>> the image of the professorial cowboy on the front page of the new york observer. what else can i call you? >> say it loud, say it proud. let's just be very honest. you've had a tremendously accomplished career, highly esteemed, you've been lorded -- or lauded with awards and all sorts of celebrations of your -- >> you're making me blush, dylan -- >> this is wonderful, but, has anybody ever made a cartoon of you that looks like teddy roosevelt on a horse? >> never, ever. >> thank you! >> there have been three other cartoons. i can't describe them because they were obscene, but this one absolutely takes the biscuit. there he is. >> there it is. >> the professor himself on horseback. >> well -- can i say one thing from the perspective of the man represented on that horse? >> yes. >> i saw you had buddy roemer on your show earlier today. >> we did. >> whether or not he's going to be a viable presidential

candidate or whether or not he the -- >> he got 31 votes in iowa. >> i thauns. but he is the only opportunity in the republican party, if he can get 5% of the votes until polling this weekend going into the new hampshire primary, that at least we can start to force the conversation about money and politics into the debates. and i do think that that is a worthwhile view to view buddy roemer, if not as a presidential candidate, but an opportunity to force the absurdity that these debates are tos we want to talk about that. >> dylan, your campaign to get money out has been doing that. >> and now we've got a cartoon, so we're unstoppable. the show starts right now. well, the big story today, presidential bid. good afternoon to you. i am dylan ratigan. auction 2012 in full swing, as you surely know. next stop the new hampshire. candidates already on the ground

there, ahead of tuesday's primaries. romney, santorum, huntsman, and gingrich all making some stops. take a gander. >> you have an opportunity to move this country. you have an opportunity to change the direction. >> and doing what new hampshires do, which is really test their presidential candidates. >> there's a huge difference between a reagan conservative and a moderate. >> this president has been on the attack, has been on the attack and has been a job killer. >> well, we're not seeing the level of ad spending around the rhetoric in new hampshire as we saw in iowa, because an auction is only an auction if there's more than one person to bid for. and because this is one's basically a lot for romney, who's going to lose their loot there? the man leads the polls a full 23 percentage points ahead of his closest rival in the state. ron paul, remarkable, continues to hold up with the strength of his narrative, despite obvious blemishes, to say the least, around the issues of racism. he is very strong with the audiences on the issues of

banking and the military. we start today in the granite state with nbc's ron mott on the ground once again for us in new hampshire. it appears there's not even a reason to bid on this one. the money's staying home because they figure this one's already been taken care of. is that fair? >> well, that's absolutely fair, dylan. good afternoon to you. and a lot of these candidates have had trouble raising money, so why go out and spend money when you don't have the support? those poll numbers are pretty damaging to a lot of those campaigns and to their optimism here in new hampshire. now, we can tell you that mitt romney, obviously, enjoying a double-digit lead here. and he's out campaigning around the state today, the word on the street is he's got to try to finish strongly here. he doesn't want to be seen as limping to the finish line, even though everyone here expects him to win. the advertising he spent so far is way down from what you normally would see. take a look at this. these numbers represent about a quarter to a third of what you might see in a normal year. our destiny pac, this is a pro-jon huntsman pac, has spent

just under $2 million. you see rick perry, who's not even coming here, about $235,000. rick santorum who's coming off his hot finish in iowa spending about $30,000. he's frantically trying to raise some money. jon huntsman has put basically all his eggs in this basket. we spent time with him this morning and this afternoon and asked him, what do you need to do here in new hampshire to continue on? >> we need to exceed whatever you say we're going to do. so if ron mott says, eh, you got to do a, b, or c, we've got to do a little bit better than that. that's the expectation game in politics. if you fall short of expectations, you lose investors. if you fall short of expectations politically, you lose voters, you lose supporters. so how we do in this state is real and very important to our prospects longer term. >> he's probably got to finish second here, and those poll numbers show he's got an uphill climb to try to reach romney.

dylan? >> big clear that the winner in iowa night's caucuses was not romney or santorum, but rather citizens united and its debut on the presidential election stage. the supreme court, and that ruling had mathematically by far the biggest impact on the iowa race. in fact, more money was spent on iowa super pac ads than by any individual candidate and all that super pac must oney was usn the brilliant way it can be used, not to get something done, but to make sure something never happens. destruction, this is a race to the bottom and the money is used to destroy people. in this case, newt gingrich. before the attack ads from the super pacs were teed up, gingrich was polling at 26%, putting him in first place. but after $3 million in negative super pac ads, gingrich ended up in fourth place tuesday night, after getting th ting rat tat t that super pac money.

