i. do noon everyone, but thanks joining us in this cold austin afternoon and welcome to the 28th annual texas book festival. we're about to start this wonderful panel. so please silence your cell phones and make sure you send

that text message now, because this conversation is going to be super engaging and a reminder that after this conversation, the authors will sign their books in the book, people tents, they're located on right next to the h-e-b tent books are sale are for sale throughout festival weekend courtesy of book people so you can help support our authors. the book festival and the largest independent bookstore in texas by purchasing the books by our incredible festival authors. a portion of every book sale help support the texas book festival's mission, which includes expanding literacy initiatives and access to literature across state. all right, so let's start this panel is called repairing a broken system the impact of immigration policy in america. i'm sad to hear of martinez, beltran and. i'm a reporter with npr's the texas newsroom, which is a collaboration of public stations in this state. and npr. today, i'm joined by alejandro

oliva and bill hing. alejandro is an essayist translator, immigrant justice advocate, and embroiderer. she's recipient of the 2022 creative nonfiction writing grant. her writing has been included in best american travel writing 2020. she was also nominated for a pushcart prize and was honored with an aspen summer awards emerging writers fellowship. she was the frank fellow at the yale whitney humanities center in 2022, and her first book is the one we're discussing today. it's called river mouth a chronicle of faith language and migration by. bill. bill is a professor, law and migration studies at the university of san francisco and professor of law, asian american studies emeritus at davis. in 50 years of law practice litigation and teaching and writing, professor hing has represented non-citizens from all over the world, especially

those facing deportation from gang members to asylum seekers fleeing violence and from individuals in ice detention to families gathered at the u.s. southern seeking refuge. bill's book is called humanizing migration how to transform our racist and unjust system. thank you so much. all right. so i to start bill with you. your book argues that it's imperative to transform the u.s. immigration system. you call it racist and unjust system. and you argue that immigration law, again, is racist. and many people have never had to navigate particular judicial system. so can you explain to us why you say racist? yeah. thank you, sir john. thanks for the invitation. and it's nice to meet you, alejandro. i look forward to reading your book. i started a legal services attorney in 1974, and i became a full time law professor in 1979. and ever since then, i started

the first immigration law school and immigration clinic in the country, actually in san francisco. and i've run immigration clinics since then. the last ten years has primarily been representing seekers from honduras guatemala, el salvador and mexico. but we we also represent people from all over world. the answer to the question on the racism of immigration law is you've got to look at two factors. one is the law itself, and the other is enforcement policies. the law itself is pretty clear starting the chinese exclusion act. congress has the power to actually pass laws that are racist. that's been felt by --. it's been felt by southern europeans. it's been felt by virtually every non-western and european group race has always been a factor. so that what that results today

is that the bad logs in the visa system are the longest for the countries where biggest demand from from asia, from india. so it's kind of it's kind of cruel to say get in line because one, there isn't a line everybody. and secondly, the line is very long for most countries. and don't get me started on migration, because the history of discrimination of black migrants in the law is very evident. turning to enforcement policies. well, honestly, do really need to remind you of the whips that were used against haitians and they'll rule a couple of years ago of the fact that the vast majority of people are deported are latinos and black migrants. i've represented my share of

asian gang members too. okay, so they get deported to. the distinction between folks gathered at the border and i go to the border every six months. i was just in the arizona mexico border two weeks ago. the distinction between the way we treat migrants who are now not just from central at the border or even south america, but from africa. we were representing. we picked up a client two weeks ago in florence, arizona who is from chad. these individuals desperate. and yet when you compare them to how ukrainians were treated beginning a couple of years ago. a world of difference i guess finally i would say that in the 1980s i was honored to help win a case the supreme court in us versus cardozo that establishes the standard for what

well-founded fear of persecution is and the supreme court said and concluded just as scalia. it was a 6 to 3 opinion was you qualify for asylum. if you have a one in ten chance of persecution, 10% was the intent of the humanitarian law of asylum. yet if you look, you look online and find the asylum approval rates for every immigration judge in the country, you just enter their name in under track. tr ac it's website at syracuse university and it will tell you what the asylum rates are. some immigration judges understand the humanitarian nature of asylum have approval of 80 to 90%. however, some immigration judges in the same courtrooms have approval rates, a one and 2%. there's a problem. and those deny alls or denials to people of color.

so that's why i'm convinced that the immigration system is rigged against certain people of color. we're going to be jumping from topic to topic because i think this this issue of immigration is very complex. there's a lot of questions that will be popping up as we have this discussion. but, bill, you talked about the 10%, that 10% rule or or or theory here. and it's it seems like no one no, not a lot of. judges are applying it uniformly. and i'm wondering, how can that fixed? because at the end of the day. right. there's discretionary powers have the power to decide how how they rule on some of these issues that judges particular. yeah, it's. here's the problem with the current court system. it's overseen by the the attorney general of the united. so if the attorney, administrative judges, they're not federal judges. they're administrative judges. so if the attorney when the attorney general changes, the

attorney general can change the precedent decision under which the judges follow. so honestly, there needs to be a shift in the immigration court to, a federal level. equivalent, for example, to the bankrate posse court or the tax court, congress can create a federal immigration court that is independent of the politics of whoever the president is. and that's something that should be done. and out. you talked about your experience in your book dealing with migrants across the border and also this site, but also the key, the idea, right, like both both sides. but when you talk about, like your experience working with them and they're all waiting to cross and, you know, that system is also pretty complicated of them having to wait there. can you share maybe three things your experiences volunteer in mexico that that think are emblematic of how this immigration system is broken?

yeah. so at the time that i went to tijuana to do this work, i don't go nearly as often bill but in i went in early 2019 and at the time the policy of the land was known as metering which means only a certain number of people get to cross. those are determined by basically having people wait in line. again, get a number. those numbers get called if you miss your number. getting, you have to get back in line. it's very, very chaotic, very arbitrary, very. and there's this kind of that goes around that migrants are the ones running this that have absolutely not true. it is policy kind of like set in place by a by the u.s. government who decides how many people that they going to allow in each day. they claim this is because they can't process any more than a certain number of people. again, that's completely matter of choice. they could choose to fund

processing instead of putting people in detention. and so while i was there. i met a lot people who were staying at a shelter that was 45 minutes away from the crossing place. and they would come in every morning and get on a bus at like 630 in the morning to come and see if their would get called. and then maybe it would be it wouldn't be they had to bring all their things with them every morning to kind of see that was the day that they were going to get to across. metering ended about two weeks after. i was in tijuana and was replaced by a policy as return to mexico, which meant that where before you could actually get across the border, you could come in, you could be paroled into the country, you would to start setting up your life while you were the extremely long time. it takes to get asylum hearings to start going through the asylum process. when return to mexico, they called them the migrant protection as the official name. so mpp they were not very

protective people would cross the border. they would kind of get assigned a number case state and then they would get shifted back across the border to wait in mexico, to wait in cities that were full of other people who are waiting, were full of people who were trying to take advantage of them, who were trying to make the best of a bad situation. they were getting involved in all kinds of economies. there it be it made these border cities that are already so complicated and tense in a place that people move through, made even tenser and even more complicated, and that these policies have just kept getting more and more aggressive during the pandemic we saw title 42, which people from crossing of disease. which again was completely fictitious. there was no added health

component for having people across the border during covid. they were not making people sicker. if anything the detention centers that ice runs were making people sicker or spreading disease around the country. as people got transferred from one to another. and so kind of see especially the border hardening up an incredible amount as time has gone on. i want to pivot to a big part, your book, which is about how language plays a big role in the immigration system. you say your book is unapologetically bilingual and you say, quote, this doesn't mean this book isn't for you. it is, but it does mean i'm trusting you to figure it out the same way. so immigrants, too, with english could. you know, i'm just to hear if if language or a change in how we approach language could make the immigration system more fair. and if so, how?

yeah. i feel like language and language access is just one of the ways in which it's unfair, but certainly it is a part of the immigration system that could use a massive overhaul. i think somewhere that we see this incredible amount is indigenous language speakers. there are a tremendous number people who speak indigenous languages coming up from guatemala from honduras, from mexico, and they come in and border patrol officials look at them and say, oh, that must be a spanish speaker. i'm just going to speak to them in spanish. i'm not going to ask if they understand. many people will speak spanish, but usually as a second language, usually sometimes a distant second. and so by a sort of that, they speak spanish by making get along in the second language, you end up with misunderstandings that end up separating families, that end up with children who die because parents are asked, does your

child need medical assistance? and the parents don't understand enough to say yes. and you know, children die of influenza and fevers and the flu, and that's absolutely inappropriate. and so there is so much wrong with the system that having correctly access cannot even touch, but having at least that level of where people are able to accurately communicate their needs is a starting point, i think. in your book, you mentioned that the, you know, part of the of the function of the immigration system is to fracture and, you know, when you're talking about how language miscommunication could lead to like separation families it's like one of those examples right like emblematic of you mentioned. let's talk a little bit about the conditions. migrants face when they are in detention rooms too cold. in fact, they're the elliott us because of how cold are or ice boxes. some folks have said the food

they they got had worms and the lights don't go out until late. it's it's loud. it's crowded. and it seems that's by design. bill, can you tell me a little bit about your experience touring these detention centers and what you've seen there? yeah, i the reason why the yellow letters are used is because the border patrol comes from a mindset of enforcement and that there's a border crisis rather than an understanding. it's a humanitarian crisis and so their facilities are not designed to be friendly, if you will. and earlier you asked me and the host asked me if i'd been to awesome before and i've not been to austin, but i've been to other parts of texas, and it's usually been as part of inspection teams under a case called flores, there's a flores settlement agreement that authorizes teams to inspect

