and the book "hidden figures" is very much about that. but because katherine johnson, as a mathematician in that full hierarchy, was the central character, they really created a plot in the movie that that hinged on math. and her viewpoint -- it was really, and this was something that i didn't even really learn until after the movie was produced and had all these questions about, you know, how particular part of the script had come together. but they made this very interesting decision to really make it a movie about math as opposed to about the engineering -- >> right. >> -- which the book is a lot more about engineering than the minutiae of the -- >> of the math, yeah. yeah. and about their lives. >> and about their lives. >> you detail their lives a lot more than the specific projects that they worked on. i wanted to ask you real quickly to talk about the human computer

project that you're work on. this is something you have continued past the life of the book. could you talk a little bit about what you're doing there and how it's succeeded since the book and the movie have come out? >> so. yeah -- so, yeah, the human computer project. essentially, what i was so surprised to discover doing the research for "hidden figures" is how many women were involved in computing, as i talked about before. not just at nasa, but at all of these other organizations. and so this is really a way to try and catalog all of the women who were involved in doing this work in the early days of computing and really understand, you know, what kind of work they were doing and also to get a snapshot of women in these fields and see if there's something that we might learn from those early pioneers that we can apply to women working in these fields today. >> so if people want to participate, they can find it onlinesome. >> yep. the humancomputerproject.com, or

you can reach out to me at margo lee margot lee shetterly.com. >> thanks a lot, guys. we appreciate your questions. we ran out of time -- [applause] >> no, we ran out of time, i've got to wrap it up. i do want to thank our esteemed guest, margot lee shetterly," author of hidden figures. please enjoy the rest of the festival. thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations]

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>> live coverage of the 17th annual national book festival. that was margot lee shetterly talking about her book, "hidden figures." and coming up in just a few minutes -- and we want to show you the line first. can we show you the line here, jim? this is the line trying to get in to hear j.d. vance talk about "hillbilly elegy." about 2500 seats are set up in there, and so we're in the middle of the crowd here, but we also have our marketing folks here. and we want to introduce you next -- and i'm going to cut through here. we want to introduce you next to didi. >> i'm here with the marketing team, and we are giving away a lot of goodies. we're giving out bookmarks, we've got some pens, we're also giving out these fantastic bags.

we've got about 35,000 of them. pick one up, fill it up with a lot of books and take them home and read it. >> and if you don't always carry books around, they're great for groceries as well. very solid bag, very nice. and this is francis who is our volunteer here at the book fair. francis, stand up and say hi to america. >> hi, america. how are you? >> what do you do at c-span? >> i am the transmission operator at c-span. >> so you're an engineer. >> i'm a, yes, engineer. yep. >> engineer on hand as well. so just wanted to introduce them to you. j.d. vance will be live on booktv on c-span2 here at the national book festival, just a few minutes. they're setting up. you can still see the crowd out here, still trying to get into the room to hear j.d. vance. after that we'll be back on our booktv set downstairs here at the convention center. and we'll have a call-in with david mccullough. so those are a couple things coming up. just a reminder, if you want the

full schedule for the day, go to our web site, booktv.org. the schedule is right there on the right-hand side. you can see the full day's coverage. everything we're doing today reairs at midnight tonight, but it also reairs on monday, labor day. so right now let's go on in, and as the room gets filled up for j.d. vance, this is booktv's live coverage on c-span2. [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] >> hello. i'm -- [inaudible] librarian at the library of congress. all day here at the library of congress national book festival, we are recognizing and celebrating the importance of reading and authors and books. the library of congress makes it easy to do this every year, but the truth is the national book festival is a huge undertaking. it's a huge financial undertaking. and it has been made possible by generous support from our sponsors. you can see who they are in your program and on the video monitors around the convention center. but we can't take for granted that this event will continue to exist, so i would ask you to consider making a contribution

right now using your cell phone. you can send a text to make a one-time gift that will be added to your mobile phone bill. the details are on the screen and on the back of your program, and as soon as you finish making that contribution, please silence your cell phone. and now on to the main event. i'd like to introduce co-chair of the national book festival, david rubenstein. [applause] >> we're very honored today to have one of the best selling authors in the country with us today, person who wrote his first book and already on "the new york times" bestsell iser list. how many people here have read the book? wow. okay. how many people are going to read the book? [laughter] okay. how many people are going to go buy the book today? [laughter] our special guest is j.d. vance. i'm going to ask him to come up now. j.d.?

