L. A. Times festival of books on everything connects the Building Blocks of daily life. Im john wiener, i write for the nation magazine, and i also host the weekly podcast called start making sense. You guys have been here before, you know the rules; silence cell phones, no personal recordings. You can watch us on cspan when this is over if you want to relive those unforgettable moments. [laughter] we will have time for questions at the end. We will have a book signing afterwards. The signing area for this session is signing area one. Two of our authors appearing today are are prolific, old pros. Ed humes has written 14 books, brian fagin has written more than 40. So lets start with jonathan waldman. This is his first book. Jonathan waldman [applause] [laughter] jonathan studied writing at dartmouth and at boston universitys Knight Center for science journalism. Hes written for outside, the washington post, the New York Times, mcsweenys, the utney reader. He has worked as a forklift driver i want to get this straight a summer camp director, a sticker salesman [laughter] a climbing instructor and a cook. His first book is rust the longest or war. It was nominated for the l. A. Times book prize in science. Please welcome to the l. A. Times festival of books jonathan waldman. [applause] thanks. Is finish so my opening question for you is what is a bigger threat to the United States military, isis or rust . [laughter] theres a guy in the pentagon who would like you to throw that question at him. Hes our nations highestranked rust official. [laughter] hes been fighting a very good fight for about ten years now. Hes making friends on the hill with a lot of politicians and among admirals in the navy who say we cant keep going the way were going, losing hips to rust. We ships to rust. We cant build them fast enough. He would say its clearly rust. I try to stay away from proclamations like that, but i did write in the book that rust is greater than all other natural disasters combined. And people this weekend have asked me, i dont get it, a book about rust. I said think about it this way our most abundant element is attacking our most important material all the time, everywhere. So isis is not bad. [laughter] and you say theres a shipyard up in Northern California full of rusting naval vessels . It was there. Actually, i havent seen it in a while. Whats the name of the fleet . The reserve fleet. Thats a nice way of putting it. In case you need rusty ships, thats where to go to get them. [laughter] theyre so rust key, theyre polluting the bay up in San Francisco and causing a big problem for california. I think theyve slowly tugged them over to texas to get scrapped and killed, but we kept them because we sort of had to. Its kind of an ugly political scenario stemming from rust. It happens all the time. Lets talk about cans. 180 billion aluminum Beverage Cans are manufactured, is it every year . Thats just for the maybe thats every year. And you need each one to be perfect. What happens if a can is not perfect . So i went to can school concern. [laughter] and almost got kicked out for asking too many questions. Because what they do to keep a can from rusting makes some people in the industry uncomfortable because of endowritten disrupters. Endocrine disrupt ors. But cans i heard referred to at can school as exhibiting time bomb behavior because they want to rust from the inside out, top down and bottom up. A can probably is made with more tolerance than anything on a spaceship sent up there. So every time i grab a can, i do this silly thing where i just marvel at it, because no one looks at a and be thinks how amazing it is. When cans rust from the inside out, they explode, and the tab part that goes it can fly out and get you in the eye. It has blinded people, it has severed peoples achilles tendons. You get lawsuits. Its really ugly, and its just the basic old thing, the can, that we run off and recycle. So i ran into the can, and i refer to it as a corrosion miracle. Every year a number of companies theres a hot market in energy drinks. I dont know if anyone here has invented any energy drinks, but if you do and you want to sell them in a cool looking can, you go to a major can manufacturer, and you say wed like to put some stuff in your can. If its too corrosive, they will call you back and is say your stuff is battery acid, you need to change the formula, because we cant put it in a can. Can and that happens one out of seven times with all energy drinks. [laughter] so drink up. [laughter] tell me more about this can school. What is can school . Socaning is a big industry. Pepsi, cocacola, everybody in the milk industry, everybody water. People want to put their stuff in a and sell it that way. [laughter] so the Ball Corporation just down the road from me in colorado invites well, they used to invite people, now they dont. Thanks to me. [laughter] they invite people to beverage can school and food can school, and i told them who i was, and they actually said they couldnt come and they goofed up and sent me an email that said, welcome, heres what it is, heres what to wear, lunch is included, so i went. And theyre familiarizing people in the Beverage Industry with what magic goes on at the can plant, how to make cans and why theyre spending a dime a can to buy them by the billions. So that was sort of my inside tour to how it goes. And i actually, i didnt get a diploma from can school, they were not happy with me. But on the day my book came out, the chief corrosion guy from their Packaging Lab showed up, and i got an email that night awarding me a can school diploma. [laughter] [applause] thank you, thank you. A lot of you so a lot of your book about rust is about the rust fighters. And this might seem a small thing, but it really got to me. You point out that a disproportionate number of the people you call the rust fighters have moustaches. Yeah, really good ones. Can you explain this. Or can you explain anything else about rust fighters as a group . [laughter] broadly, i think that engineers have a wisdom that