Better. Not marching to the senseless beat of some far off government drum. If the politicians who gave us this train wreck expect us to live by this law, then the same law, without special exemptions should apply to congress. Is that really too much to ask . Obama care serves as a grave threat to the future prosperity of the citizens of virginia, and i will continue to resist expanding it. Not just in washington, but every state in america. I promise i will do my part in virginia, and i know you will do yours. Together we can make america better tomorrow than it is today. Thank you for listening, god bless each one of you, and god bless our beloved camera. On cspan, marissa mayer, then ferc c. E. O. , Mark Zuckerberg. And later, editoral cartoonists. On the next washington Journal Washington Bureau chief Michael Kranish and matt viser talk about their articles entitled broken city. Hen Fitch Credit Rating Agency spokesperson john olert. Then robin wright of the u. S. Institute of peace is our guest. Washington journal libe at 7 00 a. M. Eastern on cspan. 200yearold clock stops ticking. Time stands still. Metaphor for easy the government shutdown. We are standing near the north extension of the capital. The clock behind me here is the oldest clock in the United States capitol. It was commissioned for the United States senate in the year 1815. Twad ordered from a philadelphia clock maker named thomas voight. Just one of the many reasons the cspan video arkifes are amazing. You can see and share cspan programming any time. It is easy. Heres how. Go to cspan. Org. To watch the newest library, click on what you want to watch, and click play. You can search the Video Library for a spisk topic or key word. You can find a person, type in their name, hit search, and go to people. Go to their bio page and scroll down to their appearances. Can you also share what you are watching and make a clip. Use the set buttons or handle tools. Add a title and description, and then click share and send it by email, facebook, twitter, or google plus. Video library, searchable, easy, and free to the cable tv industry and funded by your local cable or satellite provider. Marissa mayer sits down with techcrunch Founder Michael arin depfment ton in their National Conference in San Francisco. Or about half an hour. Did you see the cookie thing . I did. Amazing what they are doing. Before we talk about the logo, i would like to get your thoughts on the whole vote thing. I never opened a vote i would like to get your thoughts on this whole vogue magazine. First of all, i have never looked at a vogue magazine before. Look at this. That is a huge book. I gave up because i could not find the article. There is no table of contents. We finally found it. Would you autograph this for me so i can have it forever . Why not . The part where you are laying upside down on the chair there. The back story is he back story is for to does they shot me for two minutes sitting upright. Then the frafrl came over and talked about leadership being in unconventional forms. So he said, could you please move upside down, and i said, sure. It worked. That is the back story of what went on there. Awesome. We will talk about this. Every time i interview you before the rest of our lives. I wanted to get it i actually rote this for you. Actually, so both of us could maybe be upside down in the interview. Back to the logo. What happened here, right . [laughter] first of all, i like the way the logo turned out and i like the way we did it. To me, we pride ourselves at yahoo as being the Worlds Largest tartup. Our attitude the way we did the logo, we kept it inhouse. We did not have someone in a consulting firm. We did not send millions of dollars. We came from a very authentic place. For us, what the brand is really about is the product and having the products and the best user experience. That is what we want to shine through. We are happy with the logo. For us, the focus is really on the product. Ok. Fair enough. But how long before you change it, do you think . I think the interesting thing is one of the things that happens is most logos get changed a little bit all the time. Yahoo did not change its logo at all for 18 years. We have 18 years of pentup changes and small changes. Changes that you dont even see each day when they happen. From now on, we will use it to do small iterations over time just to keep the logo fresh and current. We got to a place where 87 of our employees wanted Something Different and users were mailing in saying your products are beautiful and the logo feels clunky. When you get to the point when your brand and your logo does not really match the product, it is a problem. I will drop that. You were honest. I thought you were going to talk about math like you did in your tumbler post, that even though we cant see it, it is actually beautiful. But no. No. Ok. Here is something nice. You have been the ceo for a year and four months. July 2012. A year and two months. The market has doubled. 14 billion in stockholder value that was not there before. That is really good. Is it something you would serve . Ow have you earned that . There are very smart investments. I owe to my predecessors. Alibaba, something people are excited about. For example, yahoo , japan. That is a joint venture for us. Something that was started in the early days and has done really well this year. I will say, when i look at the state of what we are doing inside the company, i said it would take multiple years. By that i mean, probably three or more to get the Company Going in the direction that we want it to go and having growth at the rate that we want it to be. For me, it is really a Chain Reaction of four things. Having the right people and having them build the right products, turning into traffic, because traffic leads to revenue ultimately. Online, and were doing really well wait, you said four things. People, product, traffic, and revenue. The interesting thing is they are a Chain Reaction and they work like a funnel. You have to get the right people before you can build the right products. The products have to be good or people do not come and use them. Once you have got those usage, people can use them. Especially in advertising. We had a modest year of growth in 2012. All growth starts somewhere. This year, we had a nice stable year so far. We are hoping to see some growth this or next year. People were seeing exciting things. A lot of acquisitions. That has brought a lot of great talent into the company. Even separate from the acquisition strategy, we get 12,000 resumes a week. The reason thats a fun number for us, basically the companies the company is worth 12,043 right now. For every job we have, we get a resume each week, up genetically. Five or six from before i was here and before july 2012. Our attrition is down markedly. We are down to between three and four. I have been really happy with the team i have made and adding new people all the time. Ed have ow many yahooter you acquired . We call them boomerangs. Team 1, 14 of our hires were boomerangs. This quarter to date, 10 . We had a lot of college grads. Over the course of the year, it has been 10 of the hired have been boomerangs. We are really happy with some of the products we have release. We would really stay product all the on who screen. It has an archive in it. South park, jon stewart, stephen colbert. You can watch those all on yahoo now. In terms of traffic, i am happy o announce we passed 800 million monthly active users in terms of yahoo s global audience. The growth represents 20 since july. So that does include tumbler . It does not. Where are these people coming from . We are seeing a lot of usage on mobile. 350 million monthly users. A lot of usage on home page, mail, search, or core properties. My strategy is to be focused on the daily habit, things people use everyday. Earch, mail, homepage, news, finance, et cetera. We have the same people responding to the way we have been strengthening the products. Can i apologize . There are 40 people taking pictures here and they follow me around all the time. It is annoying. They are taking a lot of pictures of me and i do not want that to distract. I think they are here for you. There are interesting cameras. I did not mean that in a weird way. You are a little more photogenic, i think. We talked about products a little bit. Your traffic is way up for unknown reasons. The core product. Everybody thinks i mean it in a mean way. It is exciting. I promise i will go to yahoo i did go to yahoo for the new logo thing and i remembered i had an email account and i will start seeing how that works out. Well, we appreciate it. I think mail has seen a lot of market in the last year. You will see more. It has to be hard, though, right . You came from google. You were there from the beginning. Google almost effortlessly gets praise. To a company that had really hard years, you probably have to fight harder than ever to get any attention on these products. Must not the fun sometimes. I like hard work and i love google and was there for 13 years. If you had told me i would be as happy anywhere else, i probably would have doubted it. I am as happy if not happier at yahoo . It is a phenomenal experience. Hard work, but i love hard work and i love big challenges. A big challenge, but i have got a great group of people we both assembled and were there already. We are really rising to the challenge. It has been inspiring to be a art of that. Do you think this crowd is the crowd you can get back to your products . Are you starting with mobile on that . I will start. If you count mobile, pc, weather, mail, fantasy football, everything, how many people have been to yahoo in the past month . It looks like it is about half or more than half. In many