good evening everyone. i'm a member of the staff of politicatpolitics and prose ande to welcome you to a couple of notes before we get started

taken moment of silence or cell phones as you c-span book tv with us tonight and you don't want to be the person whose phone starts ringing on national television. along the same lines when we get to the q&a portion tonight will be passing around a wireless microphone so if you have a question, please raise your hand, but for me to get over to you and thing and then speak ino everyone here can hear you and everyone who might be watching on tv sometime in the future can hear you as well. if you haven't purchased a copy of the book and decide that you would like to, they are available for the register at the front. after the event he will be over here happy to sign books and that's why we're her we are hern to him talk about his new book to rush a trap however shadow war could spiral into nuclear. former director of analysis at

the cia and white house adviser on russia for vice president cheney and now director for intelligence and national security at the center for the national interest draws on nearly 25 years experience to warn the u.s. and russia are on a collision course describing the situation more dangerous than the cold war he shows how the factors including strategic weapons shift in world power, unsettled conflict and advantages of cyber attacks over cyber defense are heightening the competition between the two countries to set off a deadly conflict in here to talk more about it is hoped the welcome george. [applause] thank you very much for that introduction and thank you all for coming tonight. i've given a lot of talks over the last few years since leaving government, the i think this is

the first time i've given a talk with a book this is my first book that i've published i and it's the first time i've ever given a talk where my wife has been in the audience comes of it as a special location and it's great to see so many colleagues and friends here tonight, so thank you. i want to start off by giving you a little bit of cia insider information. and it has to do with john mclaughlin. john is a career cia analyst who rose up the ranks at langley and became deputy director of central intelligence and acting director back in the early 2000. one of the interesting things about john which i mentioned about is whenever he would go up to his office for meetings, he kept on his desk a little

placard that read subvert the dominant paradigm. i always thought this was a funny little thing. a little bit tongue in cheek because it contrasted so strongly with john who is a very established kind of guy. he wears conservative suits, suspenders, you look at him and think he's the last one for the paradigm. there was a purpose behind this and that is because the paradigms are really serious thing. paradigms are the conceptual models we use to make sense of

things. we do this sometimes consciously, more often unconsciously but we like to think that we believe things when we see them. what psychologists tell us is that we tend to see things when we believe them. and paradigms are those things that unconsciously help us decide what we believe, what we expect, the shape, how we process the facts and information and they shape what we think we ought to do about those things. one of the reasons why john thought these were so important and why i would agree with him on this is fast the paradigms are often times at the root of intelligence failures. remember 9/11 and the aftermath of that first attack, everybody in washington talked about how the cia failed to connect the dots to.

well, those are pieces of information. the lines that connect them some extra paradigm. so, this is something that is a pattern that you see in intelligence failures throughout history. pearl harbor, pearl harbor was a paradigm failure. we had excellent intelligence on pearl harbor. we were reading japanese communications code. we had broken their encryption. but we were not able to grasp that they were going to attack pearl harbor despite the excellent intelligence. why not, paradigms really are. so i want to read to you to talk about with the new diving into this. about a week before the attack on pearl harbor, the japanese told us they were going to attack. the japanese ambassador in washington delivered a diplomatic note i'm going to read to you.

he said they believe economic measures are a much more effective weapon of the board and military measures. they are being placed in severe pressure to yield to the american physician and that it's preferable to fight rather than to yield to pressure. in other words, we still couldn't grasp that this is coming. dean acheson d. them assistant secretary of state wrote about the problem was and said everyone in the department and in the government in general they spread the japanese intentions. this misreading wasn't about what the government proposed to do in asia, not of the hostility of the embargo, but the incredibly high risk they would assume to accomplish their ends. no one in washington realized that the regime regarded the conquest of asia and not as an

accomplishment of the missio amn but the survival of the regime. paradigm problem. what i want to do with you be wu tonight is take the plaque are too hard and subvert the dominant paradigm that we have today in the united states about russia. so what is that paradigm? i shorthanded this by calling it the world war ii problem. the world war ii problem is when you have an ambitious aggressive state that pushes as far and as fast as it can and keeps going until it meets determined resistance the classic example of this is nazi germany, adolf hitler. the one thing you don't yo do wn

you're dealing with you are deae like this is to appease it. we have learned this lesson very well. munich is dirty word in our lexicon, probably the worst thing to accuse someone of as a statesman in the united states is being an appeaser. what we have today is a situation where the dominant paradigm is the have an aggressive and ambitious state we cannot appease. if you have any doubts about this, go on to google and type atim and hitler and see what you get. one thing you will get is flooded images, pictures of putin with hitler hairdo's and mustaches, superimposed.

