but then he was kicked off after writing down into the chappaquiddick river. so years later, this is all of the record. so then later it is published in 27 weeks on the best-seller lists then of 2017 when the trump era takes that hysteria. [laughter] . . . .

>> you can watch this and other programs online apple tv.org. @book tv.org. [inaudible conversations] >> starting now live from the texas book festival in office-- austin is a conversation about fake news. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon.

good afternoon and i would like to personally welcome you to the texas book festival in austin, texas, the greatest book festival in that united states. [cheers and applause] my name is brian sweeney a proud board member of the texas book festival so you can totally trust me when i say that. we are here with an esteemed panel of two writers i admire 48 panel called pulses, forgery and fake news. i often think this year may be the fake news, something that has come into the currency of our language. fake news-- fake news has become so ingrained in every aspect of our lives in terms of how we consume our media and understanding our political discord in the large decisions we make as a country going forward. i would like to introduce our panel today. one esteemed writer and poet kevin young, he's the author of

several books in 10 volumes of poetry with the latest we will discuss today called bunk. how can you not want to read that? kevin also just started on wednesday as the new poetry editor of the new yorker. very little going on. welcome to austin. at the far end is another writer i admire greatly both a political writer and nonobvious named jared makes sexton. [applause]. in his book is called people will rise upon the waters of your sure. terrific words, jared. jared's work has appeared in the "new york times", new republic salon and he's currently crater of writing professor at georgia southern university. please welcome jerry and kevin.

[applause]. gentlemen it's a pleasure to have you here and in reading your books it reminded me of why i enjoyed books like this so much because of the deep story telling and smart analysis and it was nice to read them together intend him because kevin takes us back through years and years going back to the 19th century of american culture and how we reveal things like forgeries and humbug and fake news and then jared gives us a more kind of up the minute approach based on what he saw during the 26 election and how it carried forward into our everyday discourse and i will tell you jared is not shy on twitter if you have checked out his twitter account. out to start with kevin and say going back to the beginning of your book he talks about a wonderful american character, fascinating american character in the name of pt barnum, one of the things i feel like i know a bit about, but once you diamond

the book you realize how much you didn't know and how much important that person is an barnum's time in what you identified as the pain he papers , penny press and how much it reminded you of the modern-day internet and its workings, so when you start with you. can you take us back to that moment in american history and how does it look a little bit like today? >> absolutely. thank you for having me a thank you for coming out. very much i was interested in that start that he gives of the hoax, his first big hoaxes in 1835 when he exhibited a woman named joyce have an joyce heck was he claimed george washington's nursemaid which would have made her 161 years old. [laughter] >> he advertised as fact and had experts to clear her, but what it provided people and the penny press was a big part of that was access to the first presidents, one of our founding fathers and so people literally would touch her and they argued whether she

was real, not just 161, but whether she was flesh and blood or made of rubber or, a lot of sort of things that to us are strange, but also barnum's reach and power. also, at the time she was a slave and so there was this real question there that the penny papers is one of the places that he did so and around the same time there was a new hoax in the penny papers which pretended someone had spotted people more like biped beavers and various things on the moon and i think the penny papers are like the internet in the sense that they promise this democratic world where access to it for the people and often also relied on advertisements in ways we do, that people read that penny press papers for this kind of

excitement, something a little bit different and i think the internet functions much the same way and also spread the hoax widely and fast. at the time other papers were 5 cents, so it was five times as much and people picked their penny papers like we pick her news today, so there's a lot of relation to it and i trace the origin, the hoax to that moment and is there something american about the hoax, is there something we need to know that is told there and i think barnum offered us the kind of chance to be an expert, to be in this democratic process of choosing whether something was real or not and that sort of is still with us, but i think it also changed quite a bit. >> and i think that is one of the things that we want to talk about is that internet and democratizing tools and also tremendous pit calls it has when everyone is their own publisher and their is no value and is a

former journalist myself there is real value and not having filters and being able to have access, but we also see the downside. i wonder, could you jump a sport about 150 years and you are driving up to iowa to cover the caucuses in one of the things i was struck by-- i told jarrett in the back for my now he's a real writer because part of the reason he took on political writing and because he was trying to put off fish-- finishing a novel, so there's nothing like a writer putting off one project by taking on another one, but went to iowa and spent time watching the caucuses candidates from both parties in one of the things you found their was this really intense anger. the electric was really a great order if you could set the tone for your arrival and what you saw. >> sure. i was in the middle of writing a novel that had just ballooned out of control. it was like frankenstein's monster that had gone beyond

anything i could do and so in true writer fraction i procrastinated and decided i would cover the 2016 election, which i thought would be incredibly boring. [laughter] i thought it would come down to hillary clinton and jeb bush and i thought i would do this as a hobby, but then i started noticing the trunk campaign and started going to these rallies and the thing that really shocked me was i started to see that the trump movement at its heart was beating fueled by people like my family. my family is a working class family from southern indiana and a lot of the things i would hear the trump rallies, a lot of the drum piece of anger and paranoia and authoritarianism or things my family would say and so i actually started covering the trump campaign because i didn't want that in the american discourse. i let my family, but agent want them to be the people at the levers of power. [laughter]

so i started noticing this anger they had, which people have now started to use this phrase left behind or economic anxiety and so my family is industrial stuff, factories, mine worker in prison guards things like that. they are angry about the state of their lives, but they were also manipulated by larger power doubts basically appealed to their absolute worst instinct and i started to see that like my family who started posting white supremacist means and racist stories and now, we have learned propaganda came from russia and other places. i started to realize the trump movement was powered by that. >> do you have a sense in terms of coming through that election where you see the really good examples of reporting and discourse, balance by terrible examples of reporting and discourse? i mean, how would you rate the quality of what we saw because i think part of the dynamic has been this unbelievable us versus

them dynamic that part of the country is wanting to mislead joint not tell you the truth while the other side says the rest of the country is trying to mislead you not tell the truth or did you see anything that inspired you and at the same time you saw things that really disappointed you? >> well, i have been on the book tour for the book now and the things people keep asking is what is the hope and the hope is that when i talk to people i don't agree with politically and when we have a conversation human to human and they learn a little something about me and i learn something about them we confine common ground ground and begin to build trust, but i can tell you that the people of the trump movement which is roughly 30% of the country are inoculated at this point. they do not trust regular media. they do not trust trusted voices or could they have been walled off and that will be one of the harder things to do.

>> i guess the thing that interests me at least i came to believe in my book that fake news weather in the penny press or wherever always started with race. it always was linked with questions of race in the hoax itself became a function of race, so also race itself is kind of built on the notion that it's fall, so how these things go together and how do they become intertwined and can we untangle them and my book tries to understand sort of the origins of that and so the hope you are talking about i wonder about because it's a century halfback and there is this connection. >> absolutely right. whatever the central progress we make or whatever breakthroughs we have technologically there's always a downside to it and you are saying that because we have carried this sort of racial undercurrent throughout our entire american experience there is no way to escape it going forward?

>> well, i was just going to say i completely agree with kevin. that you clearly with my family and this is an intimate thing we are talking about. my family has a lot of racism, but they are in total denial of the racism. right? these are the people that will say i'm not racist, but. one of the biggest strength of the trump campaign in the way they harm it-- harnessed the movement was they gave that excuse saying you're not racist. you see the world as it is and it gave them that excuse. i think at the heart of all of this is this really really disgusting strain of racism that has been allowed that has allowed this fake news and propaganda to come in. >> i think that the hoax depends on race which is one of the things i suspected, but as i began researching and writing the book i realized how pervasive it was in the term fake news becomes this weird thing where describes something true, propaganda or you know

fake ads or fake news as ads, but then it's also an accusation , you know. as you said, sort of challenges other truth and it becomes quickly fake news is just news i don't like, which cannot-- a lot of news, but you get to call it fake because you don't like it. >> there's also this incredible power to the fake news because one of the things we are talking about with the rise of trump is the fake news that people like my family were getting. it told them they weren't racist and they would have to actually-- the cognitive distance is a credible hard to defeat because for you to understand news as it is you have to understand you have an inherit racial privilege, which changes the entire nature of a persons like like all of a sudden you have to realize the world is different than you thought and do so it's so much easier to accept fake news even while you know it's fake like

