richd rd ana. >> jack hitt is next on booktv. he recounts america's many amateur inventors and tankers from benjamin frankel's experiment with electricity to mark zuckerberg's social media website. induorot o tchens, basements, and garages. this is about 45 minutes. [inaudible] >> so when i hit the age we start askingourselwho i wh ih17, all

my friends could claim to be, you kno descendents of robert e. lee, or charles holdsworth pinkney or something like tha i didn't hear around the family house we h manfms mo a etok my mother grew exhausted with my testing in sydney to see mary pringle, an ancient cousin and amateur genealogists, primed onotraiosity i rd afte me re t ias esd a large sheet of paper bearing a set of concentric circles. in the center, mary wrote my name. and in the immediate out a circle divided path, she wrote anexleictoo my two a. rcheroth ae y four grandparents. we filled out as far as we could in every direction. in that area where her family and mine converged, a seemingly

unfounded wedge flew backwards to scod ngan unt m anstweobinth hses mqu oso this line, mary said, pointing to one of the ancient british girls we could claim, needs a direct line all the way to charlemagne. this vtiwstu sttsbat much pride to process. i wanted to ask her what the holy roman emperor had left me in his will. but mary's tone was olemn, almost religious. understand,u rhet shrmkihaag the room fell stl as the rest of the universe slowly wheeled about around me, just like on the piece of papr. well, needless to say i-- meqieetsort of

dropping this enormous chunk of self-esteem to any passing conversation, almost as good as some folks north of here are so ye ivncadgr wh things like oh, [laughter] and you know, history matters for all of us for all sort of - our personal history matters. maty ienad03s elatedtoth adt -psh . its title cries out as much with this anxiety as it does with pride. good people beget good people, a nealy. al taaer i had tea with mary pringle i was in a college caicos last week teaching at a point about factoring large. you cide to dramatize by giving examples from th real

world explaining w reddancy affected gealo in po heedyon l back to a.d. 800, the number and says you have on average is about 562 trillion. that's hal a quadrillion pele, ich is moreta haveison nt. how, he asked, could this be? when one goes back in time the number of ancestors expands, to grandparents, four grandparents, presen foesnr suupte lcte eeer tlw creates all kinds of crowding problems to the number of ancestors one has by a.d. 1200 is just over 268 million people. roughly the total populationf all humans on the planet at that ti thouofcu t olinr olwards and then it rapidy implodes through super

redundancy and in the smaller populations that existed back then. the upshot he explained is that nearly everyone currently living on the planet can claim, and 's f emphasisto b the dire ecndenf lemagne. [laughter] the room felt still, if not absurd, as the rest of the unirsslowlyreeped abe ter added would me not to have sharma as your direct ancestor. when i first are looking into ths, this storylto a ho of ntiut nyd ornd stumbled into, through the story of kenny wegman. you remember about 10 years ago we found a skeleton come people e discussed on the banks of a river wasin.

wiftogtothateurhlo dyut on the table, into the first burst present within earshot of any announced a skeleton had quote caucasoid like fatures. this one sinwr d tu ion the greatest snowballs of amateur genealogy and history. every magazine did you from ever heard of wrote a story abt how veripotinppeared tob h toxoid like, -- caucasoid. the fossil record show this point, the pearheads that date back about 12,000rs. that arod tihawineieuln crossed through alaska through the streets and writer and

eventually became native americans. these people are arguing, or at least this word seems to suggest that it was a population already here e they arved. and thatomm ered dfois the skeleton, is about a thousand years old, solidity, but a few thousand words into this new era. before being wiped out by native americans. this concept took so mu, got yo" anicle about this, time "newsweek," everyone did when. all of them sort of playing off of this claim that there was this earlier population. when i start looking into this, siturned into h enmous hoopla, that native american indians under federal law had right in any skeleton found under the earth over a few hundredyears old, right? beside his claim no, no, no. we want to look at this because asoid like faures. mano ivaran

ds - isht y know when all the way up, it went all the way up to i think was reject but it went into the high courts, the appellate courts at least. it was my resolve on the side of the sintists agndie you'll find in that box that indiana jones has at the end of the moie. we have never heard from again. after all, of that, i tr to nopyt the ucasdlk did we learn wc d e truth is, that with the single word, i went and asked an anthropologist what does caucasoid mean? i've heard of causian but caucasoid, what does that en aesce sounding word for caucasian. to understand that this one guy said caucasoid like features and

