>>. [inaudible conversation] gerald horne was recently a guest on in-depth program. the author of red and black: the communist front and rethinking us history answered your questions and discuss all of his books , the program can be watched online at booktv.org. just type in depth into the search bar.

>> good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to barnes and noble upper west side. david blake and to the white house in 2011 and lasted until 2016 as a special assistant to senior presidential speechwriters. described as a comic music to the president, david contributed to resident obama's speeches and was a lead writer on for white house correspondents messages. he is currently the head writer for funny or die dc. adam davidson is a staff writer at the new yorker. he also cofounded and cohosted and pr planet money after serving the international plummet. he has been a frequent contributor to this american life. his work has appeared in the atlantic, harpers, gq, rolling stone and other

publications. then bring us tonight, mister david litt's new book "thanks obama". more than any other president, barack obama's eight years in the white house were defined by young people. in 2011, david litt became one of the youngest speechwriters in history until leaving the white house in 2016, he wrote on topics of healthcare, climate change to criminal justice reform and took the lead as president obama's go to comedy writer. now in this refreshingly honest memoir, mister litt brings us inside obama's world , full of hilarious stories and told in a truly original voice,"thanks obama" is an exciting debut about what it means personally, professionally and

politically to grow up . keegan michael t called this book terrific, part firsthand story about being inspired by a cultural icon, part how-to manual for getting involved in politics and taking change. "thanks obama" is a hysterical, heartfelt trip down memory lane and boy, do we need. so without further ado, please join me in welcoming david litt and adam davidson. [applause] >> thank you very much, i'm adam davidson. i'm going tobe doing most of the talking tonight . david, i'm telling david right before that i agreed to do this event before i read the book and i was very relieved to love it. it's fabulous. i think keegan michael t explained very well.

it it's a bunch of different tones and takes you into a whole bunch of different worlds from sort of nacvely enthusiastic dream of one day making change in the world to actually being in the room where change is made. but i think i was trying to think of, to give this audience a sense of the tone of the book. and it feels like a cheap shot to start with the old and borough story butis that a fair story to start with ? >> that i think is certainly the first half of the book. i divided into two parts because i felt like the first, for my first couple of years at the white house, my central question was why on earth would they hire somebody like me? i am the kind of person who

presumably could write speeches okay but does not always remember to wear a belt. and it seemed like people who worked at the white house were people who should remember that kind of thing. then the second half i think as i started to feel more comfortable at the white house, i tried to write about this sense of all of us including former colleagues here, we all played some small part in this big thing in trying to figure out what that meant and grapple a little bit more with what it means to be in public service . now, since golden girls, i had been in the white house for about nine months and the chief speak head writer at the time john favreau with whom many of you may know, he called me in my office and said betty white is turning 90 years old and nbc is doing

this, a special where different famous people are wishing her happy birthday in these 32nd skits and you are pretty funny and no one else wants to do it, do you want to give this a shot? i saidabsolutely, this was my bird address . and it is a full chapter so it's a long story but essentially i managed to ruin nearly every part of my first ever meeting in the oval office and was about to leave in disgrace when the president was heading to the golden girls team song said if i'm going to borrow my head in time to the music i can tell him how the music goes. does anyone here know the golden girls team song? he looked at our videographer overhaul, he didn't say anything. so i looked at hope and hope didn't say anything. so president obama looked at me.and suddenly i knew what i can do for my country. and i was standing in the oval office and i looked our commander-in-chief in the eye and i said, thank you for being a friend.

and that's the thing i don't write about that i've always wondered, there was a secret service agent in the hallway who couldn't see in but he clearly could hear it and i always wondered what hemust be thinking . >> so i heard you read this audiobook so you do a good chunk of it very poorly, i might add. i feel like just to set the stage for the book, to talk about who you are right before you went into the white house, someone with a touch of political experience but that first opportunity to get in the door, who was it and who you became quick i always thought i'd go into comedy after college. i did stand up in high school, i was the word weird 18-year-old at the amateur

night. i did improv in college and when i was a senior, i was 21 years old and i saw barack obama speak at the iowa caucuses after he won that night and i was on a plane and it was one of those, when they had free cable on planes and i was watching cnn because there wasn't anything else on and two minutes into that speech i was totally different person. by the time the plane landed i was one of those young people who would not shut up about barack obama and the fact that i've written a book called "thanks obama" indicates i have not changed since then. i had gotten to write speeches, i sort of fell as backwards into this internship at a speechwriting firm so i had a couple years of speechwriting experience so it was one of those things, i look back on it now and i had a conversation one of the members of the senior staff who had read one of my speeches and was asking for

