Transcript: How can I, in the people that are closes to me make a more significant contribution to our collective life, and in the United States the question ought to be how can we be a little less hypocritical, I forget to talk about the, if we talked about two things, peace in the world and improvement in the environment, then for goodness sake lets do something about the carbon emission, we really don’t have to have the cars in the way that we do and this is another enormous lost opportunity. Over the last 50 years, we could have built public transportation systems in the United States and avoided this whole crazy mess that we are in the now in the Middle East, but there is big piece of it is oil. So, I think that is the single most important thing, we could quit talk in about these things and start doing some serious. Now, they require a big sacrifice and basically as a society we are not prepare to do that.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What should we be doing?

Transcript: I think we need, let me talk with the United States first. We need to clean up our act. If we are going to provide leadership to the world then free speech ought to mean something other than protection for Popnography [phonetic] for example. I think we got an very confused about these kinds of things and I think our act is pretty bad. If you are outside the United States and you look it, what you see primarily is our popular culture, which is sex, drugs and violence. We had somehow come to some kind of an accommodation with that, much of the world doesn’t minding to do with that and they have a very good reason for that. In the world outside the United States, we do not have an effectively operating international system at this point of time, I don’t think that something like UN, which is kind of or it is useful to have an agency for discussion, but it is not a decision making effective body. So, we need some kind of a better accommodation in a better system among the great powers to try to keep peace. Now, it is difficult to do that right now, because we are not sure to great power are anymore and the Russians are trying to get back in the group, the Chinese are trying to resort themselves much more stronger and that is going to be a very difficult period of time for us in the next couple in decades, that is the biggest single problem, geopolitically in the world. Individually I think each of us should be trying to improve ourselves. Our skills, our character, I think that should go on, I think we should each look beyond and that should go on all over lives. Secondly, we should look beyond our immediate relationships in families to a role in a broader community. I think we should have some curiosity and interest in the things that would go on in the world about us. So, those are the things and that requires us to overcome what is an enormous I think suspicion of the broader society of the political, not that it does not deserve it to some degree, but a kind of an enormous cynicism that exist in the society.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: How will this age be remembered?

Transcript: I think the last 50 years in the United States will be remembered as an age of missed opportunities on an enormous scale. Well, before the Vietnam War, we had began a process reconciliation broadly in the society what we called a Civilized Movement. A process of trying to lift out of poverty most of the society what Linden Johnson called the great society in the war and poverty and all that. Almost all of that for a variety of reasons got side track, very seriously. So, here we are in 2007 and we see civil rights, demonstrations in parts of the country, we know racism is not really been the country is actually probably more segregated residentially by race and ethnically than it was 50 years ago, I think we have that technology to do more of listings with education and yet we have been going backwards on most of the educate. So, I think you gave me a field and I will tell you where the missed opportunities are. We just have not done what we could of done, I think it is the great failure of my generation in the Baby Boom generation, that is so much that might been was not done. In the world as a whole, I think it is going to be viewed as an enormous success for the reasons that I talked about, the real awakening and the improvement of living standards conditions, health and etcetera in so much of Asia.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What will life be like in 30 years?

Transcript: People will be healthier, they will have much greater opportunities available to them generally, it will be more fun in the sense that I mean by fun, which is that you can enjoy doing your duty and meeting your responsibilities. So, I think all of that is good, the great danger of course that human being is often always face is that in the dark side of our nature and our greed and ambition. We will stumble in this in very serious conflicts.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: Politically in the United States, we are split down in the middle, and our last two elections have been virtual ties, which had the Democrats not been so gracious as to concede, might not have ended happily at all. I think the United States is really much more potentially politically unstable than anyone realizes. The notion that the Supreme Court is going to resolve these problems is I think a naive notion. The political figures do not have to accept the Supreme Court decision. That was the decision that the Democrats made. Al Gore made that decision; didn't have to be done. So I think that our system is much more politically unstable than it looks on the surface.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What should be the issues of the 2008 election?

