hero, really. it was an ann arbor, michigan where they made the announcement, and there was a famous quote from him, you know, edward armorall, would you patent the vaccine, would you patent the son? it was viewed as heroic from people that i've interviewed. i also just want to say really quickly that i had never seen a modern video of a child with pertussis in the mental ability. it really hits home. >> back to the gender differences, my experience was it didn't impact in a negative way. when the human papilloma virus vaccine first came out in 2006, i actually spoke at my daughter's high school. she was in eighth grade at the time, so it was the most harrowing talk i've ever given. i also talked to a group of senior girls at an all-girls

school. i asked them who had gotten vaccines. about half of them raised their hands, which is better than today, but i asked the other half, how come you didn't get them, and they said, my father didn't want me to get them. probably because this would likely increase the possibility of sexual activity. when tmy daughter turned 18 yeas old, i told her she could date who she wanted when she wanted, she just had to wait until i was dead. >> can we go until 11:00? that reminds me of something that i actually wanted to ask sonia, because you made this film initially for the australian market. and then we brought you over here and you essentially remade it for the united states. i guess i want to ask you, what did you discover getting to come here and cover the story in the american context about what's

different? which stories, perhaps, were more important and less important elsewhere? >> well, the australian version was designed also for the european market, so it covered a lot of stories in europe and britain and ukraine and india, and it had a very different kind of slant. so the view that we took in the original was to keep it very global even though there was about 30% australian stories, but to keep it very focused on which disease spreads. the american context for me has been quite different, because in australia, a vaccination is not mandatory. you can choose to vaccinate. as we put it, we have the carrot, not the stick. so you get the trial benefits and so forth and you can get child baby bonuses and things if you have your child fully vaccinated. in our country, our vaccination rate is sitting about 93%, so

it's higher than here. so there were different issues. what i learned about the american situation was that it's more passionately debated, i think, here. it's more divisive in some ways. i think the issues -- in our country the issues of the measles, mumps, rubella, that doesn't really warrant big discussion because most parents have made the decision that's been put to bed. we have to explore that in more detail for the american audience because that's still a live subject here. hpv, the uptake in our country is quite high. 80%, i think it is. what is it here? >> hpv? >> hpv. >> hpv for girls that have completed the series is 38%, for boys it's 14%. so it's woeful. >> so in australia, for girls it's around 80%. it's much higher.

i think the distrust of authority is greater here in some ways, and this ability that you can trust your own opinions and your own research is more dominating in terms of a psychology here. so that's all been interesting to explore that. at the same time, all the moms in the film have been great and very giving. we didn't want to ridicule you, we just wanted to show your story. you were so frightened and forthcoming. i'm not sure we would have gotten quite the same thing in australia. i think most importantly, though, is we can't forget beyond the sort of emotional issues and the scientific issues, there are also the issues of convenience and the realities of how easy it is for parents to get vaccines or not. medical coverage in our country is free, so we have a whole different kind of set of issues.

it doesn't cost you anything to go and have a vaccine. so we've got completely different kind of forces at play. i do think somebody in europe once said to me, there are the three c's of vaccination. and it was confidence, complacency and convenience. and the issues that kind of shape whether people are going to vaccinate. confidence in your vaccine or confidence in the information that you have, complacency, if you're very complacent about the disease and you don't think it's a threat, and convenience. if your social system, your government, your medical systems is set up in a way that makes it easy for you to go and have your children vaccinated, then all those things influence whether or not you will. it's not enough just to blame things on parents. there are systems in place that also inform that. does that answer your question? big question, that one. >> we'll have to wrap up after

one more question. >> one more question. it's really quite self-serving on my part. i fully intend on bringing legislation in our next legislative session to help encourage vaccination rates. i understand, particularly, michael, you had mentioned that nova will have some pieces around what states have done as far as legislation. if you could speak to that or if joe has a sense of that, i would appreciate it. >> sure. well, the broadcast goes out, you know, in a week on the 10th. there are extensive details on the nova website, and they include articles on a range of topics including the legislative framework. there are infographics being

done, so there is really an extensive effort to kind of keep the story going and great resources for parents and others who are interested. >> one of the things that i would encourage people to do is if you're interested in this subject, we'll put members of your family or community who are nervous about vaccines to spread the word. i think it would be really useful to have people use their own networks to sort of have that conversation during this time. because there's a window where you can certainly talk about things that perhaps you usually sidestep. i guess one of the things i was really surprised by is the fact that in one of the families, there are a few people in the family that are reluctant to vaccinate, but people just avoid the issue and don't talk about it. here comes a window to talk about it, so if you can use your networks, that would be really terrific. >> in the very few minutes we have left, let me just ask the

panelists if they have any concluding thoughts or things that you would just like to add before we have to wrap up. >> i'll just say that i think a choice not to get a vaccine is not a risk-free choice. it's a choice to take a different and more serious risk. the time has come, actually, where we need to explain ourselves better. for my parents, as brian alluded to earlier, for my parents' generation, vaccines were not something you had to convince people about nor my generation. but i think the younger generation today don't see these as they didn't grow up with them. i think you need to explain what it means to not get a vaccine, and we need to step back and show that this is not something that sells itself anymore. we have to make it clear why it's so important to do this. we have to be patient about making it clear, because it's very frustrating when people don't see this thing that's so easy for us, but i think brian sort of makes that point.

thanks. >> a very short one. if someone comes up to me now and says, i don't believe in vaccines, instead of jumping back and saying, it's not about faith, it's about science, i now ask why. and it opens a whole different conversation, so i would encourage people just to ask why if you hear that. >> i think my last message is we tend to focus in health education about writing facts. but in my line of work, context is everything. we need to help parents, we need to help the policy discussions, understand the context of vaccination. it is helping people to imagine how life without vaccines will be different than life as it is now with vaccines and the vaccination race that we have. 70 years ago, 80 years ago, parents said things like, no,

son, you can't go to the pool today because of the epidemic. in the u.s. today, we don't say things like that, precisely because vaccines have accomplished the goal of making these diseases rare. but if we move forward and do not, as a society, maintain vaccination rates, we open the door to a different kind of life, to a return back to a life in which parents have to fear, parents have to think about these types of questions in their day-to-day life. it's that kind of choice that we need to remind people of as they're considering and weighing all the elements of the vaccine picture. >> i'll just reiterate the point about what can be done. there have been state legislatures in different parts of the country, it was mentioned washington state and california and others that simply just make it more difficult to opt out. and it's not only a matter of making it more difficult, but also, from what i understand, most of the ways this is done is

if you want to opt out instead of just signing a form and giving it to the school principal, you have to sign a form and then have a conversation with a medical professional, pediatrician or practice nurse, et cetera, and then they sign it after you have the conversation, and just that extra step is very helpful because hopefully people are becoming convinced with that extra conversation or maybe just the extra hoop to jump through makes it that they would rather just go ahead and get the shots. so that does seem like it's working in some states, according to early returns, and so that's all i have to say. thank you. >> i'd like to thank you all for coming. i'd like to thank the panel for an interesting discussion. i'd like to thank nova for embracing such a film. i would like to thank the journal institute for co-sponsoring this briefing with us. as a reminder, you'll be able to see a webcast of this session in

the next few days, and you can follow all the conversation about the film on twitter with the #atvaccinesnova. again, thank you so much for coming. [applaus [applause] new york senator charles schumer will be at the national press club tuesday. we'll have that live at 10:00

