at risk to save a structure. so that has impact. the insurance, fire insurance hasn't worked very well. i mean, these fires are not big. one category 4 hurricane is worth a century of these fires. these fires are about the same evel as tornadoes. they're very graphic and ture the imagination but in terms of numbers, they're just not there. i think you'll have a political decision that will establish a beas level for the market to operate in. that's how we did it with cities, i think that's what we're going to have do to -- to do with these. the wildfire and urban interface which has been misdefined in some ways. there are houses arn it. we could invert that and say, this is an urban fire problem, we're fighting landscape. if you need to find it, the decision is pretty obvious what you have to do.

people may not like it. this is not a technically solveable problem. we know how to keep houses from burning. we can solve them. but the larger issue is not one of a problem that we fix. it's a relationship. we have had a relationship to fire all our existence as a species. we are the monopolist, fire monopolist for the planet. fire has defined who we are. and that's not a problem you fix. it changes. so we're always going to be between fires. because fires are always changes. we're changing in ways that change fires. so you get this sort of mobius strip going on. i think that's important. that this is not something ok we just enact the right legislation, we pour billions into it or tens of billions into this, we fix the problem, it goes away, we go on to something else. it's never going away.

this is part of how nature works. it's part of how we interact with nature. that's a lesson we need to hear. >> before i started writing this book, i had known about many of these accidental scientific discoveries and i had learned about them in some level of degree, some degree of detail. but i had not -- i had not really looked at them analytically, like what makes this possible. once i began to start writing and collect these anecdotes and gather sometimes people's lab books or papers that were published, reminiscences that happened many years after the fact. when i got those and put those together i realized that there were three elements that had to be part of every accidental scientific discovery. the first is preparation.

many people have seen evidence that scientists later on said, oh, wow, this is cool. they saw it but because they were not prepared to recognize that there was something unusual in what they had seen they didn't pay any attention to it. the other is the actual circumstance itself. whatever the accident. is i call that opportunity. so the opportunity needs to be there to create or make an observation. create something that you observe or just observe something in nature, observe a atural effect. the third element is design. you know what you're see, what you're doing you know what to expect. something unusual has happened. now it's very easy in many different environments to just toss that aside and say, all right, well that was interesting and just move on with your work. scientists are just like everybody else. they've got a job to do.

they're investigating, maybe investigating how to build, how to create a new dye for clothes. it wouldn't necessarily occur to them to look at that and see if it could be used to cure disease. when you see an effect like that, you can't just say that's not my job, i am working on making a dye. you have to have the desire to follow up the accidental observation you have made.

louis pasteur was working on a disease, it was important to industry, it was killing a gnificant portion of the poultry in france. he called out what he believed to be the infectious agent he called it out and put it in broth. he would make like a soup. he would grow the microorganism by feeding it, like, chicken soup. then he would take some of that broth and he would inject it into the chicken and when he took that broth and inswrected it into the chicken, it died to. pasteur this was proof that this organism was causing the

disease. but people were not all that easily convinced of the strength f his argument at that time. he had to do it over and over and over again. it's time for summer vacation he leaves and leaves his assistant , he says, you guy, i've got this batch of infectious agent here, three days from now go ahead and inject the chickens. pasteur is gone, on vacation, just like a lot of employees do when the boss is gone they put their feet up, twiddle their thumbs and say, it's time for my vacation too. they took off. his assistants took off without injecting this broth. he came back two weeks later, the broth is there, pasteur said what did you do this for? you know how hard it is to make these broths and get these things. i wish you would have injected the chickens ahead of time. the guy said, i can do it now. he said, all right do, it now he injected all the chickens with this broth that was now 2 1/2 weeks old and none of them died.

they got sick but none of them died. and pass tchure said gash darn it, you thrind broth. make a new match. make twice as much. now we're behind schedule, we have to infect a lot of more chickens. made up new batches and they nfected a bunch of chickens. some of the ones that had been injected with the old broth and some that were not. every chick ven that was not earlier injected with the old broth died. every single chicken that had already been injected with the old broth lived. and pasteur said, whoa. let's do this again. he repeated the experiment. turns out pasteur had the wrong idea for why his injection was working. now we know that when the body detects an infectious agent it

gains to manufacture weapons against that infectious agent. now, normally, or many times, if the infectious agent is deadly, your body's response to that agent is slower than the agent can work and you get either really soirk you die. but if you slow down that infectious agent if you weaken it ahead of time so that it's slower, it can't -- it's not as healthy, can't fight back as well against your body's defenses, then your body's defenses can get ahead and now the next time that you get that infectious agent, you body is prepared. so what you do is you inject someone with a weakened portion of that infectious agent. now we have fancier ways to have doing it too but a weakened version of that infectious agent, your body gets used to it and when the real thing comes along you're all set.

