share of memorization and regurgitation often is the building block to then trying to sort out a problem of medical education and has been criticized for a longer. i think any of us have been on this earth. and i remember a long time ago when i was in medical school, you know, the the latest iteration of people parachuted in to try and medical education tried to make us more ethical. and there had been iterations and there have been subsequent. it's it's a real challenge. the thing to understand about medical school curricula and about law school curricula, people have absolute property rights in getting teach the same class next year that taught the preceding year and. they look that way because the people who are making those decisions are convinced that that is what someone needs to

learn in order to be a good doctor, whether they're correct or not is a very different question than whether they have the ability to veto. so any new entrants or when we return now to live coverage of the 2024 miami book fair right, right. no, no. and then. left and right. got to where we think your. yes, mr. radio. i never was authority before. thank you well good afternoon my name is beverly moore garcia, and i serve as the campus of the doral and campuses of miami-dade. welcome to. the miami book fair.

i've started each of my remarks with item of gratitude. i think that's we should come into the world. i think every event should start with something positive. i am happy for the weather. i am happy for the pi. yeah, i just finished and i'm that you are here. i'm very grateful for our sponsors they include the green family foundation. nicholas children's hospital, amazon john j.w. merritt marquez and brickell and, all our other sponsors because we couldn't it without them. i would also like to thank our friends of the fair members and friends receive multiple benefits. please consider friends membership for a gift for a loved one so that they can share this experi tions as we work to the future of your miami book fair, please consider supporting

the book fair with a contribution to next decade. fund. visit the friends and family or go to the website for more information. now it's housekeeping time. yes, please. your cell phones to silent silent so give you sort of a run of show. the author and moderator will talk for about 35 minutes. they will then for questions and that'll be turn and you'll see that there's a microphone there in the middle. so please at about the 35 mark start to form a line at the microphone. this is live. so we have to cut off rate at the 45 mark. so if i you on the shoulder and say you're not going to get to ask a question, i'm not out to get you.

i just need you to understand it's going to cut off you're talking or not right. and then when we conclude at the 45 mark, we're going to, of course, have a round of applause and i'm going to ask you to exit prompt early unless you're staying for the next 4:00 event and then sit still. but if you're not i you to exit books will be available. you exit the door to the left because we will be setting up for the 4:00. so now let me with no further ado, invite jeff the podium who will do the formal. thank you. good afternoon. i'm not jeff. my name is john bertram schwartz. i'm a novelist and screenwriter but that's not why i'm here this year. here this year, because three years ago, i took on a new and became an editor at large at

penguin press. and one of the first manuscripts to come across desk were the opening pages of became the friday afternoon club. and i just want to say i don't want to take too much time because this conversation is going to be brilliant and it's a live taping of danny shapiro's incredibly popular secret history podcast that's going on today. griffin is as i'm sure you know, an actor, star of after american werewolf in london, a director, a practical and other movies producer and person who's had an extraordinarily varied and creative career. so the nephew of the great joan didion and john gregory dunne, another great writer, and his father was the bestselling author dominick dunne. he comes from an amazing hollywood new family back a

period and a and a and a that he tracks through his first 35 years of his life in a book that calls a family memoir and think one of the things the greatest about it is that from start to finish, it is indeed a family memoir. and i can't think of any better person to be here interviewing him than my dear friend. shapiro you will know memoirs, her bestselling memoirs inheritance, devotion, her great book on writing, still writing, which i recommend all of you. her novels signal, fires and others, and course this podcast that's become such an extraordinary hit. this is its 11th season family secrets. so without further ado, going to hand you over to two of my favorite people, griffin dunne and shapiro. thank you.

hey, everyone. hey, griffin. hi, danny. huh? it's funny. i usually do this podcast i recorded in the basement of my house, you know, in this kind of my son's old playroom with old red sox posters on the walls and it's very different to do a live event playroom. yeah, it's this excellent. i'm going to begin where i always begin my family secrets conversations. tell me about the landscape of your childhood. well. born was born in new york, and my father was in live television. he was a stage manager for a show called, howdy doody. and he did filthy things with this puppet right before went on the air, too.

and. and he moved his family, mother and. and myself. and later my brother to los angeles. we lived. we lived in a house in santa monica. and then to. to beverly hills. and my. my father was from childhood, enamored with with with celebrity and movie stars and. so we were raised, you know, he's very, very social. and so my childhood was very kind of regimented. that was the priority, particularly most parents at that time, the priority was to be not a parent, but to be, you know, in society and giving parties and my father's sort of quest for celebrity, he could never as a movie fan, that all these celebrities would come to his house and drink his booze

and on certain big parties. we would be my brother, sister, and i would be in our our our bathrobes and and my sister would wear a little dickens like nightcap, and we would come down and bo and, my sister would curtsy to the guests and they'd go, oh, that's so cute. and then send us back upstairs. or if it was a big party, we'd be checked. a hotel. so it was. so it was like, you know, half a kid and half being part of the guests, you know, part of the family. tell me a little bit about both of your parents, as close as you can to being kid. you know, how did how did perceive each of them when you were when you were at that stage, your life? well, you know, as i say in the in the epitaph of the book, i have a quote from my father who was very ended up a very

different man than the child. i grew up with. and i remember once saying i was angry at him about something and he said the quote i use is, what can i say? i'm just a work in progress. and so he was very much a in progress. you know, when i was when i was growing up. uh, so my impression at that time was my father was not terribly athletic, maybe even of being a touch effeminate who movie stars and wanted everything to be just so, you know, production design wise. as a kid growing up, he was kind of an embarrassment. i kind of wanted my friends, my best friends, their fathers who are movie stars, played, you know, one was jack palance, who you almost killed, shane and other was a guy named howard keel, who was a played

lumberjacks. and then there was my dad. and they would say, you know, my dad could lick your dad was one hand tied. well, they could easily. so i a part of me was a little embarrassed about, you know, his masculinity. and it was i felt was such a kid. i felt identified it. so i one day i came to school and told everybody my father was arrested robbing a bank, which everyone believed. and my father, you know, got a call from the principal, you know, going neck, oh, you're out of jail, you know, my dad said, is that something you'd like me to do, rob a bank? and i kind of did. so it was a you know, so, you know, we later, you know, played baseball. you know, he threw a metal

around a ball around for a baseball game, father son, baseball game. wasn't wasn't that a direct of you know, he he understood that that was a kind of cry for help in some way. and then it became less so baseball around and he didn't have the right the right glove and he used your like was a lefty or you're a lefty. he was a righty. i was a lefty. and so he was when we were practicing, i had an extra mitt he would wear it. on his other hand and he couldn't i would throw him the ball and it would just hit mitt and then plop to the ground. you know, our family dog was so embarrassed that you took the dog the ball away from us. but yeah, he, he but i put him in right field. he was the last one chosen of the parents of the fathers and i put him in right field because it's very rare that a lefty would, would be at bat and my worst dreams came, nightmare

came true which there was a lefty. it was jack palance, by the way. and it went right toward him. and he wasn't paying attention. he was like talking to natalie wood and eating a hotdog. and it went sailing over his head and and it was such an embarrassment to me. but, you know, he walked back after finally the we got up a bat and he said, surrogate, i know i -- that up. and it made me want to just hug him. and i was was looking for my friends, you know, howard keel son and jack the son. i was ready to punch their face if they said anything. and because he was just disarming, you know, it just really touched. it's such a complicated stew of things. right. to on the one hand so see your

father. and in way have a sense that like you know of embarrassed meant because you're a kid and you you know what it kids kids want to be like other kids. yeah. and also to know that there's something so real and genuine about him. he was owning who. he was and and kind of things, you know. sorry. this is what you got is. what you got. and but, but, but after that he that's after softball game game fairly in fairly short order something happened right. he your family came home from church one day and could you tell the story of the the the kennedys and yeah you're the beginning of your career as a liar. well, yeah and it it started with the robbing the bank story which went over pretty good and i became a i became a real

fibber a real a kind of liar. and my parents, we to church, a catholic church, beverly hills, we called our lady of the cadillacs because of the extravagant cars that were in the parking lot. and and one day i just decided i'm not going to go church. i don't want to do it. and dad is going to come out, get in the car. get in the car. and i went, i'm not going. i don't know what possessed to say i'm not going. and. i had during this time had a real know, i don't know, delusional relationship with the president. john kennedy and i used to write him letters and once i heard back from his secretary mrs. lincoln, her name was and and i used to think about them all the time. and i found jackie just the most beautiful woman. anyway, i said, i'm not going to church. and jay went, oh, -- it --. it gets in the car and then with my brother and sister. and then when they drive back my

