consider this is the history in africa, and this goes back a couple of centuries. imagine that today, to be a follower of the yoruba religion is to earn the death sentence in certain parts of nigeria. christians also earned the death sentence in certain parts of nigeria and christians respond in kind and set upon the muslim community. but the level of intolerance based on ignorance has enriched such -- european papers any time in nigeria find out the church has been burned down, worshipers are machine guns, the mosque has

been burned down, bombed out of existence because even within the muslim religion there are different degrees of purity. once i consider the other side not sufficiently pure and therefore deserving censorship, the nigerian situation is more complicated as in other societies. there's never one single issue that needs to this total stabilization of society. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. ..

>> thank you, amanda. um, okay. i wrote a little something here, and i can get my glasses on and read it -- oh, and i've also got it, wait a minute, it's in the kindle. so let's see if i can read it in the kindle. but it's this little thing i wrote for you because it is a mash up of material from the god problem. and we authors will write a paragraph 20 times or 50 times to finally get it rich enough to give to you. we want to the make it as rich as a pastry, period. and when we speak, we're one person.

but when we're writing, we're 50 people. we're a cross-50 people trying to concentrate all their brains to get an idea. so rather than speaking exthem por ray which we'll do later, i've written this little thing for you, and it's just a teaser. um, let's see if it tells me how to get to the beginning of of this document. go to and beginning. okay. beginning. and it isn't a summary of the book, because the book is there to jolt the way you think to get you thinking in radically different ways than you've ever thought before, realize how alien thoughts are and how easily they could be replaced by something radically different. so this book only gives you a little hint. and it starts because the book is "the god problem," it starts with a god joke. and we'll do this one. there are these two little boys,

8 and 10. they're the worst little boys you've ever seen in your life. they are the children of of the omen. they steal all the money from their parents' wallets just leaving enough so the parents don't notice. they light fire to every structure that looks flammable, and they torture pussycats and any other small animals. their parents are at wits' ends. they're good, liberal parents. they're supposed to give their kids their creative freedom, and this is not working out. it looks like it's going to be the destruction of humanity if these kids ever get their hands on nuclear weapons. so they read about a nun who has a remarkable gift with difficult children. she not only has her or ph.d. in special education, but she's a traditional disciplinarian, tough love. so they contact the nun, and the

nun is kind enough to come over to their house in exchange for a small donation for the church, and sits down. she wants to sit down with the kids one at a time. so she sits down with kid number one, the 10-year-old. and she's got her steel ruler in her hand, and she says ever so gently just the simplest question she can think of. son, where is god? and the little boy sits there and doesn't say a word. so she gets a little less patient, and she says a little more sternly, son, where is god? and the little kid still doesn't answer. so she taps her palm with the steel ruler and comes out with that kind of controlled fury that has taken command of kids from the south bronx to compton, california, and she says, son, i'm asking you, where is god?

and the kid runs away and hides in a closet. now, his little brother knows this is the closet where they usually plan strange things like the next garage to burn and comes into the closet to see what's going on. and the older kid is trembling. and he says, we're in really big trouble this time. god is missing. [laughter] and they think we did it. [laughter] all right. that's to big story -- the obligatory joke to open anything you ever attempt to do in life, and it does have to do with a missing god. so we'll skip over that, because we told you this. now look, now we're going to get serious. picture this: you and i are seated at a café table in the nothingness before the big bang. you are a wildly-imaginative visionary, and i'm a hard-nosed, got to see it to believe it conservative.

you have extraordinary visions, and i am a stick in the mud, a crust of toast committed to logic and to common sense. you and i have nothing better to do, so we've been sitting here at our outdoor table sipping one espresso after another and piling up empty coffee cups by the thousands ever since the nothingness began. you should see the size of our tab. but here is the point. absolutely nothing is happening, right? why? because there is nothing. no thing, no action, no space, no time, no form, no substance, no shadow, no sunshine, no sticks, no stones, no bones, not a single, solitary thing. and there never has been. suddenly, you perk up. you had a nutty vision, an insane day day dream. you point to a spot in the blackness a few feet away from our table, and you me that if i

watch very carefully, i will see a pinprick smash from the nothingness, then expand at super speed, blowing up like a hyperkinetic balloon, sneezing forth like an expanding handkerchief, a speed rush sheet on steroids, a manifold of raw space and time. look, the boredom must have gotten to you, i tell you. what you're claiming is loony, and it defies the laws of logic. i've been sitting here across the table from you forever. i've kept my eyes peeled, and there never has been a pinprick of any kind. what's more, this wacky stuff you call space and time has never existed either. nor will it ever exist. why? because nothing comes from nothing. zero plus zero equals zero. the idea that this basic fact could ever change is ridiculous.

and it defies the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy, a law so basic that every respectable 31st century -- 21st century scientist will declare it thoroughly right. while i in exasperation am trying to get logic across to you, wham, a pinprick shows its head. it's what sid cysts d physicists will someday call a singularity. i'm stunned. this simply does not make sense. but you stay cool and act as if nothing is happening. meanwhile, that pinprick blows up so fast that it makes me dizzy, and sure enough, it has three properties that have never existed before. three properties that if common sense prevailed should not exist. those properties are time, space and speed.

time, space and energy. how in the nonexistent world did the nothingness pull this off? the pinprick keeps whooshing outward like the rubber sheet of a trap lean on a growth binge, unfurling as a space-time manifold. i'm stunned. what the heck is space? what in the world is time? what is powering all the speed? who in the world invented these peculiar things? and if they weren't invented, how the hell did the utter emptiness burp them out? while i'm sitting here with my jaw dropping, you are as cool as a scoop of gelato in a block of ice. finally, you open your mouth and make another of your wacky predictions. that unfirming sheet is about to -- unfurling sheet is about to brew something called things. and those things are going to precipitate from the sheet of space and time and speed the way

that rain drops precipitate from a storm cloud. now i know you've lost me. you got me with your prediction about the pinprick, but that was beginner's luck, and dumb luck of that kind doesn't strike twice. now listen to me very carefully, i tell you. there is no such thing as things. there never have been things. and there never will be things. that's why this place we're sitting in is called the nothing. the no thing. get it? that sheet that's speeding open a few feet away from us has only three properties, space, time and energy, and those are whacked out enough all on their own. everyone knows that one plus one equals two. garbage in, garbage out. add space, time and spieled, what do you get? you get space, time and speed, period. then there comes a rain, a hailstorm, a blizzard of what?

