because the first slaves were slavs grabbed by the greeks. you look at people under 30. people that grew up in desegregated schools or intergrated schools testing shows they are the least racist generation ever because they were not taught to think that way. right. i am going to be turning 50 soon. so i was one of it last generations for a member of times with whites-only water fountai fountains. my memories are few and don't but you know i am past midlife. so, we have a way to go. a ways to go. i think there is always going to

be these marginal groups and we will have always have people that choose to become neo nazis but i believe the day of children being brought up to believe that my race is superior or that the other races are inferior and that therefore i should have political and economic control over them just because of the color of their skin that is an idea that is dying out. maybe i will not see it. but i bet your daughters do. >> i bet they do it.

chris, i think that will do it for us. appreciate you. >> thank you. >> no problem. this weeknd, the funeral for "washington post" editor ben bradley and seeped evening author erin holder on his book lincoln and the power of the press. saturday on book tv after wards we talk about the con federacy's president jefferson davis. and we have a three hour conversation with the former editor and chief at simon and schuster and on american history c-span three we talk about propaganda.

and a 1936 form on tb in america. find the schedule on our website and let us know what you think about the problems you are watching. e-mail us with your comments or tweet us. like us n facebook, follow us on twitter. >> next on after wards, the book a deadly wandering recounts the story of a traffic fatality caused by texting through driving from the accident through the legal consequences in the course. this san is an hour. i am hear today hosting afterwards with matt rick tell and congrats on your new book and powerful book a dead ohio wandering. i think it is a story about a

crash and so much more. it is about tragedy and redeption and you could call it the canary and the cold mine case about how we live with technology in constructive and decon instructi deconstructive ways. i want to welcome you and start off asking about the word deadly in the title. before we go into the story, how deadly is this trend? ...

answer is we don't know yet. we have some very decent estimates about the amount of crashes and the amount of deaths caused by phone use by drivers.

and just let me pause and say, now this has been like a eight-minute sentence, and say, shall i tell you why it's complicated? >> host: uh-huh. >> guest: so, the estimates, like from the national safety council, would put at about -- if memory serves, 1.5 million of 5.6 crashes, million crashes, in the u.s., owing to phone use. those are standpoints. the -- those are estimates and the reason we don't know is because it's very hard to track for police agencies, hard to get the information. people lie. and we just started trying to collect the data. so, the estimates are based largely on how much we know people are using phones and how many crashes there are. to just give one example of how we know that the official numbers are so far off, there's a number from about 2011, the latest data we have of deaths

owing to phone use, and tennessee remarks 3 -- 93 cases and the state of new york remarks one. just simply impossible. we're not tracking accurately. the short answer is we don't know. the long answer is all the science and everything we see on the roadways say it's a big and growing problem. >> host: tell me a little bit about the story, because we are dealing with a very, very important problem. it does seem to be on the rise. even if we are not quite sure of the scope of the problem. >> guest: when thought about writing the science, i'm sure we'll talk about it -- i thought, what interests me when i read anything is story. it's character, it's narrative, it's emotion, it's conflict, and

i could not have invented and could not have imagined the story that i discovered in reporting this out. it starts with a young man, 19 years old, september 22, 2006, and he is driving the work, at 6:30 in in the morning. happens to be the last day of summer but it is freezing rain and it is dark and he is going 55-miles-an-hour, which is the speed limit but is swerving across the yellow divider and this is noticed by the guy driving hip him who happens to be a ferrier, a horseshoemaker who has two tons of horseshoes and horseshoe makes equipment, a missile and the last time reggie shaw, the young man who i mentioned earlier, swerves across the yellow divider, he clips a saturn, carrying, again, can't make this stuff up -- two not only fine family men but no kidding, rocket scientists.