brother and sister come screaming the living room. we just met the kennedys. we sat next to the kennedys and we met them. and i thought, wow, god must be really -- at could he do that? and i was like, i was bereft and i could not go. i could not tell. i couldn't live with the fact my brother and sister met the kennedys and i didn't. so i went to school the next day and i told everybody i met the kennedys and, you know, it was all staged thing. and like tapped. and mr. president, i'm griffin dunne. and he turns to jack and goes, oh, my god, jackie, this is a little boy who wrote that. and and i started to tell this over, over. well, like, right when i moved to new york at 18 and i'm in the middle of, you know, starting school, the neighborhood playhouse, with all my new actor friends. and i'm starting to tell the

story. and i and he turns to jackie and i go, wait, i didn't meet the kennedys. i'm making all this up. i don't know why i met. and i start to have like a breakdown about it. he goes, okay, nobody's saying you didn't. and i call my brother. and i said, you know, i almost told the story again. i've been, you know, feasting your experience and lying that he goes, what are you home? at that time you guys all met the kennedys. and i. i never did. wait a minute. we didn't meet the kennedys. dad told us to say we met the kennedys. so i've been telling a lie on. top of a lie, you know, for 18 years or so. yeah, but i still carried on with what the kennedys. when it comes to family secrets and thinking about like the

secrets we keep from ourselves and way that. i mean, i was just very struck in in your book about the way that that lie. well, i mean, they were all the same really. it's like the same version of when like, when we lie, we're not really being ourselves, right? so there's something in there that has to do with changing the narrative or shifting it. you know, you grew in a house that was was pulsing with secrets, different kinds of secrets what did that i mean, then that couldn't have something that you were conscious of, right? so did that feel like in in those years, you know, before it before you moved to new york? and i mean, there were so many layers of it that became over time things that you discovered. but but back then, what what did that feel like because our childhoods are. for all of us, whatever they are

no matter how outsized or no matter what's going on, they're all we know. yeah, there was you know, you're right. you're not conscious of it. and there was, you know as we were growing up, we had this, you know, were presenting one image that was sort of based on the kennedy family unit, this winning family of, you know, two boys. and it and a little girl and a young, handsome couple and just with great social grace and and that loving couple was a loving couple was the first sort of secret that that you don't feel as a kid but but you know and you don't know that father has actually got a sort of secret life in that he's closeted who you know had to keep this a secret particularly this time. and in standing in the industry and socially to be, you know exposed or out of the closet would have been a terrible

verdict. and with terrible consequences. and especially growing up as a little boy and knowing that you know that your your your preference is not is is not heterosexual well. and so he had that shame. but, you know, you don't know thinking, feeling shame. there's just something in the air. there's an atmosphere that you kind of breathe. and you know, my mother of the other thing we didn't was that my mother was ill. she was getting sicker and sicker. and it would make her she eventually he was diagnosed with me as having m.s. and but she took that pain and also the unhappiness of her marriage and probably the knowing and keeping secret of my father to herself, even talking to him about it. so it makes a rather thick atmosphere that that, you know, you kind of grow up.

it has a results in, you know, in my case led to me lying, you know, telling these fibs. i know the kennedys, i know you know i you know, got i got a lion. i have a baby lion at home. i you know, i mean, just --. i just fall out of my mouth mouth and, and you know, later was then sent to a school. i was a bit of a discipline problem. and when i was 11 years old, it was very unusual to send a kid to massachusetts to this all boys boarding school. very, very strict school. i mean, really strict. and it had swats. and you you were had were you know, a uniform and and it was there. i really perfected not only my lying, but stealing. and, you know and i just had i could at someone in the eye and i could just tell a total untruth and my pulse would never

i'd have the pulse of a serial killer. i would just and all of that was i, i can trace to the the untruths and the, the i don't know, the facade that i was, i was growing up with. and at the same time there was this moral center the at you know, at the core of the the the serial killer facade. where was it at that school or it was the next school where you were about to be kicked out. yeah. yeah, i was i did have a sense of morality and, and, and, and empathy. i've always had that, even though i didn't know quite about, like my dad's secrets, i kind of suspected it. so i always had, you know, real sympathy and love for him. i related to that much more than the the social that was

something and and you know i then went to another school all boys god forbid i met school girls and i was that's when i found acting and i playing iago in othello. and the night before i was to do the performance, my best friend who was i gravitated toward acting. he gravitated toward drugs. and he came in and met me and we don't get high anymore. and you're just a joe actor. and he gilded into taking a hit of pot and teacher comes in and i smell smoke and i go, no, this plume comes out and and it was immediate and and i was taken to the headmaster that very night to his, his, his home and he wants cut a deal. i mean, he looks at me as a fundraising tool of the future and said if you run out john my friend you can do iago and just say he was the only one smoking

and i don't know i couldn't do it. i couldn't do it and i got out of school and that was the last i ever foot in the school again. you know, it was in the 10th grade. it would have been. but i was held back because i was dyslexic so, you know, i went into the adult world feeling uneducated, too, which led to another fib that i went to college, which i never did but i did catch up on my am i reading. being dyslexic? i was, you know told you're kind of a dummy and feel sorry for you, but once i got out of school. i didn't have that, so i did become i had to catch up with my own life and, read the books i would have read, and then i became, you know, a voracious reader. well, that makes so much sense, too, because reading i mean, here we are at the miami book fair reading and being able to

know characters on the page and their internal, which is something that only reading do, only literature can do. i mean, no other art form does it in that kind of direct way. there's, i think, some way of feeling like, oh, i'm not alone or this isn't, you know, this isn't as crazy as i think it is, or look at all these other worlds. it's like it's windows worlds that you didn't have access to yet. so tell me about, like moving forward and, you know, you end up in one of the wonderful things about about your book is that it really a love letter a very particular kind of love to a very particular new york and a very particular l.a. and i'd you know, you and the circle you had a route that you took to to getting there. but that new york you know you're you're living in the east village you're you're you're

waiting tables. you're at the neighborhood playhouse auditioning. what was that really the first time? and your parents by this time are divorced your father is also living in new york, is that right? yeah. after when i moved to have actually gone into self-exile, he'd lost all of his money. he'd sold all of his belongings in a garage sale. and all the people that know he could, you know, he invited to his home and they all haggled with him over ashtrays and, and irons and stuff. and he left quite humiliated. so when i was in new york beginning my career, he had driven up the coast of california, oregon, and and lived in a cabin right in front where his car broke down. and he lived and and then really grew character. and so i was he was at that in his life. and i was just beginning my life as an actor.

um, but it was also, you know, and i wanted to live in new york from the moment i first laid eyes. and i knew i just was counting the days and i created a narrative, really kind of a magical new york i was in. i worked it. i wasn't getting acting work, but i worked at radio city music hall, filling in the popcorn concessionaire, and i had a little paper hat and and of my jobs is to refill the popcorn and the nativity scene. they had a zoo downstairs and i would feed the camels, popcorn and, um, you know and wander around to the catacombs of rockefeller center and and my roommate at at the time was my best friend carrie fisher who eventually said i've go you know, i got this part in a movie that's really stupid. and so i got to go to england and she's like working and as an

actress and working as a waiter in a popcorn concessionaire and, and. so it was kind of great. and she, you know, in a broadway show before the chorus, and i would go around and i knew all the stagehands see them throwing snow for the, you know, the scenes of the the with debbie reynolds dancing in a in under a snow. so it was all you just the new york i wanted you know, griffin it's striking me it's so much about what things look like and what things really are. i mean, they're all of these layers to that where, i mean, when you were living with carrie fisher in the days arts building and you would go to the restaurant in the café des arts building on west 67th street in new york city, the made very expensive, very restaurant. the maitre d thought that you were, you know, i don't know a viscount or a some.

