be. this morning. i. good morning, everyone. i am not all all-american. an attorney at the law firm singletary. and a long standing volunteer.

here we are happy. very, very happy to welcome you to the 41st miami book fair international. we're grateful to the miami-dade college and volunteers and for the support of our sponsors, including the green family foundation, nicklaus children's hospital, amazon, the j.w. maki and brickell, and all of the other sponsor, ers. if you are here for the first time, then i'd like to welcome you to the fair. if you are returning, then another welcome home and a very special welcome to the friends of the fair. are there any friends in the room? good to see you all. good to see you all. and i'd like to invite others to become a friend of the fair, to consider friends membership as we work to ensure the future of your miami book fair. please. as i said, consider support the fair with a contribution to the

next decade. fund. as far as housekeeping is concerned, we will have some a brief q&a at the end of the session and at this time i kindly ask that you silence your cell phone for the enjoyment of everyone here this morning. with that, i'd like to bring up and welcome maria meier, who is the executive director of the women's fund. miami-dade dedicated to creating a metropolis where power and possibility are not limited by gender. the women's fund, re-engineer, support systems for women and girls through grants, partnerships, advocacy, research and leveraging collective impact. with that, i ask maria myra to come up and she will introduce our special guests for this morning. thank you. right. good morning. bonjour. where does this i look at you

all. you all look so warm when it's so cool. so at your women's fund, miami-dade, we have a saying that your focus is our power. think about that. the power of focus. so today, here to give us her powerful insights in mind, expanding focus today is the former eve ensler, the tony award winning playwright, author and activist. her play, the vagina monologues is an obie award winning theatrical phenomenon that has been translated into 48 languages and performed in 140 countries. she's the author of numerous plays, often on broadway and many books, including the bestsellers the apology in the body of the world and today's focus reckoning. she's the founder of v-day. the 26 year old global activist movement that has raised over $120 million to end violence

against women. and that includes gender expansive people and girls. these always about inclusion. she also includes the planet. so that's all of us. she's also the founder of 1 billion rising, the largest global mass action to end gender based violence in over 200 countries. the co-founder of the city of joy in congo and v rights regularly for the guardian. she is in conversation fashion with another superstar, nadege green. miami based writer, community historian and cultural memory worker whose practice and approach to storytelling is deeply rooted in history and first person narratives. she is the founder of black miami dade, a history and creative studio that honors miami's black history. her writing has appeared in the atlantic and harper's bazaar and often on npr.

green is also the editor of the anthology more than what happened the aftermath of gun violence in miami. she's a senior civic media fellow at the university of southern california's annenberg innovation lab. please, let's give a warm miami welcome to v in a dish. good morning. thanks for waking up early for us this morning. so we we were jamming backstage, so we're going to keep it going up here. and i wanted to start with the idea of naming yourself and what it means to reclaim that self, which, you know, your formerly known as.

so can you talk to us a little bit about reclaiming yourself and renaming yourself? i love that you're beginning with that question. good morning, everybody. thank you so much for coming out. i'm so happy to see you. all. and i'm so happy to be in conversation with this astonishing woman. you know, names are so powerful, right? names are so powerful. and recently, people have been coming up to me asking me why i changed my name. and when i tell them they say i never like my name. i always i, i said, so change it. it's your life. like we're not stuck with anything forever, right? i think there's a lot of reasons why i changed it. but the last book i was here with aja monet, we did. i think it was almost the same room right. was the apology, which was a letter i wrote from my father to

myself, basically apologizing for sexually assaulting and beating me. and i wrote it in his voice. and i basically said all the things to myself that i long for him to say. and i kind of went into his story and investigated who he was, how he became the person he became, why he did what he did. and it was really one of the most exhausting and terrifying, liberating experiences i've ever had because i finally realized is at the end of it, when i had come to understand my father not justify him and not i understood him, i realized it had nothing to do with me. i was just in the way of of whatever was going to happen. it wasn't particular or personal. and at the end of the book, and as i wrote the book, my father really as an ancestor, he'd been dead 31 years, but he was all around me. he was waking me up in the middle of the night telling me to go to the office. he would tell me a story. he was he was writing the book

with me, essentially. and at the end of the book, there's a line which is old man be gone. and i don't know if he wrote it or i wrote it or we wrote it, but it was just like old man gone. and, you know, at the end of peter pan, when tinker bell just goes, my father literally went into the universe. and to be honest, i know he's in a better place and he's never come back. and i felt when i was done writing that book, that i was done with my rancor, i was done with my rage. i was done with i was done living in my father's narrative. i was now in my own story. i had left. i had left the realm of reacting to my father, proving to my father, showing my father. i was suddenly in my story. and i thought, i want my name. the next the next years of my life. i'm going to write my story. i'm going to be in and with me and not in the patriarchal response, reaction mode, right? so these have always been very good to me. i love i love the shape of a v

because it's open and it's inviting. obviously, vaginas, you know, and so many beautiful words begin with voluptuous victory. you know, very i mean, there's just so many good, really words. and i thought, i just want to be the and i joke now like i'm down to a letter and soon i'll be nothing and that will be just amazing. but it's like, you know, for so i will say that changing my name changed so much. it just, it just gave me like the second my second wind. it was like i am now going to walk through the world as v and see what that is and not necessarily be identified by everything. everybody knows me as, but by what's emerging and what's about what's becoming. and i think it's so great to be identified by what you're creating and what's what's in the future, right? so so we're going to stick with names for.

the name of this book is called reckoning. and the word reckoning. you call it that in the act of reckoning, an antidote to fascism. mm hmm. and so if you could share a bit about naming this book, but also where this name takes us in the pages when you open it. mm hmm. thank you for asking that question about reckoning and fascism. and that reckoning is the antidote to fascism. you know, i think we can all agree. let's just focus on this country. we live in a country that has never reckoned with anything, frankly. we haven't reckoned with the fact that we are living on stolen lands. we haven't reckoned that a genocide happened to get those lands. we haven't reckoned that we destroy traditions and peoples in order to seize all that mattered to them and all the ways they knew to protect the land. then we move into 400 years of

slavery, where we brought people here. we dragged people here out of their beautiful country, and we enslave them for years and years and hundreds of years. and then jim crow and the mass incarceration which we haven't reckoned with our story, we haven't probed it, we haven't gone into it. we haven't turned it inside out in a way where we feed ourselves from it. and so consequently, it keeps coming back. it never goes away, but it keeps coming back and kind of more serious, more harmful ways. right? racism never leaves white supremacy, never leave sexism never leaves. hatred of the indigenous. it's just it's it's monolithic. right. and i think part of where we are right now is, is is at the at the end of non reckoning, at the end of non reckoning. you know all those things we haven't dealt with have now come to roost in the story that's unfolding in this new government. but they've been here all along

and i think one of the things i feel very, very deeply having been a survivor of enormous violence, having been a survivor of rape, having been a survivor, aware nobody in my family, no one around me would talk about what was happening to me or reckon. and so i was the only person who spoke out about that and lost my family as a result of it for a long time. i know as sure as i know anything that the reckoning i have done personally with my past has freed me to become another person. i'm not the person i was before. i'm not suicidal. i'm not self-destructive. i'm not reckless. i'm not out of control. i'm i'm i'm a different person because i went back to the wound, which is a portal. the wound is a portal. and if you go to the wound, it will take you to another realm. we are stuck on this side of the wound. we haven't touched the wound. and the wound is pulsing and. and it's it's just pulsing

everywhere in this country now. right. and it's given birth to what is being given birth to at this moment. so our work our work is to reckon deeply, not superficially, to reckon with to to, to we we collude, break who we are based on our memory of what has been and not to deny what has been. i can't think of anything more critical that we need to be doing right now. you also invite us to really think about the through lines and how we are connected through this violence from stolen land, but also violence in our bodies. right. from congo to bosnia to here. and also your body as a geography and site of violence, right where violence has been enacted upon you. and women across the world face this violence. and so there is an idea around also the struggle of global

solidarities, right. that you have shown through your work. but you really it's really laid out in this book, the global solidarities around violence and women can use speak to how we struggle with the idea around solidarities, across borders, especially in a world that loves to put up borders as well. first of all, i think that's one of the most important things we can think about right now. what is global solidarity? we can no longer see ourselves as a separate world. we can see that in everything that is happening. and sometimes i think that if we look at the earth as our mother, as the body who feeds us, who gives us water, or who gives us air, who is the body that we live on there are no borders because everything that happens to the earth happens to all of us. if there's a nuclear attack somewhere in the world, all of us will suffer, right?

if there's a leak from radiation, all of us suffer. if there's plastic in the oceans, all of us suffer. we are all connected through one body. our mother, who is trying her best to survive and keep her children without going and think and keep everything intact. so for me, i've always known that if we could find solidarity, particularly as women and vulnerable people with our sisters around the world and our brothers around. but we are a movement of sisters. if we could find solidarity with our sisters in congo, with our sisters in afghanistan, with our sisters in bosnia, with our sisters everywhere, it makes us all stronger because we understand that we are living in a worldwide paradigm of racist, patriarchal capitalism, which is the bubble we are living in on the planet. at this moment. and so when we start to realize that, like i, i have such a

privilege life in the sense that i live in a worldwide movement of women in hundreds of countries around the world where we gather frequently, where we share our stories, where we compare our stories, but where we understand we are all in the same struggle to dismantle patriarchy. i mean, patriarchy, as far as i'm concerned, is at the core of every single thing that is happening right now. you only have to look at trump's picks for cabinet to understand the predatory nature of what is going on right now. like how many sex offenders or sex traffickers, sex abusers have been picked to run. we have a rapist and educated, adjudicated rapist as a president to be. right. so what does that tell us about what people think about women and their bodies and how much we matter to that, that 76 million people were willing to vote for somebody who was actually a rapist? what does that tell us about our bodies? and then you look around the world and you see the same story of so many leaders who are

accused of rape, accused of sexual abuse, accused of this. and then you see in how many countries, one out of three women. i can't say this enough. 1 billion women on this planet will be assaulted or raped. 1 billion. women are the primary resources of life, of creativity, of ingenuity. what does that violence do to women everywhere? it is it snuffed out their life force. it makes them afraid. it minimizes their creativity and their ability to create life affirming, life affirming actions and it desecrates the planet. so. so part of what i see in solidarity is when we are with our sisters in africa, we give each other strength because we're not alone. when i'm with my sisters in the philippines, we give each other strength because we're not alone. when i'm with women in china who are boldly doing the vagina monologues undercover and building movements and trying to

connect, we're not alone. we are trying to create a new world where patriarchy is not suppressing, depressing and erasing us. and i think all of us need to get out of our kind of single focused americanism and understand that our actions impact people around the world. we only have to look to palestine to see how our impacts in gaza and what's happening now. we only have to look to see all the war as we've perpetuated and exported and all the bombs and militarism and things we are sending to other countries to kill people in our name. right. that impacts people. it destroys people, economies where billionaires, where billionaires now don't know. do you know, two days after this election when the markets rally to ten people in two days,. made $64 billion, $64 billion to bring a rapist to be a

president? like, what does that tell us? so part of part of what i feel now is that all of us have to turn to, for example, the philippines to ask them, how did you deal with a person who comes to power, who begins to erase all the constitutional structures, to look to other countries like india, who have just been through this to find out how do people cope and what do people do? what were strategies? people used in the oncoming fascism that we see approaching rapidly, rapidly. i want to stay with that for a moment because it is memory, right? ultimately, and we were talking about this earlier, the role memory plays and memories get erased. memories get banned out of universities. books get banned. and so the role of storytelling and remembering and reread memory, but also making sure

that the stories can be found. yeah. can you say more around finding our stories and finding each other through memory and memory work? i also want to just say how much i admire your work of really holding being the memory keeper of south florida and black stories and black heritage and black because i think the holders of memory are the holders of where we come from and where we come from is so about where we're going right? i have a friend who's creating this piece in in, in london right now, and there's three parts to it. there's the extinction of the animals. the extinction of people, and then there's the extinction of the dead. and i thought that was such a powerful thing, because when we we, we, we make our ancestors, when we kill off our ancestors, when we make we no longer and communicate asian or a memory of them, we have nothing to guide us in the future. right.

and for me, i think we live in a country that has how can i say this? we we have no memory. we just keep erasing. i remember when reagan died. and i'm just going to say this for me. reagan was really one of the big downfalls of america, that it was really it was really a turning point moment when he turned this country into the individualism. and me, me, me, and was telling us the ketchup was a real food. and, you know, he changed the ethics of this country from a weak country to a me country. and we saw the death of the commons. we saw the death of social justice. we saw the death of people caring about each other. and i remember when he died, it was just this, oh, my god, ronald reagan. and i was like, wait, i was there. this is not the story of ronald reagan. this is not the story i lived through. and it felt like my family telling the story of our happy

family when i was living through a nightmare in the same really. and i think when we don't tell the truth about the past, when we don't connect ourselves to the past and understand that even writing that book about my father, i went back, back, back, back, back into his childhood to say what were the things that happened to my father that turned my father into the man he was? and i could see step by step by step what made him. and by doing that, i could understand how he became who he became. and i could understand how i could not become who he became. i could take another path. i wouldn't have to follow the same path. but if you don't learn from the past right, if you don't see the past, if you don't know the stories of the past, if you don't understand them, you're basically on your own. you're floating in space. you know, there's nothing. connect you or harboring you to some beginning point or a continuum of evolution of

thought, of action, of values that hopefully we're doing as we evolve on this planet. so part of it is like, how do we restore our memory to a culture that has quite akeley and obsessively erased? and now with book banning, with the shutting down of thought, with with not looking into the story of black history or women's history, or where we come from, it's the attempt to completely neutralize and completely erase any story of white supremacy, any story of racism, any story of brutality, any story of genocide that this country is founded on. so guess what's going to happen? it's going to repeat again. that's a guarantee. that's a guarantee. so our job is to be memory keepers wherever we go and remind people all the time where do we come from? who were we? what ground are we standing on? what ground do we need to what reparations do we need to make? that's our work every single one

of us, you know, and i think that you're doing it in such an organized way so people can come and see it and touch it and know it is so critical. thank you. that i need that. and so since you just loved on me, let's talk about love, because, you know, bell hooks taught us, right, that to love well, is the task of all meaningful relationships. and i would love to hear how you how love shows up in reckoning and how love has shown up not just in the words of this book, but in your work. like, how do you anchor yourself in love? it's such a beautiful question. you know, we don't talk enough about love, right? we we we can talk about all the horrible things that happened in the world and all the diseases

and all the explosions and all the rapes and all the. but love is. we're also scared to talk about it, right? it's almost like it's it's like woo woo or it's been put over here and and i think at this moment in this country, what we're about to walk into, i think love is the most important thing we can even imagine. how are we going to love each other in the next four years? how are we going to hold each other in the next four years? how are we going to protect each other in the next four years? how are we going to create spaces for each other where when difficult things are coming at us, we don't we don't let go of people. and i really want to say like i think we need to imagine ourselves. i keep saying this i love bees, i live in the woods and i'm kind of obsessed with bees and just what bees do because they keep us alive in such a fundamental way. but they move in swarms, they move in swarms, they move over here, then they move over here. and if you interrupt their

swarm, you can get stung very badly. so i think we need to become a swarm. like we need to become a swarm. and what i mean by that is when lgbtq are hurting, we swarm to them when they're coming from the migrants, we swarm to them when they're trying to erase black history. we swarm to them when they're taking away our reproductive rights. we swarm their we become an understanding thing of almost like a formulation of love that will we will not let anyone fall outside the swarm. right? everybody's in the swarm and there's nobody who's excluded. and there's nobody we let get taken away and there's nobody we let get harmed because if we stand up for everyone and we protect everyone and we are together doing that, it is much harder for them to do terrible things to us. and i also just want to say that i think, how do we love like what are the signs of love, right? i look at i just want to talk about my sister chris. christine schuler de scrivener, who is the person who's the

director of city of joy in congo, and she is one of the people i admire most in this world. she is like a tower of love. she's very, very tall and she's just a tower of love. and she runs city of joy in the congo. and i'm going to get very emotional when i think about her because it's the hardest place in the world. i'm not exaggerating. there's dire poverty there is violence. there's war. i think probably every woman in the congo has been raped at this point. i think the amount of theft of resources, the stealing of copper and cobalt and gold and everything that goes into our cell phones, the child labor that goes into that, the wars that have been designed to destroy women so people can have access to those mines still in the middle of all of that stans city of joy, right. this like this gem, this lotus in the mud, this this, this diamond rising out of

nothingness. right. and she leads this every person there is congolese. every person was professionalized on the job. we're now in our 12th year. we have healed over 2000 girls who come there for six months who are loved and loved and loved. they are healed through therapy. they are taught permaculture. they learn the right. they dance all day, they do theater, they do music, they they are transformed because it is a community, a garden of love. and when i go there, i literally i dance and i cry all day long because i am in the midst of what it looks like when people have turned their gaze, their hearts, their spirits towards the work of loving and not. there are rules that guide the place and everybody follows them and they've translated those rules into songs that they single day to remind themselves that we never lie, that we treat our sister's life like our own. and when i'm in the presence of

