television companies, supports c-span two as a public service.

welcome to day two, a book tv's live coverage from the 2024 miami book fair. coming up later today, authors will discuss activism, the presidency, artificial intelligence and more. up first, then merrick and ben smith talk about the social media site x, formerly known as twitter, and the pitfalls of trying to go viral. good morning, ladies and gentlemen. my name is beverly moore garcia and i work for miami-dade college as the president of the west. and the homes and campuses. welcome to the 41st. miami book fair.

and i will not say that i've been here for all of them because there's 41, but i've been here for half of them. so let me start by being grateful. i am grateful for the weather. we're certainly doing better this year than the last two years. and of course, i am grateful for miami-dade college family, the volunteers and the support and the sponsors, including the green family foundation, nicholas children's hospital, amazon, j.w. marriott, marquez and brickell and all our other sponsors. now i'm addressing the front row. i'd like to thank our friends of the fair members. friends received multiple benefits. please consider a friends membership or making a gift of a membership for someone you love.

as we work to ensure the future of miami book fair, please consider supporting the book fair with a contribution to our next decade. fund. visit the friends of fair table or our website for more information. now it's housekeeping time. turn your cell phones to silent or off, please. about. 1130 1135. i'm going to ask those who have questions to start to line up at the microphone that's in the center of the room. we'll have about 10 minutes of questions and answers. so do not feel offended when i cut you off at 1145, because, of course, we will need to close the session and vacate the room for yet another session at 12:00. it is now my pleasure to bring up one of my colleagues, george

gonzalez, who will provide the formal introductions for our guests. thank you. good morning again, everyone. how you feeling? good. we're in for a real treat today for this conversation behind the digital deadlines. it cannot be more pertinent talking about the media environment as it has evolved over time and continues to evolve and just the role that it plays today. personally, i've lived through that shift from print and getting the paper in front of the house every day to online media starting to become a thing, and now really being the prevalent way that we learn about information, engage with others as well. and we can't have two better people to facilitate this conversation. two wonderful writers. it is my pleasure to introduce them. so i'm happy to introduce ben merrick. he is the new york times bestselling author of over 6 million copies that his books have sold worldwide. and you'll know quite a few of them. so the accidental billionaires, the founding of facebook, a tale

of sex, money, genius and betrayal, which was then adapted into a film. i'm sure you all have seen the social network as well as bringing down the house. the story of six mit students who took vegas for millions, which was adapted to the box office hit number one, hit the 21, which i know we've all seen as well. and he has really been doing this for a while. additional books are the antisocial network, the game shop, the gamestop, short squeeze and ragtag group of amateurs that brought down wall street to its knees, which has been again, a very relevant part for the past few years and as well as ben smith, he is the editor in chief of semaphore, a global news company for former media columnist for the new york times, founding editor in chief of buzzfeed news and before that, he was among the first reporters to adopt the tools of the internet to political journalism, which back then was pioneering now is really the mainstay of political journalism at the new york observer, the new york daily news and political. and ben calls brooklyn home with

his wonderful wife and three children. and please join me in giving it up for ben and ben. thank you. thank you. guys. there are these these microphones on. they are. i believe they are. yes. i can't i cannot say how grateful we are to each and every one of you who has showed up for this as the for the opening act, for maya and edie who come next. you know, it's a big room, so we really appreciate it. yeah. thank you guys so much for coming. i love this book festival. it's been two wonderful days i've been here. i think five years now. i've been coming to this book festival for different books and i think the way we were thinking of doing it is i would talk for a few minutes about how i got to the book that i'm supposed to be talking about today. we should say, which one of us is which? this is ben mizrahi. i'm ben merrick, and he is ben smith. and we are both out here at sort of different stages of writing

book careers, but we've both been in the similar sort of genre for a very long time. so i'll start so i've written 28 books at this point, which sounds like a lot, but people only really read two of them. but i have written 28 books. the books that i'm most known for were the one that was turned into the movie the social network, about zuckerberg and the founding of facebook, the books that was turned into the movie dumb money that some of you might have seen last year about the gamestop craziness. and then the book that was turned into the movie 21. and i also write for the show billions. before it went off the air, i wrote for a couple of years for them. and so i can tell you a bit of how i got to the book. i'm talking about today, which is breaking twitter, which is kind of the elon musk diving into twitter story, which has become much more relevant than i maybe thought it would when i wrote the book a year, two years ago or a year ago, i never set out to be a nonfiction writer and never wanted to be a journalist as a kid. i loved television.

i loved saved by the bell and three's company and really crappy tv. and my parents, fearing the worst, made a rule when we were little that we had to read two books a week before we were allowed to watch tv. so i became a speed reader to watch saved by the bell. so it's not really a great beginning of the story. when i graduated from college, i said, i want to be a writer, but there's no like application to do that. i wanted to be jay mcinerney or bret easton ellis. i wanted to be like those cool new york writers hanging out in bars. so i wrote books that were like their books. my dad didn't want me to be a writer. he was like, you got to go make a living. but he was very kind and saying, i'm going to give you one year where i won't let you starve. so when i graduate from college, allowing myself an apartment in boston and i wrote nine novels in that year, which i don't recommend to any of you who are interested in being writers, i was writing 40 pages a day every day out of desperation because i knew the money was going to be cut off at the end of the year and i would be starving and i managed to get an agent by the end of the year and i managed to sell my first book, which was a

crappy book. it was a medical thriller called threshold that none of you had heard of because it sold five copies that my mom bought. basically, it led to a second book called reaper, which became a horrible tv movie called fatal error, which i hope none of you saw. it was a medical thriller. and my dad is a doctor and it was starred. antonio sabato, jr the underwear model. remember him? and and he played a surgeon, which was very believable casting. i didn't know surgeons did so many set ups in between their patients because that's what he did during the whole movie. and there's a scene in the movie where antonio leans over a patient's chest and he goes, we've got a subdural hematoma. and my dad looked at me and go, you know, that's in the head, right? so the quality of the writing. but anyways, i ran into i was a struggling writer. i was selling -- pop, sci fi. nobody was reading it. and there was this bar i used to hang out in in boston called crossroads. if only you would go to boston and check out this bar. and there were these kids there. they were really geeky kids. it was an mit dive bar, but they had tons of money and it was all

in hundred dollar bills. and the thing is, in boston, you never see $100 bills. i mean, you see them in miami, you see them in new york, but you don't see hundred dollar bills in boston ever. and i went over and asked, why do you have all this money? and hundreds. and the kid invited me to his house and he was a college kid with a house, which was already strange. and he brings me to his laundry. and in his laundry was $250,000 in just stacks of hundreds. so i'm like, oh, this kid's got to be a drug dealer, right? but he was a geeky kid. he didn't look like a drug dealer and say, why do you have a quarter million dollars in your laundry? and he said, come with me to vegas. so literally the next day i flew to vegas and him and his six buddies flew, pretended they didn't know each other. we get there, we go to this suite overlooking the whole strip, and they all start to pull money out from under their clothes. i mean, $1,000,000 in cash piled in on the table. and they said, we're the mit blackjack team. and i didn't know what this was. suddenly i was in this story and it's a true story about a group of six mit kids who made $6 million playing blackjack. so suddenly i became a journalist, not completely by

accident, never written nonfiction before. i joined the mit blackjack team for six months, traveled to vegas every weekend with money under my clothes. and then i wrote a book called bringing down the house, which became big bestseller and became the movie 21. and i'm basically 21 was about to come out. i'm sitting at home and i get a weird email in the middle of the night from a kid who said, my best friends founded facebook and no one ever heard of him. and i had heard of mark zuckerberg, but i had never heard of anybody else. this was back in 2000, and i don't know, seven, eight, facebook was tiny. no one really knew what it was. this kid, i'm like, all right, i'll meet with you. i'm sitting in a bar and in walks eduardo saverin. if you've seen the social network, you've seen eduardo. he looks a little like andrew garfield. not quite as good looking hollywood. makes you know, everyone really good looking. if you watch 21, it's the best looking group of mit kids you've ever seen in your life. anyways, you know, this was the best looking group of harvard kids, but he sits down and he starts the conversation by saying, mark zuckerberg -- me. and as a journalist now i said,

tell me more. that's what you do, right? and he proceeded to tell me this crazy story about these two best friends who met in an underground fraternity and they couldn't get girls. and mark, you know, you know the story basically it became the social network. so i had created this kind of thing where i was suddenly writing books that were becoming movies. and this became my new platform. and so i started writing book proposals, selling the hollywood. if the movie gets bought, then i sell the book right. then i write the book while we're developing the movie. so this career started back in 2010, 2011, and i've sold 18 movies since then. and so the book i'm here to talk about is breaking twitter. and this started actually from a hollywood producer. i was not actually thinking about it to me at the time. elon musk was a great man. okay. i thought of elon musk and remember, let's go back to pre him buying twitter. elon musk was the guy making electric cars. he was going to get us to mars. he was this savant sleeping on the floor of his factory genius who is changing the world. and i thought, you know, you

would talk about him like you talk about edison or you talk about da vinci. a phenomenal, you know, genius, right. and then he buys twitter an over six weeks. he's spiraled down, depending on what your political views are. and twitter spiraled down to a disastrous place. and so that's what my story is about those six weeks from l.a. walking in the door with that sink to what twitter became, which is x, and it happened incredibly fast. and at the time i didn't realize that it might have been the most significant corporate purchase in history, because i believe that led to the president that we're going to have now. and so the story is about why elon took over twitter, what happened when he took over twitter and and why in the tagline of the book, i say twitter didn't elon didn't break twitter, twitter broke elon musk because he went from a person

that walter isaacson would write a biography about to a person that i believe walter would never write a biography about today. and i think i'll leave it at that and send it over to you, because i have i have like so many questions, actually. but i guess i'll do i'll sort of introduce myself in my book a little, and then we can go back and forth a little bit and then take take your questions. but yeah, because i was i spent most of my career as what would have been like just such an extremely minor character in one of your movies that they would have been written out early. but i'm a journalist and so i had the good luck to be kind of coming of age as the internet totally swamped the journalism business and so started a bunch of blogs early in my career and then was at politico.com covering barack obama and hillary clinton in 2008. and, you know, just sort of feeling the extent to which people were obsessed with that campaign and were kind of maddened by the fact that if you were reading the new york times, like you couldn't find out what had happened to the previous day until it hit your doorstep the next morning and nobody wanted to wait. and so at politico, we were i mean, i think the the founder

described us as a needle in the van of political junkies. but you were, you know, but you could just feel people hitting refresh for every piece of information. if people remember that campaign. it was so exciting and then felt in come 2012, the sort of energy of what had been blogs which feel like now, like an ancient technology. like if i talked to a journalism school class, i have to explain what a blog is like, the way you explain what a print like, what print, what like typesetting is, but but and could feel that this thing called twitter that all of my sources and all of my readers and all of the politicians themselves had sort of left the blogs and were on this new thing called twitter directly talking to each other often in this very kind of open hearted, interesting, engaged way that was very exciting for a journalist, too. and so in i guess 2011, i got him jonah peretti, who had been the founder of buzzfeed, approached me and he and buzzfeed was then, you know, as it remains the world's leading

cat website. and so it was like really confusing to me that we were having this conversation. and but he but what he sort of explained to me was we were headed into a world where people were going on their desktop computers to facebook dot com and twitter.com and that the kind of job of a media company was becoming. how do you get your work into those platforms? and on facebook that was by making it in his and then my incredibly naive view by making it really positive and inspired and on twitter, it was at that point by having new information and which is what journalists want to do. like it was the most fun thing. you get a scoop and then you watch people talk about it. and so i jumped over to buzzfeed to start the news operation there. and we, you know, had a lot of fun, won a pulitzer. i ran out of money at some point, made a bunch of bad bets in terms of the way the journalism industry would work. but at the book i wrote, which is called traffic is basically about this sort of rise of the

of this new kind of media, which i think saw itself in a particular way. and then i think i don't really i don't really buy that. you know, one thing caused this surge of right wing populism and donald trump. i mean, i think there are a million factors, but certainly dovetailed with it. and i think one of the things writing the book that was so interesting is that people in the early days of internet media out of facebook in particular, really saw it as a presumptively left wing democratic space like the the the the the kind of political internet was born out of howard dean's campaign for president against the iraq war. it, you know, facebook, obama's 2008 campaign was wrapped around facebook, one of eduardo and zuckerberg's co-founders, chris hughes, went to work for them for the obama campaign. and they built like their own little facebook clone called made up barack obama. and and it was just assumed that this was a place where young people, progressive students,