lord. yeah. and, and you know, treated you as and you didn't dissuade and then a little while later, as this has been going on for while he takes his family to beefsteak charlie's where you're waiting tables and and there's that and so it's like there's constantly these things that are kind of turning turning on their head. yeah and so tell me like what what was what was your relationship with your father like during those years? when did you actually come to know, you know, sort of the truth of his sexual and which you kind of always knew all along didn't know? again, this being of about the secrets we keep from us. sure sure. well. i always hope, you know, i'd

always growing as an individual, you know, and and and finding out who you are and i always hope to find that, but never have to go. the journey of finding that my father did. i've never seen such public humiliation and and he really he that pain and that humiliation and and secrets and he and he learned from it and lived in this cabin and he wanted to a writer and express itself in these singles space letters just pages pages that were confessional and him really getting at the root of who he was and how he got this point in his life. and he was also it was a workshop for finding his voice, a voice that he would eventually find as as a very well-known and. so just lost in the of like when

you came to actually know yes. so so when that when that secret evaporated. yeah so so here i was really getting to know him now he never talked we'd never once had a discussion about his closeted being closeted or not. i didn't feel the need to have that conversation. and i think he always assumed his his sons knew. i know my sister knew because when my dad was having this garage sale, the lowest point in his life my sister who was starting out an actress and immediately started and was more money than him by far like out of the gate she her her her friend was older than her but younger. my father a guy named norman, and he helped, you know, so dad wouldn't have to touch the money and everything. he tagged with dominique and and

did all the bartering for him and my, my, my, my sister, who was one, two, really knew how to keep a secret. she saw what was going on and. i never knew anything about it. i saw and i hadn't seen norman. he was a witness at the at the trial of dominique's murder. for the murder. and that's the next time i saw him. and then as my father has cancer, he's an expensive stem cell treatment place in germany. and i fled there to be with him. and i knocked on door when i arrived. i'm in the room next door and the door opens and there is norman, the guy from the trial, the guy who was. what do you use? and my dad, who's quite ill, goes, you remember norman from the trial? well, they'd been lovers for

over 40 years. you know, we sat, my dad was very weak. he was very pale and he was in and out of sleep. and norman, i sat, ordered a bottle of wine and we talked. he brought me right up to speed from the time they first met and dominique was the only one who knew, who knew. and thought she was tickled pink that she set this. um, this relationship up. but she never told us. she never told her brothers, she never told anyone. so that's how i found out. it's such an amazing story and i think like some of the work of becoming an adult, you know that an ongoing work in progress is coming to know parents as people. yeah. you know people that aren't our parents who had lives before us and, you know, during our lives that just about about us. and it was so striking and so

moving. in your book, when you talk about thinking back to dominique's trial and your father kept his distance, norman, in this very, you know, in a way that you noticed and then understanding those years later that he must have been absolutely terrified that their relationship was going to out on cross-examination of norman and you describe it as the longest day of his life. yeah, it was which i was not aware of. i didn't know of course at this time that my father norman knew each other and he kept in. but norman was the very first person on the when my sister was attacked, when dominique was attacked the first time by the same man who would eventually kill him, he tried to strangle her. he did strangle her, but she escaped and had scars on her throat and and rushed to norman's house, who had the

wherewithal to take pictures which were used in the trial. and then norman was called as a witness for to recount that night and every day in this courtroom was a was a criminal to the way our family was treated by the judge, by the by the defense attorney. it was we could not get a break. it relentless. and our only day a victory, a small one that it was was norman's testimony how his composure he kept under this hostile little dust. a defense attorney never losing his composure and at one point he was pointing at the blow ups with the pictures of dominique's throat and her face. and at one point she smiling. well, how do you if this is so serious, why is she why does she laughing? and he said, well, dominique is

actress and she the next day she was playing part of a battered housewife. and she said, well, at least i won't have go into makeup. it was sorry sorry. it was real victory us that day. but my father was oddly distant. he didn't come to the lunch we all went every day where. we just, you know, hugged norman and thanked norman. and i didn't find out till years later when i started to write the book and was i got to the part about, know, covering the trial that i went to the briscoe center in austin. my father's papers were kept and i found out, you know, in his diary, an entry never seen that was terrified that day that that's that this defense

attorney attorney was going to out him as a man who would date you have an affair with his daughters best friend and make them a meal research his character and that he wrote, if i have done anything that will affect the of this trial in the favor the killer. i'm going to kill myself. and i never knew. i never knew. you know, the pain. wow. horror of that day must have been for him. i never that but it sense i want to just and i know we need to open up to questions but where this is taking i just want to take another minute and. it strikes me much listening to you talk about this, that there

was this way which your with your father and then you're writing book and coming to know your father and your whole family in this deeper way because you go deep in this book. you don't you don't you're not staying you know some, you know, sort of shiny surface. you're down in the dungeon and there's there's a story that you tell about, you know, you know, growing and thinking of your father in this one way as this kind of effeminate. and, you know, celebrity. so and, you know, all of that and then it's also later in your life with and in well into your adulthood that he tells that he was a war hero and he it just was not something that he felt like he needed to share or, say, and you you find out that he was

indeed braver than jack palance. and, you know, these actors playing, you know, heroes. he was, in fact, a hero. yeah. and it just so much to his character, you know, at that time, i was in the the the mid-nineties. by that time, he was a he was famous. he always wanted to be famous. and here he famous and, you know, and and he he he loved was a joy to see enjoying his his success. and, you know, he recount a cabdriver who recognized him or one time he was at the chateau and he's taking elevator calls and leaves a voicemail. i took the elevator up with. bono bono knows i am. and it was just a delight. so he would always tell you or i got to got another award or. but one day he he saving private ryan and he calls me up and he says, get over here. you overheard now i got to talk to you.

and, uh, i thought i had to do the recent cancer diagnosis. and so i rushed over and he said. you ever see private? oh, yeah i did. he goes, you know, i fought in the war. and i realized, you know, i'm kind of a history buff. i never really thought about him, even in a uniform, let alone on the way. i just never thought about it. and he goes on to tell me about this night that he and another person in his platoon whose masculinity was also question and they were humiliated mocked in their in their group. they were called the gold dust. and he tells about a night in the dense forest during the battle of the bulge where the the his platoon retreats under fire. and they both see two wounded american soldiers not even from their platoon behind enemy lines. and he this incredible night and

how scared he was, but how brave he was. and then he takes out this medal and he goes, you know, old man won the bronze star. so i don't look at. but anyway, there was another moment. but it struck me as just like. that's character. that's the real -- that he kept to himself that he didn't need to brag. he didn't need to name he didn't need because that that -- happened. and he wanted me to know and. and like many veterans of that time, like many veterans of war, it'll take a certain thing that to to loosen up this memory. and it was in this case it was private ryan. it was also just something that was real that. he kept to himself. i know we have very little time

for questions, but i think we're going to stop here and. griffin that was spectacular. and. i good afternoon. dent thank you so much for coming. i my question is you spoke about how you used to lie a lot when you were younger and during time at the all boys school. you said that you were to play jago in your school play of othello and i'm sure everyone knows, but jago is a character who is like a master manipulator and a deceiver who led othello to his own demise. and i'm interested that like when a moment when you could have lied you chose instead to save someone at your own, what's it kind of like on your own in

expanse? i'm so sorry. i wonder if you ever considers this of symbolic or ironic point in your life in which you changed your own character to save someone else? yeah. guess that was a a a benchmark moment and i hadn't thought of the irony of that. actually, i was playing duplicitous liar while i was a while i was saving you know someone else or not, you know sharing the responsibility of not lying you know it was like there a time i actually told the truth about something and i was being asked to lie so that i could continue to perform the most famous liar shakespearean history. so yeah, there are all these little weaves that went in it. but, you know, i didn't think of it as like a, chest pumping moment of what i did. i just something didn't feel right and, you know, i went on

to when i was in new york i would watch other play iago all the time and you know, to this day i can mouthed along the monologues. i've never gotten a chance, but but i'll i'll take how i handled that moment any day. thank you you. hi. i'm just curious if you used your father's latex siberians of the trailer for your character. and this is as if you pull from that at all. yeah, i this guy and this is us named nick. nikki. my father's name that we all grew up with was. nick, the guy i played lived in exile and, a trailer. my father lived in a cabin he

was an alcoholic my father was an alcoholic. he found salvation through family, through family, love through my father. that never occurred me until the book came out. and people this question i be asked and i only two and a half, maybe three weeks ago, i wrote dan fogelman, who created the show. i said, you give me part because of these similarities to two nick dunne and i listed them and he wrote back and what kate that just occurred to me. thank you so much. could we have a round of applause. is.

this over here? to right right. we're currently in a break between events at this year's miami book fair. we'll be back shortly with more live coverage. i.

can see that the federal government grew so big and became involved in such seemingly trivial things, such as magic acts and orchid growth. yeah, well, you maybe when this started coming to my mind i'm sitting on the 10th circuit. you know, court of appeals case comes before me from mexico in my circuit. seventh grader you trade in burps laughs now.

you might have been guilty of that someday too. i probably was. and instead of going to the principal's office, his parents being called. he was arrested and handcuffed. that's how we're dealing with these things today and and we'll get into why but what is the scope of the problem. it's part of its administrative actions for sure. it's on all levels. we're all guilty of it. all right. 100 years ago, the entire federal code could fit into one slim volume. today, it occupies a whole wall in my. all right, it's doubled in size. since the 1980s. all right, that's my lifetime. many of you in this room. how many laws are there on the books? nobody knows in the reagan administration. somebody sat down to try and read them all and to count them.