deep down you have to have the instinct it's fake and i think that's why it's been so powerful. >> jared, in terms of this you say it's personal. what is your family's response and what are those sort of one-on-one-- i can only imagine the holidays. [laughter] >> what are those conversations like, has accreted distance. >> on the weirdo in my family. hello, everyone watching at home. yeah, they have always looked at me as, you know the outsider. i've always had these conversations with them and even as i started to cover this thing like i would get death threats from my reporting and then i would go home and my family would have a trump thing out front and i would go in and i'd be like people are threatening to kill me and they be like oh, fake news. [laughter] so, to then very odd, but i feel

like because i been able to talk to them and curb some of their worst instincts, but at the same time they are weary of me. a word sort-- weird sort of cultural gap there. >> seems to that-- my sense is that ultimately the currency of that term is going to die out at some point; right? that it's trying to be used as this shield to not just news that's truly fake as we saw during the 2016 election in different forms, but also news you just don't like that you sort of throw that up as the shield. with you we talked about this happening on the rights through this, but of course is it the exclusive ownership of only one side and when you look back through history are there out there examples that jump out to you that felt then as it feels now this critical or vital to the national discussion? >> i think what's fascinating is

the way hoaxes crop up at different times, citing very much boredom and the others were capturing eight moment of where the us was trying to understand its history and connect to a path and sometimes having to invented as great or however they wanted to think of it, so in a way i look at things a much a continuum now, people trying to understand and i'm not sure-- i think of it as political and the deepest sense, it's about power, connection and who can hoax first in way some time, but it's very much this disconnection between hoax and races of it i came to understand is really an intimate thing. it isn't just about why we deceive, but why we believe something and sort of trying to understand that gap you are talking about and why do people believe that white girl from orange county is a south-central gang member and sell-- sold her

memoir in 2008, why did james frey, so trillions of copies of his book what is so obviously not real if you step back and i think the hoax tells us something interesting and as soon as it disappears or is debunked, which i think gets harder and harder to do or something like pizza gate. we want to believe this stuff, kind of the worst things about each other. >> 911 in new york? >> 's are, let continue, please. thank you. >> we will continue. i apologize for that disruption. >> there is a lot of things that are hard to debunk and once we do it tells us something interesting about what we believe and i use the term way because i think we all have a stake in it. understand the side or anything, i'm trying to understand why there is this constant belief.

>> like fake news just came to our panel so i appreciate you. >> i assumed that was one of your family members. >> uncle billy. uncle billy, come back. >> it's always good to catch up. [laughter] >> i think it's fascinating now as we talk about this idea of like pizza gate, which is so absurd and laughable and lead to a person to show up-- that whole thing and again this goes back to cognitive dissident and confirmation bias so we are in this polarized time in the country where this divide and what people is so great that we have people who sit here and talk about like liberals as if they are all criminals and satanists and evil evil people and that is confirmation bias at its heart. if you are up here and you talk

about liberal ideas or fake news then you are pedophile or something, like that is how deep this is now. it can lead to things like pizza gate and thank god no one died there but, i mean, we are looking at a ticking time bomb when it comes to that and who knows how far that goes. >> another example for me that was powerful was rachel, the person who was like the head of the naacp because she painted her skin and you know did her hair, a lot of people said quite well. [laughter] respect people gave her, but she troubled me and then a week later there was that murders and i tried to understand and there's a part of the book that consider this the connection between the two, which wasn't just to me accident of chronology, but they both misunderstand blackness in a certain way. as the kind of tragic thing rachel as i went to take that on as a figure of trauma, but then

also dylann roof-- i'm sorry, meant not to say his name allowed, praying with people and then not being able to kind of put together that they are praying with him and accepting him, which i found very common in my church in kansas where i went to church and with linda brown, brown v board was the piano teacher and this was where the heart of civil rights came in desegregation and they accepted him in the church and then he shot them all, so that kind of cognitive dissonance to me is that play in the hoax because the hoax of race affected them each, dole is all in roof in different ways, but also brought them to the kind of central trauma affiliated with blackness and that really troubled me and should trouble us at all because we misunderstand each other, but the hoax always makes use of the

deep divisions in our culture. >> i'm glad you brought up the charleston tragedy because i think it america we are bad at putting things in context. like a tragedy will happen and then we forget about it a couple weeks later. of the myrtles in charleston are so being to what we going through now appeared dylann roof and i hate to say his name but we have to understand% the heart of this thing, he was completely radicalized by fake news and when he read his manifesto and read the writings he left behind he had educated himself. this was a person who had gone online and found fake academics, fake studies, fake websites and he's been so inundated that he wrote he had to do this. it was all because he had been radicalized i this date news and we lost track of that like when we talk about things like charlottesville and these deaths we have had we forget that the people of charleston were murdered because of this and this does not stop in 2016, 2017th.

it goes back a long time and will go forward a long time to weep at that in of how dangerous it actually is. >> seems to me when you think of those tragedies that we are all directly affected by it. a lot of this-- a lot of us are able to see through this and i want to make there on the left in the right that i think the real danger which has been pointed out time and time again that those people that exist on the margins of our society who are particularly folder a ball for whatever ranging from mental illness to a global hopelessness, the actions of one person can be profoundly tragic for it's-- in people around them and i think that is where the danger is that when we see these people sort of act out in that way beyond just what it's done to our discourse and ultimately that erosion of trust we haven't summary of our institutions that i think we desperately need a fully functioning government. we desperately need a fully

functioning first amendment and press. we need these things and i think that we-- i think every time it's chipped away even if it seems like a little bit here and there and every time it's chipped away i worry we lose something we won't recover. i was a journalist for 20 years here in austin and love my job and loved covering it, but it seemed particularly with the rise of the internet that every story we did it was harder and harder to break through a certain veil that my wife would say you all worked so hard on certain stories are certain issues that seemingly are nonpolitical and at that very moment commoners coming and hijack it. i remember reading from the from the dallas morning loot-- news literally about the weather that evolved into a discussion about president obama. he did not make it rain and that was the problem. but that sort of craziness you realize it's sitting right beside us and we begin to lose

our abilities to reason for jared i like what you said which when we feel ourselves off either through twitter accounts or social media where we are only with like-minded people whatever that means we lose the sense of the person sitting next to us who is a good and decent person even if they don't share our beliefs. >> i think-- well, i think both things are true which i didn't journalism has been really important in say and covering sexual assault recently making people aware of things they might've been aware of that now have these consequences, so i hate to say we are in this tragic moment of journalism, but at the same time there's a kind of perhaps it goes even further, what is objectivity coming kind of talk about this in the book because it ends up affecting how we think about things and i argue we should have accuracy as our goal as opposed to sometimes objectivity means what do you think about slavery, was okay,

you know. it sort of becomes a strange thing weathers a debate about the weather as you put it or the changing of the weather, so i think we have to step back a bit and not just think about, g it's journalism or the internet because we made the internet and we got the internet we deserved or at least some of us deserved, but at the same time i think the penny press when you look back at some of the same problems. i think there was a more interesting 1970 kind of self-awareness. you knew you were being a little bit entertained. there was an awareness looking at barnum merck-- mermaid where he said it was a mermaid and you go in and it was monkey so to a fishtail and you are like okay and part of what you reacted to his houck could i be so foolish not just i was fooled, but i

don't think that second part happens as much. instead of barnum's promise that we are all experts that anyone could be a next dirt, that was part of i think that appeal and now there are no experts. knowing to be an expert in anything. to be a doctor or scientist is to be a fool now and i think that is the thing we have to think about less the media or medium that it comes to us at. >> i was on a plane a couple weeks ago and the pilots got on and said there was a dent in the tale that would not allow him to fly and people on the plane started screaming at him to try and fly the plane. [laughter] >> that is a large part of what's happening here. >> did you fly? >> no. i got off. [laughter] so, we have this thing now and i think we've actually been in denial of the difference between objectivity and subjectivity and

in this country i think we now have two-- with the internet and our phones where we can now create our own reality and i think that impulse has always been there, but i also think our media has done us a disservice because for the longest time the media has pretended as if objectivity was their goal. we do not live in times where objective journalism exists. to tell the truth now is a partisan thing. we are now dealing with an ex- essential crisis where we call it anything other than what it is we are lying in the name of objectivity. i think for the longest time trump was treated like an actual politician when in fact he should have been treated as a disease. i will actually say going back

