pitch meeting where you said, i'm going to write about trains, and an agent or an editor said paul thoreau, right? >> yeah. and that's an obvious comparison. those of you who have head him know his way of reporting on a country is simply to do what i did. he sure didn't steal it from me. he was doing this in the early 1970s, you know? simply get on a train and talk to all the random people that you meet. and thoreau's literary device is to say nasty things about them. he's sort of a famously grumpy guy, and he writes with such acid about some of the people that he meets. i'm told that in person he's actually a very nice guy and this is just sort of a pose. i wound up just really liking a lot of the people that i met and, you know, many of them, you know, telling fairly sad stories about, you know, their struggles. i met a number of people who had served time in jail, you know? that somehow just kept coming up, you know? i'd be talking with someone, and he would say, you know, when i was down in the joint, x, y, z, and, you know, that's always a good story. >> did you ever run into an uncom