a.m. on cspan. on c-span2, a discussion on the negotiations of the iran nuclear program. the talks will be extended another seven months. that's by the brookings institution, and you can watch it live at 10:30 a.m. eastern. and later in the day, president obama will speak about immigration policy at an event in chicago. it will be live at 5:30 eastern on c-span. this thanksgiving week, c-span is featuring interviews from retiring members of congress. watch the interviews through thursday at 8:00 p.m. eastern. >> i've often said the republicans do have a legitimate argument here, by the way, in that they're not being allowed to offer amendments. well, they're not being allowed to offer amendments because of filibuster bills. the best way to get rid of it is just get rid of the filibuster,

but at the same time guarantee to the minority and new rules in the senate that the minority will be allowed to offer jermaine amendments to any bill that's on the floor. jermaine amendments to that legislation with reasonable time limits for debate. >> i won't even qualify it by saying probably. the most eloquent order in the congress. henry told me one time -- i think i remember this correctly -- he said, i'm not wild about this, but there are 23 americans serving prison sentences for committing perjury. how do you justify that and then turn a blind eye to the president? he said, i can't do it. i'll always remember henry saying that. >> also on thursday, thanksgiving day, we'll take an american history tour of various native american tribes. that's at 10:00 a.m. eastern

following washington journal. then at 1:30, attend the groundbreaking ceremony of the new diplomacy center in washington with former secretaries of state. and supreme court justices clarence thomas, samuel alito and sonia sotomayor. look at the use of technology in disaster relief efforts, including the search for lost airliners and people. he moderates the discussion with matt gross and others about whether or not it's possible to become lost in today's interconnected world. the new america foundation event is just over an hour. >> thanks very much. well, welcome, everybody. thanks for coming out. you know, we're here to talk

about technology, and so much of the time we tend to turn to technology to solve our problems. and we've gotten so good at it that a lot of times the technology solves those problems before we really had a chance to think about whether the problems are really entirely problems or maybe there's something that we're losing in the process as well. maybe that thing that we saw was beneficial to us in some ways. so tonight we're going to talk about a way that technology has made our lives better has maybe taken something away from our lives. my name is jeff wise, as you heard. i'm a science journalist and i've recently been writing a lot about mh-370, the missing malaiysian airliner. people have been baffled by this case because if i lose my iphone, i can find that.

how come we can't find this 250-foot-long plane with 200 people on board? how is that even possible? but before that, i was very interested in the idea of being lost. i was a travel writer, originally, and i saw what a value in that sensation of being lost, so i might have two parts of this question, and i think from our panelists, you'll see a kind of divide here. are we in favor of getting lost or are you against getting lost? let me introduce you to the panel that's here with us tonight. to my right we have wendy harmon. she is the director of information management and situational awareness for disaster services at the american red cross. maybe she can tell us a little more about herself as we dive into this topic. next to her is clarence ordell who is a research scientist at cna safety and security. cna doesn't stand for anything,

i'm told. i'm sure it stands for a lot of important values. next is matt gross. he's the editor of bon app er bon appetit.com. he's an expert at getting lost everywhere. and he also, in fact, did an eight-part series for the times about specifically trying to get lost. so he's in favor of getting lost. he's going to tell you how to do it. but, anyway, maybe just to take -- really, these people have fascinating things to say. i don't want to monopolize the mic here, but people say, get lost, buddy, or lost at sea. it's a terrible problem.

nobody wants to get lost. but there was kind of a positive aspect to it when you think of the chet baker song, "get lost," there is a feeling of getting disconnected or getting lost from the part of the world you're obligated to. in the last 10 or 20 years, say, since the turn of the century, we found ourselves -- any adult human being is presumed to have a smartphone and has not only instant communications to the whole world, but they know where they are. they've got the gps right there in their pocket, and the authorities know where you are, too. if you dial 911, they know where you are so they can come help you. that's a great thing. you can get help wherever you are whenever you need it. here we open it up, in that, is there a problem in that? have we lost something in that we no longer need to venture out

in the world with this question looming in my brain: where am i? am i going to be able to get back to where i started from? maybe i could open this up -- there are positive aspects of getting lost. do you work for american red cross? >> i do. >> how do you help people who are lost and what are certain situations? >> well, part of the mission of the red cross, really, is to reconnect families with each other after major disasters happen. whether that's actually a war from our international rc, an arm of the red cross, or here domestically, we have a whole system called safe and well where, after a disaster, we encourage people to register themselves so their friends and family can find them. i don't want to get too deep right away, but how many of you know what google person finder

is? that's something google came up with which is entirely open to looking and checking for people. ours is a much more antiquated system but thhas all these safe measures in it, so you have to know about the person you're searching for when you find them. >> a tsunami hits, we get swept out to sea, we have to find our way back. is that the kind of situation you're talking about? >> probably less that than just being unexpectedly displaced and maybe not having been at work or something and then a disaster happens and you end up in a shelter or some other location which frequently happens in c s catastrophic events or big ones. it happens in most significant disaster events where there are definitely families who get separated from one another. >> is this inconvenience or is it life-threatening?

>> it depends on the situation. it's more about -- less about life threatening and more about -- when you're feeling lost, you just want to reconnect with your family. so having the tools to be able to do that, and i think honestly, it probably is more a demand on the side of people looking for the lost people, yeah, than it is the people who are lost. >> i did a research for an article about search and rescue, and 20 years ago, most search and rescue operations were initiated because someone hadn't shown up at the appointed time and place and their relatives or their friends called the search and rescue center and said, you know, joe blow wasn't here, can you go find him? nowadays, most search and rescue operations are initiated by the person who is lost. they call up and say, come and get me. i'm in a canyon somewhere. part of compounding this problem is because people have this

power, this immense power in their pocket, they will go out in the wilderness without first looking at a map, and there is a certain over -- >> reliance. >> -- overreliance and overconfidence. maybe something we can talk about is the difference between information, like knowing that your phone is telling you to go north and then turn left, to actually understand where you are. if you look at a map, you have to say, okay, the lake is over here, the mountains are over here, i understand the environment. you don't have to have any understanding when you have a phone, because if you're lost on a map, at least you know where the map is. there was a case a few years back, and this kind of thing happens recurringly. a couple got in their car.vegas. they were in canada. they plugged in destination

vegas and they said shortest route instead of faster route. it took them through logging areas and cabins and the man ended up dying. i forgot to ask you more about your sort of background. maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you do and how information and all that -- >> sure, sure. i guess i kind of owe what i do in part to wendy. i've been at cna safety and security team for about five years now. we do a lot of work on disaster response but also accident responding. shortly after i got to cna in 2009, 2010 was the haiti earthquake, and that was really kind of the first time it entered the powerful consciousness about text messaging and these new technologies to aid folks after a disaster. since then, i ran across

wendy -- there was a crisis data conference at the red cross, and it was the first time you saw these technologists come together with the first responders and started talking about issues amongst the two. since then i've really been interested looking at the intersection at that space on a couple levels. one is in terms of emergency responders, like the people who are charged with finding them if they get lost. as you say, we may make a phone call when we're lost, but disasters as well, they did some great work on people sending out tweets or facebook posts after a disaster. i know the first earthquake i ever experienced was actually in virginia a couple years ago. you couldn't get any texts or anything out, and i actually didn't know what an earthquake was. i went to check twitter to see, is this an earthquake? >> yeah, there was one in new

york a couple years ago and i was like, what the heck is that? yeah, you go to twitter and 30 second ago, it said, earthquake. so in haiti, do people have cell phones in the density they have them here? >> definitely, definitely. the developing world, if you will, is smart -- not smartphones, but phones. penetration would be probably more than an american venture. not smartphones, though. text messaging becomes a very kind of good way for folks to communicate and get all types of information after a disaster. so people are putting the information out there, so the work i've been doing is trying to understand and look at, okay, how can we use this information to understand people's behaviors better but also understand kind of movements and how can emergency managers use that information after a disaster?

