have to argue and it will flee wherever it perceives there to be a risk in the marketplace that it is not landing in your marketplace will go someplace else. >> i think that is very interesting concept the idea of having a consumption-based tax as opposed to income-based tax and that is an interesting theory and makes a lot of sense but to go through that debate right now and you know have a two-year debate on the fair tax we need to do something now. >> read the latest comes from candidates and political reporters and link to c-span's media partners in the early primary and caucus states all at c-span.org/campaign 2012. ..

>> a lot of people here who have been supportive of me during the whole process of writing the book. people who edited, people who traveled out to montana to read payments on our couch -- pages on our couch out there, and people who reviewed by reporting. i appreciate you guys being here and showing your support tonight. so, the idea of this book, actually, it was sort of borne out of frustration, and the idea crystallized for me that the first and only time that i flew on air force one. i'd taken this job for "the washington post" where i'd been working for a while where it was my assignment to write sort of more personal, intimate stories about the presidency and what the president's life is like. and it only took me, like, maybe a week of doing that job to realize that the president doesn't really have personal, intimate moments, certainly none

that i was going to get access to. i mean, everything about his life is outsourced in this, you know, really crazy way. i mean, he has 94 butlers and maids serve the family in the white house, six calligraphers write anything he wants written, 78 people make his schedule every day. it's this huge army that sort of helps him oart in this day-to-day way, and his schedule is subdivided into these 15-minute chunks, and there's a secretary who sits outside the oval office which actually has a reverse peephole so she can look in through the door at him and make sure that things are running on schedule. he calls that, he calls it the bubble, and i think sometimes it really drives him crazy. and in the few weeks that i've been doing this job, it had been driving me crazy, probably also my editors crazy because i was probably not writing as many stories as they were hoping i was going to write and not getting to the personal moments in obama's life. so, you know, finally after doing this for, you know, it'd

probably been a few months at this point, my turn came up to fly on air force one. and the way flying on air force one works is pretty much everybody who covers the president, like, your name is put into this huge database, um, and every time the president goes on a trip, you know, they move through this database, and eight more people get their turn to fly on air force one. so my name came up, and i finally thought, all right, this is a moment where i'm going to see something, i'm going to be up close and, like, i'll have a chance to sort of experience what this is like a little bit for him. so, you know, got dressed up. obama flies out of a private air force base in virginia, you know, got dressed up, actually represented a car to drive over there because rachel and i's car at the time was a battered pontiac grand am that we'd managed to keep functional. it didn't really feel appropriate to pull onto the tarmac next to air force one. [laughter] so rented a car. i'm sure they gave me, like, a

volkswagen bug, but still, rented a car, drove over there. waited with, like, these eight other reporters as we waited sort of for our turn to board the plane. we waited for maybe, i don't know, an hour, and then they led us up. there are two entrances on air force one. they led us up this back one that's kind of back by the, you know, the far rear of the airplane. we walked up the stairs, we sat down, and they said, okay, wait here, we're waiting for the president to arrive at the airport. so we waited for maybe a half an hour, then we heard, okay, the president is arriving at the airport. and you have never seen reporters move this fast. there was a mad scramble to get back off the plane to watch the president's motorcade arrive, and then we saw him walk six steps up the separate entrance to the plane to the front of the plane. so, you know, those six steps were very illuminating, we saw what he was wearing and what he was doing. in and we all were frantically taking notes about it. we got back on the plane, we

flew to new hampshire. we scrambled off the plane as fast as we could to watch the president walk those six steps again back into his motorcade. we followed behind separately in a different car to the event. this event, actually, there was not enough time or space for the press to go into the event with him, so we were off site in a satellite location where we watched the speech on, like, closed circuit tv and, you know, were taking notes off the event that way. so i was sitting there feeling, you know, honestly, just really frustrated with trying to write about the presidency in any kind of meaningful way. and i was listening to his speech, and i heard him say something that i'd heard him talk about before, but, you know, it just sort of clicked. he talked about these ten letters that he reads every night which are a sampling of the 20,000 letters that come into the white house every day. and, you know, he talked about how these letters were what he felt like were his only direct connection left to people out in the country and the people that he governed. and he said that the letters

were the thing that sometimes kept him sane when he felt like he was so barricaded from some of the other things. and, you know, i realized pretty quickly then that that was something that seemed personal and real and genuine, and that was something that i wallet today try to write about. -- wanted to try to write about. so that's what i did. it started with a story for the post. i wrote a longer piece about the process of getting these ten letters to his desk. then the paper was generous enough to give me a leave for a year where i did go out to montana, and i think they have totally eliminated the distinguished from that professor title now, but, so went out there and wrote, and at the end of this year finally did get time on the president's schedule where that secretary was look anything through that reverse peephole at us while we talked about the letters. um, and i'll read, i'll read a brief part of the book now that's sort of, you know, from that half hour i had with him about what this mail means to him.