organized. and so, you know, when obama was president, even in 2011, he went and he visited facebook and in silicon valley. and again, it wasn't like he had to say, i know you guys are all my supporters. like it went without saying that facebook was sort of an organ of the democratic party and and then, you know, then come, you know, like tv in facebook had swallowed out basically the rest of the internet had become this huge thing. and it and the moment at buzzfeed when we, i think, noticed the power of it was there was this i don't know if anybody remembers this, but there was this image that went in probably the most viral thing of the decade was this image of a dress. and some people thought it was black and blue and some people thought it was white and gold. and it's just one of these classic kind of delightful optical illusions that are fun to argue about. and a buzzfeed, it was like we were you know, we had a woman who just messaged us and said, hey, i went to a wedding and my mom and i are arguing about this picture. could you ask your readers to sort it out? and so we did. and it was one of the big, you know, one of the most widely

circulated things on the history of the internet. and we could quite figure out why. but obviously we wanted to replicate it. and as we started trying to copy it, we did sort of figure out why would and the reason that it went so viral was because it was divisive. you know, some people thought it was black and gold, black and blue. some people thought it was white and gold and they argued about it and it was divisive in the most harmless kind of sweet, fun way you can imagine. but what facebook was measuring it. but it was a moment when facebook mechanics and facebook wasn't trying to influence politics. they were they saw that you were engaged with facebook for 11 minutes a day and wanted to get it to 11 and a half minutes and were tinkering with stuff to get there. and what they saw was that if they sort of weighted what you saw toward things that generated what they called engagement, that you would stick around a little longer. and so the dress generally had a lot of comments of people arguing what color it was. so it was engaging and then it buzzfeed, where we mixed news and really silly pop culture. we kind of looked for other things like that, like olives

actually are very divisive. if you if you write about whether or not you like olives, people argue about that for a long time. and then facebook will show that to everyone. but in that same moment, you had this new kind of right wing politics, really like come of age. and in a way, the core move, which i think wasn't really about facebook of that kind of politics, was to say something really outrageous or sexist or gross or racist or transgressive in some way so that the media with scold you and you could and it would prove to your supporters, to people who felt like outsiders, that you weren't part of this elite club, even if you were a billionaire, even if whatever else. and trump was one of many candidates around the world doing that. and facebook, i don't think facebook was designed for that, but it was built, but it was all it could have been. and that style just, you know, dovetailed incredibly into this world where donald trump would post something, you know, that a lot of people found offensive. and people would say that's offensive or his supporters would. and then somebody would say, no, you're offensive, and then

somebody to say no, you a racist. and then facebook would would look at this and say, wow, this is incredible engagement. we're going to show it to everyone now. and facebook was sort of overrun by this kind of content in that moment. and when i went back to and actually the most interesting thing to me in writing the book and then i'll stop was that i kind of went as i kind of woke up and i left buzzfeed in 2019 and went to the new york times to write about media. and i kind of looked up and tried to figure out like, what just happened, how did we get here? and went? and when i went in, kind of rerecorded that whole period in which we thought that it was this kind of i'm not really political, but it was presumptively a progressive space. the internet, you look back and actually the people who are now around trump were really there from the very start. the founder of fortran had worked out of buzzfeed's offices. a guy hired at buzzfeed and benny johnson became one of trump's biggest promoters. and when when i was watching the january 6th capitol capital riot, there was a there was a

guy who worked for the buzzfeed there, livestreaming and there was a sense in which these right wingers, i think of these conservatives had really mastered and taken over these tools to a degree that i think no one else ever did. so i don't know. that's a that's my story as of story. well, what made you decide to write a book right now? i mean, i think actually the sense we were talking before and i was asking ben's advice about how to write books because i'd like kind of electorate another and he is the master. and you said that, like you need an ending. yes. and i do think that i kind of in 2020 felt like, okay, this year, whatever that era was, it's over and we're headed into some new thing. but this moment in which social media and social media, meaning facebook and twitter in particular, dominate public life, is over. and there's something i mean, obviously, we're now in an era dominated by these short videos, by task, by a much more fragmented spaces. but i think that moment, which

everyone in the world is looking at, these two giant platforms and it that's so interesting. so you think all of this and fragment ation that's happening means that we're not as sort of controlled by the social media? i don't know what it means, but we are in this very new fragmented world or, you know, podcast, sort of big part of it as well as that. i think it's, it used to be like five years ago everyone would have seen the same thing on twitter or facebook five years ago in my business, which is news. if you said to somebody, what's the biggest story today, everybody would know and agree. and now it's actually like, who knows? i mean, what's on the front page of the new york times? like, that's one way to check. but there isn't. but there's been a kind of real decentral ization of the culture in the conversation, which means, i don't know, for better and for worse, because it's not like that previous thing was so great. but can i ask you to elaborate on something you said, which is why do you i mean, it's interesting because i think you portrayed musk's acquisition of twitter as like a value destroying catastrophe that also destroyed him.

now, it seems like maybe you make it sound so negative, but. yeah, but and now maybe it seems like it was the best purchase in the history of the world that has turned him into the most powerful, you know, private sector figure in history. well, i will say so. when i went into this story, the reasons elon musk bought twitter were actually for him very positive. he believe that the world was descending into this basically dark age because of this woke mind virus that he believes has been spreading this sort of, you know, cancel ling of of things that you don't agree with. and he believed that twitter, which was supposed to be the world's town hall, was being controlled and censored by people who were part of this woke mind virus. and that's the reason he bought it, because he believes the entire world is a simulation. it's one big video game and that he's the only real person and he's the main player. and his goal is to get us to mars. he truly believes this and he believes you get to mars in

three ways. number one, electric cars, because it's going to be conservation of materials and we don't have to use fossil fuels. number two, you know, his his space program, which are these reusable rockets, getting to the point where you can have 100,000 of these rockets flying all the time. and number three, you need to have freedom of speech, because he believes without it, the other two things can't happen. so he came into it as the hero of his own movie, believing that he could save twitter from this spreading woke mind virus. what happened was initially he realized that he was overpaying, so he decided he no longer wanted to buy twitter. so twitter sued him, forcing him to take them over, which was kind of a ridiculous moment. it was like instead of barbarians at the gate, it was the barbarian that you forced to come through the gate. he came through with such anger that he fired 80% of the staff on the first day. he fired so many people that they couldn't get into the building because he had fired into the building fired.

so deep into it that there was no longer safety council, there was no longer anybody controlling anything. in the first week there was a concerted troll attack of racist and anti-semitic semitic comments. so you can't actually blame elon for the immediate sudden amount of hate speech because really what happened was there was a paid for troll attack, which i talk about in my book, and there were something like 500,000 anti-semitic and racist comments in the first two days of his takeover. not it was not organic. and but then basically he started to sort of do very strange things. he retweeted the thing about paul pelosi getting hit with a hammer, that it was a conspiracy theory right before going to hollywood heidi klum halloween party where she was dressed as a worm and then he started to get pushback, which elan had never gotten before. no one had ever said something negative to ellen before. he went up on stage with dave chappelle and was famously booed off the stage. and this affected him enormously. he came back to twitter, he was depressed. he was upset, and he started to strike out at the world around

him. he threw all these journalists off of twitter in the middle of the night. so although he was supposed to be about free speech, he was like going through and just throwing people off that he didn't like for a night because they were talking about this story about his where his jet was going. if you remember the elon jet phenomenon. and so everything kind of twisted in turn to the point where he tweeted out a poll saying, should i remain ceo? and he expected everyone to vote yes and most people voted no. he got so upset that he locked himself in. you know, he in his his conference room and the people who worked at twitter were so concerned they were going to call in a wellness check from the police department because they thought he was going to hurt himself. so this affected him deeply. so the transformation of elon happened because of what happened when he walked through those doors. and it all kind of spiraled down. but then you're right in that what i didn't foresee was that he would then turn twitter. he wasn't going to make any money off of it. the numbers were becoming smaller. it was becoming a, you know, basically a bubble of people who

believed one thing that he could use that bubble to suddenly become part of the government. and so he switched. it was not, i believe, a plan from the beginning, but he switched on his feet to promoting trump, to pushing trump. and now he's at mar a lago having running the country. so it ended up being a good investment in in that way. and now if he plays his cards right, he'll make billions and billions and billions of dollars off of of pushing the government in a certain direction. so, yeah, i think i miss that story and i think everybody did seeing how important it was to take over the town hall and then push it because i think i believed that he really did mean to turn it into something for free speech when the reality was what it became was a megaphone for one side and you could argue before him, you know, it was somewhat of a megaphone for the other side. but now it really became an organ of how do we elect the next president? so in the end, you're right, it probably was a good investment.

and what is his agenda? as you know, co-president of the united states or whatever it is right now? i mean, i really think he's playing a video game and he's going to save us all by getting us to mars where we're all die, right? because we can live on mars. but i do believe that that is his dream, is that that he is doing the right thing. i've always said when i write my books that no one sees himself as the villain in their movie. and it takes a big outside source to make you realize that you're being villainous. and i think he's got such a he's surrounded by so many people and so much that tells him he's great, that he may never see that he might be the villain in the story. he believes he's the hero who is going to save us despite ourselves. he wants to save us by fixing the government, by fixing the debt, by making us all go into rockets to mars. that's what he wants. and that's what he thinks is a positive outcome for this. this scenario doesn't sound so bad. aside from the mars. i mean, it might listen, i'm i'm

i'm not a political person like you know, you say you're not a big political person. i fear, you know, the world falling apart, as we all do. i fear all of the horrible things that could happen. i would like to just sit back and say, okay, save us, right, ellen, save us, because you're the man to save us. but i just know too much about what's happened. and if you look at what's happened at twitter, if that saving us, you know, a lot of trouble. so, i mean, i don't know. i'm not i'm an optimistic person in general, but but boy, it seems like, you know, we could go in a lot of different directions here. do you think the world or like florida is big enough for his ego and donald trump's ego? i mean, the big question is, and you probably know more about this than i do, is can these big egos survive in one house? i mean, you've got elon, you've got trump, you've got rfk jr, you've got a lot of really big, somewhat unhinged personalities all running around the same place. but they all want affirmation from the outside world, like all of them love to be loved. they want to be loved. and kara swisher said yesterday they weren't hugged as children

right. they want a hug. and i think that's what they all really want. so can they all survive in the same room? i don't know. what do you think? yeah, i don't know. i mean, the l.a. thing is so unprecedented, honestly. yeah. i mean, i do think the sort of history of trump is that there can be only one and that ellen is already in this bitter fight with other advisers to trump for ever. and, you know, trump's president. yeah. i mean, i would ask you i mean, because buzzfeed and and and the work that you do, what that story is growing and growing and growing that they're adding to this throat. so they're not yet at throats, but the bromance is going to be over. and how much is that the media looking for something to grab its teeth into and shake, you know, or is that really based on real stuff? i think it's the former i mean, i think it's like anyone looking at that situation says this is really combustible. there's no way these guys, you know, can possibly hold it together. but actually, i think they have, you know, enormous mutual interest because it's i mean, because ellen has a lot of

power, which he in terms of controlling the sort of public square of. right. of twitter that, you know, that the trump and just money, you know, he's just pouring money into things that trump wants. i think there's discussion of whether he will acquire trump's sort of curse social network truth, social which has is highly, reasonably, highly valued in the market but has no value other than through its connection to trump and if anyone could just purchase that an enormous gift to to the president. and then of course, the federal us government has tons of things that musk wants. musk as starlets. starlink which is this, you know, fleet of satellites that can provide remote internet and actually is a pretty good case. like the government has all these programs. it spends a lot of money providing broadband to rural areas, like if you you know, if you have a, you know, shack on a hill in remote missouri, the government will pay like $500,000 to run a wire up to your house. and there's a logic that musk is

pushing very hard, that starlink it's reasonable idea that starlink should provide that instead. but these would be huge government contracts that sort of transform that company into essentially which have replaced nasa as the us space program. and, you know, there's just huge stakes there. yeah, so are you are you going back to the social media conversation? do you think that are you optimistic that the future going forward in social media is a good thing? i mean, i have mixed feelings about social media in general. having written the book that became the social network. i would say social media in general is a net loss to humanity. i don't think it's been a positive. i do think the world is more connected and, you know, in terms of writing books, i can research anything instantly and reach anybody instantly. but when i look at my kids growing up in this world, it's a little scary that you spend so much of your time in these horrible places that are often run by people who do things, do things that you don't agree with all day long. are you optimistic about our future as social media fragments and then becomes these little bubbles and whatever's next? yeah, i mean, i do think

optimism is sort of a personality trait and obviously, like i've started a series of news companies, so obviously i'm optim insanely optimistic, but i guess i do think that i was both optimistic about the sort of i was very utopian about the internet and then about the rise of social media as these, you know, connecting people basically, and democratizing speech. and that did not really work out that way. i do. i actually kind of think this new moment of fragmentation and i feel i do feel like is less toxic than what had preceded it, which was i mean, i think one of the features of social media was it's a machine for finding the most deranged view of somebody you disagree with and just like elevating it constantly, like, oh my god, did you see this horrific thing that somebody on the other side said, this is the stupidest version of it and we're going to hit you with it? a thousand times? i mean, i would say cable news is also a machine for that. and a lot of the news ecosystem, it's not just social media. but the and i think we're now in

