Transcripts For CSPAN 2014 National Book Festival Science Pavilion 20140830

First book we are discussing here is devoted to education and competing visions of how children learn. Amandas book, the smartest kids in the world and how they got that way takes us to north and poland. Rland, she does this through the eyes of three American Kids learning in those school systems. Analysis r a unique of this. L the Washington Post says is is the most iluminating book ive seen, and the New York Times says this managed to make our culture look strangely new. Trust me, the conclusions have insights for kids of all ages as important parents. Amanda is an investigative journal with the times. Hes also the author of the unthinkable who survives when disaster strikes and why. Please join me in welcoming Amanda Ripley. Thank you. Is great to be here on many levels. One reason is this is the city in which i live. The other reason is i grow most of my articles in the library of congress. It was the only place where i could find some focus and peace. I had a new baby at the time of my first book, the unthinkable. I would go to this beautiful staste space scomprk there is part of it where you cant get on the internet, which is a wonderful luxury. It was really a salvation and to have such a beautiful place that a an all access is privilege. I am glad to be here for all those reasons. I am psyched i got put into the cience pavilion. What i want to do is talk about a mystery. I want to talk about something that has implications for a lot of kids around the world. What i really want to do is hear questions and thoughts from all of you. We want to save time at the end and turn this into a conversation at the time. It is, after all, saturday morning. Have you come out here, and you deserve to have more of a conversation than just to be spoken to. The mystery ive mentioned i think is a mystery weve all heard about. It is kind of in the ether. The mystery was this. It appeared that there were a handful of countries that were managing to educate all their kids to high levels of thinking in math, reading, and science. And i would hear various theories about why that was so. Weve all heard these theories. I would buy into one or the other of them for a while. Then i would encounter some exapplicable barrier to that theory being true. Let me give you an example. One of the reasons that i heard for why these other countries were doing so great is that we dont spend enough on education, right . In fact we spend more through pupils on education in the world than all the top four countries in the world. It became clear that we werent spending enough but that we werent spending it the same way , which made sense. The other thing i heard is that we were too big and too diverse to compare to a place like finland. Which is totally fair. I mean, finland . This is a huge country we live in. In some ways i start to think of our country as 50 different countries, particularly when it comes to education, because so much of education is fisscally fiscally controlled when you go to vermont, texas, california. Then i tried looking at the data on a statebystate basis, comparing them to other countries, imagining all our states are countries. When you do that you see not only a huge variation from state to state, but you see that not homogeonousll, most like maine, which is were white, those kids performing about like portugal. They werent seen seeing the high fliers we would have expected. Then i compared massachusetts. We had two states that were not in the top 10 but were in the top 1020 of countries in the world. Then the thing i heard about why we werent doing so well overall was poverty. That made a lot of sense to me. We know that all over the world poverty influences education outcome. We know we have an unacceptably high Child Poverty rate given our wealth as a country. Right around 20 , depending on how you are measuring it. Then i started looking deeper into the data. We are, for better or for worse, awash in data in education. We have more data than we know what to do with. Sort of like health care. If you look at it more deeply, you see that, well, look, there are actually countries that have very low Child Poverty rates. Norway has a 6 Child Poverty rate, which is close to finland, which is as low as it gets all over the world. What you see is that norways 15yearolds are performing at the same level ads american as american 15yearolds which is to say average. You will see math is a recurring weakness for the u. S. Then if you look within our data set for the u. S. , you see something really astonishing, which is that if you look at our most affluent, these are parents that have all kinds of resources again, this data includes private resources, if you look at those kids, you see they are scoring below their affluent peers in 27 other countries in math. They do better in reading, still not at the very top of the world. If you look at our lowest quartile of kids and compare them to under prifflidged kids around the world, they, too, are scoring below 27 other countries in math. So there seem to be some systemic problems that interacted for sure with poverty, that interact with diversity, that interact with our history of institutionized race, but onalized it isnt just one thing. I stopped everything i was doing writingize and decided to spend a year trying to understand what was really going on in these countries. I admit, i did part of this sort of cynically. I didnt believe it actually. I kept hearing about these kids that were brilliant in finland and singapore and north korea. Everyone was involved and the parents were involved, and it didnt pass the smell test to me. It didnt seem like any country was that simple. I wanted to visit these countries, but i knew that to have any remote chance of seeing what was going on, i needed to try to see it through the eyes of students. I learned in my reporting in the u. S. That until you talk to spents students, you really dont know the half of it. Students are experts in their particular classrooms. They sit there all day long thinking about what could be better and what they like and what they dont. They have strong opinions, if you ask them. Luckily there are 10s of thousands of teenagers who every year essentially trade places. They leave the United States and o and attend abroad. I wanted to follow these kids in particular. Because they could to some small degree see the water they swam in. They didnt know everything, none of us do, but they knew their schools and their homes and their neighborhoods back in the states and abroad, and they were essentially amateur an throw policy jifts. Part of the reason kids go abroad is because they are interested in the differences between cultures and places and they actually have strong opinions about what they see, what they like and dont like, what is surprising, what is not surprising. Im happy to geek out on that ore in the q a, if you like, i saw there were situations that the data couldnt answer, that the data couldnt get into. So i knew from the data which places i wanted to visit thrfment are a lot of International Tests these days. There is one thing we dont have, and that is a shortage of tests. There is a test i found to be most useful when thinking about the future of the economy, which test, which apiza test administered to over 30 countries. What i like about this test is that it tries to get not at your ability to regurge at a time information, but your ability to solve a problem youve never seen before that comes right out of real life. Its the kind of thing we all have to do every day, not just in our jobs but if were picking a Health Care Plan or if were trying to figure out a credit card bill. All the things we have to do given that we have an excess of information and a derth of real insight sometimes. We have to make insights, solve problems. All those kinds of higher order skills which is what this test tries explicitly to do. So this test is interesting. This is a test i will be referring to. I looked at other test data as well. Will you also want to look at metrics Like High School graduation and other tests. But this test i found compelling because we dont actually know what jobs will be available in 20 years or 30 years, but we do know those skills, the ability to solve problems, make arguments, will be valuable. I took the piza test to see what it was all about. It seemed the cynic in me didnt seem it was possible to assess Critical Thinking. I still think it is hard. I did find of test to be far smarter than any standardized test ive ever taken for whatever that is worth. I routinely found there was no right answer. I had to write out the answer. And i would get different points depending on how compelling and concise my answer was, which is a lot like my actual work. I was impressed with this test, realizing it is not perfect. If you look at the outcomes on those tests, what you see is something awesome. If there is nothing else you take from international comparisons, this is the one thing are you ready the one thing is that all over the world you see incredible amounts of change. We have not seen that at scale. We are actually the outliar. 40 of them have seen significant improvement in just one subject. Just because we are not one of them does not mean we are not improving. When you see the dramatic gains that some countries have made fairly recently, it should give all of us a surge of hope. Because once you know it is possible for countries like estonia, vietnam, poland, countries that have significant poverty rates to make those kind of gains, not only should that be encouraging and we should learn from what those countries did, there is a certainly kind of moral imperative, once you know it is possible, you must do it. That to me is the reason to look at this International Data. Another thing to look at is that poverty matters, but it matters to different degrees. If you look at a country like the United States, you see that of our childs piza stores can be explained by sociomath socioeconomic mathematics. This is ok at estonia, not finland. This is still a fairly complicated place. Statusnia, socioeconomic explains 9 of students scores. By the way, frans france is worse than the u. S. On this. So for what it is worth, there are countries that do worth. Not only on average, but also in quity, in fairness and socioeconomic status. When you look at the highs fliers, you can see they could be divided into three categories. I made this up for my own brain to think about this. One category is the utopia category on which the best and d country is sweden. Where students do not work night and day. Students do have a lot of autonomy. In fact, very few of them attend after School Tutoring and that sort of thing. There is almost no variation from one school to the next in sweden. Imagine if you could live where ever you wanted without regard for the schools because they were all basically just as good as the next . So thats incredibly cool about finland. Thats the utopia version. If turns out there are multiple ways to get to the top of the mountain in education, just like an actual mountain, you can use switchbacks and take breaks like finland or you can slog to the top of the mountain which would be korea. You can see kids are getting to the same place to impressive levels of Critical Thinking. I know people in korea say they are not creating creative kids, there is wrote moslem zation, rote there is just memorization, and i can see some of that, they are getting there, but it is through a lot of pain and suffering. And they are doing it with a lot of tutoring and hard work. And by that i dont mean the kind of tutoring people are doing in new jersey for the s. A. T. Tests. That is insane, but it is on a different playing field. What they are doing in america is very lucrative, it plays upon peoples greatest hopes and fears. If you think of sports and education and you switch countries will you understand perfectly what is going on in south korea. This is a place where there is a lot of anxiety about getting into test scores, about getting into a great university. Th korea is maybe the same there was questions about going to singapore and isnt he worried and he said, well, at least were not south korea. So this is kind of the extreme case for various reasons. So thats the Pressure Cooker model where kids are not just going they are going to school for a fairly long school day, and then they are going most of them to some kind of private after School Academy which literally mirrors everything they just did in school after school. So all the subjects again. Which i think we can all agree is pretty inefficient and also inequityable way to get to the inequitable way to get to the , which leadsuntain cost the t teachers most money for tutoring, which leads to the situation of million nare millionaire teachers, which is incredible, but you even have these teachers saying this is not the best way, but there seems to be no way to disrupt the anxiety machine. So next i went to finance lapped. Now, i dont know about you, but if i had the chance to go anywhere when i was 15, finland would not have been on the list at even 75 or 80. Kim is this remarkable young woman who had never left the United States. She was born in oklahoma who had never left the United States, he was born in oklahoma to a single mother who had also never left the United States. She was a teacher, as a matter of fact. Kim wanted to see the world. She would complain, as teenagers occasionly do, she would complain about her town, her small town, the only thing there was was a walmart. Finally her half sister who lives in texas called her bluff. She said, why dont you go live in some other country if you think its so great. And she said what do you mean . She said like on one of those Exchange Programs where kids live in another country. And she said thats for rich kids. Thats not for me. But that night the seed was planted and kim began googling is how all great and terrible ideas begin. [laughter] she started googling Exchange Programs that will literally help you live in another country for a year. This captured her imagination, and she started researching other countries, and she found many of them to be very interesting. When she read about finland, she read they have the smartest people in the world, and she said thats where i want to go. She told her mom the next day, i to spend a d a year year in finland. This is her moms last child at ome. Her moms overriding First Response was to say, no way, but she said, how much does it cost. Kim had looked it up and said it cost 10,000. She said well if you can raise the 10,000 yourself and do the paperwork and everything you need by yourself, you can go. So kim spent her freshman year in high school in oklahoma raising 10,000. Nobody, including kim, thought she would succeed for at least half the year. She started with a bake stale. She stayed up all night making rice krispie treats and chocolate chip cookies, and she found out for all its charm, bake sales are not a highly profitable way to raise money. She tried other things. She ordered a case of beef jerky off the internet and sold it doortodoor, which actually turned out to be very lucrative, just as a sidenote. And then she wrote to a letter to all 60 business in the chamber of commerce asking for sponsorship to support this crazy american girls dream. It is very sweet. She created this letterhead. No one responded. Member, this is at the tail end of the recession. But what i love about this story and why i am kind of dwelling in it almost unreasonably, is that she didnt give up. She didnt give up. She created a blog, and she asked strangers for money, and bizarrely some of them gave her money. She applied for scholarships, which she got. But what i like about the story is that it is a story about a particular kind of american girl. An american young person who doesnt quit. Whose entrepreneurial, who has a dream, who is curious. So as much as we are critical of our education system, it is important to hold in our head at the same time all the strengths that we have, which are embodied in kids like kim all over the country. So kim raises 10,000. Because god has a sense of humor, she is placed in rural finland, and actually placed with another single mother, the mother of two 5yearold twin girls. So off she goes to the utopia. Hat will she find . She has all kinds of ideas what finland will be like and wont be like and how the school will be different from her school. Before we get to that, i want to talk to you about the kid that went to korea. Eric. This kid was from minnesota. He had the good fortune to attend one of the highest performing, tricked out, most beautiful suburban high schools in the state. He had an intact familiar. Intact family. He had all sorts of advantages. He did theater, he had a back bacalaureate program. As senior year approached, he was realizing he was kind of burnt out. He just wanted a change, a break from all the academic intensity of minnesota, so this is where he makes his one big mistake. He decides to take an academic break in south korea. Literally, i cannot think of a worse place to take an academic break. He makes his decision we all make decisions that in retrospect look questionable. Went to an Exchange Student there, and the booth looked so fun. The korean kids were super joyful im making sweeping stereotypes the korean kids were so joyful. When he first arrived in south korea, a big booming city on the coast of south korea, he walked in, and the kids started screaming the way the kids screamed for the beetles. Sort of highpitched, oh, my god something is terribly wrong sort of sound, until he realized that was for him. So in some ways he was right. In other ways he was very, very wrong. So he ended up in south korea. So what did they find . I mean, i think there are lots of things, obviously, but some of the things they found i want to tell you about, because we have limited time, i want to talk about some of the things that surprised me, and then we will open it up for questions. Some of the things they found were obvious on the very first day, which i didnt expect, because they were aesthetic. There was a third student, and he went from fen pen from pennsylvania to poland. When all these students went to the schools, they found the schools to be rather lackluster to look at. Anecdotally, when you go around the world to these schools, that is true. Not only are not super impressive inside, but there is not a lot of technology compared to american schools. On average, american secondary schools have a onetoone ratio of computers to students at this point. That is way above average to the developing world. Have onend south korea computer to efrl one to do students. You didnt see a lot of green ush fields for playing sports. A school in poland did not even have a cafeteria. There was sort of a sad vending area that kids used. That was one thing that was away. To the kids right didnt see g they were parents. If you go to Elementary Schools are not parents there selling things, having things signed. We know around the world that the more time that parents spend on Extracurricular Activities in their kids schools, the kind of things that are classically american p. T. A. Type things elling things, bake sales, chaperoning, which are Great Community building types things, the worst those kids do on the piza test, even after controlling for socioeconomic status. As an american parent i was like, what . Ive been lied to all these years. But the more parents talk to their kids about the days, about movies, about the news, and read to them, of course, when they were little, the better kids did on the piza test after age 15 even after controlling for socioeconomic status. This is something the American Kids noticed. They felt they had a lot of autonomy in these countries. I ended up talking to other Exchange Students to see if there were patterns in what they found, and there were patterns. 710 International Students said they felt they had less freedom in the u. S. Than back home, and 710 said they saw more technology in the u. S. Classrooms than back home. I mention this not because i think technology is a bad thing, but because it comes up again and again. When you look at the data and also talk to people and talk to kids and teachers, what you see is not so much that technology is the problem, but that there is a lack of focus in american schools on actual learning. So if you are very focused on learning, if it is a kind of urgent economic imperative, which it became in these countries, then you do things a little differently. There is no evidence that the kinds of investments we have made in technology in learning has led to improvement. I hope that will change. I have great hope for what we are seeing in customized learning and blended learning and that kind of thing, however, there is maybe sometimes a tendency for us to be enchanted by shiny objects in this country. I think that is fair to say. You see this in our country. Thats part of the beauty of it. It is something when Exchange Students come here they needly notice. School is about track and french club and definitely football. And they are amazed about this because in most countries school is just about learning. Which is much less fun. Let me be clear about that. If you think of any big complex organization trying to do something hard, whether it is a hospital or a school, one of the number one things they need is focus. In this country i didnt even know this, but i eventually found out, in this country our High School Principals spend sometimes half their days dealing with meetings about sports, athletic budgets, getting referees, getting people to line the fields, meeting with parents that are upset because heir kids have been benched, meeting with a football coach. If you talk to american High School Principals, this is what you hear. This is how their days look. This doesnt happen in these countries. You just took half their plate off and they can just focus on learning. Probably the moost important things that the kids noitis, and in some ways that is more profound, and took them longer once they got the hang of the language and some other things, they noticed school in these countries was harder. It is certainly harder in korea, even for eric who has gone to a highperforming school. Sometimes harder bad and not harder good. One of the things eric noticed is that kids were going to school night and day. They had no time to socialize and explore the city with him because they were going to after School Tutoring academies. This was depressing to eric. He could see how much strain they were under. If you talk to the korean kids i met, they had a joyful culture and as soon as you started talking about school, all that drained from their faces. They talked about how terrible the situation was, that they re actually pitted against each other. I didnt realize i was going to actually have an alarm. Is is a new timer i have anyway, i heard it, so did you. Anyway, he loved his korean math class. This was something that struck him. For the first time he was learning trig nba. Com tri, geometry, and calculus all in e same class learning triganometry, jomtri, and calculus all in the same class. And these were kids two years younger than he was. And they were all connected. One of the things he notice is that the kids had less homework in finland he said they actually had less homework but more was required of them from the homework. A student went to finland, and she said, not much was asked of American Kids. She felt like she was doing a lot of posters, the kind of things she had done in Elementary School in finland, a lot of cutting and pasting, and it was a little frustrating, but luckily she had track and yearbook and things that she really did enjoy. But she tells the example of one journalism class she took where she loved the teacher, and everyone seemed to be learning from this teacher and respect her, and the end of semester project in this class was to write 10 articles, which made nse, and when that day game, the Exchange Student from finland was the only one that did all 10 of them. The teacher was amazed at this. She was disappointed. And life went on. So somewhere along the way, different messages had been presented to elana and her peers about what she not only should o but what she could do. 910 students said their classes in america were easier. If you get a group of Exchange Students in the u. S. They will disagree on many things. One thing they will almost certainly agree on is that school in the u. S. Is super easy. This is a complicated subject. But it is so pervasive not only in what tell not only in what kids tell us. Half of American High School kids tell us they are challenged in their classes. But in the data itself, where we know that even our most privileged kids are not doing math at the level of privileged kids in other countries, so we are system nationalcally unled estimating what our kids can do sometimes out of the goodness of our hearts, which is to me the most poignant part. Then i want to open it up to questions. But i just want to say that in this country, we have gotten along pretty well by letting kids graduate from college with a sort of nominal amount of contribution, and then once they are 18, we let them find out what the world has in store for them. That no longer works. Because they are finding out too late that the world has changed, and they need skills. They need to be able to think. They need a mental agility that they didnt need before because all of them will not only have to audition for their jobs in ways that are much harder to fake, but they will have to reaudition over and over and over and over and they will have to adapt and change very quickly as many of us in the room have had to do as well. So there are lots of things they notice. There is a lot here. I think the overriding principle is that school was harder in ways that made them have to think scomprks that this is possible and that this is possible, which is best represented from the country i didnt get to which is poland. Which has a has a lower poverty rate but there are a greater level of High School Students scoring well in math than there are 15yearolds in finland, which is ramble remarkable. Because poland who has been to poland . Poland, too, is a complicated place. Thank you all for being so patient. It has been great to be here. Now lets open it up to questions. If you have any questions, thank you. [applause] yes . Two quick questions. How to you spell piza . I would like to follow up on that. And secondly, did you find a gender difference in American Students . I can only relate to my two ninth graders, both girls, never had a b in their life in a zult difficult school, one explaining the entanglement theory of physics to me in the eighth grade. First of all, ill take the easy question, pisa is spelled pisa. There is a difference between here and a developing country. In a developing world you see a consistent pattern. Girls are pulling ahead of boys, particularly in reading. There are still in some places gender gaps in math and science. A in finland, finland has orry some gap worrisome gap between boys and girls. Luckily the average finnis shfment boy is still doing finnish boy is still doing much better than the average american boy, but that gap is growing on the pisa tests between boys and girls, and that is a concern. Thank you for your book. It is insightful and changing. Suppose on your walk, the phone rings and its barack obama it always happens. [laughter] yes. He says, amanda, give me your three suggestions for american schools. What do you think we should do . Would that he could do any of them, but i will tell you. One thing i think we have underinvested our energy in is the selection and training of eachers. We have some fantastic teachers in this country and the profession is not treated like a real profession. The more time i spend in classrooms, the more i start to understand that teaching is difficult. It is not hard like working at a soup kitchen is hard. It is hard like being a surgeon is hard, like being a judge is hard. It requires in the moment complicated dynamic changing and thinking that is it extremely difficult to master. We have 1,4 london hundred we Education Training schools. We dont confer many of those on the students until they are in the classroom we are not supporting it or treating it like a master profession. That is something other countries have been through. We are not the only ones. I talk in the book how finland shut down their major education colleges and reopened them. Today getting into education in finland is like getting into m. I. T. In the United States. Which is important because you have highly educated feachers in finland, but not everything. Plus it sends a message to everybody else in the country. You are not just seag education is important, are you showing it. So if he could do just that, that would make me happy. Focusing on education colleges at the beginning of a challenging career that needs hands on student teaching. That would be a much more elegant reform than a lot of the things we have tried to do. Thank you. Thank you. My favorite question is, how did we put a man on the moon without standardized tests . I would answer we did it with verything we eliminated, the music which transforms into Higher Learning skills. Before standardized tests took over and hundreds of millions of dollars were diverted to companies that created the tests which had nothing to do with education, they documented the gifted and ifented crim curriculum, and every classroom could have become a gifted and talented curriculum that we would have what we really should be looking for. We are almost out of time. Let me just answer that. Thats a really good question, so i dont want to run out of time to answer the question. You know, if you look at the International Data to the degree there is data, what you see is that there was never a time when American Kids were on top of the world when it comes to these higher order skills, even when we have the extreme level of standardized testing that we have now. It is true we do a lot of testing, and that most of those tests are not very smart. What you see running through his consideration conversation is quantity over quality. The only thing barack obama can do is keep demanding results, but he cant do much to help teachers and kits kids get there. The feds keep pushing the testing lever, and look where it has gotten us. If there is something positive to say, the 40some states that have adopted the common core standard are doing something that all of the super powers in education have done. It is hard to inject rigor into a system. One way to do it is to set clear, rigorous, and coherent targets for what kids should know in every grade level than what you had before. That kind of coherence and consistency is really lacking from the u. S. System, partly because of federalism. So you are seeing huge fights over those standards, right . Some of those fights neet to happen and some of them do not, and would not happen in another country. Those documents are living documents. In finland, korea, plndpow i dont understand, have these standards. Finland has it not just for math and reading, but for home ec and history. Knees are the things that i think are way within our grasp. If we can continue down the path, keep tweaking the standards, thats fine. The having clear, rigorous, consistent standards is probably the smartest reform weve made in 20 years. Thank you so much for having me here. It is great to have this audience here. [applause] author Amanda Ripley the first of five thaurs here at the National Book festival. Were live from the Washington Convention center. Here on cspan again, events all day in the science pavilion. Events in the history and bog if pavilion today. Sally e book by patil, brainwashed. Coming up later, the search for darkness in an age of artificial light. You will also hear from eric klein on his collapse of the bronze age civilization, and later on, the book, the teacher of the mind. All that and more today as our coverage from the national abook festival continues today on cspan. Geven, were live at the 2014 National Book festival at the washington, d. C. Convention center. Coming up in five minutes or so n cspan, sally patil in her brook brainwashed. Some other things to tell you about this weekend. On tomorrows newsmakers we talk about the federal deficit, the health care law, and the u. S. Job market, among other topics. That interview tomorrow at 10 00. M. And 6 00 p. M. Eastern here on cspan. Well show you part of a discussion now while we wait for the book festival to resume. Host thank you both for being here. How is the American Worker doing . Weve been hearing news about improvement in the job market, improvement in the number of businesses that are hiring, positions that are being created. Are workers actually feeling that . Guest well, i dont think they are feeling this as much always the numbers lead us to believe. I think the Unemployment Rate which has been dropping, which in theory, should be a positive sign, is not a good indicator of the health of the labor market, unfortunately. I think people feel this. In one sense, one of the reasons why it has been dropping, is that people have left the labor force. It st kind of decided seems it is likely there is a lot of under hch employment. Yes, people are going back, but they are going back to parttime jobs that are paying less. So it is not great. Guest i think American Workers and working families arent doing so well now. They havent done so well for 30 years or 40 years. We are coming out of the deepest recession since the 1930s. Things are getting better. When i look at the labor market data, what it tells me is that we still need a lot more jobs, and we really need a lot better quality jobs. We just released a report that shows that wages for the bottom 95 of the work force actually fell behind inflation over the last year. This has been the case, stagnant wages, for just about everybody for 10 years even before we went into the great recession. So i believe the key to the economic challenge we have is how to get wages growing for everybody and build Economic Growth based on that. Host why havent wages been growing over the past 10 years . Whats holding back workers making more money . Guest i can tell you its not that the employers dont have it. There has been increased corporate productivity. What we have is a situation where people dont have the leverage. They dont have the leverage because they cant readily go get another job, they cant go get a better job. The unions are too weak in our economy to be able to push for higher wages. So employers have all the leverage. Our policies that have been put in place are really giving them all the leverage, and we have to change that if were going to make things different. Host veron oh, ique . Guest i think wages have been falling, but a lot of these wages have been reporting outside of fringe benefits, which have represented for a bigger and bigger share of compensation. That said, it is true that as reported, wages are going down. It is true that the key to higher wages is Economic Growth. The way to promote Economic Growth is not to have more firms bidding on more workers. The way you want to do it is not to make lowscale workers more expensive. A lot of the policies pushed by the government in particular have tended to make or signal that there is a move toward making workers more expensive, nd that is not an exciting prospect for employers. Its not the best way to get them started to hiring. Host so in other words you are saying some of these pushes to increase minimum wage could result in a slowdown in hiring . It could create mandates. Whether you agree with what they are trying to achieve, Health Mandates have had the have made hiring people more expensive. Guest having growth and better growth is good, but that is not the solution for workers necessarily, as all of our evidence would suggest. We have had lots of growth, we have had productivity growth, but peoples pay has been going down, even among college graduates, even among people we consider highly educated. The wage data, too, really tells us something. I disagree with this something about the wages being composed too high among lowwage workers. Last year the only group that actually held their ground were the workers at the very bottom. The only reason for that is that in states covering around 40 of the job, the minimum wage went up in the first half of 2014. Everybody else saw their wages fall. Did that hurt jobs . We know that jobs are disproportionately being created at the bottom. They are not being stopped by somehow being proposed by the minimum wage. So what we really have is a situation where we have an economy where we get Economic Growth, but it doesnt get from what the employers have to the workers. Thats the problem we want to solve. Host we want to hear your thoughts as well. Where do you think the job market is headed . What does it feel like for you . Give us a ring on our republican 801, on the 3 democratic line, 3880, and the independent line, 3882. You can find us on facebook at facebook. Com or send us an email at cspan. Org. We will take some calls now. Our first is peter. He is on the line calling from valley college, new york. Peter . Before we begin, please note we are recording this program for later web casting. If you ask a question, you are giving us permission to include you in the web cast. Also, please turn off all electronic devices. It is my pleasure to introduce sally satil. She is a scholar at the American Enterprise institute. From 1988 to 1983 she was a professor at Yale University where she remains a lecturer. She is the author of many cholarly books including p. C. M. D. How Political Correctness is corrupting medicine. She and coauthor scott ollilian many feld show how the real applications of the neurofield are often obscuring the factors in sigh coling that create many of our behaviors. Til and lillanfeld tell us what brain scans can and cannot tell us about ourselves and they stressfree will and personal responsibility. Brainwashed was a 21st century prize in science. Please welcome sally satil. [applause] it is great to see everyone. Thank you. Apologies about the slide projector. It is very small, but most of my slides arent very busy. N fact, so my first slide is a copy of the cover of the book. To be honest, right after we decided on that, i really but it is a better tight ling. Explicitly meant to evoke the concept of seduction. In this case, the seduction into certain beliefs about behavior that technologies like brain scanning can lead us to, and the academy of seduction i would say a brainw science is scan, which is now the Signature Technology of modern narrow science. In fact, someone said the brain scan has now replaced the atom as the symbol of science. Is a brain scan, and it its really quite a wondrous thing. It aeason why i consider perfect storm of seduction is really that so many forces converge on it. Absolutelys an dazzling technology. We will not go into too much of that. It is very, decatur. I have a whole chapter of it in the book. It hasst technologies, objectivity and a more scientific gauge. It is about the brain. Science of course is about the brain, which is a masterwork of nature. About 80 billion cells or not runs, each communicating with thousands of others, which is more connections than the milky way. Self, andorgan of the people tend to think understandably that i can reveal all kinds of secrets about human nature. It is visual, and we are highly visual primates, which is not some that you can say, for example, about genes. Anyone can see a brain scandals of it is much harder to see nuclear accid nucleic acid. It is a most an element of surprise about a brand scandals or people tend to think, especially people who are not steeped in science, not particularly sophisticated in that realm, and why should they be . The average person reading the gosh,ce times, oh, my look, it is in the brain. It is a very key phrase. Well, of course it is in the brain. All thoughts and emotions are in the brain. Where else with the biological correlates of behavior, emotion, and thinking be . Not in the pancreas. They are in the brain. You see headlines, of course you have seen them, political bias affects brain activity a company by a brain scan. Massive piety is in the brain. Of course it is in the brain. These kinds ofs, headlines really annoy me. Proof that depression israel because we have a ran scan to show that or anorexia or ptsd that now we know the suffering is real. We know it before. We did not need a brand scan to tell us that. We need a brand scan to tell us some things. Right now it is mainly in the realm of research. There are not that many clinical applications, but in the realm of research and very good research, but like so much of research, when it filters through the press and into the popular media, things get distorted. The praise in the brain is seductive in another way because it carries a whip, the dont blame me, dont blame my name, up, and youx lights hear that phrase, which all that