to the book when i started going to these trump rallies i was watching on tv and all they would do is put a camera up and show him speak and that was it. for like an hour and a half or two hours however long he wanted to go. no one was talking about what was going on in these rallies in the moment i stepped into them was racial slurs and all of this was billing up underneath the service, but no one wanted to talk about it because the news wanted to pretend to be objective and at the end of the day we are living in a timer subjectivity is everything in a timely pretend it's not i think we are doing a disservice to reality. >> we are here with ^-caret-- get-- kevin young and jared yates sexton and if you have questions i would like you to begin to think about those. we have microphones. to ask one last question to wrap up and then we will go to that. also, both offer-- authors will sign at the author signing tent to tent down immediately

afterwards and i hope you will buy their books and meet them in person and have them sign. i will throw this had to either kevin or jarrod and then we will turn it over to the audience. often times what we see a national election is the reaction to the election before it's even when you have an incumbent in the office to some degree which is what we presumably will have an 2020. do you have a sense that the tone, dialog conversation will change as a result of what we saw in 2016 or are we on course for more of the same? >> no. [laughter] i think 2018 and 2020 are just going to be bar brawls. i think it's going to be really repulsive and my hope is by the time we are done with 20 that the electorate will be tired of this nonsense. that's my hope. >> kevin? >> people asked me or i ask myself is there something hopeful. there is a line that starts my book that's a quote that was a

merit-- what american people want is a tragedy with a happy ending so i was tracing the hoax as a tragedy, but looking for this happy ending and thinking about is the hoax getting more frequent and i came to think yes and it's getting worse and i absolutely think so. what's funny is it treat-- seems more true now than when i was writing it three years ago, so maybe something else could be more true in a few years, but i also think there is a breaking point or tipping points where we start to think again as critical receivers of whether it is news or even just autobiographical stories and i would love it if we fell back in love with arts as fiction, fiction as a place where you can explore some ideas , but they aren't pretending to be real and that's the other damage is that it hurts people, the hoax.

it hurts our notion of truth and our notion of art and what art can do. >> i will also add that i think one of the biggest dangers in this country is thinking this will spontaneously get better because of a narrative that this idea that america will heal itself, this fake news subjective reality authoritarianism creepiness is not going to get fixed until we take education seriously in this country. any notion that it will automatically correct itself is exactly what people like donald trump hope the american people believe because we have to be active and take this thing seriously or it will be here forever. >> we have some people in line for questions and the only thing i ask is try to speak clearly and try to keep the questions as direct as possible.

>> i was wondering if you think maybe it's time for journalism to change because i think maybe journalism is falling short now. when you have the press secretary of the executive branch come out and layer lie upon my upon my to cover and run interference for her boss layers lie upon my upon my daily and no one-- you never hear anyone say that they like, i mean, you never hear anyone take them on, you know? >> i think there is a gap in the fact check cycle. you get a fake story and people run and try to, you know, decipher it and analyze it and reject it, but it takes hours and that is the gap people work in. it becomes very hard and that realization, i think, is the way fake news becomes a polite name for propaganda.

in my book i say i liked it better when it was called propaganda. i don't know, jared would probably-- >> i think there are two ways the news can combat this. number one we need to stop tiptoeing around the fact we are in a crisis. stop having stories and segments on the news where we talk about it and we want the audience to fill in the blank like it's not just that we have a president that people don't like. we have a president undermining -- [inaudible] number two, went to know who people are getting their money from. i think on the news every time someone comes on we should know who their donors are and because that is the context that we are not getting. people even though they are inclined to believe it like my family if they say who you get money from they can smell it.

i think those are the things we need to do. >> thank you for your question. >> question for kevin. you talked about the role of the penny papers helping disseminate hoaxes in the day. what was the mainstream media of its time doing and what was their take on these hoaxes then? how does that compare to how mainstream media is covering these sorts of things today? >> two things, won the penny press quickly became mainstream and quickly became quite popular the circulation rose dramatically from zero to 40000 copies and lots of readers, but i also think that the mainstream media did a little bit of what it does today which was responded to the story and so they would often recount the hoax, is it a hoax. they were as interesting-- interested ed reproducing a reprinted because they wanted

readers also set up saying this is why it's bunk. that's why it's interesting in the way the hoax becomes contagious and as much as people reprinted it they were also trying to gain readers and also kind of say i don't know and not debunk it as quickly as we might wish. >> damn, i was hoping it was better in the good old days. yes ma'am, please? >> has anyone suggested that the repeated use of the words fake news, fake news, fake news were done deliberately in the event the russian connection was discovered because then that would be discounted? >> i'm-- a lot of people ask me is donald trump stupid or brilliance and i think a lot of this was done institutionally like i want to say it was right

after the election that he had his first press conference where he took over control of that term fake news. i think no one understands the power of that term more than donald trump and what he's done with his followers is he needs to give them a counter story, that's it and they will take it and run with it. all they have to do to every scandal and problem is give another story and they go with it and fake news, him co-opting that phrase was one of his most brilliant moves. >> i think the news is worse, which is that in a way and a book retraces the idea of how he emerged specifically which we know now was a hoax or maybe we all knew always, but that was admittedly a hoax. it still has its traction and i think that's the harder thing happening now is someone asked me as internet making these things worse and i don't know if it makes it worse.

these things the spread quite well before but i think it's harder to get rid of them. the internet becomes a semipermanent place where you can find what you want to find and then i think is the harder part. there is still risk among us, but we can't discount the fact of connection of race and hoaxes what propelled the national stage for trump and others all along. >> that is a good point, not to jump in, but that notion earlier that he said americans ultimately what tragedy with a happy ending. i think this cuts across are lines or at least i hope so a lot of us think that to perpetrate that sort of hoax and save president obama was not born in the us that there would open-- ultimately a price paid for having done that once it's proven it is in fact false and i think one of the things that was really troubling about the cycle is it seemed there were few prices to be paid for something like that, but that feels more

new to me then what we had previously. >> used to be in the past you got caught in a lie and you admitted it was a lie and now donald trump overloaded the system. he won't admit a lie and everyone's like i don't know what to do now and is that shamelessness. for the longest time political spin existed until you were caught in the news that i'm sorry it took a punishment. >> jared, i was wondering when you are on the campaign trail were you able to form an opinion about why these people are such hard-core followers and unshakable despite the fact it seems his policy don't help their lives get better? >> it's not about donald trump. it's not about who he is. is not about policies or principles, which there are neither.

he's an avatar, like being a sports fan saying i'm a trump person says something about you personally. if you say i'm a trump person it means entire worldview in opposition of liberals and political correctness. i don't think it matters what he does on a policy level doesn't matter what he says because they are so tied into it like a sports franchise. if you like out of the baltimore ravens and ray rice gets arrested for doing awful things that doesn't change how you feel about the baltimore ravens. he is their mascot, their avatar and as long as he is that i don't think they will abandon him, unfortunately. >> i think our last question, unfortunately. >> i was wondering how has it-- as a consumer of news best ensure we don't fall victim to some of this news that isn't correct and secondarily, how do you or can you argue with

someone who is claiming fake news? is there a way to refute that after you found the facts? >> you can start. >> i think the antidote to fake news is more time spent with the news. one reason we had the proliferation is we live in times where we won every thing given to us and now every time i read an article and i went to consider it i have like two to three extra minutes looking around to make sure other places have this. about is part of it. talking with someone else, forming a personal connection. if they see you as a human and they recognize your humanity they will talk to you and you will find they will make concession, but as soon as you start with the news and disagreement it doesn't work. show them you are person and go from there. >> don't you think we start with social media some kind now? i mean, you get your news from twitter or wherever so going

beyond that, going beyond the initial story is helpful, thinking critically and to what you said earlier, i mean, we all need six lessons. i love the classes when i was a kid and white aren't they vary more, like jim went, art went and now civics so we need the outlet for understanding how the government even works, but my book is mainly about hoaxes and the fake of that and how we can kind of get past that. >> thank you very much. out like to to thank you all for being here and i would like to thank kevin young and jared yates sexton. i hope you enjoy the rest of the festival and please remember to go by the author book signing tent and they will be there immediately after this. thank you, again.

