something or don't know anything? quote, you could publicly call a black conservative out of anything you want without. repercussion. yes, i've seen it. broadcasters call people. uncle tom's. there's actually a twitter account that i follow where they out all of the and most them are white liberals who say call them uncle tom's. you use the name name calling goes the list even the n-word and no one says anything. and because they're conservative because they're conservative. so god, you know, clarence thomas does something and you know, the doesn't like it. well, then it's current laws. you can say whatever you want. joy-ann reid called him clarence on national television. she's out of a job. nothing happens when you slander black, conservative or republican. you can call them whatever you want on, television on radio and no cares. and i think that's.

for me, it wasn't about like i'm a republican, cause i'm not. it's a thing that i notice that was an unfair in our society. if we're talking about caring about americans and saying how we should treat people like we want to be treated or even just hyper reacting to some sort of racism that might happen, it gets a black person. but you have a segment of black people that you can outwardly slander on television in and nothing happens to you. and it doesn't matter if you're black or not. that is something that is is not talked about enough. for. in the book, tv's live coverage of the miami fair continues now. the.

good afternoon everyone. my name is hy manzullo that i proudly serve as a vice provost of student affairs and chief enrollment officer here at miami-dade. we are grateful to to the miami-dade college family and and support of our sponsors including the wing family zibi media, the j.w. marriott marquee and brickell and nicholas children's hospital and all other sponsors. we'd also like to thank our friends of the fair members. first received multiple benefits. please consider being a friend of the fair or gift one as we celebrate our 40th anniversary. please supporting miami book fair with a contribution to the next decade. fund. visit the friends of the fair table on our website for more. at the end of session, we will

have time for q&a and the authors will be autographing outside. we know we now can request that you silence your cell phones at this time. it is truly my pleasure. introduce novelist short story writer and editor ask colt chuck, coeditor of from the three worlds, an anthology of ukrainian writers present to panel on the war in ukraine. thank you you. good afternoon. thank you so much for that introduction. thanks so much to mitchell kaplan in his flores the miami book fair miami-dade college and everyone behind the scenes for making this remarkable finale, the miami book fair possible. this 40 years.

it's a privilege to be here with you this afternoon to speak about the war in ukraine. thank you. also, the four extraordinary writers who for taking time, be here with us. and i introduce each of them individually as we begin our conversation conversation. several ago at a memorial for the writer grace paley, vietnamese poet nguyen bi chung thanked paley for her active opposition to america's war in vietnam. he said it is very easy to react to what happens before your eyes. it is very hard to react to something that happens thousands of miles away when the sun shines as as it is today. it's a challenge to the reign of horrors that is war. i therefore want to thank all of you in this room for being here

this afternoon for your compassion and for the people of ukraine and the future of democracy. today is the 634th day of russia's war ukraine 21 months in, it has led to some half a million casualties as that's the estimated total and wounded on both sides, according the new york times. some 16,000 ukrainian children have been kidnaped and deported to russia and belarus. in addition, over 1600 ukrainian cultural sites have been damaged destroyed, among them 600 libraries as well as hundreds of museums and educational institutions. as many have pointed, this is a war not against people, but against entire culture, something i'll return to in my closing remarks.

such numbers tell part of the story but data can too easily obscure or blur important reality is each one of the 16 cultural sites is some version of here of this building of miami-dade college and each one of these 1600s stitution is kept open kept alive by people and in service of people very much like yourselves. or is personal? certainly it so for me my parents were refugees from ukraine who fled in 1944 after my grandfather learned name was on a communist hit list. my family spent five years in a refugee camp before finding a sponsor to arrive in the united

states in 1950. they left almost everything a home, professions, friends. what my grandfather refused to leave behind, where some of his precious books i'll always the wooden crate which sat in our garage in new jersey, right next to the chicken coop. my uncle had built for his birds. my grandfather, a high school teacher, an artists by training, then spent the next 15 years working on a book about the city he'd left behind. every week he'd, take a bus from new jersey to new york to work in the new york public library, which contains some of the archives he needed to finish his project. three years before his death, he published permission the western bastion of ukraine. he wanted to be sure that come what may, his city would not be

forgotten, even if it were at some to be leveled. it to live in his book book. i never expected that i would live to witness a replay of my family's lives in the 21st century, which once so promising. the war became acutely personal for many of us. this past summer when a young writer by the name of victoria molina was killed by a missile strike, the city of kramatorsk, while having dinner with, among others, one of our panelists here, hector abad, patrolling asia, victoria was a novelist and essayist in her mid-thirties, whom i'd met when. she and her family lived in boston. the year before covid. a committed traveler, victoria, and her ten year old son, were in egypt when war began as soon

as it started. she decided to return to ukraine. like most of the writers i know in ukraine, she set aside her own works order to volunteer in support of the war. suddenly, all the country's writers appear to have abandoned their studies to fundraise for drone and helmets for the military, which many of the writers themselves then deliver to the war zones. some writers also enlisted, putting aside their pens and computers and to shoot. victoria decided to put her journalistic skills to use by writing about a remarkable group of women who had been dedicated themselves to documenting war crimes. for nearly ten years. after all, the war really began in 2014. victoria's death came as a shock to many of us here, including to christopher merrill, from whom you'll hear a few minutes. chris had invited victoria and me to teach a creative writing

class students in ukraine via university of iowa's international writing. it also came as a shock to mitchell kaplan a few months before the war. the war started. mitch asked me to invite a couple of ukrainian writers to speak on his popular podcast about how the war affecting writers and the book publishing. victoria was one of his guests. oksana latisha, from whom you'll also hear in a few minutes, was certainly to hear that this friend of her youth both hail from the city of had been murdered murdered. the shock of a sudden death, especially a violent one, is bracing and consequential. but i worry that after nearly years of shock and shock and with a new series of seismic tremors today from the middle

east, we're at risk of slipping into complacency. into what the celebrated writer psychiatrist robert jay lifton called a malignant complacency. it's our hope this afternoon that this conversation will go some way to ensuring that doesn't happen. i'd like, therefore, to turn to one of our speakers, hector abad postulating che, who was with victoria in kramatorsk, hector abad factually insha is one of colombia's most important and celebrated writers. he's a novelist, a memoirist, a journalist, a translator and an editor. he born in brooklyn and studied literature in italy. a number of books have been translated into english, including the haunting olivia. a memoir published by farrar strauss and the farm published by archipelago. his latest novel in spanish is

salva mi corazon. toto is stubborn which about which he will speaking later this afternoon and which will be published in english translation next year by archipelago. i turn this over now to hector. thank you, oscar. and thank you. you all for coming. i don't know. we've if we are in the hands of fate of providence or in the hands of chance. or, maybe in the hands of free will also. five years ago, i didn't know anything. almost about ukraine. i used confuse ukraine with

moldavia or or other countries that were part of the soviet union as, probably some americans or some ukrainians could confuse bolivia. colombia. but one day i received a letter from a very young publisher. two girls, two young ladies from ukraine telling me that they wanted to translate one of my books into ukrainian and. then i began to study a little bit about that. and of course, especially after the russian invasion, they me to be there for a presentation. some four years ago or know, three years ago, but it was the coronavirus and i couldn't we

couldn't go. we all bought this year. they invited me again to a fair in kiev. that is called the arsenal fair in late june. i didn't want to go because i don't have i'm not a brave man or, a war correspondent. i'm really what i is. a very coward, old man. but i anyway, i accepted because these two young, very ladies were there. and, you know, the war, they weren't afraid or. if they were, they were afraid. they they can't concealed. so i decided to go to to arsenal book fair in kiev and at the same time this year, a friend of

mine said he'll have me you'll begin a campaign in south american latino america that is called to crimea. hold hold ukraine. he began campaign in cartagena in a book fair in cartagena hey festival in january year and they join the same campaign trying to convince some of my friends, some of my friends in in the world of literature or art or music to to join us and to protest for the russian invasion. sergio sergio was in cartagena with victoria and melina and also with alexandra mattituck, the noble the ukrainian nobel prize and, and then he he began that campaign and in the book fair in, he made two

presentations. i made the presentation of my book. and then we made a public presentation of these i want the crimea. and this like in this table we we were with victoria lena with aleksandra artichoke, with vladimir yarmolenko and other very good ukrainian novelist and writer and, the president of pen club ukraine and, also a war journalist, catalina gomes, a colombian journalist who used to work in middle east and she's working in in ukraine. after the presentation. we had dinner together and sergio and catalina proposed that for seeing the real war. we should go to the east, to the donbass. i didn't want to go and i tried

to oppose my small wheel against that but i couldn't. i mentioned, i don't know ticket at playing together tickets or, trains or. but it was impossible to say no. and during that dinner, victoria decided that also she wanted to come with us to that region, to the donbass and to sleep there in crimea. the city near i think 20 or 30 kilometers from the from the frontline of the war. so and victoria decided at the last minute that she wanted join us. she wanted to say goodbye to to to that region and to say goodbye to some friends soldiers who where there in because she was taking a scholarship in

paris for one year to finish a new book of her about war crimes of russia in ukraine. but she wanted to say goodbye to soldiers because they probably wouldn't survive while she was in paris. so i remember her in our hotel at 6:00 in the morning. she was also in the last time. she always dressed in black with a small bag and we went 8 hours to the east and we saw more more the war and, the disasters of war. while we approach the the frontline. victoria took us to some places, very special places, and she took, for example, to the town of lyceum, where there is a a little place near ism small

place with a few houses where she found the well, the the diaries of of a brave ukrainian writer vladimir joaquin coal and she took us to the cherry tree where he concealed under the cherry tree where she he concealed his diaries and he told the father about the place but the father didn't find the diaries and victoria had found the diaries and with a shallow caving in in the in the earth and in that same book fairy arsenal book fair she published that diary is with an introduction of her and we were there and we also go well to some places that maybe i could talk that later and it was hey

well we the the last day we decided to offer a dinner to victoria because she was our leader, she was the person who took us to the very special places we visited when where we could interview, see people and civilians, but also soldiers or official was talking to us about. the war for documents for ask for i want the crimea to go back to south america and tell the people how the war was going and how was through the destruction of of buildings, of people, the death of many people of innocent people like.

vladimir bakunin. this man who this writer who was tortured and killed with a with a bullet in the head and then and then and and throw that in, you know, in know in a common right, right. grave. well, the last night with to go to to a restaurant that victoria loved and that she likes in kramatorsk and to the last time she been there with our friend the the war journalist they couldn't find the restaurant. they don't know why. so this time they sure where the restaurant was. it was the ria lounge or the ria

the pizzeria they call that. and there was a curfew at 9:00. so we arrived after seven that say seven, ten. and there was also a dry town during the war. they they don't sell alcohol and well, we see there outside in the terrace of the restaurant and it was plenty of many people, civilians soldiers, children, people, young people just asking for food pizzas and and nonalcoholic beers as victoria asked for a nonalcoholic beer. i ask for. for a quarter for my cheap pizza and i remembered that i took a bottle of whiskey to sergio our leader in i want australia and i

decided against the law. well no so he decided the law to take a whiskey and he asked for two glasses of. two glasses with eyes and he was homeless under the table serving my whiskey and then his whiskey and was this way and. oh that before going to ukraine he was feeling quite old i was feeling bad about my body because i, i lost taste and smell and i had a heart operation and a heart. a heart? yes. open heart operation. and they had a problem. my right ear. and sergio was here to my.