om that a cascade of mistakes and the medy of errors sostart with that story because i don't, i want to make, want to be fank, which is that most amateurs e fools amrist uris sememake istak, but some amateurism, and i couldn't quanfy it. in fact, the books i wanted to write was a book about creativity, a book about inva. coun tp t lo llse l together, and that was it, oh, boy, my publisher really wanted that book. but i couldn't write that book. first of all, some pressor writes that book about vey s ntri 'satentrnales

m,s ou creativity, it's a milli keys. i think itation is one of the big things always. but what i found was sortof -- ami so eanem ea thrdwhe more i have of it. so anyway i start following the stores and to realize in this country especially, amateurism exist everywhere in the world, a tier i thnk it possesses a ceain ecqualy a aue r ucnmeu re a nation that begin any kind of amateurism. but i found instead a sort of breaking down what creativity s, what i found was with a bunch of stories. anr t vusies led one way r ite'foabte ll forxamp, was researching synthetic biology, that's the fancyword for bio backing. fiddling around with dna, life.

bo a ce heks what these mesage tngbhisamateur biologist out in san francisco is trying to assert the glow-in-the-dark plasma from a jellyfish into some bacteria that she would then cultivate okay.glow-in-t-dar yogurt. cledaroulleit i d her. she's meredith patterson, a thirtysomething woman pushing 5'10", she wears the glasses slightly tps with cts le to fini oerkte d 0sro. way to pick a plain yogurt from which to extract dna we talked about her tattoos, all of them relates somewhat to her sense of herself as an off the id scientists. on one of its the sort of for rito wnhbe ni image of atlas holding up the heavens.

keeping the bird -- a terrible hard figure, an officially descrida quotay ofshboom foers unaware of anything around them other than the golden coin which seems to float in his hands. patterson shows new glow-in-the-dark plastic souvenir bag and her freezer next to some frozen chicken sashinreil too to a rave with glow sticks you could beat. so to answer the gene, she said, we will need an lectro- device. she tlls me i nves exngex this case, 2500 volts, standard wall socket is 120 volts. essentially she saide are going to taser them. her lab is on the table rht in

thfron oom r t et a aa inat alas essu cooker to patterson ink it is a sharper image tailgaters fridge she bought at a yard sale. one of the chemicals you need is like all, she tells me her comes from astro genis sof hackers they told me they use store-bought suppositories for eir glycol. i'm sure there's some brilliant observation to be made about the areas- just that i'm not sure i want to ponder these stinctions long enough to find out what it is. so later on, bythe way we blew li aave diss and shut fthe ca e nehii found out

meredith and some others that interviewed around the country are all part of ths bio hacking phenomenon tat turning up in various cities and form sortof cls. thwa iaotn h new rk tes,"thepers w in boston that i went up to visit. so now they're popping up in all these cities. it turns out, i started looking at obbyis cubs. ri eic rdnseee't ubats at e beginning. but you'll remember just recently we all learned about steven jobs and his career with the computer club in sn francisco. lay riccus. u int '70s ent lo of time with the hartford robotics club whatou think might be the first will but it turns out like darpa has been raiding these clubsfor years or battion, right? for teha were remotetrlu

ths yse k of -- likea remote-controlled sailboat or plane or something. before that the combustion engine clubs and before that amateur radio. but amateur clubbing hasbeen reraon iameran whhegene'ch it's synthetic biology. it i tinkering with life the way we tinkered with robots and computers and radios. already you're going to get wind of the controversy that will tn'apped ytu thil e o oe kind of panic among people who know very little about synthetic biology. and probably these clubs will be targeted. re a the ks who are trying to do it ight. theyre catinruof ofngngha, equipping, treating their own set of ethics, right?