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> book tvs coverage of the 22nd annual texas book festival live from the state capitol in austin will continue in a few minutes. next, author discussion on climate change and ocean science

>> book tv records hundreds of author programs throughout the country all year long and here's a look at some events we will cover this week. monday we take a tour of the book publisher in washington dc to interview some people responsible for bringing a book from acquisition to publication work on tuesday we had to the pilgrim hall museum in plymouth, massachusetts, where rebecca frazier will provide history of the mayflower voyage through the eyes of a puritan family that travel to america in 1620. wednesday, we are at the city university of new york for robert weil, editor-in-chief and publishing for the fourth annual editorial accidents award presented by the barn for international organization and on thursday theatre in los angeles with scott adams discussing how donald trump uses art of persuasion to win the presidency. friday we are back at the nation's capital at politics and prose bookstore with lawrence

o'donnell recalling the 1968 presidential election. sunday, emmy-winning actor ed asner will share his thoughts on the constitution with today's social and political issues in oregon. many of these events are open to the public. look for them to air in the near future on book tv on c-span2. >> what about tramp-- trump supporters because we have questions submitted by many of you and i will try to recommend without dropping all of these papers. obviously, people turned on you. you needed support. you were spit at. you would see families that looked like lovely families, but the dad was wearing a t-shirt that said: hillary sucks more than monica does-- >> but not like monica. >> and you would be taken aback, they have small children with them. >> there was that and then there was the father with his two kids and wife wearing a shirt that

called hillary clinton a [bleep] there was a man who wore a shirt that said: i wish hillary married o.j. i don't care what your political beliefs are or you think democrats have all the wrong ideas or if republicans have all the wrong ideas, that was a shirt that said i hope that hillary clinton was brutally stabbed to death in the 1990s, i mean, that is so far beyond what should be acceptable for common decency, for behavior let alone politics. >> but, do you think-- you got to know trump supporters and people, you know, this is boston but i'm sure there are many in this room and faith wrote to ask , you spoke about running into a trump supporter in the bathroom before a rally that helped you with your air-- hair,

act of kindness. >> you can't paint an entire group of supporters with a broad brush. i thought it was a huge mistake to call donald trump supporters the portable. you don't go after voters in this country and i don't think it's a good idea to say this swath of voters are bunch of racist, misogynists whatever name you want to ascribe to them they are a varied group of people from different socioeconomic backgrounds, some voted for president obama in the past, a lot of them were women, i mean, a variety of supporters and at the same time they wear the kind of people who often times probably lived their lives in a very polite rule abiding way, nonoffensive way, but there was something about walking into a trump rally that allowed people to shed all of those rules, to shed those burdens. i write in the book trump had a

halo of crudeness and in him and loved crudeness he allowed everyone else to be crude around him. he said whatever he wanted. he never backed down and a lot of people found that refreshing, people who maybe could not tell a joke any longer because it was a politically incorrect joke, people who had to worry that they watched with a said and thought their patriotism was being mistaken for racism and they walked in there and they said i can say and do whatever i'm thinking. >> we talked earlier about covering the primaries and early on i was in iowa and you could see the line at the trump rally their and was calling back to the station saying i'm it meeting a lot a pit-- young men, young men in particular trying to decide between bernie sanders and donald trump. >> certain rogue colter that would come out to the trump rally, men wearing tank tops and

big make america great again hats, that college fraternity culture that would show up and really liked the enthusiasm of the event, same people that would say i want to vote and this is a broad brush, so i apologize. would like either bernie sanders or donald trump and it was because they wanted an outsider, someone different, refreshing lesson part of that establishment, someone whose name they had not heard their whole life like hillary clinton, someone who was not afraid to take on the system. bernie sanders had that quality in so to trump and they both had job messages and these are young people who are either just in the search for a job or steam-- soon to graduate from college they wanted a better opportunity >> they wanted an instructor, also. >> definitely. >> i thought i observed this, i

constantly saw people who saw things that people on the left might see as appalling like those t-shirts you mentioned and they thought they were perfectly acceptable parol reality of what they might have seen. for instance, when george bush-- george w bush invaded iraq and there were some people who were against aback and if you had gone to the antiwar rally in washington you would have seen people wearing disparaging t-shirts about george bush and they really felt it was the same >> and there's an argument to be made for that. i think it's a sign of how corrosive our politics and our public discourse has become. the question is where does it go from here, do we correct it, doesn't get better for 2020, 2024 or are we going to see even more crude language, crude

behavior? will there be a line that is too far, a bridge too far? where do we go to make you can watch this and other programs online at book tv.org. >> here's a look at some current best-selling book according to book people bookstore in austin, texas. pate dawson's report of environmental disaster that hit london in december, 1952, while at the same time a serial killer was on the loose. then, chris offers his advice on launching a profitable business. followed by mark recount of the turning point of the vietnam war next, russian-american journalist reports on the generation of russians who came of age during the vladimir putin age. alan jacobs advice on structuring your thought process and how to think.

our look at the best-selling books according to book people bookstore in austin, continues with best-selling biographer walter isaacson leonardo da vinci. former first daughter's share their experiences growing up in the political spotlight in the sister's first. followed by mark manson's advice on meeting a happier life. roger hodge, deputy shares his family history of branching in texas blood. wrapping up are a look at the best-selling nonfiction books according to book people bookstore in austin, texas, is vacation land, a memoir from john hodgman. some of these authors have or will appear on book tv. you can watch them on our website, book tv.org. >> atlanta started as a transportation hub for railroads it got really crowded in the middle. by the late 1880s they began to build beltline railroads to go

outside that center and there were four different ones, so ryan's i did to connect them was unusual because they never were connected. they were or invite-- owned by four different railroads and there were industry built up around them, people began to live around them and then the street cars came in late 1800s and there was this magnificent network of streetcars in atlanta and in their infinite wisdom one year after i was born in 1948, they destroyed all of the streetcars in atlanta. why? because they were old-fashioned. why? because starting around 1915, atlanta really began to switch to automobiles and trucks.

there is a picture in the book of downtown atlanta in 1914 and it had a few streetcars, a lot of pedestrians just walking across the street in five points of atlanta and there was some horses and buggies and there was a couple of cars and then there is a picture on the next page from 1924, 10 years later and it was all cars with some streetcars packed in so people began to complain that the streetcars were in the way of the cars and there were traffic jams so they end up building the streets over the middle of town. that's how down-- how underground atlanta came to be. in the process of cars and trucks taking over, these beltline railroads died. the industry's move to further out because it was cheaper land and they could be serviced by trucks, so by the 1990s when ryan was writing this master's thesis it was mostly a car or

kudzu. i have a picture in the book covered with vines and weeds and there were homeless encampments along this so ryan wrote this thing and said people are beginning to come back into town and we should turn this into this vital network and take advantage of the infrastructure we are have instead of trying to make up some brand-new thing which atlanta tends to do and he saw it as something that could really change the city. it was very well written and it's actually online. also, let me say ryan wrote a book himself called "where we want to live". came out last year and our books are kind of complementary because his is a big picture book about what we should do with cities etc. and mine is a very yield sign nitty-gritty book and sort of down on the streets meeting the people and a

different approach and mine is much more about atlanta specifically. so, he wrote this brilliant thesis and put it on the shelf and thought nothing will come of it, like most masters theses and so he went to work for an architectural firm and one day a few years later at lunch he and his colleagues work talking about what they wrote their master's thesis on and he explained his and they said, well, that's fantastic, bring that in and let us look at it. they read it and said you have got to do something with it, so together they wrote a letter and sent it to every georgia politician and planner and environmental people and they all wrote back and said that's a terrific idea, good luck with that. [laughter] except one person who is kathy woolard who is actually running

for mayor right now along with eight other people in the city of atlanta and kathy championed this idea and so did ryan and they sort of build a grassroots organization for a few years and in 2004 mayor shirley franklin took it on and it developed into a bureaucracy, which we have now she found a weekes, a businessman who had sort of semi- retired and enough money to donate his time, which he did for four years to this project. i have gotten to know all of these people and i had interviewed like 400 people for this book in the last six years and so i began to work on it in 2011. so, they tried to figure out how could they fund it and in the process i should say ryan's original idea of running streetcars around morphed very quickly.

