they do a good job of capturing both pieces of that. those are front and center for me. >> book to be wants to know what you are reading. send us your summer reading lissette book tv. book tv on c-span2. television for serious readers. >> welcome to the book launch for the most recent book. we're pleased to have you here on this rainy evening. i'm julie, for selling books tonight please support him as an author by buying a book afterwards. they have gold stickers on it, very fancy. thank you to c-span book tv for being here tonight. it's going to be in the movies.

many of you know stephen from your work at the university. he's a professor of media studies at the university of virginia. he is the anti- social media, how facebook disconnects for us. a very short introduction. the google sensation of everything and why we should worry. the clash of freedom control is hacking the real world in cap's. i love that. the rise of intellectual property. he has co- edited with rewiring

the nation. the place of technology in american studies. we are so glad he could come tonight and have his book launch. before we get started i want to think common house for providing the space tonight for us to have the reading. they do it as a service to the book community. please stay around, buy some drinks. they've opened up the house for us tonight. there's a beautiful rooftop deck. stick around and have a drink or dinner. we are grateful for them to have this. we could not fit you all in the shop. thank you all very much. [applause] >> it i'm going to play stage crew. and get myself some height. thank you for coming. on this rainy night in a rainy week and month, it's been very strange in seattle. so, i super excited about this event. more so than any other book event. i have the home field advantage. i had my friends and family

here. gives me a chance to reflect on the process. why the book access and why there is significant interest which is more about facebook than it is about me. but i'll take it. i am happy to pretend it's a little bit about me. so facebook, it has been a rough couple of years. you may have noticed that it has been involved in, responsible for, or contributed to a number of very bad things in the world. everything from the leakage of our personal data, to an unsavory political consulting

firm out of london, to the perpetuation of lies and nonsense, to the harassment of people, to calls for genocide in some parts of the world. many problems of various levels of horribleness. let's remember, there was a reason that we join facebook. there was a reason that 2.2 billion people are regular users of facebook. that reason is, my dog butter who appears on facebook regularly. she's cute. we all joined facebook for the puppies, babies, family news and updates. that is the good stuff. if it were just good stuff, we would be pretty thrilled with our experience of facebook. but, it's not. because we are more than that.

we are secondary relationships as well. were a degrees out. we are a bundle of interests and passions, bundle of hatreds often. and, we are fascinated by our ability to share and connect with people. there is a certain addictive nature to using facebook. as my mother-in-law would say, that's how they get you. my mother-in-law is important. because many years ago when i was sitting at her house staring at my phone rudely, she started complaining about the sinkhole facebook and how is taking so much attention away from real life and that she had a facebook account and she wasn't happy with her experience and was afraid it was not enriching relationships. i was a savvy digital son-in-law and i said, you're overreacting.

people have to how to behave and things will get better. of course listen to my mother-in-law. she knew what she was talking about. the first thing i did what decided to write this book with tell her i was sorry. i decided to write the book at a tender and difficult moment. probably this moment in novembe. i wasn't sure i was to the world.

i wasn't sure what i was to anything. my country had taken a turn i could not have predicted and certainly was not willing to accept. i felt, for the first time that i did not understand my own country, even though i have a phd in american studies, i did not understand america. at least i thought at the moment. so, i had a friend who is in new york and he was feeling the same thing. he was a magazine editor for years. he quit his job and tried to figure out what he was going to do to make a bigger difference. he didn't want to do magazine profiles. it just wasn't the way he wanted to contribute. so, he was driving up and down the east coast trying to have this conversation of what we can do differently. which is happened. is living in charlottesville and went to dinner with a few friends. we were talking through some stuff and my friends was in the room and he started asking like

what happened in the election. he said i don't understand how trump could have snuck up wisconsin, michigan, almost the soda, one florida without tv ads. all the stories is that he wasn't really campaigning. what happened. how did he win the states. and i said of it was facebook and he put all his money and facebook and it doesn't take much money. the advertising system on facebook is efficient and precise. it allows you to carefully target segments of any group, the group of consumers, voters, and you can target them and experiment with messages. you can try out on a hundred