and they didn't understand him because he he talks very very, very, very okay i would finish now i would finish now and well with my whiskey i took my whiskey and i said to victoria. mm. and oh no this is so obvious. will discover us. this is of course this whiskey. and she said and she said don't worry, it looks like apple juice. and then the help came from heaven, from, from the high and 12 people died immediately and victoria died three days after and i was there. and. and i, i'm to be alive. but it's not easy to be alive. but as victoria was documenting war crimes against women and men

in ukraine, i like to document this russian last crime class, this russian crime against victoria. thank you so much, hector. i'd like to turn to carl. and for, say, one of the few essential writers from my carl, and for shea is a poet and memoirist whose most recent book in the lateness of the world was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. she co-edited with ilya kaminsky in the hour of war poetry from ukraine. copies of i have here to give away for free to the first few lucky people coming up. her memoir what you have heard is true a memoir of war, witness and resistance documents the harrowing sights she witnessed as a human rights worker in el in the seventies experiences

which formed the basis of her classic volume, the country between us. she is a distinguished university professor at georgetown university and a chancellor of the academy of american poets. carolyn, you're a pioneer. the poetry of writer of the poetry of witness. i wonder if you could speak a bit about the of language in of extremity. thank you. i'm very honored to be here. hector. that was a very moving story. first, it must be said that war damages language. it is put to military use and to the use of it. its victims numb with shock, leaving them speechless under conditions of extremity language is wounded. fragment did falsified. even the word war or in the case of ukraine, has been censored by

the. it is forbidden to use the word war in russia under. penalty of imprisonment. what is happening? our eyes. they say is not a war, but a military operation. instead of the dead or murdered. we use the word casualty and these so-called casualties are counted in round numbers. in the 20th century and 21st centuries mass murder to be called ethnic cleansing. you can think of your own examples. poetry has always been written during war in the midst of war. poems are composed within the infernal itself. and as might be imagined, many of these poems do not survive. they disappear into the pockets of corpses and the drawers of

demolished desks. the that do often have a strange. the poems that do survive a strange tone, ominous and pleading like an s.o.s. or a mayday sent into the night from a damaged ship. these poems are often addressed to those in safety beyond the war zone, or they are written to the future like messages in a bottle. as paul salon has suggests, to poetry of a witness is marked by the impress of extremity of. all that the poet endured, all that she saw, tasted, felt, smell old. these are reports from the human soul from the depths of being not factual reports such as would appear in newspaper, but the truth, human experience of

what war feels. the witness who writes out of extremity writes his or her wound. as if such writing were making an incision. consciousness itself is cut open at the sight of the wound. language breaks becomes tentative of interrogation or collide escaping most of the prominent. century and 21st century poets. beyond the english speaking world and many within it have endured such experiences during their lives. they created exemplary literary with language that has also passed catastrophe in the words of paul salon in his speech at bremen. one thing remained attainable all close and on lost amidst all

the losses language. each language was not lost. in spite of all that happened, but had to go through its own response senselessness, go through horrible, go through the thousand darkness is of death, bringing speech. anastasia afan alqueva ukraine's award winning who had to escape from her native under heavy bombardment by russian planes, begins her poem in russian. her native language and it in ukrainian. an act of defiance symbolic of how many people in her part of the country feel right now in a time of sent fancies that are blown by the minds in the avenues stories shelled by multiple rocket. this is a poetry marked by

radical confrontation. the intentional sturm nation of one people by another. this poetry have tensile strength to embody such a confrontation. there are precedents in the poetry that emerged from the shoah, from the holocaust in 20th century europe, and in the of mass murders in cambodia and rwanda, in the voices of salon and of the cambodian poet oussama or and the many quick booker poems written in remembrance of genocide against rwandan tutsi. while languages never commence with such horrors, it can and does embed a mosaic chip of in the grout of and challenge attempts to obliterate the truth of history. such as the denial of the holodomor, the terror famine

inflicted upon ukraine by joseph stalin in 1932. what becomes of ordinary life in time of war? according to the poets, people continue as best they can, but they also carry explosives around the city in plastic shopping bags and, little suitcases. war imposes a certain terrible clarity. show me what you have inside. you pray to the great to the rooster perched on a post to the blind stone and ice cold water. and later don't empty washbasins the dark have a raw potato and bury it all. that was all that will be all that calms the. it's all yours. these poems provide practical and useful advice how to comport

oneself in such a time and what to pack. should sudden flight become necessary. thank you, carolyn. our next speaker is, legendary traveler and, former war correspondent christopher, whose most recent books include on the road to leave you. poetry flares, prose poems and self-portrait with dogwood, a memoir. he directs the international writing program at the university of iowa. his writings on the war of succession in the former yugoslavia include. only the nails remain. scenes, the balkan wars and the old bridge. the third balkan war and the age of the. chris, thank you as called. and thank you, hector and oksana and carolyn.

it's important subject to talk. and i'm going to begin with a little from the late poet laureate, charles simic, who said, note to future historians, don't read old issues of the new york times, read the poet's. and that's something that i've kept in mind when i was covering the wars of succession in the former yugoslavia and in other conflicts that i have found myself in afghanistan and iraq, syria and one commonality between, the ethnic cleansing that we witnessed in former yugoslavia and the attempted eradication of all things ukrainian by the russian military is that the civilians are the ones who suffer the most right. indiscriminate shelling is one of the hallmarks of was one of the hallmarks of the siege of

sarajevo is also a hallmark of the fighting in in. and as we've seen most salient legal victory. melina was tragically killed in kramatorsk. one thing i kept thinking about as hector was talking is that victory was already a really talented novelist and and during the war, she became really an extraordinary poet, as if she as if the war itself inspired her or hurt her into a new way of to address the terrible condition that she and her countrymen had found in. and i was thinking it would. a school mentioned 660 cultural sites have been destroyed in sarajevo. the siege of nicola collier, which had a professor of american literature, the

university of sarajevo. he gave speeches long before the war from the balcony of the national library against capital punishment. his best friend, a wonderful american literature professor, uncle riddell, cavett's uncle was of croatian descent. nicola of serbian descent. the war began and nicola went to other side and he was one of the people targeted in the national library, destroyed the library and august of 1993, just millions of books and priceless manuscripts going up in smoke. and i'm always thinking. how do you balance that? here's what longo did during the war. the open society institute created a small private radio station called radio z or wall, and they asked if he wanted to have a have a show. and he said, you know, i'll play country western because country western music know any ethnic differences.

well, that might be a slightly, let's say, naive of cultural of current country western music in this country. but on his show, he often humanitarians diplomats, journalists and he ended show by playing elvis presley's heartbreak hotel and then saying, you know, don't ever give up hope. that's what they and by they he meant the serbian soldiers encircling the city, besieging the city cutting off gas, water and electricity and killing thousands of civilians, men, women and. so that's what they you to do. and it seems to me that what we have seen going on ukraine with the extraordinary amount of cultural activities the poems that caroline and ilia kaminsky have collected for the anthology of the poems in a time of war are emblems of that activity of

ways not only to. lay their terror or at least for the moment, but as as our own. robert frost said, poetry is a temporary it can be a stay against confusion in the poems that have come out of this are temporary stays against confusion. the final i want to note is as a point of commonality is that just as our attention right now is justifiably all on the horror in gaza, the horror october 7th, and then the ensuing horror in gaza and, we have pushed ukraine off to side. same thing went in the early nineties during the war in the former and i remember going to a film festival in venice not long. the concentré camps that serbs

devised for both bosnian croatian civile largely i went to a big panel at the venice film festival thinking, well, they're going to address this right this is this the pressing matter the day? no they were upset. the the u.s. had signed on to the berne treaty determining who was supposed to get the credit for the film. at the end of the film, the auteur or the company. and i have always said no. when when the world falls apart as it seems to be doing in so many ways right now at this hinge in history, there, it's a great temptation to turn away and not to look at it. but what was trying to do, what the poets and ilia have collected for us, what so many brave have been documenting throughout this time, is they're giving us the news that stays

news in order to make us be awake. and ideally to continue to try to bear witness and make those sorts of decisions that might bring this to an end. not long. the dayton peace accords were signed. i was driving out of sarajevo. i'd gone in and suddenly it was peace time. it was quite strange. after all the terror of the preceding three and a half years. and i was driving out with the humanitarian and we into toward a village, a serbian village. and he said, now you're going to see something that's going to make you go crazy. and what it was, we came around the corner and we saw one building. absolutely in completely scattered. it looked like spaghetti and. all the buildings around it were untouched. and he said to me, that's what one smart bomb, a cruise missile, had done. just imagine how many lives would have been saved if had

done that three years ago. i think about that these days when trying to find the supplementals for arms, ammunition to go to ukraine, when our own congress is than dysfunctional. it's time to be saying to them, please deliver arms. let's get this war over with. save lives. thank you. thank you so much, chris. our final speaker, oksana louisiana, is one of ukraine's most revered and versatile, a novelist, a poet, translator and scholar. her for her latest novel, ivan and she was awarded the review city of literature, unesco's prize and, the trustees of tank national award for fiction. the book has been beautifully all over the u.s. the new translation that has just

appeared. harvard will be bringing out her first novel in 2024, and my own press hopes to produce a selected soon after. she's currently assistant professor in ukrainian studies at the university of texas, austin. oksana. thank you so much. and thank you for being here. so i like to talk about how ukrainian literature, ukrainian writers are coping with what happened and how do writers, what to write about now and how to do it. since since the war changed, everybody's lives, so many, many ukrainian writers are actually the front lines as we speak. many of volunteering for the army and delivering aid to the troops. many had to become refugees predominantly. women who are now single handedly responsible for the

children whom they had to evacuate from ukraine. and just as caitlin said, war really attacks language destroy, is it? and what exactly is left? and pretty much everybody went through period of searching for meanings. how do i write now? what do i write about? is it even possible at all? so we are facing this very elemental question. what is our relationship with language as such? it actually do anything? can it achieve something? and on the one hand, what i would like mention is that this war is not just the war of weapons, it's also the war of narratives. and ukraine had to make a room for world for itself in the last couple of years trying to explain the world, who we are, where we come from. and that's when we came to the realization and the world to the realization that most of our literature with the exception of some contemporary writers, is

not translated. and means that these meanings were not really talked about. and we don't know much about ukraine. we are talking. we're talking about the west. so for example this year in in the new yorker, there was poem by taras savchenko, who is a ukrainian and a writer of the 19th century, considered our nation maker in the translation of us killed men in the church and that was an unprecedented thing. again, it may not seem such, if we do not know history of ukraine's relations with russia. but russian imperialism and eventually soviet imperialism viewed our writers as kind of not really all that great. so ukraine couldn't claim greatness or even any place. so everything was reserved for someone else. and i think right now is the historic moment we are starting to put our writers forward

where. people can actually read them. people can understand where we come from and what kind of war this is that this was going on for not just two years and not even eight or nine years, starting in 2000, 14, but for 300 years, really. and. that's one part of this answer. yes. war language. but it also gives us courage to intervene and to actually change these narratives that have been around for so long. but the other question is just on the level of actual creative prose process, how do we write all of this? what do we say? and the genres that are right now the most prevalent. the ukrainian literature are memoirs, diaries or poems, or some short fiction that people write, sometimes straight from

the front lines. victoria melena, whom we already mentioned here, said in horror a critical introduction to the diary of vladimir mccullum, the writers that was killed by the russians, that her biggest fear is that will become the executed renaissance. the executed renaissance ukraine happened in the 1930s during stalin's purges, and the fear was that this would be, god forbid, a second installment of it or more than that. so but anyway, returning to actual writing and the genres, sort of the struggle with, trying to find a voice or a tone or at least somewhere to speak, we have had again, a great spurt of creative activity. lots of people actually started putting together different anthologies of writings of them in english, some of them in ukrainian, and some of them in other languages, like in italian

example, where they collect the works of several writers under. this cover and these. these writers and poets are informing the world on a different level about what's going on because poetry for example works directly. it speaks to your heart. it's not necessarily a conversation about colonialism and imperialism, but it's actually giving you a sense of where the person is. and the metro within one of the poets who actually is now in the army. just yesterday posted wonderful poem in his social media about an operating room, which is kind of a makeshift operating room where the doctors are to save the life of a soldier. and there's a western journalist trying to document, which is also important, of course, and he's talking about how half of the room is light and half of

the room is dark. and you know this is this, this gives us more of a sense of what's actually going on. erin let's see, like an award winning ukrainian poet and writer has a striking poem about a woman who has lost her husband and she is crying and she's depressed. she doesn't want to go out of the house. then her parents come comfort her a little bit. and then the day where she opens her makeup kit and she paints lips on her and she says this be her smile now, because now half of the country has that kind of smile. so after drawing a young poet who just started writing when the war happened, writes his friend who is drowning in the river, this is a matter for they're not really letting him the body drown. they're trying to recover the body. but it's again puts in this situation of loss that is just

unimaginable especially in the context where people depend on each other like that. so i think is standing strong terms of its literary activity. and i hope we will keep standing strong. and i think we received a lot of help from the west, especially in the sense of the military stuff and also in the sense of informing everybody, giving us space and place to actually talk and being willing to hear our voices and to try to understand our history, which again was falsified and not spoken about centuries. thank you. so before turn to questions. oh, so we have 2 minutes for questions. so are there any questions in the audience? there are microphones, at least

one in the middle aisle. please please. well, certainly the ukraine situation is foremost in my and i guess a lot of people here as well but we've got this situation with nagorno karabakh and azerbaijan and armenia without adding any there's objectively thoughts on what's going on with israel, gaza. so of conflicts to comment. so thank you. thank you. any other questions please. yeah for mr. merrill or anyone else who wants to address it understand correctly. you as a reporter a correspondent. anyway the mindset of the people who were indiscriminately shelling reminds set of the

people who are doing what they're doing in ukraine. how do you make sense of? and how does try to get through to persons with such mindset? i mean, you in covering sarajevo must have been thinking this for a long time. i don't know if you understand my question. yeah, i think one minute, chris, i'll answer it this way. i once during the siege sarajevo, i gave a reading at the the bosnian writers club and in the introduction, the man made a joke. he said, well, our is among poets. they're either trying to kill us or. they're trying to heal us. what he was talking about was the famous russian poet named eduardo limonov come to parlay this suburb of sarajevo, and he was filmed shooting an automatic

weapon down into sarajevo. who knows whether he hit anybody or not. but he was clearly he had such glee in eyes as he was shooting. and we we all know that in many conflicts, there are people who who take glee causing pain to others and i can't begin to explain it. but as a writer, as a reporter i can try to document it with the hope that it did somebody in eduardo limit offers a lost cause. he's a war criminal. he's a lost cause. but those who might find themselves inclining toward what lehman of was doing might see in an accurately phrased report or poem, some element of common humanity they might want to try to hold on to as against the cruelty of those on the

offensive. thank you, chris. that's all we have time for. i just want to mention finally, that at the end of, an event such as this one is always wondering what can one do to help what can do to help is go to the web page or books and books where will find a link to a project that was kickstarted by mitchell at miami's mitchell kaplan helping ukrainian books booksellers. this is fundraising with direct to help out those who have lost their jobs, their homes their livelihoods and also help replenish the destroyed libraries. and we've managed to raise $50,000 so far. there's much more to go. please be generous. thank you so much for your attention. and writers will stick around here in the hallway and glad to speak with you. there are a few free books here. please grab some books. also. thank you so much for coming.

