from los angeles. >> welcome to this panel of the

l.a. times festival of books on "everything connects: the building blocks of daily life." i'm john wiener, i write for "the nation" magazine, and i also host the weekly podcast called "start making sense." you guys have been here before, you know the rules; silence cell phones, no personal recordings. you can watch us on c-span when this is over if you want to relive those unforgettable moments. [laughter] we will have time for questions at the end. we will have a book signing afterwards. the signing area for this session is signing area one. two of our authors appearing today are are prolific, old pros. ed humes has written 14 books, brian fagin has written more than 40. so let's start with jonathan waldman. this is his first book. jonathan waldman -- [applause] [laughter] jonathan studied writing at

dartmouth and at boston university's knight center for science journalism. he's written for outside, the washington post, "the new york times," mcsweenys, the utney reader. he has worked as a forklift driver -- i want to get this straight -- a summer camp director, a sticker salesman -- [laughter] a climbing instructor and a cook. his first book is rust: the longest or war. it was nominated for the l.a. times' book prize in science. please welcome to the l.a. times festival of books jonathan waldman. [applause] >> thanks. >> is finish -- so my opening question for you is what is a bigger threat to the united states military, isis or rust? [laughter] >> there's a guy in the pentagon who would like you to throw that question at him. he's our nation's highest-ranked

rust official. [laughter] he's been fighting a very good fight for about ten years now. he's making friends on the hill with a lot of politicians and among admirals in the navy who say we can't keep going the way we're going, losing hips to rust. we -- ships to rust. we can't build them fast enough. he would say it's clearly rust. i try to stay away from proclamations like that, but i did write in the book that rust is greater than all other natural disasters combined. and people this weekend have asked me, i don't get it, a book about rust. i said think about it this way: our most abundant element is attacking our most important material all the time, everywhere. so isis is not bad. [laughter] >> and you say there's a

shipyard up in northern california full of rusting naval vessels? >> it was there. actually, i haven't seen it in a while. what's the name of the fleet? the reserve fleet. >> that's a nice way of putting it. >> in case you need rusty ships, that's where to go to get them. [laughter] they're so rust key, they're polluting the bay up in san francisco and causing a big problem for california. i think they've slowly tugged them over to texas to get scrapped and killed, but we kept them because we sort of had to. it's kind of an ugly political scenario stemming from rust. it happens all the time. >> let's talk about cans. 180 billion aluminum beverage cans are manufactured, is it every year? >> that's just for the -- maybe that's every year.

>> and you need each one to be perfect. what happens if a can is not perfect? >> so i went to can school concern. [laughter] and almost got kicked out for asking too many questions. because what they do to keep a can from rusting makes some people in the industry uncomfortable because of endowritten disrupters. endocrine disrupt ors. but cans i heard referred to at can school as exhibiting time bomb behavior because they want to rust from the inside out, top down and bottom up. a can probably is made with more tolerance than anything on a spaceship sent up there. so every time i grab a can, i do this silly thing where i just marvel at it, because no one looks at a and be thinks how amazing it is. when cans rust from the inside out, they explode, and the tab part that goes -- it can fly out and get you in the eye.

it has blinded people, it has severed people's achilles tendons. you get lawsuits. it's really ugly, and it's just the basic old thing, the can, that we run off and recycle. so i ran into the can, and i refer to it as a corrosion miracle. every year a number of companies -- there's a hot market in energy drinks. i don't know if anyone here has invented any energy drinks, but if you do and you want to sell them in a cool looking can, you go to a major can manufacturer, and you say we'd like to put some stuff in your can. if it's too corrosive, they will call you back and is say your stuff is battery acid, you need to change the formula, because we can't put it in a can. can and that happens one out of seven times with all energy drinks. [laughter] so drink up. [laughter] >> tell me more about this can school. what is can school?

socaning is a big industry. pepsi, coca-cola, everybody in the milk industry, everybody -- water. people want to put their stuff in a and sell it that way. [laughter] so the ball corporation just down the road from me in colorado invites -- well, they used to invite people, now they don't. thanks to me. [laughter] they invite people to beverage can school and food can school, and i told them who i was, and they actually said they couldn't come and they goofed up and sent me an e-mail that said, welcome, here's what it is, here's what to wear, lunch is included, so i went. and they're familiarizing people in the beverage industry with what magic goes on at the can plant, how to make cans and why they're spending a dime a can to buy them by the billions. so that was sort of my inside tour to how it goes.