that, i know that it is possible for us to create communities of love, to stand for each other, to lift up people who have been broken and traumatized, which if you're not, raise your hand right. everyone in this room has been traumatized. if you haven't been traumatized firsthand by being beaten or raped or bullied or put down or with racial slurs or whatever, you've seen it second hand, which has traumatized you as well. we're living in a world of trauma. love is the antidote to trauma. when you see someone, when you recognize them, when you say, oh, wow, you're brilliant, you're beautiful, their life changes instantly. it doesn't take a lot. it doesn't take a lot to be generous to look at the person next to you and suddenly recognize them and say, wow, you look amazing today. or you're beautiful, or what are you working on? or i care about you or you mean something to me? and we are so isolated now. i think i think one of the terrible things about late stage patriarchy and capitalism is

it's it's taken this it's taken the world to a situation where ten people in the world have everything right and it's getting more and more. so i was just reading the other day how the ten richest people in the world are buying up every piece of land, every building. they're going to own the world and we'll just be like, they're puppets, right when we, the people love on each other, when we support each other, when we give faith and and belief in each other so that people can do their best work and be confident. everything changes. i've seen it. girls arrive at city of joy. they are dirty. they are broken. they have been living in the woods. they are traumatized. they've been exiled from their communities because they've been raped and sometimes mass raped. they can't even speak. and in six months they leave and they are flowers. they have been birthed into the glory of themselves, to their power, to their ingenuity. and it didn't take more than six months of love of just love,

constant daily love. so how do we become practitioners of love in our life and put real conscious energy into looking around us to see who needs support, looking around us, to see who the news of the election has sent into serious triggering and trauma. because there's a lot of people right now who are triggered a lot of survivors are triggered, a lot of gay men who have been bullied or triggered a lot of transpeople who have been threatened are bullied. who are we going to stand up for now and reach out to who we know is feeling like they're going to be excommunicated from this country? and i'll just tell you a little trick. i do, which is really fun. i do one serious, generous act. the day that shocked somebody, you know, like, i'll give you an example. there was a woman cleaning a bathroom at the airport and i just really looked at her and thought, whoever sees her, whoever sees the work she's doing, and i just gave her a hundred dollars and she just started sobbing. and i said, yeah, it's like

that. and i just walked away. and you know what it was? it's the best feeling in the whole wide world. so, you know, one serious, generous act a day, literally keeps your life worth going. and actually changes. somebody makes people believe people aren't awful, makes people believe people aren't bad, makes people believe that maybe there is some hope for human civilization. right. so how do we contribute to that? you know, and i think with love comes bravery. like, how are we brave? how are we not? mm. right. um, i'm sure you get that a lot. you're like, you're so brave for saying this. you're so brave for writing this. i'm sure so many of the women that you have worked with who've you documented their stories. so many of the collectives who have taken this work and built upon it, we hear brave a lot. what does it mean to be brave? i love you. it's hard to. maybe we could both answer it.

um. yeah. so. oh, man, i didn't mean to. to pull myself into this. the joy of being a moderator. you can ask questions and not have to speak. well, bravery in miami for me, is doing black. historic work, right? i think just existing is brave. but i think in a space that loves to cover itself under the veneer of fun, sun and beaches and markets itself as just this amalgamation of latin america and the caribbean, but does not reckon with the legacy of jim crow here, does not reckon with the fact that this was the site of the saltwater railroad where enslaved black people freed themselves to the bahamas and miami. being a site of that. but you can recite which beaches to go to, but don't know the history of the building of miami, which was built by black folks, 44% of the people who signed our incorporation papers

were black men. and so i think bravery is truth telling and truth telling to people's faces and being unapologetic about that truth and that history, because we understand that history is contraband and. right. it is armor. it is a weapon, which is why it's constantly under attack. because what happens when we know ourselves and what happens when we know the space that we're in and not just redesign the space? you know, i joke that people think miami fell on the map in the 1980s because that is often where the stories of miami that those are stories you hear about this space. and so so i think bravery is is what we're doing right is being in conversation being with one another because it is very easy to be individualistic. it is very easy to think that like what am i supposed to do? so i think bravery is doing something right and.

i think so. everything you just said and i think also bravery is really trusting your instincts. i think one of the things that that patriarchy and violence have done to women is they kind of wiped out our instincts because our instincts live in our body and they got us out of our body when they raped and they abused us. but what i'm what i'm realizing lately is like, you know, i'll give you an example. tina ashley is here and she's our new u.s. coordinator. and i was just so i'm just so proud of her and so just blessed that she's with our movement and i just had a really deep instinct that she would be a great leader to lead the us direction. and it was just an instinct but i didn't really know her that well. i we'd worked together occasionally, but i was like, no, i know if she can do this, i and every woman i've ever like christine, i had an instinct she

should leave city of joy. just she she just felt like that's the person to do it. and i've always trusted my instincts, like, particularly with women in leadership, like a lot of people would say. but she does. i'm not about tina, but like, she's never been qualified. she's never done something like that before. and i'm like, yeah, but she can do it. like i know she can do it, like i believe she can do it. so let's let her step into her power. let's let's that let her step into her knowing. and i think part of bravery is also when you see something, you know isn't right, saying it isn't right because. one of the things and there's a there's a term that timothy snyder talks about, which is anticipatory obedience. it's a step in fascism where you anticipate what's coming. so you start to behave, you start to be compliant, you start to agree with the fascists. you start to say, yeah, okay, we all have to get our brave on and we all have to say no, i don't think it's right that donald

trump is hiring all of jax missiles lawyers and putting in his own mar-a-lago lawyers to go and an election probe that is fascism, right? that is straight up fascism. and we need to say that it is not right that matt gaetz was, who is a you know, who is a sex trafficker and and they won't even release his records because they're so bad. it's going to be our attorney general. we all have to be outraged about that. right? when is like, not anymore. not anymore. we know that. but i'm just i know that this believe me, i know this is passed, but i'm just saying, like every single time they come, we have to go back and say no, no, we cannot roll over now. we cannot lay down now. we have to get our fight on and. we have to raise our own vibration. and i just want to say something about energy. i think you will agree with me my whole life. for me, everything's about

energy. i can walk into a room and i know who the people are. i can connect with, with the people who are who will probably have a problem with me, with my politics or whatever. i know where energy is right now. we are in a very low energy vibrate in america. it is very it is being taken over by corruption, is been taken over by people who want to push women's rights back and they want to erase black history. they want to ban books. they want to take us back to the dark ages. it's very low energy. it is our work to our vibration to raise our energy. so we are on the higher level and we can see stuff because when you get up to a higher level, you begin to see and know what you're supposed to do and find out how you're going to raise your vibration by dancing, by coming together in community and talking, by connecting with each other, by loving on each other, by creating art and going to see art, by finding the ways you can get your energy up to a

place where they are not running you over by fear and exhaustion and stress and worry because that's how they'll win the beating us down, just beating us down. and they're not going to beat us down if we stay together and we keep our energy and our vibration high. so that means dancing every day, dance every day. if that means running, if that means whatever it is you do that keeps you high because we can not afford now to let that go. and that's brave. that's brave to keep your energy high in the face of people who want to run you over is brave. right? and i just i want to say one thing, particularly to survivors, because i know i'm sure there are many in this room. it's a very triggering period right now. it's very triggering to think that the predators are in charge. and i know for many of us who come from places where we were deeply, deeply abused, it feels like they've won. they have not won. it's a pause.

it's a pause. and we're going to take it back and we're going to take it back in a better form than we've ever had before, because something great is going to come out of this. and we have to see that and we have to keep focusing on it. but i just want to say, if you are feeling triggered, if you are feeling unsafe, talk to people about it, reach out to people about it. nurture yourself, and don't let your self isolate out and disappear. go to community. move away from community because this is the time for you all to be loved on, to be supported because it's triggering to every single marginalized person in america, which is just about everybody but powerful white men. you know what i mean? so, you know, we're all a very triggered period right now. i can say. yeah. yeah. and on that note, i think we have time for a few questions. i would say that we do have time for one or two questions. and so if there are one or two people who would like to approach the microphone, we already have one there.

so we. one more. hi, i've been coming 30 years, maybe every day, saturday, sunday, there are moments and your talks, one of them blessings. so important. i mean, there are millions and millions of people obviously, who are demoralized, to put it mildly. and your talk and your words i think is important. but literally for those millions of people, because hopelessness is, of course, what has taken over the idea. you know, we're in fascism, etc. and you're right, of course, the question i guess i would pose is and yet were there so that gates's replacement is. pam biondi yeah.

and if you've heard what she said, of course she's as bad as gates and so the question is and then i'll sit down. women not only hopeless men, but women. far too much voted for this rapist, etc. so how do you because there's so much solidarity going on, but we've lost. so how how do you how do you approach other women? so the majority prevails. thank you. thank you for that question. you know, i want to say the percentages are much smaller than we thought. i think he i think it was not a mandate by any means. the new figures are like 120,000

votes, 90 million people didn't vote. 90 million people. those are the people interested in how do we engage those people? how do we speak to those people? what something they feel not a part of this country. they don't feel a part of this political system. i want to know how we reach those people, because i think that's where we should be putting our attention. and i also think a lot of people have bought a product. they didn't know it was going to poison their lawn. do you know what i mean? they they thought it was going to help the vegetables grow. instead, everything's about to die, you know, and they're going to find out soon because everything that's happening is going to be very destructive to working and poor people in this country. so i think it's going to fairly quickly. but in the meantime i think we just need to talk to people on a 1 to 1 basis wherever we go and say, where are you at? what are you feeling? how do we bring you into, you know, how to just converse sation conversation, not closing doors, not polarizing, not shutting out, just inviting

people into conversation. that's what i would say. yes. hi. good morning. thank you for being here. i have a question and i admire the city of love that you and your sister are doing in building what happens to the girls after six months where they return? are they returning to the same environment? what happens is their follow up with them? that's a good question. you know, after girls leave city of joy, they do go home. many of those villages are safe. there are some that are war torn and often we will keep girls if they're being very threatened. but what's happening is that the girls are we you know, we have a thing. we have girls go from survivor, from victim survivors to leaders and with their home, their leaders, their community, they really have changed. and so they're actually helping communities find ways to economically improve, find ways to end the violence and they are now sending girls to city of joy

from those communities. so every community is beginning to have a cohort of many girls who have who have graduated from city of joy, and they're building their new reality in those villages. so you know, yes, the violence continues and until the west stops taking minerals and and exporting and excavating and stealing minerals from the congo, those wars will continue. but those girls are very empowered now. and with that, i thank you all. this was a wonderful session. v and the dash. thank you. thank you, everyone. addressing the guys as the amazing question. thank you. i think.

that. yeah. we'll have more live coverage of the 2024 miami book fair after a short break. book tv's live coverage of the miami book fair continues. this is not the america that my brothers and sisters and i who wear the uniform risk our lives to defend these people have so completely defied all that we hold dear. and so it's personal to me and

to so many others that when we swear that oath to support and defend the constitution, to be willing to lay down our lives to ensure the safety, security and freedom of the american people, it is not only heartbreaking, it's maddening to see these people in the highest positions of power in our country so completely disrespecting our flag, our constitution, and treating our liberty, our freedom as something that is within their power to give and, to take away as they choose it's almost as though they haven't read the declaration of independence. it's almost as though they are unaware of the fact that our founders the truth that our

rights and liberties come from god and no one else. and so no one in government. our founders put these words into that declaration because they wanted to remind anybody who got into power, who had a crazy idea of thinking they could take away our freedoms. this was a reminder that these are inalienable rights endowed upon us by our creator or among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. you'll see in my book i dedicate a chapter to this situation, this mindset, to it's a chapter about god, and it's a chapter about where we our fundamental

inalienable rights from and how dangerous it is when we have people in power who ultimately believe that they are the ultimate authority, they believe that they are a higher authority than god and that they have the power to take these rights away. you can look at examples throughout history, examples in the present day of leaders who believe this and the dangerous actions that derive from those who believe they are more powerful than god. all of the outrage, all of the sadness, all of the fear that i feel it's natural for us to feel as americans who love our country should motivate us to take action. i don't want you going home tonight depressed.

you're like too late. by. but you won't go home tonight feeling depressed because laws understanding why the democrat elite are doing what they are doing, it's because deep down inside they know that they are weak. when we take action based on the power that is given to us in arkansas tution, they know that when we stand united as americans who may have different views on different issues, we may have different ideas on how we solve the great problems of our time, but who stand together united on the foundation of freedom and our ability to live in a peaceful and prosperous society. we are the greatest threat to their power.

and that's that is the call to action that we have. we just observe memorial day on monday, a day to pause for those of us who have served, for those of us who have lost brothers and sisters who paid that ultimate price. it's a tough day because we remember the times that we spent with them. we remember for the jokes and laughter that we shared. we remember those cold nights in the field miserable. and yet somehow enjoying our bond and our time together and we have this opportunity to reflect upon their sacrifice and with the sadness and the sense of loss that we feel, celebrate who they are and ask ourselves, how do we best honor them? they sacrificed their lives,

service to a country to defend freedom. how can we defend that freedom? how can we best honor their legacy? it's by not losing sight of what we can accomplish when we, the people, stand together. it's not sight of the fact that our founder was placed in our hands. the power to have a government of, by and for the people that they reminded us that our government only exists with the consent of the governed. so we see our free speech under attack. we have to protect the free speech of all americans. we have to stand up and exercise our voices, use our freedom of speech to defend others whose freedom of speech may be attacked. we have to stand up for the freedom of religion in our country and make sure that our government protects that right. not only the freedom to worship

as we choose, but to express that in the way that we choose, whether it be in private or in public. we have to stand up and recognize the fact that our founders passed the second amendment after the first for a very specific reason. they understood the fragility of this system of democracy and how those in power, unfortunately, are too often tempted to abuse that power. and so they they passed the second amendment after the first in the event of a tyrannical government trying to take away our free speech to serve as that check on that abuse of power. i. we have to elect leaders who understand these facts, who are committed to truly uphold that oath of office, that they take,

who understand and that vision that our founders had for our country. on january 27th, in 1838, president delivered a speech that was powerful then, but is very precious to the moment that we are facing in this country. he spoke to the young man's lyceum of springfield, illinois, and said, quote, at what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? i answer if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. it cannot come from abroad. if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher as a nation of free men. we must live through all time or die by suicide.

so why is it that we have one private company determining the medical school curricula and education of every medical school in the united states? they have a monopoly because they write the exams and they accredit the schools. so imagine if every college had a curriculum and standardized exam written by one private company. what would that look like? you wouldn't see innovative advance sports in education. and guess what? medical education is a joke. it's a joke. we are in dinosaur level practices of writing on stone tablet. it's and memorize and regurgitate the molecules of the krebs cycle. different points in your medical education. why we're teaching technical skills, but we're not teaching the non-technical skills like listening and being empathetic and communicating clearly and humility, knowing your limits. that's what makes somebody a

good doctor interpreting the literature critically. instead, we beat these highly creative, altruistic young people with this memorize and regurgitate culture. you memorize all these drugs, you regurgitate, you come out with a reflex, you put your head down, you see things that just are bizarre. they make no sense. they violate every piece intellectual curiosity in your brain and you're told, put your head down, just keep memorizing, regurgitate taking a five centimeter margin for a melanoma in the leg. but i half a centimeter margin, if it's on the face and nobody asks why wait, imagine they have different results of the same results. the average age of puberty goes down 1.5 weeks every year for the last 30 years, kids are having puberty now years prior earlier than what they had just half a century ago. is anyone asking why it when pancreatic onset rates double in the last 20 years? is anyone asking why when the first day of anatomy class and i'm curious what your experiences were in the first day of anatomy.

i remember we saw the lung the first time i saw the actual lung, and it was black and, you know, as appalled all of us and the instructor saw our reaction and said, oh, that's because this cadaver that we're dissecting was someone who lived in a city and people who live in a city, their lungs are black. but don't worry, it doesn't hurt you. and i just thought it's amazing how dismissive we are on these big topics. drink three glasses of cows, milk day for every adult. that's a recommendation that still goes on to this day. still is anyone question the deeply held assumption we students don't. but the fact that i would argue the fact that the the medical organized medical profession basically arranged to have a monopoly on the medical school accreditation system and the residency accreditation system has contributed because there's no competence of ways to educate people.

it's right now you have david, you had you had the advantage of both getting an m.d. where you got to regurgitate and memorize and then a jd where it was take both the best argument on each side of an issue. and so that was an interesting. did you have like whiplash into that professional? socialization is very powerful, but don't assume law doesn't involve its share of memorization. and gurjit tation often is the building block to then trying to sort out a problem of medical education has been criticized ized for a longer than i think any of us have been on this earth. and i remember a long time ago when i was in medical school, you know, the the, the latest iteration of people parachute put it in to try and save medical education, tried to make us more ethical. and there have been previous iterations and there have been subsequent iterations. it's it's a real challenge.

the thing to understand about medical school curricula and about law school curricula is people have absolute property rights in getting to teach the same class next year that they taught the preceding year. and they look that way because the people who are making those decisions are convinced that that is what someone needs to learn in order to be a good doctor. whether they're correct not is a dif very different question than whether they have the ability to veto any new entrants. here's a portion of a recent on booktv. we were trying to do something for face mask that moved that you could stand up here on the stage and i could brief you and you would not know that i had on a mask. now i know you're thinking she's going to take it off now, right? she's. and i wish that were true, but my mask was in a cardboard box in the archives in the basement of cia headquarters.