this world where, like, you know, podcasts are sort of rising to compete with other kinds of broadcast, but they're all small like joe. people talk about joe rogan, you know, who's the who's probably the biggest podcast. but if you do a survey, he has, i think like among the people who say they a favorite podcast, which isn't everybody, 4% say it's joe rogan and everything else is smaller. so it's this world where if you're on the new york subway, where i am a lot like you've no idea what somebody is listening to with their little headphones, right? like it's this very fragmented world where people are listening to these kind of loose shaggy conversations that are often full of weird nonsense, but also don't have that quality of just like hyper partizan combat all the time, which does feel like an improvement in some ways. so do you also have no idea what anybody is talking about or listening to? it's all happening in these what it used to be. you could just say like twitter and facebook were the x ray of what the country was talking at all times. and now you kind of have no idea. well, i remember a time when you'd go on the subway and everybody was carrying a book and that boy, mr. westman, who

and it was your book. it was once, once or twice. but you know, it just the changing way we consume things now is so dramatic that in my career i've had to pivot, pivot, pivot, pivot just to stay, you know, in in a career. and i wonder and i teach it, i talk at high schools a lot and there's always kids who come up and say they want to go into journalism. and i'm never sure what to say anymore. and like, what do you say when young people say, what would your advice be to the kids who want to go into this field? because journalism is really, to me, the most important thing in the world, but it's also a really hard way to make a living now. and it seems to be going in a weird direction. what do you say to kids? i just got it. your answer. could i also give our audience an opportunity to ask questions? yes. to please answer your yes. please line up over there. if you have if you have questions, get going into journals. and it is a really weird profession. i mean, i think the thing that these new partizan voices and

that by the way, artificial intelligence are not particularly good at is finding information that is not on the internet. and putting it on the internet and reporting. and that is basically what i tell people like go get scoops, find stuff nobody else knows. you don't need to be a good writer. you don't need to have any particular point of view. you don't need be particularly smart. like if you can just find stuff out that nobody else knows. like that's the core value. i like that. i. hi, my name is michael. have a question which has part for each of you. first for ben over here. do you think elon musk really believes in trump or is he using trump? and then for ben on buzzfeed, ben. you worked with intelligent people. how did they fall under the spell of trump with so many people who knew him saying he was incompetent it it's it's a

great question and we we're both ben's up here just to make it confusing for you guys so we can switch it around if you want. but so it's originally elon was not a big fan of trump. he thought, you know, he's made some tweets and things, said some things in the past that he would not you know, he was a democrat pretty much. and the democratic party went against elon pretty early. in a weird way. they were promoting car companies that were not elon's car company, even though elon was pushing electric cars more than anybody else. and so elon kind of is thin skinned and went back at them. i think he's partially an opportunist seeing this is the movement that he could be part of. partially. he's just a troll. he loves the most funny, ridiculous outcome. he likes outrage. he likes he tweets at two in the morning, four in the morning, six in the morning. he loves to sort of shake things up because he believes the world is not real. it's a big video game and the most entertaining outcome is the best outcome. so i think he's in on trump because it's fun, exciting.

it puts him up there on on this huge place that he wants to be playing, this big video game. so i don't think it's a deep held sort of belief in trump's policy. these if that's what you're asking or in the conservative kind of movement, it's it's a belief that the world becoming entertaining thunderdome from the mad max movies is the good outcome for his his worldview. so that's what i think it is. yeah. the question of why people like donald trump, like i mean, i'm not sure i've totally i'm going to be able to nail that in this answer. but but i do think in terms of the sort of generation of people online, they're sort of two different things. i mean, one is and this goes in both directions, there are people for whom the sort of l.a., one of them from these sort of feedback loops of social were so powerful. the guy who my former colleague who wound up, i think he i don't know. i think he's in prison now for his role in january 6th. was a guy named bergdahl. he went under the name bechtel, alaska. he was a white rapper who had been grown up in alaska.

and that was his his name. and he like it was just he was a kind of a seeker without who'd had a really horrible childhood and was looking for positivity enforcement and found it on social media. and for a while, like tweeting positive things, he first came to get famous because there was a thing, there was a trend on this platform called vine where if you just like poured milk over your head, that was that. that was the whole thing. that was it. so he would pour milk over his head and people would like his posts of himself pouring gallons of milk over his head, sometimes like in a convenience store. and he got positive feedback from that. so he did it and the author, the author really. and and then he got into bernie sanders and we tweet about bernie sanders, and that got him positive feedback. and then he started tweeting just further and further write stuff like really like nazi real sort of openly nazi stuff. and they found a world where that gave him positive feedback and he was just following the kind of energy of social media. and then when he got tossed off all the a lot of platforms for being a nazi he was at the march

on charlottesville, he started going up to start filming himself, going up to strangers in the street and in arizona and spraying them in the face with mace, which he referred to as content to spray to get attention. and that just sort of like then he wound up at the at the white house in the capitol on january six. and so there is a i don't think this is actually part of a partizan. there are people for whom the like lure of attention and feedback will you'll just follow that wherever it happens lead, which i found pretty depressing, i think was also a generation of people online who did genuine. this is also elon. there was a kind of conformism herd mentality to the kind of progressive internet that alienated a lot of people. and some of those people also moved to the right. so i'm a former miami herald journalist and kind of journalism refugee, and ben smith. i saw the book traffic as kind of a commentary on a business model, a business model predicated on traffic and monetizing eyeballs, which

relied on the cooperation of facebook and google and then facebook said basically f-you journalism, and they kind of collapsed. and then it seems like the next chapter in that is generative search, right where you go, you scrape the journalist website for their original journalism and then you create generative ai responses that are based on that data where you don't have to pay for the reporting. and to me, this is the death of journalism. like, i don't see a business model online anymore, so i'm just interested in your perspective on what is the business model in media? small question. yeah. gosh how long you got? i mean, yeah, i think. right. the generation of of, of these digital of these new digital media outlets, the bet was that as cable as the wires in the ground had been to cnn, espn, mtv, this whole generation of news companies and media companies and sports companies, hbo entertainment that grew up on cable, that there would be

for a new generation of media that would be distributed on the internet and on social media. so that was buzzfeed vice were probably the two big brands. and for a bunch specific and, you know, and actually the biggest question i got after i wrote the book was why did anyone invest like hundreds of millions of dollars in these doomed companies? and the answer was, well, it look, they thought it was going to be like cable. they thought these companies would become viacom and maybe it could have worked out that way, but it didn't. and because the because google and facebook and tik-tok prefer free content to paying for it. you know, i guess i'm obviously a little more optimistic than that, that there are new models being built. semaphore is one where and a lot of it is about finding a direct connection to the audience. and email sort of strangely is the best way to do that right now. in-person events are another, but it's certainly it's yeah, it's a tough business and the you know the sort of the business model of the glory days of places like the herald where you had a local advertising monopoly. and so if you wanted to buy a mattress in miami, like you were

paying a 10% tax to the herald for advertising, you know, is amazing and wonderful and it's never coming back. and that is, in a way, the biggest challenge. there's lots of parts of journalism, business, journalism, trade journalism are thriving. if you are looking for coverage of the national sanitation industry like it's never been better. but local news is really so tough right now. in particular particular to more questions, i think, about matt, thank you. hi. since this is talking a lot about elon musk, i just want to ask you to tell you about when trump hired elon musk, his job is to help remove some of the wasted money that we're sending overseas in all over. like i said, 30 million to to study that animals in guyana or 50 million for bridge that goes to nowhere. so i would like to hear you say good things about elon musk and good things about what trump is going to do make our country

safer and give money instead of billions of dollars to illegal aliens that get money for credit cards and all this and that. why don't you give them money to people sleeping on the floor? let them answer. oh, i'm happy to. so i agree with you that there are things that we spend too much money on and things that we should be spending our money on. well, if you just look at how if you look at what elon did at twitter, the result, if he does the same thing with the us government, is going to be merely ends in millions of people out of work lots of money going to the wealthy people at the top. and very little done to help anybody who isn't part the upper. so i'm just looking at what he did at twitter. i don't know what he's going to do with the government. perhaps he'll find a way to cut costs without causing the firing of 20 million people. but if he fires 20 million people, it isn't going to help. what you're hoping to help. so there are problems with the

government. the question is, do you want to take a sledgehammer to it or do you want to fix those problems? 20 million people. i mean, i do think we to fix a lot of problems. i agree with that. i think created the mess they approved giving money to all these animals and insects that you're studying. so so let's look at the good part. and 80% of the country. okay. thank you, ma'am. thank you. i want to give a round of applause for our authors. again, thank you all for coming. if i could ask you, please, to exit the room, the authors will be, as you go out the door to your left. they have their books, their. and if you could make your way out so that we can prepare for the next session. thank you.

we'll have more live coverage of the 2024 miami book fair after short break. and it's a particular honor, if i may say, to come today to to hillsdale and cpi to to talk

about my fourth book, which is just out 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. i speak to audiences that people here would say are ruby red and conservative, and i speak to a number of audiences that are mostly non-ideal logical, 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 and grandchildren, they will say, i'm not only worried about my

country, but i am particularly worried about the country the culture, 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 airlines pins, 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 increase. doubly polarized, unease and time that we find ourselves in. and i love to delve into empirical research and data. i love to read. and the more that i researched, the more that i read the conclusion, the pointers kept coming back to the 1960s.

and i began to ask myself, did it really all begin in 1967, 68, earlier, with the great society. and i found that the answer was no. i found the answer and made it the thesis of my book, which is that if you want to understand the moral and social revolution of america 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 speaking a handful of very influential men and women who were deliberately uncomfortable with the american way of life. they were uncomfortable with the declaration of independence and the constitution.

they were uncomfortable with the natural nuclear family. they were uncouth, comfortable with churches and seminaries. they were uncomfortable with entertainment. they were uncomfortable over whelming. 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 67 or 68 and 69, and being a lincoln man, i'd like to demonstrate that in a powerpoint that i have 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. and he wrote a fabulous memo law of his growing up and i particularly loved the the parts of his memoir on the 1960s. and he said to overcome the sixties, we must first understand them. one must go back in time in order to move forward. i thought that was a kind of a beautiful thesis, intense for the research that i was beginning to undertake. i talk about a a small coterie of people at the beginning of stumbling toward utopia, and i and i could talk at greater length. i've written a greater length, as you will see, about some of this handful of progressives that i think did enormous damage to our constitution, national, our way of life and also to the kind of what i think of as the

unwritten constitutional way of life, family, marriage, parenting, human life, religious liberty, conscience rights, basic magnanimity, and civil laity in the public square. education, both higher education and the classroom and elementary, middle 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 judeo-christian tradition very uneasy, very uncomfortable with objective standards of reading. right doing arithmetic as the

prince of all you know, with the formation of character, the primary role of of public or government schools, and frankly, in private schools as well. he was also i think it's important to say, particularly unam, with expressions of faith and religion, which he felt really was out side overwhelmingly outside the role of america in education. next is sanger, the founder of planned parenthood, a woman who early in the american experience, was poetic, really uncomfortable with large sectors of the american people. she was a eugenicist on steroids. she was very uncomfortable. lay with with with those in our american faith community. broadly speaking, outside of what you and i would say were

denominational, i.e. white anglo-saxon protestants and american, you know, kind of what became progressive protestantism. she had a very big role in shifting american protestantism, too, to a very progressive way of of an of a worldview that as a law professor and a libertarian 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 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 originalist 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. it's letter and spirit published by 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 little too much time talking about the founders, and we should talk a lot more about the republicans who gave us the what the republicans are, the newly formed republican party, who gave us the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, having said 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 our 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 be a better society, we would we would function better if we could bring back all the parts of the constitution and and activate them all. and that's part of the mission of i have as an original is to revive the 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 that the federalist did not necessarily want to add. it was put into the constitution because of the anti-federalists. but when the federal that there was the federalist who wrote the bill of rights with the anti-federalists wanted were a bunch of amendments that would limit 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. so when 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 said is we know these people don't trust us. we promised them. we give them a bill of rights when in order to ratify the constitution. and so we need to honor our promise. but the way they honored their promise was not to effect. and madison explains, this 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 the critics by giving them a bill of rights without weakening the structures of government that they established. and that's the reason why the anti-federalists we 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 and more dependent on the rights that happen to be included in the bill of rights. so we can thank the anti-federalists for pushing for

that. what's it like to be a libertarian 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 for them, to be a voice for them when they get into trouble. and i've been to successfully do that and i get nothing but appreciation from expressed by my colleagues. book tv is live coverage of the miami book fair continues now.

we're. the only. thing that'll be massive.

