>> booktv recently spoke with republican senator joni ernst of iowa about her life and career. here's a portion of the interview. >> i grew up in southwest iowa in a very rural part of the state and the perseverance, dedication, the hard work that my parents taught me really has carried me through so many different challenges in my lifetime, opportunities in my lifetime and i wanted to tell a story that could be uplifting certainly. people will face challenges throughout their lifetime but we all should understand that those challenges don't necessarily have to define us. >> you can watch the rest of her interview by visiting our website booktv.org and searching her name in the box at the top of the page. >> hi everyone, i'm sarah mathers, publishing manager at ãbi'd like to welcome you to today's authors in conversation

series. these are made possible by more than 200 sponsors and more than 1000 local ãa special thanks to the arizona daily star, university of arizona in tucson medical center. the festival three present expenses. today's conversation is presented by western notion ãb and sponsor of the national experience pavilion at the tucson festival of books. to keep up-to-date with the festival live events and sign up for the festival newsletter visit tucson festival books.org. joining me today is bryan walsh kebab ryan is. he signed the award-winning egocentric blog and has reported for more than 20 countries on science and environmental stories like

stars, global warming at extension. he is the founder and editor of technology and science 10 his book is "end times". bryan, welcome, thank you for being with us. >> this book is about existential risks, risks which could illuminate all of humanity or enough of humanity survivors would not be able to rebuild society to what it is now. hence "end times". let's start with the big question. are these the end times? >> certainly feels that way. it feels even more that way than it did when i finished the book and published it in august of last year. with the book that explains that we are in unique period of accidental peril. we have the big national disasters that could always happen, the dinosaurs knocked out by an asteroid and things like that, but what's really changing is that we have new technology that's very powerful and giving us a way to ã

whether new forms of artificial intelligence, new forms of biotechnology that could lead to pandemics far worse than we are experiencing now.natural pandemics themselves. all this means is that we are in a period of time when our power is ahead of our way to control it. it's a dangerous place to be that's why focus on. >>. >> the book does cover many type of existential risks from asteroids, artificial intelligence to aliens. how would you choose specifically which threats you cover in the book and whether any that you now wish you had included? >> i really try to focus on the ones that from talking to the experts and go to the research had the biggest pose the biggest threat to the future of humanity. that man's ones like nuclear war which receded into the background but it's a very real danger the biggest danger that could happen right now in this moment. then also looking at further along the newer technology are

quite there yet in terms of risk that are very close to presenting that. we've seen before in the history of the earth, the earth is billions of years old, in terms of i didn't get a chance to include, apparently people are very interested in space weather. things like that that can knock out the power grid. i kinda wish i had a little bit on that but the book itself got a little less brief than i expected. >> may be the second edition we can add more of the space stuff. >> exactly. the sql. >> let's focus on one of the topics you cover which is climate change. you write that climate change is unlike any of the other risks covered in the book for a few reasons number one of those

reasons is that it's largely out of control of our individual actions. he discusses several high-level things that scientists are working on right now but are there any normal things that everyday people can help used to reverse climate change? >> i always tell people the biggest thing you can do about climate change is act politically. climate change is a big collective action problem. that's why it's hard for individuals to meet the difference. it's a tiny drop of the big bucket that's climate change. really the difference that we need to new technologies to pass laws that restrict carbon emissions that put money toward infrastructure that adapt to climate change in the way you do that is through it can take a number of forms. voting, voting for the candidates that care about this issue and will spend money and resources on it. it can take the form of direct

action. it matters when you do individual for yourself and signal to the rest of the people to do this together as a society and a country in the world. >> what you think are the most significant contributors of climate change right now. >> the biggest most significant contributors are the energy we use. how do we generate electricity? how much are we using it? that's the single biggest factor is, are we using fossil fuels like gold, oil, natural gas, or switching to renewables or to ones that are cleaning even if they have other environmental issues. ultimately it's a question about how we power the world? and if we can't figure out a way to do that that will create really dangerous climate