and someone had to go and he was the one. it's using the money to annihilate the very reputation of a candidate who could be in your way. in this case, if you're romney, iannihilate newt gingrich and i'm good to go. joining us now is paul bloomenthal. he's the author of a website that allows us to track who is donating what to which candidates. what exactly are we tracking? we talk about how there's all this anonymous money. what are you able to track and what do we learn when we look at that site, paul? >> when you look at the site, you can track a whole host of kinds of campaign contributions. you can type in your zip code and look up who is giving money in your neighborhood, and you know, who's giving money to these super pacs and a whole host of other things. we also have a daily news letter that goes out to help inform people about advertisements that these -- this money helps to purchase. >> that's fantastic. i'm going to say, that's good. that was a wonderful asset, not only for me, but i think for a lot of folks, who have been becoming more and more aware of

just how auction-driven this election process is. but have not been able to really expose the nasty, horny toad-laden underbelly of all this nonsense. and i think we're starting to see that now with technology like what you're talking about and some other things we're seeing in development. walk us through the relevance of anonymous super pac money, not just to build up a candidate, to say to dylan's grade or paul's grade or whoever it is, but as a weapon to annihilate a single individual, as an assassination weapon to ensure power dynamics and the preservation of the status quo, basically. >> well, that's exactly what we saw in iowa, with the pro-romney pac, restore our future. and you had this group that has come in and they spent about $3.3 million, which is just unprecedented. not just on negative advertising, but just on advertising for an outside group alone to spend in the iowa caucuses. they spent this all to defeat newt gingrich. and you know, if you sort of think about the romney campaign

as they're trying to build a railroad, you've got to get somebody to blow up the mountains. and in this case, they have a super pac that can drop millions of dollars, it has no other purpose except to spend money on television advertisements, and it can just blow up mountains like newt gingrich or rick perry or anybody else who gets in their way. >> now, those who would disagree with what we're talking about would say, listen, the money didn't blow up newt gingrich, newt gingrich blew up newt gingrich. because newt gingrich is a terrible guy and all these different things. or rick perry didn't blow up rick perry. you know, rick perry -- or money didn't blow up rick perry, rick perry blew up rick perry. how do you draw the line between those, especially an msnbc audience, where you're like, of course, it's a good thing they blew up newt gingrich, i hate that guy, he's terrible. how do you distinguish between the pleasure of watching the money destroy somebody you don't like with the reality of the fact that the weapon that destroyed the guy you don't like

may be the gun pointed at the guy you do. >> one of the main issues is how the candidate who benefits does this all at a arm's length. they don't have to get their hands dirty while their friends beat up the candidate. the ads against newt gingrich were some of the most honest attack ads in history, you know, most of that is just gingrich's record, laid out plain. and perhaps romney should have been the one saying that instead after running around talking about american optimism with a big smile on his face. >> have we turned into a bunch of chicken hawks? we're just a bunch of people, we never want to confront each other belly to belly. i'm going to have my friends go in and anonymously call you names and then i'm going to run back to my camp and we're going to talk about all the names that we called you. are we really just a nation, or at least a political nation, of chicken hawks? >> i mean, i think there is this issue where you have the candidates who are able to step away from the negative ads. they don't have to get their hands dirty anymore. and they can just, you know, let

their friends and the billionaires and the millionaires that pay for these ads to just take care of their opponents. >> man. it seems like an awesome way to accumulate power. it just doesn't strike me as a particularly great way to run a democracy. paul, you do great work at the huffington post and i congratulate you on the in addition of this fund-raiser project for this election. congratulations on that. >> thanks a lot. >> thank. of course, the flood of money preventing our politicians from addressing the real problems facing this country, whether it's the private health insurance monopolies, the extraordinarily insult ily inefficient nature of our energy matrix, goes back to the 1950s. the list goes on and on. the problems, quite candidly, are imminently fixable, and we actually have the human beings in our midst to fix them and we have the money. but we're not doing it. that's why we're launching our 30 million jobs for america tour this month to bring america the debate we want in 2012. more on that soon. and all of it addressed in our

