world. >> stephen u, sbin is the or author of bureau of spies. thanks so much. >> thank you very much. >> keep an eye out for more interviews from the national press club's book fair to air in the near future. you can watch them and any of our programs in their entirety at booktv.org. type the author's name in the surgery bar at the top of the page. .. an obsessive tale of termites in technology. in the course of researching her comprehensive history she learned of a theory that would turn into gasoline.

that led to not that by a field. but the decade-long obsession with termites. she follows researchers as a study of termite behavior and investigate how the creatures who do nearly 20 billion plus dollars of damage a year in the u.s. can be almost as the fuel. with the public square. the climate change and cognition. [applause]. thank you so much for coming. and thank you to a politics and prose for having me. termites can eat books. is kind of a leap of faith.

i got interested in termites in the summer of 2008 and i am not totally sure i deftly had no idea what i was doing in the termite kind of captured me. i was having kind of a bad summer and someone has brought termites of the state here to show a book so i was having a bad summer and some researchers who i have met ask me to come out on the termite safari. and i said sure. i went out and kind of fanned across and you carry a piece of tubing that has a test tube on one side and a little to

bow here seek and suck up the termites in the between your mouth in the test tube there is a little tiny air filter so you don't suck up a termite or a cow patty or worse. i was there with a whole bunch of geneticists who were very hyper educated and also with an entomologist who could lead us to where the termites were. i will eat -- read you a little bit. i will skip through the book and take a little bit more throughout the story. i finally found the termites on my own. it's in the higher altitude desert. and the air smelled lately sh. they would be orienting themselves thoroughly. they have no eyes. they got down on the ground.

with that test tube. and under the first rock i saw only beetles and grabs. when i looked up. i saw the white homeland security truck. homeland security truck. roaming the land. in the goalie were old sneakers flattened mylar hydration packs and other evidence that some person or persons have come through with the border of mexico. i hated to think of someone hiding dehydrated in this and no man's land. the scrub here was bare than in other places we have stopped. i wondered if it was recently vacated. i felt an on candy tingle. it made me feel dumb and clumsy. if i have to be dumb i would be systematic about it. they would chew the underside of most sticks.

the ghost town with dusty webs. i dropped to my knees. i discussing process that stimulates life production. and made me dizzy. two minutes later there were no more termites on the ground. i head about 25 in the test tube. after the long hunt. my pale termites were disappointing. when i separated one from the clutch. it was less substantial. it could almost see the coiled guts and whatever it had eaten for lunch they have snazzy bodies. termites which are no relation to b's.

the highly evolved cockroaches. have around our list heads. and teardrop shaped bodies. in the long ago lost the repulsive dignity in the gleaming armor. i put the termite back in the test tube. my little gang of 25 was incapable of doing much of anything. they have nowhere to bring food to. and that was no reason to forage. they cannot defend themselves. twenty-five it termites are insignificant in that the -- scheme of life and death and production. i could not even see a single termite. they looked like a clot not a group of individuals. it was a roughly what is one

termite is it an individual termite is it one with all of the duck micros. that entity could eat wood. with a few with evolutionary existential implications. this was many and one phenomenon. but at the time i did not know much about the concept. by the end of that day i still couldn't see it termites the way the entomologist did. but i have a basic idea that the fewer i saw the more termites there might be.

where i had thought of landscapes as the product of girth. they inverted to become the opposite the remainders left behind by the forces of the persistent and massive chewing. the sky was no longer the sky. it had been eaten away. they have made the world by un- making parts of it. they are the architects of negative space. the engineers of not. that was kinda my first time really spending a little quality time with the termite. and that began ten years of hanging out. what really fascinated me. is there is a lot of scientist. we can't test -- we wanted to make biofuel. they coordinate themselves honestly. with the noaa mastermind controlling it. we would also like to build robots that can do that.