while. we're currently in a break, events at this year's miami book fair. we'll be back shortly with more live coverage. of. the.

book tv has been on the air over 1300 weekends. we covered nearly hundred book festivals and featured 2000 authors, including this event. and his doctor, dr. benjamin waterhouse, who'd been a friend of the family for years, who became the head of the harvard medical. a wonderful letter to john quincy adams, who was then president of the united. and he said this. but week, as his material frame, his mind was enthroned. if you read that, you go way back, way, way back to the summer, 1756, when john adams was 20 years old. 1756, 20 years short of the

summer of 1776 and he was teaching school in worcester, massachusetts, which was then the frontier. keep in mind that in that time, two thirds of all of massachusetts, this was still forest. two thirds of pennsylvania were still forest. largest building in all of america was nassau hall at princeton. civilization was just a little grim along subways of european civilization. american western civilization, just a little grim along the coast. only about 50 miles deep. it was a vastly different not just from the present, but from europe. and here he was with what he thought was the the frontier teaching in a one room schoolhouse, miserable he knew didn't want to be a schoolteacher. and his father had thought he would be a minister that's how he got his way he got his scholarship to harvard. but he decided that he didn't

want be administrative. he wasn't cut out for that he decided he wanted to be an attorney, a lawyer and to get into public. and on the night of august 22nd, a sunday after having attended church day, which was to be a lifelong for john adams, he went out under the. so inspired by the sermon, he said, and also in a state of euphoria. and it would also seem by a feeling of relief that his decision not to become a minister was at last resolved. and he wrote of the glorious shows of nature overhead and the intense sensation of pleasure they evoked beholding the night. the amazing concave of heaven, sprinkled and glittering with stars. he was thrown, he wrote into a kind of transport and knew that

such wonders were the gifts of god. expressions of god's love. but the greatest gift of all. he was certain was the gift of an inquiring mind mind. he would become a lawyer. but of all the provisions that he god has made the gratification of our senses are much inferior to the provision. the wonderful provision that he has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason he has given us to find out the truth and the real design and true end of our existence. it will be hard, he wrote meaning the studies that were still of him. but the point now determined i

shall have the to think for myself. did you know that all 92,000 plus hours of book tv programing available online just visit book tv dot org to watch full programs on your favorite authors and. our live coverage of the miami book fair continues now. at.

no exactly. nine and. yes, i did try to get my.

name. out. my time where that can have on

this. you know. yeah. it's. good afternoon everyone my name high manzullo that i proudly serve as a vice provost of student affairs and chief investment officer here at miami-dade. we are grateful to miami-dade college and volunteers for support of our sponsors as well including the green family foundation. zibby media, the j. the j.w. mario markey and brickell and nicholas children's and all of our other sponsors. we'd also like to thank our

friends of the fair members for receive multiple benefits. please consider being a friend at the fair. as we celebrate our 40th anniversary, please consider supporting miami book fair with a country beautiful to our next decade fund, visit the friends of the table and our website for more information. at the end of the session, we will have time q&a and the authors be autographing books outside. we now kindly request that you silence your phones at this time. it is truly my pleasure. introduce mr. ben mckenzie and mr. jonathan jonathan taplin in conversations with billy corbyn. billy corbyn, an american documentary film editor along with producing partner alfred spellman. he is co-founder of the miami based studio. ron carter, which has created films such cocaine, cowboys, dogfight, the you the you part

two and god forbid the watched documentary in hulu history. mr. ben mckenzie in easy money cryptocurrency casino capitalism and the golden age fraud enlist the help of his coauthor journalist jacob to investigate crypto and its remarkable, remarkable crash. weaving together stories of average traders and victims, colorful crypto visionaries, hollywood's biggest true believers anti crypto whistleblowers and government operatives. easy money is an underground look at the perfect storm of and criminal fraud. in the end of reality, how four billionaires are selling fantasy. the future of the metaverse, mars and crypto. jonathan taplin explores the personal backgrounds and cultural power of thiel, elon musk, mark zuckerberg and, marc andreessen showing how their tech monopolies have brought

middle class stagnation and out of american towns, a radical increase in income and about acrimony. now introduce to you the panel. thank you. good afternoon book lovers. how's it going? right right. i'm very pleased be here with these two renaissance men, star of stage and screen now bestselling author. jonathan, you got started as a in the music business managing and producing for artists you may heard of some obscure folks like bob dylan george harrison then later became a film producer for some young up and comers like martin roger

spottiswoode, vendors and now an author. your your descent into lowbrow has been impressive. jonathan so i want to start off gives both ben and john a few to tell you a little bit about their books. so so we can start this conversation and we'll start with ben. okay great. hello. good afternoon. as. as we were discussing, i am an actor by trade normally, but. about two years ago i fell down the crypto rabbit hole. i was bored. the entertainment industry was on ice during the pandemic and a friend of mine suggested that i buy bitcoin some people in this room may have had a similar experience at the. but i have a degree in economics and my friend had given me absolutely terrible financial advice. i was in my twenties and

encouraged me to invest in a thing that i think was a penny stock pump and dump. anyway, i had lost some money and he had lost some money and so when my friend dave, my very good friend, still friend, said i should buy bitcoin, i thought maybe, maybe i shouldn't, maybe i should at it though. and and i did. and i became obsessed with it. i became absolutely fascinated by it and and couldn't get it out of my head. and so i well i, i got my medical marijuana card during the pandemic as well because i like but there is a limit and i was definitely over it. and so i took edible and i thought i should really write a book about this this thing which lot of people also have probably had that experience in this room. it's usually a terrible idea, but but it probably was. but i but couldn't get out of my head. so i reached out to a journalist and i invited him to drinks. we both live in brooklyn and i

said, jacob, wonderful journalist from the new republic who wrote tech criticism. i had written a very funny piece called even trump knows bitcoin is a scam. which i appreciate it. and so jacob and i, you know, went on a blind date and i said, i've got a crazy idea, but this was august of 2021. so was like, you know, it was on tv was all the celebrities were hogging it and said, you know, i, i think it's a huge ponzi scheme. i think it's going to collapse. and i want to write a book about it and. he foolishly agreed. and we started reporting on it and traveling all over the world or into el salvador, the only country in the world trying to use cryptos, real money. we were here in miami for the miami bitcoin conference last year, which claims to be the biggest bitcoin conference in the world and other places. so the book came out july. i'm very pleased with that includes interviews with people such as sam bankman-fried who has now been obviously convicted, one of the largest financial frauds in history, and also includes other colorful in

cryptocurrency let's say. so that is my minute spiel and i love that we're having conversation a mere football field away from the crypto bull that now located here on camp and the wolfson really so just want be i grew up in texas is not really a bull it doesn't have balls it's really more of a steer i would argue can we say that on c-span sorry is that all right going to have to edit this out. it's a steer. so it's a crypto steer. i think it's more i mean, i would argue just doesn't have any it doesn't have the appropriate. okay. all right. good segway. sorry, jonathan. so a man with some cojones. that's a good one. jonathan taplin. so i'm kind of like ben. we both have written books saying emperor has no clothes. exactly. my book is about elon musk, mark zuckerberg, mark harris, and and thiel and.

all of them have a very different of the future than i suspect most of the people this room do. most of us hope that science technology can be used to improve the planet we live on. whether that means solar power or wind power or using 3d printing to make houses for people who don't have houses but these four believe, like sam altman does, that artificial intelligence will as, haldeman said, reduce the cost. intelligence to zero. that the marginal costs of intelligence will be in ten years, which means that if, for instance, you have a job as, a copywriter in ad agency, you won't have that job.

in ten years, the a.i. will the work. and so they're preparing for a world where there's a huge number people unemployed. so mark zuckerberg believes that that be a reason for you to put a virtual reality helmet on for 8 hours a day and pretend you live in a fantasy universe. mark hendrickson thinks that should buy nft is and crypto because then you'll be able to make a fortune without working it'll be easy. elon musk thinks we should give him 10 to 20. true dollars to go to mars. the first mission, which cost 10 trillion, would take 50 people to mars. he's not sure how they're going to get back from mars as he's on it. i mean, as long as he's on it feels like i would write 20

trillion, you know, i'd pay a fair amount. and peter thiel has the weirdest of all ideas, which is that he's going to live to the of 200 right now he's to do that by going to san diego once a month and getting blood from 15 year old boys because in his at the methuselah corporate and literally that's the name of his institute in his lab the old rats that get blood transfusions from young rats live longer than the old rats that don't get blood transfusion. and so he's extrapolated to think that if he gets blood from these 15 year olds, he'll live to hundred and just suck. so that doesn't happen. he's also up to be frozen and pulled out of the frozen tube in 150 years. if they've solved whatever

disease came up with. this is called trans humanism. and it is, as francis fukuyama said, the most dangerous idea in the world. i think we're in what the italian philosopher gramsci called an interregnum. the old is dying and the new cannot be born in this interregnum. any morbid symptoms appear so old that is dying is obviously maga right? i mean make america great again. that's like idea that. we could go back to the 1950s and everything be great. the new is the idea of going to mars or as was played out in the last 48 hours that open i a battle between people think that hey i might be dangerous that

was the borg and people who think we should just put the pedal the metal and go and that was sam altman obviously the board tried to fire at sam altman and then of course the money microsoft had poured through tinder billion into the company and said, oh no, you don't. and i promise you within 8 hours the board will all be sam altman will be back in control and there will be a new board is very friendly to microsoft. so that's essentially my story. and i'm sticking it. i want to ask, there's a lot of these characters we sort of worship at the altar of billionaires in this country, and there is assumption that they're all genius says, how else did they become billionaires. so whether it's the four that you're profiling your book, elon musk thiel zuckerberg,

andriessen although in miami every peter thiel story starts like this this, so is he here. well, we'll get to that in a moment but and then sam bankman-fried there's there's various figures i want to ask or any of them geniuses i'll tell you, the only one that i met was definitely not my opinion. and i don't mean be crude about it, but i interviewed sam bankman-fried in july of last year. that year, his company was worth $32 billion, supposedly he was one of the 100 wealthiest people in the world, according bloomberg and. i sat across from a 31 year old bright know a kid 45 like he's a kid, a young, a man of one years old who was clearly intelligent but not the the brilliant genius

i'd been sold in the marketing campaigns, where he was best friends with tom brady and he and gisele was there. esg advisor and it was it because that was clearly organic friendship there it was. it was absurd. it was i was in an absurd. you referenced the emperor's new clothes, which is the story that i use. i was reading my daughter, the story i decided to go down this this wild journey and was because i saw myself as the child in that story. i'm the one going these naked and everyone else is going naked as is not everyone else. meaning the people in this room. i bet a lot of folks saw something similar, but in the media, if the story wasn't being told and i thought found the power of the and the power to build sam really, it was just insane anyway, the title of the chapter devoted to that interview was the emperor's badass naked. so that gives you a good idea.