detention centers where where children held and the i thought it was bad and when i was in dili, where it was families, it was women and their children. and without getting much detail, i when i watched women and children being processed and a presentation being made i compared was juxtaposing that image with my daughter in law and my granddaughter at that time who was three or four years old and how lucky she was my granddaughter to be able play in her home. and whereas the children that i saw in dili, what their mothers the one word to describe it was lothar isaac. they had no energy. they had they were regressing. they were bedwetting again. i thought that was the worst until i went to clint texas at the border inspection. the border patrol station where

children were not supposed to be held for more than 72 hours unaccompanied minors. they were supposed to be transferred within 72 hours. the office of resettlement. but there was evidence and we went to confirm that they were holding children for 2 to 3 weeks and. we don't have enough time to get into it, but i devote a whole chapter to my experience there. honestly, i still ptsd from that experience. the youngest child was separated from her aunt at the border to be left on her own was two years old. we that out later on because as young 17 year old who was in same detention room other kindness of heart started caring for her and five year old that had been separated and we should not be detained. children. thanks for sharing, alejandro, in your book you wrote that and

this might be maybe one of the thinking of some people too. you wrote that there was a time in your life where you thought a detention center might be an excusable evil. but. but you've seen your opinion that. can you tell us what was your thought process when you thought about maybe we should have detention centers and what made you have a change of heart? yeah, i think before i was educated or informed about the immigration detention system narrative that you're fed the thing that you're talked about is like, well, we don't know these people. we don't know who they are. we don't know what their intentions are. we don't know what they're doing here. and and it makes sense to. put them in jail for a little bit and and kind of make sure that they aren't who they say they are. and we make sure that we know who are and. you don't get to see any other narrative that detention centers, as i'm sure you have experience are often kind of on the edges of things you have to drive a long time to get there. you have to you have to want to go in there.

you have to get special permission to go in you don't you don't. they're not part of the fabric of anyone's everyday life. you don't see what happens if you are just a person about your everyday life. usually. and i think the thing that started changing my mind, the thing that made me realize is the detention centers are an index usable evil that they are wrong. it is talking to people who had spent time in that. and i visited one in mississippi at one point and kind of saw a lot of the conditions that bill was talking about. it was a detention center for adult men. and, you know i saw men sobbing because of the conditions that they were being held in. and because of everything that they had gone through to get there and knowing that this was the barrier that they had to come up against, i also, in my job, got to talk to a lot of people who had won their

immigration, but were had been in detention centers sometimes for a little while, sometimes for months, sometimes for years. and the number of people who come out of detention centers with permanent disabilities because of the treatment there i have talked to people who have developed diabetes because of the absolutely horrendous quality of the food that they are served there. i have talked to people whose diabetes has worsened, who have gone into diabetic diabetic, because, again, the condition of the food, the lack of medical care. i have talked someone who had to have a limb amputated because the absolute medical neglect that happens in these places and you don't get to hear or or understand of that if you are not someone who is involved. immigration, justice, immigration law in some way, if

are not going and putting yourself into a place where you find out about and i think that it's very, very easy to take these narratives that were given. and so so much harder to find out the truth of these. so so then you we talk about the horrible conditions in these detention facilities. some of them are being held in detention for way longer than than what it's supposed happen. what is the solution? because we have this conversation over that part of the detention is to ensure that the person shows up to court. but the person, you know, presents and follows the process. but if the conditions are so bad, let's say we were to abolish this system in particular of like how detain migrants, what is the solution? what is the alternative that could satisfy potentially government officials, but also that respect the humanity and dignity of the immigrants? yeah, there are many alternatives to detention. the in fact, i don't like them,

but ankle mount monitors have been used and that's not a problem except for the people that have to wear and then today the new ice is actually using an app that monitors people to make sure that they don't more than 50 miles outside the of where they're living. and that seems to work as. so the truth is that even without those, there continue to be families that are released. there is a quality of difference between the trump administration and the biden administration that they are allowing more families to be released now, especially after the lifting of title 42. and so it turns out that there isn't appearance without any those monitors. there's an appearance of 95% of those who have been allowed and the other five, they have didn't receive proper notice of their

hearings. and so there is no evidence that we need detention because there are humane alternatives that are available. in about 10 minutes, we're going to start taking questions from the public. so in about 10 minutes, you get started lining up in that mike in the middle and we'll we'll be happy to take some of some questions. part of the argument that both of you make in your books is this of let's abolish ice, the immigration and customs enforcement. realistically speaking, what would a future without ice look like like? so i think that the reason that ice needs to be abolished and not just reformed not just altered in some way to make it more humane is that it's it's in the name itself its whole point and purpose is enforcement which means that we treat everyone coming across border as a

presumptive criminal instead of treating them as people who are coming here for humanitarian reasons, instead of treating them as people who are coming here to reunite with their families, to get better jobs, to able to survive and care for their families in the that they want to and when we have an organization known as ice being like the primary thing that they with their primary introduction to this country, we treat them like criminals because that's ice's mandate. that's what do that's their whole purpose of existence. and i think that is at least one of the reasons that i think ice should abolished and replaced with something that much more has more of a mandate of of care, humanitarian aid. i feel like, yeah, i'll tell you, a world without without ice would mean that families not be

separated and broken by an enforcement policy that is largely based on racial profiling and a world without ice would mean billions of dollars saved that could be used for community services job training for we waste a lot of money on enforcing immigration laws against people that should not be deported. so we are in texas, in case we forgot. right. and as many people in the audience know and, you also know, governor governor abbott has pushed for the state to be more involved in the enforcement of immigration law, even though that's something that's under the purview of the federal government. he created operation lone star, which is his initiative to curb illegal migration. he has also pushed and in fact the legislature recently is moving forward a bill that would allow local law enforcement agencies to arrest migrants that they deem to be undocumented,

either present them to a magistrate for them to process that migrant and then send them to the federal authorities or to even allow the local law enforcement agencies or local officer, your sheriff's department, to a migrant and require them to return to mexico or even deport them or try to remove them. again, some of these things have not been tested. there's the argument that is our constitution and all because immigration laws are under the purview of federal government. but part of the reason why we're having this discussion in texas is because the governor and other republican governors, frankly, across the country have said that the biden is not doing enough to to curb illegal migration. so i'm curious, when we read, when we talk a future without ice, the thing that came to mind when i was reading the book was. okay, well, then that could mean that states would have more power over to enforce the immigration laws. this is the discussion we're having right now that the way texas is enforcing them could arguably be inhumane or it could

not be fair. so i'm just curious, what would be the role of states or if you're concerned that by abolishing ice the states could have a higher, you know, more power to enforce these immigration laws, and then it would be harder to set standards. yeah. okay. so i'm trying to be polite to my host here. so i don't come here to texas. i but. in 2012, there's a case called united states versus arizona, which is my home. and and that and arizona passed a a series of anti-immigration. and the supreme court led by justice roberts at that time struck down the arizona law sb 1070 on the grounds that when it comes to regulate, regulate immigration, it's a function. it's not a state that so what is being proposed would uproot over 200 years of legal precedent. so a state just doesn't have the

authority to regulate immigration. and i understand that before that's pending, would authorize state police to, deport people. that's just not going to be upheld. could i be wrong? yes, i could be wrong because the supreme court maybe different today than it was in 2012. but like i said, it was 200 years. it's 200 years of legal precedent. i guess i just we've seen what has happened to abortion that left with the state that. it's it's going to vary from state to state and that i just don't think that the supreme court is going to go that way with immigration. and i would remind all of us to remember who we are and remember our power and grandparents and their aspirations and why they came here.

i challenge you to and speak with the folks that are gathered at the border and make a meaningful distinction between their lives and their aspirations, which is for their family to work, to put in a hard day's work for fair pay because they're afraid of going back home. there's not much of a distinction between what gone through and what our parents and grandparents went through, where we're getting ready to start taking questions in the next minute or so. so if you to start lining up, that would be great. but i'm curious, you know, just to hear from both of you on this question and this is something that we talked prior alejandro, which is how can people better understand this system? again, many, many folks in this room, maybe don't have to go through the process of getting their spouse a green card or going through that to do this.

immigration. they might know someone, but they you know, the reality is that a lot of a lot us live in bubbles. so besides reading your books right that i think it gives a good primer of the situation and how to navigate system. what are some things that people do to better understand how we might hold the immigration system works in this country. i think that matter where you live and. this is true all across the country. there is going to be an immigration detention center near you. there are also going be humanitarian and aid organizations who work primarily with immigrants in your area. and i think that the best way to learn and to figure what's actually going on is to talk to people who are going through that system every day for whom it is an everyday thing, for whom it is consuming their entire lives. sometimes. and you can do that by volunteering these places, by

accompanying people on their ice, check ins and seeing an ice office looks like and watching someone as they sit there, unsure if this is the check in where they're going to say buy a plane ticket in 24 hours and get out of the country or they're just going to get to go home and continue their everyday life. it is being a pen pal with someone who is in an immigration center and figuring out what their are, what their everyday life is, what they're thinking about every day as they are held away from their families. it is. you know, working alongside translating and interpreting, which is how i involved and listening to them tell their stories, listening to them talk about the reasons that they decided to come the often incredibly violent, traumatic events that have led them to leave their home countries, leave everything that they have known behind sometimes leave family members behind, come to this country and think that that is the best way that you can

