and planetary emergency are to die not trying we are the ancestors of our descendents era generation with the radical hope of survival thank you so much for joining us this evening and thank you for >> you're watching booktv. for a complete television schedule, visit booktv.org. you can also follow along behind the scenes on social media @booktv on getter, instagram and -- on twitter, instagram and facebook. >> karl deisseroth is a professor of bioengineering and psychiatry at stanford university and investigator at howard hughes medical institute, the winner of the heineken

prize, he teaches an undergraduate degree in bioengineering. cassandra luck is the professor of arts and sciences at harvard university and never at howard hughes medical institute. we'll be discussing the new book "projections: a story of human emotions." 9 professor deisseroth has spent his life pursuing truths about the human mind as a renowned psychiatrist and researcher creating the revolutionary field of optic genetics. " projections" tells a larger story about the material origins of human emotion, bridging the gaps between the ancient circuits of our brains and the poignant moments of suffering in our daily lives.

"nature" praised the book as a scintillating and moving analysis of the brain and great read. a great privilege to turn it over to our speakers. the digital podium is yours, karl and catherine are. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. you. to put these into context how i heard about your book. i know you as a collie, a neuroscientist, someone who really has revolutionized will talk about this later. we meet a couple of times of year, we talk about the brain, circuitry, behavior, and in one of these zoom meetings that we have we both what to discuss our love for

literature, reading and poetry. you told me we were just finishing writing the book. so obviously i want to read it. you were kind enough to sign me a copy of your book. i love the book. there is so much richness it is so interesting, beautifully written. i understand you been thinking about writing the book for a long time. you talked a lot about the format also of the book. so why don't you tell us about your book? how did this come about? who is your audience? what do you want to convey? >> verse about thank you for that wonderful introduction. it's really great to connect with you this way. i enjoy our stimulating stimulation conversation. i always knew your kindred soul in appreciating the art as well as the science. so thank you for taking the

time to do this. it really brings back memories for my earlier time at harvard just to hear the word harvard square mention remember the times i spent wandering around there. and also just to see you it's very meaningful thank you for taking the time. and i will tell you the book was something i had always loved as you have always loved literature and riding in the power of words to stir emotion. i have marveled at that, wondered about that. it is been part of my whole life growing up into adulthood and through clinical practice. always returning to literature. i had always thought it would be very hard to share with the broad public the essence of what we do. there are scientists that are

a challenge even to convey what we do to many scientists. but to answer your question, the first challenge was if i want to share some of the excitement of the science pretty want to share some of the important experiences from the clinic. i want to help everybody understand this better, this a moment in time and our progress toward understanding of ourselves. it's going to be very challenging to figure out how to do it. what is the right boys? what is the right style? do you try to communicate with everybody? that mantle of the academic or the white coat of a scientist or just a person who loves the sounds of words and sentences. the rhythm and sciences. in the end i decided i cannot

choose among those. so i did it altogether. so that is what the book is. it is a mix of science and medicine and a love of language. i know that is strange. but is the only thing i could think of, the only way i could see going forward. in the end to answer your question ed is a book i hope for everybody. >> this is very interesting. and your book you mention you have different perspective. it also corresponds to the three of your personality. one is psychiatry so you as an md. stop by psychiatry. first you say poignant the

what is described with a physician and the patients. even in one story, the story is told from the perspective of the patient not from the perspective of the physician. what brought you to psychiatry? at the beginning of your book you say psychiatry was the least specialty i would have selected. even the feel of psychiatry and by contrast to say my early experience with neurosurgery had been invigorating. so how did you come about to select the psychiatry? >> it surprised me as much as anybody. i have the greatest respect for people from psychiatry