of things. gazillions of them. roughly ten to the 87th power, ten with 87 zeros after it to be a bit more precise. what are they? they're elementary particles. all popping simultaneously from a mere whoosh, and it makes no sense. in fact, it is impossible. so why in the world have you been right twice, and why is my down to earth logic, my sturdy and sober rationality, my clear and sensible thinking all wrong? the god problem: how a godless coz m creates, is a detective story. it's a hunt for the answer to that question, how in heck does the cosmos create? if there is no god saying let there be light, how did light come to be? if there is no god parting the heavens and the seas, how did a mere lifeless universe cough up oceans and skies? the god problem offers five tools with which to explore this

mystery, five heresies. five rebellions against the rules of standard issue reason, the sort of reason that this cosmos refuses to obey. here come those five heresies. are you ready? a does not equal a. one plus one does not equal two. the second law of thermodynamics that all things toward disorder is wrong, dead wrong, so astonishingly wrong, it is very difficult to believe that anyone in science ever took it seriously. heresy number four, the concept of randomness is a mistake. there is far less randomness in this universe than today's science believes and far less randomness than you and i often think. this is not a six monkeys pecking out the works of shakespeare universe. far from it. and heresy number five, information theory -- the hot new theory of the last few years -- is not really about

information. not at all. its equations cover only a tiny sliver of what the theory claims. the real core of information is what information theory's founder claude shannon called, quote, meaning, unquote. and meaning, believe it or not, is not covered in information theory. why is that a big mistake? because meaning is central to the cosmos. central to quirks, protons, foe tons, flax ris, stars, lobsters, puppies, bees and human beings. why bother with five heresies? because the cosmos herself is the real heretic. the real breaker of the manmade rules of reason. and thanks to her heretical bent, this we call or car -- peculiar rule-breaking cosmos that you and i have been watching will soon churn out galaxies, molecules, stars and dna, not to mention talkingers, common sense, croissants, café

tables and you and me. but how? that is the god problem. how in the world did the god problem come to be? okay. imagine this. you are a 12-year-old in a god forsaken steel town that once helped suture the great lakes, a city that for you is a desert, a wasteland without other minds that welcome you. it's buffalo, new york. [laughter] your bar mitzvah is coming up. congratulations, you are jewish for a day. and you are avoiding a huge confession, one that will out -- utterly change your life. a confession about one of the biggest superstars of human history, god. you are not a popular kid. in fact, other kids either ignore you or keep you from getting anywhere near their backyard play sessions, their baseball diamonds, their clubs and their parties. when they do pay attention to you, to take aim. they kick soccer balls in your face. they grab your hat and pay toss

with it over your head while you run back and forth trying to yank it back out of the heights above your reach. or they pry your textbooks from your arms and throw them on the lawn covered in dog droppings. no one your age wants you in buffalo, new york. but one saturday afternoon you are sitting alone in your family's big, dark living room. you open a book you've never seen on the shelves before, and you see something that does welcome you. why? it's a colleague of deadmen, and deadmen have no choice. the two heros you glue yourself to, two heroes not in a position to object if you tag along are galileo and the inventor of the microscope. these are men b who shuffled off this mortal coil roughly 300 years ago, but they put you on an adventure that will last you a lifetime. your task? to pursue the clue at any price

to find things right under your nose, things that you, your parents and all the kids who shun you take for granted. to look at these everyday things as if you have never seen them before. to look for hidden assumptions and to overturn them. to be a deliberate and devoted heretic, to look for really big questions, then to zero in on them even if the answers will not arrive in your lifetime. why do this? pause your dead companions -- because your dead companions have lured you into science, and science is the permanent, nonstop heresy. according to the book in your lap, the first two rules of science are, number one, the truth at any price including the price of your life, and number two, look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, then pursue them from there. look for things you take for granted and turn them on their head and see what you get. says the book that has grabbed you in science, the next big question can be more important

than the next big answer. new questions can produce new scientific leaps. they can didly wink new insights of understanding, big ones. insights that nine years later a guy will call paradigm shifts. new questions can even show the people who rejected you how to think in whole new ways, and that becomes your mission: finding the questions that will produce the next big question shift, allowing others to radically reperceive. so how does god get into the picture? let's dial forward two years. you are now 12. you've got that? your bar mitzvah is coming up. your dad is going to throw a party for all the kids you know, for all the kids who humiliate you at public school, and this time you are invited. yes, your bar mitzvah is the very first time that you will be allowed to attend a celebration with your peers. congratulations. and it gets better. the center of attention will be,

guess who? you! but something is rumbling through your mind. something you refuse to register. something that could cancel your bar mitzvah. you've read the arguments that burke and russell have made about god. those arguments hit home with you. god, in russell's opinion s a silly idea. if it took a god to create a universe, then a thing as complex and powerful as a god would need a creator too. and who or what created god? in other words, the notion of a god momentum make sense s so the confessions you are dodging is this: you are about to become a stone cold atheist, but if you admit that to yourself right now, you will blow the bar mitzvah. how do you handle this? you stow the question of whether there is god safely away in your subconscious. you never put it in the words, just to yourself. but that's just the beginning.

the party happens. it isn't what you expect. the other kids show up, but they do what they've always done. they get together in groups of four and six, they bowl, and they turn their backs on you. you are left out even at your own shin dig. thank god the dead guys of science still welcome you. you write 200 thank you notes, it takes you two months, then it's confession time. there is no god. you are as certain of that as you are that a bus slamming into you and your bicycle could do serious damage, and if there were a deity hanging around in the skies, what kind of creature could he be? every creature born is guaranteed just one thing, that it will die. the results have been death by the millions of quinn until ons. on top of that, there have been roughly 142 mass extinctions since life began which would make god a monster, a pervert

and a serial curl. a demented and addicted murderer of entire species. what's more, something created pain. and if that manager was god, that would make him a torturer. not to mention a slayer of creatures made in his own image. so god is either the ultimate war criminal, or he is nonexistent. you bet on nonexistent. but this leaves you with a slight problem. a scientific challenge that is right under your nose. if there is no creator, no engineer, no only nip tent conscious presiding over everything, then how did time and space come to be? how did the universe create something so unlikely, so prizing, something that broke every previous rule and made brand new rules of its own? how does a godless cosmos make pro tons, planets, crocodiles,

crusaders and milky ways? how does it burp forth you and me? that becomes the quest of a lifetime for you. you will begin in 1956, the it's the mission you will pursue for over half a century, it's the question who's answer, be if you are lucky, can help us reperceive how does the cosmos create? it is the question. it is the god problem. there are clues to the god problem. clues in aristotle's sneaky tricks, clues in galileo's creationism, clues in isaac newton's intelligent design, clues in einstein's pajamas, clues in john conway's game of life, clues in the new kind of science and clues in those darn six monkeys at six typewriters getting it wrong. the stories of all these are in the god problem. the god problem sets out to solve the puzzle. clue number one, the first of the clues we'll dive into