and i actually, i didn't get a diploma from can school, they were not happy with me. but on the day my book came out, the chief corrosion guy from their packaging lab showed up, and i got an e-mail that night awarding me a can school diploma. [laughter] [applause] >> thank you, thank you. >> a lot of you -- so a lot of your book about rust is about the rust fighters. and this might seem a small thing, but it really got to me. you point out that a disproportionate number of the people you call the rust fighters have moustaches. >> yeah, really good ones. >> can you explain this. or can you explain anything else about rust fighters as a group? [laughter] >> broadly, i think that engineers have a wisdom that some things are not worth fighting. and i think facial hair is probably one of them.

and i want to be clear though, i don't -- i think that's a great position to take. sheaing every day is weird. -- shaving every day is weird. i have a lot of comments on amazon saying, like, you have a strange moustache obsession. maybe i do, but a lot -- i think two-thirds of engineers, male engineers have moustaches. this basically are no female engineers -- hey, talk to people who do s.t.e.m. promotion, engineering is like 98% male. fact. [laughter] >> i'm no engineer. >> well, i think we'll move on now. [laughter] we'll come back to jonathan. edward hiewms is a pulitzer prize-winning journalist. as i said, author of 14 books including garre bolling, our dirty love affair with trash. his writing has appeared in l.a. magazine, "the wall street journal," "the new york times" and other places. he's the recipient of a penn

award. his new book is called "door to door: the magnificent, maddening, mysterious world of transportation." its official pub date, i think, is two days from now. so this book is really brand i new. the forward is written by bill mccan kicken -- mckibbon, one of our heroes, and he's in the l.a. times today on the op-ed page. so please welcome back to the l.a. times festival of book withs edward humes. [applause] so, ed, you open your book with a memorable day in l.a.. how many people here remember carmageddon? that was the day they closed the 405 for how many hours, 48 hours? >> 53. >> 53 hourings. first time since it opened in 1962.

the prediction was total disaster, stay in your homes, do not go out during carmageddon. what happened? [laughter] >> well, we were supposed to fix traffic x it did. for 53 hourings. [laughter] the great irony is that closing all those lanes improved traffic and pollution throughout southern california, throughout the los angeles area. it was a great success on that front. now, after it opened, of course, it's the field of dreams phenomenon. if you build it, they will come. more cars have come to fill the vacuum. one year after the extra lane on the 405 opened it took several minutes longer to make that commute than before we built the lane. $1.3 billion, longer commute. and sort of this myth that exists that our traffic will get better if we just pour more money into making more lanes for more cars. it just, it hasn't worked.

it's never worked really. and yet we're trapped in this ribbon-cutting love of building new lanes and big infrastructure when there's probably -- this is the thing that i was trying to talk about in the op-ed piece today -- there's a lot cheaper ways to do what carmageddon did while it was closed, which was to change people's behavior. when they drive, how they drive or what they drive. and that was really important, because it showed how you can successfully make traffic better without building new stuff. >> well, i think i have a great solution which is i stay home and order everything from amazon. [laughter] and amazon, you know, ups brings it the my house, ups is driving around every day anyway, so isn't that the solution for everyone? [laughter] >> you know, it sort of seems like it's is so to convenient. all right, this is in my book, but we have a diabetic cat, you know? not a nice cat, and we have to buy this special cat food x the best place to get it is from amazon.

i clicked on it one day, and it arrived in, like, nine hours. yeah, really? this same-day delivery world is terrible for traffic. it's going to kill us. it's going to drown us. think about it. i talked to the head of ups in los angeles, and, you know, on any given day they're moving two million packages around l.a. and environs, delivering them. they used to take all those by the truckload to stores. so let's say the average ups van has 120 packages on it. all that goes to one place. now it goes to 120 different places. the orders of magnitude of more trips that have to be taken to move the same amount of goods -- well, noah massey, he was the head of the h.a. headquarters for ups -- l.a. headquarters, i'd say he tore his hair out over there, and he is maddened by the simultaneous desire of consumers to have that convenience, and yet their absolute hatred of having more