cases, i would argue we have not lost a users. We just want more of their time and attention. We can get great tools that can help. Figuring out how people spend their time. Some of what we are working on now our news strains that organizes all the news stories on our home page. We have sophisticated personalization algorithms. I have seen the dates. I am really proud of what the team has done and we are just Getting Started. At its core, yahoo is an advertising driven company but we are really a personalization company and about organizing the right content and advertising for each of our users. There is a lot we can do for the users if you happen on the site once a week, giving them more eason to come back and time on our site. Because they migrate. Do you use yahoo ail now . When you started using it, i assume you are not using it much at google but maybe you were. Did you say, this is awful and we have to change some things or did you think it was good . There are a few teachers i missed. It is a really strong product. I like the fact it is funny. One of the things i use for fast email processing is time. I like basic email. I like to be efficient and simple and minimalist. What i really love about yahoo mail is it loads fast, loads faster than gmail. We have been working a lot on efficiency and speed improvements. It is just email. It does not have video chat and a lot of those other things. We may experiment and it may ultimately get in the way in terms of using mail every day. What are the biggest product holes and problems you are trying to fix right now, the things you that make you the maddest right now that you want to change . There are a lot of small things. There always are. There are a lot of different bugs to squash as they come up. In terms of the broad need, the big case i am focused on is mobile. We have grown our mobile team by a factor of 10 since i arrived. It was fun sized in terms of what it needed to be when i got there. We had great s p and mobile. A tremendous team is working on the design. Mobile has been growing remendously. Looking at what users need to do and what daily habits are on the phone, it is a huge opportunity there for yahoo if you look at what yahoo has always been strong in. Mail, news, finance, stock quotes, games, sharing photos, group communication, all of these pieces. That is what people do on their phones. It is a great opportunity for us to take the content we have always had on the web and bring it to the phone and taking it and making sure it really needs not only the same cases we have had on the pc, but also the new used user expectations on mobile. That is the key thing i am focused on. A random question. You seemed to like you were at the apple event yesterday and seemed to like the fingerprint nsa scanner thing on the phone. Why . Why would you be in favor of anything that could gather more information . I did not realize it was a reporter. I did not know. I think what i liked about it mike made fun of me because i do not have a passcode on my phone. He was like, are you crazy . I said, i just cannot. I cant do that 15 times a day. And now i dont have to. I think building in some of these Smart Sensors into the phone is really fun. The same reason i really excited what they are doing in terms of small sensors that help make everyday life and everyday tasks that is more interesting. Fingerprint sensors are good. To unlock your phone, yes. Microsoft has not announced a new ceo. Are you happy that ballmer is leaving . [laughter] who do you want to be the next ceo and they are your biggest partner. I would say from my now almost 15 years in the industry, obviously bill gates and steve balmer have been big in the industry, and i really admire what both have done at microsoft in terms of what they built. This is an interesting time for microsoft. I do not know what their board is considering but when i look at their product line, i see a lot of strength in the advertised area, windows, office, and so one of the things i have come to appreciate is i think consumer executives and enterprise executives have different traits and different instincts. I would hope they are looking for people who are really strong. A strong microsoft is good for the industry overall. That is helping to build strength and competencies. Would you like to see bill gates come back . I think that hes a phenomenal leader. I think there is nothing quite like the passion of a founder in terms of leadership. You are turning into a real diplomat. Ill tell you that. Being ceo means you have to say things more carefully than you are sometimes used to. What is your biggest weakness as a ceo . What do you suck at the most . You clearly have great things about you that everyone understands. What are you terrible at . I have been really lucky. There is a community i know that many ceos in the audience feel that range from startups to big companies. There really is a community of c. E. O. s. I have been lucky to have some of the greats in Silicon Valley reach out and give advice. One said to me the thing that is shocking is how few decisions you actually have to make. You have to make them exactly correctly and exactly perfectly. On the average day, there is no decision you really need to make. If it has something to do with your team, it is probably ok. Every now and then, there is a decision. Sometimes it is obvious and sometimes it is not. That really, really matters and needs to be made absolutely correctly. When i hold myself up to that lens, i should probably be making fewer decisions and while i try to identify what those decisions are, and i dont think i have missed any yet, it is hard to say, what are the Big Decisions that need to be made absolutely correctly. You dont think you have made a single bad decision in the last year . I am sure i have. I am not sure any of those are make it or break it for whether yahoo returns to growth. The goal is to get the Company Growing again. From that perspective, your job as ceo is to grow revenue. In t last year . I am sure i have. I am not sure any of those are make it or break it for whether yahoo returns to growth. The goal is to get the Company Growing again. From that perspective, your job as ceo is to grow revenue. Few downward decisions you need to make but you need to make them perfectly. Ok. All right. Or memory that remembering that each day is something i hope i can get. What are you doing to protect us from tyrannical government . I have been watching your ther interviews. I knew this was going to come up. I think i agree with a lot. A board member and a good friend, i am not going to repeat that. I will say i am really proud. I cannot take credit for it it for it, because it happened before i got to yahoo but i am proud of an prism that in at the gipping of 2007 with the n. S. A. , has been skeptical of those requests. Yahoo filed a lawsuit against the patriotic act. We fought that. We were the key plaintiff. A lot of people wondered about the case and who it was. It was us. You lost there it and you caved. Not you, you were not there yet. Right. Pu the thing is, when you lose we fought, we lost. You lose, if you dont comply, its treason. Treason. Now you are going through the rocess of suing. Now on each request, we review it and scrutinize it and push back on it a lot. We push back on requests in terms of the nsa. We cannot talk about it because they are classified. Why . Lets say right now you were to tell us the truth of whats going on thats classified, what do you think would happen to you. Revealing classified information is treason. It would generally have you incarcerated. I think, when you look at we think it makes more sense in terms of analyzing requests and doing our best to protect our users, it makes sense for us to work within the system. We filed suit against the government monday, asking to be more transparent with the numbers. We have really taken charge. A lot of other companies, as well, pushing for more transparency and pushing back on nreasonable request, pushing back on what we viewed as a station that might not be reasonable. We are constantly petitioning the government to be able to release the documents of the 2007 case. We will keep doing those things. It is really about protecting our users, for our users to understand on our side and across the industry, and their data, which is why we started a transparency report friday. I want to thank you. I have asked this question of every Single Person except mark, because he was on a monologue too good to stop. About steve jobs. Ive asked everyone else and have not gotten a single answer. If you say what you said and reasons why it is great thank you. This is not about this articular thing. If it isnt cls identified as treason, it can be. You do not think the best way you will serve your shareholders and users is from jail. I do not mean to put words in your mouth. Who is smarter, larry page or Mark Zuckerberg . [laughter] it is not a fair question. I know them in different amounts. I have a huge amount of respect for larry page. He is broadly talented, intellectual, curious, interested, wanting a challenge. I would point out i think they are both really and in different i would point out they are both brilliant in really different demingses. Larry asks why not when he looks at the world. Can i change it . I have not interacted much with Mark Zuckerberg. When i have met him, i have been blown away by his insight into google. By his insight into people. I think he is incredibly insightful. He has created an amazing social tool that has helped connect us all. I think he is really insightful into people and their psychology and what drives them. I do not get the sense larry is insightful into people. Am i wrong . He is in another world at times. So smart he