new book," greedy bastard$!" which comes out on tuesday of next week. i can't believe it's actually finally going to happen. we're going to stop talking about and we're going to start doing it. if you want to preorder the book, you can do it right now at dylanratigan.com. and while you're there, check out our "greedy bastard$!" anecdotes. it's a series of podcasts with some of the brightest minds out there on what you can do to continue to cultivate the anecdotes to the greedy bastardism that has become so pervasive in the way too many folks in this country make their decisions. coming up on "the d.r. show" here, rumors of another possible recess appointment freaking out wall street. that's what we're hearing from some of our sources. plus, why the only thing wrong with failure is our nation's view of it. an author with lessons we can learn from the likes of albert einstein, steve jobs, and hannibal, the famous general, not the murdering cannibal. and disappearing in time without a big old delorean.

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our military will be leaner, but the world must know the united states is going to maintain our military's superiority with officers that are agile and flexible and ready for the full range of contingencies and threats. >> president obama today announcing a shift in military philosophy. of course, that $450 billion is

$45 billion a year, over ten years. last year, the military budget in excess of $700 billion, which does not include the $1 trillion plus already sunk into the ground in afghanistan and iraq. our megapanel joins us right now. karen finney, susan del percio, and jimmy williams. karen, you have to figure this is certainly good presidential politics and good timing to do this. hard to get resistance at this point to somewhat of a cut that deals with the debt, a cut that deals with defense. is there any -- how much real density in this proposal right now? >> well, it's my understanding that what this proposal does, it does actually cut, but it actually slows the rate of growth, so there will be an increase in defense spending over time, is my understanding. but here's one of the things that i think makes this a very defensible plan that's really quite important. and that is, part of what the president and leon panetta were talking about today is that we need to shift gears here and have a better assessment and a better way to fight the wars that we're dealing -- and the

challenges we're dealing with today. like we saw in the mission to go get osama bin laden, where counter intelligence played a very critical role. so one of the things they stressed was, you know, maybe we don't need 12 of these and 15 of those. maybe we need five of these and four of those. and that's the kind of system that they're thinking about. the one piece that makes me a little nervous is when they do talk a little bit about approachably reducing benefits for veterans. that's just something that i hope does not happen. >> it's interesting, junas you know, jimmy, joe sestak has been through this show a few times and a lot of other places, arguing that the military is imperiling us not just in excess of the spending, but the excess of spending and the blasting and the bombing around the world. he's an advocate of hot spotting, if you will, in the military apparatus, which is, use the counterintelligence, over allocate to the very specific issues, and don't just

randomly order, as karen said, 40 of these, 70 of those, and 55 of these. do you get the sense that this particular proposal of the president is drifting in the sestakian direction? >> sestakian, i love that. i don't know if it's something is that sestak would like or not like. but what i can say is we are here in 2012, i can't believe that, but we have a military for the 1980s. and it's a bloated. it doesn't mean it's not a great military. it's a great military. we have the best military in the world. but i don't want to see us building, you know, so many bombers or planes, et cetera, etc. i would rather us build the computers that do those things, where, a, our troops aren't in harm's way nearly as much, and it doesn't cost as much, and c, i would like very much for a modernized military to bring everybody else in. because keep in mind, we sell billions of dollars of equipment to countries across the world. it's a huge part of our economy. i don't want to cut that off. but i think we should have a

leaner, maeaner, smarter 21st military. >> susan, tough last word. >> i agree with jimmy. we do have a 1980s military. we do need to become more flexible and we need to realize what our troops are going to be used for. we're not going to go take over another country. so we have to be careful on how we spend our dollars and hopefully do it with more counterintelligence. >> i guess what makes me hesitate a little bit is knowing that there are defense contracts in every district of every electoral region -- >> well, that's why they'll never get cut as much as they say, because whatever they propose -- >> rhetoric is wonderful, i just wonder when it comes down to it in the back room, who's getting -- >> well -- >> like karen talked about. >> there's no question there's going to be a fight, but i think what we're talking about is essentially what they're trying to do, which is, let's modernize. and you know what, it's for us as we the people to stand up and say, we want this. which is what we want to see happen. >> to this. >> don't listen to the lobbyist. >> all right, got it. interesting rumor this afternoon on wall street.