that they would have the algorithmic ways. that is not a scientific word. ecologists are still looking at that. because of the influence. we have a little bit of that 8,000 termites. so they could be sequenced for their genes. and that night we sat on the border between natural history. the scientists are trying to find biology's and the underlying rules.

with the echo systems. they are seen in nature in new ways. at the same time they are trying to reinvent it. for most of the time that we had been alive the idea of the future was to harness the big forces of nature. all of the big forces that are on earth. and that is all the old future. with the tiniest life forms. both of the systems of organization and control it fits with our desire to have a lighter footprint on the earth. it will have greatest control over the prospects. they are the poster bug for the 21st century. a little guide to really big ideas. one of the issues that comes up with termites is that at

the core of this idea is that the stream of changing biology into a predictive science much of the way physics started observing things like apples falling in gravity. the deep understanding of the principles that lead to be able to predict and do other things i did one of the questions here that lurks in the back of the book is well there be termite bombs someday. and whether the answer is yes or no. they will laugh at the innocence of our question i think. see mick i understand that sound like a ridiculous question. as you get deeper into the situation it gets more complicated. once i was hooked on termites. i did another story for another magazine. and to follow a biologist who was studying how they were pulling their big mounts.

thirteen or 15 or sometimes 17 feet high. i have not ever seen that. whether it was 12 or 15 the only way to knock it down is to get a really big tractor with a bucket lowered her and raiment basically. they are mammoth. substantial things and when i first saw them they kind of shocked me. i was in windhoek at the capitol. and you get on the road going north that is exactly straight as though it was drawn with a pencil. just across the landscape. i got on that. and drove. after an hour or so a spider of dirt appeared. they appeared to be appear to be tossed up from below.

it is home to several million termites. and i also knew that below the mounds set the big fungus. what i did not expect it was clearly not accidental. and then benefited. there were then dozens of them. and the colors shifted. all of them appeared to be pointing north. and soon i could see nothing but termite mounds from the horizon of both sides. i've been traveling for about 30 hours at that point.

were they a troop of thousands of mournful monks. with the same inviting angle. in the direction that i was driving. i did not had time to stop and investigate because i have to get where i was going before dark. the wild game would append -- apparently jump into the road. as i drove north i just kept thinking about the weird bend in the top of the termites. and the strange straightness of the road. it riddles the thought on a whole series of other riddles. i ran into the researcher who i was looking for and he took me out to look at the mounds that night. he had been there. and trying to figure out how the termites build them.

they cut them off at the bottom. he waters them. anything he imagined doing to the mound he's done to it. and he bought me to an open shed. with something white going under the roof. and it felt like a shrine. with the plaster of paris and then washed away the mud. and what was left was an eerie sculpture. reaching about 12 feet skyward. it was the exact inverse. present were they have removed the dirt and absent where they had built it up. with the large shape. removing the smooth titles. surrounded by a lace of smaller ones.

it seemed to intimate slightly. but the blood vessels in the undeniable personality. they explained. that is actually a dynamic process. much the way their own amounts are carried away. and as with the bones the mount structure is organically coupled with its function. it knocked on parts of the mound. he spent years taking times lap photo. run together like the animation. they reveal that moving mounds. in the four or five years it took for them to form a colony. the mound then became something totally amazing it

was a computation of the on position in the solar system. with mod as the termites calculated agent. here was the answer to the first riddle. to me the riddles were very satisfying. i suddenly understand one thing and then the next thing was kind of opening up. one of the other mysteries was a white was the road so straight. in the very along war. and much of the book is really spending a lot of time with the scientists and with termites all of the history that we have it with technology. what does it mean to build new technology.

what does it do that it anticipates. and that we don't anticipate. we could make some guesses about how we use it. one of the most amazing things is the queen. as i mentioned they are social cockroaches. they have a queens in termites were running around in the dirt it's running around in the dirt. they allow them to digest wood. they could use something that was very available and have very little nitrogen in it. and they could process it. in order to share those.

