joan and adrienne. vanlusinord. c-span book tv, lindy mullinax and ray maldau for sponsoring this session and discussion. please make sure to stop by the book sales area and author signing after the session book sales at the festival helped to support the cost of the festival and the location and the local literacy programs that it funds. you can also help to keep this event free and open to everyone by becoming a friend of the festival or a sponsor of the 2022 festival. please stop by the friend's booth or by going online to tucson festival of books.org and as we begin please silence your phones and i've asked also for those folks who might be wearing hats. we are in tucson to please remove your hat so that folks behind you can see our great panelists that i'm about to introduce. so now on to this these

exceptional panelists, we have julissa arce. she's a nationally recognized author speaker and social justice advocate with medica ferrera. julissa is developing and executive producing a television series for a major network option from her best-selling memoir my underground american dream her young adult memoir someone like me is being used in classrooms across the country. she's here to talk about her new book. you sound like a white girl the case for rejecting assimilation. described as a dual polemic and manifesto the book delves into and tears apart the lie that assimilation leads to belonging. in 2017. julissa was named one of people and espanol's 25 most powerful women and in 2022 and 2019.

she was named a woman of the year by the city of los angeles. she's a leading voice. yes. she's a leading voice. in the fight for social justice immigrant rights and education equality. julissa has contributed to the new york times time magazine buzzfeed news crooked media cnbc and is one of the host of crooked conversations. she has provided political commentary across numerous tv networks. including nbc news bloomberg tv cnn and msnbc our next esteem guest here. today is todd miller. who is an author journalist and writes for the post writes posts for the border chronicle if you haven't checked it out you should. go and google it and find it. it's a great piece of border reporting he has researched and

written for border issues for more than 15 years the last eight as an independent journalist and writer. he resides here in tucson, arizona, but has spent many years living and working in oaxaca mexico. his work has appeared in the new york times tom dispatch the nation san francisco chronicle in these times yadonica and al jazeera english among other places. todd miller is the author of four books including the one he will discuss today build bridges not wall walls a journey to a world without borders empire of borders the expansion of the us border around the world storming the wall climate change migration homeland security and border patrol nation dispatches from the front lines of homeland security. he's also a contributing editor on border and immigration issues for the not cloud report on the americas and its column border wars.

so, thank you both for being here. to start off if you could just give us in the audience a little bit of background on how you arrived at this topic of that are you know the topic of your current works right now, maybe we could start with you. julisa. thank you for so much for for having me and i'm glad to see some familiar faces in the audience that came with me to the last panel. and so i'm glad to you here again. so i've written a couple of memoirs my underground american dream and someone like me and both of those books are my personal experience dealing with immigration and the immigration system. i came to the us when i was 11 from mexico and i came on a tourist visa when my visa expired when i was 14, i became undocumented. and so my previous books deal with and tell my personal story

right just that the personal cost of staying in the united states the sacrifices that i and my family had to make in order for me to continue my education. i always like to point out that texas was the first date to allow undocumented students to go to college and pay in state tuition 20 years ago, which seems really crazy to think about now given what's going on in texas, but when i was growing up there the year that i graduated high school is the year that that law passed and so i was able to go college so i spend the last five or six years really reflecting on my personal experience and writing those books, but the one thing that i realized is that there's there's bigger issues that play when i think about the immigration system, so when i was researching this book, i i don't want to say discovered but i found out for the first time in the 30 years that i've lived in the united states that the very

first congress of the united states in 1790 the very very first law immigration laws that were enacted and naturalization loss said that only white man could naturalize if they had lived in the united states for two years and we're of good moral character. however, that was defined back then. so i started to realize that this system that had kept my family apart that had kept me from being with my father when he died. that had cost incredible heartbreak. that this entire system was built upon. white supremacy and it was the system was driven by race more than any other factor. and of course their economic factors, and of course there are national interests national security interests at play, but when you really start to look at every single law that has passed

in the united states in relation to immigration border security naturalization, it all really comes back to race. and once i understood that my mind was really kind of open to understanding the rest of my experience in america. this idea that assimilation leads to belonging. so as an immigrant, i've been told since i was loving years old that i needed to learn how to speak english that i needed to get a good education. i needed to pay my taxes. i needed to get a good job. i needed to become a productive member of society and be a good immigrant. and so i did that. i did every single one of those things and at the end of that road, i still didn't belong and there is still spaces where i walk into and people will look at me and ask me, where are you from followed by? where are you from from? because some people can't imagine that there are people who look like me. who never crossed the border who have never been for some from someplace else? i mean here in arizona, right? arizona was part of mexico

before it was part of the united states and it wasn't just the land that was acquired during the mexican-american war. it was also the people the people who lived there. and that's really how i came. i came to this work was first from a personal experience and then in order to write this book. i had to take a step back and really look at the bigger picture. look at the historical record that many times has submitted from anything that i ever learned in school, and i'm sure many people in the audience that you also have never learned because those aren't things that are put at the forefront of the history lessons. and so that's how i came to this work first from a personal perspective and then from a more of a reported polymic manifesto perspective thank you for that todd. what brought you to this particular work building bridges not walls. i know you've been writing about the border for a long time, but this is a little bit different what caused you to sort of take

this perspective in your book that we're going to be talking a little bit more about yeah on the excuse me. thank you, celeste and i just first want to say it's an honor to be on this panel with julissa and and use the last and and as my microphone working i will now bring my mouth up to it. i was just saying it's an honor to be with these two with julissa and celeste on this panel, and it's honored to be with you here today. my my most recent book bill britt does not walls. it's this book here. this book is my fourth book actually, and it's a departure from my previous three books, which are much more straightforward investigative journalism. um and just the investigative journalism that i've done. my first book for example is

called border patrol nation, and it really looked at the post 9/11 expansion of the us border and immigration enforcement apparatus. so i try to do a deep dive into that and then investigative fashion and you know looking at for example the budgets of the of the us border and immigration and force of us a border and immigration enforcement from say 1994 or 1994's very critical year because that's when the prevention through deterrence strategy was implemented the strategy that we see 25 years or 26 years later on the border today prevention to deterrence is building up the the urban or traditional places where people crossed with walls technology and more agents and then forcing people to circumvent into the desert or other desolate places in order to pass the border so looking at you know, for example

budgets going from 1.5 billion dollars to if you look at the budget for 1.5 billion in 1994 to 25 billion today, and those are annual budgets. they grow every single year. so that's what you know, those are things that i've looked into like, what are these budgets? what have they meant? what the why do we have seven hundred miles of walls and barriers along the 2,000 mile us mexico border. what is this technological infrastructure? that's we put billions and billions of dollars and into why do we hire 4,000? you know when when there were 4,000 border patrol agents and in 1994 and now they're between 20 and 21,000 so um, that's five times more. so like looking at you know, those sorts of numbers and and the kind of development of this

apparatus and also another workstorming the wall, which is my second book. i i took i looked at all this and then looked at how climate change like in a world of where we're seeing according to the internal displacement monitoring center 25 million people, at least they say it's an under count 25 million people across the globe per year displaced due to some sort of climate catastrophe and then if you look at some of the documents from say the department of homeland security, they're very aware of this and the solution that you see in some of these documents that we need to build up our borders even more. and so so i took all those sorts of investigative findings and these different in this in the in these different books. oh, i should mention my the book right before builders is not walls was called empire borders and in that book. i i just did a very

straightforward journalistic strategy following the money, right? so i what i did was i followed us federal money that was going to different countries around the world to see how they they were assisting other countries and building up their own borders. and and so i i went to the mexico guatemala border. i went to the guatemalan honduran border. i went to the dominican haiti border. i went to the philippines which is the maritime border. i went to the jordan syrian border and the kenyan tanzania border trying to follow this money and watching how of us programs are helping other countries build up their borders and the whole idea is a part of the strategy to push out us borders as much as possible. to stop people to come coming to stop people even thousands of miles before they for before

they get to the united states. so those all this went into bill bridges not walls and bill burge is not walls. really happened. i'll tell you just a brief how it starts just briefly. and i just want to say that all this stuff it's a meditation of all these years of doing investigative reporting but a departure from that and it's it's a it's more it's in one way. it's a reflection, but it comes from one event and this one event happened a couple years ago. i was um, i was on the tanatum nation, which is just to the south of here the tunnels of nation shares a 70 mile border with mexico, but the ton optimization, of course the tunnel autumn people were anton land right now turn out the territory goes deep into mexico because up to phoenix right when the border was was drawn. it was really imposed in the mid eight in 19th century on the

autumn people. and so i was there. and i was driving down the down the road and down a dirt road and also in a man appeared at the side of the road. and he was waving his arms in distress. so i stopped the car he came up to the he came up to the to my window. i rolled down the window. i gave him a bottle of water which he drank. and he that asked me if he could i asked him if there anything else i can do for you, and he asked me if he could if i could give him a ride into the next to the next town and then i hesitated. you know and and that hesitation. and i'll tell you i'll explain why i hesitated probably later in the conversation but in that hesitation was was what? brought this book into life thank you, todd. so the title of our panel is immigration in america and what? like to take a minute or two for you to for us to reflect on what

the state of immigration in america is from your perspectives? whoever wants to first well it depends on what we're asking right if we're asking. what is the state of immigration policy? what is the state of immigrants? what is the state of the border? because to me those are those are those are different things and i could have a different answer for each of those things, but i think overall the the sort of headline for me to answer this question is that things haven't changed right? i things have not changed some of the worst immigration policies that are in the books today that prevent free people from quote unquote fixing their immigration status. we're enacted during the bill clinton years and and those laws things like the 10-year ban. we're enacted during the bill clinton years and they haven't

changed during the last administration. there was a huge uproar about kids in cages about families being separated at the border. well, guess what those things are still happening today. we just have turned our eye away from it. so in many ways all of these things that all of these horrible things that immigrants are put through have not changed and i wish i was more hopeful to say that i think that those things will change, but i'm not very hopeful about it right now because there's really been in action from congress to pass any kind of immigration reform, but that's only one piece of it, you know, i often before i became a citizen i was often asked why don't you fix your immigration status? like why don't you get in the back of the line and do it the right way i heard that often often many times. i heard that why didn't you do it the right way and i used to go to a lawyer every year and

ask like have they have the laws change. is there anything i can do to fix my immigration status now and the answer would always be no. when i think about my college experience, and i mentioned that i was able to go there because of the of the texas law changes the dream act, which you may have heard. and if not, i'll tell you a little bit about it. the dream act was introduced for the first time in 2001. the dream act would have gitbury had provided a path to citizenship for young undocumented people who came to this country through no choice of their own right our parents brought us here. that was in 2001. it is now 2022. i have lived an entire life. during those 21 years until and still today. there are young people in the same situation that i found myself in. so in many ways things have not changed, but in other ways, you know when i think about things that the state level there are certainly laws that that change

immigrants lives that are passed and there is progress being made just the fact that undocumented people can get driver's licenses in california and in several other states the fact that a few other states have followed food and still is crazy for me to say they have followed texas lead in the you know in a good way which is to provide more in state tuition for more students. there's about 20 or so states that provide that now so in some ways it has changed in some ways. it hasn't and i think that we, you know personally as an act to as an activist and as an advocate it is my job to advocate for immigrants and for the better treatment the more humane treatment of immigrants regardless of who is in office because these things happen regardless of who is in office. how would you respond to that todd? what is the state of immigration in america today? well in terms of the border, i mean just if i've even go to that story. i was just telling the running into person in the desert

crossing through the desert. that's you could go out right now. we could get we could leave this auditorium go to the desert right now and have that same exact experience because the way that the border is set up that has not changed one iota right that and like julisa was saying that comes from a clinton era policy as well. right the whole the whole 1994 if you go back to 1994, you could border patrol memorandum. the memorandum says talks about the prevention through deterrence. the deterrence was by enforcing the cities you force people in the desert. the desert becomes the deterrence that is still the strategy and now with the and and what has happened year after year after year after year after year if you follow the budget tonight if you should go and look at the budget you can go look at the ins budgets and then the dhs budgets they go up every single year and they've went up, you know in the last for the transition from the trump administration to the by-demstration they continue to

to go up right? so the the kind of overall arcing border and immigration enforcement apparatus has its it's it's the same there's there's a there's there's a walls and technology right now that vitaministration is talking about will shifting from building, you know building up more wall and to to technology but often it. it's it's a you know, the way that the narrative goes is that's more humane and really it's it's the same it's a part of the same apparatus, right? the technology is a it's comes in the form of surveillance towers of cameras that can see seven point five miles away or ground sleeping radar systems or drone systems. they're now implementing medium and small-sized drones on the border and all of it if you look if you look at this if you go out to the south here, you can go into the hills and see surveillance towers, they're put in place. so people can see them from far away and then we'll go even further out into remote further

remote areas, and that's why this last year there was more people dying or more remains are covered of people than then we've ever seen before and those sorts of deaths on the border and the according to the us border patrol. there's been at least 8,000 people who have the who have their had their remains recovered since since the 1990s since the pretty much since the prevention to deterrence policy was was our strategy was implemented there that you know those sorts of like you can think about it right now in march and when it's going to heat up again in arizona as the people who are from the southern arizona know very well and people are going to die again coming through the desert people who are perfectly healthy right now, and that's part of the same policy and strategy so and and that sense in the border sense there seems to be just a big trajectory of things. staying the same in a lot of ways. i know that and even in terms of

trump-era policies like title 42 title 42 for people that don't know are the rapid expulsion systems that were were put in place after when the pandemic started exactly precisely two years ago and the title 42 like asylum seekers who come to the border will be still are still rapidly deported back to mexico without being able to have a sort any sort of hearing in the united states those sorts of things are still still in place from the trump era. so in a lot of ways, it's like i mean, i'm just piggybacking on what julisa was saying, but but there's there's very much similarities in the trajectory that we're seeing. thank you, todd. thank you for mentioning the human toll of all of this too, because i think it also relates to what julisa was mentioning about. the connections between immigration policy and race and how that's all you know, there's a direct connection because if this were happening and the northern border, i think we'd see a much different response if

you know, it just wouldn't probably even occur and if i may, you know, i think one of them what's happening today in ukraine with the with the invasion of vladimir putin, i think really illustrates. how different we treat refugees depending on where they're coming from and what they look like, and i'm not at all so i i think that the way that we are welcoming you ukrainian refugees and the way that the media is talking about them is the exact way we should be talking about refugees from every of the world. thank you. let's get into the title of your book. you sound like a white girl and then was wondering where that came from. and you also mentioned that some people might feel uncomfortable about it about the title and but it's maybe something that they need to be thinking about. maybe you could just expand on that a little bit yeah, so the

title of my book you sound like a white girl comes from this experience that i had in high school. i had this i had a crush as high school girls do and this boy told me that i sounded like a white girl. and he did not mean it as a compliment, but i took it as a compliment. i was so proud that oh my god. i sound like a white girl. i was so excited because all of the girls in my school who belonged were white girls whenever i thought or imagined in my head and all american girl. like an all-american cheerleader if you close your eyes and the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear all american girl, does she look like me? i certainly when i close my eyes, that's not who i saw i saw a white girl, and i was i was i really at that point in my life very much wanted to be like the white girls in my school. i wanted to sound like them.

i wanted to look like them. i wanted to act like them and dress like them and it all comes from this idea that assimilation leads to belonging that you do all these things you will belong in this country. of course now i can look back at that experience and and you know, i sometimes cry when i think of this young julissa not loving her skin not loving what she looks like because the world has told her that she needs to be something else. and so the the title of the book is really it's a little bit sarcastic title because i don't think i sound like a white girl. i don't even know what a white girl is supposed to sound like as though all white girls sound at the same. you know and then the same the same phrase you sound like a white girl was also then used against me by my own community, right because i would say well you're not mexican enough now like you you why are you trying? why are you selling out? right? and i also didn't know or

understand what i was supposed to sound like as a mexican as a mexican-american and so the title to me, there's really two two parts to it. there are the lies that let me to believe that sound like a white girl was a good thing and then there is the dismantling of those lies in the second part of the book where i talk about reclaiming my culture and reclaiming my history and reclaiming my identity and a sense of self that decenters the white gaze and that decenters whiteness, and i do think that you know, as i said in the smaller panels i was at yesterday if you were a white person you probably will be uncomfortable reading some of the things in this book, but i do very much think that we're gonna make progress we do need to get uncomfortable to have honest conversations that can lead to a better country a country where all of us can belong without having to give up parts of ourselves.

thank you for that todd some of your work some of the investigative work and this current work can make people feel uncomfortable too when they realize the sort of economics that go into a building. walls instead of bridges maybe you could expand on that and talk about the connections between immigration policy and the economics of it and perhaps why we are things have not changed. in the ways that some would think would be would be more beneficial. sure. yeah on one of the one of the poem the points of focus for me and my work is looking at i as i explained the budgets going up, but so i've done a lot of investigation into the kind of privatization of the border immigration apparatus the variety of private companies

that have have gotten contracts over the years and one very startling was startling to me. i want probably i imagine i might be startling the youtube but soon from between 2008 and 2020 and i might get this a little bit wrong because i'm remembering it off the top of my head. but there were 105,000 contracts given to private companies by customs and border protection. of course cbp is the the agency that oversees the border patrol. it's the largest federal law enforcement agency in the in the united states. it has about 60,000 agents 21,000 again that are in the us border patrol and ice which is of course immigration and customs enforcement, which is in charge of the incarceration or the detention system within the united states about 200 to 250 to tension centers across the country many of them run by

private companies. and so there's there between 2018 and 2008 and 2020 over those 12 years 105,000 contracts to the tune of about 55 billion dollars. um to compare if you take just the border and immigration budgets from 1975 to 2003 those 28 years. this is pre department of homeland security going up to dhs, which was created in 2003 or implemented in 2003 that the total budgets for border and immigration enforcement during those years or 52 billion dollars so you could see like in those 12 years money going to private companies is more than the entire budgets of 27 years and that to me that's there's two things one that dramatic emphasis, you know in the last 25 or so couple decades and in terms of budgets of bringing up

this border and immigration enforcement apparatus, but also the participation of these private companies and what that means right in terms of now during appropriation processes you'll have private company is going into washington because they can and lobbying. there's lots of money that's given the lobbying. so making sure that those budgets keep going up right or getting behind closed doors or campaign contributions, and there's plenty of campaign contributions are different companies going to different key members from the president for the president down on down to like key committee members. so that's that's something that i looked into as far as economics are concerned and i find it, you know, very, you know, i don't find that people know that those details too much and that that could be a point of emphasis like why you know, why isn't there why are more people talking about these budgets going up? why are the private? why do these private companies

have so much power in these processes? thanks, so julissa. i'm so glad that you your voice is out there that you are drawing on your personal experiences to to really be a role model for a lot of latinas out there and i'm sure you get a lot of good feedback, but i'm just wondering if how that's been for you. it's i'm sure it's difficult and at the same time why? you feel personally that compelled to draw on your own experiences to to maybe you change things for the future or at least let people know what you know with the history has been and what things are like contemporarily. i mean, i i was still stranger people say i'm a because i i don't always view myself that way but i am but i am really glad that. there are more books more stories that are being told for.