jimmy, you'll love this. we all know richard cordray was a recess appointment for the consumer financial protection bur re. this precipitated some speculation that president obama might make another recess appointment for the fhfa, which is probably a little-known organization, but it is responsible for fannie and freddie, which is responsible for a huge percentage of the housing finance. cut to the chase, there's a rumor today that obama could pursue a recess appointment with fhfa, jimmy, and then seek to pursue this, spring a $1 trillion scaled debt refinancing in the housing market, had the mortgage traders here in new york all squirrely. mortgage bonds trading around. and this would obviously be seen as both a political maneuver, a maneuver that would, by the way, definitely accelerate the economy in the short-term, by dropping the average monthly payments, and raise the ire of i have to imagine not only everybody on wall street, but the entire tea party/conservative side of the

aisle, no? >> well, i'm going to ask you permission to wear two hats on this one. >> go for it. >> first and foremost, the president of the united states is dead wrong to appoint everybody when the senate is in pro forma recess. it's not in recess and i've said this before on your show and i'll keep saying it, i do not like when presidents of either parties do these kind of things. >> noted. >> that being said, if the president of the united states appoints a top regulator for fannie and freddie who comes and says to fannie and freddie, hey, here's the deal, you're going to go and take all of these trillions of dollars of mortgages and you're going to refinance them and if you don't, you'll lose your implicit government-backed guarantee, i can't think of a better election year prognosis for the president of the united states. and i would like for mitt romney, like he did with the auto industry, to say, it's a terrible idea. >> the potency of an idea like this for any incumbent president, let alone an incumbent president with a

housing market in the condition that it's in, karen, has obvious appeal. wall street will go off the deep end. the new york observer was asking if i go off the deep end, no, go off the deep end and see how the attitude is on the desk. when you look at that, how does one -- the obvious attraction, karen and susan, both of you, of doing something like this, which has this immediate and really compelling advantage and will be powerfully alienating to meet a number of constituencies. >> okay. >> susan, do you want me to go or do you want me to go? >> go ahead,. >> karen. >> i think in the frame of the 99%/1% conversation we've been having, and one of the things you hear a lot out in the real world, from people, is the feeling of, hey, wall street got bailed out, what about the rest of us. this really plays right into this, right? >> oh, yes. >> it's the idea that, oh, finally there's some relief for

the rest of us. i think obviously in an election year, that is a pretty powerful thing to do. but, also, in the context of the economy, i mean, dylan, you know better than i do, it strikes me that we're kind of run out of things that we can do and things that the president can do on his own without congress to actually try to get some movement. >> but he's not trying to do this on his own. >> by the way, we don't even know he is trying to do this. this is a speculation in the financial markets tied to the cordray appointment. this is a radical idea. >> but the cordray appointment was good politics for him. i agree with jimmy, yet again today, which is very hard for me to do. >> it's got to be a hard day. >> it's a hard day, but i agree that you shouldn't have these appointments under any administration, and that it's bad. you know, to do the cordray, he can get away with it, but to do this, he will get too much pressure. i don't think there's any chance of this going all the way to fruition. >> but interesting, it sort of opens your mind as to what the

idea is -- or what the levers of power are capable of -- >> it's kind of scary. >> when there's a lot at stake. >> dylan, what if he points a republican? what are they going to do then? >> isn't this -- >> go ahead, karen, quick. >> is this the kind of teddy roosevelt action, though, that you've talked about in terms of -- >> no, from my perspective, the reason i would criticize it is it's just another cover-up. in other words, the way you do this is you're just printing more money to refinance these mortgages. it's not until you actually cancel the debt and break these constitutions up, which would be a teddy roosevelt maneuver, as opposed to simply figuring out a b way to lower everybody's monthly payment by pushing the risk into the future with the next guy, which is what they did with the debt bailouts. saying, listen, you'll never get paid back that money, we have to restructure these banks and we're going to create capital requirements and actual investment in this country, which, by the way, is the highest possible threshold and would be a nightmare for any

politician in this country or any other, but may be necessary before this is all said and done. next, as president obama prepares to launch a new plan to create 180,000 jobs, what can we all do to create 30 million jobs? when you have tough pain, do you want fast relief? try bayer advanced aspirin. it's not the bayer aspirin you know. it's different. first, it's been re-engineered with micro-particles. second, it enters the bloodstream fast, and rushes relief to the site of your tough pain.