the president said the hardest letters for him to read were the ones that made him feel remote, even powerless. people tended to write to their president when circumstances turned dire. what resulted each day inside obama's purple folder was an intimate view of hardship and personal struggle, a wave of desperation capable of overwhelming the senses. so many writers needed urgent help, obama said, and yet the act of governing was so slow that it sometimes took years before legislation could actually improve people's lives. a few times during his presidency obama had been so moved by a letter that he had written a personal check or made a phone call on the writer's behalf believing it was the only way to insure a fast result. it's not something i should advertise, but it has happened, he said. many other times he had forwarded letters to government agencies or cabinet secretaries after attaching a standard handwritten note that read, "can you, please, take care of this." these letters can be heartbreaking, just

heartbreaking, he said. some you read and you say, gosh, i really want to help this person, and i may not have the tools to help them right now. and then you start thinking about the fact that for every one person who wrote describing their story, there might be another 100,000 going through the same thing. so there are times when i'm reading the letters, and i feel pain that i can't do more faster to make a difference in their lives. he said his nightly read anything the white house sometimes made him pine for his days as a community organizer back in the '80s when he was making $10,000 a year and working on the south side of chicago. he had just graduated from college, and he purchased a used car for $2,000 and spent his days driving around the city's housing projects to speak with residents about their lives. he became familiar with many of the same issues that would flood his mail 25 years later; housing calamities, chronic unemployment and struggling schools. obama's fellow organizers in chicago considered hem a master of hands-on granular problem solving. he was skinny and boyish, a good listener if still a bit naive.

and some of the older women in the housing projects made a habit of inviting him into their homes and cooking for him. he looked around their apartments, keeping a log of maintenance issues and delivering that list to the landlord. he helped arrange meetings with city housing officials to talk about asbestos problems, he established a tenants' rights organization, founded a job training program and led a tutoring group that prepared students for college. when he left for harvard law school after three years in chicago, obama had set his path for his future. he wanted to become a politician, a job that would allow him to listen to people's problems and enjoy the simple satisfaction of solving them. now, he was the most powerful politician of all, and yet fixing problems seemed more difficult and satisfaction more elusive. the people were right there in front of me, and i could say let's go to the alderman's office, or let me be an advocate in some fashion, obama said. and here just because of the nature of the office and the scope of the issues, you're removed in ways that are

frustrating. sometimes what you want to do is pick up the phone and say tell me more about what's going on, and let me see if i can be your social worker, be your advocate, your employment counselor. so what i have to constantly reconcile in my mind is that i have a very specific role the play in this office, and i've got to make a bunch of big decisions that you hope in the ago regate wind up having a positive effect, but you can't always be certain. that was one of the reasons obama had taken to responding by hand to a few letters each night. he still liked the satisfaction of providing at least one thick immediate and con -- one thing immediate and concrete. so what i would do when i picked a letter that i was going to write about, um, and really the part of the book that i enjoy the most is that i would then go and spend, you know, a week -- more than that sometimes -- with these people who had written to the president and received back responses from him watching their problems unfold. and, you know, that was by far,

i guess, the biggest privilege in this for me, was getting the chance -- the mail that comes in to him and that comes in that folder of ten letters every night, it is so remarkably diverse. it comes from all kinds of people, people who despise him, people who love him, mostly just from people who are writing about what's going on in their lives. and these really sering ways. i mean, they're sort of like these journal entries. they're so personal because people don't necessarily expect he's ever going to read them, and then for me to be able to go spend time with those people and, you know, be there with them while they were, you know, trying to reform a school or filing for bankruptcy or making these big decisions in their lives was a huge privilege to see sort of how that works on a small scale while watching how the president's trying to deal with those problems in this big, sweeping way. so the bulk of the book, really, is stories of these people's lives and, you know, narrative journalism of watching how things for these people go.

so the other, the other passage i'm going to read before i hope taking some questions is a slightly longer passage. um, but i think it'll just give you a feel for what this book really like. this is a couple that wrote a letter to the president when they were just going through a brutal stretch. it's a woman and her husband, they lived in monroe, michigan, which is this really bleak town in michigan halfway true, halfway from toledo and detroit, and actually you'd rather be in either toledo or detroit than either of these places. and jen, the woman, had lost her job. her husband, jay, ran a pool business, he'd lost that job. she had then been diagnosed with cancer, and she wrote a note to the president just sort of kind of telling him what things were like for them there. he wrote back a pretty sort of inspirational note to her, and they decided once they got this note, the president sort of told them that things could get better for them, and they should take steps to make things

better, and what they decided to do, the only way they could think things would be better was they decided they needed to file for bankruptcy and try to get a fresh start on this tremendous debt that had mounted in their lives. so i went there with them while they were going through this process, and this passage that i'm going to read is the scene of their bankruptcy hearing, this day. they woke at 6 in the morning of the bankruptcy hearing looking as if they'd never slept. jen had broken her ankle the day before when she tripped going down the stairs, and now all she could think about was the vicodin and a cigarette. jay had a headache that was threatening to become a migraine. he walked out of their bedroom to discover three loads of unfolded laundry spread across the living room floor, crusty dishes sitting on the kitchen table and their youngest son, 2-year-old jaden, awake and wailing because of an ear ache. jay checked on the ear ache can and escaped with jen to the back

porch where each had stored a half-smoked cigarette. this was their latest concession. the plan was meant to cut their consumption in half, but instead they were smoking twice as off, still burning $13 a day on two packs and wasting gas to go to walmart. jay smoked his half cigarette and flicked it into the air. i don't know if i can do this, he said. you have to, jen said. i've got five hours of work left to finish this pool, jay said. i've got the late shift tonight at the airport. we've got one kid screaming and another going on a field trip, but i have to drop everything and drive all the way to ann arbor just so i can prove that we're broke? i'm sorry, jen said. there's no choice. jay went back inside and searched through his closet for an outfit. the last time he'd dressed up was for their wedding, five months and 15 pounds ago, and now his favorite pair of slacks refused to button. he found another pair of