voters in the county in florida who might be really animated by gun rights but has is strictly voted for democrats you can try out ads to see if you get the reaction you want which would be either not to voter to vote for trump. you can do that play with facebook, you can't do that with any other advertising medium. you buy television ads everybody sees it. but, facebook ads are so effective and so narrowly effective. different colored backgrounds which they found makes a difference. training this. you can make sure that you talk to everybody in st. petersburg, florida a lot of auditor and eliminate all jewish people from that and if you want. imagine what you can get away

with if you do that. they probably did, but will never know, because the ads don't exist anymore. they hit the target cath response and then they're gone. there's no oversight. as i'm explaining this my friend said, you need to write that book and you need to talk about what that does toward democracy. i haven't thought about doing that. i have been collecting research that some amazing scholars have been putting together, work on how facebook has messed with politics around the world. how facebook is a source of tremendous dissension, hatred and other sorts of problems. how russia use facebook to try to mix with estonia. a very stable democracy. how they had, in concert with their invasion with crimea flooded ukraine with propaganda.

so it had the state appoints that i have been accumulated. i was just going to put them in electronic folders. i have material on what facebook does with their data and i thought we could string this together i had a proposal and sent it out and got a strong response. everybody else is coming around to the idea that facebook actually played a crucial role, not just in american politics but in how politics work around the world. what have we seen since? we have seen clear evidence that the very nature of facebook contributes to the distribution of the worst kinds of hate speech and calls for genocide in place like sri lanka and me and

more. that it has contributed to the election, a major driver of the election in the philippines. that, it is a phenomenon that lacks governments into power in places like cambodia. that it plays a huge role in the elections in kenya last year. that it played a huge role in the brexit referendum before our elections. the other thing is the effect of the -- party in india in the ways it has use facebook. to distribute propaganda, to cut down critics and's spread lies. to harass critics and instigate widespread threats against

academics, leaders of organizations, journalists and opposition party leaders. that's been going on for about three years and that's a frightening situation. putting that together have to conclude, the u.s. got off pretty easy, not all americans have gotten off easy, things are worse in other places and in places where facebook matters more. they happen to be the places where facebook instigated a philanthropic effort to spread

heist the data connections to the poorest people in the world. it created a system called internet.org. through that they created applications that they call free basics. if you are in one of these countries and get into a contract with the telecommunication provider that has agreed to carry this. when you use it doesn't count against your data. you don't get charged. in country where data is expensive and you pay month-to-month, it makes sense. while this suite of applications includes facebook and other applications screened and approved by facebook. places like cambodia and the philippines in the mr, facebook is the internet. man mar who just recently got phones were just recently got an a connectivity's essentially the entire media ecosystem. not coincidentally, it's the sight of her horrendous genocide. we have seen this around the world. most acutely and brutally a man

mar. how does this happen? remember 2.2 billion. the most important thing you have to remember about facebook. as of february 2018 they had 2.2 billion users around the world. there is nothing that comes close. the bbc doesn't have that many listeners around the world. cnn doesn't have that many viewers. that's a stunning number. that also means at that scale there's almost nothing facebook can do to alleviate the very problems i've described. it's almost impossible to effectively filter out all of the garbage out of the system that has 2.2 billion humans contributing garbage and some puppies to it. it's not manageable system at that scale. so to other aspects are

important. the advertising system that so accurately and inexpensively targets any content to just the right audience, and nobody beyond it. that laser pointing of advertising it has tremendous possibilities in the world of propaganda. it's great for selling shoes, it's terrible for democracy. the third aspect is the algorithm of the newsfeed. the things that pop up in your newsfeed most often on the highest are things that facebook has judged or predicted to generate engagement. because you've told facebook the things you like. and the sort of people that you must interact with. so it structures your experience to reflect what you told