please take your seats. well, my name is beverly moore garcia and i work for miami-dade college and i serve as the campus president for, our doral and our homestead campuses. i always like to start every opportunity to speak with gratitude. so i started this morning by saying, i'm grateful for the weather and if you are not in miami right now, too bad for you. we, of course, all gathered here today and we are very grateful for the miami dade college family and all of the volunteers that come forward to make this book fair a success. i want in particular, thank our sponsors including the green family foundation, nicholas children's hospital, amazon, the j.w. marriott marquee and brickell and all our other sponsors.

we we'd also like to thank our friends and family members as they received multiple benefits. so please consider making a gift of a membership to someone you love. as we work to ensure that this wonderful literary opportunity continues, please consider supporting the miami book fair with a contribution to our next decade. fund. visit the friends and family table or our website for more information on a little bit of housekeeping before i introduce our authors, please turn your cell phones to silent. our author is will have a conversation together and at about 1235 they will open the opportunity for questions. if you have a question, you see that there's a microphone there in the center. please start lining up at the microphone. please keep your questions brief

so that our authors have time to respond. and please understand that there's only about 10 minutes for questions. so if you're number 15 in line, you're probably not going to ask a question today. but when this finishes is at exactly 1245, we will have the opportunity for you to when you exit the room, go to the left and the authors will be there, the books will be there. so you can continue your conversation with them. now it my honor to actually introduce what the authors for which you have come here today so eddie glaude jr is the author of several books including democracy in black and the new york times best seller begin again, james baldwin's america and its urgent lesson is for our own winner of the harriet beecher stowe book prize.

he frequently appears in the media as an msnbc contributor here on programs like morning joe and deadline. white house. a native of moss point, mississippi, happy cloud is, the james s mcdonald distinguished university professor at princeton university, and he's going to be joined today by maya wiley. maya is the president and ceo of the leadership conference on civil and human rights, the nation's oldest and largest civil rights coalition. a former legal analyst for msnbc. this lifelong civil rights advocate and civil rights attorney, mt. had a historical performance in new york city's 2021 democratic mayoral primary, contesting to be the first woman

mayor on a reform platform. before the race, wiley served as senior vice president for social justice at new school university and as a member of the graduate faculty at its m.a. school, the first black woman to serve as counsel to a new york city mayor. her expertise and compassionate approach were and remain almost unprecedented in the world of advocacy, activism and polity. wiley also serves as the joseph l rasche junior chair of civic and human rights at the university of the district of columbia school of law, with no further ado, please may welcome eddie and maya.

hello. hey. hey. how are you? they have made a mistake by putting us on this panel with no matter later this year. so we want to begin with the question. we want to begin. i want to begin with the question, how are you holding up given what has happened? how are you doing it? how are you doing? i am not okay. we are not okay okay. and when you ask is quite. i haven't actually been able to find the words yet to fully describe all the ways in which i am not okay and we are not okay. but i do want to bring it back to you, eddie, because.

one of the reasons i'm so grateful that we're doing our shared book talk, i'm holding up eddie's book and i'm hoping to go by eddie's book. yeah. is because, you know, we had a moment. we we. and i don't see your moments too. but on nicole wallace together. and this was one of those where kamala harris, nicole plays a clip of kamala harris talking about being cut. and it was one of those moments where i don't even know what i said. all i know is i had to reach over and grabbed your hand. and so while i am not okay and we are not okay, i'm better because i'm here with you. oh. i'm going to flip this conversation and really talk with her about her book.

i just finished. remember, you are wiley are literally before i got in the car to come here, i had to get myself together. i watched you run for mayor in new york city. i've watched you with tremendous clarity and courage speak to the nation, explaining the law, explain the cultural context. what did it take for you to write this memoir? you know what did? because it's so deeply personal, it's not don't you do that? it's not just simply a journey. what did it take for you to find the courage to write this book. i'm not going to cry. i'm not going to cry.

well, as a practical matter it probably took donald trump winning in 2016. hmm. as a practical matter, i don't mean the decision to make it a memoir per say, but part of what i mean by that is if you think about what 2016, 2016 was that moment where we knew none of that racism was gone in america, none of the sexism was gone in america. we knew that but we never quite quite i, i could never quite believe you could be you could flip the script on the southern strategy as. he did write southern strategy was you dog whistle that you didn't say it directly. you hinted at it. so that the people who were who are racist could hear and know who you were and that you would show up for them, but in a way

that would be palatable to all the people who would not support or vote for it. and he flipped the script and just said, yeah, i'm going to say it out loud. i'm proud. and when on top of the blatant sexism and the realization that that could win, i, i and the fact that we were simply have not just divided not just divided because we've always been divided. we always had there's never really been anything that's real bipartisan ship in this country. that's just not true that there was something much more deeply troubling that it had permission to be out and that the gains and i thought about what i both learned from my parents about

what it meant to actually confront racism and poverty and sexism together, to think about how we a bigger tent, but with bold, bold, bold ideas like people shouldn't poor like women should be able to take care of their babies. that. we had to start talking to each other differently. right. and that the only way to start to break through was to be more vulnerable and the strength that comes from that vulnerability is a strength that actually propels through that hatred and actually starts to take permission from it because it's a different kind of courage. it's a kind of courage, and it's not an easy one. and that coupled with, you know, someone push being pushed right. i mean, none of us just that without being pushed a bit because it's just hard and i, i

won't tell the whole story, but i did have a book editor who because i was going to write what you and what i what i, i was trying to be eddie glaude now i wasn't going to be as good as eddie glaude, but i was like, i'm sitting at the new school. i'm watching all the hashtag orgs. black lives matter me to to, you know, fight for 15. and it was driving me crazy that everybody was seeing hashtags as the vehicle that produced that's producing the change rather than failing to see and understand all the years and multiple generations fights, organizing and struggle that were behind those hashtags, and that if we didn't understand, we would miss what we have to do. and in this era, right, which is continue to do that work, whether or not we saw understood the direct line to the outcome, which was what my parents work was, was what their activism with all of our not just them. so i was going to do a a lay

person's academic book about social movements, about the hashed tags to try to do that kind of public education and a book said to me as i was talking about this book, that i was yet to be written, she said, well, tell me about your mother. and i think it's because i made it clear that i wanted to write this book because i understood even personally why this was important. and so when i started to talk about my mother and my father, she just she said, you're dissociating. and i was like that's rude. and then realized. but, but then i, but we talked about it some more and then i went away rejecting it right. and sticking with my hashtag book idea. and after a bit, i started to realize that she was right, that she was right, and that it would be also a more useful book if i

was willing to be vulnerable is fascinating. one of the reasons why i wrote we are the leaders we've been looking for was precisely because i'm not okay. yeah, i don't think the nation okay we've lost a million plus people there are these cascade anniversaries of people who are gone right empty chairs at the kitchen table, folk who are just and i've lost two partners to covid and my editor was trying to get me to write this book, and i couldn't quite make sense of what the moment was the moment was too fluid. and so i went back to my harvard lectures that i delivered in 2011. and what was at the heart of those lectures was an anger about reading obama is the fulfillment of the black freedom, trying to see what was happening to black politics in that moment. and four books came out of those lectures. so i to return to them in order to find my feet because i'm not okay. and so part of what coming and

this is what made me so attract attractive attracted the book your memoir in part baldwin has this formulation where he says the messiness of the world is in fact a reflection the messiness of our interior lives that if we're going to become the leaders that we've been looking for, we've got to deal with what's in us, right? we have to deal with the wound as the harms, the hurts, the brokenness we have to find the beauty in the brokenness because the aspiration for wholeness can get you in trouble. right. and so what i wrote was reading this because i was thinking i was thinking about square in your memoir with that bold campaign you ran in new york and i found out that your daddy, dr. george wiley, and then you introduce me to your mother. how do you work the wreath? the wreath wreath of frances and

the choices that i'm talking. one of the founding organizers of the national welfare rights organization. key member of core. and all the things you witnessed and experi instead. and to be vulnerable on the page in that way and to be leader. i said this is exactly what i'm calling for, a leadership that's vulnerable in public to tell us the story of how you lost your dad, how you struggled with your mother to tell us the story on page 280 that what you came to realize, right, is that you grew up in this context of societal

racism and that it wasn't just kind of coming to terms with your father's death and coming to terms with the, you know, it was all this trying to figure out who are. and that becomes the kind of vessel by which you begin to model a certain leadership. this is the argument of my book. that's why i want to talk about your book, because i'm talking about my. well, i well know, but i need to flip this back on you as a question, eddie, because and i, i love baldwin, so i. eddie nine one of our early bonding moments was when you had when you were writing begin again right. and you were like, i'm writing. i was like, what do you write about? and you like to write about? baldwin? i was like, oh because i'm, you know, all the reasons and begin was such a perfect, not just beautifully written and is beautifully written and a lot of academic then women don't write beautifully. it's really beautifully written

a really compelling read. but the way you're able to take and i haven't read this i'm talking begin again though, because there's a lot of leadership in that because you're talking about, but you're also telling a story about america through the experience of baldwin that shaped his writing. but then how we understood 2016. but but say more about your not okay and what you're trying to reach for and get people to hear and understand in this book about leadership rooted in that and what you think is most important for people to understand, to do as leaders right now. right. so in so many ways, what i was trying to do in this text is to try to disrupt our our outsourcing of. that. the current situation of the country suggests me that we can no longer outsource our responsibility for democracy to politicians or to so-called leaders or to so-called prophets, heroes that we are

actual heroes that we've been looking for, that. so you will sing john legend no, no, but i'm just saying what? what, what i'm suggesting here, right? is. is that part of what i was trying to do is to kind of displace the kind of glare of celebrity that barack obama. right. and how he narrowed the range of what was considered legitimate forms of, black political dissent, that if change was going to happen, going to happen, it had to happen. the ground up, right. how your dad came to understand the power of everyday, ordinary folk. this ph.d. in chemistry from cornell having coming to understand was it brother bruce who taught him what the power of ordinary folks have, the power of ordinary folk in leading folk right. and so here i tell the journey in the book of a wounded child who has daddy issues and looks

just like my daddy, whom i love death, he now calls to tell me what i should say on msnbc. it's just wonderful. but what did it mean for me to be wounded and to try to reach for certain notion of manhood and how being a morehouse man, i went to morehouse and and was socialized into dr. king and so dr. king's voice became mine. and then because i was so angry at the way in which because of the way in which i was raised, i remember my freshman year of morehouse campus, i thought i was the best thing since sliced because i was 15 years old. i was at morehouse and i'm doing my thing. and this guy up to me and he says, you know, you think you're smart, but you're not really you don't really know who you are. and he gave me malcolm's autoblog raphe and i went back to graves hall and i read it the entire book, the entire. and i had my first conversion experience. so that's why i have my goatee to this day, right? i will never shave it. and so malcolm became figure. and so here i was trying to find a notion of masculinity that was

really rooted in a wound how i needed to deal with me in order to release myself. so that i could find my own voice. ralph waldo emerson says, great people come to us such that even greater people can follow. so how do we resist, right? giving ourselves over to some people? we need to understand that we are the prophets that we've been looking because we all have the capacity to imagine ourselves beyond the current moment and then to act according. and so i ended up in the lap. miss ella baker, right. who used to tell the snake organizer, shut up, shut up and listen, might learn something. hers was more pew center than pulpit center. what does it mean when you have a church, for example, that's full of fans in the pews and a celebrity in the pulpit? the church is dead ain't worth. so she wanted to emphasize the power of ordinary people. and so when i was reading what

found out, first of all, i shouted when i found out who your daddy was. i was like, oh my god. and then when you gave me stories of his of his inside that moment, listening to tom and his in between dr. king and your daddy tell that story so folks could hear it. so, you know, one of the important points about this story and you have a passage that made me think about this, okay, we're not going to read i'll will read this. you can't make me not reading this yet. the relative success, the movement, the eventual of the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965, accentuated king as he grew older. quote, what needed to be done before the poor, the powerless and the racially disadvantaged could begin to achieve equality. as he looked out, he saw,

despite accomplishments of the movement, a country still at war with its ideals and with itself. i read that because that moment was actually part of the tension that was very real and continues to be. we've always had tension. people in leaders didn't agree with one another. there was always turf, but there's always what is the most important thing to for and about and who should be a part of it. and so my father, like, you know, my father out of core congressman, racial quality, which was the militant arm of the civil rights movement, like snick, but as the national organization that was really the militant arm of the civil rights movement. right. but he was like much an ella baker at core. right. which it's really about the ground up and it's really and he understood that if rights didn't solve it was bankrupt like it

had to do both. it wasn't one or the other. and that black women could lead it and should lead it black women on welfare. so this is the juncture which they have been planned, national welfare rights have been planning a march. and so. malcolm mack, i mean, there's a whole nother malcolm x story, but. martin luther king declares there's going to be a poor people's march. and they had already been planning one. and so there was all this tension, him swooping in parachuting in and taking over and here were all these black women actually organizing it and so there's a and it's there's a photograph that i still have in my it's in my house right now. like my daughter when she was in first grade, took it to show and tell with my father on one side of actually was huge. johnny in the mountain was one of the co-founders national

welfare rights, holding her grandbaby as a little baby, sitting in the middle. and dr. king on the other side. and dr. king's looking very pensive johnny is talking or facing him with the baby and my father sitting on the other side with his hand up like this, talking. and if you don't know what's happening behind in this story, what you think is they're having a planning meeting and dad's helping him tell him something in this. what's actually going on is they're having. a real fight. and the fight about because the women welfare said, what do you know about. what do you know? the legislation we're trying to get to make sure that our welfare benefits ensure our babies can eat and our rent gets paid. what do you understand about because had a whole agenda that was poverty and they were organizing the march so it was not a friendly country. i mean, it was friendly.