help one another and i met her for the first time and she looked at her chief of staff and said he's very young, i'm not comfortable with this. and now i don't really blame her.>> so that was kind of the moment that when i was walking into the globe for the first time, it felt very surreal because you always assume that the white house is going to be populated by grown-ups, people who do not make mistakes and one of the reasons i wrote the book as i wanted to talk about not just the time but also all the mistakes that i made. >> without giving too much away, the part of the book is sort of you coming to the security i would say, very much. >> it really is sort of a complex laboratory. it reads as a very light and enjoyable way but i see the spine of the book is this complex love story about obama and coming to, going

from a juvenile infatuation to this different understanding ofwho this man is and what the role of a president is . and which i think you do a masterful job of not just there but it never feels too preachy. it never feels like alecture . it feels like you're changing over time and i think there was a period where maybe you were a little appointment at the president and maybe realize who he was and what his role was and i'd love to hear you talk about that. >> or me, when i started writing the book i thought well, how hard can a book be? the answer was very hard. and one of the hard things about it was aching about the sort of overall arc as a

speechwriter. i was always trying to make sure people only focused on one thing, a speech have to be about one thing and not five things and after i said in my first draft, my editor over there, she said well, this is pretty good but what's it about? >> i said it's about five things. >> and that was, i as i went back and rewrote it, i think to me, the book is a story about what it means to fall in love and be in love whether that's with the person or a country, when you are 21, when you're sort of just starting out and then when you are still, it's fair to say a young person but when you ate a little bit and matured a little bit and what does it mean to be an adult in the way that you love a person or a cause as opposed to being head over heels and having this very exciting but ultimately less fulfilling kind of crush that i think i had when i first fell in love

with barack obama on that plane. >> you get a sense of you take us into the oval office and into these conversations. it's not all golden girls songs. >> mostly just the golden girls theme song over and over again. >> we learned a lot of things about healthcare and other things through the eyes of your character . and it helped me think about just what is the role of the president, what is reasonable to expect of that person and what, what the world is like when that role is held by somebody who takes the office very seriously. and thanks about what that means. >> but there is a sort of heartbreaking moment where you almost fall out of love with obama. i think the presidential debate where you saw him fail

to bring it. and then sort of, that felt like a turning point in the story about him. can you talk about that period of time when we have the congress that refuses to let obama do anything and you become to realize even though within the white house, we don't have as much power. can you talk about that. >> your my experience with it, i know there's, we're all going to have these first debate flashbacks together but i wanted to write about that moment because in the first debate with mitt romney as many of you remember, president obama did very poorly and more thanthat, was , he is the best political performer of his generation. and i'm writing a book about how exciting it is to write

speeches for someone like that but at this moment when the stakes were high i was watching him have the ball in his hand and not come through. and what i wrote about is there was never a moment when i said i'm quitting or this whole thing is a fraud , but i did have this moment where the idea that there exists somebody who is just better than people, that doesn't seem to be the case and realizing that even the president, even a president you admire, even a president you think is doing a great job for the country as a human being. and trying to grapple with that. because i think when i had first imagined what it would be like having all an obama presidency, i remember on the campaign saying i'm not a perfect person and i will be a perfect president and i thought that's exactly what a perfect person would say. >> and realizing that's not the case. i don't think in the end, i think the word

disillusionment gets thrown around a lot in washington and we all get disillusioned with whatever we do in life but to me, the fact that our leaders are only human isn't ultimately disappointing, it's liberating it also makes us uncomfortable and i wanted to try to write a book about how by the end of the president obama's years in office, i felt even more confident because i knew, i had a sense of humanity of even our most powerful leaders. >>. >> can you talk about the mechanics of writing a presidential book . >> and i don't picture you painting it well but i like how you conveyed sort of a different approach or the hard approach. but that just gets, there's all this other stuff. >> mostly is taking the right analogy. i promise we wouldn't do too much topical stuff but i,