some things are not worth fighting. And i think facial hair is probably one of them. And i want to be clear though, i dont i think thats a great position to take. Sheaing every day is weird. Shaving every day is weird. I have a lot of comments on amazon saying, like, you have a strange moustache obsession. Maybe i do, but a lot i think twothirds of engineers, male engineers have moustaches. This basically are no female engineers hey, talk to people who do s. T. E. M. Promotion, engineering is like 98 male. Fact. [laughter] im no engineer. Well, i think well move on now. [laughter] well come back to jonathan. Edward hiewms is a pulitzer prizewinning journalist. As i said, author of 14 books including garre bolling, our dirty love affair with trash. His writing has appeared in l. A. Magazine, the wall street journal, the New York Times and other places. Hes the recipient of a penn award. His new book is called door to door the magnificent, maddening, mysterious world of transportation. Its official pub date, i think, is two days from now. So this book is really brand i new. The forward is written by bill mccan kicken mckibbon, one of our heroes, and hes in the l. A. Times today on the oped page. So please welcome back to the l. A. Times festival of book withs edward humes. [applause] so, ed, you open your book with a memorable day in l. A. How many people here remember carmageddon . That was the day they closed the 405 for how many hours, 48 hours . 53. 53 hourings. First time since it opened in 1962. The prediction was total disaster, stay in your homes, do not go out during carmageddon. What happened . [laughter] well, we were supposed to fix traffic x it did. For 53 hourings. [laughter] the great irony is that closing all those lanes improved traffic and pollution throughout southern california, throughout the los angeles area. It was a Great Success on that front. Now, after it opened, of course, its the field of dreams phenomenon. If you build it, they will come. More cars have come to fill the vacuum. One year after the extra lane on the 405 opened it took several minutes longer to make that commute than before we built the lane. 1. 3 billion, longer commute. And sort of this myth that exists that our traffic will get better if we just pour more money into making more lanes for more cars. It just, it hasnt worked. Its never worked really. And yet were trapped in this ribboncutting love of building new lanes and big infrastructure when theres probably this is the thing that i was trying to talk about in the oped piece today theres a lot cheaper ways to do what carmageddon did while it was closed, which was to change peoples behavior. When they drive, how they drive or what they drive. And that was really important, because it showed how you can successfully make traffic better without building new stuff. Well, i think i have a great solution which is i stay home and order everything from amazon. [laughter] and amazon, you know, ups brings it the my house, ups is driving around every day anyway, so isnt that the solution for everyone . [laughter] you know, it sort of seems like its is so to convenient. All right, this is in my book, but we have a diabetic cat, you know . Not a nice cat, and we have to buy this special cat food x the best place to get it is from amazon. I clicked on it one day, and it arrived in, like, nine hours. Yeah, really . This sameday delivery world is terrible for traffic. Its going to kill us. Its going to drown us. Think about it. I talked to the head of ups in los angeles, and, you know, on any given day theyre moving two million packages around l. A. And environs, delivering them. They used to take all those by the truckload to stores. So lets say the average ups van has 120 packages on it. All that goes to one place. Now it goes to 120 different places. The orders of magnitude of more trips that have to be taken to move the same amount of goods well, noah massey, he was the head of the h. A. Headquarters for ups l. A. Headquarters, id say he tore his hair out over there, and he is maddened by the simultaneous desire of consumers to have that convenience, and yet their absolute hatred of having more trucks on the road delivering tough and their battles against things like extending the 710 freeway and completing it after 40 years of not connecting to where its supposed to go. We want it all and we dont want to pay for it kind of situation were in. So were facing another kind of carmageddo from the hurtling towards this digital economy. Are you suggesting maybe i shouldnt order so much stuffsome. Actually, that was my last book, garbology. We do get and accumulate so much stuff from far off. And thats really where this door to door idea came out of. Looking at my own habits and my familys in my home and kind of one day in the life of what it takes to keep us moving and keep us in, you know, socks and shoes and all that stuff that comes in at the port of los angeles. 30, 40 of the kerr economy is coming consumer economy is coming out of that road we dont want to finish. And just what it takes its horrifying when you dig down and see how much were investing and spending and we do every day. Well, you have some statistics which i question. You say that the morning cup of coffee covered 30,000 miles. Now, i this bothers me. The circumference of the earth, i looked this up, 25,000 miles. So how could it be from colombia to los angeles i assume we all drink colombian coffee about 4,000 miles, i think. Yeah. So how did you get there, and maybe you should reconsider. No. Well, a lot of coffee you drink is a blend, of course. The one i was sort of picking apart was Starbucks French roast which has, i think, three or four different kinds of beans. I dont remember now. If you look at the african and south american sources of the beans, the fact that germany is, i think, the sixth or seventh larger exporter to the United States. They dont grow a bean, but the web that our and were just talking the beans here. Follow to get to us is much more than you might think. And, of course, if youre