to montize it. how important is that? it is everything. great ideas are a dime a dozen. to take an idea from making it profitable and then sustainable as a long-term business, that s what everybody hopes for, right? i think everybody is looking for media or their 50 seconds of fame. i think companies. i was thinking as we were watching, how could we set a world record and get. we certainly pay for media. i think it is a very montizable model. the reason i say, how important is that, when the obvious question should be, incredibly important. so many companies in silicon valley get bought for lots of money and haven t figured out how to monetize their product yet. this seems to do a little bit of both, a way to get a lot of people, a lot of followers and they have already found the path towards revenue, which i think is really fantastic. it is going to make them very, very sellable on the market. should they go into an exit strategy in a couple years to get their investors back t
afghanistan has almost always looked regardless of what we do. it s pakistan s stability. every person i know who works in the national security business, this is their nightmare scenario. david ignatius, before we go to break, i take it pakistan was high up on your list as well. yeah. but i do have to make the linkage that we all have in our minds between afghanistan and pakistan. the president campaigned very clearly on getting u.s. troops out of afghanistan by the end of 2014. great. the country wants the troops home, war-weary america. the problem is that the president s exit strategy is premised on the idea that afghan forces will be strong enough to keep the country from civil war by 2014. and there s new evidence arriving all the time. i just read a recent report from special inspector general looking at afghanistan saying flatly, the afghan security forces will not be ready to stand on their own by the end of 2014. so what that means is that to
at thanksgiving dinner so close to the election, this might be too hard to do. might be easier to pass on this one. have a couple of outs, you know, an exit strategy. i thought you were going to say have a couple of drinks. i was going to say that will make it worse. uncle steve at the table. sorry. no. exactly. if you get cornered by somebody, have an exit strategy, have a question before hand ready to go to kind of redirect conversation because frankly we ve all already voted. you re not going to change anybody s mind. has it gotten worse in recent years, jonathan, in part because of people like you who write columns that get us all worked up? yes. yes. it s my fault. it s my fault. it s our fault. but also because there s so much information out there, so many people have things to say on twitter, on facebook, on blogs and newspapers. magazines. a little information can be a dangerous thing for the holiday around the table. especially information that you don t kno
something about that because i think if you build barriers for new york city, you have to have an exit strategy because those barriers will not last forever with rising sea level. grim. which means we have to do something behind the barriers anyhow to protect us just like new orleans was unprepared when the barriers failed. so, we have to prepare for what we do when the barriers fail. preparing for failure is a huge part of disaster preparation. it s one of the things that s amazing in your book about the heat wave is that you begin to see systems fail. the cell phone network gets overused and water doesn t work in high-rises. how do you prepare for failure? well, you have to prepare for systems to be resilient which means you need to invest in infrastructure, you need to update the grid, for instance. every time there s a heat wave in this country every summer the power goes out and in some cases for days. one barometer to the extent to which climate change is
when we reduce the defense budget, we don t break the back of our services and force our young men and women to go to war unprepared without the sufficient numbers to win in the future. jenna: and that s certainly something neither party wants as well, general scales. one of the things we mentioned, we would hope neither party would want. one of the things that we did see discussed was afghanistan and the, quote-unquote, exit strategy there. let s just play a little sound from the debate last night, and i ll get your reaction. we re going to be finished by 2014, and when i m president, we ll make sure we bring our troops out by the end of 2014. the commanders and the generals there are on track to do so. and we re now in a position where we can transition out. because there s no reason why americans should die when afghans are perfectly capable of defending their own country. jenna: general scales, we almost have to remind ourselves that we are at war right now, today. aaron miller