wrinkled khakis and smoothed them with an iron. they fit, but he couldn't find a belt to match. he walked to the bathroom mirror and tried to knot a tie once, twice, three times and still this thing ended up dangling above his belly button. he threw the tie back in the closet and went into the living room to show jen his partial outfit. you look good, she said. i feel like an idiot, he said. jen went outside to smoke at half cigarette, and jay disappeared into the closet again. this time when he came out, he didn't ask for feedback. he was wearing skateboard shoes, jeans, a frayed cloth belt, an oversized detroit tigers' t-shirt and a baseball hat. he tucked a cigarette behind each ear and grabbed his car keys. this will have to work, he said, and then he kissed jen good-bye before she could object. he drove across the street to order a coffee with tree creams and three sugars, then he pulled onto the highway and headed for

ann arbor. jay kept the radio turned off and thought about the other times he'd traveled this highway. he'd lived in ann arbor for a few years in his early 20s, dated a college girl and worked on swimming pools when the economy was booming. customers had often paid him in cash, so he traveled with a stack of $20 bills in his pocket. he'd celebrated a friend's birthday at the fanciest steakhouse in town where waiters refolded his napkin when he went to the bathroom. now he drove past that restaurant and parked in front of the courthouse. framed photos of obama and vice president joe biden hung on the wall of the entrance. just beyond the metal detectors. directly above those photos was a printed sign, "bankruptcy proceedings," it read, with an arrow pointing up the courthouse stairs. jay followed the sign to the second floor lounge where bankruptcy hearings had taken place every other wednesday for a year because the courtroom was always overbooked. the bankruptcy lounge looked like the waiting room at a doctor's office with fake

flowers at the entrance, four televisions hanging from the ceiling and back issues of "fortune" magazine -- an ironic choice -- spread across coffee tables. the bankruptcy o officiant sat at a white folding table. jay found a chair near the back of the room and surveyed the people sitting around him. there was an elderly black man wearing mismatched tennis shoes, one red, one white. a motorcyclist in a harley davidson t-shirt with a grizzly beard. an obese woman whose jeans, worn too low, forced mounds of flesh to spill into plain view. jay would learn that many of these people had been advised by their lawyers to look at destitute as possible. it was the unspoken rule of bankruptcy court; dress to depress, not to impress. in his stained baseball hat, jay was the most dapper client in the room. his lawyer, whom he had never met, arrived 20 minutes late,

mumbled an apology about bad traffic, and pulled jay into the hallway for a consultation. thanks for coming, sir, jay said a. the lawyer had his hair slicked back, and he casually tossed a pen into the air. sure, sure, he said, glad to help. it was a good day for the lawyer. he would earn $1300 per case. jay and jen had already started sending him monthly payment checks as part of the payment plan incurring one new debt in an attempt to erase all the others. so remind me again why you're filing, the lawyer asked. lots of reasons, jay said, but mainly because my pool business went under. really? i thought you guys made a lot of money in pools. my brother just bought an inground pool, and it's costing him 30 grand. we didn't get many orders like that, jay said. the lawyer shrugged and handed jay a one-page form to fill out. jay grabbed a pen and started to write. under 2008 income with spouse he wrote, $14,000.

under 2009 income, 23,000. he checked a few boxes, signed the bottom of the form and handed it back to the lawyer. okay, the lawyer said, here's how this is going to go. the o officiant will call us up, and he'll ask you a few questions. keep your answers short and polite. there shouldn't be anything too confusing. if all goes well, you'll be granted your bankruptcy. don't be nervous, i do this all the time. trust me, this is a piece of cake. jay nodded, and they went back into the lounge where the o officiant stood to announce the beginning of the proceedings. jay leaned forward in his seat to listen. one by one people filing for bankruptcy walked to the front of the room and sat across from the officiant at the white table. they raised their right hands and offered their testimony, the soundtrack of a recession. case one, the primary reason i'm finalling for bankruptcy is that i was the owner/operator of a truck business. that went bad. now i have no truck and no business. case two, i'm in sales, and

there's no commission anymore. i sell copiers and printers. it's a full-time job, and, sir, i made only 11,000 last year. case three, my son's on welfare and not doing so good, so now i'm supporting all five of the grandkids. thirty minutes into the hearing, the bankruptcy officiant stood up from the table and called for jason stanley klein. he walked to the front of the room with his lawyer, and they sat side by side. the officiant stared back at them. he was a muscular man with a crew cut and dark circles under his eyes. he'd been processing bankruptcy cases every other wednesday for 21 years, supervising what he called a nonstop parade of misery. it had always been a hard job, but lately he'd started to wonder if it was becoming unbearable. bankruptcy cases were at an all-time high with more than 1.57 million people filing for it nationally during the 12-month period ending at the end of 2010.

doug had processed 1700 bankruptcies in 2009, his busiest year ever, and he was on pace towards 50% more in 2010. the preparation for each case required 60 pages of paperwork, but no amount of groundwork made the face-to-face meetings any easier. people seemed more desperate than ever, he thought, and more likely to snap. they shouted, they cried, they slammed their fists on the table. lately, he'd been forced to call in the court marshal to handle a violent outburst about once a month. he thought of his job as similar to that of an emergency room physician. after a while you've seen a lot of the same pain and suffering, he said. you know the stories, people are sick, unemployed, homeless. i don't want to say you become jaded necessarily, but you have to look at their problems objectively and move forward in an efficient manner to the next case. now doug looked across the table at the next case, jason stanley klein, case number 1045682.