the real thing. building boosters for the next space shuttle. he clips them. they spin across the road. they are hit by the ferrier, broadside, and the two men in the saturn are killed instantly. >> host: it's quite a tragedy, and -- >> guest: quite a tragedy. >> host: but as we're talking about as an example of so much more. let's get into what this represents, for instance. one of the most amazing reasons -- i think it might have been why you came to write this book, you can tell us about that -- but one of the most amazing issues related to this is why do people do this? we can talk about, do they know the risk? in 2006 there were arguments to and from. but i guess we can assume now

that many people have an idea of the danger and why we do such a self-destructive thing. >> guest: just to square the circle, veggie was texting. he denies it. stops down the road 100 yards, unscathed. he says he hydroplained. there's a fierce law enforcement hunt, essentially, sherlock holmes like meets the digital age, and they discover after 18 years of looking he has texted 11 times in the minutes and seconds around the crash, maybe at the crash. the first ever criminal trial, this historic precedent. but you ask the question, just to finally -- he is texting something innocuous, like good morning to a young woman he is barely dating. what would compel a young man,

who is a decidedly good person, although as you head in the book he has little bit of a checkered past when it comes to telling the truth. so he has some issues but a decidedly good guy, kind of the all-american good guy. what would compel someone who knows the difference from right and wrong to look down in his lap? this turns out to be a long scientific journey, and let me try to break it down into pieces. maybe the best way to start is to give you an image of us going back, let's say, million years, or 100,000 years, picture a caveman or cave woman, and that person is tending to a fire. and he or she gets a tap on the shoulder. i would just ask you, what do you think, were it you, would you be able to avoid turning around? if someone tapped on your shoulder and you were tending a fire and didn't know who it was, do you think you could ignore

the tap. >> host: not at all. >> guest: yesterdaying question, i'm sorry, your honor, but you don't know if it's threat, opportunity, food, someone with a spear? that this first image i would put in people's minds, and i'm going to get into the neuroscience of this in a minute. but essentially when you're driving in the car and the phone rings, the first thing to think about is, that is a proverbial tap on the shoulder, maggie, and it is from anyone, anywhere in the world, and you have no idea, is that opportunity, is that threat, is that my boss, is that my spouse, is that my potential mate? it's unknown, and so this technology has given us kind of like a warp-speed version of the tap on the shoulder. now, maybe i should pause here and talk -- before i go to the next level of the lure about the

neuroscience of that moment. is that -- >> host: tell us about the limits to our attention, which has been well-studied for more than a century. we're a very limited animal when it comes to our attentional capabilities. >> guest: exactly exactly. what is happening in that moment -- let's go back to the cave person. the cave person tending to the fire is using this part of the head. the prefrontal cortex. they call it executive control. it's the thing that makes us the most human, the thing responsible for art, architecture, civilization. but when the tap comes or the roar of a lion, it sends a signal up from here, the reptile parts of the brain, much more primitive survival mechanisms and let's say in the case of the lion, is says, boom, lion, run. and this part, the part that is doing these kind of high level tasks, must listen to that lower

part of the brain because if it didn't, guess what? you get eaten. so now let's go back in time to start to understand how these -- we begin to understand these limitations of our brain. we cannot ignore, first of all, that reptile sound. if you can, you would essentially have to have eyes in the back of your head. so, going back to probably the mid-1900's, right after world war ii, the scientists in britain were really wrestling with a question, why was it that their pilot, in airplanes, fighting the battle over britain -- why was it their radar operators could have trouble with these screens in cockpits, could have trouble with what they were looking at? why was it that they couldn't focus on a life and death

situation that they were getting interrupted? part of it has to do with the civil war going inside your brain that it just described. if something came from here, it interrupted the ability to focus, even if the focus was on something very important. but secondly, what they discovered -- and it's even more basic point -- was something called the cocktail party effect. and this happened right in the aftermath of world war ii. these kind of initial no are knew roy scientists whose story is tell you in the back, were gathered in britain and trying to figure out how much information can we possibly handle? i mentioned the cave person image. let me ask you to come up with just you and our audience to think of another image. you're at a cocktail party. and you're talking to the person in front of you, as i am currently talking to you, and you try to listen to the person

standing behind you. what you will discover, because i've tried this a number of times, is that you can do -- you can really only do one thing. i can focus on maggie -- you deserve my attention, you're listening to to me -- or i can switch any brain, switch the track and listen to that person. at that point i can no longer listen to you. it is simply physically impossible, and we have known this since like 1948, since all these tests were done. with one tiny, tiny exception, which is i can listen to you and just maybe i can pick up my name or the change in gender behind me, so that is not new science. that goes back to 18 -- sorry -- 1950. over the years between 1950 and 2000, the neuroscientist began to refine these models. how limited is what we can do? what they begin to discover is