learn about what's happening. yeah, 100% agree with what alejandro just said. i am 100% believer in the contact theory. i know the few people in the audience have as much gray hair as i do when i was growing up in arizona. they had welcome wagons and if that sounds familiar to anyone, but and governor wolf will vilsack, when when tom vilsack was the governor of iowa, he opened welcoming centers to new migrants. i would say to your churches, through your communities, reach out, get to know people, help them figure out the bus system, help them figure out how to open up a bank, get to know people and talk with them. it's going to it'll make a difference, in your view, to those folks. don't be afraid of reaching to someone who is different. now we're having to take questions from the public. we have limited time here so, you know, as someone who asks questions for a living, phil

studied every day i ask you to please limit your questions to questions. let's try to avoid long statements, though, so we can have as many questions as possible. so yeah. can you say your name and then your question, please? yeah. i'm tom hartmann and i appreciate the approach that you're taking here. it's a tragic situation right now, and we do have to get better understanding. but in the meantime we have people that help and, and if we're trying to help people that are have approach asylum and have one of the judges, as you said earlier, is down at the lower percentage job approval. could you recommend how what kind of process should we try to guide them through in order to see in order to avoid an immediate deport deportation? is there are there strategies that are for people that have that who have applied for asylum and are likely facing and you're

touching on something critical which is unfortunately the vast majority asylum seekers don't have representation. and there's data that shows that if you're represented you have a 70% chance of winning. if you don't have represented and you have a 15% chance of winning. and so what is is a massive campaign to train and recruit more assistance. i argue in the book that that we ought to have a public defender's for immigrants and that a right to counsel should be afforded, at least for children. children aren't even guaranteed the right to counsel. and so until then, we're going to run into the same problem that that you're going to run into a harsh judge who's not sympathetic or not doesn't want to listen. is there any way to find a representation that is effective because we've gone that route a little bit and been very unhappy with the representation that they've had? sorry for the follow up, but

just in the state of texas and, i don't know lawyers in the audience, but it was a friend of mine, la pena, who who runs the the pro bar system and you want to may reach out to them. but there there's national training programs clinic catholic legal immigration network. that's what i would recommend. and alejandro in chicago, the public defender's office you were talking about the public defender's office in chicago has a specific set of attorneys who don't necessarily work on it's called removal is basically people who fight against people getting deported, but they do have an office where the intersection often criminal law and immigration law can get really complicated and outcomes of certain criminal can get really. you have incredibly serious immigration consequences that a lot of criminal attorneys don't realize. and so chicago has a special

office of public defenders that are charged with kind figuring out the intersection of that for clients who are kind of living under both sets of laws. thanks for that question. next question. thanks. i'm jude. a couple of presidents ago. basically, i was involved in education versus regarding gender based violence. and one of the things that we addressed was, you know, violence, asylum seekers at the border and border patrol used to have a questionnaire and they would refer people for and it would be an almost automatic process. is there being addressed in that way right now? so it's surprise as many people. but gender based violence is a basis for asylum. right. and the reason the point is because a principle that the government of the home country

cannot or will not protect the victim, then the victims should get protection under asylum laws. and so the answer lies in the interpretation of the federal courts. the court appeals in whatever region the country that you live in. honestly, in the part of the country that i in the ninth circuit. you have a very good chance to claim asylum for a woman who's been the victim of domestic violence in machismo countries like guatemala and honduras and other parts of the country where getting there and there's interesting evolution in asylum law that take a feminist stance don't let that word scare you. taking a position violence is a political that is in contrast to those that are in power. and so some courts have that a

woman's resistance to domestic violence should be recognized as a opinion. and so that be a possibility as well. but that's evolving in the federal courts right now. also, for young boys that are trying to evade gangs, etc., i would think that would similar principle. the problem has always been that, you know, to get it recognized at the border. so they had trainings for border patrol. i don't know whether they still do. and i don't know whether it's utilized well. they have asylum officers that are presumably giving what's called a credible fear interview. and supposed to be a screening mechanism, right? right. if they're trained properly, think no asylum officers and oh, yeah, it's not 100%. yeah, okay. it's not uniform. okay. thank you. thank you for your question. thank you. we have another question.

hi. my name is caroline kennedy, and i have a friend who has been the country for a number of years on, an r visa and he's here with his family and, even though south africa has told that has as is a scary place them to go back to because they are in the streets, kill the whites, and also because there are just virtually no jobs to be. he is still being told that because he's over 40, he cannot stay here. and i just wondered if either of you agree that age discrimination is a valid reason to keep somebody out or kick them out? well, there's principle in asylum laws. there's five bases for asylum, race, religion, nationality, political opinion and membership, a particular social group. and you could argue, depending on the country conditions and the evidence that age

discrimination might might be bad enough that it amounts to persecution, simple discrimination is not enough usually for persecuted and it's got to be something a little bit more serious. i thought what you were going to ask me since it's an hour visa, is is there religious discrimination and we have a number of african clients that have actually been with religious discrimination and depending on the country. and so it depends on the facts. yeah. thank for your question. we have a few more minutes for someone else. oh, question can you use the microphone, please back there? this is being live streamed on c-span, so make sure they can hear you. okay. since we're talking about comprehensive immigration reform. yeah, that totally depends on congress. right. coming up with the bill and how many years i've been waiting for our country to come up with a

holistic human side for immigration. how long do we have to wait for that to be addressed by congress? and do you all have any on on that? i didn't hear the question. so the question is a lot of how we reform immigration has to do with congress i mean, as far as passing the to reform the entire, you know, yes. system. we've waited so long. how much longer do we have wait to address that? and do you have any suggestions on how we can get them to move. i guess part of the question is like how what can people do to to push the congress to to to to act on this to to act on immigration. so is that accurate? yes, i think that's one of the major problems. and another question i had is i do work what i do volunteer with the detention centers and with the immigrants. and one of the things that i found is when they after they have gone through detention and have gone to the places in the united states that they have to wait six months to a year before they're allowed to work, that's

ridiculous. so they're sitting there waiting and they can't to work, but they're not allowed to. so i find that as a major problem. so to answer that, i live in chicago and right now we are dealing with this influx of people who are being bussed there by your lovely governor and these folks are living in police stations. i mean, chicago has abysmal like housing capability. if a couple of thousand migrants are able to like completely take it down. but the issue and the thing that i know that at least the mayor and the governor have really been pushing the federal government on is on approving quick work visas because people are unable to find housing, they are unable to support themselves. they're unable to like do the things they need in order to be able to support. and meanwhile, the city turning itself up in knots being like, we can't all these people, this is a mess. it seems like such easy fix.

but the truth is that having people who do not have the right to work and have to take under the table jobs in order to even be able to make a living makes them in credit incredibly easy to exploit and makes them incredibly, incredibly easy to give them jobs that are underpaid, that have unsafe working conditions, that are just not human humanitarian jobs and have the same protections that you or i enjoy in a workplace. and i think that that is why there is a lot of political that is missing from here because is more effective and efficient to be able to have a large populace, it's more effective, efficient economically to have a large population of people that is able to be exploited than to actually be able to give them the tools they need to, support themselves. thanks.

thank you, everyone, for all your questions. i'm sorry, i know there's still a line, but i think you can still ask the questions to the authors. this panel ends. again, thank you so much for. joining us today. thanks to alejandro and bill for for joining us. and again, the authors will now sign their books in about 15 minutes. at the book, people tent right by the hb tent on congress. and we welcome you to come. thanks again.

for. one more to go. book. book tv's live coverage of this year's book festival continues shortly shortly. on books, we delve into the latest news about the publishing industry with insider interviews with, publishing industry experts. we'll also give you updates on current nonfiction authors and

books. the latest book reviews. and we'll talk about the current nonfiction books featured c-span, spoke tv. and now a discussion on the great books of civilization. according to michael knowles. he hosts program and podcast called, the book club for prager u. here's a portion, a book club, yeah. is a fabulous like books. i was making fun of you that you have a book club, a bookshelf with no books, sort of sparse. it's a new show, you know. but but, you know. i'm reminded of the opening of the princess bride in my time. television was called books, and in this case. yes, it's called podcast. that's right. so it's all a continuum. so i have to admit, when when you ask me to do this and you and i do our verdict podcast together every week, that's a good chance to come and do your podcast. but we talked about different

topics to do. and the last time i brave new world, i was 13. so i remember it well because i read it in the year 1984. i was in eighth grade and and my eighth grade teacher, mr. wall, he thought it was a very clever to assign 1984. in 1984, right and we read 1984. we read brave new world, or we read animal farm. and and if you want a stunning indictment of soulless gods totalitarian domination, read any of those three or ideally all. those three. so, knowles what did we just see you just saw one little peek into the book club on prager u that happened to be with my friend, senator we do a show single month and the show is truly a book club. i mentioned that he's my friend because most of the guests that

we have on are personal friends of mine. most of the books that we do are suggestions by the guests who who we will approach and. we'll say, hey, i'd like to have you on the show. what do you want to read? and they'll say, you know, my favorite book either from a year ago or my favorite book from when i was 12 years old, is x, y, z. and i just want to cover it. and so the show is not a college lecture. the show is not some rigorous, purely analysis of of some great work. it's it's really a show about love of books and the of the culture that these books reflect and in us in our in our society. so senator cruz, aldous huxley's brave new world. he did and senator cruz had not read the for some time. that was another where, as you heard him say, he read it in school, hadn't read it since. but because senator cruz is supremely nerdy, it comes to

these sorts of things, especially he was flying back from either campaign event or maybe was from washington and he cleared his schedule to reread the book on the plane to annotate the book on his kindle app. and then we actually had wait about an hour before filming that episode because senator cruz was so insistent that he copy over all of his electronic into the hardcover. so he didn't miss any of the points. and this is actually my favorite part of the show. one, it gives me opportunity to get the education that completely neglected when i was in school both both in high school and in college, i was probably out out with my friends when i should have been a little bit more of my reading. and so it gives me an opportunity to read that, to read books that weren't even presented to me in the school. but but it also gives an opportunity to see what motivates your friends and to see what books have not only made them think about something