facebook you care about. additionally, certain subjects will create attention. when they do they rocket around facebook. those are the posts that generate the strongest emotion. the largest level of engagement. what is engagement, the combination of clicks, likes, comments and shares. and those little smiley face things, those are all levels of engagement. of those, comments matter the most. so if you post something that generates a hundred comments, chances are everyone of your friends will see that post. not a lot of things to do. but pictures of my dog butter

which tend to rocket around the internet largely because people like butter and say i like butter and i say butter likes you back. but the same applies to conspiracy theories. so if i were host an article from the economist about how the current meltdown of the italian political system is going to shake monetary policy and the union, i know some of you are ready to read that. and those who are ready my go to my facebook page and like it. thanks for sharing it. it would be a well reported article. but it would not generate vitriol unless your member of a particular party. that article would sink like a rock on facebook. it's too reasonable. if i were to go home and post something how vaccination cause autism, that would generate tremendous response. 99% of my friends would say what

you doing. here's only to the center for disease control showing you how wrong you are. and here's some articles saying how wrong you are. therapy hundreds of comments. everyone would show how wrong i am unsure that my conspiracy theory rocketed around facebook. >> they might say i might not vaccinate my kid that's what happens. every example of craziness and conspiracy theories generate reaction. those are the things that traveled the furthest on facebook. it's why you can argue against the crazy. if you do you amplify the crazy. it's the upset of what we teach ourselves. sometimes it's agreeably

sometimes not and either arrive at a consensus or triumph in the public sphere. that doesn't happen on facebook. the more reasonable your posts the less visible your facebook it's a terrible system for democratic republic. it's not bad for hobbyists or making sure -- it's really bad if you get a performer politics on facebook. we are political animals and we cannot help ourselves. we conduct our politics and facebook. what can we do? very little. what can facebook do? almost nothing. there's 2.2 billion people. a system that so surgically addresses the right people for

the right product. and an algorithm that amplifies strong emotion. that combination is facebook. the only way to clean it up is to address those things. that would mean not having facebook. facebook can't not have facebook. that's what makes it work is how it makes money and how it's an important thing in the world. they're trying their best to cosmetically address the problems. so they put extra effort into filtering out hate speech before the german election. they put efforts into figuring out fake accounts. they're trying their best to make sure the congressional election in the fall of 18 are not overrun by russian propaganda, but this is a harder

problem because were talking about 435 house districts, at least half the state legislature has seats up. there's so many election that they have to monitor. it's almost impossible. facebook cannot fix itself. there's some policy interventions i would like to see. i like to see scrutiny of facebook i'd like to see instagram separate from facebook. her oculus rift severed from facebook. i think there too much power and data on all of us. it would be nice if the other systems competed with facebook. the merger should never have been allowed. it would at least give us some transparency and some ability to see what facebook does with our

data. right now we can't. we give a blanket license what we think of what they might do in the future. that would not happen under the regulations. i wish in the united states we had similar laws. certainly won't happen before 2021. i like to see it happen in many other places the only really address some of the problem the rest seem unsolvable to me. i want to be wrong about that. one smarter people than myself to fix the problem and show me that i'm wrong. whether they work for facebook or washington, d.c. or brussels. i want them to fix the problem i

want them to say that book i wrote, don't bother with it, i was so out of line, it was so wrong. if that happens i will be happy. i'll be happier after everybody bought the book. so, please buy the book. i really want to think common house for allowing us to have the space in this event. want to thank c-span book tv for taking the time to help get my message out. i want to thank my friends. especially julia who has not only done a great service to charlottesville by reviving an energizing, but has been a central piece of the life in charlottesville.

