Hi, good evening. Dr. Graham, coowner of politics prose along with my wife, Alyssa Muscatine on behalf of the entire staff, thank you so much for coming. I normally dont do this, but these are not normal times. Id like to call out somebody in the audience who has just joined us so youre not spending the whole rest of the session whispering, it really just a just as sao tome or were just a lookalike . [applause] thank you, justice for keeping hope and justice alive. A few quick administrative note, now would be a good time to turn off your cell phones or anything else that might go be able to get to the q a session, we encourage you to come to this part of the microphone and questions you might have noticed we do have cspan here this evening and we are also videoing for own youtube channel. So in order to pick up your question on the tape, it is important that you get to the microphone. At the end, our staff would appreciate if you fold up the chairs you are sitting in and leaned them against something that wont topple over. We are really delighted to have with us this evening, david rothkopf. David is one of those washington individuals who move between the walls of Public Service and private business after an initial career in magazine publishing, david transitioned in served as deputy undersecretary of commerce. He then returned to the private sector really helps manage Kissinger Associates and founded his own advisory firm. Today hes the ceo and editor of the i. T. Group which publishes Foreign Policy magazine and the foreignpolicy. Com website. And hes a visiting professor of International Public affairs at Columbia University and visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment or national peace. Hes also written several insightful books on issues including National Security and business. They included in 2005 running the world about the National Security council in 2008 super class about the global breed. In 2012, the complex relationship between public power and private power between government and in 2014, National Security about the making of u. S. Foreign policy in an age of fear. Book is called the Great Questions of tomorrow. This is a tad book. 10 books are published by Simon Schuster and define themselves as small books about big ideas, they are short enough to read in a single sitting, but long enough to take a deep dive into a particular topic. Those topics can range from architecture to business, from space travel to love. Each book is paired with the related tag talk in the books tend to pick up at the top take off. His occurred a couple years ago on the title, how fear drives american politics. He has since drawn well over a million come in nearly. 2 Million Viewers and basically makes the point especially since 9 11 have been too focused on terrorism at the expense of more significant, more profound trends that are reshaping our future. Trends in technology and demographics in the environment in the way people around the world are interacting with each other. Theyve been argued we need to do better at bringing people together. Technology and science with people who lead our government. They all start of better questions about where we are heading in begin addressing those questions and more creative ways. In this book, david highlights some of the questions that we in a world on the verge of epochal change ought to be focusing on. Questions that will prompt us to reimagine the basic aspects of our lives as an identity of community, our social contracts, who does and how we work. This is clearly pretty fundamental stuff and they think we are in for a very provocative discussion this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming david rothkopf. [applause] that introduction was better than the book actually. Now, thank you very much for that. Its a pleasure to be here. After you do books for a while and you go out and discover the parts that she dont lie, the part you like us finishing the book, the part you dont like his writing the book. You only ever go to one bookstore when i do this for a talk and that is here this place captures to me that kind of a deal of a bookstore as a Community Gathering place, as a font of ideas and really sort of part of the intellectual community. That is why im glad you are here. What ill do as i will talk for 20, 25 minutes about the book and then we can ask questions. But here is what im not going to talk about. I am not going to talk about his name so much to be spoken. Im not going to talk about todays headlines. Because the point of my book is that we spend far too much time trapped in the news cycle. And in those rare moments that we are not trapped in the news cycle, we are actually looking backward. You know, i look at the phenomenon of american politics right now in russian politics in turkish politics, israeli politics, even cheneys politics to some extent. In each case icy meters for the last leaders at the 20 century. I see leaders who are trying to cling to an idea or idea of how Society Works then it is if not antiquated, its old. You know, Vladimir Putin wants the world to be like it was during the soviet union. The president of the United States wants the world to be like it was in the 1980s. Marine le pen wants the world to be like it is prior to the european union. They are clinging to the past. And theres a lot of danger and not. The point of the ted talk that i gave was we have spent in the United States the past 16 years focused on terrorism, focused on the last that to the 20th century, focused on real issues that are not existential issues, but are not driving change in a big way. We do this at our peril because by looking backwards, we learn the risk of missing the big changes that are actually