That was after words, our Signature Program on booktv in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by, public policymakers, and others familiar with their material, it airs every weekend on booktv and at 10 00 p. M. On saturday, 12 and 9 00 p. M. On monday and at 12 00 a. M. On monday. You can also watch after words online go to tv. Org and click on after words. Coming up next the economic damage caused by rustin u. S. By Jonathan Waldman and the efforts to combat that. Jonathan waldman is the author of the the longest war, he has written for outside come in the Washington Post end also worked as a sticker salesmen and clerk. He started writing and was recently a fellow own environmental journalism at the university of colorado. He is the editorinchief. A new film about earth elements and the history of technology will have its north American American germ at the film festival. We are so delighted to welcome you both and we thank you for being here. [applause] and we will be having a conversation and then we will open it up for questions. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. A big thanks to you for organizing the event. So as i have mentioned, he was a fellow for the center of environmental journalism and that is actually where we met at the new colorado, i was a fellow at the same time. So we have a lot of complementary interest in the environment and as also mentioned i havent talked much about this as of yet, but we are talking about earth metals. One of the things that i highlighted is just how pervasive these metals are cell phones, computers, but you dont notice them always, natalie runs parallel to what we are going to discuss today. This idea that it is corrosion that is everywhere, and yet we never noticed it, we dont acknowledge it but a few people do. And you have found that the people in the places where it has become a great concern for us. Statue of liberty the whale pipelines and the costs associated with that are absolutely extraordinary. And you have such a wonderful way of incorporating these staggering statistics and also telling a compelling story along the way. At the beginning of the book particularly because i wanted to talk about the beginning of our conversation with the environment. Some of these i would not associate with environmental concerns, and yet you hold out am important ones that i hope we can get into. And the concerns that we have with the oil pipeline and the municipal water lines as well. So starting with a so easy to ignore, it threatens our safety and security environment and future and this includes our nationals will of liberty surrounded by stainless steel sinks and other things, we take nonrusting steel for granted although its only a century old. And so he also cites the federal science agencys manager who says that he imagine this to become as vague as the entire Environmental Movement. So can it be its own Environmental Movement amax. First of all, thank you. That might have been him being pretty optimistic about science taking the. But i think you have a good point that it is an environmental issue. It doesnt look like an environmental issue. And so when youre driving down the highway you see stuff on the side of the highway it is the world that is beyond our own in and its out there. We are in them midst of this and you cant find a place that is without human touch. Whether it is found or running through the water, it is everywhere. Specifically thinking about water and im intrigued by the way that we have been trying to manipulate Water Systems in the way that we are trying to coat the Water Systems and plastic. Could you maybe start as we think about the municipal Water Systems and what do they add . I know that that is not a big focus of your book. As you mentioned, i talked about how russ is ubiquitous. And there are people fighting rust to prevent it in the first place, you never meet these people must you poke and prod. So where you and i live in colorado the waterfall is clean and doesnt need to be treated very heavily but we added a chemical. Im going to forget the name. But we add hydroxide and it comes from a 50000pound tank when it gets dumped into the system and we do that because it just so happens that the cleanest water is acidic and that is the standard that Water Utilities need to abide by resulting in acidic water until we make it more basic. And so when people talk about water being hired, its basic. As it gets treated farther from the rockies, down in new orleans and has a lot of stuff in it, which is why showerheads clog up faster where i live compared to where i live in colorado. But its not because they are trying to clog up the showerheads, they are doing it because the stuff under the roads cannot rest. It would be a nightmare if they had to replace those things every five or 10 years. You mentioned something about exploding Manhole Covers . Russ has done some exceptional things, it has alone Manhole Covers and blown them away up into the roof. Taking planes out of the sky, it has killed people, it has almost killed a lot more people. And we are also getting at what we do and what better thing than that. This stuff is only as thick as a piece of paper and if we take it for granted that you can put Something Like pomegranate