tonight comes from an obscure mathematician naped giuseppe piano. for that clue, let's get back to the clue that really counts the most: you. flash forward eight years. it's 1961. a dozen freshmen sit around a broad conference table in portland, oregon. you are one of them. statistics say that yours is the brightest class of college students in the country. your class' median scholastic aptitude tests are higher than those at the entering classes at harvard, mit or cal tech. yet what is about to come is a shock, a shock and an almost impossible challenge. you can smell your professor coming down the hall before you can see her. why? in the professor's hand is a stack of sheets of paper that exude the sweet smell of the chemicals used to make copy in a now-forgotten technology. the professor enters the room, positions herself at the head of the table and asks the student on the right to pass the papers

around. only half a page of type, 165 words. but the 165 words on those pages contain the magic beans that will grow at physicists which will shay call a toy universe. those 165 words are nearly incomprehensible, but they contain a set of five simple rules you've never heard of before, piano's axioms. and every week for the next nine months you will be told to dedrive a new corollary from those -- derive a new corollary from those axioms. it isn't easy. in fact, it is barely doable. despite your brain power, only one in ten of you will be able to handle the task, and those who are able to tackle the homeworker assignment will monopolize the attention of the girls in the class, girls desperate for help with their homeworker. but what comes spilling from piano's axioms is amazing; addition, subtraction, square roots and rational numbers.

the entire mathematical system that it took you eight years of grammar school and more than eight math textbooks to learn. yes, eight math textbooks. the contents of over 17 pounds' worth of printed paper pulp is hidden in 165 words. hidden in five simple rules present from the beginning in the half a page of axioms. but how? clue number two to the god problem will come from something ente molingses call synergy. termite dung and termite spitballs are even more useful than cow paddies. they come out in tidy brown pellets or in rod-shaped bricks. why is relieving yourself on a consistent form handy? because there's a simple rule that obsesses termites -- clean up the mess. when you find a low brick of dung littering a passageway, when you see a lump of brick,

dig it out and saturate it with your cement-like saliva that's laced with the chemicals of social perfumes, laced with pheromones. next, look for the pile with the greatest height and the greatest social magnetism. the pile that has attracted the most attention, the pile with the greatest popularity, the pile whose pheromonal odor is the hardest to resist. look for the tallest pile around. and neatly deposit your pellet of termite dung on top of the pile. there. now doesn't the corridor look better? what's the result of your thousands of e repeated acts of termite tidiness? what's the result of what mathematicians call iteration? what's the result of repeating a rule; clean up the mess over and over again on the heaps your rule it has produced? towering pillar after pillar offer the mitt dung. then comes the second rule. when two piles of dung bits or spitballs rise high enough, climb on top of the litter and

deposit your new contribution so that -- we need a visual demonstration here -- so that it tick sticks out beyond the shaft. outward in the direction of another towering column in other words, build the piles of dung so that their tips reach out and touch each other. what does the second rule of repetition generate? governmentic arches and massive walls. your termite itch for cleanliness results in an architectural masterpiece. a termite hive 972 times the height of the average termite. that's the equivalent of a 640-story human building over a mile and a half high and four miles wide. a hive topped with spires or domes, a hive with air-conditioning that ups the level of moisture in the room that the workers use to form the fungus that feeds the colony.

keeps the temperature at a steady 86 degrees in the chamber of the queen and in the brood chambers no matter what the outside conditions might be. a hive whose air shafts process 1,000 liters of air each day, a hive that houses two million inhabitants. the moral of the termites? from tiny obsessions and trivial fixations big things can grow. but here's the real mystery. the one that gets to the heart of the god problem. is there a termite blueprint for this intricate structure? no. so how does the spectacular termite city arise? from the simple rule of obsession, pick up the -- [inaudible] and stow it neatly on the biggest pile around. the rule is so primitive that it showed up 13.72 billion years ago in the first flick of the big bang. attraction and repulsion showed up among the very first things. attraction and repulsion is

basic to termite architecture, but it's with sophisticated upgrades. the termite palace owes it existence to repulsion against mess and to attraction towards the tallest pile in the neighborhood. it owes its to the repetition of attraction and repulsion. it owes its existence to the repetition of a rule 26 billion times or more. and guess what? towns, cities, civilizations, cultures, religions, science and the words you and i are using to communicate this second owe their existence to the same ingredients; attraction, repulsion and repetition. persistent, unending, obsessive, driven repetition. at its core the termite's simple rule is an assumption. like the assumptions of prophets, priests, popes and scientists. but unlike many wrongheaded assumptions, the termite's assumption maps on to a reality.

and there's something more, something gigantic. in fact, the termite's assumption maps on to a reality that does not exist until the termite makes it. a reality no single termite can make. a reality that only tens of thousands of termites can make. a reality that pulls an impossibility into existence. the termite's assumption is a rule that makes walls where there were no walls and towers where there were no towers and tattoos on the very forefront of your brain the termite's assumption plugs into a world that isn't there, a world of what is not. a world of what could be. a world of possibility. the termite's assumption, its rule -- pick up the mess -- is something with a peculiar sorcery. it is an axiom. and what's an axiom? remember those 165 words on a sheet of mimeographed paper at reed college? those are axioms. giuseppe piano's axioms. and axioms have strange powers.

but how and why? let's review. clue number one to the problem of how the cosmos created is piano's axioms. clue number two is the power of ther the mitt. here comes god problem number three. it's a mystery hidden in plain sight. hidden in one of science's favorite fixations, the wave. imagine that you and the woman or man of your dreams are flying back to the united states after a quick and totally self-indull gent weekend in london. -- indulgent weekend in london. it's midday. you look out the window of the plane at the atlantic ocean below you, and what do you see? waves. if you want, you can lock your eyes on just one wave and follow it for minutes. it has a distinct identity. it trails off to the north as far as your eye can see, and its hump seems as well formed as the back of a whale. remember when you were a kid and rolled a ball of clay out on a tabletop until it made a long, round clay rope? that's what the wave looks like.

but the wave has a peculiar property, very peculiar. it doesn't exist. what? of course the wave exists. if you were in a lazily-moving blimp, you could follow it for a thousand miles. you could follow it for days until it broke off the shores of maine. if you were in the water on a surfboard, you could ride its hump, and if you carefully picked your way over the slippery rocks of a jetty off the maine coast and you tripped or slipped while a breaker was smashing its fist against the granite, your body would register the wave's power. the wave, in fact, would roll, mash, mangle and kill you by merely rearing to a frothy peak and hammering you on the stone. as the survivors of the tidal waves, the tsunamis that killed 230,000 people in indonesia in 2004 and that killed 19,000 in talk about seem ma japan in 2011 could tell you.