it's turning green. it's of no use to anyone. so it also had to be fast on and fast off. you had to be able to put it on in the dark in a in a in a parking lot with no lights and no mirror. and then somebody was after you, you had to be able to take it off. squish it down into nothing. and put it in your armpit. these were the design requirements. it took us almost ten years to come up with the first one. the first one turned me into an african-american man. i looked pretty good. i gloves. i had a suit and tie. i mean, i looked all right. so i went into my director to show him and he said, oh, my god, this is just so good. so good, so good. so we went and showed it to the director of the cia. he liked it. and he said, we're going to take you to the white house. and i said, hold, whoa, whoa. i can't walk into white house

pretending to be a man. i mean, this looks great. yes. but but secret service, give them 30 seconds with me and they're going to arrest me. so i said, let's let's just make me another woman. and that's we ended up doing and we did take it to the white house, took it to the white house when george h.w. bush was the president. i wore the mask into his office. the names that's judge webster on the far right, the beige coat is john sununu. the next one is bob gates. the next one is brant scowcroft and, of course, george h.w. i talked to the president a folder of pictures of him in disguise because we had done stuff with him. he had been the director of the cia. i said, but oh, wait till you see what we've got now. and he's looking around my chair like, for a bag. i said, i'm wearing it. so i'm just going to just take it off and show it to you.

and he said, don't take it off yet. and he got up. he came over, he walked around. he's looking. he didn't know what he was looking for. he was just looking hard, couldn't see anything. said back down. he said, okay, take it off. so i did that thing, which, by the way, is called today, the tom cruise peale. i'm a modest woman and i'm not going to go after it, but it could have another name. you can watch rest of this program and all of our book programs anytime online at book tv dot org. here's a portion of a recent program on booktv. chip and the other captains were increasingly running out of hands to operate their vessels. some ships cannot even raise a sail, and the sails were blowing out in the storm so much that they had to take them down. and one of the commanders and this was just. couldn't maneuver the ship without sails.

they were just being tossed about so badly. and so we ordered the top men, the people. cline, mass. to scurry up these mass up these rope lines and rat lines to use their bodies as threadbare sails. and so a hundred feet in the air, they are clinging to ropes like spiders. their bodies concave, holding on as a gale blew against them. it enabled the captain to maneuver the ship somewhat. but one of the men was tossed into the ship as they rocked about 45 degrees to one side and then 45 degrees to the other. and that man drowned. the ships were despot to stay together because they knew if they were separated, there'd be no one to rescue them. if something happened. and so how did they communicate? well, you know, they didn't have iphones, so what did they do? they would fire their guns repeatedly at a single location, but the wind eventually drowned out the booming sound of the guns and in the mist and the storm and the giant hollow seas.

all the ships eventually scattered and the wager was separated from the all left alone and to its own destiny. and captain ship was determined to try to get around cape horn to prove himself to live up to the secret image he had of himself as a heroic captain. and even though the wager had lost one of its mass, he manages to guide them around cape horn and then up the coast to chile, where he wants to get to a point where the commodore had told him they should rendezvous if they were ever separated. and yet, captain, chief and his other navigators on board, like all seamen in that time, were sailing partially blind. they did not know exactly where they were on the map. they could determine their latitude by reading the stars, which was easy. yet they had no way of knowing their longitude too, because that would require relying bill clocks, and they had not yet been invented. and so they were forced to rely

on what was known as dead reckoning. and to simplify, it essentially amounted to inform guesswork and a leap of faith. there is a reason why it's called dead reckoning. you can watch the rest of this program and all of our book programs any time online at book tv dot org. here's a portion of a recent program on booktv. well, you again you're spot you're inspired by the people you've met who have persevered. you're inspired to help those who are still there. there's a young man in oklahoma who's been in prison for 40 years. we can't get him out. we're still corresponding. he he prays for me more than i pray for him. he inspires me so we get that inspiration. we also are inspired by the fact that the work we're doing is

gradually improving the system. okay? because jurors nowadays return fewer and fewer death verdicts in this country because changes in the way we do things changes the way they are allowed to, to see the full scope of what the defendant, where he came from. and so they are more likely to spare the life and can do life without parole. we see fewer executions every year. we we believe, i think rightly so, that the work we do inspires jurors to be far more suspicious and cynical of what they are told in court by police and prosecutors. we believe that happens in so there are fewer and fewer death verdicts every year. more and more state legislature watchers pass more and more bills that we push. policy changes to correct to correct laws to prevent future wrongful convictions. progress is very, very slow, but we keep pushing and we you know, that's what inspires us to keep going. we're making progress.

you can watch the rest of this program and all of our book programs anytime online at book tv dot org. book tv's live coverage. the miami book fair continues now.

good morning. good morning, everyone. i'd ask that you take your seat as quickly as you possibly can. thank you. my name is nyala harrison. i'm an attorney at the law firm greenberg traurig. and along standing volunteer here. we're grateful for miami-dade college and the volunteers and for all of the support of our sponsors, including the green family foundation, nicholas children's hospital, amazon, the j.w. marriott marquee and brickell, and all of other sponsors. i say welcome to miami book fair, forty-firsts session. if you are a first timer to the fair, then i'd like to welcome you. if you are returning to the fair. hello again. and if you are a friend of the fair, a very special welcome. are there any friends in the

room this morning? good to see you. all good to see you all. and i invite you to become a friend. there are special benefits with friend membership at the end of the session, there will be a brief q and a. the author has pre signed books, and so there will not be a book signing, but books have been pre signed. at this i would like to ask you if you have not already silenced your cell phone for the pleasure and benefit of everybody here this morning. with that it's my my pleasure to introduce al dotson. al is ceo and managing partner of and sumberg. he has served as president and chairman of the orange bowl committee national chairman of 100 black men of america and was appointed by president obama to serve on one of his presidential commissions. with that, i welcome al who will then be giving an introduction

of the main folks who you are here to see this morning. thank you. thank you for that. amazing introduction. i see the room is full for me. i appreciate you all coming out today. i want to start by also welcoming every one here in miami to the 2024 miami book fair here at miami dade college. now, i'm going to introduce a couple of people. i'm going to ask you to provide them with a warm miami welcome. there will be an opportunity for you to stand and to clap. that will be your opportunity to also be on. and c-span. so i want you to pay very close attention. so i'm going to start by introducing our moderate here today. and her name is meg medina.

meg is the library of congress is 2023, 2024, national ambassador for young people's and the author of the newbery medal book mercy suarez change gears. she is also the author, an award winning young adult of young adult novels and, picture books including evelyn del is moving away, illustrated by sonia sanchez. mango, abuela and me illustrate ada by angela dominguez, which is a pura bel pré award on honor book. she is the daughter of cuban immigrants and she lives in richmond, virginia. let's give her one clap. all right. if you're going to be here, if you're going to be here as part of the fair, you've got to

follow instructions. i said one clap. let's try it. give her one clap. perfect. now the next person i'm about introduce is someone who really needs no introduction. i have a bio written here for her, but the most important part of her history is that she is a self professed star trek fan. as i'm wearing my star trek cufflinks in honor of her. she served in many, many, many positions and many roles, but the most important of them was the president of, united earth in star trek, discovery season four finale. as you know, she's also a new york times award winning author. and today, today, she is here to bring of her different roles

together to talk about her new book, stacey speaks up. i'm going to get i'm going to move away from this podium so you can stand and give them a rory. a round of applause for meg medina and abrams. are we already on? oh, yes. yes. well, this is an honor for me. i have to tell. thank you. oh, good morning, everybody. i'm so glad you're here today. so we're going to talk for about 30 minutes. we're going to talk about our lives as writers. we're going to talk we're going to dig into stacey's new book.

stacey speaks up, and then there'll be a little of time at the end for questions. sounds good. can i interrupt before we get started? so you guys are awesome, but you're going to annoy each other in about 3 minutes because you have these little miniature that you're using as cameras. so meg and i are going to stand in three spots on the stage. you'll get to take all the pictures you want and the phones are going to go in laps and our listening ears are coming on. okay. oh, i guess. can we pose. this way? all right. but before. you. make. okay, my.

friend, i. back by the fourth grade to. take my. three to. three. and i think that. i'm stealing that trick forever. have at it. i. okay. don't you want to hear, like, the first couple of pages in stacey's voice? okay. just couple of pages. can i give you this? and already opened to the opening page reading or look at my hair. okay, here we go.

mr. dexter's class lined up the whole school had voted on the special lunch they'd get at the end of each week. there was a tie between pizza and tacos. and the entire second grade voted for french. so principal howard made a compromise with taco pizza friday. this was stacy's favorite part of the week. after adventure day in the library, she always sat with her best friend, julie. in the cafeteria. stacy laughed at julie's knock joke zipcode, tried to balance his tray on his head, standing in line to pay. stacy heard a boy in front of her whisper. i don't have any lunch money today? i'm sorry, but the rules are the rules. the cashier explained, i have to take the tray back. frozen. stacy watched as the boy walked

away without. any food? suddenly she wasn't hungry anymore. thank you. and that's a great place to stop. so i'm going to. i'm going to dive in first. like on our lives as writers, because, you know when i when i started writing, i was given advice, which didn't follow, which was stick to age group. and right there and it seemed i never was able to follow that advice. and you for sure have not followed that advice. in fact, on your web site, this was a quote that just resonate. and it's so deeply with me. a lot of folks have told me to pick a lane and stay in it, but i see the as a highway and i'm always traveling in the same direction. forward my destination is telling stories, shaping vision and power. it all comes back to the values my parents taught, me and my personal mantra to be curious

to, solve problems and do good. i love that. and i want to ask you, what is it about writing for children that fits that mantra of? being curious, solving and doing good. thank you. so i grew up daughter of a librarian. my mom was a research librarian. yes. librarians in the house. so my mom was a research librarian with a specialty in children's literature. my dad was a shipyard worker. but my father is dyslexic. loves reading. but it incredibly difficult because he went without being diagnosed with dyslexia until he was in his thirties. he grew up in segregated mississippi in the 1950s, and they just dismissed his capacity to learn. and so to have a librarian, mother and a dyslexic like father who was functionally illiterate until he was in his adult years, meant that i grew

up understanding not only the beauty of reading, but the importance of storytelling. and sometimes we conflate and seeing. we think they're the same things. but what my mother really wanted us to understand was that there was there was knowledge to be found in those pages. and what my father instilled in us was that there was beauty in how you found the story. when i think about children, how i grew up, i learned so much more about the world that i was part of, in the world i wasn't allowed to see because of stories. and by being able to write for children, it is as you know, it is the most writing possible. with adults, you can meander for about 200 pages and finally get to the point. children want answer now. they want be entertained and they are brutal critics. if you have gotten it wrong, you will know very quickly. and so being able to attack

story and give information and but also give pathos and ethic to the stories you're telling for children, me is the most excuse that approach to writing. and so when i think about curiosity, i always to find a point into the story where there's something to be learned about myself or the world around me. i try to solve problems. i don't want the stories to just be there. i want them to give children a tool because kids are experiencing the same world we are. and too often, that world seems big and scary and mystifying. and so i want to reduce it down to give them the ability, solve their problems in their own way and in their time, and then to do for me is always about making sure that by the end of the book, my character or the child reading the book feels that they can do something to improve the world they were part of because the most powerful place for a child to be is not to be

overwhelmed by the world, but to see as part of the world. and therefore as part of a solution to the world. they're in. and that's what i try to do in my books. and you are so right about kids. and also just writing world as it is for them as they inhabit it. and getting to the point fast. boy, they do right, don't they? and they tell us so. i love origin stories in books and i love. so stacy speaks, speaks up, is part of a trilogy so far. you have three books in the series. the other ones are, stacey's extraordinary words and stacey's remarkable books. and and there's also really cute picture of stacey as a little girl in the back. and i saw those in your hair. i said, i know that ribbons, i read them. they're like, jani, yes, i know those. so when you were thinking about this book, were you did did you envision the series? did you envision it as a series? did you originate this or did

your publisher say, stacey, you're so good at this. you know, at issues and so on. like, which way did it happen? did you come with the idea or did they come with to you with the idea? so in 2018, i applied for this job and didn't it? and and i suddenly a lot of people wanted to know who was. i'm like the minute late, but okay, you. and while had i had written romantic suspense for years, i was approached. my agent was approached with the idea of me writing a children's book. and so i wanted to think what story resonated me most. and the other conversation i was having was that people were asking like, why wasn't i? you know, despondent? because it was a bit of a public race and it didn't work out well. and there were some there was meanness around the way that campaign was handled. and so there were all these parts to it.

and so when i was asked to write a children's book, i wanted to think about what did need to know in that moment and in that moment, it was how to get to next moment that losing and this may not resonate with anyone in here, but losing isn't permanent and it's not even fatal. and that sometimes when we don't get the thing we want the most and when it feels the most dire, or that's the moment where we have to figure what's next. and so the very book, stacey's extraordinary words was about my first big public loss, which was my second grade spelling bee, and who knew chocolate had two o's doesn't make any sense. i, i don't i don't relive that trauma exactly. but so stacey is in a spelling bee. so that was the first one and then the second book came about because when i was asked to write the we were in midst of this conversation about identity, whose stories mattered, whose stories could be

told. i know you guys in florida know nothing about that issue. and so i wanted to write a story, one that celebrates libraries and librarians, but also celebrates how our stories tie us together. and so that was based on my my dear friends in elementary school. and so for this one, it was, again, a question what was resonating for. me and what challenges were children facing? they're hearing about war and horrible things in the world, but what felt most real and accessible. and so this one really came about because when i thought about what challenge and tensions do children face? but what is a universal experience? it's lunchtime. and so let's a story about where lunch time becomes a moment not only for learning but for action. yeah. so that leads to my next thought, which is, you know, school lunch, as you said, is is a experience and a quote from

the book that her teacher tells her when she notices that one of her classmates does not have access to lunch is we do have a free lunch program. but some children don't qualify. the teacher explains stacy, it's complicated. and so we often think in this country that we have a free lunch program that covers everybody, right? but, you know, i'm recently aware that there are several states experimenting with a free meals program and that would go further because it is complicated. and there are people who fall through the cracks. so who does fall through the cracks in in the current programs the way that stacy and what kind of changes do you think would help in that? we have a we a food system in this country that's designed to fail. it's designed to fail our children. it's designed to fail families and the nation excess not just plenty, but of excess.

we have a hunger problem where one in eight, one out of every eight children in my home state. and it's true, most of the south goes hungry every day and that hunger isn't precipitous. it's simply by the visible poverty we're used to seeing. it's whether or not a family is paying three times their income for and on the scale they look like they're doing okay, but they can't afford lunch and each state sets their own programs and within each state, each school district does. you've got states like minnesota that have adopted universal free lunch. so no matter who you are, you get that lunch. you've got states like. yes, absolutely. you have states, georgia and florida, that refused money to pay for school lunches for during the summer. it's called the sandbox program. and it's not extra money. there's no additional cost to the state. the money's already there. you just have to accept it. and so a lot of this is ideological. there are people who do not

believe that children deserve to eat if their parents can't to pay for it. and that is a level of meanness that i do not understand and i cannot countenance. and if you want to learn more about this, i actually have a podcast called assembly required. and just this week i had tom colicchio as our guest talking about our food insecurity system and what we should be doing. but when it comes to school lunches, children going hungry is not just about the the pain that child feels. it lowers their likelihood of being able to turn hungry. children cannot learn to think about how hungry you get when you're 5 minutes away from lunch. imagine being a six year old who relies on school lunch as maybe your only meal of the day, but you also have families that are generally economically secure but are on that edge. we are so used to thinking that there is a racial or economic

demography that is relegated to certain parts. our community. hunger exists every and so our responsibility is one to solve the immediate issue of hunger, school hunger. and i encourage folks at the end of the book, we have a list of resources of feed feeding america and no child hungry are both amazing organizations. local food banks are incredibly supportive and important. but you need to ask what's the policy? your school system? you know, we presume that there is universality, there is not, and we often don't know there's a problem until we ask. and so we have the responsibility to ask our school boards what's policy ask? and you don't have to have a child in the school system raise, your hand, if you pay property taxes, then you are paying for the system. and if you didn't raise your if you live inside, you are paying property taxes. it's just called rent. we are all responsive and therefore we all have both the obligation and the opportunity to insert into this

conversation. if you work at a business or a business, hungry children, you money because those are children who are not getting what they need and therefore not growing into the workforce, that we need hunger, solving the problem of hunger is one of the most effective ways to expand and secure our country because healthy, well-fed children learn better. they are better, they are more engaged, and they become the people that we need them be as adults for sure. so as a follow up to that, you you mention inserting yourself into the conversation, which is exactly stacey finds difficult. so stacey's reluctant to speak up at first. in fact, she tries to address the wrong sort of non-verbally. and i'm guessing that adults do the same thing right where afraid to stand up even in our families sometimes our own

communities to say what we think about an issue she tries to address the wrong with a petition but eventually finds out as we all probably will that there is no going around it that you do have to find your voice. so why do you think it's so important to encourage children to find their and how can we do it? so i was not shy i was reserved as a kid. i just had like i didn't like everybody. so i didn't, i had to talk to them all. but i also, i didn't like making mistakes in public. and that was one big issue. so i would often try to find ways around it. the second book i tell about talk about my friend julie. she and i became friends because julie very, very tiny. her family, she was a vietnamese refugee who came to gulfport, mississippi, and bullies were picking on her. i wasn't going to fight anybody

because i wasn't good at it, but i was taller than everyone. so i would just stand in front of her. so that was my first experiment with nonverbal protectiveness. so it only worked a couple of times. they realized they could just push you over and then you're like, you're both down, but. but what i what i took from that is that we often do start with what's the confrontational way we can engage? and that's okay. it's a point of entry and i wanted children to see that it's okay to try start with the smaller thing or thing that's the least frightening. but that's not always going to be the answer and so then the next stage that she engaged her friends, sometimes it doesn't have to be your voice alone. we are louder when we are together. so how do you bring your family, your friends, your neighbors together? but ultimately, sometimes unique capacity to draw attention is tool. and we have to decide which is

more important. our fear or our success. and so for me, it was really important for stacy to understand that her getting over her fear meant that she could create success for others. and often we think that if we don't get the prize, then it wasn't worth the pain. and i wanted her to understand. sometimes you don't get the prize, but you get the progress. you create space for that person no one ever saw and gabe, the kid that she's helping by standing there and speaking up, or greyson by standing there and speaking up, she created space for grayson to think that he too, speak up. and i think that's the most important note for children that our individual experiences are not just ours alone. sometimes they're the experiences that galva nice and create opportunity for the next person and never know who's

watching you, but you also know who needs you and so sometimes we can't wait to be asked. we have to speak up anyway. and the worst that can happen is that nobody listens. and how is that different than the day before? right. and very true. i think we're often. right now we're facing so many so many moments of pushback. i'm sure you have for your books. i have for mine. and so that notion of sticking together, helping other out, standing up for librarians, for teachers, for kids. right. to read. you know, i think essential now, my friend clapper, that that was really important. yeah and she does an amazing job of making that so i think it has been beautiful to travel the nation and meet the nation's children. it's just been the honor of a lifetime. but i have some fun questions that came from the audience. so i'm going to share them. this is from camelia six.