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well, the white house today announcing its plan for a jobs initiative this summer that according to them will create 180,000 youth employment opportunities. every one of them welcome, i'm sure, and the president talking jobs, which i encourage. we too are talking jobs, except we believe that not only the president yet the entirely political apparatus is completely off the mark to what we actually have to do. we are down 30 million jobs in this country. i know it's crazy to think about, but that is what the scale of the issue is. and our next guest says that we might be just in time, too, because the machine that's been creating jobs for the last 30 years is failing. and as such, the debate for another set of mechanisms that could create those jobs is

right. ed krook, who says we're creating jobs because we're simply creating fewer businesses has worked. part of the "financial times" america working series, it's a pleasure to have you here. obviously, no one create 30 million jobs, but environments can create jobs on that scale. >> exactly. and as you said in your introduction there, the really crucial thing is the new companies. that's where new jobs come from, is new business formation. if you look at old companies, this is an amazing fact, if you look at old companies, net, they basically don't create any jobs at all. if you look at where all the new jobs come from, they're all from companies that are less than five years old. that's got to be a focus of new jobs. >> yet old companies give money to politicians to preserve their structure, and new companies have no money to give to politicians to encourage their formation. how do we get out -- i mean, i feel like we're in a situation where the horse and buggy guys have taken over our government and they're preventing the automobile guys from forming. the too big to fail banks, the legacy energy apparatus, that

the legacy health care apparatus has got a stranglehold on the policy making apparatus, which is basically depriving not only of the start-ups and solutions, but the jobs that would come with it. >> i absolutely think that's exactly right. especially when you look at the influence of corporate money in washington and the power of lobbyists and so on, i certainly think that's got to be part of the problem. i guess, when you look at the american jobs market at the moment, it's a bit like a crime scene. you're piecing together the bits of evidence. there's not obviously one clear problem, but as you say, that's certainly got to be part of it, i think. i mean, i think the other thing that's really important, as you say, is to look at the longer term picture here. that, of course, we've been hit with a massive recession, the financial crisis, everything that followed on from that. and that's a very big part of what we need to do to create more jobs, is just get that behind us. we need to get the money flowing here. we need to get more money into the economy. we need -- >> just have normal capital flows and a functioning capital market. >> all of that. but a lot of these trends are longer term. a lot of these things go back even before this crisis hit us. we weren't creating enough new businesses, we weren't creating enough new jobs. the labor market was

insufficiently dynamic. so you've got to dig down a bit further, i think, into some of the causes of that to really get the jobs market going again. >> susan? >> we know small businesses create midweost of the jobs tha need. >> new businesses. >> new businesses, i'm sorry -- >> which tend to be small. >> which tend to be small. new businesses, under five years old. but it seems industries that have been around for a while will help that develop. for example, at hydrofracing in new york, they say the it could create tens of thousands of jobs because of all the businesses it will create around it. having more investment in these towns, especially in upstate new york. but they seem to be, right now, getting in a lot of trouble with the regulation and, you know, what what the -- how it will affect the environment. and yet it seems that this is one of the surefire ways to get the economy going, at least in a large part of upstate new york. so how are businesses supposed

to gauge or what's hurting these businesses from going ahead? is there too much regulation, especially in energy? >> i'm sure that's right. i'm sure you're right when you say that, you know, the regulation is an issue there. and if you look at, as you say, this fantastic boom we've had in the united states in the past ten years or so, in terms of oil and gas production, gas in particular, that was led by the small entrepreneurial start-up companies. we've had the big oil and gas companies come into that business as of late, but it's really the smaller ones that started it. when you look at the regulatory barriers, there probably are issues. not just obviously president obama's gets a lot of the became specifically, but not just him. going back previous administrations, going back decades. i'm sure there's an issue there in terms of the regulation, i'm sure there's a lot that could be done. one of the things a lot of people talk about is sarbanes-oxley, the financial regulations in particular, the way that stops a lot of those smaller businesses starting up. undoubtedly, there are things that could be done. it's a balancing act, as you know, and clearly, we don't want to poison our water, we don't