coming at us. I start the book with a little vignette of myself when i was 17 years old and i was watching television and there was a Television Show about a nuclear winter. You could say i was a cheerful kid. You know, i watch this show and it says there is a nuclear war, and a hundred Million People would die. I was kind of upset by this because it didnt seem out of the question in search of my father to talk to him about it. It was kind of a nice spring day and he was outside someplace. My dad was a scientist. He was also a holocaust survivor in the sort of had a particular perspective. He saw as soon as he saw me that my first expression was kind of grim. And so, you said what is wrong . You know, if theres a nuclear war, 100 Million People will die. And he said, yes, but thats wrong. He was kind of a perverse character. He was trying to tweet me a bit. He was a country or in as a scientist. I said it would be a terrible thing. 100 Million People have died before in history and the 14 century. He said shortly after that we had the renaissance. He said sometimes dramatic changes produce good consequences. I want to tell you advocating that 100 Million People died. I mention this on it tv show recently and i immediately got it a lot of tweets from people thanking god is not see. You are promoting the doubt i am not. I thought there was a useful lesson. If you lived in the 14 century, you would be focused on the plague of the great schism or the little ice age and you might miss the fact that the result of the plague was the workforce in europe changed and people could demand more for their services because there were fewer people and the advent of waterwheel and other things lead to the middle class america or is this guy named petrarch and he started writing about classicism in a way that caught on. As they century of turmoil unfolded, and the next thing that you know, you were in the renaissance and you are in a completely different. Change in if you were prepared for it, you know, you wouldve fallen behind. The chapter in the book is called the day before the renaissance. In it, i am essentially making the case that we are in exactly that situation now, but every so often inhuman his tree, there are changes that are so sweeping that they leave behind the ability of institutions and systems of belief to keep up with them and when we change that rapidly, it causes disruption. And while i am an optimist, i dont believe you can study Human History and not be an optimist. Im serious. If you are rigorous, you have to note that people live longer now than they ever have. They are healthier now than theyve ever been. They are better educated than theyve ever been. They are wealthier than theyve ever been. They have access to more information than they ever have. We are in a remarkable time and we see this progress going forward. The moments of disruption, we very often how people. You know, you have the revolutions in middle of the 19th century that came with the Industrial Revolution. We certainly have the worst of the 20th century. I am concerned that we are going to miss out on preparing for the changes that are around the corner. I think those changes are there once in every two or 300 year level and are actually going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years. For the first time in Human History, every person on the planet would be connected in a manmade system, which is to say the internet within 10 years. Virtually every person on the planet. The poorest people on the planet, richest people in the planet, which means that everybody anywhere can reach out and touch anyone anywhere else in this time. We are all for the first time in Human History be in one single assist them. The culture, the border is obviously and this is a great opportunity for us to enrich ourselves, but it will also produce backlash. One of the things that is a recurring theme in this book is the changes that are coming off a big upside in a big downside. Both of them almost all the time. So we have to prepare for that. What i do in the book you say when you get to these big moments of upheaval, the questions that we need to ask have to become more fundamental. We are at a point that is so great that some of the questions we are going to be confronted with our boy am i. . Most of Human History we define us close to us. It is geographically defined and we are entering appeared in which geography will play less and less of a role in the affinities and virtuous base, but more and more of a role and may see this, by the way and the most negative sense possible, i said is out of thing alienated anywhere in the world. They say lets make common cause and they can connect and create nonstate movement there across very powerful. We have to ask how do we define ourselves and the world . If you ask him a one of the other things they come down his benefit community. What is the nature of the community . If its not geographically defined, but defined by affinity. If it goes across borders, what does that mean . How does that affect government . How does that affect how we organize ourselves in society. Some of the questions that follow along from that are almost impossible to get our brains around, that are nearly essential. We ask questions like what is war now and what is peace . What is money . What is the job . What is lifes purpose because all the things that are about to change in our lives. In terms of war and peace. Think about it. During the cold war, the price was so high that no one dare friday. We are in cyberconflict in the price of not fighting is so high that no one they dare stop. Because its almost impossible to determine who is waging the war. Its almost impossible to determine how we respond. And