so camelia says, how did you become in high camelia or la camelia? how did you become an author? so i used tell stories and when you're little kid and, you tell stories. sometimes adults don't believe you, but if you learn to write them down, then they're very. and so i became a writer. i became an author because i loved telling and i liked writing them down. i love words. i think words are so much fun. and so i used to look for new and different words and finding ways to put them into stories. i have five brothers and sisters and so i spend a lot of time reading with my younger brothers and sisters or reading stories that my big sister would give me to read. and so i became a writer because there always stories that looked like me and my few books were really about being able to write

stories about people who had my life. but i never got to read about my life. i never got to see people who looked me or who came from where, i came from. and so the other reason i became an author, was to be able to tell the stories that were like me and maybe what i wanted to be. and i could have adventures and i could try new things and i could be curious and learn new things. and as long as i wrote them down, nobody called me a liar. that's a beautiful part of writing, isn't it? we get to be professional and we just make up anything we want. it's just fabulous. okay. i have here someone who is a fan of white justice, sleeps, and they want to know, are you trying to turn that into a tv show? okay, so two things. one, thank you for reading while justice sleeps might the beginning of the african series. thank you. she actually has a second book called rogue justice and a third book coming out next year called coded justice.

and yes, my mission life is to make it a television show because i love tv. and so are in the process of trying to do so. we've got a production partner and hollywood takes than writing a book. so it'll be out hopefully sometime in my lifetime. but yes. i want to see avery and her friends and her antagonists all come to life on the big screen. so yeah, the little screen, the tv thing is rough. i know i it's the same, but i love that you love tv. one of the conversations i've had with parents across the country has been like that. it doesn't to be an either or of screen and books like that in kids lives today. they both have to exist. i'm also a tv freak, so. but here's another question. okay. and no pressure because i'm sitting right next to you, but what is your favorite kid's book? stacey abrams. well, i'm going to you tell me what it should be.

i'm going to tell you what it has. okay. so for picture books was make way for ducklings, because i have five brothers and sisters and we all used to look like make way for ducklings. we go with my parents. and then my favorite middle school book was the phantom tollbooth. it's about the fight between and and words. i just thought that was the most cool. i'm like norton juster was awesome. so those are my two favorites. but what's my third favorite book? anything by meg medina. yeah. so give us give us. hey, mercy suarez changes gears. there you go. that is my third favorite book. thank you. i my daughter love phantom tollbooth. i was a fan of charlotte's web. you see i know that friendship thing. so and my my older sister read that and told me the whole story. so it wasn't as much fun. know she had. are they all bookish also your siblings? we have a book club. oh, yeah. i sibling book. we have a sibling book club that we will not let my parents in

and and we have rules like if you pick a book and it's dumb, you get pushed out of the rotation after a while. so yeah, well you've got to you've got to be really good about book choices. but yeah we've, we've it, we have a younger brother who's faced some challenges and we, the book club is one of the ways to help him sort of reconnect and yeah, we've kept it going for about a decade. i love that idea that really a good one for us. but you learn way much about your siblings when you do a book, hold together. so just be really be really sure you want to know them this well. okay. this is from sawyer palmer and soraya wants to know what helps you to stay motivated and hopeful with all the meanness in the world. so it's hard because. you don't know why people are being, but sometimes you know why you're being mean. and what i try to do is not take

people at their word, but at their heart. if you take people out there where people say mean things, but watch what they do when, no one else is paying attention. but i also don't lean on other people. i hope is important, but i focus on determination and that's what my motivation. i see the world that i want. i know what the world could look like if we did the right thing. and so i can either get distracted by when it doesn't happen or i can remain focused on what i can do to make it so. anyone who that star trek reference there, but it is it's about being determined and letting yourself be distracted by not getting the thing you wanted when you wanted it. not winning the election you thought you were going to win. not getting the policies or worse, seeing people who are mean and who don't have good hearts, make decisions for you.

they want you to give it. they want you to give. it is much easier to dominate someone who won't fight back. it is much easier to take over a system that others don't value or when they relinquish control because it's hard. my approach is to be determined. i am determined that we are going to have more. that we are going to be more. that we are going protect each other. and that determines and means that not getting the thing i want in the way that i wanted it at the time i thought i might get it does not exempt from the responsibility to try again and that trying again is what we have to do every single. penny wants to know. stacey, why did you pick this path as i said so my mom once

said she was up 14. i was doing a bunch of different things and she said, stacey you don't want to be a jack of all trades, a master of none. what she was saying was, pick something because tired what i heard was try everything and try to be good at it. communication is important. so the path i picked and that's why i talk about the freeway highway, my path is forward and that means i look the things that i can do to make progress where i am and fill in the gaps that i see. so i start businesses, nonprofits, and i run for office and i write. and there are people who say, well, you just need to pick thing. and if you pick that one thing, you can be great at it. and that's true for some people. but for me, telling stories is one way of helping people see. the world running for office is another way. starting a business that tries to do well and do good is another way. we are all.

we all contain multitudes. and my mission is to try to leverage as much of myself as i can for as long as i can for as many as i can, because eventually i'm going to stop. something's going to, you know, something's going to make it end, but it's not going to be my lack of ambition or my lack of intention, and it's not going to be someone else saying i don't want you to do it. the path i pick not about a title or a way of behaving it is a direction. my direction is forward and if that is the direction, then my responsibility is to do anything can with the skills that i've been given and with the grace that the world has given me and my faith tradition has taught me. my job is to do as much as i can to keep moving us forward. because we started our conversation about a children's

book. i we've just, you know had an election and i want to know what do we say to children right now and this is not just because it's the book i wrote. the reason i wrote stacey speaks up in this moment is that while the election is one of the proof points of challenge, it is not the only one we live in an increasingly complicated world where our ability to hide from it is disappear. cheering because of those screens, because of those phones. we are overweight whelmed with information. when and i were going up, we had three people who told us what the news was. and if you were lucky and you got pbs heard from jim lehrer and you heard from mcneil lehrer, but that was it. so we all had the same reality. we might decide to do different things with it, but we all got the same information now. can curate your own reality.

and for children, they don't. the capacity to know how to discern which of realities they will have to live with, but they have their own lived experiences too. and i wrote stacey speaks up because want us to remember that the most weapon to take our choice is silence. that the most effective way to tell us that we don't matter is for people not to listen. and i want children know in this moment that can feel so and so cold that their voices matter, that their intentions matter, that their truth matters, and that they have the ability to build community. you don't have to wait for an adult say yes. you don't have to for someone to give you permission. your job is to be a good person and to try to share that goodness with others and to be there for people who don't know yet that they have the right to expect more. and if we speak up election or

no, we don't cease to be citizens when the person we want doesn't win an election. we don't cease to be relevant because we don't get the things we want. we exist in between elections. those are roadmap, those are markers. that's not the. and so our job is to speak up, to demand what we want to insist on the world, think we should have to do so, not because we lost, but because we know that there's another day coming. and if we keep doing the work, we will get the work we need. so. so my friends, you are a gift to children and a gift to this nation. and thank you so much for the service to to children's literature to the country. thank you. make a hand for stacey. i think this.

we're currently in a break between events at this year's miami book fair. we'll be back shortly with more coverage. and it's a particular honor, if i may say, to come today to to hillsdale cpi, to to talk about my fourth book, which is just stumbling towards utopia. and in my role at focus on the family, i travel about a third

of the time i spend a lot of time on airplanes living out of suitcases, etc., and i speak a lot when i'm on the road i speak to two audiences in groups that people here would call or say deeply blue and progressive. and i'm comfortable in all of them. and one of the common threads after a speech or a debate or remarks is something like this how did we get in to the mess that we are in? and if people have children in and grandchildren, they will say, i'm not only worried about my country, but i am particularly worried about the country. the the civilization that i'm leaving to the next generation. and so about two years ago, after hearing this common, you

know, iteration after traveling, i got out a small stack of of american airline napkins and i began to scratch an outline of a book that i hoped would answer the question, how did we get into this mess? not any mess, but this mess this in credibly polarized, uneven time that we find ourselves in. and i love to delve into the empirical research and data i love to read and the more that i research, the more that i read the conclusion the pointers kept coming back to the 1960s are. and i began to ask myself, are did it really all begin. in 1967, 68, earlier, the great society and i found that the

answer was no. i found the answer and made it the thesis of my, which is that if you to understand the moral and social revolution of in the 1960s and the seventies you really have to go back to the turn of the 20th century and frankly, it was at the turn of the 20th century, relatively a handful of very influential men and women who were deliberately uncomfy with the american way of life. they were uncomfy trouble with the declaration of independence and the constitution. they were uncomfortable with the natural nuclear family. they were uncomfortable with churches and seminaries they were uncomfortable with

entertainment. they were uncomfortable over lee with the american experience. and if you trace a line from the 19 teens and twenties down to 1963, four or five, six, seven, eight, what you find is that all of the seeds that were planted proactively at the turn of the 20th century came to germination and fruition and in 6768 and 69 and being a lincoln man, i'd like to demonstrate that in a powerpoint that i've that i brought along and i'd like to go, if i may, very quickly to one of the most distinguished sitting circuit court judges in the united states, harvey wilkinson. he wrote a fabulous memoir, ah, of his growing up. and i particularly loved the the parts of his memoir on, the

1960s. and he said to overcome them, the sixties, we must first understand them one must go back in time in order to move forward. i thought that a kind of a beautiful thesis sentence for the research that i was beginning to undertake. i talk about a small coterie of people at the beginning of stumbling toward utopia and i and i could talk at greater. i've written a greater length, as you will see about some of handful of progressives that i think did enormous damage to our constitution and all our way of life and to the kind of what i think of as the unwritten cost to two tional way of life, family, marriage, parenting, human life, liberty, conscience rights, magnanimity and civility in the public square.

education, higher education and the classroom and elementary school and and high schools. and just for today at hillsdale, i've picked out kind of four examples, beginning with john dewey. if you really want to understand the radicalism of what happened to education, culminating in the 1960s and seventies, generally speaking, look no further. than john dewey very uncomfortable with the judaic christian tradition, yet very, very with abject death standards of reading, writing, arithmetic as the principal goal you know, with the formation of character, the primary role of of public or government schools and frankly, private schools as well.

he was also, i think it's important to say, particularly unarmed portent with expressions of faith and religion, which he felt really was out side overwhelmingly, the role of education next, margaret sanger, the founder of planned parenthood, a woman who early in the american experience was particularly uncomfortable with large sectors of the american people. she was eugenicist on steroid aids. she was very uncomfortable denominational. she, uh, with with with those in our american faith community broadly speaking outside of what you and i would say were denominate notionally white, anglo saxon protestants and american, you know, kind of what became progressive protestantism. she had a very big role in

shifting american to two to a very progressive way of of an expression of a worldview that as a law professor and a liberty. and how do you answer the question, why should we rely. on 1220 old white dead guys who wrote the constitution 250 years ago? okay, great question. i've heard it before. and i will just say this. the constitution that we need to debate about is not the original constitution. it is the constitution we have today. and the constitution we have today was amended 27 times to be an original. this means you want to see the original meaning of the constitution enforced whenever that meaning was added to the constitution. so the original meaning of the 14th amendment dates to 1868. my last book was the was called the original meaning of the 14th amendment. its letter and spirit published harvard university press and

that was all about what that meaning was. and so we don't need to privilege and maybe we spend a too much time talking about the founders. and we should talk a lot more about the republicans who gave us the fact that the republicans are the newly formed republican party, who gave us the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, having all that, i do think the people that happened to write the constitution were extremely smart and they were extremely knowledgeable and well-educated about political theory. and that's the reason why they actually devised a system of government that was unique in its time. it reached some degree, remains unique, and it's uniquely good, but only if it's followed. and part of the problems we have with government is that there have been important chunks of the constitution, which is what i call the lost constitution in one of my books, restoring the lost constitution that have just been ignored or discarded. and if we would a better society, we would we would function better if we could bring back all the parts of the

constitution and activate them all. and that's part of the mission of i have as an originalist is to revive lost constitution. all of it. does the bill of rights stand in your mind? does it stand the bill of rights is important. it was something that the federalist did not necessarily want to add. it was put into the constitution because of the anti-federalists. but when the federal there was the federalist who wrote the bill of rights with the anti wanted were a bunch of amendments that would the federal government. but the federalist said, we just set up this stronger federal government because that's what we need. so how can we satisfy the concern of the anti-federalists and remember, at the time they were writing this, there were two states that had refused to join the union. north carolina had not joined and rhode island had not tried. so in the first congress met to consider whatever they were doing. you set up the government, they only had 11 states, not 13. and what james madison is, we know these people don't trust. we promised them we give them a bill of rights when in order to ratify the constitution. and so we need to honor promise.

but the way they honored their promise was not to effect. and madison explains, is not to pull back our powers but to protect the individual rights that people have. and so that's the one reason why the bill of rights we have is so focused on individual rights, because they could mollify critics by giving them a bill of rights without, weakening the structures of government that they and that's the reason why the anti federalists were all dissatisfied with the amendments because, well, all this is giving us is our individual rights. we already have our individual rights, but it turns out over time, the anti-federalists were right as governmental powers have expanded beyond the original meaning of the constitution, we become more, more dependent on the rights that happen to be included in the bill of rights. so we thank the anti-federalists for pushing for that. what's it like to be a liberty marian at georgetown university? it's wonderful it's great. my colleagues are great. my colleagues treat me with respect. people think that if you're in a

minority, a political minority in legal education or even in undergraduate education, you must be put upon all the time. but if you're nice to them, they'll usually be nice to you back. and i haven't really had any unpleasantness with my colleagues. we have our disagreements internally about internal matters and concerning faculty governance, but politically, i basically leave them alone and they leave me alone. and my job there is really to focus on my students, not really on my colleagues. my job there is to be a resource them, to be a voice for them when they get into trouble. and i've been able to successfully do that and i get nothing but appreciation expressed by my colleagues. well, joining us right over. our live coverage of the miami book fair continues now.

i think got to do big time here. you know, i was down on. one road, one. good morning. good, everyone. my name is nyala harrison, a law attorney at the law firm greenberg traurig. and along standing volunteer here at the fair.

welcome to the 41st miami book fair. we're grateful to miami-dade college, the volunteers and the support of our sponsors, including the green family foundation, nicholas children's hospital, amazon, the j.w. marriott, marquee and brickell and all the other sponsors. if you are a first time attendee this morning, hello and welcome if you are returning, then it's good to see you again. and there are any friends of the fair i'd to give a special welcome and hello. it's good to have friends and we need some more. so i encourage you to become a friend of the fair. at the end of the session there will some time for a brief q&a. the author pre signed books and so are available outside, but they have been pre signed at this time. i'd kindly ask you to silence your phone for the benefit of

everyone here in the audience with that it's my pleasure to introduce brad our immigration law firm with offices in miami beach and palm beach which continues their proud tradition of supporting the miami book fair and this critical community including mentoring the importance written work for future generations. with that, i then introduce maximo brader, a lifetime resident of miami beach. he is a senior at hamilton college where he is associate major and the editor of the college newspaper. he has had opinion pieces published in the herald and the palm beach post. i invite maximo to go come up and give the introduction introductions of the folks you are really here to see. thank you.