there's been a whole host of kind of interesting competitions, case studies and research in that space around how can we use the crowd source, if you will, for locating people in a disaster situation. >> i think we have a real life example here. i want to ask the audience how many people heard a screeching from their phone about 3:00 this afternoon? yeah? and a buzzing. i guess it could manifest itself in different ways, but this is an example of what he was talking about. i happen to have gotten my cell phone in los angeles 15 years ago now, and i still have the area code 323, and yet my phone was telling me about flash flooding in this area. so clearly they knew where i was. i don't know how accurately, but this is a great benefit, potentially a little bit weird and scary, you know, and we were talking on the phone a couple days ago and i asked him, can

they find -- so if they're expecting some kind of natural disaster trouble in a certain area, they can find everyone who is in that area. you're saying yes. how accurate is that? >> it's pretty accurate, i think. i don't know all the technical specs for doing it, but it's based on cell tower pings. so anybody within the area that cell tower is serving can get it. >> can they say, okay, let's find the cell phone numbers of everybody in this campsite? >> no. >> as far as we know. >> right. >> we've been hearing about the usefulness of this really saving lives, important things like that. but i do want to look at the nuances of this. do you have a smartphone in your pocket at all times? you were telling me recently you've been traveling for fun

and for work. >> oh, yeah, who doesn't have a smartphone in their pocket all the time? but there's two kinds of travel that i do. there's travel for -- with my family on vacation and going somewhere where it's practical and needing to know how to get from point a to point b. we were at a pool party in suburban new jersey this weekend, and my wife and kids would not have appreciated it if i threw my phone out the window and just tried to wing my way to -- ridgewood, is that a town? yeah, ridgewood. but then there's the travel for a travel story, and specifically the travel stories i do for the "times" is a getting lost series where i decided after years of intensive attention that i paid on all these technologies on my phone, on the internet that had

sort of trained me in being very astute and capable and a research traveler, i was just tired of that stuff. i kept thinking of great times earlier in my travels when i was in my early 20s or even when i was almost 8 years old and got lost in an amusement park in denmark. the world seemed so much more full of possibility and openness. >> that was not a terrifying experience? >> it was terrifying. getting lost, especially when you're seven years old, is terrifying, but it's also a moment when you learn what you're capable of. you learn how you react in a situation that you're absolutely unprepared for. and what you do with those moments determines, you know, the course of your life in some ways. it shows you who you are. it teaches you, hopefully, that you're capable of dealing with these situations. >> you set out to intentionally

get lost. >> i quickly realized that there were different ways of defining lossness. what i would do is i would pick a destination and i would go there with no hotel reservation, no plans, no contacts, no guide book, no map, no looking at my phone at googlemaps, just show up and be there for a week or so, let's see what happens. get off the plane and i really have no idea where i'm going to go, what i'm going to do. and so what i realized -- the problem of getting lost for me on a basic geographic level is i have a really good sense of direction. i can look at the sun and know what direction i'm heading. >> every man thinks he knows where he's going. >> i really do. the first time was in morocco.

there was a huge medina with all these twisting alleyways with no sig signs. as i walk through the medina, it's on a hill. if i'm going downhill, i'm going toward the sea. if i'm going uphill, i'm going away from the sea. when you're traveling and you've been around, it's hard to turn those things off. i tried not to think about where i was going. i had met a young woman who was interning at this art cinema in tangiere, and she wanted to take me to some cafe, so all i did was just follow her. just talked to her and followed her. >> tried to pay attention to where you were -- >> paid no attention. completely under her care. you know, and that was great. i sort of almost was capable of not realizing where i was. >> that's the key, is not paying

attention. that's how you get lost. i grew up in a town. i was 16 years old. all i knew about the driving around town was sitting in a passenger seat. i knew absolutely nothing about getting from point a to point b. and i think smartphones do something similarly. i want to ask you more about preparedness or emergency relief in terms of people being too dependent on their phones and lacking a kind of situational awareness? >> sure. as a little bit of background about me, i started to develop the social media program at the red cross so i sort of had a front row seat to all these changes that have gone on since 2006. >> 2006 was when you started? >> for me, yeah. >> was that myspace? >> myspace and blogs. yeah.

so i actually am a professional stalker for the american red cross. i read, i mean, i used to read 5,000 plus conversations about the organization every single day so i have a really good sense of how people feel about it, positively and negatively. but yeah, in that role, i was all about exploiting every single possibility for aiding people when they're in an emergency situation or to have more resilience or have coping mechanisms and built a whole digital volunteer program where we actually invite the public to get trained to actually provide emotional support to people who are going through disaster situations. so we tried to exploit the technology for the most positive reasons. and now that i'm on the disaster program side, certainly our reservations arrange allowing --

not allowing, but like the trend of people to be overly reliant on their smart phones for things as simple as a telephone number or how to get down the street. >> people drop their cell phone in the water and not at home, they don't know how to call their wife? >> and also there's a shift away from calling 911 to what you should do if you're in an emergency situation. there's stories that if you go to an event and hear a facebook person talk, saying these two teenaged girls fell in one of those street well -- sewer well things, and were maybe they were in there and they didn't want their parents to know. they didn't call 911, but they posted something on facebook to their friends that would come and get them. if you have friends that would do that. then great. >> they didn't call their friends? >> it was like a facebook posting, hey, if anyone's reading this, come and get me. >> did they do it as an event? >> i invite you -- >> i think to your point and you

were even saying you tried to get rid of those cues when you were out, just the technology becomes so reliant that we don't know how to pull in those cues anymore. i did it myself when i was with my sister in north carolina this weekend. and we're driving to a restaurant and it's only like five minutes from her place. as soon as she gets in her car, and she punches in the gps coordinates. so i think you become so so i think you become so reliant on technology, that we just immunize ourselves from picking up on those clues. i don't know anybody's phone number by heart quite honestly anymore. you just go through the phone. but i think, kind of how that ties back to these emergency situations, the article that wendy sent to us, you mentioned in theory, we can call 911 from our cell phones and they can locate us. but the article was talking about in d.c., apparently

upwards of 90% of the callers actually don't have accurate locations, so you're spending this time on the phone in a distressed situation where the operators haven't asked you well where are you located? >> is it the fault of the system or the phones? >> the carrier is supposed to provide this information right now. >> is this just checking the cell phone triangulation or there's a gps chip in the phone? >> a thing called stage two which is the gps information. i guess it's failing more frequently than -- >> when you buy a new phone, ever since some year recently, your phone is supposed to have this capability, but -- >> it's the system that's failing or the phone? >> it depends on how you define system or phone. kind of interconnected. so that's one of the things the 911 dispatchers having --

actually, a "washington post" article that was published last week, having a harder time, having increased instances of ptsd because they have to be on the phone with people while they die because the emergency vehicle is searching around for them, because it's using a mobile phone to call 911, it's not as location accurate. >> are people not aware of where they are? all they know is they took a left? >> there's a language barrier, if you don't speak english and the operator only speaks english, you can't tell where you are. if you're calling from a land line, it's automatically attached to a physical address. so those are just some of the struggles that we're having. also we were talking earlier, about the fact that social media, there's a new start up,