trucks on the road delivering tough and their battles against things like extending the 710 freeway and completing it after 40 years of not connecting to where it's supposed to go. we want it all and we don't want to pay for it kind of situation we're in. so we're facing another kind of carmageddo from the hurtling towards this digital economy. >> are you suggesting maybe i shouldn't order so much stuffsome. >> actually, that was my last book, garbology. we do get and accumulate so much stuff from far off. and that's really where this door to door idea came out of. looking at my own habits and my family's in my home and kind of one day in the life of what it takes to keep us moving and keep us in, you know, socks and shoes and all that stuff that comes in at the port of los angeles. 30, 40 % of the kerr economy is

coming -- consumer economy is coming out of that road we don't want to finish. and just what it takes -- it's horrifying when you dig down and see how much we're investing and spending and we do every day. >> well, you have some statistics which i question. you say that the morning cup of coffee covered 30,000 miles. now, i -- this bothers me. the circumference of the earth, i looked this up, 25,000 miles. so how could it be from colombia to los angeles -- i assume we all drink colombian coffee -- >> about 4,000 miles, i think. >> yeah. so how did you get there, and maybe you should reconsider. >> no. well, a lot of coffee you drink is a blend, of course. the one i was sort of picking apart was starbucks french roast which has, i think, three or four different kinds of beans. i don't remember now.

if you look at the african and south american sources of the beans, the fact that germany is, i think, the sixth or seventh larger exporter to the united states. they don't grow a bean, but the web that our -- and we're just talking the beans here. follow to get to us is much more than you might think. and, of course, if you're talking about that cup of coffee you're clutching on your commute, there's the transportation of the water, the milk, if you use sugar, the packaging that the coffee comes many, the coffee maker itself which probably has even more miles on it, you start to see that the transportation footprint is -- >> you're right. i hadn't counts the cup, the milk, the machinery. >> well, you can -- >> okay. you've got me on coffee, but what about the smartphone? this one you say 165,000 miles. i repeat, the circumference of

the earth is only 25,000 miles, so how could the smartphone take 165,000 miles? >> well, i was going with my own stuff, so the iphone was my model, but i believe all smartphones are probably similar. if you go to the ontario airport and look on the tarmac, and this happens every day, there's palettes of these plain, unmarked boxes with constant video surveillance. and they won't tell you what's in it, but everybody knows those are the iphones, and they're worth more than their weight in gold. and every day they come in over, out of china, stop in alaska to refuel and come into ontario, and they're filtered out to the rest of us. and the thing is if you follow the assembly, just the little home button with the touch id sensor on it, it not only has -- [inaudible] [laughter] oh, thank you. i didn't know i had --

[laughter] so if you just follow that one humble little piece, it goes back and forth between china and japan multiple times as one part is moved to an assembly, and the part they're attaching may have come from the netherlands. i think that button alone has about 12,000 miles on it because it's constantly on the move as it grows in sophistication. and, of course, it's final assembled at plant in china and then shipped out to the united states. so the transportation footprint on that -- and then, of course, the raw materials, the greek chorus of rare earth elements which i cannot pronounce, but they sound like minor deities, all those have to be sourced from all over the world. the precious metals also in your phone. it's almost impossible to trace the actual raw materials of the things we use. but apple is better than most companies at making that information public. it's just astonishing, you know? you look at your -- i have a

toyota. the 30,000 parts in that around went to the moon and back before the odometer has budged one mile because everything we do is global now. 95% of our shoes come in through the port of los angeles from foreign countries. this everyday stuff that we use, not just the exotic stuff, has tremendous footprint on it from transportation. >> and you have some horrifying pollution statistics on the supertankers. >> oh, yeah. well, you know -- and they're not rusty ships because they are gleaming and huge. when you get close to them, you guide these into port and oh, that ship doesn't look so big, and you realize you're, like, two miles away. [laughter] and the one i happened to go out on was a car carrier. they roll it on, they roll it off. it's literally a floating parking garage, and bigger than the one we parked in to come to this pest value. just -- festival. just immense.

the numbers i have is 160 of those ships, and there's 6,000 total. 160 of them on the open seas emit the particulates and smog-causing emissions equivalent to all of the cars in the world. all of the cars in the world. it's staggering. and they do about 3, 4% of global carbon emissions as well. so at any one time, 100 of these ships are either docked in the ports of los angeles and long beach or waiting to docker a hundred of them. and those together have greater emissions than all the cars in the country. that's what it takes to move our goods to us. >> are we feeling bad enough now? >> i got to ride in a google car too. that was fun. >> what was google's car like? >> all right. well, i wondered a little bit be they staged this for my benefit, but they swear they didn't. you know, they have programmed this car to drive all over the mountain view where the google campus is. and we're driving along, this car's amazing. first of all, it's the slowest