every white house is different. and in the obamawhite house, we would generally have one writer pull the pin . let's say if i was writing a policy speech i would meet with the policy team . just an egg around us in that process so my job was to not know a lot about the issue and have experts try to stop information into my head. and then i would after that, do my best to come up with a draft, you speeches on my own and it would go to the key speechwriter, that was john favreau. >> and from there, it would eventually go to the president for a big speech, state of the union, even the correspondents dinner, the president would have well in advance. for his smaller speech, he would look the night before and one of the things i admired was he didn't, just any. if you made a change it was 90 times out of 100 really good change and if it wasn't, he would leave it alone. >> on a big speech, i guess a

state of the union but bigger, for just, i don't know. a deep-sea, is it weeks of work, hours of work,? >> we usually have a week. i thought about the messages and throughout the routine maintenance for speechwriters, it's not something that's going to end up in the history books but it's sort of president obama goes to kansas city to talk about the auto industry. you can madly that way. president goes to this place to talk about these things and for those ages we would have a week. sometimes you would have somebody passing away and you have to write a statement in a couple of hours or a day or two. and sometimes with the correspondents dinner we would know that we have plenty of time to we can prepare and that would be for the correspondents dinner, it would take three weeks. >> you had a lot of friends

and all these countries coming in. >> that was an exception where we can have people, more of a writer's room. it wasn't a physical room but you could have 12 or 15 people all sending in jokes and a lot of them were current staff and former staff but some of them were also professional comedy writers from hollywood so that was achange of pace. >> i didn't realize john appenzell once wrote. >> . >> he did, hewrote. >> . >> how does it affect your thinking about great corridors, greatpolitical . >> speeches throughout history. is that what you're calling upon, listening to churchill or reading thoreau as your writing these things? >> maybe there was a muchmore conscientious person in our office who was sitting down and reading their cicero before embarking on a speech but most of the time , the

main thing is you have a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it. and that was actually, you realize maybe cicero had the same problem so i do feel like you learned that about the job very quickly, that most of what you are trying to do is do a job you think you can do but you don't know whether you can do it under that level of pressure or when the stakes are that high and the other thing i feel i learned about speechwriting is that speechwriters absolutely play a role in what our leaders say, but they don't really putwords

into their mouth. that's not really possible. so when you hear a great oratory from the past say something, it does reflect who they are. some of those people may have had help writing but fundamentally, when you see a speaker and it looks like they don't know what they want to say, it's usually because they don'tknow what they want to say and no amount of speechwriting is going to fix that. >> i can think of an example of that very thing . >> i can't. >> but is it , i remember i love radio and i became , i love magazine writer and i became a magazine writer and there's a part of me that can't read an article or listen to radio without hearing, i see what they're doing and oh boy, they sent a couple lines wrong therefore they should have moved here. do you read shakespeare or whoever it might be with that like hey, i've done the thing that person is doing? >> not shakespeare. but i do think that what i listen to politicians speak, you have that moment where you edit in your head. i'm sure that happens with a radio story or a magazine article where you say okay, i see the craft where the last guy is ending on the peace and i think that's true. and it's interesting now as a democrat, we have a lot of

democrats making a bid to be a future leader of the party so you see okay, this isn't just what they're saying but it how they're approaching these questions. and that's an interesting sort of thing you develop although sometimes i imagine a similar experience, you wish you could turn it off and enjoy it. >> and from time to time you can, if it's totally different. it's hard. >> that's how i feel i know that if something is good indifferent is by listening to a speech and i feel moved rather than thinking. >> partly because i overthink things anyway but also because that's the sign that someone has gotten past the question of. >> and into the things that make speeches great. >> you become like a rocket man, totally destroy. >> that's exactly what i was talking about in that moment. >> i do feel like we have to talk about the elephant in the room. and i mean, so sort of the

premise of your job or premise of the obama presidency was that this is the right thing to do but also that this is the seeming thing to do, that being very careful and thoughtful about your words and how you will be president. and how you will see the country and president obama says that i trust the americanpeople, that's just not how it works . we obviously could make fun of trump all day long and i've been doing that myself but if to some degree, trump is kind of a reputation, not kind of, a full reputation of president obama's understanding of the world and your understanding of the world. in a totally different way . then this on true blustery way of speaking.

