the national book award winner. the georgetown university professor. the 2017 pulitzer prize winner. in the former florida congressman trey rado. the as a look at some of the events book tv will be covering this week. many of these events are open to the public. look for them to air in the near future on book tv on c-span two. let me start up off with a fantasy i had head. it involves i have overpowered his elite guard i've fought my way into a secret bunker his cyanide pill that he keeps to commit suicide. he smiles at me. he comes at me in a rage we wrestle and manage to pin him down and put handcuffs on him. and then say enough hitler i arrest you for crimes against humanity.

this is where the medal of honor version ends and the imagery begins to darken. what would i do have actually have hitler in my hands. and it's not hard to imagine once i allow myself sever his spine. .... .... >> when i really think about it,

my heart beats faster. there is a problem. i don't believe in souls, evil, and i think wicked is only appropriate for a musical. put on the other hand, there is all sorts of people i would not mind seeing killed but i am against the death penalty. i am for very strict gun control. there was one time where was in a laser tag person and i had such a fun time hiding and shooting over and over until a kid found me, snickered and shot me several times. what is obvious is i am your typical human when it comes to this topic of violence. as a species, we have problem with violence. we have used shower heads to

deliver poison gas, letters are anthrax, mass rape, we are a violent species. we don't hate violence. when it is the right kind we leap in and pay money to watch it and vote for and mate with meme who are masters at it. there is an additional complication. amid us being this violent species, we are an extroidinarily compassionate one. how do you make sense of our biology? one thing that is clear is it an utterly boring to understand the biology of it aspects of your behavior. your brain tells your spine tells your muscles to do

something and hurray you behaved. what is complicated is understanding the next of the behavior. in one setting, firing the gun is some appalling act and in another it is an act of heroic self sacrifice. in one setting putting your hand ond someone else's is compassion but in ort contexts it is a betrayal. the one thing that is clear is you will never understand what is going on if you get it into your head that you are going to be able to explain everything with advertise is the part of the brain or gene or childhood mechanisms that causes everything. any behavior that occurs is the outcome of the biology that occurred a second before, hour

before, and all the way true to a million years before. to give you sense of this. you are in some situation where there is a crisis. there is a crisis, there is rioting, violence going on, people running around. there is a stranger running at you in an agitated state. you cannot be sure what their facial expression is. maybe angry, frightening, threatening. they have something in their hand hat seems like a handgun. they come running at you and you shoot. it turns out what they had in their hand was a cellphone instead. thus we ask a biological question why did that behavior occur in you? what is the central point is that is a hierarchy of questions. what went on one second before in your brain that brought about that behavior? to begin to understand, the part

of the brain at the top of the lis of the suspects the amygdala. think about aggression and the brain think about the amygdala. humans who have rare types of seizers that start there or tumors have uncontrollable violence. if you damage the amygdala you blunt the ability for the or organism. so it is violence. but that is not the first word coming out of people's mind who are studying it. what the amygdala is really about is fear. you cannot understand the first thing about the neuro biology of violence without understanding

the neuro biology of fear. the thing to begin to make sense is what parts of the brain does it talk to. the next region that is incredibly interesting is the insular cortex which is incredibly boring if you are a lab rat or any other mammal. you bite into a piece of food and it is spoiled and rotten and rancid and the result is your insular cortex activates and triggers reflexes. your stomach lurchers, you gag and spit it out. it keeps mammals from eating pois poisonous food.

you do the same thing with humans. they bite into something that is rancid and we do something fancier. all we have to do is think about eating something disgusting and it activates. something more subtle. sit down someone in your brain scanner and have them tell you about a time they did something miserable and rotten to another human or tell them about an occurrence of a human doing something miserable to someone else and the insular activates and does moral disgust in us. what that tells you is why it is that something is sufficiently morally appalling we feel sick to our stomach. we feel soiled by it. nauseous. because our brain invented the

symbolic thing of moral standards 40-50,000 years ago and didn't invent a new part of the brain at the time. there was a committee meeting at the time and they said moral disgust. here is that insular that does food distaste and now it will do moral distaste and has trouble telling the difference. the main part of the brain the insular cortex talks to in the human brain is the amygdala. now, in lots of ways it is very cool the insular cortex that does this. suppose you see a moral ill that needs to be cured and that could take the ultimate sacrifice.