jonathan, do you want to talk about the or any of them? yes. i mean, i don't think any of them geniuses either. i mean, i think all very sure that they know where the world going. and you psychologists have this notion, kind of logic of control and and people like these for and sam have what's known as an internal logic for control and others they believe they're in control of the world and that they can make things happen whereas thanks to their genius of creating social media and other poisons most people, especially young people, have an extreme logic of control in others, they believe that they're forces are controlling their life that they have no control over. and that's why when you look at

the teenage suicide rates, they all start sky rocketing in 2011 when facebook put the like button on social media and now, you know, in the last eight years, teenage suicide has gone up by 55%. so there is an this isn't just correlation, not meaning. i mean, jonathan haidt and lots of the most important psychologists in america believe that there's direct correlation between these people created and what is events. but worries me more is that i don't think we're thinking about the world that they want to create, which is a world in which i and robots do, most of the work and you on one sense,

i'd like to think that could be a good future sam moment believes that we're going to have to have something called universal basic income. in other words, you all get paid to stay home in your pajamas right now, whether you're going to have any sense of meaning from staying home in your pajamas with your virtual reality headset is maybe a big open question, but it is perhaps better than the kind blade runner world that we might to if all these people are out of work and there's way to support them. so i don't think these people have it through, you know, and i think that you're making so many good points. i would just echo kind of what you're saying, the sense that it's also possible you were very good at one particular thing that does not make you a genius about everything else, the entire world. it just doesn't you know, you're

very good at your running a business, making electric car, doing whatever is okay, great. i think you should be taxed very heavily. if you're making and billions of dollars so that i do believe in universal basic. but i agree with the idea they're not after for the right reasons. but anyway think that. this media i you know, i come from the media obviously i'm very aware of how stories are told and spread this narrative become so deeply ingrained that i think it's becoming difficult i think there's a there is a good amount of cynicism amongst a certain generation that grew up with the internet it's also mixed with a heavy dose of depression. so i i've that firsthand with crypto because of course most people in crypto lose. they're mostly young men, they're not supposed to talk about it. they're supposed to keep it to

themselves. they're supposed to hodl, which means on for dear life, ride the crypto wherever goes. and if you sell, you know you're a wimp. you didn't have enough faith and and suicide rates are really high. so i, i the power that we give these people is extremely, you know, i think one of the things that ben spoke points out was if you if you remember, you november of 2021 and if you would watch a football game there would be at least five or six advertised points for a crypto exchange and of the miami stadium had to. and serena and the l.a. stadium had crypto.com on it and they're not subtle and they spent about $250 million in about three

months pushing crypto and they got matt damon, tom brady and lebron james and all these stars to do it and it's scott galloway pointed out at that point in in say. november 2021 about 2% of the holders of bitcoin had 90% of the bitcoin they were thrilled to sell at 60,000 and the coin so the suckers which is what peter thiel pushed off by media advertisement piled in they sold their bitcoin and by april it was down to $19,000 a coin. i think the bitcoin conference in miami was the last hump that was the last gasp of that. one of the last gasp, yeah. it was 40 something. it was actually dropping like a thousand a day throughout the conference. it was pretty funny, weird. but, but obviously it yeah.

i mean jonathan speaking many good points. one of them is just the concentration, the stories of cryptocurrency. all of them aren't true. one of them is that it's democratized, decentralized, whatever. it's extremely centralized. there's very few players that count. 90%, as you said, of of the bitcoin or in something 2% of the addresses. it's it's really, really. if it was a commodity, there would be a a cartel that would control it. that's how you would describe it. and so that's sort of how i do describe it. the book. well, let's talk about that. everything we've been told about crypto decentralized. it'll democratize the financial world. it will help the unbanked and underbanked engage in financial transaction. it's a hedge against inflation and untethered from traditional fluctuations and volatility. none of that is true, jonathan. this is one of the primary overlaps, obviously, between your two books, you have a chapter called, the crypto con, you write overtly. crypto is pyramid scheme.

that's basically the title of your whole book. ben, your testimony, the senate banking committee as well. let's talk about that. how did this ponzi scheme if you're if correct play itself out front of the entire world in front of basically with the blessing of very important and powerful people and continues to i i think it relates back their other big holding. i mean these the four people i talk about all control social media twitter, facebook, instagram, whatsapp right and so it's very easy to use social media to pump things. just look elon used to do with dogecoin, you know he'd say one day he'd say, i'm going to start accepting, which was this worthless kind of joke. it was made as a joke. it was a joke. i'm going to i'm going to start accepting it to pay for your

tesla. yeah. so dogecoin at the was like $2 a coin and the next day it was $120 a coin. right now. you know, elon owned a bunch of doge and funding the development it, he was funding walter isaacson's revealed that elon musk was funding the development of this thing which looks an awful lot like an unregistered, unlicensed. right and he went on saturday night live and he showed it. yeah, he was the dogecoin expert. there's a hilarious bit where he goes on the news and and the the hosts are like explain it me blockchain, blah blah blah blah and explain it to me. sounds like a hustle not sounds like a hustle. yeah, it's a hustle. i, i live on national television. for those of you who don't know about dogecoin we had our own version of that here called miami coin. i guess miami coin. that mayor francis suarez was i mean, miami as you know, is like a fyre festival was an entire

city, you know, and and so and and instead of billy mcfarland, we have mayor ponzi post alita francis suarez and yes just said ponzi possibly to on c-span just happened and and we had a pump and dump scheme with this with these magic beans that the mayor was selling, these imaginary coins that quickly, of course, became absolutely utterly worthless, which could only have been predicted. everyone from the very beginning. and i want to talk. yeah, jonathan, i'd just like to say thing like we're having some laughs about all this, but there's another side to. elon's ownership twitter now called x and and even sucker ownership of facebook. we're going to have an election year, and i promise you that whatever you thought happened in

2016 will be that time's 100 because the ability of ai to create this information and use this platform to push it out and and you of all seen this just since war in gaza started, the amount of the amount of garbage that's on these platforms partially pushed by elon himself, to the point that almost every serious advertiser has said. we're not going near this platform. and now on monday morning, he's going to sue the person who pointed this out. you don't have to wait till monday, genius. it's all done electronically these days. you should probably know that you can file the thing whenever you want. you don't have to wait until monday paper over to courthouse. i thought this guy was a tech guy. the hell is going on, right? i was going to pivot the miami connection, but since you brought it up, i want to talk about your book, jonathan, and

what you call fantasy culture specter in place of truth, what i refer is the wwe ification of america and the world. you talk about use of fantasy in tech politics and of course, crypto so let's talk about that because. also, you cite various science fiction, huxley among them in your in your book. and it seems as some of these characters, i'm not sure if art was predicting life or life is now imitating art in the way that these technocrats, as you call them, are kind of playing out their own sci fi fantasy, inspired by books and films of their childhood, right? well, look, you know, this is we're not living in a real world. this a completely self-created situation. if we know we're from miami, let's let's yeah. and new england has actually suggested that we are living in a matrix like you know but let's

let's for instance, deal with the notion these men all put forward that they're libertarians, they believe in liberty, they are all crony capitalist. space x gets all its money from the us government. the satellite company gets all its money from the us army, even we're providing satellite coverage for ukraine and even though elon can turn it off any, we start getting too close to. i'm t tesla got before. $100 billion loan in 2008 from the us government. tesla sells its green car credits to every other car company. so i mean elon elon could not exist without the government he's not a libertarian. let's not pretend that and

neither are any of the others. marc andreessen sells autonomous. if you don't know what that is, just google killer. these are weapons that have no control there's nobody in a trailer in controlling them they they make their own decisions to pull the trigger. now they have a very hard time at 100 yards distinguishing a man with a gun and a man with a broom. but he's still going to push this and so, i mean, i think this notion that we're living in a reality world is not true anymore anymore. i you spent a lot of time here working on your book, ben. i kind of i get this question asked me a lot why miami why? it's why i came up with the answer because miami. because there is no it's sort of inexplicable. why has miami this sort of techno and crypto hub, why do we

have left zarina to the east? the crypto steer to the to the west? why this continue to be hustler's paradise as it always has generation after generation? but why did these folks get attracted this two americas, casablanca yeah, i think it has a certain you know, a lot of the business is run offshore in places like the bahamas, which is where fdx was headquartered. with some of them. they're often run through shell corporations there. so there's sort of money ties that i know geography isn't supposed to matter the virtual world, but it really when you're especially when extradition treaties. yeah you know extradition some people now are just hanging out in countries that just happen to not have an extradition treaty with states. it's so interesting so i think there's some of that always been as you said as you know better than i like it's a that prided itself on a certain kind of hustle and crypto really

embodies that and then i think it also is marketing you know i think i saw i attended the trial of sam bankman-fried in new york and. one of the things that i was interested to sort of small details was how he made the decision to buy the naming rights to fdx arena. some of it was just what teams were available. there's funny moment where they the royals, the kansas city royals baseball team is available is i don't want my brand to be associated the royals anyway was like, ouch is kansas city anyway she bought it because it had the the the sex appeal you know it crypto is really just a story right? there really isn't anything there. it's just bits of computer code ledgers called blockchains. so you have to tell the story and when it's jonathan pointed out, when you have hundreds of billions of dollars to market the american public and where you get that hundreds of

millions of dollars from you, from whoever invested in the exchanges, from their customers, that's where they got the money to market to more people. of course, they were going to go to places miami and be all over, you know, the sexiest youngest city in america or whatever, you know, marketing is. yeah, but i don't want you to all feel like you have an external locus of control, right? you that that you know, that there's mysterious forces going to control your life, that they're naked. i think, you know, because i've made movies most of my life. i've watched both the writers guild and the screen guild over the last six months fight a resistance movement against a.i. in other words, marvel all wanted to be able to put every screenplay ever owned into a large language model. and instead of waiting for nine months for a good screenwriter

to churn out a screenplay, they would literally put, you know, have someone write a four paragraph prompt. and in an hour. they'd get a first draft screenplay. now we know it would be pretty --, but it didn't matter as a matter because they get some poor out of work. screenwriters that everybody would be doing. it to polish it and put his on it so they could get a copyright because the copyright office won't a pure machine written something a copyright. so and as far as the actors, the studios wanted the ability to take fans body scan it and then own it. yeah. and put him in the background of any scene they wanted, you know, i mean that's what wanted of course the, the guild held out against that. yeah. no. and so in that there are ways to resist this but also have to

begin thinking about what happens if these people persist and do get a i to the point that it takes a of people's jobs and i think anyone's taking that serious and i'm not positive it would be a terrible thing you know if a lot of people a lot of time off maybe they'd help each other build their houses or maybe you know you'd homeschool your kids or maybe you maybe there's another kind of countercultural whole earth catalog vision of the future that we could find. and maybe a lot of people who never could write a book would get a chance to do that. and they would probably be a lot of bad writing and a lot of bad music and a lot of bad painting.

