account, invest in the stock market or whatever longer term investment you want to put the

money in. that's great. you can end up saving the sam way you do. the problem is you know you don't have that discipline to save through other mechanisms. that makes buying out a little more desirable than otherwise. auto when you play around with this calculator, you can change everything from your down payment, to how long you're going to live there, to wherure buying. for what types of people will the answer come back, no, this isn't a good time to buy? >> if you are on the coastal city. if you're not in california, the northeast, if you're in the middle of the country, the math in general works better. obviously, specific cities matter. that's starlgt point. the other thing is if you are going to be there a long time, ten, 15 years, the map looks a lot better. if you have a high down payment, math looks better. those are the situations that make buying look more compelling that renting in most parts of the world. >> neil irwin, thank you. no matter where you call

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overwhelmingness of feeling like there's never enough time for it all. our next guest is a washington post writer and a wife and a mom of two who knows how oppressive the clock can feel and she writes about it in "overwhelmed, work, love, and play when no one has the time." thank you so much for taking time out of your impossible schedule to join us, brigitte schulte. you attend something called the international association for time, use, research conference. josh loves this idea. can you tell us some of the things that you learned about time in your study for this book? >> well, that was stuch an interesting thing. it all started when -- whose life are you looking at? >> right. >> he challenged me to a time study, and i did keep this time study, and he found with 27 hours of what he called leisure,

and i called bits and scraps of time study, little bits of nothingness, and so that began this whole journey of trying to understand, well, what is how we define our time? what is leisure? what does our time look like? that did lead me to this. the time use research conference. it was really fascinating to find that there's an increasing sense of time pressure, largely in the united states, but it is in other countries. in the united states in particular this feeling of always being rushed and that there isn't enough time to do as much as you need to and want to in a day. a lot of that is because the way we live, it just really is light years ahead of where our workplaces are set up, our cultural attitudes, and even our laws and policies. we're living in this disconnected time. >> i think we can all relate to your book. you know there's a problem when we are given time to do absolutely nothing, and that stresses us out. we actually don't know what to do with ourselves. you write about that even when we go on vacations. we're somewhere beautiful and

relaxing, and we bring that stress and that anxiety with us. i want to get a sense of what other countries around the world are doing. it seems like they've been able to manage this work-life balance much better than we have been able to do. help us understand what they are doing right and what we are doing wrong. >> there are a couple of things. there was a moment back in the early 1970s when women entered the workplace really around the world for two different reasons. the women's movement had opened up possibilities for women, and the economy started to stagnate and costs continued to rise. for working class families, women had to go into the workplace in order to keep the same standard of living. as women started entering the workplace, different countries began looking at the phenomenon and figuring out how do we support this? how do we get good work out of people and, yet, recognize that, you know, to continue society, you need family. they came up with pay family leave policies. other countries have paid

vacation policies. paid sick days. in the united states we have none of that. we are the only country along with papanew guinea and swansealand that have no paid leave. there are three states that three parental leave policies. california, new jersey, and most recently rhode island. that's just a drop in the bucket. we have one family-friendly policy. that's the family medical leave act. it took ten years to pass. it's unpaid. it doesn't cover 40% of the work force. no wonder people feel like they're completely spinning all the time. >> it's funny. just last week on the show we were talking about this new study from the population research institute at penn state. they looked at hormone levels. a hormone called cortisol. they found that people and especially women, experience lower stress levels at the office than they do at home. this was true for working class and affluent people. do you think this busyness that you are wragt about, is it in part due to the fact that people are trying to spend time at the

office. >> i don't think that's the case at all. i think the important thing about that study that you mention is to understand that for women the home is another workplace. of course, it's going to be stressful. women, even when they work so of course you're going to be stressed out at home. men are doing more but they tend to be in the helper role. what's interesting is studies find that when men try to be more the full partner and more than the helper parent or the fun dad they are feeting more work/life kwon flikt than women and mothers are. >> as a mother myself i totally relate to what you're saying and i love the way you describe it. you talk about how typically, a woman's brain is always contaminated, is the word you use, i think, saying she's always balancing all these

scheduling conflictses. all of the work-life things that make a household go into work but you found research that shows our brain changes when we're constantly in what we're in what you call the overwhelmed. tell us about that. >> i wanted to understand about why we should care about being overwhelmed. for so long people thought these are "mommy" issues and they're really not. they're issues for everybody. how does this affect us? we know stress affects our blood pressure. there's diabetes, cardiovascular disease but they're finding that stress, this constant bathing in cortisol, is actually shrinking our brains, if you will. they found that in the prefrontal cortex, the news and most recently evolve part of the brain where aye think, remember, learn and make decisions, if you have been through stressful experiences and you feel stressed out, they found in this one study at the yale stress center the prefrontal cortex was fully 20% smaller in volume.