car on the road because it's the only car in sight obeying the speed limit. which is why it gets rear ended all the time. [laughter] but then we're driving right through the campus, and i'm chatting with the operators who aren't doing anything other than what the car's doing, and they're showing me what the machine vision -- and all of a sudden jams on the brakes, and walking across the street was some google coder. and talk about facial hair, you think engineers are bad, he had -- he was in his own world. he had a full-sized laptop on his arm with the screen up and was typing on it as he was crossing the street. and he came out from between two parked cars. and, you know, if that had been me driving, it would have been flying laptop, flying nerd -- [laughter] and this car stops on a dime and didn't, you know -- and he looked up, oh, google car, kept on going across the street. [laughter]

but it was, i am convinced that we would eliminate 90% of car crashes if that was the major mode of individual transportation. it was impressive. >> i'm feeling better. [laughter] next, brian fagin. he was born in england, trained in archaeology and anthropology at pembroke college, claim bridge. from 1959-1965 he served as keeper of pre-history at the livingston museum in northern rhodesia which is now zambia where he was involved in excavating a series of 1,000-year-old villages. he's a pioneer who makes it relevant in newly independent african nations. eventually, he left africa, came to the united states to teach and from 1967-2003 he served as

professor of anthropology at uc santa barbara. he retired from teaching in 2003. since then he's been a full-time writer and independent scholar. as i said, he's written at least 40 books, maybe 50. we're trying to nail down that number. most important of his books are the ones on historical climate change including the book "the great warming," 2008 book which was a new york times bestseller. tells the story of the medieval warm period. his 2010 book, "cro-magnon," was featured at the book festival a couple years ago. he's also author of several sailing books. his new book is about how animals shaped human history. it's called "the intimate bond." in this book brian fagin writes about dogs, goats, sheep,

donkeys, pigs, cattle, camel and horses. but in real life he lives with cats, fish, turtles and rabbits. he says sometimes he's had as many as 24 rabbits. so please welcome back to the l.a. times festival of books brian fagin. [applause] >> thank you, ladies and gentlemen. ed and i share an experience. i've been out on a container ship with a pilot from san francisco bay. truly the most frightening bit of conveyance i've ever been on. he turned it 800 feet around, and in front of the bow yachts were going around in front of them. he just looked at them, excuse my french, stupid bass towards. i said, what would you do? he said, nothing, there's nothing i can do.

by far the most interesting of them -- and the most neglected -- is the donkey. the donkey is a very cool animal. it has a number of advantages. it is very well adapted to semiarid conditions, and it can be used in deserts. and i had two extraordinary experiences doing. the first one was i discovered the work of and talked to egyptologists who have traced an ancient donkey caravan trail from the nile to the middle of the sahara, 200 miles. of it was used for centuries. and they would take these enormous caravans of donkeys. a third of the donkeys carried fodder, a third carried water in jars, and a third caroled the product -- carried the product

which was semiprecious stones. believe it or not, they've not only found the track, they've found the cases of the jars, they found the skeletons of the donkeys, they found donkey poop, and they found the camps. all on the desert, preserved. these guys were the pickup trucks of the ancient world. they were our toyotas. [laughter] and then the other one was even more fun, much more obscure. there was a very well known trade by donkeys, black donkeys, between northern iraq and a town in central turkey. and they found the archives there which are clay tablets with kind form writing. is there anyone here who can decipher kindny form? don't be shy. [laughter] i can't. anyway, i got into a correspondence with a charming

gentleman. and i wrote, are there many of you? >> there were six of us. we argue, we quarrel, we drink. they were lovely. and he gave me all information. i mean, they can even reconstruct the correspondence of wives with their husbands who were -- [inaudible] telling him to bring jewelry. they've got details of how the caravans fared, prices of donkeys which were the same at both ends. the donkeys were worth nothing, they were worked to death. and so they were anonymous pickups. but they linked the ancient world. even more so initially than the camel. >> and your book is a history book. where do you date the history of the domestication of the donkey? where does that begin? >> it began in, they think -- and a lot of this is very new research. t just beginning. it was somewhere in northeast

africa where they domesticated them out of the wild african donkey. but by 3100 b.c., there were burials of four donkeys in a cemetery associated with royal burials in upper egypt. and these guys were buried with considerable ceremony. but when they looked closely at the donkey skeletons, they found they had been overloaded and worked hard. these were draft animals. but, clearly, they were of such importance that they were buried carefully. why? because in those days, an economy in ancient egypt really the most tangible possession you had was your animals x. a thousand years later, excuse me, there were nobles who had a thousand donkeys. imagine the cost of looking after those. >> so 3100 b.c. for the domestication of the donkey -- >> actually, earlier.