young girls like me. there's a story that i share in in you sound like a white girl that for the first time in like 20 years. i went back to my middle school the first school that i went to in the united states and i had i did not have the best experience there because at that time i didn't speak english and you know girls were mean and and i and i and i really did not like going to that school. i i had teachers who looked at me i think i think they looked at me in my lack of english proficiency as meaning that i wasn't smart and therefore treating me in a very different way when in reality like i've always really loved school, and i've always really loved getting good grades, and i just needed to catch up to the language to then be able to to go back to that, but i went back to the middle school with my last with my last book someone like me and i i walked i walked into this this gym. and i was really nervous because i just all this sort of memories

and thoughts of the things that i endured when i was there just kind of came flashing into my mind. and then and then the students came in and i shared my story with them. i shared stories that had really inspired me as well like the texas cheerleaders who fought for the right to be cheerleaders because in crystal city texas only one out of the four cheerleaders could be mexican-american even though the school was 85% to mexican-american and i was deeply inspired by these teenagers at that time who fought for the right to bear pom-poms and and you know, they it started as that, but they really created incredible change in their communities the school board became majority latino the city council became majority latino within two years, so i shared that story with with these students and at the end at the end of my talk they had this i mean i'm like getting emotional thinking about it. they had this poster size

pictures of me when i was in middle school. i was a cheerleader in middle school because again, i wanted to be all american and they had this posters and they wanted me to sign them because they wanted to put them up in their bedrooms and i really held back my tears because i didn't want to cry in front of students. but when i was done i ran to the ladies room and and patted my tears because i remembered that the posters that i had in my bedroom. and none of them were of girls that looked like me. and so now to go back to that same place and to think that the the person that these young girls admired or wanted to imitate someone like me. and that i think is one of the best feelings as a writer that people find themselves in my stories. yeah. you todd what drives you to

continue to work on? issues related to the border yeah, i mean, i i don't think i ever planned to write four books about the border. it's it's amazing how that happened like one every time i wrote one book ever in one book it just that the vastness of what this means becomes. there's like each each time around kind of revelation and that in this lat and this last book you know it i said maybe i'll just mention more of that story. i you know the when i was at when i was there in the desert and i had that moment of hesitation. and there is a moment of first i was looking at juan carlos's attorney that he told me his name later, and he he looked he he asked me the question that hesitated. and there was a moment of like i

hesitated because of course i couldn't according to the us law right? i couldn't give them all. i couldn't give him i couldn't give him a ride. because i might phase years and it would be a felony right? that's what i was thinking. that's why i hesitate it. and then what overtook me after that was this feeling of ire or anger, right i thought about because i thought about all the stuff i know from the reporting right other surveillance towers that could be watching us a drone could be flying overhead. you never we could have went over an implanted motion sensor, you know, there's 12,000 implanted motion sensors along the 2,000 mile us mexico borderland, and then we 2000 mile us mexico borderlands any like a ton of things could have like triggered the apparatus to be looking at us and on but but it was season 5 like why why couldn't i give this person that was obviously in distress a

ride, right? what like even stuff even like values that i learned from as a little kid of how you treat one person you treat a person you treat a person in distress you help out a person in distress, right? and i and just and just that sort of conundrum. um brought me to this to this place. so this new book right the the um, i would say that the that the -- that idea the book was born in that moment and and when it was born it wasn't only like this conundrum of of what's going on like in this moment with this person? it was it was like this whole thing needs to be questioned completely and utterly like why do we have this border and immigration enforcement apparatus at all? let's why is it just never unpacked to the general public at? all? right. like why aren't the components of it? why isn't julisa's story like

more out there and and like all the different elements of it. and if we had all the facts and looking at it and it's entirety wouldn't we be questioning it and wouldn't we wouldn't there be more arguments for the dismantling of it? and i think that's where that's kind of the where i've kind of turned the corner a little bit and in my new in my newer. ratings on it thank you, todd. i'm just as an aside. i think that motive metaphorically and literally you are both dismantling and deconstructing borders and creating bridges in your own way. so and commend you for that and now we can open up the mic for questions from the audience. i have a lot more questions too, but i'd like to give you members of the audience chance to ask some questions. we have a microphone up here. if you could please come up to the microphone. so everyone can hear your question and we can have your questions posed to our great

panelists go ahead. my question is for todd. i'm an accountant by nature. so i appreciate the way in which you you know dove into the story and talked about budgets and and i personally believe that the way in which we identify priorities and our values can be told through our budgets. so if you had a magic wand what would you do today in terms of disinvestment from? and then what would you invest into so sort of like what you know, what would be the two sort of biggest things that you would identify for disinvestment and investment? ah, thanks for that question. i think that's a good question and i mean, i don't know but but one thing one thing i can say right is a the disinvestment rate if you're at a disinvest like again the cbp ice budgets for the share 25 billion dollars. like whoa, 25 billion dollars.

what else could that be spent on right like like if you think of terms of security quote unquote security and well-being like human well-being would there perhaps be better late? for example, it should be you should people be drinking contaminated water and flint, michigan or you know, or could um, if there's an affordable housing crisis, couldn't that money go to? to that, you know there. i don't know the answer to that, but it seems to me that when you look at it and you look at it what it is. you look at the money it costs and you look at the impacts of it and you think about human well-being. it's it's you know, there's so many different avenues where this money could be spent client like climate change, right? whoa. what about that? like, what about if like the united states being one of the

top historic emitters and claiming responsibility that and looking at how that could help places that are now being impacted in very serious ways around the globe, right? there's just so many. i don't know the answer honest. honestly, i have my thoughts, but i think the answers to those questions need to have a kind of collective conversation, right? but i think what i do think is i think you're spot on and i think that money can be that divested and then diverted into other places. thank you and a lot one quick thing, which is that you know when you look at immigration patterns and like why people end up at the southern border or you know in europe why people are seeking refuge or immigrating like these things don't happen by accident. their patterns that get created and in the united states many of the reasons why central american immigrants are coming to the united states is because of the us involvement in the

distivalization of those countries, and so part of the divestment and investment there needs to be an investment in the root causes of of these migration patterns. and until we do that. you know, i personally would have loved to stay in mexico. right? like i don't think that people realize just how difficult it is to migrate to a different country. but every day there's people who are displaced from their homes. and as i said many times the reason those things are happening is because us and western involvement so part of that money needs to be spent in those places. next question. thank you. i've two questions and i want to thank you for mentioning about ukraine because it's been bothering me how like, oh we're taking action now, but if we take an action sooner, maybe we wouldn't have to take action now, maybe we particularly, use several wars sooner. we stood up maybe there wouldn't be this happening. hard to say but my first

question is are your books on audio and available in libby, and my second question has to do more do with geneva conventions every day. i see the destruction of the the great world. we created after world war two, you know went that were we have, you know democracies becoming autocracies from mexico and india and and turkey and and hungry and italy and poland like these are all going to autocracy and here we have it happening and and this this anti-immigration is all part of it from from america first way back in the world, too and we have these geneva conventions and yet our immigration's policies daily to violator genevaemon mentions. obligations, and i'm wondering what your thoughts might be like in that and how we can you know, since we have treaty laws and obligations and this is around the world this to happen. but what can we do to make us abide by our to be the obligations?

to answer your first question. the book is on audible or fm books and i read the book. i don't know that i have the expertise to ask to answer your question about geneva conventions, but i do just want to say that the world that was created after world war two. wasn't great for everyone and and in it in it and it continues to not be great for for everyone. so that's only that's really the i have. sorry, i can't answer your other question. i just don't have that expertise. i don't know if i do either but i do know that the um, all my other books are on audible except for this one. so sorry, hopefully it will be very soon. there seems to be there was a delay with my other book. so hopefully this one will be on audible soon as far as the geneva conventions. are concerned i mean in a way, you know, one of the you know,

the geneva convention it's talk about a refugee status as far as being, you know people fleeing persecution and this is from right little you know, the 1940s. it seems like a you know, there has to be a revisiting of the geneva conventions b. i mean what like what we're seeing on the border or what we see with borders. it seems to be the the border systems themselves are perpetual human rights violation ginny. he can say geneva convention violation around across the globe and it seems like those sorts of you know, that that those sorts, you know, the convention needs to be revisited is it you know, and and looked in it's a lot of those sort of legal international legal things need to need to be revisited to take a number of things into account and if if they're being violated there should be some sort of on you know some some

sort of like it of that, right thank you next question. todd this question is for both of you, but you shared that anecdote about how your paws when talking to the man in the desert kind of made you reflect on your own values and the ones that you grew up with and i was wondering if both of you could talk about how the current and historical immigration policy kind of stands in direct contrast to our kind of collective american values and what is kind of perhaps in some ways un-american about our immigration policy. i think that our immigration policy is a direct reflection. of our american values that's you know, i don't think that

it's i i we were talking earlier before we came on on stage that you know, sometimes we talk about the unintended consequences of immigration laws, but i actually think that the consequences are the consequences are exactly what was intended when those laws were passed. and so i you know part and and this is just my perspective right like and i don't want to be clear about something like i sometimes people are like how come you don't love america, and i'm like i do love america and it's james baldwin said that's why i reserve the right to perpetually criticize it because i live here and i love it, and i wanted to be better for my children. so, you know, i think that for me i have had to stop romanticizing. what america is? in order to fully love it more and to understand it more and to understand what are the things that we need to do collectively to make this truly be a better place.

no, no, i think i agree. i agree with you. i mean if you look at you know like from the 19th century. the chinese exclusion act is like, you know, there's not it's the immigration policies are discriminatory like based on the 1920s laws based on eugenics, right but like when i was talking about my value values in that moment, it was definitely like even you could even look at like i grew up. going, you know at church. they tell me that you know or whatever way, you know, if you see somebody in distress you help them out. it's like a universe if it felt like at a universal value of somebody's not you know it downtrodden. well you help them out you if somebody's you know, the thirsty you give them water that's that's sort of thing and that sort of like now i would say a natural impulse to hospitality or at least what i had myself

right and on that's that was the value system that i was talking about like i hear i was here's a person they're asking me for the simplest thing right there were last in the desert. they just wanted to ride. like and just give the guy a ride right? and and so yeah, that's that's what i meant. than that hi, i am really glad to be here for this discussion today. i live i'm an american citizen, but i've lived in europe for over 30 years. i've been observing the whole immigration policy. evolution from that perspective this for that reason. i think it's very informative for me as well and one of my questions for you is he said that it was really important that people learned to understand that americans can also look like you there are people in the united states who believe that looking at the diversity of the experiences in the backgrounds. and the way that people look in the united states is actually

causing friction what would you say to those people? why is it important to talk about this these? these experiences in their great diversity. what does that add to the value of our discussion about what america is and who being american is? and for todd i yeah, i'd be interested to know you're obviously an advocate for more humane immigration policies. what was your motivation? to get involved in this discussion in this way and my my final to you was about the motivation of adding billions and billions and billions of more dollars to the budget each year is it a link between private? private sector interest and policy is it a fateful combination of what we think

should be happening at the border and are complicity. in allowing these budgets and these majors to go up. so dramatically, yeah. so there is and i'm and i am very sorry that i cannot remember her name right now, but there's an amazing author. that is a great ted talk about this too. she did a ted talk about this in which she talks about the dangers of the single narrative. the dangers of having one story tell the story of everyone. and my story is only one story. and part of what i what i really emphasize is the in the book is that there's been times when my own story has been used against other immigrants because i'm considered a good immigrant. but my biggest role my role model is my mother who didn't finish high school who you know

when people talk about even myself like i broke a lot of loss in order to get to where to where i got because and and i used to be ashamed of saying i broke the law but now i realize how the law was breaking me. and breaking people like me, but my stories only one story so my story can't also be used as a collective story, but i do think it's important that more of us. write books like this. that there are more tv shows and films that truly reflect who the american people are. anytime i go, you know here in the united states people will look at me and and most people will recognize me as mexican. when i go to i was i was in france last summer. and our captain for this little boat that we had he was italian and he asked my group of friends where we were from and we said we're from los angeles.

and he said no, but i mean like where are you from so like even outside of this country? we're having to answer that question and i want to get to a place where in this country or outside of this country people also not only but also imagine people like me when they think american i was just going to say the authors that you're referring to as chimamanda ngocia digi who's a great author as well. i only know that because i assigned that ted talk to my students as well. yeah, it says it's a great talk. it's gone viral. i don't know how many, you know views it's received but go ahead talk. oh, yeah. um, so a cut you know, what what motivating me. well one one thing that my grandmother is from the philippines and i grew up she came to the us when she was 16

she was odds, i mean, yeah, so i heard the stories of her her story throughout my life and and i grew up eating adobo and pence set and and you know that sort of thing and i also i went to live in mexico in the late 1990s when i lived in mexico one of the biggest biggest things that happened for me was not only learning about what was going on in mexico and and but was and learning the language and but it was also this ability to see my country from outside of its borders and that for me that was a game changer that really really as fueled my my work and my thinking about this since then in terms of on the budgets rising it's amazing to me that he just that people don't know that about the budget. it's i wouldn't even say it's complicity because i don't even maybe it is i don't know but but the fact the fact that the

budgets are rising and rising and rising and rising, it's really not something that's well known right when i say those numbers when i do talks and different places. it's usually a news, you know, and it they get past every year. it's kind of under the water sort of news and the people in the discussions are generally not the public right? it's generally like behind closed doors in certain committees and with the private companies going behind closed doors if i only could be a fly on the wall on those in those conversations. they hear what's being said, right you try to deduce what's being said, but those sorts of things are not really that public information. i wish that i wish it was i think if it was people more would be talking about it. well, i want to thank both of our authors here this afternoon. you are in your own ways really

building bridges and deconstructing borders, which there needs to be more of that kind of workout. there's i want to commend you for all of the work over the years and for the the books that you have out this year and for those in the audience. thank you for your questions. and for your attendance and your participation participation today. i wanted to let you know that the authors will be proceeding to the sales and signing editor area. they will be at the ua bookstore tent on the mall and so that you can head to that direction immediately so you can talk directly with the authors. i want to thank everybody for coming today.

and book tvs coverage of the tucson book festival continues a couple more author panels coming up that will be live. right now we're joined by lily geisler. her book is left behind the democrats failed attempt to solve inequality. lily geisler, let's start in the present before we go back in the past but a lot of the news today about the democratic party is the establishment versus bernie sanders. does that have a history to it? absolutely. thank you. so and thank you so much for having me and talking to me about the book. i think that one of the things that there's a sense that the sort of came out of nowhere, but they're actually really deep-seated tensions within the democratic party that it really existed. i mean, i would say since the 1970s, but but came into the

forefront of the 1980s as the party was really at another kind of crossroads of where to go. so after the defeat of walter mondale in that sharing of the 1984 election there was a sense of sort of three different directions. the party could have gone gone in and one was represented by someone like jesse jackson who would be of a more kind of bernie sanders type alec actually bernie center supported him, but really stood for some of the kinds of kinds of versions of democratic socialism, but i think the sanders campaign is represented and then the other side was mont was the mondale approaches the traditional democratic party and the third would be someone like gary hart as this kind of as a more who stood for the ideas of the atari democrats or who become the new democrats really focusing on sort of tech and trade in the new economy as the future for the party and that's really what dominated to help the shape the direction of the party going forward and what really my book looks at before we talk about 1984 though. let's talk about 1974.

what happened in 1974 and who got elected then that helped proceed this and i should say when i say 1984. i mean not the george orwell book, but then 1984 but the election but the you know, i'm just giving you a hard time the 1974 was it is actually another critical year and political history and the big and the big the big thing that's from dominated. the the news was watergate and you have this new group of congress of people who come into congress who were come to the owners the watergate babies who represent a sea change in the party and one of the things that it's often depicted because they were called the watergate babies that they were against nixon and the republicans, but actually what they wanted was change within the democratic party. they saw the democratic party to be holding to unions to focus on big government and they wanted change and this is representatively people like gary hart tim worth even there's an a whole sort of slew of new of new candidates who come in they're joined later by people like al gore and then the state

level like bill clinton, but they really stand for kind of a change in the parties direction and party structure the other big thing that happens in 197 around 1974 is the session and there's a real struggle amongst the within the democratic party of educating new solutions to address these larger problems of of the economy and wanting to find new ways to kind of address the problems of the economy and the who be they become the watergate babies who then be who are then known as the atari democrats because of their their love of the tech industry and post industrial growth is a sort of solution to the party problems. so the 1984 election reagan versus mondale reagan wins 49 states. the democratic party was looking to change and how did it change? well one of the key ways it changed and there have been discussion sort of going forward but the 1984 election and this landslide defeat is a sort of wake-up call and a group of democrats come together from a couple of different places one

of the group from from congress and another is a group of moderate democratic governors, especially from the south like chuck robb of virginia who sort of see that the party needs to shift its direction and they form what is what they comes to me on the democratic leadership council the dlc. and what did the dlc stand for the dlc was believe? d idea that mark free market could was the best means to bring about opportunity for for people? so one of what the things i argue in my book, is that the dlc believed in using sort of private sector means to achieve traditional liberal goals, so they still democrats they still believe in kind of traditional ideas that it's that there's needs to you need to help people create a quality, but they thought they want new means to do that. they also believe that the democratic party had become too beholden to special interest

groups, especially to the labor movement. and so they wanted to move both the economy away from a more kind of manufacturing-based economy, which would be a more union oriented economy, but also the democratic party away from it's it's strong focus on these kind of special interests especial interest groups. so really out there, they're electoral strategy was really focused on targeting moderate suburbanites who had been drifting towards the republican party in the last previous election cycle, so finding a way to kind of recapture those those that who they saw as critical voters was bill clinton involved in the dlc as governor of arkansas. he was so he was an early member one of the founding members, but he really comes to the forefront as a as a major player in the dlc after 1988. so the other key thing for and for the dlc rights after election and do caucuses yet again historic defeat or his wasn't quite as bad as it wasn't quite as bad as mondale. so we did a little he did better, but there's a sense of soul searching and a sense of really looking that there needs

to be something something different and so the dlc comes to tap bill clinton as it's kind of that as someone to both lead it to be it's new. it's new leader and and he takes on this role as a mechanism to kind of launch his own career international office and he's someone who really shares their philosophy and views, but also shapes it in many ways his third way his third way, so this is early he the third way term doesn't really come into being so the late 90s, but there that's really what they're thinking is that there needs to be a kind of alternative that can binds kind of using more traditional concert will be considered conservative means to achieve liberal and so that you can kind of find a synthesis and alternative and bill clinton have been testing out a lot of these things especially around issues of economic development. in arkansas in the 1980s, and he he is the the dlc sort of aligns the dlc the other thing about bill clinton that is really critical to the dlc itself.