is in another world. Although mark is, too. As i said, what you want to look at are the superpowers. Larrys superpower is challenging the status quo and what is possible and what is mpossible. And i think marks superpower is people. What is your superpower . I do not know if i have one. That is sad. [laughter] everybody should have a superpower. I think that one piece that i would like, i do think i am able to empathize. Coming into yahoo last year, the company had been through a time of a lot of turmoil and turbulence, getting to empathize with the employees, understand the face the company , s in all had to get there together as a team. That was not going to happen if i could not empathize and be part of what happened to them. I do not know what people would say but i would hope if i had a superpower, it is probably empathy. Thank you so much. This was great. You are giving us so much time today. You are staying in helping the judge and going to the finalists. It is great. Thank you so much. Thank you. [applause] next, more from the tech crunch annual conference with Mark Zuckerberg. [applause] all the photographers are back again. They love me. What have you done lately . That is not my real first question. We have a great interview. It was one of your first interviews after the ipo. We have not had a chance to talk since then. How has the last year gone in general . It has been an interesting year. A lot of things always change around you when you are running a company. I tend to think it is my job to keep us centered on what matters. Different companies focus on different things. There are companies that are obsessed with their way of doing stuff. You hear stories from hp back in the day. The hp way of doing things. For us, we are singularly focused on connecting people in the world. And give people tools to share whatever they want. That has been the unifying theme for us as long as weve been around. That is a unifying theme for us i remember when we were first Getting Started back in my harvard dorm. I used to get pizza with my friends. My friend at the time, he is at facebook now and a vp of engineering. We used to talk about how we were building this little site to help people connect in this small community. One day someone would surely build Something Like this for the whole world. Now we are at this point, where to a while, getting billion people was the big rallying cry. When we got closer to it, it is not that anyone wakes up in the morning and says, i want to get oneseventh of the world to do something. It happens to be bigger than anyone else has built. A billion is not a magical number. As we have approached that and passed it, now the focus for us is actually retooling, and you will see us retooling the company in a lot of ways to take on a lot of harder problems that fulfill this mission. For example, connecting the next 5 billion people will be hard because a lot of them dont have internet access. People share and put billions of kecks into this big graph every day. Now we want to we dont want to just add incrementally to that, we want to over the next five or 10 years take on a roadmap to understand everything in the world, semantically and map everything out. We want to play a role in helping people build companies and create jobs. Those are the big themes for us. Thats what were going to try to do over the next five or 10 years. Thats what ive tried to focus on. To sum that up, you want all he people . Im kidding. [laughter] not everyone uses facebook, but most people at this time use social tools. I think the design patterns and the work we do can help that part of the industry, and we are proud of the work we are doing there. You said a lot, and im going to unpack some of that. Thats what you said after my first interview. You do that. Your brain works a little faster than mine, so im going to try to slow it down a little bit. A lot of this goes to internet. I would like to talk about that a little later as you expand to all the people from 1. 3 billion today . No, were at 1. 15. How many a day . Half a billion a day . Our last Quarter Report was 699 million daily active users. Thats pretty cool. Yeah, not bad. So what do you think of all the yahho logo . Of all the followup questions you could have asked to that. I think it is perfect. Marissa is back there, so why dont you look into the camera and tell her what you think of that awful, awful thing . You dont want to answer that question, do you . It seems fine to me. But youre talking to someone weve had the same logo for almost 10 years. Ok. Twitter is going to go public. You have gone through the whole thing. If you you had some pretty rough times but everything is great now. What is your advice to them as they their this process . It is funny on the surface, because ive kind of like the person you would want to ask last how you would want to make a smooth idea. Seriously, it is actually a valuable product. Having gone through what i think most people would characterize an extremely turbulent first year as a public company. You, i actually dont think it is that bad. I was heartened by the fact that i was worried that, you know, people would leave the company and people would get really demoralized, but people stayed focused on the mission. I think it has made our company stronger. The process of leading up to going public, have you to know everything about your company, and kind of nigh out have everything. I thought we were a datadriven company. But the work that they did to to get us ready to be public took us to the next level, and we run our Company Better now. In retrospect, i was too afraid of going public. I think i have been outspoken about staying private for as long as possible. I dont think it is that ecessary to do that. You just have to stay focused on doing the right stuff. I think last year, we were talking about mobile. Last year, second quarter, we had basically no revenue on mobile. Now it is in our last quarter a year later, more than 40 of our revenue is mobile. People think that, you know, there is more competition on mobile, there are more great apps. People spend on desk tops one in seven minutes on facebook. It is 15. Around 20 . The next biggest step is instagram. We have focused on doing what we think are the right things. And were growing. Were connecting more folks. People are using more, sharing more content. All the stuff that we just come in and get excited about every day. I think as long as twitter and everything this is for all these private companies are thinking about when they go private, as long as they focus on what they are doing, i think it is wonderful, it is great. To be fair, your mobile pructs a year ago sucked. They did . And then they got really good really fast. So i think you deserved to have no revenue from thesm a year ago. Whether you agree or not, there has been a lot of work in that area, and a lot of focus that maybe was president there before. No, absolutely. And also, we took the legacy of the company was building this big web site and focusing on being able to develop for the web. So naturally we tried to look at things and see if we can build the hkml 5 system. It was clear we werent going to get the quality we needed. We took a year, it was painful, and retooled that. We took a lot of [beep] because we werent experienced on mobile. I took time to make sure we were perienced first, and i think we did it in the right order. It is good to go from really awful to good rather than really good to awful. So i would agree on the order. So started to talk about platform for a minute. You talk about the old facebook platform. Does it have any meaning for you at all at this point . Or is it that you are so focused bile, that the whole for me, when i think of our mission, that isnt realistic. What is more likely is that people will all be using tools that they can use to connect in different ways. When i got started with facebook, i felt this void in the way look toward technology. Toward ns are wired communicating with other people. We have parts of our brain that are focused toward seeing microexpressions from other people. The way we build software and services as an industry didnt reflect that at all. Hat seems wrong to me. There were all these tools you could use to get access to information. There was nothing for thome. Them. Early social networks tried to do everything themselves. I think one of the things we realized is that no one company can do everything. Instead we should focus on doing a few of the core things, and instead we should try to build a platform to enable other companies to build great social apps. The first version of that took the form of basically people building games and other things inside of facebook. That has evolved into almost a billion dollar a year business for us. It is good. But that was never the vision. The full vision over time was not that people build things inside facebook, although people get value from that. We can enable distribution out, different services. Thats what we are focused on now. Pillars of the platform strategy which are build, grow, and monetize. On the build side we want to do stuff like buildin that makes it easier to build apps. It is easier to build an app. You dont have to worry about the app. If you build an app, you dont have to worry about connecting to other services. It is awesome. There are more than 100,000 apps. That is going well. On grow, people think of facebook platforms as distribution. And thats true. That has always been a big part of the story. We have been an important part of helping grow their apps. One of the biggest things were doing is mobile app install. It is a part of our business that has grown quickly. A lot of people are starting to rely on us. Thats great. And then monetize