that's real, isn't it? very real. well, yes and no. imagine that you are a molecule of water in the middle of the atlantic ocean. like a termite, you follow what complexity specialists call local rules. you do what your neighbors hint that you should do and what, pray tell, is that? you move in a circle that's anywhere from three feet to 160 feet in radius. 3 feet to 160 feet high. first you circle up to the surface, then you circle back to the depths. you don't go anywhere, you just keep making the same circular movement over and over again. you it rate. you repeat. a simple rule. but there's more. when you circle to the surface, you help make the peak of a wave. when you circle to the bottom, you help make that wave's trough. the next time you circle to the surface, you help make the peak of yet another wave. yet another wave, a wave with yet another distinct identity, a wave that will retain that

identity for hundreds or thousands of miles, a wave that will do a heck of a lot of traveling. but do you ever travel? no. no thing travels. to make the wave. like the termite you, a water molecule in the middle of the atlantic, are part of an architecture too big for you to see. now look at it from the wave's point of view. you're a wave. what are your particles, your atoms of being? they change every minute. you are nothing. you are no thing. you are equivalent of cells, your molecules of h2o are never the same or for more than 60 freaking second. bear with me while i repeat no thing travels thousands of miles from the middle of the atlantic to the coast of maine, no thing at all. yet you, a wave, continue to be yourself. and you travel. but how?

the matter that makes you up is constantly changing. from minute to minute you reassemble yourself with new ingredients. you are not a crew of unchanging particles. you are not a pyramid with an unchanging collection of stones. you are a shape with power over substance. you are a pattern that retains its identity despite moving from one temporary team of draftees to another. you are something impossible, a shape without substance. you are, in fact, a seducer, a kidnapper and a recruiter. you are a process. you are a form of organization passing over the landscape like a breeze. you are a recruitment strategy. now what in the world is a recruitment strategy? a recruitment strategy is a process that keeps its shape second by second by second, a recruitment strategy is a pattern that imposes its identity insistently. a recruitment strategy is a

pattern that makes matter and energy do a strictly-patterned can, a social dance. remember the greek philosopher who said you can never put your foot into the same river twice? he meant that when you dipped your toe into the water the first time, you felt the flow of water around it, but if you dipped in the one second later, the water that had flowed around your toe the first time was already 5 feet downstream. and the water was water that had been upstream just a second agoment comet back two months later, and the water on your first visit has been replaced by all new water. but something called the river is still there. and strangely, it looks the same as if nothing has changed. the ever-changing river is a recruitment strategy. but what in the world is these

yous' ship? it's a philosophical brain teaser that goes all the way back to a greek historian who wrote up a version of it in roughly 100 a.d.. okay, imagine that you're a ship captain. this is an ancient greek ship captain. you plan a one year voyage near athens to get rare and expensive commodities like copper, tin and silver from a spanish colony roughly 1,164 miles away. because the voyage from greece to spain will be long, you take lumber to replace any planks of your ship that become water logged, and you budget enough coins to pay for more lumber along the way. you're all set for repairs. you have been at sea for a month when, in fact, some planks become water logged, so you replace them. then you put the planks on the deck in the sun to dry out. when they are nice and dry and toasty, you cover them with pitch to water proof them, and when you have enough, you begin to rebuild a second ship.

by the time you've been gone a year, you're sailing two ships. the first ship is the one whose planks you've been replace, and by now you've replaced every single plank. ship two is built from the planks you dried out ask and recycled. now, here is the puzzle. when the two ships return to their home port, which ship is the original? which is the ship? which is the ship you set sail on? remember, the empty ship that you're towing is really the old ship in disguise. it has every single worn-down board and plank of the original, and the ship your crew is hunkered down the in is new from stem to stern, yet your crew has never stopped sailing in it, sleeping in it and eating in it. so is the ship with all new parts the original, or is the original the ship you are towing on a rope behind you? which ship is the real deal? the ship, like a wave, is a

recruisement strategy. so is the puzzle. in fact, it's a recruitment strategy that's been seducing, recruiting and kidnapping minds for 1900 years. recruitment strategies are everywhere you look. an atom is a recruitment strategy. a galaxy is a recruitment strategy. a star is a recruitment strategy. an atom imposes its spherical pattern on pro tons, neutrons and fast-moving electrons, and it does can it gazillions of times in gazillions of different locations in very much the same way. what's more, it somehow manages to do the same thing wherever you look despite the fact that it is not communicating with others of its kind and makes sure they are all dancing to the same choreography. then there's a galaxy. a galaxy inflicts potato-shaped ellipse and often spiral arms on ten billion stars or more. a galaxy imposes its pattern on masses of matter wherever you look in the sky.

why? because the recruitment strategy of a galaxy has imposed it pattern over 125 billion times in this universe. meanwhile, a star forces its ball-of like shape and its fiery way of crushing atoms on on untiles of tons of matter. it does it over and over and over again in thousands of billions of locations without communicating with other stars. your body, which replaces over a billion cells a minute yet retains its identity, is a recruitment strategy. your personality -- a rapid-fire flood of changing communiques between 100 billion neurons -- is an even more intricate recruitment strategy. you are like a wave. a wave is independent of the water that it sucks in then tosses out. so are you. today you lunch on water cress salad, tomorrow you dine on lasagna, the next you eat a steak, yet you do not become a pasta, a cow or a leaf.

instead, the pasta, cow or leaf becomes you. yes, you are very much like a wave. every minute, every 60 seconds you say good-bye to more than a billion combinations of postsin aptic receptors in your brain and replace them with new ones. you do the same with your red blood cells and the cells that line your digestive track and that make up your skin. like the ship, you are changing your planks. meanwhile, you constantly shift your mind from one obsession to another, yet you retain an identity, something more puzzling than mere substance continues to impose the shifting flicker of a you. no, it is not an immortal soul. and, yes, it will cease when you die. but that does not diminish its mystery. that does not reduce its astonishing ability to persist as something beyond the atoms and molecules of which it's made. why call these things recruitment strategies?