so, doug said, what caused the bankruptcy? i went into business at a bad time, and a bad location and a lot of my debt stemmed from that, jay replied. doug looked down and studied jay's bankruptcy filing. not long ago doug had believed in most bankruptcies resulted from avoidable mistakes. now he wasn't so sure. he saw in jay's paperwork a familiar combination of bad luck, declining wages, housing foreclosure and unemployment, the story of michigan's economy at the beginning of 2010. sometimes doug studied a case and thought immediately of one of his favorite expressions; there but for the grace of god go i. he continued to do his job, he said, because the paycheck kept him on the right side of the white table. he looked across at jay. is everything you filed here accurate, doug asked? yes, sir, jay said. then i have no further questions. that completes your exam. jay stood up and walked out of the courtroom. the lawyer followed him into the hall and squeezed his shoulder. no further questions means they're going to grant you the

bankruptcy, the lawyer said. jay nodded. he shook the lawyer's hand, walked out to his car and drove back to monroe. he called jen from the road. it's done, he said. let's celebrate. they met at a mexican restaurant in monroe where the lunch entrees cost $4.95 and came big enough to split. jen leaned her crutched against the wall and wrapped her arms around jay. they smoked their half cigarettes and then went inside to order; a beer for him and a margarita for her. jay had to work later that night at the airport, jen had to take jaden to the doctor to check on the ear ache. the restaurant was empty. mare yap chi music play inside the background. they sat on the same side of the booth holding hands. jay took off his hat, smirked and raised his glass. to bankruptcy, he said. to fresh starts, she said. to 2010, he said. so, um, you know, the book, i think, it reveals a lot of what was going on in the country over the course of that year that i

was reporting. for jen and jay, you know, one of the heavier stories in the book, over the course of the year they filed for bankruptcy, they got bankruptcy, their debts continued to mount because of her medical bills, things did not get better. and at the end of the year and at the end of the book in this really heartbreaking moment, they decided they were going to take their first trip to new york city because an autograph dealer there had been, you know, writing them again and again and again, a dealer who knew they'd gotten a letter from the president and, eventually, jen and jay drove to new york, sold this letter for $10,000 so that they could pay off these debts. so that was one very direct case where, you know, this exchange had a pretty profound impact on these people's lives. and other stories in here are, certainly, more hopeful. and, you know, the mix in that envelope ranges from, you know, sort of this kind of devastation to, you know, kids writing who were inspired by obama and end up running for class president

themselves and doing well because of it. but one of the things that i find just astounding about this process every day, the fact that, you know, the president reads these ten letters every day, i mean, for me reading that for a year and having no control over everything, i mean, it's, it's pretty humbling in terms of just, you know, what people are going through in their lives, in the country, and people tend to write when things are, you know, things are difficult for them. as a journalist, i know that usually most of the feedback i get is people who write because they're upset about something. and i think, you know, what he reads reflects that. so, but i also think he's, it is, it is a fixture of what he does, and he'll continue to read all ten as long as he's in office. i mean, so far the mix of letters in there has not gotten easier to read, it's probably in some ways gotten more difficult, so we'll see how that mix changes in the time to come. but i'd love to talk, questions, anything? you guys want more uplifting

stories, we can switch into that mode. [laughter] yeah. >> i've got a bunch, so i'll try to limit it. you say he gets 20,000 a day or a week? >> a day. >> how does that get down to ten? is. >> it is a crazy process that requires, basically, an army. so mail used to be handled inside the white house itself before the anthrax scare, and then they decided it was too big a risk to have all this stuff come anything there, so they took over this office build anything downtown where on the ninth floor of this building 50 employees, like 100 interns and 1500 volunteers sort through this deluge of mail that comes in every day. and they're very specific about measuring the metrics of the mail. so e-mails are, like, automatically categorized into one of 75 folders that people likely, are likely to write about. and they measure every day, okay, today we got 20% of our mail about occupy wall street. half of it was negative, half of it was positive, you know? and they take these metrics, and

they make sure that the ten they give to obama reflect the general feel of what's coming in. so pretty much the people who select these letters for him are these, the staffers in that office, it's, you know, it's people who it's their first job in d.c., they maybe worked on the campaign. they go in, they read 300 of these letters a day. they pick five that are representative of sort of the main issues that are coming in but that also stand out in some, you know, that stick with them. then those letters go to the director of the office's december who can looks at 100 of these potential letters to go to his desk and picks ten that he feels represent what came in that day. so, yeah, it requires an army. yeah. >> and how many did you read, and how did you pick your ten? were you looking for ten that were representative, or were you just looking for the really amazing stories? >> i mean, lucky, i could kind of do both.

it was sort of a reporter's dream because you could take one day, and just by the fact that 20,000 letters have already been reduced to ten, those are going to be ten probably really good, compelling stories. so to then be able to pick -- i was able to read hundreds of letters over the course of the year, so to be able to pick from this huge wealth of letters, it was, it was hard to pick the ten that i wanted to follow. i did, i mean, the few things for me i wanted to pick, i wanted a mix. i wanted, i wanted stories like jen and jay, but i also wanted stories that were, letters that were funny or fun or, um, so that was one thing. also i was looking for letters that impacted his presidency in a profound way. and some of these letters, some of the letters in the book really have been transformative for him and also for the people who wrote. i mean, letters that he has used to pass major bits of legislation by talking about the letter again and again and again. or times where he's responded to a letter writer and then gone to that person's hometown to give a

