death in 1972. and by all accounts, the two old men loved each other, but they were not equal. so, that is what i want. if we want reconciliation, if we want an end to our racial problems, the first thing that we have to do as americans is have an honest conversation about what really happened over the last 150 years. >> host: do you think that is possible? do you think americans can move past the color of one's skin? i mean, it has been 150 years since the end of slavery. just over 50 years for the civil rights movement. so do you think that we can -- >> guest: i think we can.

i think we can. the expiration -- inspiration to write this book someday, the classroom and hearing martin luther king i have a dream speech for the first time. and he says, i have a dream that one day on georgia, the sounds of slaves to my friends of slaveholders can come together and brotherhood. >> host: we toasted to that last night. >> guest: and yesterday when i stood at the lincoln memorial at the same spot that he gave that speech, you know, and i don't mean to put words in your mouth. maybe you will disagree with me, but could we have done that if i had not written this book and pin honest about our history? >> host: we could have,

but it would not happen so soon. you know, i believe that we would have made a year or so from now because, it's like ours said, there is not a racist bone in your body this beach you and not in yours either. >> host: so it is easy to talk a right? we can sit down and have a beer with each other and talk about just about anything and not get offended by what the other is saying, and so, yak, man, we could have stood there a year from now or two years from now, and i think we could have without the book. >> guest: but does it make a difference? fracking to you and said, i want to write a book about how great my ancestors or, you know, sit down and tommy

your story about how great my ancestors were. when i was interviewing african americans, you know, they always started out with the, you know, i am very happy. yes, i need your cousin. it is all very polite. and it it really took a while to convince them that, no, i really do want to know the truth. you know, i am really ready to talk about the truth, about what happened. i do not want to a sanitized version camino, but that is -- that has a big difference when someone says i am ready to talk about the truth rather than straight -- fracking up to you and said, okay act, this common history, but let's forget about all of that. it is not important.

>> it is. it is important. with the help of the book, it is like if i tell you how , like he said, tommy and partly walked away, coming from -- i know how people act. and for you to walk upon during the interview that day, a timid, you know, because of what they would do, i'm sure there was a lot older than me. >> host: i was talking to

people in their 80's. >> guest: oh, yes. they knew. they knew. >> host: yes,. >> guest: they knew a lot more than nine in. the conversation about race. talking about that for generations. >> host: well, i think it is our conversation about the history of race in america, you know, and i think we have that common ground. i think when you say to someone, the past does not

matter if it does not matter of course it does. in your case it matters that your father went to a substandard school. it matters that your father before him dearly would to school, whereas my father has urquhart's education. my grandfather had an engineering degree, where we are today has a lot to do with restart. it -- and that is something that i think most white americans today are not willing to acknowledge. so that is one of the purposes of the book and the conversation i want us to have, look at the history, look at the sum total of

experience. before you start judging about what policy is good and what policy is bad, let's take a look, let's take a look at the totality of the run-up to bear we got to the sport. >> host: so, are you hopeful about race relations? >> guest: i am. i am. it comes from a deep, old part of the brain, or of the least developed. it's your fight or flight mechanism. in order to know who to have to fight or run away from that has to be taught.

that has to be taught, is not programs. you have to be tart to see race as an issue. in ancient greece black ethiopians were considered much more sophisticated and much more civilized than slavs to live and present their russia. it was a question of how did they dress, how do they speak. that was how sophisticated the culture, how strong the military. did they were close or scans, you know. several the word to slaves, from slav. other free slaves were slavs grabbed by the greeks. he looked at people under 30 today, people who grew up in segregated schools, integrated schools, they are the least racist generation

ever. they were not taught to think that way i am going to be turning 57. so i am middle age. i was one of the last generations to attend the segregated schools. remember a time where there were white-only water fountains. i mean, very few and very different. but, you know, i passed midlife. so we have a ways to go. i think there will always be these marginal groups who will choose to be following racist ideology, just like we have people who choose to become neo-nazis, and that

is its own kind of mental health question really or behavioral health question to. but i do believe that it the days of children being brought out to believe that my race is superior, that the other races are inferior , and that therefore i should have political, economic and social control over them, over other people just because of a color of their skin, that is not now. i've lost yet, but i bet your daughters to a. >> host: i bet they do, too. i think that will do it for us. appreciate you. >> guest: thank-you. >> host: no problem.