means is there is increased activity in a particular area of the brain. There is always actively in the brain. If there is not, you are dead. Then y if x lights up, behavior inevitably happens. That is not the case, either. I will be talking a lot about that. It you can see why that sort of conceits, the x lighting up and y then and avidly following, it would be so appealing to trial lawyers. And there is a whole new field law, which isuro looking at the applications of rain science for understanding the criminal mind. It is a really nice story that Defense Attorneys can tell. You see, your honor, my client has this in his brain. He could not control himself. He could not form the intense needed to commit a crime. This is a misreading of neural imaging. Without question, people do have problems with their brains that render them legally insane so that they are ulpable. Happends of damage can to one cognitive apparatus, rendering people either not culpable at all or less culpable, i say, so that they are not excuse, but sentence is mitigated. That happens clearly, but the point is at this point in time, and things might change as technology evolves, but at this point in time, we cannot distinguish who those people are through rain scans. Ancan not dissing which impulse that is irresistible from one that was not resisted. This is a key point i want to return to as well. Finally, another misconception of brainr readings scans is the notion that you can actually pinpoint emotions or emotions orubtle complex feelings. This is simply not true. Kind of activity , accusedo the phrase oversimplification of the reading of brain images as akin to neil for knowledge he neophrenology, as if particular areas of it are involved solely with different kinds of free action clearly certain parts of the brain are involved more heavily in mediating certain kinds of reactions. We know about the amygdala, for example, that is famously invoked when we talk about fear reactions, but that particular part of the brain figures very prominently in processing perceptions of novelty or surprise, so there is not a one correspondence. In fact, circuitry is where it is, and all narrow scientists know this, and a lot of the problem here is how popular merrow scientists have co through the media. There are some wonderful science journalists who know the background and they are very careful, and others a little less so. And then there is a whole crop of people called neur entrepreneurs who are frankly trying to make a buck off of selling things that have to do with the education and narrow science and a lot of fats that one has to be very careful about, so really circuitry is where it is, and that is where neuroscientists are focusing most of their energy. How the various regions interact with each other. It is enormously complicated. Ari is still basically research tool. A are probably one foot into 10 mile long journey on understanding the brain. None the less, these brain images have migrated into the public sphere where the implied promise of decoding the brain, one can see why politicians are so interested. In fact, there are some public that offer nops imaging in an attempt to advise their clients about how to make more appealing. This is an all bad from the New York Times from 2007 where candidates were shown to swing voters, and the reaction of brains were supposedly indicative of what the candidate would have to do to appeal to them more. Neuro science at its most popular and him down. Keters are very interested this is a book, very clever title, by a famous neuro marketer, trying to tap into the brain. Through brain scans or eegs or other types of technologies that data, toal brainbased tap into the brain to find out what consumers want, which is like cutting out the middleman, which is you, and going straight to your brain. Certainly we would love to find isood lie detector, and this where there is a whole chapter on this as well. Signatures that can distinguish between truth telling and lying, but it would be almost impossible at this time to apply it in the real world. In the Laboratory Setting with lots of controls, it has some. Airly good validity but then there is the question ofhow we gauge the pull cracktion from oreos to cocaine. And then there is the defensed attorney trying to claim that their client lacks malign intent or even free will. I offer a book to anyone who knows who these two guys are. Leopold and i think i heard that. I may you a book. We devote a chapter to neuro marketing and the lie detection law, and we try to tease apart the hype from what are the technical obstacles in achieving the ultimate goal of being able to in for something about the mind from the brain and what are barriers to doing that, and what is just flat out pseudoneuro science. With that on the background, i want to focus on the part i do not know if i speak to my bututhor, scott lilienfeld, to me, this is one of the most interesting things, which is the culturally significant implications of our glowing growing ability to explain behavior in our logical terms. In other words, the better weekend describing Human Behavior through biology, and we are only going to get better at it, how was i going to affect the way we think about human freedom . The freedom to choose our actions. And i will explore this through addiction. Addictionsam an psychologist. That is my area of specialty, so i can say with complete honesty that for, gosh, at least 20 years, i have been very, very interested in the way addiction is conceptualized and portrayed to the public. , this is the way it is talked about now in the media, educational campaigns can i get the water that is over there . Brain literally on cocaine. It is a new frying pan ad. Thanks. Sorry about that. And actually this represent a very legitimate and very interesting sermon. Not interesting in terms of its results you would expect the results but the fact that we can visualize the result is pretty darn amazing. Basically this study has two general paradigms. One, you take someone who has a cocaine problem, and you expose them in a brain scanner this happened to be a pet scan, but it is the same general notion. This one uses metabolic activity. An fmri or brain scan uses blood flow. Increasedreflect enhanced activity in the brain. Has a take someone who cocaine problem, you put them in a scanning apparatus, you show them films. E are little mirrors in these machines and a person looks up and they can see a film of people using cocaine, of cocaine paraphernalia, and they experience a subjective desire to use cocaine, and their brain the reflect what we call reward area, a special activation, and that is effectively their desire to use cocaine. When you show that same person a picture of a beach or a meadow or something neutral, you do not elicit the same kind of metabolic activity. Dopamines case activity. In this case, one is a cocaine user, one is not, but you show them both the films of people using, and you get this reaction in the person who has a cocaine history but none in the person who has never used cocaine, as you might expect for stop any replicated aeen lot. It is great. But the way it is described is that this is the brain being hijacked by cocaine, specifically referring to the hijacking of the limbic system, which is a complex, and fairly brain circuitry. It contains regions you may have heard of. The amygdala, the hippocampus, and others. And it mediates reward and memory and emotion, but the hijacks thethat it brain, that cocaine hijacks this limbic system, and of course the less ofion, sometimes an implication and sometimes stated out right, is that when someones brain looks like this effectively, they are out of control. They can no longer have any control over their actions and their drug use is involuntary. Changestence of these led many experts to call edition a brain disease. A brain disease because there are brain changes in the context of addiction. That is true. There are brain changes in the context of addiction, but still the label brain disease deserves a lot of scrutiny. First, changes in the brain are not a signifier of pathology. Learning italian changes the brain, as you know. There is much plasticity that is involved with learning. Changes the brain, but addiction is not like learning italian. Do notnguage lessons take on the quality of compulsion like a crack habit, nor is it like alzheimers with its own inexorable progression to dementia that is completely beyond the control of the sufferer. The brain changes of alzheimers disease renders the person completely resistant to any rewards or sanctions. If you set your grandmother, grandma, i will give you 1 million if your memory does not deteriorate. Grandma, i will shoot you if your memory deteriorates. It wont matter. But the brain changes of addiction, thank goodness, do not impair the capacity to be deterred. Now, i realized that my sound, especially for people who know addicts, that might sound a little strange or it might sound not strange at all because people who live with people who use drugs can see this, the decisions they are making every day, that make them more or less vulnerable, but in any case, just going into the lab, we know that rewards and sanctions can and do modify the behavior, which is in some essence volunteerness. Too sound a little theoretical, so let me give you a great example. Vietnam vets. And hi in june of 90 71, president and became panic that there would be a flood of veterans from Southeast Asia coming back to the innercity and further inflame the heroin epidemics in big cities that were already underway, and he was afraid of s because it was true that at least half of all g. I. s had tried opium and heroin in vietnam where it was very abundant, and about 15 to 20 may have actually been addicted, so he was very concerned. So they instituted a program called operation golden flow where everyone had to pee in a if itif it was not was positive, you were not leaving vietnam. To make a long story short, almost everyone passed the test, everyone who was using and passed thatheroin test. The few who did not work given an extra week to clean up, and then they came back to the United States. Then a researcher at the endorse reedf washington named robbins followed these people for three years and was expecting to see high rates of reelection once they were back on. But they would resume their habits. Used in the three years that they had come back. And that was very, very surprising, but also very encouraging, and frankly it really lies at the heart of recovery and reasonable Public Policy for addiction, which is the intelligent use of sanctions and reward, which we can make very good use of in the criminal Justice System. I will not get into legalization or anything like that, taking the system as we find it to the extent that we can divert people from incarceration because of nonviolent drug crime and put them in drug courts. We have been doing this for years, and these courts are based on the principles of behavior, which is that swift, certain, but not severe sanctions can really shape behavior, and drug court has been going on for quite a while and quite successful. That is just one example. There are many others in the book, but the point is that if you just focused at the level of the brain, if you just talked about the nucleus and the hippocampus i apologize you could not think about shaping behavior. When you are told something is a brain disease, you think it is involuntary. Drug addicts, how do i work with my patients so they do not crave . Well, we come up with strategies that are self binding, ways to put barriers between themselves and drugs. Stay away from people, places, and things. Oh, thanks so much. Deposit your paycheck, do not have money available. I had a patient who used to shoot up, and every time he looked at his arms, where of course he had tracks, it would stimulate a sense of craving, so he had to wear long sleeve shirts all the time or he would aroused. Elf too avoid boredom. This is the kind of thing people have to do. The point is, this involves motivation, this involves conscious engagement. Again, if we focus too much at the level of the brain, we are not going to Pay Attention to these things. That is what i am describing, the kind of yo phenomenon, create barriers, to recognize liketions of vulnerability hearing the siren song of cocaine by restraining yourself in some way. Ok. Addiction is a good example of narrowtt and i call centrism. Neuro it is the idea that Human Behavior can be explained solely by looking at the brain, that somehow that level of analysis gives you the most authentic, true, reliable understanding of a behavior. It is probably true if you have also immersed disease. Ptsd, no, no, depression, no. Che problem with a neurocentri m view is he will rely on it too much. To think that methadone is the itself, isnd of not true false up you will downplay the importance of psychology, behavior, and we the mightord to lose in the age of Brain Science. When i refer to mind, i am talking broadly about feelings, thoughts, desires, tensions, memories, subjectivity. I do not want you to think for a minute we are falling into and he kind of dueling trap, this is descartes. All subjective experience is mediated through the brain. No brain no consciousness. But it is very important to realize that the physical rules from one level of analysis ioing to skip apologize. You probably cannot see that very well. Basically after scraping all of the levels of analysis down starting from the environment itding up at genes could end up at quantum physics, but we cannot yet use the physical rule from the Cellular Level to predict activity at the psychological level. If you want to understand if you are reading a book and you want to understand what the text means, for example, you do not chemicalhe ink to a analysis. That is not the level that is going to inform you about the meeting of the book. These are just Different Levels of analysis, and the important thing is that some questions are answered better at one or more of these levels. Others are answered at others. They are not right or wrong. Does addiction affects the brain . Of course it does. But if we stay at that level, we are going to miss a lot. So it is not just addiction, but biological explanations of complex behavior can mislead in the courtroom as well, and trial rs love that and theyre counting on jurors to get seduced as well. As i mentioned before, again, there are certain cases where the brain cannot be effected and cannot be held legally accountable, it is just not that brain scans is it is just cannot be scans counted on alone. Biological explanations in general influence the way we think about responsibility over action. There have been many interesting explaining behavior in biological terms compared to psychological terms. For example, my brain made me do it. That is a big flip. Or just describing some sort of a geneticrelate or explanation, and people are much more likely to attribute less blame to the person if they have committed a crime and this is a nation given for the behavior. Is a lotled for punish less severe when people understand it as behavior that was caused by a brain problem as opposed to a childhood problem. This can also backfire when biologicalct a explanation for mentally less and substance abuse, the desire for social distance as a sigma enhances, and they have less will work,therapy and they believe that individuals are more dangerous. So this is important to know. It is important to know that the applications of how we describe behavior i am not telling you how you should describe behavior. You do not want to manipulate so as to elicit specific kinds of reactions. If the problem is in the brain, for example, you have to be truthful and talk about that, but it is interesting how these explanations do affect fundamental intuition of human agency. And my point is simply that they can be manipulated. Lets go deeper. I have 15 more minutes will stop i want to leave a little time for discussion, but i want to go a little deeper. Use brain scans and k in capital cases. They are making the point that their client could not form an intent, or their client could not reason properly. Their client had some sort of poor control. But the implication is that the default circumstance is that while most people can control himself, most people do know what they are doing, most people can be deterred, but not my client. Neuroscientists and taking sophers are going a step further, and they are arguing that no one has the capacity for choice. For that none of us could act other than we did, and that all criminals, are not in control of our actions at any point. Wow. Of, you will recognize this course as the fiendish ancient debate about free will, which we are not going to resolve here. [laughter] just so you know. Many neuroscientists claim we do not have free will, and and this is not new. This debate has been going on for centuries. But they do argue that neuroscience will make this clear. That basically neuroscience will finally resolve the free will debate. Debate that neuroscience will finally clear up the free will debate. This brings us to another very interesting aspect here, the implications of Brain Science generalist, more not just whether an individual could or could not control himself or should be responsible but whether the concept of responsibility at all is a coherent one. Now, in 1924 i think Everybody Knows the story, in hyde park, chicago, these two brilliant kids wanted to commit the perfect crime, so they found a 14yearold boy and killed him and drove him to indiana, put his body in the drainpipe, when tom, played cards, called the families, the family of the child and said they needed the ransom, and were very pleased with themselves and thought that they had gotten away with it. Well, they did not. Three days later apparently one of them dropped their glasses, and they traced it to leopold and lobe. And their parents hired the famous attorney clarence darrow, who the next year went on to inherit the wind, so it was a monthlong trial. 90 years ago, and at the end of it, there was a 12 hour summation by clarence darrow. He basically was arguing for life in prison as opposed to hanging. He did succeed, although the judge said it had to do with their youth, not his argument, and his argument was right out of what you might call the determinists playbook. In other words, well, i will tell you what he said why did they kill little bobby franks . Not for money come enough or spite, not for hate. They killed him because they were made that way. They were natures of victims. I am sure yound remember this from philosophy 10 the notion of determinism, which is that each act we do for we do perform, criminal or otherwise, follows from a cause, and given the same conditions, the same result will. Low every time again, we are talking about all the causes that go into a person. Your experiential history, your environment, your genetic history, and the context you are in at the moment. The idea is that all of these impinge on an individual so that at the moment of having to make a decision, there is basically makeu are kind of fated to one choice. There is no real choice, whether you are going to choose soup oversell it or murder over mercy, there is really no choice to be made because up until that moment you could not have chosen otherwise based on this whole causal parade. Again, i am assuming that sounds familiar. Remember in this feud there is no praise, there is no blame because you could not have done otherwise for stuff you just acted based on all the forces in hinging on you. Certainly that is not an intuitive view of how we act. On the other hand, it is true that much of our behavior is caused, and much of it is caused even in unconscious ways. That is true. But how is neuroscience, the bottom quotation where it says was victims of their own circumstances or cope the top. The top one is clarence darrow. The bottom one is a neuroscientist. What happens . This goes away. There is no blame. It means we have to change our criminal Justice System radically, turn it into one that , where weutilitarian might put people in jail, but it is to deter them from acting again and deter others who would observe how we punished them, to contain dangerous people and to rehabilitate them, but no punishment. Now, as i said, these debates have been going on for a long now with they addition of neuroscience, they lead up to this question. Maybe you cant read it. It says is there a way to preserve moral responsibility in a world when all events leading up to a moment of choice determine what that choice will be . The better we get at understanding the neuro pathways, you will actually understand that process will stop this happens to me when i think about it. It is a tough one, and it ends in tears. And i am not resolving it. The point is that neuroscience is not resolving it either, and the way for less first have largely dealt with it is to just think about the kinds of freedom that are necessary to make a choice. It is the kind of freedom you think is necessary is the kind ncaused,completely u where people operate in a vacuum. All of your behaviors are caused. There are reasons for such sum you are aware of, some you are not so aware of. In less we live in a causal called there is nothing ultimate free will. Those are called hard determinants, and they do go to the utilitarian view of the criminal Justice System. Then you have people, i am or so but that it to this, the the compatible list view, that that is enough freedom for people to be considered to have free will. If there is summing wrong with your brain so that you can not reason or deliver a or respond respond tots or reason, then maybe you as an individual do have your freedom compromised and maybe you should as a species, we do have free will. I do not know how you come down on that, but not science is not going to help you resolve it. I should end ther. E. I see that i only have five more minutes. Of course i do have more to say. The book is basically a culture book. I consider it more of a coulter book than a science book. Inevitable perhaps as biological manifestations that extra nations and mechanisms are understood, they are going to have enormous therapeutic benefits. We do not even talk about benefits. I know there will be talk later in this book about narrow science. Neuroscience. It is the final scientific frontier, and that is very true, but we should not get too seduced into thinking to mechanically about ourselves and to productively about human nature similar because we are learning more and more about how we function. Thank you so much. [applause] i guess there might be time for two questions. Does anyone . A ere from your experience i do not think your thing was on, but the question was does aa work . Aa short answer is works for whom it works. I do not mean to be flip, but for some people it saves lives. Most of treatments do not have the greatest rates. Aa does not, either. So at an individual level, yes, it can be lifesaving, but the average person wont stop drinking right away. Thathe kinds of treatments work the best or once we dont used, we do not use these contingencies, these rewards and sanctions very much, which is a shame unless you are a doctor or a pilot, and then if you lose your license, we have all kinds of built in contingencies for you, like you have something to lose and you will lose it unless you shape up, and the rates of recovery of professionals are 95 because a there is so much these are people with skills as well. You are dealing with a different population, but they do much better, professionals do much better in terms of recovery when there are contingencies attached to them as well. Yes . Hi, could you talk a little bit please about food addiction because you said that you are from yale, and you are kind of playing a little bit off the aa hasl, but being that yale the food addiction scale, and that is a marriage of a survey of behavior with neuroscience. That is poised to really impact legislation and the prepared food industry. Yes, that picture actually comes from an article that i wrote about last year. There was a Research Study that got an enormous amount of attention really bad work. Rats are fine, but there is only so much you can extra play to humans. Anyway, that cocaine was that oreos were as addictive as cocaine. Theyidea was that concluded this because you see some of the same nominal signatures and this is true in humans as well the reward pathway that i mentioned is solicited by food and sex and anything pleasurable, and cocaine. And to say that food addiction is like cocaine, what it shows us is that people have a desire for it. There is anticipation, and then there is a desire. In fact, it may register anticipation more than it does actual desire. The same principles apply as they do to addiction in the sense that or to any behavior that is habitual to the extent that we can learn the cues that make us more or less a vulnerable, and with motivation and other kinds of techniques, we can overcome them. I am certainly not arguing that some of the same neural mechanisms are engaged, but what i would argue against is that the person has been rendered helpless, and i do think that you are exactly right, that with a lot of Product Liability food, and that this is potentially a trial lawyers dream to make it as analogous to addiction as possible. I think that would be a real abuse of neuroscience. I guess one more . I am just a little confused up i am addicted to ice cream. [laughter] brain,it is not in my where is that addiction located, or am i just a little fat piggy . Inoh, no, of course it is the brain. That is exactly where it is. That is where everything is. It is a most trivially true to say there are things in the brain, and there are things in the brain we have not found. Crime in 2001the of andrea yates, this poor one at what postpartum psychosis and drowned her kids there was no brain scan in her trial. Even if they attempted to bring one and now, it probably would not reveal much. We cannot even make the most significant psychiatric diagnosis like postpartum bipolar we cannot make those diagnoses with great certainty on brain scans. We will come i am sure we will one day or other information,. Bviously genetics Genetic Information is also difficult. There are 100 genes involved in schizophrenia. It is very complicated. We will get there, i think, but we are not there yet. Is a limited technology, and responsible nonscientists know that and they really cringe when they see it being applied so sloppily in the public realm. They cringe, but we wrote the book. [laughter] i guess we should end, right . Ok, one more. Do you believe that there is a pregenetic disposition that people are born with, like, to have additions. For example, if you were an alcoholic and recovering from that, then you automatically be addicted to some thing else . Question there are genetic predispositions to these things. Genetic predispositions can be a thing from how pleasurable i mean, how pleasurable we find a certain, like say alcohol, varies a lot. Some people find it disgusting, some people cannot metabolize certain asian populations cannot metabolize alcohol very well. There is not point to be a lot of alcoholism there because basically cannot, but these are problemistic. If your parents are alcoholics, some people say dont even try it, why even put yourself in that position, but is not like huntingtons,s got for bed, it is not that kind of simple genetic transmission at all. We are talking probability, and in this case you can dress it in the most simple way, which is to not even go near it at all, or paste your self. There are all kinds of strategies a person can use so that if they feel things are getting out of control, they can pull back, and i must tell you that most people pull back. Clinicians tend to see people who have trouble. In fact, there are some in called the clinicians allusion, which is a problem, and im sure i have engaged in it as well, where we extrapolate to vigorously from the people we see in the clinic to the people out in the general universe. We saw this after 9 11. Assumption that new york city would be traumatized. The amount of money that went into Mental Health services was astounding and all wellmeaning, clearly. If youturned out, looks, were in the tower of course you could have had a severe psychiatric reaction. If you knew someone who died, you were vulnerable, but the vast majority of people were upset as hell, but not pathological at all. People are resilient, but those are not the people psychiatrists see. We see the people who have trouble coping, so we see a who do for example, not recover on their own. So many do, but that is not who we see and not who we research. That is not to say dont come in for treatment if you are having trouble for stop you come in right away. Dont wait for it to play out because you can get aids, all kinds of things can happen, but the Natural History is for people to recover on their own. On that optimistic note, i will stop. Thank you. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] we are live at the 2014 National Book festival here on cspan. You just heard from sally satel talk about her book brainwashed the seductive appeal of mindless neuroscience. To will have a chance talk to sally satel shortly after 1 00 eastern this afternoon as book tv takes your calls on our companion network, cspan2. , wey on cspan and cspan2 are at the 14th annual National Book festival, live from the Washington Convention center, hosted by the library of congress will stop indoors this year as opposed to on the national mall. Here on cspan, we are covering events in if he science pavilion all day. Over on cspan2s book tv and cspan radio, it is authors in the history and biography pavilion, plus a number of author interviews and your phone calls. You can find the complete schedule of our Coverage Today at cspan. Org or booktv. Org. Next in a few minutes here on season, paul bogard talks about his book the end of night searching for natural darkness in an age of artificial light. Later at 12 45 eastern, we will lynn sherr, who wrote about americas first woman in space, sally ride. On hiseric cline book about the collapse of the bronze age civilization. That and more today as our live coverage of the 2014 National Book festival continues here on cspan. I am a contributing editor of the Washington Post, and along with the library of congress, proudost has been a sponsor of the books festival since its inception in 2001, and we are happy to be maintaining this relationship and tradition under our new leadership. I have another sort of boilerplate thing to read here. On behalf of the library of the 2014 welcome to National Book festival. Hopee hope you were we you are having an enjoyable time reading. The pavilions presentations are being filled for the library of website and for their archives. Please be mindful of this as you enjoy the presentation, so if you have a criminal record and you are on the lam, you had better get out. [laughter] not sition, please do in the camera risers. They are located in the back of the pavilion. Thank you. Memories isst vivid on an august night in the late 1970s when some friends and i were camping in a meadow in the canadian rockies, we lay back on air mattresses outside the tent. We had been forewarned that Something Big was coming. Taking in a spectacular Perseid Meteor Shower with no interference at all from city miles, we were dozens of away from the nearest town, and that was not a very big town for stop needless to say, the shower would have forfeited much of i ts luster if we had watched a from a well lit Vantage Point in a city or a suburb. Persont words of a dying are supposed to be more light. Im happy to say that paul bogard is alive and well but his is a his basic message variation on the great german poets outcry, the more natural light. What artificial lighting causes , bogart has traveled all over the world searching for clean views of the heavens. He is the editor of the anthology let there be light and alsothe the sole author of the end of night searching for natural darkness in an age of artificial light. At thehes writing university of virginia. With the National Book festival being held indoors this year, he will have to deal with artificial lighting and make the best of it today, and im sure he will. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome paul bogard. [applause] thank you very much for that introduction, and thank you all for being here. It is a good crowd for stop i was really excited to be invited to the National Book festival, and really excited to see billy collins, who is presenting at the exact same time im presenting, so [laughter] i got to see him at the childrens thing earlier, so that was good. Is a book ofght stories. I always like to make the disclaimer at the beginning that i am not a scientist. I am a lover of science. I am a storyteller. I am an english professor. I always have loved nighttime for stop i grew up in minneapolis, and we still have a cabin in the northern part of the state, and so i grew up every summer going to this cabin and walking out onto the dock, under the milky way, under this naturally dark, beautiful sky. It just became a normal part of my life. When i finally got around to learning the constellations, which was actually not until after college, i very quickly realized that i could not see all the constellations i was supposed to see, that we have lost so many of the constellations because of the light in the sky, and i quickly realize how important darkness was for this nice guy that i always loved. And from there, i began to learn how important darkness is for so many reasons. For life on earth, essentially. Important to us culturally, spiritually. Important to our physical health. Importance to the health of the ecosystems on which we would rely. I came up with his book idea. I went on a wonderful journey. The book goes from some of our brightest places like las vegas, time square the stages quite right. [laughter] how often when i talk im facing blinding light. [laughter] all the way down to some of our darkest laces like death valley out west. Follows of the book chapter nine and works its way down to chapter one, and what that does is it follow something named the boreal scale, after an animal a storm is called john bordel, who came up with this it was named after an astronomer named john who was getting tired of people saying john, you have to go out to this place come it is so dark, and he would get out there and it really was not that dark and he realized that these younger astronomers had never experienced real darkness, the kind of darkness that he grew up in even in the 1940s and the 1950s. It has not been that long ago full stop i will show you a really revealing slide in a second that shows you how rapidly we have lost real darkness in this country. Iswhat i would like to do talk a little bit about the book, show you a number of images. Issue can imagine, this goes well with imagery. Read just a couple of brief passages from the book and then leave 20 of time for questions because this is an issue that touches on so many aspects of our lives, and i might not say everything you may want to hear about environmental, health, and i would love to answer the questions. The other big question is what can we do about this . One of the reasons i love this issue is it is one that we can do something about so readily. Like pollution, it is Light Pollution is in our control in a way so many others are not. So like i said, the end of night is a book of stories, and one of the first stories that i upper new yorko state to visit a writer named bob berman, some of you may know him, a wonderful writer of astronomy. Bob is a big, gregarious guy, fun loving guy. About writing astronomy with a sense of humor, which is not the easiest thing to do. The favorite column he has ever written was a collection of all the dumb questions he has been asked over the years about astronomy. And he called his article an f in science, so of course i said well, what is the dumbest question you have ever been asked . And hes and he said well, it is hard to top if the solar clips is so dangerous, why are we having it . [laughter] but i also quite like does mars have a sun like our sun . [laughter] but bob and i got to talking about why would people ask questions like that, and we were discussing that so Many Americans and increasingly people all around the world who are living in cities have lost a firsthand experience of the night sky and night in general, natural night in general. And i wanted to share with i wanted to share with bob why i was writing the book, what inspired me. So i told him a story about when i was 18, the year after high school. I was backpacking in europe. I will read that passage to you, a brief passage from the book. Starry nighttiful i have ever seen was more than 20 years ago when i was backpacking through europe as an 18yearold high school graduate. I traveled south from spain into morocco and from their south to the Atlas Mountains at the edge of the sahara to a place where nomadic tribes came in from the desert to barter and trade, a place that when i look at a map i can no longer find. Thatight in a youth hostel was more like a stable, i woke up and walked out into a snowstorm. But it was not the snow i was used to in minnesota or anywhere else i had been. To cool bare chest night wearing flip flops and asrts, i let a swirl as far swarm around me. I remember no Light Pollution. I remember no lights. But i remember the light around me, the sense of being licked by t by starlight li and that i could see the ground to which the stars seem to be floating down. I saw the sky that night in three dimensions. The sky had depth. Some stars seemingly close. So much farther away. The milky way was so defined it had what astronomers define as structure, the sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to the other. Stars stranger in another room than their numbers poverty of the children that afternoon making the night sky so plush it still seems like a dream. So much was right about that night. It was a time in my life when i was every day experiencing something new. I felt open to everything as though i were made of clay and the world was imprinted upon me its breathtaking beauty. Standing nearly naked under that moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression and my lifelong impression connection was sealed. When i told bob that story, hes second and said that reminds me of when my motherinlaw came to visit us from manhattan and we heard the car pull up outside the house. Then we heard her get out of the car. There was this pause before we heard a knock at the door. When my wife opened the door, the first thing her mother said cie, what are all those white dots in the sky . [laughter] that is one of the stories those stories we think, no way. Nobody can really say that. But if you lived in your man in manhattan all your life, you might say that. The reason is for all of the light in the sky. I hope you can see this from where you are. It is kind of a small screen. But this is the world at night, a collection of photographs showing the light. It is a really beautiful image. Light to be quick to say is amazing. Artificial light is a miracle, a wonder. I am not here to say and none of the people in the book say we should not have lights. The issue is how we are using lights. Primarily, we are using light in wasteful ways, irresponsible ways, and often ugly ways as well. Light itself is not ugly. Like can be beautiful like this. This is also an image of waste. This is going straight into the sky. It is not doing anyone good or making anyone safer. Worldwide, we waste about 110 billion each year on artificial light outside, so it is also a big waste of money. Here is a shot of the u. S. You can find these images easily online if you are interested. If you are interested in finding what it is like where you live, you can go to dark sky finder. It is a wonderful map. You can zoom in and see how good or bad it is there. We talk about Light Pollution, Light Pollution is an umbrella term underneath which are terms. I will give you three specific examples of Light Pollution. This first is what we call sky glow. I hope everyone can see this. This is a wonderful sidebyside image of the exact same street. On the left, you have a shot from 2003. It is a suburb of toronto. In 2003, they had a power outage. One of the folks on the street took a picture of what it would look like without all the Light Pollution. That is the left side. On the right is what it normally looks like, that pale peach glow over our cities. People in the u. S. Grow up thinking the clouds are white at night, somehow. They are only white because we are liking them. They would not be light otherwise. Lights glare, this is shining in all directions including into the sky come into our eyes. And far too often, some of you may have this extrudes in your homes, are your neighborss lights or the street lights are shining into your homes or bedrooms. Last night, i was at the hollywood holiday inn. A pulled the curtains big my room was