>> thank you. thank you. [applause] it was terrific. >> authors like to sell their books and there are books in the back coincidently. >> which i will be happy to sign if anybody wants me to. >> thank you. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[applause] >> can you hear me? can you hear me? no? yes? oh the hand mic. gotcha. hi everybody. welcome. >> thank you for coming out tonight and for providing refuge from the heat but also some intellectual stimulation in the form of this excellent book "long haul." i read the book with completely

rapt fascination. there is so much in here but i wanted to start, why don't we start at the beginning and you talked in the book about how you got into long-haul trucking as a young man, a very young man, barely out of high school. so tell the story of how you got into this business. >> will a series of missteps actually the here we are. i got into it, there was a moving company right down the street where i grew up and we all went to the same church. it was called callahan brothers incorporated and my name is murphy and we have this irish thing going on so if you went to saint siena church and you were 17 years old and you wanted to work for callahan brothers then you were allowed to do that and it was essentially closed to other entrants. so that's what i did it in the summers between college.

i worked as a local mover and i had always been sort of bewitched by trucks. i really like the work today liked working with machines. i liked working with trucks. in the household i grew up with my father couldn't distinguish the business end of a screwdriver from another thing so actually working with machinery was a new and really exciting thing to do. that's how i started. >> you are not that big. clearly you are very strong and effective but how did you end up becoming as bad ogre? >> abed dugger is a mover so truckers have these nicknames. we have this slang so abed over his movie a material caller is a suicide jockey in a live animal caller is a chicken choker. as you can see most of these names are pejorative and so a bedbug or, and what was your

question, scott? >> how is it comparatively not, think as movers as burly guys who come in and canned lifton armoire with one hand. >> so i wasn't a big guy and that was part of my baptism into becoming a mover. i was the smallest kid in my class in ninth grade so i had a collapsed chess like teddy roosevelt. there was this little insecure guy and i had known these movers for years because of the connection so i wasn't sure if i was going to be able to do that kind of work. but moving work is really about leverage. it's about working smart. >> i saw in your preview, proving yourself to these guys. they are expecting nothing but you manage to earn the trust of the guys. >> so big guys don't really do that well is movers. the first day i started, i

started with the seven-foot two-inch guy and big people like that are really built to be moving around furniture and the heat so the best mover is 5 feet 2 inches with a napoleon complex so we won't let anyone outwork him. i was right there and it was perfect for me. >> you and i have a little colloquy is the introducer mention. i wrote a book about anxiety and you and i have a colloquy on an e-mail about it. i have had some experience driving a small cheap and that was quite stressful in and of itself. >> that was you? [laughter] >> that was me cutting in front of you. i have some statistics here. you drove or you drive a thing or the regularly across the rockies gave 53-foot long,

73,000-pound trailer through the rocks on the 6.7% downgrade through rain and slush. i think this would cause me to pass out and i would obviously just die but you write in your detection maybe i will be crushed by my truck at the bottom and maybe i won't. i roll which suggests kind of a devil may care attitude. you talk about how going through a section of the rockies in a jeep claim more lives than you feel comfortable thinking about and you say i'm one loan air hose away from oblivion and then you talk about jack knifing and other things. why do you do this? >> well when you put it that way i haven't the foggiest idea. it's not devil may care so much

as they are sort have been unequivocal execution required to be a trucker and to be a mover so when you hired the movers to bring your grand piano up to the third-floor which someone thought was a really good idea of the guys that show up, we have to do that. we can't say wow this is a hard job, i don't want to do this. if i need to cross ice 70 from denver to the west coast i've got to do that but it's the opposite of devil may care. i'm terrified half the time in the mountains. i'm terrified of the rain and that's something you may want to think about. every time you pass a truck and you look out there, this guy looks like some kind of simeon. he's probably terrified that if he's smart he is. >> you talk about all the calculations you are making about how far away the next