juice and a canon not have it corrode through that stuff its a paper cup lined with wax or plastic. So i wrote a chapter about this and we test how corrosive this stuff inside is going to be in that determines how thick the layer will be on the inside. [inaudible] we are talking about just how much we could be ingesting on a daily basis if you have a can of soup, a can of soda a can of beer, you could be getting a lot of bpa. It is hard to call it a lot biochemically perhaps over a certain threshold we were not meant to take end but it is a tiny amount, a couple parts per billion at the most. And its not just one can maker it is all except for a very few that do not use the code coatings that have this on them. And the fda regulates how much stuff can leak out and then be taken in this. What you say its not as large of a threshold as it should be . Map thats right, its happy part per billion, below that threshold, they dont have to look at person and cancer i heard from one scientist that said it was off in a magnitude, which meant that we are talking parts that are beyond the the analytical capability out there. I talked to another guy that has a patent on cans coding and he says he sees what goes wrong, you knows what is in them and he is concerned he said that he is so concerned that he wont allow cans in his house. And he works for a coding research institute. And he is the one that said that pregnant women should not drink out of a cannon . Yes, i brought this up and i said what about the warning label. And he said that if the Surgeon General suggested they change it to women should not drink canned beverages, he would be in favor of that. So who thought that rust would you have impact. So you are saying that the lining and the epoxy plastic lining, in the book i think you said there were 15000 different proprietary recipes for the epoxy. And you met with someone who is testing all of the difference Different Things for corrosive myths. Is that correct . Yes there are Something Like 15,000 different lines and each one is designed so that however this is pasteurized, going through hot or cold or dry whether it has fish or beans and tomatoes or corn the coatings have to not interact with whatever is inside the can because you dont want to open up something and drink it and have it be off. And here is very susceptible to flavor scalping. The coatings are there to keep the fans from rusting. Testing all of these Different Things for toxicity, the way that is not even bpa but so many other chemicals in it. First of all they say if the chemicals part and if the coating doesnt serve very well and it turns into a mush, the Coating Company is not going to try to get it tested because it makes them look bad. So most the sadness, the fda says that see this 100 page document and they say yeah a that looks pretty good. Something like 97 actually passed. And very rarely do they do that and throw one off the shelf. And if they designed this, they are sort of clearing the government hurdle. So he was at can school. Thats right thats where we are right down from the biggest can maker in the world. And i guess it was four years ago i emailed someone and i said im learning about cans and corrosion and i asked him about the liability of them in the Health Concerns and they basically kicked me out before it started. But they goofed up and sent me an email. Its in the book. We talked about this. They sent me an email the night before and said we have you signed up with closed toe shoes, lunch and coffee and we hope to see you there and i went and i walked into a company lobby and i said im here for can on my name is not on the list and i said well, ill wait its fine im not offended, its funny because really i was hoping to sneak in but you have to, i guess for 10 a little bit. I gave them a chance to not let me in and i said okay, its no big deal. But then they realized i was there and they took me to the hallway and maybe journalists are more paranoid but i took that thumb drive that they gave me and i put it down my pants. [laughter] and there was nothing proprietary on there at all, i didnt see anything, they are really secretive about the coatings and they are not going to talk chemistry in a roomful of 80 people. There are a lot of examples in the book of where you have infiltrated places. It was something that you are able to get into places that nobody had gotten into the water. So the Alaska Pipeline. No journalist or writer have ever had this aspect is the the specifics of how they run a the socalled paid through the pipeline to check for rust more preventing spills. So how did you get access and what did that access let you into . My access was either all or none, i asked a lot and to see if i could come see what they are doing. Most that i talked to said no no thanks. And i think most of us ascribe shame to corrosion, so if you are a company, you do as well the company gets to say well there are proprietary concerns and we cant let you in because they dont want you to say oh they are working on that at the lab. So all over the country people said you cannot come. But when i said, when i asked about this if i could look at one of the heaviest metal things in the western hemisphere its probably an Alaska Pipeline is a billion