That should be easy to verify if that is in fact true. Thank you very much. It has been a pleasure. [applause] he might give you at all like to have your book signed, he will be right over there signing books. Get them here and pay for them upstairs. Or if you have them with you, that is terrific. Thank you so much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] shes welcome to this and all a daily times festival of books on everything for mac of the building life. I am john weidner. I write for the nation magazine and i also host weekly pot cast, start making sense. U you guys have been here before. You know the rules and silence cell phones. No personal recordings. You can watch us on cspan when this is over if you want to relive those unforgettable moments. S. We will have time for questions at the end of a book signing afterwards where the session inside an area one. Two of our authors appear today are prolific old pros. Edward humes has written 14rittm books. Brian fagan has written more than 40. So lets start with Jonathan Waldman. This is his first book. [l [applause]tudied w Jonathan Waldman studied writing at dartmouth in the aston knigh University Man center for science journalist impurities read far as at the washington post, the New York Times, the agni reader. She has worked as a forklift driver. I want to get this straight. A summer camp director, a sticker salesmen, and climbing there and make a peer in his first book as rest, the longest were nominated for the l. A. Times book prize inside. Please welcome to the l. A. Times festival of books, Jonathan Waldman. [applause] my opening question for you and his wife a bigger threat to the United States military . Isis or rest. Row that [laughter]hi theres a guy in the pentagon would like you to throw that question not him. He is their nations highest ranked rasta official. He has been fighting a goodow fight for about 10 years now. He is making friends on the hill with a lot of politicians. And among admirals in the navyvy whose day we cant keep going the way were going, losing ships to rust. We cant lose them fast enough. He would date clearly i tried to say i did read in the look that rust is greater than all other natural disasters combined. Think about it this way. Our most abundant element is attacking our most important material all the timeso everywhere. You say theres a ship yard up in Northern California full of rusting naval vessels. The mac it was there. I think theyre slowly gettinge rid of with the name of thate the reserve fleet. Thats a nice way of putting it. In case you need rescue ships. That is where you go to get them. They are so rusty they are polluting the bay in San Francisco and causing a bigia problem for california. I think theyve slowly turned them over to texas but we kept them because we sort of had to peer this kind of an ugly political scenario. It happens all the time. 180 billion aluminum Beverage Cans are manufactured every year. Maybe thats every year. You need each one to be perfect. What happens if its not perfect . I went to Canton School as [laughter]s. And almost got kicked out for asking too many questions because what they do to keep from rusting makes some people in the industry uncomfortable because of endocrine disruptors. But referred to as timebombs are exhibiting timebombs behavior from the top down and said that it is made with my tolerance than anything on a spaceship sent up there. Every time i do this silly thing where i marvel at it because no one looks at the canon inks how amazing it is. When can rust from the inside out of the bottomup and topdown candidates are in a tad part can fly at an hate udi has blinded eye has blinded people, severed peoples achillesit tendon. You cap lawsuits. It is really ugly and vicious the basic holding of the canterbury runoff and recycle. I ran into mckeon and i refer to it as a corrosion material. Every year a number of companies theres a hot market in energy drinks. I dont know if anyone here has invented in a come of you do and you want to sell them come you go to nature can manufacture in sand lake to put my stuff in your suntan. They said send it to us with a tested to see how corrosive it is. If its too corrosive they will call you back and say you back and say youre such as battery acid. T an you need to change the formula. That happens when im seventh times with all energy drinks. An tell me more about this can school. Can and is a big industry. We are beverage consumers. Pepsi, cocacola, anheuserbusch, everybody water, everybody wants to put their stuff in a can and felt that way. The corporation down the road command colorado invites people they used to invite[l people and now they dont inks to me. [laughter] they invite people and i told them who i was and they actually said you couldnt come and they goofed up and sent me an email that said welcome. Heres one it is, here is what to wear. Lunch is included. Wit so i went. They are familiarizing people in the beverage and due with what magic goes on at the can plant and why they are spending a dime a can to buy them by the billions. That asserted in sight to how it goes. I didnt get a diploma. They were not happy with me. But on the day my book came out, the chief corrosion guy from thn packaging month showed up in an email that night avoiding me a can school diploma. You a lot of your book about rust is about the rust fighters that this might be a small thing but really got to me. A disproportionate number of the people you call them rust fighters have mustaches. Can you explain this . Or can you explain anything else . As a group. Broadly i think that engineers have the wisdom that something are not worth fighting and i think facial hair is probably one of them. I want to be clear i think its a great position to take. Shaving every day as we are. I have a lot of comments on amazon saying you have a strange mustaches session. Maybe i do. I think two thirds of male engineers have mustaches. They basically are no female engineer so i cant say anything about that. Hey, talk to people who do some promotion. Engineering 98 male. R] fact. I think well move on now. Will come back to jonathan. Li ed humes is a pulitzer prizewinning journalist, author of 14 books including our duty love affair with trash which is featured here at the bookk festival couple years ago. His writing has been in the wall street journal, New York Times and other places that hes the recipient of a pen award. His new book is called door to door the magnificent, maddening, mysterious world oftf transportation. Its official pub date is today turned out. This book is brandnew. The book has a blurb from the great cuban, founder 350. Org, the leading organization fighting climate change, one of our heroes. And ed humes is in the New York Times on the page. Welcome, treated water. Ed humes. [applause] you open your book with armageddon. How many people here remember the day they closed the four or five for how many hours . Or did ours . 