off-ramp is for the trucks and what your speed is and what the weather is and what the guy behind you is doing but i want to talk about one of the things that to me was most interesting about your book is you have a cultural anthropology of the world, the subculture of trucking and in particular interested in the taxonomy and the status hierarchy of truckers there's this peculiar phenomenon whereby and i'd like you to talk a little bit about this as a bedbug or you are probably at the top of the earnings pinnacle of long-haul truckers and probably at the pinnacle of technical skills given what you have to do not just with the truck stop in terms of packing and moving but obviously the thread of life and death driving through the rockies in a rainstorm and there's also the threat of your personal liability as you are backing

into a driveway and colorado or greenwich connecticut. there's this inverse status hierarchy where the bed buggers have the highest level of skills and in many cases the highest level of income but they are looked down upon by all the other long for truckers in the apparatus of associate with that. talk a little bit about that. why is that? >> are there any freight haulers out here because i'm not sure there's going to be universal approbation that the bed buggers are the best drivers that we like to think that we are because we routinely put trucks and where they're not supposed to go. sometimes you might have trouble driving or riding a lawnmower and we have to ring a truck in here. although i don't buy into the

trucker myth i do buy into the fact that i'm a very skillful driver and i could put it in where i need to put it into and that's a lot of fun. then there's the whole second part of this which is movers or bed ogre still go from terminal to terminal and stay around on the interstates. regard to communities and we go into towns. we go off the road. that means we are off the highway a lot. that gives an entirely different perspective of the kind of america that i see and the kind of america that i have what you call cultural anthropology and i think someone might call opinionated or judgmental. >> i want to get back the america that you see but what is the nature of the contempt of what you call the long-haul freight hauling cowboy.

you alluded to this a second ago but you don't subscribe to the myth and in the book you talk about how you don't wear cowboy hats or of peterbilt book or avatar or whatever so why is it that the long-haul truckers look down on you? >> some of this money, that's for sure. if you are calling, if you are first-year hauler for freight hauling company do you see on the highway like werner or schneider at these big companies, these guys are making $30,000 a year maybe, maybe less the long-haul mover at the top of the game, i just move corporate executives and we do what is called high-end corporate relocation so i can make $250,000 a year so i make 10 times the money these guys make. that's a friction point and then to take the skill set.

i've got to be able to deal with these families and navigate and transition to a new home so that takes a certain skill set and then i have to be able to put all the stuff in the truck without destroying it and that's always hard. >> you talk about a three-dimensional tetris. >> i loathe the truck to the roof all the way and try not to break it. >> the other guys who are jealous or envious of the income you are able to make, why don't they do it to? uart combining diplomacy and human relations dealing with these affluent and sometimes, many times pardon my french as holes who are out, who just see you as dirt or see you as someone then can get their cost

to freight by imposing liability on you. my question is is that why other long-haul freight truckers are afraid because they don't have the skill set to deal with the aspen colorado ceo? he talked in the beginning about the meng dynasty. >> the ching dynasty gravestones. >> maybe that's part of it. you can be treated. disrespectfully without moving much. >> you just get paid better for it. >> paid better for it rated a lot of the drivers don't want to do that kind of work loading and unloading a truck so that's the first thing anybody ever says, oh god do you have to load your

own trucks. yes, that's right we do. on the other hand i don't have to drive 200,000 miles a year and i don't go from say new jersey to san jose once a week, four weeks a month, 52 weeks a year doing 3000 miles a week. that is hard work. it's different work and i certainly don't want to denigrate the work that any other truckers do. i'm just saying our work is different because it's different it pays better but you can't just walk into a moving company and sat want to be a mover. you've got to know what you are doing so i started at 17 and greenwich connecticut ms will put me here. there's not a whole lot of guys that just do high-end corporate relocations. >> how many metivier do you drive? >> right now i do a long season so almost 50% of interstate moving is done in june, july and august so the business is cyclical and seasonal. >> your book tour is screwing up