and probably lots of them called geophelia. it is very geo specific. you cannot tell people where you are, which is a drawback for us when we're looking for valuable actionable information. so some companies have come up with ways to capture, so you can actually draw a circle around the area that you're looking at and trying to finding actionable information of people affected in that zone and we were going to try it out and they were saying, actually only 3% of people or something like that at that time have geo location turned on. so you're getting 3% of the tweets from in here, and maybe you advocate that everybody turns on their geo location. i was like that makes me feel a little weird. i'm not sure i want to be responsible for people getting kidnapped or murdered. >> we have this weird kind of

dual way of thinking about privacy and people knowing where we are. on the one hand, people seem to post all kinds of crazy stuff about themselves on facebook. and yet when facebook changes the settings where they are more permissive automatically, people get really bent out of shape about that. matt, i wanted to ask you, when you published this in the "new york times," how did people respond to it? did they say yeah, i feel that too, i just want to get lost. >> there were people who say on the one hand, oh, my god, why would you ever want to get lost? it sounds terrible, why would you ever want to do this? and other people get it, this is the path to discovery. it's sort of putting yourself in a place where you don't know what you're going to do next and that's where actually everything really starts in terms of having a great experience. >> so i imagine it's kind of probably a tiny minority of people who have willingly put themselves in that uncomfortable place where --

>> i think it's a minority of one. i have not met people who want to do the extreme things that i was doing, putting it all the way. but i was doing that to sort of, you know, to prove a point, you could do this, you could get rid of everything that we developed in the last 20 years and still have a meaningful, enjoyable kind of experience. if i can get people to put their phones away for a while, to not use gps and to learn to rely on themselves, to learn the cues of the sun or understanding smells on the wind, like a boy scout. i don't have any training in this other than just having been around. if i can get people to do that more, then i think people are going to have a better time traveling. >> yeah. yeah. >> i want people to be able to ignore me, i want to put myself out of business as a travel writer.

people don't need to read other people to find out where to go and what to do. figure this stuff out yourself. >> just go out there and find it. >> viva la revolution. >> didn't work yet. >> but you had people getting lost intentionally while you had this thing in your pocket, you could always make that emergency call. so, in this day and age, you can go -- and people do all kinds of crazy adventures, they paddle their bathtub across the atlantic and whatever, which is dangerous except for the fact that they have got this emergency satellite transmitter. so you can have an emergency exit from your getting lost. so it's not quite the -- >> i used it once. >> did you? >> i was in a huge mega cite,

about half the size of -- it is like 30 or 40 million people. it is like, if you were like -- if you expanded san francisco, so bigger hills. couple of rivers. bridges. constant construction. and you know, tens of millions of chinese migrants down the middle of it. complete chaos. i just showed up there. and i had like, a fantastic afternoon. then i today find a hotel. i found the closest place that seemed okay. and it just turned out to be miserable. it was like rich businessmen and their prostitutes playing mahjong night. and i was trying to find people to hang out with, not at the hotel, but in the sort of bar section of the city, and all the

bars were just loud, expensive places where you couldn't speak to anyone. it was just miserable. and i was on a bus to pick up a suitcase that i had left at a locker at the airport. i was like, i just can't take this anymore. this is going to be a total failure, i can't connect with anyone here. what the hell am i going to do? and i realized that i had made these rules for myself and that i could break the rules. you know, and so i went on my phone and i looked up -- i figured if i want to meet people in this city of, you know, 34 million people, i should go to a hostel. and is i googled hostel. i don't know how to say hostel in mandarin. and i'm not sure if anyone would have known --

nobody knows where anything is, it's a total chaotic place. >> did you feel disappointed or did you feel liberated? >> both. i had broken these great rules that i had set up for myself but i also ended up making great friends. i realized that these things are useful. google came to my rescue at that point. it it hadn't worked out, i probably would have booked a flight to hong kong and gone to hang out with people here. but instead i went to this hostel and met some great people. local chongchingers and westerners. it was fantastic. it saved me. >> there's so much interesting handles on this topic. i would love to open it up to the audience just a little bit early, because i feel like you all look intelligent, probably more intelligent than me, probably ask better questions than me. but i would like to invite wendy and clarence to throw in, is there anything to do --

wendy looks super skeptical. >> i would say maybe have a conversation about this. when i got invited to this panel, a, why am i invited to it? but one of the first things that kind of came to my mind was this little darko challenge in 2011. i don't know if any of you heard of this. but it was called the red balloon challenge. and so they put up ten red balloons around the country, and there was a $40,000 prize for the first team to locate the exact location of these balloons. and so they gave a date for it, see the ability of crowd sourcing for contestants to see the ability of the media to help find these objects. so there was a team from m.i.t. that ended up winning, they found about nine hours in the scheme they set up was this social incentive scheme. so the person who found the balloon got like $2,000.

>> so these balloons went drifting across the united states. they landed, each one landed in somebody's yard or in the middle of a street, so each balloon would only be seen by one or two or possibly no people. so how do you connect to nine random people within a matter of hours? >> right, yeah, so they prepositioned these ten balloons all across the united states. so there were only a few people in a particular space. so they set up the scheme, $2,000 for the person who found found it. $1,000 for the person who referred the person who found it. 500 for the person who referred the person who referred the person and et cetera. so they found these balloons in about nine hours. >> so the financial incentives are causing people to put up postings on their facebook page, saying, hey, all my friends, if you see a red balloon, repost this? >> right. >> and it was kind of creating this trees of connectivity. >> exactly. so that worked pretty well. some insightful stuff that came from it. one of the things that came from

that is that there was actually a lot of gamesmanship within it. there was a lot of disinformation that was out there. so that's another piece that consider within it. so there was all these teams competing for $40,000. one example may be a terrorist situation, where if we're trying to locate bombers, locate victims, i think there was an example in mumbai, where disinformation was intentionally being put out there. a few years later, the state department actually ran a similar campaign, it was called tag. and the idea was to find five individuals, who are now moving targets across the world. it was the guy who was on that previous m.i.t. team, uc san diego. but they won again, but they only had to find three out of five people. >> where's that guy now? >> i don't know. >> but in that situation, it was -- there were two people that got lost and got away.

i just think that type of stuff is interesting in terms of this kind of collective action, the ability to narrow in on folks in a really fast way. >> so for me or the red cross, the golden ticket is resilience, so it turns out that being lost is probably a really fine balance between being resilient or not resilient. one of the key indicators of resiliency or ability to cope with the unexpected is how connected you are to your community and your neighbors, it's not about how much water you have in your closet or how your emergency preparedness kit, although you still have them. it's really how well connected are you? and so we want to do as much as we can as an organization to say we're developing all of these apps and really encouraging that connection, but also on the other side, you know, cautioning, actually, you should memorize a few phone numbers, you should be able to live and be resilient without access to

technology, if that's the situation that you find yourself in so that you can cope very well with that situation, too. and so i think it's a fine balance that has all sorts of pros and cons. >> do you think there's a negative correlation between people who stockpile stuff in their basement and people who are connected with their neighbors. >> preppers are -- that's one of the struggles that we want, because that's not an aspiration, nobody wants to be like the crazy stockpiler. >> there's a rye reality show about that. >> i don't want to be that either, i actually enjoy being lost and all that jazz. but i think, yeah, there is a negative correlation to being prepared. and so, that's just my two cents is that be connected where we can be connected and know how to live without being connected if you're not. >> and before i open up, is there advice that you guys would offer -- let me -- you can offer