his friend said why don't we put a trail by it where people can ride their bikes on it and why don't we have people be able to walk along it and then a guy named jim langford who was at the time in charge in the trust for public land, someone approached him and said they wanted help attorney the sort of derelict land south of this big old derelict sears building into a park and they said you can make this into a park and alleviate all of the flooding by building a retention pond of their. he thought that was a great idea , but the beltline was all in the news at that point, the idea of it. he said, you know, looked at the map and said it goes up to piedmont park, goes through piedmont park and if we build this park down here and look, there's this other little park

down here in this neighborhood and he realized it connected a bunch of parks and why not make it a greenway, a linear park that connected parks so he hired alexander garden, a world-famous city planner who i also got to know through this to come down here and to try to figure out what kind of parks you could have. atlanta is severely under parked we have a lot of trees in the city, beautiful trees, but most of them are in people's backyards, not in public places. in metro atlanta, a huge sprawling mess of 6 million people or so now they are losing land at an alarming rate, losing trees at an alarming rate. >> you can watch this and other programs online a book tv.org. here's a look at books being published this week. best-selling biographer robert

explores the political life president rate-- franklin d roosevelt. obama takes an inside look at the presidency through the lens of former chief white house photographer pete. playing with fire, msnbc lawrence o'donnell recount but 1968 presidential election and former democratic national committee chair donna brazil or flex on the russian hacking of the dnc. also published this week, eight seconds of courage, captain kroeber recalls his military career from his childhood in paris to be awarded the congressional medal of honor, first immigrant to receive the honor since the vietnam war. historian robert mary looks at the legacy of the 25th president. former cbs news anchor dan rather shares his thoughts on patriotism in, what unites us. in, when the world seems new jeffrey engel examines president

george h bush policy initiative at the start of the post-cold war world. look for these titles in bookstores this coming weekend watch for many authors in the near future and book tv on c-span2. [inaudible conversations]

okay hello everybody. welcome to the see change session of the 2017 texas book festival, the 22nd annual texas book festival it's great to have you all here. i am dr. spencer wells i'm a geneticist ant anthropologist sometimes author. for many years i was explore resident for the major gee graphic society and directed the project which was an effort to use genetics to study how our species has populated the world and lived here in austin founder or ceo of insight, and co-owner of a nightclub sponsoring -- [applause] [laughter] >> i would like to introduce our authors we have julie bird a

science writer, editor who contributed to publication such as new york time website nature, national geographic and slate. she had a ph.d. in ocean science from university of southern california. and she as i said lives here in austin author of spineless which we'll be talking about today. [applause] then we have peter who is the professor of ocean physics head of the polar ocean group at cambridge group in the tuck visiting at national institute of po or particular research university of washington, and currently at the scripts institution of oceanography, and he's the author of a farewell to ice which will be discussing as well. [applause] that's a couple of quick reare minders after authors will be

signing books and they're for sale courtesy of book people, and austin institution. and remember when you buy a book here at the festival you support the author, the festival, and local independent bookstore. so that's good. texas book festival is a nonprofit organization. its mission it so support low income students in texas with author visits and book donations by reading rock stars program and also to fund grants so your book purchase really does make a difference. okay, i think we're going to kick it off there -- well let's get into this. so julie, spineless is about jellyfish. >> it is. >> which is an interesting topic. yesterday, in fact, was world jellyfish day. >> i know i was surprised to find that out as probably everyone. jellyfish are fascinating everybody has experienced a jellyfish sting out in the world

swimming out in the ocean that's how most of us know about jell will fish. where i was really kind of turned on to how fascinating jellyfish are when i visited monterey aquarium when they have that jellyfish exhibit with oblique lighting you can see what creatures were like and what they were doing. what was jr. your journey to writing a book about jellyfish? >> yict start with thety of the jellyfish as i talked to scientists about why they studied most of them said it was the abusety -- beauty that pulled them in but i was textbook writer here in austin, and i was started stood some more mainstream writing and i was a story for national geographic about ocean acidification, and they had that classic national geographic has that winner and losers in a sea on the winners side were things

like algae microalgae, kelp and jillly fish. and found they really know. have we done experiment to know that they can do well in the ocean, so i -- dove into the scientific literature and i found that we haven't done experiment to know that -- i also found this like really interesting scientific argument going on and what's going on in the ocean, and a lot of things we're doing to the seas -- are making life better for jellyfish things like warming, acidification maybe that coastal development probably plays a role with runoff of fertilizers that causes dead zone and illegal fishing -- so all of these things jellly fish seem to tolerate them well so there was a big discussion

like are jellyfish taking over ecosystems? and then there was another there was a push back saying we just don't know and it turned out that we sort of systemically not studied jellyfish fir 20th century because once we started studying the ocean by pulling big nets through it u using winches and motors, our view of the ocean became bias to things that are durable that are hard enough to handle that kind of treatment before we look at them. so it was just to me incredible scientific question that really leads me into the world of jellyfish. >> very cool. so jellyfish are really interesting. they're animals and they have -- relatively complex behaviors including sleeping. >> yes, sir. >> oddly enough a new study that came out a couple of weeking ago and no centralized nervous system and no brain. so how does that work. tell us a little bit about the life history of jellyfish and

you know some of the biology which is so fascinating. >> yeah. i might just take this moment to say, there's like kind of a secret in my book. that -- some people aren't really picking up on so much that book is based on on the way i structured the book is based on life cycle of the jellyfish so -- so the jellyfish starts off as a little, you know, a male and female, and they have eggs and sperm that form a larva and that is a tiny like a tic tac with u fur on it. so the first section of my book is kind of the ideas of the book. and then that thing settles and it becomes polyp with tentacles and it lives for -- many years it likes to actually live upside down. it can live for many years like that, and so i sort of planted here in texas learning about

jellyfish science, and then what happens is -- at some point given some environmental cue that polyp will go into a stack of plates, and this is when i sort of realize i have to get out of texas and find out more about jellyfish around the world and each one of those pop off and become what are initially known as a fira baby jellyfish, and then later become madusa mature jellyfish and starts all over again so they have a complex life cycle two parts, it is definitely not the only part of a jellyfish even though it is what most people think of as a jellyfish. i'm probably going on too long. but -- the question of how back to like the initial thing how do they get around in the ocean if you look carefully at a medusa in iowa aquarium around

intensification those are sensory organs in each one with of those there are couplized usually -- a thing called a touch plate which is like -- something that can reach out into the water and smell chemicals and sense current. there's a -- balance sen or cor like in our inner ears. there's a thing called a pacemaker which controls how fast it pulses. so each one of these different from around the edge of the bell the nerves run through these and through the pacemakers, and they integrate from different directions that jellyfish is experiencing through the away the although they're not like we are, and they don't have a brain that, you know, at the top. they have this very interesting integrated interconnected intenls or -- u you know ability to gept around in the world that has given them, you know, enough

camibility and oldest animal swimming so they're adept at what they do. >> i love natural history oak peter switch to you thousand. your book is about ice. among other things but's is ice is where you start off with the book in the research ship hudson. how did that happen and why did you become interested in ice in the first place? and the arctic in particular? >> well i was always interested in the ocean. and the first ocean i had take part in which i was young and it was canadian ship going around north and south america. of the hudson it was the first and only time that the americas have been so navigated and it took a year to do it. and that meant we were started

off the antarctic on the way back we came through the northwest passage so i have plenty of times in the isoi got interestedded in that. as opposed to some of the warm waters in between. and made that my go to research, and close -- in those days very few people were working on isounsolved problems and it was a very interesting field. now ice is important because it is disappearing so a large fraction of the world environmental scientists are now interested in ice. >> so -- ice and the the shrinking ice sheets and green and antarctic we hear about that in the news but this whole cabinet of observing ice patterns goes back to whalers of all people someone named whale tell us a little bit about that. why were whalers so porpt? >> well the --

before whaler phillips in the angt arctic when they wiped out whales out to catch this was important in the antarctic and it produced the oil that was used to light towns in new england because you think about hydrocarbon used and alternate would be using whale oil to light a street and that was all caught in greenland and in the bay and whalers this doing that may observation os about the ice how much it was. for instance, there's a big protiewtion that whale were first ones to notice and recently disappeared which is a big climate tick effect so they were very valuable in telling us where the ice limits were in the 19th century. and it helped to show how much

ice was retreated over the last few years. well it was those days -- >> excellent. julie. three words for you. rubo jelly and passive margin. explain. >> i can pass that test. [laughter] >> one of the coolest stories i found when i was kind of following as i was writing the book i would start to plan our family vacations so that i could go and talk to jellyfish scientists, and we were on cape cod and i went to national geographic i started talking to these two jellyfish scientist who is work on biomechanics of jell isly fish how they move and they have just been given a grant by navy to build a robotic jelly, and the navy was thinking about they could be like surveillance you know they use very little energy so they hang out in bay, and they never let