your schedule. [laughter] >> i got a call from a loss of a man named will joyce. he is in the book could. we change some names and situations in the book but he's a real person and that's his real name. so he called and said when are you back again? i will be back driving on june june 30. i will drive through september and october. >> that's because the weather is better? why is that the high seas in? >> echoes of families. families wait until the kids are out of school which is june and then they can transition into the new home and start the new school in september so everybody who has a choice is moving in the summer. >> back to the anthropology of american that you see, you have these digressions about books

and the bookstore. you have seen over time through the devaluation of books objects to move but what are some of the other observations you have made or conclusions you have drawn about america today based on your experience moving? obviously they are members of a certain class but you are very good on the cultural anthropology and what these things mean. >> so architecture has changed immensely. the way houses are being built now especially where i am, i do a lot of work in colorado and some in california, seattle. i read some statistic somewhere houses are 35% bigger than they were a generation ago which i have no doubt bleeding. basements are also finished for extra space. there is no longer a formal dining room and the formal

living room. everything is in a play with the big island. books are gone. i used to do any household would have 50 to 100 book cartons and now you may have two or one. not in this group. we get paid by the weight and we love book items and then we get to see the book carts in the book that you have is we are packing them which is also very interesting. so we pay attention to those things. >> i knew this at some level in reading your post and you seem very like an upstanding citizen and very respectful but when you are being moved they are looking at everything that you have and judging you and deducing conclusions about your life. what are some of the weirdest things you have learned or seen in your moving experience?

>> e, judging. so let's put it this way say you are not going to do anything because everybody says oh yeah i'm going to pack all the boxes and we get there and they have like three boxes. it's a full scale life inspection because every thing in the back of the file cabinet at everything in the basement in everything you thought that you had gotten rid of or forgot about, we are going to see that and we might draw certain conclusions about that. perhaps occasionally some judgment but it's sort of an intimate and merciless exposure to your life and i don't really ask for that and i don't really get in a voyeuristic pleasure from that. sometimes i get voyeuristic pleasure from that. >> as i recall you have practical advice in there about

what to put in your lingerie drawer. >> another way things are changing in american households very often we have a gun safe under the bed and we have the stuff in the nightstand drawer. if i have to go in and pass this kind of stuff just personal preference i would just as much he put the gun in the gun safe and the stuff in the nightstand. >> you have suggested things to put in the lingerie drawer to keep people like you out. >> depending on my labor requirements that might be required to pick up some spot labor here and there and not always what we require so you want to take the expired oxycontin out of the medicine cabinet and if you are going to

leave your lingerie in the nightstand drawer i recommend that you put in a snake or a loaded mousetrap and that will scare the movers. get some respect ride off for that. >> utah in the book about so many different specific jobs that you had. what are the most challenging once you've had from either a technical point of view or the ones to me were both technically challenging and challenging in terms of diplomacy and there's one and i'm forgetting the details about but i think the truck got stuck a little ways and it was in the steep grades and talk about that. >> this is one of my first jobs and i was told by the customer that i needed to get the trailer down into his driveway and i didn't really think i could do

it but i was 21 at the time. basically i got my truck driver's license a couple of days after my 21st birthday which was when i will was allowed to do that. i digress for a minute but that says a lot about the moving industry in general. i wasn't bringing a whole lot of, let's just say it was bringing all the wisdom of the 21-year-old to this job. but these industries will take anybody who is willing to do the work so consequently they took me and i ended up getting my truck stuck and it was his tractor-trailer stuck between two trees. it was in richmond and i had the higher tow truck operator and pay him almost $2000 to get me out, to extract me out of his driveway. we had to cut down 12 trees to get me out. this was not somebody who is going to be sending a nice review back to the company about his movers, so that was my

inexperience that took me to a bad place. >> going back to the beginning, you are a high school student when you started doing this and you drop the piano through the ceiling or something? >> i didn't drop a piano through a ceiling and i have not yet although i did drop a vienna down seven stares but that's in the book. it wasn't my fault. [laughter] three words movers live fly. >> you screwed something up the first time around. >> the first time i worked, what i did was i felt through the sheetrock. >> fell through the ceiling. >> i fell through the ceiling. it was me. so i fell onto the master bed which was very nice and then i