but out of that, maybe something good come. we were going to open up the floor shortly to questions, folks. if you line up down the aisle, mike and in the meantime, while we wait for you, i'd like to ask the both of you jonathan, your last two books present, one in the previous one had taken on some very powerful people. ben, you have -- a troll army of chronically people, and some of whom don't exist in this new financial system. i wonder what mind if you wouldn't both of you share an anecdote about some of the most fun hostile reactions to your books? oh, like the jimmy kimmel reading the mean tweets kind mean tweets. yeah, if you can think of one. in the meantime, we could get a pray on it and yes, sir, for for mr. tapper and especially for anyone the interface between governance, politics, i mean, obviously we've got a dysfunctional congress, etc. but

you're raising all of the potential problems in terms of regulation. what do you suggest sting seeing as possible? well look, i, i think and i think ben would probably agree the regulation would be helpful. certainly if the fcc had regulated crypto, we probably wouldn't be in the trouble we are with all the people lost all their money on fdx. i certainly that serious people want to regulate a.i., you know elon and and sam altman and microsoft make all sorts of nice statements that they want regulation too. but if it if the social media scene is anything like what a.i. is like it's not going to happen. i mean i wrote move fast and

break things in 2016 and i'm still waiting for some serious regulation of like section 230, you know, remove safe harbor from social media. and it has to never happen. even though they keep claiming they want it to happen. so i do think the has a role to play. yeah. because you because if you don't you see what you get i mean when it comes to cryptocurrency you get their version of libertarianism which is as you say, crony capitalism. it's just people ripping. it's, it's the scam economy. it's just people each other off. is that really the world do we want to live in? because the government has to play role? who else is going to do it? you know, miami of today is the america of tomorrow. so sorry, yes, sir. thank you guys for coming here. miami, a question for for ben. and one question for john. ben, i mean, your research have

shown a lot of, say, fraud on the cryptocurrency world. my question to you is, have you seen any in the practical currency world? and then my question for john, i mean, i of these characters you have written about it's october musk and peter thiel are the balance of their creation and what they're doing right now is positive or negative so the first question about the positivity of crypto mean i struggle to find examples of it. you know i traveled to el salvador where they're trying to use supposedly trying to use cryptocurrency as real money and the argument that because el salvador's economy is heavily reliant on a quarter of the economy, the 2 to 3 million salvadorans people salvadoran descent living united states sending money home, it's kind of the foundation of the economy in many ways. if you could use crypto real money, then it could benefit the people they would pay. you know, they wouldn't have to pay services like western

moneygram and the government would take a tiny piece of that and and everyone would benefit. so i went there. what's happening nobody's using it less than now used to be than 2% now less than 1% of remittances use government system. why? because doesn't work because they get ripped off all the time. because they don't trust the government. they shouldn't the government. el salvador now has the highest incarcerate rate in the world. the government is building biggest prison there. it's not directly related to cryptocurrency, but it's pretty weird. then the only country where it's supposedly democratizing, decentralizing all this blah blah, blah, blah blah. they also happen to have an authoritarian that's imprisoning most of its citizens. for many the citizens. so i really have not found i'm i don't mean to get angry are on my high horse. i just i find the story so deeply untrue. you know, on the margins, some might be able to use a crypto for this or that, but they shouldn't even be in that position because the problems

that crypto says they're addressing are really problems we have to address outside crypto. we can't use crypto as some bizarre you know, hey, you might be able to send money across seas or you might just lose your all the money that you cite because you know, fraud, whatever. so all crypto really does point out what things need to change in our regulated system, our mainstream system. to answer your question, i would say that musk did push the electric car industry forward faster much faster. i think that zuckerberg's contribution, the society has a net negative. i that the social media in has not been fulfilled in a promise

i think that and treason is a scam. artists if you think about wall street journal the last two weeks ago said that. 95% of the people who owned who bought is in fall of 2021 have a portfolio your value of zero. in other words that bored ape that you bought for $50,000 thinking it original in in 2021 you couldn't sell for $0.50 today might any based company by the way and and as for peter thiel, i've concluded he's a fascist. he says that democracy and capital ism are not compat able think about that. so obviously he's the side of capitalism, but he has no

interest in democracy. he told the wall street journal. 2% of the people know what's going on the scientist and venture capitalists and everybody else is a sheep. i think we'll have probably time for one more question or two more. yeah. great. why am always the midget? hello. hi, ben. big fan. i watched them for years, so i think i will step away from the money for a minute and i have a quick two parter. i'm asking one, do you have any fun stories from gotham you want to share and i got to ask, what is it like to see yourself on. well, toys like, this little fella. fantastic. fantastic. the the little you. i'm not here really promote my my acting works i don't know that 'g answer your questions on where you can yeah it's you know i'm sure the audience would love to hear funny stories from gotham's set

but maybe they won't but i i'll find you afterwards and tell you a funny story. yeah. i don't even know how to pay that back on the phone. and i got a pocket, which have it assigns a very cute. it's. $50 and. and he'll sign your. that's right. yes. if you buy my book and i already did one. we have one more time for one more. okay. thank you. two part question. number one, what's really going on when someone mines bitcoin, what's behind the scenes? i heard it's nsa using it for various and part two. can you use a.i. to mine bitcoin. uh, so in terms of what mining of bitcoin is computers are simple mathematical calculations over and over and over again. one of them will randomly win bitcoin when it's minted every

10 minutes. it's the way the network validates itself, where it basically checks the ledger. so it's extremely energy inefficient. but in 2021, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use the energy of argentina. the entire country, to mine to basically use a lot of electrical, to use a lot of energy to. to produce a bitcoin that is, you know, economically speaking, a zero sum game. it doesn't actually add value any. it's basically, you know, an elaborate game of poker. so it's extremely it makes me very unhappy. and the biggest bitcoin mine, the united states is outside of my home town of, austin, texas, in rockdale, texas and i visited it for the book. i would also that air is extraordinary really energy inefficient. so microsoft has been playing around with replacing search,

with chat chips to write or their version of chat. you picture and just the experiment and the only people can figure out how much computing power they're using is that microsoft's use of water has gone up 44% in the last six months, which just extraordinary which means that because open air is running so computing power. 24 seven. the cooling needed to keep the cloud centers from blowing up has gone up 44%. so so it's it's pretty in efficient and i can't even imagine how you will be able to make money on search if if every was a long essay you know every

result of the question you gave. well stay hydrated folks and we i got the wrap it up sign ben mckenzie, author of easy. jonathan kaplan, the end of reality. you so much for joining us in my. great. yeah. so book tv's coverage of the miami book fair continues after this break.

why now? first, because i was nudged over time by a former editor, a nonfiction work to try it and. i resisted and resisted, but the farther i got from government service, the easier it became to think about crime and terrorism and espionage and so i decided to give it a shot and found it addictive and harder than nonfiction, a lot more fun. where did the storylines come from? my amazing my wife has great story vision and she throws stuff at the wall, as she says over coffee in the morning, she pitched this particular story and it sounded great to me and we fleshed it out and i set out to write it. so how much of this can we take is based on your experience at the southern district and as

director, a lot is based on the southern district. it's not primarily based on the fbi. my at fbi, although it's informed by my knowledge of how the fbi works in investigations but it's mostly inspired by my time as a mob prosecutor in new york, but also brought to the current day by the fact that when i was writing, my daughter was the chief of the violent and organized crime unit in the southern district of new york and trying a very prominent case, the same courtroom that i tried mobsters. and so this strange crossover in my life happened. and it made it nostalgic, but also current to talk about the what goes on there. so james comey, when see the character in the book central park west, nora carlton, are we looking at your daughter? you're looking at really a of all four of my smart, strong, tall daughters. but it would inspired primarily by my oldest was and still is a federal prosecutor in manhattan

and so it's a labor of love really to write fiction picturing my girls and trying to hear their voices when i write nora so her name is nora carlton, her partners are ex-partners name is nick was just a throwback to the thin man. it was not and it's funny, totally accidental, but it's been pointed out me and i say, well, maybe on some subconscious, but not intentionally. nora and nick. so that's one storyline. another is about the murder of a former new york governor who was me too in the metoo movement. any thing we should take from that, from history? no, it's fiction, but it tried to be inspired. actual events, but not about a particular person. i was explaining to someone that not every taylor swift's song is about her former boyfriend, so not every particular figure is reflected in history. a lot of salty language. there's a lot of salty language, a lot osment yeah, it's part of

the the culture of law enforcement. and obviously this is about the mob, too. there's a fair of cursing and cosa nostra. so when we get into the scenes a lot drawn on your experience there. yes, in fact, some of it is drawn from actual trial transcripts of cases that i did. i had a witness who when was one of the world's great art thieves, when walked into the courtroom to testify against, mobsters, one of the mouth, you're dead. and i didn't see the mobster it, but i saw my witness change. and so i went back and got the transcript of what happened after that to try and get exactly right. i had another i had a defendant who was murdered in the middle trial and found with a canary stuffed in his mouth in the trunk of a car. so i've tried to draw on to make this as real as possible, though it's fiction by drawing on those sorts of things. given your experience, law enforcement, would anything surprise you today?

well, a lot of the environment around, the fbi in particular surprises me, but the court system in the way operates. the rule of law is the same as it was 30 years ago when my oldest daughter was four years old, as it is today when she's in her thirties and the chief a unit in the office i worked in. who's going to buy this book? i don't i hope a lot of people because i want to do this for a job. i mean, it's fine to work at a law firm or some other place, but i'd rather this which surprised me. and so i hope people will write it, read and find it very real, taking you inside these courtrooms in, these conference rooms, without being tetchy in a fun way, and that it makes people want to read the next, which i've already written and isn't finalized, but it's out for loving feedback from my family. so they see the first draft. oh yeah, this is called mrs. the first. it starts with patrice, sees it as i'm writing it and involved in that process, looking at a google on a regular basis, suggesting edits me comments.

i like to do on google docs and then i can go through the stages of denial by saying she's wrong then stare at it and say she might be right. and then i read it a third time. she's right? i don't have to go through that pain in front her. and then once it's ready it goes out to the five kids and then it goes out to a circle of friends who know this world and who would delight in telling me i got something wrong and want that kind of feedback. now, james comey, those of us who have been in washington heard for years about rival worries among federal agencies, those kind of play a role in this book. yeah, they're a feature of all law enforcement, especially in new york, where you have the fbi and the nypd, right. godzilla and king kong, and you have the manhattan da's office almost next door to the u.s. office, talented people competing over the work. and i would try and describe it to those who didn't know new york i said it's like it's like we're mortal sworn enemies unless we're living together and having a baby because we did a

lot of task force work together. but we also competed fairly aggressively for work. and it's at times dysfunctional. it's also a source of creativity and energy. that's that's remarkable when you're in the middle of it, given your experience as prosecutor, as an fbi director, would you make a good defense attorney? i don't know i was a defense attorney briefly. i was a i found it difficult work. thank god good people do it because system doesn't work. but i i struggled with it a bit. so i'm not sure i probably be better today because. i've seen more of the flaws in the criminal justice system just through sheer repetition. but it's hard work. i never had the terrifying experience representing someone that i knew to be innocent. instead, i was providing legal advice to people to try get them the best result. it's still very hard, kyra and tony burke, who are they in the book. well, she is.

they estranged spouse of the former governor who is, as you said, was disgraced and is out of office living in a penthouse along central park west. and i'm not giving anything away to say in the very first pages of the book, he's murdered. suspicion falls her a case that my protagonist, nora carlton, is not paying attention to because that's a local murder case that the da's handling. she's got a mob case going where she's finally going to put away a really elusive mobster. but the story is about those two cases slamming together and taking nora and her investigator partner, benny doogan, on quite journey. now, nora carlton's u.s. attorney, early on in the book as well, the u.s. attorney is described as basically an idiot, is is that a typical attitude mood toward your higher level bosses enough law enforcement? there are a lot of idiots, all leadership roles. but in main, i worked for really good people.

but i was trying to capture maybe some of weaknesses that i had seen in u.s. attorneys. obviously, when i was your attorney, i had no weaknesses whatsoever. but it's all people are complex, and i tried to capture that with him because as you read on, you'll see complexity with him as well. what about politicians and do they figure in central park west? sure. there are some evil people in central park west who have chosen public service through political office, and i try to paint a picture of them. i'm little bit of a cynic about politicians. i don't mean to badmouth them on c-span, but i tried to use them as sort of character foils here a little bit. why was it important to you in this book? describe what the fbi or southern district building look like what the streets were like, what the courtrooms look like? because i want to take the reader into and have the reader feel what it's really like in those places, what it feels like

to walk up those steps, what the the intimidating architecture does to, a room in which you're trying to achieve justice. and and i could close my eyes and feel and see those. and so i wanted the reader to do it as well. and of course, even though i know these places so well, i went and made sure i wasn't anything. i counted steps. i wanted to make sure i had it right. one of the feedback from my editor at the publisher was you have a little too much. this is an architectural digest. and so he whacked a number of my use a mob term. he whacked a number of my descriptions of buildings. i it's enough to bring readers in without overwhelming them. james comey the media also plays role. and one of the things that the media does is they happen to know about an arrest of somebody and they show up and they're waiting. how how does that district attorney use the media every their advantage? well everyone, in law enforcement in general should use the media because you're in

the service public interest business and the way you communicate what you're doing and why it matters to the public through the media. but there's a in close to my experience relationship, law enforcement and the media in new york. i think it's a function, a number of things, including that there's enormous law enforcement organizations with lots people that media members might be able to speak to. and the media is enormous, concentrated in new york and there are longstanding source relationship tips that used to frustrate me when i was u.s. attorney and when i was the director of the fbi, because stuff would get out in new york in a way it wouldn't elsewhere. and oftentimes when you're trying do an arrest and not have a not have a circus word still gets out. i remember when we indicted martha stewart, when i was u.s. attorney, i was very keen to have any pictures of martha stewart in with handcuffs on because the case was important it had to be brought. but she wasn't the criminal the century. and i worry that that would send