Transcript: Well, the most important issue is the one we just talked about, because we are so mishandling it at this point time and that is what America’s proper role in the world. The second big issue I think is that this society is not improving. One of the things we've lost some how in United States, which the Puritans brought to us in the beginning, was the notion that individual human beings and societies, whether large or small, should always be trying to improve themselves. They should be trying to learn more, they should be trying to improve their character, their service, their all kinds of. We kind of have lost that notion, so that self-improvement is become a joke or it means something like losing some weight and we have as in we focused instead on happiness and pleasure and enjoying in life. I think that is very serious conflict, we ought to talk about that, those I think, now there are issues, there is the health care and financing problem that we have in United States. There is going to be an economic problem that is coming up. There are those kind of issues, but the really big ones, are the ones that are what are we about. What are we about in the world and what are we about at home?

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What are the world's biggest challenges in the coming decade?

Transcript: The biggest challenge the world faces now, is to adapt to the changes that are taking place. The Chinese want a major role in the world that has all kinds of implications for geopolitics, for the environment, for all kinds of things. The Indians want a bigger role. The Russians are going to try to put together their empire again. The economic structure of the world is changing dramatically. Some countries rising, others falling, all of this we have to adapt to in some way and we seem to me in the United States to have taken the view that our role in the world is to see that nothing much changes, that the political boundaries and the relations among nations stay pretty much the way they are, so I think we're having an enormous problem and the world’s biggest problem is how to adapted to the changes that are so strongly underway.

Question: What does the U.S. face? 

Transcript: Biggest challenge confronting United States is to figure out what are the proper role in the world is. If we are the world’s major superpower, what does that mean we should be doing? It seems to me to be obvious that we should not be engaging in small-scale wars in the Europe, Asian, African continent mass. We can't win those; we have never won them, our people keep forgetting that. At best we draw them and that is at best we get a stalemate. They are very expensive to us. We can't be successful, and our politicians are having an enormous amount of difficulty figuring out what our proper role should be.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Transcript: I read the newspaper and watch the news a great deal, and I'm looking for certain things. I'm looking one to keep myself in formed as to what is going on. Secondly, I am looking for what are the major trends and developments that are going on, I never read or listen except critically. One of the great weaknesses of American education and I think education in most of the world today is we don’t train people to be critical in their thinking. If they read something, they accept it--most of them do--they do not think through it and think about, “is this accurate, why did this persons say this,” but that's not consistent with what I just looked at yesterday or what this person said before. So I always read critically and when I am looking for a major trends and significant in consistencies, because, where there are consistencies, that tells me that there going to be problems.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Transcript: The only over arching purpose or direction that I can think of the man kind as a whole is very well expressed in the definition of humanity that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin provided. Now, he was a Jesuit priest who lived in China for a long time and was a kind of an anthropologist. His definition of humanity was evolution become conscious of itself, and it is very powerful point of view if you think about it. My sense of humanity is a whole is that’s what it is. We are life become conscious and therefore it becomes able to understand what we are doing, to set goals and that I think is possibly unique in the universe.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What forces have shaped America?

Transcript: America is shaped primarily by two I think. Number one is it isolation. We are protected behind our oceans, and that is as true today as it is been before, we went through World War I and World War II without any significant damage at all to our homeland. Almost no other major country in the world--certainly none of the major countries Eurasia--did that and it really does shaped the way we feel about the world. The second thing is that we had, what is largely, because we are settled by immigrants and the mixture of the world, it’s a, we had a largely blank page on which to write and we are largely our own creation for good and bad, in a way that is simply not true of most other countries. I think of the Russians a great deal. There is a country; there is a group of people who have been invaded again and again and again, and it's a totally different culture as a result of that than is our culture. We’ve never been invaded essentially, except briefly by the British in two wars around the time of the Revolution. So, I think the isolation and the ability to develop ourselves as we saw fit are the two really important things.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What forces have shaped humanity most?

Transcript: The most important thing that shapes humanity is human nature. In my view, it is a complex combination of good and bad--of altruistic impulses and impulses that are fundamentally selfish and difficult, and that's the most important thing. Now, in addition to that, shaping the history of the recent past by which I mean the last few thousand years, rapid growth the technology, which is very important, the improvements in our learning and skills and that things, so that the population has grown enormously. It's very interesting about that. When I was born, and I am not that old, there were about two billion people in the world. When I die, I expect it will be eight. So, that will have been a four-fold increase and enormous numbers. I think we underestimate how significant that has been, but those are the major factors I think that so there are demographics, there are technology and there are our basic nature. Those would be the factors I say that really shape us.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What is the measure of a good life?