broke whole bunch of mirrors by the door in the final thing at the end of the day was my boss who had come out to take me off the job and collapse the cargo into the dumpster which is about my skill level. he told me to park his car in the corner on his really hot day and i forgot to turn the car off and the ac was on so it turned the car up a win in the end of the day to hand my boss my time card and told him even though we had all gone to the same church and i've known this guy since i was a kid i was going to tender my resignation and he gave the card back to me and told me i had to be at work the next morning. i started getting a little better after that. >> probably most beginners fall through the roof and overheat the car so par for the course. >> the crew was very interested to see what was going to happen

the next day. >> i was reading some of your reviews and you've got very favorable overall and one traffic talking about what a great storyteller you are and some of the other things that i have highlighted that one of the things she expressed was a disappointment in the book, and i relates to this because she said you just mention elliptically that at one point he got fed up and you left been bugging for 20 years and then you say a series of bad decisions and other circumstances lead you back in if you feel comfortable talking about a why did you leader what did you do in that 20 years and what brought you back to your

credit? >> she did say she was a little disappointed. in the review should call that a literary crime. it was a crime i wanted to complete my whole life so i was very gratified. so i have had two stints as a driver. i had the first when i was 21 and that was about 10 years and i was with north american van lines. you've probably seen a red white and blue texan than i had, what happened was the reason i started doing this are one of the reasons was to try to save money and put some money away and have my own business which actually worked out that way. so actually i got married. i moved to massachusetts, took the money that i had saved from driving all those years and bought a retail textile import business and i was importing

those nice fisherman sweaters from ireland. that's what i did for a long time and i ended up getting into other kinds of textiles and that was 20 years on nantucket and then. >> did you hit the road while you were there? >> no, i didn't. the second stent was after my wife and i separated and i moved out to colorado, starting all over again and i didn't have any clue about how to start all over again at the age of 49. i did what a lot of drivers do because i still have my ceo. i always had my commercial driver's license so what i did and what a lot of drivers do is when it gets a little too hot in the kitchen he just get another job with another trucking company turn on the motor and go and then you don't have to deal with it and that's what happened , that's what i did so i've been doing that since 2008. >> would you think about when

you are driving? how do you keep from a falling asleep and b going crazy with their own thoughts? do you think about anything or are you thinking about the situation when you are driving through the rockies focusing entirely on the technical things you should be doing in that moment. when you are on that straightaway through route 66 in the middle of the country, what's going through your head then? >> well the first thing is i like driving i 80 through nebraska where there's nothing happening. what makes a lot of people really bored is just fine for me. i read a lot when i'm not driving at night and then during the day i have an audio book habit that probably needs a 12 step program. depending on the book, maybe

you've all had this experience, where you get to where you were going any up to the minute slept on the book and he just stay in the driveway. i do that and then concentrating on driving itself, it's not that boring really and if i was going to say anything out there people who drive cars, in america everybody are pretty good drivers. generous and pretty well-behaved as a whole. the one thing i would say is if you are driving then just do that. you don't need to make a sandwich or spill your drink or discipline the kids in the backseat for work on the relationship of the person in the backseat which is probably the biggest activity that people have in cars, talking with her husband or wife tried to work something out and you can tell by the body language. that's the other thing, i can see everything. everything you folks are doing.

i'm way up high. >> was the most amazing thing you have seen or appalling or maybe they are the same. >> i saw a guy reading a book, really reading a book. he had it on the steering wheel and he was turning the pages, turning the page. it must have been a really good book. >> was he driving straight? >> strait-ish. the you are by yourself, do you get lonely and how do you combat that? >> especially now. you have all these restrictions of how long we can try. i can only drive 11 hours a day and i start early. i am not a morning person by any means but usually my day starts about 4:00 so i will get up and get something to be. >> 4:00 a.m.? how do you do that when you're not a morning person?