they're so different from other fields of medicine. there are no measurable's in psychiatry. i know real blood draws tell you which mental illness the persons is suffering from print the brain scans don't tell you that. it's all words. we make diagnoses and track responses to treatment with the reading but those are all words too. it's all words. it has to be done artfully and scientifically but very different in that sense from all of the other branches of medicine. i was completely reset in a single moment. i was a medical student doing a required psychiatry rotation. medical students toward the end of their training go through a number of rotations

near experiences exposures to different branches of medicine. psychiatry was required. i loved it was a fantastic and everything about it was invigorating. but psychiatry, you talk about experiences that are transformative, the very first day i was on a psychiatry ward a patient burst into the room where i was sitting. i saw a human being in front of me who was specifically intact in every way, nothing altered physically i saw in an instant through what was saying what is yelling at me i saw how different he will his was than mine's words were also interesting not to

sugarcoat his suffering, he was suffering from a very serious disorder. the nature of his use was so creative and unusual that as someone who was always intrigued by words i was also struck by that as well. he had a complex delusion that became clear. what changed my whole life and that moment was realizing this is something totally understood to the need was greatest compared to any other field of medicine in terms of how far we need to go for a new the need was great, and a while was it fascinating. it is so interesting. it's almost a little guilty how interesting it was. there suffering at the same time. but see all this together and realize someone who cares

about words and language and this is the only road in this is what matters. that moment becoming a psychiatrist in that moment. >> i always tell my students to get out of their comfort zone. it's a nice example of that. what you say really brings a natural link to your perspective which is imagination. i think in your book you say experience has reviewed that many limitations of psychiatry. and ideas from literature have seemed to me as understanding patients. i see that literature is much as science and thinking about the mind.

so, can you go over these again? end up with these also in your personal context. waiting to go bad and even you mentioned about going to and from school with a book previously had on the handlebar of your bike. i'm thinking we complain about people who read their e-mail on their iphone when they work. that is pretty extreme. >> it is pretty extreme. i did it happen more than once. and so i was a slow learner. the interesting thing about the imagination side and how

science and alone are not enough. particularly on thinking about the brain. some modern perspective to make this clear. i will begin by saying as a psychiatrist who cares at interviews by using words and using words to bring out what is within artfully pretty cannot do it crudely you have to elicit what are often guarded, headed or understood in their experiences from the patient. you have to elicit these and a careful, respectful, and slow way. and it is almost like you are doing something with words that could never be done at least with current abilities we have cannot be done with a microscope. could not be done with a

scalpel. could not be done even with electrode, with modern recording electrodes. the words are more precise getting to something than any other method we have available to us. that's part of it how important the words are. but only think about the imaginative experiences that people have a gets reflected on literature and what really is how the stress and affect our emotions so directly and powerfully, even separate from meaning, separate from the definition of words of the usual construction of sentences, words put together in a new way can make us feel thing very deeply and powerfully. realizing what is going on there, is something like what we would say and neuroscience today as a project and for a multidimensional space into

something that is accessible and interpretable to the human conscious mind. we feel an emotion it's turning something very complex and bringing into something we can understand. it is projecting that complexity down to something that is unitary intractable. realizing that, realizing what literature does and poetry does they can seal these things in precise and being repeatable, powerful and describable. that is pretty important when you think about understanding the brain prevents accessing something that currently science and medicine cannot reflect. in the book what i tried to do is present the science side. but also in each chapter each story about these human beings is to use words to reflect on

how people imagine in their minds to create that state within themselves. that is the hope and goal to bring that side together with the science and medicine. what i think you're succeeding quite well the book pretty also bring this third dimension which is neuroscience. and you explain how you been fascinated without the ability the molecular insight to try to understand what is happening. and so, why don't you tell us a little bit about your development of this technology at the genetics by being able to access. cracks this has become a theme of the book as i've been writing for this a lot that's

exciting in biology. other developments as well. because aspects of the book are shared experiences of my own as well, opt genetics shows up while the book. it is important to allows us to move beyond a correlation to study real-time causation. real-time causality in the mind. i know we have a broad audience here. using light in a way that's opposite to how we normally think about it. normally we think about using light to observe pretty bring information to rise by using lights. as you certainly know opt genetics is the opposite of that. we are sending light into a system to change things to make things happen. and to do that in a very