a piece of advice? this is how to survive. what would you have? i mean, your buddies in social media, what would you have to encourage people to do? >> so actually one of the easiest things you can do is connect with the emergency management and police departments, just in case anything would happen, then you have access to those tools and they're at your fingertips. download the red cross apps. >> what apps does to red cross have? >> we have lots of them. they're hazard specific. if you're in a tornado, we have lots of tips about what to do in that scenario, right. yeah, just having that connected community. so i'll give you one quick example, which is actually in tornadoes now, hundreds of times, i have been sitting there while tornado sirens and

warnings are going off across the midwest for example and i'll start to see literally thousands of people use the hashtag bathtub, because they're all sitting in their bathtub right next to each other and feeling really alone. one of the things we have done is just start connecting them to each other saying you're not really alone, if you do these three things, and you stay there in that bathtub, you're doing all the things you need too do in that moment. but after the tornado goes through, sometimes the connectivity is not there anymore. so it's both being able to reach out in that time of need and maybe you would prefer to be able to reach out after the tornado is through, but if you can't, knowing exactly what to do and how to handle it. >> fantastic. clarence? >> i don't know. i like this idea of, i'm actually going to go into anti the position that you said. i like the idea of getting lost in your own city. and so kind of beyond using the international stuff, back to

this piece of like, don't necessarily just hop in your car and pull out your phone to figure out the story. when i first moved to atlanta, i remember distinctly just getting in my car and just spend like an hour driving around the city, not really having a destination in mind, just getting a lay of the land and i did not do that when i came to d.c., and now complete reliance on the phone. for general emergency preparedness, knowing the lay of the land, where you're at. >> or just where the high ground is. >> look at that, seriously? no way. >> flash flood warning. >> everybody stay put. have another glass. >> avoid flood areas. check local media. >> wow. >> with that, i feel like you have maybe -- >> i don't know if i'm supposed to be giving advice about getting lost and not getting lost. i mean, follow your own curiosity. one of the things that i do,

just driving around randomly and exploring is, i -- if i'm curious about what's down that street, i will go down that street. if i want to know what's in that shop, if i want to know who that strange person is in a foreign city, go and ask them. you know, it's sort of getting over yourself. part of breaking free of the reliance on the smartphones and guides and as far as travel writer, is a shyness factor, being willing to just go and talk, put yourself out there. >> well, i think social media has enabled a new kind of traveler. we're talking about airbnb and all the different ways that you can find yourself trusting strangers who before, you might never have had any contact with. and it's always easy to go to the holiday inn express. check in. have no interaction. but because of these forms of media, it seems -- i agree with matt, i think we have very similar travel philosophies and

we come into the world that's full of mysteries, and the two sources of mystery are first the world, we don't know what's in the world, and secondly, we don't know what's in ourselves. and it's only when you go out into the world and finding yourself dealing with situations that you have never encountered before that you live your life. i do feel that we live in a world that everything can be found out beforehand, everything can be planned beforehand, we're very efficient. we're never surprised by ourselves. but having said that, you know, it's a little early, but i would love to open up the floor. we have a procedure here where there's a mic and we have a -- and we have a mic bearer who will bring it. so if anybody has -- okay. >> hi, i have one question and it seems that it's very focused on being not lost, having power actually. so in the moment, where, like,

sandy, there was no power, you relied on your cell phone until it died and i knew where it was, but i think the catastrophe is basically the limit, and instinctively, i would fully agree with you about the importance of learning how to orient yourself to know where you are and to be very conscious about where you are and i think the connection to your environment, to me, is the most important. maybe i just belong to a different generation. >> i think everyone who's above the age of 12 feels like they're in a different generation. you hit some really interesting point, one of which, in disasters now, people -- you know, you go ten hours or whatever, your cell phone hasn't been charged, you're all of a sudden helpless, you don't know how to do anything anymore. is that a problem? >> yes, i think we're preparing

to see it more frequently. and on the sort of meeting needs side, almost as important as food and water and shelter now is access to information. and so we've shifted our offerings a little bit to make sure that -- or at least try to make sure that we're able to provide real-time information or even work with telecom and other kinds of companies to ensure that we're getting those infrastructures about for power and connectivity back up as quickly as we can. certainly, the red cross isn't taking credit for that, but the whole emergency management community, that's one of the shifts that the 21st century has brought that people need that almost as much as they need water. >> wow. so this is part of the emergency preparedness, making sure that people don't have to live without their cell phones? that's when the crisis has gone literally ballistic. >> can i ask a question? >> sure. >> elderly people who don't have

cell phones, who are perhaps just not even going to look on the internet anyway for information, how do you reach out to them? how do you not -- how do you avoid neglecting them in a disaster? >> the technology stuff is all fairly supplemental to the core thing that we do as a response organization, so it's the same way that it has always been done. but when you're an elderly person, i have heard of lots of neighborhood groups preparing by saying, the woman on the corner who's wheelchair bound is our meeting point. so wherever she is, that's where we're going to go huddle around, and make sure that she's okay because she's the most important one because she's the vulnerable one. it's sort of up to your resilience is very much dependent on your connection to your neighbors if you're not technologically literal. >> are there still old people who don't have cell phones? >> probably, yeah. >> i feel like my parents are

more on e-mail than anybody. >> i have been dealing with an editor that doesn't have a cell phone at all. >> i think it's a dwindling minority. >> this gentleman back here. yeah? >> hi, i'm bill. journalist and author. the malaysian airliner tragedy really struck home for me. i actually lived in sri lanka for a number of years and used to look south out toward the indian ocean and realizing there wasn't much between there and antarctica. it was fascinating to me to see how if people ever knew just how remote that stretch where they think the jet went down. and not only remote in terms of

how far apart, you know, it was from land mass, but also how really gnarly those oceanic conditions and even the sea floor topography. i mean,, we're talking 15,000 feet deep with huge canyons and mountains. and it led me to think that is this going to be a catalyst for somehow reviving school curricula around geography and particularly maritime geography? really pretty educated people were pretty clueless. and like you said, at the beginning, people kind of being indignant, how could that plane be lost? i could find my iphone in a jetliner so big. but we're talking about land and oceanic, just huge amounts of space that was just were fathomless and wide. just thinking, cnn, did you get any kind of inquiries of people looking at developing some kind of educational program around that? >> i mean, it's -- you raise a

great point. i mean, this plane chose the worst place, or the best place if you look at it. >> you couldn't calculate a better place to go, to purposefully lose that thing. >> no. and i mean, we know -- there have been a lot of calls for it. not about education, but about we should change the air traffic system, we should mandate changes to the equipment that planes carry the procedures they should follow. and unfortunately, we still have no idea why this plane went missing. and so it's hard to figure out how you should make sure it doesn't happen again. we don't know how it happened. we don't have a single scrap of evidence. the entire, for those who maybe have lost interest and aren't following it as avidly as i am. the authorities expect to spend a year mapping this very remote

seabed and then scanning it with sonars and other kinds of equipment. based on entirely one -- well, you could say seven pieces of electronic data that were obtained from these satellite communications transmissions. of which amount to parts per billion of a frequency shift. and i've been spending a lot of the last few weeks in communication with these experts scattered around the world trying to make sense of how does the frequency shift relate to the timing data that creates. the frequency, it gets a little bit boring pretty quick if you're not really into it. the point is, it doesn't really match up very well. so the assumption had been at one point that the plane diverted from its course to beijing and went west and it was lost for malaysian radar. at some point soon thereafter flew south and a straight line at some point in this mysterious

ill-mapped ocean. turns out that doesn't work, the electronic data doesn't support that. somehow either the plane circled for 50 odd minutes or took off and landed again. or it didn't do that, it went south, and we don't know why. the mystery is as baffling as ever. and so, kind of rambling here. but, i mean, the question is about, like, people don't understand how easy it is still to get lost in this world. if you've ever driven from coast to coast, which i've done a couple of times. the country is big. and imagine all of that. imagine just you're driving -- imagine an endless nebraska of water. nothing after nothing after nothing. and, you know, and it's winter down there. it's thousands of miles from the nearest port. i mean, it's insane.