and the sort of ham-fisted reading of words that someone else wrote . whether you are on telethon. and just, how do you think about that? as how you understand america? >> first of all, i don't think the main issue is confidence, or the order in which he organizes his words. and i don't think that's the main issue before the main reason that i imagine president obama certainly many of us work for him objected to trump so strongly and assumed that america, that americans wouldn't vote for this guy. >> i think when it comes to his speaking style, some of the things he does are out there.but i also think there is, sort of two modes of communication, president obama was always making a clear argument. he was a writer for he was a politician and also a lawyer. you want to tell one story, wanted to make the argument

for a meeting to be. >> i think with trump, the one thing i will say and the reason i don't feel that my opinion of america as fundamentally changed is i do think you have to look back and remember that donald trump wasn't elected by a majority of voters, most americans rejected him. and. >> and continue to. and so what reminds us is, our political system is really broken but that americans are better than our politics. that was actually one that president obama was saying for years before that. that when you look at the values that americans have, they're not reflectiveof washington and they should be. >> . >> and i guess the, you already said that point that the clarity of obama's speaking is a reflection of the clarity of his understanding. >> that was not very clear in speaking. >> you think you see a window into trump's thought process which is alittle jumbled . >> is there any part you see

and a great stephen miller speech or, one of trump's? >> i don't think, i'm just saying this because in manhattan it's sort of a home crowd for democrats but i do think that when i read sort of teleprompter trump speeches, they're not, i don't object. or i don't agree with the idea that the language is fine but it's not great. it's simply, but then it seems like so low on the list of issues. and the thing that drives me crazy is the danger that we lower the bar in general . that we say okay, when president obama was begun teleprompter we would get freedom from the conservative media constantly, that's just a fact and when president trump successfully teleprompter, suddenly he's presidential and it's

important that we remember not to set our expectations for the future based on donald trump because i do think this is an aberration . >> were going to open it up to questions. there's amicrophone , we are being taped for c-span so if you don't want to be on c-span, don't ask a question. >> i do have a q&a might hear. >>. >> i was wondering if, i was wondering if west wing or house of cards influenced. >> mostly house of cards. most of the murders i committed were based on house of cards. i think the speeches, the presidential speeches in the west wing were good presidential speeches and so i think in that sense, in the same way that you go back and look at a speech that are at a or jfk said, you can look

at a speech that aaron sorkin wrote for jeff bartlett and it gives you a sense of what you want. more than that, a lot of democrats in the way i put it in thebook , it's like most democrats, i was raised in part by aaron sorkin. the idea that politics can be inspiring andmeaningful, that had a lot to do with west wing . >> itold you earlier that reading your book , you get that west wing feeling of entering this world and it's a really thoughtful president, use a human being and a bunch of highly competent people who really want to do theright thing. and the world in your book , presidents screwup, usually a few but it's a world where

>> and you've conveyed that he was thoughtful. can you elaborate a little bit more as to the president, what about him you admired the most? >> just so you know communicating narrative is better with a specific period. >> i'll add some details. and i think one of the things i'll mention because i think it was maybe not necessarily evident if you were watching president obama speak, i talk about some of the ways working on his jokes gave me these

glimpses into the way his mind worked and he made decisions and much more consequential moments. that was nice because i didn't write about what it was like to be in the situation room saying we really should get in lawton, because i did that do that. i got to talk about this other thing. i write about one point in the book we are doing a taping and we had to takes, you know, president obama has got stuff to do so we only have ten minutes. he reached through the first set of jokes and they're not bad but it's not perfect. he sorted sometimes emphasizes the wrong word. things are not quite right. i remember being worried. the second time he read it i could see he had not rehearsed it. i was there, sitting to the whole time but he was like he had studied this thing and he knew exactly which word he needed to get in order to make every joke land. that was in a very low stakes context, a version of a quality you saw with them a lot.

that he was very, very good at figuring out, sorting through lots of information, giggling out with the most important thing is to focus on and then executing on that thing flawlessly. that is a quality i don't think if you had asked me at 21 what would make barack obama or what would make a good president good at their job, i don't think i would've said that ability to identify the important and focus exclusively on that. but that is something i came to admire a lot about the president. >> as david knows i'm one of the people to use due to the visuals for the president, one of the people who make sure he could deliver the words that david had written without the state falling out from under him. so i don't mean to denigrate the visual guys but there's a book called on deaf ears by a professor that put together body of social scientific evidence, however the last 20 or 30 years

before social media took copy soundbites of gotten shorter, the extent people pay attention to those has diminished. i'm curious if you write a whole speech how you are thinking about how to sell the portions of it that the majority of americans might actually listen to or absorb? >> i will say sometimes being a speechwriter felt like being a very, very sort of well-qualified horse and buggy repairmen. you feel 20 or 30 years or a presidential speeches will not be as important as they are today. there will still be moments after tragedy, state of the union what a presidential speech is important. one of the things upright about is the way we started communicating not just to speeches or interviews but in a variety of different ways. i write about what it's like to have funny or die, now my employer but at the time they came in and president obama was a guest between two ferns and i