major speech. so i was looking for things like that. also, and this is a little bit, like, maybe inside journalism shoptalk, but i was looking for stories that i could still go and watch things unfold. the book, i think, would be a very static book if i was just going back and reporting on this person wrote because of this. i wanted the letters to sort of be a beginning point for me where, you know, somebody's writing about something they're going through, and i can go watch and be there while they're going through this, so -- other questions? thoughts? criticisms? open to all things. [laughter] yeah. >> i thought this -- i've read the book. >> oh, cool, thanks. >> i thought it was, i thought it was excellent. i thought it was something that should be read in schools because i think that was a very -- i think that was one of the messages that sort of came out of it is that, you know, is that you can, you can connect, you can, you know, make your

voice heard. but i thought the story about the health care, about the woman in ohio who was so ill and the fact that her story was kind of clinch that health care deal and was absolutely amazing. >> oh, thank you so much. i really appreciate that. yeah, the story that she's referencing in the book which probably is the letter that over the last three years has had the most profound impact on the president, it came from a cleaning woman in ohio who wrote a letter to say, basically, my health care premiums have skyrocketed, i can't afford to pay them anymore, i've had to choose between being able to keep my house or pay my health insurance. i'm giving up my health insurance. the president immediately recognized sort of the potential of this letter. he was just beginning to try to pass his health care reform. and so at the white house they talked about, well, maybe we should bring this woman here and have her talk to some major health insurance companies.

so they called her to see if she'd be willing to do that. at that point, two weeks had passed. during these two weeks right after she'd given up her health care, she had been diagnosed with leukemia and given a 35% chance to live. so, you know, it was this really, um, you know, sort of impactful moment for both the president and this woman whose name is natoma canfield. he then decided, okay, instead of her coming here, i will go there. he gave a major speech there and sort of

. >> yeah, that was a case that impacted the president and her in a pretty profound way. thanks for reading it. i really appreciate it. yeah. >> i was really struck by the access people gave you to their lives, and i was sort of imagining you, you know, at the breakfast table. it seemed like you were right there for all these moments. so what does that look like? you just show up and interact with them for a period of time?

>> kind of, yeah. it's kind of what i usually do for the paper too. in this case i'm always amazed just as a journalist in general by how willing people are to open up their lives to a writer. i mean, which is not an easy thing to do. to have me, you know, to have me go to your bankruptcy hearing with you, it's like a very, a lot to -- >> or your chemo. >> yeah, or your chemo. in this case i think people write to the president often times because they want, they want to know that their lives matter and that their stories count and that somebody's listening to them. and so then in these cases when i called and said, you know, the president did read this letter, what you're going through does matter, and i want to come, and i want to write about it because, you know, i want to write about it in this up-close, honest way across the board people were totally open and willing to having me do that. and, you know, just in terms of how those trips usually go, and there are other people in the

room who do them, my experience with them is the first day of a trip like that can be, um, a little bit awkward or hard. people are nervous, and, you know, it's -- those days are the hardest. usually by, like, the second or third day that you're there, you kind of stop being the writer/reporter, and you start being ely or joe or whoever, and i think that's when you get to the best stuff because you're at this level of intimacy you need to be there to get which is why i knew i wanted to spend time with these people. because just going back and reporting on why people wrote, um, you can get, you can get to a certain layer of depth. i think just being there while things are unfolding, it's a different kind of thing and kind of helps you get to that next level. >> >> i'm glad you add the epilogue because before i finished the book, i was looking up on the internet how she was doing. you get invested in the stories, so thanks for including it. >> yeah, sure, thanks. >> did anybody turn you down?

>> nobody turned me down. and that, you know, it honestly made it hard to pick the letters i was going to write about. usually in picking a letter the other thing i was looking for, you know, there were some big issues over the course of the year that i knew i wanted. i wanted a letter about the oil spill. so finding -- sometimes i would say, okay, here are ten letters i could pick about immigration. and then i would call, you know, ten of those people and have these initial sort of half hour, 40-minute conversations just to get a feel for if it was going to work. and sometimes narrowing those six, seven, eight, ten to one was, yeah, brutal. you know, i feel like i could have written 100 letters. nobody would have read it after the first ten. [laughter] but, you know, it was hard to narrow it down to that number. yeah. >> so were there, did you take ten trips? so was it ten trips, or did you spend time with people who didn't make it into the book?

>> i never -- good question. i never made, i never went out of town for a long trip and then said, okay, this is going to be on the cutting room floor. i made more than ten trips because sometimes just because of what people were going through, i would go for a few days and then come back and then go again for, you know, to be there for a big, a bankruptcy hearing, a first day of college. um, so it ended up being more than ten trips in that way, but i never, you know, i never went somewhere and felt like this really isn't going to work. and, you know, also just in my job for the paper where i do the same kind of thing, that doesn't happen very up, and i don't think it's because i get there and i'm getting incredible material and, you know, i'm not good at what i'm doing. i think a lot of it is people are just, people are really interesting. and if you get, if you get to that level, i think with almost anybody people's lives are really interesting. and if you can, if you can write about them in textured ways, there are very few people whose lives you go and find, jeez,

this is just really boring. i think if -- [laughter] if you were feeling that way, you're probably still at, like, a very surface level. so, yeah. yeah. >> did the white house approve the ten letters that you selected? >> they did not, no. i had to battle with them for access to be able to read letters and to say, basically, i want to do this book, and we need to work it out so that i get to read the letters he reads. that was, that was a process and a long process. but i, once i had that access, um, you know, they were not -- i picked whatever letters i wanted to pick which, um, i think, honestly, that worked for them because what, why the president likes to talk about these letters, i think, and why they like to talk about these letters so much is they want to show that he's listening to everybody. so the fact that i knew i wanted to write about, you know, one of the letters in the book is from a republican in texas who writes this really angry e-mail late at night. i knew i wanted something like