you -- your body says, i'm ready for you, you're gone. it was all because of that accidental discovery of -- that wouldn't have happened if he hadn't taked a summer vacation. the story of louie pasture and his accidental discovery is an interest -- pasture and his accidental discovery is interesting but one of the things about accidental discovery is that the person who makes this observation, they need to be able to pursue that observation to its logical end. for pasteur, he was the boss , he had two guys working for him, what he said went. when he wanted to look at something, they did. it's tougher in the corporate world. not only today but in 1938. in 1938 there was a chemist called roy plunkett working for dupont. his job was to make new refrigerants. things like freon. the c.f.c.'s.

they had a process of doing it. there were some well defined chemistry for making these things. they would put certain elements together and then kind of put them under pressure, maybe treat them with temperature an try all sorts of different things to get something that would make a good compound for working in refrigerants, in refrigerators and other motors and other kinds of compressors. so that was his job. his job was to make new refrigerant. well one day, they let their stuff sit overside they opened up the gas bottles that they did their reaction in, they opened up the bilge gas bottle and nothing comes out he says, oh, shoot, it must have leaked. now right there, he could have said it must have leaked, he could have thrown that bottle out and started over. instead , he said, what if it didn't leak? let's weigh the bot. he weighed the bottle and the

bottle weighed just as much as it should have with all the hings in it. it's a little bit of white powder, like shredded coconut. they actually sawed the bot until half and there is this white powdery stuff, kind of coating the outside of this metal gas bottle. to make a, his job is gaseous refrigerant that his company can now go sell to make money and -- in their refrigerators and other things that require that capability. he went to his bosses and said, look, this material is really kind of cool. look how slippery this stuff is. and so, he was able to get the buy-in from his bosses and he himself had the curiosity and

the gumption to go say, hey, this thing looks really interesting. what it ends up he made was teflon. now, teflon, nowaddais we think of it most commonly in terms of the nonstick pans and even though we've kind of moved beyond teflon in general, but still, teflon was the nonstict material. but it's many other thing. it's in wire insulation and many other similar products. but in the 1930's, late 1930's, there was another problem that was happening. the world was just kind of discovering atomic energy and one of the things that they discovered was that they needed to uranium and uranium comes in form, uranium hexafluoride, it's very toxic, very caustic,'s through anything around it. when you have a process where

you want to push this chemical through a factory kind of operation, when up to -- when you want to do that, you've got to have seals and valves and joints. if the rubber you make that out of disintegrates and it's toxic stuff, really nasty stuff and it's radioactive on top of that you don't want that. you need to have some kind of material you can use to make a good seal. you can make bearings with it. that's not exactly the right term but you can have two surfaces that move against each other and still maintain a good seal. teflon is so slippery yet so resistant chemically that it ended up being the perfect answer for that problem which was confronting the world right at that time and the united states in particular. once again, one is interesting preparation, the

he was a chemist , he knew when something strange happened. he had the opportunity. he by chance made the conditions just right to make this new material. but what he could easily have not had was the desire to follow it through he had a job to do, he had to ignore that job because there was something really interesting here and it wasn't just him, he had to then be interested enough that he could go to his bosses and say, hey, you know what, this is really cool. we should take a lack at this thing. separation, opportunity, and desire came through for him. that's why there's teflon in the world today. so one of the prototypical examples of accidental discovery in the scientific community is the discovery of x-rays. they were discovered in 1895 in germany.

-- one of the reasons it's an interesting discovery is because it makes it very clear that you need a lot more in just preparation and opportunity you need that desire as well. and this is why. around that time, people, scientists, were discovers the nature of matter. they were exploring the nature of matter in the same way we're exploring it now, but this was before they had a concept of the atom. the idea of a nucleus and electrons surrounding it was unknown at the time. however they did find a new state of matter called cathode rays. you could make a cathode ray by taking a glass bulb, like a light bulb, and putting a filament in it, but putting it very high voltage. it's a little more complicated than that but that's the general idea. you take that and then you could see this beam of something. which we call a cathode ray