everyone knows julia through her activities, she's done a fantastic job. again, the best bookstore in town. it will remain store with your loyalty. thank you. i'll be happy to talk to if you have questions. [applause] >> what did i get wrong? >> on your second point about the words on facebook, facebook if they choose to change the algorithms? it's something they control, right? >> facebook is doing something

to adjust the advertising system in the united states before the election. they are requiring anybody who posts an ad that has any indication of having political content, like having some keywords from abortion to face to the economy, if you post an ad and have any of those words you will be flagged by facebook and asked to submit proof that you live in the united states. now, once that is screened in clear, they will run your ad. they also want to take a copy of that ad and keep it in an archive so in the future people

can examine what that ad was about. but, if you are working for the internet research agency and shape st. petersburg, russia, i want to distribute the same as you did without any problem in 2016, what you're going to do is find a few people who live in the united states. you're not don't have to be a citizen, you just have to live here. there's plenty people in the united states willing to mess with the united states. it only takes a handful. and you can get those people to sponsor the ads and have the same effect that the. >> so, facebook is doing this and making a big deal. i think it's a big deal, the problem is that there is no way to get around the fact that people would get around the barrier. again, because it's so big and global. it's easy to get around this restriction. i don't think it'll have that much of a difference. the miller center here tried to run a facebook add to promoting event. but because they cover politics

it was late in denying because it has political terms in it. i tried to buy a facebook ad for this event and it was denied. i don't know what about this event seem political, except it was a book. my book table has the word democracy in it. that was probably enough. again, his country to country. facebook is doing nothing in india, zero. in fact, india's probably the hardest problem. when you have more than a dozen languages and have to hire staff and create artificial intelligence system and flake

for all of the different forms of derogatory speech and keep up with the slaying, that alone how many people use facebook? 250 million. 220 million people use it. that's only 69% of the u.s. you probably won't see much growth there. at 250 million that's only one quarter of the population. not only is the future the only real differences each of us is worth more to facebook in terms of revenue than everybody in india. that might not be the case. it might not be through the american level. so what facebook is trying to do

is plug up their problems as they see elections rollout. that's a terrible process. >> thank you. i'm wondering if you could help me understand your talking about how facebook is trying these things to shore up. who what is the pressure that's causing it? would you see you soon political pressure? . .

to how facebook updates in future if they want to get ahead of the episode to get in the room and be able to write the bill they have to take the temperature down. the thing is they are making a good-faith effort. the people at facebook get this. they didn't until last year which is madness. there was a social media scholarship like my friend here. we live in this stuff and we knew that it was not only possible but it was happening. nobody was listening.

cambridge got a hold of the data on 150 american voters, and sorry 150 million. that's a lot of voters. almost all of the actual voters and that was a massive scandal. a researcher got the data and handed it over to facebook because they have no control over who took it out and when that story ran out it was like a massive meltdown. it was a reflection of the facebook policy and they encourage application developers to take all the data and use it to target ads and use facebook in a more creative way. it encouraged other websites and applications to connect itself to the ecosystem and become

dependent. was policy everybody that follows social media knew this. a lot of us raised questions and got no response. in 2012, there was application on people's phones you could use if you were a volunteer and you could login with your credentials and not only what the data be shared with the campaign but all of your friends would. pretty soon without even knowing they were getting it they would have all the data on americans. the campaign could do that in 2006. in 2012 i 2012 of us raised ourd and said this isn't good. the head of stat state has intie data on the citizens of the country and it's in the political whim of the person's operations.

this is an unhealthy situation and nobody cared. we couldn't get anybody to write a story. it just wasn't interesting. because the story was they were digitally savvy. that was data from facebook. it was a major international story and then they were working for the campaign and all these bad people. it was easy to se see that cambridge analytics is a bad actor stealing data and above a facebook data schemas that they stole the data instead of not caring who else go will scoff ah was the case.