little bit differently, but have really shaped their lives, shaped their desires, shaped way that they view the world and the way that they view themselves. now, where did the idea for the book come from? the book was totally originated by our friends over at prager u. my day job is at the daily wire. prager u. this truly is a book club for me in that. it's sort of like a hobby. it's a hobby that's been going on for years now. and we've read many, many books on it. but our friends over at prager, you came to me one day. they said, michael, have this idea for a show. and i know you got your show at daily wire, and i know you do your show with senator cruz. but this one i think you're really going to like. in fact, think you'd probably do this show for free. you're just going to read whatever books you want a month and we're going to post them on prager u 25 minutes. we're going to have it be complete digestible. we're going just talk about why you love this book, why why your friends love book, and why people of all ages, whether they're ten years old or whether

they're 50 years old, should read these books. i think what prager you was that today many are graduating without read the great works of our culture. and part of this is because of the rise of political correctness and a general hostility to the western canon that's been brewing since the 1980s. so for for the purposes of political correctness curricula, we'll see great works replaced by more fashionable or politically activist. and this is a great shame because every second that one wastes reading some shallow political diatribe is a is a second. that one could have been reading shakespeare, one could have been reading tolstoy. and so that's one of the reasons for that. but but also important because, most people don't get their most meaningful education in the classroom. if if school succeeds in anything it will be in stimulating a love of learning in you such that you graduate at

18. maybe you go to college graduate at 22, maybe even get an advanced degree, graduate at 25 or 26. you've got the rest of your life ahead of you. there is no way that are going to read all the great works of the civilization and in ten or 12 years, it's just not going to happen and if you do happen to succeed at that you are not going to have taken everything out of them that you should. and so really your education in a way it sort of begins when you graduate school and this is a way of continuing that, whether you're on the job and you pop in an earbud listen to the book club, whether you we've had people write in who sitting on tractors in the of the country or maybe you're in school studying these books right now and want a perspective that is not not hostile is not a politically activist that really just gets to to what the books us about our culture and why the books have had such an effect on our culture. so michael knowles, you ever assign one of these what you call great books of western

civilization to a guest, or does a guest have full editorial control? i make suggestions but i never force to do a book in large part because i find that the conversations with someone to whom i have simply assigned book are just not going to be as good. yes, i'm interested in the plot of book. yes, i'm interested in the broadly accepted commentary about the book. but i can do that. i can easily recite it in much less than 25 minutes. the plot of a story and why it's had some significance. what i want is the desire i want is to know how it's personally affected somebody, why it speaks to somebody how this kind of a work could make somebody tick. one of my very favorite episodes of the book club was with a friend of mine who is a young don scholar, catherine illingworth, and we cover the divine comedy. we a little over 25 minutes we had to get through three canticle. it's a very long poem, but we went through the whole thing. we probably did in about 45

minutes. and i think that divine comedy is an exemplary book. the book club, because the divine comedy is about desire, even as dante and virgil are heading by the as they're about to enter into hell, they notice that the shades that are dammed now they've they've died. they're going into hell. they seem eager to cross over into hell proper and you read this and you think, wait a second, why are these people eager to get across the river to their eternal torment and damnation? and it's because what is telling us is that hell is not simply the punishment for when you do naughty things, but hell is a logical consequence of disordered desire is. and c.s. lewis has made this point. we've covered c.s. lewis on the book club that that people get what they want in this life or the next people tend to get what they want. and so so one of the objects, probably the most important object of education is not just to fill head with a bunch of facts, but it is to our will and cultivate our desires so that we

desire things that are edifying, that will lead, lead us to have a flourishing life rather than to to disregard our rational and allow our our base and appetites to run away with us. so how do you define a great book of western? well, i it for the purposes of this show, a little bit differently than i would define it if i were teaching a course at a university. i guess i am teaching a course at its prager university. i'm a tenured professor there, but i'm talking about a four year kind of school where you spend a quarter million dollars instead, these five minute videos that you get for free. the degree book definition that you would out of a university is probably something like you would read in in a bloom commentary. here is the canon going all the way back to. plato and aristotle and virgil going all way up to the modern philosophers. you've got works of literature and history and philosophy and

poetry and all the rest of it mixed there. we're a little bit looser about this book club. i am not just going systematically through all of the ages, through all of the very fine canonized writers. we're throwing books in there that people just happen to like larry elder really likes a book by somerset maugham. throw it. i think somerset maugham is a very fine writer, but i'll throw that in there. somebody likes a book by a gosh, i don't know plato or spencer claiborne wants to read the symposium. okay, great. we'll do plato, plato's certainly, certainly would count as a book. maybe a scientist named brian keating decides he wants to cover galileo. the dialog concerning, the two great world systems. okay, throw that in there too. we're hopping around everywhere. there is. there is no rhyme or reason, really. other than the love of books. and it can be the kind of book that a 12 year old would read. it could be it could be animal farm. it could be a relatively simple book, or it could be some of the most complicated literature and philosophy that's ever been written. we'll cover all as long as

people are to read it and to learn something not only about their culture, but about perhaps eternal truths. that those cultures are our looking toward. so tell us a little bit about the conversation between you and larry elder on human bondage. this was a book that i did not see coming. this is sometimes i make the mistake of of giving my guests free rein, and then they tell me a week before we're shooting that you're going to read an 800 page book. you've you you have no familiarity with. and you say, well, okay there go my nights this week. but this was a book that larry had read, i think it was 30 years may have even been 40 years before we did our episode. and what was so amazing before our episode is that larry had not reread it. very often the guests will have a little refresher before. they go do it. larry said, nope, i'll sit down and do it. and so during the episode, larry asked me. he said, okay, what happened

exactly on this plot point? oh, right. yes, it was that. and then he would just start quoting it clearly. this book had had and left such an impression on him, especially for someone like larry, who is deeply concerned with freedom, freedom and bondage and larry is not only a conservative, a libertarian leaning conservative. and so somerset maugham is not writing some political diatribe. he's writing he's writing novel, but it touches on these kinds themes. and so these big questions will pop up out of out of a novel. what is nature of liberty? is liberty the ability to do whatever you want, or is liberty the right to do what? you ought to do as as lord poses this question, these are questions that crop up throughout all of western history. and so i think it can be really helpful when people are trying to just get a grasp, just a hold on their culture, when read much less than we have in the past, when our attention spans are about the same as that of a fruit fly these days, it it can

it put us on the right path when we realize that some of the same questions that plato and aristotle were raising. well, these are the questions that shakespeare is grappling. these are the questions that tolstoy is grappling. these are the questions that george eliot is grappling with for that, or any even more modern writer that these keep, keep up and that there is a coherence to it that there is a through line in our culture. so michael knowles is a fair critique to say that the book club focuses on dead white european male dread dead white, european male. i suppose so, because of the the greatest in history in our civilization tend to be dead. just it's an old civilization and they tend to be white. we're talking about europe, mostly white people. i happen to come from the sicilian people, which an ethnically ambiguous liminal people broadly they're considered white, tend to be men. the writers tend to be men, though not all of them. we've covered plenty of women writers on the show i just

mentioned one of them who happens to have a man's name, george eliot. and. they tend to be christian, though they're not. certainly exclusively christian. in fact, the first book that we we launched was man's search for meaning with dennis prager, that great, great book by victor that touches on history, psychology, philosophy. it's another really important point because the the opponents of the western canon, they, as you point out, they will write the whole thing off and say it's all just a bunch of dead white men. to which i would reply, you know, dead white men are in so bad they've actually done a lot of great things in the past, but they'll they'll just sort of write it all off. and as though they were a monolith. and when you engage with these works you realize one they cut across sorts of categories and the works themselves will cut across all of these categories. how would you classify man's search for meaning? how would you classify plato's symposium, how would you classify dante's divine comedy?

how would you classify? the death of yvonne eliot by leo tolstoy is this fiction? is it novel? is it philosophy? is it theology? is it? it's it's kind of a bit of all of these things, including scientific work by galileo, is a dialog, a dialog between philosophers. it touches on theological questions as and in our age have increasingly become specialized. the idea of the university exists anymore. a university is supposed to be one thing where all of these different disciplines come together in the pursuit of truth. today, the university is a is a diversity. now we've now removed universality as as a core value of ours. now, diversity is considered to be one of the highest values and that the downside of that is that all of these different branches of knowledge have very little to say to other. in the modern age, everyone is specialized. they know everything about, one little topic, but they don't know anything about everything

at all. and so when you when you read these books, one can recognize again there is a coherence that science actually has something to say about philosophy and something to say about theology and something say about poetry has something to say about has something to say about the theater. and plato been able to communicate his ideas better in a in a long essay, i'm sure would have done that. there was something about the work of plato that that predisposes it for dialog. that wasn't true of his student aristotle. that is true of plato and it's important to to remember that there is coherence that we're not just picking up a bunch of random facts just to do it. we're not going to school to fill our head with a bunch of random trivia in case we happen to be on jeopardy someday. but we're trying to figure out something about. the truth, ultimate truth will tell us about our communities and will tell us about things beyond our immediate perception and will tell us something about

our souls and ourselves and what we're here to do. were you exposed to this canon at yale a bit. i don't want to this yale too much. it's very very mean thing to this one's mater. i think it was don kagan who was one of the great certainly not left wing philosophers. he was the great, great ancient historian who died only recently. and he had been the dean of yale, i believe it was professor kagan who said something to the effect of years ago, a student could graduate yale with an education, didn't have to have an education to graduate yale. but it was possible. and today, i'm not sure it's even possible, because so much of that university and really all of the universities has been taken over by grievance studies, all the the pseudo academic departments that come out.

