john nash was of paranoid schizophrenic. if you see too many patterns that aren't real, that is called madness. madness has many causes. i am not just claiming it is another pattern but it is the process of finding patterns that are not real may also lead you to be a creative genius. that is described in the book version. the movie is different from the book. in the book is reality is hallucinations were mostly auditory. that is the case for more schizophrenics. more auditory is -- hard to make a movie that way. it is more visual. he describes in the book why do you believe in aliens are talking to you? secret government agents are speaking to you? it is the same voice. it feels like the same source that i get my mathematical ideas from. so without some way of discriminating between true and false patterns how are any of us to know if we made an important discovery or if we are crazy? the answer is science. science gives us a systematic reliable method of giving out what is real and what is not. it is not perfect but it is t

it was a bestseller about a mathematician, john nash. it was helped by the fact that it became a movie with russell crowe, so she has a big following. i think what she's trying to do is take economics which has been called sort of the dismal science and add some humanity, personality to it. i just began, and she comes across -- this, to me, was a new idea that 150 years ago or so the idea that most people were doomed to live lives filled with poverty and despair was an accepted given. and she traces how that has changed over 200 years or 150 years. >> jason boog, what about michael lewis? >> i'm really looking forward to this book, actually. his last book, "the big short," looked at the economic meltdown and how the stock market crash affected our lives here in the united states, but his next book is going to go around the world and look at the different ways it affected other countries from europe to the developing countries around us. and it's really an important thing to do right now, i think, to just not forget that we're not the onl

but i found the story of john nash, i was an economics reporter at the times, and i was covering someeconomic story, and i heard a rumor that this crazy mathematician who hung around the math building at princeton might win a nobel prize. so i asked the person who told me, what is his name? and he said, nash. and i said, oh, you don't mean the nash of the nash equilibrium? and the nash equilibrium is something that's so old and so basic that you learn it in the first week of graduate school, and you would never imagine that the person, that the nash would be alive because it's such an old result, and it's so basic. so that intrigued me, and long story short, ultimately, a year and a half later i wrote when nash did win the nobel, and i realized right away that when i first heard the story that, you're a journalist, it was the most amazing story that i'd ever come across as a journalist. it was like a fairy tale. there's so few real-life stories that have a third act, and when he won the prize, i wrote a story for the sunday business section of the new york times. yeah. [laughter] >> h