>> discipline, scott. >> or if you are really late night person and 4:00 is still part of the night. >> i will have breakfast and do my. >> trip inspection about 4:45 so my day is done at 2:45 or 3:00 in the afternoon. i'm not allowed to drive anymore even if i want to so that's the hard part ramparts in some truck stop and i have 10 hours before i can start all over again. the restaurant to pretty much and the truckstops are also boys so you can get anything to be. it used to be a lot of guys would talk on the cpr hang around the coffee counter and now the trucks are so comfortable and they are big. i have a walk-in sleeper. as a double bed and a bunk above in a microwave oven and a refrigerator, a generator for air-conditioning and he put a lot of the guys just get into

their jammies at 5:00 and watch tv. >> it sounds cozy actually. >> it's better than anywhere. >> i had a question. what was i going to say? how do you keep from falling asleep? or is that not a problem? >> it is sometimes on a hot afternoon in the sun is coming into your eyes and your eyes get heavy. it's really easy for me because i have a double bed in the back with a sealy posturepedic and a 600 count sheets with the corners tucked in and the feather duvet. i just pull over and turn on the air-conditioning and take a 12 minute now. it's no problem. >> the police don't bother you? >> i've never been bothered. >> how come you don't subscribe to the myth? you have freedom and you were on the open highway and heading

west towards the frontier. nothing to tie you down except your job. what is it about the myth that a lot of your compatriots espouse that alienates you? >> partially i do subscribe to the myth and that's part of it. whenever i cross the mississippi in st. louis or driving east in eastern washington to the vineyards and then seeing the cascades come up, it's pretty amazing so i do subscribe to part of the myth. the part of the myth i guess i don't really buy is, so here is either judgment or cultural anthropology at -- depending on your point of view. it's a low. low status job so therefore, i've seen this in other places, when you are low status you

create a myth to make it more livable and i think that's a truck drivers do. i think that's what earth and rappers do. i think as with southern rebels do. that's why. >> maybe others do it too. i want to ask one more question before we open up to questions from the audience and this is a broad question and maybe a number of responses to it. again this is going back to you are seeing people as they really live because you are moving their stuff and you see stuff that is buried deep in their drawers plus you have the packet is there a gap between how obviously the business you're in you are looking at mostly affluent corporate people but what is the most glaring thing about the gap between how they present themselves to the world

to anyone who wouldn't know because they don't know the lingerie drawer or the gun safe for the kitchen cabinet and the reality of how their lives are organized, are you able to do something about that? >> wow. this is your opportunity to say something really profound. >> i know. i wish i had more. let me sort of the circum- locate here. i think what i see when i moved these types of people is not quite sure that they understand how much stuff that they have that drives them crazy and about having multiple residences driving them crazy and how continuing this cycle of

purchase and storage of purchase and storage and eradication and purchase and storage. it does work for some people so i'm not making a blanket here but in many cases i'm not quite sure who the master and the slave is when it comes to acquisition and it's really good and i try not to bring any judgment about that but what i do is i remember that in my all my and all of the movers that i have worked with and most of my guys i work with the moving industry is like the landscaping industry or the house cleaning industry. we are talking about a non-english-speaking subculture here and my movers who are in a first name basis they don't want this life. they don't want all that stuff. movers even if they don't know what movers are buddhists. >> and they have learned that from being movers? >> they understand the transitory nature of objects and

since they are the guys who throw away they don't get attached to that. >> why do we open it up to questions from the audience here. >> you have a tame tracker here so it everything you've ever wanted to know. >> i will ask one question first. you are obviously a more literate trucker than the average trucker. there is class and status issues here. do you feel like you belong to the paternity of truckers or are you truly a lone wolf and looking at not only the people you are moving but the people you are driving alongside or talking to on the cb radio as something apart from what you are doing? >> i am one of the guys. there is no way to avoid it

because actually the moving work is a total meritocracy because you either do the work or you don't do the work and nobody cares what color you are nobody cares what language you speak. if you can lift your end of the piano venue where they are so i can do that. the other part of it is if it's 4:00 in the morning and it's freezing out and i have a road flare and i'm crawling underneath the trailer to unfreeze the brakes i'm in there. this isn't a game. >> right here. >> thank you so much much. can you hear me? i have a couple of questions. you talk about your movers. where do you pick them up? they are not writing with you in the truck. how much do you have to know about auto mechanics. do you get trained for that and i gather now you don't really hang around with other truckers they don't exchange all of the interesting sort of guy talk i think of it as in cafés and stuff like that.