i remember 2 years ago when i first started writing, i covered a lot of computer haking. thwahueictanow if you remember ul fhe er hacrs will be of the crash our phone system, take over the war games, get pentagon. many of my sources, 16 euros kids from new york city, were arrested and imprisoned. of course, these were the ones cr che eering to dot ih touched them, right? right? the low-hanging fruit is much easier to go after. so my fear is here we have this wonderful sort of mome in american history where the amateurs are sort of convening in t wndb, fmi o i hacking. but some out in this post-9/11, tsa, homeland security kind of bedwetting era that we are in, i fear tht the best ntentions of these kids comintogether in e cls oio

oned eoezlo osecutor. and we'll be hearing about some other version of the stry. anyway, in each of these chapters, what i fnd as that it otgateund somei ay nse of playfulness but i don't really, i don't know how else to describe. the term that often came up when i talk to these people. data which is something kind of out nttegdng yely abou gig sendsusode th any effort to produce anything, other than what you are sort of ultimately dreaming of. theyven have done these studies where, andertainly nyyioot is rt fngteperef business concerns are not being even the threat of a paycheck or lack of one. creates a certain kind of higher

creativity than being paid. an tnrinstoth untry, it's always had a kind of special quality to it in part because from the very beginning when you go back and look at our history, we will aays thought this kind of aate eythg eath thtasatponsn europeans. and even amateur people. i was done to find out that the common sort of the scientific attitude in europe about smr,kendds the vapors of our men less sort of virile, and made the women less fertile. made our animals smaller, innier. our cows supposed pduce less milk. it akwti nn athewa a

snake fed in north america was simplto lie back on the ground, unhinge its job and wait for one of ourspastic squirls totlist e'aot dinner where franklin was there with a bunch of other americans, and this came up. this was the conversation, and e french were sort of making fun of us. wrangling, was a tall man, asked all the americans tosdp sietl.ndre ourl the men were these much smaller people. that didn't end the conversation the. we've always had that sense, i think the immigrant narrative rie arroatorces it, thisea aror cultural dna. where the other characters i have in the book is a woman named claudette lopez. i don't know if any of you know, but she's a woman who escaped nazi germany, came to erica in

the '3. anmeneve ou roso '50s. the only job she did get was as a second chip it wasn't even as a secretary. she was going to be the transcriber. somethg called the ben franklinapers. been '0 id umta t scholarship works for all the presidential papers. so we have ben franklint yelena, jefferson at uva, hamilton iat columbia. that yale stl gog n pathran w on. she was a transcriber who basically sat in the corner and was ignoredfor 20 years, wasn't even listed i the books of ing a part of the team. buasm ine bt ar rng ofrin bs rzee different opinions than all these fancy historians and

should nation she started to write a book. in fact, almost everyone in this room i'll bet you will tell you, i could guess we'll take it in wozehaat as gre xuet bal wasted half the year in france instead of getting his money for the evolution, sort of playing chess with naked women in bathtubs, the story you always [lauter]t was true. clttkere mpngat'l wrt rptiy a bunch of men. he was kind of a dopey guy around women. so a lot of that has been interpreted as kind of his rapaciousness. but anayhe bc thsgeat ho onor great franklin scholars but anyway, i come to that at because there's a number of images that i like about franklin, and about his very deatheeitateismtwhn

onhrase, life, liberty and property. that was the phrase that was in your area in 18 session. we don't know for sure but we do know that ben franklin edited jefferson's declaration to so did add in for legal terms but thh syenbawe lth te put that in there. we don't know for sure, but he wrote a lot, about half, and about a lot about the playful randomness that comes with greater the. the other image below to invke heteut a c i onwoli n his back on the surface of the harbor and get pulled along by his kite. it's almost certainly fiction but that image is so compelling. drifting about, poll to enter by a guy. this a is o the image is a bit more famous. the most famous image from the founding era, ben flying his

kite to prove electricity existed in the clouds. the fact is that franklin had given what his theory of electricity by publishing his ideas and letting others, europeans, prove his theory by seing up electrica od e exeim asstt e klar rdu an overcast greek under some afternoon to get the charge was charged with electrical plasma strengthen believe, then you would feel a nice cakeof intee static eletricity, and wen ee. whwdshscipu ucne the rod ride when a bolt of lightning struck and he was killed. the famous kite story was one franin told me years later. not at the time he allegedly performed the experiment. hionwtsswhans acnts