critical theory. i'm thinking of women's sexuality and gender studies, black studies. this studies that studies american, which ironically is the only studies where teachers teach you to hate the thing that you are studying. it's not not true black studies, not true of women's studies. there was a great exchange with another yale professor, harold bloom, a great defender of the western canon, who said that he had a student into his class and professor bloom, i just had an american studies class and the professor spent 2 hours discuss saying how walt whitman was a racist and professor bloom said walt whitman, a racist. in the face of that, my i lose my capacity for rage and indignation. and i fear that that the way that these books when they are taught today are taught is that these are dead white men who were racist who were sexist who were ignorant, who didn't know anything. they were so much less sophisticated and brilliant than

we modern people walking around and and to read literature from the perspective that school of resentment is waste your time. there is there are so many better things you could do with your time than to go perusing through the pages of shakespeare to figure out what a bigot he was. please go outside and touch grass. go. i don't know go play soccer or something. you'll have a much time with it if you're going to read, you ought to do so in a spirit of humility. seeking wisdom, and you ought to do so because you love the books and you love texts and you love the truths that the books are trying to represent, and that that's the spirit that we're trying instill in the book club. what about in high schools. are you finding that high schools are not teaching what we call the classics today? no, certainly not. and they're censoring and editing some of these classics as well. the clearest case of this would be huckleberry finn. over the last several decades,

you've seen moves to ban huck finn because it deals with the issue of slavery and you've seen calls to censor politically incorrect words out the book. and this is so ironic when. you get to huckleberry finn because huckleberry finn is an indictment of slavery. huckleberry finn an indictment of racism. but they philistines who are unfortunately leading our schools and our universities today don't seem to understand that. i would be surprised if they ever crack the spine of the book themselves. they've just been told by somebody else that it's racist, therefore terrible, and we have to get rid of it. so unfortunately now, you're seeing all sorts of bizarre or frankly, obscene and pornographic books creeping into schools. one clear example of this would be genderqueer by maya kabob, which is essentially gay -- graphic vivid gay -- in schools. all the while the great writers are being kicked out there was a terrible move. the yale english department just just a few years ago to remove the requirement that one study

major english poets because. the problem with those major english poets is they happen be white guys because their their english mean the english tend to be white. and so you my goodness, if one of the most prestigious english departments in the country is getting rid of the requirement to study the great english poets, what's further down the line in high schools and elsewhere and every time that we hear calls to open up the curricula to bring in new and writers, i have no problem with bringing in interesting writers of any sort of background or race or sex or whatever, but have to be good books and the the books that are being kicked out in favor of these politically fashionable texts are, really, really good books. and so if you think that you can be shakespeare and and and all the way up to wallace stevens and modern people, good luck

with that. but if we're just doing this because of a cultural toward the past and toward man and toward white people and toward whatever other object of of loathing has come into your mind, well, that's going to be really, really deleterious to your education. now, michael knowles, you mentioned that the book club was created by prager. you you mentioned dennis prager. what is. prager you. prager u is an alternative as as our educational system is in recent decades. prager offers an alternative. it with a series of five minute videos where you could tune and you watch a complex subject or question distilled down into 5 minutes. there are hundreds hundreds of these videos. they've gotten billions views online. and then. prager you branched out. prager had a number of other series as a number of influencers. you speak to young people on college campuses. it's prager force, which goes

out and spreads the message and then has favorite book my favorite show rather it prager u, which is the book club. and so it's it's not a four year degree. it's amazing how sometimes prager u's opponents will you're masquerading as a university. my answer to that is, oh, we would never do such a thing. we have far more respect for ourselves than to call ourselves a modern university no. prager u is offering an educational alternative to people who feel that they have been ill served by their high schools and by by their colleges. and and now, actually, prager u like the daily wire is offering children's content. well, we just believe that people deserve an alternative. one example outside of the book club for a video that we've done a prager u is i've given video on the history of christopher columbus. this is a man without whom none of us would be here. this is the man who discovered the americas. he has been terribly maligned in the last 20 years by people who

are utterly ignorant of the history of this man and his motivations and what really happened. and i'm reminded of of pope's warning that a little, little learnin is a dangerous thing. people who read one sentence about christopher columbus and and really don't know the whole story. so we present that that side and and because popular culture is so opposed to tradition and the inherited wisdom of the ages, a lot of these videos are really simple, really common sense things that schoolchildren would have known 30, 40 years ago. but they are simply no longer taught. well, fortunately, it is available online, and michael knowles is also author to bestseller speechless. controlling words, controlling and then reasons to vote for democrats. a comprehensive. 266 pages. what was in that book? well, you you started with my most recent book, speechless. that book contains words.

my first number one national bestseller does not contain very many at all. it's 266 blank pages and i'm really edified to the blank book became a number one national amazon bestseller. i man if the second book doesn't sell that's going to look really bad for me. they're going to tell me that i should stick to what i know, namely, nothing but but the second book, thanks to, many wonderful listeners out there did hit number one national bestseller last year. and ironically, the one called speechless is the one that has words in it. michael noles is the host of the book club on the program and a podcast. we appreciate your time today on book tv. well, thank you so much for having me. a big fan of book tv, so it's an honor to be here. well, thanks for joining us for about a program and podcast produced by c-span's book tv book tv will continue to you new author, programs and publishing each week. and a reminder that this podcast

and all c-span produce podcasts are available on our c-span now app. and now more coverage of the texas book festival. austin.

right here.

this is. go. good afternoon, everyone. thank you so much for joining us. my name is charlene ramanathan. i am with quinn brook infrastructure partners. we invest in clean energy

projects. so we invest in the technologies that i hope will get us away from climate change. so of course, this topic is and dear to my heart, it's what i've done with my career and i'm really excited for all of us to talk with goodell. and jeff, you're book came out on july 11th, july for a lot of us was a heat dome summer here in austin for a lot of people, not just here. but in austin, we had 11 days of temperatures that were at or above hundred and five degrees. and that's record. and your book came out in the middle of that and think you're psychic. and so before i go any further, i what is your crystal ball suggest election stock tips anything yeah well of all thank you all for coming and it's really great to see you all here and to talk about this. yeah it was a little weird it

felt a little bit like i was living in my own stephen king novel. you know, that i had spent three years working on this book about extreme heat and. then the week it's published. yeah. you know, this heat dome down over us. and it did feel like i had summoned it in some weird way, but, but it did allow me to have a conversation with people and i think made people pay attention in a way that. you know, obviously if we would have had a freakishly cold summer would not have happened. yeah, no, it's true. it was of mind for a lot of people, including. your book, which loved i really enjoyed reading it. it has so many stories of people who meandered into trouble because they didn't understand. they underestimated the issue of heat and the threat it presents. and when we think about climate impacts, i feel like, you know, hurricanes and, wildfires get all the attention.

so why is it that we as individuals will wander out in the you know on a hot afternoon the way that we wouldn't the middle of a of a snowstorm? why we underestimate the threat. that's a great question. and i love the idea of meandering into trouble, but it's a great phrase that really describes what happens to people including myself. i mean, this book was born on a day when i was in phenix, arizona. it was 115 degrees. i was late for a meeting. i was staying downtown. i ran 20 blocks to the meeting. and by the time i got there, i, i was going to pass out. my heart was pounding and i thought, oh my god, this heat is dangerous. and which sounds like a very sort of simple thing to say. obviously, a simple observation. and it's especially kind ironic given that i had been a climate change journalist at that time for 20 years, but i'd never given like heat itself the heat

a real thought that really revealed the of it to me. and, you know, part of the reason why it doesn't with us, first of all, is obviously it's invisible. you can't look out if it's a hurricane or you know tornadoes or you know even droughts can kind of see heat you can't tell looking out here today, other than the fact that people are wearing some people are wearing down jackets. you can't tell how hot it is. there's no visual clues. so our brains register in the same way. and the other thing is our language is very confused. heat. i was just at the austin airport today. i was coming back from a book festival, charleston, and in the austin airport. there. a little, you know, austin booster poster on the wall talking about austin hot music,

hot food hot. you it's like, okay. and you know, i worked for a long time at rolling stone magazine. we would have a summer issue with like, you know, hot music hot so hot is a good thing to a lot of people. so, you know, we have all these kind of cognitive dissonance with this that we don't have with other climate impacts. yeah. and one of the things that you talk that resonated with me is hot can feel good heat, can feel good. you know, the end of a long winter. it can feel nice when it warms. and maybe that also into it where we don't i guess. this is a line from the book the lie invisible. when you cross into the danger danger zone right. yeah. i mean, people do like warmer weather think you know, i personally like cold weather spent a lot of time in the arctic and in antarctica and cold places. but generally, i think most people would prefer to live in

austin than in duluth with, you know not be nothing wrong with duluth. it is wonderful. but i just think people like to be in flip flops rather than, you know, snow in general. and i think that you know, warm we like warm weather. it feels good. it warms our bones. you know, and yet there this line where you go, oh, this feels good to oh, this can kill you quickly. and that's sort of one part of what this book is about, is about, you know, the reason i called the book the heat will kill you first, which i should say, was a very controversial title for among at for my publisher and for among many of my sort group of friends who were telling me, you cannot possibly call your that. no one will buy it. it's too who is going to pick up a book? the heat will kill you first.

and i and my editor both it because i really wanted this to feel visceral. i wanted this to be about you and about you know what happens to us. i think a lot of writing and thinking and about climate change is about future generations of people far away or, you know, just people not like us or not like you. and i think that kind of distance thing is a big problem. the whole climate change discussion and wanted to break that with this book. well, speaking of, you know, all of us and the of heat, i think a lot of people, when you talk about extreme heat and, the threat that it presents immediately think, well, i'm going to turn up my air conditioning, know the power bill will be higher, but i will. okay. and, you know, air conditioning is a huge on the grid and it takes up a lot of power which you know, is to climate change.