change. that situation is how we think about that as a country. >> you've already answered this question a little bit with that answer but there's a lot going on in the world all the time, especially right now, people's attention is being pulled in many different directions. why do climate change deserves some of that attention right now? >> climate change is one of those problems that gets worse and worse with every passing year. it compounds. you have something like nuclear war where it's kind of always present in the background and make it a little worse a little better but it's always there. if you don't act on it now it doesn't change but every year we it compounds almost like death. the same you take out a loan if you don't pay down your

principal it's the same as climate change. while there is always good to be other issues in the moment will have more pressing attention that can take a lot right now if we don't put climate change it's not first and foremost very far up there in terms of what you're looking at, we continue to lose ground, continue to lose territory and be harder and harder for us, one of the most dangerous catastrophic consequences. >> on that note, is there anything else you would like to tell our audience about climate change or talk about or are you ready to move on to a new threat of our existence? [laughter] >> so many threats. i like to focus on the need for technology, we need to think about ways to potentially take it at the atmosphere. that's not to be cheap, is not to be easy, but the reality is it will get so out of hand in a decade, two decades, three decades time we might need to

somewhat extreme solutions. better equipped to invest in them now, experiment and trial them out so we are left to rafting for emergency measures after the fact when we don't even know what to expect. >> let's switch over to pandemics. shockingly all the topic right now. in late 2017 you wrote a cover story for time called "the world is not ready for the next pandemic" in that he wrote that the consequences of a major pandemic would be world changing. do you think we are at that point with covid-19? >> i think that covid-19 is in the world changing, i hope it will lead to the end of the world. this is just not deadly enough, even though it's truly awful and every life lost is one too many, rather it really shows how much it can alter the course of history, alter the

course of countries can alter the course of the entire world. what that underscores to me is how interconnected we are. that's what we learn here in the sense that both how the disease came about and how it began to spread around the world also the economic effect that spread as fast as a virus. the effects that change the relationship of the countries to each other. the fact that we are actually rolling mobilization to a certain extent because of the pandemic. this is not the apocalyptic virus we all feared yet it can do this much damage and we mishandled it badly. that really worries me about what could be next. >> when he first started working as a journalist for "time magazine", you are correspondence stationed in east asia when sars started. he wrote this is the first emerging global disease of the 21st century out of nowhere and exposed how vulnerable our

modern world was to diseases like this. now you are writing about covid-19, how is it the pandemic chapter of this book different when you're writing it now during covid-19? >> this would be a lot longer although i have a hard time figuring out how do i conclude it because i don't know what can happen to covid-19 and i become a little leery of making those productions. to me covid-19 shows even much more than sars just how 21st-century virus really works. sars was a surprise, deadly, dangerous but ultimately didn't have the ability to's red around the world. it had isolated outbreaks like hong kong import to china but never really took off in that way. covid-19 passed the case count and death toll of sars within a couple weeks and we've seen how it's gone around the entire world. also i would rather spend more time focusing on how you can mismanage this. we think of the pandemics as natural what they are. not entirely predictable.

their man-made disasters when they're mismanaged badly. that is something we have no excuse for. not something unpredicted. i would've thought we would've handled this better than we did. how a lot of other countries can take a natural disaster, turn it into much more expanded one. >> the sense i got from reading your book is that the way to address the fears one might have about any or all of these awful existential risks or personal localized risks is to learn about them. you have recommendations for resources that can help people learn about and deal with everything happening right now. >> there's a few other books that are really good on this, some of it has been out since my book came out one called "the precipice" a book by an oxford scholar named toby ord who was ãbstill very

readable. if you wanted to get deep into the subject, that's a great book to read. and think about the ethics of it. we often think, the end of the world is good for us but he really makes the case that what really matters is keeping that future around for our children, grandchildren. i look at the work of other academic institutions in this field the cambridge center on essential risk. one of the oldest ones in this field and a few other ones here in the united states that have really grown up around us. that's why i recommend books, and really a website called $80,000 that looks at how best to spend your career avoiding asked essential risks. should you work in congress, should you be a scientist in a bio lab. >> thank you. what are you working on now?