gu my own suspicion is that franklin feared that the discovery of electricity was his greatest acievement, which was. so he try to retrofit the story of hisxperiment so the history bos wld give him rpe cred. no h els ofme his experiment, like i said, the county state. know, gravity put the minds of all of us an image more indelible than the scribblings of a thousand historians but he improvised his own rewriting of history, in other words, by a oo. nghtl ol fira he did it by invoking an image that is once playful and profound, practically the logo of the amate child is spared of liberty, alicia, the emblem of the likeness of beinghere creativity thrives. ita utou omr nationalistic prize but this since emerged after than and is the inheritance of anybody born or driven to come here.

while we might list the great lirties, speech, assembly, due thoeats di by to mo present is the revolutionary decision to abandon one's past and oneself as was once culture, tradition and history. to walk with him everything that one is, what is link the repressi nation for e bao r anaesimply 'sl do 'stoha oha lives here and everyone who comes here recognizes in thick it as too, that the amateur string is the american dream. thank you. [applause] >> so let's take questions. >> andre has a microphone onthe pole. and, of course, if for some reon y don ant to be a maha wn.rgam

>> parole officers don't normally watch c-span. [laughter] >> lease, estions for ack esunn. >> nice suit, first of all. >> it's just a sports jacket, inntte t eye with ideas and they don't work and in you acknowledge even how to talk this book started out, come back. i'm curious, there's been how ny yae to ton >> kecst time frame. >> i'm curious, what book ideas you came up with and discarded between that book and this book

no,k with you me just inth m ngree r ok ideas that i'm always curious with a writer, what other book ideas? >> well, i would say except that i'm ing to do some of them. [lauter] i llayhasm sd e w b s ely an autobiography, right, a massive self-justification for a lifetime of freelancing and not really working. so i will plead guilty to that. im very interested in the lack of correlation or the office of correlation you found beween sort of creativity and being paid for, r the how being amateur ud] d wonder if you have a idea

how and criticism plays into all of that. when people are being paid for something when it's their job, r wk is rte r ireed edd k t's t of talk about how creativity bonds the absence of judgment. do you have any -- >> when i s with meredith, one of the things notice with her was beu vy thininhe se in she eo, ers me, even like with what she used to cultivate the bacteria, she come back to 1956 or a magazine article on how to make that stuff. ke from the very beinning e l ns f eyong l tod d thist us everything she had on the table was hers, when anything would go wrong it wasn't even, she didn't even perceive it as failure. it was just another step towards

success. mus hav al i ngin ta toh bacterium. and i spent a week up there with her and we tayed up 36 hours straight at one point. she was never fazed by any of this. and i think, te nice thg abnoing under e guof a acecis e a eoffailure. you are sort of liberated. obviously, in workplace if you fail than you are fired. or you can be. th threat is here. there's a famous experience, and ex isewilpau otell owt. e'fa re, m just going to describe it broadly, but they gave an assignment to children to draw something and somehow, i can't member the details, but creavity was a function of the assignment. nakecen drentars teidcinht they have done will prevent on the second round of the

experiment the children who got stars did worse. beuse somehow, now it had a direction, point, the action had a point. d asae,d some of that kind lowered their enthusiasm to be as inventive as the kids who were not burdened by debt. like i say, edwad aoewo abho get people who don't want to do something. there's all sorts of corporate tricks they tried to do. have you ever seen a bicycle with six seats? used t have aroundtime square its rulclwtt. x atn . that was invented by a european ceo who is trying to get his vice presidents out of the building in sort of a weird new space so they could be created. that whole thing was about trng t g h es o

exted y idents. or you probably know about, you know, sort of the dress down friday's a lot of companies now have we can come inand use their facilities, and then stuff and not have to necessarily give thea ot eattpny age a sense, you know, any workplace. there's a zillion schemes now to try to do this. i mean, there are some advantages to amateurism. i will sy unguided mtursm, t t esal s tag t ma. where you see like amateurs really work well as when it has some kind of interaction with a professional col de port. i have a whole chapter in our astronomy, and to show youhw seracentieng asoman university. that's been insanely productive for everybody.