i'm sure if you are not, i hope not spending anything at the bar so those are all my questions. >> i have a little black book where i've got the names of professional on-call movers who are available on a moments notice anywhere and then i have a regular cruise so the company i work for now has seven terminals around the country and we have got crews from their so only occasionally will i get stuck where i'm not going to know somebody. i don't hang around with the regular truckers because actually there's not a lot of hanging around this being done anymore with the restaurants being gone and the trucks being more comfortable. it's much more solitary than it used to be but i will have a burger and a beer if i can find a place to park. oh mechanics. not much. as i say in the book i may bedbug or not motorhead but i can change the oil.

and make sure i get good fuel and i can unfreeze the brakes in the morning with the flare but i'm not particularly adept at that. but these big trucks you see those trucks will go for a million miles with hardly any problems. >> in between i want to insert this one. what are the three most harrowing moments you have had as a trucker either in terms of dealing with mad people who are being moved or literally on the road where you had a weather incident or a jackknife or something like that? >> in his bills, hills and hills always. i've made mention this earlier on. if you are in the road and you see a truck coming down the hill you have to assume it's terrified. >> should we get out of the way? >> you should definitely get out of the way. if he's on your tail and you are

on a hill you really want to get out of his way because it might mean there's something wrong or it might mean he's a predator with an 80,000-pound weapon and in neither case you want to take that on. >> if you had to go up one of those? >> a runaway truck ramp? i never have. >> thanks for really interesting presentation. i enjoyed it. all the different kinds of them from -- observations you have made about your job and i enjoyed it a lot even though wasn't exactly what i expected. i was aware of the distinction between the bedbug her and the other hierarchy level so i came hoping there was more on the tipp poll for a driver not to highly paid and relatively low

respect. wondering if you are able to give me some impression of how that life has changed for the others that aren't at your level may be changed between the first chapter and your first stint as a driver or just in general over time. you have a pretty long perspective from when you were 20 years old until now so i assume it's gotten tougher in many respects but maybe not. what do you think? >> the trucks are a lot more comfortable. that is made a big difference for a lot of drivers. the money is probably the same or slightly less than it was in the 1980s. we are always hearing about a shortage of truck drivers which i have heard since 1980 but the money never goes up. so i don't know.

there's a huge turnover in the freight hauling part of the business. those pick companies that i mentioned earlier, 85 to 95% turnover. >> why is that? >> i think they think they are going to make a lot of money and then find out that they are not. it's not that they never learn. once you go in there and leave they don't come back but there's this huge, what's the word? trickle down from people who are getting downsized in other businesses in this country who do look to tracking is the next possibility and another change which by the way is a nice one is you see a lot of husband-and-wife teams now. that is really nice. wherever we move men tend to behave better and at a truck stop that's what come change. >> maybe not the best job in the

world where the average trucker but it hasn't gotten worse is what you're saying? >> i don't think we have much more time left. i think driverless trucks are here. >> that was my next question which is what is up with driverless trucks in what is that going to do to you in industry? >> has anyone seen that youtube video, the anheuser-busch truck that was fully automatic and it drove across hoover dam and the drivers in the backseat and asleep or reading a magazine? that's what's coming. >> is that a good thing or is it a transition phase to you were not in the back reading a magazine, you are out of work. >> the whole idea is to get the human driver of the supply chain actually. >> will bedbug crispy the last to go because it will be extremely challenging. >> they perfect the energy