6 itself success is given his southern and sort of populist demeanor, but he's able to target a lot of different kinds of voters, so he's able to kind of take what was dlc policy and platform but presented in a much more and widely appeal of it widely accessible set of terminologies and that really leads to both his success and their success and welcome to book tv and our coverage of the tucson book festival lily geisler is a professor at clairemont mckenna in california, and she is the author of left behind the democrats failed attempt to solve in equality. and this is a call in program. we're talking about the democratic party past present and future. we want to from you especially democrats. get your view on this 202 is the area code 748-8200 for those of you in the east and central time zones 2 0 2 7 4 8 8 2 0 1 if you live in the mountain in pacific time zones, and if you want to

send a text message about the democratic party to professor geisler 202, 748-8903. please include your first name and your city if you would some of the things we talked about with the dlc. well, first of what are three? points that the dlc espoused so one was the idea of for less less government so that you that you you can expand opportunity not government was one of their their critical taglines that also you could use use market principles and both in terms of kind of growing the economy, but also applying what tools of the market to make government itself more efficient and also a belief in kind of in opportunity for all but also individual responsibility for people people just take certain action. and those become three kind of key guidelines of the d lc say one thing that's also if i don't

mean to jump ahead but in your questions, i think another thing of the differences of sort of today versus versus the dlc of the past by dividing was also an early an early member of the dlc and they actually don't they don't they choose not to support him in the 1988 election and support al gore instead for one reason that he wasn't ideological. he was sort of his ideology was a little bit more muddled hard to figure out he was more of a democrat democrat. whereas bill clinton was someone who's actually very ideological who believed fundamentally believed in these ideas and a lot of what the dlc was trying to do was actually to shape shape the electoral strategy at the democratic party, but also to shake reshape theology of the party to make it much more focused on those types, so for the very liberal members of the democratic party back, then what we would call progressives today. what was their critique of the dlc? well, they called it and jesse had many choice words. probably captured on c-span.

um, but of really being really frustrated, i mean one of them was that there was an old it was a southern voice network because it was primarily white southern men. another critical one is that they're the democrat he called them the democrats of the leisure class and that it was this idea that it was sort of trying to promote more upper middle class and upper class corporate interests and not really standing for what the democratic parties traditional base traditional base and values what there was a fear both that it was trying to marginalize labor from having us say, but also also other marginalized groups and a particularly people of color and instead of strategy that of kind of trying to win elections and having policy that focus on extending the face with within marginalized communities. it was much more focused on these efforts to kind of tailor policy towards a more upper middle class suburban voter and the boat was their response to the electoral success that the

dlc saw in the 1990s. so this becomes really challenging and i think especially hers of republican of the republican domination it becomes really difficult to challenge the dl the dlc because they have a strategy so many people are critical and especially just someone like jesse jackson, especially after bill clinton as a famous sister soldier moment. they come up publicly critical but ultimately end up supporting bill clinton because they really see it as the only chance that it's better to it's better to have the have a democratic office and have a republican like another four years and this becomes a kind of critical bargain in many ways. i think for many more progressive people in the democratic party, and so i think to go back to your initial question about sort of the direction of the party and where it's going this actually ends up sort of obscuring some of these other tensions in the party's

direction more towards bill clinton, but that tensions that i think are very much emerging today, but i've been there really since the eighth and i in early 90s now, there's one gentleman that we haven't talked about who was very involved in the democratic leadership council. l from who is al from al from is a fascinating and really impressive figure? who was he he himself was a democratic a congressional staffer who worked his way and throughout the 70s and early 80s and various different positions. he was actually particularly posted in the chief of staff of gillis long. who was then the head of the democratic the customer had a caucus and he becomes the leader of the dls of the dlc. it's executive record and the midnight in the mid 80s and it works in hand in hand with bill clinton to kind of craft to craft it the dlc's message. but also the democratic party's message and one thing that's fasting in the dlc and i think he's a very serious of a serious person who believes an ideas who

believes and i think one thing about the dlc in their focus on markets and corporate issues is not that they were trying to make a lot of money, but they actually believe fundamentally believe that this was a better way to help people and one thing about the dlc too that they hold a term they come to hold a tremendous amount of power in the late the late 80s and early through the 90s, but it's a very small organization. so it's mostly unlike a kind of big grassroots or even like the democratic national committee. it's it's primarily made up of politicians themselves. and so it's it's really only about a couple thousand people but at its height, but they come to hold to really reshape the party and i think the other piece of the dlc's power is that bill clinton in 1982 selects al gore to be his running mate. who's another dl founding dlc member and so that really solidifies this idea of like this is the new direction of the party. so instead of taking the the usual approach of picking a vice

president who will represent another wing of the party to try to win over voters. they actually double down on the dlc booklet is a double down the kind of dlc message such to get elected. professor geisberg when you espouse some of their principles it sounds like republicans in a sense. yeah, and that was one thing i actually in my book. so i think often people think of the dlc as just other as republicans light as often what other other democrats called them. i don't think that that's i think there is actually a critical difference between the dlc style of democrat and and the republican party. they did not support everything. they did not support reagan. they thought a lot of what reagan was doing was was horrible, especially the way it was. affecting low-income and poor all especially for people of color and wanted to find a different approach and i think really believed that this would be that that focusing on the market and the private sector would be a way to to fundamentally help people in a

different and move the country in a different direction. okay. let's go to the present and the title of your book left behind the democrats failed attempt to solve inequality. where'd you come up with the title? and why well the title that title the first part of the title comes from the language actually of bill clinton and many democrats have talked a lot about people who are being left behind. and community for being left behind and the ways that they could use the new economy of tech trade and finance to help those people become part of the new economy and make them not left behind. so that's one part of the title. the other part is about leaving the left of the democratic party behind in the effort to kind of win win success and and then the sub go home if we do a full explication of the title is is about the the types of programs that the democratic the democrats on the new democrats

espouse and promote before office. and then what cuts implemented in office and it's a huge that i look at all these different types of programs that are there to help poor people using using the market. so so the book looks at things like empowerment zones charter schools mixed income housing to replace public housing closing the digital divide a huge part is on microphone micro enterprise and micro finance the community development banking. so all of these different efforts kind of use some use market oriented means to address poverty and equality. the book is left behind the democrats failed attempt to solve inequality. lily geismarck is the author and donald in detroit. you are the first call up for her on book tv. go ahead. we're listening. yes, my name is donna jackson. i'm in michigan, i'm retired so i get the chance to look at c-span all the time my comment is this the democrats will probably lose and we'll never hold office again because of the

way the republicans party has structured itself to for the voting right? they don't like the vote then they get to throw them away democrats have a problem that we live in cities and we do not live in in rule areas per se and so the republicans have more legislatures and and office around the country. this is why they're doing all these heinous things to us. and unfortunately, we'll buy your book our planet read it, but that's my comment. it's not necessarily a question because i see the right. we'll tell you what we're gonna we're gonna have her we're gonna have her address that now lily geismar is your book at all about what the republican party is. well, i think one of the things is i look at the reaction the democrats reaction, but i think to the caller's great important point. is that one of the things that the democratic leadership council focus on and push the democratic party to focus on was

winning was winning national elections and especially presidential winning the presidency and what this did is created a real vacuum at the state and local level, which republicans have really taken advantage of over the last several years. so i think one of the critical things that has happened is the college absolutely right that the republicans have been really effective at the working legislation both of the state and local level. and so i think one of the really critical lessons of that is for the democratic party to do more at the state and local level and for people to get out and focus on state and local elections because critical issues of democracy are being are being addressed there. don is calling in from glen burnie, maryland, don, please go ahead. yeah, good evening. yeah, what do you what? opinion on a future of the progressive wing of the party. and what about bernie sanders is uh, do you bernie running again are in the future and why is the

age of yes. done. what is your opinion of the progressive wing of the party and do uc bernie sanders running again in the future? future? and would you like that? yes. i'll think it's very viable, you know, but i think that the message and i think they just have a bad label it with the all the negativity about socialism and communism. i mean, that's what i think hurts them. but overall, you know, i think it'd be better for the country if it could get some progressive our candidates to run and win, but i definitely thank you don. let's hear from lily geisler now, i think that one of the things that's happened is that because of the kind of new

democrat approach and the kind of clinton eras power over the democratic party for so long and both in terms of policy and strategy is it really crowded out progressive voices, but one thing that's happened since i think especially since 2015 but even starting in 2011 with the occupy movement is many many people from from a wide different why different why the different constituencies feeling really fed up with the democrats and saying that you know, there has to be other approaches another answers. i think that's the wing is really has really been resurgent in a way that's been really effective. i don't know necessarily if standards will run again, and i think one of the issues is his age, but finding another candidate who can really fill in and not in that way and i think i think i think getting beyond some of the questions of the labeling but actually looking at the policies that there are lots of things that progressive candidates in the united states at the national at the state and the local level of an offering that have been really powerful speaking to a lot of different people but politics is also pragmatic there has to be

electoralex success. it's true. it is true. and that's i think that's it. that is a heart. it's a it's a fascinating thing and it's amazing to me. i'm fascinated with that that sanders has done as well if he has because you think he's a he's a he wouldn't have been the first person. i think if you were a political consultant to think would be a really front running of presidential candidate. our third caller is named don. i don't know if you heard that but we had three dumps in a row fallon. tana don, go ahead. all right like to have you do book reviews on laptop from hell and red-handed. i think they pertain to the democratic party. don thank you very much book tv has covered both of those books peter schweikert and miranda devine and miranda devine has aired already peter schweikert has not aired yet, but will be airing in the near future.

so thank you for that advice. we appreciate it mary astoria, ohio mary you're on with author lily geisler. we're talking about the future of the democratic party. yes very from foster, ohio. i wonder if you could tell me a little bit about. some mary you gotta turn down that tv and just talk in phone. we're listening. thank you. okay, i'll turn it down. i mean, okay. so um, i i mentioned that i was a republican so i was probably about 60, but i i learned my parents to observe and to analyze politics and these news that today just want to win. and i wonder if you could come in on that because it's really important that the both parties because of what they can and not

try to each other out. and well, i think there are two two parts of that. i mean one is an issue of what happens after you win and paul what policies get passed and we elect our officials so that they will pass policy that are in our interest and i think when you have parties who are only focusing on winning it actually that also leaves many americans behind because you don't have you don't have politicians who are fighting for their for their interests. i think another critical issue has been just the increase in polarization and lack of bipartisans cooperation. so actually the 90s are an era where you start to see this increased polarization emerged, but there was more but more bipartisan cooperation in the 90s on on many critical issues and for better or for worse, but i think that that has sort of gone that has really gone away and as affected i think in the focus on winning some of these other kinds of real questions of help. i've actually helping many americans and feel like their

voices are being represented in her little geismar one of the things you talk about in your book left behind is that with this market oriented approach to problems some dedicated government funding has gone away and has been picked up by foundations and ngos etc. really key part of what happens i think because of the when you focus on the efforts of the private sector to do the work of government, you are actually giving over the rules and responsibilities of government to those issues. so a key place of thinking this is charter schools, which are technically publicly are public, but they're often run by by nonprofits funded by foundation and that actually removes a lot of democratic accountability out that voters voters don't you don't vote in the gate foundation to to do the work of government and you don't have a say in what you can't hold them accountable and say i don't agree with that because you don't even like them and so it takes away that that really

powerful voice that that citizens and voters have and i think also it leaves away some of that transparency because a lot of those decisions are happening even behind further closed doors than what's going on on capitol hill. robert and stockton, california. good afternoon, robert. hello. i called because for many years until i was about 60. i was a democrat. and the last 10 years or so before trump, i was kind of indifferent but personally, i think the democratic party has switched completely and has become a party controlled by the elites. and have offered no one with really any. talent, i mean if you look at joe biden and the vice president my god what do you think of the people that the democratic party is offering to run our country?

well, i think i i think to. actually, robert's point is more to your sense of frustration with the party is a lot of the shift away from kind of more more focusing on post-industrial growth who that helps is actually many people who we've consider elites that it's helped. it's helped many corporations gain make money and made many many voters and many people who want. we're long to any democratic voters feel much more alienated from the party. so i think about it less in terms of the actual politicians then in terms of the policies that have been that have been put in place that have made many people feel just that the party's not really speaking for their interests. bob fort lauderdale, hi um, it's good afternoon. yeah. i'm a lifelong democrat the first election i voted and was 1972 voted for a shirley shows them in the primary and then i voted from the governor in the general election some kind of on the left side of the party.

how do we get to the point where we do solve the inequality issue? it's my question. thank you. okay. thank you, sir. thank you, and and you are post voted even before the watergate baby. so you have a longstanding longstandard party. um the i think that one of the the really i think they're a lot there are important ways. these are policy often times policy problems and their policy solutions. i think many of them have to do with kind of restructuring and recommitting to a social the social welfare state and and restore the social safety net so that people don't don't feel constantly vulnerable and insecure and have a sense of real equality. i think there are ways of doing more government regulation of corporations that there's not the inequity in pay where you have ceos making a large amount of money in their workers not even having having to work several jobs even to just stay afloat. finally. i think another really important way is to go to pull through the power of the labor movement and

that's one thing that there's been this this kind of alienation and and marginalization of labor's voice and power by the democrats in the three more broadly and they the labor movement really fights were working people and to get help for gain living wages benefits securities first workers. i think making labor more central is a way to address fundamental problems of inequality professor. geismer. what's the clinton's reputation in the democratic party today? well, i think it's an interesting they no longer have the same. i think the fact that bill clinton was not a marquis speaker at the 2020 convention is is a sign of the party moving in a shift as shift in a different direction in some capacity or leaving behind leaving maybe leaving them slightly behind but i think that they're policies have still had a stay and a sway and i i think also that the the particular as as came up that democratician went elections and each be pragmatic and the particular

clinton approach has is one that is quite pragmatic to winning elections. so i think oftentimes especially in this moment right now of fear of the democrats moving the losing the midterms that there's a there is a real potential that they'll go back to the democratic that clinton playbook. the only guy smur is the author of left behind the democrats failed attempt to solve inequality. she's been our guest on book oh, thank you so much it. was well book tv's coverage of the tucson book festival continues now, it's an author discussion on current affairs. david k. johnston who will be on our call-in program after this panel along with alexander. vindman max chaffin some other authors. here it is. lab, hey everyone. welcome to the 2022 tucson festival books here at the university of arizona -- the pac-10 tournament, arizona wildcats.

i please note that as guests of the university of arizona. we are following the university protocols regarding masking. and we ask that you remain masked for the entirety of this session. i'm jim mintzel executive editor of the tucson weekly and this panel is will we ever be the same it's going to go for an hour. please save your questions for the panelists until after all of them have spoken and we'll have about 15 or 20 minutes at the end for you to line up at the microphones with any questions you might have and i'm sure actually you'll have plenty the festival organizers thank cspan and book tv for sponsoring this location and the shentizer family gerald and barbara goldberg cindy and bill rainey phil keigel and for sponsoring the upcoming discussion, make sure to stop by the book sales area and author signing after the session book sales at the festival help support the cost of the festival as well as local

literary programs. you can also help keep this event free and open to everyone by becoming a friend of the festival or sponsor of the 2022 festival. please stop by the friends booth. or go online to tucson festival of books.org. and as we begin, please silence your cell phones. i i actually couldn't be more honored to be sitting next to these four gentlemen on stage here. we have lieutenant colonel alexander vindman. he's the author of here right matters, which tells his story of being the whistleblower on what president trump called a perfect phone call with ukrainian president. zelensky colonel vinman. i want to say on behalf of everyone in the room here how

devastating it is to see what's happening in ukraine right now. we also have pulitzer prize winning investigative journalists, david k johnston a lion in the field of reporting. he has written about everything from police misconduct to tax policy and along the way he's followed the career of donald trump for decades his latest book the big cheat how donald trump fleece america and enriched himself and his family. okay. next to me here. we have another pulitzer prize winner with former white house, washington post white house bureau chief and current deputy national editor phil rucker. author of i alone can fix it donald j.