Transcript: Two important things. Number one, that you do your best to help people who need help, who were in need, the disadvantaged etcetera that is crucial and secondly, that you try to keep yourself unsullied from the world, that you try to live a moral life and if you do those two things that seems to me to constitute what...by the way that is the message of James who is the brother of Jesus in his letter which he survived into the New Testament and it is probably the earliest document we have from the Christian era.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What do you believe?

Transcript:  Religion plays a very significant role, because what is most important to me about religion is I think it is the only secure a basis for ethical and moral behavior. And I think that as religion decays, ethics and morality decay dramatically, and I think that often happens in history with material prosperity and with lack of danger generally speaking, and I think that is happening again. So, I look not to doctrinaire religion. I am not religious in doctrinaire fashion and the protestism in the Christian church gave us that. So, I read the Bible and the religious classics and I think that what they mean to me and what I think they should mean the other people, and it plays a huge role in my life in that regard.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What is your personal philosophy?

Transcript: I believe that the most important things are the service that you provide to others.  I think that it's very important to be objective and clear thinking, not to get lost and the two great dangers that we have. Particularly in our society, one of which is wishful thinking, we are always thinking that the world and everything is going to be better than it is and the other thing is hype. Americans tend the hype everything as the result of that, we do not have a sense of proper proportion and we overdo things. The classic example right now is the attack on 9/11. It was a terrible thing, but it was only a terrorist attack and yet the number of people in this country who were referred to this is the beginning of World War III and use that is an excuse for the military adventures that we're in abroad now is I think just astonishing. The hype in this country, the sensationalism continually confuses us and causes some enormous errors, and my philosophy is avoid those things at all cost. 

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: In the business world, who is teaching great things?

Transcript:  Only the entrepreneurs. I don’t think any of the large companies are particularly well lead by and large in the world, there are some exceptions, but there are exceptions for short period of time normally. By and large, the growth rates of most of the great companies are limited the internal growth rates are limited to the growth rates of the economies, of the global economy. They are 3%, 4%, 5%. Actual revenue growth comes mainly from acquisitions and things of that nature. I think almost all the really significant leadership...most of what we called leadership in business today is financial manipulation of one form or other. The only really significant things I think that there is very impressive are the entrepreneurs particularly in the technology sector, because they are really changing the world.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What are your favorite books?

Transcript: Well, I read the Bible all the time. It may be a little bit out of, it is certainly out of fashion in New England. It is not out of fashion in much of the United States. There are enormous insights in that book. As I get older and more experienced in my own life I read things that I read a 100 times before since I was a boy and I realize I ever really understood them at all. So, that's one thing. I am very impressed by the work of a British military historian called whose name was J.F.C. Fuller, who I think is now passed away, but his perception of the broad scope of human history and the relationships of nations and why conflict occured and these kind of thing, which by the way is very different then the general perceptions in United States about these matters, and particularly a three volume work called A Military History of the Western World, which is much more than a military history, is I think one of the most influential things I have ever read and I read it again and again and again.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What inspires you?

Transcript: Thing that inspires me most is the opportunities that we face. When I think about that human race, I think we are at the very beginning of a very long journey. It's really only about 6 to 8,000 years that we have had civilization as we know it, we are at the thresh hold and had been now we are stepping into space, we can get the human race off of this planet, the exclusivity of this planet, and I see, what really inspires me is those opportunities. What makes me sick is our very large inability to get excited by them or to do anything constructive about them.

Question: Who inspires you?

Transcript:  If you began to go through the institutions of the society and you say to yourself “who are the political leaders that I admire today?” most of us don’t really have anyone. There are political leaders we support. They are primarily, because they reflect our interest. If you look at the religious community, they are fairly weak, the leadership. If you look at the educational community, it is hard now from most Americans to name the president of the major university. This was not true before. Now, in the smaller scale in other words names that I could give you that no one would recognize. There are a lot of them and very impressive in small business in local churches and local communities. That's America’s great strength, has always been America’s great strength. We, in my view, and I have written this, in my view America does not yet very good leadership at the top level and constantly our people bring themselves rise to the occasion and bail the country out of the problems that its leadership is gotten it in and that is this country’s great strength in history in my view. I don’t see any change in that, so it is difficult for me to answer that question.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What impact does your work have in the world?