a thousand years earlier. >> a thousand years earlier. i had the naive idea that the wheel was the key to transportation, but this seems that i've been wrong about this. >> you are, indeed, very wrong. [laughter] actually, that is incorrect. imagine a world where the only way of transporting everything was either on people's backs or in canoes. so that made the four-regularred four-regularred -- four-legged beast extraordinarily important. wheels came in later. he were brought in in central asia, mess -- mesopotamia. and you had to have animals that would haul those, and you didn't use the animal's back. you used them to haul carts. ox carts were the earliest. then, of course, later you get the chariot. but that's another world. >> and i also loved your chapter

on the camel, another creature that didn't tow a cart, but was itself a beast of burden. >> how many of you have ridden a camel? many. [laughter] camels, what absolutely electrified me when i really got into these wasn't the camel itself, which is a remarkable animal. i mean, it has adapted to desert. and when people put them on caravans, you led -- you found the water, and the camel took you there. but the thing that really made the camel important of all things was the saddle, the type of saddle on the back. the initial saddle was a simple one in saudi arabia on the back of the camel, at the back. but it got better when they put the camel saddle on the hump. why? because at that point you could start fighting, and you control your caravan.

and then even later they developed the long distance carrying the saddle, the saharan saddle, which enabled people to cross the sahara and carry loads. and let me give you a statistic. in 1492 two-thirds of europe's gold came from west africa, across the sahara on camel back. so this was a pretty important animal. but it's not the 405 freeway. [laughter] >> probably faster. >> nor did it rust. >> it doesn't rust, excellent point. >> so today, today our animals are either something we eat or something we keep as pets. the animals that we eat we treat horribly, the animals that are our pets, we treat like members of our own family. you also say there's a history to, a history to the household pet as the loved member of the family, and the history of

cruelty to the animals that we eat. >> it is a very sering history. sering history. i was horrified by it. my wife and daughter are real, genuine animal lovers. they love rabbits. we have cats. there are on our bed my wife and me, three cats. here is my wife, here are the cats, here is me. [laughter] and the other thing about this book, i got criticized for not doing more on cats. but cats decided they would adopt us. they're not domestic animals like dogs. ..

and pick them up and recycle them. one of the reasons the prevention for their cruelty to animals came in england was because of cruelty of animals. animals were penned up and it was horrifying. today we are in this position where we eat animals. we treat a lot of animals inhumanely and this is beginning to change and get we have all of these animals. i'm known as the bunny husband, because i don't do anything with the rabbits. i'm not particularly fond of the rabbits.

the more i'm around them the more i realize this extraordinary dichotomy. >> i was horrified by your section on the pits ponies. i had never heard of them before >> i had quite a trouble with that because oddly enough there is not a great deal of literature on them. >> what is a pitch pony? >> a pony that spent its life underground mainly in: minds, moving the call from the face to the bottom of the shop where was taken up to the surface and these animals, which actually were treated reasonably well, but when they were shot echoed old they were brought up and had trouble adjusting to the light and this was a huge huge population. i believe in england at one

point there were 70000 pit ponies, but this died out by a basically world war ii and people were trying to make their lives better by abolishing them, but brought really abolished them was the invention-- invention of the electric devices you could use underground. i and my cat's servant, but that something different. >> went to see if our panelists have any comments or questions of each other's presentations. >> my brook was born on a sailboat in san francisco and i realize we had your cruising guidebook on the boat. we work following every word. >> thank you. so nice. >> i didn't go anywhere. >> that was an interesting book to write, actually. i want all of you when you leave

here to go out there and say to yourself i don't still displace. what landmarks would you use to get their because writing at-- any sort of guidance is what pilots do. you have landmarks. it could be a color of the building, whatever. to think about that when you leave, if you got lost like i did among all this italian architecture. [laughter] >> which, it is. clec that's a nice way of putting it. >> i said that in one of the information booth and it almost died. i'm an englishman. i can get away with it. >> other panelists comments or questions back and forth? >> i'm fascinated by the donkey history request that the first domesticated transport animal?

was that before oxen and horses? >> horses are much later. about the 35 bc, i think. you are talking about a huge new animal because a horse assassinates mileage and they can use vast loads. the donkey was the earliest serial yes pack animal. you can use oxen, but they had to use water every 24 hours. donkeys linked egypt. linked afghanistan with countries further south and the mule, which, of course. is of the horse and the donkey was one of the major transport animals of the roman empire. they are very early and much neglected historically.