precise way. to turn on and off in real-time comment, during complex behaviors. during complex sensations and by doing so we can see what really matters, which sells matter which can give rise to these complex states and processes and which when altered subvert the normal function. this works as you know through a process of ancient forms of single celled life in ancient genes that were used by microbes to turn light into energy and information. take those genes that work with the natural light and we bring them to in their single proteins called microbial options that turn light into ions into the electrical

movements is along the surface been right of themselves microbes do that for their own reason then you turn light into energy bad movement of ions happens to be the code for on and off the positive and negative ions that turns them on and off. so by doing genetic tricks to put these into single kinds of cells are even single cells and guiding light to those kinds of cells are single kinds of cells or projections across the brain we can actually cause those cells to be turned on and off during real-time behavior and understand what matters. turns out to give us a new perspective on how the parts of the brain and give rise to the beauty and mystery of the whole system working together.

>> give us a specific example. you have to deal the particular patient or metal and how you are informed by experiments. some bring your own experiment. in the carrying capacity you talk about particular close to my heart suffer interaction. you talk about two offices behaviors whose hyper social, tell us about the two patients, how you interacted with them. the thoughts and experiments you had in your own lab. and how that is done in your procedure of medicine. >> what was so exciting was as

all the sciences being developed and as we were gaining not only developing the technology of gaining insights into how these behaviors will work at the same time as think patients this is my little clinic office here i see patients i specialize both in depression and autism spectrum disorders. so i would have patients these are difficult conditions to treat and also do not respond to medications. i would focus on their comorbid conditions. helping to treat anxiety and so on and patients that have social behavior challenges. until the two patients the chapter discusses are people who live on opposite extremes of the social spectrum. one was on the autism spectrum. this was charles who although

he was able to speak as somewhat autism cap he was able to speak effectively but had very significant social deficits could not make eye contact it was clearly something averse to look in the eyes of another person which we often often see and autism. the other extreme very, very hyper individual who had instant connections rich and complex imagery and seem to connect all phases, all streams of information together to a beautiful tapestry that flowed out effortlessly. in my own way i was amazed by both of these patients. i sing these patients at the same time we were studying with optic genetics social interaction in mice. i tried to reflect some of the amazing feelings they get

stirred by that when you see patients who are expressing often debilitating but quite interesting states to build to test things directly with animals that are guided by what we see in the patients. i will play about the neuroscience but of course katherine your work isn't the best example for the social interaction on optic genetics to study social behavior. i was inspired by your work showing the state of parenting that is so fundamental to the experience of animals in general is it can be studied innate rigorous away that identifies you and your colleagues did some amazing

experiments showing complex state of parenting could be broken down into particular connections to find the young, retrieve the young, bring them back to the nest. other that govern the actual care, the grooming and so on. that was a beautiful illustration of how we could give rise we could speak about precision we could identify components that matter that are causal. that was part of the overall picture. also in my lab some experiments on social behavior as well. we found we could tune we could have the excitatory self prohibitory vittert stimulating other neurons. it had been hypothesized this about between these two kinds of cells might be important in

autism. because a number of bits of evidence including many patients with autism are susceptible to seizures and have epilepsy. and so what we had found was there was this over excitation that could be studied in the laboratory as well. we took mice and made the excitatory cells advantage compared to the cells we found profound behavior. they can be corrected by flipping that back around i had this patients in this very nice young gentleman charles i was able to talk to him and ask him about very specific symptoms that he had read including this eye contact thing which is really striking many people of friends or family autism eye contact

almost seems like it is avoided. my contact is made it's very fleeting it is terminated very quickly by the person. i was able to ask my patient about this. i tried to reflect in the book what a privilege moment this really is to be able to study things and talk to other human beings in the ways that were directly connected the reason he was looking away the reason eye contact was difficult for him is not fear, it wasn't anxiety, it was the information was overwhelming. there was too much content too much of data coming in too much information and it overwhelmed him. he had to think about what he would have to do and he knew he was not able to keep up. he knew he wasn't going to be able to he knew that was going to be a problem he was looking away for that reason.