if moral outrage version this distanced sort of state it would be hard to pick up steam to act against it. your stomach churning is where the force is made to make the moral imperative but the insular cortex isn't good at remembering it is only a metaphor and then the problem with the world who is disgusted by someone's behavior is disgusted by someone's lifestyle. and there is the danger being morally disgusted by something is a good litmus test to decide right and wrong.

and every idealog in history has a brilliant feeling for how the insular cortex works which is if you can get your minion to the point when you talk about them, them in the next valley, them who think differently than you, pray differently, love differently, if you can get your followers to envoke their insular activated you are 90% of the way toward pulling off a successful genocide. the key to other genocidal movement is taking them and turning them into infestations and malignancy or whatever. meanwhile, we have got the most interesting part of the brain far and away. a region called the frontal cortex. i just wasted the last 30 years

of my life studying the hippocampus which is interesting but i wish i had been studying the frontal cortex. we have more of it than any other species on earth. what does it do? the frontal cortex makes you do the harder thing when it is the right thing to do. impulse control. gratification post poponement, g term planning and instant gratification. the frontal cortex sends inhibitory projections to the amygdala hoping to rush there and say are you sure that is a handgun? i would not do that if i were you. believe you you are going to regret it. the frontal cortex is racing to try to control the amygdala. there is a picture of the

frontal cortex and all it does is go slumming down the amygdala and preach to it but there is by directionality and the amygdala has plenty of means to talk to the frontal cortex. every time we are in a moment of an aroused state we make a decision that seems brilliant because that is the frontal cortex being marinated in what is below. the frontal cortex recently evolved and it is sitting there marinating in all the emotive yuck going on underneath and it is by directional communication. in terms of making sense of the frontal cortex, the whole notion of doing the harder thing when it is the right thing to do is value-free judgment.

sometimes you have to have an incredibly strong, aerobically studly frontal cortex to resist the temptation to lie. and that is at the center piece of the most important cross roads in our lives. however, once you decide you are going to lie, you need your frontal cortex to do it effectively because it is the frontal cortex who says don't make eye contact or use this right cheek muscle, keep your voice under control. it can take an enormous amount of discipline to make the world whole and better but it can take a lot of discipline in staying up late and studying to be effective at ethnically cleansing villages. we have a sense of the couple brain regions that are pertinent. no brain is an island.

now we have to take a step back. what was going on in the seconds to minutes before in the sensory environment which triggered that amygdala or frontal cortex to do that. what are the stimuli? the sights and sounds of the riot are pertinent to making sense. but there is a whole world of sensory stuff going on that is subliminal and you hardly know it is there and if you did you would not think it was pertinent. when you have to make split second decisions you are more likely to mistake a cellphone for a handgun if the person holding it is male, is large, is of another race. your brain processes that in 50 milliseconds. 1/20th of a second your brain is distinguishing that incorrectly.

that turns out to have an interesting piece of the wiring of the amygdala. suppose you look at somebody and there is something in their hand that is a cellphone on handgun. the information goes from the eye, to the way station and gets to the visual cortex and the first layer sits and spins and figures out what pixels are and the second layer turns the lines into curves and neurons in your cortex says i believe that is a handgun and let's wake up the amygdala. that is the simple part. there is a short cut to the very first way station where sensory information comes in short cuts directly to the amygdala. the amygdala knows there is a handgun while your visual cortex is fusing around with the pictures. that is good and helpful to get that information quickly but it

