problematic things are the ways he feels about women, he also credits his mom was saying she was the first to teach him this kind of discipline that he found in the nation of islam. in many ways returning to her teachings before he even met. why is it that we have this evidence included in the book that we just erased it over time. some part of it is this understanding of sexism and our society, racism in our society

where people do not think that our lives are worthy of documentation. not worthy of celebrating. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org. search for the title of her book the three mothers using the search box at the top of the page. >> good evening, everyone. welcome. i am brad graham along with my wife. we have a great event for you this evening with michael lewis talking about his new book premonition. we would like to thank our friends in miami and harvard book store in cambridge massachusetts partnering with us to make this event happen. a couple of brief housekeeping notes first, a question at any point during the talk just click on the q and a icon at the bottom of the screen.

the chat function will be available for audience comments this evening. in that column you will find a link for purchasing additional copies of the premonition. in the introduction of his new book defines his job as mainly finding the story and the material. he has done that consistently with extraordinary success with it 16 bucks over 30 years. found the story where the subject has been wall street, baseball moneyball, football and the blind side, fatherhood and home gain. the sub prime mortgage collapse. high-frequency trading and behavioral science and economics. the unduly project or the hollowing out of the government under trump in the fifth risk, just to name a few. in the premonition, michael addresses the pandemic. as in so many of his previous works he does so through intriguing characters. a loosely connected of doctor

scientists and public health experts that attempt to get the u.s. government to take the pandemic threat seriously and run up against dysfunction and indifference. basic premise is to understand extensive bungling of the crisis we need to look beyond donald trump's own mismanagement to the nations fragmented underfunded public health system and particularly the failings of the cdc. a compelling argument told as michael typically does and a narrative that reads like a thriller. michael will be in conversation this evening with the cognitive scientists that is google's director and previously served as an advisor in the obama white house and at the un. she is about to start a podcast called a slight change of plans. michael, the screen is yours.

>> hey michael. >> hey, maia. >> i know we have talked several times this week. so, as i mentioned to you, this is my favorite book that you bring. i think one thing that i really appreciated was that very early on you gave us a glimpse into your philosophy as a writer. your job is mainly to find the story and lead us readers make up our mind about that story and the characters. it does not mean that you do not form some sort of an opinion about it, too. i am wondering what your take about this book is about? >> well, it really is true. my job is to find the right characters. find the people through the eyes you want to see the world. if i bundle that the book will not be any good.

my job is to kind of draw attention to it. i am like a stripper in front of the cathedral. i will not strip for just any church. these people are important and you need to listen to them. i get excited about stories when there is a situation where there are people that are not being heard. it does not matter all that much what i think about. it really does not. it is more do i feel like i have done justice to these characters in their situation. the story is about what they did and who they are. they are obviously curated and selected for reasons. i think of it as a reason, i thought of it all along as a portrait of a broken dysfunctional system.

not just a public health system, it's like a portion of the society. it tells you a lot about what is wrong with it. they are drawing us a picture by the things that happen to them. yes, it is more narrowly about the public health system to, but that was my target. to write a book, here is what i thought. this thing is a world historic event. it is like the 1918 pandemic. one of those things at 100 years from now, what was it really like? i thought if i do my job really well, it is a little message in a bottle that will describe american society. that was the hope. that was the ambition. it does lots of other things too.

the guiding principle is not what it is about. my editor, he has been my editor my entire career, do not bore your self. keep your self as interested in the material as you can and the reader will stay interested too. i just found this thing, i am glad you think it's my best book, i think it might be my best book. an absolute thrill to write. exhilarating to write. in the way that it is exhilarating, the way it is exhilarating to play tennis. the material is always on the other side of the net. if the material sucks, there is only so much that i can deal. if the material is like roger frederick, then all of a sudden i look so much better than i otherwise did. i felt like i had roger on the

other side. >> one of the reasons this book feels really fresh, the story is unfolding in real time. i don't mean we don't know how coronavirus will evolve. i mean your character's work infectious disease took on new significance against a black drop of a new global pandemic. they are re- processing and reinterpreting their own past in real time. you are kind of live on this journey with them. in having decades to have a more stable understanding of who they are and what they've done. we will need to rewrite my own understanding on where we are in history. >> it is not unprecedented. the thing poured out of me. from first meeting the characters to delivery of book, and both cases it was a year.