19 53. First time since 1952. The prediction was total disaster. Stay in your homes or do not go out. What happened . We were supposed to fix traffic and it did. For 53 hours. The great irony was closing all those planes improve traffic throughout the los angeles area. A Great Success on that front. The field of dreams phenomenon if you build it they will calm. More have come to fill the vacuum trade. One year after the extra lane open, it took several minutes longer to make the commute. 1. 3 billion on their commute. Ar so did this myth did this and it did exist better traffic will get better traffic would be better if we pour more money into making more lanes for carse ive never were. And yet we are trapped in this ribboncutting love of building new lanes and big infrastructure when theres this thing is stuck in mud of the oped piece, a lot cheaper ways to do what karma debt and did. What th that really i thought was important because it showed how you can successfully makewe traffic that are without really new stuff. I think i have a great solution which is i Stay Home Order everything from amazon. Gps brings it to my house. Ups is driving around every days anyway. Its not the solution forseems everyone . Is sort of seems like it is so convenient. Hi we have a diabetic cat. Not a nice cabin we have to buyy the special cap in the best place to get this from amazon. I clicked on that one day and it arrived in like nine hours. The same day delivery world we are hurtling towards this terrible for traffic. It is going to kill us. Its going to drown us. I talked to the head of ups and los angeles. Any given day they are moving 2 million packages around l. A. , delivering them. They used to take all of thoseby by the truckload to stores. Lets say the average eps ban has 120 packages on it. All of that goes to one place. The orders of magnitude of more trips that have to be taken to move the same amount of good. The head of the l. A. Headquarters for ups to rightparen over this, but i think its fair to happen. He is maddened by the simultaneous desire of consumers to have that convenience and get their absolute hatred of having more trucks on the road delivering stuff in battles against things like extendingee the 710 freeway in completing that after 40 years of not connecting to where it is supposed to go. We wanted on we dont want to pay for a kind of situation. N. We are facing another kind that they are hurtling towards the digital economy. Are you suggesting i should martyr so much stuff . That was my last book. We do get and accumulate so mucc stuff from far off. Thats really what this door to door idea came out of. Looking at my own hobbit and one day in the life of what it take to keep us moving and keep us in socks and shoes and all thatan stuff that comes in at the port of los angeles. Ng 30 , 40 but an is coming up the road that we dont want tosh. Finish you dig down and see howi much we are investing in what we do every day. You have some statistics which i questioned. The morning cup of coffee covered 30,000 miles. This bothers me. The circumference of the earth, i looked this up. 25,000 miles. How could it be from colombia to los angeles i assume we all drink colombian coffee. Maybe you should reconsider. A lot of coffee drinkers lend of course. The one i was picking apart the Starbucks French roast which has three or four different kinds of beans. If you look at the african and south american sources, the fact that germany is sixth or seventh largest importer of coffee to the united state if they dont grow up being but a lot of coffee moves they are. The web we are just talking the beans. It took much more than you might think. If we talk about the commute on the four or five, the transportation of the water, tha milk, sugar, the packaging the coffee comes in. The coffee maker is self which has even more miles on it. You start to see the s transportation for red is much larger. You are right. I hadnt counted the cup with the milk, sugar, machinery. Youve got me a coffee. What about the smartphone. This one is 165,000 miles. The circumference of the earth is 25,000 miles. How can the smartphone take 165,000 miles . Ne is going with matt does. The iphone was my model but i believe all smartphones are similar. If you go to the ontario airport and look at the tarmac in the palace of these plain unmarked boxes under 24 hour guard with the constant video surveillance. Want to you within it, but Everybody Knows they are worth more than their weight in gold. Every day they come out of china, stop at alaska to refill and come into ontario. They filter out the rest. The thing is if you follow the assembly with the home button but the touch i. D. Sent to run it, it not only has thank you. Sages followed that one humble feed at the button you turn your screen on what goes back and forth between china and japan multiple times is one part is attached to an assembly and mr. Dennis country and up rightparen attaching comes from another living thing goes through this incredibleause procedure. But no one has 12,000 miles on it because its constantly on the move as it grows and sophistication and its finally assembled at the plant in china and shipped out to the United States. There are materials, and thele rare element that cannot renounce, all of those have toey be sourced from all over the world. The precious metals. Its almost impossible to raise the actual raw material. Apple is better than most companies that making that information. As its astonishing. I have a toyota. The 30,000 parts in that car went to the moon and back before the odometer badged onemile because everything we do is global. 