turns out you need all those computational layers in the visual cortext to tell what is there accurately -- cortex. the amygdala gets sensory information that is emotionally aroused before the conscious cortex does and the accuracy is not great thus if you are tired, hungry, in pain, if there is a bad smell around, any of those things happening you are biasing the amygdala toward mistaking a neutral facial expression for a harmful one. now we need a step further back. what about hours and days before? how is that affecting how sensitive you are to sensory information? we moved into here and that is the realm of hormones. in that regard, amid a ton that

are important a few stand out. testosterone is one and it is why men are such pain in the ass. it does not cause aggression. it biass you toward interpreting ambigius social information as being threatening. take somebody and pump them up with testosterone and they will decide the neutral facial expression is serious. it makes preexisting tendencies and sensitizes you to whatever social learning you have received about about what kind

of aggression is fine and what kind isn't. the single most interesting thing is that is not even what it really does. testosterone doesn't make organisms more aggressive but it makes organisms more likely to do whatever behavior is needed to hold on to high status when challenged. if you are a baboon that means aggression. if somebody is threatening you it is aggression. that is the entire world of the baboon. in humans, put somebody in economic gang where you get high status by being generous in the offers you make and testostrone makes people more generous. the problem is we reward aggression with status so read redly. if you took budhist monks and

shot them up they would be running around seeing who could do the most for others. the other hormone that has just as undeserved repetition, but in the opposite direction is this hormone, oxytocin which is officially the groovy hormone on earth causing bonding between mothers and infants and pair bonding between couples and makes you more expressive and emotional sensitive and more charitable and trusting. there is a new field of science called neuro marketing where if you sprits oxytocin up people's nose they are likely to believe

people trying to sell you stuff. if they could spray oxytocin through the vents of costco what that would do to the economy -- oxytocin promotes pro-social behavior until you look more closely. research work shows that is what oxytocin does. makes you more co-operative and generous and charitable with people who you categorize just like you. more pro-social toward in-group members. when it comes to out-group members, makes people more xenophobic and less cooperative. a group in the netherlands showed this. they got their lab rats, college graduates from a university there and they engaged everyone in the standard process. the runaway trolley problem.

okay to sacrifice one person to save five and there is a whole lot of research done on this. they established the levels people would be willing to push somebody to save five. they gave the person they were pushing on to the track a name. a third of the time the person would get a name that is like your stereotypical dutch name. a third of the time, names people have hostility toward, germans, world war ii, or people with muslims name. so do you push dirk in front of the trolley? do you push otto in front of the trolley? give people oxy tex aoxytocin a

are less likely to save dirk. it doesn't make us nicer but makes us nicer to people who we are predisposed beg nice to makes the us versus them concept drawn out more. how about weeks or months later? this is neuro plasticity. if you spent the last few months in stress, your amygdala will have grown larger and made more connections and the circuits are more exitable and your frontal cortex is more sluggish and atrophried. the frontal cortex has less capacity to get there in time and say are you sure before you pull the trigger you can see that changing? stepping back even further,

going back years, decades, how about adolescence? what is going on in adolescence is relevant to this one assessment of whether or not you will pull the trigger. the central fact of the adolescent brain is all of the brain is going full blast, fully mature except for the frontal cortex which is half backed at that point. amazingly the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to fully mature. it is not fully online until you are about 25 years old which explains an enormous amount of freshman year in college. it is the last part of the brain to fully mature meaning adolescent and adulthood is a time of life where environment are sculpting your front cortex into what you will have. what that tells you is if this is the last part of the brain to

fully mature it is the part of the brain least shaped by genes and most shaped by environment. okay. but now stepping even further back, how about back to your childhood, fetal life important because that is when the brain was being constructed. but people learned experience during that period causes changes, epigenetic changes causes permanent changes in some genes and parts of your body are turned on forever after, other genes are turned off, life time consequences. childhood matters. this is a mechanisms by which childhood matters. a pertinent example of that if you have spent your fetal nine months being bathed in high levels of stress hormones because mom is extremely stressed as an adult thanks to epigenetic changes during your