that there are networks or attention in our brain. they discover they can literally watch inside the brain blood floor and discover when you're attending to one thing and you shift your attention, you can see the load shifts. you can't do both things. you can't juggle both things. it's often said that there's a myth of multi tasking, and again, that understanding, at least by neuroscientist, goes back to 1948. >> host: so, we're talking about, again, a creature with limited attentional capacity. we are destined to jump to what is novel and expected and -- unexpected in our environment, and attention is something that, if you're paying attention to something, you're going to be blind to -- if you're paying attention to, say, your cell phone call, you're literally blind -- the visual signals into

your -- >> guest: literally blind. >> host: when a child jumps into the street, et cetera. so, add to this -- let's talk a little bit about the allure of the technology. you wrote about the social connection, the technology so often represents and that was really fascinating. >> guest: so, there's three or four levels of this. one is the social connection. and the social wiring is very, very deep in us, and it is, again, a survival mechanism. in fact, as we go through this conversation, i think what i'll begin to describe is that the power of these devices comes because they are in effect survival mechanisms that are becoming so powerful that they can be counterproductive and even deadly. so antisurvival mechanisms for want of a better word. on the social point, let's go back to the fire analogy. one of the values of being social is we learn from each other. so, if maggie -- if you learn

that fire burns you back millenia ago but you're unable to communicate that to me, i have to burn my hand in order to not get killed, right? because i get burned, i get infection, i'm dead. language itself, the telling, oral, written, anything else, is so deeply wired on a social level because it helps us survive. it tells us, don't get -- go into the bomb shelter. go down the list of ways. so, communication and the idea that a communication could be urgent is deeply wired into us, and not just that. it's not just the receipt of information that is so powerful but, as i document in this book, the sharing of information -- harvard researchers have shown -- gives yaw 0 dopamine

rush. helps scorch your reward centers in your brain, reinforcing the idea that the sharing of social information is a reward. so now you have the receipt being a reward. you have the sharing being a reward. i'll just pause there and say that is one way in which our devices lure us, but it's only one of several. >> host: uh-huh. so, you're painting a picture of someone behind the wheel getting extraordinary temptation from that device beside them. might be a commuter, often a smartphone now. there's a person at the other end, there's something possibly rewarding and even the idea of peeking behind the curtain of it novelty is rewarding -- >> guest: you said a really important word. you said possibly rewarding. i think maybe in some ways my favorite bit of science that i learned in this, the one that really surprised me and honed in on just how powerful these

devices are is, that you would think to yourself, well, matt, maggie, or whomever, if i know that a lot of this stuff is spam, and it is -- 6 '% of what we get is spam, at least in e-mail -- then i would get conditioned to ignore it because i know it's worthless. going back to your word, possibly important. it turns out that the very fact that most of this stuff is worthless makes it even harder to resist the phone. this goes back to bf skinner, and a concept called intermittent reinforcement, and the way i would illustrate it is -- that will probably connect to your audience as it did for me -- you have a rat in the page and the rat is supposed to push a lever to get food but the rat doesn't know which push will bring the food. so the rat is compelled to push all the time all the time all the time.

it's call intermittent reinforcement. one of the most powerful lures in all of psychology, and i you'll forgive the comparison of to us rodents, it is exactly the same thing with your phone. you press and press and press and press because you don't know when the good things are going to come. as many scientist call it, it's a veritable slot machine in your pocket. so you add that piece to the social wiring, you're starting to find something super powerful, and i haven't given you the full range of the lure yet. >> uh-huh. it is really powerful. i don't think when people are doing it, they quite realize quite what a package of dynamite is sitting in the car with them. i think it also seems as though it's just such a part of our daily life. it's receded -- perceived as a picks -- fixture, tool and that perceptual invisibility adds to the fact of what it's doing to