because they have no idea what it was noum we know the cathode ray rs electrons but at the time they had no idea. many people were investigating these cathode ray. it turns out that something else was happening as well. in addition to this cathode ray, there was another kind of radiation that was coming from his. and he saw , he had just put some photographic plates down and saw that there was an outline of an object on these photographic plates and he said, that's not from the cathode rays because cathode rays don't do that. they don't have this effect on this film. so he said, i will -- i'm going to take a look and see what these things are. with the cathode ray if you put cathode rays, if you put them in a magnetic field, they'll bend

he said, will these things bend? no. cathode rays don't go through very much. if you put a piece of paper, they're absorbed, they don't go through. will it go through pain her yes. he did a series of experiments over six weeks, that fully, it has been said in six week he is learned everything that would be known about x-rays for the next 100 years. other things have been learned since then but he did such an exhaustive investigation of x-rays for that six weeks, he buried himself in those. why the -- by the time he was done he had a complete understanding of the operation of x-rays. now he didn't understand everything and in a sense he was lucky. what people didn't realize, what he did not realize at the time was that x-rays are what's called ionizing radiation which means when they hit living material or nonliving material, or any material, they will knock off pieces of it. they destroy it a little bit.

and bit by bit, just tiny little bit, but over time it can add up and be dangerous. and so luckily for roentgen , he did all his experiments in a lead-lined room he was did that to keep light out. what he didn't know whuzz w was that he was protecting himself from the dangerous effects of the x-rays. over the next couple of decades, people were exposed to x-rays and began to develop lesions on their hands and other things because of that. but x-rays continue to be used as a medically viability, important tool. very important for diagnostics. nowadays we learned methods to significantly reduce the dose by making the sensitivity of the detectors much higher. without x-ray the whole science of medical imaging would not be anywhere near where it is today if it weren't for those six weeks that roentgen spent digging into this. one of the interesting things about it, not only did roentgen

get some degree of fame for this, which he did not really enjoy , he opportunity like the fact -- he did not like the fact that germany they called them roentgen ray he wanted them to be x-rays. but not only did he get that fame, when he got that degree of fame, all these other folks come out of the woodwork and say, i saw that too. tand they had. they had written in their notebooks. what did they do with that? nothing. they said oh, that was funny. and they left it. so this is one of the things that's difficult for people who aren't in the scientific field, he was just lucky. you can't be just lucky. it takes more than that. you've got to have the preparation to see that something unusual has happened. you have to have the opportunity to see that unusual thing, whatever it happens to be. and that's the chance part. you have to -- and part of that is directed by, you know, the more you look at things, the more you'll see.

but you need to also have that desire. and what people outside, when people outside scientific and technological fields think of the role of chance, sometimes they think of it like winning the lottery. they just go to win the lottery, that's why you immediate the -- made the scientific discovery. no, you cannot do it unless you first put in ground work to be able to understand the basics, what should happen, and when something happens that shouldn't happen, you have to know enough to question it. and you have to have the desire to follow it up. that's why the story of x-rays is such an interesting one in the scientific annals. the more that we prepare ourselves with a baseline of knowledge for whatever it is we are doing, the easier it is for us to idefinite fi when things are unusual. and once you are in a situation where you're given the opportunity to see something unusual, then -- now it's really in your -- it's in your hands now. you've prerared -- prepared yourself, trained, whatever this

thing happens to be, you had your chance observation, the hand of fate stepped in and showed you something, and now do you have the dezero to follow it up? it could be something as simple as you play a sport and something happens and just accidently you do something and say, whoa, that really worked. now you say, well, yes, but that's not the way i'm supposed to do it, or do you follow it up? do you say, i'm going to see if i can realy make this work. i think that happens, we can apply those principles in many different ways in our lives and enrich ourselves by being open to following those chance opportunities that present hemselves to us. >> if you're going to write a a history of arizona an want to tell it, you can't ignore george hun. he was so much involved in everything that went on from

1890 to the 1930's. the progress i movement, the new deal. ushered in a lot of reforms. fought for arizona's right to water from the colorado river. he was at the center of everything. george hunt was born in a place called huntsville, missouri, which was named after his grandfather. he was born there in 1859. he was in a part of missouri that was settled largely by southerners from the upper south, tennessee and north carolina. his family came from that area. a farm, raised on which was devastated terribly by the civil war. so he was raised in poverty really. had a very tough time, subsistence farming. had to live on what they grew he had very little education. he didn't have -- he had to work