did not feel like i needed another day. i think that that is right. they were all a little surprised that i showed up on their doorstep. i cannot tell you how many times. why are you talking to me? i am just a local public health officer. you are really important. do not talk to me. i have been invisible my entire career. i want to remain in the basement until i retire. mortified by the whole thing. that is true that i think they think of themselves may be a little differently than they did in the beginning. that was, figuring out who they were in relation to this event was the trick.

people had asked me, it is an ongoing event. that was never the problem. because they define themselves, they were basically out of the event by june. it's too late, it's over, we lost. there was never an issue of that. foley processing. that is right. >> yeah. did you ever feel like in some sense, as you are interviewing, did you ever feel like you are taking on a therapist role? traumatic parts of their childhood and past. you are forcing engagement. >> always. this is not true just for this book. if i do not get to that place where they are talking to me like they don't talk to anybody else and i have not done my job, at one point, you now know me

better than my two ex-husbands. she said i was not saying that much at that time, but i got way past that. she thinks i may be know her better than anybody. i know things about her that her sister does not know about her. it's a funny thing. i think the basis at the bottom of all of my books is a trust between subject, writer and subject. clearing a reality in any way in their favor. they trust me to understand what the world looks like through their eyes. once that trust is established, like magical things happen. magical things happen. you get to a sort of see the patterns in their lives that they don't see for themselves.

fully formed people. you are delivering in understanding. there are moments like this. this was, this book moment, i met charity dean in early may of last year. after pestering the california government. they told me she did not want to. they lied. i found her through back channels. i went and visitor in sacramento. we had to relay long days together. she was really interested in what i was doing. this book kind of needs to be written. she had a view of how the system was screwed up. she said she would help me. she told me a couple of things.

she told me that among the more personal thing she did every year was to write down her birthday resolutions. it says a new year's resolution. and that she put these on the back of her grandmother's photograph. a big grandmother like a northstar for her. and i said, when she said she would trust me, can i just walk around your house. can i look at anything i want to look at. you go out back with your boys and i'll just wander around. okay. i started wandering around the house. >> i need to pause right there. very casually and nonchalantly, this is not normal behavior. are you this extremely charming disarming character with a nice summer draw or a character who

is like sure, nothing to hide. >> we know each other. we have gotten to know each other. i will write each other but i will walk in the house. >> probably not. we just lied for this group. they have that for this contest. >> i think he would have said yes, but that is just me. that would explain why. she wanted to tell, there were all these things on the walls to remind yourself of who she was. that sounds strange, but a lot of things had to do with bravery. post-it notes on the walls. i wanted to inspect this stuff. i'm walking around her house. in her bedroom, her grandmother's portrait is hanging by her bed.

i take it off the wall. there are all of her most intimate personal resolutions from the last 15 years written on the back. it is all stuff that is more or less conventional. i will go to west africa and treat malaria or i am going to, you know, learn french, what ever it is. where the trust takes you. i get to look at this thing and december 20, 2019th, the first one on the list is something very personal. the second one is a prediction. it says it has started. a tingle went down my spine. i called her back up from the pool and i said what is this? i had this feeling that this thing i've been waiting for my entire career was about to be upon us.

i did not have any evidence. i had no reason. she is a doctor and a disease hunter who also tried to hone her instincts because she knows there is such a thing as a sixth sense and all of this. that moment, i did not know what i was going to do with that. i thought this is when i am at my best. so that i see this thing in the first place. she was never going to mention it. she had premonitions and december of 2019 that we were about to be overrun by a pathogen. i thought, so, for me, i don't know, for me to feel like i'm doing what i'm doing properly, a place where i can pull the grandmother's portrait off the wall. >> i love that. >> this leads to another question i've always had. one of the reasons this is my

