hi your immediate ecosystem. not coincidently at the site of genocide against the muslim population. within this time and time again around the world most acutely in most brutally in the mr. how does this happen? one member of a cuter member peer to .2 billion. the most important thing you have to remember about facebook. as if every 20 team facebook had to .2 billion users around the world. there is nothing that comes close. bbc doesn't have that many listeners around the world.

cnn international doesn't have that many viewers around the world. that is a stunning number. at that scale there is almost nothing facebook can do to alleviate the problems i've heard it described. it's almost impossible to affect delay filter out all of the garbage out of a system that is to .2 billion humans regularly contributing garbage and some puppies to it. it's a really unmanageable system at that scale. two other aspect of facebook are important to remember. the advertising system that accurately and inexpensively targets to just the right audience and nobody else beyond it. the laser pointing has tremendous possibilities in the world of propaganda. it is great for selling shares. it terrible for democracy.

the third aspect is the core algorithm of the newsfeed. the things that pop up in your news feed the highest right things facebook has judged are predicted to generate engagement because over years of using facebook you have total faith that the things you like in the sort of people you most and around her. it structures your newsfeed experience to reflect which you've already told facebook you care about. in addition, certain sub checks will generate tremendous amounts of attention and facebook knows that and when they do, they rocket around facebook. those are the posts that generate the strongest emotion from manila to level of engagement which is the magic word to facebook. the combination of clicks than light and comments and shares in

the smiley face and someone comes out. those are all levels of engagement. also comments matter the most. if you post something that generates 100 comments, chances are the most everyone of your friend will see that post. things that generate a lot of strong emotion do like pictures of my dog letter, which rocket around the internet largely because people like butter and say i like butter. butter likes you back and it works out really well. same applies to conspiracy theories. if i reach in a posted article from the economist about how the current meltdown and italian political system will shape monetary policy and the european union. some of your rate already to read the article. a handful of you ready to read the article make automate page and click lake.

thank you for sharing this article from the economist. well reported, well-thought-out sober minded economist article but it wouldn't generate future health unless you are an active member of a particular party pitcher not because i don't have any friends like that. the article would sink like a rock on facebook. it's too reasonable. if i were to go home and post something about how it causes autism, that would create tremendous response. 99% of my friends would say what are you doing, siva, why would you spread those lies showing how long you are in here are some scientific journal articles and hundreds of comments and my conspiracy theory rocketed

around facebook and got more people to see it appeared if it reaches 100 people, one of those goes i might not vaccinate my kid. that's exactly what happens. every example of craziness, wackiness, hate speech come the conspiracy come the general reaction and they are the things that troubled the furthest on facebook. this is what you can't argue against the crazy on facebook. if you argue against the crazy you amplify the crazy. if the exact opposite of what we teach ourselves about how he debate issues in the world, how were supposed to disagree with people, often agreeably, sometimes disagreeably and arrive at some consensus or triumph in the public sphere. that doesn't happen on facebook. the opposite happens. the more reasonable your post the less visible you are on facebook the more wackier posts are the more influential you are. it's a terrible system for a democratic republic.

it's not bad for hobbyists. not bad for making sure you follow this interest. it's pretty good if you really like puppies, but it's really bad if you put your politics on facebook we are political animals. we can't help ourselves. we conduct our politics on facebook. so what can we do about this? very little. what can facebook do about this? almost nothing. to .2 billion people. an advertising system is so surgically addresses the right people for the right product in the right candidate for the right idea in an algorithm that amplifies things that generate strong emotions. the combination is facebook are the only way to clean up facebook is to address those three things and that would mean not having facebook and facebook can't not have facebook and address those three things because that is what makes it

work. that is how it makes money and made faces an important thing in the world. trying avesta cosmetically address address those problems country by country. so they put extra effort into filter not hate speech before the german election. extra effort into abortion rights. i'm trying their best to make sure the congressional elections in the fall 2018 are not overrun by russian propaganda to where the presidential and 435 house districts and have the state legislators with a good number of governors. so many elections. it's an almost impossible job in a country like this. there's a couple of policy

intervention said like to see. stronger antitrust scrutiny of facebook. i wouldn't mind seeing instagram and what's up suffered from facebook, the virtual reality systems covered from facebook. there's too much power and data about all of us and it would be nice if those other systems competed especially instagram. mergers never should've been allowed. i'd like to see the united states adopt strong protection regulations much like in europe which would give us some transparent fee to see what face but does with our data. they give facebook a blanket license to do whatever they might think of in the future. that wouldn't happen under the european general data protection regulation and i wish here in the united states for similar laws for many years. certainly not before 2021.