[applause] so thank you very much for coming. let me give people who may not know your background a little introduction. j.d. is a native of middletown, ohio -- [applause] >> okay. [laughter] and a graduate of the middletown high school. he then went into the marines for four years, served in iraq -- [applause] and came back, went to ohio state and finished it in two years -- [applause] then went to yale law school, graduated there as a member of the yale law journal, clerked for a federal judge for a year. he is now in the investment world and based in part in bah d.c. in washington d.c. he is married to a former classmate from yale law school who is here somewhere, maybe on

her way with bringing his two-month-old son. [laughter] [applause] so if you see a two-month-old son somewhere, that's his son. [laughter] so let's start. surely when you started to write book, in your wildest imagination you could not have thought that you were going to write a new york times bestseller many your first book. or did you? >> no, i certainly didn't think that i would. >> so was it -- where'd the idea for the book come from? >> well, it actually started in law school, and really the genesis was that i was very interested in some of the concepts and the ideas that i wrote about in the book, most specifically this question of upward mobility in the united states. and at yale we had to write this, basically, this thesis by the end of our third year in order to graduate, and i really wanted to write it about sort of the legal and the policy implications of social mobility in the united states or the lack thereof. and the more that i started to talk through the idea and the people that were advising me,

the more that especially my primary adviser, a woman named amy chua who herself is a pretty successful author -- >> she's the author of tiger -- >> author of battle hymn of the tiger mother. and she encouraged me more and more to bring my personal experiences to bear, because she thought that i could write something that was both hopefully intellectually interesting, but also personally and emotionally powerful. .. well, i was always working on it part-time.

i think it took me two years. i started writing it towards the middle of 2013 and finished towards the end of 2015. >> the right long and/or on computer? >> my computer, my handwriting is absolutely terrible. >> did you have any publisher lined up? >> this is interesting. it exemplifies something i write about in the book, social capital and social connections can have these important than if it's. because of amy, when i started to think of making this into a book project, if she said let me introduce you to these people i know in the publishing world, one of the people she introduced me to is this woman who became my agent and as i quickly learned, when you have an idea, someone like tina advocating for it, the publisher is relatively easy and that happened with me.

the hard part was getting into the publishing world and once i was there wasn't hard to find a publisher. >> first time of his age shouldn't be hard to write a book and halfway through, how can i get out of this project. where you in that category? do you want to abandon it? >> i definitely did. if my wife is here she would tell you how miserable i was 50% way through the writing process. for me what was so tough is once i got halfway through the book it was too late to give up. i couldn't just stop writing it but writing an additional 40 or 50 words seemed so imposing and i realized what i didn't realize going into this project, i probably had a 10:1 ratio of words typed 2 words that made it into the final manuscript. i didn't realize what a long

slog it would be until i was halfway through it and i definitely thought to myself would it be possible to get out of this? >> your publisher had some confidence. the initial print run was 10,000. 10,000 and 500,000 about 10,000 is good for a first author. at what point when the book come out did people say there aren't enough copies and we have to print more? >> this happens quickly after the book came out. and two or three weeks there was an interview i did with the american conservative that went viral. a lot of people sharing it on twitter and facebook and i went to check my amazon ranking, your amazon ranking is checking real time how your book is selling, i was checking obsessively every 7 or 8 seconds. i go to check my amazon ranking