and that's a huge issue. but i would love for you to about how the idea that air conditioning a solution to the extreme that we're that we're facing more and more how that's just a really poor strategic thinking. yeah i have to be careful because i could talk about air conditioning 9 hours. me too it's because it's really complicated, fascinating in all kinds of ways you know, first of all, you know, should be very clear, you know, air conditioning can save lives, access to air conditioning in hot places and hot times is really important. and i spent lot of time in reporting this book with people who either lived in places that didn't have air conditioning or to me kind of even more tragically have conditioning and can't afford to run it. and i spent time in housing projects in arizona with families who were literally making decision every day during the middle of summer if they

could run the air conditioning for one hour or 2 hours and thinking about what that would cost their meal budget and things like that. so it's not just having thing hanging on the wall or in your house but it's also having the money to run. and i think that air conditioning is you know is, creates a bubble a bubble misunderstanding the threats of extreme heat. it makes us think that because we're okay, the world is okay. it's like i had a nice lunch world. hunger is over. you know, it's kind of you know taking your own experience, extrapolating it to the rest of the world and, you know, i want to be very there are billions of people, this planet, who do not have air conditioning and for all intents and purposes, will never have air conditioning. we are not going to air condition. the fields where food crops

grow. we are not going to air condition. the oceans. we're not going to air conditioning the amazon rainforest there. it is not a solution to a warming planet. it is a solution you for your afternoon and for your life but. and then can again, i have to be careful because this is a nine hour conversation. but then there's the whole energy side of it, right? the fact that the demand for energy increases some of the largest demand we've had here in texas been in the summer, it always spikes on hottest days. and we have very close to you know better than i do, very close to total, you know, grid possibly of rolling blackouts and things like that, because demand surges high. so it's this we get into this vicious cycle of having to build more power plants to power more air conditioning and. the endless cycle continues.

the last thing i want to say is that air conditioning. i write about it as i think about it as this sort of technology of forgetting, because everyone here knows here in austin, texas, lots of people lived austin, texas, before air conditioning. we had dog trap houses. you go to galveston. i spent some time in galveston reporting for this, looking at how they designed houses there prior to air conditioning with transforms that are opened and elevated air shafts that brought the the hot air out. you know, they knew how to make ice in the middle east a thousand years ago by how having wind tunnels that captured the wind and circulated it or under the water. there's lots of ways of building and being comfortable without, air conditioning. but we don't do that anymore. we just build glass and steel boxes and then stick an air conditioning in it. and call it a day.

yeah. and it obviously is an issue if you don't if you're not in one of those boxes. so moving to from air conditioned spaces to the great outdoors, one of the really fun parts this book is that you it's a bit of a travelog you go to different places and talk about heat in different contexts and one of the places you go, chennai, which is the capital thermal naidu, which is where my family and i are from. happy diwali everyone. and you. if i were describing chennai to someone, i would inevitably use words like lush and green because my experience of it is a lot of trees and i understand things changing. but i was still shocked when i read in your book when learned that chennai now has same tree cover as phenix, which is a desert of course. so there's the heat, heat, domes and events caused by global

warming made worse by global warming. but can you talk about how human in the built environment in what and what we've done in cities, how that affects our experience of heat? yeah, that's a really important thing to talk about. i mean, cities, there's a well known effect of of cities called the urban heat island effect cities austin phenix chennai they are in between seven and 15 degrees hotter than the surrounding area and it's not hard figure out why right because we have a lot of black we have a lot of concrete. we have a lot of glass a lot of steel. all these things absorb heat and then radiate it out and they the cities are hot boxes and we have not designed in the cities because no one has been thinking about heat with this idea of how

do we build a cooler city in mind and also really important in this is in cities the divide between the wealthier neighborhoods and the poorer neighborhoods, wealthier neighborhoods in virtually every city tend to be much cooler. the poorer neighborhoods because wealthier neighborhoods have bigger trees, more more parks, poorer neighborhoods, have a lot more concrete, a lot more asphalt, a lot less trees. there's nobody there to maintain them. they don't have the same kind of money to to maintain them. and so there's a real, you know, kind of racial and economic divide between. heat in cities also that is beginning to change. virtually every city in a hot place in the country now, tree planting campaigns. and, you know, there's ways of thinking about how to cool cities off. we have wonderful here like

barton springs, which you know, mecca is on these really hot days. but cities are a big problem i mean, they are they are hot boxes. yeah. one of the great phrases that you in your book, it's one of the great themes, but i really liked the phrase is in all the divides have in our culture now have a thermal divide and you specifically talk the example of people who work outdoors and landscapers for example and that's what they do. there is indoor element to that job. so can you talk about the equality aspect of heat? yeah, it's a huge issue. this divide, because and it goes back to air conditioning, you know, and when i was starting this book, i had a notion. as a gesture in this direction, i was going to the book outside that air, you know, and that. about 3 hours.

so i, you know, i retreated because i thought that having the book done would be better than, you know, me just sweating it out virtuously and not getting any writing done and falling asleep every 3 hours. and in those 3 hours, did you feel your productivity? oh, totally. are you kidding? mean, you know, complete stupor came over me because i of course did this experiment, you know, during the middle of summer here in austin and it was pretty brutal brutal. but, you know i think anyone who lives in a hot place and when you're here in austin when you're outside driving somewhere and you see people working out on the black asphalt on a july day and they are doing physical work of whatever sort you think, how can they possibly survive? i mean, i have a hard time going to my mailbox on a hot summer day and they're out there in the heat. you know, this a big difference

between the sort of, you know, the thermal elite i will call them who have access to cooling can work in cool spaces, who can live with no who can live under this sort of denial bubble that. everybody is like them versus people who have work outside every day, whether it is doing street work, whether it's, you know, roofing, whether delivery people, postal workers. in my book, i i write about a farm worker in oregon had come up from guatemala, been in in oregon for a couple of months. there was a big heat wave in the pacific. you may remember, in 2021. and he was working in the fields the middle of this heat wave. and he understood guatemala. he understood heat very well. he even talked to his mom the night before and his mom sweet mom called him and said, sebastian, i heard it's going to

be really hot tomorrow in oregon. careful. and he said, don't mom, don't worry, i'll be careful. well, he went out into the field. he a job to do. and because at that time, as in they're still in texas right now, there are no real laws, heat exposure, there's no requirement. it's for shade and water breaks. so sebastian was working out the field. and even though he knew the risks, he also wanted to keep his job. and he knew that if he took a break and when decided said, hey, boss i want to go sit down under this tree for a half an hour, i'm getting really hot. he was going to be fired immediately. so he he made kind of arbitrage of like, okay, i'm tough. i can handle it i'll be okay. well, wasn't okay. he was dead. his coworkers went to for him at the end of the day, and he was laying there in the middle of the field, dead from, a heat stroke. and that the kind of risk, you

know, is on the other side of this divide. and this is the kind this is why i call heat in this book predatory, because it really is something that goes after who are vulnerable in these kinds of situations maybe we need a marketing to like come up like anthropoid, modifies it somehow. we'll take it seriously. well, we talk about naming and ranking heat waves in the air, right? because one of the things that we talked about the invisibility of heat and, we also do, you know, weather services, media i mean, whenever you turn on the news and they're talking about a heat wave coming, they inevitably show barton springs or they show the beach or they show a kid playing at a fountain, there's no message, really, that really talks about how dangerous it will be, how serious it will be and. so there is a movement among, some meteorologists and some cities i talk about the city, and it's a villa in spain that

is decided to name heat waves and the way we name hurricanes. and in italy, they have come up with some clever names like heat wave, lucifer and things like that. and some people that i know have suggested we should go a little farther and do like heat wave or something like that. but that has not, for some reason, gained traction. so what heat has such pervasive consequences i mean, you're talking about people losing their lives and that's very dramatic. but you also about how he could change our and you talk about how 4th of july cookouts might become like torture, like a thing. you don't want to be invited. so can you talk about how our culture reacts might react to summer's not being nice anymore? sure. it's it's think it's a going to bring profound changes to a place like texas mean if one simple example a football high

school football for example i mean people i know a lot of moms who are cancer learned about their kids practicing football in full gear the middle of summer because they don't want their children to die of a heat stroke on the field. and you things like that, very tangible and very real. and there is, you know, high school football teams are getting better at understanding these risks and taking cooling breaks and things like that. but that's one example of the kinds of things that are changing. i talked to some city officials, houston, who talked about shift in construction to nighttime because it's just too hot for construction workers during the day. so we're going to see more and more things like that the federal reserve bank of dallas which is hardly, you know, a left wing treehugger radical,

did a study of the economic losses from this summer this past 2023 extreme heat summer we had they calculated $24 billion in economic losses because of this heat dome that we had and that was because as you know here the food were shut down because nobody could stand to be out there. workers output was much slower. there was, you a huge economic it is hard to kind of put your on in the way that when a comes through and blows out everybody's houses know what you can calculate it pretty easily. a heat wave is much more insidious. however, it is equally dangerous, more dangerous and also equally expensive so. one of the my favorite chapters in your book and it's a really fun i really enjoyed it. i read a lot climate. i love that you can call it a

fun read. thank you for that. and really grateful. i read a lot about climate change, so this is in that context. there are stories about polar bears and sahara and so, yes, it's a very fun read. climate change is here. we might as well read about it. right. so one of my favorite chapters is the one where you profile scientists who are working event attribution, which is it was a breakthrough in the world of climate science, but i think it's not that well understood more broadly. so can you in a very fun way, please talk event attribution. how you following the gala down to it in a fun way, but i do want to say something about fun? i'll talk attribution, but i really did work hard with this book to make it not entertaining but readable. i mean, i really think that my job to translate science and into stories and i really think of myself as a story teller in