you will see op-ed accusing russia of being a modern-day nazi germany. you will see op-ed's and editorials cautioning about going soft on russia. what we are most concerned about right now is we won't be tough enough. though we arthat we are going ty as the former minister used to say. why is that a problem? because the russians would interpret this softness and lack of resolve is an invitation to be even more aggressive. if we don't step up to aggression in ukraine and georgia in the cyber sphere, we will only invite even more aggression and the problem will compound and get worse so if you want peace with russia, prepare for war as the romans used to say. that is our dominant paradigm.

now not everybody in washington. this school of thought there were a few prominent proponents of this. the professor emeritus at the university very prominent advocate of the school of thought, john mayer shiner, university of chicago is another one. their argument is russia is reacting to the eastward expansion and steady encroachment by what they perceive as a hostile us-led material alliance creeping closer to the borders moving

from the warsaw pact into actual former soviet republics and that the combination of this, which the russians perceive as a serious threat to national security in a long history of u.s. meddling you might say in their own internal politics is provoking a defensive reaction. and according to this school of thought, the danger here is not that we will appease russia. what happens when you are threatening somebody that is already threatened, you might call this the syndrome what happens when he grabbed his corner become anyone that has been in that situation knows that it gets ugly because he perceives he's got a choice i fight or die, so the choice is

very simple. according to defensive russia school of thought, the worst thing that you can do is exactly what the offense is russia a paradigm says we ought not to do. they say we've got to accommodate and recognize what are some legitimate security concerns that the russians have and find a way of accommodating those in ways that don't undermine our own interest. so, these are opposite schools of thought. the diagnosis of the problem is biologically opposed and the prescriptions are fundamentally incompatible. so where do i come down on this, what is this book about? the thesis is that each of the contending schools of thought, the dominant paradigm of

offensive russia and much less popular defensive russian school of thought, each of them have aspects of their diagnosis which are accurate. they are telling part of the story accurately, but not all of it. so, what i argue in this book is that what we are facing here is not a world war ii problem, it is a world war i problem. so, what caused world war i plaques it wasn't an aggressive ambitious state trying to seize territory and push-ups as far as fast as it could and it wasn't a defense of states that felt it was cornered. it was a systems problem. a whole bunch of factors combined, entangled alliances, new technologies, the railroad had a profound impact on how you

mobilize for the war and prepare to defend your interest. misperceptions, crumbling empires that were worried about threats from within. all of these things mixed together and there were feedback loops that occur and they turned wood were relatively minor developments in the particular case the assassination of the arch ferdinand, and it spun this through these reinforcing effects into a european war that none of the participants expected and none of them want wanted. so, what i'm arguing in the book is that we need to understand that the threat from russia, and it's a real threat. this is a genuinely dangerous

situation, not as an offensive russia that we need to detour, not as a defense if russia that we need to accommodate, but as a complex systems problem that can get out of hand and do that in ways that we do not expect and that are difficult to anticipate. in other words, small events right now could produce giant problems. why do i say that? let me describe the complex factors interacting right now in this relationship. i'm going to break it down for analytical purposes. one of the problems that we have right now is a structural geopolitical problem. what happened in europe after the end of the cold war there was a lot of uncertainty about what the new european security arrangement was going to look like after the warsaw pact collapsed, and the soviet union

ended. nato was there with no peer rival, no competitor. a lot of the states in this new ban of states were left uncovered. new security problems arose that we had to deal with. and stability in the balkans, old historical grievances, separatism into the question became how do we handle these things. and in part by default and in part by design, nato became the primary institution that was addressing these problems. and a lot of the state were facing the situations looked at nato and said that looks attractive. why, while the folks in that club were all pretty rich, pretty secure, pretty prosperous and we remember the problems we

had with the folks running things at moscow and the security blanket over there looks pretty appealing. so, what happened essentially was that vacuum and immediate post-cold war period got filled by nato, and as they did, russia irussia's insecurities became exacerbated and we gradually in part by design and in part by the logic of the events that nobody really planned wound up in a situation where we have a new security arrangement in europe and one of europe's largest powers isn't a part of it, russia is on the outside looking in incentivized to do what? at this point it is impossible for russia. i'm not sure that it ever was very realistic but at this point it is off the table as a possibility with a lot to