and it says book is out of stock, we will ship about a week, i realize we don't have enough books out there and that is when they started to turn on the crisis. >> how many have been printed? >> i don't know how many are in print. hard copies we sold just under 1 million and it is a little over 1 million if you count digital copies and all that stuff. [applause] >> the title, very often authors don't come up with a title right away. is that your idea for the title where did it come from? >> your conversation with my agent, i really wanted the word hillbilly to be in the book title and the reason is i it captured the particular cultural subsegment i was trying to write

about, but i also thought it captured the interesting insider outsider dynamic that existed in my family where my grandma would say we are hillbillies, we can college of hillbillies but if anybody called you a hillbilly you have to punch them in the nose. a sort of interesting word that always had a really textured meaning as i grew up so i wanted that word to be in the title but og, had to take a while before i was comfortable with making it "hillbilly elegy". to pair elegy with hillbilly there were a couple reasons with that. >> you are reasonably well known. can you go to a restaurant with people asking for autographs or selfys? >> depends where i am. i get noticed, in columbus i get noticed a fair amount, i get

noticed in dc. i get noticed in eastern kentucky or southwestern ohio. i was in nashville a week and a half ago and i didn't get noticed once. >> you have to make a record there. what has been the reaction of your family. many family secrets people don't want revealed about themselves, everybody has family secrets. what was the reaction of your family to this? >> i didn't reveal every family secret. i saved that for my second book. it is interesting. in talking to my family about revealing the secrets i think i have noticed a slight tone shift from when i started to write the book from where it is now. people are much more open about spilling the family history on the pages of a book they don't expect anybody to read. now we are at the number of

copies we sold, there is more sensitivity but some people definitely say it is in the family, we shouldn't tear the family's dirty laundry, some people appreciate that it was an important and worthwhile story to tell, some people come down in the middle. >> any of them say how come i don't get royalties from this? >> i haven't gotten that yet but maybe i will now since this is on c-span. >> host: let's talk about the book itself. i have read it and enjoyed it a great deal. i think it's success is three things. one is the writing style is crisp, clear, to the point, second, personal story is extraordinary which is the kind of thing it is almost like a novel. hard to believe it was true. and the relationship between what is going on in the country,

the opioid crisis, unemployment, let's go through each of these. first, the writing style, were you a gifted writer in college, law school, where did you get this crisp and clear writing style? >> law school helped in that regard. one thing they teach is don't write with a lot of excess verbiage, be clear and concise but engaging and so thinking about how to write as a lawyer, cut out the excess words, definitely helpful but when you ask if i was a talented writer, i don't think i am a talented writer, but it is funny because there is this eighth grade biography i had to write and my family still has it and it is interesting because it is very similar to "hillbilly elegy" and they pass it around, he was a

great writer even when he was 14 years old and when my wife picked it up she will go your family is not being honest. you were not that good a writer when you were 14 years old. i do think law school helped. there is the story i tell in the book where first writing assignment i had in law school i handed in, was pretty proud of it and this law school professor headed back and circled -- masquerading as a paragraph. if you ask if i was a talented writer he would say no. >> having had a first book that was very successful normally publishers will go to the author and say you are ernest hemingway, let's have another book, the sooner you get it out the better so surely after you write another book are you speaking of writing one right now? >> thinking of writing another book, i eventually will. my view on this is not something i am trying to undertake

tomorrow. if i write another book it will be a couple years from now as opposed to immediately. >> there will be a paperback addiction. will you edit it or change it or go at it the same way? >> i will do it the same way. i would like to add a chapter to contextualize the political ideas some have attributed to the book. i had no idea it would be attached, frankly to me a pretty bizarre way, i would like to write a little bit about that, i haven't talked a ton about that but it will stay the same. >> before the paperback comes out or after the paperback comes out there is supposed to be a movie. ron howard is producing a movie or directing as well, who is going to play you? >> i don't know. i want it to be someone