fetal life you amygdala is going to be hyperreactive and you will secrete higher levels of stress hormones making the amygdala more active and the frontal cortex sluggish. going back to when you were a fertilized egg and genes. genes have tons to do with everything but here is the determination that genes don't determine behavior because they work differently in different environments. moa -- meoa comes in vari want -- variants and if you have one you are more likey as an adult

to commit anti social violence if you were abused by a child it. it is not your genes but the way the genes interact with the environment. the interaction between genes and environment will shape what state your brain is in in that one critical second of do you pull the trigger or not. you have to go further back past you as a single organism. how about your ancestors? what were they up to? if you ancestors were pastoralists, people wandering deserts and grasslands, the odds are they would have invented what was called a culture of honor. high levels of attributed violence, warrior classes, and that is the whole world if they come take your camel and you do

nothing they will take your herd and wives too. if you ancestors were a culture of honor centuries later that is influencing the values with which you are being raised including within moments of birth how often mothers are holding their children. steps further back where are the cultural differences coming from? ecosystems. one example of that. you look at people living in deserts and nay are likely to come up with monotheastic religions. look at people in east asia who grow rice and require collective farmering and you get a collective mindset. people in the hit side grow wheat done in individual

families and you get the individualistic mindset of people living in manhattan. we have to go even further back because if you are talking about genes you are talking about the evolution of the genes. you wind out seeing evolution has sculpted different primate species into different levels of aggression. some have none, some other immen immensely high levels. what about us? we are somewhere right in the middle between the two extremes. in other words, if you want to understand why this behavior occurred you have to take into account everything from one second before to a million years before. what do you conclude from that? it is complicated. that is useful. how about it is complicated and you better be real careful and cautious before you decide you

understand the causes of a behavior especially if it is behavior you can judge harshly because things can go wrong. we have a dark stained history of that occurring precisely for those reasons. for me, when i look at the information, the single thing i find to be most important has to do with change. every single biological fact i have given along the way is subject to change over time. ecosystems change. thousands of years agree, the sahara was a lush land filled with hippos and giraffes. in the 17th century, the scariest people were the swedes and now they have not had a war in 203 years. they changed. most of all, brains change. circuits form. neurons weaken.

patterns grow. parts of brains expand. as a result, people change and they can change extraordinarily. some examples of it change in people that can occur over the course of decades. a man who moves me enormously by the name of john newton was a british theologian and played a central role in the banning of slavery at the beginning of the 1800s in new england. he spent the early decades of his adult life as the captain of a slave ship and after he retired he spent as a local parson still investing in the slave trade and growing rich from it until one day something changed in him. something changed and he se celebrated it in a hymn he wrote amazing grace. another example, a man who on

the morning of december 6t, 1941 was the lead pilot in one of the bomber squads that took off from japan and attacked pearl harbor. he was a star pilot and led a division there. 50 years later to the day as an old man he came to a ceremony at pearl harbor, came forward in broken english and apologized to some of the elderly survivors on the ground and spent the rest of his life close with some of them. think about that transformation. if one of those men he befriended became a captive during world war ii, he might have happily walked them to death in the baton march. if he had been a captive of one of the american men who killed him he might have taken his skull as a souvenir which was a standard thing with dead japanese. and instead 50 years later he is

writing a letter to that man's grandchildren consoling them when grandpa died. change can occur over the course of hours. the example of the first winter of world war one. the christmas truce. the idea was along the trenches of france, people could come out and retrieve bodies and no and bury them. german and british troops came out and retrieved bodies and they helped each other carry the bodies and soon they helped each other dig graves in the frozen ground and they prayed together over the dead and shared christmas dinner. then they exchanged gifts. bay the next day, they were playing soccer together up and down no man's land and exchanging addresses to get together and see each other after the war was over. those truces went on for two to

three days until the officers had to arrive and threaten to shoot these men unless they went back to killing each other. all it took was a couple hours to completely reorganize these people's sense of who counts and us being all of them in the trenches on both sides dying for no damn reason and them using us as just pawns. and sometimes change occurs in the course of seconds to minutes. historically the single biggest horror from the vietnam war was the milan massacre. a brigade of american soldiers went into an undefended village of civilians and killed between 350-500 of them, gang raped girls and women, mutilated bodies and utterly nightmarish because it occurred and because