undermine the nato alliance and european union more broadly that is a fundamentally stable situation and unresolved. that's factor number one, number two the united states and russia over the past 25 years have gradually each come to the belief that the other side not just as a competitor but actually wants to destroy it if led them to believe that the united states was trying to encircle russia with hostile regime's expanding the nato alliance up to the borders and ultimately regime change inside of moscow to break the country apart. now, we think that's crazy. we look at this to say they are

go the russians again. they are paranoid. in fact, when we talk about russia and its perceptions, you hear that word paranoia a lot. it's almost like russia and paranoia go together. what happened with the united states particularly over the past two years? ..

things. in the pentagon's effect policy board did a study of this and it was just as significant as nuclear technology. think about that for a minute. it's a strong statement by a serious group of guys that don't tend to be hyperbolic about the stuff. why did they say that? for two reasons. cyber technology has tilted the playing field to the advantage of the offense. it is very, very hard to defend against a sophisticated cyber operator that wants to penetrate a system. and if you talk to cybersecurity professionals they will tell you if there is a computer or network or system, regardless of their plugged into the internet

or not, they can be penetrated. you really cannot stop it. they can complicate the task and they can make things more difficult and we are getting better at detecting intrusions than we used to be. and attribution is something we are improving out. but stopping these intrusions before the attack is very hard to do. what does that do? the sense of vulnerability has an impact on both sides, they know they're vulnerable and they know they cannot stop the other side. what do they do? >> they are incentivized to play offense. why? the best way to figure out what the other side is doing to you is to go to their system into

use that to gather information about their operation directed at you. it's a classic intelligence problem. but, there is a twist on this. because in cyber technology, under citing the intention of the other side is really difficult. if i'm an assistant administrator and detect somebody in my system that should not be there, when i noticed he is there but i don't know why. what is his purpose. because he can go into my system to collect data, information but while he is in there he can correct that information, he can destroy the information. and he can sabotage my system. he can go into my network and my computers and plug in a millwork code that causes everything to

break down or to do things that it should not do. when you do that in critical systems water plants, power generation systems, wall street trading systems, what happens when those breakdown? really bad things. that's if you cannot get anybody out of the atm or your cell phones do not work, now imagine this going on for weeks and what do you think happens? very bad things. so this is a real vulnerability and there is not much we can do to prevent this, so what do we do, we have to go into the other side system and figure out what they're trying to do and figure out their capabilities and we also think we have to take hostages. because the best means of making sure they do not detonate the cyber bomb sitting in the nuclear power plant and by the

way i don't know that it is, i don't want to scare you with that. but the best way of ensuring that does not go off to know that we are malware in their system and we can detonate two. so it becomes a mutually assured destruction situation just like the nuclear balance during the cold war that there is a twist. it is spiraling hostage situation because these things go bond if the left overtime. the vulnerability that their exploiting gets patched, the bombs get discovered and diffuse over time so you have to continually do this to make sure you have the situation in hand so it's not a stable assured balance we had during the cold war. it's an unstable spiral situation.

i do not want to scare you too much but it's even worse than that. something else fundamental has changed since the cold war. during the cold war, we had conventional weaponry over here that was essentially its own world separate from the world of nuclear weapons. so nuclear weapons have their own control systems and dedicated satellites that managed all of this, early warning signs that would detect incoming strategic systems fired over the pool. so we know what to look for where it was coming, we knew how to prepare to retaliate against all this in the world with weaponry was entirely separate. that is no longer the case today. these two worlds of nuclear and

conventional weaponry are intermixed. in ways that are unprecedented in and i think ways that most people outside of a select expert in washington don't understand. so the crews missiles that the united states frequently uses in various regional crisis situations in the world, the iranians did something bad, we threatened the tomahawk's with the crews missiles launched from naval vessels, et cetera et cetera et cetera. what controls the systems? satellites. what else do the satellites control, nuclear systems. so there's an intermission of those things which is new. another thing that has happened, satellite systems turn the cold war and very, very high organs,