still lit by the streetlights. I could not get it dark. The third thing is one that speaks to the light coming to our house. This is light trespass where light from one house is trespassing onto another. That is schools light from the School Setting onto the house where the students are living. They have black curtains trying to block out the light. This is wasted light. It is not doing anyone could. Here is a shot of harrisonburg, where i live in virginia. This is a good shot of sky glow. On the left, you see stadium lighting from the school, jmu, where i teach. I asked somebody when i first got there a few years ago why we leave the lights on all night long. It is goodwas advertising for the school. [laughter] i81 runs through harrisonburg. I think they think anyone that drives through will think, wow. All over the country, we have parking lots lit all night long whether there is a car in them or like this one no cars at all. Gas stations are lit like this. This has nothing to do with safety. This is everything to do with getting you to stop and buy stuff here. Gas stations and parking lots are interesting because they are lit about 10 times as bright as they were just 20 years ago. We have a lot of what we call up lighting like billboards shining into the sky. Vegas, the poster child for Light Pollution. I want to point out on the righthand side digital billboards spreading all over the country. We have almost 5000 countrywide. Their growing at a rate of Something Like 600 a month. They tend to be incredibly bright and left on all night long. Also, it is the type of lighting. These are called wall packs. The thing i would like you to notice are these are meant to us to simply ostensibly light light the parking lot. Because they are arranged horizontally, that light is going as long as it can through the atmosphere, through the moisture in the air. This is the same effect you get when youre driving through the country and look on to the verizon and ca security. Orizon and see a barn light you can see it clearly because that light is shining for miles and miles sometimes. That parking lot more effectively by shielding the light down to the parking lot where we want it and not anywhere else. Back to the photograph of europe at night. About 10 years ago, a couple of astronomers from italy came up with something they called the world atlas of the artificial night sky brightness. That asted to show impressive as these photographs are, they dont show the true extent of Light Pollution because it looks like if you get out of the cities and towns where those bright dots are that it is dark. They wanted to show that light spreads into the countryside, so there is no place in western europe that is naturally dark anymore. You have to go into the north sea, off into the ocean, before you get back into natural darkness. The brightest places are the citys cities shown in white and it works its way out from there. The spread of Light Pollution is something most of us do not understand. Here is their image of the u. S. This is the most revealing one. I apologize if it is hard to see. This is an image of four images of the u. S. They had data from 1996, the lower lefthand corner. What it did which is fantastic is to estimate back to the 1970s and 1950s on top and show us a very darker country. I always enjoy looking into the audience and guessing there are people who remember the 1950s or even before when this was a darker country. I remember the 1970s. Bottom righton the estimating forward to 2025 and where we are headed if nothing changes. Here is another way to think of this. This is an abbreviated version of the bortle scale. We have the brightest areas on the left onto the darkest, 9 to 1. I mentioned before i used that structure for my book him a starting in bright places working down to dark places. In each chapter, iced talk about a different issue. We talked about the history, safety and security, the ecological costs of light. I talk about the Human Health Effects, some of the spiritual effects, the effect on our spiritual life, downed the last two chapters of what we can do about this. The big issue that always comes up is, dont we need this light for safety and security . I live in harrisonburg, virginia, a town of 40,000. Recently ranked as one of the top 10 safest cities in the u. S. I went to home depot and i am told, by these lights for safety and security. We are taught we need to light everything up for safety and security. Unfortunately, too often it is these unshielded lights sending light in all directions. If you have light shining in all directions, it makes it harder for us to see. Anybody who wants a great demonstration of that after the talk, just come up and look out like this. [laughter] i want to show you two images that illustrate this problem of glare and how the idea that more light makes us safer does not make sense when you think about it. Light is good. We are going to have light. It is how we are going to use it. This is an image of a yard in tucson, arizona, a typical security light shining into the sky, glaring into our eyes. The next image is the same scene. The only difference is the photographer is going to hold his hand up and block that. Thus mimicking a shield of that light sending where it where we need it and nowhere else. When he does that, you can see the bad guy standing in the sense fence. I will go back. You can definitely see him barely in the fence before. When we shield that light, we lose the shadow. We can see better. Whatever cityive, in america, you can see unshielded lights like this. Wherever you are, you will see lighting getting brighter and brighter. One of the things happening now is we are switching from electric lighting to electronic lighting, led streetlights for example. Great promise because they are primarily focused down and we can control them. But also great peril in the sense they are often times much brighter. Everywhere is getting brighter. Very few places are getting darker. We can shield other lights. We can shield ballfields. We shield this field, that is what it looks like. There are more lights on the field than before. We can shield streetlights like this. This is slightly out of focus, but this is the effect when you shield streetlights commute can see all the way down the street. There is no light shining in your eyes. This is florence, italy. Im happy to talk more about any of these issues. But i always like to end the slides with an emphasis on the beauty of light at night and the beauty of night because that is what inspired me to write the book. That is what im tried to share with the book, how beautiful night is, how important darkness is, and how much this wasteful, irresponsible, overuse of light is costing us. Atther it is beautiful light night like this in london, or paris where theyve spent, a talk in the book about how they have spent 30 years relighting the city to create the atmosphere of the city of lights that we know and love. They have an aesthetic of beauty about lighting so different from any places we know in the states. Likeve beautiful light this in santa fe to create a romantic atmosphere. We have light and darkness together creating the symbolism of light. You need darkness for a candlelight vigil to make sense. Let us not forget the beauty of natural light, whether it is the wonderful moons light or starlight from northern minnesota, where i am from. Image. This i hope you can see it. It is an image down on the bottom of a human being coming facetoface with the milky way and the ocean. One of the things that stays with me from writing the book is that we have taken what was once one of the most common human experiences, that of walking out the door and coming facetoface with the universe, and we have made it one of the most rare of human experiences. That . S the cost to i think when you think about all the science and astronomy, spirituality, religion, art, that has come from the experience of a true night sky, Something Like this, then go from 1888painting from the south of france. Was excited to go and see where he painted this painting, where he stood and saw the stars in the sky. It is funny if you see the milky way or big dipper on the top. Astronomers have gone back and figured out the nights he was painting this, the big dipper was behind him. [laughter] he borrowed that and thought it would look better. I was excited to go there. Waited until it got dark to go to the exact spot. You can see it. Oops. [laughter] there it is. You can see the plaque that says on this spot Vincent Van Gogh but you are blinded so you cannot see anything else. On that scale i mentioned of nine to one, and the book follows that journey, here is a level two. This is a night in Death Valley National park. It was an amazing night. I write about it in the book. May be the darkest place, certainly one of the darkest places i have ever been. But this is still level two because you can see in the righthand corner the glow from las vegas. Ofill leave you with a view a level one darkness. This is a picture of the race track in death valley taken by the National Park service with the milky way overhead. Re andk i will anend the leave time for questions. Thank you very much. I appreciate being here. [applause] a couple of years ago, i stayed in something advertised as a dark village in the Peak District of england. It probably was not a one, but the village was proud they were not contributing to Light Pollution. My question is, why are none of these shielded lights readily available . Is it cost or ignorance on the part of the manufacturers . Manufacturers are getting better. Thank you for the question. We are seeing more shielded lights. If you go to your local home depot or lowes youll find in the lights you are able to b uy for your house, i actually counted, 85 or so unshielded lights and about five shielded lights. So we are still on the back end of the curve in terms of getting things out there. Biggest thing with this issue is people are not aware. If you are younger than 40, you have probably grown up subsumed in light, swamped in light. You dont know any different. When you go to buy a light for your house, you are not even thinking about this. The good thing about leds, the new streetlights, they are primarily shielded and focused down. Because they are so much oftentimes it makes the sky glow worse than the unshielded lights. Let me quickly say i did not spend much time talking about the Human Health Effects of artificial light at night. That is something that obviously is important to all of us. Arethree things scientists finding about our exposure to light at night is it is disrupting our sleep and contributing to sleep disorders, which are tied to every major disease we are dealing with. It is confusing our circadian rhythms, internal rhythms that orchestrate our bodys health. The thing that worries people the most is it is impeding the production of melatonin in our bodies, which is only produced in the dark. Some serious issues human healthwise, too. Thank you very much for your presentation. Is usedn scientifically to define an actual harm to the environment. Given that, would you argue that this Light Pollution is actually harming the environment or not . Thank you for the question. That is a great question. I would say absolutely. It has an enormous effect on the environment. If theres one thing im passionate about it is what we think of as environmental issues. If you consider the fact that life on earth evolved with bright guys bright days and dark nights are basically ,orever until only recently every species has evolved with that rhythm. We now have 60 of invertebrates, insects, are purely nocturnal. 70 of vertebrates are purely nocturnal. Many other species are most active at dawn and dusk. All of this life has evolved to rely on darkness. When we flood that habitat with artificial light, we are essentially destroying that habitat. At the very least, disrupting that habitat. Species struggle to adapt to that. It is enormous issue. Some folks have heard about the sea turtles in florida but come on shore to lay eggs. The hatchlings come out of the sand. They have evolved to scurry to the brightest light on the horizon, which for hundreds of millions of years were the stars. Now it is parking lots, hotels, streetlights, the wrong direction. We have more than 400 species of birds that migrate at night in north america alone impacted by lights. Up and down the food chain throughout the ecosystem, light at night does impact the environment. I am an architect in town. The document on the internet that you referred to. Haverchitects and planners written a code to obtain darker nights. It is not adopted by the International Building code, but it raises an issue of exactly what you are saying. Absolutely. I think that is really true. I have worked with a number of architects. One thing people forget is bright light shining in your eyes is not beautiful. It is really pretty ugly. Blasting against the side of a building is not beautiful lighting. I love talking with architects who are aware of how beautiful Night Lighting can be. As i said, when i go to paris and walk around with a guy who was in charge of relighting paris, one of the things i loved about this guy was he had a parking pass. He could park anywhere in paris. [laughter] imagine that freedom. He talked about how carefully and thoughtfully. Noted on used to be lit in the 1950s and 1960s likely like buildings in the u. S. , just floodlights. They took those down. Now they have lived it so it is darker on the darker and gets gradually lighter toward the top as your eyes rise to heaven. They have done all these interesting things to tell stories and create beauty with light. We can do such a better job with our light at night. Thank you. I thought it was funny you had an image of tucson, arizona [indiscernible] iremember when i was there partook in amateur astronomy. We would have to go way out. You still had the city glow. Fellowber some of the astronomers saying city council was good about working with the astronomy community. They implemented some codes and stuff. Basically, one was to shield streetlights and have them angle down like you were saying. Have you heard of any other cities nationwide . I think it is just a city council thing in most cases. Generally not a statewide thing. One other question. What would you rate the light level for d. C. . D. C. Is at least a nine. [laughter] d. C. Is light polluted, no doubt about it. The monuments at night are beautiful. But in general, it is overly lit. It is a great question and is a question about something we call lighting ordinance. And flagstaff, arizona, have the best lighting ordinances in this country. At least atarily the start was for the nearby astronomical observatories. If you go to tucson and flagstaff, you see a city that is darker. It is lit differently and is darker than most cities we know. Crime, attending rise in no problems people might immediately think we need more light. None of that. It just lit differently. It is just a matter of getting used to that. The International Dark skys association headquartered in tucson can help you in your immunity with getting a lighting ordinance on the books. There are statewide lighting ordinances. New mexico has one. Other places have them. One of the big problems is enforcement. There are not many people driving around looking for lights to enforce. There is no light police like many things, it will come down to spreading Awareness Among all of us. Lighte start to see spreading in all directions, that we Say Something to somebody and think we can do better than this. Weekend light we can light more responsibly, thoughtfully, and were beautifully. You definitely addressed the question. I was going to ask what legislative efforts are in place. I guess the following question would be, what are the major advocacy efforts and groups toking in an activist manner affect this area . Im currently fighting the wells fargo in my neighborhood to get them to lower their lights. Last year, the mothership landed on the wells fargo. It looks like Close Encounters of the third kind. Im thinking of showing up with a synthesizer and trying to communicate. In d. C. ,time i checked it was illegal to use your high beams in the city. The number of lights on cars but i find to be dangerous, i am definitely wondering if theres activism around the because i feel it is a sensitive issue. Speaking of sensitivity, do you think there is anything about being redheaded that makes you and i really angry about this issue in particular . [laughter] i feel like the brunettes do not care as much. You have traveled the world so i am asking your opinion. Im not angry. I am full of love. But we are passionate. No doubt about it. There is a lot there. Headlights are something i hear about from a lot of folks. All it takes is one of those cars coming at you with the new headlights, not even high beams, just some of the new led lights where you are blinded and cannot see to start thinking this might not be such a great idea. I think often we think because some light whether streetlights or headlights or lights on our houses can help us be safer and more secure at night that more light will make us safer. That equation breaks down so quickly. The brighter it gets, it makes it harder for us to see. That reduces our safety. Is thing about advocacy theres not a lot of evidence on either side about this issue. The folks who care are trying to gather the data that shows some of these things we are talking about, that you wont make your city safer by turning the lights up. You will just waste more money. There are things everyone can do, whether it is on the level of their own house, their own neighborhood, their own community, with this issue. I really believe this is something we can do something about. Twinscited to see a shortcoming to the mic. I do apologize for any Light Pollution. [laughter] so ifrom minnesota too have experienced that northern minnesota pitch blackness in the 1970s. Before reading your book, i would have said that has got to be bortle one, the ultimate darkness. But you are saying it is not. Try to tell me why that is not the most dark. In northern minnesota . Yeah. It is really dark. Absolutely. [laughter] sure. What the bortle scale is talking about is the light in the sky. Sometimes people say, did you go into caves . That is not what i was after. I know in the woods in northern minnesota on a cloudy night if you walk into the woods, you cannot see your hand in front of your face. It is that kind of darkness. Even under a starry sky, it can be wonderfully dark. I want to encourage everybody to get out and view that. It does not matter if it is a bortle scale one or three. That is just a way to get us to think about what we are losing and the value of this darkness. If you get out and it seems dark to you, fantastic. That is awesome. We need to get our kids out into the night and let them experience the sense, the sounds, and the beauty of this time and the value of the darkness. Concerning oncoming headlights, there was an old inventor ofthe polarizers to put diagonal risers in front of polarizers in front of all headlights and shields windshields so they would eliminate things well for the driver. But then you could wear only polarized sunglasses. Any chance of bringing that back . Anything about all lighting in this issue is technology is changing all the time. People are working with this issue all the time. I would say no matter where you live, light at night is going to change. Night is going to change. It is a matter of how we change it. With a discrete lights or light in our houses, it is all going to change. We are at a place where we can say we have enough light. We like it, lets not have too much. Ourlets not in danger health or the environment more than we need to. Lets bring back some of the darkness. Thank you very much. I think i am out of time. Appreciate it. [applause] author paul bogard talking about his book, the end of nigh the end of night searching for natural darkness in an age of artificial light. We are live at the Convention Center in washington. It is the 14th annual book festival hosted by the library of congress. Taking to the indoors this year instead of out on the national mall. On cspan, we are covering events in the science pavilion. Cspan2 and radio, it is presentations in the history pavilion. A number of author interviews cspan2. Phone calls on on cspan in a few minutes at about 12 45 eastern, we will hear from lynn sherr who wrote about americas first woman in space, sally ride. At 1 40 eastern, eric klein on his book about the end of the 1177 b. C. , the year civilization collapsed. Afternoon, david simply about his latest edition of the simply guide to birds. The scientist discusses his book, the future of the mind, the scientific quest to understand, enhance, and empower the mind. All that and more coming up as our live coverage of the 14th annual book festival National Book festival continues on cspan. This labor day weekend, president obama used his weekly address to talk about the minimum wage. The republican response was from indiana congressman larry bush on who talked about jobs and the economy. We will bring you both as we wait for the next speaker to take the stage at the National Book festival. Whether you are firing up the grill or filling up the car for one last summer road trip, happy labor day weekend. We set aside labor day to honor the working men and women of america. This labor day, we have more to celebrate. Months, american businesses have added nearly 10 million new jobs. Last month for the First Time Since 1997, we created more than 200,000 jobs for six straight months. For the first time in over a decade, Business Leaders worldwide have declared two years running the number one place to invest is not china, it is america. There are reasons to be optimistic about where we are headed and the decisions we make now will determine whether or not we accelerate this progress, whether economic gains flow to a few at the top or whether a growing economy fuels rising incomes and a thriving middle class. Thick about it this labor day. The things we often take for granted like Social Security and medicare, Workplace Safety laws, and the right to organize for better pay and benefits, even weekends. We did not always have these things. Workers and unions had to fight for them. Those fights build a stronger middle class. To build a stronger middle class in todays changing economy, we have got to keep fighting. We have to fight for the right to Affordable Health insurance for everybody, the right to fair pay, family leave, and workplace flexibility. The right to a fair living wage. Let me focus on the last one for a minute. In america, no one who works fulltime should ever have to raise a family in poverty. A hard days work deserves a fair days pay. Raising the minimum wage would be one of the best ways to give a boost to working families. It would help around 20 million americans from all walks of life pay the bills, provide for the kids, and spend that money at local businesses. That grows the economy for everybody. The bottom line is america deserves a raise. But until we have got a congress that cares about raising working folks wages, it is up to the rest of us to make it happen. In the year and a half since i first asked congress to raise the minimum wage, americans from all walks of life are doing that. 13 states and d. C. Have done their part by raising their minimum wages. Four more states have minimum wage initiatives on the ballot this november. In the states where the minimum wage has gone up this year, they have expressed higher job growth than the states that have not. Business leaders are doing their base wages for tens of thousands of workers because they know it is good for business. Mayors are doing their part. The mayor in chicago and delay are working to lift their city wages over time to at least 13 an hour. Im trying to do my part by requiring Countries Companies to pay who contract the government to pay their workers a fair wage of 10. 10 an hour. Said aernor of kentucky great example giving himself a pay cut so he could give raises to his lowest paid employees. His sacrifice will give more of his workers and their families extra money to help make ends meet. That is how america built the greatest middle class the world has ever known. Not by making sure a few at the top are doing well, but by work hard and play by the rules can get ahead. That is the bedrock this country is built on. Hard work, responsibility, sacrifice, and looking out for one another as one united american family. Lets keep that in mind this labor day and every day. Have a great weekend, everybody. I am proudly serving indianas eighth congressional district. Im honored to be speaking with you from the heartland of america on this weekend when we tip our hat to the working man and woman. Americas workers make our country go. Our goal should be to make the economy work for them. Traveling around indiana this week going from job fairs to Small Businesses, it was easy to see how our workers are still hurting. We are seeing some jobs come back. Too many of our fellow americans are stuck in parttime work or have stopped looking altogether. Between wages staying flat and costs on everything from food to Health Care Going up, families are being squeezed at every turn. In indiana and in many states throughout the union, we rely on coal to power our homes and provide good paying middleclass jobs like the one my family relied on when i was a kid. My dad spent 35 years as a coal miner and my hope hometown of kim k, illinois. He was proud of the work he did everyday and rightly so. The coleman helped put food on our table and helped me pursue an education and realize the american dream. Unfortunately, the Current Administration is waging a war on this reliable, affordable source of energy and the countless jobs it supports. This is one example of many where policies coming from washington do not make sense. As a physician, i took an oath to do no harm. While this administrations policies continue to harm our economy and families continue to struggle to make ends meet, republicans are Offering Solutions americas workers can count on. Our solutions will address the sluggish job market and grow our economy over the long run. First, we need get people back into steady, good paying jobs. One thing we have already done is fix our job Training System to make it easier for workers to find the skills they need to get ahead. This was a bipartisan commonsense compromise with our colleagues in the senate. We have also offered proposals to jumpstart Small Business investment and rain in the red tape factory that makes it harder for employers to hire and expand. We have more than 40 good job bills awaiting action in the democrat run United States senate. Lowering cost is another area that demands action. Several of the bipartisan jobs bills we are asking Senate Democrats to act on would help make inner gillespie expensive for families and Small Businesses like the manufacturers that help support the hoosier economy. We need to implement Real Health Care reform that lets patients choose the coverage they want at a price they can afford. We need to restore real opportunities for all americans. That is why we sent Senate Solutions to make education more affordable for middleclass families. We are ready to fix our tax code to make it simpler and fairer for everyone. These three things, getting people back to work, lowering costs at home, and restoring opportunity, will continue to be our focus in the weeks ahead. We call them American Solutions because they put the American People first, which is exactly what we are asking of president obama and Senate Democrats as we celebrate our nations workforce. Put aside politics and do what americans do every day. That is get to work. Thanks for listening. God bless you and god bless the United States of america. We are back live at the science pavilion at the 2014 National Book festival. Place today at the Washington Convention center in washington, d. C. Book tv andspan2s cspan radio covering author presentations. On cspan in several minutes, it is a book about sally ride. About lynn sherr wrote americas first woman in space, sally ride. We will hear from her at about 12 45 eastern. After that, eric klein on his book about the end of the bronze age. Cspan2, we are talking to the site is to will appear here on cspan later on about the advances and limitations of neuroscience, a chance for you to call in and talk to the scientist. Tv. Is on cspan2s book on cspan, lynn sherr about astronaut sally ride in a few moments of our live coverage of the National Book festival continues. All right. Thanks for coming. I am with the Washington Post, which like the library of congress is one of the sponsors of this event. I can report that last night i sat on my porch on a beautiful washington evening and just loved the book you are going to hear about britain by written by lynn sherr, a longtime correspondent for abc news and the newsmagazine 20 20 about sally ride americas first woman in space. This book is a barnburner. It has several narrative threads that are utterly captivating. It is not just about astronaut. Pasty physicist in the 1970s when not a lot of women were getting phds in physics. She broke down so many barriers could i have three daughters, all young women. I want them all to read this book. This book is about someone who had such an extra ordinary life. As a reporter, i also admire lynn so much because lynn new sally ride. They were friends. Cover the Space Program and Shuttle Program in the 1980s when sally ride made her flight in 1983. They became friends and knew each other for decades. Lynn is also a terrific journalist. Away sally ride passed untimely at an early age, lynn was brought in by friends and family to write this biography. What you see is a journalist at work. It is a truth that piece of journalism because sally ride was an historic figure, public figure, but also a private figure. Secrets, including one very large secret which came out after her death. It is a great piece of storytelling. It gives us a chance to know this extraordinary woman better and appreciate her pioneering life. I think you will love this book. I think youll love hearing from lynn sherr. [applause] thank you, joel. Joels been a fan of work for many years at the Washington Post, and now i want to marry him. [laughter] i love being in washington and i love the fact there are so many book lovers in this room. Thank you all for coming. I am especially thrilled to be here to talk about a woman who really was a true american hero. A woman who made an enormous impact on our world and whose life is exactly the kind of inspiration that so many of us are craving for inspiration in these troubling times. Name ride is a woman whose is now attached to several schools around the country. Her name is attached to an impact crater on the moon and to an outer Space Science venture vessel sallyarch ride has just been christened in yalifornia, a ship that will pl the waters so scientists can explore beneath the sea what she was trying to do in outer space. Posthumously, sally was awarded the president ial medal of freedom by president obama. In her lifetime, she played herself in an episode of the t. V. Show touched by an angel. And she threw out the first pitch at a world series game. She was regularly begged to run for office, any office, including taking over the job as nasa administrator. She turned them all down, too private to do such a public thing. One of her nasa colleagues once asked what it would take to get her to take the job as nasa administrator. Sally spent most of her life in the perfect climate of our west coast. She quickly said she would take the job if they moved it to california. [laughter] she was also funny and mischievous, and she was indeed my friend. While her real name was sally ride, how does that happen . She was not the inspiration for it mustang sally. She admitted she ran from that song her entire life. But i have to tell you it was sung and chanted when she flew for the first time in june of 1983, 31 years ago. I was anchoring the liftoff and mission. My favorite sign at the Kennedy Space center was on a bank marquee in cocoa beach on the strip south of the Kennedy Space center in florida. A giant marquee. Sally was flying in a crew of five. Sally,quee read, ride, ride, and you guys can tag along, too. She was acknowledged in billy joels song we did not light the fire. He ticked off the names of 56 his store figures and moments of the last 50 years. Sally came between wheel of fortune and heavy metal suicide. The song shot to the top of the billboard 100. Sally heard it for the first time driving in her car and nearly drove off the cliff, so did her good friend Billy Jean King, who told me she would always turn up the volume to catch sallys name when it is on the radio. I have to tell you i do the same thing. Why all the tributes and fuss about this extraordinary woman . Let me start with a cartoon that was published right after sally died. There were a number of editorial cartoons commemorating her life and death in july of 2012. The one i like the best is a teenage girls bedroom, a surprisingly neat teenage girls bedroom. It is bursting with science textbooks, physics, astronomy. There is a poster of the Space Shuttle. There are models of rocket ships all over the place. The teenage girl with her ponytail is sitting at her desk looking at her computer. On the monitor is sallys obituary. Ride, 19512012. There is a picture. The girls mom is standing behind her. The teenage girl is talking. She has a look of shock on her face. It is not that sally died. It is the back story. The caption is a girl talking to her mom. It reads, are you saying there was a time when there were not any women astronauts . So that is what this story is really about. Of course there was a time when there were not any women astronauts. Our glorious Space Program was a mens club only for the first 25 years. Sallyesult, women like who were smart and adventurous just did not grow up with astronaut dreams. Sally certainly did not. The job was not available. What sally cared about was science. She loved science as a kid. She also cared a lot about tennis. She was about nine years old when her mom put a tennis racket in her hand for the first time. It turned out this incredibly athletic woman was a great tennis player. Wound up with lessons from a pro named alice marble, unaccomplished tennis player. She played on the womens junior circuit three she won tournaments all over the country. She considered becoming a professional tennis player. Ofpped after college out college after year and a half to give it a try and quickly figured out the combination of not being what she considered in also all thend practice required, that led her to go right back to science. Later in life, people would say, what caused you not to be a professional tennis player . Sally would owe his answer, my forehand always answer, my forehand. She was a great pivoter. She would have been a great politician but was not interested and went back to science. She grew up in southern california, had gone to Swarthmore College outside of philadelphia for a year and a half. Dropped out to try to be a tennis player. When that did not work out, she went to stanford where she would go get her undergraduate, her masters, and her phd ultimately in astrophysics. She was in the midst of writing her Postgraduate School applications in january of 1977, just finishing up her thesis, when she wandered into the stanford Student Union one morning that january. Tried to settle in with a cup of coffee and a sweet roll to wake up before class. Picks up the stanford daily, the school paper, and never got beyond the front page. Above the fold on the righthand side of the front page was a headline that read, nasa to recruit women. Sallys future had just landed in her lap. After 25 years, at that point it was not 25, after almost 20 years of the Space Program that had been as i said men only, and in fact white men only, nasa was finally joining the rest of the country in appreciating the fact women and minorities could expand the core in a good way. There were also laws and rules. The federal government has said everybody has got to get on board with this. The rest of the country was a well along at that point. Harvard, yell, princeton, most big schools had integrated along sex and race lines. It took nasa a little longer. But once they got there, they were totally involved. Earlier, theyr had put out the call for a new class of astronauts, specifically to be trained for the space Shuttle Program. They specifically wanted to add women and minorities. This article sally saw was an interview with somebody at stanford who had been contacted to say we are looking for women and minorities. Sally read the article. She read the Job Description for the new breed, the new category of astronauts called Mission Specialists. With the new Space Shuttle, 727h was a plane like a that was going to go up, orbit the earth, build a space station, launch a space telescope, do experiments, and the return. Our firstng to be reusable spacecraft. It was no longer a tiny capsule like the ones we sent our brave men to the moon in. John glenn used to joke about the Mercury Program that when he started, the capsule was not something you got into. It was something you put on. [laughter] now the Space Shuttle was a larger vehicle with a larger crew compartment. The crews were going to be larger. There was blue room to move around. Because of that, there was room for different genders. There was room for more privacy. There was a need for these Mission Specialists who would do these scientific things in space. Sally read the article, saw the description of mission specialist, and said to herself, i can do that. Puts down her coffee, walks out the door, goes directly to find paper, pencil, and envelope, and a stamp. It was that long ago. And immediately sends off to nasa for an application. This is a woman who thought for sure she was going to be a scientist, who thought for sure she would be teaching, she would be doing research. Now she said, im going over there. Im going over there. Long story short, all of the details in the book of course, sally was one of more than 25,000 people who sent in for that very application. 