talking about that cup of coffee youre clutching on your commute, theres the transportation of the water, the milk, if you use sugar, the packaging that the coffee comes many, the coffee maker itself which probably has even more miles on it, you start to see that the transportation footprint is youre right. I hadnt counts the cup, the milk, the machinery. Well, you can okay. Youve got me on coffee, but what about the smartphone . This one you say 165,000 miles. I repeat, the circumference of the earth is only 25,000 miles, so how could the smartphone take 165,000 miles . Well, i was going with my own stuff, so the iphone was my model, but i believe all smartphones are probably similar. If you go to the ontario airport and look on the tarmac, and this happens every day, theres palettes of these plain, unmarked boxes with constant video surveillance. And they wont tell you whats in it, but Everybody Knows those are the iphones, and theyre worth more than their weight in gold. And every day they come in over, out of china, stop in alaska to refuel and come into ontario, and theyre filtered out to the rest of us. And the thing is if you follow the assembly, just the little home button with the touch id sensor on it, it not only has [inaudible] [laughter] oh, thank you. I didnt know i had [laughter] so if you just follow that one humble little piece, it goes back and forth between china and japan multiple times as one part is moved to an assembly, and the part theyre attaching may have come from the netherlands. I think that button alone has about 12,000 miles on it because its constantly on the move as it grows in sophistication. And, of course, its final assembled at plant in china and then shipped out to the United States. So the transportation footprint on that and then, of course, the Raw Materials, the greek chorus of rare earth elements which i cannot pronounce, but they sound like minor deities, all those have to be sourced from all over the world. The Precious Metals also in your phone. Its almost impossible to trace the actual Raw Materials of the things we use. But apple is better than most companies at making that information public. Its just astonishing, you know . You look at your i have a toyota. The 30,000 parts in that around went to the moon and back before the odometer has budged one mile because everything we do is global now. 95 of our shoes come in through the port of los angeles from foreign countries. This everyday stuff that we use, not just the exotic stuff, has tremendous footprint on it from transportation. And you have some horrifying pollution statistics on the supertankers. Oh, yeah. Well, you know and theyre not rusty ships because they are gleaming and huge. When you get close to them, you guide these into port and oh, that ship doesnt look so big, and you realize youre, like, two miles away. [laughter] and the one i happened to go out on was a car carrier. They roll it on, they roll it off. Its literally a floating parking garage, and bigger than the one we parked in to come to this pest value. Just festival. Just immense. The numbers i have is 160 of those ships, and theres 6,000 total. 160 of them on the open seas emit the particulates and smogcausing emissions equivalent to all of the cars in the world. All of the cars in the world. Its staggering. And they do about 3, 4 of Global Carbon emissions as well. So at any one time, 100 of these ships are either docked in the ports of los angeles and long beach or waiting to docker a hundred of them. And those together have greater emissions than all the cars in the country. Thats what it takes to move our goods to us. Are we feeling bad enough now . I got to ride in a google car too. That was fun. What was googles car like . All right. Well, i wondered a little bit be they staged this for my benefit, but they swear they didnt. You know, they have programmed this car to drive all over the Mountain View where the google campus is. And were driving along, this cars amazing. First of all, its the slowest car on the road because its the only car in sight obeying the speed limit. Which is why it gets rear ended all the time. [laughter] but then were driving right through the campus, and im chatting with the operators who arent doing anything other than what the cars doing, and theyre showing me what the Machine Vision and all of a sudden jams on the brakes, and walking across the street was some google coder. And talk about facial hair, you think engineers are bad, he had he was in his own world. He had a fullsized laptop on his arm with the screen up and was typing on it as he was crossing the street. And he came out from between two parked cars. And, you know, if that had been me driving, it would have been flying laptop, flying nerd [laughter] and this car stops on a dime and didnt, you know and he looked up, oh, google car, kept on going across the street. [laughter] but it was, i am convinced that we would eliminate 90 of car crashes if that was the major mode of individual transportation. It was impressive. Im feeling better. [laughter] next, brian fagin. He was born in england, trained in archaeology and anthropology at pembroke college, claim bridge. From 19591965 he served as keeper of prehistory at the Livingston Museum in Northern Rhodesia which is now zambia where he was involved in excavating a series of 1,000yearold villages. Hes a pioneer who makes it relevant in newly independent african nations. Eventually, he left africa, came to the United States to teach and from 19672003 he served as professor of anthropology at uc Santa Barbara. He retired from teaching in 2003. Since then hes been a fulltime writer and independent scholar. As i said, hes written at least 40 books, maybe 50. Were trying to nail down that number. Most important of his books are the ones on historical Climate Change including the book the great warming, 2008 book which was a New York Times bestseller. Tells the story of the medieval warm period. His 2010 book, cromagnon, was featured at the book festival a couple years ago. Hes also author of several saili