those orbits were so high they were untouchable. they were invulnerable. nobody could reach them with ground-based antisatellite weaponry. and they were certainly not space-based antisatellite weapons either. we knew that the satellites were secure. we have to worry about them. that is not true now. so satellites that are detecting and controlling weapons are vulnerable. they are not only vulnerable in the satellite weapons connecticut weapons, they are vulnerable to cyber penetration. and we probably cannot defend them. what that means a crisis situation and the ability to detect threats in the confidence that we would have when the president says watch that those

systems are actually watched has gone like this compared to the cold war. that is a very unstable situation and it comes to crises today. so, these factors are reinforcing one another to make for very unstable situation. a couple other things to play hereto. because we think the russians should be appeased and we are dominant that this is an aggressive, vicious state that will push as hard as he can, fast as i can until it makes resistance. we decided that means we should not talk to them. do not engage. engagement diplomatically as a reward for bad behavior. so how do we handle the crisis if all these things come together, who do we talk to? >> right now the dominant says

we should not be talking to anyone. that also is a factor that makes the situation very risky and offer you one final one and that is triggers. syria, ukraine, iran, north korea and all of these cases, the united states and russia find themselves on opposite sides of the conflicts. to during degrees with each side engaged in a directly or indirectly proxy warfare. many cases we have americans and russians with boots on the ground engaged directly or indirectly in fighting. so the potential for one of these triggers actually setting something off and winding up with the world war i style chain

of cascading development is quite great. now, what i do in the book is layout this problem. i call it premortem. why do i call that, it is an examination of a failure that has not happened. why would you do that, you do because you're fundamentally optimistic and you're probably shaking your head say nothing of hurt sounds very optimistic. but the reason why i'm going through this is because i believe that this is a manageable problem. it is not manageable unless we recognize what kind of problem we have got. if we think we have a world war ii problem and we tackle it like that you have to make world war i problem worse. but if you recognize that we have a complex problem, you

realize first and foremost i gotta be careful, this could turn into something i do not expect and do not want, how to handle that. once you have done that, now you're talking about how do i handle this and how to put rules of the road in place, mechanisms to contain the dangers, that is possible. so in an optimistic person when it comes to the ability to handle this and pessimistic when it comes to how do we change that. i sprayed right now are stuck in something and in an accurate portrayal of the situation we are facing. that is what the book is about and what i hope it can make progress in doing and getting people to do what john mclaughlin urged which was left look at the dominant paradigm, let's think about what other

possible ways of understanding what is going on there are and then let's think about how we deal with the dangers in a pragmatic way. i am hoping that the book will have some small impact. thank you. [applause] >> any questions? >> thank you very much for the talk, credibly interesting. i have a question, how do you think russia evolving relationship with china factors in to the. i and the potential for the paradigm shift? >> i talk about that in the book. one of them patients is a growing hostility of the u.s., russian relationship is russia has been incentivized to accelerate the warming trend and its relationship with china.

i think that is a significant problem for the united states and i personally think the growth of chinese power in the world is the most significant geopolitical challenge that the united states faces and it will be the biggest problem for at least th the next half-century d very much not in our interest to encourage the growth of russian and chinese cooperation. it complicates the problem for us. so i believe not only do we need to manage the security threat in the hostility that russia poses for us but from a geostrategic point of view, it makes a lot of sense for us not to incentivize that cooperation between moscow and beijing.

>> were in the systems and the paradigm was something like venezuela or other not near a broad meddling fitting and if we have tried to extrapolate rules of the road, what do we do in their lively. >> yes, i think what the russians have been doing in venezuela economically, more militarily is the strongest counterargument to the defense of russian school of thought. the ones that say the russians are just defending themselves and they want us to butt out, that is only part of the story. the russians also have office of ambitions and want to be of great power. in fact, it is complicated. for various historical and cultural reasons i think the

russians believe unless they are a great power that they will not survive intact sort of a strange mix of offenses and defensive motivation. what do great part do? they dominate their neighbors. in the russians think all great powers do this, we do it, china visit, russia thinks it should do it too. and they also think the great power is basically sitting on a metaphorical global board of directors. they are the ones that are sitting around the table to decide what the rules are so the russians think they should have a role in deciding what the roles are in right now they think they don't like that. they also believe that the great power gets to decide when you make exceptions to the rules. and they look at the united states and say, you make the rules, we did not get into it, that's not okay and you get to