good-looking but not so good-looking that people are disappointed when they actually meet me. the question i have trouble meeting, who gets into that not too warm not too called category? >> host: let's move to the second part of white is so successful, your life story. those who have not read the book i don't want to give away everything but where were you born? >> middletown, ohio. >> biological mother and father were married at the time. >> they were. >> host: did they get divorced afterwards? >> guest: i was a year old when they got divorced. >> host: your biological mother was raising you in the early years. and you had a close relationship

with your maternal grandmother and grandfather and what was their names? >> mama and papa. their names were bonnie and jim. >> host: is that hillbilly type word or unique see your family? >> guest: it is pretty common in a broader culture, not exclusive to billy culture but definitely something people from that region disproportionately call their grandparents. >> host: people in the east coast say what is hillbilly about ohio, that is the center of the united states, describe your family roots in kentucky, you came to ohio, your family came to ohio. >> guest: they were part of this migration from eastern kentucky, east tennessee, west virginia to the industrial midwest and when they moved they brought a lot of cultural attributes with them. even though my family lived in southwestern ohio we traveled to

eastern kentucky a lot because i spent so much time with my grandparents i spent my formative years in eastern kentucky, always felt that with our real homeland and interesting that is a pretty common attitude. there are country music songs about this and stories similar to mine where people who grew up in the midwest grew up in michigan or indiana or ohio felt like their home was in west virginia because they spent so much of their lives in those places and that is where their family was from. >> guest: >> host: you are growing up and have a stepsister? different dad, same mom. >> host: you are raised by your single mother. how did she support herself? >> guest: mom, i remember, became a nurse sometime after maybe i was 8 or 9 or so, as i write in the book these were good times economically, we were not struggling economically during that period. before then i don't know. i think she worked odd jobs.

my grandparents helped a little bit, certainly one of the stories in the book is after mom was no longer working in nursing things were pretty tough for our family economically. more importantly they were tough socially, a lot of issues. >> host: your mother was married or had male relationships to people living with her, four six different times, wasn't that disconcerting? a different man in the house all the time? >> host: it was an unstable childhood from the perspective of people coming in and out of our lives. i didn't realize what effect that was having on me. i didn't like it when i was a kid, i didn't like that i would befriend this guy or feel of this guy was becoming a father figure and all of a sudden he was out of our lives. i knew that was common. a lot of friends were going through the same thing and none

of them like that either. i didn't appreciate the effect it was having on me until i was older and looked back on these things. >> host: at some point you redeveloped relationship with your biological father and lived with him for a while but that was not a pleasant experience you thought it would be. >> guest: he had his life together living with my stepmom and they had a happy home life and in some ways i was searching for that family stability in the eighth grade or so when that happened but i also realize i had become incredibly attached to my grandma. even when i was living with mom as a kid, we would spend a ton of time with our grandparents and his mom struggled with problems we spend more time with our grandparents so there was this weird moment where i was living with my dad and recognized he had a normal home

as people understood it but i felt so desperate to get back to my grandma's house and live with her and that is what i did. i don't think i realized until that moment that in my own mind and my own heart she had become chief caretaker. >> lived with your biological father, not as happy and experiences you hoped, you moved in with your maternal grandmother and grandfather and he was very close to you so the shock of his passing away, how did that affect you? >> it affected me in all the ways the death parents affects a young kid. because of this situation growing up, the revolving door, he was the closest thing i had to adapt during formative years, he took care of, made sure i had all the things kids need and

emotional support for me, a sense that if he was around things would be taken care of, and family drama was happening, he never lost his temper or flew off the handle. mama had a temper, poppa didn't. i think it affected me in a number of different and negative ways but the way it affected me most of all, what came after it, i understood instinctively that poppa was the glue that held the family together and i realized it in a very obvious way when he wasn't there, just what would happen. >> host: you lived with your mother for a wild but at one point, she is violent with you and difficult to deal with and had a drug problem. was it like an experience where