this book, as you pointed out, is sort of full of stories. some are more fun than others, but i really do think of it as kind of narrative, but i'm telling you story about heat, which sounds boring, but there is a polar bear and there was. it is. it's a you'll have to have to buy the book to read about it. but i learned about why polar claws are different from other claws, which i had never thought about. so an example, right, of the readability. yeah. so the scientists that i wrote about about event attribution is really important. up until very recently, there was a heat wave or a hurricane. and you asked the climate scientist, well, was this hurricane or heat wave caused climate change? they would say, well, we can't say. it was cause they would they would often trot out a term first used by jim hansen, who

was the kind of the kind of the godfather climate change science, who said you talked about higher levels of co2 in, the atmosphere loading the dice, more extreme events. so it's not like you could point to any particular event and say oh yeah, climate change cause that. but it made these events more likely. well, these breakthroughs in science, in science modeling, more powerful computing modeling have allowed these in what is called attribution science. i talk about a german scientist who is working in london. her name is freddy otto. she's a really charming and fascinating character. she's a young woman and she was like, no, we can do better than that. we can do better than saying it's loaded dice. and she's leading this movement that is gaining a lot of power in both climate science and climate politics.

there is a lot she's she's building that allow her to say, know this event was caused by climate change. she the i write about the 2021 heat wave which was a notable example of that. the one in the pacific northwest. and after that heat wave, within three weeks after that, her and her team were able put out modeling studies, it was sort of vetted by all the best climate scientists that proved through. i you know, i use that word deliberately that this heat could not have happened without the higher levels of co2, the atmosphere. she was able attribute it in the same way. this is a rough parallel in the same way that doctors learned through the fact that you smoke three packs of cigarets a day to the that you have lung cancer. it's not dissimilar that not the thing is is it they do these on many major events and not every one of them, do they say that about there was a major

rainstorm in pakistan that caused tremendous flooding and all kinds of problems last year and they did the same attribution study on that and they said, no, this is within the range of natural events. this not a this was not caused by climate change, but the this is really important for a couple of reasons, but the main reason is it changes this of responsibility. like one of the big questions in climate larger global climate politics but also in global climate politics is who's responsible for these extreme weather events and when you can have scientists saying this heatwave was or this hurricane or this drought or whatever it is that you're talking about was cause and we prove that it was caused by essentially burning fossil fuels, that changes. and that is one of the reasons why in the last years there's been an explosion of climate

litigation of i was just in charleston, south carolina, yesterday hardly a bastion of left crazies. the city is suing the ten big oil companies for damages related sea level rise. they can't afford to build seawalls and things like that. and they're saying, look, you guys, that co2 causes warming for a long time and yet, you know, continued to we've continued you've continued to sell it not warn anybody about it you owe us to help pay to adapt to and that's also a center of the u.n. climate talks where global south is saying to the global north to. essentially the poorer countries, poor developing nations saying to the richer developed world mostly the us and europe, hey, you guys spent 150 years burning fossil fuels. you put all this stuff up into the atmosphere, you got rich,

we're poor, we're trying to, you know, develop and we have to deal with all of these climate impacts. you to help us. you got to pay us some money. and the global north is saying, yeah, maybe we'll think about it. and it's the central tension in international climate politics right now? is this question of responsibility and accountability and who owes and who pays. yeah it's a really big question. we will to audience questions soon. so please, about your questions for geoff. and my one request is if you could questions because we have limited time with geoff. so i have one more question for you. you write in your book about how things can change and they change much more dramatically what we're prepared to to consider. and so you and i live in austin, which is know just seen as this and it is wonderful i love it and it's it's seen as a desirable place to live. and yet we experienced a pretty

rough summer and you write and you write in your book about places that became uninhabitable and we've seen in ten years. san francisco go from being you know a very desirable place to be to being seen as, you know, having a lot of problems that make quality of life pretty low. and that's, you know, very recent. so what does life and, austin, look like in 30 years? will celebrities still be moving here? let's hope not. you just got here. you got a celebrity. well, i think the the the thing that i would ask back to that is like, what does it look like for who right. i mean, it's going to look very different for, you know, the entrepreneurs and things who are driving around in their teslas right now, who can to do whatever they need to do to deal with whatever weather is coming their way whether it's more

extreme heat or droughts or whatever it is. and if it gets too uncomfortable for them, their tesla steering wheel gets too hot, they can move somewhere else. very. and not everybody like that. and so this question of what it will be like, it really depends on who you are talking about. but it also depends on how aggressive this city and other cities and countries and globally we are in confronting and talking about these things that are coming and doing something about it. you know, we have to this is real, you know, there's a lot of talk about climate solutions and that's really important and there's a lot of climate solutions both on the energy side and on the sort of adapting to a changing world. so and i'm the farthest from a doer, but i also think to think to understand what kind of solutions we need and think

clearly about solutions, we have to understand the and scale of the problem that we face. we can't just say, oh, he has to get hotter. so we got to here's all the solutions you know, is is a massive transformation we're going through, whether we like it or not, it's going to change how we get our energy. it's going to change how we get our food it's going to change how we build our cities. it's going to change every about our lives. and we have lot of agency about what those changes are if we are informed about it. if we get engage, if we elect politicians who recognize this and are willing to help with changes because you're not going to be able to do it yourself. this is something that has to be political, cultural. it's bigger than any of us individually. it's about these sort of larger cultural shifts. so what austin will look in ten years, whether it will be, you know, some climate version, the san francisco although i love francisco, a great city great so

we can't do san francisco. or so whether it becomes know moves towards some sort of climate utopia or moves towards a climate dystopia depends us and depends on how educate here we are about it, how willing we are to look what's coming in the face, and how willing we are to do something. it both personally, politically, absolutely. see, if you do have any questions, there's mic over there. so if you could go over there that people can hear you. thank you so much much. well, let's just go ahead. oh, hi. a question about media. can you hear me? question about media and news information. and please help me not be a dumber. it's about concern that.

the missing formation disinformation. we get like we just this day we just passed power grid, make the power grid better. but it's really just give a lot more money that'll go fossil fuel facilities and even our our county we just had a oh let's build a bunch of parks where it was really mostly roads for a massive bond issuance. so single family housing, most people don't get the right information about how most forms of housing are prohibited in most of american cities. how do how do we hope to make to tick fi or get and i mean even you said urban heat island and of course the real enemy is not the city. it's the how housing for cars and massive and so how do we better educate ourselves?

i have one suggestion read my book. so you can buy the book at the main book sales tent and jeff will be there to sign it. so yes, next class. no, no, no. let me just i'll go a little more than that. you know being that you're right, this there's a lot of misinformation out there. there's a lot of powerful interests who are deliberately spreading misinformation about this. it is a very difficult kind of news landscape and knowledge landscape to negotiate it. and i think for people who care about this and who really want to educate themselves about it and make good decisions, it's part of that is getting media savvy and understanding who is a trusted messenger, who is not whose voices, whether it's a publication or a writer or politician or whoever it is, really knows what they're talking about. and you can trust and who is it and? you know, my daughter, a student here at u.t., one of her

classes, they just had the professor had her all the students in the class put in a question. this is about, but still not unrelated to chad. djibouti, and see what it said. and then research all the answers and find out how it was wrong and what what it didn't get. and that's sort of what we all have to do, becomes these sort of information vetters of this incredibly power. you know, information world that we in. we have to figure out how to be smart about that. and that is about the kind of media education i did see on instagram, someone wishing taylor swift had fallen in love with the scientist. yeah, yeah yeah, that was great. how would you go? yeah, yeah. hello? yes, i was thinking that we

somehow. i mean, all of us have contribute to the problems that we have in climate change now. i think as people that been able to become educated and on get a better economic or financial situation, we are. we can make a stronger. solution for. and so besides elected good leaders that are going to help that are going do something for these. and i know this is complicated because. there's a lot of interests, you know, from individuals us that want to do something about this problem. but sometimes you have to compete with big, you know, that

they kind of have lobbies at the government and say, hey, no, don't change things. but besides, yeah, electing leaders is there a list of things we can do individually, you know, in order to to help? i think in your select for example, i would like to improve my i think insulation, you know, get my home better solutions so i can use less energy to call my my place know and i and i'm sure i do individually yeah yeah yeah but well i mean you know, there's a long list of things that we can, you know, in virtual actions that matter from know driving less driving more efficient cars, you know, shifting towards electric vehicles are really important. i mean, you know, all these things of using less sparse that

use less fossil we just put a heat pump in our house for example when the furnace went out shifting a from you know, these sort of polluting fossil fuel consuming devices that are that are in our house is really important. you know, using, you know, less plastic. i mean, all of these kinds of things that i think pretty well known. you can at a website like project drawdown that has a lot of individual recommendations about these kinds of things. but i ultimately think it's socially and cultural is what's really important and creating this sort of social and cultural shift. and so i that has to do with voting of course, number supporting organizations that do work in this world that trust and think doing good work, talking about this with and family and everyone not being

afraid to talk about it, talking about your concerns spreading the word about books you might like, you know, tv movies, whatever. i think that stuff is really important. being afraid of, of being making it a central part of your not just your life. how do you live your life, but how do you think about your life right? first, i will buy your book and i will read it. and thank you so much for writing my. question is around the idea of if there are cities doing it right here in austin. we have really fantastic austin climate equity plan but at this point it's mostly performative the council's really not paying much to it. you know week and week out making decisions are in direct conflict with plan. so are there cities that in your research you found who are actually doing important work to