favorite book, these characters are larger than life. i called you after i first learned about it. learning about charity. i cannot believe this woman is a force of nature. i'm curious to know what came of her specifically. how did you source her? how did she ever cross your desk as a potential? did you kind of know from the beginning? this is a done deal? >> so, she was inevitable. she was inevitable because i met all my other characters first. all the other characters pointed to her. they all said, you know, before i got to her, five people had

said to me you have to meet charity dean. the only one who knows what we should do. she is a bad asked. they just had a sense. if i was going to understand what was going on, i needed to spend time with her. these were not dumb people. you know, these were important men who might not typically find themselves enlightened by a female doctor. it was clear that she was special before i even met her. when i met her i was not thinking i am looking for a main character of the book. i was thinking i am looking for how to write about this. when the penny dropped for me, i thought one of the problems the

country had was a status problem it is the wrong people have the status. you have these bozos who are a rotating cast of characters on cable news who are supposedly experts and to actually kind of just learned about infectious disease three months ago. the people that make themselves public are usually not the experts. and the people who are really experts in disease control are the people that are controlling the disease. those are local public health officers who are nobodies, who are paid like crap who get all kinds of grief, they are the soldiers on the battlefield. it is a battlefield where the generals are often people -- it was clear i wanted to do it in

the structure of the story. what the society should do in real life. take the person who was the lowest on the totem poles. the most important in this fight. make them the most important in this story. i thought, yeah, she is who i want to lean on the most. then there was this other thing. reality reconfigured itself in a way that the other characters were all connected through her. that is how i found her in the first place. she was the natural connective tissue in the story. she led the reader to the other characters. that was sort of the other reason she ended up where she was. >> it felt like i had watched this cycle where all the characters were in someone's world. it is well known there. one thing that was so fascinating to me was that being

an infectious disease doctor but then public health official, it feels like she is possessed by this role. she looks in every know ken cranney. it may be in my community. i will rush there. i need to extract lung tissue with garden shears. all the other guys wearing hazmat shoots. telling him he is out of business. he cannot practice anymore. sure, i will do that, too. very few limits to this person's abilities and the willingness to contribute. i am just struck by, i interacted recently with the government employee. i was walking to work and i got bitten by a stray dog. i am scared.

i am in the doctor's office about to get a tetanus shot. oh, good, mountain view has an animal control center. i am on the phone, i am super flustered. hi. i got bitten by a dog. he does everything in his power to avoid having to act. no problem. just give me the dog's social security number. if you have photo evidence of the dog, dog's birthday street address, sure. i will do what i can to chase down this dog. and take a picture while i am at it. i see that same stray dog two weeks later. and, so, exactly to your point, i was thinking, how do we help solve this problem where we recruit people to the system. we just find more. people that are possessed by their job and have deep passion

and conviction. that is hard to deal. the other alternative is to increase the way we view these. we have been on this mission with teachers for decades now. teachers need to be paid more. they are the backbone of our society. potential workers were lifted up. the mailman is a very important person. it would be so wonderful if we elevated especially local officials. when i was working in the obama white house, a political appointee type, there are career civil servants that worked for 50 years. these are the true experts. the shiny new object is a political appointee. i feel like even that power

system needs to be an inverted. >> i think this is totally right. that is what i'm trying to do with the book. this is a person that should have status. everybody should know who they are. should have the resources to do their job. they do not have to be that brave to take the risks that they take. nobody should have to be as brave as charity dean is doing their job. it is not, instead of a public service rage. that is what struck me instantly as being screwed up. it was not that she was under resourced and underpaid. it was that she was expected to take all of this risk, all the risk in the system back to her. the cdc was not willing to cover for her. she was on her own. nobody is coming to save you.

she had to learn that. i did not expect to have to be as brave as i have had to be. what makes her such a good character is she is good full of fear. deeply rooted in a problematic childhood. dealt with alcoholism among other things. she has willed herself to be brave in order to do her job. all of those things i was looking out around her house, it was all courage of muscle memory. telling herself, reminding herself to be brave. how screwed up is the world that we have created that kind of pressure on that role. that, i agree.

the thing in this case, there is great hope in this case. it is such an interesting job. it is a mystery to me that there has not been a television drama built around a local public health official. the stories are cinematic. it is natural material. because what they do is so interesting, i would not be surprised if one of the effects of the book, lots of people think maybe i want to do that. what an interesting job. i want to know who my local health official is. then all of a sudden they have some profile that they did not have before. i was working on the fifth risk. the status of the political appointee. compared to the status of the

career civil servant. it made no sense to me. it still makes no sense to me. >> i literally heard people say that. for like 35 years they could recite things. hundreds of pages that they definitely felt that dynamic. i always felt relative to my own expertise. they were just here and here i was. >> it is not that they are not compelling people. usually, people that have tunnel vision and are obsessed with their subject, there is another aspect, obsession is like that is when you know you have obsession. the combination with a failure to realize your character is gold. when someone knows they are kind

of like a character, they lose altitude on the page. it just becomes kind of mannered and self-conscious. generally obsessed but do not think anything is peculiar about themselves. not finding anything peculiar about themselves. she was a person who, as a kid for entertainment wrote books about the bubonic plague. held models of viruses from her ceiling. the excommunicated from her church and leave her first marriage in order to pursue a medical degree. she found nothing unusual about this. >> i think that is true. carter, this was so fascinating to me. he has add. he is struggling to pay attention to anything. when it comes to critical care medicine it is as though he is being given ritalin. i just find that so powerful.

another taste of being obsessed. this accident as a child. told his whole life you are here for a reason. you are here for a reason. what is my reason. finally he stumbles upon this pandemic playbook. i guess this is it. this is my life's work. >> talk about a moment. i had chills talking about this. richard was actually the jungle guy for the book. richard is prominent in the book but not as prominent as carter. richard was the one who held my hand through the whole book. it is a literary figure. richard could, i think his first was to be a poet. writing was too hard so he became a doctor. he was he an oncologist. the way he gets into public service is itself a story. he is not self traumatizing. we were talking on zoom, he is in england one night and we were

talking about a particular moment when they were trying to figure out how to model, how to build models or find models that would enable them to study effects in a pandemic. like social distancing did not exist. these guys reinvented it. .... ....

when he is in the white house facing the possibility that they will not have a solution to a pandemic. by solution i mean they are trying to answer the question when getting a vaccine. there will be a period where disease will sweep through the land. he has this feeling that this is why i am here. this is what my mother was talking about. it is hard to ree

people are prone to the same vulnerabilities and behavioral biases like fear, ego motivated by incentive structure et cetera and he came to see my first teacher in the supermarket for the first time like buying food in the same place either she lived in the school so that's what it felt like these are my colleagues. as charity put it she was so disappointed to find the man behind the curtain was such a

pansy. she gets into it and kind of thinks they are the gods and all of a sudden finds herself fighting disease on the streets of santa barbara behind oprah's house and it's, you know, multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis on the santa barbara and it's terrifying and she needs backup she needs material help and moral support, political cover all that and they don't materialize in fact it is to basically tell her you could take that risk but if you do you are going to lose your job and we are not going to support that but then after the fact after she suppresses the outbreak on the campus for which the health authorities are grateful and say she did it all on hirono when there's another outbreak on another college

campus it's mind boggling she gets to a place in her head of actually fighting the disease where she bars the cdc because they just interfere they don't bring anything to it. it's crazy. and what's interesting depending on how they do their job they have different relations with the cdc about the culture is supposed to be following the cdc orders.

the good ones work crosswise. almost always as opposed to the rich doctors, the brave ones found themselves realizing no one is coming to save you. the cdc is going to get in the way. they are the ones that got their heads chopped off in the last year. they had a couple of exceptions. you are in the santa clara machine should get a presidential medal. she saw she needed to shut down the county without back up from donald trump nothing but grief and probably saves a gazillion

lives because interrupting the early disease transmission and what does she get as a thanks every wednesday at her house a mob gathers today to still to this day and insults in obscenities of her and her family. i called her like a month ago and she was in the shelter around-the-clock armed guards. her teenage daughter needed to study for a test the next day so that's what they get. i'm not going to interfere, let them stay. >> definitely. again, to think back to my time in government, there is almost an allergy towards the

innovation and risk-taking. people were petrified and i don't mean risk of the magnitude of the sort of things we saw, i mean, basic things like running an experiment to see if the program works well or not. so that is the easy way forward it is alarming so the willingness to lose everything in order to have a voice. do you have any ideas coming out of the stories about how we can redo the system so that we are leading to the best kind of problem solving whether it is in academia or corporations where it's all about profits for medicine et cetera, et cetera.

>> is that a question? the tone of the voice i thought it was a statement. i wondered if you had any ideas how to redo the incentive structures within the different sectors so that the end goal of making it act as achieved. we need to create a recognition culture in government and celebrating government achievement and risk takers. the oscars for public servants is a really good idea and if there is such a thing as the sammy awards. a. >> and it's slowly gathering steam. the stories are fantastic. first creating the recognition culture. second, it is a leadership thing.

i think the leaders of each organization need to create this culture it isn't just like the society does it. it's if you become the secretary of commerce you need to celebrate the people who were taking the risks. even if it goes wrong. silicon valley. if you're not screwing up sometimes, you're not taking enough risks. you need to kind of tilt the other direction. what kind of leaders will do that? and i think there is a structural change. i wonder why you think of this that would have a big effect and it would be to lop off the 4,000 something political appointees that come in with the administration. they are usually typically with a couple interesting exceptions there just for the tenure of whoever is in the white house at best. they might quit, get fired, take forever to get confirmed. the average tenure is 18 months

to two years. that's not, you're not going to create anything in 18 months or two years nor are you going to think to do it because you know you're not going to be able to do it. the head of the gao is an exception the general accounting office the president appoints that person but it's a 15 year position and it's not surprising the people inside that organization rank at the top of the federal government in their answers to questions like i'm encouraged to take questions or i'm satisfied i love my job or i might work as meaningful but it's because the way the institution's lead so we need more long-term leaders who have the home owner rather than the renters adding towards the enterprise they are on top of. instead of 4,000 you have 400. and you sort of institutionalize

the leadership in the operations. to the best practices in the sector what do we need to do to make our employees at the department of agriculture as excited about their jobs as microsoft. i don't think that's that hard. it sounds radical and crazy but i don't think it is radical and crazy especially when we see what happens in an institution when you don't have this and you frame it as this is no longer is government a little more or less efficient. this is an existential matter of the existing of the society we are only as good as our government. so i think we are talking about the federal level but you could do similar things.

>> i do think it is a good idea to law off some traction but one thing the political appointee position is solving for is allowing people who have gigs elsewhere that are often afforded to bring fresh ideas into government and so we do see these let me come in and revamp. >> you are the new head of the cdc and last until the end of the administration and you will probably have two good years. you are the head of the cdc and you will probably have it for 15 years.

you are more likely to bring in cass sons dean and much more likely to look for innovation if you're going to have to live with what you got eight years from now. i don't think that these things are mutually exclusive. the only other point i make is i did sense the urgency among the political appointees to get things done because they knew the clock was ticking and that could cause a psychological mess. i once wrote to a department official in 2014 she reassured me that in 2017 they would make sure to implement my case like three years. >> think about why the person is that way because they are led by someone they know will be gone

and whereas if that person is led by someone that's around to do what they are supposed to do and that person is that slow they will just be fired. this whole business of slow walking stuff because they won't be around people, that will go away. i think that clearly the institutions need a refresh it isn't just of the cdc. >> but there is the tension. >> you could tilt too far the other direction. if he doesn't have any ability to have an affect on it, then that gets a little silly.

but yes, i agree. i need to make sure we have time for q-and-a. i want to end with a final question i remember when my husband and i were visiting you told us when you are writing a book you create a music playlist and play over and over again i wonder if you could share a few songs from the animation playlist. >> while you are looking at questions i will tell you what they are. it isn't curated for musical excellence. i don't pretend to have the song picking ability. i'm not a dj. it's kind of like a musically

idiotic spin instructor looking for stuff that's up easily. but there are things i like to write to. but romeo and juliet and emmylou harris, suspicious minds, may i have this dance, fix you by kelly clarkson, stuff i asked charity what her favorite song was and she sent it to me and i thought that's so curious i'm putting it on the playlist and it was permitted the frog rainbow connection. [laughter] >> chasing cars, snow patrol. it gets me going and becomes pavlovian. if i'm in the grocery store and i hear that song, i look for a

pc to start writing words. a. >> what a nice behavioral hack. >> how do you decide what to write and once you do, -- >> this is a truth and it sounds not true. i don't say i've got to write another one. i start from the position possibly no book will ever need to be written by me again. that way i am called to the book rather than i forced myself on the books so i have to feel like i'm called to the story like it needs me to the point i have a sense of obligation to tell it

and it's depended on the subject in this case i had said something bad is going to happen and the trump administration will mishandle it and something bad happened so i thought i had the duty to poke around and it yielded such gold right away in the form of these characters that i was off and running. but sometimes i'm just answering questions. why are they winning games and the answer is so breathtakingly interesting it just mushrooms into a book. but there are these fits i have the same conversation with my editor i've had 16 times where i say i don't know does this interest you, i'm interested in this but i'm not sure and we spent three months pondering my uncertainty and at some point i think know i've learned so much about this and i care so much

about this and nobody else is going to do it. i've got to do it so this is slightly revealing maybe i had a secret group of doctors influencing policy all over the united states because they had a privileged view of the pandemic carter at the center of it. no one in the world so far as i knew knew who they were and i was all in. "the new york times" discovers one of the e-mails and he's briefly in the news front page of the times. they got a tiny sliver of the story. i said i don't think i'm going to write the book now because it is now in "the new york times." i came back to it. it is this story of if i don't

do it it won't get done and it should be. how it's found his accident. >> you sound like your characters. if i don't do it, nobody else will. >> that's true. >> interesting. so you had that same concession. which of your own books is your favorite? >> it's like asking which of my kids is my favorite. >> which one is your favorite, right here, just you and me. i know who it is. [laughter] >> it doesn't completely compute the question, but i will make critical judgments and the way that i judge them is the way olympic dives are judged it's not just the quality but the difficulty. all of the project was an

incredibly difficult dives where i made some splashes. waters poker was an unbelievably simple dive that was no splash at all. the moneyball pretty simple but not much of a splash. this one was complicated and if i had to rate them it's not my favorite but if you said you have to put one in a writing competition against other writers i would put this one up. >> helen wants to know the most surprising discovery that you made when you described the writing process. >> the interesting discovery in the material or the writing process. what did i discover that just

blew my doors off, that was easy. charity in santa barbara where iwas for two weeks in retracing her steps following the path of the mudslide or she been rescuing people. living the drama i felt like i walked into a netflix show. and not this person but this role. right behind it are the other two characters. we haven't talked about joe, but this guy is like solving pandemics. >> and brand eating amoebas. >> and then these people that completely rethink what happened in 1918 to create a national pandemic strategy, that blew my

doors off. >> in the process there was one thing that kind of excited me that was new and that was in a very self-conscious way for the first time in the book i said i'm going to go where the characters go and i don't know what the story is yet. that proved to be a very fertile way to write the book. >> it's like i remember asking someone a friend of mine the day i was getting married like do you have any advice for me. he said you already did that part. then the story will unfold. >> yes, you are building your house on the best foundation. some of the building materials don't end up being up to code you are still okay.

>> what do you view as the biggest mistakes by the cdc in response to covid-19. we don't have two hours but please choose one. >> the testing failure is the simplest and the biggest. you couldn't control anything if you can't see it and they not only failed to provide us flashlights but providing people their own self-made flashlights and together with the fda essentially blinded us when they are supposed to enlighten us so that was shocking and catastrophic and costs i don't know how many lives. but the other thing i would say it is a drift in the institution to the point that it was not able to stand up to donald trump

it became a mouthpiece for all sorts of stuff and it lost the process by which it lost its ability to be brave is the other side of this. >> and you point out these problems didn't start with trump and that is an effortless narrative to have that this is deeply entrenched and it began long before. molly wants to know if you could redo an interview in your career what would it be. we had this conversation, go for it. if i could redo part of my career? >> no, an interview, what would it be? >> redo an interview. i don't have those kind of regrets. i just don't have them. nothing comes to mind because no