>> this weekend on the c-span network's ..

i think that it's a story about a crash and yet so much more. it is a story you write about tragedy and we dump sharon and i say you could call it the canary

in the coal mine case of how we are living both destructive and constructive ways so i think we have a lot to talk about. >> guest: where was that when i needed an elevator pitch? [speaking in spanish i wanted to welcome you and also start by asking the word deadly is in the title so before we go into the story, how deadly is this trend and what are we talking about historically especially drunk driving which everyone has heard about? >> guest: first i like your canary in the coal mine reference and the reason i liked it relative to the question you just asked is the canary is if you are texting while you are driving it will tell you, that it is indicative of a lot of other things when it comes to distraction, sitting at the dinner table, being counter

productive at work. that's kind of the extreme example but how specific to your question drunk driving now i think is about 10,000 a year in the u.s.. it's the biggest number that we can measure of the 30 to 40,000 deaths we have a year. it's come down sharply with the light of the strong laws that have brought it down sharply. what about texting and driving. the answer is we don't know yet. we have had some decent estimates about the amount of crashes and deaths caused by phone usage by drivers and just let me pause and say now this has been like an eight minute sentence and say shall i tell you why it is complicated? the estimates from the national safety council would put at

about if memory serves about 1.5 million or 5.6 crashes -- million crashes owning up to phone use that those are estimates and the reason we don't know is because it's hard to track for police agencies, it's 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 just to give one example of how we know that the official numbers are so far off. a number from from 2011 which is the latest data that we have of the deaths owning up to phone use. the tennessee remarks 93 cases and the state of new york remarks one. simply impossible we are not tracking it accurately so the short answer is we don't know

and the long answer is all the science and everything that we see on the roadways see that it is a big and growing problem. [speaking in spanish tell me a little bit about the story because we are dealing with a very important problem. it does seem to be on the rise even if we are not sure of the problem. tell me about the story, about the accident briefly because it is a very gripping model or example of what could happen to all of us. >> guest: what interests me is character and no shame and conflict and i could not have invented or imagined the story that i discovered in reporting this out. it starts with a young man 19-years-old in 2006 and he's driving to work at 6:30 in the

morning. it happens to be the last day of summer but there is freezing rain that he's swerving periodically against the yellow divider and it's noticed by the guy driving behind him who happens to be a barrier of a horseshoe make her who has 2 tons of horse shoes and horseshoe making equipment at the highway speed. and the last time that young man who i mentioned earlier swerved across the yellow divider eclipsing saturn carrying, again can't make this stuff up to not only find the family men with no kidding, rocket scientists and building them to the next space shuttle he clips them and they sped across the road and they are hit by the fair year broadside and the two men in the saturn are killed instantly.

[speaking in spanish is quite a tragedy what's good with this represents. one of the most amazing reasons you came to write this book and you can tell us about that but, one of the most amazing issues related to this is why people do this. but we can assume now that many people have an inkling of the danger. so why do we do such a self-destructive thing?

>> guest: reggie was texting. he said he hydroplaned and it is meeting the digital age age experience and they discover after 18 years of looking that he has texted e. by then times in the minutes and seconds there is this historic precedent. but you ask the question he is texting something innocuous like good morning to a young woman he is barely dating and just getting to know. what would compel a young man that is a good person although uganda and the book he had a checkered past when it comes to telling the truth so he has some issues but he is a good guy. what would compel someone who knows the difference from right

and wrong to look down in his lap blacks this turns out to be a long scientific journey so let me try to break it down into pieces. maybe the best way to start is to give you an image of us going backwards to say a million years or a hundred thousand picture a cave man or woman and that person is tending to a five-year and he or she gets a tap on the sugar. i would just ask you if edward u. would you would you be able to avoid turning around. if someone tapped on your shoulder and you were attending a fire and didn't know who it was decent the thing that you could avoid the top? leading question you your honor but of course you couldn't. you don't know if it is a threat, opportunity, food, someone with a spear. that is the first image i would

put in in peoples mind and i'm going to get into the science of this in a minute but essentially when you are driving in the car and the phone rings first thing you think about is that as a proverbial tap it's a proverbial tap on the shoulder and it's from anywhere in the world and you've got no idea is that opportunity come is the threat, is if my boss, is if my spouse come is that my potential mate. it is unknown and so this technology has given us kind of a warp speed version of a tap on the shoulder. maybe i should pause and talk before i go to the next kind of level about the science of the moment. [speaking in spanish tell us about the limits to our attention of the study of more than a century where we are a limited animal when it comes to our intentional capabilities.