us is kind of becoming invisible. >> guest: i like the way you put it, where it's just become a fixture. it's like -- we understand it to be part of life and maybe even, to go to a step further, celebrated fixture you look at the way the advertising is today, it may not tell you to do this in a car but certainly celebrates being on all the time, and i sort of document the ads coming from various places that say, try to do more, try to do more faster, from, say, wireless companies, or do two things at once, is this ad from one company where it's little kids and they say to the little kids, of course you'd want to do more than one thing at a time. the kid's say, of course i would. so it's a fixture, it's been invisible. it's become celebrate, and i we are sort of enumerating you take the social, you take the slot machine, you take the cultural, and still we're not done but

you're adding up again -- you're amassing a pretty irresistible thing. >> host: to push that point a little further, tell us about the -- i don't know if complicity is too strong a word but the idea that the mobile phone companies and the car companies -- you can still see this today -- the car companies want more on your dashboard. the mobile phone companies want you to have this device at hand at all times. so, tell us about that. there were echos to me of smoking. i'm not saying there was a conspiracy but that was really, really very interesting. >> guest: well, look, there's another one of these just as i reported in this book, one anecdote, you have the phone to your -- you have to be kidding me, and it's one of the

neuroscientists in the book who played a huge role in the reggie shaw case that we talked about at the beginning, is named david strayer, and he worked as a lot of of neuroscientists do, he sort of went into corporate america when he first started, and he was working for one of the cell phone companies in the early '90s and they were starting to market these phones as car phones. and he went to them and he said, i think we have a problem. i understand -- he was in this long line of people going back to world war ii, sort of this very kind of -- fine line connected back to the beginning of neuroscience where they understood this stuff we were talking about, and he went to his bosses and said, i am not sure you understand. this can't work. this is dangerous. and as he records the anecdote in the book they said to him, why would we want to know that? and he said, like to him it was

self-evidence, because people could be in trouble. and the way he describes the situation, knowing that would be very counter to making a lot of money. now, i want to be really careful in this conversation because the cell phone companies have actually gotten much more responsible, but i think it's worth noting the point you brought up. early on, the cell phone was the car phone. that's how it was sold. the reason it was sold that way? is because that was where you didn't have phone service. so if you're trying to build a business, you're going to build it where you can't have phone access. the early cell towers went up on the highways, the money was made there, and you remember what they used to charge. 50 credibilities a minute, right? -- 50-cents a minute, and the marketing from the cell phone companies reflected this. there would be literally an ad with a guy talking -- standing in his jeep, or sitting in his jeep, phone to his ear, speeding down the road, and it was

glorification of this. there was one -- i'm closing my eyes it's in the book. it said something like, wildly offensive on a number of levels but, like, can your secretary take rick indication at 55-miles-an-hour? and it's a guy in a sports car talking on the phone. that's the early days. the car phone -- it's hard to national that the cell -- the wireless candidate -- companies didn't know, and in fact early on some very courageous legislators, wishingfully california and in utah, where the story happened, early states got fought by the wireless companies who said, let people do what they want. we're not sure of the risks. parallel to the smoking industry is a very weighy, probative thing so i wouldn't use that exactly but it was the kind of prevery indication that is very unnerving. now, these days the cell phone

companies mutt out apps to block things, no texting, at&t, verizon go down the list, they have campaigns, they have public service announcements, but by now it's so ensconced in our culture. the auto companies is a different -- shall i keep going? >> host: we're approaching ajack we want to talk about solutions and where both the industry and where we fit in. i'm getting a picture, an incredible picture of individual accountability and perhaps societal responsibility here, and where it all fits in. just before the break, we have five minutes. why don't you bring us back to the story, and we'll parcel this fantastic story out. here's this kid.

i think maybe vis-a-vis the -- the issues we have been talking about, there was some denial. maybe as we all have had about this issue. tell me a little bit about his first reaction, just briefly, and how the scene was set for what came to be a trial. or a judicial event. >> guest: just briefly. he pulls over to the side of the road. tells the police he doesn't know what happened. maybe hi hydroplaned, and this tenacious state trooper takes him to the hospital to get a blood test, and notices that he is texting, and the trooper tells me -- it ends the first chapter -- this guy is a one-hander, and he spends the next 18 months in this hot pursuit, trying to get the phone records, and reggie, apropos of what you said, one of the big issues, he says he didn't do it, gets a lawyer and a standoff is set for the first-ever -- this historic l,