trump's catastrophic final year which examines the trump's response to the covid pandemic among other topics of that final year. and finally we have max chafkin features editor and tech reporter at bloomberg business week was authored the contrarian peter keel and silicon valley's pursuit of power. it is indeed an honor to sit here with this crew. and i'm sorry we only have an hour because i feel like we could do an hour or more with each of them alexander. i want to start again by saying. russian invasion of ukraine has been simply horrifying to watch and i realized this is a question that could take up our entire hour. but can you give a little bit of perspective about what's happening there and and how we got there? alrighty then. so in the year 967 not just there is something to be said about the fact that the ukrainians have been struggling

for their independence for for a long long time and subject to russian and soviet dominance and although they achieved their independence in 1991. russia has been trying call that back. so that's probably the most important factor here, but the confrontation is also between east and west between democracy and authoritarianism and and where we fell short to a certain extent is we had a lot of wishful thinking about the relationship with russia putin is a kgb case officer. he fed on that kind of the almost primal type motions on hopes and fears. there were hopes that we would be able to bring russia into the modern world and to be a thriving democracy part of western western civilization and fears of a devolution that relationship with a nuclear power and he effectively deterred us from protecting our interests and protecting our values over the course of two

decades. ultimately that if we were heading slowly towards the confrontation where russia was increasingly opportunistic and increasingly doubling down and it's provocative actions against us interests. we lurched forward under the previous administration of donald trump because there were i'm many efforts intentional or not that undermined our your atlantic alliance so our cohesion with nato domestically hyperpolarizations made us seem weak and distracted and as soon as donald trump was voted out and frankly, you know, just on the heels of january 6th is when the russians started to build up for this particular operation. so that's why that's why there's a clear linkage between donald trump's administration and the fact that we came to a head with this major war between the largest country in the world in the largest country in europe. now, of course we weren't the

only ones that were mistaken about how to manage putin putin was deeply mistaken about the fight. he was picking with ukraine believing that ukraine wasn't a legitimate country didn't have a right to exist and thinking that he would just be able to roll in there remove the regime and replace it with the puppet government and roll out and not have any consequences. obviously those count those were some you know fatally flawed potentially fatality flawed assumptions. and this is this is now turning into what will likely be a protracted war especially if the us decides to fall back on our roots and you know attempt to sit it out like we did for the first several years of world war one world war two instead of traditionally kind of a reluctant ally reluctant partner and instead of maybe helping ukraine in a more robust way and this conflict because the longer

this continues the greater the chance that that through incrementalism through whatever putin's preferences for doubling down we head towards a confrontation that actually does draw the us in so i think we're um, what's absolutely clear is that putin is not going to be able to achieve his fundamental objectives with regards to ukraine. he's going to bear some tragically difficult costs for himself for his regime and for the russian population. there's going to be an immense amount of suffering in ukraine, but ukraine will emerge as a sovereign independent state. so this is that they will succeed in that struggle if it might look different than it does now on the russians certainly are going to try to attempt to hold on to some territorial gains, but it's going to be a sovereign independent state and increasingly looks like it'll be a member of the european union at some point. so that's what we have to look forward to.

phone call between trump and president zelinski when trump was holding up the military aid in order to force zelinsky to open up an investigation into joe biden and and this was of course what led you to file that report that led to the first trump impeachment that phone call followed a lot of hinky behavior as you as you talk about your book by the trump administration regards to the delivery of arms and and other relations with ukraine talk about what went into your decision to blow the whistle. sure, so i should point out that maybe out of the like 12 chapters in the book only about three of them touch on three or four of them touch on. on trump. he's kind of like the foil in the book. in fact, it's mainly a story about why and and how so why of course i felt this was a threat to us democracy. i thought the president was

attempting to steal an election or you know, certainly cheat. and i certainly acutely felt the dangers to us national security interest in that how this would embolden vladimir putin and taking us to where we are now and the how of the book is basically my upbringing my family story coming here as a refugee the decades of military service frankly what i learned from my my parents where i learned from military service serving combat serving in some pretty awesome and unique assignments. but with regards to you know this. there is there should be an absolute clarity about how trump's phone call and trump's machinations fed into this. i mean were they the the determining factor for russia's invasion? that's hard to say, but it certainly we can ukraine weaken the relationship between the us and ukraine and presented an

opportunity for our from larry putin's perspective an opportunity that the us was not going to get involved. ukraine was radioactive after they're ukraine scandal and after trump's ukrainian scandal and it also was a an opportunity for us to really help zelinsky harden himself against an offensive that we missed and we lost two and a half years in helping ukraine kind of advance become too big to fail to a certain extent or too big to attack at least and that's that's the the role of trump all the way through. the hours before and after this war started because as we all know he was cheerleading and talking about how brilliant putin was as putin was unleashing his war machine to massacre ukrainian civilians. now he's trying to walk back like he does so many times but him and his and you know his

trumper gop followers really waited into what what amounts to an amish. i mean if somebody was looking to ambush president trump, that's that's what he walked into with this because the american public is in no way supportive of vladimir putin or his belligerence or as aggression against ukraine and he is he's clearly at odds even with his, you know, the large portion of his base. and he's going to try to do what he always does lie in obfuscate to try to are you know we recreate reality in his own image and david as someone who has covered trump for decades. i don't imagine his efforts to shakedown president zelensky came as any surprise to you. you're a new book is all about the crooked insider dealings of the trump administration and how he used the office to enrich himself and his family despite this and the other scandals of his presidency. he still manages to control the base of the republican party to the point where you can direct a mob to attack congress and republican lawmakers just shrug

it off or pretended. it was nancy pelosi's fault or whatever. and if republicans do object we see as with representative lynn cheney their ostracized from the republican party, but but in your book you make the point that the january 6 insurrection was actually an example of trump's incompetence. can you expand on that? well, it was a clown show insurrection run by people. who can you hear me in the back? okay. it's a clown show insurrection by people who you know, really didn't know what they were doing. foul and evil is there intent was to kill people and to take down our government and but that's because donald is not a strategic thinker. he goes from you know item to item as his emotions and immediate opportunities arise without regard to long-term thinking about that. his hold on the american people i think can be explained by two fundamental things. in his 2015 announcement of

candidacy, which wasn't his first. he peeled back the veneer of the civil rights movement. and gave permission to people who wanted to to use slurs and be openly racist and otherwise bigots to other people. and secondly in 2018 90% of americans made less money than in 1973. basically, they only got 50 weeks of income. plus very few people had pensions anymore health care costs went through the roof. and for every dollar of equity people added in their homes, they took on $2 of debt. so there are millions of people who they're not policy wonks. they don't understand why what's going to on why they are worse off or no better than dad and grandpa. but they're looking for someone to explain it and donald comes along by the way using throughout his campaign a lot of material for my economics books. freedom he just watched me on tv

reducing him to one lines. and you know, they he says i alone can save you the the line that alex very smartly, you know glommed onto. and and people who don't understand worsening economic conditions tend to turn to people like that. phil on the subject of uncomfortable but on the subject of incompetence and and this is like the bible of incompetence right here. it's it's a very thick but quick read. you're you're looking at the mismanagement of the covid outbreak among other things in this book and and it seems like well trump could bully and manipulate a lot of people he couldn't do the same to this deadly virus. do you think that's what cost him that second term? hmm. a good question. let me start by saying i don't actually think he was a shoe in

for re-election before covid, you know, the economy was going well trump looked like he was headed for a big win and yet when you drill down and look at the polling numbers at the beginning of the year 2020, he was still underwater fewer than 50% of americans approved of his performance in office a lot. obviously depended on who the democrats would nominate as their standard bear and presidential nominee, but there was no sure bet that trump was going to win reelection. he was deeply polarizing and and not popular with the majority of the country. but of course his numbers worsened when covid arrived and it's because the pandemic for so many americans was a presentation every day of government incompetence. incompetence from the president and from his cabinet members in terms of protecting americans implementing a testing program that would work providing clear guidance to the country about what to do and what not to do, but it was also an incompetence

from the president himself when he showed he didn't really understand the science when he told everybody and i was in a briefing room that day that you should try injecting bleach into your body because it could be a cure and he looks over at the government scientists off to the side for approval and you could see dr. burks just like not knowing what to do. i mean it was a really crazy moment, but you know, he just showed little care for humanity and for the survival of the people that he was elected to lead and he was all about himself and getting my numbers down meaning the numbers of cases and the numbers of deaths in the united states and i think as the summer boron and polling showed this focus group interview showed this i spent some time out on the campaign trail and when i talked to voters, they told me this people were exhausted by the chaos by the incompetence by the corruption every single day was a new drama in washington and in

in joe biden, they saw somebody who kind of had a steady hand and some experience and at least would would do away with the chaos and the drama, you know, i i you could look at the at the way things are going right now and wonder whether biden is really done away with all the chaos because there's still a little bit of that in washington, but nevertheless, i think i think trump's response to covid did him in but i think it was broader than that. i think it was an overall exhaustion with the chaos of government and the inability to competently lead the people that he was elected to serve and protect. and and max peter thiel is in a household name, but he's certainly well known among people who follow the silicon valley news. he's a billionaire. he made a fortune with companies like paypal he worst trump and spoke at the republican national convention in 2016. he's had some pretty unusual political views regarding the advantages of monarchies and such. can you talk a little bit about who peter thiel is and what he's now doing in politics? yeah.

sure. so, um, you know, talking about this. the craziness of the of the trump period and and you know, the there was this institution that was created that that made trump i would argue possible and and that institution was basically facebook and and the sort of silicon valley, you know media and business infrastructure and and peter thiel is very much responsible for that. he's the first investor in facebook. really the first person who saw mark zuckerberg as as like a viable businessman which of course is very smart buddy, buddy. also has these extremely extremely out there political beliefs including as you you know, he's a bit of arterian he also, you know in favors this kind of like extreme, you know libertarian approach to information where facebook, you know, as we remember, you know, it wasn't just that trump was talking about injecting bleach,

but but there were, you know, huge parts of the media ecosystem that were amplifying that and convincing other people that that was a good idea and i think teel a lot to do with that, you know money creates a center of gravity. so like teal by being this very prolific donor. i think he's the biggest donor in this in the current cycle and who's somebody who thinks that for instance the election was stolen in 2020, you know that that we all overreacted to covid, you know, and so on that that pulls politicians towards him and and we're seeing this rise of sort of like trump-like politicians one of whom is running for senate here in arizona his lake masters there jd vance and there's a bunch of many of them are are raising money for teal and and they're a lot like trump ideologically, although there are a lot more, you know competent than trump and they're a lot more reliable than trump. so in some ways that, you know

the success of the trump movement could be even could be more extreme but also more competent than the than the original and and you dig into one of the anecdotes in your book that that teal is is well known for which is this whole kogan lawsuit that drove gawker out of business and that he was secretly bankrolling and until it emerged that he was can you talk a little bit about you know, what that means for for press freedom, really and and what what god him behind hulk hogan in the first but yeah, i mean, i always feel weird a little weird talking about this because of course there there are journalists under just you know, a lot more stress and and who are really putting their lives on the line. i mean even right now and ukraine, but but what teal did is he bankrolled this lawsuit that whole kogue in the wrestler? who's real name is terry bella

and it was a it's very toddry it he was a sex tape that gawker published and hogan sued gawker for invasion of privacy and peter thiel secretly paid hogan's legal bills. and the reason he did that as he explained when this all came out in 2016 was because gawker had out at him as gay basically 10 years or earlier and then had written a series. this was unsaid but gawker had also been very critical of teal and teal's. and and the thing about this that that makes it difficult and i would argue kind of insidious is that it's so you can argue about whether about gawker right gawker did not behave in in the best way and and and journalists and one of the things about free speech, right is that you sort of have to be okay with it even when you don't agree with it, but but what this did is it creates like a chilling effect where it made of course my life more difficult trying to write this book because every source i would talk to sort of like afraid that like if they say something negative, you know,

maybe peter teal secretly. sue them 10 years later. um, but but of course any billionaire can can employ this and and there's no reason why you know another wealthy person could come after a journalist, you know down the road and we're seeing it happening. we just saw this lawsuit that sarah palin brought against the new york times the times prevailed but it's a lot of the same lawyers who are involved in the hogan litigation and i think we're gonna see this pattern again and again, it has this kind of insidious effect on freedom on free speech where journalists suddenly are thinking just a little bit in the back of their minds about the risk, and i think that's really that's really awful and and david trump obviously frequently complained about his press coverage. you know, we're all american enemies of the american people etc, and he wanted to be the ability to punish the press when they wrote things that he didn't like and as we as max mentioned sarah palin's recent libel suit

against the times failed, but it's late reported that charles harder the attorney for a whole kogan was among those in the courthouse taking notes, and we talked yesterday and you mentioned there's there's a big effort of foot to overturn times versus sullivan the landmark us supreme court case it says the threshold for libel. can you talk a little bit about that? well, i'm very concerned that we're moving into an age when you are not going to get reporting that is anything other than that's what i want to see printed about me and donald. it was very explicit and clear that he said you shouldn't be allowed to write stories about me that i don't approve of and it's not a new view for him to have helped. if we will not have vigorous coverage and frankly, i don't think we have nearly as vigorous coverage as we should okay vigorous coverage of political leaders business institutions business leaders. if we see the loss of the

sullivan protection and sullivan by the way, wasn't a news story was an advertisement in the new york times in 1964 that contained a factual error. factual errors are going to happen. the issues should be that i think the current standard actual malice. you knew this wasn't true or you acted with such reckless disregard for the truth that it's the equivalent of knowing it wasn't true and therefore you the writer and publication can be held liable. i think that's the correct standard here are some people gonna get hurt along the way sure i can cite lots of articles written about me that are nonsense in places like the national review, they're non-factual, but you know, i'm here didn't hurt me and we if we don't defend all the elements of the first amendment including especially the right. to assemble peaceably and petition the government for a redress of our grievances notice. it doesn't say the government

has to respond to your petition. um, then we will lose the fundamental liberties on which this the second american republic is based. and alexander you mentioned in the book you had to deal with fake stories from rudy giuliani and trump regarding ukraine the claim that ukraine was behind the hacking of dnc computers and other similar nonsense. can you talk about how that affected the actions of the national security council? sure, so initially that was outside of the official channels and we ignored them maybe to our detriment but we decided consciously that these are this was politics. this is the way politics are going to was going to play out in the trump administration and we kept our business professional we engaged with the ukrainian government when they solicited feedback on what this all means, what is what is our giuliani's effort to conduct a

to compel and investigation? what does that mean for the bilateral relationship? we said we stuck to our line this is not official policy you continue to work with us, but clearly there were some other calculations. there were there were meetings between rudy giuliani and the current chief of staff for the president of ukraine, and they had to make some tough decisions and ultimately frankly. what ended up playing out is. we were only about 48 hours away from an investigation being announced. i think president zelinsky did the best he could to hold out and he was we tried he tried to adhere to a principled line, which was conducting a transparent investigation based on evidence that the us provided but he was two days away from from actually giving president trump what he wanted which is just the announcement of investigation. what prevented that was the fact that my my concerns ended up

becoming the driving force behind a congressional investigation that resulted in two two or three house committees launching a investigation to the hold on security systems on september 11th, and that preempted this. september 13th conversation between president zelensky and fried zakaria in which this investigation was supposed to be announced. so we tried to we did the best we could to kind of play by the rules. maybe there was a little bit of bearing our head in the sand but there was really i mean the best we could do was just to run government the way we could there was. where i guess we we sometimes forget, is that the constitution probably wasn't as made to guardrail against the president. yes. there's a an opportunity to potentially impeach the president for wrongdoing but not

a president that consistently continuously looks for ways to enrun around the constitution. we in certain ways. we're lucky that we had a incompetent president competent malicious president next time that's not going to be the case. so i think it's the onus is on us the electorate to make sure we don't elect people like that. there are plenty of indicators. i think beforehand that of who he was and certainly plenty of smoke and mirrors and he was making the right kinds of appeals to grievances. but there's some some fundamental. some fundamental issues, i guess some of them are very very difficult to handle on the information landscape and how propagandists could manipulate that demigogs could do that but there was also the fundamental grievance of being left behind and that's where politicians we have an obligation to elect politicians with some creativity

some for foresight and help our segment large swallows about population not feel left behind and make sure that you know government for the people. and and phil, you know. that kind of brings us to the weird conspiracy theories that we see so much of these days, you know, whether they're about jewish space lasers or italian satellites flipping election results, and we had a lot of that here in arizona with the so called audit of the presidential election in maricopa county, which was a clown show of epic proportions. it's almost like we had this avalanche a bs as reporters that we have to deal with these days and how do you handle whether to debunk these stories or just ignore them? because it seems like debunking becomes a full-time job because people can led the zone with bs faster than you can explain that. it's not true. you know, this is one of the most important challenges we have as journalists right now, and i'd say it's an obligation for journalists right now. we can't ignore these conspiracy

theories because if they're out there if you know millions of americans believe them then it's our duty to ferret it out and help people understand. what's true. and what's not true and separate fact from fiction. there's so much fiction in the world today that that we need to do better sifting through that and providing citizens the tools that they need to be able to you know, synthesize what they're seeing out there and to sift through it all for themselves because you all have all kinds of stuff popping up on your facebook feeds and and we need to do a better job of helping you understand. what's real and what's not real and i i take pleasure and sharing this with you guys at the washington post just in the last couple of weeks. we've announced a new expansion. we're creating a democracy desk as part of our national team. yeah, and there's a there's a local component to that. we're going to be hiring a reporter in arizona who will be based in arizona to chronicle

the assault on voting rights here to write about. yeah. it's a big investment and to be on the ground doing investigative reporting into what is going on in phoenix and around the state with you know, part is an actor is trying to limit people's access to the polls with disenfranchisement of voters, especially voters of color and with the spread of misinformation and disinformation throughout the ecosystem and especially in a battleground state like this. we're also going to have reporters in georgia and in the upper midwest which we see these as three sort of critical places right now for the assault on voting and you know, there's another important piece of this and that's the work that we do but other number of other news organizations are doing to fact check and it's not just fact-checking politicians and what they say in their speeches, but it's trying to surface the truth when we can and looking at theories that are spreading

through political social media through right-wing and if and if something is false through left-wing as well media channels and organisms to to root out where these lies come from who's funding them who's pushing them who's believing them and trying again to give citizens the tools that they need to understand what the truth is. well this being arizona you may need a dozen reporters. we're on the ground. we're here we're gonna start with one and by the way, it's not it's not just one person's job. we have a number of reporters really skilled investigative reporters in washington who are also going to be looking at what's happening here in arizona, but we think it's really essential. to have somebody on the ground here who can build sources and make connections in both political parties in this state to help us understand what's happening here because it's a it's a hot and active story and it's only going to intensify in this midterm election and then of course in the big the big prize in 2024, thoughts on that.