pounds, its miles long and very heavy. You almost have to wonder if that affects tectonics. They do worry about it affecting the permafrost because its full of hot oil. The to the credit that they saw that what i wanted to write about was how they have a basic challenge and to their credit they know that they inspect their pipeline nearly twice as often as federal standards regulate. So they had something to show off even if they havent succeeded every time that they tried. And they put in a lot more money and effort and intelligence and technology than almost any other company out there and it is the most regulated pipeline in the world and its also perhaps the best. So as you know it is a robot 16 feet long. It goes in one end of the pipe. And you said that that is the same as the oil that comes in . There is a little bit of attacking it, we open up a big blob of wax. And so takes 26 days now, it used to take only four days because 20 years ago a lot more oil was coming down the pipeline. Now we are at a quarter of that. The lack of oil affects the pipeline . Yes, it cools off more kind of like cholesterol or something. And down those mountain ranges the oil kind of flows like a mountainside. So the pig is going too fast, the center can break, they can come apart if it hits a big puddle i want country and a transplant of their watches in 2013 and in the last dozen years half of them have failed at. By failed does that mean that they did not detect the corrosion was that they got stuck in. It means that something got wrong and then they didnt get all of the data that they want. So what amounts to 7 million square inches and they want to know what everyone of those inches looks like. If theres one thin spot right there, that is enough still 5000 euros of oil and it could be billions of dollars of damages. National and international protests could happen as well. Yes, and then you get individuals that dont like responding to spills. They want the industry to look good. One of the good things about being a writer is that you get to look up words in the glossary, and theres a phrase that means everything is good. They want the pipeline to be like that. And so the pig is flowing and moving slower now than it needs bigger batteries and it has to do more work and because it takes so long there is so much at stake. The guys run around they bring it back up and its a big deal to put a robot in the pipeline and they do it again. And in 2006 in 2007 they did it two times in a row. You said that there are more that come through, it pushes that out and has to get through. Im curious how that works with the metal reign he said the more likely it is enact. You would think that a lot of people ask if it rests on the inside and it does a component, of oil and wax and theres waxen water and oil. And so when it gets cold it protects it. And so its kind of a protective environment. So the way that the the pig moves, the wax can block the magnets from doing the work that they need to do and they actually used to use ultrasonic pigs but the wax block the sound and so they had to give up them in 2001. So now the this is kind of the only way to go and this is messing them up as well. So on top of putting a multimillion dollar robot and hoping that it pops out with good information, they also run cleaning for the pipeline which are kind of like big around squeegees and they run those every few days and those are pushing out and share from one to 40 barrels of wax. And so they are trying to get all of it out when they put the robotic pig in her comment it can just gather data smoothly. What does it mean for the oil . And what do you think . I dont think it really matter i love the way you talk about the actually went to go back to, historic point throughout the history. [inaudible] not being such a young invention, the pig has its origin in the name came from texas, wasnt . They were running the straws are the ones to keep it clean . Yes when you start doing journalistic research, you find some things in history that are unknown and you say oh, this should be fun. And so it has been claimed and i say that because they just use some of the cleaning tribes and so a bunch of wax accumulated. Others used rubber balls i read a great story and i think that a paint factory they used loaves of bread or Something Like that. And pretty much anything you can shove in a pipe it will get worse room and take some stuff with it. I love your main character who was also incidentally obsessed with aquariums he actually is in charge of the giant pig that runs through the pipeline and then he also has two have though of little tiny tubes. I asked him if there is a challenge that he faced and he said my room and i was like oh, that is kind of like what do you mean, that cannot possibly be relevant. And thats like saying that its hard to take care of my cat. But it just didnt add up. And thats probably the largest pilot owned orient in alaska, it took a great deal to get it in his house, there are tv shows about people that make bacterium in florida and theres Power Outages plugged into this and so they built this and he gets updates about what is going on with the video monitor, oxygen monitor, he is a real engineer. And the lines in his fish tank corroded. And they are