the victims who have been in canada, brazil, australia and other places to rein in the power of facebook. these are long shots and they only address some of the problem the rest seem pretty unsolvable to me. here's a thing. i want to be wrong about that. i want smarter people than myself to fix the problem and show me i'm wrong. whether before or facebook or washington d.c., i want them to fix the problem that i want five years from now to be able to pay the book i wrote, don't bother with it. i was so out of line. it was so wrong. if that happens, i'll be super happy. even happier if that happens after everybody bought the book. so please do buy the book could once again i want to thank

common house for allowing us to have this space and event here tonight. i think c-span booktv for give me the time to get the message out to an audience beyond my dear friends here. i especially want to thank julia who's not only denigrate service to charlottesville by energizing dominion bookshop but has been a real central node in the cultural life of charlottesville . those julia to her various activities she's done a fantastic job for many years to charlottesville would not be charlottesville without her. again, the best bookstore in town will remain so with your loyalty. thank you very much and i'd be happy to talk more about this if you have questions.

[applause] what i say wrong? why did i get wrong? >> on your second point about advertising on facebook, is this not a place that facebook can actually if they choose to change the algorithm? this is something they control, right? you may be resistant to die because revenue stream somewhat not. >> facebook is doing something to address the advertising system in the native days before the election. they require anyone who posts are not it has any indication of illegal content, like having a set of political keywords from abortion to the economy. if you have any of those right now you'll be flagged by facebook and asked to submit

proof that you live in the united states. once that is screamed and threw they will run your ad. they also want to take a copy and keep it in an archive so in the future people can examine what that was all about. here's the thing. if you are working for the internet research agency in st. petersburg, russia and you want to distribute the same kind of ad that you did without any problem in 2016, what you're going to do is find a few people who live in the united states. there were plenty of people in the united states willing to mess with the united states. all it takes is a handful, maybe only 10. you could get those people to have the same affect that the directly purchase internet

research agency had. so facebook is doing not been making a big deal. they are taking the problem seriously. there's no way to get around the fact that people get around the barrier. again because facebook is so big and it's so easy to get around this restriction. i don't believe the hype not much of a difference. the miller center here tried to run facebook but because it happens to cover politics, the atlas five been denied. i tried to buy a facebook ad for this event and it was five been denied because they are just been so careful. they don't want anything that might seem political. i don't know what about this event seems political except that it was a book may be. i don't know.

my book title has the word democracy in it so that was enough to fly good. those are the sorts of things that i'm facebook. that's what doing in the united states. facebook is doing nothing in india. facebook is probably their hardest problem. more than a dozen major languages then you need the hires baath and create a machine learning or artificial intelligence system in each of these languages and be able to flag for all the different forms of derogatory speech in each of these languages. imagine what that like and keep up. that alone with 250 million. 250 million people in india use facebook.

220 million in the u.s. only 69% is pretty much top cow. 250 million in india. each of us in the united states is worth more in revenue and that might not be the case. the buying power will probably be of the american level. what facebook is trying to do his country by country try to plug up their problems. >> this is the last hearing. can you help me understand where talking about these things to

shore up. what is the pressure it is causing. what do you see? >> they found that the book and they're really scared. the pressure is that they want to head up the regulation they can write about themselves. legislators in brussels are in london or in ottawa are in the u.s. maintain a high level of animosity towards facebook than the regulations could be a real hindrance to help this operates in the future and they want to get ahead of god. to get in the room and negotiating in good faith and write the bill which is whatever industry wants to do to have to

take the temperature down. they have to make it seem like you're making a good-faith effort. they didn't get this until last year, which is maddening. they read social media scholarship like i do, like my friend meredith does. we live in a stuff and we knew this stuff is not only possible is actually happening, but nobody's looking to us. cambridge analytic battle halted deep data on 150 million american voters. that's a lot of voters. almost all of the actual voters. there was this mass is handled. this researcher at the university of cambridge got the data and handed it over to