so, you know, as long as, if you go to the garage and you have no connecti to anyone uside, towpeuati ch, n of come you tend to be, the neighborhood crank who has like invention that gm still, the electric car, the fuel hat gets 300 miles to cote rtyne w icus realize. then it could be a bit more productive. anybody else's? yes. two people. >> y, doyn e y aside, like the jim thorpe thing, heas professional because he got 10 bucks to respect e money aside, when amr? one ceased to beco an ontelevision and being, you

know, being the amateur expert, wright? because you have written the yoted -- debunked the woodpecker. >> hardly an amateur. yeah, the word is a complete messf contradiions eo thdcuiti o re w tam w an meits t love, from latin. from the french versio and it means to do something out of love, not out for money. that'she most basic. a fengseo ig has vr but here, if you look it up in the dictionary, we say, if a city that someone was an amateur art collector, you would not

think that they were a bad art collector. but ifi id seoas r atyoudkw on pab b a meg. s something is amateurish, it just means they are a novice. so it can mean grenhorn. it n mean boob. it can mean connoisseur. and i think part of the esn at ewool nfinan iecy because americans fl so conflicted about are real amateur status. i have a whole week in their why we love award. by relos macarthur grants and we love to be sort of recognize, because weraly, we dn't of oecpr e university, we don't have the kind of institution that europe enjoys of being able to single out someby. so we have awards. whatever profession you are i but in mine, we have lots of awar. if d thriag yo tone, you

might want to try it another field. but i do hink, it speaks our n anxiety about being amateurs one of tets ce that happened, someone made it past amateurism is to completely erase the amateur past. and i noticed one of the figures i talk about an there is the guwho discovered thev int oundad basically set back the time of european arrival by 500 years. you know, he was a crank, a total crackpot. he thought the jews had sailed mexico 2000 years ago. he anm ackpot years but he just happened to be right about this one. he was a lawyer from norway originally. when he died he was not -- the

opec by fantastic. he was the greatest archaeologists of our ie. frahsgrfe university but it was like the end of the "wizard of oz." what you lack, young man, is a credential. [laughter] so anyway, i thitre - i n'oweoneesm atsmpoesonsm, but, but, and the word can mean tommy different things but when you're talking about, no one considers daid an ameur everything. isant f a geomis t eardntliig bu t ic f about the cornell sighting of the ivory billed woodpecker, david was an outsider. he is cornell outside of a deadly space to the fact he's been all this time in the field looking at birds in painting em. ofo e theme official experts but all the ph.d's at cornell were the

ones who got caught up in the kind of mass hysteria of the ment, seeing something they desperate wanted to see. they saw. theven videotaped t nosenhis most expert occasion, that a kind of bigft phenomenon happened. we can almost live the part of a one of these sort of loch ness nt lwineszy tvoild woodpecker video, blurred. bigfoot picture, fuzzy. loch ness, fuzzy, wright? if i was always nvolves evidence that is just enoug to sort of sep all ththe coitivetiggs, ift's sols big footprint or whatever. in the case of the ivory billed woodpecker was the acoustic sound recordings of this tinhorn squid. but almost anyone can make that noise.

and then you had sort of the hysria.hnedd rt r cornell, all in was to get them all on a secret mission because no one knew about when they went after. are all in this bubble, like we're on the secret mission to see this burden that we think it anteat ovewhen hy allaw n . and it took three years of outsiders led by sibley, also a three-year blogspot, completely undid all of the findof cornl. i knes ome sort of denial, but most of us now know that no one saw an ivory billed woodpecker. but it was amazing. the reason i wrote that, it was amazing to see how officials could construcanntire rtress of a new truthadh escegvat could arrive later and in this

case rightfully tear it down. did you have a question? [inaudible] >> one thought of eaur hefutsdke d jobs, success means an ipo eventually. the other end of the skill you have the tinkerer who just wants to tinker and it wants to do anything differen and. ud] wihekerer. i just came up on a wonderful story of a 22 year-old woman, this is like a pleobiology is to cover this kind of annoyed whn' have wirelessg he battery recharges but we have wireless everything else. her name is meredith perry so she went to the authoritative source of expert ngineering n pea. thh the air?