as well. A lot of people making payments for their services. If we can help make it so that the industry overall can build better apps that are more human by and helping monetize, then i feel really good. I am going to go with a personal question now. I dont know how many people realize every year you have a personal challenge where you challenge yourself to do something really interesting, hard. In the past you have learned chinese, which you did. Right. Tried to. With one code every day . No. Ok, i made that one up. You certainly have to kill everything you eat here. We are suddenly on facebook. You did that. And there was wear a tie every day. I dont know if i have missed one. I dont know what it is, if you do have one. I do. The point of these is really, you know, i think you get perspective from building things by living in different worlds and kind of going deep on things. Doing something for a year, i unintended ave some consequences of making decisions. And the other theme for that is willpower, kind of seeing things through for things that will be hard for me to do. Like learning manderin, for example, i was always terrible at languages. I tried to learn french in high school. When people would say things to me, i could not understand what people were saying. So i went to latin, instead. It is better, because no one speaks latin. That was actually a lot of fun. So i decided to pick up what is one of the hardest languages for people that only speak english to learn. It was interesting. One of the unintended sideeffects is i set up these sessions where mandarin speaking facebook employees would talk to me about parts of the company that they were working on that i wouldnt normally have meanings on. It was great. I learned mandarin, i learned more stuff about our people, and it was awesome. In the end, i was complaining to my wife one day that, you know, i was never that good at listening in mandarin, and she goes, mark, you are not good at listening in english either. Thats when i realized the level it was going to take me to really be fluent in mandarin was very hard. So i tabled that for a while. This year my challenge is to meet a new person outside of facebook every day. I think it is really valuable to have perspective. In person . Yeah. And have like a conversation. Not in person. It has turned out to be really easy. I sandbagged this one. It turned out that i actually on average meet more than one person already. I kind of underestimated that one. I wasnt talking to a lot of people externally. When i was planning this out, i kind of set up things to get more involved in the community. I started teaching a class at a local middle school. I got involved in different organizations to meet people that do different things. It has been interesting. Now, that class, the middle chool class is what led to forward. Us, is that right . One of the reasons why i started doing that, pricilla and i have done a lot of education work. Her career in kids, when she graduated from harvard, she went to become a teacher, and now hes a pediatrician. Pediatricians are all facebook and kids. She decided one day if we were going to do a bunch of education projects that i couldnt just be that guy that gives money to education projects without having been taught myself, which i think is a reasonable perspective. One day after class, i asked the students how they thought they were going to college. One of the top students in the raised his hand and said, i dont know if i will be able to go to college because im undocumented. Blown. Was i hadnt thought of that. This kid was so talented. I couldnt tell the difference. There was no perceptible difference. I asked, how many of you were born outside the u. S. A bunch of them put their hands up. One of them said, i really hope our government does something about this. I kind of went home that night, and i talked to pricilla and i talked to my friend joe who is one of the smartest people i know in business and politics and the intersection between them. We decided we were going to build an industry coalition. It wasnt something just a few people would take on. I called some of my people that run companies. Called drew and people involved in facebook. You know, the great thing is, the Tech Industry really cares about changing the world. A lot of people i would expect to have been i care about getting highskilled folks for my company, but we made clear up front, this is not just about highly skilled people. Were going to push on them, and were going to push for getting full comprehensive Immigration Reform done. People in the Tech Industry are really idealistic and believe in getting that done. Ive never been prouder of my peers in the community for coming together to work on an important issue like that. Do you think that anything will happen with that this year or next year or ever . It is really tough, right, to megs around with washington, d. C. . I am an optimist. I think you have to be, to be an entrepreneur. These things are not without risk. There are a lot of people that want to do the right thing. You know, people talk about how many washington it is polarized and no one can get along. But, you know, conversations that i have had, a lot of people really want to do the right thing and agree with it and are kind of looking for a pass card. So zero chance on something happening . I dont know. It is not it is my job to provide the culture, not my job to do it. Who do you think should be the next c. E. O. Of microsoft . Thanks for bringing that up, by the way. I could tell you there are probably a lot of people that can run microsoft and do a reasonable job. When i was growing up, bill gates was my hero. Come on. He was hes the bad guy. No, he is not. Bill gates ran one of the most missiondriven companies i can think of. Right now, i think microsoft their mission is less spoken than it used to be. But when i was thinking about, you know, what would i want to be when i grew up, you know, microsoft has had a great mission. Put a computer on every desk top and in every office. Maybe it was every desk top in every home. You know, there are companies that define themselves by way of doing things, the h. P. Way i was talking about, and there are companies that define themselves by making concrete changes in the world. Microsoft did that. I have a huge a of i have a huge amount of respect for him doing that. It was an inspiring company. I think they still are doing a lot of things, but they have lost some of the focus. I dont know. I think hes like one of the greatest visionaries that our industry has ever had. Do you think hell come back . I dont know. Youd have to ask him. Do you know . You have to answer. I dont know. I dont know. I dont think you would lie to me. Im not a very good liar. No, i dont think yeah. Well remember that and ask you a couple things later. The culture of moving fast at facebook, is this a good thing, or does it just get you into trouble . And we can talk about things like home, if you want. Yeah, whatever you want to cover. Yeah, it gets us into tons of trouble. Im of the belief that values are only useful when they are controversial. Right, so there are companies that write these value statements that i think are meaningless because they are table stuff. People are like, be honest. Of course youre going to be honest. Thats not a choice. Thats not a value. You have to be honest. Go home if you are not honest. But move fast is good because it is something people can actually disagree with. There are companies that dont move fast and that succeed, right . And i think in our what i mean by move fast, is i want to empower people as a company to try things out. I dont demand that every iteration of what we produce is perfect. What i would optimize for is learning the most and having the best product three, five, seven years from now, which you can do by iterating quickly, getting feedback, and going from there. There are companies with different approaches like that. Apple would never launch something that didnt meet their profession bar. I think move fast is you can meaningfully disagree with it and i think it leads to it an interesting outcome. In terms of what we are doing, i think it is incredibly powerful. Of we need to do is a lot engineers. There are thousands of different versions of facebook running. Any engineer is empowered to try something out and get this report on how it performs on all the metrics we care about, sharing, and the amount of money that we make. For every test we do, kick off a survey and people tell us how happy we are. You dont have toe get approval, there are different layers. Try something, and it works, it works. So ns a surprise to you. You dont know what im looking at right now. Explain this sign thats up at facebook. I dont know if it is, but i believe it is. If it isnt, youll tell me, cause this doesnt say move fast. Slow down and the camera. Is that sign up there. This doesnt mean anything fficial. It is something we always it is not like any company wakes up in the morning and says, we want to move super slowly. What i want this to mean for us, we want to build our company and our infrastructure and we try to move one or two clicks faster than other companies. Sometimes we move too fast and we mess up a bunch of stuff and we have to fix it. Thats cool. Would you consider home so far a failure . One of the toughest things is determining when something isnt going to work versus it hasnt worked yet. I definitely think home is slower in rolling out than i would have hoped. What we have gotten is a lot of positive feedback on the cover feed. They like chatnet. We rolled that out 100 . Then we got valuable feedback. People want more than just Facebook Content on the lock screen. So we are taking time to build that in. One of the things you will be age to do is get instagram and other content in there, so that will make it more valuable. It is early in its development. It is a bit slower than i probably would have thought. But, you know, were patient. I fully believe this is going to be something that a lot of people want over time. Getting content delivered to your home screen and being aware of what is going on is i think a valuable thing. Maybe the current formula is something we still need to keep working on, but were going to do that. In are so many tech representatives that refer to this as a [beep] show. But you disagree with that . You have moved into all the mobile apps already. Chatnet. In that sense, it is almost a testing ground, right . Yes. The parts that work well will roll out quick, and the parts that dont will kind of slow down. You know, the longterm goal for this, you know, we released the first version of home as a separate app. We kind of did that so people could go out of their way to the play store and go get it. Where this is going over time, once we get to the point where we are happy with the product, you will just turn this on and you wont need to download a separate product. You will be able to have your lockscreen as part of a different app. We do this by iterating and having it for feedback, we will do that. We will just keep on working on t until we get it right. So n. S. A. , user data. You have 1. 