facebook because facebook had no control over who took the data out. he seemed to read a story ran out that this was a massive meltdown, it really wasn't. this was a reflection of facebook policy between 2010 and 2015. facebook encourage developers to take the data about all the thought of facebook and use it to retarget dad and use it to use facebook in a more creative way around the web for instance. a thoroughly encouraged other websites and applications to connect itself to the facebook ecosystem and come dependent on facebook. everybody who followed social media closely knit this. a lot of us raised questions about it and got no response. in 2012 the obama campaign had an application on people's phones that you could use a new login with your facebook

credentials are not only richer data be shared with the obama campaign, but all your friends with. the obama campaign had all the data on all the americans. amazing how much data they had at the trump campaign could not do that in 2016. i get to that in a second. in 2012 a lot of us raised our hand in that you know what, this is not good. a head of state has implemented a on the citizens of that country and that data is in the political wing of the person's operation. forget whether i like the candidate or not. this is an unhealthy situation that democracy and nobody cared. nobody who would run an op-ed about it. it just wasn't interesting. the story was barack obama's really digitally savvy. yeah, of course it was.

so it's run by bond villains and becomes this major internationals dory. no one in texas really likes them and working for donald trump which 60% from 70% of the country looks like an elite campaign, all these bad people. real easy to say that cambridge analytic of is a bad actor stealing data. cambridge analytic pistol that data instead of facebook is the data away and didn't really care who while scott of which was the case. facebook now has to deal with a series of crises that strike at the core of its business and facebook will please you to believe and most importantly like senator mark warner to believe that it is a series of

fixable glitches. they just need to sand the rough edges. mark warner is smart enough to know that it's not the case. we will see over the next couple years a couple of credit times to ran facebook and that though probably not go anywhere for some time. >> kind of speaking to that directly having read the book, it seems like there is this techno- determinism in the book once you implement the technology in this techno- optimism and everything keeps getting better. can you talk more about the idea .

>> one of my mentors years ago and another call to not believe. his mentor and the idea was than human beings are completely different animals. that's actually pretty powerful technology. technological determinism doesn't actually map to human experience beyond a simple technology that has profound effects like a lightbulb. if you take something most simplistic, much more complicated in creative ways, by introducing a turntable and you

don't change at one particular way in one particular direction. it's supposed to rotate at 33.5 minutes -- per minute. some people move it this way. in create rhythm monitored. an imposed individuals and groups very different as could that's an indication of the different way of looking at technology. i find that image for a compelling way of looking at technology. a set of algorithms and interfaces. but they don't determine what they do. we change facebook as much as facebook changes us. invented for the puppies and babies and for college kids to

keep up with each other over their lives. that's how it was designed. it came when they showed up and decided to use it for very different purposes. one conspiracy theorists, one flat earth groups and by the way about a thousand flat earth groups unfazed doctrine to commence everybody the earth is flat. when those people show up that's not what facebook is designed for but it becomes shaped by those interventions. facebook is shaped by us as much as we are shaped by facebook. mark zuckerberg doesn't know what's come it didn't get us, didn't even get curious about us before he created a system that it quickly connect to billions of people too. he made a profound take by assuming we were all the sort of people who hang out with mark zuckerberg. though we all went to prep school and harvard in silicon

valley. if we were that kind of people, even just a harvard people to be fairly usable. except for kissinger would like to kick him out. that is not the world. the world is messier than that, anger than not come and meaner than not and that is what we've seen. >> bringing the temperature down to us to fairly impractical problem. facebook for years and years has had the reputation of purposely being deceitful with the control of their interface. i'm curious what those data points they like facebook is making a good faith effort. my intuition would be that they're not making a good-faith

effort. >> i've been in the room with a few people who were shaken by what is happening. that doesn't mean everybody there shaken up by what's happening. but i get the sense that he is. one of my former graduates students is a brilliant professor at the milwaukee. he spent a couple years assembling an archive he called the zuckerberg files where he has catalogued every public statement ever made. everything he's posted on his own facebook profile and every speech he made in every video interview he's appeared in. i went through hours and hours and weeks and days and various contacts mostly with immediate training them very carefully structured.