that in the book, but also, like, i think for them they wanted to show that, you know, yeah, he hears that person too. he reads whatever comes in. so that made it work out. yeah. >> seems like this book would inform teaching journalism and poly-sci. do you know if it's being assigned in classes? seems like it ought to be. >> oh, thanks, i appreciate that. i don't know if it is. maybe i can pull some strings in montana and have one class of 15 kids read it. [laughter] but that's probably the extempt. thank you, yeah. >> has the president read the book? >> i don't know. he's gotten a copy. i doubt he's read the book just in terms of how much he's got going on and also, i was thinking about in the other day like thinking, wow, maybe he's read the book moment, i was just thinking about what he reads. and then i remembered that everything he reads is, like, very public. and they release, the white house occasionally releases, like, here's what's on the

president's reading list. and it would probably look really weird if he was reading the book about the mail he reads. it would look a little conceited, so there's probably -- [inaudible] >> i'm sure he does. >> but, yeah. i sent him a copy, and i stent him a -- sent him a handwritten note. i don't know if it got by the mail room. no, i think it did. he has a copy. i don't know if he'll read it or not. yeah. >> hi, my name's bishop, and i haven't read the book, but i'm landing on it. >> cool, thanks. >> were you in contact with the president throughout your writing? >> i was in contact with his staff, and there are some people, um, very few people, but there are some people who work in his administration who i know well enough at this point that i could sort of, you know, if i was writing -- part of, the book was kind of an education for me because these chapters are about, you know, they're all about different issues. so one of my challenges was, like, to learn about, for instance, education policy and

learn about it enough that then you can write about education policy in an interesting way. it's hard. so during that i would be talking the people, like, you know, arnie ton can and people on -- arne duncan and people on his staff trying to learn what they were trying to do with education and learn that way. i wasn't talking with the president about any of it until the end. >> right. >> and then i went in and had, you know, 30 or 40 minutes to sort of talk in general about the letters and, also, talk specifically about letters in the book. >> did you ever get to visit the office? >> i did, yeah. which is just a crazy and really cool place. i mean, it's, it's like this building is this filter between the public and the president. and so if you send an e-mail, it lands on one of the computers there. if you send a letter, it goes there. if you call the white house comment line, there are 35 people who sit at a phone bank and try to keep all those calls to two minutes. there is by far the most fascinating, there's a gift

room. like, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people send the president gifts which is sort after a strange instinct. and they send these really, really weird things. sometimes like, you know, just like when he was interested in getting a dog, the white house received a handful of different puppies that were mailed -- >> oh! >> yeah. i mean, it's this -- and it used to be worse. in reading about, like, the history of this mail room, the presidents who were big game hunters would sometimes receive gifts from across the world of big game animals; tigers, different things like this that would just land at the white house. so the gift room is probably the coolest place. it's really strange. yeah, the gift room. [laughter] exactly. exactly. spend some time with a tiger, yeah. [laughter] could be a book. that room is really cool. so -- >> so i have a question with the, i'm sure there were letters of threats that he would receive. what do they do with those letters? >> yeah. so the first thing that happens to any mail is it goes through

this weeklong screening process where it's scanned for, you know, chemical threats, radiological threats. so that happens first. then it comes into this office, and the reason that they have this huge staff is there's a rule there that every single letter has to be read because, who knows, you know, buried in up with of these letters could be some kind of credible threat. so that's why they've decided we need to make sure a person reads every one of these letters, and letters that are threats are flagged immediately and go places much high or than to me. but, you know, also like on the comment line, even people calling in to the white house, all those phones have a red button that automatically transfers both suicide calls and threats which is, was astounding to me that enough people call the white house with either because they're going to commit suicide or because they're calling with this threat that they have a button on every phone that just automatically transfers it. so, yeah, it is sad. i mean, people call there for

all kinds of things. yeah. crazy place, you know? it was, it's just, i think that whole building is, like, this window into, you know, this window into the the relationship between the public and the president, and, you know, both the fact that things get to him which is great and also what it takes to get things to him which is really illuminate anything this other way too. -- illuminating in this other way too. any other questions? yeah. >> i don't remember if you talked about this in the book or not. has the volume increased with obama? because i know, you know, there is this because he has talked about the letters, and he has, you know, complained about not being able to have his own blackberry and that kind of thing, and so my guess would be that people feel as though he's somehow more accessible. is -- >> i think definitely the volume, especially at first the volume was, like, more than they had ever seen. like, right when he was sworn -- >> of any president? >> of any president.

i think that's, you know, partly because of the historic nature of his election, partly it's that letters, especially e-mails, are much easier the send now. people can go, you know, letters are one thing. e-mail, like, you can go to the white house web site and send an e-mail very quickly, and people do. thousands of people a day. so the volume at the beginning was, like, skyrocketing high. and it stayed, it came down a little bit, but it stayed very steady, and i actually had coffee with the director of the mail room to do who said they've noticed it's already climbing again, and she thinks that for the next year before the election it's going to be crazy in there. you know, people, people write, i think, probably more when politics are big and in the news and in their mind which is a lot of the time but, obviously, that's influenced. so -- yeah. >> great book. >> oh, thanks so much. thank you for coming, everybody. i really, really appreciate you

