. >> host: "sag harbor", benji has a bad haircut. >> guest: benji is a kid growing up in new york in the 80s as i did. unfortunately my life was not very interesting so i had to exaggerate. i'm not that cool or compelling so you have to take a little bit of license. when i started the book unfortunately nobody appeared on the page and it became less and less like my friend david or my friend scott. it started off as a autobiographical and i'm definitely in there but the story supercede any kind of autobiographical. i'm trying to make a compelling story which means exaggerating what actually happened to me. >> host: colson whitehead what is the process to get to an elevator inspector or a zombie or an underground railroad in the physical form? >> guest: t i don't do the same thing from book to book. if you know how to write a certain kind of look and perhaps that's foolish butk writing a book that is plot heavy and following up with a book that is not is plot heavy, a book that has a first-person narrator and one that's funny and not so funny is a way to keep it for me i went from a p

it's benji firester, 18-year-old and he's with me now, benji, congratulations. >> thank you.ng. >> killed all the crops in ireland in 1840's which was part of the famine. disease is prevalent all over the world and causes billions of dollars in damages in epidemics, i invented a mathematical model which predicts the spread of the disease and gives farmers information to protect fields and prevent epidemics. stuart: that was pretty good. i didn't think that you could explain it so that i could understand it. very good. you look at weather patterns, i take it, where the disease, infection is located and the wind patterns and you predict this thing is going? >> exactly. stuart: that's it? you invented the algorithm which is e occasion which takes all the weather patterns and bring it altogether. >> the part i invented how things interacts, what times we need to look at wind directions, which fields we need to look at and how does all correspond with a probability or what's your risk of infection and algorithm just puts tall data together from all the infected fields and all the