i think i know them as well as anyone that hasn't met them if that makes sense. my sense is that is overwhelmingly naïve. fundamentally uneducated. he'd never ever confronted the inhumanity of human beings. the potential cruelty of human beings. in those areas i think is caught by surprise. he does care very deeply but he only can look at the problem through his ideology which he has solidified largely by getting so rich on the back of it. that is an ideology that insist that the more we are connect it to each other the better we'll treat each other. the closer we are to each other the better we will be to each other. thousands of years of human history not ending. plenty of cases where people living next door to each other

are not good to each other. to think back to constant interaction will somehow fall into mutual understanding and time and time again that is how he is describing the mission of face book and its social mission fundamentally. he's very committed to that. that's a good sum up in the morning. in terms of what he does with our data, he's been duplicitous because he said early in his career that he does not believe we should have any control over the data announcements at the reputation in all cases because that's what they call authenticity. he thinks they are inauthentic when they hold back information about ourselves and hold back aspects of our lives. so if you're not willing to tell all of your friends that you are that is inauthentic to mark

zuckerberg even if you're not willing to follow your friends because you might be afraid of some terrible consequence for you are not ready, that doesn't matter. many people in silicon valley believe this. if we get to the point where everyone will be exposed for who they are, we won't be located everybody. terribly simplistic, terribly naïve to join other human relations. he's unshakable. when i share opposed i can choose whether everyone on facebook has potential to see it, whether just my friend on the potential to see it, whether a subset of my friends has potential to see it for everybody but my mother has potential to see it, which sorry i've done that a few times.

to have that level of control. first of all, you have to care about that level of control as i have some stuff i might not want to share with my mom. i'm going to tweet it a little bit. not many people do that. they just post. the default is that it's open to everybody. you share stuff with on facebook is an issue but it's not as crucial as the fact that you share everything with facebook and apparently with cambridge analytic as well. analytic as well.

of the past couple of years, many people have quit over the last year, leaders of projects, the guy that ran what's app, they were devoted to privacy. i happen to know that there are a lot of people there who are taking the sort of attitude that you have james mattis takes every day, if not me than whom, it could get worse if i'm not one of the good guys trying to work on this problem. that's a tough position to be in and it's not an envyiable position to be in. i have former students who are working at facebook. most of them aren't true believers because they just got there. the ones who have fully vested, they are true believers, a lot

of them are. and that is because they're in that bubble, right, that is their bubble, that's ideology, that gets them up in the morning to go to work and people at facebook who still believe that connecting everybody to everybody is answer to all of our problems. one more question, hi, sir. >> does facebook have any real competitors? >> it does in other places in the world, top 7 social media forms, two of them operate in china and very little outside of china. the one that's most important of that is we chat and i will get to we chat in a second, if you take like of the top 7, 5 of them operate outside, remove the two, you are down to 5, what are they in order of number of users, facebook number one, number two youtube at 1.6 billion people but youtube isn't really a social network

system in the same way, it does a lot of things that facebook doesn't do, but let's keep it in the list anyway. facebook and youtube, youtube is owned by google. what about the three after that, facebook messenger, instagram, whatsapp owned by facebook. whatsapp has 8 million users -- 800 million users. twitter is way down on the list. it's actually not that important. don't tell the president. it really isn't that important. in terms of how it affects people's lives and who is on it, right? it is important within certain communities and more important in north america and even more important among celebrities and other groups within the united states that use it for certain purposes but in terms of like affect it's not near top 7, four

of the 7 owned by facebook. what about we chat, we chat has about 850 million users, which is a lot, you know, and it is an amazing service, it does everything for you, you live through we chat if you're in china, we chat, you can take out library books, make doctors' appointments, charge sodas at a machine, you can live through it, operating system of your life, it just so happens that the government is watching everything that you do or at least mining everything that you do and keeping record so you don't misbehave. we chat in terms of social network stuff does everything facebook does, instagram does and youtube, it's everything. if we had we chat, a version of we chat in english operational in the united states, we wouldn't use anything else and this is what's scares facebook, facebook sees we chat as a model, they are currently not

directly competing, a lot of people in the work who use facebook and we chat but people in chinese, you can't use facebook in china, right, so two separate worlds. what does facebook want, facebook wants to be more like we chat, they keep embedding new services to become the operating system of our lives. that's mostly what you're seeing on facebook messenger, if you open up facebook messenger, many apps at the bottom, bank of america app, starbucks app, pizza hut, more transactions filtered lu -- facebook system and they might actually be integrated fully at one point and facebook would do anything like we chat. think of all the things facebook is trying to do. it's trying to become we chat before it comes out of china at the same time mark zuckerberg is