as facebook now has to deal with a series of crisis that strikes at the business. it is a series of glitches they just need to fix the edges. we are going to see over the next couple of years attempts to raise facebook but they are probably not going to go anywhere for some time. there is a determinism that you talked about once you implement the technology for certain

outcomes and the optimism everything keeps getting better. can you talk about the idea -- >> technological determinism, one of my mentors years ago wrote this really important book and then another. he is very much a technological determinants. his mentor was marshall and the idea was of course and it i ands introducing the technology you change everything. you introduced the light bulb and human beings are suddenly completely different animals. the locals are a pretty good case study.

if you take something less simplistic and more complicated but is used in more creative ways like the turntable, you will see you don't necessarily change it in one particular way or direction because of course it is supposed to rotate this way and 33.5 rotations per minute but some people decide to move it this way occasionally and create a rhythm out of that and the fact that human beings interact in ways that impose individuals and groups have different agendas that's an indication of the social changing technology. how does that relate to

facebook? a set of algorithms that offer us instructor and encourage the behavior that don't determine what they do. we change facebook as much as facebook changes us. facebook was invented for graduation photos and for college kids to keep up with each other. that is how it was designed to. when misogynists showed up for different purposes and when the conspiracy theorists and groups about a thousand obvious but trying to convince a everybody the earth is flat, it then becomes shaped by those interventions. so it is shaped by us as much as we are faced. could shaped by them.

they didn't know us or against us or even get curious about us before he created a system that he quickly connected billions of people too. he made a profound mistake by assuming that we were all sort of people that hang out with mark. if we wear those kinds of people then at least even the harvard people, facebook would be fairly usable except for kissinger, we want to kick him out. [laughter] but it's mess it's messier and r than that and that is what we have seen. >> [inaudible] but also for years and years

they were purposely being deceitful a but the control of e interface. so you click facebook is making good-faith efforts to. >> i'm getting the benefit of the doubt for a couple of reasons. i've been in the room with a couple of people that have been shaken up by what has been happening. but i get the sense that he is. he spent a couple of years assembling an archive where he has catalogued every public statement ever made. everything that he's ever posted on his own facebook profile and

every speech that he's made in every video that he's appeared in and i went through hours and hours and hours and weeks and days mostly with media training and structure but especially in this career a little bit looser. i can't say that i know mark zuckerberg but i know him as well as anybody that has never met him if that makes sense. my sense is that he's overwhelmingly naïve, fundamentally uneducated. he just never confronted the inhumanity. the potential cruelty. so in those areas i think that he's caught by surprise and he does care deeply but he only can look at the problem through his ideology which is solidified by getting rich on the back of it and that is an ideology that

insists the more we are connected to each other the better we will treat each other. the closer we are the better we will be. there are plenty of times when they are not good for each other, people in the same house are not good for each other. so to think that the constant interaction between human beings is going to somehow flour into a mutual understanding is so incredibly naïve and yet time and time again that is how he's describing the mission of facebook and social mission fundamentally. in terms of what he does with the data, yes he also said he doesn't believe that we should have any kind old over --

control over our own data and cases to everybody because that is what he calls authenticity. he thinks we are not authentic when we hold back information about ourselves and aspects of our lives so if you are not willing to tell all of your friend that you are gay, that is not authentic according to mark zuckerberg. even if it's because you might be afraid of a terrible consequence or you are not ready, that doesn't matter if we got to the point many people in silicon valley believe this if we get to the point everyone will just be exposed for who they are we won't be able to hate everybody because they would realize how many people like that are around us. again, terribly simplistic and naïve ignoring other human relations but that is the core belief.

whether my friends have the potential to see it or a subset of my friends whether everybody was my mother, which is sorry i've done that a few times. you hav have have to care for tl of control. not many people do that. who you share stuff with is an issue but not as crucial as you share stuff with facebook and cambridge as well. the people who created the mafia war and words with friends, they have all of your data.

they know about all of your breakups and everything that you have read, they know all that stuff but we don't know with whom they shared or sold data to. >> can you comment on the corporate culture? people have serious misgivings about what's going on. and i happen to know that there are a lot of people that are taking that sort of attitude which is if not me then whom.