interview is ever that important. it's a relationship. i have to spend not days but months. there's no great risk from any one interview. and. >> one potential misstep may be for a moment you make them feel like i shared too much or said the wrong thing. i never encountered that moment. >> each one i've hooked i've landed. i never had a problem with someone saying no you scared me off the story i don't want you writing about me anymore with one exception but it wasn't an interview. the mistake was with george soros 20 years ago when i was going to write a book about him and there was a masterpiece in

him. i made a mistake about writing a piece that offended him. he agreed to let me be his writer and he then said no. he didn't trust me anymore so i think he made a mistake but that was a mistake on my part to write that. >> let's do one final one. there are some great questions and hear. what do you read or listen to for fun? >> i read all kinds of stuff. right now the novel clara in the sun is like how can you win the nobel prize and still write so

well. the nonfiction i tend to read is usually work-related and stuff f that i needed to know about. i seldom pick up. that isn't true sometimes i read biographies but i tend to read more fiction than nonfiction for pleasure is a tendency there. then what do i listen to -- >> what is your favorite podcast. >> well, there's one called a slight change in plans where it's like i don't want to write anymore it's so good. >> the host is so charming. >> i mean, i listen to all of malcolm gladwell's podcasts because he led me into the

business. this is damning. i am not a big consumer culture. i am a consumer of fiction and a sort of consumer of some kinds of nonfiction. i do get hooked on tv shows. i'm now watching mayor of east town, the kate winslet detective story. it's a soap opera about i could watch kate winslet open an envelope, she's just so good. i get hooked on things. i'm not a systematic consumer culture. this stuff kind of appears before me and i eat it. but tending towards fiction and good television drama.

given your last book on federal bureaucrats and all that happened during the trump years, do you ever circle back to the folks being featured to find out what happened to them and what they thought? >> thought about what i wrote? always. i mean, almost always. a lot, yes. a lot of them are oblivious to what's going to happen in the book. i will tell you what's funny. arthur allen who ended up being the afterword to the paperback in 8,000 words who basically created the field of it was the world's expert in how different objects drift at sea enabling him and the coast guard to rescue people that otherwise would have been lost at sea because they didn't know how it

overturned. they couldn't predict where it had gone. i called the author to write about him because i picked him off and alphabetized list of government workers that had been furloughed as inessential and i thought i wonder what he does that is so inessential. i called and i said i want to come. i've got this a book that i want to write and he didn't listen that closely. i fly to connecticut from california and i will spend time with you. he spent three full days. i interviewed his wife, children, we went to his old

office, to the sound where he floated these objects. he cried before me remembering a woman he hadn't saved. it got very emotional. three days later i'm on my way back to the airport and i get a call from arthur allen and he says you are a writer, you are like an author and i said, yes, i told you that when i called you. he said i didn't really hear that. i said what did you think i was doing, flying to spend three days with you, he said i thought you were just interested in how objects drift. [laughter] i said no i'm interested but not that interested. and so i got an e-mail today because he just read the premonition.

i stay in touch because we become friends, so i know the first thing that happens is i hear what feedback they got [inaudible] >> if you are the kind of person that wanted to do damage i wouldn't approve, but if you wanted to use my book as a weapon against them you would say if you are so smart how come you didn't know as much as carter on january 20th.

he is playing a political game at the same time he's doing his best to save lives he was kind of the man last year. okay this will be the final one. anything that is pandemic related 24/7. people will have that prejudice

at the very beginning of it, you don't take it on this march through a dreary event in some ways it isn't even a book about the pandemic. >> in the pandemic or the infectious disease the same stories would hold. >> you did a great job.

>> thanks, you too. >> great moderating. i don't know why she won't let you go around her place but you can come to mine any time. [laughter] >> [inaudible] i had no idea. this is really damning for our friendship. >> i'm starting to feel creepy. [laughter] >> everyone watching, thanks for tuning in. this is the best book yet so please feel sure to read it and here's carol on the u.s. secret

service. ... ...