>> i'm surprised you don't have some. >> think god i don't. we have a horse. my wife has horse, not on the property. she is now threatening a dog. fortunately my cats won't allow dogs. clec have a question. i thought that advantage of aluminum cans was that they did not rest clec i use the word rest locally. all but three metals oxidize or can be made in some way to oxidize, but aluminum on a sailboat turns white and makes it stronger, doesn't it? >> makes it stronger until a certain point at which point it just falls apart. in a lot of metals form a protective lay her on aluminum will do that. expose it to salt water or something that can allow it to

keep oxidizing and the protective layer creeps inward. it's a way of creating a protective layer kind of artificially on a metal. there are only like six ways you can protect metal from corroding , which is why the book was fun to do. there's not much you can do. i guess i could have kept going and down different bridges in different types, but there are only-- only summary angles to take a didn't actually go into antedating electroplating, but that is one of those. >> you have a vivid picture of all the different metals on a sailboat that oxidize in different ways. >> a sailboat we mostly have stainless steel, but the parts of a sailboat-- we bought this 1978 fiberglass boat in mexico and i was actually sort of sent their as a pioneer by my buddies to investigate to see if this

was about we wanted to buy, which was a terrible move because i didn't know anything about boats, but i went down there with a camera and took a lot of pictures and it looked less boat-- it was a great boat it turned out. we took her sailing in the first time we furled the mainsail it fell off in the water in the wind vane on the stern almost fell off into the water and the tracks that hold of some of the blocks in place were rusted, i mean, every part of the boat that had to do something would not do that thing because of trust. >> last week they had a boom on one of the boats, mainsail just from the inside. >> the funny part is fighting rest in the boat did not get me to a book. it was going to the hardware stores and asking what i do about this and they told me so many different things that i

said they don't know what they are talking about. back got me to a conference called they got rust because i figured the navy probably had the same issues i had and it was there i met the nation's highest rank official and i did not know that guy existed. >> well, i did take some notes on the cocaine in, which prevents rust-- coke can which prevents rust with a lining. the line he has been linked to early puberty, obesity, miscarriage and cancer in rats. early puberty, obesity, miscarriage and cancer in rats. do you teach-- drink coke in cans? >> i don't drink coke period. >> what is your sense of the lining as a solution? >> campbell soup's recently got

rid of bpa lighting is altogether because of the attention the subject is getting and i don't know this-- chemical industry is pretty funny. we sort of assume a chemical is okay until we study it and find out it's not end there is only a handful of chemicals on the list that are not okay. bpa is entering the consciousness as a not okay chemical. i have no idea what their lining their cans with and you will have to sneak into canned school to find out. they are not going to-- they have not told me. i can't even say if it's better. it's something else we don't know about and i guess you have to be a cynic to assume it is just a chemical, i mean, unless they are drinking water. >> are there other metals that

don't corrode or oxidize connect there are a handful. the coke cans with different thicknesses of the plastic on the inside to keep it from rusting and i found early on that beer is really a minimal to be putting into aluminum cans so it needs to be finished and aluminum cans and it's not acidic, but i liked it when they told me there was made for cans in cans was made for beer. >> i think on that point we will open it to questions in the audience here please quipped to the microphone so that the audience of c-span can hear? and our policy here is if at all possible please make your question a question. >> this is for ad. i had a question about-- i know there is a lot of variables involved in this question, but if you have a general sense. if increased technology is changing and you talked about the number of miles that goes into producing something like iphone, whether the thing it

replaces, what is the cost benefit analysis there in terms of energy put into that system? >> if it is a source more locally? >> right or-- a phone would replace things-- e-mail would replace paster-- paper and postage and the many other things that technology replaces. is that utilizing things-- our natural resources better or worse? >> well, as you say there are a lot of variables and that, but one of the future visions that some futurist are talking about is the future of 3d printing technology as more and backwardness and more specialized than it is now and they aren't making pretty amazing things with that technology, but imagine the depth of shipping in general

where you don't buy the good, but you buy the software, the app that makes the good and then in some local location if not in your own household for some things you actually created and this would be the return of the local manufacturing as being competitive with a global manufacturing without all of the related carbon emissions. of course, you still have to move the overall material that you make this step with, but theoretically it could be a much smaller impact on the world and on our wallets if we did it that way, but something that transformative would also mean the end of millions of jobs. you know, truck drivers it's one of the most common occupations in america and there would be a lot of unintended consequences of that shift as well. >> over here. >> comment on 3d printing.