8000 some field the application in, of home more than 1500 were women. In the end after a yearlong process of interviews and screening and recommendations, sally was chosen as one of the 35 members of the new class of astronauts to be trained specifically for the Space Shuttle. Of them, six were women, three African American men, one hawaiian. Likewas suddenly looking the poster child for multiculturalism, and sally was over the moon about the choice. Understand that sally was an introvert. A very shy woman. If you study psychology, there is something called the myersbriggs psychology scale, and on one side are the is for the introverts. These are people who are much happier in a Smaller Group of people. On the other side are the es for the extroverts, people like me, who like to stand and talk to people. Sally was a total i. She gets the call telling her she is going to be an astronaut candidate, and in her own room at stanford, she starts jumping up and down, screaming and yelling, picks up the phone, calls her best friend from high there,and says hi, this is your friendly local astronaut calling he. Sally always said that her father who did not have a scientific bone in his body, when sally said she was going to be an astrophysicist, dale ride said he did not know how to explain it to his friends, but she said now that im an astro, he knows. Her mothers pundit in a different way her mother spun it in a different way for stop with her sister training for the ministry, joyride said well, one of them will get to heaven. [applause] [laughter] this is the background she came from. Sally soon learned that it was a little tougher and she was not going to get to heaven immediately because she started out facing a press corps with very little imagination. She suffered through her First Press Conference is this is a graduate student, now has to have a press conference, and stunned by the stupidity of questions like are you afraid of being in orbit with all those men . And do you expect to run into any ufos . Sally calmly answered no to the that herd assured career as an astrophysics student made her very comfortable around males, thank you very much. I was a chorus when it for abc news. The teamited to covering the then upcoming space Shuttle Program. The first flew in 1981 full stop in january of 1981, i went on to the Johnson Space center in houston to help prepare for stories ahead of time. We had a great team. Im sure you will remember many of them. The anchorman was frank reynolds, the abc anchorman who was extremely knowledgeable about space will stop our space correspondent was jules bergman, hath inventedy the field of science journalism and was brilliant at what he did. I was learning to be what i now describe, like in the baseball booth, i was the color guy. I was supposed to do the feature stories and all of that for stop because of a variety of instances, i wound up anchoring and becoming the lead a space reporter in anchoring almost all of the shuttle liftoff and landings for the first five years, and it was truly a great experience. So when i first got to nasa, i was assigned my first assignment was to do a story on this new breed of astronauts, the women and the minorities, the nonpilots, and sally was one of the first people that nasa offered me to interview, and the two of us just hit it off immediately. I liked her direct manner, i liked her determination, and i liked the fact that she did not give me canned answers, that is to Say Something she thought i wanted to hear. For instance, i asked her in that first interview why do you want to go into space . And she said to me i dont know. She said i discover that half the people would love to go to space and i do not have to explain it to them, the other half cannot explain it, and i do not know how to expand it to them. That is how she answered that. She was a breath of fresh feminism, acknowledging unequivocally that the Womens Movement had made her situation possible, that nasa with its 20year heritage of white male Fighter Pilots was finally doing the right thing, and we became friends instantly. As the program develops and i wound up anchoring abcs coverage, i continued to spend time with sally as she married a fellow astro, steve hawley. Pizza and became my beer hangout. Sally of course got her chance five years later. She was the first of the six anen chosen to fly amazing story all by itself. She became our newest american hero. Funny, trained, optimist who answered questions tirelessly. Attention, though, as i say, was both flattering and a little bit frustrating to her and is still reflected the way that women were viewed as a novelty in this previously meant only club. It culminated in the question i would nominate as being the dumbest press question ever asked at a press conference anywhere at any time i have been to a lot of press conferences. [laughter] may of 1983, the month before sally flew. Sally is up in the front of the room, a room about the third the size of this down at the Johnson Space center, up with her entire crew, sally and the four guys, and a reporter from Time Magazine raised his hand and said dr. Ride, you have been training for a year, and im really just curious, when you make a mistake, when something goes wrong, how do you respond . Do you weep . Of the wayss kind most of the room treated it. Sally, i would have clawed the guys eyes out the minute he said it, and this is why sally was the right person to of been selected. She took it all in stride for stop this exist on videotape was of you can see it. She kind of rolled her eyes. She had one of those oh, my god, is this guy serious looks on her face, and then she smiled and she turns to the pilot of her mission sitting next to her, and whysaid pleasantly doesnt anyone ever ask rick these questions . She diffused the bomb instantly. It was absolutely great. Within nasa, there were some other hurdles to leap. The six women, when sally was chosen, she had to make a number of very quick decisions about stuff that she would be taking with her in flight. When you fly anything in space, every item has to be checked for chemical reactions with other things in the spaceship, for what might happen in the microgravity in weightlessness, so every item has to be checked. The men had a pretty set list of toiletries, cosmetics stuff in their toiletries kit that would show up with them. Now that women were fly in, they had to change some of that, so they said to sally, what do you want to take . Sally wisely brought in the other five women immediately, understanding that whatever decision she made was going to devolve on the next group of women to fly, so she got their opinions right away. So the women, the first thing they did was they got nasa to exchange the old spice aftershave and the british rling dealer it for more deodorant for more female friendly lotions and potions and they got nasa to add what they called hair restraints will stop we call them rubber bands. Just nasa. When the original launch date was moved back a couple of dates , Johnny Carson joke on the tonight show that the shuttle was going to be delayed because sally ride had to find a purse to match her shoes. Of allt was the funniest of his jokes that continued for a solid year before sally flew. I am happy to report i watch all of the videotapes of these old shows. Im happy to report that the audience kind of laughed at the first one and over the years there was less laughter, there was silence, and toward the end there were boos. The idea of americas first woman in space had gone from being a punchline to a matter of national pride, and i think a huge amount of that is the way sally ride herself handled herself with such integrity and such wit throughout the situation. Weargot to the point when she finally launched, the whole world was riding with her. The networks had oneonone interviews with the astronauts before they flew, and in my oneonone with sally, i said to her do you feel under pressure as americas first woman to fly . She said i do feel under pressure. I feel under pressure not to mess up. That is all she said. What i think sally metz, what i know she meant was she did not want to mess up for her crew because every mission is a team operation. She did not want to mess up for nasa because she believed in nasa. She did not want to mess up for the United States because she believed in the preeminence of the u. S. In space technology. She did not want to mess up for human spaceflight. But mostly she did not want to mess up for other women because she understood that if she messed up, somebody with a well, you cannot fly a woman astronaut because one woman messed up. But if she did well, then that would open the door for many, many more women after her, is of course what happened. Listen to another shuttle veteran, threetime shuttle veteran pamela milroy, one of only two women to have commanded a shuttle flight, from a different generation from sally for stop she said it was not until after i became an astronaut that i discover the most important gift sally gave me, which was that she was tremendously competent. The reputation of everyone who comes after you defense of how well you do. Sally smooth the path for all women because she was very good at what she did. She was brilliant at what she did, and she was also very playful. On the morning of the night before sally flew, she flew on a saturday in june of 1983, and the night before, before you fly, all astronauts go into quarantine, which is to say they cannot have any contact with other people except family members who might be cleared by a physician because you dont want any stray germs to jeopardize the mission, so sally was in koren team, she was totally offlimits to everyone, including the press, and she was the most famous person on the planet at that moment. She was on the cover of every magazine, everyone wanted to talk to sally, no one could get to her. I was sitting in our abc workspace that afternoon getting my script ready for that night before she flies by the way, it was a trailer. We had a very glamorous digs in television news. And the phone rings, and somebody picks it up and summary says it is for you. I pick up the phone, and a little voice at the other and says hi, there. What are you doing five minutes from now . And i said i dont know, sally, what am i doing five minutes from now . Dont you come uturn oy out of your trailer, come out and turn left on the gravel and stopped. There was sally and cut off shorts, a tshirt, flipflops and standing by a car smiling and waving at me. She likes to push the envelope a little. Sally was a team player who could follow the rules very well, but this was one rule she wanted to push a little, and she wanted to say to me i am in great shape, i am happy, and you can tell the world i am just fine before this flight. She do i would not get any closer, she knew i would not ask her questions she would not answer, and it was typical sally. This, incidentally, is my vision of sally that i hold in my mind for all mind, of sally just standing there, waving and smiling. She was one happy person. She was even happier when she got into space. Sally loved her flights. She performed beautifully. They launched a bunch of satellites. They made the American Government many millions of dollars. It was a great flight. It lasted a week. I signed off one of my pieces that week saying technologically, nasa is pushing for the 21st century, but in human terms, it has finally entered the 20th. And i had trouble getting that through my bosses, i would like to say. To thebrought my mother launch. My mother was then approaching 80. Sally was in many ways very lucky. I am sure all of you who watched many of the Space Shuttle missions remember there were always delays. Sally flew twice will stop no delays whatsoever. Got to the pad iand boom, she went off. My mother said i saw the horse and buggy, i saw the airplane, and now i saw this. Week later ined a california, president reagan telephoned his congratulations to the entire crew and he said to sally and someone said that sometimes the best man for the job is a woman. You were there because you were the best person for the job. Millions of other people around the world agreed. I think it is a lot of things. I think it is about the mystery of the universe. I think it is about riding a rocket into space will stop i think it is about going into the unknown, but mostly i think what women, particularly young women did was to translate her bold journey into their own tickets to success, and the thinking went if she can do that, i can do anything. And anything was everything from getting out of the typing pool to getting into law school to doing whatever it is you thought you could do with your life. This was the image that she presented. When she came back, she shared her story with the world, which is what you have to do when you are an astronaut. Part of the Public Relations thing. She most loved talking to children. And she most loved the question that children would ask first because adults were too embarrassed, and the question always was how do you go to the bathroom in space . [laughter] sally cooked up a very simple explanation. Easy, she said, it is like sitting on a vacuum cleaner. [laughter] sally also talked endlessly about what she had seen from space, but the most important thing that she saw was what she always described as the thin blue line encircling our planet, and that is earths atmosphere. As if someones had taken a royal blue crayon and just drawn a line around the and she, realized from where she was sitting in space that without that thin line, and she also would change the metaphor, called it as thin as the fuzz on a tennis ball, or she would say but sherths spacesuit, said without that thin, blue line, we would not have a planet, and that is why we have to protect this planet that we live on. Much of her life was devoted after her flight to being sure that we protect planet earth, and she believed in space flight, she believe in human spaceflight. She thought that first and foremost, space should be used to take care of planet earth because without that thin, blue line, we would not be here in this room. We would have no trees, we would have no grass, and no water, and that was extraordinary to her. Sally made a lot of contributions after she left nasa. She left nasa in 1987, which was a year after the challenger explosion. It, asas horrified by was everybody. She served on the commission the only shuttle asked not to be on Rogers Commission investigating the challenger explosion. Made a critical contribution to the investigation. She also served on the Commission Investigating the disintegration of the spacecraft columbia when it came back to earth. By then it was by then she shegone from nasa for so did research on arms control and then she started her own company. She finally decided it was time to do something for other people, and she and a couple of partners and started something called sally ride science, which is a forprofit company to encourage, particularly middle school girls, to study and stay. T. E. M. Ed to the s technologies, science, technology, engineering, and math. She was not the first woman, two 1953ans beat her to it, and 1982. But sally was the First American woman, and with all of the publicity that goes with that, the soviet program was very close when the other women flew, so she liked being the first. She liked that it opened the door, but she wanted to get girls and voice committed to science and to understand the joy and beauty of science as she had all of her life. So that is the sally ride i knew. A smart and witty pal who would stay with me in new york and go off and play dragons and then she would come home and i my living roomon floor with her shoes off in her legs up on a coffee table, watching perhaps the dumbest programs on television she could find. She was a superb able toentalizer, focus intensely. A College Roommate once said she could study through a whistling tea kettle. And then she said she could flip the switch marked oblivious. She could just turn it off whenever she had to. This was the woman i knew, but there were things i did not know about her. Pricenot realize what a she paid for her celebrity. I did not know she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in march 2011, which would take her life just 16 months later at the age of 61, and i did not know for sure until i read her obituary that she is been in a loving relationship with another woman for 27 years. Sally was very good at keeping secrets. It may be sad when i learned that. Admit me sad that she felt she could not share it, that i could not share her happiness with sam. She had divorced steve holy after five years and they had remained friends. Sally had chosen to keep her life private. That is to she was was up it is partly a function of the times, partly a function of an intolerant society and the pain and shame it can inflict even on his heroes, and i like to think that it might have changed over time post up i like to think that this book at least would relieve sally of the burden of not being able to share the truth with the world, but despite that, i will say that her legacy is entirely secure. She was an amazing woman, lucky and her parents, who believed in education, who believed in giving their daughters what they wanted, who did not believe that anything should stop a woman from being what she wanted. She was lucky in her timing. She came around when the doors were open, after the Womens Movement. She came around when the government was turning around, when the social situation in this country had changed, and when opportunity knocked, she knew exactly how to take advantage of it. I once said to her that i thought a great turning point in her life had been that moment any stanford Student Union when she saw the article in the paper and made that choice. She also thought it was important, but in her own little way put a different spin on seizing the moment. When she would speak to she wasaudiences, usually deadpan i guess the message is read your college newspaper. [laughter] she was amazing. She also did everything with a smile. When she came back from her first flight, she said that was the most fun i ever had in my life. I do not think i will ever have a much fun again. She was 32 years old. Later. Muc lots of fun at five feet five inches, she was way bigger than that. Her colleagues that it is not until she left the room that you realized she is really short. I call the lessons that i learned from sally flying lessons because i think she taught me and she can teach us all how to fly high without ever leaving earth. Her life reminds us that whatever our own personal limits, there is something greater than we can measure, more marvelous, something just waiting to be explored. She proved you to not need the right plumbing to have the right stuff. In any field or any endeavor, and after smashing through the ultimate glass ceiling, the celestial glass ceiling, she brought back a wonderful lesson. What do you see out there she was asked over and over. Sally ride put her science and a bit of eloquence together, translated the dazzling reality she saw from space into a beam of encouragement for the rest of us on earth. What did she see out there . Stars do notd, the look bigger, but they do look brighter. Sally rides 61 years on this space,minus 343 hours in definitely made our lives better. I mourned her death two years ago, but i rejoice in her life. She was the perfect First American woman in space, and she was a great friend. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you. There is a little bit of time, and we have microphones if we have some questions will stop yes, surfaced up the other astronauts in the first group were also very talented. Was she actually competitive enough . Did she want to be first of those six . The other six women were y talented. L with sally gone, there are four of them left. All of the women wanted to be first, and nobody ever would admit it. There was a friendly competition, and they all knew i have spoken to them all for stop i did more than 200 interviews for the book, and they all told me pretty much the same thing that yeah, i wanted it, but nobody was really going to go out there and say how do i get this because nobody knew what the criteria were because of the guyssense who made the decisions, and it was impossible to know what was on his mind. I believe sally wanted it sort of if that is possible, and i believe that she was chosen in large part because she was so smart, because she handled of her well, and because tennis, the idea that she knew how to play on a team and her great hand eye coordination when she was working the robot arm were big pluses in her favor. Yes, surfaced up because you were friends with sally, do you think that softened your News Coverage of her . Softens my think it News Coverage at all. I thought about that a lot. I thought about at the time. There was nothing i did not report, and i am so grateful 24 7i was reporting before news covers and before twitter and instagram because i would have then probably felt obligated when i would go hang out at steve and sallys house to sort of report some of the gossip that they told me, but nobody was interested. I could barely get my stories on the air. We had morning news, good morning america, and i had evening news, i had world news tonight, and there was no time to put the stuff on the ai r except for special News Coverage during a live transmission. There is nothing that i learned at the time that was significant that i did not report. And i approached the book like a reporter as well as up yes, she was my friend, but there are a lot of layers of the onion that are peeled away that she probably would not be thrilled with. Thank you. Yes, thank you. S scienceride the only thing that is still perpetuating her memory or do you expect other things to come along as well . There is i believe an internship or scholarship at nasa with her name on it. Sally ride science is the legacy she wanted and the legacy she chose. These sally ride impact site on the moon is pretty cool. Is probably her biggest legacy i would say. And her memory and what she left us. In your conversations with her after she had had the experience and was the First American woman in space, what did she say about the progress we have made so far and how far we had to go . In terms of women or in terms of nasa or both . Both. She loved what happened with women. Since sally flew, many women have been in space, most of from this country but also with european, with the soviet program. She loved that. Astronautsany women currently at nasa, formerly at nasa who never knew sally but who were inspired by her, and sally love the fact that they were inspired by her role, and she would frequently called them before they flew. In terms of nasa, she still had enormous regard for nasa post up she was deeply disappointed, horrified after the challenger accidents, believed that both of them were accidents waiting to happen because of mismanagement. It was not about technology. It was about management in both cases. And that horrified her. But she did not want to get revenge. She wanted to make nasa better, and in both cases, she was part of the group that recommended changes, and indeed it made nasa better in both cases. Missions. 135 shuttle two of them were failures challenger and columbia and the rest were pretty darn successful. She was proud of that and wanted to see nasa do more. I know she would be disappointed that we do not have a more active program right now. She believed very much that the Human Spaceflight Program would continue, and she in fact would have liked to have gone on to mars as long as she did not have to train for it, but she also believed very strongly into things. One is robotic spacecraft. You do not need to risk human lives for everything. She believed in international corporation. At the only way it makes sense is to do this globally and to get all countries involved together. X thank you. Thank you. Yes. Go ahead. You describe sally as an introvert. Do you think being an introvert was a pleasant her becoming the first woman astronaut in space . Yes come im thinking when i was a kid, some of you had this little toy, a black and a white scottie that were magnets, and you held the next reach other and they pushed away if you held them on the wrong end . That was sally in publicity. She knew it was part of her job. She knew that when you fly, you get back afterwards by going around the world and telling shet your trip, and absolutely hated it, but she did it, and she overcame it. She had to psych herself up for every speech she gave. I dont believe i think they her i knowked they would have liked her to be more outgoing. I think they picked her despite the fact that she was an introvert. That is probably another reason she kept her Sexual Orientation private is that it would have been the last bit of privacy she might have had that she gave up, and i think she at least had a zone of privacy there at the end that was very important for her. But no, i think nasa i know nasa wanted her to get out there more, and i tell a story in the book about the time sally refused to go on a bob hope special for exactly that reason. Nasa was not happy. Why did they pick her as the first woman . Because she was so good. Even though she was an introvert exactly. I think we are in overtime here, and in less there is something pressing, i will say thank you to all of you. I hope you will enjoy the book, and thank you for coming. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] we are live at the 14th annual National Book festival on the cspan networks today. Live coverage from the Washington Convention center here on cspan. We are in the science pavilion for the day for stopover on cspan2s book tv and cspan radio, coverage of the authors and history biography pavilion as well as several author interviews and your phone calls. In fact, right now on cspan2, psychiatrist and author sally satel taking viewer phone calls. You can find the complete schedule of our book coverage on the cspan networks on cspan. Org or booktv. Org. Coming up next in a few minutes on cspan, eric cline is the next speaker talking about his book on the end of the bronze age, 1177 b. C. the year civilization collapsed. After that at about 2 35 and lateravid sibley, on today, scientists michio kaku discusses his book the future of the mind. David Theodore George on his why untangling the mind we behave the way we do. Coverage continues here on cspan for several today, investigative journalists Amanda Ripley appeared at the festival to talk about her book the smartest kids in the world. We will replay a portion of her remarks while we wait for the next speaker at the Washington Convention center. [applause] thank you very much. It is great to be here on many levels. How many live in washington, d. C. . I would assume most of you. I wrote much of my book, at least the parts that were decent, and the library of congress. The only place i could find some focus and peace. I had a new baby at the time. This is my first book, unthinkable, and i would go to this beautiful space, and there is part of it where you cannot get on the internet, which is a wonderful luxury. [laughter] really a salvation. To have such a beautiful place that we can all access is a privilege, so i am very glad to be here for all of those reasons. Very psyched that i got put in the science pavilion. You never know where youre going to end up when people categorize your book. Is talkant to do today a little bit about a mystery, and it is a mystery that starts with data and has implications for the lives of millions of kids around the world, but what i also want to do is hear questions and thoughts about all of you, so we want to make sure to save time for that and turn this into more of a conversation if we cancel stop it is, after all, a saturday morning, and you have come out here, and you deserve to have more of a conversation rather than just be spoken to. The mystery that i mentioned is a mystery that i think we have all sort of heard about, kind of in the ether, and as a reporter, i kept hearing about it as well, and the mystery was this it appeared that there were a handful of countries that were now managing to educate virtually all of their kids to high levels of Critical Thinking in math, reading, and science, and i would hear various theories about why that was so, rights, we have all heard these theories, and i would buy into one or the other of them for a while, and then i would inexplicablee barrier to that theory being true, so let me give you an example. One of the reasons that i heard for why these other countries were doing so great was that we dont spend enough on education. Fact, we spend more per pupil on k12 education than all the four countries in the world. If you look at those four countries, they do not line up with those topperforming countries in the world, so it became clear that we that it was not that we were not spending enough, it was that we were not spinning at the same way him and not spending it wisely. Which makes sense for stop the other thing i heard was that we were too big, too diverse of a country to compare with a place like finland, which is totally fair. I mean really, finland . This is a huge country we live in. And i started thinking about country as 50 different countries, particularly when it comes to education because so much of education is locally controlled, and is very different, when you go from texas to vermont to california, so that satisfied me for a while, but then one day i tried looking at the data on a statebystate basis and seeing how our kids were doing compared to other countries, imagining that all of our states were countries, and when you do that, you see not only huge variations from state to state, but you see that not even some of our smallest, most homogenous states 94 white, which is and has a quarter of the thosetion of finland, kids were performing at the level of kids in portugal, which is below average or right around average for the developed world. So we were not seeing the kind of high flyers that you would expect, but two exceptions were massachusetts and minnesota. Do we have anyone for massachusetts or minnesota . There we go. So we have two states that were maybe not in the top 10, but certainly in the top 15 countries to 20 countries in the world, so that was encouraging, but then the most convincing theory i heard for why we were not doing so great overall or in some of these smaller states even was poverty. And that made a lot of sense to me. We know that all over the world, poverty influence education outcomes, and we know that we have a really unacceptably high Child Poverty rates giving our wealth as a country. Right around 20 depending on how you are measuring it. So that made a lot of sense to me. But then i started looking deeper into the data. Now we are for better or worse a wash and data right now. We have more data than we know what to do with. It is sort of like health care. If you look at it more deeply, what you see is there are actually countries that have very low Child Poverty rates. Childorway has a 6 poverty rates, which is close to finland, 4 , as low as it gets, really, all over the world. What you see is that norways 15yearolds are performing at about the same level as american 15 euros, which is to say average for the developed world and reading and science and and it isage in math, a recurring weakness for the u. S. If you look within our data set for the u. S. , you see summing really astonishing, which is that if you look at our top 25 15yearold,ent these are kids who have lots of advantages, highly educated parents, hightech schools, all kinds of resources, and by the way, this data set includes private schools will stop if you look at those kids, you see that they are scoring below their affluent peers and 27 other countries in math. They do better in reading, although still not at the very top of the world, and if you look at our lowest quartile of kids, economically speaking, and compare them to underprivileged kids around the world, they, too, are scoring below 27 other countries in math, so there seem to be some systemic problems that interacted for sure with property, that interact with diversity, that interact with our institutionalized racism, that interact with many of these, but it was not just one of those things, and no single thing could fully explain what we were seeing, so i stopped Everything Else i was doing writing wise and decided to spend a year trying to understand what was really going on in these countries, and i this id part of just did not believe it. I kept hearing about these brilliant kids in finland, singapore, korea, and there were no tests and everything was awesome all the time with teachers who were juniors since and the parents involved and it did not pass the smell test to me, it did not seem like any country is that simple, so i countriesvisit these cannot but i knew to have any remote chance of seeing what was really going on, i needed to try to see it through the eyes of , and i learned in my reporting in the u. S. That until you talk to students, you really do not know the half of it, and students are experts in their particular classroom. They sit there all day long thinking about what could be better, what they like, what they dont come and they have if you askedns them, so luckily there are tens of thousands of teenagers who every year since lee trade places with a bay leave the United States and go attend Public High School abroad and live with a host family or vice versa for a year. So i wanted to follow these kids in particular because they could to some small degree see the water they swim in. They did not know everything none of us do, but they knew there homes and neighborhoods back in the states and abroad, and they were essentially amateur interpol is just. Part of the reason kids go abroad is because they are interested in the differences between cultures and places. One small disclaimer i have three before this performance. Library off the congress, welcome to the book festival. We hope you are having a wonderful day cellaring the love of reading here at the Walter Washington committed center for some i want to warn you that the billion presentations are being filled for the library of Congress Website and further archives. Please be mindful of this as you enjoy the presentation. In addition, please do not sit on the camera risers that are located at the back of the billion. Thank you. So eric cline, as a matter fact, he is the first person ive ever met who has his own wikipedia page, is a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington university. You know, i make notes, and memorize them [laughter] he is a specialist in biblical archaeology, history of the mediterranean from antiquity to the present for the ps written or collaborated on 16 books and written nearly 100 articles. Is also been featured on a number of television presentations. His book, 1177 b. C. the year civilization collapsed, is a fascinating read. The stories and the conclusions are truly interesting. I welcome dr. Eric cline. [laughter] to ivory much. Well, it is bread appear. You can all hear me, i hope . Wonderful. This is a first time for me. This is extremely exciting and an honor, and i thank you all for coming today. One thing i will do is illustrate with slides, but i will explain to you if you cannot see where you are what we are doing. And what i want to do is present some of the findings from the book, and basically show you why i think it is one of the most fascinating periods in history, this 1177 b. C. It is the end of the late bronze age post up we are talking about 3000 years ago, obviously, and this is when everything collapses. Most people think about the end of rome as the major collapse without i would argue that this is as significant if not even more significant for us today. So what happens i will give you the background for a moment, rob from Princeton University press came down from gw and said to me i want you to write a book on the collapse, and i said well, sure, i can write a book on the collapse, what is as interesting is what collapse, so i said i will write about the collapse if you will allow me to enlarge part right about what collapsed. It was an international world, it was a globalized come and part of it is why it did collapse. He said ok, fine, i will give you latitude, which is nice. And the ensuing result is what you see here, so the beginning of the book talks about a group of people that i will go to in a moment, and then the end is about what might have caused the collapse because to be honest we still dont know. There are a number of possibilities out there, and i will go through the possibilities and come up with what i think might be the most logical answer, but this is archaeology, this is ancient history, this is 3000 years ago. We are not sure what happened. Came up with it, i wrote it, and then he said to me and i do not know if he remembers this. He said i want to make a book trailer. I said what is that . He said it is where you stand up in front of the camera and you advertise your book as if it is a movie coming out. And i said what, you want me to hold my book and say please buy it . [laughter] no, i have no, something in mind really over the top. So we got together with the next student of mine, jeffrey, who runs goldmedal productions, and he put together about a minute long trailer, and it ran for probably six months before the book came out. I have no idea if it had any effect on sales, but it was a lot of fun to do, so if you want come i can show that to you. If not, we can just skip right through. Yeah . All right. Yeah. It will be projected here. Hopefully the sound will be up because the sound is everything. I will warn you right now it is completely over the top, and it is made tongueincheek. It is supposed to be one of these summer blockbuster things, so lets see if we can get this working. [cheers] [applause] thank you. [laughter] i will now take questions. [laughter] seriously, how can you follow that, right . Anyway, we had a lot of fun doing it, and i thank rob for making us do it and Jesse Krinsky for making us do it in the first place. If you see other book trailers out there, i think this may be the way of the future, but we will see. Anyway, let it go back for a moment and take a look, and see exactly where we are and actually i cannot even see my slides there. Oh, there we go. What were dealing with is the late bronze age come about 1700 two 1200 bc, and this is when we have the minoans and the mycenaeans and the hittites. You probably have heard about some of the people already. This is the time of the female pharaoh, moses the third, one of the greatest conquerors of all egypt, and hotel for third, my the harris and then the heretic, ramses the third, and he is the man under whom pretty much everything collapses during the time of the catastrophe, as we call it. This is also the time period of adesh, the of cuk trojan war, some of you may have heard about or seen the movie with brad pitt, and also the time of the exodus, so these are all about 1250, 1200 bc, the end of the end of the late bronze age here. It has been said for the most part there we go. It is at a very bad angle for me. We cant determine that a little bit so i can see it . No. All right. There we go. If we can turn it just a bit so i can catch a glimpse which one it is. There we go. Perfect, thank you. And you all can still see it . Now i can see it and i know where i am. It has been set for about 100 years or so that the sea peoples were the colbert. This was a nation that was come up with by a guest on maspero, one of the spero,st by gaston ma one of the earliest egyptologists. He said they are the ones that are responsible for destroying absolutely everything at the end of the late bronze age. The thing is he came up with majorheory based on one inscription plus a couple of minor ones, but before any of the archaeology had been done, so thereafter any time any site was escalate excavated, they atd it to the sea peoples. So this became kind of a bogeyman. All caps on my goodness, the sea peoples are going to come and get you. This has changed over time. This is in part what i wanted to do in the book was to say that the sea peoples may not be completely responsible for the collapse, and in fact i think that they are almost a symptom rather than the cause. That they are as much victims as they are oppressors. This is one of the things that i wanted to take a look at in this book. A fairlye have put out simple fight way of looking at things. They said there was a drought back then that cause a famine that caused the sea peoples to start, they cut the trade routes, and therefore everything collapse. That is certainly possible, but i would say this is probably too simple and i would add in a couple of other factors because i do not think it is just drought. There is drought. I will show you that any moment. And i think it is Everything Else as well because we know that there are earthquakes, other invaders and so on and so forth. I think it is a multitude of factors and hopefully i will be able to show that. What i want to talk to you today is we started out going through some of the evidence that we have got. For instance, let me just give you this as kind of a fun and interesting example. We are in the bronze age. The bronze age starts at about 3000 bc. That is the early bronze age was that we are in the late bronze age at this time post of some of the may know that to take bronze you take tin and copper. 90 copper, 10 tin and you make bronze was up by the way, if you do not have any tin available, you can use arsenic as well, although i do not recommend it. You would have a very short lifespan. The copper in antiquity come from many places, but the main one was cyprus at this time, so tin most of it is coming from afghanistan. There is some evidence that they might have gone up to cornwall occasionally, but the vast majority is coming from modernday afghanistan, and so some of the scholars that have have shownis this in the written tablets. Mari,s a tablet from which is on the euphrates in mesopotamia, and there they say th a mina to the interpreter, so someone was multilingual back then. If you take a look and you see these trade routes that are mariging the tin over to and then over to crete, if those were cut at any time, you are in a lot of trouble. One of my hollies, carol bell, over in england, has said the acquisition of tin and thereby bronze was as concerning to the egyptian pharaoh as the acquisition of oil is today to the u. S. President and to all of us. Some of you probably remember the gas lines back in the 1970s, . Right . I remember those will stop that is what wouldve happened if those trade routes had fallen and they could not get tin anymore. Iron is going to take over after that. That is what happens when something that is necessary is now gone and something comes in and takes its place, so we have evidence for International Trade routes, and i think you will agree with me that getting from afghanistan all the way to fairlyand crete is significant back then even as it is today. But we have also got other evidence, which for me is fascinating. The stories of the ancient world just come to life for me for stop that is what i love about them. Here we have for example in those same mari tablets, we have been saying they are importing weapons made out of gold that are made in a minoan style and these are being sent all the way over to ancient mesopotamia. My absolute favorite are these. In those same letters, it says that a pair of leather shoes probably sandals made in the minoan style were brought to the king of avalon, but they were returned by him. [laughter] why would he return these shoes . I have no idea. Did they not fed . Fit . D they not were they so last millennium . [laughter] if i were him, i would have kept it in regifted it. Some of the other things i could show, i could go on literally for hours, but other people need this space will stop let me whiz through a couple of these just to give you an example of the internationalization. Their version of globalization in the ancient mediterranean that we have got, and then i will go to some of the causes for the collapse and see what you think. Tshepsut,ooking at ha the famous female pharaoh. She was more interested in peaceful mercantile trading, and so here, this is a depiction of down,nding in expedition and they show us what everybody look like, even the queen down at the bottom there. The problem is we did not know where it is. It is suggested to be in ethiopia or yemen or elsewhere, and just recently researchers looking at monkeys and baboons assay this is coming from or ethiopia. And number of egyptian pharaohs are trading back and forth, but this gives you some idea of the International Trade, and the tomb paintings inside the egyptian nobles tombs are even better. This is a division of a trade embassy coming from greece. The people carrying the stuff are somewhere in the aegian. In the they are dressing objects they are actually holding are coming from the edgy and the way over to egypt. With that other people carrying things like bibles had, which are very typically minoan, so we know there is trade going backandforth in the time of hatshepsut and moses the third. To go backneed to see what collapse. My favorite guy, hotep the third. How many of you guys have seen these . Absolutely amazing. 