on behalf of the broader immigration law firm. good afternoon and welcome to the miami book. fair's author session. malcolm gladwell on revenge of the tipping point over superspreaders the rise of social engineering. our moderator today, tom hudson, who is a lawyer and economics editor and special correspondent. his extensive reporting on south florida economy has taken him from the water. the florida bay to the depth of the port miami and countless offices and conference rooms. he's interviewed bartenders, bankers, caregivers and ceos to report on the people behind economic statistics. he began his business reporting career in march thousand, just a weeks after the dot com bubble burst. here's reporter from the trading floors of cme. chicago board options exchange, nasdaq and the new york stock exchange. he previously served as vice president of news at w all r. n where he created and hosted the sunshine economy for ten years. he was managing editor and coauthor of business report on pbs's hudson is married with two

sons and advises every bicycle rider to always wear their helmet. our esteemed author today, malcolm gladwell, who has provided us with the prism and vocabulary through which we understand social phenomena not data centric analytics, but through rich storytelling narratives replete with characters and dramatic settings that are so visually evocative that they play out like films in your mind's eye. he speaks of the overstory a framework for understanding points of origin. in many ways, he's become the conduit through which we understand how we got here. personally, i finally understand why my parents always told me to get working. now e to put in your 10000 hours. if you want to achieve expertise. and i thought it was parental, but i realize now they just read his outliers. malcolm gladwell is the author of seven new york times bestsellers, all published by little brown and company. the tipping point how little things can make a big difference. blink. the power of thinking without thinking. outliers. the story. success. what the dog saw. other adventures. david and goliath. underdogs. misfits and art of battling.

talking to strangers. what we know about the people we don't know. and the bomber mafia. a dream of temptation. and the longest night of the second world war. he's also the co-founder of pushkin industries. an audio content company that produces the revisionist history podcast, among other podcasts and audio. he was born in england, raising canada and lives outside new york with his family and a cat named biggie smalls. please give a warm welcome to malcolm gladwell and tom hudson. well, hello, miami fair. come on in and grab a. malcolm gladwell is in the house and this is his first trip to the miami book fair. welcome, malcolm thank you. it's also the last up on his book tour for revenge of the tipping point. so we've got it here at the miami book fair. wonderful. all. so, listen, literature is full

of profound questions, right? to be or not to be. who is john galt? well, i would like make perhaps an addition to this literary canon of questions. everybody have a book. who's got a book. who has malcolm's book? hold it up high. hold it up high so we can see it. all right. so for those of you with the book, i want you to open the book to the front flap, the cover, and together in our loudest outdoor miami palmetto traffic jam voice, we going to read the first sentence that is in black text together. everybody ready? here is our question, malcolm, that we would like to add to the literary canon. here we go everybody with the book. let's read it. why is miami? me? miami. malcolm, why is miami like miami? yeah, it's i was looking for a

way to write some flap copy that would attract the maximum number of americans and i felt like a reference. miami's weirdness would be the right place to start. well, considering it's another bestseller, i think that you have hit the nail of the hat. well, listen, miami features pretty well. well, it features large in this book. i'm not sure it features well in this book. let's be frank here, malcolm, that you you have held up a mirror to some behavior that is not all that. yeah. before talk about the specifics. what did you find about? miami. that was so intriguing as a storyteller that so compelling as a journalist? well, i was really i was very interested in this question of why there is so much unexplained variation in in in the behavior across a wide range of things from one city to the next in the

united states. so this is an observation that was first made in health care that the way a doctor practice is in. i use the example in the book boulder and buffalo, the way a cardiologist treats in buffalo is very different from the way a cardiologist treat the exact same patient with the exact same problem in boulder, colorado, for example. and you can look across any number of medical procedures and you will find these crazy, easy variations from place to place. medical spending varies dramatically from your post of texas, where the per capita medical spending is like two or three x. what it be in minneapolis, for example. so i got interested in miami because bmi is a great example of this crazy variation. and the thing that i focused on was medicare fraud. this is the medicare fraud capital of america.

and and thus you're not sure that really deserves a round of applause. miami, i think this is part of the problem that malcolm is going to be talking about. yeah. would be the and there's a number mean i could have focused on any number of things that make miami peculiar. but i decided to focus focus on this one because medicare fraud is a huge deal. it's the biggest kind of fraud in a category of fraud in america. nothing else comes close. i mean, and what's curious is that, you know, it's really easy to do, as i discovered and so you would expect a crime that's really easy to do to be practiced across. you know, there's not like any barriers right. i could actually teach you all if you want to if you don't know already because you're miami, you probably do know already. that's do it, malcolm, that's ted talk. that's a different type of event than the book fair here. but so if it's really easy

anyone to do in the united states, then why isn't everyone doing it? that's question number one. and question number two is why, of all the small number of people who really are doing it aggressively is miami, florida way the leader. so once i found out that miami had this exalted position in this fraud category, i, i came to miami to kind of get to the bottom of that. so 25 years ago, when you tipping point. yeah you chose stories about hush puppies. yeah right shoes. you chose a story about sesame street and blue's clues. and 25 years go by and then you decide to feature a story about medicare in miami. might you. might. my vision has gotten a little darker over the 25 years i. maybe i have a richer appreciation for the diversity of crazy behavior in this country, but. well, i'd always, you know, because the thing is, you forget this because you live here, that

an outsider coming to miami is immediately by the fact that it doesn't bear any resemblance to any other city in the united states. right. exactly. like the joke is so close to the white latin americans like miami. it's so close. you know, it says the. and so i was trying and so i told i tell a story, that chapter of this marvelous character named philip is forbes, who who's lawyers in his room, by the way. and who is who was was accused by the government ambassador. manning, one of the largest medicare frauds in american history. but, of course, not the only one. i mean, there's many, many i point out that your senator, rick scott scott, was someone who was head of hca hospital when it was accused and convicted of being one of the biggest. there's a rich vein of medicare fraud.

adjacency in miami. and so i you know, i began just by kind of diagnose using the varieties of flamboyant medicare fraud behaviors that take place in the city, which are considerable. spent this hilarious day. there's something called the medicare fraud task, which is this group put together by the fbi, the doj and hhs as special and they have these offices around the country, but they don't really have offices around the country. they really have offices in miami. and i spent the day with them and they told me a number of really hilarious to these two really wonderful investigators who had a sense of, i think, a sense of. a certain amount of ironic attachment about their job. but one of the things they pointed out was when they figured out that there was a one of the biggest money launderers involved in the medicare fraud business in miami, they were tracking him down and trying to,

you know, arrest him and make a case against him. and they realized that he was in the office upstairs from where the task force was. so there was here's a guy who's running a he's a central part of a massive multi, multi-million dollar medicare fraud. every morning he goes to an office building in north miami and like, you know, he look know the the big board on the wall which shows all the occupants he's literally on sixth floor. and on the fifth floor, it says medicare task force. so it's like you have to put yourself inside the mind of that of that guy. he's like he has he has a certain amount of audacity. so, in fact, in the book, when you are talking with a member of this task force, you write quote, there was a certain characteristic shamelessness, a particular kind of brazenness and, flamboyance that sets miami apart. yeah, it is. so a of this i don't go into

this in the book, but i have many occasions to reflect by writing book about the central role that the television series miami vice plays in this because, you know, this is the first for most americans, our encounter with miami. this is miami vice and of course, miami vice. in retrospect is an extraordinarily peculiar year, a television show some may consider groundbreaking, great time and what and if you think back, i don't know how many you remember vice it's a don johnson from yes. from the eighties. what's peculiar about it is it until that point, if you did a television show about cops in, a corrupt place, the job of the cops, the the place was considered to be a bad place that needed up the job of the cops to confront the bad. and then when you watch my face, you immediately struck by the fact that the two cops who at the center of the show drive lamborghinis and wear armani

suits. and your first thought is, how do they afford that on a police officer salary? it was amazing, rodney. it was all was another reason i think it was the lamborghini, was it? i think we will have to fact check it. we need to get a fact checker, fact check on. but like just that notion that you know, in previous cop shows, the venial t or the corruption in the city was presented as part of the problem of the city in miami. the corruption of the ality was presented part of the appeal of the city. and there is a huge there's actually and i feel badly that i did not go into this in my book. there is actually a kind of scholarly literature about did miami vice play a key role in the turnaround in the city's fortunes because miamians will remember in the late seventies was not a tourist destination, right? it was in fact being passed in summer. but and it suddenly from being a

place that no one wanted to go to, to a place people did well, well, test out the history buffs here. 1981, time magazine cover has two words on it. what were they paradise lost. yeah. south florida. yeah, yeah. and so anyway i'm i'm on miami vice but but there's a there's a guy i do i do spend a little time with this is guy who wrote a book, a guy named griffin who writes a really wonderful book called the year of dangerous days, which i argues that 1980 is the pivotal because you have mariel boatlift, the race riots and explosion of the cocaine trade in a very country a period of time, three massive shocks to the system that have the effect of creating a kind of vacuum. so as this relates to some of the themes you pick up 25 years later in the tipping point, you know, a quarter of a century ago, you introduced kind of three key concepts social epidemics.

one of the key concepts in here and it's the first word of the subtitle is over stories, which is related to this idea local variances, local area variances. right. and this is described as the patterns behavior attract themselves places in ways that can sometimes surprise us. yeah. surprise generally has a positive connotation to it. but i think as you relate these stories about miami's all over story, they're far from positive. yeah, i mean, there with the question that that that's actually one of the questions that was at the center of that case i was talking about involving this guy philip as forbes in miami is to what extent. so here's a guy it's a good example of what i was about. so here's a guy who came from chicago where his family had been a sew, upstanding citizens

and had run a chain of nursing homes up there. then they all move en masse to miami and philip has farms very quickly, becomes in some kind of questionable behavior. and at his sentencing hearing, his rabbi shows up and his rabbi says he was an honest man in chicago. it wasn't until he came to miami that he became a crook. maybe miami is to and i chose in the chapter to take that seriously. and i do think there's something to that that there is something about the ethos of a community that has an impact on us in a way that we may not realize. i mean, in that griffin book, for example he has this example of how there was a money launderer in the late a cocaine who used to launder money for one of the cartels and he would pull to a bank on biscayne boulevard, far from here every morning and he would have a

giant full of cash in his back trunk of the trunk of his car. and he would take the trunk out and the guard would come running out of the bank and help him move the suitcase into bank. and my is if you observe that every senior morning route is to walk down biscayne boulevard and every morning you see somebody, not just move a suitcase of cash into a bank, but you observe the guard in the bank, assisting in the spade. yeah. what does that do to your sense of to your own kind of desire to follow the rules and obey the law? so when i was reading this in the book what i was thinking about is and if you want to raise your hand in this question, by all means, who among us takes our publix shopping cart back to this shopping corral? oh, there's your book, fair audience. yeah, this is so there's a yeah, this in it. which publix are you shopping at?

because need to wear you did not raise your hand i go so far yes yes well i probably don't use the shopping cart maybe i don't know. so you but this is a good example of a community norm. right, right, right. so i would bet that if we asked question of a random group of people in i keep mentioning minneapolis with minneapolis is kind of the paradigm for a well-behaved city. if you ask that same in minneapolis. everyone would cause and you do it because everyone else is doing it because you know that there is a point a tipping point when you no longer feel kind of, you know, a social pressure to adhere to that norm? and so you can observe that erosion of norms on the level of returning the shopping cart to the thing you know, it's it's not to imagine that. it also applies a much grander scale to something should you abide by of the rules about.

and the thing that's interesting about medicos is i'm now going down a medicare fraud rabbit hole. the thing about medicare fraud, of course, is that a lot the things that end up sounding like fraud don't begin as fraud. it's a it is a really a kind, classic slippery slope. it takes a lot of players. medicare fraud can be quite easy but it also takes a number of players to be at least complicit to get it. well, social security guard helping carry your suitcase of cash to the bank. but to give you an example, you're a physician. i'm a nursing home. i would like you to refer your patients to me. we're friends. so you do it because. we're friends. now, that's not. right. right. i mean, it's. we don't declare it, but you have a slight preference. and as a result of the fact we're friends, i like. let's go to the he came. i have great seats, right? we start doing that, and then maybe your practice gets a little bigger and there's more a greater volume of patients. and i start like picking up the

tab for an more extravagant series of things. now. so we've moved from something that was just a kind of i you knew me and trusted me. oh, that's a good nursing home to a case where there is a kind of implied quid pro quo. and at the end of that journey is fraught is where i am paying you to send me patients, which is the definition of one kind of medicare fraud. and i think what's going on is that in other cities, there is a point at which the people, each party acknowledges that we've gone too far. right. and wait a second, let's not be. and in miami, you look around and you see so many other people doing versions. this you don't have the same restraints. so this leads to the question that kept coming in my head as i was reading the story, which is where in over story of miami lies individual responsibility to have that person stand up and say sir, would you please your shopping cart back to the corral

it's blocking the the the driveway everybody. yeah. or perhaps no don't buy me the lamborghini nursing home owner to the medical doctor that that's yeah that's a step too far. so this is you know this is a really, really great question and it is a fundamental problem that. i don't feel that is a society we confront nearly as honestly as we should, which is any investigation about human behavior ultimately leads you down a path of of moving away from the idea that human beings can be held fully responsible for their behavior. in other words, the notion oh, i agree. i think we all agree that we need to hold people accountable for their. but the minute you turn a spotlight on and who they are and why they are individual starts to play a smaller and smaller role like, i mean, i'll give you an example, which is i was for something else i've been

working on. i've been spending all this time with these the woman who's a psychologist who spends lot of time with people on death row and would she she's not the only one to anyone who has studied people on death row tell you the same thing, which is that everyone on death row is distinguished by one common characteristic that they, over the course of their life typically in childhood, experienced extraordinary abuse. they all have that in common. right. so it's not like the people on death row are not people who these kind of lovely upbringings and then chose to go down a path of violent crime. these people who are powerful and deeply damaged the get go. so once you once you say that, you have to yourself, well, how am i how can i hold someone responsible for their behavior sort of. if i once i know that they had a series of developmental experiences that were

catastrophic. right. so, i mean, but the same thing is true with these kinds of norms. things, you know, it doesn't erode entirely our our appreciation, individual responsibility. but it has to kind of right. you know, i was talking about this at an event, a couple of weeks ago in broward county, a whole different story. that's right. so it's like, well, malcolm, i mean, you know, in when you're driving broward county, you never turn off turn signal. and when you're driving in dade county, you never turn it on. you yeah. so there's a bright line there of a cultural norm. yeah. so this individual is from dade county, but we had this conversation in, broward, which for this audience is good context, i think and i was talking about kind of this idea of the overstep free to him. and this was a long community civic business leader. and he said, you know, county

particularly in back to 1980 which can be a decent election point, dade county is a community of risk or dissidents or descendants of descendants of takers. historically. and so perhaps that risk appetite, that risk behavior or appetite is is materially different in this community. it doesn't mean that the norms or the ethics or morals are necessarily different, but that appetite for risk, i think there's yeah, i think that's i think those kinds of observations are really useful. they're not definitive right they don't explain behavior on the individual level fully, but they're really useful in understanding why because you at a certain point you have to grapple with the fact that there are these enormous differences in behavior from one group to the next. i had this discussion. in my book outliers had that i

had a whole chapter on trying to account for the fact that countries like south kids in those countries massively outperform countries. other kids from around the world in like performance math standardized tests right. and i was talking to a student at the school who was of korean background who felt uncomfortable with the fact that i was singling out his his cultural group for some kind of explanation. and i said to him, i know it can be a little uncomfortable to do this, but we have to have an explanation for this. you can't just look at the fact that south korea's up here on performance on these tests. and, you know, the united states is down here and just shrug it off, make at a certain point, you've got to you know, and they started going through the whole i was like, you know, the most educated group, ethnic group in the united states is nigerian

immigrants. why? i mean, you can you you can observe that and then walk and say, i don't want to i don't want to look further. that's a really, really, really interesting question what is going on with nigerians who come here that they have like a a level of educational that's just kind of way outside the norm. but i think, i like answering this or asking these questions. i think it's important to ask these questions even when they sometimes make us feel a little weird. so on education. it's another place where you focus on revenge of the tipping point, particularly lee high school in a community that sociology ists had studied as they were looking into self-harm by teenagers. and you at their work and talked to them and whatnot. and this is an extreme high performing high school. yeah, and part of the rash, part of the explanation came down to

monoculture. yeah. right. so explain a little bit what monoculture is for us and in the context of that you write about in the book and the implications of that. yes. so this is a i tell a story in the book of this town which is i don't tell you where it is. it's but it's the researchers who started it called a public and it's a suburb. it a upper middle class suburb of a major american city that is in every way perfect. when i say that, i mean, if you toured it, i actually figured out where i was and taught it. and it is like, oh my god, i would move there in a heartbeat. is gorgeous. it is the most close knit supportive community. the high school is the best in the state. i mean, it's just the kind of it's your dream drivers use turn signals, probably turn signal and they've this problem at their high school local high school of of a suicide epidemic going back ten years now. and it's a very, very serious one that they can't shake and