are you looking forward to a second edition of "end times" or something new in progress? >> i'm currently the future correspondent at the ãaxios it's a strange job title that makes it seem like i would be ã ãi focus on the future as the subject. looking at emerging technologies like big local political trends. i write a twice weekly newsletter at axios science, that's what i'm focusing on now and a lot on the pandemic, a lot on the effect of ai on how we live, how we work, and i would definitely like to come back to this. i think we will have new ways ã within the next few years. i would love to write more about them and talk about them. i'm keeping an eye on it. >> great. is there anything else you would like to say to everyone listening right now? >> no.

i think covid-19 has really shown us that our world is not as stable, not as we hoped or assumed it was.i really hope, even after we do essentially defeat the disease, i have every confidence we will, we will take a lesson here which is that it's much better to prepare for these risks and head them off as early as possible then to wait until after they metastasize like a cancer. if you imagine how much lives, how much money, how much political disruption we could've saved if we been able to snap up this disease early on where we were with sars and similar outbreaks. i think that's important to play out not just to do this but with climate change, with conflict with any kind of major threat preparation is the way to go especially when the last thing you want is to figure out a way to survive after the end of the world. >> great, thank you very much for that.

that is all we have time for today. brian, thank you again for joining us. bryan's book is "end times", thank you to everyone continuing to watch. safe and happy reading. >> recently new york times columnist ãbhere's a portion of his talk. >> over the last few generations it's become a lot harder to effectively govern western countries and to effectively reform or transform or build new or unbilled government programs. in an age when it was possible to elect the president and have a dramatic program of reform from franklin roosevelt and lyndon johnson really down through ronald reagan as given way to an age when presidents are lucky if they can pass one major piece of legislation across their presidency if they

succeed they might pay a political price for it. and overall politics is dominated by various stalemates, by polarized parties competing with each other without building clear majorities, within the united states congressional application and an increasing form of government that consists of basically negotiation between the executive branch and the judicial branch, which is how i think a lot of american policy gets made. there is a version of this somewhat different version in europe where you have the institute ãbinstitution of the european union which is advanced to a point where it's ineffective too big to fail, it has all kinds of problems, no one except wild and crazy english are willing to actually take the step two leaving, even the sort of fierce and populous nationalist of eastern europe don't actually plan to leave the eu but, meanwhile, it's

inefficient it creates common currency it creates all kinds of economic problems obviously to everyone but can either move forward nor back it can't shrink back toward a more sensible arrangement. it can't move forward toward the kind of actual european superstate many of its architects and vision and sell it too has this stalemate. so that's what i'm describing as closest and i think that's the easy one, that's the one that people nod along to. the others are a little bit more debatable. stagnation economic stagnation is not as thoroughgoing a reality as sclerosis come you still have periods of economic growth, you've managed a respectable pace of growth under basically since the great recession in 2008 but overall you see a pattern of real deceleration, lower growth rates compared to what was the

norm prior to the 1970s and you have those growth rates achieved basically through a perpetual borrowing where you can get to two percent growth with massive deficits whereas in the 1950s he could have ãb with wit then was complained as massive deficits but really more deficits at all. in effect, i think those deficits may be more sustainable than some conservatives think but there sustainable as in effect he would say a rich society paying itself to maintain a form of progress that its own fundamentals don't really justify. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org, using the search box at the top of the page. >> next on booktv, uc berkeley center for right-wing studies chair lawrence rosenthal chronicles the history of the

old right and it's role in politics today. then political consultants harlan hill and brian geer dusky offer their thoughts on the rise of nationalist populist movements in the u.s. and abroad. later booktv looks at books about democratic presidential nominee joe biden in the upcoming presidential election. it all starts now on booktv on c-span2. for more information visit booktv.org or check your program guide. >> hi, i'm bill so cool and electable commute this afternoon to the osher lifelong learning institutes the first in a series of presentations on america's unfinished business. the presentation this afternoon will be with doctor lawrence rosenthal, we will be talking about the far right, white supremacists from the streets to the white house, spreading out globally, log