decide when you don't have to play by those rules. when you can bomb iraq without going to the council and asking for a resolution authorizing it for example. that is not okay. when we do is wrong but when you do it is not okay. so they want a situation where they get to make the rules and get to decide when there are exceptions. venezuela, why are they doing that. they are doing that in part because they are saying to us, were a great power. you get to intervene in our neck of the woods, we get to do it to you too. how do you like that. and if you do not like it, then why don't we sit down and talk about how we will work it out. what are the rules of the road for this activity because if you are saying we cannot do this in venezuela, then what is wrong with us saying you cannot do this in ukraine? this is a conversation we do not

want to have. when you ask, why are the russians doing things like meddling in u.s. politics and meddling in our sphere of influence as we regard this western hemisphere, part of the reason is a can you hear me now message coming from them. we don't like them interfering in russian politics. how do you like it if we would interfere with your politics. and if you did not, why don't we sit down and talk about the rules that are going to apply. so my personal belief is, what we have interpreted as a desire to destroy american democracy within, i think it's an instrumental tool meant to force us to have some conversations and reach agreements we do not want to reach or have.

>> is there a friendly relationship between russia and iran and also, considering how he seems to be cozy with putin, how does putin play out with iran? >> very good question. i will use this as an opportunity to make a comment on the dominant belief that russia is driven by ideological motives. there is a strong belief from the united states that russia hates democracy. you will hear this a lot. putin is authoritarian and russia's authoritarian state, they hate our system and they hate democracy and want to make the world safe and the train to wipe it out everywhere. ukraine, georgia, that you, the united states but i think this is a misperception that is

driving them. i think the russians don't care about democracy one way or the other and they don't regard a lot of the states that we think are democratic like ukraine and georgia. and they have very good relations with a number of states in the world that are democratic. india, japan and israel. who has met more often with putin than any other leader? met in yahoo, who is walking beside putin at the last victory day parade on red square, benjamin, a very good relationship and a lot of complexities in this relationship. israel and russia do not agree on a lot of things but there's also areas where they have things in common, common interest. iran is a very difficult issue

within russian is really bilateral relationship. part of the reason why he wants a good relationship with putin because he realizes putin is a critical player on the issue. he was to influence russian differs in venture decision-making in dealing with the threat. do the russians regard iran as friends? i think the answer is sort of. russia certainly does not look at around through the same prison that we look at it through. they have some concerns about iranian behavior absolutely. they don't regard them as irrational theocratic apocalyptic actors the way many americans tend to see you then. i think they see them as a regime that does rational, predictable things to advance its own security interest in the

region. the russians don't want the iranians to do bad things with muslim population itself, they want to keep the relationship in a relatively stable. they don't want to see actual conflict between israel and iran. because that complicates their ability to have good relationships with israel and iran what they want. if you look at russia's overall posture in the middle east, right now today they are playing a role that the united states played 35 years ago. back in the 1980s, the gospel was, the united states was only country that could talk to all sides in the israeli dispute, we were able to play a role of honest broker. today, not so much. united states has tilted rather significantly towards one side

and a lot of the disputes, russia's outside power that could talk to the turks. the israelis in the iranians, the saudis and iran, it is actually a position that they've achieved which with quite a bit of diplomatic skill. they do not want to see this going away. conflicts that flareup in interfere, i don't think they don't want that to happen. they're trying to manage us as best as he can. beyond the systems problem in the system complication that you talked about. how much did you describe to the fact that the world is changing,

the geopolitical balance of the world is changing and the situation were rising china and russia would like to rise in the united states is no longer dominant and that can be inherently destabilizing. >> that's another factor that is playing into the system problem. the geopolitical is in a transition right now and the end of the cold war it was clearly a cold world, there was no. relationships, competitors that the united states had a pen with and our system of government, our economic system was unrivaled and there was nobody that was arrival in those things and nobody approached our military power. and we were quite confident. the real question that we had

was, how can we spread our system throughout the world and create a liberal system that would make everybody friendly and one big happy family. that is no longer the case obviously. our relative power is declined and clearly china has risen a lot farther and a lot faster than a lot of people anticipat anticipated. the relationship between china and russia has advanced in ways people did not expect even ten years ago. we have lost our confidence internally. part of that is structural changes but part of it is a function going on inside the united states itself.

it has taken us by surprise and compounded with the international order. and frankly it's affected our perception to some degree our loss of confidence domestically has been projected of what russia is doing. and all of these things are reinforced with each other. and it makes something that is very difficult to handle. >> i am wondering about your diagnosis because it seems to me that many of the same outcomes could also be explained by the authoritarian acting to power explanation.