it could get worse if i'm not one of the good guys trying to work on this problem and that is a tough position to be and it isn't an enviable position. there are a plenty of people that are still true believers. most of them are not true believers because they just got there but they would like to be fully vested true believers and a lot of them are. that is because they are in that bubble. that is their bubble, that is their ideology that is what gets them up in the morning to go to work and there are people that still truly and deeply believe that connecting everybody has the answer to all of our problems. >> the top seven social media platforms, two of them operate in china and very little

outside. the one that's most important i will get to in a second but if you take the five of the seven and remove you are down to five. in order of number of users, to point to this youtube at 1.6 billion people but it isn't really a social network system. it does a lot of things facebook doesn't give you doesn't give a lot of the things they expect us to, but let's keep it in that listhelist anyway. facebook is owned by google. what about after that, facebook messenger come int, instant grad facebook. what's up with a list of 800 million around the world. 800 million, twitter has about 300 million users around the world. way down on the list. it's actually not that important. don't tell the president. kill the president. but it's not. [laughter]

it is important discreetly in certain communities and places, so it's more important in north america and western europe damages and the rest of the world and even more important among celebrities and other groups within the united states to use it for certain purposes but in terms of its effect globally and its effect on politics, it isn't anywhere near the top seven. four of the seven. what about the chat? about 850 million users, which is a lot and it is an amazing service. it does everything for you. you can check out library books, make dr.'s appointment, it is the operating system of life. it just so happens the government is watching everything you do or at least

mining everything you do and keeping a record so you don't misbehave. in terms of social network it does everything twitter and facebook does, everything youtube does, it's everything. if we had a version of it in english, operational in the united states, we wouldn't use anything else and this is what scares facebook. facebook sees it as a model who couldn't play not directly competing there are a lot of people in the world who use both, but there are people in the chinese diaspora because you can't use facebook and china so they are two separate worlds. but what does facebook wants? they want to be more like the chat so they create for services to become the operating system of our lives. that's what you're seein seeingn facebook messenger if you open facebook messenger on your phone you will see a bunch of apps at the bottom, bank of america, starbucks, mcdonald's, pizza hut, these are attempts to get more of your transactions faltered through the facebook

ecosystem in hopes that someday you won't use anything but facebook messenger and that they might be integrated fully at one point and then facebook will do everything they do. think about all things facebook is trying to do. it's trying to become more like the chat before it comes outside of china and at the same time work is playin playing to china, learning mandarin trying to get into china to compete so that's the answer to the question. outside of china, zero competition if we get to the poinpoint that they are directly competing for our attention, then it's serious. 20 years down the line there is competition because the idea of the operating system isn't just what happens on our phone is what happens in our thermostats, car, refrigerator, clothes and glasses. at that point when everything in our lives as data flowing through it, some company, probably just one will manage all that data and w the data ane

outsourcing decision to that company. it might be google or microsoft or amazon, it might be facebook. they all want to be the operating system of our lives. that's why they are gettin theye into virtual reality and self driving cars. they are taking up differences but amazon and google want to have those to manage everything that you think about and listen to everything you are doing. that is all part of the process and it has to be one company because there has to be some sort of a standardization for the data to work with set as the game, that's what we have to watch out for. as citizens, we should be very aggressive in forcing our leaders to try to assess the potential negative consequences

and there may be positive consequences as well and i'm sure there are. it's going to be about trying to make healthy decisions as those opportunities arrive in our lives and not just rushing towards the shiny new thing because it is the shiny new thing. anyway, thank you so much. please come and hang around, get more to drink. thank everybody for letting us hang out here and let's thank julia again. [applause] we need to mention steve will be signing his book in the back. so everyone come back and have a drink, have dinner. [applause]