thought it was a terrible idea but i but i was terribly wrong. that was a moment when you realize there's other ways to get the message across. the phrase i think we used and hurt a lot especially in the second term was eating people where they live. when it comes to the ability of speeches to persuade, it was not so much, i don't think we thought somebody who voted against obama twice was going to listen to him at a message even and say nevermind, i was wrong and now i support this policy. what we could do is focus of the countries attention on the issues that you knew if people are focusing about that, then they would certainly on the other stuff. so if we could talk about the auto industry and when it come back that something people all agreed was sort of, wasn't hard for people to wrap their heads around why that was important. that to me is how i think about it. i write in the book is president

get the people what to think but they can still tell people what to think about. i think that was our sort of guiding idea. i don't know if we ever expressed it that way but that's how we would think about it. >> david, you mentioned obama's speeches often at a point of view or trying to make an argument. to the extent you agreed with that argument may be about a a policy you didn't agree with, affect your ability to write the speech or how challenging it was? >> i didn't have to write any speeches about anything i put them in a discreet with. there were a lot of obama policies where i said this is terrible but i'll do it anyway. the one thing when people ask me was there a speech that you just feel like you had to write about something you disagree with, i did write a speech about the new chips and ready cards and how great they were going to be. i have been told since then they are good policy for reasons i don't really understand, but every time i sit at one of the

credit card things and then waiting for 15 seconds i feel just a tiny bit person responsible, like i am deceived somebody. [laughing] i'll regret that forever. >> its apparent mr. trump has an unusual antipathy to former president obama, and that's highly unusual for one president towards another it's pitiful as actually there was a foreign correspondents dinner several years ago which obama pretty much crucified the president it was like a personal roast. do you remember that or did you see that? >> yes, i remember that. >> did you write for that and do you think that contributed -- >> that was in 2011. i had just started at the white house. john lovett, one of the former white house speechwriters, he was managing joke writing

process that you and you wrote those jokes about trump. my experience with it was kind of sitting in the cheap seats in the back of the room and watching trump sort of the back of the said but you could still see how red he was turning from behind. and then we have all at this point i think seeing him on the video of it and it is, like he seems to go sort of inside himself to a very strange and dark place. the one thing i will say is some people it said well, that's the moment he decided to run. but it's not like president obama was just picking on some random person in the audience. donald trump had been on this birther to work for quite some time, so we clearly have gotten a taste of politics and hit some sort of political ambition. i always think what really got trump in that moment and obviously speculation but if you like speculating about what goes on in his head is like our new national pastime so i will participate. to me it was this is an audience of hollywood celebrities, media

figures, and washington politicians. those are other people who dond trump has always craved the approval of his entire life. he is watching president obama gain their approval by roasting somebody who he feels has done, sort of acted wrongly to them. so donald trump was not just being the subject of humiliation, he was also watching his fantasy play out on stage. i think there was a sense of envy and i think one of the reasons he is so obsessed with president obama is he became president and discovered just because you're the president doesn't mean that everybody loves you. you have to earn it. when you are the president you can do a good job and your friends still are frustrated with you. >> i'm not sure trump has learned that lesson. >> he definitely hasn't. but i think is beginning to realize, i think there was at this notion you walk into the white house and everyone would love him. or at least everyone would pretend to love them.

i don't think he draws a distinction between the two. i think he is realizing in a democracy is the opposite, that the people who loved you the most are still going to give you a hard time, and i don't know that he's come to terms with that but but i think it comes n weird ways. >> i wonder if you would agree that to some of us, maybe the substance of the speech is more important than how poorly or how, that it might not be delivered in a very good way. it's what he says more than how he says it that he gets his arguments out. >> i absolutely would agree with that. it was a real joy to write for president obama because he was a fantastic speaker, and there were moments when you use that ability to accomplish goals that he maybe could have if he wasn't so good when it came to