the police saved you from your mother. is that fair? >> i thought about this a lot. i wonder, i was 12. i always wonder if maybe it wasn't quite as dangerous as i remember. i think in part that is because i'm a lot closer to mom now and in some ways people try to remember things in a way that reflect fondly, i love my mom and we are doing well in a relationship now. i was terrified. i thought we were going to die and that mom was going to try to kill us and the car was traveling very fast and she didn't seem especially stable. i got out of the car and ran and found this woman who called the police and the police came and arrested mom and she was charged

with domestic violence. that was a pretty traumatic moment, there is no other way to say it. >> host: do you go live with your grandmother or go back and live with your mother? >> for a time i lived with my grandmother. i was always living with her for weeks or months at a time even when things were going well. it wasn't that different, wasn't much of a departure -- i with the with mama for a while, but that is the way things went with us. >> when you were growing up, when i was growing up i didn't have the experiences you did but what happens when i was 12 or 1009, how did you recall? did you have documents? how did you know these incidents

so well? >> being able to rely on your family really helps. a lot of the stuff i tried to cross reference as much as possible with my hands or my sister or mom, my dad. what happens here, this is sort of here is the draft, the manuscript of this story, what am i leaving out, what am i missing, and i do think going back to how the family reacted to the book is one of the reasons they reacted well, i tried to make part of the writing process, not just sorting from my memory onto the page, i tried to make it a family memoir but as i said in the introduction, i am sure things aren't perfect, how i remember them and they are pretty well documented with what is primarily a memoir. >> host: your grandmother died, it must have been traumatic. were you living with her at the

time? >> guest: a few months before i left for iraq in 2005. >> host: you were living with her when you graduated from high school? >> i lived with her for almost all of high school and left for the marines from her house. >> host: you were filling out applications for college. and either you thought you couldn't afford college or weren't ready, why didn't you go to college right out of high school? >> guest: i didn't feel ready for it. i had at least enough maturity to recognize this was my one real opportunity to have anything in the way of a good job or good career. if i screw this college thing up that would be it. that would blow my one chance. because of that i didn't want to take it for granted. when you went to college i felt i would have taken advantage of it. the cost of part of it was a significant issue as well.

it wasn't just the cost, i knew i would have to take out all these loans and pell grants and things like that that i would be able to take advantage of but even with that i knew it would be a significant amount of debt but it was more the logistical side of it that made college theme so imposing. filling out financial aid paperwork, what is your dad's annual income, what is your dad's address. at that time i hadn't spoken to my legal father in 6 or 7 years, finding that information required a certain amount of detective work. there were pages to sign off on these massive loans. my grandma hadn't graduated high school, it seems really imposing and in some ways terrifying to go through this entire administrative process no one in my family had gone through and i didn't feel comfortable doing it myself. >> walk down the street and goes

of the marine recruiter. >> that is a simple version of what happened. at that point there are six kids in my generation of grandchildren. my two older cousins, my sister and my two younger cousins and three of us, both of the older cousins, so i was encouraged pretty strongly by my cousin rachel who was in the marine corps, she said if you are worried how you are going to pay for school and you are worried whether you are ready for college you should join the marine corps, that will be great for you. you will get out of town, see some stuff, gain financial independence and about doing that. >> host: you sign up for the marine corps. did your family tell you that was a good idea? >> guest: it is a patriotic community and a patriotic family. people were proud of me but not

happy i had chosen -- this is -- i signed up in 2003, we had just invaded iraq, gotten involved in afghanistan for a little while, there was apprehension justifiably so about what it meant, what i was getting myself into. my mother reacted negatively. she framed my decision to go to the marine corps instead of college almost as a betrayal. you are leaving me to take care of myself. you could get hurt and that was very hard but she understood why i needed to do it. >> you went through basic training and what was that like, you couldn't get their basic training. >> i was never afraid i couldn't get through. in high school i was afraid of the physical demands but a drill instructor told me if you think drill instructors are going to be mean it will be nothing like the grandmother of yours.