guys being here. i hope those of you who haven't read it enjoy it, and thanks to those of you who have read it. appreciate it. [applause] >> this event was hosted by one more page books in arlington, virginia. for more information visit onemorepagebooks.com. >> you know, that's the kind of story which on the surface does sound very intriguing to me. for me to go forward with it, she would have to have a personal in for me. because i'm not one of those journalists who's going to show up and knock on doors. i have to have the story. and it would have to have the elements that i'm looking for. when it's already in the papers, that means there's other journalists running around it. and i'm also not a gun for hire. so for me, i have to want to go in and write it as my book. but it's intriguing. i would love to see an e-mail from her. ben as ben mezrich.com because if it's something you have the handle on and i can get in and

talk to everybody and they want to tell their story, oil, i did write a book about oil, but it was, you know, more in the new york merc exchange and dubai. it's intriguing. but, you know, also, i start and stop stories all the time. i'll get dozens of these, i'll look into them and be like, you know what? it's going to take too much time, or it's going to be too dangerous. i don't like to put myself into real danger, so you would i would not write a story where i had to get involved with mob people or go, like -- i've gotten those e-mails, too, i mean, really crazy e-mails from people who have done horrible things. it's like when eliot spitzer went down, the madam was e-mailing me, right? i'm going to hang out with a madam for a year. i got e-mails from charlie sheen's people. again, i don't think my wife would have let me do that one. julian assange. everyone does contact me at some point. i do like the stories off the beaten track because no one's heard of them.

>> well, sex on the moon, he got arrested in orlando, big trial -- >> 100 agents, they closed a major highway -- >> headlines in tampa -- >> and yet they covered it up. nasa -- and i'm not going to say nasa, i don't know how nasa covered it up, but they were very unhappy. he was one of their own who robbed him. >> big trial. >> big trial, i don't know how public it was. it was a federal trial, i would assume it would have had to have been. >> yeah. >> there were reporters there. it was written about so little, and it didn't really just -- it never exploded. there was a wonderful l.a. times article about it at the time which was, like, a four-page article, and that was really it. and that was, you know, years ago. >> did nasa cooperate with you at all? >> no, no, no. so nasa was not thrilled i was writing this book, and they told everyone not to speak to me which makes people want to talk to me. i actually got axle amerman whoo is the belgium mineral collector -- >> antwerp.

>> he collected rocks, and his wife's name is crystal. he meets with a bunch of 50, 60-year-old guys in an abandoned rec hall, and they trade rocks. and he gets an e-mail out of the blue, do you want to buy a moon rock from the u.s.? so immediately he's excited. then he starts to think, wait, something's fishy here, and he decides something is going on, so he mails the fbi in the united states and says you might be interested in this. and the fbi creates this whole case using axle as their main source, and axle became my source. he reached out to me. wonderful guy. spent a lot of time talking to him. and nasa people were feeding him things that they wanted me to know. and then i decided, okay, i want to go to nasa, i want to see what it's like. so i just went on their web site, nasa.com or whatever it was, and i signed up for a level nine tour which is an internal high-security tour. they only let ten people do it a day. i figured they would cross-check

my name, but it's a government bureaucracy, and we all know how that works. i hope is up, they give me a security badge, and the next thing i know is i'm inside nasa. and then thad starts texting me, so i was walking around nasa, the ultimate bided tour of nasa by the guy who had robbed nasa. and then i was able to get all the court documents. i have a little, like, group who helped me. i have a lawyer who's kind of like one of those guys who can do anything lawyers, and he's got private eyes who could go to tampa and get me the court records -- >> but those should be public anyway, shouldn't they? >> i got the fbi files from the freedom of information act. i was amazed they sent them at all. it was redacted, but it was thousands of pages, so i knew everything that thad had been saying was true. i could back everything up. i even had what was in his pockets when he was arrested. the fbi, you see how hard they work when you get one of those

files. they had research on moon rocks for 200 pages just to know what a moon rock is. so i did, you do get all the information that way. but, um, yeah. yeah. >> this is booktv's "in depth" program. 2 02-737-0001 in the east and central time zones, 202-737-0002 mountain and pacific. send us an e-mail, booktv@cspan.org or a tweet, twitter.com/booktv is our address. patrick in new london, connecticut, you're on booktv. >> hi, guys, how are you? >> good. >> ben, a question for you. when you're an author and then you become a screenwriter, too, what's the difference aside from the obvious having to consolidate it down into a two hour movie format? and also, does it get frustrating? it seems to me whenever you watch a movie after you've read a book, 99% of the time you can

say there was something left out. i just saw a movie in theaters, and i had read the book -- not yours, by the way -- but i think important things get left out of a screenplay that were in the book, and i understand you can't fit it all in, but can you talk about it that a little bit? >> sure. first of all, i'm not a successful screenwriter yet. i have done one or two screenplays. so when i sell my books, they usually bring in somebody else who does it, and it's a process. screenplay's a very different animal than a book. all of the interior sort of dialogue and all of the motivations and all that stuff kind of gets left out, and they have to write it very succinctly, very action-driven usually. and, yeah, you know, often movies are not as good as the books. i've been very lucky. "social network" was a phenomenal movie. they have to pick and choose. you can't put everything in the book onto the screen. it's a shorter format, and also,

it's not always relevant. but, yeah, i've seen movies before where i've, oh, they left something out. and then i've seen movies where i felt like they put way too much in. so it's all the strength of the screen writer. and as someone who adapts their own work, i think the hard thing is cutting things. most writers, you know, make the mistake of putting too much in. you want a screenplay to run quickly. you want it to be fast, exciting and not spend a lot of time just sitting around talking. and in books you can get away with that. but my books are very written by screenplays. i mean, they get attacked for that as well. i visualize every scene, i imagine justin timberlake running around doing it all, and that's how i sit down and write. so when i write, it's as if i'm writing a movie, and i write it in a book form. but people who write screenplays don't usually write books. >> michael tweets into you, mr. mezrich, what are your upcoming prompts and storylines?