me just say i don't think there are any jelly out there. but in the course of making the robotic jellyfish they -- they created this -- this silicone cell and they put some mussels in it and robotic and what they did they turn it on and it it squeezes it squeezes and it moves forward. and then they turn it off and it opens and it goes back to why it started so what, it goes forward and then they open it and it goes back it is like a yo-yo and they're like well we've got something wrong, and this one graduate student was like well they're supposed to be a little flap around the edge of the bell, i didn't have time to glue it on. maybe we should glue that on so they said okay pull it out of the o tank an dry it off and they imply this silicone you're seeing the enof the jillly fish, and they glue it on and put it

back in the tank and power and goes -- and it slims out of sight like just the same as a jellyfish so the discovery is that that path of margin it has no mussel in it but moves as consequence of the bell moving is everything -- to pushing something forward through the water. it pushes to move forward but that wasn't even the whole story. they -- they continue to work on the project and they were able to create almost -- like a map of the pressure field around the jellyfish. and what they discovered is well like when we walk we push back on the ground behind us we create like a high pressure zone behind us and we push off that to go forward. we're terrestrial creatures we don't have thick things around us but in the water bending of the jellyfish doesn't only push

back against the water. it actually creates a suction in front of the jellyfish's bell a low pressure system like -- when we suck in air from our chest so that low pressure is is actually a great contributes had more to the movement of the jellyfish than the high pressure in the back. so then they started looking around the world or the ocean at lots of things that swim and you know you notice that everything bends. it's all flip and flops in the ocean. and the whole reason is because it creates this low pressure in front of the animal that suck it is through the water as we've been building ship and submarines all things to explore oceans we've always used our tres cial point of view like let's push back against the water but, in fact, we should probably be bending creating bendy vehicles to be underwater because they're much, much more efficient, in fact, jellyfish most efficient swimmer they looked at compared to a salmon

which we think of as a powerful swimmer the jellyfish use way -- a fifth as much energy to move the same distance as a salmon does. so yeah. really cool very cool story. >> yeah. mimicry we shob paying attention to nature. tell us a little bit if dagalo jellies. >> so this is another great story from the jellly fish maybe not so well known that is that -- both many jellyfish and they live all over. they just don't just live in surface or coastlines but throughout the the ocean and in the deep waters it is one of the major probably the major way of communication. it is -- animals make screams and holler to come meet me. check me out and go away. so p i'm getting eaten help me

all of those they make these calls that have these different meanings and jellsly fish are good at that, and in the 70s they were trying to understand how that makes that happen and one scientist -- was working on that question in jellyfish in sound, and yeah interestingly he was about a few miles away from nagasaki and it was on the bomb so he had an interesting life story. anyway he was had able to purify chemicals out of jellyfish are from the sound and then -- what he noticed was that purify the gloi glow was blue but jellyfish in the ocean glow green. and so how is is what was going

on there, and he went on to discover that there was a small protein callinged green floor res that takes blue light and it shifts to green and self-contained unit. it doesn't need an enzyme to work but it needs light and some biochemist and genetic pick up on this this to take the dna for that green protein insert it in front of the the gene that were interested in studying in animal hads to light up it is almost like adding sentence to e-mail before you forward it. so every time gene is expressed the green protein will be as well and so you probably seen pictures of cells that are glowing and that's all started with the green fluorescent protein from jellyfish and then other people a guy named martin chelsea figured with the green protein now it comes in all of these every color of the rainbow

really, and so this -- and this scientist won the nuclear -- nobel prize for their work dagolo jellies. >> funding per basic research which is -- debated. >> which is for science. speaking of basic science peter, we're going to get into the discussion, obviously, about present day climate change, human pin deuced climate change but give us some context tell us about the cycles in these longer periods of climatic shift that happen naturally over hundreds or thousands of years. >> to say something about that's happening to the ice now in the last few -- decades, because when ice first started working in the arctic it was very heavy ice mostly that you can see the picture multiice

which is really thick like mountains of ice. occupying the whole of the arctic ocean between north america had and the asia, and so the feeling psychological feeling was that -- the world from the hemisphere joins join together at the top because it extends to join kind of to the russia and we all won. but recent years the ice is being retreating faster in the summer but also in the winter as well. so that instead of her continuous cover across the arctic you now have -- you have seas in some of events which has changed everything. they've changed nature of the ocean itself. and has produced a lot of feedback effect, and one with, first part of my book is actually concerned with this because when you sew this sea ice retreating and thinner ice

and less of the the temptation to say this is a curiosity. it's obl global warming has caused this. but it's just that a curiosity like disappearance of last few years from kilimanjaro but what we're finding is that the loss of ice from the arctic is having much bigger efnghts elsewhere in the climate systems. so we can't just think of arctic sea ice retreat by itself. it's affecting whole climate system. to greater extent than the loss of isoopen quarter is giving us that warming of the world. and it's causing warmer air to spreads over the green lapd ice sheets and that's making greenland melt faster which is giving us an increase in the rate of sea level rise globally. so that's no typical here in the gulf of -- gulf of mexico everywhere, in fact, in the world.

so you have at least rising at the accelerated rate and that's very extra contribution is mainly from -- the melting of the greenland ice sheet due to sea ice retreating in arctic and another effect is that we're getting -- released from arctic surface because les sediments from the continental shelve was of the arctic and actually the three bed sediments -- in the last ice age allows below to get out, and we're now seeing big ones coming up into the atmosphere and again causing an acceleration of global warm withing. and the final -- not final but --

two more that affect people here is fact that -- the as sea ice retreats we're getting warmer the arctic is warming faster than rest of the world so the temperature difference between the arctic and the lower latitude is going down. and that's reducing strength of the jet stream that's the rapid air , wind, mass that separates arctic air from the tropical air and you experience it when you fly from u.s. to europe. it helps you on your way, and that jet stream is slowed down because these winds have decreased in strength because the temperature doesn't slow down, and jet stream now is producing a low instead of being straight. it's in -- vertical low and each low brings polar air down into some low latitude region like the midwest.

and warmer air it takes up towards higher latitude where it shouldn't be like -- the northeast. so you are finding alternating fleejts world in mid-latitudes where it is either exceptionally hot or exceptionally cold and these extremes of weather are being seen for the past eight years coinciding with the retreat of sea ice, and they span the latitudes where we get most crop production and so they're having very drupghtive effect on crops and causing global food crisis to rise which is really serious for third world countries so we're finding another effect on the -- global food production that's -- the life of people. and the final set which is is really important for around here with the hurricanes -- is up north greenland a place first spotted by whale hadders

is a location where ice used to grow in the winter and cause the the surface quarter to sink the ice has salt into the ocean and that producer helped to produce to slow circulation of quarter in the atlantic. not the same as the gulf stream but in the same direction. and that circulation in the line -- has slowed down because that is not being produced anymore. and the result is for less warm water from the gulf and the caribbean being carried to northwest europe that means because it is just as much heat going into the world that means hot water stays down here, and the the surface water temperature down in the gulf and in the caribbean is warming u up faster because the water is not being transported efficiently up to europe. so europe is calling down or not cooling down but warming slowly.

but the gulf is warming faster and this hot water is what intensifies hurricanes this is warmer the water at the surface the more intense the hurricane. so we are getting hurricane intensification because of this slowing down of the water that takes water away from northwest europe so i guess the point for all of those is that sea ice retreat in arctic doesn't just affect of the arctic but the whole planet and some parts of the planet are affected much worse than the arctic itself, and one of the places affected badly is around here because of the hurricanes getting more intense and sea level rise affecting low -- low at altitude regions which is northeast and louisiana -- >> great. so peter in your book, you talk about this if notion of tipping point. do you tell that we've reached a

tipping point respect to climate change? >> yes. i think we we have. well we -- tipping point if you stop poking something with a stick it goes back to sleep. it's if you don't have a tipping point a and you poke a lion with a stick and then you stop it goes being to sleep and everything it okay if you reach a tipping point you poke and it comes to eat you so a irreversible process in science. and question is -- have we stressed the climate and the planet so much if we managed to take a away to take it away then we'll go back to where before and i think we still can. i think we haven't reached that tipping point that say -- mars or venus reach where had they lost all of their water and became completely lifeless.