1 million users, affiliates. You have more data than any entity in the world, and it is all of our data, and we care a lot about it, and we dont want people necessarily getting it and using it to do bad things. We know what facebook has done over the last several months to try to help increase transparancy. We have seen the lawsuit. We have seen those efforts. And i dont need you to repeat them, although im happy to talk about that if you want. What i want to know is what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about these issues and our right to privacy versus the government. Yeah, so we take our role really seriously. I think it is my job and our job to protect everyone who uses facebook and all the information that they share with us. It is our governments job to protect all of us and hopefully to protect our freedoms and protect the economy, right . And companies. And i think they did a bad job of balancing those things here. So frankly i think that the government blew it. They blew it on communicating what they were basically the balance of what they were going or here with this. So the morning after this tarted breaking the government tenet was, dont worry, were not spying on any americans. Oh, wonderful. Thats really helpful for the companies that are trying to serve people around the world. This is going to inspire confidence in american internet companies. Thanks for going out there and being really clear about what you are doing. So i think that was really bad. We have been pushing just to get more transparancy on this. And i actually think we have made a big difference. So i mean we havent the big question you get from all the coverage is, whats the volume of the total number of requests that are going on . Is it closer to 1,000 requests that the government is making of us . Is it closer to 100 million . From the compling and what the government has said, you would not know the difference. But we worked really hard with the government behindthescenes to get to the point where we could release the aggregate number of requests. It was around 9,000 in the last half of the year. You know, does that number tell us everything we want . No. Thats why when it was cutting up to the point where we werent going to make further progress, we decided to reveal them if it was 1,000, 2,000, 8,000 or 4,000 of the 9,000 requests, but because of the transparnse transparancy we push for, people can know that the number of requests that the government is making is closer to 1,000. It is 9,000 or less in the last six months and definitely not 10 million. Not a drag with regard to grabbing data. So were not at the end of this. I wish that the government would be kind of more proactive about communicating. We take this really seriously. Thanks. Last question. What thank you. Last question. What are you excited about product wise that would surprise us . We did not spend much time talking about the internet which is not surprising. That is one of the things im excited about. I think a very underestimated problem. We live in a world where everybody around us have high Speed Internet access. It is unfathomable for us to think that only about 1 3 of the people world have access to the internet. For something early in the development, it is going to percent a year. It is kind startling for how few people in the world have access and how early it is in its development. The internet is the backbone of the modern knowledge economy. All of the opportunities we have the ability to have society and jobs and education and all this stuff, it is not happening by itself. It is easy to think there are 5 billion files of the world. The vast majority are feature phones. 5 billion phones in the world. One day all the feature phones will be smart phones. I think that is probably true in the next 510 years. To misinterpret, the extensive part of ownership of a phone is not the phone about the data. If you have an iphone for two years and cost about 2000. 500 or 600 is the phone. Unless the data price comes down, we are never going to be at a point where the vast majority of the world will be up to be on the internet. That is what were to focus on. When able by making them suction to provide the internet cheaper and the most frequent use apps consume less of data. And also trying to provide new Business Models to make a so more people can get of the internet. That is a big focus for us. That is probably not a surprise. You intend to make it happen, dont you . That is why we are here. All of the tactics change all of the time. Mission does not change. That is who we are. We are on the earth to connect everybody intel people share more of what they want. We will do this. Whether they want to are not. I am just kidding. Everybody wants to be connect. It is a fundamental thing. Not every person wants to use a specific service but the internet is a broad place. This is what were going to focus on. Thank you so much. [applause] it is boston globe journalists, washed and Bureau Political reporter talk about their series of articles called broken city, highlighting gridlock in washington. Will talk about what they do as one of the three main credit raging Credit Rating agencies. Iran, we will discuss posses Nuclear Program in geneva. Robin of the u. S. Is sued of peace is our guest. Live at 7 00 a. M. Eastern on c span. This weekend, on newsweek on newsmakers, Chris Van Hollen will talk about what is ahead for the 29 member conference committee. That will try to reach an agreement on the federal budget. Here is a look. Concentrators will have to decide which we want to bite off and chew as part of these nicholas negotiations. That will be one of the early decisions we try to reach. Round isnews in this that, we hope, our republican colleagues have learned the right lessons from the debacle we just went through, unnecessary pain post on the country for six days. It did not have to be that way. We are hoping our colleagues will put down the clubs and recognize the negotiation no one should try to gain advantage again by threatening to shut down the government or default on our debt. If we could for put down the clubs and have a serious conversation, maybe we could advance the ball. Your colleague, a fellow democrat, said yesterday you will look for Common Ground. Is different from compromise. One of the areas where there might be Common Ground is to try of therid of some or all acrosstheboard cuts hitting the pentagon and every domestic agency. Is that probably what we are looking at . What are democrats willing to give up in order to alleviate sequestration . We have to decide as negotiators what the full scope will be. Part of any conversation would be to try to replace the sequester. These are very easy, immediate, andacrosstheboard cuts important investments like transportation, education, science, and research. The Congressional Budget Office recently said if you keep the lower, deep funding levels in place, by this time next year, you will have a hundred thousand fewer jobs in the United States of america. That is a self and what it will and selfinflicted wound. Want to replace with an equal amount of deficit reduction. Done in a smarter way over a washed with watch newsmakers sunday. Cspan, we ring Public Affairs during the to you. Offering complete gaveltogavel coverage of the u. S. House all as a Public Service of rented industry. We are seized and, created by fundedcable industry and by your local cable or satellite provider. You can now watch us in hd. Discussion with three awardwinning cartoonist but the future of cartons. This is one hour 15 minutes. Good evening. I am tom watkins, treasurer of the Atlanta Press club. Thank you for coming to drawing the news. The Atlanta Press club is one of the largest and most active press clubs in the world. We encourage you to join. We have some great programs coming out. We will host a newsmaker luncheon on september 17. Join us on october 8 for the hall of fame dinner. For more information, visit our website at www. Atlantapressclub. Org. We are pleased to have three cartoonists in an ever shrinking universe of cartoonists joining us tonight. Kevin, Award Winning cartoonist for the economist magazine of london. His career spans more than 35 years and he has created more than 8000 cartoons and 140 magazine covers. His resume includes six collections of