a confusing message. and it took a lot of work. make sure that no camera person was given a tip as to where to be to see martha stewart in handcuffs. you have never sn hoto. so that's a success in trying to push apart symbiotic relationship in new york between, media and law enforcement who has the advantage in a courtroom. is it the prosecutors or the defense attorney or what are the advantages on each side? the prosecutor starts an advantage because represents the sovereign. she's able to stand up and say, i'm nora carlton for the united states. and so jurors sitting there see the united states of america, a country love and they're part of embodied in this person. that's a tremendous advantage but we have built our system counterbalance that with the of proof the prosecution has to get to beyond a reasonable doubt all 12 unanimously, which is a very high burden. it's one of the things i try and show in the book that's why truth and justice can be

different. you may know something in your heart of hearts, but if you can't prove it to 12 unanimously beyond a reasonable doubt, you will not have justice in that sense. and so there's a balance. and i guess it depends upon the particular courtroom and the particular people. often the quality of justice varies in direct proportion to the quality of your lawyer. if you're a defendant. but on balance, we've done a good job of trying to counteract the innate advantage that the sovereign has in courtrooms. does a defendant enough advantages, in your view. yes. not enough to be perfect. our system is flawed because. we humans are flawed, innocent people get convicted in our criminal justice at all levels. and a tragedy. that's why we should fall in love with our system. but i think it's the best that there is. and we have shrouded the defendant in presumptions and protections that designed to let the guilty go free so that we

don't pay the cost of the innocent suffering. and i think we a reasonably good job of that. again, a race is an important factor in courtrooms power of all kinds doesn't stop courtroom doors, but in the main, we have a very fair criminal justice system. and now more live coverage of the miami book fair. afternoon. and. many of us hanging out some more

tonight from serve as the vice provost of student affairs and chief enrollment officer here at miami-dade college. we are grateful to the miami-dade family and volunteers and the support of our sponsors, including the green family foundation, zogby media, jd, the j.w. marriott marquis brickell and nicholas children hospital, and all other sponsors. we'd also like to thank friends of the fair and fair members. our friends receive multiple benefits, so please consider a friends membership or gift. one as we celebrate our 40th anniversary, please consider supporting miami book fair with a contribution to our next decade. fund with the friends of the fair table, our website for more information. at the end of the session, we will have time for q&a and the authors be autographing books outside. we now kindly request you silence your cell phones. it is truly my pressure to

introduce martin baron, moderated by matt hackman. matt hackman is the executive vice president at the beacon counsel greater miami public private economic development organization, where he leads opportunity, a community wide initiative focused on imagining miami of 2040 and helping the community rebuild it. he previously miami program director and knight foundation, where he created built the foundation's program. the play a pivotal role in jumpstarting propelling miami's rapidly growing tech and startup community. numerous efforts funded and supported under hackman's leadership, are pillars of miami's entrepreneur economic system. today. prior to that, he was an award journalist at the miami herald, or his awards included the gerald loeb award, the highest honor in business journalism. mr. ma and byron, just seven months into his new job at the

washington post, longtime journalist and newspaper editor martin baron received news that amazon founder jeff bezos would buy the paper just two years later, donald trump, who can paint against the press as the lowest form of humanity, won the presidency collection of power trump, bezos and the washington post explores the nature of tech, media and power in the 21st century. mr. brian hackman, please come on stage. thank you. well, thank you very much. what an honor this is and what treat we're in for it to be here with marty baron. marty, thank you. yeah, great to here. thanks to everybody for coming. so i actually this was an amazing book. i actually felt a little sad when it ended because i so it.

by the way, you want to listen and read the live shriver as your huge win just extraordinary you yeah very nicely you came to the party to launch the book and he and i were talking and we concluded that we are the same person and for. who may have forgotten of course it was liv who played marty in spotlight, the academy award winning film. so let's start with in writing book marty. there's of course, a very illustrious history of washington post leaders writing books about their time, you know, a good by brian bradley in 1995, personal history by katharine graham in 1998. now you with collision of power. what were your primary motivations in writing this book and what were some of the things that you really sought to share

with readers in doing so? sure. so i was living through an incredible moment in history and here was a paper that had been owned by the same family, the graham family, for 80 years. sold to one of the richest people in the world. just incredible who set out to try to transform us for the digital era and set a whole new strategy for us. and then comes donald trump, a candidate unlike any we'd ever seen before, a president unlike any we'd ever seen before. and i thought somebody should tell that story. we in the press play an important role in democracy the post, plays an important role in all of that. and nobody else was going to tell that story. and i could that story. and i felt i should tell that story. you know, we have this motto or mission statement is baseless, likes to call it democracy, dies in darkness. i thought i should be the one to shed a little light on our own role in that democracy. secondly i felt that i wanted to give the public a vivid sense of

what it's like to be the top editor of a major news organization, this country. i think there a lot of stereotypes and preconceptions about how we do our work, and i people to live through the judgments and decisions that i had to make and understand that people can agree or disagree. the judgments that i made. but i think they should have a full understanding of why i made them and just how difficult those judgments really are. and third, there were some things, some trends in field that had me concerned, and i felt i had something to say and i wanted to get of it off my chest. i guess. and it wasn't entirely cathartic. it was more like compounding my ptsd. but it was i felt like i needed to say and say it in a way that where i could discuss these things in full, explain my reasoning, explain my thinking. and that means not doing it on twitter, but doing it in a book where i could explain it.

so want to dig each of those and particularly, obviously talking about covering trump, the trump presidency. number two with jeff bezos coming along and the transformation of the post under his leadership and three, journalism and you have a lot to say about that. but let's start with trump. you would like that? yes. you would. so give you and he actually a became you're going to read a little bit shortly about a dinner that you had at the white house with him with with fellow leaders at the washington post. but also he would call you on the phone. give us scent which you talk about in the book. give us a sense of what these exchanges were like and if it was even a conversation or a lot of sort of listening. yeah, well, these are conversation. yeah, well, these were these were calls not conversations. and they occurred after this dinner that i guess i'll read

from the book after the dinner we had at the white house about five months after he began to occupy the white house. and he called about some stories. one came out about 9:00 at night after he had met with modi, the leader of india, and complained about a story by two of our white house correspondents, parker and philip rucker. and said that the story had portrayed as a child. and then he said words that i never thought i would ever hear from the president of the united states. he said, i am not a child. and. i have to say, thought that was kind of childish. so. anyway, a few days later, he called again. it was right as we were wrapping up our morning news meeting and and and he complained again about a story and went on a rant

about about this being all because of amazon and because jeff bezos and i had heard him say that during the campaign. i'd heard him say it in other occasions, even after he took the white house and was just so sick of it. and and just responded. and i said, well, that's not true. and, you know, it's true. i don't, i don't think he was like i don't think he was accustomed being spoken to that way. and he then broke out into a bunch of profanities and and so and then he said, you know, the post is nothing but it's nothing but a hate machine. that's nothing but a big fat lie. this is all bezos is amazon. he on like that. in fact, this this so-called conversation which just him talking which is i guess falls within his definition of a conversation is it went on for so long that i was you know looking at the time thinking i actually have work to do today.

i don't really know about the president of the united states, but i don't have the time to keep talking or to let him talk. so anyway, i did my usual thing when i wanted to wrap up something or just if somebody was complaining and said, oh, well, thank you. i appreciate your calling and sharing your. so i thank him for sharing his perspective and was the last time i ever heard from him. so. so so you know in the book you no punches. you talk about how he was to dehumanize the press celebrating violence at rallies, hateful language and dog whistles. continued lies in my preference. misrepresentation. i want be autocrat. but of course, you know, this is not and talking about all this isn't this isn't just history. actually here he likely going to be the nominee for the republican party from all of

time leading the coverage of him. what do you think that from those lessons how should we should we be covering him going forward and how do you think journalists should be covering him going forward? sure. well, i think some of our coverage is beginning to take now. i'm seeing more of it. i'd like see still more of it. and that is what will he do if he gets back into the white house rather than paying so much attention to what his standing is in the polls? i mean, obviously, politics in and of itself, by definition is a bit of a horse race. so you can't ignore that. but i think it's a matter of emphasis. where should the emphasis and the coverage be? and i think the emphasis should be on what would he do starting in his four on his first day in the white house. and he's been quite open about that. he hasn't hidden anything. the thing about trump is that he's open with what he intends to do. he's hiding it. it's all out out there all to see. and he's what he's been saying has been very much the definition of authoritarianism.

it's not even an opinion on my part. if you were to define this, would be these would be the characteristics of it. so, i mean, he's only the only only politician i've ever heard talk about suspending u.s. constitution. this from the same individual who, when he took office swore to uphold constitution of the united states, he's talked about using the military, suppress entirely legitimate protests in this country under the framework of the insurrection act. he's talked about bringing treason charges. the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and most likely having him executed. he's talked treason charges against nbc for coverage that he deemed to be unfavorable to himself. he's talked about, you know, for all his complaints about, you know, the republicans complaints about weaponizing the u.s. government, he talks openly about weaponizing the u.s. government has talked about using a first he funded and then

reconstituted the department of justice to pursue his political enemies, to prosecute them and ideally imprison them and and maybe worse. and so that all of that is the definition of authoritarian ism. i mean, it's not, as i say, decent opinion. that is the nature of. victorian authoritarianism and on top of that, of course, he's continued to talk about crushing press and independent, free and independent press in this country. so think we need to focus on that. how he expects to achieve that and focus a bit less the political horserace. and your view as well that more stories talking about sort of where the support that is there for him where that is coming from and why. yeah, i think we really need to understand and i think that we should do our reporting on that. i think that's a mistake that we made actually before donald trump became a candidate. i talk about that in the book. i think it's one of the most serious mistakes that we made is that we didn't anticipate a candidate like donald trump.

we didn't understand the level of grievance in this country that would lead to a candidate like donald trump. i mean, you may recall that people were talking about the being the former governor of the state jeb bush. okay. so he didn't go anywhere. okay and and then people mentioned everybody else as a potential except that it was donald. and so we didn't really understand this this grievance in the country. and i think we need to and we need to understand it today. the reality is that there are many people in this country who live in communities that are really struggling. they themselves are struggling individually. they their communities have lost industries. they are not at jobs that are paying them what they used to paid. there aren't opportunities for their kids. they are. and they blame a lot of people. they blame the elites in washington. they feel that they're being condescended to. that they're being in contempt. and they, of course accuse the press of doing that. and i think it's important that

we not hold people in contempt that we actually understand who they are that we reflect all of that in our in our our coverage so that we really understand people in all corners of this country. and i think we should do that today just as we should have done it back in. before donald trump ever announced candidacy. so we can come there will be q&a and i'm sure there'll be many questions folks asking more about trump. but want to turn jeff bezos buying the washington post. and what i was by in the book is you talk about how when jeff bought the post, he didn't then lavish, you know, tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars on the post and treating it like a personal charity, but instead tried to really run it as a business, something that could stand on its own two feet. is from this lessons even a blueprint that can be applied to other newspapers. of course, as we all know, you know, it's newspaper first that that happened disrupted and to

figure out what that revenue model is, how they should operate going forward, are there lessons from this experience. bezos that can actually be applied to other news organizations? well to some degree, i think there are. i mean, i think that it's true that he wanted this to be a sustainable business. he did not treat us as a charity. and i always told people at the post we should be glad for that, because if he ever got tired of the charity, we would be in very bad shape and we should use his ownership as an opportunity and his willingness to invest for the term. but infinite, not indefinitely, but for the long term to create a sustainable business. the first thing he did was to change our entire strategy. we had been focused on our region of washington, the district, northern virginia, maryland, all that. the motto was, and about washington, which meant, yes, we covered, but other than that we were focused on our region. he didn't feel that was the right model anymore for the post. and we had this incredible opportunity to to be national

and global because we're based in the nation's capital, because we had the name the washington post, which could be leverage because we had a and heritage going back to watergate. that would where there were millions of people around this country who had never read a word of the washington post. but had an idea of the washington post, and that had this opportunity today because the internet had given us a gift. of course, we were like, yeah, what would that be? and it destroyed our business. and he said, well, the gift is that you get to distribute your journalism everywhere or with digitally, which means essentially with no additional cost. so he would put it take the gift. that's how he signed it. take the gift already. so so we did we changed. so i think the lesson there for other news organizations, of course, is and that did make a huge difference us. had we not done that, i think the post would be in terrible shape today. it was already in terrible shape when he bought it, which is why the graham family sold it in the first place. so it's the importance of this of the strategy and understanding that and