transporter in "star wars" a mic and "star trek." we'll have to carry their stuff out of the house. >> are you working on that? who. >> have you noticed in the last 30 years of vast difference in the volume of family mover's? utah today as if it was in the middle of the 50s and i think the middle of the 50s because of the change in the technology and so many families are working at home i mean we move were told to move up. we weren't given a choice. he wanted a better job he went and i would think to the point you could see it in certain neighborhoods in the summertime every other house was for sale for obvious reasons. but not now. you live in certain communities and you rarely know if anybody

was moving. i imagine the volume is reflected in your business. >> it's different now. it's slightly less. still its 40 million americans every year and that number doesn't seem to change. of that, 2 million of those will hire a van lines to do that work but you are right. you don't see ibm used to stand for i have been moved so that corporate moving thing has dissipated somewhat but that is being replaced by telecommuting electronic service workers and computer people who now have the opportunity to live wherever they want. so they are moving. >> so people are still moving. >> we have been moving since we moved across the bering land bridge. i wonder who that mover was. >> are if these things working

at all any more? i identify with your career. i was a furniture mover my first job. i got my license when i was 18. i'm older than you are and then they change the rules. what i have noticed and i went and trucking along the way and got a ph.d. and then came back to tracking when i retired but what i have found is in 1989 i was paid the same amount of money in 2011. >> inflation? >> $15 an hour both times. he used to be trucking was competitive with a ph.d.

actually. but then now you are poor. the truckers are now poor and not even middle class. they used to be able to make $70,000 a year. >> so did ph.d.s. >> that's true too, and that's an issue depending on what kind of ph.d. you have. do you have comments? it's a property profession now, not middle class. >> so recommend when i first started when i was 16 the guys to work for a local moving company they were middle-class labors and they could own a home and they could have a regular sort of middle-class life. what did you call it poverty, property profession. we are getting more and more property profession's all the time and it gets completely

eliminated by computers and then we will have what you call it when you don't have a profession and a more? i agree with you, completely. >> i just want to thank you again for coming out and talking about your career and i have two questions for you actually. number one is did you write this book on the road and number two, do you like what you do? do you like doing this? is if you like a job to you? of course it feels like a job to you but do you like being in this kind of for? >> good questions. >> thank you. i didn't write it on the road. what i did have was a audio cassette recorder and i was always making tapes either driving or at the end of the day were sometimes surreptitiously recording conversations and

those began to accumulate and i had quite a few of those in six years ago i decided to have us transcribed and that's what formed forms the basis of the book. to the second question yeah there is a lot about the work that i love doing and what i really love is working with families and helping them do a transition to a new home if they want to be open-minded enough to let us help them do that rather than be suspicious or hostile. we are actually on their side. >> i read this book is a practical thing to read if you are planning to move because it will tell you all the things that you should or should not do if you want some unlike finn to move you. finn will move you no matter what but if you want to say and do the right things and treat them with the proper respect you

will get a better result. >> the best way to move is to get rid of everything you can't pack in the suitcase. >> and a high-end corporate moving to work primarily with the business offices or with the people being moved or both? >> it depends on how high and it is. i moved this hollywood guy. he was an eager guy. law and order got canceled so he had to move back to beverly hills. it was just his personal assistant. i've never met him or his family so that happen sometimes but usually it's the families. >> i have a niece and her husband were being relocated from columbus ohio to the boston area. >> thank you. >> i have one question that i

want to ask you directly related to the book because it's something that's never been resolved in my mind. if someone came to me -- you and said nobody likes me and i never heard you try to give them advice but never really crystallized. the idea wasn't finished. how did it work out? did he stay or did he leave her what happened? was a personality are paying? >> thanks for that. you are right about everything. that particular scene in the book didn't resolve itself because there wasn't any resolution in the point i was trying to make with this particular guy who was lacking in any sort of social skills was that trucking, these kinds of guys are out there for people that can't fit in anywhere else and there's a subset of those guys. certainly not all of them but he

was an archetype of that. he is still there and he still works for the company. he is fine and he is still scaring people. >> that's what you said, i seem to scare everybody. >> a big giant truck driver missing his two-front teeth. >> you still have the guy in your team from time to time. >> absolutely. thank you. >> thank you. >> i'm also one of those people that is licensed to drive a truck and i still have a ph.d. can you hear me? the question is a professional question. i am a professor but when you