because a recruitment strategy is insistent. it is persistent. it is driven. a wave of yellow light, for example, will repeat its corkscrew dance 540 trillion times a second. always sticking with absolute precision to the limits of its amplitude and frequency. a recruitment strategy is not matter, and it is nowhere. nowhere. it is in no permanent location. yet a recruitment strategy imposes its shape on matter over and over again. it imposes its way of doing things in location after location after location. but if a recruitment strategy is nowhere and no thing, then what the hell is it? for ten years, and this is the last story, for ten years from 1821 to 1833 in berlin the german philosopher george hagel

l wrote a long and nearly incomprehensible book, the philosophy of history. a book so hard to understand that few philosophers ever read it. the copy in my local library is made with pages that were printed in 1905, no one has ever slit -- or no one had ever slit the pages until i did. okay. the central theme of the book was intriguing. hagel said all history is spirit becoming matter. sounds spooky, right? sounds b superstitious and religious. and it certainly does not sound scientific. but in a sense hagel was right. we've been certain that we can understand the cosmos based solely on material things, but we've missed the astonishing capacity of immaterial things. we've missed the importance of arrangements, patterns, shapes, forms of social organization as tush on and -- stubborn and

resilient as matter. with structures all their own, structures that insis tently abstain despite obstacles, structures that sustain no matter what matter they con taint we've missed the secular mystery of a wave, a merry go round that masters matter, commands it, grabs it in a fist then lets it go. we've missed the mystery of a you and me, and we've missed the mystery that will someday explain the five heresies. you and i are patterns with ambition bursting forth in a cosmos devoid of gods, of after lives and of immortality. we are pyramid makers and palace creators on the prowl. we are multigenerational waves of culture. no, we are not the first forms that immaterial pattern has done, and material identities also work on their -- recruitment strategies are alive in colonies of bacteria and hives of bees. they are equally alive in stock markets and trees.

but we are the most complex social project that recruitment strategies have ever attempted to achieve. we are the repeaters of ancient patterns like attraction and repulsion, repeaters through whom the cosmos has sketched new spires and domes and woven whole new tapestries. we are the cosmos' tools for fantasy. we are our her first vessels of dream, and yet we are only the foothillses, only the steppingstones, only the starting blocks for the cosmos' next big leap. now, remember the first two rules of science. the truth at any price, including the price of your life, and look at things right under your nose as if you've never seen them before, then proceed from there. question your assumptions. the first two rules of science are rules of radical reperception. the first two rules of science are a recruitment strategy. and the first two rules of science are the rules of heresy. the moral of the story? the time has come for science to grapple with the mystery of form without substance, the mystery

of form with persistence, the mystery of recruitment strategies. so that's it. it's as long as it is because i wanted to weave a bunch of threads together for you and leave you puzzling over things. there are answers, there are lot of of puzzles and lots of stories, but the point of the puzzles is to make you reperceive things you take for granted every minute, the way that science takes for granted the wave is appalling. science doesn't recognize science is supposed to be metaphor doesn't belong in science. well, when i tracked that one down, it turns out it comes from aristotle who says metaphor is not scientific, and we've been repeating him like parrots without even questioning whether he was right or wrong. well, if metaphor doesn't have anything to do with science, what are we doing with the wave? you'll see the whole story of how the wave got into science, and it'll surprise you. the whole journey of writing this book surprised the hell out

of me. okay. so that's it, that's the speech. you all get awards for valor and for stick to itiveness in listening to the whole thing. any questions? eric, you should have questions about all this. it should seem to you like it's not even science. he's telling all those stories. what in the world is he doing claiming this is science? >> actually, yeah. i wanted to go back to the very beginning. when you talked about, um, no this, no that, no -- and i was reminded of the buddhist, um, what is it called, the sutra that they read all the time which philosophers have pointed to as sort of -- they call it the object of negation. in other words, the negation of any label onto any phenomena. >> well, it's very useful in your thinking to go back to the

beginning and to imagine how in the world we got the ideas that we've got. for example, in this book, um, i wanted to write just a quick couple of pages on the history of mathematics that led to axioms, because i had to explain piano's axioms to you, and that's not easy. none of us could understand them at reed college. so i went back to look for the history of axioms, and i wrote a quick page that said, well, first in mathematics the people of jericho invented the wall, this idea of piling stonings together. and they made their walls round, all of their buildings were round in the beginning. so they invented the circle. right? it's obvious. then 2,000 years later people came up with this bizarre idea, you take this toxic system that can kill you in the rainy season called mud, and you pound it into rectangular bricks, and no one's ever seen it before. this cosmos has never really seen a rectangle anywhere. so you pack this into rectangular bricks. imagine, you came up with this

idea, and you've got to convince people to do it. and you put these things in the sun. what in the world are you talking about? mud kills us, that's all mud does can. and you're going to insist if i do this for 60 years i can make a garden of -- i say, eric, what planet have you come from? there is no such thing as a garden apartment complex. the word "apartment" doesn't exist. we have caves, or we have little round dwellings made of mammoth bones and tusks, for god sakes. or over in jericho they have these big round things. so i was going to say in this little half a page or two pages that the people by making these bricks in a rectangular or form and piling 60 million of them together made the first flat plains, you know? flat walls. the universe had never seen flat walls before. and the first right angles. because the world had never seen those either. and it was simple. besides that, everything i was saying was supported by the

ensigh so crow media britannica, it was supported by what's his name -- oh, i always block on his name. the guy who convinced me to be an it in the first place, bertrand russell. it was obvious, everybody knew it. and then on my next page was about how the babylonians then invented the 360-degree angle. now, how did i know that? because it was in the encyclopedia britannica, it was in bertrand russell's history of philosophy, it was everywhere. so i was about to write that, and then i thought, oh, my god, if eric's going to read this book, i want eric to feel what it's like to be a babylonian b. and to feel what it's like, i have to put the babylonian protractor in your hands and to make your feel viscerally what it's like, i have to find out whether that protractor is made of clay, wood or copper. so for a month i pursued the

question of whether a protractor is made of clay -- that is, a babylonian protractor -- is made of clay or p copper or wood. and i couldn't find it. and if somewhere in the back of my mind this happens to you every day, this happens to authors too, you go, you amazing idiot, how could you be so stupid? you are following up this obsession. you know what you have to say, go write it. well, after a month it occurred to me why in diligent research, you know, with google book search these days you can go through hundreds and sometimes thousands of sources in a day. and after going through tens of thousands of sources, why was i not able to find the babylonian protractor? because the babylonian protractor did not exist. because bertrand russell was wrong. because the babylonians did not invent the 360-degree angle. because the babylonians did not invent the angle at all. yes, the babylonians had t

0-degree -- 90-degree angles. if they didn't get those exactly right, off with your head, you know? the zero was made to absolutely awe and impress and overwhelm rival kings and make everybody want to come to babylon, for god's sakes, and view babylon as everything good in the world. and if it fell down because your 90-degree angle wasn't right, it was going to make your king a laughingstock, and he would not be kind to you. so, yes, they managed to make 90-degree angles, be i they didn't -- but they didn't even have a special word for a right angle. so you have to go back and rethink from scratch. so the best way to do science is to go back and imagine what it's like not to have any of these concepts concepts and what it's like to be looking at the world around you. look, i kept trying to find out what the ecliptic was. so i -- every week i run a meeting, and my friend don davis appears in the meeting, and he's the world's leading space artists. so if anyone knows what an

ecliptic is, it's don davis. and he said, well, you know, the earth revolves and goes around the sun. hey, don, no, i'm talking about go out into a field, look up at the sky, what the freak do you see? and he couldn't tell me. he was so obsessed with the concept, he couldn't tell me. well, it turns out the concept of a circle was a radical new invention when it came along, and it does not put it in your mental tool box. it takes somebody utterly reperceiving a simple thing like the circle to put it up there. it takes somebody utterly reperceiving something like the 90-degree thing where walls meet. and we have tons of these mind tools. the flat plane? that was an invention too. after people had been living with flat plane surfaces for thousands of years. so the big question is what thing right under our nose are there right now that could be turned into a mind tool? of some kind? what are we missing?