and they're just throughout. they gave up, gave up. get estimated around 3000. right. today it's probably double that. it's at least 5000. the criminal today on the federal level what about regulatory output because really statutory is just the tip of the iceberg using congress and busy did you know that on average they they enact laws amounting to 2 to 3 million new words every year? okay federal regulatory output, many many times that 100 years ago. the federal register which is where they write the rules and publish them was 16 pages long in the year it started recently, it averages 60 to 70000 pages every single. how many crimes in those regulations? truly, nobody the answer to that. but there are at least 300,000

of them. so that's of the scope of the growth of law in just really my lifetime since about 1970. there are more people serving life sentences today in our prisons than were serving any sentence in 1970. so one out of. 47 americans is to some form of correctional supervision. that's all new. that's not the new deal. that's our lifetimes. so that's what i wanted to really explore and write about and how it impacts our liberties, our institutions, and maybe even our respect for law itself. right? what respect you have for something that you can't understand that you can't comply with, that you didn't know about, is that different than respecting rules that you know, intuitively are right and yeah, and you lay a lot of this at the feet of woodrow wilson why?

well, woodrow wilson did many great and wonderful things but also had great skepticism for our three branches of government. he believed kind of the madisonian structure of our government. you separation of powers have three branches supposed be three third of americans can't name so 60% of americans are estimated that they would fail the citizenship exam that my wife took. it's not hard. but now filling out the paperwork to become a citizen is very hard. i because i tried and it got sent back. all right. think about. i'll never live that one down at home either. well, at any rate, you know woodrow wilson that the ideal

thing we should do is allow experts to govern us instead of democracy. right. and he his ideal was the prussian bureaucracy. now, think about that prussian bureaucracy as your model for government. all right? and i don't doubt experts have a very important to play in increasing complex world. they do. but one thing our founders is that no men are angels. none of us is perfect. we all have our flaws and the way to with that is to counter balance power against power. madison put it balance power against power and bring to bear all ideas. and in debate and discussion. and that there is more wisdom in this room than in any single head right? might call it the wisdom of the masses. we it today francis galton, who was a cousin of charles darwin, put it this way.

he went to a county fair in england and there was a guess the weight of the ox contest. and he looked at all the guesses by the experts and he averaged up all the guesses by the ordinary people and he found that average of the guesses by the ordinary people was, closer than any guessed by the experts and how our system of government was designed right is that we would make our laws in the legislature where are represented lives come together and theyebat they disagree, they hash it out and the best ideas trust will emerge from that process. and that's something that think that woodrow wilson didn't value enough. he denigrated democracy and said we need a fourth branch of government or really, in his mind, maybe one superior branch of government. and i again, i'm not to second guess that we need experts in our world, but there is another kind of wisdom that we can forget about to.

and i think daniel halberstam put it maybe a way that we can all relate to is relating a story of lyndon johnson talking to sam, then speaker of the house, the beginning of the kennedy administration and johnson's bragging on all of kennedy's appointees. they all went to harvard. the phds, one's brighter than the next. and sam replies, yeah that's great, but i wish one of them, just one of them had run for sheriff. so my question is, to what extent do you think that sanctions entangle to what extent one i'm sorry. oh. to what extent do you think sanctions could an intangible effect as opposed to a tangible act either positively or negatively, for example, by undermining support for a regime by making on the ground conditions a lot worse or on the other side possibly strengthening regime's cause, a

belligerent cause against our own interests. and yes, what are the intangible effects maybe i'm not sure i entirely your question, but i think some of the programs we run, for example all of which seem in a way me to run somewhat parallel with the american foreign policy. that we run democracy promotion programs or programs that encourage looking at broader questions than ideological questions. these these are all to the good i have taken, but i suppose i'm a bit compromising in sort. i've been involved in quite a lot of republican institute projects and some of their trips to talk about democracy, elections and all that. the the core of the current dan twining happens to be a good friend of mine, one of the characters i often invite as a

guest lecturer, by the way. and so i there's a role certainly for what you call public diplomacy which is not based at all on economics but based on trying to teach other ways to think about how you organize yourself, how you run a political party, how you a campaign, how you do. i i'm not sure if i touched at all on what you were asking. i yes, i think so. well, you know, so i there's a very big role, you know, for places like the council to cause you to think more deeply and and to look at what might be the factors involved and why things the way they do and are sometimes that are economic. but sometimes are well. and to that point you can when you talk about sanctions right there is outcome and iran is a

perfect example where sanctions can be an economic success. i mean tactical but a strategic failure right. they can they can draw down resources, but they don't necessarily change the long arc, right, of a country. right. and that sort of what we've seen time, as you sort of point out, and about. yeah, that's exactly right. and it and simply. giving iran $6 billion for five. i mean, some of this just boggles your that somehow you're going to change the iranian regime by handing out this chunk of money them. i mean, this is ridiculous. and so i agree. you can certainly generate some suffering in another country. but whether that results in change policies of the regime. it seems like the kind of regimes we want to punish are the ones least likely to suffer from our sanctions in the sense that the, you know, kim jong un

lives well, he drinks what he wants and eats whatever, obviously too much. and and so also the regime under the russian all these regimes, the who the elites don't really care all that much what's what they're about and sick and therefore it's obligatory on us as we think about them and what motivates to try to understand one better and again, just at the risk of being a broken record, it's not. i was all about economics. well, it's just not so. thank you. thank you. thank you. yeah. just curious in selecting your four pilots, are those based on life characters? and so how did you do the research into them? they're all real life. okay, so it's history. yeah. so every bit of yours is all true story. yeah. yeah, that's a c. the trick is to take a true story and make it sound like it was made up. so, in other words, take these people who did such amazing things, the amazing things that

you and i could not comprehend, and then telling the story in such a way that people go that never happened. you know, that guy never flew head on into a messerschmitt, you know, playing chicken at 5000 feet, 300 miles an hour. that would never happen all those things, if you can do that. and at the same time being to their own written word, how their own descriptions about what they did there and their own squadron logs about the events that took place. if you can take that fantastic whole experience and make it something that the reader goes know, it's it's all made up, that's that's magic. that's i'm doing my job. and then my last question, i'm going to perhaps a suggestion. have you thought about doing a children's series, something makes it more powerful and only because what got you into was when you were a kid. and i think that when you discuss how boring history can be and how they just it's a

grind. i think that is true many children and so i just i thought maybe you'd and that's a no here's i think, i i yeah when i was a kid my dad will tell you i think he feared that i was just to become one of those kids who never left the house. and just read books all the time because i was one of those kids you i did little league and all that kind of stuff. but that was a book, kid. but i don't have it is a special skill to write children's books and. i'm not saying that to be pandering. it really is you have to know how to tell very very broad story in a very limited number of words. but i go back to this quest. i'm on history is not boring, but most history books are boring history. the way history is taught in school. it's history should be taught as if it was you know, it was a big story. yeah, great. you know, like something that people should go to history class saying what's going to happen today? you know and they should leave. like i believe that that's what

real history is like. and so i'm trying to write my books. i love when people. oh, your book read like a movie and and i will say i still still some elements of a screenplay it with just with a with a kind of the opening of each and stuff like that. but i want people to feel like they're watching a visual experience even they're reading about an actual, you know, a physical experience. and now more live coverage. the miami book fair. used to and i don't. realize. good afternoon. good afternoon. are you ready for this session?