committing to it. and doing everything possible and making the hard decisions that are necessary in order to in order to execute on that strategy. and also understanding our readers are and really what it what do they want from us. so and another important point is that, you know, this model that we had, which is now famous is democracy dies in darkness, which was a real struggle to come up with. i have a whole chapter just how difficult and painful was at the end of which i was the only thing i could think of was the serenity prayer. you know, done. i can't change it, you know, okay. most marketers don't use darkness and death and the motto, but we're going with that. so and it worked incredibly well. it's amazing. it worked incredibly well. and so but the idea there i mean, one of the things he talked about is that he wanted this to be a not a newspaper people want to subscribe to, but an idea that people want to belong to. he understood that newspapers different other products, that there is a real relationship

between us and our readership. and they have expectation of us and and they want us to serve a mission, not just be a product and so we need to think about every news organization really needs to think through very deeply what is that mission that are going to serve if it went down some interesting paths? i mean, is you describe he talked about this you know we're focused on the reader and then work there and led an analysis of who in the organization working to directly impact readers and indirectly impacting and those who are indirect, which included editors needed fewer of. yeah that was you know, it was sort of disappointing. an editor myself, i kind of believe in editors look his the idea was that he had this idea of direct indirect. so that we should put our resources into areas had a direct impact on the consumer with direct contact with

consumers that would be. reporter maybe some social media photographers, things like that that. we really needed that had could be you had a direct you, could see the direct connection with the reader, but then editors, he kind of thought, well on the complicated stories, the really sensitive stories, the investigative, we need editors, but on the other stories we probably don't need that many editors. and by the way, they're really indirect. he thought of us as essentially as a bureaucratic administrative layer. i did not like that. i did not like that. and i protested that and made clear that editors actually had a huge direct impact on the coverage and he had a clear misconception of what editors. i think he's come around. i'm sure he has come around to better understand the role of editors and the importance of editors. but at the time, he wasn't. we had a really difficult time sort of getting approval in the budget to hire additional so much so that at every that we

had, we tried to come up with a different title for them. so you know, like we down strategist, analyst things like that. and was like that was our way of like disguising the fact that they were editors. so. one of the things you're really clear on the book though, is that bezos did not engage in any of the decisions about the journalism that the washington post undertook. he didn't he didn't. i mean, he i mean, obviously, there were a lot of worries at the beginning. i myself was worried. mean here was a person who had huge commercial interests with amazon, lot of controversies around amazon, all of which people are familiar with and but we had also just before he came we had published the most sensitive national documents in the u.s. government. there were leaked by edward snowden. and i made the final decision to publish those documents. there were people in government who, particularly in the intelligence agencies in congress, some who felt that people like me should have been thrown into prison for.

that decision and and i and one of the big businesses for was cloud computing. they had a contract with the cia. and so i really wondered, well, are we going to be able to do this anymore? and how is it going to react to coverage of his company i mean, amazon, by the way, had this reputation whenever they were asked a question by the press, they had one answer, no comment. so he was asked it was asked for the first town hall. well, why how can you buy a newspaper when amazon says no comment? every time the press asks a question? and he said, you the right to ask the questions and amazon has the right not to answer them. so you do what you wanted. you need to do and amazon will do what it to do. you make those decisions. so i was concerned. but he said right at the beginning you cover you can cover amazon, you can cover me any way you'd like. and he he reiterated that to me the entire time i was there and he never reneged on that, never interfered in the actual substance of our journalism.

so, you know, honestly, i think my take away from your book is that it's a ringing defense of tradition, journalism values, namely, which you know arguably has been lost right in how journalists think about their. talk about that you raise real about how journalism is practiced today and how sort of the stand was that you came with a quickly disappearing. yeah, not everywhere, but in some instances for sure. and i was very i was very concerned about first of all, i think we need to define we mean by objectivity because i think that has been widely mischaracterized. it's been conflated with both sides of some with false equivalence, all of that and is not what it is. okay. so this is the objectivity is a concept that goes back more than 100 years to walter lippmann, who wrote this small collection of essays called liberty in the

news. he sort of popularized the concept there were others who were behind it, too. but the idea was that we should be like, basically take the approach scientists. you have an apotheosis going into a story, but you have to test that hypothesis. you go where the evidence leaves you to go, but do it in an open minded. so for journalists it means going in open minded. you have knowledge, own preconceptions, you acknowledge your own sort of feelings, but you move that and say, okay, i'm going to do an independent job. i'm going to open minded job, i'll be comprehensive, i'll be rigorous, be thorough. when we've done all that, then we tell people what we've actually found. there's no requirement and in the concept of objectivity that you do all this work. and then you pretend that you didn't do that work and you ignore what you did and that everything is 5050, even though the evidence shows otherwise. so but it also acknowledges it requires a recognition on our part that we don't know the answers before we we should go seeking the answers. i mean, the reality is that in journalism you're often sort of seeing world through a keyhole.

then try to work to sort of push the door a little bit open so you can see a little bit through the crack in the door. and if you get lucky you get the door all the way wide open, you see the picture. but often we're working part of the picture of the best that we can get. and so we need to acknowledge that. and my concern is there is a that there are are too many people, our profession, who think that they know the answers. they've embarked on the reporting. and i have to ask, what does reporting mean? if you already know the answers there, what's the point of reporting other than to confirm your own preconceptions? and so i'm concerned about that and the concerned about people expressing their opinions on social media, particularly on twitter. and i think that that has a corrosive effect on public trust. when public trust is already so threatened in our in our in our and i don't know why people would view us, steve bannon said at the beginning of the trump. the press is the opposition. i don't think we should behave

the opposition party. i don't think we should think like the opposition party. i that we need to be we shouldn't be personal agendas. our agenda should be to find the truth wherever the facts fall. okay. whoever they benefit, whoever they hurt, fine. that's what we should do. and should be. our agenda should be the truth, the facts, the context in which are and within which things are occurring and and not be our personal agendas and assume that we the answers before we've done a lot of reporting. so in at one time you famously said we're not at war we're at work and talking about your posture. but of course when you're covering someone who's at war with media, who's at war, democracy, is your point that it's the journalism is the work, and that's how you combat someone who is at war with democracy and and yeah, well just a little context. i mean, that came about because

trump on his first full day in office, went to the cia to talk to the cia. he stood in front of a memorial to fallen cia agents. and of course, what did he choose to talk about in a place like that the media? so he said, as you know, i'm at war with the media seeming to want to enlist cia agents. the intelligence and his war with the media, because by the way they work for him. so i was asked for my reaction a couple of weeks after that, and i said, we're not at war with the administration. we're at work. so what did i mean by that? i think we have to go back to the origins of the amendment, why we have a first amendment in this country, why we have a free and independent press in this country and go to the principal author that the first amendment, james madison and what he said and he talked about the need for freely examining public characters and measures so free we can understand examining means that it's not stenography, we're not practicing

stenography, practicing journalism. so who's doing what or who influence those those decisions? who's going to be affected? those decisions going beyond beneath the surface and behind the curtain. and that's that's what journalism is. and so that's what we need to do. and so examining the public characters are the politicians, the the government and the powerful individuals, institutions who influence them. and the measures are the policies. so that was the original assignment given to a the press in this country. it's the reason that we have a free and independent press was that was our assignment at the founding the country. and that's this was the assignment during the trump administration and remain so today during the biden administration and for all administrations yet to come. so that's what we ought to be doing is holding our our public officials to account, shining a light on what they're doing and why they're doing it and who their actions affect. and so that was it's not a war.

that's just our job and that's what i meant by that. okay. please be thinking of your questions. that does deserve a hands. i want to take minute to talk about local news. of course, your role include your roles now, include being a trustee at night foundation. you know that the approach that the washington post brought, that you brought with bezos was essentially to go from a model where you a few people paying lots of money to buy a newspaper to lots people paying a little bit of money to read. that's harder to do for local organizations. but and right now we have news deserts we have and that is what's probably contributing to so much the polarization we see in our country in our democracy. what are some of the things that you are hopeful about as it relates to local news.

yeah, well, it's a really difficult i think the greatest challenge in our in the press right now is is the sustainable city of local news coverage. so if you are not already, i urge all of you to subscribe to your local newspaper. and i think need it otherwise who's covering the cops? who's covering the the city council? who's covering the county government? who's covering the environmental issues, who's covering all of the issues that we we face in our in our in communities? the answer is that, if they're not doing it, if there isn't a local press, do it. nobody's nobody's going to do it. and that be a real shame that that will undermine our democracy, because democracy really begins at the local at the local. so it's really critical. i mean, in terms of what's i'm optimistic about. yeah. mean, do you like these experiments around non news strike or or other things. sure i was getting that the so i

think there's some promise out among the nonprofits and i see that in some are working pretty well and glad to see those those things working well i don't think that we know we know the full answer here to that. but. which ones are going to work and which ones aren't? i don't believe that there's enough philanthropic money in this country to have an entirely media sector. i'm quite there isn't. so i don't think it's the answer to us. we have to come up with commercially sustainable model. i do see some promise there too. so i look at news organizations around, the country that have a newspaper legacy. so boston where i work, they're doing pretty well. i'm not meaning money. i don't. but i think they have a pretty sustainable business model. minneapolis seems to be doing pretty well. san francisco seems to be doing well and some other places around, the country that seem to

be doing reasonably well and i'm encouraged, i'm encouraged by that. but it remains a huge challenge and i think, you know, the organizations that aren't doing so well should be taking a look at the that are and figuring out what is it that they're doing right we have to make some really hard decisions. there are some things are just going to we don't have to stop to stop doing simply because they there just aren't enough people who are interested in that. and we have to focus on the kinds things that really serve. as i talked about at the so what is our mission and who are we serving? is this an idea people want to belong to? and what is that? what is that idea? and so we should think a lot about that fundamental concept. it's like what is the idea that readers to belong to here and how can we serve their interests? you know in reading your book i mean i thought to myself that sort that the different areas that want to hit or one of course adhering to strong journalism values which talk about to using technology in smart ways, being really

customer focused and for a news organization that's really open and willing to change and talk a lot about sort of newsroom culture having and i was in a newsroom for ten years, these can be places that can be really averse to change. they are seen a lot of resistance over time. fact i think i saw i saw resistance to the use of computers, believe it or not. when i first got to the l.a. times, where you're using a manual typewriters, i still have the underwood that i worked on. i have it at home. and, you know a lot of reporters were like, hesitant to give that thing up so that because they had to learn how to work on a computer, believe it or not. so people were resistant. we started introducing graphics into the publication and. more interesting design people were, you know, what a terrible thing was that we were focusing on the esthetics over the substance of our journalism. how horrible. it was. i mean, take a look at the newspapers of some time.

they looked really terrible and and so and we didn't use the tools, had to tell stories, which was graphics, which was, you know, and that was a great way to tell stories. so then we went to color, by the way, and some people were horrified by color. would that it would it would cause such problems for us that it was like cheapening our product. i remember i was at the new york times when went to color and they waited for the perfect time, what they deemed to be the perfect time. the former editor waited for the perfect time, which was a yankees victory, by the way. so. so you got nice blue on the you know on the on the front page and. he didn't want something with balloons, anything like that. some frivolous stuff. he wanted like something really important, like a yankees victory. so so but i mean, hesitation over that was just preposterous. i so and then you know, we have gone into things where, look we we to the age of the internet and people were very reluctant to do that. the basic that are necessary to succeed on the internet.

we don't have to run through all of them. but people were resistant to and there's a different form of storytelling that can work on on the internet that doesn't work so well. we need to change our story and people want to keep doing the same thing that they've always done. it doesn't mean that we abandon our values. in fact, i think we very much need to hold on to those values, those traditional values. but we do need to change a the way that we disseminate news and be of the story formats that we use because people are processing information today, it's a much more visual people are much more visual in their approach to information. these days. and we can't just, you know, hold that in contempt and look down our nose at it. we have to sort of say, okay well, that's how people want to get information, how do we adapt to that and not just adapt to it? how do we embrace that in order to be successful? how do we become enthusiastic about that, to become at that? because if we don't, you know, in the end, these legacy news, find somebody else will and they'll they'll, they'll win they'll will win the competition. i'm going to hand you the book so you can read a little bit and then we'll turn to questions.