so that they will constantly that is the way they keep the microbes going around. and then they distribute the other tasks as well. there is a king and some of them. there is a lot of different ways to be a termite. sometimes it doesn't even make any sense. the soldiers have very elaborate heads. they have have a novel in their head. they have big heads that they will use to block passages.

the evolution as a crazy thing. i want to read you a little bit about the queen the queen is in the bottom of the termite mound inside the thing that is about a capsule -- capsule of dirt. they cracked the soccer soccerball open. he was in and symbologies. in the hollow space. the chamber have holes on the side. allowing air and solid termites to pass through. the workers are this big. the king is about this big. they waggled. like a bobble have kind of thing. but barely budged. with a sack the sac of the lower body. as though she was a toothpaste tube squeeze by an unseen hand. the fats inside her swirled like cream dribbled into

coffee. everyone shuddered. she offends art sensibility. i think the first stimulus to shutter and in the horror kicks in. she is a slave. captive up her body of her children. the strict strip in this stability. it's something we can only infer. some species can clone himself. and then matured those into sexual queens with only their chromosomes. to give them kind of a full set. these knockoffs are good enough to get the job done. and so part of it allows the queen to live pretty close to forever.

i wonder why. when early european nationalist. it was misleading it said. it was actually true. not only did they misinterpret what they were seen but the many insect states. up until pretty recently. they were seen as the utopias tiny humans and insects living in the way the nation -- nature intended them. it was needed to be fed by the workers.

were also marvelously the look inside. the whole world was meant to be run by women. an socialist looked in and saw it. and then in the 20th century things got much darker. people looked into the termite mound and saw eugenic society. with forced extermination. this was in the 1920s. they also saw them as totalitarian workers. can it comes up later. and having concept. and that when we looked at termites people attend to look to see that they are all doing the same thing. i'm in the skip ahead a little bit.

it is a marvelous thing to do. so they could build those ideas based on and their idea it's kind of a brain. they saw them somewhat as a working together in a network style they could do something that we don't yet understand. they also saw them as they wanted to model the termites. they wanted to have them have no memory and no personality. they have since then. built they paraded the

sausages all through town. they were hiding the whole town sausages. when i told them one of the principal investigators at the institute in harvard. about the dream she said sympathetically how collective transport. as though she have that dream all the time. whatever frustrations i felt were transient i was merely vacationing in the nightmare finding the termites around. and that of the other self organizing the systems was a self organized treatment.

it was a researcher at harter bird. a little briefly. there is a joke that we are all just waiting for it. this is a reference to that tragic comic plate waiting for the dough. in the 18th 20s. and how the heat energy is expected to work. there was observations. the field of complex systems. while waiting for someone to appear. coming up with a viable theory. the emergent equivalent.

justin had gone to school. only to wake up in a beckett place. these people are very generously. one of the things that that team of researchers discovered. that they were all different. some are charismatic leaders. some are just running around. some were just standing and kind of shake. some would do what others were doing and just to be part of the fun. they would all come and jim in a little hole.

they would all run over summer and build a little stack. as they change the ability. they have the ability that's what made this a termite termite. in addition to personality. all with the fungus nine times their size. it gets fairly complex. three years into my termite problem where i was taking time off from work. i worked for a think tank in dc. i would take time to go do termite things and escape from the energy things that i was doing. i realize that the door and my apartment did not shut right anymore. i did that for a couple of months.

it turned out that my house it was was actually infested with termites. the landlord called the carpenter who entered the studio and pointed to the origin of the problem. i could see that they have chewed through the beams. with the old cardboard boxes left out in the rain. they had left a set of shabby ruins for me. here was living right on the edge. the good shiver of a earthquake. they had been chewing on my feet all this time. the revelation was eerie. and the fact that i saw the termites in my wall was interesting rather than horrible. what most people know is that they eat houses and yet i have completely missed the obvious fact that they were eating mine. as a carpenters began the work. all of these insect vacations i had been taking were more about escape and work.