i just mean it was a it was but it was it was a little bit of a throw down. but the fact that my father located and sat johnny tillman right there as one beside martin luther king, as the one there heard to sit and hold her grandbaby, that was but but that the the orientation of that to say is this is the leader this is the person you need to listen to these are the experts. and so it's not just about having a march. it's what's the march supposed to produce and who's seen out in front of it. and if you go to the african-american museum of history and culture today, if you go there and i hope you do, if you haven't and you go to the floor or where it has the poor people's march, there's one big photo of national rights organization and johnny tillman and all these other mothers leading a march. they agreed to do it despite the

fact that there was a lot of tension about it. right. and because they decided it was more important for it to happen, to fight about it. and that they but they they also understood they were being asked to be the boots on the ground rather than the generals in the front line. now, that's one part of the synergy. the other part is your struggle with remember, you were a wiley. so i've invoked your father. i invoked his legacy he what does it mean give us a sense of the story for you, maya wiley, to find your voice not to be an echo, but to be the example, ordinary figure that you are in relation that legacy, that tradition out of which you come. so talk a bit about how how you found voice and the story that you tell here. you said something so important, andy, about your own personal and your father and how you had

to go into and i think. we are all constantly to understand who we are and what our purpose is. and when you have for many of us parents, no matter what, though, sometimes we have parents who can make it very difficult for us to hear who we are, not their fault. and in the case of my parents, not their fault, they were just on these my parents were on a pedestal so high i couldn't see the top. you were a movement. maybe i was a movement, baby. and. and it was i remember i was very angry child. wow. i'm still angry, but a lot of my anger. it also what was hard about being a movement baby and all the things i didn't get because of the movement. even as i was proud, i was very of my father. i didn't understand till i was

older, proud. i needed to be of my mother because women's contributions getty raised and and because she was a woman. she very understood that she should not even to assert, nor did she want to. it wasn't her personality. you know, she wasn't doing things for accolades or for attention. she was actually very introverted. but her own contributions even to his success, quite significant because she was an activist in her own right, a strategist, his sounding board. and but i say all that because i did revere her. and when you that it's like a noise in the head it's like a noise the head that is just like and you can't be enough because you can't be them and and that the world is so bad how can you possibly do something that's

meaning in the face of this ugly and broken and bad and i say that because i, i didn't know that that was my struggle all the time. it just it was my decision to be a lawyer. that was the beginning of my journey out of that. and when i when i say that it wasn't my parents, it was me. it was in my head, right? i mean, my mother was and probably one of the ways i was able to get out of is my mother was so phenomenal about not wanting me to have him on a pedestal, like wanting me to understand he was just a he was just a man, a wonderful man, but was just a human being. and he wasn't perfect. and so her ability do that helped me, but also her ability to everybody has a way. you just have to find your way. and when i realized it law and i thought law school because even as i was i thought going law school, i wanted to be a lawyer,

wanted to be a judge. when i was a little kid, they had to because they had to power the story in a book. i won't tell you. i read a book, but but there's a story and a little kid i was like, i want to be a judge because they have the power and the power to do good. it's because i wanted to do good and i started to reject it when i realized i had to go to law school because that was the antithesis of being an activist. that was the antithesis of empowering people. that was an elite thing. and lawyers told activists what to do and what to do, and it was a bad word. and if i'm only saying that because but when i when i, i, when i really dug down and understood what i was good at and what i could contribute and what i wasn't good at, nobody had no business trying to contribute something. i wasn't good at it. then i realized no, i'm really want to be a lawyer. i really want to be a lawyer. i want to be a civil rights lawyer, and i want to be the lawyer who understands what organizing and activism is so

can serve that. so can be a tool in that toolbox. yeah. and understand that's what i am a tool and that's a good thing yeah it's like when my father understood he wanted the people impacted to be the leaders. he didn't have to be the leader, right? i mean, he was a leader, but he was also trying not to be the leader. right. and that that's, that is and that, that was being a wiley. now, that was being a white being a widely knowing your purpose and having that purpose be about people a be about something outside of yourself that feeds. but to understand it feeds you and that you have a way to utilize. you have to give whatever it is, whatever it is. so i want to transition now. we've talked about our books and individual journeys. what are we going to do with donald trump. what are we going to do with this moment in the in the session right before. us? you know, we thought we you know, we it was there was a

moment there was a question about elon musk and what about the good things and and it was a defense in some ways of the current regime. we know that 76 million americans voted for donald trump. we know that there are people who are trying to engage in an autopsy of what happened with the harris campaign and the democratic party. and and we both have serious positions that we've taken in public on the problem. where are you in your assessment of what happened and where we need to go. before i am going to that question, i want you to answer it first in the sense that i know what you i think a whole bunch of people i know, but you can't say it enough, right? so i want you to. so again, everyone is saying that, you know, inflation and

economics drove, the decision, even though philip bump just published a piece in the washington post showing that many republicans now think the economy firing on all cylinders as all of a sudden, all of a sudden, so the people are saying that is inflation, which drove that drove folks to to make this decision. folks are also saying that is the democratic party's overreach with to wokeism you know this kind of beholden to the far left. and and part of what i've been suggesting is that something else has to be at work here right. we can talk about the economy. we could talk about inflation. we could talk about pronouns and the like but there's no necessarily leadership between those grievances and disagreements and complaints and then choosing to vote for a character like donald trump. and the only reason i think people can make the leap from

eggs are too high and bridge too high to voting for. donald trump is that he gives a permission for folk to hate and blame others for their condition and so race. i don't. and so what i said is that i don't believe people who are saying that it's just inflation and the reason why people want to believe it is because they don't want to believe what the country is and they don't want to believe what's actually in them. that's what i thank you. i won't say what i usually say about elon musk, because this is being stream stream live live live. so i and i what i have been

saying in a nutshell is white supremacy. one and and all these other pieces of information are also true, right. i mean, you you have to understand that a lot of people are in pain hurting wealth inequality has been impacting people for decades now and we have not interrupted it. when you create those pain points, you know, people react in different ways. and it's true that, you know, there are you know, we can say a million things are also factually accurate, true and not unimportant about how we understand this election. but there is but we the truth is it's always multiple factors. but the fundamental dynamic and nader every single time is that refuse to address racism in it

the fact that it's a gordian with gender it is it is always has don't take us back to virginia colony. we can talk about what some of what is at the root of the anti laws and trying to dictate and control white women's reproductive freedom don't we. i mean we could do a whole historical analysis. we don't have time, but point is it is always that are you you always talk about it as the original sin. we have never repented from that original sin. and in fact, we make for it and blame victims of it. and we don't ever fully understand that class. we should under stand class and classes and the struggles of hard working people of every race around this original sin. you can't understand what white men in manufacturing are dealing if you haven't addressed

original sin, right? you. so even the way we talk about class and make it race neutral is not talking about class race. because the reason my father went and organized women are is he understood as a civil rights activist the central importance of of understanding how. it shaped all of our pain points differently but how it and the and that you couldn't cross it you couldn't organize most most women on welfare are white right hello but yet we fight the undeserving poor because we put black women's faces on it. right? that's an original sin. when we. so i'm just saying that even when i think about my my parents lesson, my parents lesson was

intersectional before it was a word right. but the fact that it had to be around power but you couldn't do it race neutrally. you couldn't understand it neutrally and you couldn't fix it. race and you still can't. and so unless we actually are willing to face down what you said, eddie, because it doesn't take away the other issues, it doesn't of course, there's crazy sexism in this country, always has been. of course there are white women who will vote their race over their gender, always has been. of course, there's an erosion in those numbers and certain communities of color because guess what? lots of things like. including the 90 million who just didn't show up because they don't think it matters. that's out of that wasn't a vote for trump necessarily. so i just want to say this. we can have multiple factors, but if we don't address the original sin is we just keep sinning, hey, man, we're going to take it to the microphone.

so please ask your questions. be succinct no testimonies. so come on. welcome to miami and thank you for coming in. my sphere of friends, we have been under induced fast. we can't listen to the news so we're so to hear your voices. but i'm just wondering, are you intimidated by the fact that small d is looking to arrest journalists? is that me would be the tipping point. no. look, i am the joseph rao, professor sir at university of detroit, columbia joseph rao was the civil rights and civil liberties attorney that represented people during mccarthyism. if we're not willing to take the

risk, we lose. yes. i'm wearing particular shirt for a particular occasion for a particular purpose because i'm an american. you have no idea which side of the aisle i voted for, but i will vote if i voted for us. and i think you can i can apply why i'm in this room for the line is no testimonials. love to do that though. real quick, lbj did phenomenal work domestically but lost the narrative with vietnam. i voted blue, but i will tell you the one issue that irked me and still irks me is the the noise and the distraction motion coming from ukraine, coming from gaza, coming from other

conflicts. the democrats have done great work this past administration, but they've lost the bully pulpit. they've lost the opportunity to do good. as you've spoken to clear i we got your response. i don't know if they lost the narrative, but they certainly may have lost the moral high ground. so we have to we have to address it. there's so much in that in that comment commentary that we would have to tease out. but there are some issues that we have to address. we got we only have, you know, we're doing live television, so we to i want to get all these questions in because democrats small d right. we want to get all these folks that come up. so ask a question. hi, my name is roberta velez and. i think one of the worst things we can do in response to the last election is to blame identity politics and sideline palestinian voices and transgender voices. so how important do you think it is to focus on an all inclusive

economic left for 2028? all inclusive is? the key look, there's there yes, it's we never are going to unless we continue to grow our tent. but we can't grow our tent by cannibalizing our young and. so and really, there is a way to have a lot of discussion about solutions that meet the needs of everyone. but we can't do it by saying we're not going to listen, not going to be responsive to not going to understand and not going to have these discussions about what those are. and we must do it. and i just want to say the other thing, the trans. transgender people did not lose anybody in election. i just want to say that out. right. and let me say this really quickly. let me say this really quickly. we don't need to be gaslighted by third way, democrats who are trying to reconceive validate their position by saying that

what we need to do is leave wokeism identity politics behind as. if they haven't been trying to present the democratic party as republican lite since, what can we just what is what is identity politics? because what i'm seeing play out in the nominations that we're seeing right now is identity politics. so don't say it's identity politics. we talk about who we are and what our needs are, but it's not identity politics. when the other side that exactly let's go to the next and every don't don't bring up merit to me after you nominate matt gaetz and pete has don't bring up marriage to me here. go ahead. so it's not my name. isn't that a super serve as the only the first four? yes. we're going to ask both of these questions really quickly so we can get them in. and then we're going to wrap up. we got 2 minutes. y'all do the original send. we talked about the original sin. we oftentimes identify as a christian nation, but in order to be saved by jesus christ, have to redeem. right? we have to to acknowledge that original sin. so what do you what do you say to those who identify as christians yet still don't want

to, you know, redeem themselves? okay. i appreciate that question. that's that's a great question. yes, my question kind of piggybacks on this as somebody that grew up in new york and thought i was so a of racism, i sitting down with my cousin's son, who is black, living in an area for mom only white and telling them, stand up for yourself. so right after that, my brother says a joke. i about blacks. and i laugh and i, holy --. like it is so suddenly in indian to me, somebody that believes that himself to be very racially conscious. my question then is how do you feel or what do you think we need to do to kind of teach people that there is this underlying racist? got it. got it. you want to we're going to we're going to give you some some of these statements in our answers to the questions. so i do think we have to be two things informed enough to do it

effectively because this is why they don't want us reading books. so why they don't want us history. but that means we do have to be able to speak about it with knowledge. i don't mean expertise i just mean but yet we have to listen first. and this is a hard thing to do in an environment like this because to find the opportunity to do that with people who we haven't. remember, there are people here who are not they may have been lost in this election cycle, but they're not lost to to what is right and good. then there's some people who. there's we want to talk there, but but there are a lot. so but you can't do that without listening to what their fears and concerns and issues are and then be able to show them within their own experience where they can see it and connect to it. and that's that's just something we have to do. we have to be willing to listen, not just to lecture, because the lecturing alone will not work

and, you know, just really quickly. so i know we got to and look, you can't be saved if you don't recognize. you're a sinner, right? so to recognize that one is a center is not to condemn one to the gallows is to release you into the possibility of being otherwise. that's the question. the second question, if we're going to address racism in any serious way, we're going to have to understand the of our hatreds. you know what people are saying around your kitchen? people knew who killed that baby emmett till because they drank with him. they played checkers with him. you know what happens in these hyper segregated environments? we're going to have to stand up in the private spaces for a better world and then we can become better people and we can figure out a different way of being together. thank you so much for everything.

