harassment training in companies should focus more on enablers than almost anything else. >> yeah. >> we should focus on how do we give the courage to the enabler to not be the enabler and to also come forward. it's crucial. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> thank you very much for coming out tonight, i really appreciate it. you know, at the end of 2017, not so long ago, we were celebrating -- that's probably a bad word, we were commemorating the fifth anniversary of hurricane sandy, superstorm sandy which, obviously, affected a large part of the eastern seaboard. and i was reporting on superstorm sandy as it struck, and my research for that became what was my third book, superstorm. and in that book, i was looking at how it was that we had gotten superstorm sandy so wrong, how it was that new york had failed to issue evacuation orders, how

it was that so many buildings and key pieces of infrastructure were flooded or ultimately destroyed during that storm. and in my research, i spent a lot of time at the national hurricane center, and the meteorologists there -- who were incredibly talented -- kept telling me the same thing over and and over again and that was, you know, we're just not very good at this. we're just still not very good at forecasting and predicting these storms. we're still not very good at preparing on the front end for the kind of havoc that is wreaked by these storms. and we saw that in 2017 with hurricane maria, we saw that with hurricane hugo. and as i was leaving and thinking about the questions of infrastructure and prediction and how it is that we respond to natural disaster, it to occurred to me that, you know, for all that is powerful about a hurricane, they're nowhere near our most powerful natural phenomenon, you know? when you think of the sheer sort of explosive power, earthquakes

are exponentially stronger. and so i started to think, you know, how is it, how do we prepare for those sorts of natural disasters, and to what degree as a country, as a nation are we prepared for that? and what i found was really kind of chilling, you know? when you think about, for instance, a hurricane which is still very difficult to predict, we have a lot of technology that we can use to literally get inside a hurricane. and so we have, for instance, the air national guard and noaa that's capable of flying these souped-up jets directly into a storm. they can drop these little technology pieces called drop zones which measure wind speed, barometric pressure, that sort of thing. we have radar, we have satellites. and with all of this technology, we can try to predict the track of a hurricane. we can try to give people 72, 48 hours' worth of notice with a hurricane. and yet we still see the profound devastation that we saw in places like houston and puerto rico.

so all of that being said, hurricanes are a no-brainer compared to earthquakes. and that became very quickly abundant to me when when i was doing my research. they are our least known natural disasters. we know less about the inner workings of the planet than we do distant galaxies. and for every seismologist that i met while i was earning this book, they all had some kind of analogy. they would say we mow more about x than we do about earthquakes, and they'd fill it in with things like dark matter or quasars or kate middleton's hats, you know? something, anything that we know more about. and when you think about it, that's a part of where i think the sort of terror comes from earthquakes. if you think about right now, for instance, and this year alone, 2017, we we've had 107 earthquakes that the united states geological society deems as significant quakes. and most of them you haven't

heard about because they've happened in places like uzbekistan or the canary islands. but they're happening every day. every day the planet is experiencing thousands of earthquakes. and the thing about them is we don't know when and we don't know where. according to the usgs, there are 2100 known faults in the united states. and for each one of those known faults, we think they're anywhere between 10, 100 maybe even 1,000 faults that we haven't discovered yet. and when you think about the last 200 years in the united states, every single earthquake that's occurred, every single major earthquake has occurred on a fault that we didn't know about prior to that earthquake. we know about fault zones, places like the san andreas fault zone, but when it comes to the actual fault that's happening there, we usually don't know about them until it happens. most of the faults we do know about are west of the mississippi x that's not necessarily because west to have the mississippi is more sort of

seismically predisposed, it's because we've done more research there. so when you talk to the geologists and seismologists, they say, listen, if you want to be really terrified, think about earthquake potential in the northeast. we don't know anything about that. and basically that's because when you think about it, you know, earthquakes are happening 5 miles, 30 miles under the surface of the everett. we don't know when and where they're going to happen, we can't anticipate and get technology there to measure them, and so all we can really do is just kind of postmortem after an earthquake has happened. so they remain this incredibly unknown phenomenon that we have to sort of guess at. but what we do know is that the united states is profoundly seismically activity and that the -- active and that the potential for major earthquakes is happening just about everywhere. as i say in the book, unless you live in miami, you're probably at risk for an earthquake. now, will that earthquake happen tomorrow?