want to pollute the air. there are issues that -- you know, there are legitimate concerns, regulation is there for a reason. it's not there for no reason. and so you have to make sure that you respect those things. but i think you're right, i think regulation has to be one of the things we look at. as you say, not the whole answer, because i don't think anything is the whole answer, but it's got to be part of it. >> i like your crime scene metaphor. we know the system's not working. because we know there are a bunch of people and we know there's a bunch of things they could be doing. and we know there's a pile of money. we just can't figure out why the pile of money is not working with the people -- you're like, this is -- something's wrong here. karen, go ahead. >> hi. so my question would be, you know, one of the things i like about the announcement that the president made today is that it's less about putting principal dollars to create these summer jobs, in which i would just say, summer employment for our youth, particularly minorities, is so critically important and connected to so many other issues. i'm really happy to see the administration -- it's a drop in the bucket, but important. so what the president has seems

to have done with this program is figure out a way to incentivize these companies to agree, essentially, to hire "x" number of young people sort of for internships for the summer. who other kinds of things or ways can we -- because, obviously, it's not -- just can't be just about spending federal dollars. what other kinds of ways can a president incentivize companies or browbeat companies into high hiring quality >> i think one of the big things getting the economy right is just getting the strength of demand out there to encourage companies to want to expand and grow. that's part of it. the other big thing, particularly when you talk about young people, is skills and education. that's actually one of the amazing things, really, when you look at the jobs market right now. is despite the really high levels of unemployment that we've got, despite, as dylan says, needing to create 30 million new jobs, we still have skill shortages. we still have plenty of employer outs there who say they can't find all the people that they want. so that's a real issue, i think, in terms of improving the

education system, get people coming through with the right kind of qualifications. again, this is not a short-term problem. this is something that's gone back decades and probably has been getting worse over decades. but the quality of the public schooling system in this country just really isn't what it should be. >> hang on. you can't say that without -- we can say that. we can say it, but you can't say it. >> i'm going to say that the quality in my country is probably even worse. but the facts are facts, when you look at all that -- >> yeah -- >> the united states does not score as highly as it ought to, if it wants to be what it should be and can be, which is the world's greatest economy. >> jimmy, quickly. >> you mentioned before, you got in a great sort of lobbyist bashing moment, and i think that's important. but what you left out, i think, is that the theory in the 1990s, when we had such massive job growth and creation in the country, we had just as many lobbyists then as we do now. so why, then, do we have such massive job creation with the same about of lobbyists? wouldn't it be smarter if we

just banned corporations and lobbyists and the american people from buying their politicians? what would happen with lobbyists then? would we create jobs? >> i don't know. i saw you shaking your head, dylan? >> there are more lobbyists now, and there's certainly more influence from those lobbyists now because of the money. >> lobbying became a remarkable thing under bill clinton, trust me. >> right, well, as i say, none of this is kind of a ratically new thing in the past couple of years. a lot of this stuff has been going on for decades. and i'm sure, as you say, it was preceding even the 1990s. one of the things we had during the 1990s was this tremendously disruptive technology that came along, essentially, the internet and everything that went with that. and that, undoubtedly, created a lot of jobs, opened up a lot of opportunities and so on. perhaps that's part of the problem, we haven't had that same new disruptive technology in the past decade, in the 21st century. nothing like that has come along. back to the crime scene, there's more detective work to be done to figure out why those new technology aren't coming forward

in the same way. in the 1990s, the internet was a big thing, so maybe that's one of the reasons why that was such a good decade. >> one of the reasons you're not getting that kind of invasion because the incentive for easy money in the capital flows, whether it's into trade, into the swaps market, there's other ways -- there are other things to do with money that are simply much more profitable and less risky than pursuing the innovations that we're all looking for, because there's less of an incentive to do it. anyway, we'll continue to investigate the crime scene and thank you very much for everything, with the exception of your indictment of our educational system, even if it is completely screwed up. mega panel, jimmy, susan, karen, we'll see you guys soon rather than later. ed, thank you so much. straight ahead, a wrinkle in time. scientists make an amazing time cloak. we'll tell you about it.

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let's see, then. put it on. whoa! >> my body's gone!