and so, yeah, no, we're -- nobody's -- and no, nobody called for more geographical education. better gps. but great question. thank you. >> i do wonder if you open street map the movement of sort of digital volunteers mapping, you know, third world places that don't, that aren't well mapped unlike the united states, but i wonder if there will be an emergence of open ocean mapping. >> wouldn't it be cool? i mean, ultimately if you roll forward hundreds of years or something, you can imagine kind of a google street view. >> right. >> of everywhere. you could be on the bottom of the ocean, the top of the ocean. >> right. >> and that's probably -- if this plane is in the bottom of the indian ocean, probably it's going to be like 2348, some google robot is looking around. but then, you know, maybe that would be really sad. i take a kind of comfort in knowing that there is some mountain lurking in the eternal

darkness of the southern indian ocean that nobody's ever seen and it's completely -- i like to have some mysteries in the world. it's a little bit scary to me if everything was in a data base somewhere. >> there's things left to discover. >> yeah, you know. let's open it up again, does anybody -- how about over here? >> i'm curious, if you could check out the consequences of it or the ability to do something. >> i'm a guy wandering the world on my own. i suppose i have less to fear about getting lost or winding up in a strange place than women might. but that's a ridiculous thing to

say. i have met so many women doing crazy strange things in strange parts of the world. i've met women who hitchhike across turkey. women who drive land rovers. you are limited in some ways only by how you think about how you're limited. >> what about in terms of getting messages out to people or encouraging certain behaviors in people? we all know that men, i mean here, i would much rather drive around in a circle for an hour than stop and ask somebody where i went wrong. >> yeah. i mean, i don't have great insight into this. i don't think about the gender divide very often when it comes to getting lost. so, you know, completely uneducated pontificating here.

but i think we certainly women are probably make up much more than half of the followers of the red cross on facebook anyway. they seem to be the ones who are much more interested in connecting with the safety or community than maybe men are at a broad glance. and so that could have ramifications in being lost or not being lost. >> do you do any demographic targeting in your social media outreach? you could say here's information for women 25 to 45. >> yeah, we do some of that. but i don't know i have enough intelligence that's translatable right now. >> how about right here. >> thanks, i'm mark, i live in new york, i'm scottish. i've traveled a fair bit. i think as you're talking, i wondered if it's more about the future of serendipity. because the further technology takes us, it doesn't result in

us losing our fallibility of human beings. we still make mistakes. got hopelessly lost using gps. we don't pay attention. and we don't react fast enough. and what's interesting, what you talked about is serendipity of meeting people. whether you're connected or not connected, what's really interesting is where technology takes us. whether you're using the sun or traveling through the empty quarter or wherever it is. you meet people. you meet people through happen chance. i think that's interesting rather than just about the idea of getting lost. >> absolutely. one of the great things i like about the word lost and getting lost is just all the sort of english language phrases above the word getting lost, you get lost, you are lost. you get lost in a moment. there are ways it lends itself

to all these types of serendipity. i've been involved in this project at bon appetit where we've been working with ibm on a recipe developing piece of software where you give it, it's been trained, you give it ingredient and a type of dish and a theme. and it will come up with like quintillions of combinations. and recipes that you can -- >> doesn't actually make it. >> that's the thing. it's this amazing piece of technology that finds things for you that you would otherwise never have imagined for yourself. then it's up to you to cook it. to follow the directions or not follow the directions. >> it's essentially like spodify. helps you discover things -- >> it does come down to, as mark said, actually doing it yourself. following the directions or not following directions. and meeting people or not meeting people.

what happens then is up to us to pay attention or not pay attention to what they're telling us. >> i love the idea of serendipity, you're open to the unexpected. >> and of course, where serendipity comes from a piece of literature. something like the sands of serendib. an imaginary place that doesn't exist and is searched for. that's where we get serendipity. >> that's great to know. okay. how about right here? >> not sure this is relevant, but i don't understand how those 200 girls in africa have been lost for three months and no one can find them and the people who took them are using technology and i don't know why they can't be found. >> yeah, that's a great question.

i think there's a potentially similar angle with the malaysian airliner, if people are trying to make you get lost. if human ingenuity is working at cross purposes to human ingenuity, then you can get into an insoluble problem here where it's a remote part of nigeria and technology is being used against technology. >> that was actually, we had this conversation a little bit about some of the limits of online activism and some people say #activism. you know, this ability of just masses of people to bring attention to these issues. right, so and we talked about how that kind of bubbled up during the whole malaysian airlines hysteria where, you know, we all of a sudden started paying attention to these 200 kidnapped girls but weren't paying attention before. and the other kind of analog there is joseph kony 2012, probably the most massive campaign in terms of online activism.

the whole premise was let's make kony famous and lead to some sort of capture, right? but still, as you say, still out there, wechblt found most of these girls there are limits to what technology can do, right, especially if you have people trying to evade. >> it goes back to the basic human connections. the 200 girls in nigeria will probably be found because someone informs on them and tells the authorities where these girls actually are. and it's like osama bin laden, too, for years and years the most hunted guy in the world but it's actually through human connections and people speaking face-to-face. >> didn't they track someone's cell phone? >> yeah, it was finding the

courier, i think. then it's about, you know, actually speaking to people and not texting them. >> yes. this gentleman had a question. >> so i went camping in the desert one summer and i got, i went to the bathroom during the night. didn't go with my phone and got completely lost. you learn about yourself when you get lost. so, i learned about a lot about myself. >> and you have been to the bathroom. >> yeah. i should have brought my phone. i'm alive still. question between nature and urban getting lost. do you have a different mindset when you get lost in nature and lost in a city? >> when i said about getting lost here, i didn't want to die. my wife would have been upset, my editor would have been upset. i wouldn't have been able to file the story. there are expenses. it's easy to get lost in the

wilderness. it's very easy. i didn't want to go the easy route. i wanted to do -- to get lost in places where it was technically hard to do that. the hardest place to get lost for me was a place i'd already been before. i tried to get lost in paris once. i'd been there half dozen times for various extended trips to try and get lost in a place you know really well that you've walked across again and again is hard. i wouldn't recommend getting lost in the woods because i don't want any of you to die or get eaten by bears. >> but you came back with great anecdotes which would be good. >> well, unless you die. >> when it comes to getting lost in the wilderness, there's two parts. the first is not knowing where you are, and the second part is

thinking you know where you are. and searching, there's a fascinating part of search and rescue called lost person behavior. and people can act in very strange ways when they're lost. and you might see a lake and you think it's that lake you pass two miles back. it's actually a different lake. and this one has a boat on it and the other one didn't and you think maybe someone bought a boat. and there was one amazing case that i read about in the accidents -- these people got lost and came to a stream and they convinced themselves this must be a stream that leads to their camp except their camp is up hill. they managed to convince themselves that for some reason the river was flowing uphill. and they didn't know why, but it had to be the river was flowing. and i think that -- that's the kind of -- when you're lost and you often find yourself in this kind of situation where like i know a and i know b, and yet