60 feet tall, and their guarding the front of a temple that is now gone. It was quarried and rob bell by later pharaohs for their own uses, but what most people dont need is the hide inside where the temple used to be are a line, actually about 40 of them now they found of slightly statues,an lifesize maybe 10 feet tall or so, and on each of these, they have list of names of foreign places, and i just give you this one as an example, because this is known ofthe aegean list, a list names of places from greece will stop on one side you have mainland greece and on the other side you have crete, and then running around the side of the all kindss like of places that belong to the andans and the mycenaeans, it looks like it he go to those actual site, you find objects iii orlong to amenhoteph his wife. A randomar this is not list. I think this is an embassy full stop basically how do you get to greece from egypt and back again . We have things like plaques with his name on it, vessels with iiis name. Weve have scarabs with his name or his wifes name. This is not quite usual. In fact, if we plot this on the map the weighty sites go, it really does look like you are going from egypt to create all the way up to mainland greece, then back down to crete. There is one site that appears twice was a bit is one of the first ones and one of the last ones, and i see this as the bathroom stop. Are we there yet . Can we stop for food, water, and the bathroom . The first thing you did when you get to crete is stop, and of course it is the last stop before 23 more miles or whatever it is that we have on the new jersey turnpike, so i do think this is a record of a geographical itinerary. Bear in mind this is about we actually do have evidence of ships that were making journeys back then. Ship sank off the coast of turkey. A m been excavated by texas. 1980sere divers in the and 1990s, and on this ship are there remains from seven different cultures. It shows the international and cosmopolitan nature at the time. About 300s mostly is ingots of solid, pure copper. Has raw things from elsewhere. We have in the ancient records room about this time we have one guy, the king of cyprus, who apologizes and says, im only sending you 200 pallets of copper 200 talents of copper. Shipnot writing about this but another wouldnt, and it gives you an idea of what theyve got. Glass, ancient glass, rock glass. Ivory and various other things. All kinds of Raw Materials including resin that you could use in perfume. We not actually sure this is the ship belonging to a private merchant or whether it was a gift from the king. I can tell you one thing when it went down that dark and stormy night, somebody lost a fortune, and they did have insurers back then, so i hope this guy was insured. That gives you some idea of what weve got. Other things that we got from here there is a letter from north coast of syria, and this one letter says a man fromng exempts tax, basically. Beer, his olive oil to the palace he shall not deliver. The ship is exempt when it comes to crete, so again, youve got tax breaks for the wealthy back then. [laughter] things dont change. Happensapse what here . Everything i have just painted a picture i have to tell you i had great fun writing what i consider to be stories of the ancient world. You may get lost among the ancient names of the rulers and places, so we have a glossary at the back, and you can impress your friends and neighbors by memorizing those. At it all goes away by 1200, little after, and thats what i spend the next couple of chapters talking about. One of the things that weve got letters again, and you can see the little red circle on the north coast of turkey almost up near sorry, in syria almost up near turkey, and we got a number of archives from houses,. Ostly upperlevel one of the letters reads and i know its too small for you to see, so let me read it out loud. It says my father, now the ships of the enemy have come. They have been setting fire to my cities and have done harm to the land. Doesnt my father know that all of my infantry and my territory are stationed away and all of my ships are stationed in the land of lukka . Theyve not arrive back, and the land is thus prostrate. Its under attack. The seven ships of the enemy which have been coming here have done harm to us. If there are others coming, send me a report. It was long reported in the literature that this was found in a kiln and was being baked before it had been sent, and that in fact the city had been destroyed before it could be sent. More recently analysis has shown it was not in a kiln. It was in a basket on the second floor and it fell and turned upside down, which gave it the shape and its probably a copy of a letter that to the question as to whom the ships belong, and that we cannot be sure. The question is who exactly are the sea peoples . The one relief that weve got, and i alluded to it at the beginning of this presentation. This is the mortuary temple of iii. Es he tells us on this wall as hes got pictures and a text, and he says as follows the Foreign Countries made a conspiracy in their lands. All at once, they were removed from the fray. He is describing the sea peoples that are coming in, and he even names them. Our problem is that we do not know where most of these people come from or where they go to. The inscription keeps going. Hes got pictures of them. These are what they look like. In the end, we really do not know where they come from. Theres no city you could point to where they either came from or they ended up, so people have played linguistic games with se, and one of the groups they say the shard on a, so they say it sounds like sardinia, so thats probably where they came from. You can see they are guessing, basically. These are probably the philistines, and the bible says they come from crete, which would work in here, but to be honest, we are not quite sure where these people go or where they come from. In fact, its possible that rather than coming from sardinia, that thats where they went after they were defeated, and they gave the name there. The upshot is that we are not really sure about many of these people. The one group would be the philistines. Remainshave found there up and down the coast, especially in what is now modernday israel. Though theres nine of them all told. Its not just like vikings. As part of the drawings that ramses the third has left us on the wall, he shows us families, and he says they are coming in ox carts. This is a migration, not just viking raids, as i have said. Dontoblem is that i think they alone could have caused the collapse of everything. Theres been lots of raiders, lots of activities in the middle east including today, and usually, people survive in the end. I think that it was more than just the sea peoples. In fact, like i said at the beginning, i think maybe they are part of what is happening, not necessarily the cause for it. For instance, theres evidence now for drought. This has been a theory that has been around for about 60 years in archaeology. It was suggested that maybe the bronze age had ended because of drought, but he was never able to prove it. In the last three years alone, there have been four separate studies that have shown that there was drought starting in about 1250 bc, and there was, if you want to call it that, Climate Change back then. Its not manmade, obviously. The hittites are not driving suvs. Im well aware of that, but you do not need humans to have Climate Change. Climate chance happens again and again and again. The question is can you survive it . In their case, i do not think they could. We had one study that focused in on north syria. They are doing pollen analysis here, and they can show that the climate is getting drier, more arid. There was a similar study done on cyprus, that it was also affected at about this time. Another study was done with three or four separate parts to it, showing, for instance, that the surface of the Mediterranean Sea is changing at that time, which results in less rain on the greek mainland and, again, would in the fourth drought. And then, the most recent has. Een done by israel they were working by the sea of galilee and the dead sea, and they also came up with proof that there was a drought there for about 100 or 100 50 years. I think drought is definitely one of the factors, and, of course, the media took this and ran with it. Ou got the l. A. Times here Climate Change may have caused the demise of late bronze age civilization. The New York Times following it as well. Everybody got into the big Climate Change debate a couple of months ago. But i do not think that was all there was. With drought comes famine, of course. If you cannot get enough to eat because all your plants are dead, that will affect you as well. We know from the textual. Vidence that there was famine this, for example, is a letter from a guard which dates to about 1185. It is sent by a city in inland syria, and they say there is famine in our house. We will all die of hunger. If you do not quickly arrive, we ourselves will die of hunger. You will not see a living soul from your land. To me, at least, that seems pretty clear there was famine going on. We also have a letter from the king, again on the north coast of syria. He is sending it to an unidentified recipient, and he here with me, plenty has become famine. I think thats pretty clear evidence there was famine back then. I do not know if this was exaggeration or not, but again, definitely evidence for famine. We also have evidence for the cutting of trade routes at this time. Remember i was saying that if the trade route was cut off, they would be in a great deal of trouble. Here, one of the last letters arrived, the army was already humiliated, and the city was sad. Our food from the threshing floors was burned and the destroyed. Ere also our city is sacked. May you know it. That was it for the city. We have evidence for innovators, not only textual, but also archaeological. There was a sight which was excavated again up in north syria, and there, they have found arrowheads in the walls and brick layers of destruction. Its very obvious the city was destroyed by warfare, but we do have a problem. In the past, everybody would have said that was the sea peoples. Its the right time in the right place, and i would say not so much theres actually no evidence for sure. In what is today israel, we know that it was destroyed. These are all mud bricks you are seeing that have been baked orange and black and brown from the heat of the fire. The problem is even though we know it is destroyed, we do not know who did it. Ven the codirectors are split some of the possible culprits are in egypt ands or canaanites or israelites or our friends the eternal , or internal rebellion. Even when we have destruction, we do not always know what caused it. In some cases, though, its quite clear. When you have a site destroyed by an earthquake, then we frequently know it. If the whole city is destroyed and you do not have arrowheads, its pretty much sure that its Mother Nature that destroyed it. For instance, here, we have a map of most of the sites that are destroyed in the aegean and Eastern Mediterranean at the end of the late bronze age. If you overlay this on top of a map where earthquakes have happened just in the last century, you can see that almost all of the sites are in the earthquake zones. If you have earthquakes there now, you had them back then. One might suggest that a number of the destructions are caused not by humans but by Mother Nature. In fact, the faultlines run throughout this area. Theres the north anatolian fault line, another series that goes down through greece. One comes right up to the rift valley through the dead sea and jericho, and it may be that a number of earthquakes occurred here. In fact, we do see that there are a number of destructions between about 1225 and 1175 where the site does seem to have been destroyed by earthquakes. This happens in, like, and earthquake storm where the fault runs it is. It is a known phenomenon. If an earthquake does not release all the tension, another one will happen next to it, a little bit later, and youll get the fault line unzipping, usually in about 15 years. We have seen this in turkey over the past 50 or 60 years. I was suggest we probably have some sort of earthquake storm back then as well. Frequently, it is easy to tell. These are fallen column drums and all that. This was where i thought, wait a minute, why would anybody build their city directly on top of a faultlines . Wait a minute, yeah, san francisco. In fact, there are dead bodies from this time where in this case, this poor unfortunate woman was killed by a rock landing on her head. She is in the basement of her house. You can see that that wall it is not supposed to look like that. Trust me, its not supposed to be that way the. We also have earthquakes at this time. All of this,with what i think we have got is as follows we have a number of separate civilizations that are flourishing during the late bronze age that is 15th of their 10th centuries, and these include people that are minoans, mycenaeans, hittites, egyptians, babylonians, syrians, canaanites, cypriots, all of our friends from the late bronze age. They are independent but interacting with each other, especially through International Trade routes. Its also clear that many of the cities are destroyed and that civilization, as they knew it, basically came to an end in about the year 1177. I chose that year because that iiihe year that ramses records these sea peoples coming through. The collapse takes about a but 1177 is al, good, almost, like a bookmark, shall we say. For instance, the fall of rome is 476, right equity line its actually not. Its about a century that rome falls, but four 76 is our shorthand. I would say here that 1177 is shorthand for the collapse at the late bronze age. The problem is there is really no proof for who did it or what did it. There are a number of scholarly publications that today suggest it is a linear progression. They say that a drought again caused famine, which caused the sea peoples, which cause them to cut the trade routes, and i would argue that it was not that linear, that the reality was much, much messier. In fact, i think what we can say is that there probably was not one single driving force. Its not the sea peoples. Its a number of Different Things droughts, famine, earthquakes, invaders, rebellions. You could survive a drought, fine. Look at the 1930s and the dust you can survive earthquakes. You can survive invaders. But what if they all take place at the same time . Giveits like, oy, i up. We have almost a domino situation where when one falls, the next one false, too, because they are all dependent on each other. If the mycenaeans go, it destabilizes the situation, and what we wind up with is a systems collapse. Collapses. Ystem you have Central Administration going away. You have the traditional elite going away. The central economy goes away, and then there is a population decline, but out of that, after you have, like, and ensuing dark age for a while, new things come on up, and you got basically a Phoenix Rising up from the ashes. Even though the civilizations of the late bronze age and, out of them come out of their ashes come people like the israelites in the era mans and the phoenicians, and then even the greeks, the athenians, and the spartans. They were able to establish themselves because of the power vacuum that happened. All of a sudden, they were able to move in. Out of this, we get new ideas. The out of that, monotheistic religion, and eventually, democracy. The way i would phrase it is out with the old and in with , and the new includes lots and lots of good things. In the end, ive concluded that sometimes it does take a largescale wildfire to help when are the ecosystem of an oldgrowth forest and allow it to thrive afresh, and i think thats what weve got here. Thank you. [applause] ive got a question here. I think there is actually a. Arallel with california im just wondering if the droughts in california have any parallels and if it will have a Ripple Effect because of the overall greater economy of the world and some of the droughts. I wondered if you could drop a parallel between what you are talking about in the parallel in california. I think theres a definite possibility. When you have a drought, you never know what will happen. The one thing i would point out, one of the differences is that we are fully aware of what is going on. We may even know what is causing it. Im not so sure that they completely understood what was going on, so we have the advantage in a way of looking at this and realizing the Ripple Effects. We know that this is a possibility, we will take steps to go and somehow make sure it does not collapse our civilization, but there are parallels between back then and now. Obviously, its a very different type of society today, but i would suggest that maybe we see what happened to them and realize that every civilization has collapsed for one reason or another and we are probably not going to be immune. Especially as an ancient historian, i look everywhere i can for clues as to what can help us move forward. If its droughts in california or whatever, i still say one needs to learn from the lessons of the past. Am curious if you read sm thelings novel in which presentday island of nantucket and if so,1250 bc, what he got right and wrong. I have not read that. I had not heard of it. I will go and read it now. Thank you. Its called island in the ea of time or co time. Theres a bunch of sequels, too. Im interested in how nefertitis empire was impacted by drought. Did you look at that in your studies . Would say he is brought to an end by other things, especially internal rebellion and all that. There are evidences that droughts and famines are starting as early as this time, but i do not think we can attribute that to his fall. I think its more that he pretty off everybody with his religious things. What is happening here has already begun back then. We can see it in the text. Short comment and then a question on selfawareness. I think we are aware that occurring, butis we as a world civilization continue doing what weve done and not doing very much to combat that. Referredion is you as a peripheral topic to the exodus. My understanding is that theres archaeological evidence for the exodus. I wonder if you could comment on that. Sure, commenting on whether there is archaeological evidence for the exodus. [laughter] we could be here all afternoon. The short answer is there is not evidence yet, but that does not mean there will not be. So far, we have nothing that points to the exodus, though in the book i talk about it, but i do point this out. 1250 bc is probably about the only time it could possibly have happened if it does, but we have yet to find anything for it whatsoever. I was wondering how did you get interested in anthropology and archaeology . What is your advice to people who are interested . Great question. How did i get interested in archaeology its my mothers fault. Nd it was a book my mother gave me a book when i was seven. All about finding troy, and i Just Announced that i was going to be an archaeologist. My mother said, thats great eat. Re cothats gr my father said, no, youre going to be a doctor. [laughter] theres been no looking back. It has been tough. Its hard to get a job in archaeology. Thats what i would say. If its the one thing you love, than absolutely go for it, but be aware you will probably be eating rice and beans in your parents basement at some point. I say that kind of half joking, and i had one of my recent graduates of a couple of years ago who wrote to me and said that he was eating a tortilla in basement. S i wrote him back. If you want to going to archaeology, i would heartily recommend it. Just be aware that you will not be wealthy, probably not be famous or anything, but you will be doing what you love, and i do think that excavating our past history is an amazing thing. I go out and excavate every summer. I had to do that i helped codirect. I bring my students with me every summer, and, you know, playing in the sand pit is just absolutely amazing. If you want to go for archaeology, go for it. Just be prepared not to have any money. [laughter] to thankhat, i want you for doing so much of the work so we can enjoy the research. All the physical evidence of what happened, military and so forth. Is there a way to take a look back and understand political movements, cultural attitudes . The problem with things like certainwe are, to a extent, at the mercy of the text, what is left to us by the written evidence, and its very hard. For equally, those things do not leave their mark in the archaeological record. If they have written about it, yes, we can, but otherwise, we are quite literally at the mercy of the epigraphic old evidence, the written evidence. Sometimes we can figure it out, and sometimes we cannot. As someone once said, love does not leave a mark in the archaeological record. I think politics might be the same upon occasion. Chance we will see some blockbuster discovery in the coming century or next year . Always. You never know what is going to happen tomorrow. Thats the beauty of archaeology. Thank you very much. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014]. Live coverage of the 2014 National Book festival continues. Indoors at the Washington Convention center. At thesespan, we are science pavilion all day. Over on cspan2, book to be, coverage of the history pavilion. Complete coverage all day on the cspan networks. Just go to www. Cspan. Org or booktv. Org. Coming up, david sibley talks about the latest addition of the sibley guide to birds and michio kaku talks about his book the future of the mind. After our book festival coverage, looking ahead to programming later this evening, tonight we will bring you armour president jimmy carter speaking Islamic Society in detroits. 9 30is airing tonight at eastern, here on cspan. Before that, we will bring you a. Ebate from a bbc scotland the debate over whether scotland should end its Political Union with england in an upcoming referendum vote scheduled for september 18. You can watch that tonight. 8 00 onte starts at cspan. Heres a preview while we wait pavilionext book speaker. I want to go back to currency though. On sunday, i read in the you made a better twist on explaining what your plan b is. Off you go. Tell me. [cheering] let me try again. Think that having the currency arrangement, sharing the pound is best for scotland and best for the rest of the United Kingdom for the reasons i have said. A bs. E are also the 3 plan it affects the Exchange Rate norway and denmark have. We cannot you stop from using the currency anyway. [applause] we have three plan bs, alastair. Not 1, 3. The currency is the foundation of our economy. It is the foundation of what we have to to save the value of our money, our into straight. Ask yourself what is your plan b . You must have a plan b. This is incredible. [applause] i can explain the options in great detail. Adamant in you so concluding what is best for scotland i am seeking a mandate, a mandate from the people here, a mandate from the people at home, so we can go win with the will of the scottish people to go win with a common sense, common currency. [indiscernible] all i am asking you is, just as bos just suppose for one moment you do not get a currency union. Are we going to have our own currency . Are we going to end up like panama . One of your top advisers said that we might have a panamanian solution, using a currency for six months. I do not want to be like panama for six minutes. An independent scotland would be the first country in history where as you described all of the currency options are wrong. I am the first minister. I want to go when with a clear mandate from the scottish people. You have been asked a number of times. If you win the referendum, i will accept the results. Will you campaign for scotland [applause] results. Accept the but some of the papers going out the day after tomorrow, people want to know what is going to happen to the money they have got . What currency are they going to have . Just answer the question. The problem is and you admitted it in this program. We cannot be stopped from using the pound. I think there will be a currency union, because if you go down the road of denying us access, you end up stuck with all of the debt. Debt, incidentally, which it you and me, chancellor managed to accumulate 60 . Will you be prepared to support the sovereign will of the scottish people if they win the referendum . [indiscernible] i want answers from the first minister. Clearly so [indiscernible] let me just ask you about another plan b. We talked earlier about the fact that revenues were 5 billion pounds less than you expected last year, which was less than we spent on the schools budget. When youre in the u. K. , that can be dealt with. If you are an independent country and you have lost the equivalence of your schools budget, how to make up the gas the gap . , one rider said there is no black hole in the scottish governments estimates. How will you roll it out . They gave that estimate last week. Alastair, when you were the chancellor of the exchequer, you had a forecast that turned out to be 11 billion [indiscernible] what you do with this enormous Natural Resources when you are having a decrease, you use that. If you have lost 6 billion pounds of revenues because production goes down, how do you make up the difference . When you have lost that much in one year . Production is going up, alastair. That is why Oil Companies have invested 30 billion euros in scotland this year. [indiscernible] nobody can hear if you talk over one another. Investment ishat offset against revenues, but we know as we know, it is 80 . We know that north Sea Oil Production because of a u. K. Subsidy, a u. K. Subsidy that is going into decommissioning. I am asking you as an independent scotland if you suddenly lost revenues, the equivalent of everything we spend on schools, have what we spend on the Health Service in just one year, how are you going to make that up . Alastair, that is exactly why we put forward be fun for stabilization. [indiscernible] everybodyknows knows scotland has spent more than it has brought in. That is not true. It is true. The last five years relative to the United Kingdom, scotland was 8 billion pounds better off. Alastair, you know that. [indiscernible] you are spending more than you are bringing in. Can you allow me a minute to get another question then . Sure. Am asking you if you are hit with the 6 billion pounds lost the studies that you quote with approval in your white paper, how would you find that . Will you raise taxes . Cut services . Professional studies have shown that scotland will be a prosperous economy if it is independent. You have 150 billion pounds [indiscernible] we are putting a hold [indiscernible] [gavel pntdown ounds] [applause] you now have eight minutes to cross examine alistair darling. Alastair, how many children in scotland is it estimated that will move into poverty by 2020, sven that the u. K. Government welfare spending cuts . Too many children are moving into poverty. When i was in government it depends on what the government policy czar, but policies are, but how many is the estimate of the children. There are too many children living in poverty. Extra children0 in scotland moving into poverty with the welfare reforms. Do you think that is a price worth paying . I do not agree with the present governments welfare policy. I am a labor politician l abour politician. Labour party said they would continue the policies of the tory government. 100,000 would be affected by the welfare reforms. We have got a lot of birds down there. Some of which i recognize. Some of which i think i recognize. Better which i have a idea of what they are. I put this in my jacket pocket as i walked through the field. When i spot an interesting bird, i can pull it out and go, what is that . That is a chickadee. Dont you know anything . [laughter] then i would put the book back in my pocket until i started the next tour. Would be annoying to david. Fortunately though, we have a book, handy david sibley which is the sibley guide to in 2000. Hich came out many of you know it. If you havent, it is available. Be with usfor him to in humans and teach us more about his flying friends. We can have no better expert. First a brief legal matter. Being videotaped for subsequent broadcast on the librarys website and other media. The audience is encouraged to ask questions, but please be advised your voice and image may be recorded and then broadcast. This is starting to some like the nsa, isnt it . You are consenting to the librarys reproduction and transmission of your remarks. If this idea terrifies you, you may want to consider hiding under your chair during the q a session. Please welcome david sibley. [applause] thank you. It is a pleasure to be here. What a great crowd. Thank you all for coming indoors. Ok. How is that . Is that better . Thank you all for coming indoors on a beautiful summer afternoon. Aboutere to talk to you my book about birds. I started birdwatching when i was very young. There we go. And my father is an ornithologist, so that probably has something to do with my early interest in birds, but for as long as i can remember, i enjoy drawing and i enjoyed birds, and the two things would together perfectly. Drawing is just a great way to learn about something, and there is so much to learn about birds. For me, birding and drawing have always been one thing, a combination i could never separate. This is a drawing of a peregrine in 1969, when i was about eight years old. It is copied from one of my fathers books. This is me at age 13. My father, being an ornithologist, could offer many opportunities like bird banding. I learned bird banding when i was very young. When i look back, it is one of aspects ofimportant my early bird studies. The opportunity to hold a bird in your hand, to feel it. It is so much richer than looking at it through binoculars. Part of my Early Birding experience was old thing the birds in my hand, feeling them. The incredible amount of life and energy packed into that little tiny body, and they are so small. His is a sharp tailed sparrow it probably weighs 13 grams, half an ounce. So, put that in perspective. You could put two in an envelope and mail them anywhere for one staff. [laughter] some are much smaller, six grams, five grams. Imagine fitting five in an envelope for one stamp. Of feelingerience theenergy, the life, seeing birds up close and being able to release them and watch them file flyaway was really magical. Also early on, i had an interest in books, or at least gathering information and compiling. This was an early example of a book project i worked on as a teenager. Edition ofimited one. [laughter] and colora typewriter pencils and glue and photographs. Was the one constant in my birding experience. I always had a sketchbook. Itried to draw the birds that saw. Drawing is really just a way to focus your attention. For me, that is what it was. My drawing is always been about information. Scientificeal, true illustration. Looking at a bird like this, this is the first white winged cross tail i had ever crossbill i have ever seen. On, but inf and move order to do this relatively sketch, just a pencil outline with a few details added in, there are hundreds of questions i had to ask. I sometimes describe sketching as being like an interview with the bird. It is a structure that forces you to ask those questions, to look more carefully, to wonder and ask what is the shape of the head . Relative tohe bill the head . What shape is the eye . All of those questions then get translated into pencil, lines on the paper. It is really all about the process, looking carefully and asking those questions and learning those things. Once you have gone through all the steps, you really know what that bird looks like. Thewhen people ask me about sketching and how to draw birds, i think it is really just about observation and practice and each sketch is just practice for the next one. Of the best bits of advice i can give for sketching is to think of just think of sketching as something youre never going to look at again. It is all about learning. You are not producing something you are going to hang on the wall. It is not going to be your christmas card. You learn something from it and your next scheduled be better enter next one after that. Is a photograph of me sitting in the back of a friends car in maine, and i am sketching a northern hawk owl. I will start with the first northern hawk owl i ever saw, which was within a few weeks of the white winged crossbill. You will notice the similarity in the style of sketching. I was about 13 years old. S was one that we saw watched it for a few minutes, watched it on a family trip, and then we drove away. I did these sketches in the car as we were leaving, just to have something to remember it by. , i had justlater finished college after almost a and i decided to go birdwatching fulltime. So, i left college. This is the beginning of my fulltime birdwatching. And sketching. So, this hawk owl was wintering in portland, maine, and this is the first sketch i did on this day, just testing out some lines, testing out ideas for how to draw it. This is practice. Later that day, after a series sketches, so other several hours of watching and sketching, i am starting to get a better understanding of what a looks likehawk owl and how to draw. I went back three days later and spent several more hours with the same hawk owl. I did this. This is like the indepth interview. This is really looking at the bird, asking every question i could think of, really getting to know it. As an exercise, to spend an hour or so on one sketch. After that, after learning through that sketch, i was able to do this kind of sketch, which thets, now that i have got basics, the fundamentals of the hawk owl in my mind, i could start to do sketches that capture some of the movement, the character, the overall shape with just a few lines and experiment with more subtle things. , and i spentater those seven years basically birdwatching and sketching fulltime, traveling all across the country, living in a camper van, learning as much as i could about birds and drawing. This is one of the drawings i did sitting in the back of my friends car in maine. Is actually a very unusual field sketch for me. This is very detailed. It is really a finished pencil drawing. Part of that is that hawk owls make fantastic subjects for drawing, because those of you who have seen hawk owls know that they just sit still. They sit on one branch. Flagpole. Sit on a one really prominent perch, and they will stay there for hours. You can set the telescope on it, work on your sketch, looked back, and the bird will still be there. Ist of my field sketches will show are more like this. Very quick pencil drawings, from the gulf is of maine. What this represents is probably 45 minutes of watching and maybe five minutes of actually putting a pencil on paper. There is a tremendous amount of just looking and five minutes of looking and then some very quick scribbling on the paper, testing some things out. Look at the bird some more, look to be sketch, look of the birds, look of the sketch, figure out what is wrong, what i need to change, and then do a little more scribbling. So, this is a typical field sketch. This is another, more recent typical field sketch. People often ask me how i can draw a bird in the wild when it is the largest uc them, and a so hard when it is just to see them, and a subject ithese hooded warblers can stand on the path and watch and most of the time there would be one bird in view. They were coming and going on the path. But this again is probably 15 or 20 minutes of watching and just 90 seconds maybe of actual drawing. More of the time involved in a sketch is observation observation and thinking about what im going to be drawing. These sketches built on everything i know from the past. All of the warblers i have done before, all of the songbirds i have drawn before are helping me to draw this. It would beusician, like practicing chords. I have practiced my courts and i know how to play the notes and which ones fit together in which sequence, so i can look at a piece of music, look at the bird, and quickly scribbled down the fundamentals. So, that is one way each sketch helps to inform the next one. So, this is one of my more detailed and more scientific field sketches. This is two species of hummingbirds. If i were going to produce a field guide to the identification of these two species of hummingbirds, this is the only illustration that would be needed. But this sketch, this outline shows all of the details that are keys to identifying the species. And any other information that i added to this would distract from the important information, which is the shape of the bill, the proportions of head to body and head to tail, the shape of the wings, the length of the neck. Those are the details you really need to look at. Adding color and shading and all of this sort of flash for this would distract from the important details that you need to identify the birds. Thinking really helps me when i was planning my field guide. Which i spent years thinking about the guide and planning it, and one of the important points i came up with was the more simplified the illustration can get theeasier it is to information that you need out of them. So i deliberately set out after eriod of trial and error, i set out on simplifying the drawings as much as i could isthat the information that in there is just the information that is really key to identifying those species. Walkere is i will through the process of doing one of the paintings that is in the guide. In the field,s watching and sketching birds, when i go back in the studio, i start working on the actual paintings. All i do in the field is pencil on taper. On paper. Queen charlotte sub species of starlet owl. Lebegan with a very simp pencil outline. This is the first step. I had already added four or five layers of paint to it, these translucent layers of eight and i added a watercolor. I started the painting, adding layers and gradually building up the color and the detail of the entire painting. So, i will go through a series and youfive slides, will see they will gradually build up. I am adding a little bit more death, a little more detail, starting i am adding a little a little more, detail, starting to add starting to add more light around the face. Finally be finished painting. Gradually building up layers of paint over the entire bird. I was a min there we go. Zooming in, the original paintings i did for the guide are three times as big as the reproductions you see in the book. They are much larger. When you look closely, they are not really very detailed. There is a level of precision, but not a lot of detail. Large brush, i use quick brushstrokes. All of this i sort of developed to work more quickly. This is the second part of the guide. It shows the outline a began with and at the bottom the finished painting. Secondset out to do the edition of the book, i have all of the original art from the First Edition, so here are three pages from the First Edition showing several species of dubs. Each of dobbs. Each big sheet of paper shows all of the illustrations that i expect to appear on the page in the book. And i looked at i went through and worked on every one of those pages, every single shape and checked it. Most of them i made some minor touch ups. Some of them i made major corrections. I was looking through and updating most of the artwork from the First Edition and then toing new illustrations