the reason it was such a transcendent moment, this maps directly onto what we were looking at in the laboratory. we could quantify mbits per second under the conditions where this excitation and inhibition existed there is an information processing mbits per second we could quantify this overwhelmed quantity in the circuitry. this is an answer to your question trying to capture the feeling of the physician scientist was able to talk to patients in cap nearly an art particular bowl states expressed as best a patient can. and for modern neuroscience including optic genetics and help with the understanding. conveying that excitement and that hope for the future was a big part of that chapter. therer

on some essential means, hunger and thirst that you describe. i found very striking. you talk about a patient who has bulimia you also talk about several patients who have anorexia. this brings you to some reflections about the control of hunger and thirst. very specific stimulation of neurons and how they have very specific behavior being engaged. makes you think and discuss

and completely to the core of what neuroscience is trying to understand. how it could go wrong the eating disorders, anorexia and bulimia are first of all which is mostly this is so heartbreaking they become extremely ill and can die from

this. psychiatry is full of mysteries. there is none more terrible and mysterious than eating disorders. if you think about what is really going on here, how can we study this, the first question is let's think about how we regulate feeding. we are hungry or thirsty, which sells art governing response intake of fluid or water. : : :

and they seem like it but it's different part of the state and going to get water that and those are bound up together. not just to help us identify what covers that state just as with well is with their beautiful parenting work so that helps us understand there can troll and behaviors but what's interesting is in eating disorders the patients no it's not as if they don't know they are hungry. they know the patients who have anorexia is not blind to the hunger. it's not as if the hunger sold or shut down and that's why they are no longer taking in food. that's clearly not the case and you can understand this by talking to them. they know it's there and they know the hunger is there but there's something else on top of that the changes their response

to hunger and that's got to be something very powerful considering how important the drive to eat into drink are. so this layering of something on top that has the ability to exert a tolerance control over these drives is what's going on with these disorders. so in the chapter there is i think some very -- you reflect on some of the heart rendering and this case the positive case of an eating disorder but also the modern science was really helpful because what we were doing even as the book was being written we were carrying out experiments in my laboratory by will allen and these were

experiments where we were carrying out brain electrodes listening in on the brain while we were make king animals thursday are not thirsty and an animal that is thursday will wait for water so it's no longer thursday and so that's normal. if you stimulate the neira and you can make an animal that is stated in the longer drinking water to then start water again very vigorously. that's pretty interesting by itself. that shows which are the thurston are owned and the cells that connect to and they'll this neuroscience. we know it's a very interesting thing in its root like that in the paper that we published. when you just stimulate the thirst neurons and we record to

see what the rest of the brain is doing almost all parts of the brain you could tell his it looks like this was an animal that had been thirsty for gotten a lot of water and was no longer thursday and no water -- no longer drinking the water and the animal was behaving as if it were thursday -- thirsty but all the other neurons looked like they were in the thirst mode and clearly most of the brain was showing this. some parts were not completely fooled. there were some areas in the higher cortical areas in the cortex and an area in the prefrontal cortex that clearly were affected but if you look at them it wasn't quite the thirst state. it was something else and there's an evolved part of the brain that stood apart and was able to resist the construction

if you will resist the influence coming from the thirst and this i thought this tells us there are parts of the brain that can resist the primal drives that we can identify them and even drives as fundamental as hunger and thirst these are structures in cells and connections that may underlie the ability of patients with anorexia to overcome these primal drives. so at the same time as this heart-rending clinical cases are going on we have promise and hope from neuroscience to understand this. >> the hunger -- are easy to model and animals but there are