>> oh, well, that's a good question from michael. michael's in boston, right? i think i know michael. yeah, yeah, he's an incredible fashion designer who works, yeah, in boston. >> yeah, there's -- >> he wants me to tell secrets. i am working on a big, new project, but i'm not yet at liberty to say what it's about. it might be a female main character which would be very new for me. i've never written a female main character before. um, so if i write that book next, that will be it. but i'm not sure i'm going to write that book. i haven't really decided yet what my next book is. i'm also working on a couple television shows. i have a scripted show that i'm working on, and then i have a show, a really-type documentary show where i go inside stories every week which i've been working on sort of, like, you know how there's always macho guys on tv? i'm the opposite of that. so all those man v. wild, i'm the guy who doesn't succeed against the wild.

[laughter] i go inside these stories -- in hurricane winds? >> well, you know, all the stuff people pitch to me, essentially. and i become a part of it, and you can see the story, but then i get right how. so that's another show i'm working on. i don't know yet specifically what my next book is. i have an idea what it might be, but i haven't fully decided yet. >> mudstick tweets in, regarding ugly americans, are you concerned with muddy waters, carson block and the china media express fraud? >> no. [laughter] that sounds intriguing. i have been pitched a bunch of china stories. they're tricky because, first of all, there's so much corruption. it's dangerous, spending any amount of time following around people -- there are people making fortunes in china right now doing crazy things. but it's a little bit dangerous for me, um, to do one of those stories. i don't know specifically what story he's talking about, but, you know, there's been some good ones there. >> robert e-mails in, are you

familiar with richard hoagland's work in relationship to our moon? >> richard hogueland, i know -- you know, it's familiar to me, but i don't know. i think if he gave me more, i might know who you're talking about. >> that's all we've got. mario in miami, good amp, you're on booktv with ben mezrich. >> yes -- [inaudible] to make a book, if that person gets paid when the book is -- [inaudible] >> right, great question. yeah, good question. i mean, a lot of people want to know, a lot of people who come to me to tell me their stories want money. [laughter] i have two types of people, people who want money, or people who don't want money, they just want their story told which is off more fun. but it depend on the situation. i'm not really trying to write biographies of people.

um, i really want to write my books that are about true stories that happen, so it's a little bit different. i have in the past the main character from "bringing down the house," for instance, you know, it was my first nonfiction book, i gave him 10% of pretty much everything. and the movie was sort of separate. they can become consultants on the film, it depends on the movie situation. you know, some of the books they don't get anything. obviously, the facebook book, you know, they're all way richer than i'll ever be for the rest of my life. it's just different for every situation. my goal is to write the story and not have -- the problem when you're paying the characters is that you can become beholden to them in a way. it's not, it's a weird partnership when you write a story about someone because their not going to -- they're not going to like everything you write in the book. some of the things they're going to dislike because when you're telling a true story, you have to tell all the elements of the story, so you want to have some independence, you want to be able to write the story as it

happened and not necessarily as they want you to write the story. so it's not a pay-for-hire situation where someone says i want you to write my story and, no, that's not the way it happened. it's more like we have to work something out. if someone gets paid, it's because they're enabling the research, they're consulting on the facts, and they consult on the film. and if they're consulting and helping with the film, then, yeah, hollywood wants to buy life rights because it wants the story to be accurate. and, you know, it much -- i believe that hollywood studios much prefer someone who, you know, gives themselves their life rights, gets involved to the point where it's accurate but isn't, you know, running around the set trying to control everything. so the goal, of course, is a partnership in which, you know, i can write the book however the book has to be. if a movie is made, they can be involved in some way to consult on the film. you know, it's a good question. it's different for every project.

you know, usually a main character if book becomes a success, they're going to get a out -- a lot out of it. they can become famous, first of all. they can use that in any way they want, you know? the people from the facebook book, i believe, profited very well from it. i believe everyone involved did very well from that book, including mark zuckerberg. i think they were very good for zuckerberg and facebook. i don't believe he would have been on the cover of "time" magazine without accidental billionaires, i don't think the company would be worth $100 billion without the social network. i really think it was a big part of making their image cool. mark is way cooler in the movie than he was before the movie, and everyone knows him, and they know him in a way they would never have known him, and i think that was a big positive. >> be how is it that you were able to use a picture of mark zuckerberg on the front of your book? >> you'd have to ask the publisher. i believe it's a photo of a public figure. i think, you know, i've seen a lot of obama books with obama on

the cover. there are different rules and i'm not a lawyer, but as long as it's true, um, you can't -- you're not libeling anybody. as for photos, i think if it's a public figure -- honestly, i have no idea how that works. i don't know anything about the law of it. i'm sure there are people who do. >> do you think you'll ever get the chance to chat with him? >> yes, i think i will. when i met cheryl sand berg, she came up to me and said, you know, they did not like the book when it came out, they disagree with it, they say it's not true. however, now everyone's cool with me and, you know, it would be kind of fun if i came to facebook and talked. i think i was enemy number one for a good year. there's probably a ben mezrich tartboard in there -- dartboard in there, but everything's worked out. the company's great, and they'll all be worth trillions of dollars, and she's done amazing stuff over there. i think she's really an incredible person, so i have no ill will towards them, and i don't think they have any ill