on a farm, didn't have time for it. so he was -- more than willing to find something else to do with his life and he decided he wanted to head west. he wound up in new mexico and he he sided to go to arizona. he wound up in arizona, riding a donkey into town, doesn't know anyone. he prospered very well after starting off washing dishes, being a waiter. he had a lot of menial jobs. became quite wealthy. was president of the bank. in the meantime he desaied he wanted to get interesting in -- interested in politics. largely the people who ran the government were republicans because they were appointed by republican presidents, most of the people, the settlers, were like george hunt, they were democrats. much of arizona was settled, at

least in the most populous areas in tucson and southern part, by southerners. much of the north was settled by northerners. there weren't that many people there, though. so you had yankees here, southerners there. but in the legislature, the democrats larblingly controlled the legislature. although what was happening then was division among democrats. you had a populist movement which was basically strong among workers in mining areas in arizona. wasn't so much a farm movement as it was elsewhere. but it was a movement, a strong movement of miners. these were the first industrial workers in arizona for the -- before the advent of corporate mining, most mining was simply an individual exercise you do something on the side of the mountain, pan something through a river, you were in business for yourself. all of a sudden, they headed

down deep in the earth. you need capital you need organization, you need companies. the miners became wage slaves, they work for somebody else. there was all kinds of problems in terms of miner safety pay, working conditions, that there was an agitation among miners and unions to bring unions in and this fed into the populist movement in arizona. hunt was elected on a ticket, a joint ticket work a populist to the territorial legislature. it was a time when he got into it when there was a lot of national ferment for change. populism, later progressivism. the idea that the government had a role to play in protecting the weak from the strong. protecting the people who were just becoming wage slaves. george hunt had an evolving political appearance. when he was -- personal

appearance. he was a rather attractive young man, quite thin. as time went on , he gained a lot of weight. couldn't ride a horse, it was dangerous for the horse. he was over 00 pounds at one time. not 5'9", maybe. he had a walrus mustache. he was not the handsomest of men. i don't think it bothered him so much in speaking or appearance. he was common guy. but he did werery about what people thought of him because he bias.re was class when he was gring up, he was poor. people thought he was a hillbilly, a hick, he spoke horribly, looked terrible. he was not made for the modern age of television, by any means. but he had a -- he had a great talent for one-on-one politics. he would -- people would think

they knew him and he thought that he knew them. he would go to towns and talk to people about their children and their aspirations, their lives, how things were going. he would write all this down. when he came through that town again, he would say, how is that son of yours? did he ever get his leg fixed? is he working now? people were so impressed that he remembered all these things about them. he just developed a style of politics, so good for arizona at the time. it was just a state of small towns and mining camps. you could go in there, you could get to know everybody in about a half-hour and know their families and he -- with the help of index cards, remembered people. and that style was picked up by other politicians in arizona because it was so effective. governor hunt was elected for the first anytime 1911. they had leches shortly before

we became a state. once in office, turned away from more the political issues and economic issues to work on an area that he took a lot of interest in, that was prison reform. he cleaned up the prison, they had a snake hole where they would torture people. they had all kinds of terrible things there. he got rid of that he was a believe for the scientific prison administration. people are not necessarily bad when they're born, they're turned that way and they can be educated and saved and science can do that. and education can do that. so he was very, you know , he let them get the mail they wanted he they didn't have to wear stripe uniforms. he was trying to treat them as human beings who needed help, not necessarily as terrible criminals. eorge hunt was a progressive focused on progressive issues up until, say, 1920.

1924. have -- as you may remembered, in 1916, they said he lost the election and when the votes came in in 1916, this was sort of the end of the progressive period, he -- he didn't think he did. he refused to vacate the office of governor. he barricaded himself in the building, actually. the republican who beat him, tom campbell, couldn't get in. hunt said, i'm still governor, go away. for three months here they had -- they had two people pretending to be governor of arizona until the supreme court stepped in and said, hunt, would you vacate the building? he did that but the next year, 1917 , he kept challenging the results and he finally got it reversed. so he came back in office. but after that, he wasn't going

to run again for gnchor in 1918 so he got an appointment to siam from president wilson to be the ambassador. that was done largely because he had threatened to run for the u.s. senate against a democrat who was very close to wilson, marcus smith. marcus smith said to wilson, do you think we can get another job for george hunt? maybe an ambassadorship somewhere far away? and so wilson appointed him as bam as -- as ambassador to sigh yam where hunt went for two years, largely spending his time planning to come back and run for re-election. he didn't he bought a lot of antiques and trinket he is sent back to people and the correspondence i've gone through there, it's at the library here, he was just plodding. he was trying to figure out who was going to vote for him, whether he was going to run or