trying to get into china to coomp eat. that's really the answer, outside of china, zero competition. 20 years down the line there is competition, the idea of operating system of our lives it's not just what happens in phones but thermostats, cars, refrigerators and clothes and glasses, maybe the chips in our brain. at that point when everything in the our lives has data flowing through it, some company, maybe one company will monetize all the data and we will be outsourcing decisions to that point and the company might be google or microsoft, maybe amazon, it might be facebook and they all want to be the operating system of our life. that's the long game, that's why they are getting into more virtual reality, more into self-driving cars like google is, more into wearables, facebook taking a different route but amazon and google want

to have in your home to manage everything that you think about and listen to everything that you're doing, that's all part of the process to become the operating system of our lives. as i said, it has to be one company because there has to be some sort of standardization for the data to work, for everything to work together so that's the long 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 of such a system and there maybe positive consequences as well and i'm sure there are, so it's really going to be about trying to make healthy decisions as those sorts of opportunities arrive in our lives and not just rushing to the shiny new thing because it's the shiny new thing, anyway, thank you so much. please hang around, get more to drink, if you meet someone from common house, thank them for

letting them hang around here. [applause] >> do i need to mention that he will be signing book in the back here. >> yeah. >> everyone come back there and have a book, stick around, have a drink, have dinner upstairs, thank you for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> book tv is on twitter, follow us to get publishing news, scheduling updates, author information and talk directly with authors during live programs, twitter.com/book tv. >> on book tv we want to introduce you to first-time

author casey gerald, the name of the book, there will be no miracles here, memoir, mr. gerald, where did the title of the book came from? >> the title actually comes from art from artist nathan in scottland and a big light sign that said there will be no miracles here and i thought it was a beautiful sign and i wanted to know the story behind it and it's a story from a village in medieval france where the peasant, the village in 17th century and the peasant started experiencing what they called miracles, the mass hysteria and stopped working and put down the plows and pissed off people in charge who tried to convince the peasants get back to work, we need you for the survival of our society to do your job but it didn't work, so ultimately the

lord goes to the king of france for help and the king of france's solution was to have signs placed throughout the village that said there will be no miracles here by order of the king and so this book which is on the surface a memoir but is actually for me an intervention is saying not at the surface level there will be no miracles here, do it yourself, you know, be depressed but actually something more important and more prevalent for our times which is that this system for those peasants it was a system, for us it's the world that we've inherited is not working for us and in a lot of ways it's killing us and the first thing we can do is put down our plows and stop the stuff that's killing us and they will say no

miracles by the king, the kings are gone and that gives me hope. >> when you call it intervention, is it personal intervention or societal intervention? >> it is both a personal and societal intervention. i mean, this is, i think, the power of memoirs that with the i you can get to the we, you see, i started this book because i lived myself into a dead end, i had achieved everything that a kid is suppose today achieve in the society, i had gone from oak cliff, texas, you know, sort of almost orphan after my participants left my sister and i sort of lived like the box cart children and out of the blue recruit today go play football at yale and when on from there to wall street, to washington in the early days of the obama administration, went to harvard business school, lined up in cover of magazines, george bush's dinner table, i did all the things people say you're supposed to do and i got

to late 20's i got cracked up, i wasn't say i had a nervous breakdown but not too far from that and my friends were cracked and the world was cracked up when i started the book in 2015. i set out to traced those cracks and try to save myself, figure out what was wrong with me and wrong perhaps with the world and while i was doing that, one of those friends committed suicide. >> elijah. >> elijah, a few months after that he came to me in a dream and sitting in a dinner and i was standing over him and he looked at me and he said, you know, we did a lot of things that we wouldn't advise someone we loved to do. and then i woke up. and i knew exactly what he meant, and so my job with this book became to make plain what those things were and racial

story that i have stood for and that so many young people are convinced that is the goal, pick yourself up by your bootstraps but the reality is that if you look at it from right angle, a boy picking himself up by bootstraps looks like suicide, there's a cost to journey that we send kids on, journey of success, this intervention for me was not just casey what's wrong with you, how can you heal but it was for my friend elijah and a lot of kids like us how can we, you know, live in a better way that's actually life and not death. >> were you supposed to feel grateful that you had been lifted up by bootstraps? >> i guess so. that's a great question, are you supposed to be grateful, i think