published work. Mike, Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journalconstitution. He began his cartooning career in 1984 in new orleans and joined the constitution in 1989. His work appears in time and the new york times. Rick has been the editorial cartoonist for the augusta chronicle, he started at the Atlanta Journalconstitution years before. His cartoons are syndicated to more than 400 newspapers across america. He has won numerous awards, including first place for editorial cartooning in the Georgia Press associations Better Newspaper contest. We will ask a bunch of questions, i will start off with a couple, formulate your own. We will pick the brains of people who look at world events and distill them to simple pictures and make us laugh or have an epiphany or think deep thoughts. I want to know rick did not get a microphone. I think he deserves one. I guess he gets one. There is an extra. First off, you are talking to the press club, which has endured a bitter few years. I am wondering if you could comment on the state of editorial cartooning. Is it the same as newspapers, or has it been spared . I think the cartoonists have been hit harder than the newspaper industry. In a large part because, the beancounters and businessmen are making hiring and firing decisions as newspapers. They look at a cartoonist and say, what does this guy really bring . The journalists know the value that a cartoonist can bring. We see it in the work of rick and mike that the powerful attachment that a local Community Gets to the cartoonist, and the power that it can do to affect both Public Discourse and also get the full attention of the politicians. That is part of the job of the free press. Cartoonists have been laid off at a rapid rate. There is maybe the numbers are kind of loose. Maybe 25 years ago, we were hovering in the 200 range. Now we are in the 70s or lower. When a newspaper loses a cartoonist, it is likely that they will never rehire one. I am an example of that. I was a 17year cartoonist for the Baltimore Sun. I was offered a buyout and i took it because i saw the writing on the wall. They invited me to come back. We want a cartoonist, please. Do you want to add . Newspapers have contracted. I think it is a casebycase situation. I think there are some cartoonists in better shape than others. The ajc is lean, is doing well. A few years ago, things were great. 2004, 2005, newspapers were doing fabulous. Now, they have to be leaner. As i said, i think if you are if your publisher and your editor and the people who people who own your paper value that cartoon, cartoonists are in a good position. I dont have much to add except to say that there are a few people who have been hired in the last couple of months. It is encouraging. I know my paper has beefed up coverage, added an opinion section. Im hoping it has stabilized maybe, maybe we can turn it around. Ok. Has the internet helped or hurt the business of cartooning and the artistry of cartooning . Should i take this one . I think that the internet has initially hurt newspapers, like all media. People thought they could get everything for free. That is stabilizing. It has been a good thing in that our work has a much wider viewership than it used to. It used to be your hometown and if you are syndicated in other newspapers, people in those towns. Now, everyone has the ability to look at your cartoons. My stuff is on facebook and twitter, i do not know that much about all that stuff, i know that my cartoons go on there and people are seeing them. I think that is a good thing. It is hard to say. There are a lot more internet type cartoonists who are not necessarily professional, they are not paid staffers. With the advent of photoshop, anyone can go out there and whip something out. There is a lot more political opinion not many people are making money on it. There is another interesting byproduct of the web in the way it is helped cartoonists. This is mostly internationally. You see three guys up here. Whenever you get cartoonists appear and ask them how they got into this business, everyone has a different story. There is no conventional way to become a cartoonist. There are no schools or graduate degrees. We in the u. S. Have a rich tradition of satire that goes back several centuries. In emerging democracies, they dont have that same background. When they are looking to emulate what we do, what happens is, cartoonists are watching the cartoonists here. In the facebook scene, youre seeing a quick and Rapid Development of cartooning in countries like india, brazil, countries where the press is growing. There are more newspapers, they are growing. In many places in the west, they are shrinking. Cartoonists are learning at a faster pace than we could have done. It is accelerating the growth of cartoonists in other parts of the world. I hope you guys have some questions. One more. At its best, what should cartooning do . What do you hope to accomplish as a cartoonist . Give me the hard one. They should make the readers think. And a lot of cartoons use humor. If i have challenged my readers to think about an issue differently, maybe one that they may not agree with, then i have accomplished my mission. Mike . I am a very idealistic about cartooning. I feel like i feel like we are perfecting our union. I am trying to make people think, like rick says. I am trying to show what i believe is not right out there. There is a lot that is not right out there right now. They say that bad news is good for cartoonists because it gives us fodder. I would rather work harder and have less bad news and know we were going in the right direction. I think we are not going in the right direction right now. I feel very like it is a real calling for me to get my opinions out there. All of those things are absolutely right. One of the things that is interesting about how cartoonists contrast to any other member of the journalism school, it has the ability to penetrate a society, each cartoon is a sentence. They are pretty simple, straightforward, we try to get a point across in a succinct way. Over a week, a paragraph, over a month, a chapter. You are basically having a long term conversation with your readers. We use humor, pictures, we have an interesting way to reside in a special part of the brain. People approach it openminded because they think they are going to laugh. We engage in a very personal relationship with people. Over time, the ability to reside in somebodys brain and go to what rick mentioned, to make them think about subjects that sometimes they may have fixed ideas about. Maybe rethink them. Sometimes awaken them to stories they need to know about. In some ways,i am going to sound like miss america, we want to make the world a better place. We are doing that with our unique medium. Questions . Not at a paper, would you run down hot you determine which how you determine which articles have a cartoon attached to them or which are standalone . What is interesting about that question, that is the same type of question that i would like to ask all of the other cartoonists. Everyone has a different feel. We are as different as comedians. There is woody allen, chris rock. All cartoonists are different in our personality, our approach to the news, our style. I cannot wait to hear what these guys have to say. [laughter] was the question . No, my cartoons standalone from the articles. I have a great situation. Although my editor says i have to start getting in earlier. I now get in at noon. [laughter] the first thing i do is i have lunch. After lunch, to the untrained eye, it does not look like i am doing anything. I am just sitting there on ebay or on itunes. I am looking at topics, too. Around 3 00, i start to get nervous because i have been procrastinating all day. I start to get nervous. That is when i start coming up with ideas. Usually my first couple of ideas suck. I will show them to somebody and they will be happy to tell me that they suck. I appreciate the honesty, that gets my journaling going. I want to come up with something to show this person that i am not a failure. I keep doing that, it gets later and later. My day starts out with procrastination and ends in panic. Right at my deadline at 5 30, i have to draw a really quick. I do not pencil in, i just ink. I have whiteout on my hands, i just got done with a cartoon. I am going as fast as i can, that is how my day goes. [laughter] wow. My cartoons are standalone as well. I am in the office with the other editorial writers. I am doing a cartoon on syria, they have an editorial coming up on syria, we might run those two together. You might get the idea that we pairedthem, but it just happened. I come in at 9 30, but i also look like i am not doing anything. I hope to have my sketch to my lunchtime. That has got to go through the approval process. I do a different way of inking. I have a light box that i put my sketch underneath. Then i ink on top of the paper. I have the sketch to guide me. Then i scan it in, hopefully i have inking done by 3 30, i start to color. You asked how the web affected it, we have a color position online. By 5 30 or 6 00, i have the color position done. Do you assign yourselves or do they say might, we want a cartoon on syria . For me, no. My editor likes to suggest ideas. Sometimes i listen to him, most of the time i do not. I do whatever i want to draw. I did not even go to meetings. It is the most incredible thing. I sit in my office, i do not see my editor. No one bugs me until i come out of there and show my rough. They do not tell me what to do. I have got such a great situation. Largely, the freedom that each of these fellows have is in large part because they have built up a reputation that they will deliver. One of the things about our business, we work