we're currently in a break between events at this year's miami book fair. we'll be back shortly with more live coverage. and more point of the book because this is kind of the green beret mindset. we'll back to it. i got on a little bit of a you know, a little bit of a frustrated solo there. you know, i asked again, we specialize in unconventional warfare, unconventional thinking. i once asked the senior official

at the air force who was coming to the committee for more bomber, said, look, i absolutely support pre-positioning more in guam or other locations back to the indo-pacific. i said, but what gets inside? beiji thinking? what gets their decision more a few more stealth bombers or another hong kong or even the potential a weaker uprising or, you know, it started kind of going down that list because the thing whether it's the ayatollahs, iran or in beijing, the thing they fear, the most of their own people. and if we have them looking internally or even can it, i'm not for, you know, everybody watching, calling for regime change or anything along those lines. but when you have people like masa, the little the girl who was murdered by the ayatollah as a virtue to police for not

wearing a hijab, a head covering, and it sparked a national uprising. and these people are begging for even some type of rhetorical support from the united states. much less like encrypted apps. starlink or other things. iran has a lot less energy to muck around abroad. they're looking internally at their own folks. and we from moral standpoint, should be supporting these people. we did it in the cold war. those dissidents, whether it's a solider or any movement or inside the soviet union, were household names that we absolutely supported. and why aren't we taking that more unconventional approach now? i also tell a story about an afghan elder that i had been working with the better part of a year. like my teeth were brown from drinking so much tea. what this man. and he kept going on and on. he commanded a pretty large militia i was trying to win over to our side about his secret

weapons. oh, commander mike. my secret weapons. this is how. we're going to defeat the extremists. this is how we're to win this war. this is the long term approach. and eventually i kind of had to call him to the carpet because i didn't know he had stinger missiles or what. and he said he says, okay, okay, commander, i'll bring out my secret weapons. and he sent somebody the back and i hear a bunch of rustling. i know what he's going to bring out. you know, it walked out. his two daughters and one of the most conservative taliban and run parts of afghanistan. i'd never seen a woman outside of a burka completely uncovered in their late teens twenties. he was smuggling them over back and forth to india to get educated as doctors and. and, you know, he said, i'll take a battalion of them. this guy was completely illiterate, by the way. i mean, he was a he was a boss. he said, this is how you undermine al qaeda and icis in

the town. and then when women like then, are running this country, when they're in in islamabad and in tehran and in kabul, that's how, you know, when the extremists are defeated. and it just it's that of ideas, right. that i thought was so powerful. but you know, that our default washington is to throw more money, more tanks, planes and ships or divisions at a problem. and that's the kind of thinking i try to get to. and hard truths they can lead like a green beret to about these problems differently. and so thinking about these problems, i mean, obviously there's the election and you're on the short list of names for secretary of defense. if if dieppe or everyone everyone i'm talking to. and so at least, i mean, you just you know, you're you've close to the former president. you spoke the rnc. you know, obviously in the book you mentioned that you had multiple meetings with them and you shared your advice with them

and you took some of your advice and listened to you. mm hmm. so under a trump administration, if you're in the administration now, what would you see. what would be the some of the major shifts that you do? you don't go all the way around the world. but what would be some of the big things that you would suggest push for that could get at some of this move, public diplomacy or as you said, like starlink's an iran things like that. what could be should the states do in the near term? well, number one, i'll just tell you, in the engagement with him, you know, there's this narrative there that, you know, he's he's stubborn and obstinate and, you know, knows kind of that the right answer his way or the highway. it's all of my experience would have been complete opposite constant asking questions, constantly seeking input. what do you think about this? what do think about that? the frustration talk to some in his administration. they think he's made up his mind and then he talks to somebody else again. and and and and changes it. so he really does kind of espouse one of the attributes i talk about that bottoms up

leadership and constantly seeking input and ideas and and but then you know in terms of what difference i think you'll see accountability again which we've seen far too little of particularly such debacles as the afghanistan withdrawal. not a single person fired, not even like laterally transferred. in fact some are being promoted that were in charge. and i tell the story, you know, his instincts are often so right. and then he leaves it to others for the details. and his instinct was, hey, we can't be one on earth if we're number two in space. and once he was really briefed on what the chinese and russians are doing up there to militarize space, to be able to take out our entire economy, which is dependent on space, much the military's ability to operate the world. gps, global communications and what have you. he said, well, we need our own forced and defended the space force. everybody fun. everybody mocked it.

you remember the netflix series with adam carolla and what have you? well look, there were people that were resistant even as our own air force secretary. she was fired a lot of people said that was really mean. but you know what the generals got on board real fast, got the message and i think now even just a few years in hindsight, we see that actually that was very prescient. how well working with the private sector and commercial and how critical that new space force is, because that absolutely is the future and we can't continue to dominate or be a leader economically or militarily if we don't, if we don't control our space assets. so that's the kind of, you know, i think, approach, which oftentimes that is is that is needed, you know, on the 80th, 80th anniversary of d-day. and i hate to call it an anniversary, but we did a bit this evening on this and just

the sheer magnitude of of what happened on that day, it's shocking. it's like one of the most humbling things. and we as were writing this segment, everybody was it was very emotional about it. and i think that more people on a single day in normandy than died in the entire iraq war of 20 years. and when you sit back and you think about that, you have 430,000 americans died in world war two. 54 total, 54 million total people died that day. that's 3% at the time of the world's population gone in, a world war and you can't say it enough. you can't look back and you can't teach history enough about that. but unfortunately, it's being stripped out. our culture today and anything that is not popular, anything that's not politically correct, anything that doesn't fit a progressive narrative is being pushed further and further and further out of our curriculum. and that's why i wrote this book.

it's you know, not it's not a hard read in the that it's short stories about pivotal people some you've heard of, some you haven't heard of. and it doesn't allow people to whitewash history, you know, and everybody's heard the story of some of the key founding fathers, george washington, ben franklin, like that. they they did fantastic things. people behind them also did amazing things to influence these people to make them become the people they are today. i have a high school wrestling coach who i dedicated the book to. his name's brad wallace, and i lived my entire life by one phrase that he told me he was my coach from junior as a sophomore year to senior and he said never half --, whole --, everything. i said, that's a pretty good thing. so i live my entire life by that phrase. probably about two years ago when i started writing this book, i told him, i said, hey, brad, you know, like that phrase really stuck me is, what the hell are you talking? and he had no idea told me that phrase. so i was like, okay, from the heart, i guess.

no, but but those are the people. there's always someone behind. somebody who influences them, and they don't always get the credit. and in this book, i talk a little bit about some of the people behind the big people made all the waves, the change this nation, but also the fun stories that you're not going to hear about like ben, you know, i named my son after him. yeah. because ben was a g. he was not here at all during the revolutionary war. he was over fornicating with booze and hookers in who, quite frankly, him and hunter biden might get along just fine, but he was over in france. but he was also getting us all the guns to win the revolutionary war. we never we never would have won the revolutionary war without ben franklin and. you know, people know him for the hundred dollar bill on electricity. i mean, who stands out in a lightning with a key? but whatever you george washington, a ulysses s grant, who was obviously during the civil war, i mean, he was the only president to ever get arrested twice, actually, on

horseback drinking as president. so him and trump get along great these days. but these people really made a mark on society. and we have we have a culture now that is trying to strip everything history out of our thinking, out of our, i guess, the repertoire of our kids growing up. and, you know, i have three kids. i don't want them grow up in a world that forgets some of the greatest moments. but i also don't want them to forget the worst moments, because the worst moments in life are the ones that shape the best as a wrestler, high school and college. i always tell people that the most i learned was from the matches i lost. and if we erase those stories, we're doomed to repeat it. you know, every country through the history, every, i should say, every country, every empire, through the history of the world, has always had some sort of downfall. you know, is america next? i sure hope not. can we fix?

well, if we learn from history, we but every single society, when they've gotten weaker and weaker and weaker, they've become this problem. there's a saying that actually we had a general on this evening who took the words right out of my mouth and he said, you know, hard times, great hard men, hard men create good times, good times, great soft men, soft men, great hard times. and the only way we can stop that cycle is is teaching the history, teaching what made this great? the honestly, the greatest country in the world and gave us the resolve to to do all the things that we get to do here. i mean, we have such privileges and such rights here that most people will never know. you know, 50% of the country doesn't have 50% of the world, doesn't have clean drinking water. and we decide which starbucks we want to go to every day and it's an anomaly. this piece we enjoy is not the norm war is the norm. peace is something that is generated through being stronger than everybody else. our live coverage of the miami

book fair continues now. but right now. good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. may i take your seats. settle in. it's going to be a great event. my name is beverly moore garcia, and i work for miami-dade and i am the president of the doral and homestead campuses of miami-dade college. i'd like to start by offering some points of gratitude. i am incredibly grateful. be part of the miami book fair. i think what an amazing event in

miami. a round of applause for the miami book fair. i'm very grateful for the miami dade college family and volunteers and especially for our sponsors. they include the green family foundation, nicholas children's hospital, amazon, j.w. marquis and brickell, and all our other supporters. i would also like to thank our friends of the fair members friends receive multiple benefits. please consider a friend, membership or a gift for a family member that you love because you want them to have this experience. as we work to ensure the future of your book fair, please consider supporting miami book fair with contribution to our next decade fund visit friends and family table or our website for more information.

a little bit of how is keeping please your cell phones on silent. our authors will start to take questions at about 135. at time you'll see me standing in the middle of the row here by microphone. and that's your cue. get up and ask your burning question. however, will only have about 10 minutes for questions. so as i said in the previous session, if you're number ten in line, chances are you're not to have a chance to ask a question. but when we finish 145, when you exit and turn to the left, you will see our authors and their books. with no further ado, it is my pleasure to introduce rosario lazard. she is a law professor author and director of a being program

for law students. fsu college of. her pioneering in wellbeing mind, fullness and legal education has been recognized by the associate shawn of american law schools and the american bar association, among others. professor lozada earned her law and undergraduate degrees from university of notre dame, and she will formally interest authors. enjoy. good afternoon. welcome. on this beautiful day, a few proud to sponsor the miami book fair. the university's dedicated to creativity and community engagement values, which align perfectly with the mission of today's event. i use privilege to support a celebration of stories, ideas and voices from around the world. but let me get to our authors,

max boot is a columnist with the washington post and author, most recently of reagan his life and legend, which the new yorker magazine called. the definitive biography on the 40th president. max's previous work, a biography. the road not taken. edward lansdale. the vietnam tragedy was a finalist for the pulitzer prize in biography. max is a senior fellow for the national security studies at the council on foreign relations and the former op ed editor of the wall street journal. carlos lozada is an opinion columnist at the new york times and winner of the pulitzer prize for criticism. he is the author of what were we thinking an intellectual history of trump era and, most recently, the washington book how to read politicians and politics. he's co-host of the weekly

podcast matter of opinion and a visiting professor of public discourse at the university of notre dame. i should note both our authors immigrants who came to the as children, max from russia and carlos from and both have been honored as great immigrants by the carnegie corporation of new york. i also have fess up that i have been a fan of carlos's since he was born and that. 1974 we immigrated together to the u.s. because, you guessed it, he's my brother. and i want to give a quick shout out to the proud mama in the front row that. your mom. let's give our amazing authors a welcome with a round of applause applause.

good afternoon. hi. so, words it to be here. max and i are going to sort of each talk about our book for a little bit and then engage each other with questions and then open it up to your questions. so, max, it's a delight to be here with you. an honor i've been i was reading boot since before it was like as cool as it is today, back when he was just an amazing historian of warfare. so, max, why don't you tell us about your reagan biography? great. well, thank you very much, carlos. it's truly a pleasure to be here with a writer for whom i have such great respect and really one of the leading, if the leading writers on on the subject of books in america. and you know, there's a lot of aspects of ronald reagan. one could talk about, i think in honor of carlos as a book subject. i'm going to talk a little bit about reagan as a communicator.

