he came he gave us letters from sarah for the first time and she had been out about four months by that point so sarah and my brother and then we didn't know if they were going to keep getting letters so we said thank you for these letters but just so you know every 30 days if you don't bring a new batch of letters and no missing letters we will continue a hunger strike. so it will take so long. we couldn't write out so we realized we never realized if we were getting all of them. so we got a phone call five months later and one of us said right on the letter the next letter like that eight of the last two letters that you sent. once that started happening we had a little bit more to say

that that was the month before we were released. in short it was a big trauma. but then also to say it was a lifeline and what happened is we would go through these cycles like everybody cares about us and remembers us and then two weeks later i haven't heard from anybody. i feel totally forgotten and the group psychology between us started going down until we could get another batch. >> it's interesting also about the dates because all of the prisoners i correspond with now ask the same thing for me to put a date. i think it is a fear that a letter is going to be taken away and they will never get it but i will say we have a huge industrial duffel bag full of all of those letters and every once in a while when i'm feeling down and i forget to appreciate

life and freedom i will just get one out and read it. [applause] i don't think anybody has asked when did you decide to write the book and how you actually did it. it looked like maybe you took different chunks to narrate in your own voice. but how did that work? you are living in different cities now. how did you come together to write this? >> when we decided to write a book together i think we assumed we would write this way. there wasn't a process. we assumed we would write in first person. the way we started as we said okay let's just take this first four months we are in prison and write about that then we came

back and had a ton of writing and we had to put it in order to figure out and it took forever and it was really difficult because everybody -- there are three views to everything so we decided to divide the main events and create an outline and we would each write about these main events and in the process other things would come up and we would write things on our own. we did little chunks and we would write and come back and put it in chronology and then edit intensively to try to do all that stuff. it was probably six months of just editing. >> i know it just came out and i'm sure it's going to be very successful. do you plan to do anything more with it or use the profits for a

special program? >> no plans as of yet but i will say in writing the book and in the process our story is a story about of course the horror of losing our freedom from the captivity and the miracle of getting it back and it's also about all the people that didn't get it back, the people we had to leave behind. i had a friend in prison that was executed after i left. so this isn't just our story is many and some of those people are in the book are in the room right now. >> thank you. [applause] the book is for sale over here in the back corner.

in our double conversations

one of the signatures of this is how quickly it has moved. there is good about that but then there's also some bad. we were ten years into this before regulators and the companies themselves started asking tough questions. what exactly is going on, what is the cumulative impact, is it healthy, what are we going to inject and is i his and some of

that's causing earthquakes? these are important questions and one of the mistakes that has been made as we were so far in before we started asking the questions into th and the good s that when you start looking at these there are answers and solutions and ways to do this better says that there is a hipster even read in america that

determines how the government is run by how the news is reported and how our children are educated. this is about an hour. [applause] >> let me point out they are clapping more for you. it was louder when she came out because of the introduction. how many did you say along the way? >> about 500 a morning. thank you. president and mrs. bush are not here tonight but gregg said he would still be hated. yes. i wore pants. i wasn't going to. we are honored to be here together and we are going to talk about the new book, talk of a bit about how we met and about the size and then ge didn't gete to take pictures with you afterwa