on tight deadlines. We are creating art and satire on a deadline. It requires a lot of different skill sets. A requires the skill set of being a journalist, keeping up with the news, then put on the habit of being a columnist. I think that is how people should regard us. We approach the news, come up with our own perspective on the subject we are going to cover. Then we have to be a satirist and apply humor. The last thing, we are an artist, using pictures to deliver our satiric commentary. It is interesting how everyone does them in different ways and each cartoon has a different energy. I have to wear two hats, i work for and international publication, the economist. As well as the Baltimore Sun. I use a very oldfashioned english style pen nibs. It takes me three hours to apply the ink. Three hours of scratch, scratch. If the deadline is 7 00, that takes you back to 4 00. I have pencil sketches before that, that takes two hours to three hours. And then you have coming up with the idea. Everyone finds a way of getting two ideas in a different fashion. Sometimes, they do come quickly. Other times, you go through a lot of processes. My day is pretty much an eight to ten hour day. About the freedom we are given, with all freedom comes responsibility. What i admire about my peers who do this really well on a daily basis is how managing to the cartoons that are both apt and right on the news, not sexist, not racist. Powerful one day, funny the next day. All of these things that have to go into the mix. Next question, go to the microphone, please. I forgot with caroline. I was on the editorial board, i can vouch for mikes work ethic. [laughter] what i wanted to ask all of you, mike particularly, i would now and then write a column, i could not believe the reaction. It was totally not what i meant. I wonder if there has been any one particular cartoons you have ever drawn that you were flabbergasted at the response. You thought it was really misinterpreted. It would be fun to know a specific example. First of all, often when there are cartoon controversies, one reason is that the symbolism over takes the idea that you are trying to get across. And people do not understand what you are trying to say. I did one a few years ago when we were in iraq. America was starting to understand that we were torturing people. I thought that that is what our enemies do. I thought about it, i realized after i did the cartoon and it ran, the symbolism was too strong. What it was i drew two hooded figures, one was an American Holding a whip. Another was an al qaeda member with a serrated knife. The american was holding a book called torture etiquette. The al qaeda guy was telling him to go to page, paragraph, line. It was not a particularly great cartoon. People think everything in a newspaper is a big controversy or a big sinister thing, a conspiracy. My cartoon ran, but on the same on the opinion page, there was a blackandwhite photo of two american servicemen who had been beheaded by al qaeda. The combination people went nuts. This was at a point where people had not process that we were torturing, people were still denying. People started complaining, it became a big thing. We had security, i was getting death threats. And then, they wanted me to be on fox news. Fox news the bill oreilly show. I begged my editor to go on and explain this. She thought it would be misinterpreted or i would do something stupid. She did not let me go on. They did the most nasty, one sided thing on there. It all started dying down, but then rbm, the big car dealership in atlanta, they took out a fullpage ad with the letter from the president of rbm saying that we have the freedom to do what we want and say what we want, but this cartoon was beyond. It just generated all the crap again. I was so glad when that was over. I do not know if you guys if it has been the same thing with the symbolizing overriding the idea. I run into that as well. Also, we do so many cartoons that are considered funny. It is when you have to switch gears and do something serious. You want to be respectful and pay tribute. Everyone is expecting you to crack a joke. Mine was a local cartoon about a local school. It was misunderstood it was nothing compared to that, though. I have not gotten any death threats. I am Still Holding out for some. [laughter] i had a situation that was along the lines of what happened with mike. This was in the mid2000s when the Israeli Government under ariel sharon had a policy of bulldozing the homes of palestinian terrorists family members. Both the Bush Administration and many allies thought that this was an illadvised policy. Controversial within israel and outside. I was doing a cartoon that was basically also, bush was trying to tell sharon dont do this. Sharon was doing whatever he wanted. We had arafat as a cat being chased by a big bulldog, sharon. He was pulling through the air, george bush, he was saying good boy, sit, stay. I thought it was a good cartoon. Sometime between the time i finished the cartoon and the next mornings paper, a terrorist bomb attack in tel aviv killed about 80 people. Two buses. The next morning, all the images were this carnage. Then people turn to the editorial pages and see a cartoon of me blaming sharon. I became the hot button on all the talk shows and all the fallout. It was also revealed that two weeks later i was slated to give a talk in baltimore right in the heart of the jewish community. That was going to be a focal point of a lot of protests. The library contacted me and said that they were getting threats. And whether we should go on with this. I said do whatever you like. In the u. S. , if we cannot have a civil discussion in a library, where else can we do it . We got a lot of security, went down there, it was mayhem, chaos. People wanted to shut it down. It was a misunderstanding. It touched a raw nerve. The room is about the size, packed with folks. I give my presentation. I told everyone that we are definitely going to be addressing the issue that everyone wanted to hear. I go through the slides of cartoons of controversy that have been done over the years. Then i bring up that cartoon. It was like a bad movie, people started, oh my god. It was something else. Everyone who has something to say in this room was going to have an opportunity to say it. I was going to stay here till next week if required. It is a wonderful thing, both to let the air out of the bag and the air out of the room. It also served something that is very special in our society, we can vent and say these things. Hopefully, we can say them in a civilized fashion. It turned out to be a great exercise in democracy. Have you found yourself being more careful about cartoons related to israel . No. You could see where there was a misunderstanding with that. We are all aware of what happened with the danish cartoonist. For guys like us who have been in the game, we know that there are landmines. You have to be careful about how you manage these things. Issues to do with abortion in the u. S. , guns, race, arab israeli relations. In other countries, they have their own red lines to be aware of. What a cartoonist can get away with an San Francisco may be different than in alabama. You have to understand your audience. I think mike made a really good point. It is often not what you say, it is how you say it that gets you in trouble. If you can actually i dont think there is any subject that is offbalance, it is a matter of finding the best way to do an effective cartoon. I think cartoonists that get in the most trouble are the guys who rush out and try to be first rather than giving it thought. A little bit of time in between an event and the cartoon goes a long way towards avoiding some of that controversy. Each of our guests are now going to share some of their favorite cartoons. Why dont we start with you do i get a clicker . Can i stand up and walk around . Great, thank you very much. This is huge fun. This is my first cartoon, a very important cartoon. [laughter] i thought it was important to show this. This is important because this has got abraham lincoln, the gettysburg address. This cartoon inspired a feature length Motion Picture starring daniel daylewis. I do this at age six. Everyone is drawing at age six. Most people drop off. The idea of trying to capture reality with lines. As cartoonists, we stay six yearolds for the rest of our lives. It is the notion of how brains work to capture things. As we mentioned, over the years, i have done 140 covers for different magazines. Each of these have interesting stories behind them. Here is a curious story about this. Back in 1998, we were economically booming. Now, we are coming out of deficits. This was the lead up to the state of the union address. The economist was doing a cover story about bill clinton who wanted to spend a lot of money. He was like a kid in a candy shop, what could he spend it on . I did this cartoon, all these gals with sweets. We go to press on a wednesday. Wednesday at noon, the Monica Lewinsky story breaks. [laughter] they scrap the lead editorial, they look at my cartoon and say we are going to use that cartoon. I thought that was great. The next two cartoons, stories about what it is like for a cartoonist before and after the internet. This cartoon, way back when Mikael Gorbachev came onto the scene and the soviet union, he was a new kind of russian leader. Young and hip. I was working in the u. K. , i had lived there for 11 years. I said, i have a great idea. Lets turn Mikael Gorbachev into a new character miami vice. The problem was, before the internet, how do i get pictures of miami vice . How could i drop a miami vice draw a miami vice picture . My wife and i went shopping in brighton, we did our best to get clothes based on miami