but we -- we can go back. but we have to first of all stop producing carbon dioxide so what we put in already is enough to give us acceptable global warming. it's not a question of reducing emissions. we've got to not only reduce emissions but we have to get rid of the stuff there's out there already and research methods to take it out of the atmosphere directly and it is just technology. but it needs a lot of money to develop it. but once we develop it we have solved global warming so i think we can see what we need and feel totally gloomy about global warming because we can find a way to get that up. and that's in the atmosphere if we spend enough on research to do it. >> you've done some effort about

research on the coast in some of these geoengineer projects. >> i work up at u.t. piment with a group that does sequestration, and yeah it's a -- really, you know, they -- the idea is that you take carbon dioxide from a power plant and inject back into the reservoir where original fossil fuels were extracted done in west texas as part of a process called enhanced oil recovery for 50 years i think. so there's a lot of technology right here in texas. and there's a lot of expertise about carbon sequestration, and, in fact, there's a project down on near houston called net carbon, which is -- one of the big problems with carbon sequestration is added cost to the electricity. but there's a innovative project happening there's innovation everywhere it is like peter's point you know we -- i do think we have are the

capacity to solve these problems and this is one toilet mention because it is interesting there's a problem called net carbon down near houston where they're using this pex tract they're burning fossil fuels taking the carbon dioxide and directly using that to turn a turbine opposed to what regular power plants do which is extract, you know, burn a fossil fuel get carbon dioxide in the other things and those go off the pollution. and then use the heat to boil quarter to make steam so dynamically you have lost every level so a much more efficient way and idea is that you can scale this so i think there's really creative ways for pus to attack in some of these problems that event the ocean that the jellyfish are telling us about and what ice is telling us as well. >> julie do you see evidence of the affect of climate change in jellyfish population? >> so this is one thing that scientists are fighting about but i think in certain places

certainly -- there's jellyfish that invaded eastern mediterranean originally from indian ocean which is quite warm in the past it probably would not have been able to survive this the eastern mediterranean which was significantly cooler but that part of the ocean has warmed as proportionately so much, much warmer now and these jellyfish came through are thought to have come through the canal or else in the water ship that cascade through the canal, and they've been dispoflted in the eastern mediterranean u now formed looms that are tens of miles big every summer. and these jellyfish are really, really bad sting percent. they're called nomadic jellyfish so you can't go to the beach when they're bloom and then they wash probably they wash into power plants which use sea

quarter to cool their machinery, and they are like millions sink stoppers coming into the machinery so they have to shut down operations and then you can google it like there's these container ships physical of jellyfish that they have to scoop out of their machinery and wait until the bloom dissipates. this similar thing happened in australia -- swooped into the ronald reagan a big aircraft carrier, and it incapacitated it so yeah the jellyfish are responding to changes in the ocean. they're living probably -- able to take advantage of the new habitats that are forming as we warm the ocean. >> so peter, there's all of this evidence you know scientifically for climate change caused by human activity. but a lot of people are, obviously, reluctant to accept this is an issue and researchers

at texas tech university pointed out when they've done surveys people believe that in general climate change may affect a region or a country but it won't affect them personally. do you feel they have to be kind of an advocate rather than a scientist when it comes to climate change? >> well it's -- to be a scientist is to be an advocatening because the evidence is so powerful scientific evidence, and so which -- it is evidence which can't really be -- there's fed that can be refuted or if you see some peskts right the ice is clearing you can think about the ways that either things might be causing that besides warming of a -- of the atmosphere. and so there's always room for doubt in science and someone can dream it up but some things in science that refutable like gravity and fact that --

dan has says that quarter flows quarter flows down here and two plus two equals four so this should be respectful for tax when we think about political discussions. and one fact is that carbon dioxide warms atmosphere because it is sort of high school physics you have a bowl floated in space the earth -- it's the temperature of the earth is balance between the radiation that it gets from the sun. which is pretty much constant and the radiation that the earth itself emits because of the temperature which is long wave with raid ration if you have atmosphere covering the earth the radiation from the sun gets in and warms erst but radiation from the earth can't get out because carbon dioxide absorbing it and gets it back like in the a green house and more carbon

dioxide it is and warmer earth gets so produce fat balance so you can't add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and get anything other than warming of the planet so to say that carbon dioxide doesn't affect the climate is -- is absolutely wrong. it's not just an opinion, it's like saying that water flows up hill so you have to accept basic things about climate change that really -- all scientists accept and then beyond that the magnitude of the afterefnght is something where the scope ore the disagreement and disagreement about how it will show itself what will happen first, will we start starving because of lack of food or will we start drowning? or o will neither of those things happen? all right on that note like to open up to the audience if you have any questions there's a

microphone set up over here. i'm sure you have lots of questions for our panelists julie and peter. >> hey, spencer -- >> hey, how are you? >> you know we read about the preserve, reserves, natural gas reserves and so on and that there are folks who own these reserves and are working diligently to get the fuel out of these reserves so that we can bring them and put carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, and i'm wound peering you know i don't know how to interpret the numbers that are involved here. so with these reserves that people are actively either pumping out or -- have purchased and have plans to pump out, in terms of the carbon dioxide that will will end up in the atmosphere i know it depends hows pennsylvania and but if we know what rate we're burning fuel is there a ballpark that

figure that we can have is as to what the effect of all of this stuff out there will likely have so that when we talk to our representatives we can say this is not good. >> recommendation from the government power and and it's about two-thirds of the remaining known reserve of carbon oil should stay in the ground we can't -- ration of what we can burn and still keep warming below 2 degrees which is the what's regard at this acceptable means that two-thirds of the reserves can't be shouldn't be got at. but it's psychologically highly unlikely that the world will allow two-thirds of the remaining oil in coal to stay in the ground so that's where it shall i see all of the engineering methods have to be use od or co2 removal used

because there's an irresistible urge to dig for coal and to build for oil, and we've got -- we've all the world has that despite what they say about reducing carbon emissions so we won't get that amount of restraint i think we'll see two-thirds of our reserves left in the ground. and if we're going to drill -- and burn them we have to get rids of co2. technically -- >> next question. >> hi, this is for peter. i left four years ago i lived there my whole life and one of the reasons i left was because of sea level rise and sense i left city put millions into a pump system on miami beach to try to keep high tides out of the streets. and it doesn't look like it's

done much good i think this weekend is the bad king tide as well. and my question is -- i have heard so much about how much more quickly the ice is melting and now the winds blowing on the antarctic from the west cause warm waters to melt under the ice as well as the warm air melting above that. it seems like it's happening so much quicker than we thought we can see it whatting in our lifetime which is amazing to me. should everyone be moving away from the coast now? well perhaps think we should be careful living right on the quarter, and because the sea level ice rate was previously thought to maybe be -- half a meetser or so by the end of this century that's, you know, two and a half one and a half feet in the u.s..

but now keeps going up because with the accelerated amount it have greenland now antarctica and some of the predictions are four, five sb six feet essentially which means we'll see changes for places like miami fast within our lifetimes and -- close to real estate will stop being high priced because it will be underwater. [laughter] >> i just had sort of a question that you could both deal with. i just read an article like yesterday and this morning that the meltings of the ice in the northwest passage is also changed gulf stream going up around the island and changed the pods and other animals that live in the --

[inaudible conversations] is this reversible type of thing or is the pods that are imroag there now are less u nutritious which affects the birds. the birds and fish are not going to live as well et cetera, et cetera. and wonsdzering how reversible do you both feel these things are? well, i think in materials of biology it is a difficult question to answer one thing we've seen with some of the coral reefs are that have been affected by climate change already is that -- they can be resilient. there's a coral reef that was not destroyed by climate change but by pollution. and oil spills in the red sea, and once they put in place made a marine protected area, put in place restrictions about the kinds of fishing and pollution that could go on around there, it came back within, you know, a decade.

so they're -- in materials of the biology it is an incredible -- there's a lot to be hopeful for whether it will come to back to what it was is -- who knows. but it could become a very rich ecosystem given enough time the thing is that -- the amount the speed at which we're changing our planet is outpaces evolution and the resilience of many ecosystem so i don't know. i don't know if anyone can really answer that question. we need to start paying attention to it. how about that? >> definitely -- message first went to it in 1970 we have to factor the way and we still got statistic and this here a cruise ship went through and only ice that was seen it was in the atlantics -- [inaudible conversations]

a big change happening there. [laughter] wing we have time for one more quick question. thank you for being here. i have a concern about the gee engineering aspect for two reasons. one i think politicians tend to think oh, we can fix this by sticking the engineers on them on the problem, and that will fix everything. and our history of unintended consequences is not good. so if you can speak to that. thank you. >> well that's a problem with engineering is intended consequences but in that sense there's a form of engineering is massive -- you just plant trees everywhere and that -- the trouble is not enough land. but unintended consequences of

putting sea is one method of geoengineering and there the fear is that it will -- spread out over the whole planet and they all effect places where you don't want it to effect maybe like the indian monsoon and you've got to wait until that all falls out of the atmosphere before the effects start. the method i like because it is like a scallop is called marine lightening here you put seawater in very tiny -- very tiny nozzles in the bottom of gray clouds like you get in britain. and it makes them white, and they reflect more radiation. now that -- that is what works and also it's you're putting something harmless into thes atmosphere ad as soon as you stop pufferring through nozzles effect stops so you can minimize the -- harm possible u unintended

harmful consequences as soon as you get in you stop doing it and that you don't have immediate stop what would happen. that's i think is the release harm form of engineering. >> okay i think we're going to have to wrap it up there. thank you very much. [applause] both of you. so julie and peter will be next door at the book signing thank you very much for coming up.