people who did not feel that same sex of being overwhelmed. >> what does that translate to in terms of the way you behave in your life? >> well, you don't have the capacity to think state. to make good decisions. you know, to learn and remember. we're increasingly in a knowledge economy. creativity and innovation matters and if you don't have that resource that's got huge implications for everything. at work and at home and we don't have much leisure time but it would affect you there as well. >> i think this is all totally real but i think also, there's another aspect as americans. we want to seem like we're busy and tired because that makes us feel like we're important. people who have lots of leisure time in american society are either not important or they are incredibly wealthy and have already succeeded. >> what's important, what i discovered in my book is that there's emerging neuroscience that shows when you're in leisure, when you're relaxed and

calm, your brain is more active. now we're understanding where the inspiration, the "ahah" moment comes from and it's not -- keeping or staying with your nose to the grindstone at your computer 10 and 12 hours a day. what's important to recognize is look at work hours and compare ourselves internationally we're not as productive per hour as other countries are. we just put in long hours at the office. it doesn't benefit anybody. >> let's give you some leisure time right now. thank you very much for being here. up nasdext, life before "th cycle." can you start tomorrow? yes sir. alright. let's share the news tomorrow. today we failrly busy. tomorrow we're booked solid. we close on the house tomorrow. i want one of these opened up. because tomorow we go live... it's a day full of promise. and often, that day arrives by train.

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beforeives a reporter i was a real estate banker. banking has got 'a bad name in the last few years because of the thing where the banking pump the economy full of debt and fuel the speculative bubble in real estate and leave taxpayers and kwon assumertion holding the bag when it came crashing down. from 2005 to 2009, a saw the recklessness that dlooef mess and saw how bingeing can be a force for good in the economy when bankers do their jobs right. i worked on loans for large real estate projects and whole portfolios of supermarket anchors and strip malls. bank loans like this are great, they build the places where we live and work but as a lender it's important to make loans against smart projects where the borrower makes money and can

repay you. but lots of banked failed at that. recklessness wasn't a clever strategy. bankers may have thought they could sell off they're bad loans but places like bear stearns got stuck in the crash with batd loans they couldn't sell which made them insolvent. even citigroup and bank of america saved by the bailouts suffered huchblg losses that their shareholders have yet to recover. all the financial struck churg in the world couldn't change the fact making bad loans is bad business. unfortunately it took a economically devastating crash for bankers to learn that. my employer, wells fargo wasn't perfect and it got in trouble for it's home mortgage practices but it's done much better than most banks because bankers were more careful about the risks they took. wells fargo made sure the same person was responsible for schmoozing the client, doing the lone math and monitoring the loan. once you made the loan it was your problem until the borrower

paid it off and that abili accountability pushed people to avoid making these loans. so kevin roadways followed wall street bankers around for two years and found them to be miserable and overworked doing jobs that held little value for them individually or for the economy as a whole. based on this experience, rousse urges them to keep on. i made money and did things useful in the economy and learned research and writing skills that med me a better reporter. but i was in a financial institution where caution was rewarded and business activities were closely tied to the real economy. banking doesn't have to have this reputation. spreading this would make for a healthier financial sector and a safer economy and maybe hatchier bankers. that does it for the "the cycle." "now" with alex wagner" starts right now. it's wednesday, may 28th and

this is "now." >> america must always lead on the world same. no one else will. >> barack obama's presidency has been bedevilled by -- >> achg, there was no mention at all of how that war is going to end. >> we're going to have almost nosh there in 2060. >> and what the president is saying to the taliban, hang on, we're leaving. >> they refused where indecisiveness. >> how much effort are we going to put into resolving the crisis in the you yan as opposed to syria. >> the bottom line is, we've more or less accepted the forcible anextation of and you can't back away from warfare. we're