95 of shoes come in through the port of los angeles from foreign countries. The everyday stuff for years. Not just the exotic stuff has tremendous upgrade from horrify transportation. Youve had some horrifying pollution statistics on the supertankers. Favorite meaning and when you get close to them, you see that the somewhat rust. You realize two miles away. The one i happened to go up was a car carrier in the role it on and off. It its literally a flooded parking garage. Bigger the one to come into this festival. Just amend. The numbers i have is 160 of those container ships. 160 of them on the open these emit particulates and smog causing emissions equivalent to all of the cars in the world. Its about 3 , 4 of Carbon Emissions as well. At any one time from the 100 of the ships are docked in the ports of los angeles among each were waiting to talk and those together have greater emissions than all the cars in thes country. Us. Astonishing. Are we feeling bad enough now . I got to ride in a google car, too. That was fun. They not what was the google car light . They swear they didnt. They have programmed this car to drive mountain view. The first on the road is the speed limit. Its rearended all the time. But we are driving right through the campus and im chatting with the operators arent doing anything other than monitoringwh what the car is doing and showing me what the Machine Vision look like. Walking across the street for some google coder. Talk about facial hair. He was in his own world. Yet a fullsize laptop on if id like to screen out unless typing on it as he was crossing the street. He came out from between two parked cars. If that was me driving wouldve been flying flying laptop,p,andh flying nerd. This car stopped on a dime. He looked across the street. I am convinced that we woulddwew eliminate 90 of car crashes if that was the major mode of individual transportation. It was impressive. E. Im feeling better. Land, trai next, brien fagan was born in england, trade and archaeology at Humber College from 1959 to 1965. He served as keeper ofer of pr prehistory at the living stone museum and northern rhodesia, which is now zambia where he was involved in excavating a series of thousandyearold farming villages. Hes a pioneer in taking archaeology out of academia and make it relevant to his event in newly independent african nations. Eventually he left africa, came to the United States to teach and from 1967 to 2003, he served as professor of anthropology at you see Santa Barbara. Since then, hes been a fulltime writer and independent caller. Hes written a least 40 books, maybe 50. Most of them are historic including the great warming 2008 which was a New York Times bestseller tells the story has 2010 boat his new book is about how animal shaped Human History called the intimate bond. In this book, brian fagan writes about dogs, goats, sheep, donkeys, pigs, cattle, camels and horses, but in real life he lived with cats, fish, turtle and rabbits. Please welcome back to the l. A. Times festival of books, brian fagan. [applause] thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I have been out on a container ship but the pilot from San Francisco bay, truly the most right embedded command under. He turned in its own length it 830 feet long and somehow are f going around in front of it andm he just looked and said nothing. I just kept going. Theres nothing i can do. As i think about by far the most interesting and the most neglect did is the donkey. The bounty is a very cool animal. It has a number of advantages. Its very well adapted to semi arid conditions. It is easily trained and keeps up with very steady pace and it can be used in desert. I have two extraordinary experiences doing this. The first was discovered the work of a talk to those who have traced an ancient trail for the mono to be away for us in the middle of this era. 200 miles. S. It is used for centuries and they would take these enormous caravan and donkeys. A third of the donkeys carried water in chairs in the third. The product, which was semi precious stones. Believe it or not, theyve notit only found the track. They found the skeletons of the donkeys. They found the camps, all in the desert preserved. These guys for the pickup trucks of the ancient world. They were our tiredness. S. And the other one was even much barbs skewer. There is a very well known trade by donkeys, black donkeys between Northern Iraq in a town in central turkey in based on the archives there, bush of cuneiform writing. Is there anyone here who can decipher cuneiform . Dont be shy. I got into correspondence with the charming gentleman and i said to him, he wrote back and said there were six of us. We argue. We quarrel, but we drink. And he gave me all thise corres information. It could even reconstruct the correspondence of wives of their husbands, telling them to bring jewelry. They got details of how the caravans fail, donkeys which were the same that offense. The donkeys are worth nothing. They were anonymous pickups. But they linked the ancient world, even more so initially than a camel. Your book is a history book good bird you debate the history of the domestication . It began a lot of this is just the beginning. Some in northeast africa where they investigated them out of the wild african donkey. But by 3100 b. C. , gary berry also for donkeys in asymmetry associated in upper egypt and the skies were very good considerable ceremony. Though it may look close late, they found they had been overloaded and were tired. These were draft animals. But clearly they were such important that they were buried carefully because the nospace, in an economy, really the most tangible possession you have is your animals and a thousand yeal years later excuse me, nobles had 1