but this is not just an idle conversation i mean, literally, democracy is at stake part in finding an answer to what you're talking right now in terms of local news, how we practice our how we get in front of people. yeah, absolutely. i mean, look, there's a reason why authoritarians. the first step that they take us to is to crush news organizations. i mean, the reality is that it's true that know the press can't survive without a democracy, but a democracy can't survive without a free, independent press either. and it's important that we figure out how to be self sustaining how to how to thrive, how to give people the what i see as the mission of journalism, which to give the public the information that needs and deserves to know in, order to govern themselves and. so so so it's really important that we we embrace the change that's necessary, but that we actually hold on to our values. let's hear a little bit of book. okay. i hear it's highly readable.

let's see here. all right. you hold your. oh, yeah otherwise. okay, let's see the white house. june 15, 2017. the dinner with president trump was to be kept confidential. he wouldn't talk about it. we wouldn't either. our reporting staff was to be kept in the dark and to this day the meeting has never been reported. no one in the newsroom ever suggested me. they were aware of it. reporters had dug up many secrets about the trump white somehow missed this one. the black suv tinted windows, windows carrying jeff, owner of the washington post, would be allowed onto the white house grounds. 6:50 p.m. waved in through wrought iron vehicle entrance gate so that he could enter without being observed on that clear june evening in 2017, with temperatures in the low eighties, the post's publisher

fred ryan, editorial page editor hiatt and i is the executive editor who oversaw news coverage would up to a gate at the northeast corner of the white house grounds, avoiding the northwest gate where we would almost certainly be spotted by entering and exiting. this was not a dinner. i was looking forward to. i had not met trump even, though. our reporters had spent many hours with him except for natural curious. i didn't feel a need to. i could assess him on what he said and did and what good would come from spending time with him that evening. surely he would see as a favor and expect something in return. and surely he would conclude our visit as a group that bezos had a hand of news coverage. although ryan had proposed the meeting to the white house. he sought to allay my concerns about how would interpret it. he assured me that he had made one thing clear the white house should not expect this get together to influence coverage. and yet why else would the white house agree to us over for dinner if trump felt had nothing to gain? i'm skipping ahead here.

to themes stayed with me from that dinner. first, trump would govern primarily retain the support of his base. he pulled a sheet of paper from his jacket. the statistic 47% appeared above his photo. this is the latest rasmussen i can win with that. the message was clear that level of support, if he held states, was all he needed to secure a second term. what other voters thought of him? he seemed to say, would not matter. second, his list of grievances appeared limitless atop them all with the press and atop the press. the post. we were awful, he said, repeated. we treated fairly with every such utterance. he would me on the shoulder with his left elbow. the physical. the physical jabs were annoying, but harmless, yet they were a hint of hard punches to come, skipping again taking shape was

a collision of power. the occupant of the white house, the world's most powerful person aiming bring the post to submission through ceaseless public attacks on our journalists and unrelenting pressure on our owner. the post's with ample power of his own is one of the world's richest humans seeking to avoid open confrontation with trump but unwilling to succumb to a censure and coercion. and the washington post from famous for its role in felling a prior aggressively revealing administration's unsavory secrets, persistent lies flagrant sabotage and of incitement. so let's turn to some. we have a microphone right here, and i see someone's jumping up. let's let's jump right in. yes, sir. thanks. my name is david julius a of

your former colleagues are my sister amy, joyce and stephen. so they say hi just put it the safe our family thanks for fighting the good i know you say you're just working but simple question what has to be done in the next year or so. you don't have to write a sequel. oh. well, that's up to the american people, actually. so it's a point that i that i make. look, we in the press can't decide. the president of the united states is the public. the american public decides that the best we can do is provide the information that. as i said before, they need and deserve to. that's why i said that we ought to what we ought to be focusing on right now is what trump do if he got back into the white house. people should know what they're choosing. if they if they choose him and been very open about that, they are choosing to have somebody who intends to measures in an authoritarian way and and that that's going to be the decision of the american public that's a

decision they'll have to make. but we in the press have role to play and that is to tell people what might be coming next. already. all right. hide the you just talked about it. the white house was confidential. what's the process. what happened that you now to reveal what happened at the dinner, sir. so you know, once somebody says everything that they've said privately, there's nothing there's not really any confidentiality that attached that attaches to what they said what they at one somebody says something publicly, what they said privately, there's not really any confidentiality to that attaches to what they said privately in that meeting the fact of the meeting itself. first of all the the people who wanted the the meeting kept confidential mostly was the washington post, because we didn't want people to see that business was there. and and the reality is that the post had published an editorial

arguing that the that these the records of who actually goes into the white house that that should be made public. we ran an editorial on that before we actually kept it before we actually had our meeting and then wanted our own meeting to be kept secret. so to me that that that was an act of hypocrisy. and i don't think i should be party to that hypocrisy any longer. thank you. hi. i wondering if you could speak to the foundation, the project 25. i don't know if you're aware of where they're backing up trump with a lot of money, a lot of influence to bring a third authoritarianism to the united states and the heritage foundation is very influential. yeah, you know, i don't know specifically about their involvement. i'm afraid don't i don't have the details on that. but clearly, trump has a lot of support from a lot of different interests who are quite supportive.

the agenda that we just talked about. all right. we've got about 7 minutes. so i think we n to get to everyone. hello. could you compare and contrast nixon, watergate his treatment of the post with trump, his scandals, treatment of the post? sure. well i mean, i think that it worse so, you know, nixon attacked the press all the time. remember his first vice president, spiro agnew, who talked about nattering of negativism and but he worse than that nixon to portray the water the the washington post watergate investigation as a partizan venture. and a lot of people this country felt it was that but his attacks on the press not nearly even though he had an enemies list, there were members of the press who were on that enemies left his his attacks on the press

were not nearly as as vicious, as dehumanizing, as those that came out of from came from donald trump, who it part of his campaign strategy, who made it part of his strategy in the white house. he said before he actually after he won the election, but before he entered the white house, he acknowledged to lesley of cbs she asked him why, he continued to attack the press and he said that he did so that so that nobody would believe anything. you say when you when you criticize me and that he's open. as i said, that is exactly it was the idea was to undermine constantly try to undermine the credibility of the press so that the public wouldn't believe anything that was written. and by the way, the media environment is completely different today than it was at the time of nixon. and that's a really important distinction. you had three, i think three, three networks at the time. you didn't have fox news, you didn't have newsmax, you didn't have any of these outfits. one american news or any of those outfits you didn't have

the internet. that has changed a lot. so and in typically in most communities you had one or two dominant newspapers and a couple of local a couple of local tv stations, but that's about it. so the environment is completely different. and so now people can go out and people do gravitate to sources of information, often sources of misinformation, disinformation that confirm their preexisting view of the world and often are just disseminating wild, bizarre or unhinged conspiracy theories. and so the media environment completely different as well. so yeah, hi. so i well, you've been here, you've talked a lot about the outlook for journalism and how they should be adapting for the future. but i'm wondering your advice is to young journalists who are looking at even legacy organizations like the washington post who are laying

off staff and cutting off, you know, promising verticals. what should a young journalist be doing to stay in this industry if they'd like to be sure? well, know, i think people should always follow their passion. i got into the field full time in 1976. it was a recession year. i started to work for the miami herald, my first full time job. it was a bad year for journalism and it's been a bad year every year since i made a whole out of it. so i recommend you do the same. so, i mean, my, you know, every every young person's parents will tell them, don't do. but, you know i know you should listen to them. so so the field is going to change dramatically. yes, there are. look at the post right now. it's a matter of buyouts, layoffs. but maybe they will get the layoffs. but even after that, the size of their staff will be 940 people in the newsroom. it was 580 the day that i got there. and i had to i had to cut the staff by about 35 people in the first year. and we were expected would was

expecting to have to cut another 50 or more every after that. so but now they have you know, they'll have 940 and that's a pretty big, pretty big newsroom. and there are a lot of new start ups. there are nonprofits there are ones that specialize in certain areas. so field is changing. i don't think you should judge future of journalism just by what's happening at the legacy news organization. and i think it's, you know, anybody who's getting who's interested in journalism. you'll be you'll be really good at what you feel passionate about and you should pursue your passion there be difficulties in every other field. you know, a lot of stuff that everybody was the career. i mean, look, my my after two years in journalism when i was working at the miami herald, you know, my mother said, well, don't you want to be a lawyer like your friends? and i first i said, they're not really my friends. so. i can't. and secondly, no, i really want to be a lawyer.

i'm interested in the law but i don't want to be a lawyer. it's just not for me, it wasn't interesting enough. and i, i wanted to do something that for me would be both interesting and meaningful. and i think i found it in the field of journalism and, and i'm glad that i did it. and so the field is going to change as long as we remain a democracy. so. well, sumption, there, but as long as we remain democracy, i think there will be a need and demand for journalism of of a certain type it'll be the formats will change as i mentioned, and they should change and people should learn it. and if a young person has the knows how to, they has the skills and the will, they can leapfrog over all the people are unwilling or unable to do what's necessary to adapt to changing. thank you. so we have one minute left. so close up by the way, formats will change, but our won't try to keep my answers more concise. hello. what specific measures do you

foresee in a trump administration against the media or what kind of actions do you think they could actually take and what what should we be preparing for? yeah, well, you know, i'm sure they're i'm sure they thought of them all already. i'm not making any suggestions here, but i that on national security matters, they will the press i wouldn't be surprised to see i think they will encourage particularly troubled news organizations that allies the business world to to acquire them as has happened in venezuela and other other where allies of the government are acquire these these these news organizations and and then i think there'll be a of libel suits brought against us even more have been brought in the past to harass us. all right. let's give a hand for marty baron. thank you.

if you missed of today's coverage of the miami book fair, it refers in its entirety starting tonight at 11 p.m. eastern. right. time. this weekend's on c-span. two are an intellectual. every saturday, american history

tv documents america's story and on sundays book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors funding for c-span to come from these television companies and more, including comcast. are you think this is just a community center? no, it's way more than that. comcast is partnering with a thousand communities centers to create wi-fi enabled lifts so students from low income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anythin comcast along with these television companies supports. c-span two as a public service. recently at the 2023 national book festival, historian douglas brinkley discussed, environmental activism during the sixties. here's a portion of that conversation. when rachel carson wrote silent spring in 1962 warning about ddt and pesticides being detrimental to your health, having a carson eugenic effect on animals and

potentially humans, kennedy was asked at a press, what about rachel carson's? articles in the new yorker? and he said, well, i'm going to put in a scientific panel, advisory panel. we're looking research and if it holds up and he found the best scientist you. they came up with a pretty quick fashion a report that proved that carson's research accurate and yet it took a decade to ban it was 92 not till 1972. rachel carson of breast cancer in 64. and kennedy, of course, is dead in 63. but there this movement as silence might called silent spring revolution and the big turning point in my mind was the birth of law in the sixties, even as late as 1965 and 66, it was called conservation. lyndon johnson's program was the new cancer, but environment started kicking in due to barry commoner and scientists were

using the term environment. and it really kind of took hold and. ddt got banned by nixon ruckelshaus in two. and in the big lesson of all of this is it's people we have to up we can't under curse of climate today these reports are all there. i mean, i deal with them in my book like david. i mean, with revelle in the fifties talking about in kennedy administration had a loose document going round about what we're climate change johnson and in 65 tried to give a speech about it as early as 65. but you know, he had medicaid and medicare in vietnam, civil rights, sex, voting rights just kind of got buried in the media flow. i print almost verbatim in the book a memo that any of you remember daniel patrick moynihan new york senator brilliant guy

moynihan writes john erlichman, nixon's domestic advisor for that he's done investigation. and so that this climate, the scientist saying we are in big trouble to co2 emissions. in the letter it says, what does this mean? it goodbye, miami and new york city forever verdict on seattle all unknown were were truly i mean there it is in the white house and then you'll find other presidents you know jimmy carter trying to do you know put solar panels on the white house and get up global reports 2000. but the truth is we failed. we're sitting here today there is no climate hero president, not for the reasons david marks in his book the the oil and gas petroleum industry started organizing starting in 1973 with the arab oil embargo and gas prices went up and they had their own groups start attacking

environmental and it took they even said in the famous powell memo. it'll take about 30 years to undo all the wins of the environmentalist of the sixties, early seventies. what they don't like the companies was federal regulation. if you're a mining company, you don't want to be regulated. you don't want the federal government. and this movement in the sixties as, david brower, head of the sierra club, said not only did they win, they had fun they stopped the dam in the grand canyon, a dam and dinosaur national dams that were stopped through protest hikes. william douglas, supreme court justice, hiked 186 miles here in to save the and canal from d.c. to cumberland, maryland to stop a highway from coming win after win after win after win in that period. but by 73 i mean certainly by 80, the reagan revolution kicks in. and now if you're an environmentalist, you're seen as a