will that earthquake happen in 500 years or 5,000 years? we don't know. but we do know that the potential is really there. so what i wanted to do with this book is set out on sort of the classic american road trip and drive around the united states and try to get a real sense of just how real the seismic hazard is, what the real potential is there, how well we are prepared for that earthquake and what we still need to do to become not just sustainable, but ultimately resilient communities. and so i embarked on a road trip for about a year, and there were some obvious places that i knew i needed to get to. i knew i needed to get to the san andreas fault zone, and we do know that the closest thing to sort of scientific certainty is at southern california, the southern section, will see a major earthquake in our lifetimes. we mow that that's entirely possible. we know that, for instance, the pacific northwest is really primed for a major earthquake and would come with sort of a resulting tsunami quite possibly that could do a lot of

devastation. we also know that places like salt lake city, very, very sort of ready and poised to have a major earthquake. so i knew i needed to get to places like that. but what really surprised me were these other places that you might not expect like memphis, like new york city, like washington d.c. and so a lot of my research was going to these places and talking to really smart people about the work that they're doing in trying to understand just what the threat is and why the threat is there. and some of the things that really surprised me was just the sort of snow eball ripple effect of what the seismic potential has. i have one section of the book where i spent quite a bit of time in memphis, and some of you may be aware of the series of earthquakes in 1811, 1812 on a fault zone called the new madrid fault zone. and we have all sorts of really wonderful, sort of apocryphal stories about this, that it made the mississippi river flow backwards, that it made the liberty bell crack.

those are not true. but what is true is some of the strongest earthquakes in u.s. history happened in this zone in 1811 and 1812, and we know that the new madrid fault zone which basically follows the mississippi river is ready for another quake or series of powerful quakes. so this is bad news, obviously, if you like barbecue and blues or you like the ducks at the peabody hotel, and we don't want any of those people to suffer. but it's not only bad news not only for the country as a whole, but also for the international system of commerce and commodification. and something you may not be aware of is the fact that the overwhelming majority of all of our national commerce passes through memphis on any given day. something like 40% of all of our trucking commodification passes one single bridge, the desoto bridge in memphis. something like four million packages fly in and out of the memphis airport every night. fedex has their world headquarters there, and if you

want a really exciting night, spend the night on the tarmac there and watch these 300 airplanes come in from around the world. they stack them up so they all land at the same time from sydney, australia, to savannah, georgia. they all fly in, they offload something like two and a half million packages, they sort them in this place called the matrix which is exactly what you would want the matrix to look like, they get redistributed onto new planes and get sent out again. ups has their third largest hub, they're processing about a million and a half packages. so were a place like memphis to go down, we would have basically this standstill of commerce, right in and when you think about a place like fedex, there's the obvious things you think about, right? there's contracts, there's mortgages, there's paychecks, there's deeds, there's your amazon order -- though ideally you're getting your books in an independent bookstore like this and not from amazon. [laughter] but then there are these other

things you might not think about. two of the largest contractors of fedex are the u.s. military and the u.s. post office. so we not only have things like, again, those packages, those books, but we have medicine, we have car parts, we have military equipment. pretty much everything you can think of. beluga whales are flying through this memphis hub every single night. we have got the trucking. so memphis going down, right, and taking into account things like the mississippi river still major conveyance of trade particularly things like grain, petroleum, things like that. our levee system, one of the most fragile of our infrastructural systems, you know, memphis going down doesn't just affect memphis. fema listed an earthquake in memphis as one of the worst, catastrophic things that could happen in our country because of

the ripple effect. so i was really interested in how this could be and what the effects would be if it happened. and when you think about infrastructure, we really need to be asking some big questions about that. every two years the american society of civil engineers gives the united states a report card for our infrastructure. and for about the last nine years, we've averaged somewhere between a d or a d- for our infrastructure. and this is because, you know, over a series of decades we have chosen to invest in things other than our national infrastructure. and when i say infrastructure, i think about the literal infrastructure which is our roads, our bridges, our airports, our railways, our levees and also this sort of metaphoric infrastructure which is equally as important. it's our tsunami warning systems, it's our weather satellite systems. and we've really underfunded all of these historically over decades. and so we have this incredible deficit, and we have these really outmoded systems.