these things are mutually impossible. that's when your stomach sinks. i'm actually, there's a moment that comes. i don't know what happens you're in a city, but there's a moment when you're in the woods, you have a sense, i think i know where i am, and you're like, oh, boy, this isn't where i thought i was. >> there's a great, several years ago when survival shows were starting up on tv the best one was survivor man. i don't know if anyone watched that, the host, star would carry around gear out into the woods, was miserable most of the time and had a good sense of his own emotional balance as he was completely lost in the woods or in the desert or in the south seas and was terrible. a great counterexample, and he knew when he was doing stupid

things. would explain into the camera. >> yeah. >> it's really good in that sense. he wasn't as cute as bear grills and didn't have the sexy british accent. he didn't last. >> he was lost. i think maybe we have time for one more and front row seat gets it. >> so something i like to do from time to time is to go on to google street view and find some obscure road somewhere in some continent that i'll never go to and virtually drive around there. just for whatever reason. and i wanted to get your feelings of virtually finding yourself in a completely unknown place from the comfort of your own home. and how that compares to getting

lost. >> i wrote a traveler story on digital virtual stay occasions it's fun, it's amazing you can see these corners of the earth on google street view and google earth. >> you can be under water, on an icecap. >> yeah, it's incredible but not a substitute for the real thing. you can go and make coffee. >> it's weird, i went to pennsylvania recently and i was -- and i got -- i like when i'm feeling paranoid to go and look at the weird turn, am i going straight or going left? and you can put yourself in that right before that intersection and see what it looks like and you have the weird feeling when you're actually at this random county road and, oh, yeah, i feel like i've been here before.

>> yeah, the weird guy in the red flannel shirt, still there waiting for you. >> yeah, exactly, weird, too. you're here and summertime and you go 2 feet further and it's winter all of a sudden. well, let's see, 7:44. should we pull one more out of the crowd? see if we can get flumixed. let's pick from the back. this lady right here. >> with all of the talk of using technology to be found and to also get lost, and i guess kind of -- is that me? i guess that we have a -- technology for everything. like literally for everything. but now i think that people around my age in the 20s are starting to go back to basics a little bit. the quote hipster movement or something like that. it seems ridiculous and a fad, but do you think reaching a

plateau of what technology how much we integrate our lives with technology? or is it a path of no return? are we going to do microchips or start this renaissance of going back to basics and trying to find ourself in places where we don't know where we are? being prepared without having to google everything or is it too far integrated? >> i want to jump on this. i totally hear you and completely agree. guys wandering around williamsburg with handlebar mustaches. and i think there's -- i think we're all feeling the same kind of nostalgia for real things and hand-powered and a sense of connection. everything does feel virtual. you can start feeling like you're in google street view all the time and not just for fun, but forced. >> we're at this exciting time in my lifetime i remember being fascinated with the phone in the car.

to beepers and then we would do like the kind of upside down text on the beepers. and we're in this fascinating time where we don't know where we're headed and figuring it out i do find myself and often get yelled at by my girlfriend and others, put the phone down and be in the moment right now i don't know to what extent, i think we may find an equilibrium with that. and they're just -- and there's this kind of catch 22 is like the more we use them, the more they figure out how to make the product more addictive. >> i think as much as we have this desire, we may find out

like 70 years from now these are like, cigarettes when they first came out. then you learn, hey, put the cigarette out. i think it's a fascinating question. i don't know where it's going to end up at. we're in this very new exciting times right now we'll find equilibrium. >> we're just now beginning the whole internet of things movement where every part of you can be tracked and data can be collected so you're making the most efficient decisions about your consumerism or whatever else you might be doing i keep actually talking to people, like the punk kids created straight edge where they don't drink or use drugs or any of that stuff i'm waiting for the straight edge technology straight edge movement, maybe it's here.

it'll be an interesting dichotomy to watch people try to hold on to that feeling of finding serendipity without the aid of technology and finding and balancing it with serendipity with the age of technology. >> i'll be the opposite end of that. you can't escape it. it's great. i think there's a ton of people in their 20s who are returning to print media who want to have something actual to hold. but that is in opposition to the overwhelming 95.999% of the rest of the world that is hurting towards greater technology. we'll have devices in our clothes. not every piece of clothing, but your cool jacket. that is going to play music and know where you are. status updates on the wrist of your sleeve.

that's going to happen faster and faster than anyone expects it to. >> it's going to be optional? it's going to be ubiquitous that the option will be the same as getting a custom made suit instead of just getting what's available everywhere. every gap and old navy and forever 21 is selling stuff that has technology integrated into it. yeah, that's everything. that's like everything everywhere, what are you going to do? >> and has the final word and then we'll -- >> okay. >> no, but i think -- i think both of you hit on something very interesting. it's like the technology is not just kind of this desire to connect. but it's also this idea of optimizing experiences, right? so we've all -- it's made us all kind of hyperaware of what everyone else is doing and previously done. so there was this article going around recently around this restaurant. i think it was in new york and

they were trying to figure out, i don't know if it was two hours, but it made sense. but why they've been trying to optimize their service over the past 20 years and they've been getting nowhere and they've been trying to do a bunch of the stuff with their staff and what they noticed was 20 years ago people would come in and sit at the restaurant, look at the menu, order something and move on, and now we come in first thing we do is sit down at our phones. and we go to yelp, we want to know what's the best thing to order right here and the same way with travel. i'm going to spain. i'm going to barcelona. two or three restaurants i have to visit while i'm here for fear of missing out on those moments where you may find something else and somebody else hasn't done yet. and so i think that's another piece to it, right, it's this kind of am i -- my fitbit, am i optimizing my daily steps? should i take 22 more steps before i go to sleep? to your point, i don't know it's

a hard thing to try to put out of your mind. we're brought up in this world to try to be the best writers. constant improvement. technologies in a lot of ways enable that. and so i think as much as we wanted to go back a little bit, i do kind of feel the same way. >> well, i can't top that. i think clarence summed it up as well as can be summed up. so let's call that good and thank you all for coming. it's been a pleasure.

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>> good to be here. all right. get a sense of time. thanks, chris and lisa. this is such a great place to be. a rare space. so many spaces i have talked in are so tied to the university or tied to -- little closer? >> yeah. right in here. >> what if i do this one? this is better. okay. how's that? i'm getting uncomfortable being this close to the mic. >> so they can hear you. >> i don't know if it is about hearing, it is about recording. no one has had a problem hearing me. so yeah, just rare to have this kind of public space. to have a political, intellectual, a political intellectual space. not academic but intellectual and engaged in the everyday. i love being here. thank you very much for having me. i guess to start with, i want to

say, yeah, i was active a long time ago and i was postponing it. i kept saying, i'm not done with the project yet. okay, i'll be done with may. school will be over, it will be fine. it's may, i'm not done with the project. i presented pieces on it, so i never really presented this before. you will see different pieces i have worked on. but it is really the first time i put the others to the talk. i will come in and out of figuring out -- you will hear the freshness, newness, roughness as i go forward. so, there are three basic parts to the talk. i will start by talking about the industrialization of the bee. start with activist. you will know about that in a minute. then the industrialization of the bee quickly. a lot of you would know this -- actually, how many people here are bee keepers? all right, a handful of bee keepers. anyone interested in the bee sting, you will know part of the

story. i will do that quickly but it is a necessary starting point. it is economic history of the honey bee. we will get going there. then i want to reframe it. we often -- we know a story, a narrative of the bees and you hear it again. and over the last two years, you know in the first paragraph exactly what comes up in the same fact, same people quoted. and i will try to refrain -- it talks about why i'm reframing it and how i'm trying to reframe it. then i will give you a larger piece of the project. ecology of the empire, which is the milltirization of the honey bee. which gives you a take on our history of relationship with honey bees. so the first part. okay. accidents. i'm going to come in and out of reading this because again, it is new. accident. as a bee keeper, you never want to make the 5:00 news. and we were all over it.