what are we so inured in our concepts, what concept can we not see beyond that they are reality, not the tools with which we look at reality. and if we step back and measure ourselves without these tools, and i do finally put you in the mind of a babylonian and an egyptian and people who don't have any of these concepts at all, then all of a sudden new vistas open up to you of new ways to reconceive things, of new concepts with which to grasp hold of things like the concept in here that abandons the sheer dependence on matter and looks at something that those of us who are obsessed with matter don't look at. form. form that sometimes is so vigorous that it has an identity of its own, and we'll do just about anything to maintain that identity. and it's as solid and persistent and yet changing as matter.

it's right under our nose. we look at it every day, form. and we somehow fail to see it. and i'm sure, you know, we could sit there and have a scientific dialogue about the people who are actually looking at form in some way, but it's not what i'm talking about. it's not the big picture view of, oh, my god, what is this stuff? and how do we come up with laws for it? in fact, there's another basic discovery in the process of writing this book. um, i was doing my research like a madman and was up in buffalo, new york, my hometown where finally at least my family wants me. it's a big change. and so i was up there for thanksgiving. and i realized, you know, i take buses because you can get on the bus at 7 or 8:00 at night and work my work hours which are until 3 in the morning, and you can do that on your laptop, and sometimes the buses actually have what they promise, electricity and wi-fi. but i knew there was a good chance the wi-fi might not be working.

so i downloaded an entire book by aristotle just in case so that i could read it on the laptop. um, and sure enough, the wi-fi didn't work. so here i am with aristotle's posterior analytics. my research has indicated might have something interesting in it. and i'm reading the posterior analytics at one or two in the morning on the bus, and all of a sudden i hit two pages in which the entire program of modern science complete with modern science's prejudices is laid out including that prejudice that metaphoric is not science, including the idea that a bull's eye -- which you'll see in this book -- works and doesn't work all at once. opposites are joined at the hip usually in this universe. so the point is that a lot of the things that we take for granted, they've been prejudices for 2300 years. and if we get beyond those concepts, we might be able to see the things right under our

noses that make the universe so spectacular, including the things that make it creative. because right now with our basic rules of logic we don't get to what makes this universe creative at all. in fact, we so much don't get it that we prefer our concepts to reality, and we deny that the universe is creative. how in the second law of thermal dynamics, all things fall apart. how, wait, this universe or fell together. once upon a time, there was nothing. that's falling together, that's not falling apart. even when the stars died, you could say, oh, my god, that's entropy. all things fall apart, just like i told you. no, they fall together again. in other words, the deaths of the first generation of stars only has three items in it, hydrogen, helium and lithium, but they are crushed together in brand new ways, and 89 new forms of atoms emerge. so even in its most entropic

moment the universe is defined entropy, the universe is giving entropy the fingerer big time. -- the finger bigtime. if we step outside our logic, we can begin to get hold of the logics that can let us understand it. that's the essence of the book, anyway. >> to go back to something we talked about before, um, what is your explanation for dark matter? >> okay. this is the big bagel theory of the cosmos, and i'm going to try to explain it in three minutes. um, this is a theory i came up with in 1959 when i was working at the world's largest cancer or research facility, the roswell park cancer institute in buffalo, new york, and the big problem in 1959 was called the cpt problem, the charge/parity/time symmetry problem. if matter and antimatter are made in equal amounts at the same time, why is there so much matter in this universe and so

little antimatter? well, eric, i can be very e slow. and it took me a whole two and a half months to come up with this. but imagine that the universe is a bagel. you know those bagels with those little, tiny, anally retentive holes, the holes that barely exist? that's the kind of bagel our universe is. and what happens, this is a space-time manifold, by the way. what happens at the beginning of the universe? well, there's a big bang. that takes place at the very center, that tiny little thing in the bagel, a singularity, you know? inmy he's malley smaller, and the matter universe comes spurting from the bagel's top. the antimatter universe comes out at the same time in equal amounts on the underside of the bagel. okay, well, this is so simple, a bagel, you know? who could take that seriously?

.. your bagel, you are stupid. and you don't know there is such an action. let it go. 18 years later, a team of 15 others, looking over the cosmos come to a startling conclusion. quince galaxies, galaxies are constantly fleeing away from you, this is an expanding

universe. once galaxies get past a certain point they begin to accelerate down on the accelerator. and increasing speed. to get constantly increasing speed you need energy, when scientists don't understand they don't even have a concept, they fudge, they come up with a name. when you walk into a doctor's office and you say i have pains in my stomach last five years, what has he told you? he told you you have a stomachache. physicists do the same thing. for all of this acceleration. they come up with the name dark matter and the cosmological constant. guess what has a prediction at a

certain point galaxies will start flying away from each other at an ever-increasing speed? you are a bagel. it is your bagel. the bagel applies the universe expands rapidly and slows down and gets the hump and wanted goes over the hump, what does that indicate at the curb? your bagel does something else. nobody can explain where dark energy comes from. there is an attempt to explain terms of cosmic fold or quantum theory but i don't believe in quantum theories of the conference of international conference of quantum physicists in 2006 why everything fino is wrong and wrote a book about the subject and send it back to me. at any rate, this is the first

sensible explanation. the matter universe up here and the entire matter universe begins to accelerate. and share a common language and a cannon ball running out of energy at the apogee, they begin to run up of the energy and begin to get attracted by -- close to the get to each other accelerate. that is it. gravity between the two universes' -- what does that apply, standard cosmology says it's the universe is going to end in 1 hundred trillion years, big bagel's theory says if the universe is going to end it is around the corner so pack your bags now because it is 1.6 billion years approximately depending on how you do the math. it is 1.6 billion years away. it will be after the mayan

calendar ends. there is a trivial amount. one way or the other this is a theory that explains dark energy. will be accepted by the scientific community? we will see. one of the leading quantum gravity cosmologists says about a god problem, a fairly mathematical despite the fact that james burke, the guy behind the connections series says it is the most thrilling cliffhanger of a book he can ever remember reading. i went for the cliffhanger relevant but also the messina cheri gave you the big bagel's theory and i told you i was geared toward it. the attacks, very heavily for something like that in a book. it has been welcomed. dudley hirsch back, nobel prize in physics said the book is amazing and fascinating. nobody is going to endorse big

bagel theory by itself, it is a risky move. i told you neil the grass tyson -- buzz aldrin produce me to neil digress tyson, he returned my e-mail land the lovely form sent i make a policy of not commenting on new cosmological theories. it is dangerous. you go out on a limb with one of these things. eric, one of the members of the audience, we never met before but turns out he has worked with neil digressed tyson and in the got a problem you will read about all these alternative cosmologies which support in some way the big bagel's the. of course it is my book and i wrote it that way.