the u.s. government covered it up because they did slapping of a few wrists and it was one of the nightmares of the vietnam war. the massacre was stopped by one man. a man named hew thompson who was piloting a helicopter gunship and was seeing american soldiers firing activity, they are under attack he thought, landed there, got out and was viewing the sight of american soldiers shooting elderly women, digging out babies from underneath the buddies of their mother and shooting them and figured out what was happening and thompson got into his helicopter and undid every bit of training he had as to who was an us and who was a them and took his helicopter and landed it between the last group of surviving viliagers there and landed his helicopter and turned his machine guns on the american

soldiers and said if you do not stop i will mow you all down. and what is most important to me is none of these guys are fancier neurons. same genes and same enzymes. what i think we are left with at the end is the version of that cliche those who don't study history are destined to repeat it. those who don't study the history of extraordinary change and those who don't study how we go from the worst of ow our behaviors to the best ones are destined to not repeat moments like these. let me stop and see if there is any questions at this point. [applause]

>> okay. oh, no. oh, good, someone coming to the microphone. >> what is happening in the future of neurology that gives us hope for understanding the brain better and having better outcomes? >> okay. let me tape this book i happen to have sitting here. here is one figure. i don't know if you could particular see it on the left page. it is a bunch of graphs and it is a bunch of graphs doing this and then suddenly that. those are the number of publications by year of the various topics i talk about.

2006, 2010, the number of papers in the medical literature concerning the topic of oxytocin and trust. everything about it has been learned in the last ten years. brain and aggression, 1985 zero papers published. by the last decade, more than 2,000. every single one, the vast majority of what we have learned, has come in the last whatever short amount of time. we are only a couple hundred years into understanding epilepsy is a brain disorder and only 50 years in understanding learning disabilities are due to malformations in the cortex and it isn't laziness or lack of motivation. the vast majority is 10-20 years and all that is going to happen is we will learn more and more of that stuff and we will learn more and more to recognize the extent to which we are a

biological organism and our behavior has to be evaluated in that realm. for my money, what that eventually does is make words like soul or evil absurd and makes words like punishment or justice questionable as well. i think it will require an enormous reshaping of how we think we deal with the most damaging of human behaviors because none of it can be thought of outside the context of biology. >> you mentioned the buddhist. i believe i have been around several people who did that. for example, buddhist, people

who undergo psychoanalysis or a series of activities come from that group relation work, or group therapy, there are tools that have that effect. what i am wondering about is why those things are not customary. they are not institutions. we don't have, for example, bbc doesn't have a program to cause people in the community to meet together. there are packages that can do that. but it doesn't happen. why is that? >> well, the easy punch line is because they are usually really hard to do. one example is you have conflicting groups that for decades, for plin, have us and they dichotomy and the notion

has been floating around and that is called contact theory. if you bring people from hostile opposing groups together and they get to know each other they will recognize we are all the same and it is going to be wonderful and we will be singing together and it will be terrific. and that has been the motivation for the programs taking palestinian and israeli kids in summer camp and northern irish catholics and protestant and what the literature shows is when it works right it reduces intergroup conflict and changing perception and people can generalize it to i know one israeli guy who is a good guy. none the less, most of the settings make things wrong

because it is narrow domains. you have to get everybody on equal ground with a shared goal. if you have anything other than that you will make it worse. in other words, none of these things are done easily but they are all workable. >> you talked about the critical time of adolescence and the development of what we consider right and wrong. how do you address the generation of coming up and being inidated with violence in the media and video games they play and the desensitizing of acts of violence? >> okay. i as a parent am horrified by that stuff and can go off an rant on bad consequences. i really feel like going down to the second sub-basement in the