weve seen that. Think about it. The biggest cyberhack of political consequence of our time was last years election. This week, the president of the United States had the foreign or the country that did the hack in his office to discuss when he was going to meet with the leader of that country. Because we dont know how to deal with it. When sony was packed by the North Koreans, the white house scrambled to try and find language to refer to it in the ultimately called it vandalism because they didnt want to collect an attack, and because if they called it an attacker wouldve required a certain kind of response. If a bunch of North Koreans had come in a rubber boat, walked into los angeles and the computers say okay, now what we have to do is veto and make them pay in a kinetic way. We dont have the doctrine for this. We dont have the words. What about the vocabulary. We dont even have leaders who understand how to talk about it. I was talking to general mike hayden who was one of the top in our Intelligence Community about this. He said he would go in the white house and brief people in cyber. He said they looked at me like i was rainman. They didnt understand what you were saying because we dont have a generation of leaders who actually trained to understand cyber. But its not just cyber. It is economics. Think about it. You know, 20 years ago, Alan Greenspan was also referred to as the most powerful man in the world as he controlled the big monetary tools hes had. A fiscal tool and a monetary tool and thats how he controlled the economy. I think we are going to look back on that. As the Jurassic Period of economics. When you go into the big dig era and we are about to entry. Three, four, five years from now where theres 50 billion devices on the internet. They internet. Theyll preassigned information on Economic Activity to the block level, this part of the store versus the back of the store. When you look at Economic Data right now, first of all defined by national boundaries, which is a very crude, the correlations within the boundaries of the country are very mixed. But i could come up with the new data and stands, what you become 10 Million People who are almost exactly like me and i could come up with new stimuli that i could use, but i would also be able to do it in real time. One of the biggest innovations in using technology 20 years ago was in new york city, they introduce something called the commons that police Data Tracking system. Prior to this, you would get crime data once a month. It took three months to determine the crime. Once they started tracking the idea, the computers to three days to determine when there is a crime in your able to redeploy people, to nip it in the bud. They do the same thing economically. We dont have to wait three quarters. We dont have to use a crude measure like gdp. We will have all sorts of new measures. That will require new economics and economists who understand the. Another thing i wouldve thought that the last election wouldve been how you create jobs. For most of american history, if you have gdp growth in productivity growth and job growth and wage growth. But starting seven, eight years ago that stopped. In some respects, it stopped 20 or 30 years ago. So we have to ask ourselves how a question, which is how will we create jobs and we are in the early stages of this with a lot of nations. You know, there is a philosopher that i referred to in this book, a guy named nick foster and the studies Artificial Intelligence. He went out and talk to all the people who wrote in Artificial Intelligence inside when is this going to be a reality of our lives . Some said 30 years and some stud 40 years and some said 50 years and none said never. What does that mean . It means that a lot of the work that we do is going to be done by a machine. I sometimes go out and talk to a crowd like this that make all of this is terrible. It is terrible because we have all this time on her hands. I might come if you really believe that . Bosses have been selling this for a long time, this notion. Your work for me is how you define the meaning in your life. But he got my time in your hands to spend with your family, read a book, write a poem, to grow spiritually, to travel, that is that the purpose of life is. We could be moving in that direction, but our whole Economic System is not set up to address that yet. We dont know how to deal with it. There are some countries exploring it. In finland they are exploring the idea of a National Basic income, which is one way to deal with that. There are other countries that are doing this. You know, i could go on and on. I think to conclude, some of the most important question has to do with what kind of society do we want to be in . The social contract is going to change. We too often defined the value of our society in terms of how we make gdp growth, how do we make wealth . One of the moments where we could make a different answer that its about quality of life or its about bringing us all together in different kinds of ways. We have the opportunity to move in that direction if we ask the right questions now. I would have to recognize there are some challenges here. They took 350 years to get from the Gutenberg Printing press to the First Amendment of the United States constitution. In the middle, the glorious revolution and john locke and philosophers thinking about this and debating it. But it also took 350 years to get from the first book to the 100 millionth book and 70 years from the first telephone to the 100 million telephone. And it took 33 days to get from the First Edition of angry bird to the 100 million download of angry bird. What does that mean . It means that the world is changing faster than institut