i really thought as long as i could physically cut it, the psychological part would be fine and i could make it and that was true. marine corps is definitely a challenging but it is also in a weird way kind of fun, stockholm syndrome but a lot of marines enjoyed their boot camp experience. i was no different in that. >> host: your grandmother has a colorful language. did that rub off on you? she never was embarrassed to use those words around you. did you say anything about it? >> guest: my son is too young to show evidence of how foul my language is. i definitely try to cut back on the language relative to my grandma because she loved a dramatic and well-placed f word. you go from mama's house to the us marine corps, the phrase cursed like a sailor doesn't come from nowhere and the marine

corps is part of the department of the navy and i definitely had to scale back my language to operate in polite society. it is ingrained in me and i don't always succeed. >> you get their basic training and go to iraq where you are afraid you will come back in one piece or not sure you would survive. >> anyone about to deploy to iraq is worried they will come back in one piece. the thing is, i had the military occupation specialty where we lost some people do to combat deaths and combat injuries but is wasn't quite -- i wasn't thinking about the danger as much as i would have been if i was working in the infantry for example. i was worried about it but i also tried to recognize it will be dangerous, it will be more dangerous than driving down the

street but most marines come back okay. >> host: for four years you leave the military and then decide you want to go to college, you felt you were ready for it but you were then four years older than many of your college contemporaries. why did you decide to go to ohio state which is not a great place to go but did you consider any other place? >> well, i think it is possible to make these decisions seem more rational and they were. the reason i wanted to go to ohio state as i grew up loving ohio state. i was not nearly as thoughtful about my college decision as i should have been. i had a great experience, glad i went there but it was mainly luck i find myself at ohio state, i wasn't thinking as smartly about it as i should have been. >> host: normally people go to

college for four years and you seem to get through ohio state in two years. how did you do that? >> guest: take a lot of classes, don't -- go during summer and transfer credit you gain in the marine corps over to ohio state. those things were enough to enable me to cut a couple years off. >> host: how did you support yourself, where did the money come from for ohio state? was marine corps salary enough to supplement? >> accommodation of things. no longer getting a salary. little bit of savings, a little bit of debt that i incurred, subsidized loans, had some pell grants, had the g.i. bill which i was trying to save for law school and worked jobs during

college or multiple sources of income were enough to get me through. >> you graduate in two years and decide you want to go to law school but there are not as many people going to yale or harvard, ohio state, how did you decide to go to yale law school which is a great law school as opposed to ohio state or some other school in the midwest? >> guest: i wasn't thinking super strategically about it. i apply to law schools, i got into them and was thinking about going to one of those schools and one of my best friends, best man at my wedding absolutely, if you have got good grades and think you can get into a good place, this is 2009 right after the great recession, i have friends from law school who are struggling to find work, you should try to get into the best school you can because that is your best insurance policy

against unemployment so i took off a little bit of time and reapplied and that is when i applied to yale. >> host: you are an average high school student, how did the change from mediocre average student to a great student? >> guest: average is putting it terribly and i school -- in high school. i was a more mature person, back to me being ready for college in a psychological way, this opportunity as opposed to responsibility if someone foisted upon me. i try harder. paying for it and seeing the data bill go up and up gave me a sense of the fact that i was lucky to go there. i also thought a lot about my grandma when i was in college, the woman who left school when she was 14 years old to come north to ohio, she had not had many educational opportunities, she was supersmart.