they were giving me some kind of purpose in some kind of joy. then they kind of let me into some other things. i guess we are fine. i'm going to skip ahead a little bit. towards the end. so one night it goes back to the first place where i was looking at the termites up at the high desert. one night while procrastinating. i have forgot what i was looking for. as many as three predator drones have been flying above me. and air-conditioned trailers about 25 miles away. they look at the off plane.

they are unmanned, they are lightweight. they have no windows so they appear to be headless. they can see whether person 8 miles away is carrying a backpack. i have not been alone on my first termite safari. the landscapes have been engineered into something like that. rather than the conscious thoughts. uninterested after your sabine consigned. ten of them were flying along the border. without any democratic discussion we made a choice to have more control over space suit through the on constant presences the definition of the human for it once said.

they would never give up the individual liberty. but by becoming a bit bugged through bogged through technology. we are losing some of the essential qualities. i think one of the. >> i think one of the things i will just go ahead to the end. the termite book that i was doing. and in the last two days i realized i have termites with a midlife crisis. they were my way into and out of it. as well as myself. the mounts became everything that mattered to me.

with the process and science what were the mounts. and yet they were also the building blocks of our world. they make the world and the whole world that we live in. more personally they seem to be the human brain turned inside out. we can only approach the word -- their weird glory. at the 19-degree angle. they are the ongoing meditation on the complexity of dumbness. i was really lucky to find the mount at the moment when we could still see them as an old fashion super organism. which is not really a scientific useful concept.

right now the termite mound is a thing a contract of fungus and national history but someday we will live in it with all of its byproducts of abundance and control in its peculiar organization. when we do we won't be able to see at it the way we do now. i also had to say that the mounds are hopeful because they have an incredible tolerance for failure and inability to adapt. it's actually a very hopeful beacon. in a biosphere the changing rapidly. >> that is the end of my reading. [applause]. >> if you had questions you should come up. to this microphone. >> thank you. how much time to have left? before the time when the

termites take over. >> in washington dc specifically. they are moving northward in the u.s. in this wonderful stuff is actually horrible step. stuff. amazing stuff is happening in florida where to a distinct forms of invasive termites had been hybridizing. and they have super colonies. they are extra hard to kill an extra fast. but termites are also very good. they will help us fight climate change to some degree. scientists in australia found that using termites instead of conventional fertilizer in wheat fields increase the yield by 36 percent. maybe your next loaf of bread comes from a termite. >> what is the relationship between the termite mound in the fungus. how do they relate.

and what does the fungus do for the termite. that is the other question. the mounts are the spec and underneath there is a big fungus. they had been living together for at least a hundred million years. the termites run out into the ground around the mound. all around the mound in a giant hexagon until they hit another mound. then they grab grass. they chew into little balls. they stack it up in the piecrust construction also looks like a vein. it is a strange shape. and it's vaguely familiar when you see it. and then they inoculate each ball with the fungus. and then the fungus dissolves the sugars that are in that grass they come down and slurp them off.

and then they feed them to their brothers and sisters. and then they come back down and they tend the fungus. the big question. it is metabolism is roughly nine times this size of the joint metabolism. we would assume that the termites must be the brains of this in the fungus must be drawn. but there is kind of a question of maybe the fungus is telling the termites what to do through chemistry of some sort. i wish i could ask you a deep philosophical question relating to termites because i enjoy relating you talk about the aspect of the book. but the best i can do is just to ask for a few little factoids that i didn't quite understand. >> one of those was the soldier termites were they

there to battle other termites is there a predator there or is there a part where they take part of the eugenics exercise in the calling out of the week or something. >> i'll give you three of them head about that. the other was. the geneticist were they studying the genetics of the termite or by chance of the bacteria in the guts. >> they were studying the genetics of the bacteria in the guts. and then, may be most interesting to me is the one about nitrogen which i have totally did not understand. you said at one point the fuel or the material that the termites sort of create is nitrogen free. c met the fuel that they eat where do they get there nitrogen.