awesome. i am. that dr. garcia vasquez, dean of students here at miami-dade college. welcome. we are grateful to the miami-dade college and volunteers. and for the of our sponsors, including the green family foundation, nicholas children's hospital, amazon the j.w. marriott marquee, brickell and all other sponsors. we'd also like to thank our friends of the fair. friends receive multiple benefits. please consider a friends or gift one as we work to ensure the future of your miami book fair, please consider supporting miami fair with a contribution to our next fund visit. the friends of the fair table or our website for information. at the end of the session we will have time for kewanee and the authors will be autographing books outside. we kindly request you silence your cell phones now and is my pleasure to. introduce miss joy ball. i'm winning that. she is the author of the

national bestseller unmasking. i my mission to protect what is human in a world of machines. she's also, the founder of algorithmic justice league groundbreaking researcher, a after speaker. her writing has been featured in publications such as time the new york times, harvard business review and the atlantic. as the port of code, she creates art to illuminate the impact of artificial intelligence society and advises world leaders on preventing ai harm. she has received numerous awards, including a rhodes scholarship, the inaugural morals and machine prize, and the technological innovation award from the martin luther king junior center for nonviolent social change. her mit research on facial recognition recognition technologies. as featured in the emmy nominated documentary coded bias morning canada to guyana and parents ballroom lives in cambridge, massachusetts. and our moderator, museveni

sylvester is the founder of avatar buddy, a powerful. integration of gen eight technologies with built in evidence based mentorship. she has worked in corporate i.t. 30 years for companies, including burger king subway, wachovia, hp and the children's trust. welcome. hello. good afternoon, everybody. thank you for. spending your sunday afternoon with with us. i'm honored and barely beyond words that i got this amazing. so i'm going to start off with a poem by my word, buddy in the

heart of miami, where cultures entwine on november 24th, at the stroke of four. two visionaries meet their parts align to unravel unraveled the mysteries of ice core. stephanie sylvester, a beacon of light with roots in it. a journey profound. from burger king to subway. her insights craft in avatar buddy where solutions abound. a member of the links with a heart so wide empowering communities within each voice. her mission to bridge the digital divide to make technology a tool of choice. enter dr. joy with a story to tell on mask in eye. her book, a clarion call for exposing bias, is where shadows dwell from justice for justice and equality. she tall. together they sit under miami's sun a dialog of a dance of the

mind. ai's power what's loss and one in their world a future redefine. stephanie asks with wisdom and grace about the journey, the struggles, the fight. dr. joy responds with courage to face the systemic barriers brought to life in the exchange attests to our spirit. waves of technology, algorithmic justice and dreams, untold a spoken word. symphony one that believes in a world where every voice is full. so gather around, let the stories unfold. at the miami book fair, where ideas ignite. stephanie and dr. joy narrative goal inspiring us to envision delight in the heart of miami, where cultures entwine and 24th at the stroke of four. two visionaries meet their paths align to unravel the mysteries of core. so thank you. so i am going to get right it. and the first question i have,

dr. joy, is let's talk about this amazing cover of your book. thank you. so this cover designed by algerie and french illustrator malika of you might have seen her covers on the new yorker and others. and it shows me in this pivotal moment where i literally had to put a white over my dark skin face as a student at mit. here i was this epicenter of innovation working an art project that actually used face detection. and it wasn't detecting my face. so i started experimenting. i drew a face on my palm. it detected the face on my palm. it happened to be around halloween time. that's why i had the white mask. a friend invited me for a girls night out and she said, let's do math. so i thought she meant halloween mask. but she actually met korean mask. so had i known that this thing

might have never started. but thank you, cindy. so because that mistake i had, the white there and i put the white over my dark skinned face and the white mask was detected as human while i was not. and so that's literally where my research began. and phenomena started in his book, dark skin white mask. i just didn't think it would be so literal and so that's how we got to title unmasking i and the cover as well. thank you. so i'm sure that you've encountered this as. i have during my journey about in educating people about i. when i read your book i just was really moved and fascinated by how you wove every day a currencies in where complex thoughts and broke air down to a level that anybody can understand.

so talk little bit about your writing style and. what made you choose that path? got it. and i have a writing style now. this is fun to hear because when i was approached to write this book, i was really fortunate. an editor, random house slid my audience and i looked at she was she had maybe four followers on twitter. so i was like, well, one of them was president obama. so like, all right, let me return this. right. so i was to say, i kind of found my way into world of writing. and i was on my ph.d. at the time. so i was under the fiction, my ph.d. would be the book. that's not what happened very much of voice. so as i'm through and i'm writing this academic piece to a dr. joy title, we called it mission, dr. justice. the voice wasn't what i it to be because i wanted people feel my

humanity. i to go from performance metrics, which were all of these i test algorithmic audits right to performance arts. so you could actually know me from being that idealistic research immigrant coming into having to face tech giants like amazon on or what it was like to get a film like coded made when no one believed in the story to then have it go be emmy nominated all of that or almost dropping out of mit to start my skateboarding which didn't happen right. you know and along the way as a poet, i thought this would be a great way to drop in some if i'm going to be published. anyways, so throughout add poems that reflected where i was at that particular time and the journey of the book and with i. so an eclectic representation of the poetic elements of myself,

the science communicator as well, and really trying to make it feel like people with me. so when i'm in davos the snipers right. are fixing their i want you to feel like you're there, you know. so that was how i wrote it. thank. so a bit more on present day being a black woman in i feel is emotionally wrought if you want to say it. being conservative at best and i want to know you about like the getting blocked at door and the the security guard not even the time to validate if your name was on the lists and not really like spoke to me because i have an air company and there are times i am present in and i see people that have like a

minuscule of a knowledge look at me and say so who's the brain behind this? and then get in a little when i say i am the brain behind this, like just so so i can just imagine. i mean, because what you're doing is multiple times complex to what i'm doing. so how do you process that emotional fallout and for the people in the room that are having to deal with that are some tips that you can give to them. so i write about this in the and there's this chapter. i think it's the streets, belgium gates of belgium, because i'm talking about gatekeepers. so i was invited to be part of the eu global tech headed by the vice president the european commission. one of my mentors was megan smith, who's former chief technology officer of the united

states, had invited me on. so she pulled up a seat at that table using her privilege and access. so i was still i still like, okay, here i am, eu global tech panel. i roll up to brussels and. i tell them that i'm here for the meeting. they tell me literally, that's a meeting for important people, right? so i look around like, okay, i might look, i might not look like the gray clad diplomats, which was true. i was like well, my have an invitation letter. right. here's my invitation. i kid you not. and i write about. anyone could have printed anything. which is true. still, you know, it's at this point, i'm just hoping that international plan doesn't fail me. now. i managed to get hold of the secretary, and they come down, they give me the special badge, and i'm literally the only one

who's wearing the special badge that kind of say that i'm supposed to be in this place. and then he finally looked at the list to see by name, which could have been the process from the beginning. and so that was gatekeeping that you were just speaking to, that we experience in different ways. and i was using that in the book kelso. talk about the algorithmic gate that are happening right. so it might be the hiring instead of that being the hiring manager, right, who might who might not want to hire or something like this. now it's the faceless ai interface or systems that you don't even see as well. and in my case, i could contest it right. there was somebody i could out to. but so many of the ai systems that are being used in our you can't contest the power. you don't see this is something that i at times called the coded gaze. so some people might have heard of the male gaze, the white

gaze, the post-colonial gaze. this cousin concept, which is really about who has the power to shape technology. those are shape the priorities, the preferences, and at times prejudices. and then to your question in terms of how do you navigate in that space it was having to stomach what just happened while doing what i came to do. so in that space that was actually i first shared my poem i ain't i a woman and it shows some of the biggest tech companies amazon, ibm, google, mislabeling or mis gendering, the faces of iconic women like oprah winfrey, serena williams, michelle. right. and so in that space after that experience is happening i'm saying can machines ever see my queen's as i view them can machines see our grandmothers as we knew them? ida b wells data science pioneer

hanging back stacking stats on the lynching of humanity teaching to send in data. each entry and omission a person worthy of respect. shirley chisholm. and on balance, the first black congress woman but not the first to be misunderstood by machines well versed in data driven mistakes. michelle obama and unafraid to wear her crown history. her account seems a mystery to systems unsure of hair, a wig up, a font, a toupee. maybe not. are there no words for? our braids in our locks, the sunny skin and relaxed hair make oprah the first lady, even for face well known. some algorithms fault her, echoing sentiments that strong women are men. we laugh celebrating the successes of our sisters with serena smiles no is worthy of our beauty. and that was that was literally part of the algorithmic audit

that i was showing them that i almost was blocked from even delivering and. the head of the world economic forum was in that room. one of the co-founders of deepmind was that room representative, the president of microsoft and so forth in that space, having that conversation, bringing us in literally right through poetry to ground conversations. ai and so later on, that very same panel engaged all of the eu defense ministers ahead of conversations on, lethal autonomous weapons. so the poem is a bit of how i show up, right? we celebrate our successes with serena smile. so there's all of pain that's happening, but i still know i was there on assignment. i had something to do. so i had to put that aside in that particular moment and then write a whole book. the process there. okay. so all of for those of us that don't know how to write i guess we have to use ai to help us get

our words out out. a mask and a mask and i don't know. i mean, i think as an approach the world, right, with my artist hat and then also my research. so i was an undergrad at georgia tech for a while. we didn't really to write that much, write our currency wasn't and how well we words together. it wasn't how we built machines and, halls. and it wasn't until i was in the uk studying on a rhodes scholarship well, okay, these people are really about words and lots of words right. so in a way i kind of felt, oh, i wasn't equipped or i wasn't prepared. and i learned it was more about voice than words, right? the message you have to share and sharing it in whatever way is true and authentic to you.