bits of sponges. We have so many moments like that in the book and its just magic the way comparisons that no one else can in these characters just pop out. I was lucky that i have found good characters. That is what journalism is in a way, you can not make people what they are not but you hunt until you find the people that tell the story well. And there are some came here, thats probably because i dont want to do anyone a disservice, but i didnt find enough to keep going another 20 or 30 pages. We touched on this at the beginning of the passage that i read about the idea of the statue of liberty itself is in danger and came very close to just falling apart because of rust. Thats right, the statue of liberty was designed and im going to butcher the name nonrunning was the engineer, and the idea was to put an iron frame to hold it up. They knew since the days the early days, one of the medals are going to corrode because of the other. And so he knew this and he will try to separate the two metals by asbestos. And so who knows, and of course the superintendent thought, okay we are trying this with these two metals. When the superintendent finally discovered that there was a problem with the statue there were some areas where the pain was Holding Nothing anymore, it was just paint and the frame was not there. Five engineers climbed up in their and they found a big pile of quagmire grossness and they passed it around and they were advised not to do that again because the frame was not there anymore. And they said dont go there. They said dont go sit in the torch again because it could break. And that would be really embarrassing if you broke the International Symbol of freedom. So when the park service got around to restoring the statue they replaced every one of those except they left one. Her heel was sticking up. And i think they left one of the original iron frames and their but every one of those has been replaced with stainless steel which was the alloy of choice by a wise corrosion specialist and they talk about us, they never did more than one at a time they did not want to do or want to work because then her shoulder migrate. It took a long time to climb the statue each one with 50 pounds, to get them to a fabricated area, bending them in the same shape, and it cost 300 million to fix this giant metal thing sitting there at the new york harbor salt water acid rain its a terrible idea to put a copper statue right there. And one in the gems of the book is the National Association of Corrosion Engineers put a plaque up and they talk about how it is coded in something to protect it. But i guess they chose the wrong one and so the only one began to rust about a year later and bob went there and discovered it and when he told other people about it, apparently the other engineering groups all laughed saying that these guys cant even do it. You feel bad theres a lot of trial and error and i suspect that that was eight quick trial very well learned. The whole reason it was discovered is because some activists and protesters had tried to rob climate . Yes, that is one of my favorite stories i might have pushed hard to get it in the book but i think its worth it. Two hippie climbers came out the day before mothers day in 1980 and they were going to climb the statue and they were going to sleep on her shoulder and they had backpacks and suction cups and food and a book of poetry. And they were just going to read poetry to each other. And they were protesting the imprisonment of the black panther who allegedly had killed a teacher in california. He did not do it he was released 25 years later, and these guys you know, they were activist and they went out there and they thought this banner and they started climbing and i talk to them a lot about this and they stood up and they put on the harnesses so that visitors to the park with say what is going on over there. And they climbed up the door frame and they started climbing and the statue was basic way i dont want to say disintegrating, but there were holes all over and then they would slowly come off. These are good climbers, this man has the first that is no joke come i dont think it has been climbed many times and he did it in 1972 or something. It is a serious climbing feat. And that means it was a very terrifying climb. If the statue had not been resting . Would they have made it up . I think so, yeah. You talked about hearing popping and he was supposed to be keeping an eye on things and he heard the popping and thought that they were hammering nails . Two yes, i had to make an assessment and find out what had happened there. They actually tried they tried and they put them in the holes but they didnt and they did not work. But the statue had holes because the rivets were getting pulled out because the skin was separating from the iron frame. And the park service was so upset at them desecrating the symbol of freedom that one of the employees went up and took the butt of his gun and basically went like this. Started rapping on the frame of the statue. Someone else down below says they are destroying the statue, but it became a convenient way to say they are bad guys in doing that you. [inaudible] with the superintendent of the park looked it up. And another gentleman in the book