jeff anderson, fourth generation bee keeper, shakes his head and goes on. i saw the station wagon enter the freeway. i saw the kids in back. it was like slow motion. a done deal before i even step on the brakes and i knew it. jeff slammed on the brakes of his international flat bed semi carrying almost 900 hives, stacked seven high, 17 million bees. he swerved feeling the weight of the trailer shift behind him. it was flatten them or dump. it was dump. it was the right thing do but the outcome wasn't pretty. sparks fly. trailer flipped landing on the guard rail. jeff remembered seeing the trailer explode into fragments of old pine boxes into millions with black brew he wood, bees, high tops, bottom boards, with millions of bees coming this massive cloud engulfing him in his truck then sateling on

highway 90 making both directions of traffic come to a complete stop. jeff lowers his head as he tells the story. he said, simile, it was a bad day. the station wagon kept going. to this day, jeff don't know if the station wagon knows what happened, seeing it in the rearview mirror. he got out of his truck and realized it was like putting a building back together. an impossible task. first, chp is on the scene. he gets there, out of his car, first thing, gets stung. he gets pissed. caltrans workers nearby, on the offramp, they are stung, they get pissed. firefighters, getting stung. people stopped in traffic, they get stung, they are pissed. it is mother's day. a number of years ago. but mother's day traffic

stopped. 13 miles over through the day, 13 miles in one direction, 7 miles on i-90 completely stopping traffic in both directions. headline of the local newspaper, sacramento bee, the story, simply read, it was a real mess. and it was. it took almost a day for them to move the shattered pieces on the highway. and putting the few hives they could back out -- back together. putting those in nearby caltrans yard, watering them, trying to keep them cool. but the majority of the bee is form these massive clumps that hung from these pedestrian overpasses nearby. the size of 50 gallon barrel drums. and they couldn't figure out what do with them. eventually since traffic was stopped, they called the forest service in and they incinerated them. incinerated the piles nearby because they didn't know what else do with it. the highway, again, a sticky mess. from 8:00 a.m. when it happened until 4:00 p.m., stopping traffic in both directions.

jeff, that night, had to climb in the back of another truck, which is his uncle, part of his business, and drive that truck with the rest of the bees all night to bring his bees back to minnesota where his cousin dealt with the remnants and legal mess around the accident. this haunted jeff for years. he describes it as seared in into his soul. there are many remarkable things about this story. the sheer scale of the incident. massive waste of bees and labor that had gone into building the -- the bee is and labor that had gone into building the op rigs over years. millions of bees swarming around trying to find their queens.opr. millions of bees swarming around trying to find their queens. but i have talked it bee keepers, several hundred over the years, and said this is remarkably common. bee keeper in pennsylvania, first brought this up to me, david hatten burger, again all

over the news. but he said, there are two types of commercial bee keepers in the united states. those that have accidents, and those that will. in my research assistant at uc berkeley, since 2000 scanning newspapers, found 68 incidents of truck carrying bees have collapsed and tipped over. making the incidents much more common, i'm sure there are a lot more, that's just scanning the newspaper and trying to find them, haphazardly. there are scores of these incidents and accidents. and there will be scores more. in fact, much of modern -- and there will be scores more because so much of agriculture depends on the bee. and as matter of fact, contemporary agriculture would not be possible without the honey bee. not just in a sense, on top of it, it is a necessary condition of the honey bee. so even though we know that it will happen, we know the

accidents will continue to happen, there's not much that will be done -- not much that can be done. and not much that seems can be done about it. the industriousness of the hive, bee's ability to be mobile, the hive itself. ability to pollinate back, makes their role in this industrial agriculture indispensable. so these accidents like many other vulnerability of modern bee keeping, this size, scale, configurations, of the industry, are often seen as in a sense, the consequences are simply work the industry. consequences of political history. i started working on these bees, i was interested in that political history. i thought dwoi an economic history of the bees. the structural construction that brought the bees into being. it is still very much centrally

a part of my story. but other elements came out. size of the palettes. the materials that became part of the tellings of bees, of these incidents. human agency. and a sense made that kind of history, the economic history. one that is very difficult to tell. all right. so while this incident is not predictable, not intentional, often the fact that it is often deemed unexpectable is frankly blind of the consequence, and the politics of its making. jeff's truck accident was overdetermined by the history of its make in the industry that turned honey bee and keeping into the modern form of production in order to survive. part of what is produced here is industry. part of what i want to argue today is more than those relations of production but actually a production more than the industry itself, more than

agriculture, but what is produced of this is the modern honey bee. modern industrial bee. okay. let me, in a certain sense, in a material sense, not symbolically. i want to argue, and the actual material form of the honey bee, the skoe excel tan, size, shape, color, have been transformed over the last few centuries. over the last century and half in particular. one of the most consequent -- i will look at a number of the changing and making of the modern bee in the book, but most consequential have been industrial agriculture. so i will tell you a little bit about that. for those who don't know, this is a lather maj larger making b. of the bee. i will start with this.. of the bee. i will start with this. the almond industry. any time you read about a bee, you will read about the almond

industry. it has the most in the agriculture crop. the almond industry is huge in california. larger than the wine industry, in terms of economic crop. 80% of the world's almond are produced in california. what happens, if you haven't been through central valley if february, march, is this. simply, washed out here a little bit, but this pollination. incredibly fragile individual pink blossom blooms on an almond tree. it is a pretty remarkable bloom. and you start thinking about it as you drive through. and the scale of it is going on. see how this remarkably fragile thing on the one hand. and massive scale of literally hundreds of miles of these. the awe, beauty, enormity, is simply stunning. you get a sense of -- a sense of a little bit of the size. that's remarkable is that 60 to

80%, depending on who you talk to, 60% of shipped to california from 40 state. all of the honey bees this this country, most are put on the back of semis and brought to california to pollinate the almond. it is basically what makes bee keeping economically viable at this point. barely making it during honey production. marginal business. but almond production. since 1970s, at $10 a hive, four hives pr acre, now about $170 per hive. almond growers pay more money for bee keepers and bees, than they spend on irrigation in the central valley. massive part. the almond industry. about 2 million hives right now trucked in make possible 50 million pound of almonds and of course, hundreds of other crops. but i'm focussing simply on almond right now.

in that process as you probably heard, bees are trucked 50 to 60,000 miles a year. also fed corn syrup and sugar -- corn syrup or sometimes sugar water. corn syrup is much cheaper. and pollen patties. and they do this in a totally different cycle. rather than bees building up colonies in spring, if you are in minnesota or florj north dakota, where a lot of bow keepers keep their bees, you will see they feed their bees in dead of winter. eow keepers keep their bees, you will see they feed their bees in dead of winter. eow keepers keep their bees, you will see they feed their bees in dead of winter. w keepers keep their bees, you will see they feed their bees in dead of winter. keepers keep their bees, you will see they feed their bees in dead of winter. where a lot of b their bees, you will see they feed their bees in dead of winter.