you can send sound through the air pretty decent. you can send sound to the air we yon te,djlsor even snce. done this but she is now the ceo of a new company. she ha now got a host of engineers working for her. she's 22 years old. and it's now i think that is now attracting ventu ait. t f h obsc y ry wto w said that can't be done. what was the reason he can't be done? because they hadn't done it. that's why. so if that mpany goes public i suspect in the year we will flinng h ru-hrname around like mark zuckerberg. my argument is amateurism kind of comes in cycles but it comes

in times of ecomic distress. it's not a coincidence i think it she would impact it would end rereosilli fi of h dollars into the original stated that it was when they first went in there. is the great temple of the american ingenuity. at is where we go to dadream aw frothe urdste mehe ama seid t g,he bills. and so it's not a coincidence i don't think either the jobs and eve wozniak went into the garage and 9036. tiarpiking.rmurre patents are a bunch of, it's largely a con game now filled by trolls. some teves tryingoa sointe t e otrnications

that there are more startups do. if you look at the jobs numbers from able, with 119,000 jobs by the way created in april, according to the govrent. how many oft 00 os re tb im, esta ndyl renvrs, the ones that are funded by what we've are not flatter bankers with the job -- term job creators. 4000. 4000 came from large firms to ,000 came from startups and small businesses. deatd republicans that mainstream, small business with the engine of american security. or at least that's what jobs country. both parties are enough towa thwittisculoett b to they are bankers. they find things, that's good, but they are no more job greatest that i am a farmer for my food at super stop & shop,

wright? there will risktakers, and by thea htk r ainoe efn. their very identity is to hedge risk. they are running away from it. they can't stand but that's the whole point of there being, wright? e real risktakers are these people who risk being called thidaeand idio wertaki dierho s told by scores of engineers that this idea was ridiculous, and now she has a company. granted, it's not every amateur gets to have that moment but it happens enough. and i think and in a time of haship, erkoi in lf pe g e getlout of choice, hardly not so much. but anyway, i think this cycle comes around from time to time, and thankfully my book is coming out right around the te tha it seems to be cranking u. qutions?hv

yes. >> consider people like mark zuckerberg-- spend mark zuckerbe and he dropped out of college. cue incedentialed is a form of professionalism. so if you look at the long list of college dropouts, and they are so good here, zuckerberg is one, gates is one, jobs is one. e goes on n. [iib e >>hael yeah. it's interesting sor of historical freudian argument aboufranklin. he was an apprentice to his tranber james and the pit tshebledan jumped on a boat and fled eventually to philadelphia. ran away, invented this whole new ben franklin down in philly, the one window, wright? he dropped out. ofhsareatme historians, grandson

ersot f cplang the original franklin story. at we all fe some need to bolt for something. our parents, our state, our past, charleston, whatever it is. and find some other vrsn of urse. ysh so a ros al iat place. franklin did go back to oston, but not really. he was forever a philadelphia man after that. ..

he-ty va f ga ormmwr it is not money. it is the inability not to go there. at is what almost all of them said to me. there is no place else that they would ratherb estes here. [laughter] >> i would like t know what you'ost moro expienc

wainse fhek. thcalculus teacher explained to me what pedigree collapse was. [laughter] actually, when meredith and i we ramping up the wall socket to 200,000 votes. that was kind of a death cherbourg it is literally the same voltage as the debtor from the 1920s. weeretg llds precautions. at one point we did hit the ghts where they went out. re.oht washarng, auter] think you were coming, everyone. we appreciate it.

>> for more information, visit jngo tv,r's e. coauthors megan mccain and michael ian black. "america, you sexy bitch" is the but. >> we met via satellite and we followed each other on twitter and teach we did me in one night and said he do you want to write about and i said sure. >> i a nal fm the time. [laughter] [lauter] >> it pleases me to no end. it could be after we air this og a trho you two met.

>> that is exactly accurate. >> and you asked her ove twitter to write about? why did you agree? >> iht go through a al a up it's really funny when i say it -- hattayote litical book been comedically. i thought it was an interesting idea and i thought i would probably get no other time in my life to do something so un and exngculo and over the top d >> so a blue state, atheist, liberal, christian, red state,

got together and what is the tone of the book? >> i think it s supring whic a wha e ia discussion and we were talking back and forth about the concept of the book, both of us knew about each other enough that we weren't really going to be nasty towards each other and make it personal. although it happens a little bit in the book this is aeis ci experience. we wanted to be friends and discover america in 2012. i apoume,mp through mr peter. >> sivas got together with a couple other people? >> yes, to other people. wedrgoumehe river nr anager. in people.