yeah. so just kind of following up on that. so what about the people that don't have technical acumen to navigate the complexities of ai or to even start understanding why what's happening and what advice do you want to give to them? because as much as it's overwhelming at times, we need to take steps in order to sure that everybody's aware of what's going on or this get out of get get away from us. such a great question and i love to say if you have face you have a place in conversation and i and in this whole journey in terms of, you know, the academic experience and the technical knowledge and so what really made the algorithm make justice league, i think, resonate was storytelling.

it was having the courage as, a student who experienced what i felt a pretty embarrassing thing, like you might and i'm putting on a white mask to be seen and i didn't realize how far white mask would travel in terms of story, in terms of impact. and so i think right now we all have the opportunity to tell stories our lived experience. that's exactly what i was doing right at that. and so sharing your stories about how ai is impacting you, what your you're seeing and also sharing the stories of how it's impacting others, for example, a not too long ago there was a report about a 14 year old boy who sadly self-harm trigger warning took his after interacting with a character created on character not a i and his mother says she believes he'd still be alive if not for the kind of emotional that was

co-created with this particular ai entity. and in the book i open with a man, belgium, whose widow also a similar thing right? her husband getting involved with this kind of chat bot that went sideways. and in those cases they're not i experts per say they're people lived experience that is really important to share because that actually informs how do we create systems where there isn't the emotional manipulation or ways which we might think we're putting out something good but ends up having unintended consequences. that's a big way that i think a lot of people can engage now, because the are more accessible. when i started you kind of had to have the technical knowledge to really dive in, but now you don't. yes, it's great. so i want to go back a little to the amazing poem you just spit out for us.

i obviously i had to get my to write my poem for. it's definitely not as good as yours, but why ain't either woman? i mean, that is such a powerful little piece of american history. and i think that it doesn't always up to the foreground as much as it should, especially when you talk about women's movement, women, power, and so forth. and i just kind of want to kind of unpack that a little bit more and really ask you like just to be like authentic and raw if possible, in what was going through your mind when you went with ain't i a woman? yes. so i inside a woman was inspired by looking at the research results i got when i tested systems from ibm, from microsoft and others, and i was testing gender classification.

so guessing the gender of somebody on their face, what could go wrong right? yes, that's what i was testing and what i found was that overall, the systems work better on male labeled faces than female labeled faces. there was no concept of gender fluidity or anything like this. it was just binary gender classification as done by the machines. and then they all overall work on lighter labeled faces, darker labeled faces. but then did this intersectional analysis looking at lighter metals, lighter female, darker metals, darker females and. i found that the results varied, except for one group, the darker females, though women like me, they always had the worst performance. so let's say, for example in one case the performance gap was 34% and accuracy rate for lighter males and darker females. so of that performance metric, i wanted to change that

performance metric to performance arts. so that's why i go to back to that phrase machines ever see my queens as i view them capuchins, ever see our grandmothers as we knew the that's literally from the numbers that i'm seeing and i wanted to do something i now call an evocative audit. so you have the i audit the algorithm like audit that's testing the different aces stubs and their yes, you get the numbers, but you don't get the emotional piece. and so when i say my heart smiles as i bask in their legacies, knowing their lives have altered many in her eyes, i see my mother's poise in her face like, looks my aunties grace. in this case of déja vu, a 19th century question comes into in a time when sojourner truth asked, ain't i a woman? that's going back to the history to say this is part of a much larger history and line of inquiry about it even means to be seen on own terms.

because i was referencing sojourner truth, a 19 century talk. a ain't i? oh, and in that case, she was actually challenging the women's movement to say, wait, what about women of color? we're part of this conversation. and to and so that was was going through my mind i really wanted i knew that the research even though it's literally one of the most cited papers in it's filled in this category would only reach a very small number of people so wanted to break out of that. i wanted to break out of the lab and poetry was, a way to do that. i will say i love the fact that you're using poetry to make i accessible, because as you start about it and you use in poetry, realize that it's really not scary. it's actually very easy. and when we look about the history of i. it's been around from the 1950s, so i want to kind of touch a

little bit about your style not because i'm being shallow, but because because you like these boots. i, i was like, i love the boots, love the different the glasses on the cover of the book. but one of the things that when you're in this space, people look at you as woman and they they sometimes say, well, you don't look like a computer scientist person or you don't look like an it person. and i always whenever they tell me that, i always stop to think what should a woman in computer science look like, if not like me? and you know, these are what i call like little microaggression that after a time can wear on you how do you how do you like the movement going? because this is a fight. i mean, and we have to enroll so many people to get to where people that like you cannot

leave an entire class of people behind in this revolution. so how do you first the first question just to make it little tighter is how do you in a intertwine your your your style lipstick, your beauty, your access, and then how do you like have that? does that help you keep the momentum going in this like brutal revolution that's happening to make that a segment of the population doesn't get left behind? yes, i there are few parts. one by the time i started my fourth degree ph.d. at mit, i have lyon i might have heard of tiger parents are the african versions. so it's like you have arrived until stacked it up. so that's just working my dad's the original dr. von when he a professor of medicinal chemistry pharmaceutics sciences, my mom's father was his advisor and he

was also a professor of medicinal. right. so that's like the lineage of that. i am coming from. and then my is an artist. and so i grew with the world of art and, science and literal companionship. if you think i have style, i of this, like from my mom's read writing her closet and that kind thing. and so for me it was kind of how i grew up and also being from ghana and being of to and wanting a represent that identity that just felt a natural to me when i was younger. as i got older, it became very that okay, the stem kids are over here, the art kids are over there and you need to choose. and by the way, you're an athlete and that's kind of messing up this thing. what's with the pole vaulting the basketball? so all this to say, i was always in that case, right? like, you don't look like, you should be in any of these

classes. you look more like an athlete. i've been hearing that all my life that i never look like the thing i'm supposed be. and so after a while, you just kind of have to be who you want to be. and so in the book, talk about being at the lab and the company of supply coming out, and it was supposed to be space space fabrics, right? for everyday use and. they only came in men's sizes, right? even though that time about women were about 3% of the media. and so there are just these constant reminders that you were not the norm, just like the white mask. you are not the norm. so in that with these whitewashed walls, it was actually a deliberate act to be the splash of color that i was anyhow, even if it might get me blocked out that you global tech panel because they're looking up and trying to figure out who's

there. but i feel that's been the story of my life oftentimes and when the film coded bias came out and people saw my style, things like that, i would get all sorts of things like your white glasses distracting from your very important message. i was like, well, if you were paying attention to the message, maybe the glasses would it really? or people feeling seen and the i show i have them do scene where my hair is being braided. right. or there's a scene where i'm with my partner at the time that those human moments, people really latched on to i thought was so that experience of how people reacted to the film the style in that film made me realize oh this is another way to speak right as to who gets to do tech who gets to be an air expert anybody and you can look any way right and this how i look some of the time you know so there was some freedom there

for sure it's just great. so just on that and being seen, we are seeing with our research both formal and informal, that is giving voice agency to a class of people that would otherwise discount. so when we were building company, we went to a city and overtown and west perrin and miami gardens to get people to help us write the requirements and test it and give us feedback. and that really positioned us to be about two months ahead of opening. so whenever opening i came with a way to use a.i., we already had figured it out and were deploying it. and so as much as there's a lot be concerned about with ai, we are also finding that it's given agency to people that wouldn't

otherwise have a voice. and so i wanted you to see if you could spend a few minutes talking about how to navigate that because that's a very tight, tight rope that you need to navigate and when one misstep could cause you to careen in the wrong way and create negative unintentional biases but positive steps gets it to a point where this class of people now have a voice can be seen and can assert themselves in ways they have never been afforded before. that's i'd love to get your left. shakespeare inside of that, because one thing i learned while i was at the center for civic media, that was the group i was a part of at mit media lab. we were always thinking about tech and society, but tech was a way to have conversation points that needed to happen anyway. so, for example we released the promise tracker app in brazil, and this allowed people to

document civic so maybe potholes or school lunches, right. elected officials said they would improve the school lunches that that actually happened and so the technology became a way to have documents session but it also became a way to bring people in conversation that otherwise wouldn't have been in that conversation in that way. when i was thinking about some of my earlier work in ethiopia working on neglected tropical diseases and using mobile tablets to make it easier to collect the information for health systems, those were all kind of like this tech for good kind of exploration. and then as i got further in, when it came to, i saw times what was position opposed to giving people voice stripped away their right or stereo typed their voice as well. so i'd be really curious how you're the technology in terms