was the climbers first they were thrown in court then the lawyer was probably the most infamous lawyer in the country at the time and the judge put his head in the sand and said oh, not you. Which i am a big fan of the guy, i think its a great story, and then he had the case and it turned out that these guys had not damaged the to the tune of 80,000. In fact it had revealed that it needed repair instantly. That is the best thing is that the banner said that liberty was framed, and it was and the frame was resting and they put it in a big banner and made it clear to the country about this, that there was a problem and it turned out to be a different problem. But they were sentenced with i think 24 hours of community service, so being the climbers if they were they went back to california and taught a bunch of city kids how to climb. I would like to touch on the metaphors that you revealed and that rust can reveal, thinking about the way that the u. S. Is spending money and your decision on the cover here to have kind of a bloody besmirched white page and her subtitle here is trickier. After reading this and think about the amount of money that the amount of money in spending on fighting wars overseas, and the lack of spending that is done here on infrastructure the amount of persians that is happening on american soil the amount of corrosion and the amount of money that is going on military vessels, do you have a statistic that the u. S. Navy is spending more on rust than it is to kind of fight the wars . I dont know if id go like that far, thats definitely part of it. Based on billions of dollars . The defense of department as a whole spends a great deal of this. That is also one of my favorite chapters because you see the way that this is treated as the waiter we all do. Its uncomfortable, its off word its definitely not interesting or sexy, guys that are making 100 milliondollar missile programs say oh rust you deal with that, not me. And then you get a stubborn corrosion and there is a guy who is the erosion ambassador and his job is to change the way that the pentagon is dealing with rust and he says while coming what you think you are dealing with is really important, but we cannot just end this, making things fall apart in 10 years is not a way that is good bureaucracy. I there are better ways to administrated. And the funny thing is that its tempting to think that the highestranked official should be an engineer and hes not. Hes Public Administration hes very interfaced, hes very funny and loud and definitely quirky and personable and persistent but hes not an engineer and when darted his job, lot of individuals said this guy is never going to succeed, hes not a chemist, is not someone who probably knows anything about physics and he doesnt care. But hes getting a lot done he proved himself that he has saved billions of tax dollars and so i end the book with him. Its a book about this and i finish with him saying that i am alive. And its very typical of the guys in the book. I think that they deserve to shout a little bit when they win and he is winning. I want to make sure that we have time for questions and i want to open it up. The story is it exposes the cost and what is happening underneath in this world that most people travel on. And i think that it shows the hidden cost and this war that is going on to keep all this stuff on the surface in a way. And all of this externalized cost and we want to have a little bit of this here and now and we need it. And i guess im just wondering about how you think about this as a bigger lesson and is there a way to imagine a world in which we dont have to fight this war and what would that mean and how different would our society have to be or how differently would we have to organize our lives . Everyone wants to know that. What can we do. Im wondering if you have a sense of how utopian one would have to be to imagine that. I dont think its utopian think its if its dystopian. I think if you want to live in the desert and use oxus tools you wont have a problem with rust. In the book i mentioned that a world free of rust, its not possible in a way and i call it rust the longest war, we like to think that we live in the iron age but i like to think that when extraterrestrials say they are looking for signs that we did stuff here and made stuff here, you will not find the edge of liberty but you will find the granite pedestal where she was and they will say, did they try to dim the hudson, and they will find stuff in egypt, the pyramids, an increase, but you will not find things that are made out of metals. I was also thinking of this, a moment in which wooden ships were the infrastructure it it wasnt a fundamental part of our infrastructure and that such an interesting transition. The guys that first suggested making myths were also laughed at. And i think someone in the british navy says that iron doesnt swim. Its like okay i dont know what youre talking about, that the crazy idea. [laughter] but we figured out how to do it and we have a great deal of science in keeping the navy afloat and so you have admirals thing that the number one enemy of the navy is rust and if we keep doing things the way we are, we can keep our navy fleet decides that it is. Thank you so much for