not he decided to run again in 19 . ran in 1922, 1924, 1926. he won those. he lost in 1928, came back and won in 1930. by that time the issues had changed. it wasn't so much prodeprezzive issues. it was -- organized labor had weakened a little bit. that wasn't a driving force. his issue was saving the colorado river for arizona. he had a sort of propry tir interest, or viewpoint he temperature the water came think arizona, didn't it? why in the hell can't we use it he didn't think of the down stream people. he just said, this is arizona's water. and we're going to need it someday and we've got to protect ourselveses from kale. who is going to grab up all our water. they were trying to get it to southern california at the time. 10 hunt spent a good deal of the 1920's, not so much on progressive issues but on trying to save arizona's water from

being diverted from the colorado river into southern california. that was his cause. it was a good cause for him, helped him get re-elected through much of that period he died in 1934 he last in 1932, he came back, he was planning to come back in 1934 when he die. on christmas eve, much othe establishment of the democratic party deserted him by the 19309s. his career, his influence was pretty low. he was truly very relevant to the minds of contemporary progressives. he was saying what bernie sanders is saying and a lot of progressives are saying today. his ideas are not dead. there are spokesmen there. he left that legacy. >> when do i like to write?

oftentimes early morning. nothing else is going on. i can get some writing in undisturbed. i also like writing, oddly enough, late at night for the same reasons. i can pay attention to my daughter , my wife and everything else during the day but during the evenings, early mornings, that's my time. i make the past come to life. so it's like the musical hamilton. who lives, who die, who tells your story? i'm the person that tells that story. i'm going to try to do it as best i can, as honestly as i can. as balanced as i can. but i get to do something fund amount -- fundamentally creative and say, this is what i think happened. my routine in writing is pretty nondescript. sometimes the night before i've taken some notes about things i want to talk about. sometimes some sentence fragments, some ideas, some phrases i want to try out. i have a pretty good idea by the time i get in front of my computer what i'm going to do.

but i usually thought about it for quite some time before that. most people know me as a historian of 19th century america. especially political and military topics. and in that area, the place where i'm best known, the area i'm best known, is civil an reconstruction period where i've written about the united states military and political leaders so i'm associated most notably with ulysses s. grant, but other people, abraham lincoln, andrew johnson. of spent a bit of time writing about presidents so now i have the media title of presidential historian. the civil war sesquicentennial was a busy time for me. i think one of the challenges is you know you're not working with everything that happened.

that the material we have is but a slice of what happened. things survive. other things perish. so trying to take that material and say, ok, now let's find out what really happened. forget about what you think about it. forget about how you interpret it. just -- what really happened? that i find a lot of historians don't understand, what did happen? how did people see at that time? that could be challenge enough. forget about this notion that i think some people have that historians sit down and they have a prearranged agenda, they have an ax to grind. they want to celebrate their subject or denigrate it. just finding out what happened is challenge enough many times. well, you know, when you write about civil war generals, you're trying to get your reader to understand what that particular individual saw and understood. you know in hindsight what

happened. and hindsight, you think, would sharpen your understand but in fact it's very distorting. now you know what the result was. then you say, why did someone do something so stupid? well, history gos from front to back, not back to front. so you then have to look and say, hey. what were they thinking? what was their understanding of the situation at the time? why did they make the decision they made? sometimes people, we can understand they made the wrong decision. but at least we have a better idea of why they made the wrong decision, given what they knew at the time. political figures, i think that's a challenge in a different way. i think they too carry their own baggage and popular memory. again, you've got to think about the decisions they had, the options they had, how they sense what political reality was before them. politics, they say, is the art of the possible but great political leaders expand what is

possible. that i think distinguishes say an abraham lincoln who responded to the situation, took advantage of opportunities and moved forward, to someone like a ulysses s. grant who often found himself hemmed in by the notion of what was possible and did not always do very much to expand that even if he was frustrated by that. i want you to understand that for me, grant has been a moving target in terms of popular awareness of him. when i started to write about grant as a historian, the most famous biography of grant was that by william mcfeely, won a pulitzer prize, took a largely negative view of grant, some saw as unsympathetic or caustic. if you said anything else, it was bound to be more pozzive. that said, by the time i started writing, after a while, making some points about grant in smaller, more focused aweas first.