supplement that, a new species for the second edition. In the original First Edition, when i was painting these full plates, i would work on the entire page at once, where i show these solid owl building up gradually layers of paint on that one image. I would work on each of the eight or 12 images on a sheet of paper all at once. Pain greyt paint for the shadows. Mix some reddish brown color, and that Assembly Line process allowed me to work more quickly. It was more efficient. On a good day i could finish one whole sheet. About an hour per illustration is what it takes me to do the paintings in the book. Some species take longer. More details or more intricate patterns. Some, like rose, take a lot less. [laughter] crows, take a lot less. [laughter] do not have a lot of patience for painting. Sorry. Wow. Our techniques for speeding up painting process, making it more efficient and getting results quickly so i can feel like i am actually moving forward, taking another step toward the top of the mountain. When i finished the First Edition of the guide to birds in 2000, i did a couple of other bird projects, and then i decided i was interested in another big rod checked project. My childhood, my interest in books, compiling information. I wanted a project that was not birds that would give me a lot of the same challenges. I settled on trees, and i did a guide to trees, which was published six years ago. And i found that trees are , in termsurprisingly of nature study, maybe the one that is most similar to bird study. If you think about other aspects groups of organisms in the Natural World and studying you want to study butterflies, in this part of the world there are only butterflies around for half of the year. A lot of the species require a tremendous effort to find. They are in very local places. The only fly at certain times of the year. If you want to study, say, reptiles and amphibians, you have to go in the woods and really search for them. Mammals, you have to go out at night. Trees are the two kinds of organisms that are around us all the time. We see them from office windows. We see them from the bus. Everywhere you turn, there are birds. They are outside your kitchen window. Birds and trees. For me, that was really important for my next project, to have something i could study during the course of my everyday life. It is something i can use constantly. That is how i ended up doing the guide to trees. The rewards of that were very similar to what i think are some of the rewards of bird study. Me, a lot of it is understanding patterns. How they are similar as well as dissimilar. Elder is as, the box maple. It is in the same genus. A maple. G about it is except it has the same leaves. A lot of guides to treatment and thetion will put it in section with ashes and walnuts and other species that have compound leaves, but Everything Else about it is a maple. This learning about tree these threeon species in this picture, and i am sure i am sorry if you cannot see very well from the back. On the left is a birch and on the right is in aspen. In the winter, the easiest way to tell them apart is by their twigs. Once you learn that, you realize distinguishou to all of the birches from the aspens and poplars. Delicatee arches have tway examined all of the aspens and poplars have thicker to eggs. Twigs. These are patterns that i have learned through all of the species. They have the same number of lines and streaks on their breast, the same number of rows of feathers. The patterns are determined by the arrangement of the feathers. Exact sameve the arrangement of feathers. It is only the markings on the feathers that are different. The birchest like and aspens, as a beginning birder, you might learn the difference between herons and cranes. They are both big, longnecked birds, and until you pick up a bird mind, a bird guide, you do not notice. But they are fundamentally different. Aside from the color and their overall shape and size, their behavior, their food, theyre boys, theyre flocking, their flight here it everything about them is fundamentally different. And their attitude as well. Could easilyrons take on [laughter] the other aspect of bird watching i really enjoy is the ,ay it connects me to history to the bigger picture. Short and longterm history. We have birds constantly coming and going. The birds that were around a few have ago, some species already migrated to south america, Central America and will not be back until next april. There is constant movement. The woodpeckere in this area 30, 40 years ago when i was starting birding, mostly in connecticut, it was a rare bird then. There just werent that many big trees around. A lot of farmland has current back to forest. A lot of these suburbs have mature trees. There are a lot of 60, 70, now,arold trees out there growing in our suburbs and parks and forests and a lot of philly headed woodpeckers. Changes like that happening constantly. Species declining, species increasing, ranges shifting. Birdwatching constantly exciting and interesting. Migration, like the warbler, the constant excitement for bird watchers what is going to happen next . What is coming tomorrow . , they dos i like trees not quite match that excitement of birdwatching. [laughter] thedy ever woke up in morning to look out in their yard or their kitchen window and wondered what trees they would see in their yard. Those of you with bird feeders probably looked out the window every morning and wonder what kind of birds will be there. It is that discovery that makes birdwatching so exciting and engaging. Along with the academic challenge of identifying them, the pleasure of learning or figuring things out and seeing those patterns and the sense of understanding of the passage of time. But i think of birdwatching think as i birdwatching has become so much more popular in the last 40 years and it has grown tremendously in popularity. Morer lives have become and more disconnected from nature, we are in our offices and cars and houses. We do not experience nature the way our parents and grandparents did. Most of them were birdwatchers living on farms. They did not call themselves birdwatchers. They marked the change of seasons, the passage of time by the birds. They knew the songs. We do not have that as part of our daily lives anymore and birdwatching gives us the opportunity to do that, to get out of doors. An excuse. Ust it is the hook that gets us out there. It is the reason we set the 5 00 a. M. , and if it is raining to actually go out. But the reward is getting to see a sunrise, to see a migration of dragonflies, seeing a fox. All of the other things that happen while we are out there, is understanding that comes the reward of birdwatching. Birdwatching gives us these structured to get us out there to make that a part of our lives. I hope that the bird guards help to introduce you to that world. Yourelps to increase enjoyment of it. That would make me very happy, to know the guide was helping to get more people out of doors. Thank you. [applause] if anyone is brave enough or questions much. Nk you very i appreciated the art and the discussion. I wonder as many of us understand, we are in the middle and sixth extinction event the relation to biodiversity and the birds . Yeah, i have a slightly less pessimistic view of it all, as you might have gathered. I see a tremendous number of bird species increasing. Obviously what we need to worry species that are more specialized, the species wildrequire real, Natural Habitats. Those habitats are disappearing. Most of these species that are increasing our species like the frilly headed woodpecker, the canada goose, species that have adopted to human modified environments. They live in these suburbs now hundreds ofe thousands of square miles of suburbs for them to occupy. The species who require real Natural Habitats need our help. Each species is kind of a different story. That one of the things makes it so challenging. Each species requires a slightly different set of slightly different kind of help. Some of the Common Threads are our human rate of andumption of resources preserving land as open space and allowing it to be nature natural. Those are the two key issues that ross many, many different species. If we could get a handle on those, there would be a really Bright Future for all of the birds. Of speciesre a lot that are doing very well in our humanmodifieder environments. I wondered if you had had a nce to work with migratory Roger Tory Peterson and were by his approaches . Yeah, i got to meet him several times when i was a kid. I grew up in connecticut and he lived just 20 miles away. He had a tremendous influence on me. From actually and being there as a real person. I showed him my sketchbooks on a couple of meetings and he was very encouraging. Maybe his biggest influence was just sort of being there as an example to give me the idea that riding a bird guide was a viable career option a bird guide was a viable career option. [laughter] 13 years old,or people were talking about bird guides, and with my father being an ornithologist, hanging out with other birdwatchers on the weekends seem like seemed like everybody wrote bird guides. [laughter] it was just something people do. [laughter] you for the talk. Two questions that are slightly related, and very quick, i think. One is, do we assume the birds in your book are all birds you had seen . Almost all of them, yes. There were about eight species in the First Edition i had not. Een when i painted them i have not counted. I had a lot of rare species in the second edition. You really any bird wish you had seen so you could get it in the book . Oh, well, yes. Just one or two maybe . As a birder, i wished i had seen all of them. It is very difficult to paint them when i have not seen all of them. Building up the layers of paint over the whole bird, and i can kind of visualizing how it is going to end up or have a vision of the finished tainting as i am putting on each layer. But if i have not seen the bird, if i do not know it very well personally, it is harder for me to have a vision of where i am headed with the painting. So, i have to constantly be imparing photographs to what have painted, and it is a much more tedious, less intuitive. Rocess of painting i use photographs a lot for reference anyway, to make sure i am getting the details right, but for birds i know well, a lot of what i am painting is just what i visualize myself. Name a couple of species i am particularly anxious to see that i have not thrush, a aztec mexican species that has occurred in arizona quite a few times. I have missed it by 24 hours three or four times. Another it nests in the eastern atlantic, and it is seen every year now off Cape Hatteras in the gulfstream. But that is a pretty recent discovery. Thanks. Yes . I live on the Eastern Shore at the tip of the delmar peninsula. I do much of my birdwatching on my morning runs. I had a question the other day. Why is the egret white . Are brown water birds or gray. The egrets is so bright against the sky. I was just wondering what the reasoning for with that for that would be in terms of predation . There are many, many fascinating questions just like that. [laughter] waiting for someone to come along to try to answer it. It is interesting. Quite a few of the herons and egrets are white, and some have a white more for a dark morris. The same species. I do not actually know if anyone study tod, has done a see if there is a difference in i thinkey forage, or one of the theories i have heard is that white birds might be less visible to fish. Most of them are hunting fish that are below them in the water. The egrets net hanging out a white water, maybe neck will be harder for the fish to see. But there must be other times when dark plumage is better, or maybe it doesnt make any difference and there is some other reason i thought maybe it had to do with the colorblindness of some of the predators. I dont know. They cant see the whites. We dont know if it is something to help hide them from fish or pray or hide them from predators or maybe to make them more attractive to other egrets. Thank you. I will keep thinking on it. Hi. I do not mean to ask an embarrassing question, but in terms of the bird guides that are extant now, including yours, which is wonderful if you were a birder other than yourself and you wanted to get know three guides you there are photographic guides and different approaches. What do you think about the different approaches just generally to bird guides and can you give advice to those of us who are looking to purchase them, besides yours . [laughter] i have several books. [laughter] we dont know each other. Yeah, the debate over photos versus illustration will continue. To me, as i have described a little bit here, in the illustrations, i can emphasize the key points and strip away youreing else so they only seeing the information that is really important. And a photograph is just a complete record of that bird at that instance. Of a photograph is it shows you exactly what that bird looks like at that moment. Withld supplement my book a photographic field guide, and there are quite a few out there. A new one and new ones coming out all the time. I will not single one out. But there are some very good photographic guides. I will recommend actually, a book that really inspired me for the artwork was birds of europe. The 1990sished in by Princeton University press. Just fantastic artwork. It is not a fantastic field guide, but the artwork is just glorious. So that is i will recommend that for the artwork, and there is a newer book. A new book that just came out this year called rare birds of north america, published by princeton as well. Speciesers all of the that have been recorded in north america that arent included in my book. [laughter] covers over 800 species, but leaves out the very rarest of the rare, the species that have only been recorded three or four times or fewer. Get information on all of those, there is an excellent new book called rare birds of north america. Seguewould you say they your guide fory the birdwatcher. You want to see what five things are on that bird to identify it is such a bird, and he photographic guide is also helpful in that it looks like that . To have it is helpful the photograph. So once you think you have identified the bird, look at the photographic guide and see what does the photograph look like to have that multiple different viewpoints. My book includes my own particular vision of the species. My interpretation of what a robin looks like. Having multiple field guides is always a good idea to compare different artists interpretations or different photographs to get a broader picture of what that bird might look like. Thank you for justifying the spending the money on multiple field guides. You are welcome. Thank you. [applause] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] coverage of the 2014 the book festival continuing on cspan networks. Washington from the Convention Center. We are spending our afternoon in these science pavilion. If history or biography is your thing, you can check out our coverage on cspan2 and is and cspan radio. Complete coverage available on our website. You can go to www. Cspan. Org or booktv. Org. Moments, in a few scientist michio kaku discusses his book the future of the mind the scientific quest to understand, enhance, and empower the mind. Easternthe mind at4 25 Theodore George talking about his book untangling the mind. Author of the day will discuss her book the amazons the lives of warrior women across the ancient world. Our coverage continues on cspan. Shortly. Ku coming up until then, a portion of earlier americas a book on first woman in space, sally ride. [applause] you, joel. I have been a fan of joels work at the Washington Post for many years, and of course now i want to marry him. I am thrilled to be here. I love the library of congress. I love the Washington Post. I love the fact that there are so many book lovers in this room. Thank you all for coming. I am especially thrilled to be here to talk about a woman who really was a true american hero, a woman who made an enormous impact on our world and whose life is exactly the kind of inspiration that many of us , butust joels daughters many of us our craving for inspiration in these troubling times. Sally ride is a woman whose name is attached to several schools around the country. Her name is attached to an impact crater on the moon. And to an outer Space Science rv researchthe vessel be sally ride has been christened in california. A ship that will plow all the waters so scientists can ask floor. Posthumously, she was awarded the president ial medal of freedom by president obama. An played herself and episode of the tv show touched by an angel, and she threw out a worldt pitch at series game. She was regularly begged to take an office, any office. Down. Rned them all way too private to do such a public thing. One of her nasa colleagues once asked sally, what will it take you what will it take to get you to take the job of nasa administrator . Sally quipped she would indeed take the job if they moved it to california. [laughter] she was funny and mischievous and she was indeed my friend. While her real name was sally ride how does that happen . Inspiration for mustang sally, with its great chorus ride, sally, ride. Sung and it was chanted when she flew for the first time 31 years ago. My favoriteite sign down at the Kennedy Space center was on a bank marquee in cocoa beach on the strip, just south of the Kennedy Space center in florida. Giant marquee. For men and sally. The marquee read ride, sally ride, and you guys can tag along, too. [laughter] more to sally for liking was being knowledged by billy joel in his song we didnt start the fire. Remember that one . He ticked off the names of 60 figures. Sally ride came between wheel of fortune and heavy metal suicide. Sally heard it for the first time driving in her car and nearly drove off a cliff. Her good friend Billy Jean King told me that she would always turn up the volume to catch sally from name when it was on the radio. I have to tell you, i do the same thing. While why all the tributes and why all of the fuss about this extraordinary woman . Let me start with the cartoon. This was a cartoon published just after sally died. There were a number of cartoons commemorating her life and death in july 2012. The one i liked the best was a teenage girls bedroom a surprisingly neat teenage girls bedroom and it is bursting with science textbooks and physics and astronomy and there is a poster of the Space Shuttle and models of rocket ships all over the place. And the teenage girl with her ponytail is sitting at her desk looking at her computer, and on the monitor is sallys obituary. 19512012. Ly ride, there is a picture. The girls mom is standing behind her. The girl is talking with a look of shock on her face. It was not that sally died. It is the back story. And the caption is the girl wait. To her mom it reads, are you saying there was a time when there were not any women astronauts . So that is what this story is really about. Of course there was a time when there were not any women astronauts. Our glorious Space Program was a mens club only for the first 25 years. As a result, women like sally who were smart and adventurous just did not grow up with astronaut dreams. Sally certainly did not. The job was not available. What sally cared about was science. She loved science as a kid. She also cared a lot about tennis. She was about nine years old when her mom put a tennis racket in her hand for the first time. It turned out this incredibly lean and supple and athletic woman was a great tennis player. Wound up with lessons from a pro named alice marble, an accomplished tennis player. Sally played on the womens junior circuit. She won tournaments all over the country. She actually considered becoming a professional tennis player. Dropped out of college after a year and a half to give it a try and quickly figured out the combination of not being what she considered in the toptop and also all the practice it required, that led her to go right back to science. Later in life, people would say, what caused you not to be a professional tennis player . Sally would always answer, my forehand. [laughter] brilliantly. Ed she was a great pivoter. She would have been a terrific politician but was not interested and went back to science. She grew up in southern california, had gone to Swarthmore College outside of philadelphia for a year and a half. Dropped out to try to be a tennis player. When that did not work out, she went to stanford where she would get her undergraduate, her masters, and her phd ultimately in astrophysics. She was in the midst of writing her Postgraduate School applications in january of 1977, just finishing up her thesis, when she wandered into the stanford Student Union one morning that january. Tried to settle in with a cup of coffee and a sweet roll to wake up before class. Picks up the stanford daily, the school paper, and never got beyond the front page. There above the fold on the righthand side of the front page was a headline that read, nasa to recruit women. Wow, indeed. Sallys future had just landed in her lap. After 25 years, at that point it was not 25, after almost 20 years of the Space Program that had been men only, and in fact white men only, nasa was finally joining the rest of the country in appreciating the fact women and minorities could expand the core in a good way. There were also laws and rules. The federal government has said everybody has got to get on board with this. The rest of the country was a was pretty well along at that point. Harvard, yale, princeton, most big schools had integrated along sex and race lines. It took nasa a little longer. But once they got there, they were totally involved. In 1976, a year earlier, they had put out the call for a new class of astronauts, specifically to be trained for the space Shuttle Program. They specifically wanted to add women and minorities. This article sally saw was an interview with somebody at stanford who had been contacted to say we are looking for women and minorities. [applause] youyo wow. Th ae science room is rocking. I and inom you are full bestsellers he is written multiple bestsellers. This book begins the first line, of future of the future the mind is the name of the book. Two greatest mysteries in all of nature on the mind and the universe. He asks the questions, do we have a soul . What happens to us after we die . Who am i anyway . Where do we fit into this great cosmic scheme . And thats on the first page. [laughter] people,the stuff that when you are in college, at 3 00 in the morning, in the dorm room , staying up all night drinking healthy carrot juice, this is what you talk about. He is an amazing man. Lets hear from him. [applause] wow. After such a great introduction, i cannot wait to hear the speaker myself. [laughter] first of all, i have a confession to make. Sometimes all these accolades can backfire. Recently, new York Magazine voted me as one of the 100 smartest people in new york. Hought, what an honor. However, in all fairness, in all fairness, i have to admit that madonna also made that same list and next year, i understand that lady gaga is going to push me off the list entirely. [laughter] today, im going to talk about the future. The future of your mind. Making predictions is dangerous. Let me quote from that great philosopher of the western world, yogi berra. Yogi berra once said, prediction is awfully hard to do, especially if it is about the future. [laughter] im a physicist. We can talk about the future of the universe, billions of years from now. Let me quote from that other great philosopher, woody allen. Woody allen once said, eternity is an awful long tmime time, especially toward the end. You may say to yourselves, what does a physicist do anyway, what have you done for me lately . Well, we physicist ands physicists invented the first transistor, helped invent computers and internet, we wrote the world wide web. Forget, weay, dont invented television, radio, radar, microwaves, xray machines. Dont forget, we created the Space Program. And the gps system. Love to make predictions. When we assembled the antenna, one physicist predicted that the internet would become a forum of high culture, high art, and high society. [laughter] that 5 of, we know the internet is pornography, but thats because teenage boys log onto the internet. Just wait until the grandmas and grandpas log onto the internet. Then 50 of the internet will be pornography. [laughter] begin, giving you a guided tour to the incredible, sensational developments in narrow science, let me tell you a cautionary story about a science, in neuro let me tell you a cautionary story about a physicist. There were three gentlemen about to lose their heads the lawyer,ne, a priest, a and a theoretical physicist, just like me. About to lose their head to the guillotine. On thethe priests head chopping block and they asked him, do you have any lost last words . He said, yes, yes. He said, god. God from above shall set me free. All eyes were on the blade. They raise the blade. The blade came down, siw swish, and stopped right before it hit the neck of the priest. The crowd gasped. They had never seen this before. The mob said let the priest go, because today god has spoken. And now lets see about the lawyer. Yes, a lawyer. They put a lawyers head on the chopping block and they asked him, do you have any last words . Spirit, yes, maybe the of justice, justice and mercy shall set me free. All eyse were on the blade all eyes were on the blade, the blade came down, then stopped before it hit the neck of the lawyer. This time, the mob went crazy. Dancing in the streets of paris, people were saying god has spoken, justice and mercy have spoken today. Now lets see about the physicist. Ony put the physicists head the chopping block and asked if he had any last words. He said, yeah, yeah, ive got some last words. He said, you know, i dont know too much about god and i know even less about the law, but i do know one thing. If you look up, you will see that the rope is stuck on the pulley. [laughter] the physicist said, if you remove the rope, the blade should come down real good. Big mistake. Big mistake. [laughter] down, the blade came down, and the poor physicists head came down. It goes to show you, sometimes we physicists have to know when to keep our mouths shut. [applause] nonetheless, today, i will open the mouth of three 300 of the worlds top scientists that ive interview for bbc television, the science channel, discovery channel, about what sits on your shoulder. And afterwards, i will be signing books, your books. Afterwards, you can go to ebay and auction it off for money. You can actually make money today. Ok . So, today, we are going to talk about the future of your mind. And the previous book i wrote, if i can bring that up, was physics of the future, talking about the next 50 to 100 years. In theften said that book buying world, the word physics would never enter the New York Times bestseller list. Well, i did it twice. Physics of the impossible talked about teleporters, starships, even time travel. What happens if you go backwards in time . You meet your teenage mother before you are born, she falls in love with you. [laughter] inyour teenage mother falls love with you before you are born, you are in deep doo doo if that happens. But today, let us talk about the greatest of all mysteries, what sits on your shoulder . Believe it or not, we learned more about the brain and the last 10 to 15 years brain in the last 10 to 15 years than in all of Human History combined. Thats the power of physics. Radio allows us to penetrate right into the thinking mind. And then we look for echoes, of radio ricocheting off of oxygen molecules in an mri machine to give us gorgeous, gorgeous pictures of thoughts, ricocheting like a pingpong ball inside the human mind. And believe it or not, your brain only uses 20 watts of power and yet to simulate it with a digital computer, it would require a computer a city block by a city block. It would consume the energy of a Nuclear Power plant. It would have to be cooled by a river. Your brain does that with 20 watts. When someone calls you a dimbulb, thats a compliment. [laughter] and whats it possible is consciousness anyway . Of science, there have been 20,000 papers written about consciousness. Never in the history of science have so many devoted so much to produce so little. However, in my book, i actually give you a definition. A metric by which you can measure numerically levels of consciousness. Im a physicist. We dont just waxed eloquent and philosophical just wax eloquent and philosophical about consciousness. We quantify and definte define it. Its all in my book. The two great mysteries are the universe and the mind. Some people think, well, i work in what is called string theory. What is so strange about strings . Look at nature at the fundamental level. Dna is a string. A string allows you to encode vast amounts of information on the dna molecule. And the unit of thought in the brain is been there on, which is is the neuron, which is also a string. Some think that string theory lies at the fundamental of all biological and physical knowledge. Lets talk about the movies. The movies are always a little bit ahead of us. They talk about telepathy, reading minds. Did you know that we can now do that in the laboratory . They talk about telekinesis, moving objects with the mind. And not only that, but in hollywood movies, they talk about not just telepathy, but also uploading memories. We can now do that for the first time in history. At Wake Forest University, the first memory was uploaded into a mouse brain and we put the memory back into the mouse and the mouse remembered it perfectly. And last week, the United States pentagon announced a 40 Million Initiative to record memories for gis from iraq and afghanistan. Recording memories is going to happen in our lifetime. This is like the matrix. Uploading reality. Have you ever thought to yourself late at night, late at night when youre all by yourself have you ever had that weird, bizarre thought that maybe, maybe youre the only one thats real . That life is like the matrix, just a movie uploaded into your mind . And maybe someone is trying to test you to see whether you are smart enough to figure out that you are the only one . Let me ask you a question, have you ever had that weird thought . Raise your hand, raise your hand if youve ever had that weird. At night weird thought at night. Wow. Youre crazy. [laughter] you think youre the only one in the world . Thats ridiculous. You see, im the only one in the world. Im actually in bed right now. Herectually imagining im in washington, d. C. , at the Convention Center, speaking to an audience. This is nowe that possible. The first memory was uploaded into a mouse brain, and the shortterm goal is to do it with monkeys and then for alzheimers patients. The shortterm goal, not the longterm. The shortterm goal is to create a brain pacemaker. Thats why the military is dumping 40 million into this, to create a brain pacemaker for alzheimers patients. President barack obama have announced a 1 billion initiative, the Brain Initiative, to create a new genome project. In the future, you will have two disks, one is your genome with all of your genes, the other is your connectome. A billion dollars is being put into creating a second disk, with all your sensations and memories, basically all of your thoughts on a second disk. And when you die, when you die, your genome and your connectome live on. In some sense, you are in mortal. Are immortal. But is it really you . To quote president bill clinton, it all depends on how you define you. [laughter] but nonetheless, let us think about what happens when you upload memories. This is the former governor of california. [laughter] having the memory of being married to sharon stone suddenly uploaded into his mind in the movie total recall. So, yes, there are consequences of you upload if you upload memories of an entire marriage. But in the future, it is conceivable we will upload memories of the vacation you never had or the mathematics course you never passed. This is something that is actually potentially real. Money is now being dumped into it. The first results coming out of Wake Forest University and the university of southern california. And exoskeletons. If you saw the world cup how many people saw the world cup soccer games this summer . Did you see the Opening Ceremony . In the Opening Ceremony, a man who was totally paralyzed, a quadriplegic, goes up and kicks the ball and starts the soccer games in front of one billion people. That person was paralyzed. Etonas wearing an exoskel designed at duke university, controlled by his brain alone. Christopher reeve, the handsome actor, who played superman in the movies he died. But before he died, he dreamed of the day when his mind would allow him to bypass is spinal bypass by pass to his spinal cord so he could walk again. Unfortunately, he died too soon. We can now do it. The military has dumped over 150 million to create exoskeletons like this for our wounded warriors. And surrogates. That is, controlling a robot mentally. This is from surrogate, starring bruce willis. This is the future perhaps of the Space Program. It is too dangerous to put humans into outer space on the time. Why not put robots and have the robots guided mentally by an astronaut sitting in his hot tub in his living room . So, you could explore the universe just mentally and thats the thesis behind avatar, the movie avatar, and also the movie surrogat es, mentally controlling robots, and we can do that today. And telekinesis, the ability to control objects with the mind. We will talk about this in a moment. This is from the movie carrie, where a High School Kid who has been picked on all these years has her final revenge by destroying the whole High School Class at the senior prom. Whats the lesson here . [laughter] the lesson here is never bring a telekinetic or the senior prom. Telekinetic to the senior pro m. Even superman movies have gotten wind of this revolution. Every high school every kid knows that supermans father died when krypton blew up. Every kid knows this. But in the latest superman movie, his father lives on as a hologram, whose memory is inside a computer. A memory that lives on. A personality, memory, sensation, all played by russell crowe. Here is russell crowe, the father of superman, living. And this could be the future of the library of congress. When you go to the library of congress, you may sit down and have a wonderful conversation with somebody like einstein, winston churchill, George Washington, because all their memories, sensations have been recorded. There you are talking to a hologram, having a great afternoon tea with abraham lincoln. This is possible. D the question of mind without body Science Fiction writers love this concept and, believe it or not, if you have two disks, one with your genome and one with your connectome, and they live on after you die, in some sense, the mind is living beyond the body. This is the dream of the engines, ancients, the dream of science action writers, and this is now conceivable. So, lets talk about the brain. Oeste baucom of blood flow can be analyzed by mri scans. On the left is your brain first of all, blood flow can be analyzed by mri scans. On the left is your brain when you tell the truth. Not much happens. On the right is your brain when you tell a lie. First, you have to know the truth, then create the lie, then create the coverup, consistency with the lie and all the previous lies you have been telling all these years thats a lot of brain power. Your brain lights up like a christmas tree. There is your brain on the right telling a lie. What have we learned from these brain scans . We learned that the most ancient part of the brain is the back of your brain. The socalled reptilian brain. The brain has evolved from the back to the front. When infants are born, the back of the brain is most developed. Thats the reptilian brain. When you have a car accident and you have whiplash, your balance, your sense of territoriality, aggression, simple things like that in the back of the brain are affected. Grows from infancy into adolescence, the center part of the brain develops, the limbic system, the monkey brain. The brain of emotions, the brain of etiquette, politeness, social norms. Thats the center of the brain. And finally, when you become an adult, the prefrontal cortex at the front of the brain develops. By looking att the living brain. One old wives tale says, every parent knows this, that their teenaged kid suffers from brain damage. Its true. You can actually show that as the brain develops from the back to the front teenagers do not have a well formed refrontal cortex. Wellformed prefrontal cortex. Its another old wives tale that when a man starts to talk to a pretty girl, he talks he starts to act stupid. It is true. Blood drains from the prefrontal cortex and he becomes mentally retarded. You can measure this by looking at blood flow. It is absolutely true. All of these old wives tales can now be systematically analyzed looking at mri scans. We have two hemispheres, one on the left and one on the right. Now, normally, these two hemispheres talk to each other. But in epileptics, it gets out of control. They have seizures. Scientists have to cut the connection between the left and the right hemispheres, and then something bizarre, Something Weird happens. The two brains that are now cut begin to create two different personalities. Its amazing. Documented cases. One man comes home and great his wife with one arm, embracing her, the other arm socks are in the face. Socks her in the face. A documented case. Ring was an left atheist, his right brain was a believer. Can you imagine dying and going to heaven, only half your brain goes to heaven . Sooner or later, right here in washington, d. C. , im sure will find some person who has a left brain that is republican and a right brain that is democrat. Skull, eachhe same controlling two different arms. Can you imagine them going to the polling booth and the two of them fight over which lever to pull . That is going to happen. That will happen. And this is the 1950s. In the 1950s, we had these really horrible looking gadgets placed over the brain that measured radio, brain impulses, electromagnetic signals from the brain. Now we do it with implants and headbands. In the upper left, you can play video games mentally. It picks up radio from the brain. It deciphers it by a chip. You can play video games by thinking about it. In japan, on the upper right, you can buy a headband with two party, whennd, at a you meet someone who is interesting, the two years ago li two earxs go like that. When you talk to someone who is really boring, the ears go like that. So, in japan, you always know if youre going to go home alone after a party. [laughter] im going to make sure that my students where these helmets so i know exactly who is going to fail and exactly who is going to pass my course. On the lower left, Silicon Valley is getting wind of this. They realized that we can now, by putting these sensors on your head, when you walk into a room, you can turn on the lights, you can turn on the internet, surf the web, you can write email, read email, play video games, operate household appliances. And in the future, you will be able to drive a car mentally. This is today. Silicon valley is saying, well, maybe in the future, when we perfect this technology, the mouse will disappear. And madison avenue is getting wind of this. They want to make this fashionable at some point. And even my colleague, Stephen Hawking he has now lost control of his fingertips. He can only blink. That is his sole means of communication, blinking. So, my friends, we are all physicists, we hooked him up to a computer. Chipight glass has a that picks up radio messages from his brain and allows him to type on a laptop computer mentally, bypassing his fingers, bypassing any mechanical modes, by thinking, he is able to type. And we can now even do this with their projects with paraplegics. Invested 150has Million Dollars. The pentagon has pledged to put a chip on top of the brain and connected to mechanical arms and legs. This man is totally paralyzed. He cannot scratch his nose. He cannot communicate with his loved ones. He is a prisoner, just like ownhen, a prisoner in his body. But at brown university, they put a chip in his brain and connected it to a laptop computer. He can now control his wheelchair, operate kitchen appliances, operate kitchen appliances, and surf the web and play video games. And this person can now operate mechanical arms. Mechanical arms and she is totally paralyzed. She communicates with blinking, just like what stephen does, and she can now feed herself. For the first time in history, she can now feed herself mentally. The pentagon, as i said, has thrown 150 Million Dollars into the revolutionary Prosthetics Program so that injured soldiers can bypass the spinal cord and control socceretons and at the games, as i mentioned, one billion people witnessed a historic event with the power