of providing people with agency and so forth. well, well this is your interview, so i'm only going to give take two data points. then we're going to turn it back over to you. but for one thing, we took about year and a half to make sure that or i sounded like the people we wanted to have, use, and that was a struggle, really find voices with the appropriate accents that could understand. so that's kind of what we're doing. and the other thing that we're seeing is that i did a ted talk with, this woman from overton moore, she the women's club of overton young and what we did is, is that she's ai to help resumes and why is that important? so the ai helps to rewrite the resumes of individuals and they're seen themselves in new light and given them a whole way

to process themselves, giving them self-confidence. but the other piece of what they're saying is that they're coming back and you're talking about the jobs that they're getting. so somebody their forties got a job for the first time where benefits and career paths and that is a lot for a community to be able to be gainfully employed in a way that makes you feel good about yourself and obviously that is given lavette a lot of agency as well and she's now come in and we're talking about all these really cool plans we're going to be doing for 2025 and we would not be having conversation had it not been ai giving her some kind of agency. so that for me is very powerful. that's something i've been trying to figure out since was nine years old. how do we the problems of poverty and why some people get

to have a voice and people don't know that's powerful. okay, so back to you. it's like we can't have all this brilliance and not hear about it. well, i appreciate. so just coming back, what are you when you're think about 20, 25, 2030 and beyond, what what do you want to see the world look like in terms of ai and making sure that there's appropriate guardrails? and i love this question and love that you're in green because that's that i think about a lot green ai sustainable. ai right now many of the ai approaches are so energy intensive. i i was reading a study somewhere where they were putting a prompt through chat gpt can be like pouring eight glasses of water depending on

the time of day. and the thing is it have to be this way. we different flavors of ai that come out where we're in this transformer moment and it's gotten a lot of hype and people are seeing that but there are alternative ways of it that aren't as energy intensive. and so by the time we to 2030 i want there to be green ai where we can be happy, you know, about the kind of environmental footprint that's associated with these technologies. i also want to think what alternative ethical ai pipelines look like because so many of the companies they're facing lawsuits, artists, writers, authors, right. of the best of what we see of i came from the best of what was created by humanity that was taken without consent. ask without compensation, pay without credit.

like, where did you get that nice poetic sound from? poets here? and it didn't just come from anywhere, you know, and then also control, right? it could be that you to experiment with some of these a.i. systems on your own terms with. we should have that. and we should have that with the ethical api plans with the green ai. so that's the future that i want to be a part of and we can be part of advocating towards that. that's part of why i started the algorithmic justice league because. truly, we're all impacted by ai systems and so we do a voice and we do have a choice in shaping where it goes as this wonderful i'm glad to hear it out where there's an alignment with where we're wanting to go and where you're believing it should go. so before open the floor for questions, can drop one more, one more. okay. yes, we'll the audience choose. so i a poem one is called unstable desire. it's the way the book ends after

a conversation, a roundtable with president biden, and the other is called brooklyn tenants, which was to people on the front lines, successfully resisted air installation that they found harmful to their community. so show of hands brooklyn tenants show of hands, unstable. yeah, well, it looks like unstable desire. when i saw brooklyn tenants. okay, how about the vote? we have time for go. yes. yeah. right. so i'll start with unstable desire. this spike is longer than i thought. okay. yes. so unstable. page 289. unstable desire prompted to

competition. where be the guardrails now threat insight will might make hallucinate actions taken as prophecy destabilized on a middling to outpace to open chase to claim supremacy to rein definitely haste and pace control altering deletion and unstable desire remains undefeated the fate of a i still uncompleted responding fear responsible aib where profits do snare and people still dare to believe our humanity is the neural nets and transfer nations of collected muses more than data and errata more than transactional. the fusions are we not transcended beings bound in transient forms. can power be guided with care, augmenting delight alongside

economic destitution temporary band-aids cannot the wind when the task ahead is to transform the atlas fear of innovation the android dreams and tastes. the nightmare schemes of vice put of code certified human made. thank you. we can do questions and then i can with the last one. but okay okay. well, thank you to both you for talking to us today. i had a question because i have been teaching the netflix documentary coded bias in my class. it's a freshman composition class at florida university, as well as new york times article by. keith metz, i think you were interviewed as well, and of course, it's freshman composition class. i walk them through. you have a thesis statement, you have a to action and that i like

to stress to them like this is your essay. you know what do you really see as the point of you're writing here in the documentary? i think you're really good about presenting calls to action. my students always point out the moment that you're sitting before and actually trying to work with the legislation of this issue and then i ask the students, okay, how many of you are going to now do that or how many of you are going to willing to do something like that? they all of like, well, not me i hope maybe it's the person next to me, but not me personally. so wonder what would be your to students in that position who aren't going to realistically seeing themselves going up to congress state things like that but still have issue with what you're saying about i and these topics at hand what's kind of like a realistic pathway for

them that you could advise on got to one of the things i'm proud of with the film coded bias is it that raji, who was an undergrad, shows me as a grad student. right. and it shows some of these aspirational not to say that's something you have to do, but it is to say that is something that could be a path for you so for some seeing that we've seen youth organizations like encode justice high schoolers around the world where they've actually put together ai policy agenda as well i'm always surprised with the middle schoolers and elementary school students who also reach out with what they're doing of algorithmic bias as well. but i also hear your question the deeper question, right? it goes overwhelming to fight for algorithmic justice, right like what do i do on a day to day? that's why i think the sharing your story and the experience is really important. have a report agl dot org where

people can talk about how how they're experiencing ai. so sometimes students will talk about the use of ai to to detect if they are cheating or not and e proctoring and what their personal experiences have been because sometimes it's less daunting right when you know that you're going to a space where people are open to hearing those experiences. thing we encourage everybody to do is when it comes to airport face scans if you're traveling you have the right to opt out of the space scans and most people don't even know and it's usually even faster. you just stand away and you say, i want the standard check. look at your face. they look at it. you're not trying to get the lighting right and go through. and each time you do that you're actually voting for biometric rights for people like robert williams or porsha woodruff, who were falsely arrested due to facial recognition and misidentification, i think it's important to again emphasize

that your experience matters. one thing we love to do with the algorithmic justice league is this workshop called drag versus ai. we developed it the boston public library, with high schoolers. and so we have this workshop where people are actually testing ai systems and seeing how the ai reads face, and then they can try to do the invisibility chamber. so see if you can have it not detect your face. all we do the infinity chamber play with age. can you look older, you look younger, and then that starts conversation about, well, how is ai being used within your classroom or your school are there surveillance uses? are there uses you would like to see? and so in those spaces i've really seen when there is expectation and also invitation to be part of the conversation and also the validation of the importance their experience and their perspective. then we see more engagement in

way because i know if you see code advisor like go do that that might feel a little overwhelming for sure and part of the reason i wrote unmasking ii was to also talk about that film almost didn't get made because. people didn't want to bet on somebody who looked like as the lead and that sort of film i talk about, i almost dropping out of mit and, what the dynamics of that were like and. so sometimes when you see the glory, but you don't the story, it can also feel less accessible. so i think i'm hopefully as you're teaching this to your students, you also showing them some of the things didn't go so well, right? because part of the journey to i do i do compare for them how you're introduced and like the article, the film and how like legos behind you. so thank you for that advice. appreciate it. thank you so. i enjoyed your lecture. i just got introduced to ai when. i was looking at 60 minutes, so, you know, i started out with a typewriter there was an

electric. yes. so a slow motion but as i saw that documentary, they talking about how they could, you know write an essay and, you know and refer to particular and their concepts as now i was just wondering with. project 2025, would it be possible for a i to analyze it and have students discuss what their future goals and objectives are and then see how it matches with project 2025 in terms of, you know, policy? oh, that's a provocation. i'd love to see that exploration happen. i would also one of the things we see sometimes with these ai systems are hallucinations, so it's not even clear that the summaries produced about attacks like project 2025 would be

completely accurate. it really depends on the type of system. if we're assuming there's that could even be part of that assignment right because we've seen this so many times where, cognitive labor is assumed to be easily taken by a ai system when it isn't. so we saw a lawyer, for example, using a chatbot for one of their cases, and it cited law that did not exist and they were actually debarred. right. and so i think it's so important that we continue to have examples of where a.i. astray. so we are limited our expectation and also our trust. and you'll see many companies now they'll say we we stand behind nothing that came out of this. you've had your own risk. but as people continue to engage with it generally, you're not a subject matter expert in that particular topic. you're not going to know if what you're getting is actually

what's in there. so i think even an assignment that there would be another piece of is what we're getting accurate was talking to the library of congress about this and this will be ever more relevant right it is the for congress and have congressional researchers and one of the things they wanted to do was legislation that's there's a lot of legislation to read but because they're library of congress they have to be right right can't just be a hallucination and so forth so they actually found in that particular instance it was taking them time to fact the summary in first place. so all of this is just fascinating me because we're still in the early days of how these systems are being developed and where their weaknesses are, but also where some of those weaknesses are can give us into what it is to expertise, what it is to have deep comprehension, what it is to sit with text for not just

seconds. right. but days, weeks, years and so forth. i gave my eighth graders a project that 20, 25, two years ago and. they looked at me like i was crazy and thought maybe if i would presented it with the computer that, they would, you know, because they they check everything, say based on, you know what wikipedia or somebody else had said, as opposed to what i had to say. but i'm hoping that that'll be the future with the a.i. that they can understand that legislation and make it their thing. yeah. thank you. thank you. there are technology now called small language model that's working on it to make sure that i is a little bit more effect have and less about hallucination. so it is in the works and that's else that we do it. avatar buddy is using small language model to make your responses more accurate

accurate. thank you, dr. joye. a riveting conversation. thank you all for attending thank you so much. i hope to see you at the book signing.