rhetoric. but certainly when it comes to jokes, for example, he has really good comic timing. that's not a quite what to be present. you can be a good president and not be a good comedian. i certainly agree that most of the problem in speechwriting, when a speech doesn't feel right, it's not have someone says it, it's what they said. this is not talking about the president or my experience in the white house but broadly about speechwriting. the question people often do not ask is what's the point? uc you see speeches were some hs ever answer the question whatever kind or college with this and what is the point of all this? in the white house we were lucky enough were able to do both of those things. there was a clear sense of what the point was going to be, and the person delivering the remarks was capable of doing a lot as a speaker. that's one of the reasons i don't see myself doing a lot of speechwriting in the future because i feel like i have the best speechwriting job you will ever get. >> i would just observe having

observed as reporter at several different president that it's not two separate things. it's not like there's the process of having clear goals and policies and didn't then sey there's this other thing of even making them look pretty or not. the very fact there's a competent communications team and the goals can be articulated well is a a reflection of the l function white house. i was in iraq when they were having trouble communicating their policies in iraq, and all the best, shakespeare himself couldn't have made those policies sound good. it was a reflection of a muddled, confused policy. >> that's a good point. >> when we talk about humor and politics, the role is usually to be the outlier for us to say the things that politicians can't say. so you got like jon stewart or people are getting a trouble consistently for crossing lines, but here your job is to create humor that actually is the thing

that the president can say. how did that sort of change your own notion of humor and its value and the effect that it has in politics? >> so i think that when it comes to humor and writing for a president, the way that i i pun the book was about writing a joke for a politician is like designing something stunning for marlon brando passed his prime. when we writing for president obama, even though he had a sense of comic timing that a lot of politicians do not, you're still thinking about what is the line, what is of the line for him? for example, i think about a joke in 2013, he said one thing all republicans grin is they need to do a better job of reaching out to minorities, called me self-centered but i can think of one minority they can start with. i like that joke but one of the things we were wondering is, would the president what to refer to himself, be comfortable

referring to himself as a minority in public. that would not have been a question and john stewart's writing room. of course you could say something like that that that was edgy for the president in that moment. it was a step he had not taken before. to me humor, one of the things you learn about is it's similar to other speeches. it's not just the words on the page, not just the speaker. it's this combination of the person, the moment and the content. >> your introduction emphasized the use of the administration and your own opening remarks discussed an undercurrent of your naïveté maybe, i think what your work in the beginning, and idealism and your maturation throughout the process. as a centrist, outside observer is not really, there's the love between me or either party, then naïveté idealism of administration at the beginning was that hard to discern, but

i'm wondering if you could identify anything you thought were lost opportunities? because in the early part of the administration there was so much you for you by the time to get to the end of the administration if they could have revisited them again they might have achieved a a goal they were une to achieve because in the beginning they just did know how to achieve it? >> well, one thing, sorry, let me answer your question and then let me say something completely different somewhat related. i think what are the things i talk about in the book was the ditzy negotiations in 2011. 2011. i think it was surprising to all of us how far republicans were willing to go to try to draw concessions out of the white house, that they were basically willing to hold the entire economy hostage. if we had triggered the debt ceiling and if we had defaulted on our debt it would've been another economic crisis,

possibly even worse than 2008. i do think that was almost incomprehensible, in part because in the obama white house we were i think, and i see this as a good thing, idealist. so the idea that someone could be so cynical as a purely driven by power, i think sometimes, that was a moment when maybe it took us a little bit by surprise. the one thing i would just sort of rephrase a little bit, you talked about naïveté and idealism and i don't think those two things have to be related. one of the reasons i wanted to try to write this book is because i do think a lot of washington books have this two sides of the spectrum where one is being naïve and idealistic, and the others being worldly and cynical. i think that the challenge for all of us, not just political but as people, is if you want to

be an adult you need to be a little bit worldly and realistic, you want to be like a good adult and a good person you have to have some idealism as well. to me it's a book about becoming an idealist and also realists simultaneously. how do you hold those two contradictory ideas and yet at the same time? >> great. well, thank you so much, david. [applause] >> thank you. >> you will be signing books over here. right behind us. and i can't encourage you enough. you will really enjoy reading e book. it will not feel like you're rolling in thing the end of it you will realize the world is a different place. >> a big round of applause for david litt and adam davidson. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. give us a moment to get set up. if you like just see this event

follow us on social media. thank you so much. be well. have a great evening. [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching booktv, television for serious readers. you can watch any program you see here online at booktv.org. >> now on booktv want to introduce you to first-time author helen raleigh. her book is called "the broken welcome mat." when did you come to the united states? >> i came to united states in 1996 as a graduate school student from mainland china. >> host: when did you become a u.s. didn't? >> guest: