terrorism in america. he's interviewed by author michael german. also this weekend fox news host brian kilmeade provides a history of the battle of new orleans and the life of andrew jackson. amy knight talks about the critics of vladimir putin who have been killed since he came to power. and a recounting of the women who joined the suffrage movement in the early 20th century, and the before columbus foundation hosts the american book awards that recognizes outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of america's diverse literary community. that's all this weekend on booktv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books. television for serious readers. >> and now on booktv it's the 15th annual wisconsin book festival from the state's capital in madison. over the next eight hours, we'll have a full lineup of authors on a range of topics from life in

janesville, wisconsin, after the town's gm plant closed, to the vietnam war's tet offensive and a report on spy rings at american universities. first up is journalist jessica bruder. she reports on the living and working conditions of migrants working in the united states. >> it's going to be like that. [laughter] my name is conor moran, and i am the director of the book festival. i want to thank all of you for coming out to celebrate the 15th anniversary of wisconsin book festival. [applause] yeah, go ahead. [applause] i am incredibly proud to be the director at this moment. the book festival is livelier than it has ever been, having expanded into year-round events, we are getting more and more people involved. the faces in this room that i know are wonderful. the faces in this room that i don't know are exactly as wonderful. i hope that all of you leave this and invite a friend to something that we're doing over

the next couple of hours or days or even into november and january of next year. it has truly been a transcendent year for us. we will definitely end the year with the most people who have seen the events in our entire history, and i couldn't be happier about that. [applause] i want to take this time to thank madison public library. they provide an incredible amount of staff time, staff works really hard for me especially over this weekend. they are here right now behind the scenes, and they also give us all of this space for free. that is one of the main things that keeps these events going, is that we have a place to do them, and we have an audience like you who comes to see them. i also want to thank the madison public library foundation. they raised all the private funds from individuals, organizations and businesses that keep these events free and open to the public. and that really, to me, is the other thing that makes the wisconsin book festival so special. anyone can come to any event for free anytime. and i hope that you care about

that as much as i do. and i think because you came at 10:30 in the morning on a saturday, you probably do. so thank you. i also, i love this moment. kicking off saturday at the book festival, we will do more events today than we do on thursday, friday and sunday combined. but the energy in this room, the energy in this building right now is incredible. my daughter is downstairs seeing her first book festival event. i hope some of you are seeing your first event, and she's going to have to come to a lot more, so, so will you. [laughter] i'm also delighted to be introducing jess bruder this morning for nomadland. jess goes out with the people who are really the untold story of the great recession, people who are underwater on mortgages, people for whom social security is just not going to make ends meet, and they give up a lot of their safety net. they give a lot of family ties,

social ties, health insurance up to go travel the country and try to find work. they are new form of migrant workers, they are also potentially a new form of what retirement looks like in america. and jess went out with them and tells us their story. so please put your hands together for jess bruder. [applause] >> oh, my goodness, all right. this is my first time in madison. and i think this is a larger group of people than were in attendance when i actually launched the book in brooklyn, which is kind of my home turf. so forgive me if i've got deer in the headlights eyes. i'm so excited that you're here, and i really appreciate it. wanted to thank conor and the library and the festival for holding something that draws together such a neat array of books. i'm excited to be just a guest here and go check out other

books as well. and thank you for coming out on a saturday morning in the drizzle to chat about this project. so i'm really grateful for that, and i wanted to say thanks. so i think i'm going to start off by telling you a little bit just about the genesis of the book itself and then read a little bit, and then we'll do some q&a, and i'd be happy to chat about anything you'd like to know more about. but for me -- so i'm a journalist, and we read a lot. a lot of times i feel like my students -- i teach grad students in journalism -- they expect that ideas jump fully formed out of journalists' heads like athena jumping out of zeus' nothing begin and that it's -- noggin and it's just this immaculate thing that happens. the truth is, honestly, a little more boring. [laughter] so bear with me. there were no lightning bolts here, i just do a lot of reading, and i tend to read a lot about labor particularly in the digital economy. beneath the headlines of will

the robots eat our jobs, how do we hide from them, what is going to happen, there's a lot of other stuff going on just in the day-to-day in terms of how people work and what it means to be working in an economy where so many changes are happening at the same time. so somebody who is really kind of addicted to reading about that, i read a story back in 2011 that some of you may have read as well i. made a lot of headlines, and it came out of a very scrappy little newspaper called the allentown morning call. and as somebody who comes out of newspapers, i love it when a scrappy paper gets a scoop. the scoop told us that in an amazon warehouse temperatures were going up to 110 degrees, and rather than open the bay doors -- which they feared could lead to theft -- or installing air-conditioning, the managers had stationed ambulances outside. and those ambulances were there to, essentially, scoop up people as they dropped.

it solves the problem. so i hear all the gasps of exasperation. i can tell you, i felt the same sort of thing, and it kind of blew my mind. fast forward to the next year and i was reading a magazine story where a young reporter went undercover in a warehouse that was never named, but everybody knew it was amazon. and while i was reading that story, there were two paragraphs that really jumped out at me. this was a piece that ran -- it was by a fantastic writer named mac mcclellan, then it ran in mother jones in 2012. and there was one woman who told mac, hey, i work here, and i work here and live full time in an rv. i'm doing it because i can't afford to retire, and there's a whole program for people like us. and then the story kind of went back to the work day and just the general rigors. but my brain got completely stuck. it was like having a record with a little scratch in it, and it just kept hopping and hopping and hopping, and i kind of

couldn't get out of that groove. so when i'm stuck in a groove, i google. [laughter] i told you, this is a little mundane. i promise it gets better. [laughter] but, yeah, i started googling, and i realized i learned more -- first, i did bring a little show and tell for you. a crutch, a prop, as it were. but i learned more about amazon's program that hires rv-ers, mostly people who are full-time rv-ers and usually traditional retirement age. it's a program called camper force that grew -- basically, it came into being just several months after the housing collapse in 2008. and it brings workers who are on the road full time to work in warehouses in the months before christmas. so what they do is a lot of pick and pack. it's really difficult. i know a guy in his 70s who was walking 15 miles a day. i know people who have gotten various injuries, and that's just from the sample pool of people i've spoken to myself. and later on in the book i do spend a little time undercover

there as well. although doing that as a woman in her late 30s, as you can imagine, is probably a little different, but i till wanted to get a finish still wants to get a taste for it. amazon wasn't just a total anomaly. there are thousands of employers hiring people in this demographic doing, having them do everything from working at tourist traps like walmart and dollywood to this theme park call add ventureland where a -- adventureland where a conveyor belt started up too quick, and that was it. to people doing campground maintenance jobs all over the country. as we'll talk about it later, it can be pretty challenging. so we have that. we have people, i mean, selling fireworks, selling pumpkins, selling christmas trees at roadside stands, you name it, they're doing it. and it's kind of the shadow economy x it's all just a cycle of jobs. and a lot of folks who i met who are doing it had come from what

we might have called the traditional middle class or the traditional housed economy. and for various reasons, i mean, if we think about the fact the federal minimum wage is still at $7.25, that rent keeps going up and that there are just a lot of really difficult, contending factors going on right now, a lot of people said, screw this. i want something that feels a little different and gives me some more autonomy that might in some ways feel like some kind of freedom. and they found it on the road. now, it's not without challenges, and we'll talk about those too. but, yeah, i'll start off with a little reading, and then we'll take it from there. so, yeah, this story actually did start as a magazine piece for harper's, but i didn't realize when i started it that i would end up working on it for more than three years and driving more than 15,000 miles in a camper van. [laughter] which was actually kind of the great part. it's a great excuse to be out on the road.

people have been asking, did i keep the van. i kept the van. the story, untold and boring story behind the book is the love story of a girl and her van. [laughter] it was supposed to just be a vehicle for this one project, and instead it's become a big part of my life. so there you have it. that's the hot gossip. [laughter] on the foothill freeway about an hour inland from los angeles, a mountain range looms ahead of northbound -- oh, i'm sorry. you have to forgive me. i have two post-it notes, and the other one got pushed in. [laughter] sorry about that. coffee didn't save me there. that's not where we're starting at all. i begin again. see, i talk about my van, and i get all flustered. [laughter] all right, here we go. as i write this, they are scattered across the country. in north dakota a former san francisco cab driver, 67, labors

at the annual sugar beet harvest. he works from sunrise until after sunset in temperatures that dip below freezing, helping trucks that roll in from the fields, disgorge multiton loads of beets. at night he sleeps in the van that has become his home. ever since uber squeezed him out of the taxi industry and making the rent became impossible. in campbellsville, kentucky, a 66-year-old ex-general contractor steers merchandise during the overnight shift at an amazon warehouse. it's mind-numbing work, and she struggles to scan each item accurately, hoping to avoid getting fired. in the morning she returns to her tiny trailer, moored at one of several mobile home parks that contract with amazon to put up nomadic workers like her. in new byrne, north carolina, a woman whose home is a tear-drop style trailer so small it can be

pulled with a motorcycle is couch surfing with a friend while hunting for work. even with a master's degree, the 38-year-old nebraska native can't find a job despite filling out hundreds of applications in the past month alone. she knows the sugar beet harvest is hiring, but traveling halfway across the country would require more cash than she has. losing her job at a nonprofit several years ago is one of the reasons she moved into the trailer in the first place. after the funding for her position ran out, she couldn't afford rent on top of paying off student loans. in san marcos, california, a 30-something couple in a 1975 gmc motor home is running a roadside pumpkin stand with a children's carnival and petting zoo which hay had five -- they had five days to set up. in a few weeks, they'll switch to selling christmas trees. in colorado springs, colorado, a 72-year-old van dweller who cracked three ribs doing a

campground maintenance job is recuperating while visiting with family. there have always been itinerants, drifters, hobos, restless souls, but now in the second millenium a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. people who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. they're giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call real estate; vans, secondhand rvs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers and plain old sedans. they are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class, decisions like would you rather have food or dental work, pay your mortgage or our electric -- your welcome trick bill, make a car payment or buy medicine, cover rent or student loans, purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute. for in the answer seem radical at first. you can't give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense, trading a stick

and brick domicile for life on wheels? some call them homeless, the new nomads reject that label. equipped with both shelter and transportation, they've adopted a different word. they refer to themselves quite simply as houseless. from a distance many of them could be mistaken for care-free, retired rv-ers. on occasions when they treat themselves to movie or dinner at a restaurant, they blend in with the crowd. in mindset and appearance they are largely middle class. they wash their clothes at laundromats and join fitness clubs to use the showers. many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the great recession. to keep their gas tanks and bellies full, they work long hours at hard, physical jobs. in a time of flat wages and rising housing costs, they have unshackled themselves from rent and mortgages as their way to get by. they are surviving america. but for them, as for anyone, survival isn't enough.

so what began as a last ditch effort has become a battle cry for something greater. being human means yearning for more than subsistence. as much as food or shelter, we require hope. and there is hope on the road. it's a by-product of forward momentum, a sense of opportunity as why the country itself, a bone deep conviction that something better will come. it's just ahead in the next town, the next gig, the next chance encounter with a stranger. as it happens, some of those strangers are nomads too. when they meet online or at a job or camping way off the grid, tribes begin to form. there's a common understanding, a kinship. when someone's van breaks down, they pass the hat. there's a contagious feeling. something big is happening. the country is changing rapidly. the old structures crumbling away, and they're at the

epicenter of something new. around a shared campfire in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia. as i write, it is autumn. soon winter will come. routine layoffs will start. the nomads will pack up camp and return to the road, moving like blood cells through the veins of the country. they'll set out in search of friends and family or just a place that's warm. several journey clear across the continent. all will count the miles which unspool like a filmstrip of america. fast food joints and shopping malls, fields dormant under frost, auto dealerships, mega-churches and all-night diners, featureless plains, feed lots, dead factories, subdivisions and big box stores, snow-capped peaks. the roadside reels past through the day and into darkness until fatigue sets in.

bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. in walmart parking lots, on quiet suburban streets. at truck stops amid the lullaby of idling engines. then, in the early morning hours before anyone notices, they're back on the highway. driving on, they're secure in this knowledge: the last free place in america is a parking spot. all right. so in a previous life, my day job was covering start-ups. i did not really like covering start-ups. i had a column called "start" for "the new york times" web site, and i got to write about some neat stuff there. but what struck me most was the amount of jargon that i'd stumbled over and jumped upon on a daily basis whether it was this is innovative, this is disruptive and, you know, nine times out of ten whatever was getting called disruptive would

enable you to get your dry cleaning back like three minutes faster. [laughter] and i don't like bullshit very much. [laughter] so one of the great things about being out on the road in a world with a lot less of that sort of jargon was, well, wait a minute, this is disruptive, this is innovative. you want to see people who have managed to completely turn their lives upside down, who are creative, who are resilient. it was kind of exciting because there wasn't really a lot of room for jargon or bullshit because the decisions people made impacted their day-to-day so immediately. and just watching what people were able to do with the circumstances that in many times they were handed by a very weird economy was really impressive to me. so it's interesting, people really like to pigeon hole ideas. so i think sometimes people want

to hear about a book like this, and they expect people to be walking around in sack cloth and ashes and bemoaning the economy and yelling about their lot, and that's a huge distortion. other people want everything to be freedom, road trip, all right, turn up the stereo, and that's a distortion. and life is just somewhere in the middle. but the people i did meet, again, i just can't underscore how resilient, how creative and, i would argue, disruptive they were. so i'd like to share a bit about one of them with you. her name is linda may, and i met her when i was writing the initial iteration of this book for harp or's magazine. -- harper's magazine. we met in the desert, and if i said to her that, you know, i'm going to be spending the next three years, i will sleep in my van in the driveway in front of your daughter's house, i will be parked next to you when you're camped in the desert, i will stay on the parking pad when you're working as a campground host in the mountains, i think we both probably would have run

away screaming. but over that period of time, not only is she resilient, she's incredibly tolerant. and, yeah, really had the generosity to share her story with me. so i'd like to share a little bit of it with you today. this is where i started before. on the foothill freeway about an hour inland from los angeles, a mountain range looms ahead of northbound traffic bringing suburbia to a sudden stop. this wilderness is the southern edge of the san bernardino mountains, a tall, precipitous escarpment in the words of the united states geological survey. it's part of a formation that began growing 11 million years ago along the san andreas fault and is still rising today, gaining a few millimeters each year as the pacific and north american plates grind past each other. the peaks appear to grow much

faster, however, when you're driving straight at them. they're the kind of sight that makes you sit up straighter and starts a swelling sensation in your chest, a feeling like helium crowding your rib cage. enough, perhaps, to carry you away. linda may grips her steering wheel and watches the approaching mountains through bifocals with rose-colored frames. her silver hair, which falls past her shoulders, is pulled back from her face in a plastic bar et. she turns off the foot hill freeway onto highway 330, also known as city creek road. for a couple miles, the pavement runs flat and wide. then it tapers to a steep serpentine with just one lane in either direction. starting the ascent into the san bernardino national forest. the 64-year-old grandmother is driving a jeep grand cherokee laredo which was totaledded and salvaged before she bought it off a tow lot. the chechen engine -- check

engine light is finicky, and a close look reveals that the white paint on the hood -- which was crumpled and replaced -- is a half shade off from the rest of the body. but after months of repairs, the vehicle is finally road-worthy. a mechanic installed a new camshaft and lifters. linda scrubbed the foggy headlights with an old t-shirt and insect repellant, a do-it-yourself trick. for the first time, the jeep is i towing linda's home; a tiny pale-yellow trailer she calls the squeeze inn. [laughter] if visitors don't get the name on first mention, she puts it in a sentence. yeah, there's room. squeeze in. [laughter] and smiles, revealing deep laugh lines. the trailer is a fiberglass relic, a hunter compact ii built in 1974 and originally advertised as a crowning achievement in travel for fun

that would follow like a kitten on the opened road, track like a tiger when the going gets rough. [laughter] four decades along, the squeeze-in feels like a charmingly retro life support capsule. geometrically reminiscent of the clamshell containers once used as hamburger joints. inside it measures 10 feet from end to end, roughly the same interior length as the covered wag gone that carried linda's own great, great, great grandmother across the cup more than a century ago. it has quilted, cream-colored elizabether covering the walls and ceiling, linoleum on the floor. the roof is just high enough for linda to stand. after buying the trailer at auction for $1400, she described it on facebook. it's 5-3 inside and i am 5-2, she wrote. perfect fit. [laughter]

linda is hauling the squeeze inn up to hannah flat, a campground in the pine forest northwest of big bear lake. it's may and she plans to stay there through september. but unlike the thousands of warm weather visitors who travel for pleasure each year to the san bernardino national forest, a swath of wilderness larger than the state of rhode island, linda is making this journey for work. it's her third summer employed as a campground host, a seasonal gig that's equal parts janitor, cashier, groundskeeper, security guard and welcoming committee. she's enthusiastic about starting the job and getting the annual raise for returning workers that will bump her hourly wage to $9.35, up 20 cents other the year -- over the year before. and though she and other campground hosts are hired at will, according to the company's written employment policy meaning they can be fired at any time with or without cause or notice. she's been told to expect a full

40 hours of work each week. some first-time campground hosts expect a paid vacation in paradice. st hard to blame them -- paradise. ads for the job are splashed with photos of glittering creeks and wild flower-choked meadows. a brochure for california land management, the private concessionary that is linda's employer, shows gray-haired women smiling delightedly on a lake shore arm in arm like best friends at summer camp. get paid to go camping, cajoles the recruiting banner for american land and leisure. another company that hires camp hosts. below the headline are testimonials. our staff says retirement has never been this much fun. we have developed life-long friendships. we're healthier than we've been in years. newbi sexer are -- newbies are known for balking and sometimes

quitting; baby sitting drunk and noisy campers, rowdy visitors like dropping bottles into the flames to make them explode and the thrice-daily ritual of cleaning outhouses. though tending toilets is the least favorite chore, linda is unfazed by it, even takes a little pride in performing the task well. i want them clean because my campers are using them, she says. i'm not a germophobe. you snap on some rubber gloves, and you do it. as linda reaches the san bernardino mountains, the valley views are sublime but distracting. the roadside is narrow with barely enough of an edge to call a shoulder. along some stretches there's nothing but empty air past the ribbon of pavement that clings to the slope. sign posts warn drivers: rock slide area and avoid overheating, turn off a/c next 14 miles. none of this teems to rattle

linda know. her stint as a long-haul trucker nearly two decades ago left her undaunted by difficult roads. i'm driving a camper van just ahead of linda. as a journalist, i've been spending time with her on and off now for a year and a half. between in-person visits, we've spoken on the phone so many times that on every call i anticipate her familiar greeting before she even picks up. it's a melodic hello spoke on in the same three-note sing-song you'd use to say i see you when playing peek a boo with an infant. i'd originally met linda while researching a magazine story on a growing subculture of american nomads who live full time on the road. like linda, many of these wandering souls were trying to escape an economic paradox; the collision of rising rents and flat wages. an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. they felt like they were caught in a vise, putting all their

time into soul-sucking jobs that paid barely enough to cover the rent or the mortgage with no promise of ever being able to retire. those feelings were grounded in hard fact. wages and housing costs have diverged so dramatically that, for a growing number of americans, the dream of a middle class life has gone from difficult to impossible. as i write this, there are only a dozen counties and one metro area in america where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. you'd have to make at least $16.35 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage, to rent such an apartment without spending more than the recommended 30% of income on housing. the consequences are dire, especially for the one in six american households that have been putting more than half of what they make into shelter. for many low income families, that means little or nothing left over to buy food, medication and other essentials.

many of the people i met felt that they'd spent too long losing a rigged game, and so they found a way to hack the system. they gave up traditional stick and brick homes, breaking the shackles of rent and mortgages. they moved into vans, rvs and trailers, traveled from place to place following good weather, kept their gas tanks full by working seasonal jobs. linda is a member of that tribe. as she migrates around the west, i've been following her. when the steep climb into the san bernardino mountains begins, my giddiness at seeing the peaks from a distance fades. suddenly, i am anxious. the idea of driving switchbacks in my clunky van scares me a little. watching linda pull the squeeze inn in her rattle trap jeep scares me a lot. earlier she instructed me to drive ahead of her. she wanted to be in the rear following. but why? did she think her trailer could come unhitched and backslide?

i never did find out. past the first sign for the san bernardino national forest, a shiny oil tanker truck looms up behind the squeeze inn. the driver seems impatient, a bit too close as they enter a series of s curves that obscures linda from my sight in the rearview mirror. i keep watching for her jeep. when the road straightens out again, it doesn't emerge. instead, the tanker reappears on the uphill straightaway. there's no sign of linda. pulling into a turnout, i dial her cell phone and hope for that familiarhello. the call rings and ring then goes to voicemail. i park the van, hop out and pace nervously along the driver's side. i try again. no answer. by now more cars, maybe half a dozen, have come out of the curves onto the straightaway and past the turnout. i try to push down a queasy feeling, adrenaline blooming into panic as the minutes slide past. the squeeze inn has disappeared.

and i leave you with that literal cliffhanger. [laughter] so what can i tell you? what can i tell you about what happened to linda? you know what i have to say to that, right? [laughter] i'm not going to do hashtag spoiler alert. i'm going to say read the book. but linda's all right, don't worry too much. [laughter] please. >> have there been any corporate changes -- [inaudible] more public discussion as far as the amazon -- [inaudible] >> to the best of my knowledge, no. it's funny because there are a few things on that register that the book addresses. another one that concerned me quite a bit was so many people i spoke to about campground hosting, which is really a hard job and often pays just a little

more than minimum wage. you're essentially on call all the time because you are a captive audience on that worksite. but many, many people toll me directly -- told me directly that when they were working, they were not able to invoice for full hours. they're expected to do job a, job a exceeded the amount of hours they were allowed to invoice for. and if they tried to comment about that, they were worried about being targeted for firing or just told, you know, make it work with. bend -- work. bend time. it's a tricky job. if somebody bangs on your trailer at 11 at night and they want firewood, you're on, right? so that's a challenge. so what i ended up doing was writing a freedom of information act request to the national forest service which is one of the many, many, many employers of campground hosts. they hire concessionaries, private companies to manage

campgrounds. that's actually already controversial particularly in the west where there's vigorous debate over the management of public lands and the fact that these are kind of private middlemen who make a lot of money. so i did ask for just any complaints in a certain region. they told me they couldn't do the whole country, it was just an effort of coordinating too many offices. but i did find even though many people i talked to said, yeah, every has this -- everybody has this problem but nobody wants to get fired, there were some complaints. probably the tip of an iceberg. so i said, okay, what do you do? were these investigated? what happened next? what they told me was, oh, we hand them back to the concessionaries. we forward them. and i said, wait a minute, these are our public lands. this is a public trust. i don't understand. you give them back to the concessionair es who are violating wage law. and they said, yeah, we're not authorized to investigate. and i kind of felt like i was on

one of those game shows where you say is that your final answer? [laughter] and the final answer to my asking was, yes, that is what we do. so i think there are a bunch of things that are a little dodgy that came up in this research that, i mean, maybe it's still too soon to see if they get addressed. >> [inaudible] >> oh, sorry. thank you, conor. may i please direct you to the audience microphone for questions. [laughter] sorry, it's over there. thank you, conor. >> well, first of all, thank you very much for writing the book. i'm only halfway through, but the thing that brought it close to home to me was after reading the book, i started looking for these campgrounds and find out that right here wisconsin amazon has some in the rah seen-ca know shah area. so i was shocked that i was not aware of what was going on.

could you tell us a little bit -- maybe you have in the book and i haven't gotten that far -- about your experience working in their warehouse. >> sure. >> thank you. >> surreal. [laughter] a little surreal. so, basically, i'm a journalist. i'm not a memoir writer, and i like to tell other people's stories. so whenever possible, i would be the annoying person following someone around the worksite. ilyed next to linda for three weeks, and when she got up in the morning to clean the toilets, i wasn't allowed in her golf cart, so i would put on my running shoes, and i would go jogging after her with my pad and camera, and she and her work buddy sylvia enjoyed pointing out pieces of litter that i could pick up. [laughter] that's actually my preference, but there were two closed worksites that i really wanted to see because from my understanding these were places you go if you want to make a chunk of money in a short time. one was amazon and the other was the annual sugar beet harvest that happens in the red river

valley which gets marketed as an unbeetable experience. [laughter] i like puns as much as the next person, but when they're directed as a slightly exploited work force, i get stressed about it. so i went undercover and did some stuff with the sugar beets to see what that was like, and then i went to amazon. at the time i went to amazon, i interviewed many dozennens of people -- dozens of people and had seen a lot of instances of this being hard work. firsthand accounts of injuries, all sorts of stuff and a lot of people coping with it by saying, hey, i'm getting paid to lose weight, this is a fitness program. amazon was sending out newsletters saying camper force, the value of friendship. so there was a little bit of what i have called weaponized positive psychology happening. it was weird when i went there because, you know, there aren't any age requirements. and at the time i was 37. that was two years ago already. but, you know, it was really

easy to get a job. it's called bulk hiring in the url. it feels like a cattle call, right? and i applied for a job at the warehouse in haslett, texas. and when i got there, in my cohort even though there are some younger workers, i think there was one person who might have been in her 50s, but everybody else was definitely north of 60. i stuck out like a sore thumb. it's funny, i joke about it in the book and in the wire story, but, you know, just, oh, i was a slacker, i left after a week. i really left because being undercover is stressful. i kind of had everything i needed to write, and it was time to go home. i'm not that lazy, i swear. but, yeah, it's surreal. i know there's been a lot of reporting on the work camping environments and particularly just amazon's warehouses in general, but one of the interesting things was at the time this was one of only ten warehouses where people were working with robots. so it's just kind of this

man-machine synthesis thing that's happening, right in and what i'd heard was this would make jobs a hot easier for people because instead of walking 15 miles a day, the robots would be bringing things to you. but what i learned is that that just kind of outsources the jobs to different muscles. inthe stead of lots of walking, you're doing a lot more stooping, reaching, ladder climbing. we were warned about these ladders. apparently, one of them had gotten caught on one of the robot shelves, and somebody got dragged away. we were told about that in orientation. it was pretty intense and incredibly regimented. even when i went to use the restroom, they urged you to match the color of your urine to a pantone chip to make sure you were hydrated. frankly, you feel like you're on kind of a living game board. you needed to stay within these paths, you've got to keep your numbers up. i mean, it's pretty intense.

i hope -- i know that's a general take, but i hope it's specific enough to be useful. hi. >> hi. first, were there other places in wisconsin doing this. and, second, what was the age of the oldest person doing in that you found? >> definitely mid to late 70s. the hard thing about being undercover is you can't ask direct questions. it's really just liken standing there with your mouth with a sock in it and just listening and kind of feeling like a jerk all the time. but definitely people in their 70s, although one fellow -- the guy i know who was really proud of doing this 15 miles a day in his 70s said, well, i know a guy in his 80s who's doing it, so if he can do it, i can surely do it. and i wish i knew more about the wisconsin take, and i do not. i don't know, i don't know if camper force is happening here. i do know a few years ago i was writing an article for reuters about amazon coming to new

communities and seeking tax breaks, and i actually watched via the internet a rather vigorous debate in the city council in kenosha when they were debating whether or not to bring somebody in. i was worried then about what this kind of beauty pageants of tax breaks and subsidies meant. it's funny, i have a friend back in new york who owns a bookstore. i was trying to picture a bookstore other than -- owner being told that their hard-earned tax dollars were going to subsidize a large monopoly. and it just seems kind of heartbreaking to me. it's probably not exactly what you wanted, for which aapologize. please. >> first, i want to say i'm really thrilled that you're here because i heard you on npr and saw in the flyer that you were going to be at the wisconsin book festival, and my number one choice -- >> thank you. >> -- for coming to a book talk. i was wondering, what are the impressions of the family of the

people that are living this nomadic life? you mentioned a lot of them are grandparents and that they stay with relatives and stuff. is so what's the reaction of the younger generations to what they see their elders doing? >> sure. so, no, people ask me that a fair amount too, and it's like, well, where are the kids? i have to say when i was first meeting the family of one person in this book, i just remember she was already sleeping on the couch, one of the granddaughters was sleeping in what had been a walk-in closet. they told me i could stay the night, i said i'll stay in the van. no pressure, it's all good. but again, we're in a really weird economic time. i can't underscore the fact that federal minimum wage is $7.25 which isn't a floor, it's a basement. so i think a lot of people that i met really didn't want to put pressure on the next generation. they saw them as under enough pressure. and from the next generation's

angle, gosh, i remember talking to linda may's daughter audra, and she was telling me, you know, based on the linda may you know, you must think she was always a social butterfly. she has this whole tribe, linda may has a posse. she was, like, she was not this social at home. so sometimes i see them being impressed by the communities that form on the road. just because there's such an incredible tight-knit, mutual aid, mutual-sharing network that people find themselves joining. and it's a membership that i think it's kind of a non-blood family. it's what the writer would have called a logical rather than biological family. and i think a lot of people are impressed by that. it's not always that rosy. there's one fellow in the book who i'm a big fan of, samir. when i interviewed him and the call to prayer went off on his iphone, he showed me this really cool app he used that was

always pointed toward mecca. he went home once for ramadan and his family threw him out for no other reason than someone decided his lifestyle was a bad influence on the kids. and when he told me that story, it shredded my heart. you do hear of strains and also situations where there's just not that much contact. so i've met lots of people whose families are super supportive and just trying to learn as much as they can to the other end completely where i remember interviewing a pastor in the town of courtside, arizona. he ran a food bank, and i said, okay, what's up with this place, courtside? is and he looked at me and nodded. this guy's seen everything. he was a former biker for christ. i think his son had died of a heroin overdose, and he was just putting his whole life into meeting and helping people out. and he said, well, courtside is a cheap retirement town. and then he said to me, it's also a good place for people to hide. [laughter] and suddenly i'm thinking of all

the people i've met, are they all on the lam? what are you talking about. that cannot be, that cannot be. i said, what do you mean? i'm picturing lawrence, and this seems quite impossible. and he says to hide from their kids. [laughter] and gave me -- there was one example where in some situations people were just like, look, i'm going to make it, i'm fine, but not everybody was fine. some people were doing great, but there was one guy who was in his 80s who'd been visiting the kitchen, and he was found dead in his rv on the gravel terrace of aaronberg. again, i don't have stats on any of this, but there's a -- [inaudible] i speak with all the time. and even just a couple of months ago she was camped way off the grid. she met a really cool guy who was living in an rv, struggling a bit. he was also a painter like her, and they were sharing each other's art and kind of bonding over looking at each other's craft stuff. and one day she came by, and she

hadn't seen him in a few days, and there were flies on his screens. so, you know, i'm not saying that's super common. i've got no stats, but i've seen the range of people with a really vibrant support network of family or people with a non-blood family or people who are having a tough time too. thank you. [inaudible] hey, louis. louis is the doc. [laughter] >> so what perp did you least -- person did you least expect to see here? >> you. [laughter] now that you validated yourself, i feel like i'm allowed to mention you're in the book. >> page 81, i believe. [laughter] >> not that you've read it or anything. >> twice. >> you going to sign mine? i'm asking anybody who shows up -- >> i would. >> thank you. >> would you recommend people try this lifestyle? >> oh, gosh. i mean, would you? so it's really different for

everybody. i think some people -- >> would i? >> well, your in it. -- you're in it. >> the eldest elder of the tribe? of course i would. [laughter] >> i'm just a faux nomad. >> i would strongly recommend everybody get out on the road, see america. don't go on the interstate. stay off the interstate. >> little highways. >> a trend of mine wrote the book "blue highways." if you've read that, read this book. continue. there's thousands of people out there that you will never expect to see. and you can't see them unless you get out on the small highways, get in the back country, get out and meet people. it's a wonderful country. >> thank you. [applause] hey, yes, please. round of applause. [applause] thank you. no, and it's true. one of the things i really hope to do with this book is to show

just, to make it harder to pigeon hole people who are out on the road. i mean, there are people here who have been, had all sorts of different lives, all sorts of different lives before they were out on road. done different things all over the world. people who -- gosh, linda may's been everything from a cocktail waitress to somebody who defeatherrerred quails at a hunting lodge. another guy i met out there was the former head of product development for mcdonald's. he got hit real hard by the great recession. but the stories you hear around the campfire out there are just, i mean, it's so beautiful. please. >> thanks for doing this, and i notice as a journalist you probably do a lot of surveying. and i'm going to ask, do you frequently survey your audience? because today i got here, and i do that a lot as somebody who likes to watch people. there are a lot of gray beards like myself here -- [laughter] and i think it's utterly important that younger people be aware of this phenomenon, because it's affecting our

country dramatically, and it's something that i think they need to be cognizant enough of that if they don't start analyzing it, it could be upon them quicker than they think. but is this ten call of an audience -- typical of an audience that shows up to your book readings? thank. >> sure. man, i want you to come on tour with me and do the surveying, because i'm really just trying to keep it together up here. [laughter] >> i roam america too. >> all right. yeah. so i've got to say it really varies. i talked to a couple hundred high school students which was funny. this was in connecticut. and they didn't warn me. i thought i was going into a classroom, and suddenly i was back in high school. and the only thing i could think of to say was it gets better. [laughter] so contextually, it's really hard to answer that. but point well taken, and i agree these are issues that everybody should be thinking about. >> hi, jessica. >> hi, david. >> my name is david, and i'm a

nomad. sounds like -- >> everybody, hi, david. [laughter] >> sounds like i'm recovering from something. i don't know, if i am recovering from something, it's probably from being chronically housed in a sticks and bricks most of my life. now i am very happily living in a camper that i have carefully built into a really very comfortable home with refrigeration, cooking, wonderful, comfortable bed. i call it my ultralight motor home, and it's a pri us. prius. so, yes, that's pretty unique. i love it though. it works really well in a lot of ways. i'm so happy that jessica wrote this book. i mean, i've been on the road for three years and, oh, my god, i can't believe all the things that she discovered that i haven't seen yet, and i thought i had seen so many things. but she interviewed so many

people, and she uncovers such a diversity of people on the road, i really, i really appreciate that you've written the book, jessica, and that it's a very balanced book. she's, she pretty much says what's going on for everybody. and, again, there's just a lot of diversity. there's a lot of diversity of happiness, there's a lot of diversity of seeking happiness and doing different jobs, etc. i'm lucky in that i don't have to work. i'm retired and, in fact, i have a little money left every month. so that puts me in a little different position, little different perspective in the dealing with working. but certainly, all the stories i've heard of people on the road working jessica really nailed it. so -- >> thank you. and i didn't put him up to that. [laughter] >> you know, i sometimes get a little crowd of people asking me afterwards, and i am open to that if you want to. >> he has a fan club. >> it's her show, not mine. so -- [laughter] >> thank you, david. >> okay, thank you.

>> good to see you. please. >> i want to follow up my first question about policy. i think it's great to have the romantic, positive stories, and clearly you've also identified the negative impact and particularly connecting it to the recession. there's a myth that, about the gig economy being so liberating, and we know clearly in your work before you started this book in looking at that economy that, yes, there are always the 10% or the 20% with the great liberation stories, but for a lot of people it's pretty awful. and whether that's meatpackers in iowa, farm workers in florida, you know, the idea of migrant work in america has been there for a long, long time since "grapes of wrath" days. so i'd just like, you know, before we leave on this wonderful, you know, glorious note about retiring to one's rv that you can address a little

bit about the policy possibilities of bringing up the bottom if this is really what our children and grandchild will be facing. i -- grandchildren will be facing. i appreciate your reference to the minimum wage. >> oh, there's so many issues. are you ready? [laughter] let's start. the economy's a mess. i mean, there's the big umbrella statement for you. it's a mess. and i really worry that a lot of the things that i grew up considering to be ironclad, you know, we all have such short life spans. so, like, i thought retirement for just about everybody was just something that was kind of in the water, right? i thought the 40-hour workweek was something that was going to stick around. i thought people would have weekends. but when you look at the great sweep of time, these are all relatively recent innovations and a lot more fragile than a lot of people realize. one of the great forces eroding all of this is the sunnily-titled gig economy. i would argue that anybody -- yes, there are some tunnels for

freedom -- some opportunities for freedom there. but we also saw in the 1980s when pensions gave way to 401(k)s, they were marketed as an instrument of financial freedom which was greek for saying now your corporate bosses aren't responsible. so good luck to you out there in the stock market, have fun. so freedom gets loaded a bit and abused as a word, i find. i'm worried right now just, again, even in just following this particular subset of a subculture just watching, you know, there was that supreme court case where workers sued amazon saying they deserved to be paid for the time that they spent in line waiting on the metal detector. they lost. there was another case, there's another work camping job that involves guarding the gates9 to oilfields in texas, and, you know, this is a job where somebody has to be there 24 hours a day, but because they're an independent contractor, you're not going to get paid for

all our to your time. making people independent contractors on the gig economy has been a way to skirt everything, every gain that the labor movement has made in this country. and it's eroding incredibly quickly. it's very sad. yeah, and employers don't want to pay for benefits. they don't want to have to give you leave, and if you're an independent contractor, you're not their problem. in a weird way, when i think of work campers, they're kind of an employer's dream. they're plug and play labor. you show up with your house. you are perfectly self-contained. it's almost like the way a usb drive plugs into a computer, right? every slot's the same, you show up, you have it in there for as long z you need it, and then it goes away, and you're not responsible for it anymore. that's how i feel about that. ma'am. >> well, that's a heavy topic. i wanted to get back to the camping aspect of this -- [laughter] although i agree with everything you just said. and i have a specific question,

but it comes out of the fact that my husband and i actually lived on the road for two years in our late 30s, and we lived in a tent. and our purpose at that time was to spend a lot of time in wilderness areas. and we just got finished this summer with what might have been a somewhat similar trip. we own a toyota -- i forget what the name of it is now -- >> [inaudible] >> no, it's a van. we own a van, minivan. toyota minivan, sienna. and we outfitted it out with a platform and put all of our camping gear underneath. and so we travel for five weeks, and next summer we plan on doing it for probably twice as long. but what was interesting to me in comparing the two experiences was that when we did it in our

late 30s -- which was quite a while ago -- we had so much flexibility. we could go places in summer anytime, and we could find a place to stay. you -- that is, it's much more difficult now because there are so many people out there, and it's harder to say if you're going to a forest or campground, particularly if you're going to national parks. it's extremely difficult to be flexible about it. you really need to make reservations. so my question is when you talk about these people being off the grid, way off the grid, i always felt we were pretty off the grid. but i'm wondering what is off the grid, what does it mean to you? what is that nowadays? >> sure. >> because i might want to go there. [laughter] >> in my mind off the grid connotes a level of self-sufficiency. so, for example, in recent years the price of solar panels has come down quite a quite a bit.

and one of my favorite anecdotes that i got to share in the book is about a woman who goes by the name swanky wheels. at the time i think she was 70 teaching a trans man who was in his 20s how to install solar panels on the roof of his van which he named, what was it, tillie starlight from the little engine that could, i think i can, i think i can. he really felt and, you know, he's in his 20s, he felt this was the only way he'd ever a achieve financial independence. he'd worked a ton of jobs. so for him, finding that mentorship -- i mean, swanky even told me her family wouldn't receive her mail anymore, was letting him send his meds, kind of apprenticing him as he was learning to go off the grid. ..

>> in a lot of places. the question is where physically, location-wise, do they consider off the grid to be. >> >> there is a lot of stuff going on.

and as low-profile as possible but at the same time. and and criminalization of homelessness. this is a parking spot, and and if you can't prove to me you live there you must be homeless and you're making the forest your home, get out. i there are a lot of people off the grid but a lot of sites have more pressure on them than they have. one more question.

>> 8 years out from the great recession, and how many do you see being there. everyone needs an address to have a drivers license. and people blend in with the house, and on this group, every is nomad in the larger nomadic population, and these jobs. and when i was at amazon, and everyone except for one person.

and the numbers of jobs, and tens of thousands, and i would say growing since 2008, it didn't really end for those who don't have time to make up whatever standing they had a who we are relying on, those opportunities are not coming back. if anyone wants to continue the conversation, thank you for coming out. >> we