i mean in the old days, i'd cover a city council meeting and and we'd talk about, you know, some people didn't want to raise the cost of the pottery classes and some people did want to raise the cost of the pottery classes, but nobody had to explain that they weren't sacrificing children in the back room. the the the just like i said the the way it is just everywhere these days the flooding the flooding zone. well what phil just described as part of the critical need in journalism to look at structures and how things work not just stories that are all over the place. and to provide some create a tapestry out of threads. i don't know what we do with this conspiracy stuff, and i don't really know how deep and widespread it is we're going to learn a lot about this in the november elections by who turns out to vote. but we do need to recognize that even if people who believe these things won't ever listen to us

don't care. it's our duty to explain that these things are nonsense. and to his best we can build an accurate reliable verifiable public record. of the kind of conduct that's going on. max you mentioned earlier. we do have the chief operating officer of teal capital blake masters running for the us senate here in arizona with with teal's financial backing and i what what is teal after as he tries to build this political power from what you've been able to clean? well, i mean, i think the two things i mean, you know teal is money basically teal is a very successful investor and he's somebody who is like like a lot of these people is, you know, good at making bets on various things. when i was working the book, i think he's basically a lot like the the koch brothers in the

sense that you know coke industries. is this like industrial conglomerate that you know doing fossil fuels and stuff like that and it was feeding an ideological project that was basically designed to move the republican party and america in general towards sort of more libertarian. economic policies which you know in turn helps the this industrial conglomerate coke industries teal has kind of a post-industrial conglomerate and that is you know, facebook and you know this this portfolio of tech companies and what he's trying to do is not sort of move the republican party to you know, like libertarian economic policies. it's more like take over the the far right and he wants we basically wants to become the you know, the koch brothers of the far right or you know, some people would dispute that and say, you know the trumpest part of the republican party and the thing is i mean masters has not doing all that well and and it's not it's not at all clear that that he'll win because because

you know voters may reject it, but as i said earlier, you know the money and and the amount of money that teal has spent he's 10 million dollars on blake masters 10 million dollars on jd fans that sort of creates a pull that's gonna continue to pull candidates and and continue to some of the electorate in that direction. so so not clear where it's gonna go but it's it's certainly going to be an influence i'd say over the next decade or so. better earlier mentioned the the fact that that trump's incompetence tripped him up and that's a point you make in the in the book, but you also say that someone wore competent than trump could be the end of the american experiment with democracy. you also express some hope at the end of the book that we can recover from the damage to trump did to our government. well, what do you what do you think that will take? well, we have survived all sorts of things the british sacking washington a murderous president whose face is still on our $20 bills. military bases named for

traitors actual real traders who attacked the united states who still have their names on military bases and military roads. um, we're we're quite flexible we've gone an agrarian culture. from agrarian culture to an industrial culture to a digital society and we're on the cusp of the genetic age, which which will really change the country. the central thing that we have to do to have a better future is expand the franchise to universal voting in every way we can and recognize that the whole history of restricting. the franchise is white supremacy end of story it was white male supremacy, but after 80 years of struggled women got men devote them them the right to vote fortunately. and we have to decide that citizenship is something that involves a responsibility. that if you want to be a free people that you have to decide

that you're going to stand up for people you can't stand. you have to vote you have to make informed votes. and you have to you have to make an effort and if we do that, you know, we'll we'll come out of this on the other side. we're going to be permanently changed and the biggest worry we should have. is that someone who has the wannabe dictator ideas of donald trump who really does believe that no one else is qualified. he should run the whole world because we're all idiots. but imagine someone who works hard on like donald. who is really actually educated unlike donald who has management skill unlike donald who understands federal policy and from regulation to budgeting unlike donald and whose determined to be our dictator. they're a whole bunch of people waiting in the wings and they've now seen how as as alex pointed out. we don't have guardrails. we assume that this was an office of trust and people would

do what they thought was best. even chester arthur did he thought what he was fast. he came out of tammany hall and became president. not donald and so that's gone. we can't just assume this is an office of public trust and we also need to be aware that a lot of our problem right now is cowardly federal judges. who delayed acting on cases because they didn't want to address them. and we're we've got about 20 minutes left and folks want to start lining up to ask questions. oh, yeah, phil. absolutely, please please do ad but if yeah, folks want to start lining up. that's great. i just want to add one thing to what david said, which i thought was was spot on about people citizens across this country understanding that citizenship means voting and having informed votes, but we also need to get back to a time when our best and brightest saw public service as a worthy pursuit as an occupation for the finest people

in the country like too often in in campaigns for president, but also in campaigns for local offices, you don't have the smartest and the most honorable and the most sort of ethical well-meaning people running for office. and so your choices are not always the best choices and to repair our democracy i think is going to require a new generation of public servants who are committed to what it means to have the public's trust. and max i did have a final question for you, which is peter thiel a vampire or not. you know, i i feel like i'm disappointing people. what i answered this question. uh, no, i not a vampire in any literal sense that the rumor in case you're don't know what i'm talking about. there was there was sort of reports and then an episode of hbo's silicon valley that suggested that teal who had some interest in this kind of out there research involving blood transfusions where you take a

young mouse and you transfuse the blood into an older mouse that he might have tried this himself with with people. i spent a lot of time trying to figure out if maybe he had and and i don't i don't think so. but i do think there's a reason that that meme kind of took off and because i think there is something vampiric about the tech industry and you know, these these companies that basically have you know, we're talking about these like crazy conspiracy theories, right the jewish space lasers and one of the reasons that people believe in jewish space lasers is because tech companies are basically trying to keep you on their websites for for as long as possible and like nothing will keep you engaged like a crazy conspiracy theory or like, you know, yelling, um, you know with your conservative or liberal uncle or aunt or whatever and says, maybe like bringing the worst out of us and then creating this incredibly wealthy class of like super

billionaires who are worth more than you know, a hundred billion dollars. so i think there's something of empiric about that world although sadly or probably happily. actually, i should say not literally true. okay, let's let's take some questions from the audience here number one here. i don't know how i'm gonna to follow a vampire talk. so as you guys are talking i'm thinking about this ongoing debate that my dad and i have and the debate that we have. i think every other weekend because we always talk on sundays is that i think it's an exceptional time the more i learn about current events and read about history. i think it's exceptional. my dad is, you know, obviously much older than myself and he thinks that it's always been corrupt crazy chaotic, so i'm wondering what you guys think and if you can help me sort of settle this debate in terms of is an exceptional time or is this how it's always been right? does anyone want her dad's phone

number give him a call you wouldn't want his phone number if you could guess. i'm the democrat and he's the conservative republican. so that's that's how we sway. all right. said what you know, i i teach at the law school at syracuse and i tell all my students. there's enormous opportunities out there and things are coming that you can't see my great great grandchildren are probably going to go down to a store called capital d capital g designer jeans to engineer their kids how they're going to look what they're going to be like those are the kinds of things that are coming in the world. so it's always an exceptional time because human beings keep advancing and what we just don't want to lose sight of is that our country is an idea and that idea is if we enable the human spirit to be free in an system of ordered liberty what can human beings achieve?

all right. anybody else want to show you nobody? all right. here we go. um. you guys have talked a lot about mr. thiel and the others billionaire class that seemed to be thinking that they can do everything better than everybody else, but i'm curious if you guys can comment about all of these political machinations going on around the issues of when we have such a huge wealth gap going on that keeps only getting wider and at the same time dark money the citizens united case which suddenly allows foreign money to be snuck into our election system through all these 523 programs that can social groups that get networked out and tens of thousands of them created every year so that they're laundering money back and forth. how do we get back to actual democracy? from all of that david is also sounds like it's down your your alleyway. well, first of all go read my economics trilogy, which is

about this perfectly legal free lunch and the fine print. we need to recognize that all of these huge fortunes and the diminution of incomes for other people other result of government policies, and people may not have realized what they're doing. my goodness congress passed a law and they didn't didn't understand what it did. but they're the result of policy choices we've made. and so in a way we're responsible for this and we've picked it and you don't have to be contrary to wealth creation. we should be in favor of wealth creation wealth concentration and antitrust are something else. and so fundamentally, you know, we need to reset how we think about inequalities something i've written probably more about than any other journalist in the country. and part of that reset has to be how do we make sure that people are actually compensated for their contributions to economic output because what we have right now is a set of government

rules that very much distort that outcome. and max, i think there's there's some tax advantages that peter thiel took advantage of to a massive fortune. yeah. yeah. i mean, i i think it's there there's sort of a of course as a policy component, but there's a cultural component where you know, we've sort of all decided collectively that um being a billionaire or whatever is inherently good and and i think that's kind of a kind of weird thing. there's also been kind of a collective decision that like, i was talking to somebody or later today and he you know, it's like people sort of think that millionaire and billionaire you just that's like just the next natural stage of you have a millionaire and then a billionaire but like a billionaire is like way way more than a millionaire. and so anyway, and i think that there's been this kind of campaign like a cultural campaign that that teal and and

also but many other, you know, kind of wealthy people have kind of undertaken to to get people to accept this and to to get people to think that the rules shouldn't apply to them teal when and acquired emergency citizenship in new zealand during the obama presidency because he was worried obama might be a socialist and and we've seen like lots of behavior like this that that really it's it's odd that that it's sort of goes by without anyone saying anything we just sort of assume, you know, as trump said, you know, i think when he's you know running and sort of bragging of almost about not paying much in taxes that like fundamentally strange think it should give us pause. all right next up here. so in 2015 when i stopped laughing at john oliver's take on trump when he announced his his run for the office. i started paying attention david to what you were saying and one of the things that you really focused on was what would happen

to the basic parts of our government that served the basic people who in citizens who live in the in the country and i know for a fact that a lot of that happened that that websites were taken down that records of of you know, what different agencies do were removed people were lost their jobs. is your sense that any of that has been rectified and how do we prevent that from happening again if we get another dictator first off? i love your phantom both well toll booth shirt. i have one. there are a lot of things the bide demonstration has not fixed and the new service i run dc report we've reported on several of these like profiteering through medicare where they're letting policies go through. we're going to publish a piece in a couple of days about how one of the worst tax policies of trump administration is being embraced by the biden white house. that won't even return our repeated requests for just say no comment.

because they don't want to deal with it and we did real damage to our government in it's even worse than you think the middle book in my trilogy. i tell about a highly rated very successful government career executive who was assigned to process oil royalty checks because he wouldn't go along and tell about people who were forced out of their jobs left and right and this has caused real damage and we have massive investments in the people who work for our government, especially in the area of diplomacy military officers and scientists, and no we haven't recovered from this and it's not a focus of this administration to undo that is best. i am the people who work i shouldn't say work they get honorariums who semi volunteer for us have been able to establish. and just a follow-up. how can we as voters? insist on that being rectified elect a different congress one

of the things that is involving this new reality that i haven't seen in my lifetime has arise in anti-semitism both from the right and the left any ideas how we how we can stop that from being mainstream and put that genie back in the bottle as far as from government media government or the public. and any ideas from our panelists it's a stumper. i don't want to dominate this but donald pulled off this veneer and and we discovered that a lot of the progress. we thought we'd made in the civil rights movement and in reducing anti-semitism and all sorts of other prejudice and bigotry was just a veneer over the top of it and that means we have to have education you have to have people be in contact with one another we shouldn't have supreme court justices who have gay clerks say to them, you

know, i've never met a gay person in my life. which actually happened we we need to have discussions about civility and pluralism and put those on the forefront. and be vigilant about white supremacy and genderism and anti-semitism. thanks for give me a second to think that i think this one through but well, i think actually it's it goes back to accountability and calling people out right now. there is an impression that it's okay to speak your mind. even if it's hateful or destructive towards minorities towards jewish people doesn't make a difference. i think in every one of these cases. i think there's an opportunity to shout them down shame them and that's how we start to hold people accountable that it's not okay, because in fact i think those are not, you know, i i that's not my impression of america. it's not representative of america. these are and a lot of ways

fringe voices that are able to coalesce because of the information age around these ideas. so if they're mounted to kind of a minority 10 15 20% they're able to mass massive numbers in a country of 330 million people. we need to hold them accountable when shame them. we need to announce them. excuse me. it doesn't have to be protracted argument. it doesn't have to be you know, a give and take i could it could be just simple denunciation and that that's a form of accountability that we should pursue. and it it seems to me that a lot of people were ashamed to express these points of view max until facebook hooked them all up together. yeah, you know, it's it's like i said this on an earlier panel, but it's like they took the worst five minutes of thanksgiving dinner, you know and turned it. you know into their business model like and it's just it's really it's it's totally a testament tile powerful these

technologies are that like, you know, i was just in one of these conversations like arguing with my cousin over, you know, anti-vax stuff and afterwards i was like, oh god that was horrible. why did i you know, why did i get involved in that and and because like it doesn't convince anybody it just it was just this like misery and yet you have people who have been basically sucked into at misery for hours a day and and companies that are using that misery to push all kinds of, you know, prilosec and all, you know viagra and you know t-shirts and god knows what and i think you know one one really positive the developments happened with respect to silicon valleys. we've seen politicians of both parties become aware of this and and you know that they kind of seem to disagree about exactly what the problems are and what the answers are and there's a lot of kind of bad faith stuff going on, but there's like an awareness and which i think is really positive that that these

platforms are powerful and and i think that's kind of like the first step both in terms of having smart regulation, but also maybe for us personally to like avoid getting sucked into these, you know pointless arguments. i just want to add i think you're right about the platforms, but it's not just a platforms. i mean we had four years when the president of the united states used hateful language every day on camera on his twitter in talking casually with people and and when that becomes repeated so many times that that the american people become numb to it people start to think it's okay to not only believe hateful things but to say i'm out loud and to screen them at their neighbors and so it's just going to require a lot of change to shift the thinking in this country. i'm not saying president trump was responsible for hate speech it existed before him it'll exist long after he dies, but i think he accelerated it and i think he made people feel like it's okay to act that way in public. all right next question here,

and and we got about five minutes left fy. oh i wasn't going to take that long. anyway this and this was touched on before about the inequality and billionaires and things but it seems like a lot of things don't happen in this country because it's an oligarchy and the people and with the money. decide our elections force to a large large extent and is there any you see any hope for that? for getting out of that situation i don't think they do decide those elections. i think yes, there's a lot of advertising effective campaigning, but i think partially this has to do with making sure that we encourage good people to run for office because good people running for office can can overcome mountains of of obstacles mountains of and i think for whatever reason the service bug that has been kind of part of our i mean, i have it i served

for more than 20 years, but this idea of public services is somehow damaged that there's they're more benefits to you know, go into the private sector. so encouraging people good people to run that might be the part even the parties themselves actually going out and recruiting good good folks to run for office not farming people up because they, you know, they meet certain tick marks on a checklist or something that nature and and that could i think the american people can can parse through a lot of the stuff not all of it? it's difficult, but i don't think where the same you know, i guess part of this is the fact that i have perspective and i've served another places where you do have legitimate oligarchies that could pull the strings and we're we're not there we might be heading in that direction, but i think we still have an electorate that calls a shots and we saw that play out in the 2020 election the pretty significant, you know something for for donald trump when everything seemed to be on a side frankly.

well, thanks. i have sort of a similar question, but i want to thank all of the panelists for your work. i think it's important for thank you. and it gets to my question in a suggestion or a challenge is that i agree that this is an incredible time, especially in relation to democracy, but i disagree on the point of politicians first, i believe that civil society is what is going to propel our society forward whether it's the black lives matter that brought out 20 million people all over the united states. we look at the national organization like national organizational women or the naacp civil society has to lead in promote the development of civil society and that that

serves us both the field and the fertilizer for politicians to em, politicians themselves, especially we see in this present system. i believe is corrupt, but that's why i believe that it has to be civil society and that would be my challenge to you and your perceptions or at least as i hear them the evolution. elevating politicians. i'm not yeah for that. okay, and i just would say very quickly. i think that's right. civil society has been absolutely essential in a place like ukraine and helped reformat the country but our system our electoral system works on on party politics and frankly. that's those civil society organizations need to get behind or kind of nudged the political parties because of the weight they carry in the right direction, but i think frankly that's the the means of change fundamentally is based on our

political system and civil society has a major role to play, but i i don't think you necessarily could separate those two. you know george soros paid to bring people from the former soviet satellites to southern california to teach people how to engage and create a civil society. we might learn something from people who had to live under the the boot of the kremlin. all right, and we're gonna have to leave it there. thanks to all these authors for their participation today. and thanks to all of you for for coming today. the authors will be proceeding to the sales and signing area the u of a bookstore tent on the mall. please clear the room quickly. so the next panel can set up and thank you all for coming by.

right perfect.

kind of and book tv's live

coverage of the tucson book festival continues in just a minute. you're going to have the opportunity to talk with author david k johnston. he was just on the panel you saw after that another author discussion david k. johnston's most recent book is called the big cheat how donald trump fleece america and enriched himself and his family. mr. johnston, that's your third book on donald trump, right? it's trilogy. the making of donald trump before the 2016 election that laid out all from the public record. his history including his very deep entanglement with a major drug trafficking lord big drug lord. it's even worse than you think examining what he did to the administration and been the promise of the campaign that

they would deconstruct the administrative state, which is high folute language for we're going to destroy the executive side of the federal government then this book is about the money and all these loose threads of pieces something came out in the washington post and then politico and the new york times and the wall street journal and i just picked up all these loose threads that you'd have to read 25 news organizations to see as i do and woven into a tapestry to explain what was going on when you started writing that first book, the making of donald trump in 2016. did you know it was going to be a trilogy? no, not at all. in fact, i was only going to do the first two books and simon schuster came back and said we want you to do this third book and i said, okay, but your fascination or study of donald trump began way before he became president 1988. there are several 1988. there are several people. i followed a great life jack welch at general electric darrell gates the lapd chief because i was at the la times.