i live in the state of maine, and about a week and a half ago we had a big wind storm. we had almost hurricane-force winds as this nor'easter passed through. and over the course of about 24 hours, 400,000 people in a state of 1.2 million people lost power. and they lost power largely because we're dealing with this sort of 19th century system of hanging wires on poles, right? [laughter] and assuming that everything's going to be fine. but we no longer have 19th century weather, and we no longer have 19th century systems in place. so as a result you see this catastrophic result where you see, you know, hundreds of thousands of people without power for a week, right? and so i think natural disasters really call attention to that, to the degree to which our built environment has kept up with our physical or our natural environment. and we have really sort of undersummitted power of -- underestimated the power of

earthquakes historically. the last major earthquake in the u.s. was in 1989, the world series earthquake, which some of you may recall. it was also the first truly televised earthquake. and it was catastrophic. you may remember the awful pancaking of the bridge systems and the really devastating images that calm out of that. but while i would like to believe that 1989 was not so long ago, it was a really long time ago. and our collective history, our collective memory, our collective imagination for keeping track of those things after 30 years have passed is not very good. and so we consistently underestimate the risk that these quakes pose. and it doesn't take much. if you think about, for instance, new york city, on average new york city has witnessed a moderate earthquake every hundred years. and that goes back about 5 or 600 years. and it was really fairly regular almost to the year, right?

hundred years, moderate quake. the last moderate quake in new york city was in 1883. and so using this sort of historical precedent, this sort of back dating of earthquakes, one could say -- and seismologists who study the return rate of earthquakes say, listen, new york city is about 40 years overdue for a moderate earthquake. now, we can't predict earthquakes, we can't say it's gonna happen, and the it is 40 years later. but based on historical averages, this is true. a moderate earthquake, the kind that has happened many new york city every hundred years, would create more rubble than september 11th. think about that. and it's not necessarily the high-rises, the steel and glass structures. it's the brownstones, it's the unreinforced masonry, it's the rubble that sort of prevents first responders from getting places, it's the ripple effects of the fires that are created because the gas lines have been ruptured but then fire departments can can't get to put

out. that's the sort of scenario that we all have to kind of be confronted with and think through. we're finding new faults all of the time. we're finding them in really scary places, so it's really beholden upon all of us to start asking questions about the degree to which we're willing to deal with this risk and the things we want to do to mitigate it. one of the things that i find utterly fascinating is the way in which human-induced seismicity is really changing the face of both geological hazard and also the way in which we understand risk. and some of you are probably familiar with the human-induced earthquakes happening in oklahoma city and around the state of oklahoma, a state that used to be one of least seismically-active states in the union and is now the most seismically-active in the lower 48. we have relative scientific certainty to sort of suggest or even argue that the overwhelming majority of these earthquakes are caused as a result of

wastewater injection which happens because of fracking. so with frack, companies go in, they inject at super high pressure water and chemical solvents into the earth to literally create these tiny little fractures in the rock. they withdraw gas and natural -- natural gas and oil as well as the water that they injected and huge amounts of sort of latent saltwater that exist there from when that area was covered by a shallow, ancient sea. so they bring all this sort of wastewater up. and depending on where you live in the country, that wastewater either lives in settling pools in a place like pennsylvania, or if you're in oklahoma, it's reinjected into pressure wells. and when it's reinjected, it changes the pressure underground such that faults that were already sort of primed to go off get that little added pressure they need to really go off. and what we're seeing in a place like oklahoma, it started off as

these very sort of small earthquakes. now they're getting bigger and bigger and bigger. small earthquakes up create bigger earthquakes. so not only is this a daily problem for people who live in oklahoma city and the surrounding areas, places like stillwater who are dealing with shallow earthquakes that sound literally like bombs going off. and i sat with one family. he was a survivor of nuremberg, he fought in the korean war, and they both said, listen, like those war situations were sort of lesser terrifying and unsettling for us than this. and i sat on their patio for three hours and heard these multiple explosions which were these shallow earthquakes. they do minimal damage, but the sound is just so startling to people that it's really become this sort of human rights issue, this sort of environmental justice issue. and as the earthquakes grow, you know, then we start to see these larger threats that are happening as well. so that probably is not news to you. you're probably aware of this