other people started thinking ant grant and thought he might be safe as a biographical topic. some went too far, i think, in the other direction. in the beginning people saw me as the anti-mcpheely. i was going to correct the historical record and return grant to his pedestal. now we've had a slew of grant biographies. people think it's safe when to the write about grant. when i was around writing about him. but new everybody is writing about him. the revision has been going on for about 25 yores. they're coming in near the end. a lot of those people talk about how they rehabilitate grant, how they elevate him. that's not my objective. my objective is to make you understand what ulice see -- ulysses s. grant was about. thing he is did we may find praiseworthy, things we did we

may find we questionable. the man in all his humanity. the people i study, i can identify with them, at other times, if i had them in the room i'd say, what were you thinking? why did you do that? i don't see myself as somebody who is there to raise grant a few pegs on something. on somebody's scale of greatness. but i do see myself as someone who ss, this is what grant was about. i think in that way i try to be very fair and try to be dispassionate. i don't try to become enamored, i don't cry to become hyper critical. why is the civil war popular? as a subject? i think some people are still refighting it. i think especially as someone who has taught in the american south, married a a southern-born

woman, i understand that many people are interested in the civil war identify very personal way. and they talk about how we lost. it had nothing to do with us. so in fact they become very agitated if you say certain things about the confederacy because they take it as a personal attack. you talk about their heritage and honoring their ancestors. that's all well and good but that's not the same as understanding their ancestors or the role that their ancestors may have played in that period. so i think a lot of people get involved in this period very personally. reconstruction, i think is different. i think reconstruction is different because many people interested in the civil war aren't interested in reconstruction. the war is over, lest go home. reconstruction is a story americans ought to pay attention to. one of the reasons is because of the use of terrorism. to reinstitute a white

supremacist order in the american south. a process that many white northerners acquiesced in. i think that's an ugly part of our past that we don't want to confront head on. and yet i think we must understand that and we must understand why after the civil war, the united states came back together after a fashion, but that the struggle for reconciliation took place by trampling over racial justice. i think americans have to look at the dark parts of their past, not just the celebratory parts. it's not going to be reconstruction the musical. but i think it's something we ought to pay attention to. the war in many cases still continues in part because reconstruction left so much undone. when people react to me writing and they're not enamored with it, that's their problem. but sometimes i think it's because people who read what other people write assume that they do come with an agenda.

that they do have heroes and villains that they're going to celebrate or vilify. and as historians come to their -- and that historians come to their task with solid ideas about what they're going to do. they're going to exalt somebody or praise somebody. i'm not into that, actually. but it's interesting to see that assumption. often i see those critics are actually projecting their own issues on to me. one time i wrote a book on henry adams back in the 1990. -- back in the 1990's. it was a short book. i knew it would be controversial. i knew the historians would like it, and literary critics who were enamored with adams would hate it. when the book came out and then the reviewed followed, if it was a review which said, simpson doesn't approach -- doesn't appreciate adams' great

achievement, i understood that. that's not what the book was about. it was about how ren i -- henry adams tried to forge a political career and how he failed and how that failure ruzz reflected in his later writings. historians liked it. critics did not. i knew what i was getting into. history is never just the facts. it's how you put those facts together and how you bring the past alive to the reader and give your insight and the things that you know and incorporate them, making it work. that's a lot of fun. when the work is over and you can reflect on what yu written, that can be fun. that little turn of phrase you like, that can be a delightful oment. >> the premise of the book is both simple and complex, right. let me tell you how it started. was doing field work in a

place in central mexico about 16 kilometers soviet of mexico city. -- southeast of mexico city. in a brand new urbanized area where you had 10,000 people moving there per month. i've always been interested in two basic questions. one, two do people survive when they shouldn't. two, how do they excel when they shouldn't be able to do that either? and i've always been trying to touch those questions regardless of where the field work was. in this particular case this came almost by serendipity. i was asked by the guy whose home i was staying in for a loan of 100 pesos. i said what do you need it for? he said what it's for i said what's that? he said we get 10 people together, each one puts in 100 pesos, we take turns over a period of 10 turns and each one gets 90 pesos and the other people who remain in the circle,

it's like a lending circle, keeps putting back in 100 pesos. when your turn comes along you get 900 pesos. i said how does that work? he id, it's based on -- explained the term. it's mutual truss. the people who participate in these are basically people who trust each other. so i asked a basic question, how do you avoid people just getting the money and taking off? he says, well, it's a matter of trust built on your social relationship. which is a very nice, handy, sose yo lodgele argument. the more i delved into it the more i understand that these groups, these are savings and loan and credit associations that vary, as i studied them over a pord of 25, 30 years,