any other questions? come up acquistion. >> not really a scientific person, you seem like a happy and well-rounded guy. if you don't believe in god or a higher power, how do you explain, how you explain your positive outlook on like. >> if there were a god, let's go back to einstein the talked-about spinoza's god, it would be a creative force in the cosmos, the very thing i am seeking. if there were a god looking at the universe, it is an astonishing place filled with wonders but also filled with nightmares. the people in syria really deserve to have their entire homes destroyed and put on the streets and wonder if they will be hit by sniper's bullet? that is god's universe if there is a god. it is our job to clean them out,

our job to strain the place out. we are the first collectivities of protons thirteen.two seven billion years old. they have been around all long time. we are the first social project those proton's ever put together that have a consciousness. and they can look at these things and say this is not right, this is not warm and compassionate and loving which means we are the first creatures capable of anything, a phrase that al green gave me when driving around memphis and showing the local vatican, anything you conceive and believe, you can achieve. it is true. it is our obligation to dream these things, to dream a more just, kind, loving cosmos, if that is our job, we are it.

if there is a god, the responsibility lands on us. >> how do you go -- how do you go from no thing to patterns? it is a big jump. >> it is. the universe is good at big jumps. if you go to 380,000 years after the big bang, 380,000 years, a problem that has been plasma. you are a proton, we come at each other like racing cars going at each other head on and bounce off, a very crowded cosmos. the minute you bounce off it is like the shock of your life, you bounce off of erik, you are bouncing around all over the place and despite the fact that it is a cosmic smash up, cosmic

bumper car experience, these protons, you and me already organized in grand patterns. we are already making waves and those waves go from one end of the universe to another. and travel all the way across the universe and has 4 physicists, they say the universe rang like a gong. large-scale structure emerging from a large scale chaos and at 380,000 a.d. after the big bang you are sitting at a coffee table at the end of the universe and you being a visionary say things will slow down. and i go short, after watching this matchup for 380,000 years it is all smashed and-and then you make another prediction. the little things over there the

size of your fist, i have seen them for a long time. and you see those things over there that are the size of the empire state building? i have seen those for a long time. they're always smashing into each other. that is all they do. when things slow down those buildings are going to develop an inanimate longing and the big films are going to develop an inanimate longing too and the inanimate longing of the things the size of the empire state building will precisely fit the inherent longing of the things the size of your fist no matter what part of the universe you got them from. more precise than any german engineer has ever come up with because i know you've lost it. too many years of watching smash ups and matchups and all of a sudden things slow down and when things slow down, little things

the size of your fist and begins the size of the empire state building get together, it is astonishing, a perfect fit. a new pattern emerges instantly and electrons downfall all the way into the proton and disappear and instead they hover in a shell. where does the shape of that shell come from? how did it come to be? i know the universe, i have seen it, 380,000 years. smash and chaos. there are no things like all these crystalline spheres around the earth. you have got to be crazy. you are right, i am wrong. these emerge and patterns come popping out of this cosmos and we haven't taken a good look at why. two guys were sitting around in 1835 conquering this new stuff called chemistry and the fact that 60 years earlier these two

gases had been derived. if you have one guess is partly transparent. and with the other guests, aristotle had come up with an idea in those two pages where i found the program. this breaks everything down to its elements, discover the laws -- and this is not a natural for a. understand the laws of the elements and you will understand the whole thing, the big picture. you understand the laws of the gas, take the two gases and get one jar twice as large and the gases in. one plus one = 2. and a thing of gas, that is it.

let's add a little heat. what should we get? the logic of heat. we understand what he is, all we have to do is understand the laws of each element and understand everything. we should get a slightly heated gas. strike a match. and what do you get? an explosion. an explosion. that is not predicted in the elementary laws. and this weird substance, so weird you can touch it just like this tabletop but your finger goes through it like that gas. if you are male it still buffet table and still on your hand you won't want to walk around and to drive off because people think repeat your pants so it is liquid. is really bizarre. it is water, it is really

bizarre. these two guys are sitting around thinking about this and one of them, john stuart mill, says this is outside the bounds of the kind of science rear doing and not predictable by our mathematics. this is 1835. so let's come up at least with a special name for this weird kind of thing. let's call it heterotrophic, that becomes a craze and kids put on their lunch boxes and you know the phrase every day. his friend, george henry lewes who ends up in the scandal of the century with george eliot, all of that is in the book, says why george we college he emergence? the phrase emergence become the basis of several scientific colts in the early nineteenth century, twentyth century, really takes off. paul davies, the physicist and mathematician at the university of arizona is pushing it like

crazy and has every reason to because emergence is where the real mystery lies. emergence is where the answer to cosmic creativity lies but these guys, 177 years ago said the big problem is science can't deal with this and math can't comprehend it at all. that is 177 years ago. what have we done to advance the math? we have done something. it is in the book. >> without wading 1.6 billion years, what could disprove your bagel pherae? how would you challenge yourself? what would make you rethink your conclusion? >> i get it all the time and i haven't come of the financial yet. 1.68 billion years, i have got a big production in two predictions of already come true but they were implicit predictions, applied in the

shape of the veil. that is the greatest of vantage you can have that they are wide in the very shape of the bagel but in a sense, those things of already happened, tell me what is next, give me another prediction. that is the question i get from people in science. you know that my history as i grew up in science and there was no question what i want all my life. i was a scientific nerd and feel there -- the article physics, fascinated with passions that make historical events and instead of accepting my grad school scholarship i went into a field by nothing about because i wanted to find out about those things. feeling way to do it was to jump into popular culture which i knew nothing about, the culture of kids during their backside. i founded the biggest pr firm and the music industry, working with michael jackson and bob marley and that kind of stuff. that is not a standard background with which to push a new theory of the beginning,

middle and end of the universe. right? so we made an animation of the theory. it is on youto. it got its first five weeks 754,000, alder three quarters of a million hits. the public enjoys it or something. now the question is going to be if you have lived a life and running science in order to expand science which is what i have done, then ok, now a normal credential process and get your theory taken seriously. not something i have time for by will do it. >> to bring everything back down a little bit to the pragmatic, i don't have a science background but i am in political science policy. i was very struck with your explanation of the wave and you're comparison to the stock market which is hanging around in the back of my head.