oklahoma situation. but what utterly flabbergastedded me when i was doing this research was just how many ways we can set off earthquakes. what we know is called anthroprogenerallic activity. so in addition to waste waster injection -- wastewater injection, it turns out as a species we're really, really good at setting off earthquakes. we do it all the time. when the hoover dam was built and the reservoir, what we now called lake mead behind the hoover dam, we set off 10,000 or earthquakes just by filling that reservoir. we set off earthquakes through mining, we set off earthquakes through tunnel building. there was a large apartment complex in taipei that set off hundreds and hundreds of earthquakes just because of the weight of this building. and as our technology improves, as we dig these sort of deeper holes, these deeper wells, these deeper mines, we're setting off more and more earthquakes. and, again, the issue here is not just that we're doing that,

but also that our infrastructure hasn't kept up. and so what's happening is what we thought we knew, which is very little, is changing, and we wind of know even less. so the question then becomes what do we do with this. and over and over again when i talk to seismologists, when i talk to first responders, this was what they wanted me to kind of come and tell you now, right? is not that there's this or sort of doomsday scenario, that, you know, may or may not be true. but as a nation and as communities, as a household there's so much that we can do. and part of what i do in the book is sort of outline the degree to which we can anticipate this risk. we've tried really hard through our history to predict earthquakes, and as a nation we've invested tens of millions of dollars in earthquake prediction. we try to track snakes and birds and see if they would tell us. we tried to put, you know, devices down into fault zones.

we've tried all sorts of things to try to predict the earthquakes. so far we've been mostly unsuccessful. and what experts say is, look, we're going to continue to be unsuccessful. we're never going to be able to predict earthquakes. but that shouldn't really discourage us all this much because there are other things that we can do. when the mechanics coe quake -- mexico quake occurred in august and september of 2017, mexico did a couple of things. first of all, it occurred on the an anniversary of the 1985 earthquake that killed thousands and thousands of people. after that earthquake happened in mexico, the nation instituted a national drill system where every year on the anniversary of that earthquake mexico undertakes a major drill where everybody pretends like an earthquake is happening, and they practice what to do. so in the hours prior to the 2017 earthquake, mexicans were practicing what to do in the event of an earthquake. they knew what to do. they also instituted after that 1985 earthquake the first early

warning system in the history of the planet. and is so after this mexico quae happened or before it happened, people had 20, 30, 40 seconds to prepare for the quake. and that doesn't sound like much time, and i was skeptical too, but i spent some time at the university of california-berkeley which is currently developing what we hope will be our first national early warning system, and we practiced. if you think about it, in 30 seconds you can grab a go bag, you can grab your infant daughter, you can get under a table, you can stop a train from entering a tunnel, you can divert a plane that's about to land, you can have kids in a classroom take cover under a desk. and those sorts of things really can be the difference between life and death. and so one of the things that i hope that this book will do is really kind of spark us to start asking these questions, what can we do to prepare for what we know is the inevitable next earthquake? we know one is coming.

we know we're going to have a major quake. we don't know if it's going to be in washington, d.c. or salt lake or l.a. or new york city, but we should all be acting as if it's a possible thing. and so when it comes to just a household, for instance, there are very simple things that we should be doing in terms of being prepared for any natural disaster. when the power went out in maine during that wind storm, most people doesn't have wart. -- didn't have water. they didn't have a week's worth of food. they weren't blared to go without -- prepared to go without heat even though we should know that's a likely scenario. having a go bag, having a plan and understanding what we're not going to have in that scenario. most of us rely almost entirely on cell phone technology more our communication right now. that's going to be one of the first things that goes. and i don't know about you, but i don't even know my most loved ones' cell phone numbers by heart, because i just punch their r their name into my phone. i couldn't call most of people

who are really important to me, plus i wouldn't know where to go find a landline to call them. knowing how to communicate in the event that i don't have cell phone technology, knowing where we can meet or what we can do is really, really important. and this is where it comes into this idea of resilience, how can we be a resilient society. one of the towns that i focus on in the book is a small town at the base of to limb pick peninsula -- the olympic peninsula in washington state. it's a working town, a very sort of economically modest town. it's a freshing community mostly blue collar -- fishing community, mostly blue collar immigration population. they're right in the zone for a tsunami, right? and we know one that looks a whole lot like the 2011 tsunami that devastated japan. that's an entirely real possibility for the olympic

peninsula in washington. so knowing that, they decided to take action. very modest town passed a major reference tunnel for something like $8 million -- referendum. and they decided they were going to build a tsunami sheltering station at the top of their new grade school so that they knew they could keep all the kids in their district safe. and so it's this incredibly sophisticated sheltering system, rubber floors, high walls, enough food for all of the kids more two weeks, and the kids drill again and again and again. and they've got it down to 27 seconds. and they know that they're going to be safe. the likelihood that's going to happen in the next 5-10 years all that great? no. but they decided that the risk was really worth it. and i think that as a nation it's really beholden to start thinking that way. we are really good at responding to natural disaster, and i think it's a real testament to the generosities of the spirit of

the united states that when a disaster happens, we're ready and we show up with our first responders, ask we make donations, and we call in to the sort of benefit concerts that are happening on tv, we send teddy bears, and we donate blood. we're great at that sort of thing. but we consistently underestimate the power of natural disaster. if you can ask the average american what the biggest threat is that they face on a daily basis, the average american will tell you that it is either nuclear disaster or terrorist attack. and, in fact, both of those things are really, really unlikely. it's much more likely that we are going to be the victims of a natural disaster than either of those things. but because we lack that sort of imagination, we lack the sort of preparedness along the way. and i think that's really what we need to be focusing on. we have this unknowability of earthquakes. we have the potential to invest more in things like tsunami monitoring systems we have the

potential to invest more in the technology that would allow us to monitor earthquakes to start to really understand what causes them, why some little quakes become big quakes, why some little quakes don't become big wake cans. we have the technology to institute a national warning system. multiple countries including what we might consider second world countries already have these. and so by making these sorts of things a priority more our country, you know, we're giving scientists the power to do the work that they need to do, we're making sure that we don't necessarily have to have these catastrophic disaster scenarios that we're responding to because we've done the work on the front end. and the work on the front end has multiple benefits beyond whether or not an earthquake happens. so investing in better levees for the mississippi river, investing in a better bridge system in memphis doesn't just help memphis and when that earthquake happens, it helps commerce, it helps trade, it helps flooding for agriculture. we are changing everything about this planet, you know?

between climate change, between the anthroprogenic activity, it really is beholden to us to change the infrastructure. i also hang out with some really fascinating seismologists who are quirky and interesting and weird and want to set off earthquakes to see what happens and are really a lot of fun to hang out with. and i sort of tour some of the more sort of iconic places in the united states, places like yellowstone, places like hoover dam where famously one of my very favorite stories where the movie san an dray yas -- san andreas which shows this catastrophic failure of the hoover dam, the filmmakers approached the hoover dam and said, listen, can we film this movie here? there's this earthquake, the dam collapses, you know, the colorado river careens out, you know, it's mayhem, and they said

absolutely not, no, it's impossible that that would happen. the hoover dam is so overbuilt, you cannot do this. and so because they have screen and script approval, they could say, no, you're not allowed to film this here. and i said, really? why wouldn't you do this? some of you may be familiar with the movie transformers which is about this sort of megadeath robot who comes from a distinct galaxy, and he's this massive robot who's here to destroy the planet, and in our infinite wisdom in the 1920s, we see this deadly robot, and we decide what we need to do is create a holding facility to imprison this mega-deadly robot, and so we created the hoover dam to house the deadly robot. they got script approval to film at the hoover dam, and i posed to them. so you'll met scenario -- let

this scenario go, but not where an earthquake knocks down the dam, and they're like, well, we find the robot a more plausible scenario. so some of it is looking at the pop culture depiction of earthquakes which we love to be terrified by. i focus on some interesting figures like gin jeannie, the most misguiding superhero in the world, the more gin that she drink cans, the more drunk she gets, the larger earthquakes she can set off. that's her superpower history. as one sort of comic commentator said, she's such a lousy superhero, she's actually a villain. so i look at some things like that just trying to come to an understanding of these disasters, how they function, why we feel about them the way we do, what we can do and really how it is, again, that we can kind of move forward and think about this in terms of resiliency and kind of where we go from here. so that's kind of the book in a nutshell. i would love to answer questions

or hear your earthquake stories if you have them. any natural disasters. they're my very favorite thing to talk about, and thank you all so much for coming. [applause] >> well, thank you. [inaudible] before i forget, we have this little tradition. we give you a bird in hand mug. i just want to warn you, it was created with -- [inaudible] and i hope that the extraction did not cause a seismic event, but use it at your own risk. thank you. ..