things that are way more difficult. you talked about henry and what is interesting here is that when you talk with him you actually become angry because he is manipulating you and their something in him that goes under the wire and you are trying to help him but you become upset. is neuroscience going to help with this? >> you picked up on the fact that there are a couple of cases where neuroscience has a ways to go and the underlying personality is one of them. i'm not all the chapters show a path towards understanding or a resolution by the science. some of them are human stories

and saying what is known about the brain but really it's helping people understand what this human condition is. borderline is one of those disorders in terms of how hard it is to understand and relate to in the typical human experience and the story that i tell here is about, it's the psychiatrist will recognize this and it's an important thing to share. when we feel an emotion that shared by a patient it's important to recognize it and it's important to realize that fact that it's something that other patients will have experience to that is very helpful because you can use that and say okay he is feeling this and even if it's something like

anger. i know that's not fair and i shouldn't try to prevent i'm not feeling it. >> it's a g-men comes from training experience and we recognized that it's there we say okay i need to use this. this might help the patient so we tried to do that with the patients with borderline in this case i was able to come to a very helpful connection in the end of the patient direct and icing that anger and there's a lot of interesting neuroscience but we have a long way to go in understanding this disorder and i just wanted to share the story and get the global community up to speed on what this is and as mysterious as it is it's real

and it's biological and it's something that our brothers and sisters and friends and colleagues are suffering with and as hard as it is to understand its real and neuroscience is starting to get us toward an understanding. >> we have run out of time but my last question is from the q&a. what is next for you for neuroscience and oxygen addicts? opto genetics. are you going to work with primates in hopes that it might be helpful somehow? >> it's primarily a science discovery tool and it's given us so much insight.

because you deliver a gene it's not the simplest thing for direct clinical translation. my colleague in switzerland has recently used it to confer light sensitivity at least on the human beings and so there will be cases where there are cases where it's dreck we useful but much more significant is the understanding when any kind of treatment becomes more powerful and with psychiatry we just need understanding of what we are doing our clinical trials. i came from a hospital where we are doing experiments to understand better the human state of this association. this is where the self becomes fragmented and people are aware of physical experiences but they don't attribute them to themselves so they don't care as

much about them. this is clinically important shows people have trauma if, in end ptsd and borderline. optogenetic has helped us understand the state more deeply and going back and forth to the laboratory to the clinical setting. we have patients who are undergoing normal clinical therapy with electrodes in their brain to find the source and then the normal course of treating these patients we are getting insight into the construction itself and how it binds together unlike in that back to what we can do in a laboratory directly using optogenetic. that is not even primates. we are going right to people and gaining already amazing insights

into these very fundamental and mysterious questions, the the construction of the cells in the unity of the cells which is more than i could have ever hoped for but it all comes from these beautiful microbial genes that were identified with responses more than 150 years ago so its botany that's helping us understand in some ways the most mysterious parts of ourselves and i think it's a great story of science. >> a question asked a few minutes ago is there a limit to understanding the phenomena of the mind by breaking them down. you are talking about studies of the brain that brings them together. how does this work and how far can you go?

>> if you completely disassemble a system you lose something very important. if the above sentence and you take all the words apart they lose their meaning. only by being together that they matter. we can't speak too much about any one part in isolation and that's in many ways the beauty of optogenetics. you can work with the precision of individual kinds of cells or even individual cells while they are all still fully intact in the functioning brain. so it's a different kind of reduction. not actually reducing the system. the system stays intact but you are increasing the does precision for which your intervention occurs and that has been remarkably informative. we done experiments where we can deliver input with the dignity of dozens of individually