a free press abroad reports on corruption in russia. and helping to establish authoritarian regimes abroad to crack down on the free press and it would have similar to a genuine disc taste for democracy or a fear that there is color revolution in nato creeping on the borders. . . .

these things in different ways. what i'm advocating here is not that this is the only way that you would explain it and these other things are not plausible. what i'm saying is reasonable people can disagree and the state are so high that we better think hard about this. we better consider alternative explanations because if we get this wrong it matters a lot. one of the things i would say regardless of the dominant

paradigm one of the ways you do with this is working or not, whether it is accurate is do they predict things or fail to predict things that do happen in other words do actual life events show the explanatory powers and i would offer one example that should cause people to say and that's georgia in 2008. so the dominant paradigm says russia expands its power wants to push out as far as it can. it invaded georgia, 2008. how did that happen? the government knew the tension between russia and georgia were accelerated and we have seen this for several years. we knew where this was going. we were concerned that there was going to be more the dominant

paradigm says you push back and stand firm and signaled to the aggressor state that you are not going to go soft. so we armed the georgians and undertook the program and send u.s. military personnel into georgia. they undertook a significant program to bolster the georgian military. why? to say to the russians they were going to be in for a fight if they wanted an attack. then we engaged with moscow and said to the russians don't go there. this is out of bounds. don't even think about it. and then what else did we do ask in conjunction with our nato allies, we announced officially that georgia and ukraine would

one day become part of nato sorties are all signals that according to the dominant paradigm should have caused the kremlin to say okay that's not where i'd want to go. let's look at those wherefore my intuitioambition but instead wht happened is a very complicated situation. a complex system dynamics problem. the georgians read all this and said wow, we are imported, the president of the united states cares about georgia. he visits me and talks to me on the phone. condoleezza rice and national security adviser, secretary of state comes to georgia. we matter and certainly they are not going to let us down if we get into a problem here.

they've got our backs. now we told them don't get it io a war. condoleezza rice said don't attack, don't fall for the russian trap. what did they hear, what he heard was yes, i know, don't attack the russians, that would be bad. the actions we took going there and meeting with him said something else and said you really matter to the united states. he attacked first at the russians were waiting for him. they knew what was coming and took over the.

we wound up in a war that we were trying to deter. i would argue it's because we had the wrong paradigm. we thought that the model would work but in fact it produced a cascade of events that we didn't anticipate. did that prove that the model is the one that we ought to rethink about, no it doesn't but i think that it should cause us to step back and say maybe we need to think harder about this. >> this is going to be the last question. >> how much do you think russia still takes and its inroads in the balkans mainly its relationship in serbia and even kind of expanding outward. >> i think they care a lot about the balkans. there is a lot of history

obviously speaking of world war i. there is a lot of cultural affinity. the orthodox church is playing a much more important role in russian society and politics and even in the russian was very damning to his back during the cold war period certainly. all that matters to how the russians view of the situation in the balkans and how they perceive their interest to you. there is a fascinating subject for those of you that are not familiar with it is a region of moldova nestled in between ukraine, romania and essentially been separate territory as a part of what they call frozen conflict since the early post

cold war period. one of the things i learned in writing the book i knew a lot about it, but i realized how much of the history of the russian perceptions about our policy goals and how much of a breakdown in all of the rules that were once opposed during the cold war and all of these arms control agreements and other confidence in the security measures will disappear in. how much of that was tied into moldova in all of the places of the world you would think us americans couldn't find it on a map. a lot of it was in some way connected so it's one of these issues in a land blog out-of-the-way place. you would think that it would be

an area that we would be able to find a compromise solution, and yet it has proven so elusive, i think that it's one i would look to if i were to say you know, is there a place where we might be able to have some traction sort of put some rules in the place to look at. can we get one more round of applause? [applause] once again books are available at the register and he will be right over here happy to sign. thanks for coming out. [inaudible conversations]

the idea is that they wanted to go out and have fun and demonstrate. but they were not going to have to try to buy their own campfires, they were not going to eat cold beans out of cans, they were not just going to put a blanket on the ground. they had all these different amenities. they had a refrigerated car powered by edison batteries so they could have fresh dairy and they hit shelves that would prepare gourmet meals at night and in the morning they would dress in freshly ironed clothes but you see they were so famous in america was so grateful to them that it didn't matter. the point was we are