and that was a look at climate change and its affect on marine life and in a few minutes more live coverage from the texas book festival in austin, up next harvard professor danielle alan from most recent book is kuz national book award finalist jaisms talk about race in the criminals justice system. we'll be right back with more live coverage. [inaudible conversations] here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. this weekend we're at two state xap tolls, we're live at the

texas book festival in austin, and look for us at the wisconsin book festival in madison. next week, we'll be at the national press clubs book fair and author night in washington d.c. then on november 15th, it's the national book award in new york city. and later in the month, we'll be live at the 34th annual miami book fair on november 18th and 19th featuring senator al franken. best selling biographer walter isakson nbc news katy and many authors. for or more information about upcome book fair and festivals and to watch previous festival coverage, click on the book fairs tab on our website booktv.org. >> but i was home one day, and my cell phone rang. and i looked and it was like a really weird number. i don't know if it was pun known if it was just like to answer --

i picked up the phone to check the message and the message said you know this is not a -- prank. this is a white house. will you come down to d.c. tomorrow? to meet with the president? i said okay. all right, you know i had this feeling about whether i should do this and not doing this. so i said okay i'll go and i went down and i was reading next time at the time and i had this heavy artistic impulse i kept thinking where don't people write this way why don't people to to write with this beautiful marriage in a journalistic historical all in one so i'm reading that i got that on my mind and went down to the white house, and there's me and a bunch of other journalist and i knew that obama with duties off the record -- so meetings at the time -- and they have a assigned seating. and you have to sit where they tell you to sit. you know you don't get to

choose. so my name plate was here, and obama's name plate was right there. so i kind of, you know, i coming up on issues i knew what this was right. this was like -- you know say it to my face, right? [applause] [laughter] i wasn't polled. but i was a little shook. he comes in, shakes hands, sits down, i sit next to him i'm like oh, i can't say what i was thinking. i'm in church. but i was like -- so you get to ask the the question you go around and i ask for some really weak, moist question. to the president -- and he answered the question and he said and by the way -- he didn't say my nail right he

said what ely said -- he said -- i saw that she wrote that the other day pep and it was like terribly i'm saying. but then you know he went off on me right so what had felt like an hour. i know in an hour but it really felt like that. [laughter] so i love, you know, i went home told my wife about everything. and you know i said it. he went become and he gave another one of these -- i used to hate these speeches i hated those speeches. and he went and gave it again and i said you know what -- i'm not shook. you know because after that they call use down and think they're going to talk to you and then they don't at least that's what i was thinking in my head so i went and i wrote it again. i wrote not the same thing but i was like you know -- i was like you're going to see all of this. and you know i get another phone call. [laughter] and it's this strange, you know,

number and this time i answer it can you come down tomorrow -- so day of i told my wife you know i said listen i'm going down again you know i said but i'm not shook this time but i'll go in and take it to them. you know what i'm saying -- [laughter] and he's like yeah, yeah, yeah -- [applause] u you know -- you know what i mean she's like we can do this when you met kennedy gave it to them something about it you know with that's you baby. you got it. you got it. so i got on the train i had -- i bs you not i had the bullet on my iphone. i was listening to that joint. all the way, mall come going man, i said man -- i'm going to do it. i gets down there and it's raining that day and i get to union station i catch a cab, and traffic i'm way, way late. and i get out the cab and i

don't have an umbrella and yopght have a suit on i'm totally in my mode and totally inproarpghtly dress ed and it is raining and you know, they're calling me while i'm in the cab like are you coming this to start it is the president show some respect. i get there, and it's like a room full of like room is all white. except him -- again assigned seat and this time in motion and he's here and my seat is across from him. he's ready now. i'm ready, though. i'm ready now i'm not shook i'm late, i'm wet but i'm the not shook. good. [laughter] so he says -- look it's nice of you to join us and he keeps answering without a question. so i sit down and this time like it is journalist from like all across the board, i mean, it is like high level you know like david brooks level of people in that room and i don't like you

have to remember like i'm not seeing myself luke that. you know what i mean i'm still unemployment officer in harlem that's me and i'm sitting down watching this dude so they're asking me questions and asking about the economy, foreign policy. the environment -- tax cuts, and he is taking every one of these dudes on in detail. i mean it is like i wish you could see, it was a display of brilliance and part of me like the black part of me is like e yeah get them. get them. [laughter] you know, like buzz i'm watching this black dude like do this thing. you know? but then other part me is like i have to get ready to do what i've got to do. you know so my time come right -- i ask him my question -- and this time like i'm actually over heated like when you said you were going to x, y, and z and run aring down statistics about obamacare and this and back in mississippi two-thirds in unemployment i'm going. he said hold up, hold up and i

respond. you know, and he gives his response and i say usually this doesn't happen you get this and you get going, and i say can i have a phone? he's there, please, please -- and i look around and all of the white people in the room are like -- i can't tell you again it is in the book but i can't tell you my reaction they're looking like oh, my god. [laughter] you know two black dudes are are fighting like they're getting it in. [laughter] s it's u now a speck spectator sport you're not going to beat the president. but we go back and forth and i leave and i'm thinking about about this. and i'm thinking about like how -- fortunate i was to be there and to take that case directly to, you know, the highest offices in the country and i call chris jackson up and out of there and i rewound and tell them about reading -- i say yo this is --

this is the moment not only is the text it should be inspiration that is the moment in this book doesn't exist. and he said to me you know chris is my friend and you know gave me the friendly advice he said listen man the vote is limited with writer who is tried to do the fire next time. you know just go google fire this time so a lot of folk who is tried this. they didn't quite get there nobody remember -- and then he said -- well you know i think you can do it. i think anybody can do it you can do it so you know we went off and five drafts later you know we didn't quite do it but we got between the world then. here's a look at books that are being published this week. best selling for robert pex ploars political life of president franklin d. roosevelt. obama takes inside look at the presidency of barack obama through the lens of former chief

white house photographer pete, and playing with fire msnb has the presidential election, and former democratic national committee chair donna brazil reflectings on russian hacking of the dnc and the 2016 election in hacks. also being published this week in 8 seconds of courage captain goldberg recalls military career from his childhood in pairs to being awarded congressional melds of honor in 2015 first immigrant to receive the honor since the vietnam war. in president mckinley historian looks at legacy of the 25th president. former cbs news anchor dan shares his thoughts on patriotism in -- what unites us, and in when the world seemed us in, jeffrey pink l exams president george bush initiative at the start of the post cold war world look for titles in book sthoars coming week and watch for many of the

authors in the near future on booktv on c-span 2. does anyone else have an experience they would want to share tyrone asks about the medication and deflect and conversation turns to drugs and alcohol when tyrone instead begins talking about getting arrested for smoking a blunt everybody except for wall flower patient has something to say about drugs may i say something minor asks manny during a pause in the discussion. sure cynthia knots i don't mean to take up time i don't dweive it thank you so much for letting me speak. he sighs in frustration you're fine man just talk. thank you, thank you. it's just that i struggle with alcohol for so long almost 40 years now. and i've been sober since getting locked up. i hope so badly i can stay clean when i get out. he seems to be a little more kivel now and still continues talking. he tells us about being whipped

against the wall as seven-year-old when he didn't do a good enough job cleaning up from the father's night partying the night before and drank a glass of leftover orange juice not realizing it was mixed with vodka and father found out he whipped until blood seeped through his shirt and didn't hurt because he was tipsy from the alcohol and from then on he drank as much alcohol as he could get his hands on. thank you for letting me share says manny i know i'm not worth your time. ...