i thought to myself, to sacrifice all those things to get me to a place like this i should take advantage of it and try harder. >> you go to gail law school, it is the hardest law school to get into in the united states, very small law school. many people go there from harvard, yale, did you feel out of place when you got to yale law school? >> i was the only ohio state grad at yale. it was weird to me because i realized there were high schools, preparatory schools where there are more students at yale law school then there were at my university which struck me as weird but i was definitely culture shocked. it was more of a culture shock than any place i had ever been, more than ohio state, it was

sort of astonishing how different the expectations and backgrounds were from my classmates relative to where i came from. >> host: bill clinton came from arkansas and took a lot of pride saying i am from arkansas. did he say i am a hillbilly from kentucky, really different, as good as you guys? >> i don't know that i ever introduced herself as a hillbilly from ohio but that came through in the way i conducted myself. i was a pretty strong ohio partisan even in undergrad, everyone knew where i was from, but i don't know if i used that. >> host: how did you do it? where you academically at the top, the middle, the bottom? >> i was not at the top. my wife was clerking for the chief justice but i didn't do as well as her.

the weird about yale for those who know these law schools is they don't give traditional grades. it is hard to know where you rank relative to your peers. i was doing fine, wasn't at the bottom of the pack but wasn't have the top either. >> you wrote your way to the yale law journal, which is something you can do it yale law school and decide you wanted to practice law. what did you decide you wanted to do? >> guest: my wife and i went to the district of kentucky. >> host: you met your wife -- where is she? here somewhere? i thought she was coming. where is she? okay, okay. okay. all right. so you met her and were in the

same class. >> on the eastern strip of kentucky with both of our bridges, they were both in covington which is just over the river from cincinnati. a perfect opportunity to go and clerk for a federal judge and be close to home and work for things that were interesting to us. >> you spent most of your life trying to go back to kentucky? >> i don't know if i was trying to escape kentucky so much as the chaotic home i grew up in. i loved the places i came from and always wanted to go back. it definitely was a really exciting year. we both worked for really good people. sometimes people get stuck with bad judges but we worked for great people and had a great year. >> host: there are 3 reasons the book is successful, when is it is very well written, very

precise, and a good read. secondly the life story is almost like a novel, so it is very interesting. the third, one of the reasons the book has become so popular is as you point out your self the world has changed since you conceived of writing the book and what you wrote about is one of the problems of our country which we have a lot of drug abuse, opioid abuse, the people you came from have these problems. let's talk about that for a while, let's talk about the opioid problem. you point out in your book that drug abuse was a problem in your area and you think it has gotten worse. why do you think it is so bad? >> guest: it was something i saw growing up. i remember when addiction hit our family and i found out mom was addicted to prescription pain pills as we called them back then. i didn't understand why anybody would be addicted to pain pills. it wasn't particularly common in the 90s so if the problem had not gone mainstream as it has

now, in 2017 we sit here and talk about the opioid epidemic which is a nationwide crisis, i felt i got an early insight into what would be a crisis. why has it gotten worse? there are a ton of different reasons and explanations. one is, to be honest, a lot of these drugs were marketed as nonaddictive and they were addictive and it caused a lot of problems. we have a prescription problem in these areas, i was in southeast ohio a few months ago talking to some folks dealing with this and they tell me that when high school kids used to hang out and get into their parents liquor cabinet or beer, now they get into grandma's medicine cabinet and passed around drugs. that is a different kind of problem. it is in some ways a consequence of some negative social come --

problems. if you have domestic problems, a lot of unemployment, people do find a way to deal with it, maybe 50 years ago they dealt with it with alcohol and now -- >> host: you seem to have avoided the opioid problem and marijuana or something, not really anything addictive. how did you avoid that in the environment in which you grew up? >> guest: mama was cognizant of the problems of addiction and was strict about it. if she found out we were smoking a cigarette or had anything to drink, she would fly off the handle. she appreciated just how bad addiction could be and this role in the family, that ruined her life for the first 30 years of her marriage with alcohol, it was ruining the life of one of her kids. i was very much on guard almost

obsessively so. one of these people who doesn't take ibuprofen for a headache because i am uncomfortable with the idea of putting foreign substances in my body because i have seen addiction trap a lot of people. i got really sick at ohio state, i had mono. they gave me a synthetic opioid, i had to take some medicine. i was in the hospital at ohio state and i remember calling everyone in my family saying i know why mama didn't want us to take this because it is fantastic. i being on guard about that. >> host: you avoided alcohol. >> guest: i haven't invited alcohol. i have never felt that i have been addicted to alcohol. when they ask at the doctor, one of these once or twice a week type people, no, i have never