Transcript: The impact of my work has been on the way other people think and do things primarily, in a whole group of areas in which we made significant progress and how organizations are structured and managed, in how we think about strategy, in the whole notion of clear thinking, which I think Americans do not do very well. They are constantly confusing what they are talking about. I think I have had a significant impact with a large number of people who had significant impacts in sales in that area that regard; it is how other people think and do their own businesses and professional lives.

Question: What is your proudest achievement?

Transcript: Well, as you know I have done several things. I was extremely proud of the way we maintained the stability of the American economy during the Vietnam War. At one point, I was in charge of about 25% of the American economy. It was the capital goods sector. And one always has to do that in a fairly large war, because you have to ration, and there just are not resources to put to everything. In that aspect of it, with a staff of 24 people, for about a period of three years, I set every wage and price in the capital goods industries in United States, and we got through the war without any significant economic problems, and I was extremely proud of that. I’ve always thought that what a president ought to say, if our presidents ever care about how the federal government is actually managed to people that they put in charge of agencies is “do the thing and do it efficiently.” The fewer people you put on the payroll, the better we all are off. Instead, as in this Homeland Security thing that we are doing now, we just piling people up, because it is another form of patronage and it is grotesquely inefficient and so I was very proud of that and wish that example had been paid more attention to.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: How can we improve early education?

Transcript: I think the biggest problem that we have is the parents. I don’t think the problem lies in the teachers and in the school. Now, they can be better and there are problems, but if people really want to learn and we have islands of that the United States and I can talk about some of those examples. If people really want to learn you don’t need much, but books or a television screen in the internet and some adults to work with you. It isn’t the quality of the buildings or the amount of money spent or any of that kind of thing. Learning has to be self-motivated. I think, by and large, the American adult population does not care much about it, does not convey values of that nature to it’s young people, to its children, and we have a basic problem of motivation is I guess when I am saying. On the other hand, we do have islands, some in the minority communities, some in the majority community. We have the areas like the Asian American community right now in which the learning effort is enormous. I remember talking to a young Asian student, college student the other day who said to me, they say, “we Asians are just very bright,” he said “I can remember all the nights I spent at the libraries, when my friends who where not Asians in San Francisco, were out playing and partying and I was working all the time.” And that level of commitment and that level of effort is what really is needed. Most American parents are not bothering to instill that at all just too. Now, add one final thing, we have a huge entertainment complex for profit and its purpose is to develop people and it spends enormous amount of time, effort, imagination diverting people in entertainment. So, the broad media industry is a real problem in this regard and of course they deny any responsibility for it all.

Recorded on: 9/27/07

Question: What are the most exciting trends in education?

Transcript: The most exciting trend in education I think is the larger in number and proportion of people who were doing higher education. I think that the technology is going to make a possible the much improve the quality of education. On the other hand, we are slipping backwards badly in education. People are simply not as well educated as they have been. People have degrees who really do not have the competence, have not learned what it should be necessary for that. We have much more complicated social, governmental and business systems and we are pouring people into them, who really are not competent to operate them, which is one of the reasons no one wants to talk about in the world, but one of the reasons why our airline systems and our governmental systems are not working very well. They are more complicated then the people who operate them can handle. So, I think education is extremely important, it is crucial to our future and I think it has some very very serious challenges. Technology will not solve those challenges. There is a recent Labor Department poll in the United States, or survey if you will that says the average American taking seven days a week spends about five and half hours a day on entertainment and nine minutes on learning an education. I think that is probably about accurate. So, we have a real problem with getting our people to pay serious attention to education. I think that we do not prepare young people to really to be excited about an intellectual life, to be curious, most of our people are not particularly curious except about what their close friends are doing and perhaps what some celebrity is doing. They don’t have any deep curiosity about the way the world works and what is going on and what can happen and I don’t know quite why that is. So, I don’t have a facile answer to that.

Question: Which country educates their children well?

Transcript: It is very difficult. In the past the Soviet Union did a very good job with science and technology with a portion of its people. Israel did a very good job for a while. We in the United States continue to do an excellent job of providing education for a small portion of our population that really wants it and I think the Chinese government this spring issued a list of the world’s top 20 universities and 18 of them, I think, it may have been 17, but 17 or 18 are more American and our best universities are really superb. But we are talking about one-half of one percent of the American college population. So, there are all islands, if you will, of great promise and great performance, but, in the broad scope, they are great problems.

Recorded on: 9/27/07