but first, i want to the question that that i get asked often. so even if you don't ask it, i'm going to it. and it's a it's a pleasure to be back with all of you here today. but the question is, you know, why did i this book aren't there and maybe this actually goes to carlos, the subject as well. aren't there enough reagan books out there already? kind of the implicit subtext of what i often get asked and you know the answer is when i started, i started this book, you know, more than ten years ago. and when i started, there were certainly a lot of reagan books out there, and some are even pretty good books about we really missing, i thought was a definitive biography that really provided an objective and balanced account of ronald reagan's long and important life. and that's that's something that's a gap on the bookshelf that i set out to fill to write something that was hagiography

nor nor hit job. something that presented both reagan's successes as well his failures his as well as his weaknesses. and so i've been, you know, very delighted and gratified to see the critical reaction, which is as as as as we just noted, the new yorker calling it the definitive and others saying that, you know, giving me kind of my my mission accomplished moment and in an ironic sense. you know, the other question i get asked most often is, you know, what did what did you learn about reagan? what was surprising about reagan? the answer is there's a lot. but i think in the in the big picture, i guess what surprised me the most was both how ideological reagan could be as well as how pragmatic he could be. and i think to understand

somebody like ronald reagan, you have to really be comfortable with paradox and and contradictions. and this is one of the central paradoxes and contradictions of his life that, yes, he was ideological. and you know, he went from being a new deal democrat who voted for fdr four times in a very ardent new dealer in the 1930s and forties, to somebody who by the early 1960s was a very right wing republican and, of course, burst on to national political scene, giving his his time for choosing address on behalf of barry goldwater in 64. and, you know, people forget just how radical reagan was by the early 1960s that he was, you know, claiming that every piece of social welfare legislation was going to lead america to communism. he was claiming that medicare and medicaid would be the end of freedom in america. he called it socialized medicine. he also had a weakness, as i discovered in the course of my

book research for quoting these apocryphal quotes attributed to communist leaders explaining their dastoor the plot to destroy freedom america by advancing social welfare legislation, often with from the likes of lenin and bukhara and stalin and others, all of which had one thing in common. they were phony, they were made up. these were largely these were largely concocted by the john birch society to impugn democrats as being, you know, traitors and with with the soviet union and reagan eagerly repeated this stuff in the early 1960s. so in many ways, you know, you can say that they're you can see the continuity in the republican party from from those days when in 1960, for example, reagan actually wrote a letter to richard nixon talking about his his his political opponent john f kennedy saying underneath that tousled haircut is the same old

marxist idea. so he was calling john f kennedy a marxist, even though by any, you know, reasonable interpretation, kennedy was actually a very conservative democrat who was a staunch cold warrior, opposing communist designs. so, you know, you can kind of see the continued d from the days of the early 1960s to to today, you know, with a certain presidential candidate impugning his opponent as, comrade carmela. so this has been a consistent theme of republican oratory for, you know, more than 60 years. but the surprising thing about reagan is not that he said these things, but that he acted in a very different fashion once he got into office and once once he was elected governor of california in 1966 and president of the united states in 1980. and sure there were aspects of his of policies that were very right wing. for example, in the in 1960. and i know the national guard into my alma mater, uc berkeley,

deal with the people's park demonstrations or as president, you know, trying to roll civil rights legislation. but on the whole, i think what's striking about reagan as both governor and president is just how moderate actually was and how successful and how pragmatic. in fact, i actually asked jerry brown, who was the son of pat brown, the man that reagan beat to become governor of california in 1966. and, of course, succeeded reagan as governor california in the 1970s. i asked jerry brown said, how would you assess ronald reagan as president? as governor, rather? and jerry brown said he was a pretty good governor, which is not what you would expect to hear from a liberal democrat. but willie brown, longtime california democrat, speaker of the assembly, mayor of san francisco, said the same thing to me. reagan was pretty good governor. and why do they say that? because he was he moved away from his his ideology in many respects. he signed one of the most liberal abortion laws the country. he signed a tough gun bill. he excoriated, you know, college

campuses for supposedly being full of beatniks and hippies. and yet he expanded funding for higher education even by 136%. and he consistently made deals with jesse unruh, who was the powerful speaker of the california assembly democrat, just as later in washington. he consistently made deals with tip and the democrats in washington and as both governor and president. sure, he cut taxes, but he also increased taxes as president he signed a law that legalized of undocumented immigrants. and his greatest achievement of all in his second term as president, working with mikhail gorbachev to peacefully in the cold war and reduce the level of nuclear armaments. that is not something you would expect from somebody like ronald reagan, who had been such a staunch carter's political career. in fact, he basically got his start in politics in the late forties, early fifties as president of the screen actors guild in the mccarthy era when he was an fbi informant administering the the blacklist in hollywood before the house un-american affairs committee.

and yet, despite a a lifetime of anti-communist dogma, he was able to see that gorbachev was a different kind of communist, somebody he could do business with, margaret thatcher told him. and they established a working relationship that made it possible to eliminate intermediate range nuclear missiles and the stage for the fall of the berlin and the collapse of the soviet union at a time when many on the right, including reagan's own defense secretary, caspar weinberger, were telling him, you can't trust gorbachev, but yet reagan decided otherwise. and i think that that reagan gorbachev truly, truly history. and that was the ultimate tribute to his pragmatism. so, you know, if you compare reagan to republicans today, you can see a lot of commonalities or not a lot, but some commonalities in terms of their rhetoric on the campaign trail. but i think the differences that reagan was able to pivot once in office away from rhetoric towards actually more centrist and pragmatic policies.

and i think that accounts for why he was relatively successful as governor and as president, notwithstanding he certainly had his share of and setbacks, including as president, the failure to address the aids pandemic or his opposition to strict sanctions on on south africa, or, of course, the iran-contra, one of the worst scandals. and in the modern american presidency. but despite of that, i think he was able to to be fairly successful, to work across partizan lines, to bridge differences and to and, you know, achieve something that today seems almost mythical and impossible, which was in 1984, he won 49 out of 50 states. and an amazing achievement that may never be be replicated but an example of how he was able to to be so successful. and i just want to before turning it over to carlos, i just want to very briefly address the subject of reagan as communicator, because that's kind of what the subject of carlos's book and, you know, he was often known as the great

communicator, but often a somewhat disparaging subtext to say that this was just a guy who knew how to read a teleprompter. and there's no question he was very good at reading a teleprompter. but he was far more than that. he was who throughout most of his career was writing his own speeches, not just delivering them. and he really learned the art. in the 1950s, when he was working for electric as host of general electric theater, as a spokesman for g.e., and that was a very important period for a variety of reasons for his political evolution, because g.e. in those days was a very conservative company, and they really foisted a lot of political materials on their employees. they saw promulgating free market dogma as being an inoculation against union troubles, essentially. and so reagan really imbibed a lot, his conservatism from his days working edgy, but he also learned how to be such an effective public speaker. and he came up with a with a system of index cards and he

would have these index cards he would write down facts or quotations, not always accurate, but things that he wanted to say and arguments and then he would shuffle his index cards before giving a speech. he never gave the same speech twice and that as he was going through the index cards, he would be watching the audience, seeing people reacted. and if something resonate it, it stayed in the pile and if it didn't resonate, it won in the trash can. and so by that kind of method of trial and error, he came up with a very effective speech, largely excoriating big government. and that was actually the basis of his legendary time for choosing speech 1964 on behalf of barry goldwater, that wasn't something it struck the nation out of the blue, but it hadn't come out of the blue. it actually came out of a decade of preparation and basically time as a politician in training on behalf of g.e. and so that, you know, was really and even

before his communication skills as a radio broadcast actor, as an actor, all of it being put to good use. and of course, by when reagan became president, he was once asked how an actor could be president. and his reply was he didn't understand how anybody, an actor could be president. and that was that was one of the secrets of his success. max. that was fascinating i what you mentioned about how reagan would respond to crowd and see what what you know, enjoyed hearing what was resonating. and then that would stay in the speech that has real echoes today. that is very much how how donald trump operated in 2016 when he was sort of starting out in the rallies. the reason the wall became such a theme is because he saw how how visceral the response was from from the crowds. so actually, i think this is a

very fortuitous pairing because. i'm i'm fascinated by these these of communication. i've been a journalist and washington for almost exactly five years now. and yet i have to confess, in that period, i you know, i don't i don't cover press conferences, don't go to campaign rallies. i don't meet secret sources in parking garages. you know, the way i try to cover washington by reading, reading kind of books that that that max produces, i read, you know political histories and manifestos and and biographies. i read a lot of government documents, you know, special counsel reports, commission reports, congressional inquiries. and i read a lot of books about politicians and by politicians, i read the sort of glossy memoirs publish when they're trying to. reach high office. the revisionist memoirs they publish when they leave high office. you know and and often when

people hear that's how i that's how i spend days, you know, i make a living like reading by politicians. i get this kind of sad look, you know, and people say, guess, thank you for reading those books on our behalf, you know, so that we don't have to read, you know, political and. the implication of that is that these books aren't very right, that they're especially i don't mean books like the ones max read. i mean kind of like political memoirs. right. that they're they'll surface they'll self-serving. they're they're propagandistic or they're just lies. and i understand that critique. but i think it kind of misses the point of of what these books have to offer. i wrote a prior book four years ago that rosie mentioned about trying to examine the trump era through all books written about it. and read about 150 different books that explained different of the first trump presidency. and i was working at the washington post at the time, and the new york times gave it a very nice review. i was very pleased.

but they said that my reading all those other books was an act of transcendent masochism, like that was that was the line that that's how even even the august new york times that it must be like to read political books and again, i think that misses the point and for me, what's so valuable about these of books and this is what i try to write about in in my own book, is no matter how carefully politicians scrub their records and sanitize lives, matter how diligent they are about presenting themselves in the most electable or confirmable light, they always end revealing themselves. they always let something slip. that tells you something, not just their policies or their strategies, but about their character. and that's what i look for. and in the books and the political books that i read, a lot of my colleagues in the political, you know, they give you like the five takeaways from so-and-so's book and like, that stuff is great. it's useful, you know, and it's like, you know what scores this is politician settle or who does he or she? that's not the stuff i'm i'm looking for.

i'll give you just a few examples of the kind of things that i focus on when. i'm trying to read these political books, washington books, and i'll be bipartisan. i'll i'll pick from republicans and and from democrats. barack obama wrote three books and i really think his best book will always be his first, no matter what else he writes. the future dreams of my father as, a book he wrote when no one was looking. and that's a good rule of thumb. the closer politician is to his or her time in office. the the book is the the more removed it is added long before long after, the better. it tends to be. but when i think of obama, i don't even think of one of his books. i think of a book by a low level aide, a guy named reggie love, who was his body man, the guy who carries his bags and made sure he got his appointments and stuff and it's called power forward. and he mentions in that book that during the oh eight campaign he forgot to bring obama's briefcase onto the plane when they were headed somewhere. and that's like a huge i mean

take your one job is to like make sure he's there with his stuff and so you thought he's going to get fired. obama kind gave him a hard time, but he forgave him and he just mentioned one of the reasons that he he was annoyed about the missing bag and said, you know, he like to be seen stuff off the plane. he said jfk carried his bags. right. and just that line alone. right. obama saying oh seven, obama right. it just told me so much about how carefully he was thinking about and his public image right. and i was even relying on sort of myths surrounding our most mythologized president or one of them, you know to start building the aura around himself. right. and just that line is the one thing i remember from reggie loves book, right. i'll move briefly to to donald trump. donald trump has written has published many books and, you know, the most famous one is the art of the deal which was his first. but when think about his

writings, i think about a book he published in 2000 for called how to get rich. he had lots of these kind self advocate, you know, self-help financial advice books as well. in addition to various memoirs and in how to get rich. he has this passage where he talks about his hair and it's actually, i think, very, very i'm going to i'm going to pick it up. you here because i don't i can't remember it offhand. he says the reason my hair looks so neat all the time is because i don't have to deal with elements. i live in the building where i work. think about that. i take an elevator from my bedroom to my office. the rest the time. i'm either in my stretch limo, my private, my helicopter, or my private club. palm beach. right. so just think about that description of his life, right? a political reporters tell us that the the white house puts puts presidents in in a bubble. right. sort of isolates them from the world. but just reading that passage,

you see that donald trump was in a bubble of his own making long before he ever came to washington. right. surrounded by people who depended on him, who worked on him acolytes and that kind of isolation that deliberately constructed isolation, lets you start believing you want to believe about yourself. and so for me, out of the many, many books donald trump like, that's the passage that i remember. i'll mention briefly mike pence. mike pence wrote a memoir in 2022 called so me god. thank you, whoever. thank you, sir. and you know, he takes victory lap about the events of january six where he he didn't go along with the effort to decertify the election. i don't know how how i feel about that victory lap. i don't know that you get full credit for saving democracy from the brink. if you kind of put it there in the first place, maybe credit for sure. but there's a moment in that

book where he's quoting the president, his boss, donald trump, on january, and he's quoting the video message that trump gave when he finally told the rioters to leave the capitol. right. and and see if i can. yeah. and here's how pence quotes trump in pence's own book. i know your pain. i know your hurt. dot, dot. but you have to go home now. we have to have peace. and you can read right past that or you can stop and think, what did pence skip with that little ellipses right in that quote? so i looked up the video and i saw that trump did say all that. but it's all he said in between there. he we had an election that was stolen us. it was a landslide election. everyone knows it, especially the other side. only did he go on to say, but you have to go home now we have to have peace. right. so even when he's putting down his message for history. right. mike pence, when he's saying like this is what happened this is what i saw. he's still covering for the boss. you know, even on a day when,

you know, he was some danger. right. and and that that attitude that sort of civility just, again, is the one thing i remember from mike pence's book. like so much of his vice president, for me, his vice presidency is captured in three little dots in in that passage. i'll end with the recent presidential kamala harris, who has published two memoirs i want to know nine one in 2019 and in her 2019 memoir, which was just when she was running for president the first time. there's this phrase she keeps coming back to just this kind of tick, and that is that she to many situations as false choices. she'll say, for example, you know, people that, you know, i either to be you know, i'm in favor of the police or i have to help people by police brutality, false choice for both. you know, people accuse me of caring too much about undocumented immigrants versus american citizens. false choice. i care for both.