the idea of lots of discrete entities doing things, creating something larger with or without in the case of people, with or without the intention of creating something larger. could we -- if it is already being done, apply this to policy, okay, we want to do this, we are doing it this way but it is not working or all of these actions we are taking are not -- are somehow creating this other thing we haven't even thought about. i feel like there could be an adjacent sort of guide to how we put -- what is it, recruitment strategies for use them as a tool in other fields. >> you are absolutely right and that is why i have done this dual thing of guiding it. i have been involved in

politics. and cargo on iranian television and i go on saudi television discussing world affairs. i also do american television, radio stations talking about world affairs because the as are all related. because mass behavior among clark's has a relationship to mass behavior among human beings. it doesn't make that mass behavior precisely predictable because mass behavior of humans builds mass behavior of quarks considerably, builds on these patterns of attraction and repulsion but in recognizing the commonality lies hints of the solution. if you read my first book the lucifer principal, an exploration of the force of history will see ideas like this apply in ways that relate directly to geopolitics and economics. if you read my second book global brain, the evolution of brains from the big bang to the twenty-first century the office of the secretary of defense

thought it was irrelevant to these kinds of things that that office through a seminar based on that book and brought people from the state department, energy department and ibm but in reality the path to understanding these things has been chosen by madelbrot who went beyond conventional mathematics, he ditched the mathematics of his uncle was a great mathematician in paris and ditched the mathematics of equations which was largely there in order to keep us from understanding mass so we went to apply to making weapons and he went back to making that -- what had been since the beginning of mathematics, pictures. he did it using this new tool. he works for a business machine company as a permanent finger and coming up with incredible business machines called computers and got the computers to create pictures based on very

simple equations. and began to see the kinds of patterns emerging that will allow mathematics to deal with the stock market. mathematics will only be able to do that when the answers, john stuart mill and the question coming up with mathematics that can predict huge jumps, discontinuous jumps of things called black swans. until science can turn black swans into white swan dance one that understand it is not science yet. it is still primitive. as if we are working with an old stone tool kit of mathematics and it is time to get beyond this and the computer shows ways to get beyond it. the computer is not the answer. we are very good at convincing these things so we will invent something some day that allows mathematics to cope with the stock market's going like waves

do. any other questions? should we leave you -- wage. the microphone is making its way. >> what was your statement about mathematics? >> mathematics, the equivalent of the old stone tool kit, the old stone tool kit was extraordinarily useful. it translated us from homo havilah to homo sapiens. without it we would not be where we are today and it has hung around for 750,000 years without very much changing. every tool is also a limitation. every tool is the tool with which you will someday make the tools that will make the old tools not obsolete but put it in a small corner of your tool kit. modern mathematics is the old stone tool kit of science.

it is just the beginning. it is primitive. until it deals with questions like how the cosmos creates, how electron shells came to be from the nothingness, until it deals with those things is not science yet. it is still primitive. it is your job, my job to make it less primitive. is that it? you have been wonderful. i have had a terrific time with you all and really appreciate the energy you have given me and yu too, amanda. thank you for coming. it has been really a delight. [applause] >> tell us what you think of our programming this weekend. you can tweet as on booktv or comment on our facebook will send us an e-mail, booktv, and nonfiction books every weekend

on c-span2. >> you had been talking about this dream he had, he talked about it for years. the american dream and it becomes his dream and he had been in detroit a few months before and talked-about i have a dream that america will someday realize these principles and the declaration of independence. so i think he was inspired by that moment. >> sunday on afterwards, claiborne carson recalls his journey as a civil-rights activist participating in the 1963 march on washington to prominent historian and editor of martin luther king jr.'s papers, part of three days of booktv this weekend, monday featuring authors and books on the inauguration, president obama and martin luther king jr.. >> last week booktv attended the key west literary seminar in florida. today from noon to 3:00 eastern

we bring several of her talks and panels from the event. paul hendrickson, robert richardson, and many more present and discuss their books. >> fred. this is the white house correspondent and author of the right frequency:the story of the talk radio giants who shook up the political and media establishment. what a talk radio giants we are talking about? >> today you have rush limbaugh, glen beck but this goes to the very beginning, walter winchell, it shows the trajectory of how talk radio began, the beginning of radio. i use this as a history of the united states since 1920 through the lens of talk radio. >> going all the way back what year are we talking about? >> we are talking about a 20s.

the dean of commentators, the first guy i talked about in here, walter when shall -- walter windchill with a hard-core new deal supporter, he shifted in the 1950s, became a strong anti-communist joe mccarthy suorr. radio show syndicated newspaper column, a huge imposing media figure. fast-forward through the 1960s, a major force, the sec was able to regulate broadcasting industry and two chapters on this. one is challenging iraq when the johnson administration used the third doctrine to target political enemies. one of the people i interviewed in here, i interviewed mark fowler, reagan's chairman who helped dismantle the fairness doctrine. once you had the regulation out of the way and allow people like

rush limbaugh to get a foothold in and that led to a real explosion of conservative -- mostly on the conservative side. >> that was my follow-up question in regards from 1920 to today the predominant voices, was there pattern that when left right left? >> interesting enough one of the things i write about in this book is how during the new deal you had a major metropolitan dailies lean to the right. they were very anti fdr and most of the radiobroadcasting voices, talk radio were very pro new deal, kind of the opposite today. mostly became sort of domain for the right and the late 80s with russia limbaugh, his national show in 1988 and the group from

there, in the clinton administration, one of the best things that happened for talk-radio, gave lots of material and continued on and grew as well during the george bush years. a lot of folks thought what is going to happen when they don't have bill clinton to kick around anymore? they thrived during that period. glen beck, sean hannity and michael savage became major national voices in that time period. >> what is the state of talk radio now in comparison to cable news outlets? lot of people have moved over to cable news outlets and become pundits on television. >> in most cases, sean hannity, glen beck, the interesting thing about sean hannity is he is one of the only guys to maintain both a presence on tv and in radio on a long-term basis. glen beck was in cable news for

a while, has his own cable network now internetwise but in last long on fox news, rush limbaugh had a brief four year stint on tv but those two guys were pretty much radio, where they get the big ratings. >> fred lucas, author of the right frequency:the story of the radio giant to shook up the political and media establishment. >> here's a look at some books being published this week. tom daschle, former senate majority leader from south dakota and reporter charles robbins explain how the u.s. senate operate and the u.s. senate, the second book in the st. martin's press series, fundamentals of american government. in invisible armies:an epic history of guerrilla warfare from ancient times to the present, military historian max boot's provides a comprehensive history of unconventional warfare. andrea stewart uses her family