they don't understand. and the particular thing they don't understand is how could you have a suicide in a high school that's perfect. and the answer is they're not having the epidemic in spite of this perfection. they're having it because the perfection and that the is that if you think about most of us went to high schools where there was a a a large of social groups so no matter who you were, once you showed up at the high school, you could find a home for yourself. you know, there was a of you know, there were i'm just remembering high school, you know, it had all the standards like a seventies john hughes movie was like, which one did you belong to? malcolm? i was a jock. you were a jock you were runner. i was a right, right you had the jocks and the nerds and the drama people, band geeks. band geeks. were you a band? oh, yeah. yeah. you proudly makes a little. yeah, i see that. and what we don't appreciate about that is what we don't

appreciate about that kind of diversity. first of all that it's that's diversity and it's powerfully protective of the students. it means that every student, no matter how dysfunctional they may feel can find a home is, a place for them. what they had done at this high school is they had abandoned that kind of diversity. and they had it was a high school with one track and that was great athletes socially popular, headed for an ivy league school. and if you didn't fall into that track and very few people do, it was very easy for you feel lost and alone, alienated and. the weird thing, of course, is that the parent constructed a high school without one straight highway out of a belief that they were doing their kids a favor. and in fact what they were doing was creating a situation where a an large number of the kids who

went there took their own lives and that, you know that notion i feel like this a really good example of how upper middle class culture. this society is in has has kind of gone off the rails in any number of ways. but you know the number of expected options that have been that have been burdened on teenagers, upper middle class teenagers is getting preposterous. and i separately i i've there was a there's a a woman named linda flanagan who wrote this book which i adore called taking back the game where she makes argument specific to sports, making really the same argument that. we we have ruined youth sports, something lovely and beautiful which kids had for hundreds of years in the last 25 years. we've ruined it by exactly this

by by just raising expectations by turning 13 year olds into pros, by having traveling squads with eight year olds, you know by showing up for games. i mean, her. she's one of these. she's all these i love this woman so much. she's these prescriptions for saving kids sports. one is no more scholarships, athletic scholarships. if you a school and you want that athlete to come to your figure out whether that person is a financial need case and extend financial need. but if you have a scholarship, what you do is you set in motion this craziness at an early. and the other thing is parents should not go to games, stop it's not your game. there's a there's another rule i've heard maybe she's come up with it is the game should not be longer than the time it takes to drive to the game. is that your rule? that's your rule? yeah. that's a good rule. yeah. no, the drive to be game to the game should. not be longer than the game itself. yeah, yeah. so, like, you should be. that should not be driving 3 hours for right to for a swim meet with your kid. we're going to open up the microphone for your questions.

line up. we'll take as many as we can and i'm going to take the opportunity. malcolm, since talking about collegiate athletics, to talk, to ask another small of miami in the book regarding varsity blues college admissions scandal. folks remember the college admissions scandal when folks were kind of paying for kids to be rowers or tennis players or whatnot? so there's one federal case in massachusetts where federal prosecutors brought a case against father that they thought had was part of this. it was in boston federal court. georgetown university was on other side of this admissions scandal case. but miami plays a role in this case. well, remember, i said that lawyer for philip has forms of medicare guy was in the audience. he was also the lawyer who got this guy off the c howard are you let's get howard shoutout. if you're ever in trouble call

howard. he he he's really very good at this. yeah no there's one case where the father of you know both of is all about parents bribing coaches to get their kids into fancy schools. 5656 of those cases, the parents pled guilty in the 57th. the guy said, i'm going to fight it. and he got off. i want to get to the questions. but this is the case that that malcolm calls his lawsuit. my favorite one ever favorite lawsuit if everyone ever he to podcast episodes on it because it's in the book it is terrific it was really it was it was a gift. it was every now and again god shines on you and, gives you a a federal case that is so delightful that just when you think you've heard it, here comes miami. here comes miami. hello, sir. first question, please introduce yourself, richard rudo. get a little bit closer to the microphone, please go ahead. feel free to. yeah, there you go. richard rudo.

so i started your book and i've read all of them and i follow, you know, revisionist history, the podcast and i started this book with the hope and expectation that i could put the election aside. but then medicare fraudsters popped up and you told the story and i just want to make sure that i'm on this ultimately. this doctor was pardoned who him? well, trump in his previous or when he was in is at the end of his first term. yeah. the guy that we were talking about who was at the center of this medicare fraud case has was sentenced and then had his sentence commuted by by donald trump at the. final weeks of his first term. now, i believe it was it. yes.

yep. so that's why the right yeah you can yeah i to write a book in which the words trump social and internet were never mentioned so so i was going to ask him. one of the criticisms is that folks will say, well malcolm, isn't really accounting for social or internet and no but that was by design. oh, yeah, well, that's what we did. we really need another book on what's wrong with social. i mean, i feel like this is there's a start with section 230 of the federal decency act. there are some critics who think that a what a book is, is a term paper where, you know, if you write about the 19th century and fail to mention napoleon, you get docked. but a book is not a term paper, right. you're allowed to write about the 19th century without mentioning napoleon. wonderful. hi, how are you? thanks for coming. yeah. mindy pels huge. and i also write books and i'm curious about your process. how do you find these stories.

do you have a team of people that are gathering them? yeah, just so curious on that. yeah. i do not have a team, i don't have anyone i do, i think once you outsource the research you control of the material and so it's very very, very important to me that i'm the one who's kind of and i don't have a kind of process and it's, it continues to astonish how many fantastic stories are out there as long as you are, have the patience to it's just about patience and believing that there is ultimately something interesting. right? there's always a kind of there are a couple ears of that you have to get through. and once you get a couple of surface layers. it is it is invariably the case that, like i'll give you an example, i got i've recently i we've just been talking about cases these legal cases that i

write about we're about the thing you have to understand about legal cases is that almost no journalists ever them so they will report on the verdict. sometimes and that will just be maybe they'll just hear the summary arguments or or even just they'll just write that the jury returned the following verdict. but before that, they in some cases, is weeks, weeks of a trial and thousands and thousands of transcripts and in which are much complete story is told with fun tons of digressions and an astonishing of journalists never read the transcript so just by being willing to do things like read transcripts you're just way ahead or read footnotes the amount of stories i get out of reading. footnotes is so a lot of it's just your willingness to commit to looking for interesting things. first, rule of financial reporting is.

always read the footnotes. it's the same for legal reporting. i'm always joining one of my favorite stories i wrote for the new yorker about the journalist who broke the end remember the enron? oh story, smartest guys in the room. so the question is, how did this journalist who wrote about it for the wall street journal? find out that enron was engaged in all this nefarious? the answer is he read the 10-k and annual reports of enron called up enron and said, can you explain to me what you're doing? they said, sure. they came on down to houston they met with him for hours, explained he what they were doing, and he wrote it up like there's no he was just the first journalist who ever read the financial disclosures of enron. and i believe if i may have been that story, but enron it came out that enron would paper house when people would come visit. so they would hire actors to sit in computers as if they were trading electricity in california, when in fact, they weren't and --.

but there was no, you know, the idea that the that that story like in the old paradigm, the way that you broke a story a scandal was to find out something that the subject did not want you to know. and in the new paradigm you break a scandal by simply by reading what the subject does want you to know, which i just find it just speaks to the kind of complete laziness of the current generation of people who look for stories. yeah, present company excluded, of course. yes. yes. can just add one other thing then. how many do you spend years researching before you write? sometimes. yeah. yeah, i would imagine. i feel like you should probably have a google news alert for miami official charge or something like that you know just how useful. yeah, some yeah, i'm sure there are. yes, there should be an algorithm. just kind of trolls. yeah. hi how are you? thanks for being here. i'm sarah johnson. my question is, have you looked into how social media algorithms

break through or create new or unique monocultures? dwight what was have you looked into how social media algorithms either break through into our monocultures or creates new ones as users? well, you know, i vowed not to mention social media. my so you make me break my vow. i haven't looked at that. i mean, i know that some people say that what social does you know it reinforces whatever particular silo you belong to. and i did notice prior to the election that twitter the story that was being told to me about the election on my following stream and the story that was told in the for stream were totally different. i mean, it was as if they were describing that maybe a little concerned who i was following, but i haven't looked at that systematically yet. but i think it's useful to assume it does support that idea. thank you for being here appreciate come on. hi, how are you?

hello. her actually, her question a little bit similar to mine. i really loved how in your book, you you made me think about, like the barrier of entry. we used to have to our homes and how, you know, we got our news source for just so many channels right. everything has changed with social media, internet. i loved how you mentioned how well and grace kind of changed people's thoughts on same sex marriage. so around what she's asking. i'm wondering what does the future look for my daughter? where's she going to get her news? have you had any thoughts heard from any experts what they think that looks for our generation? well, i mean, again. the thing you have to understand about the period that we're in, that it's early. so it takes if you look about at the history of newspapers. what you discover is that for the longest time, newspapers look very much like social media does today. you have in the 19th century and

newspapers are like, there's a zillion of them. they're wild leigh ideological. they're you know, they're full of disinformation and hate speech. you know, that's norm. and then what happens over time is that the the newspapers professionalize and consolidates. and you had this period in mid-twentieth century when, you had this kind of trusted voices, like the new york times, walter cronkite kind of thing. but that's a relatively short end. and it's a it's a it's a period that was predated by something that looked very, very different. right. so now we've we've kind of started over again and we're just back to the 19th century. so the real question is not what does it look like now, but what will it look like when it matures. right. that social media is highly immature the moment we don't know what these form with

platforms look like. i can't you whether twitter will be around in five years. no idea i can't tell you whether i was talking to some guy in silicon valley recently who said like facebook is in a death spiral. facebook might go away. it's not like it literally there's a kind of way in which these things get into spirals and they just kind of vanish. so making any kind of broad statement or prediction on what we observe now is impossible. we you have to just kind of wait to see how it shakes out. point out. thank you. thank you for being here. thank you. well, that was i think everything that we thought it would be and more so i want think again, tom hudson and malcolm gladwell. that was fantastic. thank you very much. thank you, everybody. if i just may, just want to i just want to share one thing. so, malcolm, you talk about you talk about the overstory, you talk about the overstory of miami with the fraud and whatnot and the overstory he creates a shadow.

this book fair, this is the underbrush. this where ideas are nurtured. this is where conversations grow. so congratulations for being here. thank you, malcolm. congratulations on another terrific read. 25 years and a great first visit. best of luck to you. oh, hey, your honor. i walk.

book tv's live coverage of the miami book fair continues after this break. and walk this pain. i was like a crab. it was very strange. and i almost to the floor went, really far away from me. and i almost fell over and i sat back down. i said to my wife something i never thought would ever have occasion to say, i think i'm going to need help. i've never felt anything like this. and so wife sort of dragged me down the trail or back to the driveway and put me in the passenger seat of the car and ran in and told bear that teenage girls like sebastian help try to get a cell phone signal. and one of them got one. but i remember her sort of walking in figure eight on the dirt driveway, like trying hook a signal. and she finally got one bar and called the ambulance. and meanwhile in the car and i'm i'm going blind.

all of the all the symptoms, the dizziness going are symptoms of blood loss. so what i didn't know that i'd had a aneurysm in. my pancreatic artery, which is like this little that you don't really ever need to think about here they are. and. i'd had them my whole life. aneurysms develop over years decades and it was because of a ligament in the wrong place. it was like literally a freak structural abnormality. and this aneurysm developed this sort of ballooning in the blood vessel at one particular spot. and when a blood vessel balloons that the artery walls get thin weaker and eventually they can rupture. and if they rupture. there's a very, very good chance that you're going to die two more. excellent. i've already introduced you guys, so hope you'll hear from me later.

and what was happening is blood was pouring into my abdomen internally. i was losing a pint of blood every ten or 15 minutes, probably, and like i said, we had one hour transport to the hospital. i was literally a human hourglass. there's 1010 pints of blood in the human body. you can lose maybe two thirds of it, and then you cross over to a place where you most people can't come back from. and even if they a pump, you're full of blood. once you've gone past two thirds, it's very, very hard. undo that and so the ambulance came and we drove to the hospital and i was feeling a better because you go into something called compensatory shock and that's your miraculous body realizing that something's off, something's wrong, you're dying and it shuts down, circulate ocean to all the areas of the body where you don't need right now, the legs, the arms, skin and. so you sort of like reboot.

i sort of rebooted a little bit and suddenly i was sort of clear minded again. my wife said, i've been going in and out of consciousness i was babbling and not making any sense. every time i lost consciousness, she thought that was it. and then would come back and. i came and went the whole time i was with her. so finally into the ambulance, screaming down the road i get to the hospital, i'm still feeling pretty, pretty okay. thinking maybe i didn't even know i need to go to the hospital. what waste of time. and we get there and i go off a cliff and i'd gone out of compensatory and into end stage hemorrhagic shock. i was shaking, i was convulsing. i was hypothermic. they rushed me into the trauma bay. the doctors knew immediately what was going on. my blood pressure was 60 over 40, but i had apparently about 10 minutes left to live, ten or 15. they rushed me into the trauma bay and and they started there's

one doctor started to insert a large gauge needle into my neck, through my neck, into my jugular, to me, no, no. i had no idea. i had no idea i was dying. and he asked permission to do this. and i, i reacted like most of you guys would react like, is that really necessary? i it actually didn't hurt at all. so hopefully none of you will ever have to this. but if you do, it actually wasn't. but you know, i could feel some pressure. i think they of numbed the skin on my neck or something. i don't know what they did but i could feel some sort of pressure sort of working on me and while i'm lying there i feel i sense this black abyss open up underneath me and just to my left adds, of course, there were doctors all around me, but in my we experienced that the doctors the nurses, the technicians, everything that was about life was on my right and on my left

was this place. i didn't want to go. i didn't know i was dying. but i knew i was sort of outbound and i was outbound. i was getting pulled into this abyss this infinitely black pit. right. and i was very scared of it. and i. at that moment, my dead appeared above me. my father, the physicist miguel, is his name. he grew up in europe. very, very sweet, brilliant, vaguely spectrum disorder, kind of man, like probably half the businesses in the universe. and he died eight years earlier and there he was above me in this sort of it wasn't like a cardboard cut of him. right? it was his essence. it was he was his energy was there unmistakable above me. i was shocked. i mean, i was like, dad, basically, like, what are you

doing? and. he communicated me again no words. it's very hard. there aren't english words for what i was experiencing. but he communicated to me, it's okay. you don't have to fight it. you can with me. i'll take care of you. and i was horrified. i was horrified. and my mind, i'm like, you're dead. i'm not going anywhere with you. like i was actually offended at the suggestion that i would want to, like, go with. you like you're dead. i'm alive. what are you doing here? we'll talk later. like. like a lot. well, i want to have anything to do with you right now. our president often says that he is the champion of black americans, but his policies have not been the champion for black

americans. in fact, they're quite unpopular. what a lot of people don't realize, and this what i the reason that i wrote the book, black americans are assumed that since the large percentage or democrat that they're also woke progressives black americans are not woke progressives not as a group. there are some but like their woke progressives and any group, if you compared the woke progressives on capital punishment, you'd be shocked to find that black dramatically diverge. when you talk about crime, especially during the george floyd riots, polling numbers were coming out often about whether we need less law enforcement or more law enforcement. black americans in many polls, it was waters whether it was gallup, were saying they wanted police, not less. so why was the defund the police

movement so visible, so in many ways of america still blamed for the plight of black america. now what booker t washington's what frederick douglass said was leave black people alone, because the things that you're trying to do on their behalf are harmful. many news stories have stopped covering the serious level of crime when woke, deejays won't prosecute. here's what they will cover when a tourist comes to town and gets harmed or injured when they break into someone's house in newport beach. those kinds of stories are still the news. but what's not making the news are the over whelming number of

black americans who are victimized almost systematically. and when officers in chicago, in detroit, even though the detroit claims they're having a lot of progress, you're seeing police officers, new york city, we need those officers, especially in black communities. one of the charts that you have in your book is about prison rates. explain that. so in. beginning of the 20th century, black men were least likely to be in federal prisons. if you say that the trend that we see now, the phenomenon that we see now is an outworking of slavery. what explains this drop? the truth of the matter is this is all the police did was people and convict them who were last

name of macdonald for the crime that mcdonald's have committed. the prison would be overflowing with these mcdonald's. so what we then argue that somehow our prison system is anti mcdonald's. when young black youth and that's what i talk about in the chapter. young black youth are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victimizers. when a grandmother reports to the police that she was assaulted, that she was raped is what progressive would have us believe, that she identifies, as a black person that did that, even though it was a white person. that doesn't make any sense. when you see some of the brutal crimes that these people, they're telling us who did it and all too often, the most likely victimizer is someone between the age 14 and 28 who

happens to be black. you're getting between 35 and 45% of all of the felonies being committed by this smaller cohort of people. is it no wonder that they're disproportionately arrested and behind? what should we be doing to prevent from assaulting grandma from doing a home invasion? that's the conversation that we ought to be having, not a conversation that says, well, he didn't have any choice. he had to do. too many americans, too many young americans are dying now because of fentanyl, particular son and grandson. and that son and grandson. i'm so sorry ma'am, the elections matter. yes, they do. elections.