vary in amounts between, like in this one, say, 1,000 pesos over 10 persons, to $25,000. let's say at the -- at one extreme, you have one that's basically made up of 10 people, each one putting in $25,000 every three months. so every three months, the other persons who participate in this, say there's 10 of them, they'll be collecting $250,000. less $25,000. actually, $225,000. they'll keep putting less back in. over a period of 30 months. they'll use that money for investment, or use that money, for example, take care of whatever expenses you have in a particular business. a lot of mexican restaurants, for example, participate in these kinds of things. so that's one extreme. at the other extreme it could be somebody, for example, who uses, say in mexico city, uses the 100 pesos, 900 pesos, buys a big box

of kleenex, sells it for 00 pesos and makes 900 pesos. it could be used for that. or it could be used for ritual obligations. there's relationships, making sure you meet your original -- your ritual obligations. mexicans have a ritual cycle beginning with christmas through easter. there's a lot of other ritual celebrations between including weddings, funerals, baptisms, confirmation, communion, all these punctuating ritual events need some kind of gift. so what happens is that people use this to meet one of these obligations that creates even more density in the network itself. so every time you give a gift, you're going to receive one in -- at some other time because in fact one of your children, children's birthday is coming up. so the collateral then is

constantly being reinforced and expanded as well because new people are coming in. if you don't know somebody and they want to be part of these rotating savings and credits rk uh -- you lend your collateral to this individual. and that individual then is obligated to you to make sure they meet their obligation. and then along that rain, you have to understand, i looked at 135 of these things, from mexico to washington state, these are truly transborder, the fraud rate or the rate in which people didn't pay, was .005%. which is infinitesimal. it's better to participate in these than put your money in the bank. especially one of the major banks in the united states that was recently caught expanding their service to a whole bunch of people that didn't need it. people don't put their moneys into a standard bank, and in fact select rotating savings and

loans associations for a lot of reasons. banks ask a lot of question. if you're a poor person or a person of modest income and you don't have a lot of collateral you don't have a lot of credit. then this is a way in which to get around that. and participate in something that in fact is guaranteed. a bank asks you to fill out forms after forms after forms about your own personal identify. i.e., it's a highly individualized and end individual waited kind of trands action between you and the bank. it's not a social relationship it's an economic one. there's nothing coming back except perhaps minimal interest. the government can't be voed in these because they're not pyramid schemes. if they were pyramid schemes, they would be illegal. but you're rotating the same amount of money between 10 or 20 or 30 people. you're not making any money unless it's what's called a dead

one. that's when you have an organizer charges a turn to organize everything and make sure everybody, that each individual has the money distributed them at the proper point in time that kind of thing then is kind of an earned income for that individual but not for the rest of the participants. part of my obligation as an anthropologist and working in this particular area is to provide a closer proximate narrative to who and what the population is. there's an awful lot of stereotypes, an awful lot of negative information as well as what i would call racialized concepts of immigrant population, especially the mexican population in this region. and being treated differently because of the way you look or what you speak, this in fact balances that negative narrative that is even -- that is being used now in the presidential

election by at least one of the candidates. so in a way, writing the book has three or four or five different layers of reasons for it, one of which is to make that narrative more proximate to who it is, to really provide a kind of understanding, fundamental understanding of the cultural and social and economic behaviors of the population. and three, really, to contribute to an academic literature that didn't exist prior to that xcept in very small terms. >> our visit to tempe, arizona is a book tv exclusive and we showed it today to introduce you to c-span cities tour. for five years now, we've traveled to u.s. cities, wringing the book scene to our viewers. you can watch more of our visits t c-span.org/citiestour. >> this weekend, c-span's cities tour along with our cox

communications cable partners will explore the literary life and history of scottsdale, arizona. west most western -- the west's most western town, on book tv on c-span2. hear about life on route 66, known as america's mother road, route 66 was one of the original u.s. highways between illinois and southern california. in his book the 66 kid, raised on the mother road, author bob bose bell recalls his life in kingman, arizona, located on route 66, and the many thing he is observed while helping his father run a gas station. >> about 1 years i-- ago i got a call from a writer hsm said i read about your article about your father's gas station and i'd like to interview you. i said sure. his first question, the very first thing he asked me is what was it like growing up in such a his taric place. which visit guyden books

specializes in civil war. >> my father was a custer eckor, my mother loved civil war but also loved the women of the west. >> and then on c-span3, hear about the founding of scottsdale from historian marshall tremble who shares the story of winfield scott who saw potential in the arizona salt river valley. >> he just graduated from seminary school and was assigned to a torch when the civil war broke out and lincoln called for volunteers. he wanted to get into it, went back to his hometown in new york and -- a little, tiny town and started recruiting and raising his own company of soldiers and he -- i think he recruited about 33 of his own cousins and his bible study class and he even