about how you're supposed to feel is what you're supposed to do. my silence held the world together, that the silence of people who have gone on this journey, this sort of rags to riches, american dream journey that are silent pose the world together, we don't tell the limitations of that quote, unquote, american dream that if you work hard and play by the rules you can be anything and be anybody. sort of empty promise but we also don't fez up to the cost when it does work, that you can't -- the cost of burying yourself cost of trying to pretend to be somebody else just to fit in, the cost of pretending even more so that all the things that you've been through are not with you because all the stuff we ran from comes running after us and so the

silence more than feeling, the action of silence is the more thing that i hope to counteract by writing, by telling it and not telling a glory story about casey gerald but telling the truth that i'm as screwed up as anybody else, you see, and i think if you tell that truth, liberation is an understand offing the truth, there's no turning back from it and so hopefully the book does some of that. >> how did being gay affect your life up to when you wrote this book? >> i think more important than sexuality part of it is the idea of being queer, of being at odds

with the world. i write about a video that came out when i was 13 by deangelo entitled video which if you look at it in surface a strange e -- erotic kind of thing. >> a musician. >> incredible artist but i write about it not just from the standpoint of physical attraction to this person but if you actually listen to deangelo talk about this song and even the video where he's practically naked, just before they start shooting the video he was talking about the holy spirit, he was talking about being in church and transcending the physical plain and i think at best, that's what artists are supposed to do.

so, you know, i write in the book that i've never known a single faggot who survived without called home, you see, i use that intentionally and not as slur because here we are as the queer person in a society that invalidates your humanity and if you are determined to live then you've got to really figure some shit out. [laughter] >> you have got figure out way to look at data and the fact that is you're given and figure out to do something different with it. over and over throughout this book, i couldn't have written this book without being a person who has moved through the world, moved through a society that at base is designed to destroy me or designed to invalidate me and so to find joy in that, to find some sense of life, finding

sense of possibility in the language even, a new way of looking a language i think is most important, truth about myself and set of experiences that i've had, the most important thing i've got. >> the church of your youth, yale, wall street, harvard, were they set out to destroy you in your view? >> that's probably a bit too strong. it sounds a bit too strong to say that they were set out to destroy me, but i went to jerusalem last year on a pilgrimage and in some ways to find jesus which sounds ridiculous when i say it but which is kind of true because over my life i had found that i

had to let go of the god that i was given to find the god that i needed, and so many of my friends have had the same experience of growing up in a certain understanding of god, a certain understanding of children, a certain understanding of love, a certain understanding of success and reaching a point where that just didn't work anymore and so much of my adult life has been finding that for myself and so i went to jerusalem because i didn't want to throw the baby out with the bath water, this jesus thing still has a hold on me a little bit and i can't take it the way i've got it and i have to find it on my own and jerusalem was a heart-breaking thing. going to cavalry and the garden and the most important thing i did was i went to the juice market, there's a juice -- market in jerusalem where the

jews healer and people say i'm depressed and there was a woman there who, an elderly woman who rushed up to him and says, my husband has dementia and i don't know what else to do, i need you to help me and it was clear that this thing was just racing her life with despair and the jew's healer without delay says, bring me a walnut and he takes the walnut and shows it to the lady and he says, 7 of these a day, 7 of these a day, whatever looks like the brain help it is brain, give your husband 7 of these a day and everything will be all right. and i'm standing there in the back of the room, are you kidding me, this is the most ridiculous thing i've ever seen but this woman all of a sudden felt this deep sense of calm and she said, well, give me 3 pounds of them, i will take it and it

was so moving for me and it was such an education for me because while i knew that there was nothing in those walnuts that was going to cure the terminal illness her husband had i also knew the myth had brought her real comfort and i think when you talk about the god that we were given, the path or success that we were given, when we talk about the ways that my generation were trained, it's not so much that they were set out to destroy us, it's more so that they're like the walnuts, they're very topical solutions that may bring comfort but don't actually bring any long-term relief or cure and so that's what i hope when i talk about innovation is not to destroy or attack or vilify, it's to say i understand the role these things

play but let's consider them the walnut, let's not consider them the cure. >> ten things i hate about yale and new heaven? [laughter] >> i believe i was the most miserable freshman in the history of yale college and when i got there, this was the early days of facebook and i wrote a facebook post called ten things i hate about yale and new heaven. and funny enough, the toughest thing for me when i got to yale was not necessarily the wealth gap although it was the first time i realized i was poor and it wasn't actually the race gap, i mean, you know, i grew up in all-black neighborhood in texas where we spent two or three years in slavery so we were always told that america was racist, white people were racist and that's the way it is for 400