>> i know what that is. that's an invisibility cloak! >> well, harry's cloak may have made him invisible to his enemies, but scientists' new breakthrough here in real life could hide our actions from time itself. they created a t ed teeny, teen in time. it was as if it never happened at all. the process is call eed tempora cloaking, and it doesn't require a magical cloak with crystals. it requires the manipulation of light, since light is what normally allows us to see objects and understand the passage of time, the transient nature of events from one to the next. the speed of light is a constant, so that becomes the mark by which time is measured. normally, light rays bounce off objects, placing them in time and space, so there's a contextualization to the permanence of scope of the light

stream, by by using lasers and special optical fibers, the scientists were able to, quote, make something happen. the light was not disturbed, they would say. they could do something and there would be no disturbance in the light stream, which would therefore make it as if that something that happened hadn't happened. scientists are not sure if there's any practical applications to this temporal cloaking. and before you get any ideas, it's important to note that this teeny tiny hold in time they created was only about 50 one trillionths of a second, which is significantly less than the duration of an eye blink. as one researcher joked, it's not enough time to steal a painting from a museum, which is a shame, because around here, we were thinking the mona lisa would look really nice in my living room. with a little more time cloaking, we can get that done. next, iing up. the author who claims we don't always need to succeed. [ sniffs ] i have a cold. [ sniffs ] i took dayquil but my nose is still runny.

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well, our next guest decided he needed to make a change in his life, shifting from bankster to journalist, he drew his inspiration from an unlikely source. i actually switched from journalist to activist, i guess. hannibal is the model, and i don't mean that one. we're talking about one of the greatest military leaders in history. andreas clouet is the columnist. he chronicles his journey in

"hannibal and me: what history's greatest military strategist can teach us about success and failure." before we get into this, andreas, give us a quick briefing. what do we need to know about this man, hannibal, to understand the comparisons that you're making? >> well, you have to know, first of all, that hannibal was a general who was, in my opinion, the greatest general and the greatest winner in all of history, and he lived 2,200 years ago, but the reason i chose him as the main character in my book is that he's very modern, which is probably surprising to most of your viewers, because, i mean, he has lessons to teach us today that are, in my opinion, more relevant than let's say alexander the great or julius e subsi cesar. >> i want to look at this full screen. leave this up for one second and explain this to. he says, never confuse means with ends. what does that mean? >> that's from -- paraphrases

from a strategist, but it essentially goes to the colonel of hannibal's story, and of his message to us, is, if you confuse life strategy with life tactics, if you confuse the battles with the war, or even the war with the peace, then you can win and win and win and end in failure. on the other hand, from the point of view of hannibal's roman enemies, because they fought this great war, even if you lose, and a lot of people are struggling with failures and disasters in their lives right now in this economy, or if you're diagnosed with a disease, even if you have some real setbacks, you can turn that around and win the war. because that's what the romans did. >> and the whole point is, know what the war is, and know -- and then know how to create the proportional allocation, and know that the war is a different thing than the battle. always have young ideas. i know that new businesses create jobs, but what's the point of having young ideas? >> well, there's a funny

paradox. some of the characters in my book, i compare pablo picasso. there's a certain kind of success that you tend to have while you're in your 20s, because -- and then the something happens as we get older, and we become experienced, we see the complexity in everything and we stop having these really bold ideas. so someone like hannibal crosses the alps, the alps with elephants, he's in his late 20s. there's a different -- so there's a lesson in that, like how can we stay young, so we can have great, creative ideas when we're in our 40s, 50s, 60s. on the other hand, you know, you want to have -- even while you're young, it's good to have some aspects of an old person's discipline, because a lot of young people, you know, they succeed early, but then they fall apart. >> yeah. let's -- i, by the way, try to seek out 22-year-olds at all time to figure out what the heck we should do next. i say that half joking, the

clarity -- >> and that's the perfect thing, to mix an old guy like you, i'm sorry about that, dylan, with a young person who's 22. then you get -- >> it's amazing. i really, i do. it has been -- the past couple of years have blown my mind. i was like, if i can find somebody young enough who knows what can't be done and tell you what to do. maintain self-discipline. we'll let that go. it is a necessary but we've talked about that in a lot of ways. adjust your meaning of success and keep calm and carry on. adjust your meaning of success. give us two seconds on that. >> well, when you're young, very young, an adolescent, you probably think success is whatever your parents told you. then you have to set a goal in your 20s and using strategy, hopefully, not just tactics, set about to achieve that goal, but you might not. but then in your mid-life crisis, or in mid-life, let's say, you have to, people inevitably find out that they have no idea what success even was to them. and then they start thinking deeply about it, ideally, they