specified cells with visual equipment in the part of the brain that processes input first and most directly and we can cause a mouse to behave and for its brain to behave just as if it's seeing something that isn't really there just like the precise patterns of cells that correspond to what happens with actual visual stimulus cells and that internal replication which psychologists have sought to understand for so long. what is the internal representation of the external world? we can "cnn" provided and the rest of the region of the brain and you hate your correspond to what happens naturally. we have not encountered what we can do in principle with optogenetics. we can provide patterns of activity and illicit natural and

internal representations and behavior so there's a promise of keeping the system intact while increasing the revolution of which one can access individual parts. it still has a long way to go and many things to discover. >> there's a question about the basic immersions or the top down interpretation. >> this is a very deep question and again you have to first accept that there is not a single spot in the brain that covers emotions and there's not a single spot in the brain that governs actions. we often do use words like up down and bottom up in neuroscience and they are convenient words but we are

increasingly realizing that choices and actions and feelings and sensations really are distributed everywhere and represented everywhere in the brain. why that is the case is another question but it's certainly the case that they are all over. and emotion related decisions can be affected by neurons in the brain and involves parts of the brain like the cortex, the areas we share with fish that are deeper and older. these all can reflect the aspect of our emotional state. so this answers that emotion is really everywhere and effective responses are really everywhere. the basic emotions when you say what is a basic emotion, we have senses in defending ourselves

and aggression and anger and others seemingly fundamental emotions. we can reflect these insidious happening even in our most ancient people in and fish we can see behaviors that correspond and we see amazing commonalities and we are doing work on zebrafish with the same basic structures that express these emotional changes send the same things that are relevant in mammals as well. so in most of our ancient ancestral preserver in a representative and distributed by. >> you talk a lot about emotions and obviously emotions cannot

the -- but you describe fear is something that's uniquely part of psychiatry. so tell me about it. how do tears appear in how do we cry? >> that's an important distinction. it's very clear that other mammals express grief and mourn and even have expressions that in many ways make the make us think of grief or morning but what's interesting is the emotional tears, the drops coming from our tier docs appears to be a human trait. even our great cousins don't seem to shed emotional tears per se and not only are we special

in that regard but also you can quantify the effect of tears. people studying human beings have visually alter the presence of tears on images of human faces and it's much more powerful including calls to help than any other facial expression and so that's one interesting thing. that's a fact. >> that's interesting. >> all the they are not completely involuntary they are partly involuntary and we know to some extent it's like the truth channel. it's a channel reflecting information that is not entirely under our control and we know

that it has the most powerful impact of any other facial features by humans. it raises the evolutionary question the value of our truth channel that conveys what is a ground truth that cannot be gamed and for social organisms like us that live in communities that help each other build an energy and helping energy need to have some access. it actually makes sense where the cobalt expression of the response to the impulse. so there is a story that is reflected. there was a patient who could not cry i won't go into the details of what happened to the patient but it was a terrible tragedy and he was somebody who hadn't been able to cry before

and was experiencing tragedy and grief but he couldn't cry. it had been deleted from his complex state and what i was able to find in this patient was the unique thing about what happened to him was there was no hope anymore for this patient. not only was the tragedy terrible but the nature of it was such that he had no further hope. that raises the sad and tragic but interesting question if there is no hope it's probably not worth the trouble of tears and it's no longer worth it. this is something that we can link to anatomy, to behavior. we think about the emotional areas of the brain and the brainstem lacrimal glands and nerves and the nucleus and we think how close that nucleus is

that governs tears normally to other parts of the brain that govern emotional breathing and a small redirection of a few little projections across the brain turned an emotional state into one that carries a largely uncontrollable expression of tears that serve as the truth channel, a social communication truth challenge and it's interesting to identify what sources there are and organize and -- organisms. >> acquires in from someone in the audience. the brain nucleus controls the imagine how will that image -- can you'd deem treatment and psychiatry in your own life? >> the question of what is the