research currently the most popular product could be printed on 3d printer is a 3d selfie. [laughter] >> thank you for that. >> jonathan, question for you. could you talk more about the impact of a rust on the military. for example, is this really a risk of the reserve forces or is this a risk for in country combat forces as well? >> risk for nuclear weapons. i get this courteous erica slusser. he found out at the height of the cold war we were trying to make our nuclear missiles saver, so we actually put a tape-- i think it was a tape on there somewhere so that if something happened neutrons could not pass through and trigger a reaction. unfortunately, that tape rusted in place . . .

this was with our-- i'll get the name of the missiles wrong, but it was with the most powerful nuclear weapons and i sort of bad down to eric slusser for finding that because it must have taken him a decade of work. but, the pentagon has done a lot of work on-- he uses the word matériel a lot and they have studied rust effect on the readiness of planes and helicopters and boats and they have actually calculated by weight, which planes caused the most to repair because of rust. you can put a dollar figure like if an f-15 way so much each pound cost so much and corrosion repair and it has taken certain planes out of commission a month, a year or weeks a year and they have worked the numbers and said this is-- the guys in the navy-- navy says that a threat. aside from people who are actually you know engaging in

war. it's a 20 billion-dollar a year problem to the military. dan dunn meyer-- it's like the fight of his life. she says he does this for the warrior. he doesn't want weapons suffering in the hands of our soldiers. is a good fight. >> yes. >> so, speaking about the truck drivers, i think the bigger threat for trough-- truck drivers is the self driving vehicle. but, the question i had was if you could just relate each or any of you great stories about the law of unintended consequences and i think in particular with regards to things like invasive species when we see the vietnamese-- [inaudible] >> invading certain ecosystems.

are there other stories you come across that have good intentions gone bad. >> jonathan,-- >> i think that's as about as big as i got right there with nukes. >> i think the-- one of the biggest disruptions of recent decades is the invention of the shipping container because that's really is the very low-tech developments that enabled off shoring and the outsourcing of so much of our economy goes suddenly shipping long distances became much more efficient. for a thousand years we used to load ships like you pack your trunk going away for a vacation. guys carrying on stuff and piling it in a big zero. now you have to see how these container ships work. they had these cranes that drop them down on rails in a stack in

so orderly and the goods are sealed away from the port and there's no theft, no loss in every thing as tract. well, there is some of that, but not like it used it to be. kneeled day there was 20% loss of every ship. what it really enabled was moving everything offshore, which is a big topic in our election these days. whether it's good or bad for the economy is another question, but he wasn't unintended consequence. >> brian, do you have any unintended consequences from the domestication of animals that you like to mention? >> basically, that's a very very complex question to answer because if you look at the domestication of animals, you immediately and completely are altering-- >> into the microphone, please. >> you alter human relationship with the environment, landscape,

with the land, with each other, with animals who become profiting. with the animals themselves. immediately, although, in the early stages the relationship was fairly-- ultimately the animal becomes a commodity and in a way it is rather like of the container because on the one hand you have got all of these changes made, but on the other hand you have more interaction with people from a distance and as you got donkeys and then you've got horses and camels the distances got larger and larger. a whole business of let's say you trade grain to turkey in exchange for gold. you may do this. it may take months to get there on the back of don c's and you don't even know the person at the other end, so you get into this whole business of anonymous

trade. there were a lot of changes that have come along. >> yes. >> i was wondering your thoughts about the impact of drones. is that the new donkey? >> the drone the new donkey or something else? >> he's the boss. i stop at the industrial revolution, thank goodness. >> i think this idea of amazon sending an army of drones out to deliver individual packages is not going to happen in any foreseeable future work is kind of silly, really. and the faa kind of stuck it to amazon by saying you couldn't use drones if you have an human within sight of it. you would have to drive there in your truck and deploy the drone. the companies that are really itching to have drones are