>> guest: what is happening in that moment and moment a devoted to answering the question of the limits let's go back to that person, the cave person tending to the fire is using this part of the head. they call it executive control into this what makes us most human and responsible but when the lord of the board of a lion comes and sends a signal from here, the reptile parts of the brain which more primitive survival mechanisms but in the case of july in it says run. and in this part that's doing these kind of high-level task is 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 over time so we begin to understand these limitations of our brain.

we cannot ignore first of all that reptile sound. if you can do do what he essentially have to have eyes in the back of your head. so going back to probably the mid-19 hundreds right after world war ii the scientists in britain were wrestling with a question what was it that their pilots in airplanes fighting the battle over britain and why was it the radar operators could have trouble with these screens and cockpits and have trouble with what they were looking at, why was it that they couldn't focus on a life and death situation that they where getting interrupted to ask part of it has to do with the civil war going on inside of your brain that i just described. if something came from here it affects the ability to focus even if the focus was on, you

know, something very important. but second, what they discovered and is even more basic points with something called the cocktail party effect and this happened in the aftereffect of world war ii he sent initial scientist whose stories i tell you in the book were gathered in britain and they were trying to find out how much information can we possibly handle. what we ask you to the audience to answer the image and we are 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 tried the same number of times, you can really only do one thing. i can focus on maggie. or i can switch my brain and

listen to that person. it is simply impossible and we have known this since 1948 since all these tests were done with a tiny exception which is i could listen to you and maybe i could pick up my name or the change in the gender. that isn't new science. that is going back to 1950. over the years between 1950 and 2000 the barrow scientists began to define the model. what we begin to discover if there are networks of attention in our brain that discover we can literally watch inside the brain blood flow and discover when you were attending to one thing and you shift your attention, you can see that the load shifts. you can't do those things.

you can't juggle both things. again that understanding by the narrow scientist goes all the way back to 1948. [speaking in spanish so we are talking about a creature with limited capacity. we are destined to delve into our environment and attention is if you are paying attention to something, you're going to be blind to -- if you are paying attention to, say your cell phone call, you are literally blind, the visual signals when a child jumps into the streets etc.. so come add to this lets talk a little bit about the aware of the technology. you wrote about the social

technology and i thought that was really fascinating. >> guest: one is the social connection, and again it is a survival mechanism. in fact as we go through this conversation i think what i will begin to describe is the power of these devices come is because they are in effect. they are becoming so powerful that they can always be counterproductive and even deadly so anti-survival mechanisms for the want of a better word on the social point with go back to the fire in allergy. one of the values of being social is that we learn from each other. so if you learn that fire burns you a millennia ago but you are not able to communicate in order to not get killed because i give her a bike infection of the

language itself, the telling world, written from anything else is so deeply wider of the social level because it helps us survive. it tells us go to the bomb shelter. the communication can be urgent. it's the seat of information that is powerful, but as i documented in this book, the sharing of information harvard researchers have shown give you a dopamine rush and helps the reward centers in your brain it is reinforcing the idea that the sharing of social information is the reward so now you have the receipt of being of every being the reward and the sharing being the reward.

i will pause and say that is one way that our devices were us that but it's only one of several. >> host: so you're painting a picture of someone behind the wheel getting extraordinary temptation from this device beside them. it might be a computer. it's often a smartphone. there is a person at the the end or something possibly rewarding and even the idea of peeking behind the curtain of its novelty is reporting. >> host: >> guest: before you go wanted to let me go back because if you said possibly rewarding. i think in some ways i favorite bit of science i learned in this, the one that really surprised me and helen and how they're not how powerful the devices are is you think you're -- your self 67% of what we get