direct link to treatment comes up all the time because i'm seeing patients in the clinic and these are patients where we don't have all the treatments that we like it we have this amazing insight that comes from the laboratory. one of the fastest ways that we can get help to the patients, and as i mentioned we are already helping blind people see again which is amazing but it doesn't have to be a direct application of optogenetics. a great thing about this technology is once you know what matters and once you know which sells matter than any treatment that addresses or targets those cells can become very powerful. and a great example includes the association question that i mentioned. this is a debilitating symptom that shows up all across psychiatry in the normal human experience. we were able to identify self of

this -- through optogenetics the cause that given the patterns and now knowing those cells you can dive dive into the those cells in great detail and understand them much better and see which genes they express in which proteins they make which routes into those cells might be available on a molecular level and if we are doing this now we can say okay here's a unique protein or set of proteins in the cells. let's now design the medication strategy that targets those cells. this precise knowledge has been tremendously useful in helping us develop new treatments so that i think is the most important clinical outcome of optogenetics is making any treatment more potent. spent the last question is an educational question. what do you advise advise people who are just getting into neuroscience?

>> this is something i get asked a lot and i'm always wary. i don't want to seem as though i have any answers at all. that could be the worst possible thing for me to tell people here so i think you should do it. so i'm not saying that what i will say the world is complex and life is short and you can study what is the most beautiful to you and the most interesting that strikes a chord with you that will make you think about it and wake up and think about it just because you love it and it's amazing to you. that's the first thing i would say in the only other thing i would add to that, try to have a mix of things that seem hard and seem easy and also be aware that

you can be wrong about which is hard in which is easy and this happens all the time. sometimes in science it works the other way around. i would just say you can't predict what's going on. and try to see things in a new way but just follow your heart. >> thank you so much. congratulations and actually i'm sure you have a lot of stories and way more to say. >> i do but this for me you know this was such a great day. this was a big undertaking for me. this was more than 20 years of thinking and writing and medicine and science and

imagination so i've been taking a little breather for a little bit. >> thank you so much patrick and carl for this fascinating conversation and thanks to all of you out there as well watching and thank you for meeting with us. to learn more about this workable book you can purchase copies and that posted the link in the chat and on behalf of the harvard library >> steven coonen, former undersecretary for science at the department of energy during the obama administration, argued that climate science is not settled. here's a portion of that conversation. >> about 2005 when i joined up until the time i left the government in 2012, i was working to prevent and demonstrate emissions like

technologies of different kinds. but in 2013 i was asked by the american physical society, which is the professional society that represents 50,000 physicists, to bring a refresh of the statement on climate change. in 2007 they had issued a statement to great controversy among the membership because of using the word incontrovertible. and if you're a physicist, you know that that is a red flag. and so in 2013 it was time to look again at the statement. and i thought like many professions and societies who issue climate statements, the u.n. says, i thought, heck, we're physicists, we should have a deeper look at the issue. and so i convened a workshop. , at that time it was five fuzz cysts who were not -- physicists who were not climate -- and

three credentials, skeptical scientists. we heard presentations and we talked for a day or so. and i came away with the sense, again, gosh, there is a lot here we don't understand and some of it very important to know that we didn't know. i was also surprised by how i had not heard about those shortfalls in the time i had been studying the matter. and so it was the revelation about sub stance over -- substance over science, how poorly it had been communicated to even the literate public. >> you can watch the rest of this program at booktv.org. use the search box at the top of the page to look for steven koonin or the title of his book, "unsettled." >> and you've been watching booktv. every sunday on c-span2 watch nonfiction authors discuss their

books. television for serious readers. and watch them all online anytime at booktv.org. you can also find us on twitter, facebook and you tube @booktv. >> i am so pleased to have with us this evening spencer mcbride, associate managing historian of the joseph smith papers project and author of tonight's book, "justin smith for president." in conversation with him is the. the harry williams -- the t. harry williams professor of american history at lsu and author of the best selling book, "white trash," nancy isenberg. welcome, both of you. i'm so excited to have you with us, and we're all looking forward to hearing from you. ..