vice. I modeled for that drawing. That was not my car, but that was my out of it. The most expensive cover i have ever had to make. We had to do a wardrobe to go with it next. I will show you black and white ones here featuring uncle sam. And this is one of my favorite ones. What foreign enemies and americans looking for, world control. What americans are really looking for, we remote control. When i came back from abroad i realized this is very accurate. I had just come back from cuba. People of cuba next. Why stick with that big castro . Missing one. So anyway, to thing about this is everybody can be good cartoon fodder am a whether you are a democrat or dictator to me you are good fodder for cartoonists. This is a cartoon i did back in 1989. It is being reproduced around the world. A guy says i have a stock here that could really excel. Sell, sell, sell. It carries on. A guy says this is madness, i cannot take anymore. I, buy, buy. At the end he says i have a stock here that could really excel. Here is the story. Cartoon appears in the Baltimore Sun that gets picked up new york times. Third it being reprinted around the world. Then i started getting phone calls, stock brokers. South america, all over the place. Ernst they say they want a copy of the cartoon. Second they say that is exactly how it is. Seriously. I get requests almost every month. A stockbroker in hong kong wanted the size you see their to be put on the wall in their lobby. We had to send them one. This is an interesting story behind it because we were talking earlier about the value cartoon spring. This is a local cartoon and baltimore. When we are doing our cap cartoons, we have to do local cartoons. We have to do National Cartoons and interNational Cartoons. Probably the only person in the newspaper that has the full responsibility. It is the local cartoons that get peoples real attention. We are it when it comes to this. They watch us like hawks. The cartoons can have real power. Here is a case in point. 20 years ago this took lace. This is about an area of baltimore called the block. A red light district causing trouble for the mayor. He wanted to do severe zoning laws and said he could close the whole thing down. I and others thought it would be ill advised. If you just close down there it will spread and other places. So i did this cartoon that make sense. You have the block and explodes. Then little blocks all over the place. Well, the mayor wrote an essay in the Baltimore Sun to say that this cartoon changed his mind about policy. It was a cartoon he was going in one direction. Put the proposed legislation into the city council. He withdrew it after he saw the cartoon. He was brave enough because he was no longer in politics but now in the private sector to be able to say a cartoon changed his mind about angst. There are probably times cartoons affect politicians in ways we will never hear because no politicians politician who is worth his salt will ever admit up cartoon changed his mind but probably happens more often than we know. I will show you this because i finished it last night at 4 30 in the morning. Here we go. Afghanistan. He is chased out. Now uncle sam a little more sober approach is iraq. He gets traced back by an even larger set of these. Look at the beehive with syria. Uncle sam thinking more carefully about what we are doing. My deadline with the economist is thursday morning at 4 00 in the morning. 4 30 a. M. This arrived in london. This takes place in heaven, as you can see. Michael the ark angel speaking. John paul ii on the line. Again . He is worried about the movement to ordain women as priests. But i have artie told him what i think, tell them i am busy. I am sorry, she is busy right now. Even when you do tricky stuff like religion, it can be done right. That is it. I am through. [applause] i like all of them but i really liked the afghanistan one. Very clever. Before we start, let me just think about what im going to say here. Wait a minute, i know what i am going to do. I just had a brain part. If you read my cartoons, you know i have a strong view sometimes. As politics have gotten crazier, and in my opinion, as the Republican Party has gone more insane i have become more strident. This first cartoon shows the republican approach to governing. Republicans await response. We have your dog. They are are ready planning another thing with the debt ceiling. That is not how you govern. The gop keeps talking about how they will rebrand themselves, show they are more except to know other all, gays and latinos and africanamericans and the middle class. To me, it is just bs. [laughter] here is another thing. Bill clinton, i was so pissed at him yesterday. When he was giving his speech he had the best line. It should not be harder to vote that it is to get an assault weapon. I thought what a great line. Because of the nra, they have such a lock on the Republican Party that we cannot get any kind of sensible gun control. Showing ideas the airport. Removing shoes. Full body scanner. Telling someone i am traveling to d. C. To argue against background checks. We had a recent example of a assault weapons with huge magazines and a mentalhealth issues and this is what resulted. A congressman saying as a member of congress my goal is to do the nra bidding so i will not lose my job. He talked to the empty classroom. They get posted on facebook. So i get a lot of response. I do not usually respond, unless it is like really nasty or something beyond. I do not like to get into big things with people. It is like having an argument with a relative, nothing is ever resolved. The republicans are losing it demographically. They are trying to come up with ways to discourage voting you just had the Supreme Court decision on writing voting. This is a crappy drawing. I had done a cartoon on Michele Bachmann leaving congress. I cannot remember what the punchline was. I have heard in this i have her in a straitjacket. I cannot remember what she is saying. My editor says we should not do this because it is making fun of people with Mental Health issues. I was getting in my car to pick my daughter up because she was working at an internship. We said we will disrupt another one, a syndicated one. I said i hate doing that. I said let me see if i can come up with an idea. I will drive her home and come back. This is the cartoon and that is my house. Our cartoonists a cartoonist lives there. One of the things that has just amazed me is the quickness of equal quality and gay rights. I think it is so amazing. This is after the Supreme Court vote. I am sorry i am being so partisan, but it is like the republicans, they do not care about the country. They will ruin the country to get policy goals because they cannot get it through legislation. I did this cartoon recently. The nsa guy saying we intercepted the chatter of a group plotting to triple cripple the u. S. Government. He says we do not appreciate you listening to our phone calls. Again, this is the past couple of weeks we have had discussion and celebration with Martin Luther kings 50th anniversary of the speech. I have an elephant saying i have a dream. Because the Republican Party has gone so far to the right, they have been taken over by tea party people. This is the cartoon i did about that. Which one is the face . All right. Thank you all very much. [applause] i think they might have put me on the bill for equal time. I tend to be more conservative. I am the baby of the group. I have been following these guys works for a very long time. I do a lot of local cartoons. For us, this is a local team. I think any falcons fan could appreciate the cross fingers. I thought about trying to market goes. After the whole miley cyrus thing, going to stay away from the foam anger. This is one that i did back when kim jongun was causing all the problems. Pretty popular on the internet. Another local topic for me. This is where it equal time comes in. There was a time where president obama was trying to position himself as the new reagan. Here is the rockwell self portrait painting to show he is more like the old carter than the new reagan. Here is another one. I do not know if there are any reporters here. There was an incident where the department of justice was tapping into the phone records of the a pay ap and fox news. One of his favorites is the press listening in on. Here is another one. We went through a time where things were happening. President obama would say i heard it on the news just like you did. Just in time for labor day, another cookout. The hope and change poster. During the campaign, a big uproar. Mitt romney wanted to kill big bird. I also go after republicans. This is when new mitt romney took him in a landslide. Of course anthony weiner, whatever you do, do not let him kiss your baby. This is one for last thanksgiving. The turkey is a metaphor for something. [applause] we have a couple more minutes. Go to the microphone, please. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I have been living and working in this area for the past 43 years. Structural engineer and builder. I will be brief with my question addressed to all three gentlemen. Since i am originally from iraq i am proud to be a u. S. And iraqi citizen. I could not help but ask a question to you all, which is the same question i asked a few months ago here at this halt to the former editor of the wall street journal. The question is very simple, if someone told you all that the media in general almost 100 betray the american will by not telling the truth, why we lost in such a big way in iraq. It was a rush to war. We were sold a bill of goods on that. It ticks me off to think in a just world, i think bush and cheney should be in prison. I think that members of the press did not ask questions and th