communist china. i've been railing about that since 2006. they send the chemical in to mexico. cartels mix them up. they send them over with mules and kill americans. and they want to kill americans. they want to take out our young youth. they want to take out a working class. they want to help out and take us over. nobody takes them seriously. donald trump did. we did have. the iron maga triangle, top of the top of the heap, strong. secure borders. the third element of that and the endless wars. yeah. yeah. and the showman here. how was not an endless war? that was five years. we beat the nazis and the japanese forces.

we in, we got out. we had a mission, and we allowed people to shoot people. yeah. afghanistan, iraq. decade between the two of them. trillions of dollars of treasure. i would had occasion to go up to walter reed, and it was said i would see men and women in the rehab places at gyms missing an arm or a leg two legs, two arms, all went. right. a and now more live coverage of the miami book fair.

miami. good afternoon. good afternoon. my name is nyala harrison. i am an attorney at the law firm greenberg traurig and a long

standing volunteer here. welcome to the 41st miami book fair. if you a first time attendee, then i'd like to welcome you to the fair. if you are returning, then it's good to see you back. and if you are a friend of the fair, then i want to extend a very special hello and welcome to you. are there any in the room. all right fantastic to see you it's good to have friends and love to have some more. so please consider joining the friends today. we are thankful to all of our sponsors, including the green family foundation, amazon the marriott, marquee and brickell and all the other sponsors. at this time. i'd like to ask you to silence your cell phones for the pleasure of everyone here in this audience this afternoon, at the end of the session, the author will be signing books

just the hall, and there will be period for a brief question answer. with that i'd like to go ahead and susan rose, who's then going to introduce the folks who have come here to see susan rose is an award winning theater and film producer. she is the tony award producer of the band's visit. her other broadway productions include the tony nominated shows and the amazing technical dreamcoat hurlyburly, bloodshot, the who's tommy and illinois. she co-produced macbeth, starring daniel craig and the drama desk award winning musical the last five years. with that, i welcome susan. hi, everyone. i'm a newbie to miami. this is my first book fair, and it's amazing. i think it's amazing everybody.

does a fantastic job. i'm so happy to be able to introduce the moderator today, ben manzarek. he the new york times best selling author of the accidental billionaires the founding of facebook, a tale of sex, money, genius betrayal, which was adapted aaron sorkin into the david fincher the social network, bringing down the house, the inside of six m.i.t. students, who took vegas for millions which was also adapted into. the number one box office hit film one, the antisocial network, the gamestop squeeze and the ragtime group of amateurs, traders that brought wall street to its knees, and many other best sellers. his books have sold more than 6 million copies worldwide. i'm very pleased to also able to introduce kara swisher. she is the host of the podcast on with kara swisher and the of the pivot podcast with scott

galloway. both distributed by new york magazine, a co-founder and former editor at large of recode. she was the host of recode decode and co-executive producer of the code conference. she is the former contributing writer for the new york times and host of its sway podcast and has also worked for the wall street and the washington post burn book, a tech story. simon and schuster is her third book. and i just want to say something on a personal note i know kara rarely stays, but when you do it's because she were hanging with your favorite dog potato who comes you down when you were watching shogun. and without further ado, ben and kara, thank you you.

shogun. hi, everybody. you all so much for being here. i want to say what an honor and a privilege it is be sitting with kara. same amy. i think that kara is the best journalist around. she's the best by far. journalist. i would not have able to have written my books without. borrowing from your reportage. yes. and she is fearless and feared, i think, to some extent. and she's willing to say things that nobody true. so hopefully won't get in too much trouble today. so i'm you. yeah, we do get in trouble. let's that so i'm going to i'm going to bounce around a little bit because how i know kara is when i wrote the facebook story is when i discovered you you had already been in the tech world. and i'm an outsider and you found mark zuckerberg.

got to know mark before anyone else. that's correct. yeah. so i want to start with mark. yeah, because he has changed a lot. yes, he has many more muscles and even more muscles. so when you started to care, mark, it's fine. i'm good. it i'm going. he looks good. same with jeff bezos, who the way is having the best midlife crisis ever for all this. so zuckerberg was a kid when you first met him. he was he was, i don't know, 19, 20, something like that. very young. when you first where was facebook when you started with mark? they were in a small you know, they actually had an office when i met. they were actually in the garage, larry and sergey. so they were all of them. jeff bezos i met him when he didn't have a headquarters and i helped him find it in seattle. was weird, but that's when he was wearing pleated khakis and and oxford shirts and was quite a bit thinner. but i, i met him at a small

headquarters that facebook had gotten in palo alto, and it was right above a place called pizza my heart, which was a pizza. and so i met him there because the guy who was it was in troubled company from at the beginning. very much so. and he could never find the right people to him, get to the next step. it was kind of a weird, crazy place and it was it still had the effects of sean parker, that gang and he had hired, this guy named own ben otto, who worked for jeff at amazon. and owen called me up and they also had a pr person named brad barker, and they're like, come and meet mark this, you'll you'll like him. and i said, oh, all i and i had met every social network. there was myspace, there was friendster. there was so many of these at the time was like search engines but previously and i go i don't know i've heard he's an --. and and, and they're like, well, they didn't say no. and i was like, wow, all right, fine. and i went to meet him and mark

of today is little different than mark before, but he was very shy. he had a hard time interacting and having an actual conversation and and he but he messed by being incredibly arrogant, like he had a card that said which so immature. he thought it was cool. i thought was an interesting juxtaposition. but he had a card that said, i'm the ceo, which i'm like, what is wrong with you? and i have four kids and i was like, stop it. like, i would laugh at my children if they did that and and he came in and the first thing he sexy didn't know how to enter a converse station like hello like hello would be the then he would say he goes i heard you think i'm an -- and it was sort of like, all right, i do it because most people sucked up to me because i was at the wall street journal and he this was not a suck up. and because they wanted a profile or whatever and and i said, listen, a lot of people think you're an --. i've never met you, so i don't. you're an -- yet, but let's find

out. and that's where we started. oh, my. i mean, so did use not an assault the way did you believe when mark started, when you first met him, that he was going to build something that is is impactful? is facebook or as important as facebook? you know one of the things he like to do, we like to mimic other tech what he read about other tech leaders. steve jobs used to like walk around palo alto right. right. and so mark's like, let's walk around palo alto. and i'm like, i've known steve jobs for 15 years stop. like, please stop. i know what you're doing here. and so what we did, i walk with him. and one of the things that he did and it was actually he was better walking. he started talking, you the myspace guys, and they were like the miami club. they're like, thump, thump, thump thump, thump. you know, they were all trendy, very good looking party, that kind of thing. and we're the top thing. and he started calling facebook immediately, which was really struck me as a utility. that's the word he used. it was an unusual word from a young person and he was dead.

right. it was a utility. right. as opposed to it's cool place to hang because you know what happens to cool to hang, they become an uncool place to. hang. and so he immediately i well that's really smart like he he really did understand. and what i found very unusual is and you'll find this among a lot of tech people is he is the least person running social network. right. if you know so that was interesting. so it was his way of of creating his ideas community he had these ideas around you know all kinds of the first amendment he didn't never read it from what i can understand he he hasn't it's very short. it's i used to say to him, it's very short. it's first you can read it and then because he used to always say he's the public, he was saying is the public square. remember that i'm the public square. i'm like, okay, why do you own everything why do you control everything? it's a private company and you're a billionaire. how is that a public square? he's like people who say something the public square tend

to go bad, right? and then i said, well, let me make some of the decisions. of course, that's not happening. but so anyway, so he was he was a thoughtful person, but he had a very hard time community, as you know, as you depicted. i was joking with ben backstage when mark when the social network came out, i did this famous interview with him which he sweat. this was profusely. it was the best and most famous interview. zuckerberg but also in my mind, it was maybe the best tech interview. i'd ever seen. oh, really? because you got to mark i don't well, you can us how you got to mark so we knew mark better after that interview we did we ever did or ever will. you know, oddly enough i didn't like that i didn't like that interview at because he was i don't like you don't want someone fainting during an interview. it gives you a bad reputation. but but he what happened was he has a panic attacks. i was aware of them. walt, who did? walt mossberg, who did the interview with me was mark was very nervous. and one of the reasons was this coming out about him. he was very upset about it.

and we had had dinner the night before and he kept saying, you know, this is how people are going to think of me, this person, blah, blah, blah. and kept saying, it's not like you at all. this guy a lot. and, you know, and he's kind of better looking than are but anyway he but was very upset that this is what people would think of him and i was like it's a movie, mark. it's not real. it's not. well, they didn't i didn't say this and was like, would you please stop? like, you're having movie made? and in any case, i think this is before they went public, i was like, you're going to be a billionaire. like, don't worry. it like, don't be notorious the way you are. but he was very upset by that movie. he really was. and so that's what led to it, was all of what sheryl was upset. yeah, for a while. then she was okay with it, whatever. and you know sheryl well too, right? or jerry but you were telling me now your relationship with them is not same. you know, i talked to facebook i was invited to their christmas party next week, so i guess it's okay. but no, they don't talk to me

now. and that gets me to the next week. i mean, they're like, you're mean to us. i'm like, what are you talking about? like, right. i said, point to a place where i'm being mean, like and factual. and by the way, i was right about the impact you were going to have and the deleterious effects social media, they just didn't like the message and they didn't like to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. none of these people do. it's never going on. so i agree. and i think that that gets to sort of the next point, which is that previous to you. yeah, tech journalism didn't really exist to the extent that does. no i think what mossberg really actually i would give my partner mark was mark mean said mark. walt mossberg i'm thinking of mark wrote this column that his first line, the column which preceded me by ten years, said is too hard to use and it's not your fault. and i love that idea. walt is someone that recruited me into the wall journal, by the way, and became my partner and we did these famous tech things. and i think the idea was there a

lot when i got there, walt said, go in with your cleats, parachute him with your cleats on. but be fair. that was what he told me when. i went because there was no one out in silicon valley except for slavish fanboys like mr. gates. your head is so big. how did you come up with microsoft? and i was like, this piece of software from a user point of view, like why did you come up with this piece of -- and so or are you creating a monopoly like that was the kind of questions i ask. i was i wasn't telling you what was how the watch worked. i told you what time it was right. that was how i looked at it. and so he you know, what really got me into that idea? and i think you had all these slavish fanboys, but just like it was crazy and it was all boys, let me tell you that just couldn't look up and see the historical impact this asilomar pact, the way you might see. they just were like as if it was electricity being invented, they interested in the science of it

versus the impact would have. and i was interested in the positive and negative impacts had hoped for. the positive things to have more of a resonance. and i very aware of the negative things. right. and so you went into this and in burn book, which is wonderful and everyone should read it. it's part you did not initially you wanted to be in the military i did and you shifted gears. i didn't shift gears. i was gay and you weren't allowed be in the military without don't ask, don't tell. my dad in the military, i always joke i'd be such a good admiral. be right about now i'd be being fired by trump. i too woke because i you know, whatever they i wanted be in the military. i have a great regard and. i thought i would be good at it. and i was going to be in the cia. i thought about being the c i went to foreign school at georgetown. so i thought the cia was one area and i even the cia at the time was, i would say, anti-gay they would. at one point i had one interview

where they were not the cia, but another one. and they're like, well, what if people out, you were gay? and i'm like, but i'm out there. like, what if they found out? i might, but i'm out. this is the kind of discussions you would have. yeah, well, what if we assigned to saudi arabia? i'm like, i don't speak arabic, but sure. like, why would you do that? it was like those were the kind of discussions you i just wanted to be an analyst or serve in, it seemed. and then when you went to california, i remember in your book at someone said to you, are you going to cover cvs or some like cb radio? because cbc radio's right, because this was the media people also were even worse because at the time print was ascendant and media reporters were ascendant because it was like time or time warner, all that stuff. and the minute i saw i was at washington post and i left and don graham, who's one of the loveliest owners all time, not the current one, was sorry, but give me a -- break, jeff come on. how much how much of a wimp do you have to be to do that at the

last minute? oh, my gosh. yeah. i'm sorry to be sorry. he could have waited. i get the argument he's making. but not ten days before the election when it's already a written thing like, stop it and stop pretending anything else and then blame reporters for it. it's it's his fault they lost a subscriber because of him. nobody else. and do you think that it was an act out of fear? was he being fearful or was he going for this space? oh, he's worried about iran. worried about iran. i wouldn't say mortal enemies. i mean, who cares? these are two like they had to actually fight. it would be ridiculous. i mean, i could take them both easily so that i believe i believe that and i would write about it. we'd make a movie and it would be great. wrote, in the immortal words of kamala harris, i have a glock. i don't actually. but, you know, i mean, we would we definitely want i think she has a mythos. i definitely want to get to elon musk and be sure i want to start software. let's start software, though. well, you asked about we were asking about what the.

oh, media. i always thought the media did not get what was coming and that was another thing. i was at the washington post and don graham asked me, why are you to the wall street journal? i said, the water's rising and you're on a lower flood plain than the wall street journal, because i thought business would have a little resonance. but the minute you saw the internet, the minute you saw these technologies, you understood that everything that could be digitized would be including the business plans of all these newspapers, particularly i covered retail for seven years, and you saw wal-mart come in and decimate all the local retailers that paid for the washington post. so you saw that coming out. you saw i subscribers. and then when i saw craigslist, i was like, oh, you're screwed. you you sell a product that's expensive static and they're mean to you. what a great product classifieds are, right. and they don't work on top of it. and so i was like, oh, no, this is going to change the economics and i don't think a lot of people paid attention to. so i was paying attention to cell phones and the internet and it so obvious where it was going

for these people amazing. so you were you were definitely on the early side very quickly, which is why i left newspapers to create all things, all the other thing. yeah. yeah. and so starting back sort of with these that were, were dominating that world. i want to start with steve jobs. yeah. because i think i want to get it from you. i mean, you called him. i think the words i have it here. reality distortion around him. it was good though. it wasn't like this bad stuff. now that he's like a ponzi steve, you would say. i want to say he's perfect. he's right by today's standards. he looks like a gentleman. like, come on. i mean, like he parked his car badly. like you know, he'd be parking handicapped spaces, not good, but boy, he nice compared to people today. he, you know, specifically and he was he was he was he was he had a lot of education. he read widely. he understood history. he understood his responsibility a little better not to say he didn't want to sell iphones right he really did not to say he couldn't be mandates. yes.

he lied to us on stage about creating iphone. and the next year i said you lied to us. he goes, yes, i did. you know, but like he said, yes, i did so that's fine. you know, not great, but but he was i thought he was he understood the marriage of art and technology. i thought they were very it's not a marketing from the privacy thing was really was irritated by social media he really was irritated about rapacious grabbing of information. and he had real problems with. and if an apple still to this day doesn't do that like as well, everybody does. but you know what i'm saying? yeah, they, they really did have a set of values about what they were selling, which is a really good product we're not going to steal. we're going to tell you what we're doing all the time as opposed to. and that's why, you know, facebook and apple have so many beefs back and forth because. and they they look at apple as like, you know, a tisk tisk and like. mm. yeah. how dare you want a thing which is they're taking your information and then they're using it, monetizing it and then

it back to you. right. you know and then telling you how dare you say this is the wrong thing or how dare you pass law that might protect you the thing. so and so getting the bill gates how about and was steve was great he was positive is bill gates on the same he's changed okay he used to be very irritating now he's kind of like the elder statesman. he's made some bad judgment calls around the epstein stuff obviously that it's hard to leave that out, but i'm not sure what i've yet to see. really good reporting that i haven't done any, so i'm not going to comment on it, but he he was incredibly arrogant, incredibly domineering, obviously, i covered the microsoft trial, the washington post. he really you know, he he was he was very aggressive in terms of doing things and trying to take advantage over the years. he's changed, i think, since he left microsoft, the philanthropy has been very interesting. i just interviewed him recently and the stuff he's doing climate

change around investing in that is is really interesting. and i think he's had a just a a bigger view of impact. i would say he i put him in the steve jobs camp. he sort of they they reconciled as steve died which i think i think we did the interview with the two of them, which i think was the best tech interview ever done. i have to say yeah. it's like having edison and man up for it. i don't want interview him that anti-semite. so edison in way but that gets it elon you know yeah like he can i have all these tech people he can lead rocket on a surfboard. yeah the at&t transit. it's like henry ford went all again. well, he's. he's an interesting one. yeah. yeah. we getting like nice with the cars but you're a -- anti-semite. thank. okay all right. yeah let's well, let's start with bezos. okay. before we get to elon, because i have lot to say, and you have a lot to say on elon bezos. i'd like to say less and less over time.