[inaudible] [inaudible] but it's something can be proven to be an event through some sort of a human induced, you know, whether it's fracking or whether it's using the earth to store plutonium, i'm just wondering how far along, and i'm not asking you to be a lawyer, it's something happens in this plot of land that affects people all around it, people will say well, what do i have to do with that? it only happen happened on my . it seems to be earthquakes don't

look at the geography of a map. if you could just talk to us about this whole issue of liability, is that summary of creating this kind of moral hazard to begin to cause people to think harder and longer about where they build and what type of waste they inject into the earth? it just seems to me that's the quickest way to create some sort of a legal regime to prevent bad behavior. maybe you could comment on that. >> it's a great question and a really complicated one. certainly if you look at places like los angeles and hollywood, for instance, they do have ordinances that said you can't build within x number of come within a known fault. you have to be at least 100 feet away from a known fault. that's one way to try to do with it. it doesn't solve the problem of most of the faults there are

unknown faults. as far as i know no one has successfully sued because they've had damage of result of human induced earthquake. people have tried and the sierra club of oklahoma tried to push through a really powerful and provocative suit that tried to hold people accountable for the damage that was being done there as well. that hasn't happened so far. part of the issue is that where an earthquake occurs is not necessarily what human activity was. one of the test cases that a look at is a salt mine in utah that we used to store waste, particularly like radioactive and nuclear waste. as we continue to do that we started to see earthquakes but they were not necessarily happening right there. they had this ripple effect that would have for some ice. that's part of the complications as well. that's proving that connections are really hard. this idea culpability and liability is not something

anyone has successfully prosecuted. in terms of the point of what do we do when find out about hazard is really difficult question. if you look at, for instance, the nuclear power plant, diablo canyon in california, they successfully stopped that because they decided this place was built with that real understanding of the seismic potential that happens you. there's also really famous dam in california that was eventually next with this $10 billion national disaster that we try to push through and we've interested we are not going to do this because the seismic hazard. that's on a test case by test case basis. even did something like indian point nuclear power plant about 20 miles north of new york city on the hudson, one of her most beleaguered power plants consistently sort of pointed to by the nrc for having problems, it was built unbeknownst to the people who built it on a very

significant fault zone which some experts say is capable of anywhere between 7.0-8.0 earthquake, enough to do real damage to the building that houses the reactor. what do we do then when we know that? do we close this power plant? lycée listen, damage to this reactor in its worst case could actually result in the mandatory evacuation of new york city. so far we haven't. that power plant which is also on hudson, therefore sort of possible place for flooding, because it is so beleaguered and such -- in 2020-2022 got a pass on the nrc for fukushima retrofits that were required of all the other power plant. we take one of our most beleaguered power plants we tell them you don't have to retrofit and renovation to get you up to snuff for fukushima type event. so there's a case again where

liability come is elegantly? i don't but it is responsibility and i think that's important to consider. this question of as the plan continues to change, as sea levels rise, as our weather patterns change, as we induce seismicity in places that didn't have before, as a cumulative start asking start asking some are difficult questions. if for instance, as i am, you live in a place that just became a flood zone that was never a flood zone before. what do you do? do you move? do you send is going to have to get flood insurance? demanded that flood insurance? these other really hard questions. some communities in washington state, two different native americans communities are literally sing their community sort of wash into the sea. they made the decision at the un-expense with some federal funding to relocate their entire community. that's another occupant were starting to see and fine motor

refugees, started their days haven't asked these difficult questions that are really expensive to come with a lot of emotional repercussions as well. i don't know anybody necessarily figured out the answer but certainly it's a question we need to start asking, and asking again little the household level but community level as well. >> you have not spoken about legislative involvement and action of the city council level, the state level, the federal level. what's happening in terms of planning ahead, anything? >> the questioning of what's happening at the legislative level entrance of planning ahead. you're right it's a different answer at the local, the state, the federal level. some states like california probably not a surprised you are doing quite a bit actually. one positive thing that's come out of california's earthquake history is with every passing earthquake we've learned a lot more about one particular thing,