stanford medical library and pull out journals from the '60s there are the same papers where all you need to do is replace the word television with video violence. every single generation has wrestled with this. when you go through the massive literature looking at each new incarnation what you see is on the average all of those forms of violence cause a short term burst in violent behaviors in individuals but in terms of whether it has long term consequences and every realm you get a familiar punch line violent media makes aggressive individuals more aggressive. it has no effects on anybody else. what it does is legitmize and disinhibits individuals who have the predisposition toward it. just like testosterone it

doesn't create aggression. so the good news is it is no worse than cop dramas from the 1930s with the radio. the bad effects are none the less those who are vulnerable this is a more visceral and real form of imitating an awful reality than anything that has been invented before. but the general effects turn out to be not terribly benevolent. >> you tuck about how complicated it is to explain behavior. the example you use is the figure out if the thing in the hand is a gun. it could be a police officer or anybody in that situation. a lot of neuro science has been brought into the classroom and courtroom to try to use a scan.

i wonder where you see that headed where people are getting brain scans and saying my brain made me do rather than me. >> great question. insanely contentious field. there is scary smart people i argue with taking the point that neuro science is nowhere ready for its appearance in court. an example of where neuro science plays a role in the criminal justice system. the gold standard for deciding somebody who committed a crime is so organically impaired they cannot be held responsible for acts is if they cannot tell the difference between right and wrong which is usually a way of describing schizophrenic psychosis. this was based on an individual, a paranoid schizophrenic who hearing voices attempted to assassinate the prime minister of england in 1840.

that is the legal standard. i don't think horses even evolved brains at that point and that is the bases in which the legal system works. they have incorporated zero neuro science and that is the realm of people who know the difference between right and wrong who none the less can regulate the behavior. you get somebody there who can tell you which is the appropriate thing to switch for but you only get one as a reward. they will say i know how it works but i need to reach for the one i because i get much more m & m and go for the wrong one. when you have frontal damage, you know the difference between right and wrong and none the less you cannot regulate your behavior.

there is no state in this country that accepts volitional impairment in court. 25% of the men on death row have a history of concussion head truma to the frontal cortex. other horrible fact, by the time you are five years old, the socio economic status of your parents is a predictor of the levels of stress hormones in your blood stream. the direction of the poorer you are the more stress hormones and the more stres hormones the less frontal. by kindergarten, if you were foolish enough to have picked the wrong family to have been born into, that is going to impact the thickness, number of connections being made. by age five you were already

three steps behind in terms of frontal regulation of behavior because of ses differences in the country. in that realm, the consequences are enormous and hugely underappreciated. >> last two questions. >> yeah, i am a big fan. i will try to articulate my question having to do with the role of testosteron e and consequen consequences. if it related to an increased reward of status where does it act in the brain and given kids suffer with impacts in the brain that might affect aggression as adults would a pharmaceutical route be suggested before any kind of cognitive training? you know, the drug industry will latch on to anything but i feel like that is something they

haven't done. i don't think that is a long term solution either. >> great. okay. which part of the brin has the most receptors for testosterone makes sense. the amygdala. it is ground zero. does it cause amygdala neurons to fire to invent aggressive outputs? not at all. if and only if the neurons are firing testosterone makes them fire faster. it doesn't turn on the music but ups the volume. in terms of let's make the world a better place and get rid of all the males or at least ca castrate, no, no. how about if he farm logically block the effect and you see besides scary a track record of

not working well. in a number of places on earth, the two places where it has been most explored is india and the state of texas. there have been state ordered chemical castrations drugs given that block testosterone receptors youlusually for viole sexual offenders and it is shown to have no effect whatsoever because such aggression has very little to do with aggression and sexuality and has a lot to do with domnation and fear and issues like that. pertinent to that, you take any male on earth of any known species and take out his testicles and that was done 10,000 years ago when a bull chased people around in the backyard one time too many and

wrestled him down and got rid of the testes. levels of aggression go down but never to zero. the more experience that male had being aggressive prior to castration the more it will stay there afterwards. the more experience you have with aggression, the less dependent on hormones and the more a function of social learning. so that unfortunately or otherwise doesn't pan out there. final question? >> yup, final question. hopefully a more optimistic note to end on. you mentioned the chronic stress and there are things we can do perhaps for people who have experienced chronic stress. people who have been on multiple tours overseas is who i am