address heat island and then you know climate heating in general. yeah there are cities that are doing really interesting work and you know austin is doing a lot of good stuff and. they're also doing a lot of not so good stuff and there's a real conflict between the city and, the state, and it's it's there's all kinds of difficulties around that. austin could be doing a whole lot more. but given that austin's in the middle of texas in all the complications that go with that. i austin doing a lot but it's just the very very beginning other cities around the world that are very inspire that are doing things number one is paris for sure you know they have a mayor that is a very very strong leader on this she is leading the charge re-imagine paris i

mean they're banning internal vehicles from the inner city. they've just cleaned up the sense that you can swim in the sand, which is really important when it comes to heat and things like there had this whole program to do with they are bringing nature back into the city, creating more parks. there. you know, qamar ali say is once a you know, one of the most famous iconic streets in the world, they're totally redoing it. they are pulling out the old 18th century. well, haven't started yet, but they will soon pulling the 18th century paving stones, rim, imagining it completely, you know cutting down the traffic lanes and half planting lot of trees, a lot more access for pedestrians, a lot more greenery. so, so paris is i would say, you know, the leader in this other cities, the world are doing amazing things. athens is rebuilding a roman

aqueduct to bring water into the city in order to create green spaces do have more access, more water for urban and things like that. so it's beginning, but, you know, it's really because cities are built environment and so, you know, how do you how do you reinforce event that right without it's one thing if you were just building a new city but having to reinvent and reframe a city that is already built is really difficult. just a couple of other things. you know, small things a lot of western cities experimenting with white roofs to improve reflectivity white streets things that there are a lot of sort of fairly things that can be done to help, you know, cool off the immediate effects of this urban heat island. i talked about, well, my has to do regarding messaging and

education as we all it's going to take education in order to help move needle here. but i think that the messaging has to start with the fact that people are now using this euphemism climate change is not climate change global warming. we are frying the earth and referring to it in future tense which even you two have done. it's here now. so what would you suggest ways that we can really intensify the messaging so that people understand that, hey, it's here and b, it's up to us. i mean, even things like recycling we can't even seem to teach people how to do that correctly. how are we going to get this message across? yeah, well, that is the central challenge and that is, as a writer what i think about all the time and you know, there's no magic answer for a lot of reasons. one is that, you know, there's not message that's going to work for everyone.

you know, i try to deal with this a little. i mentioned before with the title of the book making it really about the and now that it's not some far off thing you know there's a lot of everyone's debating should we call it climate we call the global warming should we call it global weirding? should we call it a planetary emergency? should we call it global boiling? you know, i i don't know what the right word is. i don't think it ultimately is about that. i think it's ultimately about, as you mentioned, education. it's about a broader education of understanding the consequences of this. you know, i was mentioning this because it's top of mind. i was in charleston the other night doing an event similar to this, and one of the people afterwards said, well, you know, you're just talking to people who already understand this. and you to go out and talk to people who are kind of climate deniers and things like that and i understand that. but i also think that even among

people like yourselves and myself we don't really understand, we have a long way to go. understand like what i talked about before is the scope and scale of problem. and i think that we still ourselves a long way to go in really understanding what's at stake here, what's at risk, and this education is really important. all of us, even not just climate deniers and things like that, for for people who think of themselves as progressive, you know we still have a lot to learn and i think education is at the center of all of this. i think that's a great note to end on. sorry we didn't to everyone's questions jeff will be at the book signing tent so this festival which i so much is is free to attend but it's not free to put on and by buying a book you help support festival and you also support this great mission of climate education that journalists like jeff keep

writing books. so thank you, jeff, and thanks all of you for coming. thank you. thank you very much. how are you. we'll have more live coverage of the book festival tomorrow starting at 11 a.m. eastern. and if you missed any of today's coverage, it re-airs in its entirety just after midnight eastern tonight, 9:15 p.m. pacific time. so the past 25 years book tv has been on the air over 1300 weekends covered nearly 900 book festivals and 22,000 authors, including event. i thought it might be fun to

write a simple story about my favorite. one of the things i did as a child was ride and we really had to to work the and conduct roundups and do the work at the ranch you had to do quite a bit of it on horseback and in the early days didn't have motor vehicles that lent them us too much ranch work. the four wheel drive vehicles such as jeep came after world war so we did a lot of the work on horseback and i was privileged as child to have four different horses and you couldn't ride the same one every day on the ground up. they'd get worn out. it was too much work. my favorite horse in my childhood was a horse named chico chico. as those of you who speak spanish, no means small.

chico was found in a wild horse. and he was a formed horse. he was just smaller than most horses. which suited me fine because meant i didn't have to find a big rock to stand on. get on him. i could get on from the ground. he ended up being a very kind and gentle horse, not horses are. every horse has a distinct personality, of course, but chico's very pleasant and friendly. and when i fell off as i did, sometimes chico would just stop and wait for me to back on. now, the others run off to the barn. but not chico. and chico was remarkable. another way, too. he had what we call cow sense. we had to work cattle with the horses. and chico had an innate instinct of how to turn a cow and how to go after the one you were trying to move from one place to

another. he was quite impressive. and i just liked him a lot. and he lived a long time for a horse close to 30 years. amazing enough we stopped riding him after close to 20 years because we thought he'd done enough work in his lifetime and he, like me, got to retire and he was amazing and retired because we let him roam the horse pasture, which was a pretty good size tract of land, and somehow he friends with a deer. we had mule tail deer on the ranch. and i know you've seen plenty of those in arizona and this deer had somehow strayed from his deer herd and. he made friends with chico and the of them would wander around the horse pasture together and even in to get water together.

and that went on for several years. and then the deer disappeared. so chico, next best friend turned out to be an old boxer dog had at the ranch, and the boxer dog attached to chico. and the two of them roamed the horse together day after day we learned that something happened to chico when the boxer came back to the ranch alone. and we went to look. and sure enough, chico passed on. but i remember him with such pleasure. and the fun i had riding that i thought it would be good to tell a bit about me in this book. and that's what i tried to do. did you know that all 92,000 plus hours of book tv programing is available online? just visit book tv, talk to watch full programs on your favorite authors.

monday watch c-span series in partnership the library of congress. books that shaped america will feature milton and rose friedman's book free to choose. the book was written in 1980. shortly developing the television series by the same name and strongly argues for free trade. lower taxes, limited regulation and school choice. a bestseller. free to choose. continue to spark debate today. in 1976, milton friedman, the nobel prize for economics, was an advisor to british prime minister margaret thatcher and president ronald reagan, who presented him with the presidential medal of freedom 1988. lanny evens, ii, lecturer of economics at the university of california, santa barbara, and author of milton friedman, a biography, will join us on the program to discuss the book watch books that shaped america featuring free to choose monday live at 9 p.m. eastern on c-span, c-span. now our free mobile video app or online at c-span dot org. also, be sure to scan the qr to

listen to a companion podcast where you can learn more about the authors of the book feature. in the past 25 years. book tv has been on the air over 1300 weekends, covered nearly 900 book festivals and featured 2000 authors, including this event. john grisham who is deborah carter. she was a although old journalism cocktail, among other jobs. 2122 years old in oklahoma, who was in december of 1981 raped and murdered in a very, very brutal episode. and it took the police, ada five years to solve her crime. they thought they solved it. the they got the wrong guys and.

they convicted the wrong guys and sent them prison, said one to death row, run williams someone to death row. he had never met deborah carter and he spent. 11 years in prison and was exonerated. ten years ago. 1999, almost ten years. exactly. but he spent a total years in prison for the murder of. deborah carter. i never met her. who was ron williams? ron williamson was a man i never met. i never heard of him. he was one of the first big notorious dna exonerations in. the late nineties. um, and i met him when i read his obituary. so i never got to see him. obviously. but he was a fascinating character when he was younger. many people in his small corner of oklahoma, emma thought ron

was the next mickey mantle. and ron certainly thought so. he had had nice ego and he was a second round draft pick in 1972 of the oakland a's and went off to seek league glory. i thought he was going make it. never came close. i had a bunch of injuries didn't take care of himself, started drinking and drugging and you know pretty pretty wild. crash and burn in the minor. when he was 25 or 26 years old and began the first signs of some type of mental illness that was eventually diagnosed as as being bipolar. all the wheels came off for ron williamson. he didn't help himself with a lot of self-medicating with booze and drugs.

and. in 1986 or 87, he was arrested for the murder of deborah carter. again, a woman he never met. why you choose this story to be your only work of nonfiction? well, it was not novels. 2022, 21 novels now, and one work of nonfiction. i ever thought about nonfiction? i never i'd never i'm not trained as a journalist. i never thought it. i'm a lawyer. i'm a novelist. that's the way i think i create fiction lives. and at the same time looking for good stories. always. i'm always on the prowl for good stories. i never thought it would be a real one. i read ron's obituary in the new york times early in december of 2004. nobody steered you. it stumbled across open the paper. one day there was his obituary and was a picture of ron in court in ada, oklahoma in april of 1999, the day he was

exonerated, the same courtroom from which he'd been convicted and sent off to die. 12 years later, he's in the courtroom. this one photo was taken and he and i were the same age same race, same religions same part of the world. we grew up in a small town in oklahoma i grew up in a small town, arkansas and mississippi and louisiana. a lot of similar there's a lot of similarities. and i thought, how could this guy. go to death. for 11 years and come within five days of being executed? i mean, he was he was dead, man. oklahoma about to strap him in and lethal injection. it was all. and he'd given up. he was i nobody cared about that except his family. it's too it was too good. did you know tha all 92,000 plus hours of bo tv