felt addicted to anything except chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. >> many people left kentucky, go north, those jobs are higher out. you see a lot of unemployment in the background, can you describe whether it is cutting better or worse and what can be done? >> guest: it has gotten better because the economy has picked up a little bit, but i don't think it has improved significantly over where it was 30 or 40 years ago. the number of people's heads the coal industry or steel industry employed in 1950s and 60s hasn't returned in the last few years, not as bad as it was but i do think you are seeing a long-term shift in these areas and it is

something policymakers were blind to. everyone just that the economy would adjust and folks would get different jobs into different prescribed -- professions but you have seen a lot of communities get decimated and that is one of the undercurrents of the book. what is there to do about it? there are a lot of different things we could do about it. the first is we have a significant problem with the fact that you are given a choice when you graduate high school between working in the fast food job or getting a four your college education and we should provide more pathways than that. those are the only two pathways, you see people going in those two directions but i also think we have to think more constructively about regional economic development, the way this has gone is i am a local municipality, i offer somebody a tax credit to set up a

restaurant in my hometown, that is great, restaurants are fantastic but that is not the long-term redevelopment that has to happen in these areas, something all levels of policymakers have to think differently than they are right now. >> somebody writes a book is successful is yours and subjects that you deal with, at some point somebody from the democratic national committee or the republican national committee or some political entity would say you are a great candidate to be a member of congress, governor, senator or something even higher. have you thought about running for something? >> guest: i think we are out of time. >> host: you would say you wouldn't preclude anything? >> guest: certainly not, certainly, that progression is exactly right. when you have a book that is

successful, people from various political parties ask if you would be interested in these things. we 19 how can people who are in these jobs like these jobs? >> guest: i don't think i have. i talked to a couple members of congress, not about me running but about in this environment do you enjoy what you do and say say i like working on policy but we don't do any of that. >> host: leaving aside whether you would run for something, the platform you now have is so great you could be a spokesman about alcoholism, unemployment, opioid addiction and are you going to make part of your career talking about these issues or do you want to not be seen as a spokesman for these issues? >> guest: i don't want to be seen as a spokesman for these issues but now that i have this platform i might as well do something productive other than just talk about the book.

there are other issues worth talking about. i have tried to be a participant in these policy debates during the health care reform debate a few months ago, went to capitol hill to talk about how this might affect the opioid crisis or the people from back home. i tried to be constructive as much as possible, but we live in a nonconstructive time. you have to be careful and smart and recognize that sometimes even when you try to be careful are smart you are not being careful or smart. >> host: when you talk to members of congress or congressional staff people they just want a picture with you or your autograph or do they listen to what you say? >> guest: it depends on the staff members but i found generally speaking i have become more cynical about our political

process writ large because the book came out from talking to folks spending time in these areas i do feel more optimistic about individual members and staff. by and large people actually want to make a difference and care about the policy and what effect it will have but we have to live in a political period and political time where it is hard to translate interest in policy to constructive acknowledgment. >> host: team people might call themselves hillbillies referring to hillbilly culture, are they proud of your book for having exposed some of the challenges they have or upset for having exposed the challenges they have? >> opinions differ. some people think i am a traitor and hate my guts. there are people who think i have shed a light on important issues and they appreciate it. the thing i hear most from people back home when i talk about the book, i hear people when they run into me on the

street, they appreciate that the book talked about these problems in a way they feel wasn't talked about before, no one wrote the story from the inside. what is it like to grow up in a household with instability, addiction, a household where you are worried whether you can pay for more fundamental things because that is the most gratifying to me but it is a region that is large and diverse, opinions as diverse as any large population. >> what is the most frequent question? you are on tv, and talking about your book or your background. >> guest: the question i most freqly