companies like ups and federal express because they run these crazy overnight flights shipping goods. the pilot is just sitting there laid not automation do the work anyway, so that's where if we have goods movement drones will be big honking airliners, not little drones banging on your door. >> in a few minutes we have left i went to turn to the question of, writing itself and have each of our panelists, where did you get the ideas for this book and what was the hardest thing about writing this book and we will start again with the youngest person. >> of the hardest thing. none of it was hard. >> none of it was hard. that's a good answer. >> getting answers, talking to people-- i don't know. one of the big discussions in journalism is to write what you know or write what you don't

know and i think it's fantastic to get the opportunity to write what you don't know. i think we need to know something you sort of form i don't know a picture of what it's like and you don't go down certain roads. eyed to even know there were roads to go down. yeah,-- >> could answer. ed. >> my wife likes to say that i'm the happiest guy she knows 11 months out of the year and then there is some awful deadline i have to me, particularly reading eight manuscript and apparently i stop shaving and i'm hard to be around. >> it's cool. >> i wish my beard looked as good as yours. actually, i will go for an animal reference. the thing that makes my writing life best are my dogs. we have three rescue greyhounds which are kind of-- >> greyhound rescue?

>> rescue, but mostly cash potatoes. they will let me know when i need to get the hell out of my desk and walk and get some exercise. they are also personal trainers. plus, one is named pirate and we get mailed to the house for pirate humes. >> brian, where did you come up with this idea and what was the hardest thing about writing this book? >> my agent, bless her heart, who is one very tough-minded new york lady told me i had written enough about climates and it was time to do something else. and animals are in my life and i looked at domestication. i was updating a textbook, i think and i got into it and discovered no one had ever done this and if so i got going. my cats like yours, my cats have

a central role. they specialize into things and one is sitting in my outbox, which is fine. the other one like you they decide i need to get out. logically they want food and they get up and arrange themselves on my keyboard and the only solution is to dedicate the books to them. and the last book i dedicated to my main coon cat whose name is atticus at a more loose-- moose. otherwise known as the great keyboard sitter. >> brian, i have to ask one question. since you have written between 40 and 50 books as i understand it. tell us how you did this. how can you write that fast-- that much a lifetime? >> 40 years of undetected crime. [laughter] >> and these books are researched.

it's not like writing your life story or something. >> it all started in africa, where i was working the museum at the time of independence and we were asked a question, you got all this history and archaeology, how we put it and i got about the writer that. men, i almost gave up archaeology because i got very bored by it and was a very good excavator. they told me to write for the public. when i came to santa barbara i was appalled to find no decent tasks books, so that's why started. i wrote textbooks. then, i got into other stuff and i have become one of the very few people and archaeology who write for the general public as a full-time job and it's become a full-time job. i have commitments through the year 2018 without looking because there's no one doing it. so, i have written a lot.

>> these are commitments to more books. we salute you. can you tell us what the next books are? >> the next book, which is almost ready to go. i have been working on for two years and it's a global history of fishing. which stops with the industrial revolution. [laughter] seriously, there-- [inaudible] >> after that i have a book, a short book with a friend in england on the history of beds. which is originally titled: life in the horizontal plane. [laughter] >> so, i'm busy, but it's a fun stuff and i really in deeply satisfied with being able to communicate. it's fascinating stuff out there.

i could talk to you for hours, tangents. that's the fun of the job, isn't it? these two gentlemen what they have produced is fabulous. wonderful stuff. >> thanks. >> thanks. >> to either of you want to say a word about what you are doing next? do you have two or three books lined up for the next three years? >> this one comes out in two days, so i'm going to like baskin that glory forth three more days. [laughter] >> i'm working on a book about a small company in upstate new york that has spent the last seven years of building a robotic brick laying machine that has been the dream of engineers for pretty much 50 or 60 years. the machine-- machine is named sam. it's out there in the world. you might see it on a jobsite somewhere. it looks like a hot dog cart with the red arm that grabs

brick and puts it down and is again and again and again. so, i will make you care about brooks. >> well, jonathan waldman, edward humes, brian fagan, thanks so much for talking with us today. [applause]. [applause] >> and thanks to everyone for coming. t we now have our book signing in signing area one. [inaudible conversations] >> this is book tv on c-span2 and we want to know what's on your summer reading list. send us your choices. you can also post it on our facebook page, face booj.com,/book tv or send an e-mail at book tv at c-span.org. what's on your summer reading list, book tv wants to know