and now joining us on booktv is mark scouser. he is author of 25 plus books. we'll get to those in just a minute. but he's also the founder of this libertarian gathering called freedom fest mark skousen. how? how did this get started? actually, 2007, maybe even earlier, because when i was made president of the foundation for economic education, it was the oldest free market think tank.

but it kind of fell out, fallen into obscurity with cato and heritage and reason being the really big libertarian conservative type of organizations. george made president v and i said, what can i to jump start the. and i said, well, let's have a feed fest. let's have a national and let's do it in the most libertarian city in the world. las vegas. and it was a big success. we had 850 people show up. we had ben stein as our keynote speaker. and unfortunately, i was not very good at fundraising. so only lasted a year the president fee. but i love the idea of getting together this. and so i started a four profit organization called freedom past instead of dfs and we've been going great guns ever since and. we have a couple of thousand people show up every year in vegas. when they shut us down in 2020, we the next year we went to a

mount rushmore, rapid city and a great time there. we had a huge turnout and then we went back to vegas. and then last year in memphis. so we we now do other year in vegas and the rest of the time we go to other states. what do people get? this is kind of a renaissance gathering. so we talk philosophy, history, science and technology and not just politics. yes, we have rfk coming and we have the party and we have a president. we have presidential debate with all the third parties have shown up. the two major parties have not up. so that's kind of frustrating that they won't they're not willing to debate third party candidates. and i think rfk has a good criticism of the parties. so. but what do people get out of it? it's an incredible feeling to get together of like minded individuals who believe in freedom within the rule of law. it's the adam smith model, the

system of natural liberty, within the rule of you want maximum freedom to to choose your occupation to decide where you want to go to what price pay, who you hire, who you fire, maximum freedom. that's what this conference all about. so we attract people. we actually don't call it a libertarian. we call it the largest gathering of free minds. so if you have a closed mind, we don't want you here, but they come anyway. prior to getting involved with freedom fest, what was your occupation? well i still am. i write an investment newsletter called forecasts and strategies is published eagle publishing. i've been doing it since the greatest president of the 20th century was elected. so who would that be in your view would be ronald reagan? that's correct so in 1980, i started my newsletter and i'm going for 44 years. that's my major, main source of income. i'm still writing the newsletter, but i'm also a

professor or i have i hold the doty spogli chair free enterprise at chapman university in southern california. i taught at columbia school, columbia university. barnard college, rollins college, and now at chapman university. you know, i have one sort of but you've also taught somewhere else. well, i've taught it since saying penitentiaries. all right. yeah, 12 years. not as an inmate, but as a as a teacher. and as a volunteer. and that was an incredible my wife and i were very much involved with inmates who were in a maximum security prison, state prison, or something quite infamous and about. it was great to see their lives changed and. so it's not just about, you know, it's about changing their lives. so that when they get out, they're not going back to the same crimes and the recidivism rate with our program of

education. is a 3% versus 60, 70%. traditionally. so it's been a very successful program at sentencing. we were glad we were part of it. mark scales and as we mentioned, you're the author of 25 plus books, mostly politics or economics, things like before economics and politics. your latest book, there were giants in the land. yeah. what is this? so this is a story, in his own words, of my uncle cleon skousen and cleon skousen was what i regarded a giant in the land, but more known in the west. he was based in salt lake city. i mean, he had a nation wide program. he was very much involved with the fbi. he was a special assistant to jager, hoover in the fbi. he was assigned to help. he was assigned as a special assistant to georgia hoover. he was there on december 7th,

1941, when japan attacked pearl harbor. so he was the communications director for j. edgar hoover at that time. then he was assigned to the los angeles bureau, and he was assigned to hollywood dealing with the whole anti-caa communist movement during that time period and also organized crime. he had. there's some incredible stories here about him with mickey cohen and bugsy siegel and people like that. so it's quite an interesting book. i think my perspective, but it's all in now, basically in the story excuse me, this is all, in his words, what we did. my wife and i, joanne, who's an english professor, we took all of his private journals and we compiled and edited and reduced it to 500 pages to tell his own story in his own words.

and we got lots of photographs and stuff like that. and what's really cool is you can see if you take hat off and i put my glasses on. there's quite a resemblance. let's see if we can. let's let's see if we can get a little closer on that and we'll let that happen. why did you write a book about your uncle? is this a tribute? well, you could call it a labor of love, right? well, what would a general audience out of this? well, there's a lot of it's a story about a motivational story in many ways, because clarence gougeon was born dirt poor in alberta, canada, and he kind of became, you know, like a lot of these people like ben franklin, a lot of the other great leaders and stuff, they started with nothing and they built up an empire. he was an empire builder. he was mormon was mormon

ancestors. and they built and so forth. he was very an entrepreneur, but he was firmly he was born in 1930. and he said, had me become come into the earth in 1913 because three legislation occurred in 1913, that was all bad legislation and he was there to reverse it. what is what happened in 1913? the income the federal reserve was created and finally the i'm not sure which amendment the constitution had direct of senators. instead of by state legislatures. he thought these are all bad. and so he worked hard his whole life to reverse these. well, guess what? he failed on all three counts, despite all his efforts. and yet he was always an optimist because at the i tell this story at the end of his

life, people would ask him, dr. and he had a j.d. degree as fbi agent, said, to have a degree in law and. so he said, dr. and how can you be so optimistic? all the terrible things that are happening in the world? and his answer was a religious answer because he was a christian. he said, well, i've read the book and in the end we win. so he had kind of optimism stuff, but there's some great stories in here, motivational stories in the fbi, his stories with organized crime, with hollywood. i tell the olivia de havilland in this book, which is about gone with the wind, the one of the main actresses in gone with the wind who was an actual communist and was very supportive and giving of money to the communist party in 1940. and so my j.

edgar hoover said, i want you to visit the home of olivia de havilland and i want you to thank her for her wonderful role in gone with the wind. but needs to know that the communists bad they she needs to learn about the american story. can you do that for me? so clean on makes an appointment to see a lady to have the fbi so she agrees and he goes in and says listen jagger hoover loves your book and wants you to be follower of america and you not you shouldn't give money to the communist party. she said, well, they're my best friends. they're really support. i'm really supportive of them. so thank you very much. told you edgar hoover. thank you, but i'm going to stay with it and who and so clinton says but before we leave have a tape recording here we have been secretly taping the meetings of the communist central party and your name comes up and i have this recording here. why don't you listen to it? i'll step out and i'll come

back. and if you feel the same way. i'll take the tape recording. you never hear from us again. she listens to the recording. she comes outside swearing like a mule skinner and. she said, i can't believe these people are calling me money back and stooge and we're taking we can know how to take advantage of olivia de havilland. she said, i'll have nothing to do with them ever again. it's quite story. so it's stories like that. by the way, clients said, do not publish this story until after olivia de havilland dies. i'm not sure why, but in any case, she lived to be like 103. so. but fortunately she has passed away in the end. so the story is there. there's a chapter in here called my friendship with black panther, eldridge cleaver. mm hmm. so julian always had a weakness for. people who? he was a communist he was involved.

he had to flee the country because he was involved in some murders during the sixties and seventies protests, the black panthers somewhat a revolutionary group that engaged in violence and so on. and not ideologically anything in common with cleon skousen, but but eldridge cleaver changed it and came back to united states because he lived i think he lived in a communist country or something like that it was not what it was cracked up to be. and so eldridge cleaver back and and changed mind about life he said communism. he rejected communism. and he befriended cleon, my uncle cleon skorzeny, and they went giving speeches together. i've got pictures, them together and so forth. he he still had drug problems and things like that. so the end, the friendship kind of disintegrated. but it was a remarkable story.