it's not bioavailable. and the microbes can do things to the nitrogen to make it bioavailable. >> back to the question about the soldiers. the soldiers defend are blind just like the workers. and they have this weapon tree on their heads and the kind of orient themselves by sniffing the air where the puffs of the air and sensing the currents or maybe hearing the clerk the clicking from the other ends of the termite. if an anteater or an art world or somebody or bucket love there comes smashing in. the fresh air pours in. a whole bunch of termites will run around. they will click up and set up a fuss. and then all of the termites grab a bottle of dirt and run towards a whole. following that little sniff of the fresh air. in the soldiers run along with

them. and they all get to the edge of the known world which is the edge of the mount and they begin to launch themselves. >> if they are mandibles for their thing. they launch themselves and snap. or they might just start squirting their little nozzles. it's really nuts. what the soldiers do is they are defending against everything from a bucket loader to an aardwolf. to some ants coming in on a raid. but the workers also will defend against things like bad fungus is. and they all groom each other all the time. and they have more defenses than just animals. >> i was reading the termites of the state. >> are you familiar with it.

now i'm not just reading papers about termites. it's on my list of things to read. two questions. one was i was wondering if you could talk briefly about the biofuels. that kind of set you on this path to begin with. how is brave new new world based on termites. i will just enter answer the second one very shortly. the brave new world a eldest huxley's brother. i feel like i should do one of these for toddlers. that is into biofuels. in 2007 and 2008 wheat oil when oil prices that were going up and we have a growing

belief that we were soon to have a can have a bipartisan consensus on climate change. there was some scientists believed if we get a leap frog at the political process and replace the gasoline with a biofuel that would solve our climate problems i would be like insurance for whatever the political system cannot handle about doing something about climate change. it started off with tremendous bipartisan support. and we have a couple of national labs and we also have the joint bio in energy. there is a whole bunch of programs all across the country. termites were a early candidate. because they can eat the wood they thought let's go in and sequence all of the genes in the microbes.

and these are termites that did not use the fungus. so the whole suite of guts. and then we will get all of these jeans like a million and try to figure out which one is called for some & that might angina might break up wood. that first run did not work. the mental one of the people in about as a physicist who said you need to understand the principle.

we know so little about what's going on in the teenage genes. when gasoline is not $4 a gallon they had ended up making two biofuels. they have other industrial applications. i understand that they have also looked at how they've been late. did you run across it. if any interesting story about how that works. there has been ongoing controversy about how those termite mounds in africa

mentally. early on i was thought they acted like a chimney. i was sort of rise up through the top of the mound and come out. they have a hole in the top and air went across. they tried to get the propane gas. sometimes this last round. also from the species of termites or the termites that have evolved in different

places they may create mountain dew very different things. and they found that the indians have a different sort of heat exchange pattern. they have beautiful heat photography. they work more like a long and some ways. they have some sort of double

walking mechanism. they go way up and they had tried and they all face north-south and they had tried hitting them with range rovers. more questions. can we get one more round of applause. think everyone so much for coming out. the line will start basically right in front of me. [inaudible conversations] sees

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to understand not perhaps because are interested in the topic of the day. you can watch them in all other the author's name and book. in the top of the page. it continues now on c-span two. television for serious readers. it's another holiday weekend. with four days a book to be. some of the prayer programs you will see. on the economic policies of the in the pulitzer prize

winning author. discusses the god of islam. this is how to enjoy your holiday weekend. visit book tv.org for a complete schedule. [inaudible conversations] good morning. it's wonderful to see you here this morning. i am not at all superstitious. but most time we give them an umbrella in this goodie bag. this year we didn't. i'm sorry about the weather. i'm really excited to be hosting this wonderful panel on not just a game.