>> we both were frustrated with the climate and environment of american politics right now. when he was talking about writing a political book, i real started to ndesta toonthadfor a couple of years. we intervied hundreds of people. what's most fascinating is that americans are even positive now. we are in a dark time in a dark recession, but everyonstill believes in america. nevrwereome ophare ere is this feeling that we are in this together and we are going to get through this hard ti. we thought we are going to write a book, we should write a positive but, yes, we are together and the recession start on everyone. thtwof u,hec n msn, can come together and write a book that we think can

hopefully influence young pele. he e of e day, tis a i nvrn interested -- i like people who are turned off fr politics. but those are the people i want to get interested. you would ver owhash twytamn l she's she is amazing. i am blown away. i am in awe. >> when you would watch megan mccain interview people or introduce -- what was your is alon t r. s anheefwe met. to my liberal jaded mind, this is a way that i felt that publics don't often talk why. men isomeby whis ns,sesain coherent way about issues that i

think have relevance in way that i can understand. and i thought that if i was ever going to be budds with a republican, i would want to be buddies wi i knew who she was because of her last name, but it was irrelevant. hem d get ang fausly >>ooe imad stovimo. my father -- he doesn't like the title. >> i got a lot of flack from senator mccain. >> think that now he has read half of the book, and i think he dreude.t pak veayoko erent audience. i have been accused of being brutally honest. but i write as much to understand is to be unerstood. taing about my lifad

li iryha. to q o er my agelo, my basis for doing this s sometng i love. michael ianlawhs yo mosfavote ait in the united states? >> i fell in love with branson, missouri to so tonigh >> branson,issouri was the best. i thought that i'm goingto maisla aat p, ouote mfu warmer, more gregarious, we had a dolly parton's dixie stampede. i never had more fun at a live theatricalxper haeeihoa i haf venice. doy parton put him to shame.

you have guys writing on horses, there's buffalo, it comes with the dinner, you eat with your hands. >>ricaf >> they couldn't have been nicer to us. dolly parton and the dixie stampede. they were wonderful they we so nice. >>inbles] >>ism mibl belt. we had gone to las vegas and had an r-rated experience. we jus had just been awesome an een csh i had to perform. >> meghan mccain, and experiments in a blue state that was memorable? fa. ntimeg

connecticut is blue, right? >> talking to his family and friends. some of his friends were not fans of my fly jeinoo me s nddn ie me, whatever. but overall, we had a great time. it's interesting to have your world --we really have to face it up front from your wis totyp -- that republicans are more fun than democrats. i can absolutely confirm that that's true. republicans are a lot more fun. >> we like to have a good time in a dferent way than crs o. siwrg ooan >> i got more into guns. megan's brother taught me to shoot.

i like that a lot. it is your brother who served in the marine >> yes. >> we had a great timehotin asabchngds as it was time to hear the other person's point of view without judgment. i think i cnged your mind for more than you changed mine. >> i have myidcag itfefft tigs on't know. [laughter] >> marijuana legalization in america -- we met a lot of people whewe were on the od. lope g ryd on cases, decriminalization, marijuana in this country, the possible financial benefits, my opinion has been changed. which scary thi tadi go inheublican

orthodox. it is something that the right-wing conservatives will use against me. >> william bucey was a big supporter. >> yes, he was. possibly mario como at this >>s gguy. enact it is just -- it's a scary thing, but that is part of the issues that i had. >>stieeeof therapeutic [inaudible] victims and he makes a compelling case. >> that was something that reallycaged. >> i loved the to all of garden. we both love fast food and chain

hotels. red roof nns, olive garden, do'sns,ge king, soda. both of us don't care about her health that much. >> who came up with the ttle? >> megan came up with thetl ri i said america is sex then we both thought it was funny. [laughter] [laughter] "america, you sexy bitch." >> he doesn't know what to do.