and that that's fine. i think there are things in life and in politics that that are false choices. and it sounds very kind of sage and thoughtful to say something is a false choice. but so much of politics is, in fact, about making really tough among competing priorities. right? not everything is zero sum, but almost everything involves some kind of tradeoff. and i think that when when i think about harris and i think about both the difficulty she had in carving a very clear as vp and also some of the difficulty and really making clear her positions as a nominee for president, i think about that reliance on false choice. she doesn't like being pinned down, having to make difficult choices. so she says they aren't real. one of my favorite books on politics is called speechwriter by this guy named barton swain, who had the misfortune to be the for governor mark sanford of south carolina, who you may remember was governor who disappeared for a few days, said he was hiking the appalachian

when he was actually hanging out with his wife, girlfriend in and in barton swaim, this writer worked for him and was a speechwriter for didn't write that speech, but wrote all the others. and, you know, he has this interesting conclusion about about the the use of truth in in political speech, in political. and because everyone says, oh, these guys just lie all the time. right. and says one hears very few proper lies and politics using, vague, slippery or just meaningless language is not the same as lying. it's unintended deceive so much as to preserve options to buy time to distance himself from others or to just sound like you're saying something instead of nothing. right. and that, you know, i've sort of found my mission statement in in that passage. right. because i feel if if the art of politics is to subtract meaning from language, then my job as a as a as a book critic or as

columnist as a reader of political text is to try to scoop up that meaning being drained out of words and to jam it back in. and so that's what this is an attempt to to do. and i assure you my experience of reading political books is not masochistic at all. so. so you want to take questions or you want to. we have time for. yeah. and i'm not sure what our yeah. short list. yeah. we can take questions. yeah, go ahead. it's 130. that's good. okay hi. my name's sort of ridiculous. i really appreciate this presentation, and i really enjoyed a topic i wanted to ask for both of you with recent movies like reagan 2024, starring quaid and the apprentice, 2024 starring sebastian, stan do you feel like

historical biographical films about american can ever truly be faithful and objective without incorporating our own unconscious bias against those figures? would you want for max? would you want your book to be adapted into a film? if who would you want as the director? well, no author says no to being to having his his his book adapted for for the for for the film. i mean, i confess have not actually seen the reagan movie because i've been too busy promoting my reagan book to actually see the movie. but just reading it, which is maybe not the best to learn about it, does seem like it's a fairly dimensional, very, very positive portrait of reagan. and to be sure, there were certainly a lot of positive aspects of his life. i mean, i think there's a reason why in a poll of historians he was rated a couple of years ago as the number nine president in u.s. history, because i think he does have real achievements. but i don't think you can just look at the positive and ignore

all the negative. and there's also a lot of negative. well, and i think it's it's it's you know, i think you have successful movies that try to grapple with the reality of who that person was. and i think of, you know, for example, the lincoln, for example, or or or or others, i mean, of the most successful ones are completely like, you know, all the all the presidents, all the all the king's men. about the kingfish or. you know, obviously a lot of great political movies like all the president's men. but in terms of biopics, presidents probably it's hard for me to think of great ones just because i think there is kind of a tendency to to kind of flatten and simplify and and and the kind of the the route of least resistance is to present kind of a heroic picture of of that president. whereas again, the reality is very few people are all good or

all bad. they're usually a combination of things and presidents probably magnified to the to the nth degree. and i, i certainly a complexity that i try to capture in my book. but i, i, you know, i think very to to get that on film. i'll just add thing about that in terms recommendations i think that the paul giamatti's version of john adams i think was an hbo miniseries a few years ago i thought was was was excellent. but i think it's like max and i live in the world of sort of like, you know, books and the the, the written word. and i think we can't underestimate the impact that, not just these kinds of of movies that you highlight, but also just what like television film due to politics, like there is probably no trump presidency without the apprentice, right? without like, you know, these all these years of the american public, you know, learning about this version of trump that was not quite the sort of the, you

know, the successful businessmen just take charge guy. you still you still see interviews of voters and the like. and so many people are are affected by that, that portrayal. and i think it's it's it's a critical for for politics which reagan, you know, articulated more better than anyone else when saying like how could anyone an actor be president. i thank you so much. really appreciate it. yeah. and keep in mind, trump and reagan were both individuals who hosted nationally televised shows before becoming president. and that was very important. their success in both cases. maybe oprah will have chance. i'm a neurologist and. it's clinically obvious that reagan's dementia showed up. actually showed up and was obvious in second term. who covered it up? who were the principal cover uppers? well, that's kind of like, when did you stop eating your wife?

question. i mean, it may be possible that his his dementia did show up in a second term. i, i actually leaned the other way after looking into this and including talking to his neurologist at the mayo clinic, who actually treated him and i think what he me was that and maybe you can confirm i think it's very hard to tell in the early stages of dementia, of alzheimer's, you know, what is the normal aging process? what is what is the actual disease. and i found there is no question that reagan slowing down when he was in a second term in office. but unlike if you look you know, for example, at his diary in his handwriting, in his diary, it remained pretty clear and firm from beginning to the end. and even you know, even even after he left office in 1994, when he was actually diagnosed with alzheimer's, even at that point, he was able on the spur of the moment to, sit down and compose a beautiful to the american public, talking about how he was writing now into the sunset of his life. and it was beautifully and

certainly by that point, he was already having a lot of episodes. he was, you know, very befuddled and lost. but, you know, he still had his wits about him to be able to do that. and i think my general conclusion from from talking to a lot of people worked with him very was that and from talking to the actual doctor the the alzheimer's specialist who treated him that he probably was not manifesting dementia while office but certainly slowing and not as active and in governance as he had been at beginning of his presidency. and even then, of course, was a very disengaged manager. i my information from somebody who was in his cabinet and said it was definite. well, i talked to a lot of people in his cabinet too, but opinions will differ. first of all, thanks for being here. just really quick with mr. lozada. you already signed my books. i'm not going to get into it too much, but huge fan from your time in the washington post going forward.

so i really appreciate you being here. and it's interesting because barton swain, i think is kind of a trump apologist now and writings, but we'll get into that still wrote a great book. oh, it's a fantastic book. it's honestly one of my favorites as well. max i've read all your books going back to savage wars, peace. and my question and and paid for them full price, too. but my my question to you is, is i think our ideological journey is more or less the same. i'm not going to say that this was my favorite reagan book. i think definitely cradle to grave. it is definitive in terms his story. my question is how different would this book have been if writing it, if trump wouldn't have happened? that's a great question. and, you know, i i'm generally as know, not a huge fan of of president elect trump, but i will give him credit for one thing, which is for nudging me, out of the republican party, i

reregistered as an independent the day after the 2016 election. and i think that was very much to my own benefit as a writer and historian. i'm somebody who grew up as as i, you know, have written about i grew up as as a fan of ronald reagan as a as a young republican and, as was mentioned, you know, you know, i came the u.s. with my family in 1976 from the soviet union. and so like a lot of emigres from communist countries, a lot of folks from a country, not too far from florida, i tended to gravitate the right side of the political spectrum. and so thrilled when reagan was calling out the evil empire and, saying, mr. gorbachev, tear down this wall and. so reagan made me, you know, a republican or helped to make me a republican in the 1980s. and then i was involved in, you know, working at the wall street journal editorial page and serving as a foreign policy adviser to republican presidential candidates, etc., etc.

but, you know, i don't think there's sort of been nearly as good of a book. if i were still in kind of my republican bubble, which and again, that's why i'm thanking donald trump for nudging me out of that bubble and allowing me to see ronald reagan in republican party in recent history. i think with greater objectivity and i would have it possible for me in the days i was, you know, a republican partizan. thank you. for mr. boot. what would reagan have have made of trump? and if were politically active from 2016 to now, what what part what role do you think he would have played in the trump phenomena? would he be like the kinzinger or liz cheney or would he have somehow gone along? and the other thing is what a counter for his shift from new dealer to, the staunch anti such

policies. those are those are both great questions going to spend the bulk of my time on the second rather than the first because i think it's very hard to know it's very hard to channel ronald reagan and say what he would say about about current politics, except he would probably be very surprised by what has befallen the republican or the way the republican party has changed. but this was actually your second question as one near and dear to my heart is how did ronald reagan become, a republican, in the first place? because that's in many ways the central mystery of his life. and the answer that he always gave was completely even false. he said, i did not desert my party. my party deserted me to suggest that the democrats had suddenly veered far to the left and he had stayed in the center completely and untrue because in fact, the democrats in the 1950s, when he was moving to the right the democrats were actually pretty conservative in those years. again, in 1960, john f kennedy ran to richard nixon's right on defense and foreign policy. so it wasn't the democrats shifting. it was reagan.

and i. i trace the evolution beginning world war two one as a highly paid movie actor. he was irate at having to pay rates of income taxation of about 90% on his income and then in the years immediately after the war, when his movie career was on the wane, he was getting more, as i mentioned briefly on the in the hothouse politics of much of hollywood in the mccarthy era, becoming an fbi informant, testifying before the house un-american committee, administering the blacklist, he was convinced largely by the fbi and other right wingers that there was this communist plot to take over hollywood, that he was preventing the kremlin from controlling the american movie, which, as i show in the book, vastly exaggerated, largely mythical, was no huge communist plot to take over hollywood. but reagan it. and that made him into a staunch conservative. and then as i mentioned earlier, it was really his time as a spokesman. in the 1950s, i completed his transformation into a right winger who espoused free market

ideology. and that was really a core bedrock of what he learned working for a guy. and then ultimately, as i mentioned before, becoming almost conspiratorial and fairly extreme in his views. by the early 1960s. before then moderating and moving to the center as as a as governor and president. and, you know, i'm sure he was actually became so moderate that i that i would suspect that if he were still alive, he would be written off as a rino as a republican in name only. he would be so much at odds with the current republican party on issues like immigration, because he was very pro-immigration, free trade, very pro free trade naito very pro naito, very pro standing up to russia. and it would be inconceivable to me that ronald reagan today be criticizing u.s.a, ukraine, for example, whatever else. i don't know what else he would think, but i'm sure he would be in favor of resisting russian imperial. we have two more minutes. so just let's have these questions be fairly quick. okay thank mr. booth. there is such enormity of data you needed to this book.

all the people to date. just can you tell us a little bit about how you did it? did you write research first and then write or write and researched? you have 30 costco tables full data and papers, or was it all did you write every day? did you have office or did you write at home? i'm assuming for me, yeah. yeah. i mean, i my my was i began with oral history interviews. i was very cognizant that a lot of the people i needed to talk to might not be around forever. in fact, quite a few of them are no longer around. folks like george schultz or colin powell or many others who were very instrumental in reagan's and career. so i, i talked to roughly 100 of those folks and then moved to spending a lot of time at the reagan library in simi valley, california, where i learned to test my my tolerance for boredom because there were an awful lot of documents that are produced by any u.s. administration. and as one of my biographical heroes, bob caro says, turn every page.

you've got to turn all the pages. and doing so can often be a very stupid buying experience because it's extremely boring. read most of these things. but then, like every 20 minutes you're kind of jolted awake and see something that is of great interest and that winds up in the book. and so this was about a ten year process and it was after about probably about seven or eight years that i started writing, which took a couple of years to produce the first draft of the book. and and, you know, then another revisions and now on the most important part of it all, the book tour. so i was wondering if you can comment on reagan's frame of mind after losing the 1976. nomination nomination. you. yeah, well, he came very close to 1976. i mean, it was funny because we were talking earlier about learning from your audience. and one of the things that he learned from his audience was it was very popular. denounce the panama canal treaties.

he