are going downhill in a snowstorm and your truck is loaded and it's heavy, how do you stop the truck? c you can't stop it. you can slow it down. you want to be properly adhered. in fact the introduction to my post goes into the exact detail about how you do that so i'm usually in up to 13 speed transition and i'm in fifth gear which gives me a range between 23 and 28 boss per hour and then i have a jake brake. did you have for jake brake when you were driving? the exhaust brake keeps it down and the rpms keep it down but you still have to hit that break every once in a while and that's where it gets scary. >> utah in the book about how attention itself is a break. >> that's the exhaust brake.

>> i don't know if you cover this in the book. i don't know if you touched on this in the book but i have a personal experience that i would like to share with you. it's about movers. >> here we go, let's do it. >> when i moved i had been doing orientation and there were a lot of truckers. there were a lot of movers there anyway they came to my house and i was alone and you can see i'm a senior citizen and they were doing what they were doing and they told me that the next day i should wait a while and come in

and i would have a surprise. i sure did. what happened was i told them that i was having some closet work done and they should come a little later. anyway, they disregarded what i told them. they said they had a schedule and i really don't recall but when i got into that apartment all of my clothes were lying on the couch because there was nothing to put the clothing into the closet. there were a whole bunch of boxes stashed in the bedroom and the women who would dare apologize to me. they said they were sorry and you know they apologized anyway

when she came to see me i told her i wasn't going to pay that $4000 because of what i had seen. she said she was going to sue me and they did deliver some. anyway i told this story to my son-in-law who happens to be a very smart businessman. he couldn't stand it when he heard it. he hired a lawyer to represent me. i told the -- i had a few notes in the book and showed it to the lawyer. he said he didn't know what he could do because i had signed a contract but what the upshot was , he discussed this with with a movers attorney and he came

back and told me that the best he could do was i could just pay for the $4000. she wasn't going to charge me for a lawyer and what not but i had to sign an agreement that i would never tell emily's list or or. >> angie's list. >> that i would never tell them about what happened. what i found after i was unpacking, they left behind a lot of stuff but it was garden stuff that they left behind. some stuff was stolen, some personal items of mine and i guess i just i want it to tell anyone that this happens, take pictures. maybe if i would have had pictures it wouldn't have happened.

>> what is your response to this? >> my response is the moving horror stories happen every day and i'm always chastened when i hear about them. i try not to do anything really bad. ..

should be covered those are two reasons. one of them as i developed a nice collection of opinions over the years and i've needed to discharge and i think the last one is there's something to say i think it is a serious book and there's something to say about the importance of how and why people get attached to certain things. >> you come away with an appreciation from detachment from objects. do you want to tell the story about the polygamist?

>> one man's polygamist is one man's regular guy. where this gentle man came from i don't think they call themselves polygamists i think they just call them neighbors. this man had been trained as a doctor and then moved to the united states and he couldn't practice as a doctor so he worked driving a taxi for five years and then worked for another five years said he was ten years living in the bronx and his dream was to move out west where the wide-open spaces are. it's one of those cities with 20 million people or something. so he moved to this corner of arizona where people are like a modern family because he was going to start bringing his wives over and figured he would be totally invisible in the

middle of this community and he could be a doctor as well. he was one of the friendliest people i've met in my whole life but he was following his cultural imperatives. >> thanks to all of you. >> i recommend this book highly and there's an easter egg treasure hunt for any of you that are fan of hunter s. thompson in his very cleverly sort of illusions and references to fear and loathing in las vegas and many others as well to add a layer of pleasure in the book. >> thank you politics and prose and brad graham and everybody else, thank you so much. [applause]

>> affects afterwards, journalist discusses how it is used to protect public opinion and the book the smear how shady political operatives and fake news control what you see what you think and how you vote. she's interviewed by "washington post" media critic.