whether it's schools, whether it's the performance of hospitals. and with each passing disaster california's institute more and more building codes, more and more plants along the way of like that. are they enough? a lot of experts signature one of the things interesting about building codes is a building code exists so that people can safely exit a building. so they can get out alive. the building code does not exist to make the building habitable again after a disaster. this is an express. people think it still to decodt will survive the earthquake. probably not actually. one of the things we're going to see in the place like salt lake city or seattle or l.a. is tens of thousands of people who are then homeless. yes, they get out of the building and that's awesome and we want that to happen but they can't get back in. that's one thing to ask, do we want stricter building codes? some communes communities have. others have said no. the city of memphis sat and

looked at it and said, about 12 euros ago and said do we want to institute much stricter building codes here? it's going to be ex open to expensive involved and they decided the cost-benefit analysis didn't work out. that's a question. i'm going to invest in something that may or may not happen? who's going to pay for it? do we want national codes? do we want national structures in place? for my money when it comes to national spending i want a really robust tsunami monitoring system. i want police out there in the ocean. i really want that national early warning system. some of the most innovative work that's being done now is looking at crowdsourcing for this kind of warning system. if you all have a cell phone, there's this really great sort of function on your cell phone that knows if it's in portrait or landscape. that same function that allows your phone to know which

direction it is being held can record jostling and distinguished it between you dropping your phone, you dancing on a friday night, or you're experiencing an earthquake. there are these apps that are in beta testing now through consortium of universities at california in conjunction with usgs where if you're willing to have the app installed on your phone and it and on my sister data so doesn't know if it's john smith in baltimore but knows a phone of baltimore, it can record earthquakes. so it becomes his crowdsourcing early warning system. this is really smart. in the place that's not los angeles that has a lot of seismographs and seismometers on the graham, in a place like new york city that doesn't have that monitoring system we have millions of cell phones that become the earthquake warning system. they can give people the 30, 45-second, it's brilliant and

specially like a a place like e paul, hugely earthquake prone, great seismic risk. have about six seismometers in the entire country but if something like 10 million cell phones. investing in this kind of technology which is pretty inexpensive to invest in and mandating it, we get a a ton of bang for the buck. that's the kind of thing i would really like to see. i of course would like see a robust national infrastructure plan, something that's going backwards and undoing and trying to repair the frankly i would say the delinquency we have seen since world war ii in terms of our investment in our national system. that's the kind of legislation i would really like to see. >> this is wonderful. i mean, it's terrible. [laughing] it's terrifying. thank you so much. i've learned more about this than probably any -- keep up the

wonderful work. >> thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> tv is on twitter and facebook, , and we want to hear from you. tweet us or post a comment on our facebook page. >> it seems like education has a love-hate relationship with fraternities. they love them until something goes wrong. i think that is definitely fair. it's a big selling point, house student will go to a place like indiana university where i spent a lot of time because of the social life and social life is centered on fraternities.

fraternities afterwards they bee so the most loyal donors picked indiana university again i found some data that they make up 19% of alumni but 60% of donors. they are loyal. that's a great deal of power. they attract students. and they're basically promoted. you go to some of these campuses. there's these palatial mansions which are barely a appealing housing. and then when something goes wrong, the universities will then be pretty quick to condemn them. i think that's absolutely true. >> when something goes wrong really, who's responsible? >> while i mean -- >> in terms of, i don't think depends understand some type of responsibility should come back to them. even though there are hundreds or thousands of miles away. >> that's true for one of the issues i look at a lot in the book is insurance, particularly

as a business reporter that's how we started looking at fraternities. one of the problems sorted since the 80s was the fraternities have a lot of trouble getting insurance. their risk is something, i think that just about toxic waste dumps in terms of the risk. [laughing] >> fraternities really struggled with this, and what the solution was to craft insurance policies that excluded drinking and hazing and sexual assaults,, which is on a lot of levels make sense because you don't really want to subsidize that. on the other hand, what tends to happen is when they're something terrible happens, someone dies in a hazing incident and there's a lawsuit, the fraternity members themselves have been paying these come for libel insurance, company doesn't come with a. it covers the national organization but they are on their own. these lawsuits can drag on for

years. so parents are going to have to sort of tap into their homeowners policies to hire lawyers and payout settlements. >> i i get the sense most parens don't know that? >> i i don't think that's widely known, definitely not. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> good evening everyone and welcome to two nights event. we are delighted to have joini