of the mind, a person setting off the world soccer game just this past summer. And then realizing that even beyond this lies the capability of controlling robots mentally. This is japan. In japan, this worker puts on a helmet, picks up radio from his brain, and then he controls onmo, the robot here shown the right. Mentally controlling a robot. This can be the future of firemen, ambulance workers, emergency workers may eventually control robots that can walk right into a fire, right into dangerous environments and do the work they have to do. For example at fukushima in raging nucleara meltdown, three of them simultaneously going on even as we speak. Even as we speak, they still have not yet gotten control of three melted cores. They sent an robots all failed. Every robot has failed because they are simply not sophisticated enough, so why not put a robot in that is controlled mentally . This could be the future of your classroom. Remember when we were kids . We used to play hooky all the time. You would ask your mother, mom, can you write a note saying little johnny is a sick today . This is the future. In the future, you will have a surrogate. The surrogate will have your image on it, the teacher will see your image on the surrogate sitting in your chair, and you will see the teacher in your surrogate. This is the future of education. Isnt the future wonderful . We will never be able to play hooky ever again. You will never miss a day of class because you or your surrogate is always sitting in your chair, diligently taking notes just like we all did when we were little, right . Yeah. And this could be the future of the internet. The internet today is in your glasses. Google glasses, you can recognize peoples faces, and a biography appears next to the persons face, and if he speaks chinese to you, we can now create internet so that translations occur as someone speaks chinese to you, you will see their biography and their translation underneath their image. How many times have you been at a conference like this and you bump into an old friend come and you say to yourself who is this person . Jacob i know this person. In the future, your contact lintel say it is jim, stupid. [laughter] you see him every year at the National Book festival. Here is the complete biography, even if he speaks chinese to you. Lets say afterwards you are shooting the bull at a contact cocktail party, very important people. You do not know who they are. In the future, you will know exactly who to suck up to at any cocktail party. So these contact lenses will change everything, and to our the first people to buy internet contact lenses . College students taking final examinations. They will blink and see all of the answers to the final exam right there in their contact lens. Who is the next person to buy internet contact lenses . President barack obama so he does not have to have these damn teleprompters in front of him giving him his speech. Who is the third person . Vice President Joe Biden so that he is always on message, as they say. [laughter] so you can see that the potential of this technology is like living in the matrix. When you walk into a room, you will see i do navigation of all the objects. If you are in rome and you see but the ruins of the roman empire, you will see the empire resurrected as you walk through the ruins of rome, and if you bargain with the merchants in the bazaar, you will see the subtitles translating italian into english , so in the future, everyone will be connected. These are emergency workers of the future surrogates controlled mentally by the mind. So this is the prospect of exoskeletons. The prospect of surrogates. The prospect of literally living in the matrix. And then, this is the possibility of richer evening memories. Last year for the first time in scientists i Wake Forest University recorded the first memory. They took a mouse. The mouse had a hippocampus that was wired up. Memories are made through the hippocampus. They taperecorded, just taperecorded the impulses of the hippocampus, and later when the mouse forgot the task, they reinserted the memory into the mouse. Dingdong, on the first try, the mouse remembered the task. And at m. I. T. Just a few months later, they duplicated the experiment and uploaded a false memory into a mouse, and last week the United States pentagon announced a 40 million project to create in four years a memory chip for veterans of iraq and afghanistan to and hence their memories. Like i said, in the future, you will be able to relive the vacation you never had. That at berkeley, where i got my phd years ago, you can now photograph a thought. Intowas considered way Science Fiction, and that we do it every day. Here is how we do it this picture here shows a branin scan using mri. It converts blood flow into 30,000 dots. Then with mri, we are able to massage the picture, analyze the dots, and create an image. So from the brain, from all these 30,000 dots, we create a picture of what you are looking at. Look at this picture very carefully. You are looking at some of the first photographs of human thought ever photographed in history. You see a picture of steve martin, and i too is a fuzzy and reconstructed next to it is a fuzzy picture reconstructed from the human mind. Amazing. If you are looking at the mona lisa, the computer will reconstruct a crude picture of the mona lisa from the blood in your brain. And then as you follow sleep, it records the memory of your dreams. In the future, you may wake up, hit a button, and see the dream that you had the previous night. We can also begin to understand things like lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is something right out of Science Fiction. It is when you are conscious while you are dreaming. It was once considered a fake, but with blood flow experiments wea university in germany, proved it is real. You can now control your dreams while you are dreaming and prove it using mri flows. Way,any people, by the have ever had an episode of lucid dreaming where you knew you were dreaming while you were dreaming . Raise your hand. Hundreds of people have done it. You can train your self. On the internet, there are ways to train yourself to become a lucid dreamer, and it is true. These are pictures, pictures of an elephant, pictures of a human, and on the right is the computer reconstruction of what you are looking at. Mental big one is illness. Why is president barack obama, why is the European Union funding 1 billion into the Brain Initiative . Most ancientof our diseases Mental Illness. Millions of americans at some point in their life will suffer some episode of depression, Mental Illness, anxiety. What is Mental Illness . Is example, schizophrenia when you hear voices. At is called madness when you hear voices. However, when you put this scan, you findi something interesting. The left part of the brain lights up. That is because that part of the brain talks to itself. When you talk to yourself, the less part of the brain generates voices. That is why you talk to yourself. The front part of your brain is the conscious brain. It knows that the left part of your brain is talking to itself, and these people when they have an episode of schizophrenia, the left part of their brain lights up without their permission. They are unaware that they are literally talking to themselves, and you see that now for the first time in history looking at blood flow of a schizophrenic mind. And we can now look at joan of arc and many historical figures. It turns out that a certain fraction of people with lesions also suffer from hyper religiosity. They think they are talking to god. Everything that happens is because it was meant to be that way. If somebody falls, it is because he was meant to be that way. We think that joan of arc was not schizophrenic. Joan of arc suffered from hyper religiosity. Thisn actually induce with a helmet. We can have a helmet that shoots radio into the cortex of the brain and induce the feeling of being in the presence of god. This is called the god helmet, and we can actually induce the feeling. The scientists, of course we like to ask for them its, we put an atheist inside the god helmet. [laughter] that atheist was richard dawkins. Afterwards we asked him to you feel the presence of god, and he said no, no god. We put a catholic not in the god helmet, and a catholic nun, was her belief shaken . She said no. Us with aod made telephone system so that we can communicate with god. You cant win. Anyway, let me whine up. One of many things we talk about in the book some people have had a bullets go through the left temporal lobe. One person had an accident where he injured the left temporal lobe hitting the bottom of a poll. Afterwards, both of them emerged as super of mathematical geniuses, so tonight when you go home, do not pick up a hammer, do not hit the left part of your brain thinking you are going to become the next einstein, but it has happened several times in the past. This individual can take one helicopter ride over the harbor in new york and trawled the draw the entire skyline of new york city down to the window. You can see at jfk airport. The next time you land at jfk, look up and you will see this huge mural drawn from memory by this individual, and of course einstein is the greatest genius of modern times. His brain is still with us today. We have his brain. It is different. Not by much, but it is different. It is at princeton hospital. I am running out of time, so let me wind up on one note. If you have further questions, you can read my book. [laughter] when i was a kid growing up, my einstein, was albert and my favorite einstein story is this when einstein was an old man, he was tired of getting the same talk over and over again, so one day his chauffeur came up to him and said professor, i am really a parttime actor. I heard your speech so many times i have memorized it, so why do we switch places. I will put on a mustache, i will put on a width, i will be the great einstein giving this speech that you have given so many times, and you can put on my hat, my uniform, and be my chauffeur, so they switched places. This went along famously until one day a mathematician in the back asked a very difficult thought, and einstein oh, the game is up, but in the question said, that is so elementary that even my chauffeur here can answer it for you. [laughter] thank you very much. You have been a good audience. Thank you very much. [applause] questions . Time for i think we have some time for questions. Hello . I dont know if this is on. Now it is on. I just have one quick we do not have time for a question and answer session. If you do have a question, he will be at the book signing at the end of the session. We will have to clear this room before the next session starts. Everybody in a chair, please leave, everybody on the floor it is too hot in here, people. You have been a great audience. Thank you. Thank you for understanding, and we hope you enjoyed it. [applause] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] michio kaku talking about his book, the future of the mind, as the toy 14 National Book festival continues. We are covering the festival on the cspan networks here on cspan where the science pavilion and over on cspan2s book tv and on cspan video, coverage of authors and the history and biography pavilion today. Also several author interviews and your phone calls. In fact come on cspan2s book to become a we are talking with congressman James Clyburn of south carolina. You can check that out on cspan2. For a complete schedule of our book festival coverage on the cspan networks, just go to our website, cspan. Org or go to booktv. Org. Coming up next in a few minutes here on season, david Theodore George talking about his book untangling the mind, and then our last author of the day, Adrienne Mayor at 5 20 p. M. The poison king the life and legend of mithradates, romes deadliest enemy. Just a fewk or in minutes. On tilden, a short portion of a clinesne of eric book. He spoke about the collapse of the bronze age civilization. [applause] thank you very much. It is bright up. You can all hear me, i hope. Wonderful. This is a first time for me, this is extremely exciting and an honor, and i thank you all for coming today. Now, one thing i am going to do , but istrate with slides will explain to you if you cannot see where you are what we are doing. And what i want to do is present some of the findings from the book, and basically show you why i think it is one of the most fascinating periods in history, this 1177 b. C. It is the end of the late bronze age. We are talking about 3000 years ago, obviously, and this is when everything collapses. Most people think about the end of rome as the major collapse without i would argue that this is as significant if not even more significant for us today. So what happens i will give you the background for a moment, when rob from Princeton University press came down from gw and said to me i want you to write a book on the collapse, and i said well, sure, i can write a book on the collapse, but what is as interesting is what collapse, so i said i will write about the collapse if you will allow me to enlarge part right about what collapsed. It was an international world, it was a globalized come and part of it is why it did collapse. He said ok, fine, i will give you latitude, which is nice. And the ensuing result is what you see here, so the beginning of the book talks about a group of people that i will go to in a moment, and then the end is about what might have caused the collapse because to be honest we still dont know. There are a number of possibilities out there, and i will go through the possibilities and come up with what i think might be the most logical answer, but this is archaeology, this is ancient history, this is 3000 years ago. We are not sure what happened. So we came up with it, i wrote it, and then he said to me and i do not know if he remembers this. He said i want to make a book trailer. I said what is that . He said it is where you stand up in front of the camera and you advertise your book as if it is a movie coming out. And i said what, you want me to hold my book and say please buy it . [laughter] and he said no, no, i have something in mind really over the top. So we got together with the next student of mine, jesse krisnky, who runs goldmedal productions, and he put together about a minute long trailer, and it ran for probably six months before the book came out. I have no idea if it had any effect on sales, but it was a lot of fun to do, so if you want come i can show that to you. If not, we can just skip right through. Yeah . All right. Yeah. It will be projected here. Hopefully the sound will be up because the sound is everything. And i will warn you right now it is completely over the top, and it is made tongueincheek. It is supposed to be one of these summer blockbuster things, so lets see if we can get this working. [cheers] [applause] thank you. [laughter] i will now take questions. [laughter] seriously, how can you follow that, right . Anyway, we had a lot of fun doing it, and i thank rob for making us do it and Jesse Krinsky for making us do it in the first place. If you see other book trailers out there, i think this may be the way of the future, but we will see. Anyway, let it go back for a moment and take a look, and see exactly where we are and actually i cannot even see my slides there. Oh, there we go. What were dealing with is the late bronze age, about 1700 to 1200 bc, and this is when we have the minoans and the mycenaeans and the hittites. You probably have heard about some of the people already. This is the time of hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, moses iii, one of the greatest conquerors of all egypt, amenhotep iii, my favorite guy, the father of the heretic pharaoh, king tut, and then ramses iii, and he is the man under whom pretty much everything collapses during the time of the catastrophe, as we call it. This is also the time period of the battle of qadesh, the trojan war, some of you may have heard about or seen the movie with brad pitt, and also the time of the exodus, so these are all about 1250, 1200 bc, the end of the end of the late bronze age here. It has been said for the most part there we go. It is at a very bad angle for me. We cant just turn that a little bit so i can see it . No. All right. There we go. If we can turn it just a bit so i can catch a glimpse which one it is. There we go. Perfect, thank you. And you all can still see it . Ok, good, now i can see it and i know where i am. It has been set for about 100 years or so that the sea peoples were the colbert. This was a an explanation that was come up with by gaston maspero, one of the earliest egyptologists. He said they are the ones that are responsible for destroying absolutely everything at the end of the late bronze age. The thing is he came up with this theory based on one major inscription plus a couple of minor ones, but before any of the archaeology had been done, so thereafter any time any site was excavated, they attributed it to the sea peoples. So this became kind of a bogeyman. This was, oh, my goodness, the sea peoples are going to come and get you. This has changed over time. This is in part what i wanted to do in the book was to say that the sea peoples may not be completely responsible for the collapse, and in fact i think that they are almost a symptom rather than the cause. That is they are as much victims as they are oppressors. This is one of the things that i wanted to take a look at in this book. And people have put out a fairly simplified way of looking at things. They said there was a drought back then that cause a famine that caused the sea peoples to start, they cut the trade routes, and therefore everything collapsed. That is certainly possible, but i would say this is probably too simple and i would add in a couple of other factors because i do not think it is just drought. There is drought. I will show you that in a moment. And i think it is Everything Else as well because we know that there are earthquakes, other invaders and so on and so forth. I think it is a multitude of factors and hopefully i will be able to show that. What i want to talk to you today and what i did is we started out going through some of the evidence that we have got. For instance, let me just give you this as kind of a fun and interesting example. We are in the bronze age. The bronze age starts at about 3000 bc. That is the early bronze age was that we are in the late bronze age at this time. Some of you may know that to make bronze you take tin and copper. 90 copper, 10 tin and you make bronze was up by the way, if you do not have any tin available, you can use arsenic as well, although i do not recommend it. You would have a very short lifespan. The copper in antiquity comes from many places, but the main one was cyprus at this time, so the tin most of it is coming from afghanistan. There is some evidence that they might have gone up to cornwall occasionally, but the vast majority is coming from modernday afghanistan, and so some of the scholars that have studied this have shown this in the written tablets. This is a tablet from mari, which is on the euphrates in mesopotamia, and there they say that onethird of a mina to the interpreter, so someone was multilingual back then. If you take a look and you see these trade routes that are bringing the tin over to mari and then over to crete, if those were cut at any time, you are in a lot of trouble. One of my colleagues, carol bell, over in england, has said the acquisition of tin and thereby bronze was as concerning to the egyptian pharaoh as the acquisition of oil is today to the u. S. President and to all of us. Some of you probably remember the gas lines back in the 1970s, right . I remember those. That is what wouldve happened if those trade routes had fallen and they could not get tin anymore. Iron is going to take over after that. That is what happens when something that is necessary is now gone and something comes in and takes its place, so we have evidence for International Trade routes, and i think you will agree with me that getting from afghanistan all the way to greece and crete is fairly significant back then even as it is today. But we have also got other evidence, which for me is fascinating. The stories of the ancient world just come to life for me. That is what i love about them. Here we have for example in those same mari tablets, we have been saying they are importing weapons made out of gold that are made in a minoan style and these are being sent all the way over to ancient mesopotamia. My absolute favorite are these. In those same letters, it says that a pair of leather shoes probably sandals made in the minoan style were brought to the king of babylon, but they were returned by him. [laughter] why would he return these shoes . I have no idea. Did they not fit . Were they so last millennium . [laughter] if i were him, i would have kept it and regifted it. So they were not that different from us. Some of the other things i could show, i could go on literally for hours, but other people need this space. Let me whiz through a couple of these just to give you an example of the internationalization. Their version of globalization in the ancient mediterranean that we have got, and then i will go to some of the causes for the collapse and see what you think. Daniel, and i am an employee of the library of congress. On behalf of the library of congress, welcome to the 2014 National Book festival. We hope you are having a wonderful day celebrating the joy of reading here at the walter he Washington Convention center. Before we begin, i want to perform you that the pavilions presentations are being filmed for the website and for their archive. Please be mindful of this as you enjoy the presentation. In addition, please do not sit on the camera risers that are located at the back of the pavilion. Thank you. Now, i would like to introduce dr. David the it george, the. Thor of untangling the mind dr. Untangling the mind, george has presented us with a virtual Owners Manual of the human brain, how it works, how and what together outputs you can expect from the input we make every day. I think the outputs of the book are explained very well. Part 1 why emotions spin out of control. , extreme losing it behavior. Seeking 3 thankfully healthy emotion. As dr. George goes through his presentation, he will probably explain to you how all of these may together, and he explain why you see such abhorrent behavior as road rage, and addiction, and other extreme to expected reaction stimuli. On behalf of the library of congress, i present dr. Theodore george. [applause] thank you very much. It is quite a privilege to be here. You have to keep in mind that i am a psychiatrist and i am used to dealing with oneonone [laughter] so this is a little bit overwhelming for me. The first question is why did i write the book . I have been in practice now for 30 years, and ive seen an awful lot of people. One of the things that has impressed me is that there is an awful lot of emotional pain that all of us experience at least sometimes in our life. So anyway, i got together with , and we wanted to sit down, and every time we did i way said are we going to help sort ofand so that was my guiding principle as i tried to write this book was to say are we going to help people. My ideas and sort of you always look back on the defining moments in your career. I was doing studies 35 years ago. You know how it is with your doctors. At the end of the session, i was walking out the door, and the gentleman says to me, by the way, dr. , sometimes i am afraid im going to lose control and im going to hit my children. It was one of those questions that i have not had before, but it really has intrigued me now. As a psychiatrist, we often look at symptoms. We formulate treatments, but the real question that is there is why do i do these things the poison king the life and legend of mithradates, romes deadliest enemy things . Se killedn Robin Williams himself, why did he do this, he was great, why was he depressed . These are questions we raise in the book in terms of we meet different people to try to understand the emotions and behaviors that they have. Defining moment, when i was in kenya, we flew up to this area, a little plane, during landing, and this was taken from the veranda of my hotel room that was built inside of this little mountain, if you will, not veryamera was good, so you cannot capture it, but to me it was one of the most gorgeous places, profound, picturesque things that i have ever seen. You would see a herd of elephants, a herd of giraffes, gazelles every animal imaginable that you could see in that little river bed. And monkeys were jumping around outside of the room. And i am saying this is the most beautiful thing i have ever seen. That evening at around 6 00, the naturalist came and we went out , and when we did, the first thing he said to us was under no circumstances do you ever get out of this van. Not safe. All of a sudden, the serene atmosphere was changed, and it if you about survival, will. And here what you see is a cheetah mama looking after her two cubs. Is she hasnt see just taught them how to kill an antelope for them to survive, and she is scanning the environment and looking around, and he naturalist says if she were to leave them, they would be dead. They could not defend themselves. So basically this was sort of a defining process for me to begin to look at the nervous system in , andontext of survival here what we have is the response to threat and the pursuit of reward. Now, when you think about threats, it is obvious when somebody has got a gun to your head that you feel threatened, but if you look at the nervous system, it is much more profound than that. It may be a look, a tone of voice, everybody that is married can relate to that. Saying i dosomebody not love you anymore. It could be that you lost your job. Feel like somebody is looking down on you and sort of disrespecting you, so in other words, think broadly when you think of threat. The other is the pursuit of reward. We do not have much time today, so im not going to get into this. It all makes sense in terms of we pursue food, we pursue air, sexual behaviors, all of these tips for survival, and when we look at addictions, these try these get taken over, and it sort of trys to understand the irrationality that we see with addiction, of the person that can be tricking, they have got cirrhosis of the liver, they are going to lose their family, they are going to ine their job, they will sit treatment as a doctor, i am never going to drink again. And how they begin to understand the sort of a rational Human Behavior. What i would like to do is just to introduce you to a couple of people that you will meet in the book, and one of them is mr. Wilson. I think he was sort of a favorite of mine to talk about just because i think we can all identify with him. Why henot quite sure came. His wife told him to come, but as you got to know him, he is dealing with the issues that we all deal with. He is dealing with a child, with work, with finances. As far as his child was concerned, both he and his wife and sheis dearly, was having a lot of problems. She got into drugs, she got into alcohol, she was cutting herself, she was depressed. So he and his wife were debating lisa capturedd it, my coauthor, when she said they kept revisiting the same issues. I think all of us can identify with that in terms of sometimes you get stuck in these loops because you have to know mr. His otherew it aough features that were about him as well. You could tell he had an anger problem. Hardys sometimes work is for me with my boss, he is a micromanager. I got into it with him, i probably should not, but he deserved it. Been a couple of sessions later he says i lost my job because of cutbacks. Work was a problem for him, and then one night he comes in and he recounts his story and he , andyou know, i came home my wife was not there. I was really nervous did she leave me . So he calls her on the cell phone, and she is out shopping. So he said i was furious. Did she not know that we dont have money for this . And she is disrespecting me. He starts to drink, and she comes home. She is furious at him. She hates his drinking. She calls him a loser, and he says that is it, i out of here. He tries to leave. Says oh, no you are not. Youre not leaving me this time, i am tired of you walking away from me. She tries to block him, and there is a push that takes place. In other words, how can we begin to understand mr. Wilson . I thought what i would do is just to give you a little reference points when you talk about it in the brain because it helps me to conceptualize it. I can give you a bunch of structures here because this is taken out of the book and we can talk about a number of stuff, but the ones i want you to focus on is the cortex here because this is going to be sort of the overriding thoughts, process, decisionmaking, and others going through the lobe. La, in your temporal and then when the you probably have not heard much about is the the octavthis is one of major tenets of the book. What it is is in the midbrain, tiny structure that runs along expandnal here, and i upon it here. You see this sort of diagram. Is not particularly helpful, but it is the best that i could do. And you see this column of narrow fibers running through this midbrain and embedded in it are going to be clusters of neurons that have a specific job, so you are going to see these activere are nonce to process the environment, and then there are more passive knots. This is highly innovative with the parasympathetic nervous system, and now you begin to see the mind by connection. Now is justnt to do sort of give you a model in terms of how i process all of and then weion here can build upon it to try to understand mr. Wilson. , this isink about it critical for survival. Just imagine you are walking through a dark alleyway at alone,t, you are all and you hear a noise or you see a face coming at you. In other words, this is really important because they could make the difference between whether you live or die. You also have sensory and put from your body that can make a difference whether you live or die, your chest pain if you do not deal with it. It can make a big difference. The sensory input is going to come into your nervous system. It is going to be processed in two major directions. It is going to come up to the cortex and you will have multiple synapses. It is going to take quite a bit of time, but it is going to give you a very precise approximation of what your environment is. The other thing is going to do is it is going to come down here to the amygdala, and it is going to be extremely fast. The amygdala is interesting because what it will do is it is processing your sensory input outside of your conscious awareness. It is that fast. So it is going to pick up those sites, it is going to pick up those found, it is going to pick up those facial expressions that make you feel like you are nothing, and you are going to begin to react. Now, the way a neuroscientist at talked about it who works with animals, is that you are walking through the woods and you see a wiggly line. You immediately react to it and say it is a snake. If you look at it longer, you will know, it is a branch. So in other words, the branch is the cortex, the snake is the amygdala, and that nervous system has to put those two together. That to me is really going to be sort of the future of psychiatry, the future of neuroscience is trying to see how do we process our environment . It is going to be a function of genes, a feng shui of our past experience, etc. , and then you have output behaviors, and that is taking place in the pag. Andhave all heard of fight flight. That is where i really believe that they have a final pathway that is coming up, so you have got all of the sensory information being processed, but now it has got a final pathway pag, sorganized in the you have flight here, you have fight, and another when you do not hear about is shut down and then predatory behavior. The emotions. If you ever look at the emotional literature. To me it is very complicated literature. Process it is that emotions are there to drive behavior. Me to fight ifme to figh i am not angry. It is hard for me to fear if im not fearful. So depression is going to drive, shut down i cannot think of an emotion that is going to drop predatory behavior. Thati like about this is now you have a model where you begin to see that all of these emotions, all of these behaviors in and of themselves are not wrong. It is the context in which they words, id so in other could be angry, i could be bad, but it does not have to be bad. So what you have is this processing thing theoretically it should work so it is commensurate with the stimuli you are dealing with. Where the fallacy comes about is when you find yourself sitting on one of these buttons, experiencing the emotion, experiencing the behavior where it is not connected to the environment or the situation that is driving it. I want to do is just to spend a few minutes looking at all of these different behaviors and emotions. T we all talked about it, but what is it . In it got interested is when i was studying domestic violence, and when i demonstrated what you see here with mr. Wilson. Theanimal model would be halloween cat. If we look at that cat, it gets boxed into a corner and the tail comes up first, stands sideways, puffs up his lungs, shows its teeth, hisses at you, and fundamentally that cat is afraid. It is trying to say stay away from me, so that basically was mr. Wilson. I did a number of studies of people with this problem, and the interesting thing to me ns, and itpetsca showed the correlation between glucose metabolism between the cortex and the amygdala were not very well connected in these individuals compared to control, so basically as i see it, the ability to inhibit sensory input is data, so they see some in, they hear something, and they overreact and they cant dampen it down. Another feature about it that was very interesting to me was that when i was setting these individuals, many times they were chronically angry. Training was ok, lets figure out why you are angry. You talk and talk and finally you realize you are just angry. That is really a critical thing when you start to study this and to understand it because you start to see the importance of those connections between the driving out into these behaviors. Another thing we do notice about mr. Wilson was that he was drinking. A large number of these people alcohol problem. Out the hall fills part of that void that is there. The major problem is it drives the behavior that much faster. If you are prone to become violence, you are much more prone to become violent if you are drinking. Of thing. Same kind another point of fear that is fascinating is when you are involved in this particular button, when you are sitting on sees the world as a threat. You become very focused on whatever the enemy is that you perceive, and you then have the indset i am so justified him am so right, and it makes sense that the body would do this because if i start thinking well, what if i am wrong, they could be right, i am not going to survive. Thather words, constellation that you will see we touch on flight, for example, we saw it with him, i am out of. So that is that flight type of behavior. I touch on this in the book and really it is not part of the story, but it is so powerful when you think of it, the power of fear in our lives. It is a great thing if there is a tiger outside my door. So many people are living on thereutton of fear, and is no tiger that is out there, and it is very incapacitating. It is hard to talk about because it does not make any sense. It is a rational to me. Why should i be afraid . But i am. It takes so much energy. It is a most like im treading water in three feet of water and i am getting tired, i am getting tired, and you say stand up, but it takes so much energy. It is so hard. Shut down. You saw it a lot in mr. Wilson. He is dealing with his job, his daughter, comes home, just leave me alone, i cant handle any more stimuli. He was depressed. Depression never made any sense to me because it is just an ugly emotion. Then i read an article back in and what the author did was he went in and stimulated the pag, and the animal and he called it going passive. When i read it i was like finally i have a model now to begin to understand depression. Senseically it would make that the body would do this, supposing you have just been out in oklahoma, you have had the tornado come through, you have lost your house, several family members died, and going into shutdown is like a shot of novocain in your nervous system. It numbs you. It gives you a little bit of distance. It is not that it takes it all away, but somehow it just removes you enough so that you can begin to deal with it. Emotionally it makes sense. The other thing that makes sense is i have just been out to battle. And been wounded and so i have to heal. If i did not go into the states, i just keep right on going. In other words, it serves the other physiological role, and you see now again we come back to this, and you can get into this thing and be depressed for no reason. So that is what i see with so many people when they come in is that there is no great reason and they are just sitting on this button. Going to i am not say much about it. It is a fascinating thing. I do not see these people. They do not come into me and say hey, doc, i am a real predator. [laughter] but occasionally i have met them. And i go what goes on in your mind . Distancethere is a that takes place. They are wired differently. They do not have the same fear conditioning that we do. They cannot appreciate apathy. Not apathy, empathy. They cannot relate to your pain. And here again, it is all on a button. Society loves you if you have got that propensity to be a predator and go get bin laden or you are president of a company and you are getting after another company we love you. So there is a good site to it and there is a bad side to it. The last one that i thought i would do is just to talk a little bit about post traumatic disorder. In order to do this, i thought what i would do is get a little audience involvement here. A person in the book that you are going to meet and her name is carol, and what i wanted to do is i want you to picture that you are carol and then just begin to say how would i feel if i was her . A long timeat i met ago, she was a young girl at the time that the thing occurred. She was at a party, had a little bit to drink. She was with three other girlfriends, and she was driving did, somethinge happened so fast, she could not even remember, the car flipped. She had her seatbelt on, and she was ok. The other two girls they got ejected out of the car, were dead, and then the other girl was in the backseat, and she vividly describes the screams and the fear that were in that persons eyes as she was trying to get her out of the car, and she ended up dying as well. She says that she just sort of slinked away from the accident in a numb sort of states, ended up at home. , want you to sort of picture put your self into her shoes what would it be like . And basically i think what you would see is you would see thoughts coming back into you, scenes coming back at you of that accident, of that girl who had the fear in her eyes. You would be trying to get rid of those thoughts. I do not want to think about them, put them out of my mind. But you cant put them out of your mind. You would be startled, and then you would have a host of emotions, so basically what ptsd is going to do is it is going to disconnect your cortex from your amygdala and it is going to give you all of these emotions, it is going to move from anger why did i do this . What is wrong with me . To total fear of what is this going to mean . And then there is a panic that goes on top of it. And then there is that part of just going numb i cannot feel anything. It is just over. And then you have some other symptoms that are there. Ate hours later, you are home. Are you going to feel happiness . Are you going to feel joy . The one that to me is perhaps the most interesting is do i see a future . At this particular point in time, my life is over. I do not know how i am going to go on. So basically what you have done now is you and your mind have concocted the symptoms that you would experience, as i think you would, with ptsd as i have listened to people that have it. In other words, ptsd makes perfect sense if you are in a war because if i forget the enemy, if i forget that threat, i could die. Of you are ready to go, youre ready to fight, to flight, to flee for survival. And then the other one that you have got is you have got a future. If i am sitting there and i am thinking listen, in two months, i am going home to be with the family. I am not focused on the war. I have to focus on right now. I cannot think about the future. In other words, all of these symptoms come together and they make so much sense. Peopleblem is that some it justays there and drags on and keeps bothering them. In other words, this is a very difficult thing