senator lisa murkowski, what is on your reading list? >> i don't know if i have a list that i can tell you what is on my nightstand right now and it's a little awkward because it is all starting to tip over. i have a tendency to take home the books i might get in the office and put them on the nightstand because i want to read them later. i would've a couple of chapters here and there. the bass i base is that it's the biggest book and masters the senate. i have that on my nightstand for about a half a dozen years. that is tough as you know that i enjoy that. i have both francis and cyclical

on care of the common home. my book on climate change, i have a reflection of prayer. i have kind of a junk beach novel i don't even know who the author is on that. i have a book written by a friend called how to repair a piano bench, which is not a self-help tha but kind of a reflective one. what else do i have on the nightstand right now? i just finished one of by a priest in los angeles who ran a column for young people who've just been released from prison,

kind of the reentry. i've got his second book sitting there as well. so that's kind of a random hodgepodge of what do i feel like tonight and how tired am i. i want to think about and reflect or save it for tomorrow. it's a big list. by the way i have all of these supreme court opinions. i don't do this b put those by e of the. efforts to provide scientific evidence that children in flint michigan were exposed to lead

poisoning through the water supply. john delaney the first democrat to declare for the 2020 presidential election laid out his vision for america. and amanda carpenter former senior staffer for the republicarepublican senators tee and jim demint provided a critical analysis of president trump political messaging. in the coming weeks on "after words," former white house press secretary sean spicer will discuss his time in the trump administration. comedian and actor hubley will offer his thoughts on race in america and mark adams, shares his experience retracing the 1899 expedition through alaska exploring the differences in the region's climate then and now. >> alaskans love the outdoors. they are constantly in the outdoors especially in the summer because it is the three months when you can get outside and enjoy those long days and things you are not able to do in january and february. at the same time, conservation

is kind of a taboo subject in much of america. it's a very deep red state. they are very suspicious of government intervention. they worry about things like federal overreach which is a popular term. senator murkowski has a whole topic on federal overreach on her webpage and it's a weird sort of schizophrenia. they love the outdoors. they are always in the outdoors and at the same time, they assume the outdoors are always going to take care of themselves and that may not be the case. >> "after words" airs every saturday at 10 p.m. eastern and sunday at 9 p.m. eastern and pacific. all previous "after words" programs are available on the website, booktv.org. i mean, i think more and more cities are realizing they need to have something like a livable wage, and the truth of the matter is that a lot of people in the private sector are

realizing as well. companies like j.p. morgan have a major commitment in detroit, and they are doing in the form oit in theform of banking brancd opening up opportunities for financial literacy. so, a lot of folks in the private sector are realizing we create a better society, a better market, a better set of consumers if income and wealth are more broadly shared. now let me make a quick point on the difference between income and wealth, because it's pretty interesting. income is what people make, and then whatever's left so it is in and out every day of our lives, every month and paycheck. and on that score, minorities in the united states make something like 70% or so of what the average american makes an

income. but, while this is a different thing. it's what you get to save. it's what you invest in what you own. it's your network and on that, minorities in the united states make what would you guess about 10%, much less in the wealth comparisons. there's understandable reasons why that is the case because the families tend to be younger therefore they haven't invested in things like pension systems for example or insurance for a lifetime and they don't have the money to buy things they are not owners of rental property or stocks and bonds, they don't have any ladies to act on. they work in industries that don't have coverage for them in terms of pension, retirement, so it's kind of like predictable. it's obvious that there would be that difference, that 10% is a

huge advance minorities own 10% oon 10%on average of what other americans on and that means you don't have the ability to get a loan to send your kids to college to start a business because you don't own anything. so, the communities of color have a hard time advancing as the generations progress in that situation. so, for all these reasons, the subjects are a need to be talked about. up next on booktv "after words." mark adams shares his experience retracing the 1899 harriman expedition through alaska and explores the differences in the regions climate and environment then and now. he's interviewed by the "washington post" reporter libby casey. "after words" is a weekly interview program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their