years, by the way even 30 years, 400 years, the tough thing when i got to yale was the difference in black people, the diversity in black people wh i had never really experienced which was hard for me but also very important both for me to unlearn some ways and notions about blackens but to be clear about some things, there was, i think, my sophomore year a spray painting on one of the residential colleges that said nigger school and right after this, not long after to believe campus was in an uproar, we had no idea who did this but this was unacceptable thing so people wanted to post these protests and i will never forget the sign that was the most iconic sign for the protest was i don't

spend $50,000 a year to be called a nigger. and i thought that was very peculiar because it spoke to a deeper issue that i think we have to unlearn which was that there was something that you could do to make you deserve not being a nigger. that just because you pay $50,000 you should just be -- you should be treated differently, you should be treated as an elite, you should be treated as yale man and not black man, so so much what i'm trying to say with the book actually is we are talking a lot about white supremacy, we are talking a lot about structural racism and i'm not convinced that in our lifetime american people will not be antiblack.

a lot of work to say that a lot of us have to be niggers or none of us have to be niggers for any of us to be free, we can't be invested in this difference between well, i'm not a nigger, i'm black, or i'm not a fogot i'm gave, i've married and i work in the white house, this idea that i have earned the right to be treated better than somebody else because of the school i went to or the car i drive or the money i have or how i dress or the clothes i wear, we've got to unlearn that because that is imprisoning all of us. >> now, college football might not know who casey gerald but they might know who roger gerald is, who was he? >> my dad in many circles is considered to be one of the greatest high school football players texas has ever seen,

quarterback in the 70's, second black history, played for legendary woody hayes and i write in the book him being a real legend was a pain in my pass, every great man is inconvenience of the father because everybody tries to be their own when somebody calls you the son of somebody. but football plays a very important role. my dad became a legend when he was 20 his sophomore year and had broken his back in a game against perdue, they made the orange bole -- bowl and a year or so before that, woody hayes comes and says, we need you to play, his back wouldn't heal but my dad, this was his identity and woody had become somewhat like a father figure to him, so

he tried to do it, he shows up and before the game a guy comes to him and says, you want me to give you something that will help you play like a champion today, my dad says, sure, man hands him envelope and inside the envelope is cocaine. he takes cocaine for the first time. he goes on to be orange bowl mvp and a serious legend in college football, it also was the start of a drug addiction for him that by the time i was born it had gone onto crack, had gone onto heroin, had gone onto the beginning of the destruction of my family and so when i'm 11i go into school and there's -- my teacher hands me the dallas morning news and on the front page is my father, at once pride of texas, athlete star, his life

affected by drugs. the whole story that i received, here is this boy who threw away his life, through -- threw away career because of drugs. the things that made him a legend, this game that so many young men in this country including myself are told that is your path to salvation, that was the thing that in his moment of great success actually started the moment of destruction as well, path destruction as well and sacrificed his body for the game of football but nobody tells that story and so much of what i was trying to do with this book was kind of muddy the waters of villains and heros and because i had been told the story that my dad is an addict, you know, he's got issue, he could have been a

great star but it was his fault, so the other side of this hey, casey gerald is awesome, you know, if everybody else -- every kid is just like casey gerald, we have a troubled dad hero myth, we also have troubled myth of here is the kid who made all the wrong decisions and screwed it up and threw his life away and it's more complicated than that. we are operating a system, many of which are designed to lead kids like my dad at 20 year's old into poor decisions, into unsafe choices and environment and then blames it on them. so i think there's a lot of blame to go around and i think we have to account for it if we are going to heal from it. >> casey gerald's book, there will be no miracles here, a memoir is available in october, this is book tv on c-span2.

>> you're watching book tv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. book tv, television for serious readers. >> next on the communicators a discussion about european rules concerning internet privacy, after that senate hearing on foreign and influence and social media. and pennsylvania senator bob casey talking about aviation safety. c-span, where history unfolds daily. in 1979 c-span was created as a public service by america's cable television companies and today we continue to bring you unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and public policy events in washington, d.c. and around the country. c-span is brought to you by your cable or satellite