to experience, and something that i am very passionate about is we all understand war, but to the other things that are driving it to me is very troublesome. It is going up in a home that is growing up in is a home but is not safe. It is a domestic violence. Man, some of our streets. There are places, and i hear it all the time when i deal with people who are from the inner cities. I saw someone get shot the other day. That is the way it is. We just sort of accepted in our society. The other one that is there that is going to cause a large number of cases of ptsd is going to be sexual abuse, and we just dont realize the power of what this does to the nervous system. In other words, one thing i forgot to mention about the gal that i think is important is ok, so she tries to go to sleep that night, and her mind is racing. She cannot shut it off, and she learns, well, if i drink some alcohol, i can get some sleep. I can get some distance. The problem is it just makes it that much worse the next day. It is not the answer to the problem. And then you start to look ok, what are some of the ramifications of this ptsd . And, you know, we talk about trying to get people to read, try to make our students the best that they can be, but if i am suffering from ptsd, then i have no future. Am i going to be that interested in learning . And my going to be that motivated to say hey, man, i am going to it out there and start thinking about future and think about what i am going to do. There is no future. My life is over. That sense of being out of control. So you move from an internal sense of control to an external sense of control, and perhaps then you would join a gang or, you know, i wonder about some of these people that i see in it is an x terminal control that takes care of all the emotions. What you have to do is imagine sot they are so right, justified, and they put a cause on it. You begin to understand some of the Human Behavior that we see. I would like to close with one of my favorite barney is the one you will meet in the last chapter. This is a gentleman who was 80 years old and i can still see him standing at the door and he is so fired up. He has fire in his eyes. I said, come on in. He has his wife in tow. Barney, what is the matter . Cants to me, dr. , i stand her anymore. [laughter] barney, when did it start . He said, 40 years ago. [laughter] laugh,point is that we but what would their lives have the ability to face who he was, to face the situation and say, im going to do with this . That is the parting thought that i want to leave you with, this gps system. We all have times in our lives where we missed the exit. We have that lady that comes on and says redirecting your path. Sometimes we hate her, but she is really our friend. Sometimes, if we make that extra turn, we will have a different road and it will be a different experience, but it will still be meaningful. That is the hope that i want to leave with you the power of the human mind and spirit to change and to get healthy. I think we have tremendous medications, tremendous therapy that are out there that can really help us and i want to leave you with a sense of hope. Thank you. [applause] anybody have any questions . Yes . Over here. [inaudible] the question was, so many , dide up to the age of 28 you say, label things as anxiety. To me, anxiety is a much more difficult concept to put your finger on. I think we all experience it. I think it is probably a portion of that p. A. G. Dala getex and amyg disconnected and make us more vigilant. How do you name something . There is a naming problem that takes place. I see it as a Rating System to try to deal with something readying system to try to deal with something. Sometimes a test is coming up tomorrow and it is telling me to get ready or it could be there is no test tomorrow and the anxiety is there. It is that sense of button and whether it is appropriate or inappropriate. Anxiety itself is not wrong. My question has to deal with you mention a lot almost like you are talking about an electrician. Connectivity, disconnected, buttons, wired. Chemical is a electrical organ. , howk about how the wiring important it is to help we are as a person and is there a connection to error dna and genes to affect that . The question is, we have this wiring. Where does dna fit into it . You know, this to me is an interesting thing. System ise about this it is simplistic because it is about survival. The only way to me life makes any sense is if youre responsible. Otherwise we become that life does not matter. We try to address this issue in one of the chapters in terms of responsibility. You have to know yourself. I know that i have a problem with anger, and so what am i going to do about it . I seek help. One of the things i have been excited about is i did a study where i treated people in domestic violence. If you take an antidepressant like prozac, it makes a huge difference in how youre going to do. It will doo things is you will not be as angry and you will have an extra second to think before i go off. It is independent of depression. The next is i have to assume responsibility. If i do this and drink, i will probably have a problem. That is something i need to do. Look at this as a medical illness. If i have polyps;, i know i have once aa colonoscopy year. I may not want to, but that is the fact of life and i assuming that i am assuming responsibility for my nervous system. You talked about how depression is a shutdown of the body. I was wondering if that could trigger an actual physical shutdown of the body, eating disorders and anorexia, if the depression will lead to a physical shutdown. Well, that is where i tried to introduce this concept of the mindbody connection. I also trained as an internal medicine doctor and it is so exciting to put the two together. If you look at fight, think about what the body is trying to do. It is going to go out there and it is going to fight the enemy. When it is on that button, it is anticipating that there could be some injuries that take place. In other words, now you start to see that people that have an anger problem, they have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. I may be making a few jones, but there are plotting factors that be making a will few jones, but there are plotting factors that will be in play. The body is preparing itself for battle and then to heal. Depression will also have some of those things as well. It is going to be activating more of your parasympathetic nervous system. You will see how that will tie into your guts. You begin to understand how there can be an interaction between the mind and body. One of the most are manic cases that i ever had, and i love the case, it was referred to me and it was a woman who had not eaten or drank anything in a year and a half. Every time she went to drink she would gag and could not keep it down. Place so theyand were feeding her directly into her stomach. They had done all of these tests, could not come up with anything. They referred her to a psychiatrist. I did electroconvulsive there be on her and within therapy on her and within three treatments, the woman was eating normally. You see the link between the depression and the gut. It gave me such pleasure to call the doctor and say to him, when do you think they want to take out the pe peg . [laughter] just joking, sorry. Any other questions . You have spoken about one , specifically, road rage and things of a depression nature. What about the more severe problems, like bipolar, schizophrenia, and the role of medication and how that p. A. G. . On affects the where i would see it is where the imaging look at studies that are out there. It seems as though these major illnesses that the last show was domestic violence, you will see it with panic and depression. There seems to be a decreased relationship between cortical structures and limbic structures. That is established. You start to see how these illnesses probably all reflect some sort of lack of inhibitory control that takes you into these strong emotions and behaviors. Medications make a big difference in treatment for depression and panic and anger. I think it helps to look those things up. When that thing totally disconnects, and youll see with road rage, domestic violence, someone in a state of panic, someone that is in a severe depression. You can talk until youre blue in the face and they cannot connect with you cortical he. That cortex is gone at that point and time. I pull her is a fascinating illness. Bipolar is a fascinating illness. I did not included in the book because i did not have it in my model. It looks as if that behavior would have survival value. I am extremely energized. I have all the energy in the world and i can stay up. I am not going to sleep. I am invincible. The things that we tacked onto it, like you are going out and spending it is a byproduct of severe energy. , my guess is i would probably put it in terms of the way we deal with sensory input and how you process that. Ygdala, the the am message violence guys, they will overreact. I see my wife talking and she is having an affair. They cannot process same things such as jealousy. Thank you. You have been a great audience. [applause] our coverage continues on the cspan network. We are live at the 2014 National Book festival at the Washington Convention center. At past years on the national mall, moving indoors this year. Mayor0 eastern, adrienne on the book, the amazons lives and legends of warrior women across the ancient world. Cspan 2 book tv and cspan radio, the book the bully pulpit will be discussed. Taking eastern will be phone calls. Here on cspan, our live coverage of the National Look festival continues with Adrienne Mayor in a few minutes. A short portion of Amanda Ripleys remarks from earlier at the book festival. She spoke about her book, the smartest kids in the world and how they got that way. [no audio] [applause] [applause] thank you very much. It is great to be here on many levels. One of which is this is the city where i live. How many people live in washington dc . I assume almost all of you. The other reason is that i wrote much of my first book, or any of the parts that were decent, and the library of congress. It was the only place where i could find some focus and peace. I had a new baby at the time. I would go to this beautiful space and there is part of it where you cannot get on the internet, which is a wonderful luxury. [laughter] salvation to a have such a beautiful place that we can all access. It is a privilege. I am very glad to be here for all of those reasons. I am psyched that i got into the science pavilion. You never know where you and up when people categorize your book. What i want to do today is talk about a mystery. It is a mystery that starts with for and has implications the lives of millions of kids around the world. But i also want to do is your questions and thoughts from all of you. We are going to make sure to save time for that and turn this into more of a conversation, if we can. It is, after all, saturday morning. You have come out here and you deserve to have more of a conversation rather than be spoken to. The mystery that ive mentioned is a mystery that i think we have all sort of heard about. It is in the ether. As a reporter, i kept hearing about it as well. It appears that there were a handful of countries that were managing to educate virtually all their kids to high levels of Critical Thinking in math, reading, and science. I would hear various theories about why that was so. We have all heard these theories. I would buy into one or the other of them for a while. I would encounter some inexplicable barrier to that theory being true. Let me give you an example. One of the reasons i heard for why these other countries were doing so great was that we do not spend enough on education. In fact, we spend more per pupil on k12 education than the other top four countries in the world. If you look at those countries, they do not line up of the top Education Systems in the world. It became clear that it was not that we were not spending enough, we were not spending it the same way. We were not spending it wisely, maybe. Other reasons i heard is that we were too big and too diverse to compare to a place like finland, which is totally fair. You know, really, finland . This is a huge country we live in. In some ways i start to think about our country as 50 different countries, particularly when it comes to education. So much of education is locally controlled. It is very different. When you go from texas to vermont to california. That satisfied me for a while. Data on aoking at the statebystate basis, a matching that all of our states were countries. When you do that, you see not only huge variations from state to state, but you see that not even some of our smallest, most homogenous states like maine, which is 94 white and has 1 4 ,f the population of finland those kids were performing at the level of kids in portugal, which is below average or right around average for the developed world. We were not seeing the kinds of highflyers you would expect. The exceptions are massachusetts and minnesota. We have anyone from massachusetts and minnesota . We have two states that were maybe not in the top 10 but in the top 1520 in the world. That was encouraging. The most convincing theory ive heard for why we were not doing so great overall in some of the smaller states even was poverty. That made a lot of sense to me. We know that all over the world, poverty influences education outcome and we know we have an unacceptably high poverty rate given our wealth is a country. Right around 20 , depending on how you are measuring it. That made a lot of sense to me. Then i started looking deeper into the data. We are, for better or for worse, a wash in data in education. We have more data than we know what to do with. It is kind of like health care. If you look at it more deeply, what you see is, look. There are countries that have very low Child Poverty rates. Norway has a 6 Child Poverty rate, which is close to that of finland. As low as it gets, really, all over the world. Norwayssee is that 15yearolds are performing at the same level as american 15yearolds, which is to say average for the developed world in reading and science and below average in math. As youll see, math is a recurring weakness for the u. S. If you look within our data set for the u. S. , you see something really astonishing, which is if you look at our top quartile, 25 of most affluent 15 years old, kids that have lots of advantages. Highly educated parents, hightech schools, all sorts of resources. By the way, this data set includes private schools. If you look at those kids, you can see they are scoring below their affluent peers in 27 other countries in math. They do better in reading, although not at the very top of the world. If you look at our lowest quartile of kids, socioeconomically speaking, they too are scoring below 27 other countries in math. There seems to be some systemic problem that interacted with poverty, that interacts with diversity and are history of institutionalized racism, that interacts with many of these things. It was not just one. No single one could fully explain what we are seeing. I stopped Everything Else i was doing, writingwise, and decided to spend a year to understand what was really going on in these countries. Did part of this sort of similarly i would like to welcome you and hope youre having a wonderful day. Before we begin, we need to inform you that all of the pavilion presentations are being filmed by the library of congress for his website and archival purposes. Please be mindful of this as you enjoy the presentation. In addition, please dont sit on the camera risers that are located in the back of the pavilion. It is my great pleasure to introduce Adrienne Mayor, who is an author on ancient science topics and a classical for cloris folklorist. She has spent two decades researching major works of classics,ps in philosophy, science, and technology. Her work has been featured on and abc, the Discovery Health channels and has been published in the New York Times and national geographic. Her latest book is titled the amazons lives and legends of warrior women across the ancient world. Through her deep research, mayor combines classical myth and are. To reveal details about the lives of these ancient women warriors from the ancient world, from the Mediterranean Sea to the great wall of china. Ladies and gentlemen, Adrienne Mayor. [applause] thank you. It is really a great honor to be part of the National Book festival. It is especially exciting for me because this is the debut of my book. I dont even have a copy of my own yet. [laughter] this is a sneak preview. The book does not hit stores until midseptember. Very exciting. , all the popular movies i think we can start the slideshow. With all the popular movies, tv series featuring bold, warlike women, x amazons likeena and wonder woman amazons like xena and wonder woman, movies and the hunger games, im guessing that everyone is aware of the idea of warrior women. It is almost impossible to count the number of books for adults and children featuring amazons. Im wondering if the slideshow is beginning. Ok. I had compiled a slideshow, but we will see if oh. You did not put it on slideshow . Ok. Who were the amazons . Ago, the ancient greeks described amazons as the independentn, and fearless women who hunted and wrote to battle. I think it is fair to say the amazons have always been with us , as a reality and as a dream. It is just that sometimes their fiery nature is hidden from view or even suppressed and at other times, it comes blazing into Popular Culture into history, especially if you have been paying attention to the kurdistan women who are fighting isis. The images you see in the slideshow really bring that home. The timeless quality of ancient amazons as they were depicted in classical greek vase paintings and sculpture. Those images i showed with modern archaeological excavations of the battlescarred skeletons of reallife amazons, women of eurasia were buried with weapons and horses. Those real horse women of the steppes whose grace can tell us so much, were alive at the same time that the greeks were describing of barbarian warrior women that they knew as the amazons. Im also including a few maps for orientation as you can see them. They might help you see where we are talking about. I have added to the mix some thrilling images of modernday amazons. Who were the amazons . It is a simple question but complex answer. As many of you know, in greek mythology amazons were fierce women of exotic lands, as courageous and skilled in battle is the mightiest greek heroes. Amazons were located in a vast territory that the greeks called the land around the black sea and beyond. Amazons played a major role in the trojan war and the chronicle of the cities of athens. In greek myth, every great champion from hercules, achilles, they all had to prove their courage by overcoming powerful warrior queens and their armies of ruthless women. Those glorious struggles against foreign mankillers that is what the greeks called them were recounted in oral tales and they were later written down in epic homes like homers iliad. The ancient greeks surrounded themselves with images of amazons, just as we do today and every greek boy and girl, every man and woman new amazon adventures by heart. Audacious warrior women were not confined to the realm of myth and antiquity. We also hear that famous historical figures such as cyrus the great of persia, hannibal, alexander the great, and the roman general pompey also tangled with fears amazons. The idea of warlike, barbarian females the greek use the word barbarian for anyone who did not speak greek. They were the opposites of proper greek women and they certainly served many symbolic and psychological functions for the greeks. Is thewas entranced by archaeological discoveries that confirm that amazons were not just fantasy, not nearly figments of the greek imagination as so many scholars have believed. That is what i am going to focus on today, the archaeology of amazons are in i was amazons. I was struck by the fact that greek and roman authors never doubted that amazons had existed. Many ancient writers up to the roman period reported that life then were actually enjoying liberated life of amazons and still dwelled in the lands around the black sea and beyond. Long before modern archaeologists began excavating the graves of warrior women, those ancient writers understood that among the nomadic, horsewriting peoples of the thepes of western asia, woman lived the same rugged, outdoor light as the man. Life as the man. They have no cities. A live free and on concord so savage that even the women take part in war. Others, were as fearsome and courageous as their husbands. From ancient times, the greeks realized that the amazons of their myth were somehow elated to the living women of city of. The nomad women were first described in detail in about 470 herodotus. Istorian i was intrigued to learn that the philosopher plato stated that the amazons of mythic times and the contemporary warriorwomen described by herodotus inspired platos idea that greek women should serve as soldiers alongside men in his ideal republic. Thanks to spectacular archaeological destructor is discoveries, we have overwhelming proof that girls and women sitting the artription of amazons and really existed. They were members of tribes that lands to thee north of greece. They were called thracians. Among others. Used were trained to use bows and spears. They knew how to defend themselves and they went to war, just like men. The lives of these nomadic women were very different from the lives of greek women, who were normally confined indoors to weave and mind children all their lives. That difference made a deep impression on the greeks. It the greeks began to encounter these nomadic peoples in the seventh century bc, when many greek cities were beginning to establish trade colonies around the black sea. The greeks met and traded with these diverse but culturallyrelated steppe tribes centered on horse and archery. They have their own names and history, but they became known , which is a name we can use today. They were feared further expanding conquest across attentionapture the and fired the imagination of the greeks. Stories about them begin to filter back to greece and then there was the wrecked contact with formidable mounted archers, both men and women. It is easy to understand how genuine knowledge mixed with details, traveler reports, curiosity, imagination and a lot of speculation to fill in the gaps would have led to an outpouring of sensational and vivid pictures of amazons. We know about these peoples because of excavations of more than 1000 ancient scythian graves. They have been carried out since the 19 for these 1940s. Before the advent of dna testing, it was taken for granted that anybodys any bo with weaponst must belong to a male body. The recent example is a tomb of a warrior discovered last september. The skeleton was holding a spear. It was announced as the grave of a powerful warrior chieftain. The dna test of the skeletons and revealed that the owner of that spirit was a woman that spear was a woman. Archaeologists had to scramble to reword your announcement. , now bulgariaace and romania, two grave mounds filled with magnificent treasure were excavated in the 1960s. Each grave held a wealth of weapons, gold, silver, artifacts, armor. Many things decorated with fantastic animals and tattooed faces. There were the remains of richlyequipped horses. Each mound held a pair of skeletons. These in the 1960s were routinely identified as two powerful warriors and their wives. 50 years later in 2010, dna tests were done and they reveal that all four of the skeletons belonged to warrior women. The graves were from the fourth century bc. There were two find silver cups inside each grave and the cups were inscribed with the name of a thracian king of that era who ruled a confederation of scythians and thracians. They were apparently honorary gifts from that came to the warrior women, perhaps to seal a treaty. Now that dna analysis is becoming more common, several hundred graves of scythian women buried with their graves buried with their weapons are known and more are being found. Studies oflogical skeletons and dna testing of the bones of adult skeletons can reveal the sex and age at death with about 90 accuracy. The dna studies tell us that a substantial number, about women of the scythian were buried with their weapons. The studies are questioning the old assumptions of the past that a body must be female if it is buried with a mirror and jewelry and if there are weapons, it must be a male warrior. Archaeologists are reexamining remains that have been misidentified as male warriors simply because of their masculine grave goods. We are learning that among s,ythians of the steppe man, women, children, everyone owned a mirror, knives, needles, combs, and rich, golden ornaments, earrings, bracelets, necklaces. One out of three women were buried with quivers full of arrows, spears, and weapons like the mans. Many of those women had war injuries, is like the mail orders. Test like the male warriors. They were laid to rest with the equal honor of the man. Funeral fees, sacrificed horses, little cauldrons for burning hemp, and food for the afterlife. Some of you may have heard or read about one or two of these discoveries, but i was astonished to realize and learn just how many female graves of warriors from antiquity have been found. More than 300 warrior women burials have been discovered so far. The skeletons and grave goods are described in chapter four. The biggest concentration of burials are in bulgaria, ukraine, south russia, and kazakhstan, the very places that were identified as prime amazon territory by the ancient greeks. In theical grave goods heart of amazon lands include armoredars, massive, fighting belt, quivers filled with arrows, battle axes, shields, and necklaces of needs and animal clause, golden earrings, and sometimes even clothing of wool, leather, fu beend hemp has preserved. Most of the warrior women were between 1645, but the youngest girl warrior found was about 10 years old when she died. She was buried in iron armor with two spearheads, evidence that Young Children were trained for battle. That was in the ukraine and another nearby grave held the remains of three young girls, ages 1015. Their arsenal was very surprising to the archaeologists. It included heavy cavalry items, scaled armor, helmets, javelins, shields, and quivers full of errors. Arrows. Three of the most ancient amazon graves ever found were in the region, whichsus is now the republic of georgia, a land strongly associated with amazons in antiquity. These women were buried about 3000 years ago in about 1000 bc. One woman was 30 years old, wearing a necklace of needs and she was buried in the City Position sitting position, a bronze sword across her knees. The job owner of her horse and shield were nearby. Of hert the jawbone horse and shield nearby. The left side of her head at a wound from a battle ax that had begun to heal before she died. She had survived that wound. Next to the warrior woman were several lion or leopard claws, maybe hunting trophies or part of a cape. The analysis of scythian skeletons are revealing details. Some of the women were bowlegged from writing all their lives on horseback. Y suffered our stride this arthritis from constant riding and hand bones showed repeated use of a bow. Injuries included ribs slashed by swords, and skulls punctured by battle axes. By careful analysis of the bones , bio archaeologists can determine the direction of an opponents attack. They can tell whether they were fighting face to face, on equal footing, on horseback, whether a person was in motion, and or whether or not they tried to deflect the strike. Most combat injuries are on the left side, indicating that the adversaries were righthanded. Evidencearchaeological points to a level of gender equality unheard of among the ancient greeks. No wonder they were fascinated and horrified by the barbarians of the steppes. It is Little Wonder they spawned eggs a liberating what if exhilaratingawned what if stories. Amazons were a way of envisioning, turning about the possibility of equality between the sexes, even if remained only a dream in ancient greece. Unlike the lives of greek women, being an amazon was an option for women on the steppes because they had been raised to shoot arrows by their brothers. This egalitarian lifestyle made perfect sense in their nomadic culture, and a small group on the rugged and harsh steppes. You are facing constant threats from enemies. You have to go right enemies. Holder. Was a stake it was natural and necessary in these society to teach boys and ng,ls the same horse ridi hunting, and fighting skills. They all rest alike impractical tunics and trousers and every tribe could handle a bowl, a spear, and a battle ax. It was among these peoples that the horse was first domesticated. This is also where the powerful recurve scythian bow was perfected. Horses in archery were the great equalizers. The combination of horseback riding with archery met a woman could be just as fast as a man and just as deadly as a man. That meant that ordinary women of scythian could be hunters and warriors. These foreign women could behave freedom, greek men, roaming at will, choosing sexual partners, chasing game and killing enemies. It astounded the greeks. It invoked respect, anxiety, and fear. That ambiguous reaction coupled with the storytelling imagination generated countless mythic tales about amazon queens from exotic lands. Those popular stories were illustrated in thousands of artworks in greece. Today, only a fraction of the art that once existed survives today. Images ofre than 1300 amazons on greek vase paintings. I was struck by a poignant indicator of the popularity of amazons when i visited the louvre museum. They have a collection of amazon dolls recovered from the graves of young greek girls. The clay dolls had movable arms and legs. They were helmets and had a metal weapons and they could be dressed in different costumes. My book is packed with stories about amazons from greece, persia, egypt, across asia, and all the way to china. Since this is the science section, i have been focusing on how archaeology sheds new light on ancient greek narratives and the artistic images we have of amazons and how some details in ancient the richer and art 1 literature and art once dismissed as imagination are turning out to be accurate representations. Archaeologist showing us how much the greeks actually knew, or guessed correctly, about the scythians. As greeks learned more on more about scythians, they revised it for trails of amazons. In the fifth century, the greek writer herodotus reported that scythians enjoyed getting high on the intoxicating smoke from burning hemp. Archaeologists are finding that wereian men and women often buried with their kits, withpsmoking burnt residue still on the pebbles. Of amazon weapons is one of the most striking changes for accuracy in greek art. The first images of amazons appeared on greek vase paintings 2500 years ago and they showed amazons dressed like greek words with greek icons greek warriors, with greek armor, and were fighting on foot. Greeks soon put the warriors on horseback, equipping them with scythianstyle weapons. They were seen lunching with spears and twisting around on their horses to shoot backwards in the notorious parthian shot. I found a painting of an amazon on horseback twirling a lasso like wonder woman as she charges a greek warrior, cowering under his shield. The wild pattern and textures of the leggings in sleeves worn by amazons in paintings match the textiles and clothing that have been recovered from scythian graves. Typical amazon vase paintings are shown wearing necklaces and earrings and tunics or layings decorated with geometric designs dear. Riffins, liens, and lions, and deer. All of these items have been found in the burials of real amazons. The greeks were especially fascinated by amazons trousers. This is something no greek man or woman would be caught dead in. Trousers were thought to be just barbaric articles of clothing. Why would anyone where such ugly clothing . Simpleeks themselves for wore simple rectangles of cloth held in place with pins. Sers are the first tailored garments. The greeks claimed that amazons were the first people to ride horses and they claimed that the ugly trousers had been invented by barbarian women. In fact, the greeks were onto something. Trousers were invented on the steppes by the women and men who first starting riding horses. Trousers have been found preserved in scythian graves from 3000 years ago. They were necessary for a life on horseback and these garments served as equalizers for the scythian women. The greeks were also fascinated ambivalentd and about another barbarian custom, tattooing. The greeks themselves considered tattoos barbaric, but according to many ancient greek writers, scythian women wore tattoos of beautiful designs. Agent painters detailed deer and other tattoos on the arms of the warlike women. You see that pushpull attraction of the amazons for the greeks. We have solid physical evidence to prove that women of ancient scythia did have tattoos and they were much like those shown in greek vase paintings. Some of you have seen before grass of the socalled ice princess and her exquisite tattoos of deer with towering s, griffins, other animals both real and imaginary. She is one of a score of ancient scythian mummies that were preserved naturally in the permafrost. Their bodies are heavily tattooed with fantastic and real animals and geometric designs. Some of the tattoos were invisible to the naked eye until very recently. In 2004, tattoos hidden for more than two millennia were revealed by archaeologists using infrared cameras at the army taught museum in st. Petersburg armitage using them in st. Petersburg, russia. My mission in writing my book myth from fact. I wanted to uncover the realities behind the amazons stories and unearth overlooked knowledge and gather the most advanced discoveries about real women warriors who had been mythologized as amazons. I wanted to find out what we could know about the historical counterparts of mythical amazons. Who were the model for those mythic amazons . How can we be certain that amazonlike women actually existed in antiquity, and what languages did they speak . What do their personal names mean . Would female archers really to shoot a breast bow or parole a spear . R . Or hurl a spea what kind of horses did amazons from the steppes ride and what were their most Deadly Weapons and what injuries did they inflict . I had a good once i had a good picture of what genuine womens lives were like on the steppes, the ew ms. Sprung to life myths sprung to life with clarity. What it hercules have to kill Queen Hippolyta of the amazons after she offered to give him her were built in friendship . Armyid a great amazon decide to invade athens . Where did those amazons and up end up after that mythical war . Instead of fighting to the death on the battlefield of troy, why couldnt achilles and the amazon queen have been allies and lovers in a alternate world . Who is the beautiful amazon queen that stocked alexander the great across asia . As i delved deeper into the archaeological discoveries, more and more new questions demanded answers. Wondered, who else was fascinated by amazons beside the greeks . What kind of stories do the scythian tell themselves about their own baroque women . What their own heroic women . What kind of tales were spun about nomadic warrior women in egypt, central asia, and china . The answer to those questions revealed that the nongreek cultures told radically different stories about warrior women, which i cover in the concluding section of my book. I will stop there because i am sure some of you have burning questions about amazons of your own and i will be happy to try to answer them. Thank you. [applause] did you find archaeological evidence linking the msmyth e myths linking artemis to the amazons . Artemis was the goddess of the hunt. Two gods ofs, the hunting and warfare were women. Athena, the goddess of war. I dont know of any archaeologists that would give us information that artemis and athena existed, but there is a lot of evidence and artistic evidence that the greeks believed that the amazons of myth and the real amazons of scythia worshiped artemis and they felt that she would have been their patroness because she hunted and was very ruthless against her enemies. She also used a bow and arrow. She was not on horseback, of course. They really associated amazons if theremis and felt was any female goddess of the amazons, it would have been artemis. Archaeological evidence of real ofthian sites, im thinking amazon island, which is just off the coast of northern turkey in the black sea. It was mentioned by whoever wrote jason and the argonauts. They make a stop on amazon island and they see the ruins of temples that were used by amazons that lives even before jason and the argonauts. This is evidence of the greeks they looked at archaeological ruins in amazon territories and associated them with amazons. Archaeologists who have gone to , they discover that in fact it was a center of worship of cavalli, who is a mother goddess of anatolia and the black sea region. The real amazons probably worshiped someone like cavalli. My question is i am here. Kazakhstan and people recall the tradition of warring women. I was excited to learn that many years ago. I have a question about social structure. You wellsketched the fact that we have artifacts, injury records in the bones themselves, we have the armaments which were buried with the women. What about the social structure . Conjectureone into somewhat into conjecture. Could it be the women and young girls had certain roles in the use incursion in these incursions . How do we know they would perform the same tasks in the raid that the men did . They had the training for what you are saying, but perhaps they were not put in the most perilous part of the invading force. I wonder what your thoughts are on that. The greeks, when they described the living women of scythia, mentioned the girls had to prove themselves either in hunting or battle or emergencies and they could not even form a union or have children until they had at least defeated or killed a man, an enemy. If you think about it in that kind of society, a small tribe is by danger and rugged life, facing enemies all the time and raiding, it makes sense that young people of both sexes would have to prove themselves to the tribe before they could marry. The greeks also mentioned it was the young girls who mostly did the hunting and went to battle. They were the reckless, tough young women. The older women, although they had all the skills, only rode out in emergencies. It seems that the archaeological evidence we have seems to support that. Andrussian archaeologists ukrainian archaeologists mention that they feel they have evidence that young girls were the activeduty soldiers, going out with boys or other girls. They had that choice and the ancient greeks say they either went out by themselves or in groups of young men and women and that the older women only if they chose to or if there was an emergency. The other interesting thing about archaeology is that we do find some of the warrior women are buried with Young Children. Who had beenthers fighting. Thank you. A couple of questions dealing with patriarchy. Culturea patriarchal as greece, what is with the amazon dolls . The other question is your photograph seem to indicate that some amazon tradition survived. I was wondering to what degree they did and how much they were overwhelmed by invading patriarchys . The first question about the amazon dolls it is a striking discovery that it contradicts what many scholars have said about amazons, that amazons were invented by the greeks in order to be killed and that they were examples, negative examples for greek rural send women, that you should not greek girls and women, that you should not be like in amazon. Now we have evidence that young girls played with amazon dolls. The other interesting thing that i did not have time to mention is that amazon images appear not just on pieces of pottery that were used by men in their symposia, but they appear with great regularity on womens perfume jars, on womens jewelry boxes, on things owned by women in ancient greece. I think it tells something about the private life of the greeks that we really do not know. [laughter] ambivalence and fantasy going on. I dont know. The second question about the survival of other traditions and warrior women in nongregarious. Nongreek areas. I was surprised by how much i was able to find stories come from the caucasus or central asia and they were oral histories there were only written down fairly recently, within the last 100 or 200 years. Linguists say the languages and traditions were they give us a pretty good idea theye kinds of stories told themselves. I hope that answers your question. Thank you. [applause]