thinking of who saw and did horrendous things. people are coming back now and i am wondering, and i know people have tried meditation, maybe yoga might work, but are there ways even with the example of testosterone and the role of the amygdala are there ways we can reduce size of the amygdala? >> the realm where that is most studied is with ptsd. combat trauma and sexual violence ptsd where you expansion of amygdala and over generalized into it beg a terrifying world out there. my lab for a while was doing gene therapy work on trying to protect the amygdala in ways a

circuit trick is useful because it will not help a mammal but my sense is ptsd is not anything that is cured. there is no clear biological cure for it but something fascinating and horrifying emerged. ptsd is about fear, the terror or trauma of people trying to kill you, watching your bodies get killed, it is anchored in fear and the fear of the violence that may harm you and those who you love but the whole field has to accommodate extraordinary finding in recent years which is drone operators get ptsd. they get ptsd at the same rate as to warriors out in the battlefield. drone operators living in a suburb of edward air force base who get up in the morning and

remember to drop off the clothing at the cleaners and get into traffic jams and barely make it to work on time and sit in a simulator for eight hours blowing up people on the othersoid side of the planet and rush out to watch their little girl at the end of the day in a ballet concert and go back to work the next day has ptsd at the same rate. it is not about the fact there is nothing more abnormal and terrifying than the notion of somebody violently killing us but the bizarre notion of us killing someone else and that is causing enormous rethinking as to what ptsd is about. and lurking in there is a bit of optimistic. a man wrote a book called on killing and analyzed the history

of the extraordinary percentage of people who throughout wars, in the middle of battle, who none the less, never fired their guns. there is an enormous inhibition against doing that. after the battle of get-tysburg the majority of guns had not been fired but loaded repe repeatedly. i am about to shoot i better load again. and he argues somewhere in there is the greatest bit of optimism. asking someone to kill somebody on the other side of the planet is easy. asking someone to kill someone whose eyes are seen hand to hand there is inhibition against that and that is room for some optimistic.

but the u.s. military trains more drone pilots than actual pilots now. remember what i was saying about castrating males or i don't know just hold our breaths and try not to fall into too much despair. i don't know. i spend my time on college campus and trying to console my self this is going to generate a new generation of activism. if it produces ten times the activism let's say the '60s did it will still be an up hill battle to undo the damage done in the next four years. i don't have a lot of grounds for not being despairing and you guys get to live here and watch it day by day. i get to live out in california and ignore it when we want to. okay. thank you. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] >> here is look at the authors featured on booktv "after words." stuart taylor examineed college campus sexual assault policy and dr. elisabeth rosenthal editor and chief of kaiser health news reported on the current state of health care. in the coming weeks, new america president and ceo will examine

how technology is impacting foreign affairs. and minnesota senator and former saturday night live cast member will discuss his campaign. and a report on how low and moderate income families manage money. and ben sass argues america's youth are not prepared for adulthood. >> i wanted to spend time to get to know the people and figure out why the senate doesn't work. i interviewed a majority of senators in private to get to know them well. i am one of the three or four most conservative members by voting record but i am pretty unpartisan. i want to know what motivates these people and why doesn't the senate deliberate and why are we

not talking about the portability of benefits when millennials are going to change jobs faster and faster? i realize there are collective action problems i would summarize as saying as we move into the this post-industrial moment, local communities and media mediate institutions are being hollowed out. there is a lot of lon liness in america. most of the public is checking out from this conversation all together. one of the effects of polarization is people in these two parties think the main way they would lose their job and one of the things that is scary is the biggest long term thought a lot of politicians have is

their own incumbancy. blaup .... >> washington journal continues. host: our first guest, former u.s. senator from oklahoma he is the author of the book, smashing d.c. he is also a senior advisor of the convention of state project.