being here and for speaking to us. You tell a nice story, unique point of view. How are you connecting to science trying to bring it to the front. Thats right. [inaudible] would you like to ask a question about that in a more specific way . A lot of times we are getting to the meat of it. We are talking about the pervading information. The convenient thing is that its everywhere and people are fighting it in almost every industry and this includes how we keep can survive in for a year, there is a corrosion guide making sure that this stuff can survive with the coding and this can in the fridge right there and thats all they do to make sure that it doesnt kill these cans and we look at the pipeline come and the statue of liberty, nasa, Naval Research labs, it is almost hard to not find something fighting rust its an issue in server rooms, they get rid of the oxygen and pump them full of nitrogen so that the metal parts are not corroding. But you are not daunted by the Science Behind it. You really team to dive into that and go into any conversation whether with scientist or whatever. So how do you think that you approach the more complex scientific ideas . I think that we are doing everyone a disservice. Sometimes they are complex. I dont think that much is complex, and its a mental thing that you do. And if you get into it it might be tricky and im definitely capable of understanding it and i think that most logical people are capable of understanding most things that they try and there are probably things you dont know about but i dont think its especially saying its complicated doesnt mean it is something that we study. We are talking to someone who is thinking about the pathways and if you dont have a history and genetics and you are trying to read a paper about the genome, they can be daunting. Complicated as hard because of you Say Something silly and i dont understand it, its your fault and not mine. And i say dont tell me that i understand i dont understand. That is the heart of journalism, ask questions until you do understand it and you have an insatiable curiosity and no shyness about asking questions. None at all. And i really do say thanks at the end of the book, thank you for letting me ask dumb questions, but they also deal with answers and i think that i have figured out a lot of what people do and what they are getting at. Its like something things that you try, theres a learning curve at first and then you become marginally good but still capable of killing yourself and then you become an expert after however many hours. It really is trial and error, there is Scientific Research and lab science. And we can learn from this that is trial and error. And we are going to get sidetracked on us. There is a story that showed up in an texas newspaper, it landed in a kids bedroom and i cannot believe it didnt get more attention because it was a news story of a flying pig. And i thought it would be on all the news channels and it went nowhere but the oil industry likes to be hushhush with information a week later. But if you have done such a good job of making sense of stuff, it is not too intimidating anymore. [inaudible] right here in durham they are busy digging up right around the campus and they are about to replace iron pipes downtown with products that i think they truly believe at this point are going to be just fine and they will last forever. God knows what is going to happen healthwise between now and forever and what are they replacing this stuff with that is carrying on . I think they want to replace mine with steel instead, i think that iron has metal Optical Properties that are less desirable [inaudible] okay, you are giving a good point. The industry, that is the funny thing, they are making five or 10 year projections based on euros, and they are getting a little half cent margin over the other guy. And now when he threatened the things that they are living on come in the system that they operate under, they have to play defense. And they dont really want to argue that this is safe but that is the one position that they will have to take and that is the cool thing about the modern world we are learning more about stuff that we didnt have the capacity to learn about the first time. So i mention in the book a company on the Delaware River making beams and the navy had tested these things and they are using them on railroads as well. But theres also an issue of putting big plastic things in the environment and seeing if the ducks can have a nest under the bridge or if they all have 18 legs. So again im not making any allegation about this but that is kind of where we are now as we do crazy amounts of test and learn. And that is what it should be everything in engineering is a big tradeoff because you are down thing with costs and materials to build and maintain it. I wrote a lot about people who do maintenance and i talked briefly with Matthew Crawford who wrote the book which is kind of about what comes from doing work with your hands, maintaining things, knowing things, and i think that maybe there is something happening in American Society where we like to think that we are better than maintenance, that its not my problem, i have a job i wear a collar. You know, like someone mow the lawn, someone buy my groceries and someone maintain that. And so i tell people a lot and i was reading about this about a guy going across oregon trail and his brother tells him that if it breaks, you get to fix it. And i make a point now of getting the maintenance going and the opportunity. Some people were reluctant to let you see that their products were susceptible to corrosion, makes me think of my favorite advertising, which was in a mall there was nine of advertising and like it was a mistake as you got older. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that cultural charge. And it is interpreted as a statement about you. The first thing, that they were not allowed to use that. [inaudible] [laughter] but they look up a bunch of words and that is certainly interesting. I say in the book that rust is somewhere between cholesterol and hemorrhoids. Its awkward, we dont always want to talk about it many will say okay. But it is this line between being ubiquitous com,com ma we all have seen it because we think we know it, but because it is so present we file it away as okay, i get that. [inaudible] and thats kind of it theres a lot of things that humans are uncomfortable to resting. Corrosion occupies a strange place in the world where its like every part of our brain is the maximum distance from it. And i can tell more stories about cars if you want. Pretty much every car manufacturer has recalled cars because of rust and i happen to know it has caused failure of so many things and it causes some ford vehicles to spontaneously catch fire when they were parked. So its interesting to hear from someone who had that happen, which kind of made my day, but even if that happens in your vehicle catches fire you probably dont want to tell your neighbor about this. [applause] i think that we have time for one more question. I would like to say a word or two about this connection between that and this book in particular with your finding about corrosion whether it is rust or not and sometimes it is interchangeable and sometimes not. Something that i learned from the book is that rust only is corrosion of iron, technically, but it is all metals. And so when i was interested and in was looking at the earth metals which are often called [inaudible] and they go into computers and they are mine. That is something we havent talked too much about, but the mining can be quite destructive and many are radioactive, we have discussed some of the radioactive metals are going to a lot of the materials today, what i did is i went to the desert and the miner opened in the 70s primarily for europeans which was used for this produces this vibrant color of red, so in some ways it exhibits colors are defining ways that we see the world and they are continuing to do that in our screens they are responsible for how we are seeing the world and also how we are hearing the world because some of these have specific properties that allow microphones and cameras and cell phones and speakers. So again, its something that is pervasive. And maybe you could talk about mining a little bit and that is something thats means that they can turn and especially when when we are digging into the earth. Talking about something a little bit different it is so tempting to say that we live in the Information Age and its not the iron age anymore. But the reason that we are hunting so desperately and using all of this water and dagan is that earth metals have Amazing Properties that we want. I mean, its great you can make bridges out of iron and steel, but if you want to make sense of electronics, you have to dig up a bunch of stuff that are pretty rare earth metals that are in relative nonabundance. The difficulty is separating them in dealing with how some of them are radioactive. Thats right, we probably have more uranium. And if not, its not easy to separate that from the other step. We are in this age. Yes, it is the magic stuff. I think that that is a really good thing. I think that that is a great line. We are in that age now. And i want to thank everyone for coming, there is food and Jonathan Waldman will be happy to sign books were talking outside, so we thank you again and we thank you. [applause] thank you for having me. [applause] booktv is on twitter and facebook are it send us a comment on our twitter or facebook page. Facebook. Com tv. And heres a look at some books are being published is weak. A series of Sexual Assault or is discussed. And then we have stories from our guest in and the good news is. Plus, solutions to create what this man seizes a fair economy. And the journalists investigate the increasing use of black tar heroin in rural america. And the reason behind the drugs growing popularity in dreamland. And this presidency of Franklin Roosevelt in the china menage. And then we have the egyptian journalist arguing for a sexual revolution in the middle east and after that the expounding of japaneseamericans held in internment camps in the book them to me. Watch for these authors in the near future. He thinks you have please double check to make sure it is actually off. With that i am very pleased to introduce the founding dean of the university of California School of law which the six short years as one of the finest law schools in the country. A prolific scholar a