i was the first journalist to seriously scrutinize the lapd baron hilton who tried to steal 2/3 of a billion dollars from starving children quite literally snatch it out of their mouths. and when i met donald in 1988, i was the atlantic city bureau chief for the philadelphia inquirer. and i just went this guy's going to be important in the future and i just continue to follow him even in the years. i didn't write about him build files on them. i have what i'm pretty sure is the world's largest private collection of trump documents. do you have a fourth book in there? hi, my publisher may could do. we'll see my the book. i want to finish now. i put aside in 2015 as i have designed an entirely new federal tax system and every expert who's gone over it tax administrators business owners, accounting professors tax lawyers, every single one of them says, oh this would work congress will never do it and my answer is i'm getting enough people to read the book. they'll do it.

well, we'll talk about that a little bit later and get a little bit more, but we want to get your calls in and your voices to talk to david k johnston if you were listening to the panel before you heard what he had to say, we're going to be talking about as most recent book the big cheat how donald trump fleeced america and enriched himself and his family 202 is the area code 748 8200 for those of you in the east and central time zones 202748-8201. if you live in the mountain and pacific time zones, and if you want to send a text message, you can send it to this number text messages. only two zero two seven four eight eight nine zero three, please include your first name and your city if you would let's go to the subtitle of your most recent book how donald trump fleece america two examples. um his son-in-law gerald jared kushner was in very deep financial trouble in 2015 and 16. the family had bet its fortune a

substantial fortune on the purchase of 666 fifth avenue just down the street from trump tower. they paid 1.8 billion dollars a gigantic record for real estate in new york and by 2015 that building was worth a third of what they paid for it, maybe half. jared kushner immediately set out to seek money from america's most important ally among the arab countries in the middle east cutter. we have an important military base there the qataris looked at the proposal and said, you know, we're rich but we're not stupid. we're not making you this kind alone shortly after that donald trump begins attacking cutter. he takes the case of the saudis and the emirates who don't like cutter. and takes their side and lo and behold they get new financing for this building. so one example here is the family the trump kushner family. submarine our national security for money. no previous presidents has done

anything like that whatsoever. secondly donald's actions with his hotel. when donald trump was leaving the capitol after being sworn in the motorcade stops and not one of the tv networks at the time reported where he stopped, but i assure you that every lobbyist favor seeker every foreign diplomat everybody who wanted something of the trump administration got the message. they stopped in front of the trump hotel. now this is a hotel that by law and i write about this extensively in the book. trump should have been kicked out of the lease since 1808. we said congressman and presidents cannot have leases with the federal government. and i tell about how to bureaucrats try to avoid this pretty soon the bar and restaurant. we're taking in 68,000 a night the saudi government would buy entire floors of rooms. t-mobile wanted to merge with sprint.

and the president of t-mobile america made a big deal out of showing up and running rooms, and this was a way you paid tribute to donald trump. you publicly demonstrated you were paying tribute to him. and then you would maybe get your policy approved, but if you didn't pay tribute, you probably couldn't even get a phone call in. using that phrase paying tribute to where does that come from? well, it's because that's what happens when in i used to teach the law of the ancient world. so when the persians would conquer another country, you know, they would have to pay tribute to them the ninth century philosophical books in islam talk about paying tribute and who doesn't have to pay tribute when in islamic army takes over a country anybody watch game of thrones, you know, you'll notice that there was a lot of tribute pain and obligations that were in that and that's the same thing here. donald didn't see the white house as a public trust as every other president good bad and different. they all treated it as a public trust.

donald has no history or knowledge or understanding these things and he treated it as well. of course, i should be president. the rest of you were all idiots. let's take some calls. let's hear from our viewers annie in sugar grove, north carolina. you're on with david k johnston, please go ahead. hi, good evening. i've been following david k johnston for years. i've watched him on democracy now and no one's ever brought this up, or maybe i've missed it. rudy giuliani was us attorney for the southern district of new york. while trump was committing crime. do you think that really helped cover up and and and let him avoid prosecution. i just think that there's something there, but i don't know. i'm just curious what you think about that. all right annie. thank you. thank you, annie. no, i don't think that's quite how it went. there are lots of high level

white collar crimes committed in this country that we don't do anything about and one of the biggest problems in this country is we pay way too much attention and have very strong laws for blue collar crime robbing a bodega for example, but when it comes to white collar crime, our laws are complicated they're full of loopholes. they're difficult to prosecute if it takes a prosecutor six weeks or six months to put on a case. it's sort of inherently says to a jury. you should have some reasonable doubt about what went on here. and if donald hadn't run for president, i don't think he would have ever gotten the much attention from law enforcement. it wasn't that law enforcement wasn't very very aware of him. they were but that goes way beyond rudy giuliani. you're based in syracuse, new york. is that right? well, i i live in rochester i teach at syracuse university college of law, and i'm not a lawyer. so you do have some knowledge of rud. giuliani as southern district and mayor has your opinion of

him changed over the years at all? when giuliani went my friend wayne barrett revealed years ago that his father was abandoned who went to sing sing prison. not many people knew and then wayne who's gone now wrote a fabulous book about what actually went on the day of 9/11. he starts off by telling you here's what you saw on tv and he tells you what's really going on in the background. and we've seen giuliani started deteriorate front of our public eye, you know, i mean right in front of our eye peter incoherent sentences, you know booking the wrong four seasons and then coming up with all sorts of crazy theories. so the skill he had in managing other prosecutors. he didn't prosecute the mob cases in new york. he just ran the office, but the skilly hadn't managing those and building up himself. sort of just let be ruined by his embracing crazy ideas chasing after money not acting from a position of principal in his conduct.

antoinette in milwaukee, you're on book tv. hi. hello. i have a question. i'm running as fast as i can. and i don't trust government anymore. i can't even vote but i was born antoinette jane scarborough in milwaukee are in waterloo, wisconsin. what do iowa 78 years ago? do old people matter anymore just it's government outrunning me. well, thank you. after that. first of all is an old guy? i'm 73 years old it is easy to become cynical about government not just now but in the past but our freedoms and our liberties under our constitution the underlying idea of which is if we provide people with freedom of religion and thought can't what can the human spirit do how can we enoble the human spirit

and see what it can achieve and it's easy to get cynical about politics campaign money has done a lot to do that and the quality of the people running for office one of the last things we discussed in this panel. but you know, it's the best thing we've got and you should think about the alternatives so i would urge you to keep voting keep voting internet. text message not sure who it's from but it says my impression of donald trump's sons and daughter is that they are every bit as dishonest and unscrupulous and dangerous as he is. i i absolutely agree with that assessment. i described donald both in my books and there's a nonprofit news service that my friends and i run called dc report singular. it's free. there's no ads. it's public service dc report as the donald is the third generation head of a four generation crime family his grandfather fled the draft in germany ran basically -- houses

in washington state in the yukon territory. his father fred trump ripped off the taxpayers for in today's money about 40 million dollars in building housing for you guys and sailors who survived world war two president eisenhower when he learned what fred trump had done through a fit in the oval office. think about the the moral weight on general eisenhower who sent all those men to die on the beaches in france. and then you have donald followed by his children and they are emblematic of a fundamental american problem, which is these weak white-collar crime laws and our focus on street crime rather than sweet crime. thomas is calling from washington dc thomas, please go ahead. yeah, hi. this is smith from the colony of washington dc. this is nothing new if you look at america america is always had a streak of fascism and racism and just like president johnson said all you got to do is bring

up the racism part and white america will vote for you. they'll let you please see your pocket. this is why profits in office has continued being officer because a large portion of white america likes and and likes what he does. thanks. well, i agree with you about that when donald made his announcement in 2015 his latest announcement of running for president. what did he do right off? he said murders and rapists coming from mexico and he gave a comfort aidan comfort to people who want to be bigots and use racial slurge. he basically pulled off the veneer that the civil rights movement had provided us with and showed how many americans really haven't bought into that at all. they've simply been they feel coerced by the rest of society. but we've still beyond that. we've made a lot of progress compared to say the 1940s when

soldiers who came home from europe and japan and dress uniforms that they were black traveled through the south would be viciously attacked because white americans many of them couldn't stand the thought of a valorous black service member and we need to get back on the track of trying to create a multicultural fair society, and we're nowhere near there, but that doesn't mean we can't be we can we just have to work at it. i'm not going to live to see it. i'm not gonna live that long, but maybe my grandchildren even though though they're already grown. we'll see it. david k. johnson given what donald trump the candidate said about mexicans, how do you explain his increased vote percentage with latino voters or at least as reported? yeah. no, that's a very interesting phenomenon. of course, the world is full of paradoxes like this. we see it in the movement for equal gender rights for women. there are a lot of latino voters

who are socially quite conservative. and who embraced donald's thinking about this the number of latino voters though fell off in the i believe in most areas in the 2020 election, but they're always these paradoxes that exist like that and people don't you know, a lot of people will vote on a single issue. so if you're with me on a single issue, i'll vote for you even if i can't stand the rest of what you're saying. what's your personal opinion about president clinton and president obama? becoming quite wealthy after their presidencies well only ones who became quite wealthy ronald reagan walked out of the white house and made two million dollars in the last person who didn't try to monetize the presidency i think was eisenhower certainly harry truman who walked out with nothing but a $22 a month, so maybe today $250 a month army pension from world war one. um if you get elected president

you leave office if you do this by writing a book where you're in the competitive marketplace, that seems perfectly reasonable you get appointed to a job of some kind being president of the university. i think that's quite reasonable. but this business of going around and giving speeches like hillary clinton did for 400,000 to goldman sachs. it's not illegal, but i think we reasonably should say what were you thinking? so i certainly don't begrudge anybody their wealth who earned it in the marketplace. i've written books exposing how lots of people have grown rich from subsidies. almost nobody knew about until i expose them. that i very much disapprove it. i don't believe in corporate socialism because it destroys the benefits of market capitalism, which so far is the best idea. we've came up with in human history doesn't mean it's the best idea of all times. just we have to live in our times. and so, you know you leave office. and you go make money because

you do things like write a book go on the lecture circuit, but private talks to wall street bankers. yeah. we should we really should denounce people for that. i think next call comes from jeff in los angeles, please go ahead jeff. hello, and thank you for taking my call. my question goes to the hopeful hopeful hopefully he's being investigated criminally by the attorney general. um, we don't really know but i i have a feeling there's more going on there in new york state georgia is well as for federal crimes the us attorney. i wanted to ask you i heard recently one of the late night cable hosts talking about the fact that donald trump will never go to prison because they would never be able to do it because of sacred service

accommodations, etc, etc. because and protecting him i hope that does not become a mainstream idea. because i would hope. that if he is convicted of crimes he would go to jail because as far as i think we got it. let's hear from our guest david k johnston jeff. thank you in first of all, we should all be very troubled by what's happened with the manhattan district attorney the new district attorney who essentially shut down and investigation that i was pretty confident was going to lead to an indictment under new york state's rico law little rico law. um, i i could build a case on that law from my knowledge of trump, and i think they got off on a tangent perhaps and and didn't quite have the roundedness they needed for such a case. there's no external evidence that the justice department. the federal justice department is investigating trump when you have a big investigation like

this leaks occur from the defense and people who are witnesses. they never happen from the prosecution. they just don't happen. i got 50 years plus years of experience to tell you that but he is under investigation criminally in westchester county by a very seasoned prosecutor mimi roca by fanny willis the fulton county, georgia that overlays atlanta for trying to rig the election. he's under civil investigation by the attorney general of new york who can acquire criminal investigation that the governor gives it to her or the manhattan da gives it to her. and he's under civil investigation. and what i think is a very important case involving the 2017 inauguration by the attorney general of washington. there's a whole chapter in there in which i talk about among other things the effort to take in money off books, which is criminal. mr. johnson you mentioned that mr. johnson you mentioned that

you met former president trump in 1988. did you have a conversation with all many of donald and i have i mean for three years of my life he was pretty much what my focus and what i learned the first time. we shook hands and talk the second time. i sat down for a talk with him and i had learned by them that he was his own executives thought he was a raging incompetent. his competitors said the same thing some of his players at the same thing and the government sort of wanted to not do its job of enforcing the law and so with the connivance with some of trump's guys i planted in this first interview i had within four questions. and in each of them i spoke on truthfully. and donald picked up the untruth and incorporated his answer and one of my books i point out. he pretty much did the same thing in an interview with lester holt. and that's what con artists do i've exposed various con artists for about 40 the last 55 years.

and they tell you what you want to hear. in fact, i literally thought having just left the la times to go to atlantic city and having seen these ads on tv. oh i get donald. we're the california psychics. does your boyfriend really? love you call this number and we'll we'll tell you the truth because we're the only psychics you can trust. and that's what he was doing. he's just a con artist and he was assuming you wouldn't check the facts and as soon as donald began to realize that everything i wrote about him. i would check the public record and check him out. our relationship became fairly stiff from their forward. derek's in seattle, derek, you're on with author david k johnston. oh you thank you mr. kay. i've been trying to talk to you for a long real long time. what i would like to know is this you had donald trump one of the biggest financial crooks steve mnuchin the four-cold the king wilbur ross. they call him the shell game man, cuz he's illegal. he listened banks which he was involved in overseas and trump

and minutian was over the united states treasury, but i would like to know is there a way that you can have investigation to see if stephen nutria when he was over those stimulus packages and we're around conspire and transcribe our transfer any money to overseas banks in saudi arabia are russia. that's my simple question. you need to be investigate you had the biggest crew. thank you. thank you derek. thank you. i don't think that's what happened you get caught a few today. they're actually our very good government. action reports and investigations. there was lots of money stolen by various fraudsters, but mostly low-level fraudsters in the stimulus and other packages and they primarily benefited big businesses not the little ones they were supposed to help and one of the programs was really we've reported a dc report an effort to help the biggest banks strengthen their ties with their biggest customers.

they didn't have any interest in little ones. um, they're much smarter and easier ways to to take money and if you read the big cheat, which i write you don't have to understand finance read my books. i i my effort is to make sure if you finish high school, you can understand the economics the way i explain them in my books and i think if you read it, you'll see what they did and in many ways. it's more troubling and worse than what you're managing here. mr. johnson we heard for four years about deutsche bank. yeah and donald trump. can you give us that 60 second 90 second explanation when nobody else would loan money to donald because he publicly said i borrowed money knowing i did intend to pay it back imagine saying that to your banker. deutsche bank kept making loans to him. well, there's something in banking called a back-to-back loan. so i want the bank to loan one of my grown children money for a business venture, but i could get loan them the money, but then it's family difficulties. so i go to my banker and i say listen, i'm gonna deposit a million dollars with you or give you a letter of credit for a

million dollars loan the million dollars to my kid if he doesn't pay it you're guaranteed you'll get paid off. there's very good reason to think there were russians on the other side of these deals deutsche bank has already paid over 600 million dollars in fines for laundering russian criminal money. the head of that bank when he was forced out and disgrace went to the bank of cyprus the most notorious russian money laundering bank in the world whose vice chairman had two of them one was wilbur ross who became commerce secretary and who there's a chapter about in the big cheat and the other was vladimir putin's appointee and who are their customers a bunch of russian criminals? brian in west union, ohio, please. go ahead. yes first always thank you for taking my call andy he kind of goes back to what a few of these other call past callers were talking about like when that lady called about really giuliani and donald trump being crime getting away with it and

and clay there. you go along with it. my thing is, you know, there's a there's a line there, um being accused and being in a criminal somebody real careful about calling him a man criminal. you ain't keep me and convicted yet. that's all. right. well in fact in the news if you you're a killer and tell you're convicted then you're a murderer, but only after you're convicted in donald's case. he there is so much evidence going back so many years of his criminal conduct and he's lied under. he's falsified documents. he forged his own tax return that's in in one of my three books. i think it's the making of donald trump. he forged his own tax return his own tax lawyer testified against him at his trial for tax fraud that almost nobody knows about so there's plenty of evidence of donald's a criminal behavior going back decades.

david kate johnson, let's go back to your potential next book on the federal tax system. how would you change it? well, nobody would defend our current tax system. it is bloated beyond belief with favors that congress said well, we're going to give you this favor for these counting contributions and that that favor and we've lost sight of what the purpose of our tax system is, and this is an important point peter. why do we live under our constitution? we live in the second american republic? the first american republic the articles confederation failed because it had no power to tax and and no power to regulate commerce. we created our constitution to tax ourselves so that we could be a real country and we could have all these freedoms. but the tax system now allows many people to make a fortune off of it a 20 years ago. i said the corporations in the new york times when i was a reporter, i wrote that there were corporations that made a profit off taxes.