should. and then you get remarkable turnarounds as you did for hannibal, for eleanor roosevelt and for the people in my book. >> and, i suspect, for a lot of folks whose names you'll never know and whose lives may never be written about, but there's a lot of opportunity for that awakening or self-revelation at a certain point to actually define how it is you're going to spend your time. maybe, perhaps, one of the most critical experiences that a human being has, as somebody who's been through an extraordinary amount of emotion and psychological pain in the last couple of years, trying to figure that sort of thing out. andreas, congratulations to you and thank you for not only being a great guest, but being a great teacher. and obviously enduring the necessary pain to publish a book like this. "hannibal and me" is the book, andreas kluth is the author. do check it out. coming up here on "hardball," chris in new hampshire asking the question, can anyone stop mitt? but first, how to actually keep those new year's resolutions. yes, we're skeptical too, but our good friend noah kass will

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well, it is a new year, which of course means new year's resolutions and some six in ten of them will be broken at some point in the year, most of them in pretty short order. here are some resolution solutions. noah kass, clinical director of the realization center here in new york city and columnist for thestreet.com. a friend and a colleague and a man who likes to drink out of an orange msnbc cup. so you can't solve this. listen, there are a lot of things you can take care of. i understand you help parents with their kids, you help

addicts with their adetectioadetection dictions. >> i can solve everything. >> this one, out of your league. let's talk about it, anyway. >> first of all, before we talk any of that, a little audible here. someone who works for you sent me this article. it says, "dylan goes eclectic." can i put this up? >> they've seen it. but -- >> "dylan goes eclectic." and i read that your new year's resolution is to lose some weight and be happy. >> that's wonderful. >> very excited. part of my thesis here -- >> i'm not going to let the man get me down. >> and you shouldn't. part of the whole deal here is i don't think new year's resolutions ever really work. >> ever? >> and the stats really back that up. >> i'm surprised that four out of ten stick. i think people are lying. >> most of them are lying and the reason they're lying is because a new year's resolution is actually based on a lie. >> how so? >> some people say they want to do something. you know, they say i want to lose weight. i want to get a better job.

i want to date a hotter girl or a better looking guy. >> i want to move to antarctica. >> but in the end, they're a little bit too lazy to go for it and they don't want the excess baggage that comes with that. and they secretly like all these maladaptive behaviors, whether they're cigarette soaking or eating too much or excessive alcohol intake, it serves them and they don't really want to change. >> now you've hit the sweet spot, right? >> or a sweet spot. >> this is the shadow, this is all the stuff that we talk about. this is -- we're in the guts of the machine here. >> yeah. >> and what you're saying is people like to toalk about thes maladaptive things whether it's eating, smoking, alcohol, drugs, because they view themselves as not doing that, but they actually, whether it's the food, the sweets, the drugs, it's a pain killer for them or a reliever of some kinds for them. >> it's a maladaptive behavior that serves a purpose. >> when what do you do?

>> change doesn't happen overnight. the whole idea of a new year's resolution is ridiculous. that at the 31st, at the end of the month, magically, you'll stop doing what you've done previously the rest of the year. >> it is a different year? >> it's a different second, first of all of all. change is thought of, it takes plan, it's an honest self-assessment, and it also prevents us from allowing ourselves to change throughout the year. how many people do you know whose new year's resolution is to stop smoking cigarettes, okay. january 5th, january 6th, they're back to smoking. >> and the self-loathing and the guilt and the shame. >> get back on the horse. >> that's why i just enjoy smoking. i've given it up. i'm not going to feel bad about this. i'm going to enjoy the cigarette. >> i think quit smoking, but not because it's the ent of december. >> you think i should quit smoking primarily because it kills people. >> primarily because it kills people. well, it kills you. not people. >> you see what i do -- i was like, it kills -- >> deflecting.

other people. >> other people can be hurt by this. >> you'll be fine. just like if you keep eating a lot, you'll be fine. >> it's not a problem. but other people, i hear, gain weight. you must want to change. we went over that. you say, be careful what you ask for, you may just get it. >> yeah, yeah. >> you say, for instance, i would like to lose some weight. you say, be careful, you might become skinny. >> in the great, that would be great, and you'd look wonderful in the mirror for yourself -- >> it's not how i look, it's the lower back pain. >> you don't think that weight maybe does something for you? what do you think that weight could possibly do for you? >> the weight does a lot for me, because if i'm stuck without food somewhere, i can live longer. >> you don't think it protects you? puts a shield up in front of you? >> i don't know, maybe. i think i would be more protected if