recruited the town band. >> and we'll visit taliesin west, the winter home of architect frank lloyd wright. >> an example of how to live in the desert southwest. it was a building that frank lloyd wright used as a laboratory. wright was working to create a new kind of architecture for america. >> the c-span cities tour, saturday at noon eastern on c-span2's book tv and sunday afternoon at 2:00 on american history tv on c-span3. working with our cable affiliates and visiting cities cross the country. >> a live look at the central florida fair grounds in orlando where we expect to hear from president-elect donald trump and vice president elect mike pence this evening as they continue their post election rallies. live coverage in orlando when this event gets started. scheduled for 7:00 eastern time,

about five minutes from now on c-span. in the meantime, more from incoming freshman members of congress. c-span caught up with the incoming freshman members at an orientation meeting on capitol ill. >> when colleen hanabusa, remind our viewers how it is you're returning to congress? ms. hanabusa: it's a very unfortunate situation. i ran for the senate and did not prevail in that election. congressman mark takai assumed my position in congressional district 1 for the state of hawaii. congressman takai, unfortunately passed from pancreatic cancer, he was very young, one of the saddest things i've had to contend with. before he decided to withdraw his name from the election process, he called and he asked me if i would run for my seat again, that's what brings me back. the people of the congressional district overwhelmingly voted

for me and it's a very nice feeling to be supported but at the same time, extremely bittersweet. >> why is it that you said yes to the late congressman? ms. hanabusa: i think it's because he did not want his legacy to be a situation where, we're both democrats, that we may have lost the seat and more importantly than that, he wanted somebody to continue in congress who had a sense of what it was like to be here. so that the district wouldn't lose anything and wouldn't miss a beat, so to speak. that's exactly what the reason was that honoring his wish and also being very honored by it was the reason why i did it. >> what about his legacy will you pick up and carry on? and what about your previous work here that you want to pick up again and try to fight for here in washington? ms. hanabusa: you know, mark wanted to continue in the armed

services area, he was part of the guard. the armed services committee was something i served on for four years and for myself, one of the issues that i was very passionate about before i left the congress was, what did it mean when president obama said we're pivoting to asia pacific? as you can imagine, representing hawaii, asia pacific is critical. we are the most forward of the states, but more importantly than that, you know, what they call the pacific command's area of responsibility, a.o.r. is about 55% of the earth's surface. i tell everyone don't forget what's smack in the middle of the pacific, it's hawaii. as you know, all the sir vises, all the military services are located in congressional district one in some form or another. it was very important and i believe we shared that, but for me in particular it was something that i looked forward to. president obama said that the 21st century would be defined by

asia pacific, whether we live in conflict or cooperation. and then-secretary of state hillary clinton said, let's not forget hawaii is the gateway to asia pacific. that's been something that's really driven me and it is not only for what we call the pivot which people think is a military pivot but it's not that. it's one of the greatest peace movements that i think we have and in addition to that, it's diplomacy as well as the military brens in the area. >> since you left the house what have you been doing? ms. hanabusa: i've been doing a lot of fun things. i was featuring at the university of hawaii law school as well as university of hawaii's political science department and in addition to that i was asked to sit on various boards and also resume my practice of law. it was only a matter of about 18 months but during that period of time it was a wonderful experience to reunite with people and there's so many

different types of issues that hawaii was faced with. a lot of it related to our native group, indigenous people, the native hawaiians. so i was able to keep abreast of a lot of the issues just because it wasn't long enough to be away to divest of the major issues that were facing our community. >> anything you would do differently now that you're -- from your previous years here in the house? ms. hanabusa: i think one thing i would do differently, i feel that having been here four years before, you can hit the ground running and you also are able to look at things and know what to do. i jokingly tell people, i don't have to learn where the bathrooms are, i know where they all are. it's a way of saying that you're familiar with the setting and also having the relationship still, i told people no matter what anybody says, congress is no different than any other local government or local legislature. what it is, it's a matter of

relationships. so we may have partisan labels on us but the bottom line is, it's the relationship and trust that you build and i'm so fortunate that i built a lot of them and they're all here. so because of that, i think that it's not that, you know, well, >> enough know who you can rely on. that is the greatest difference and how i can better serve the constituency. >> do you ever wander out here in washington? >> do you know, i did. since then, senator who retired in 2012, he is somebody i see all the time. -- senatorensitive has taught me about how to be bipartisan. a joint appointment