congress ordered up a study because some people thought that was crazy. and 1800 page. yeah, you're right. there are a whole bunch companies that the corporate income tax is a profit center. they even stamp documents profit center. so what i do is just my system will just text back to basics. it's cheap proof because of the system that i've designed that will be in the book and the book's going to be very short because i'm not gonna write a doorstop to say i'm gonna simplify the tax code, but every but every expert who's gone over it peter. every across the board they all say oh that would work. it would make us a wealthier country. everyone would have to pay the taxes congress says they owe we wouldn't have these scandals of people who pay no taxes legally because of all sorts of rules that hardly anybody knows about but i spent years studying and deconstructing tax shelters the irs actually told congress we can't deconstruct some of these tax shelters. and i would get rid of all of that and we have a very

straightforward very simple system that will work in every country with a modern economy. so working australia, it'll work in japan. it'll work in europe. it'll work in canada. it will not work in places like honduras or some of the poor countries in africa. there it won't work. but if you have a modern financially robust economy, it'll work. that's the next book the current last book of david k johnston the big cheat how donald trump fleeced america and enriched himself in his family. thank you for joining us and taking calls from our audience peter. thank you. well our continued coverage of the tucson festival of books continues now. welcome everybody. welcome everyone. can you hear me back there wearing it super close to your >> welcome, everyone. can you hear me -- [inaudible conversations]

no. all right. too loud. >> welcome, everyone. [laughter] we have some real diehards. this is the end of the show, and it's good to see a great crowd. welcome to the 2021 tucson festival of books. we are talking with dr. ethan cross about that voice in your head. dr. cross here until the last 15 minutes or so, which will save room for questions. we want to thank festival organizers c-span book tv for sponsoring this location in the arizona daily star for sponsoring the upcoming discussion. make sure to stop by the book sales area and author signing area after the session and book sales at the festival help support the cost of the festival and local literacy programs that it funds. please take a moment to silence

your digital devices and whatever and you are to remain masked throughout the session as participants today. so we have quite a treat. i had a chance to have some lunch here with dr. cross and i think this will be terrific so if you haven't read this wonderful book, i just read it the second time the other day chatter is what we're talking about. this is dr. cross first book. he is professor of psychology at the university of michigan. one of the world's leading. we got to michiganders good go blue one of the leading researchers and experts in the area of controlling the conscious mind. so we all have one of those. director of emotion and self-control laboratory, he's done pioneering research and as presented in multiple venues journals both new england journal and others as well as popular media with our friends anderson cooper good morning america and articles new york

times wall street etc. so with that is a basic introduction. i'm going to turn to decent, can i call you dr. crossy that if that's okay? tell us about chatter and our inner voice. could you kind of go through define what it is and maybe how you developed an interest in this topic? sure. maybe i'll start with well, first of all, let me say thank you for coming it is so nice to be here with readers together in person. i've been talking to folks through zoom for the past year about this book and my god, am i glad that that is over so so, thank you very much for coming here and you know, the more interactive we can make it the better. so do do feel free to ask questions when we cue you so let me start by where this interest began because it'll set up your question. well, i've been formally studying chatter and the inner voice for about 20 years, but i've been thinking about it for

about twice that time since the time i was a little kid about three years old because i grew up in a household with a pretty unconventional dad and what i mean by that is my dad was this very colorful colorful character didn't graduate from college, but had a voracious appetite for two well for three things. new york yankees cigarette smoking and eastern philosophy go figure right and when he wasn't engaging in any of those activities he was talking to me about two of the three not the smoking and in particular with respect to eastern philosophy from the time. i'm three years old. he starts telling me hey whenever you have any problem, you know, you're not feeling good. would say go inside. try to try to use your mind to get to the kernel. he's very hit all these phrases find the kernel of truth. he would tell me, you know, i i thought it was like a colonel

and a gi joe show back then but the idea that he was essentially trying to instill within me is use introspection to work through your problems and this was a skill. that served me really well throughout my childhood adolescence i get into an argument with my mom i go inside figure out why i'm feeling this way. watch this. i'd move on i would ask girls out on dates in high school a lot of them. they would say no a lot of the time but you know, they'd say no i go. all right why this happened? okay move on next one, and i never really got stuck. then i got to college and i took my first psychology class and what i learned in that class was that. this capacity that we have to use our mind to solve problems is one of our greatest superpowers. it is the basis of our ability to innovate and create and problem solve. just like my dad taught me. however.

a lot of the time this ability we possess backfires. we experience some adversity in our lives. we turn our attention inward and we don't end up coming up with a clear solution. we end up spinning instead. we overthink things. we worry about the future. we ruminate about the past we experience what i call chatter chatter is a term i use to refer to getting stuck in a negative thought loop and i think it is one of the big problems we face as species. i won't get into that now maybe we will a little bit later. but that to me was just fascinating that we have this tool. and it serves as well a lot of the time but other times it backfires and so i decided to go to graduate school to learn how to use the tools of science psychology and neuroscience to try to figure out why this happens and most importantly identify tools that people can use science-based tools to reroute our our inner monologues when we find it conspiring

against us. so so that's the origin story of my interest in chatter how many people here just by show of hands experience chatter from time to time. all right, pretty big we're gonna have a lot of fun today. yeah, so you mentioned two things you said rumination and worry. can you kind of sort that out for us? because we all ruminate and get stuck and get in negative spirals negative cycles. also have a lot of worry and that there's a distinction there go through that. so rumination tends to be about the past. that's how scientists define rumination when we're thinking about the fact that you know, thinking about some some something that didn't go well in the past and try. oh my god, why did that happen? what does that mean? for example, i engage in a tiny bit of rumination just a little while ago. i didn't tell you about this. i went to the bathroom. and we went fine usually does. well. yeah, that's a little bit but it'll make sense why i tell you

this and i'm walking around the whole festival and and then a fellow author comes up to me about 20 minutes go taps me on the shoulders as as author friends. we have to tell you ethan the back of your jacket is tucked into your pants in the back. so i ruminated about that a little bit. so hopefully you didn't see that so that rumination is about the past worry is about the future and the present what if this happens god nuclear nuclear holocaust nowadays can you hear me now? you know, how about now? okay, we can just we can switch our can i print i'll use my professor voice. can you hear me in the back? no, okay. how about now? all right, forget the professor voice so ruminations about the past worrying tends to be at the about the present or future. but the key idea here is that we are looping things over in our head.

there's a problem that we are consumed with and we're narrowly focusing on it and an attempt to work through the problem, but we're not making any progress. it's sometimes people call this monkey mind lots of different terms to refer to this tendency to just overthink and and it gets us in in really really deep trouble because it it undermines us in three domains of life that i think all of us care a lot about i'll just mention these really quick to set the stage for what is to come chatter makes it hard for us to think and perform how many people here have has the following happen to you? you've sat down to read a book. i know you're all readers here. you read a chapter or half a chapter under oath you would swear that the words have passed your field of sight and yet you get to the end and you don't remember a -- thing you've read. come on, everyone. that's chatter because your mind

somewhere else. it's consuming your resources your attentional resources. we only have so much attention. we could focus at any given moment in time if all the attentions on the chatter. it doesn't leave anything over for you to often do the things you want to do whether that be reading or focusing on your kids your partners or your jobs. so chatter undermines our ability to think and perform it can create friction in our relationships with other people because we find people we want to talk about our chatter and then we keep talking about it over and over and over again. push push other loved ones away because we're not censoring our chatter at all, and then it can also create physical health problems in ways that are pretty scary and we need not really belabor here. so i think it's one of the big problems we face. mentioned in your book is venting and we all have the need to vent and i think it's big it become exacerbated with social media. so easy to get out there and just out there.

and you make a point to say often venting is not necessarily good thing. i mean it can have certain negative implications and i wonder at what point. does the support you're looking for? and you've got initial hearing for what you're venting and then starts you starting this vicious cycle down and or they they support that negativity and it becomes a spiraling downhill cycle. how do you view that but the idea of venting and it's limitations? well, you know other people can be an unbelievable asset to us when it comes to managing our chatter, but they can also be a tremendous vulnerability. and so i spent a chapter in the book trying to break down how you can harness your relationships with other people for for better rather than for worse. a lot of people think and have learned through culture and socialization that when you are

struggling with a problem the thing you want to do is find someone to just express your emotions to just vent. just get it out. how many people here have heard this? hi up people. yeah. thank you. most of you here, so this is an incredibly common belief it dates back to aristotle. who's the first one to suggest it and then freud ran with it and people magazine has ever since there's been a lot of research on venting and and the technical term catharsis and and here's what we know. venting about your problems to other people can be really good for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds that we share. it feels good to know that there are folks in my life that i could turn to who are going to just listen to me get it out there there for me. they're willing to take the time to to just let me express my emotions. here's the problem with venting if all you do is vent in a conversation without with other

people. so you're talking about what happened and how you felt and they're saying oh, it's terrible. i would have felt the same way. what did you do next and they said that oh my god that leads to that we call co nation your ruminating together with one another and it turns out that that can be really good for relationships, but it doesn't help you actually work through your chatter. because all you've done is rehearse the negativity so you leave those conversations you feel really good about the person you just spoke to like you've got my back. yeah, but you're just as upset if not more upset after you finish talking to them. so the formula the scientific formula for getting good chatter support from other people actually involves doing two things. you do want to if you're if you're the support provider if you're the person who's there to help someone else you do want to take a little bit of time to learn about what the other person is going through to hear them out to learn about the circumstances. but at a certain point in the

conversation you want to start nudging them to look at the big picture. i oftentimes our problems when we're experiencing chatter. they feel all consuming or tunnel vision focused in on the problem at hand when we zoom out and look at the bigger picture. we can often find solutions to our problem that make us feel better and other people can help us do that might say to them, you know, that's that sounds terrible, but how he dealt with this in the past or look big picture, right? this is one of event it's not going to happen again and so forth and so on that is the formula for providing good chatter support now there are there are two take-homes here and a caveat. i want a very quickly mention. the take-homes here are if you yourself find yourself wanting to talk to someone about your chatter think really carefully about who you go to for support. i have three or four people that i go to when it comes to personal issues five or six professional. that is my advisory board if you

will it is a powerful resource that i that i have at my disposal and i make use of it. i will admit we're on tv now, aren't we? okay, so i got to be a little careful here. there are people i'm gonna be let's see if you tell me how i do here. i may not be able to go home. there are some people in my life not my nuclear family, but in others that i'm very close to i love them dearly. they love me dna determines these kinship bonds if you know what i mean. i never talked them about my chatter because i know they want to help but their way of trying to help is to just stoke the fire further asking me about what happened and and making me feel worse. so i'm really selective about who i talk to. so that's one take home the other take home. is it when someone comes to you? air problems and with their chatter be mindful of these two principles you now have a scientific blueprint for helping

them. so take some time to listen and then try to help them go abroad now the final covenant throwback to you. jerry is there is an art to doing this well and what i mean by that is depending on the person and the problem some people need to spend a little bit more time expressing their emotions before they're ready to start broad and having their perspective be broadened. so, you know to use my wife as an example here the hell with the tv. i love you if you're watching. he sometimes my wife will come to me with some chatter that she's experiencing and i'll i'll be there for her and i listen and i learn about what she's going through in a certain point in the conversation when i see my opening. i'll i'll say totally, you know, totally get it. can i offer you like i've got a thought can i give you my advice about this and she'll she'll stop and look at me like just listen and okay, and then she keeps going and then i try to

broaden later at other other other conversations other kinds of chatter shall come to me. i i listen i see my opening i offer you my advice. please tell me what to do. that's exactly why i'm here. so you want to just be delicate as you feel that out, but that's how to take other people and turn them into an asset rather than a liability. so before we get in more detail about the toolbox, which you go through in some detail. when do you know that? you've you've surpassed the skills of your board of advisors. when do you need to seek to real professional help? i mean, that was not really covered a lot of the book. yeah. that was of some concern. i when do you know you're really in trouble so, you know the book really focuses on the run of the mill chatter that is part and parcel of the human condition i have yet to to speak to an audience and when i talk about i'm talking about audiences that range from middle school kids to executives and everywhere in

between. chatters an incredibly common experience. so if there's one thing you leave here with just know that if you experience chat or times. congratulations, welcome to the human condition. this is part of life having said that chatter can morph into more serious kinds of problems psychological disorders and the in which you would want to get more focused and concentrated forms of help beyond the tools that i talk about in the book. the indications that you might want to talk to someone else or if you find yourself experiencing chatter for at least two weeks and and to a degree that it is impairing your ability to live the life you want to live on a daily basis. that's an indication that the run of the mill chatter is morphing into something. more more disconcerting and if that happens, i'd encourage you to to find someone who practices

an empirically supported form of a therapy. there are many out there. but but that would be my go-to advice. so i really would like to open the toolbox. so on the toolbox as as i read through things. three different bins you want to go through that because it's rife with lots of great. anecdotes examples that we all can relate to and how we deal with chattern up control our inner voice once you go through that a little bit for us. so i i like to break the the so what have what has science taught us about how to manage this inner voice that we have that is usually helpful, but can sometimes be harmful i talk about about 26 different tools in the book and you could find these tools as following in three different categories things you can do on your own so ways of shifting the way you're thinking that can help you

harness this chatter then there are what we might call relationship tools which we just talked about how to harness your relationships with other people. and then there are environmental tools which refer to tools that exist in the physical world around us. ways of changing the way we talk to ourselves by engaging with our physical environment in particular ways and there's no there's no magic tool. you know people often ask me is our journals will often ask. hey, what's the one thing? what's your favorite tool? what's the one tool? you should use to manage your chatter. i don't have a favorite tool what i know is that people generally use multiple tools and and what the challenge i think that we all face is to figure out. hey, what is the combination of healthy tools that works best for you for helping you manage your chatter? so i want to go into depth then on each of the different tools the different boxes of tools if you will so looking at self.

i mean what self-control kinds of tools i mean meditation we have faith. we have ritual we have all kinds of tools that can help us structure reorder things in our heads. can you go through some examples of sure self-help first? so so one kind of tool that that is useful for helping people manage chatter on their own are what we call. and they're a bunch of these that i talk about in the book. book. i'll tell you about to first thing to keep in mind about chatter is when we experience it. what happens is we we zoom in narrowly on the problem at hand as all we could think about right tunnel vision and what we've learned is that when you're in that state the ability to take a step back and think about your experiences from a broader perspective can be really useful. one tool that we've studied a lot in my lab i use this tool myself that is useful towards this end is something that we

call distanced self-talk and what it involves doing is using your own name or the second person pronoun you to coach yourself through a problem. one of the things we know about we human beings is we are much better. oh, we have a mic problem. we're much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving advice to ourselves. how many people here by a show of hand have been in a situation where a friend or love one comes to them with a problem that they're experiencing chatter over. they don't know what to do. it's driving them nuts. they present the problem to you and it's very it's relatively easy for you to coach them through it. okay, again, welcome to the human condition we can advise other people much better than we can advise ourselves what we've learned is that you can use language to shift your perspective to get you to think about yourself like you were someone else and involves using your own name. so so if i'm struggling with chatter, i might think to myself

already in here's what you're gonna do and then i start problem solving accordingly lots of research that shows that this can be effective. there is a caveat you don't want to do this out loud while walking down the streets of tucson if you feel compelled to do it out loud have airpods in your ears. so it looks like you're talking to someone else but but actually there there there are people on record using this tool during stressful times throughout history dating back to julius caesar henri adams lebron james, jennifer lawrence and so forth. all these are are in the book. so that's one really simple you can do when you're managing. chatter give yourself advice like you would give advice to your best friend use your name to help you do it another very easy tool to implement on your own or something that we call temporal distancing or mental time travel. this is my 2 am chatter strategy. has anyone here ever have two am chatter? and it kind of stinks, huh?

so when i have chatter at 2am, i don't start meditating for 20 minutes. like i can barely think at 2am right so i don't have resources to do complicated things instead. what i do is i remind myself. that whatever it is that i'm worrying about at 2 am which often has the form of being life-ending by the way, right? whatever is 2am. it's like this is it i'm usually like fired or in jail or dead by the time that chatter is done. and myself you're gonna feel better about this in the morning. because i always do because in the morning when my brain is is firing at full force. i have the ability to think these things through in a way that i suffer. i cannot do none of us can do to the same extent in the middle of the night when our brain is partially sleeping if you will, so this is mental time travel when you travel in time in your mind and you're ask yourself. hey, how am i going to feel

about this tomorrow or a week from now or a month from now or a year from now? what that does? is it highlights that how however awful what you're going through is right now. it is temporary. it will eventually pass and that does something really powerful for us. it gives us hope and hope is a very powerful antidote to an inner voice run amok. so that's another distancing tool many others of the sort you asked about ritual. so let me tell you about a rich we'll switch gears here. just giving you a flavor of what's the richness of what's out there how many people here? partake in rituals when they're stressed out. how many people here partake in religious rituals spiritual rituals? okay fair amount. how many people have stopped to think about what a ritual actually is? i mean, i mean let me maybe tell you what that is. i talk about rituals as a kind of ancient chatter fighting tool

that in many ways our cultures. give us when we are dealing with chat if you think about for example what happens when we lose someone we love many of our religions give us things to do precisely when that happens, right? there are morning rituals, which are incredibly common that our cultures. give us what a ritual is. it's it you can define a ritual as a rigid sequence of behaviors that you perform the same way each time that are infused with meaning. so in in judaism, for example when someone dies you dress in black you let your hair grow and you ceremony wasn't any better yet. he had a mic. is that mike? mike is the mic is playing test test here. now the question is did you hear the last 15 minutes of what i

was saying? should i start again? alright rituals. did anyone hear anything? i said about rituals. okay. anyway, here's the deal rituals. they are chatter fighting tool. here's how they work. when you're experiencing chatter you often feel like you're not in control your mind is taking over. it's running away from you and everything feels kind of in disarray like you don't have order. one of the ways that rituals work is they provide us with a sense of order and control because a ritual is something that you can do. and so it leads to what scientists call a state of compensatory control your compensating for the lack of order and control you feel when your mind's racing by doing something that is under your control. this is also why cleaning and organizing can be really good. when people are stressed out who here is a stress cleaner who organizes? okay a lot of you so i'll share with you a personal anecdote

here. i'm not a particularly orderly person. i think i'm relatively clean but in terms of order, you know, i'm the kind of person who usually you know, there's a trail of clothing from the shower to the bedroom closet to the downstairs. and yet when i am experiencing chatter what i do first is i neatly stack all the books and papers in my office then i go put my clothing away then i go into the kitchen wash all the dishes scrub down the the island. i'm doing that because it provides me with a sense of order and control which makes me feel good one added bonus of engaging in a ritual. is that it can be really good for your relationships with your partner? so i sometimes think that my wife secretly would like me to be experiencing a chronically low level of chatter because she is so pleased with how the house looks i really hope she's not

watching right now. so rituals they provide us with a sense of order and control many of the rituals we engage in are so done in a religious or spiritual context which which also helps broaden our perspective. it provides us with a sense of meaning in the sense that if there's a higher power whether that be a religious power or a spiritual force that is going to ensure that your life is in order. what is meant to be is what is meant to be? leaving it to the universe to decide this also prevents presents us with a sense of order and control because there's there's that other force that is going to help us out. so that's a way that religious rituals also can help via two different pathways. what about meditation self-hypnosis? can be accessed as well meditation is great one of the ways that meditation works is by helping give us a sense of of distance allowing us to

recognize for example that the thoughts and that are streaming through our head that are that are paralyzing us at times that these are just mental events. they're separate from ourselves. that's one of the things that meditation strives to do. so meditation is a great tool my only caveat about meditation is i think the way that meditation is often promoted in popular culture, and i think this is in part a consequence of capitalism is that it is promoted as a one-size-fits-all cure all and we know that that's not the case. all right meditation works really well for some people but less so for others, so it's one tool amidst the the broader toolbox that we've possess of of tools one other point. i'd like to throw in there about that's related to meditation concerns living in the now being in the moment how many people have heard that? you should strive to always be in the moment. all right, we're going to do

some mythbusting here. you're ready for this? so if you think about it, one of the things that really distinguishes us from all other animal species is our ability to not live in the moment. we developed this marvelous thing called a frontal cortex a beautiful giant brain. that allows us to do things like reflect on the past and my time travel into the future. and that can be the source of enormous pleasure and innovation, so a few weeks ago my family went on a wonderful vacation the kind of which we couldn't do for several years because of covid i regularly find myself savoring that experience. i'm going back in the past and thinking about what i was doing with my wife and kids and how wonderful that felt that brings me much. joy. i'm also transporting myself into the future. regularly. i'm thinking about the next vacation. it's not happening soon enough.