i know. unfortunately, i think we're going to stay more. he's now in the oxygen now. so so amazon let's start with bezos. yeah. when you started with bezos, he was a geeky yeah, you know, well, he was a math guy and he had worked for wall street firm. now, one of the differences with him is he started as an adult. like a lot of these people were young. the google twins were younger, right? mark was young. mark was later the way not for late to later, but he was he was an adult was in his thirties i think i think we were we're the same age and and he was he was he already had a good career and was success awful financially successful. so it was a little different. i always thought the word i wrote down in my notebook, which i found was ferrell. i found him. ferrell. ferrell yeah, you could see him like right around the thing. and he really was much of a business person. so honestly, he was easier to deal with because i didn't get any lectures about community and saving the world and right the wearing of sweatshirts stuff like that he wasn't yeah that

archival silicon valley we're doing this for good he was books that's right you know and he was but now he's seems to be his best life in some ways. yeah. he's gotten really good shape. he is. and and now i think somehow he stepped away amazon to some degree and. he stepped away from amazon to some sort of. yeah. yeah, i think so. and he's still having a relaxed interactions him or. yeah there's no another one. i mean you know he's this is why it kind of like is like he called me incessantly when he needed me and then when he didn't, he didn't like such a user. but that's fine. i got the i got the switch. he wanted to be in the wall street journal. he wanted have profiles written of him. he he was that it was a touch and go company a long time right. so are you this is coming from that are you in competition with regular newspapers now is do you see yourself in that i don't even think of them as competition they're just not even in the same anymore. no, i make i'm profitable so that's of of and now i want to i

don't newspapers i work for all of them. yeah. worked for everybody. most of quit all of them. so does it make you sad to see newspapers or you think that. no, i think what like about it is that now it's an opportunity do interesting things right now. now, same thing with cable networks. they're done. i'm like are they like why do they have to be now it's like this spinoff i was talking the comcast people yesterday about the spin. i wanted to understand it a little better and it's an opportunity to do great stuff now, now that they're free they have to be good and they have to be innovative. and so i always think the decline of something is an opportunity, right? for me, for all of them and so they can now like they're like, oh, it's only old audiences. it's this and like does it have to be, you know, you can change it. same thing with newspapers. you just get the court, see, one of the things i have always been in business and so to me if costs are aligned with revenues, you're fine you know, even if it's break even if you don't you're not going to ever make that much money for media

necessarily all the value is sucked up by google and facebook and everything else. these days. not forever but you can do some really interesting like my podcast stuff. we have three or four people working for me. that's i pay attention to the costs and i understand one of the things that i understand is when we met and this was from the early of doing the code conferences, the all things d conferences, i knew exactly how much money we made, what our contribution was, which was almost total. by the way, the journal would have never thought doing this thing. and then you could pay me based on what i did. like, that's i got from silicon valley. my you know, if we made $5 million, i'm going to get at half of that, my friends. right. and if that was i mean, profits that what that's what's interesting because you know you're i know i don't mean to quote mika brzezinski these days, but know your value, right? i've always been aware of my value. and i some people in media are overpaid and some people are underpaid. actually, their value.

yeah, i think it's an opportunity for these come up. i sit there and think that they have to get out under right now to stay alive. a billionaire has to buy them. that's no, they don't have to be. what's happening? yes, you have to recap, analyze them. that's what you have to do. i think the billionaire thing is a problem because they sit around. now, what's happened is that the pros, they're in a status. what's bezos going to want? that's what you can feel it. they're right. what's going to do? the thing is he could give --. that's my feeling. he's on his yacht with lauren having a good time, and then he's like, oh, i own that paper. katharine graham convinced me to buy it. so same thing with marc, like i was marc benioff owns time, and he got on that. he he had some fit on twitter about. kamala didn't do an interview with him, right? how dare she? you know, she never did in 50 years. but i'm like this. and so i texted go you know what you whiny person said i had a bad word to him and i said she'll do and said, if you were relevant, she'd do an interview

with you. it you try to be relevant. and he was like, what's how did i magazine? i'm like, nobody reads it. so guess what? she'd be better my podcast because i'm bigger than time magazine. so it was like, you know, they just are so sensitive. these they think they should get everything for owning it. and so i think there's other ownership ways, there's other cost ways that don't like. i think people in media should own a piece of the stuff like the washington post reporters should get a piece of it, a piece of it, and then be motivated to do something about. right. i mean, okay, that would be. but then they never gotten a pot like i'm just using poll as an example. they they podcasts. they never did. they and one of the things that's gotten i used to wonder is when is cnbc going to do a business in media podcast? never, never. why not? they could have. yeah, just not their model. and they don't. why not? so why not figure that out? and and engineer it and figure out what you could put on to figure out? yes. and so i want to get switching gears again. i want to talk about peter thiel, because this is someone

that now people know about. but previously i think most people were unaware or he's just a shadowy figure in the background. yeah, well, he's written like three books, so he's not the most significant person. i would agree in the world right now. and i would agree and we don't know him you this circus clown in front of everything but peter's the one i always watch. you know because i only about peter is very smart. where did you start with peter? i mean, did you actually, i paid attention him right away because you could tell. first of all, look, you don't have to agree with someone to think, wow, a smart person. like, i hate to tell you, but steve bannon is very smart, right? or you know. you know, but i guess so. goebbels. but but, you know, that's the comparative for me. but you have to pay attention to what saying and so i read all of steve bannon. i read all of peter's books and some of them were terrible. like when he when he and david sacks compared rape to belated regret he said rape, was belated regret. and i wrote a story about that why they don't like kara swisher, but they wrote it.

i didn't write it. they wrote it. so they should take responsibility for their stupidity. stupidity and cruelty. but one of the things about him that's interesting is he's got a viewpoint about world, which is let's let's break it completely down. let's destroy. right. and create something a new in which an uber ceo runs everything right. he has a point of view and it's not authoritarianism, a new way of thinking. it's like a it's like founder mode, whatever, that kind of thing. and so think he is very behind the scenes. he's the one that paid j.d. and which my favorite rachel maddow calls him, peter thiel's failed intern. and i would agree he wasn't very good at tech. he was a senator and now he's probably to be president. i mean actuarial tables. he's trump is old too. like he could be president at any time and so i do not want anything to happen. violence is repulsive but i have to say he's in line and so peter

paid $30 million to get him elected to senate and got him to the like. that's a very good and bad investment, a small investment to get him and is i'm sorry, his his he is i call him a billionaire's but that's a different way to put it. but i think he's bought himself in a very smart into that so he has influence and i think he has influence j.d. who used to be very anti-trump. right. and i don't particularly think peter likes trump either. you know, you can sort of i think he's a vehicle for him. and one of the things it'll be interesting how much he engages because he's not doing the performative stuff that elo' isa lago and like waving to people on the patio. that's so strange. that's such a strange it goes into elon. i mean, peter is a background guy. usually, and well, you know, he is i mean, i think he's open about his beliefs, which is. yeah, that's correct. and which i appreciate he's not hiding anything about who he is. i think we don't realize the

degree of 100% or remove himself were some personal things that were going on but he remove himself for a little while. but if you go back i didn't interview i used to carry around a little camera a little flip phone. it was a flip. it was called flip camera. and i used do videos of all these guys and have a 15 minute argument after with peter on it. very early on i went to this. he was over in the presidio and we were debating everything, like all this stuff. facebook's valuation is that he's gay. we were talking, he was like, gay people shouldn't have special rights. i was like, how about equal rights? he goes, i go, why can someone adopt? we had this amazing discussion about that now he has kids. he may have a different point of view and and it was really it was was really smart and he very pugnacious. he's some of the stuff is weird some of it's interesting but he definitely is the brains of the opera he was he was the brains of the operation back at paypal right he was the brains facebook. know he facebook.

yes he made a $500,000 investment for 7 to 10% of that company and had a good at it. not a good influence, but he had an influence on mark clearly compared to say, you know, the bizarre stylings of marc andreessen or whoever, like peter is very clear there. so i pay attention to him more than what he's funding got all tight with the mercers and that kind of stuff. amazing. yeah. so he's sort of george soros, the george soros bad side. interesting. so let's talk let's continue on. i want to get to elon. so when i left out the google guys, we could get to the google guys. but let's start with elan, because i think we're all talking about elan to some degree. when i went into writing about elan, saw him. i liked elan thought elan is like a da vinci. he's in the same sentence as great, not inventors, but someone who's taking the world forward into, i think, more like a i think he's more like a ford and he's a business innovator because. he didn't invent many of these. that's the one thing. but he got them to like jobs.

jobs wasn't a coder, but he understood and he knits things together in his force of his personality. he's more like that, i would say, right and and then there's big change with ellen. yes. and i think it has to do with twitter when took over twitter deeply before it was before that, because i've done probably more interviews like long term interviews of them than anybody. and he he was so challenging and interesting. and one of the things is at some point, everyone was making a lot of money. everyone shifted into doing stupid, stupid things like, you know, and i joke about this. but they're like, cara, we're going to digitize dry cleaning. i'm like, how? like basically just an app. and they pick it up, right? that's it. thank you. so uncreative, so uninteresting. but it was like that and so and all of them were like, swanning around. we're going to make investments here as if they had they had one lucky job at google and they thought were a genius and they were tiresome and he was not. he investing in cars. he was and even even hydrate hyperloop, even neuralink.

interesting. there's plenty of other companies besides neuro. like, not that you'd know autonomy, although is so far ahead of tesla doesn't. have anything. and he was good. i liked his p.t. barnum thing he had going on a lot of. it is p.t. barnum like. yeah. we're going to start robotaxis. i'm like, i've been riding in for san francisco for three years now. like, might i introduce you to it's been going for many years, but he was really interesting and then the and the space stuff, was it challenging analog things that were also digital. and he also had the force of personnel ality. he also was very funny. you know, people often say that about trump in the early days. now it's sort of curdle into whatever is happening right now but he had a sense of humor and it was very juvenile. and i would say he 5% of what he is 100% now he had 5% of meanness and, weird, angry ness, you could feel it like, but it was very small. it never showed itself very much. now you heard all these stories

of what he did to his his poor daughter and stuff like that. but he was really interesting compared them like he was different. and we talk we talk a week, we text a lot and stuff like because he was always i was like, huh, that was interesting. this was interesting. and he would admit failure, which wasn't was unusual. the only person does doesn't now is mark cuban. he does absolutely it was great yeah who's who is sort of arrogant now is terrific which is interesting he's gone the other direction it's called maturity you know but you don't see that in silicon valley very often the opposite toddlerhood and that's an insult to toddlers. i have one. and and so what interesting about him is he was so challenging and interesting. and then things started shift like very and he was also somewhat i can't believe i'm saying this, but was sort of poignant like it was random at some oscar party and he's like i've anyone to date? do you know anyone, i'm like,

i'm not fixing you up with anybody. like, there's nobody i want near you because i think there's a lot going on there that i don't want a woman involved with that i know. and so, so he was he was funny. he was interesting. it was always orthogonal. i like orthogonal thinkers and he was that he was you're like, oh, i hadn't thought of that kind of thing. and jobs was very much like that, too. he's not like jobs. me just say, i know steve jobs. he wasn't my friend, but he's no steve jobs. that's what i would say about him. but he was he was interesting and. then we did an interview during covid first. he got really mad about something walt tweeted and decided not to talk to me for a year because of walt tweet. and it was weird. walt said, i love my tesla, but i don't understand how it's worth four car companies, something elon had actually said himself. but because walt said it, he got mad and then he's like, i'm never speaking again because of walt. and i was like, first of all, you idiot, he loves this -- tesla is your problem.

he wasn't talking about you. talking about wall street didn't matter it? was this weird, like, anger thing. and i ran into him. he texted me a year later, he's like, why are we talking? i'm like, you told me never to talk to you again. like it was weird. it was weird and capricious and strange. but then during covid, we did an interview that was on zoom and he you could see him curling with covid. it he was all mad at the state of california for being responsive about it. it was very early on. and he said, you know, i've read all the studies. there's only going to be about 15 people dying from covid. this is what he said to me. i was like, oh, doctor, well, be good to know, like, what the --? and older people get this reference and or doctor george clooney fine, whatever. and i like i don't know the history of of pandemics million people tend to die that's usually the bottom rung of the number that die. it seems like we and also i said we don't what we don't know. so being cautious is a good idea necessarily? no, it's not i know what's going

to happen. it was really i read like you could see he probably stayed up all night and read all the studies and he started talking about hydrochloric and all this stuff. and i was like, well, you know, you do not say this to elon musk. right. but got like crazy. and he goes i'm going to just what do you want me to walk out right now like as if it was like some you know over bread horse or something and he's or dog or poodle and it was and he was like i could right now i go, okay, no and he's like, but i could. and i said, well, okay. and then he's like, do you want me to go? and i don't know. but you think this was so ridiculous? was so like, i'm like, ah, like i'm a lesbian. this is dramatic for me. like this ridiculous and. and and then he didn't go right. he doesn't go. and we texted back and forth. trump he was on some of his committees, stuff like that. and he started to get this another thing we did an interview in which he would she teared up said he didn't cry, but he did. he said that if when tesla was in real trouble for a while, there and he slept on the floor

of the factory and i was like, you know, there was a hotel next door. and he's like, i had to sleep the floor of the factory to show people. i'm like, no, you did you or is it just performative, right? i was like, there's a hotel you could have gone over, you're going to sleep, come back. like, it was so stupid. and he did stuff like that and at one point he said to me, if doesn't survive, humanity is doomed. a version of that. and i was like, wow, okay, yeah. like we're going in a different direction. sure. if i had heard that from a homeless guy on street of across the street, right? like that kind of thing. and but he was elon, so you have to listen to him. and so which is where we are now. and, and then he got more and more he got mad at that and then he was fine. he came back. we did a very funny interview which he compared jeff bezos rockets to small --, which was funny. they are they do look like small --. it's weird that design is weird. and i mean rockets, but that one in particular. and so he was fine. and then i tweeted something. he stays up late at night.

and then obviously the journals written about his drug. right. the megalomania as he gets richer and richer, kind of increased this with all these enablers and and the and all the good people that he interact with fell away, whether can think what you want about sam altman. but they were very close same thing with reid hoffman all of them the ones that were reasonable all mark right all the way and then all the minions and enablers come in. aren't you the smartest person in the world? blah, blah, and, and then i started to see some i heard from some of the personal stuff that seemed disturbing i found disturbing. and and he got mad at me and, called me an --. that was it. and. and this is amazing. i could talk to you, but i think we're going to open it up for questions now and see what you guys want to ask for the time we've got left. so with the time we have left, i'm able to entertain one question. oh, wow. okay, so. oh, no, we only got one question and that's a lot of pressure you can listen to pivot every twice

a week. so you're in, you're here in south florida. you've probably seen a lot billboards for crypto. and you guys. oh, yeah. you haven't mentioned anything about crypto. what are your thoughts on that? you were at as you said, you're very good at looking out did you buy bitcoin when was one? i actually did when i did one of the original stories about bitcoin because a guy named wences casares who started xapo, i came i was very intrigued by the idea he was from, i think, argentina. and so it made sense for a country like argentina where they had massive inflation to be in cryptocurrency and i bought ten bitcoin and at the time i put it on a hard it, there weren't wallets then or anything else and i put it on on a little thumb drive, i think, and i've lost it oh no i it for $50 at the time i think in bitcoin. yes i do somewhere i'll find it someday but i sure couldn't it, i'm guessing because i don't remember code. i think i'm interested in it, i'm not against it.

i think it needs regulation which is not going to have now. gary gensler gary over did i thought that i mean it's like the early internet it's of of charlatans and ridiculous people who make you know, it's a speculative instrument right now and it doesn't seem to have any efficacy. so ultimately, it's just a speculative. and where is it going to have efficacy? i think there was a big in it. and then sam bankman-fried kind of pulled back on that. so you the fraud and game playing, you know, it's at 98,000 now because they think trump's going to start a bitcoin reserve but that's not doesn't give it underlying value to me the real focus should be on i almost constantly what's happening now is a cambrian very much the same way was even more so what's happening now is really massive. you see the money flowing to it maybe too, you know, in video is now the most valuable company the world. they're like cisco in a way, and in the early days of the internet.

and so you're going to see if i was focusing i mean, i think crypto is one part of it, and that's to go up and down. but it's to me, it's a casino. and again, i don't see the use case it yet, except as a speculative instrument of value. well, you got to hang out with the winklevoss. martin no, i do not. i never reviews. oh, man. those two that they were perfectly depicted in that movie years. i'll tell you those two. and they get hurt. they get hurt. they're like, you're mean to us. i'm like, deservedly. boys would love your thoughts on blue sky and chad. djibouti. well, fascinating for you. i just an entire episode of on kara swisher about this you can to it but very briefly i'd use them and very promiscuous with social media i'm on twitter largely because i don't like being called the c-word by elon musk all day long. i just don't care. i think it's a nazi -- bar and should stop using it. it's not. and it's useful for my businesses and it's just mean makes me feel bad. i have 1.6 million followers and i'm off of it. so that's how much it annoys me.

it doesn't help me, by the way. it doesn't help me. so it doesn't matter. i wouldn't be there. it did help me, but i liked. blue sky, my wife loves blue sky. she went to brown university, so she would. but one of the things that she said, i like threads. i think it's a good product. i actually do think it's a good but i know all these fancy people so wife's like threads is like the cheesecake factory and blue sky is like the cool bar, right? and i'm like, i like the cheesecake factory. it's really good cheesecake. it's delicious. and they have chicken poppers. yeah. you know, so it's whatever you want. i think you should try it. like linkedin can be very good for a lot of people. i think you should try all. i love blue sky. i love the the and the ceo blue sky. they're fantastic people. i think there's i think there has to be a fractionalization of all these social networks. so go where you like make the social network you like if you like white supremacy i've i got a social network for