but i'm also planning for the future right i'm thinking about hey earlier today. i thought about what i wanted to say to all of you, so i just didn't show up here and i don't know what i'm talking about. right? so i'm i'm constantly moving. in time in my mind. i'm not just in the moment. i think what we we want to be teaching people how to do and what we want to be striving for is to learn how to be better mental time travelers. yes the mental time travel machine sometimes breaks down and we find ourselves stuck in the negative past or the worrisome future and when that happens refocusing on the present can be really useful but so can engaging in several other tools so we don't only want to be in the moment. we want to learn how to time travel in our minds more effectively. i just wanted to comment again on ritual. i'm been playing tennis for 60 years, whatever and i loved a little comment about if you ever people here tennis observers

players rafael nadal and his ritual, you know of the thing and the thing and the thing and the thing and he says his greatest demon is what's in his head and he does these rituals like we all do am i going to double fault? i'm gonna put this, you know, so that kind of ritual of calming your mind helps to calm your mind and get you through that moment of of dismay if you will, so turning just to help with others. i as as a healthcare person we have used the placebo effect for many years and and you could go into some detail about the placebo effect. just i'd like you to comment about some of the research you've done with that and how a belief in something helping you. can really be can work whether or not there's an actual physiologic? mechanism for the activity that promoting how many people here have a lucky charm?

that they like to clutch. okay, keep doing it because science has it will help you if you think it will. that's the placebo effect in a nutshell. the placebo effect what it refers to is the power of our belief. to actually bring us in the context of chat or some emotional relief and it's been well-documented for centuries that if you can if you can do someone into believing that doing something or maintaining some possession will will make them feel better. oftentimes that's exactly what happens in the book. i tell the story of anton mesmer. who's a person who is responsible for the term mesmerism, which you're probably familiar with? anton mesmer was a physician living in europe in the 1700s who took europe by storm by

developing this really sham medical ritual this technique that involved using magnets to to make people feel better. and what he was really skilled at doing was convincing people that if they partook in his medical treatment, which had no active ingredients that they would actually feel better. it turns out that the medical treatment was a total fraud the person who who demonstrated this was none other interestingly enough then benjamin franklin who was whose moonlighting and in paris at the time that mesmer was there. so we've known about the power of belief to structure our thinking for ages oftentimes. just taking a sugar pill. is as powerful for leave for relieving our depression and anxiety. as an antidepressant medication lots and lots of studies attest to this for mild and moderate forms of depression and anxiety a sugar pill works as well as an

ssri. that's powerful right if you think about some of the side effects associated with with these active active drugs. so for a really long time we've known this but there's one important element that has prevented folks like yourself from using this knowledge to help people, which is you can't lie to people you can't give them a medicine say hey, this is a pill that's gonna make you feel better. trust me and then just give them a sugar pill. i mean think about the lawsuit's gonna malpractice would go way up. so over the past 10 years, there's been a real. there's been an amazing growth in in our understanding of how to harness this capacity what scientists have shown is that? if you can teach people about how placebos work by talking to them about the science as we're doing today and as i do in the book and actually convince them that hey. this thing that you're this

bracelet that you're wearing. there's nothing special about it. but if you believe it's going to make you feel better it actually will. that if you can convince them of that you can still benefit from this placebo effect. we call these non-deceptive placebos. we've done some of this research in my own lab. we show that you get reductions in how up distress people feel using neural measures. and so i think this is really powerful because it suggests that we can actually harness the power of placebos without lying to people and so it's really the frontier of new work in the space. so we've talked a bit about self-help. we've talked about interpersonal support venting etc. and we we've lost on the environmental the outside control in with the with the rich some of the rituals you want to expound on that a little bit in terms of i mean for me i constantly every few weeks do it to-do list, you know, that just

helps me organize my my thoughts about getting stuff done. what other tools do we have? i'd love to examples of yeah, nate going back to nature. so so we talked about creating order from the outside and let me say, you know, some of the tools that i talk about in the book are things that you may be already doing but are not really deliberately doing you just kind of stumble on to and i think one real value surrounding knowing the science is that it gives us the opportunity to be deliberate you don't have to wait to just slide using a tool. the moment you sniff a little chatter brewing. you've got a plan, you know, you're going to do these four things and then of course there are some tools that maybe you never knew about our thought were wacky like talking yourself using your own name. try it out. it can actually have benefit in terms of environmental tools. creating order and participating in a rituals are two things you could do seeking out

awe-inspiring experiences is another and for those of you here who live in tucson you are in an ideal environment to experience all because you just go out your front door and you look around you. my god, it's amazingly beautiful. so, let me tell you a little bit about how this works oz and emotion we experience when we're in the presence of something vast and indescribable looking out at this mountain range fills me with all my god. this is so amazingly beautiful like even the the cactus forest. is that the appropriate term. i mean, i've never seen anything like it. it's it's amazing. it's beautiful. you get all you can find this experience a lot in the natural. world some amazing sunsets looking up at the stars. these are common experiences that trigger all you can also find this experience in in the world of human innovation, like looking up at a skyscraper in a city or for me contemplating interplanetary travel which you know for a long time was the

stuff of science fiction, but nowadays we're actually doing it. we recently landed an suv on march and it projects back imagery and about that planet like this fills me with awe. how did we figure out? did we go from struggling to start fires to landing spaceships on other planets? i don't have the mental apparatus to make sense of that. when you experience this emotion of all when you contemplating something vast and in describable that leads to something that we call a shrinking of the self you feel smaller when you're in the presence of something vast and then describable and when you feel smaller, so does your chatter so experiencing this emotion? this is a the kind this is kind of the ultimate perspective broadener, and there's lots of of cutting edge research which shows that this can be really helpful for people when they're struggling with chatter one other way, and then i saw the little note there about wrap up

soon for questions, but five more minutes. okay some questions once you get me talking about this, i just go i love this stuff one other thing i want to mention about nature. there's another way that enhancing your exposure to green spaces or in this case brown spaces. i don't know. i mean that in a nice way where i'm come from now in michigan, it's all gray and gloom spaces. so you've got it much better than us. there's another way this can help us and it has to do with our attention. earlier we talked about you know the book anecdote when you're struggling with rumination and chatter. you can't focus your attention because your chatters consuming it. one of the things scientists have shown is that when you go for a walk in a safe natural setting one of the things that happens is that natural setting very gently grabs our attention. our tension drifts onto the beautiful surroundings we call this a getting stuck in a type of soft fascination.

there's kind of taking it in. you're not you're not like focusing really hard on the geometrical structure of the cactus plants. i mean, maybe some of you are but i think most of us probably aren't photographer as a die. okay bad example, but but you're just kind of taking it in usually and what that does is it'll allows our attention all the all the attention that we were previously devoting to our chatter. it allows those attentional reserves to restore. so going for a walk in a green space even watching a movie of interesting, you know, a green surroundings can be really restorative and that's another way that nature can help us from the outside in the next three or four minutes. i want to open up one of the discussion that is social media and kids and chatter and when you introduce the idea of controlling the conscious thoughts with children particularly with the onslaught of all the terrible news and social media out there. it's a big topic we can spend an

hour on it just for a few minutes and then we'll line up for some questions in a few minutes. so when to when to start with your kids, i think as soon as they start with social media or express an interest in in wanting to do so, we've a lot about how you interact with social media ways that are harmful versus helpful and i think sharing that information with kids is really really important. there are a couple of ways that that social media can can really be quite bad for our chatter one thing that we know social media allows us to do is is curate the way we present ourselves to the world. so i was out to dinner last last week with with my wife and some friends and i noticed that there is a a person sitting at the other table and they did that they were doing this. where's my where's my phone here? i assure you it was one shot that they were after right and so they're trying to get the

perfect selfie which they will then know down filter and photoshop and then post and what we've learned is that this is a normal human response or always curating the way we present ourselves to others. i wear a jacket here. i don't always wear a jacket on sunday afternoons. i'm doing it because of this venue. so we're always curating the way we present ourselves, but there are limits to our ability to do so in the physical world that are absent on social media. and so we put we put our glamor shots and glamor tweets up there and what happens is other people are then bathing themselves in the curated glorified lives of others, which can lead them to feel feelings of envy which in turn create chatter and so forth. that's one way social media can can get up get not just kids but adults in trouble the other thing social media allows us to do is just vent, right? we know that people like to press their emotions and social media and our smartphones allow us to do it the moment our

emotions are active. so oh my son of up look tweet now, there's one other important element one way that social media changes the way we express our emotions. in everyday life when we're communicating with other people. we are we are awash in a rich source of information that comes from the people. we're talking to your facial expressions right now. you're giving me all sorts of information empathy cues. i can see people who are engaged some folks who aren't don't look at them too much. i'm just joking. but this provides me with information that modulates how i talk to you even on the phone. we hear people's vocal tone we can tell if they're engaged if we're being rude on social media that information is absent and it allows us to say things to other people that we would never say to their faces it allows us to act at some in some cases ugly which promotes things like cyberbullying and trolling which are are significant problems

that we now face a society. so we absolutely see chatter manifesting in social media in ways that can be quite toxic at times not to say social media. can't be useful too. i think looking at the ukraine situation. so social media has garnered tons of port but it can be an achilles heel as well. if anyone has questions, we invite you to the microphone right up here and please project as best you can because we'd like to hear your questions. we can repeat them if we can't hear them. i have actually two questions. i was surprised that you said that you know talking about it isn't can be kind of negative and i'm wondering immense thing you mentioned example of your wife and i'm wondering if there's a difference between men and women where men want to get right to the solution and for me talking about it is the way i figure out how to solve it to get to expend that energy and things that i'm wondering what your science says about that. yeah, and my so yeah, let me say that one. my working memory is my only so

much attention left end of the day if you're talking about in a way that ultimately lets you come to a solution. that's fantastic and you want to keep doing that. i by no means mean to imply that we should not talk about it period we want to talk about in a way that ultimately gets us to the point where you are ending up. so seems to me like you're expressing your emotions and working through it at the same time, which is which is what we want in terms of the gender difference interestingly enough. there's this myth that women like to talk about things more than men. that's been that's been studied and it does not hold so men have just as strong a need and desire to express their emotions and talk to other people about it as women. i cite some of this research in the book. i thought it was it certainly updated my views on that with myth as well. so men aren't from ours and women from venus. no, no, they're both from this planet, but different continents but my second question comes

from more from the political realm of reading the cult of trump and he's talks about the mind control that that cults like the moonies and the scientology and the and and that trump uses like and i've read books like think and grow rich and and then there's the i can't think what his name is the one that trump models himself after the constant the the positive language the end the neurolistic programming and i was reading in saying that's not effective but then tony robbins seems to be very well using something much like that. so, i guess what i'm wondering is in terms of chatter like that that the idea of positive chatter versus negative chatter neurolex programming and when has become you know, into negative of mind control and what authoritarian organizations use or and when can be the the positive thing where it can like

be that but the athlete focuses on so that he succeeds. thank you great questions. well, i sure hope that none of these tools are used to help mind control others. you know. any tool can be miss abused and with respect to nlp neurolinguistic processing and a lot of these other approaches to helping people a lot of them just haven't been held up to scientific scrutiny every single thing in this book. is science-based. i'm a scientist. that's my day job. it's very important to me that this work is grounded in science doesn't mean that in the future. we won't learn new things that updates how we think but what's in there is at the time that that book was written the best cutting edge in terms of what we know. so with respect to some of those other practices, i think there may be some interesting elements

in there. but until we subject that to science. we just cannot know how much of that is, for example placebo kind of intervention. so so i i'll leave it at that. i just wonder at some point it gets to be that narcissistic personality. i think of you know stewart's smalley, you know, al franken on snl, you know. people, you know people love me, you know that that thing where it really becomes self-inflated and and it's great to have that self-talk, but if it's not based in reality, it can be have negative implications. yes. i hope i don't flood this. i'll ruminate on it for a long time, but you're not going to it's gonna be great. okay? when my mind gets carried away and i can't think about other things it goes and goes and goes and it seems like i had a circuit breaker. and it just stops and i just think about something else. sometimes it could take a day. sometimes you've taken hour am i crazy or unique or both?

do you really want me to answer that question? no you are you are absolutely not unique. so, you know that that explains in part. that explains in part how mental time travel that temporal distancing strategy works right? because the circuit breaker does switch eventually for you, right? it turns off. and when you think to yourself, how am i going to feel about this in a week or a month what you're reminding yourself in that moment is you eventually will feel better and that often takes the edge off the chatter. there are some research really interesting stuff that looks at the duration of our of our chatter and it varies depending on what the source of the chatter is the kind of emotion whether it's anger anxiety or depression driven, but but most of the experiences we have surrounding chatter do eventually fade over time what my hope is that teaching people about these tools what that can do is shorten the amount of time

that you get stuck in chat or people often ask me. hey, you're an expert you study this your whole career. you wrote a book you ever experience chatter? yeah times. told you about the bathroom episode but what i am really good at is the moment, i detect the chatter beginning to proliferate. i've got a set of tools that i implement right away and it shortens a period of time in which i'm stuck. so thanks for that. excellent question. you didn't love it. yes. so i'd like to ask a question about the impact of social media going back to that something. i'm personally you know concerned about is the echo chamber effect that social media has on, you know, a lot of commentary a lot of you know, very in you know inflammatory opinionated, you know comments and it almost at least to me it sounds like that aspect of social media could be a rife

breeding ground for this, you know negative kind of a venting that you discussed and i was just curious. you know, what are your thoughts on that? and you know, do you have any thoughts on you know how we could implement a solution to prevent social media platforms from being you know, this this epicenter of you know of negative negative venting yeah, we completely agree. i think it's a tremendous problem. we do research on this topic in my lab. i think there are two solutions we to addressing this issue. we don't have the solutions yet. one thing. i think that will make a difference is teaching people about how this all works. so social media has been a giant experiment and we've kind of stumbled through it without really teaching ourselves or our kids how to navigate this space if you think about drawn analogy

between the online world the offline world from the moment. our kids are are little we teach them how to navigate the physical world, you know, don't go here go here. you don't say this. you don't talk this way to this person you talk this way. we haven't socialized kids into into how to use social media and i think we now have enough science that we can begin to do that we can begin to explain the culture of curation we could talk about how social media makes it easy for us to act in ugly ways to other people and i'm really curious what effect teaching people about this how all this works might have on their actual behavior. so that's one thing we can do. the other thing we can do a little bit more challenging but when i say we i mean people who are designing social media algorithms and programs my hope is that they use this science to change the way these platforms operate to make it more challenging for people to get stuck in an echo chamber that is

characterized by co-rumination of the sort that can lead to violence and outrage that is definitely within the power of social media companies to to leverage the science to inform how their product operates and in the hope is that they begin to do that. so great question. okay. yeah. thank you. yes, my question is about rumination. so you described it in more of a negative context around ruminating on a negative experience, but can we ruminate on a positive experience that can lead to a negative income or outcome? great question. i don't know of any work. so ruminating on a positive experience is generally talked about in terms of savoring. and i'll i will often actually prescribe savoring to people so i will say you know, we do a lot of research in my lab on on

distancing and the ability to step back and try to reason objectively about your problems to try to work through them you want to do that when? your focusing on something negative, but when it comes to something positive my advice is to immerse yourself in that experience as much as possible. so when i'm at the at the playground with my kids having fun around the soccer field, i don't want to be ethan. what are you doing? right? i don't want to be stepping back. i want to be totally engaged in that experience. so i'm not aware of any work that shows that ruminating or perseverating on positive stuff can get us into significant trouble. you're welcome. my therapist says that the episodes of chatter that i have are episodic. i'm not sure. she's right. she's no kind of scientist. well the heck with her. yeah. well, she's just really sweet

but i'm not sure i believe that so. if that's true. is there a way to plan for this and because you know what your cycle is or is it actually cyclic is it well? i i don't know that there's some regular predictability as to when we're going to engage and when we're going to fall victim to chatter it would be great if we knew exactly when it's going to happen because then we can activate strategies beforehand to try to prevent that from occurring but you know life is filled with chatter chatter triggers chatter landmines. sometimes i log into my email there goes, you know, someone said something that gets it all going. so the best preparatory work that i think you or anyone here can do is to familiarize yourself with the different tools that are out there. that can