so, lanny, tell us about your book. oh, i've well let's see here. before i do that, let me thank you for for a grander ground and give me some tough questions and thanks, brad, for for inviting and thank all of you here. now, the weather was so good. i can't wait. there's more of this outside somewhere. i have so many friends here and some and also some writers and editors. i wanted to say a few words to sort of stir the pot about the sort of basic themes in my book. and then we're going to get to the data gretel. and so i, like many of you, i used to think that celebrity culture wasn't a an intriguing diversion and musing. so professor but not harmful. it is a source of gossip and funny stories but that was before the celebrity stayed morphed into a vast profit generating enterprise i like to think of as a celebrity industrial complex and magazines paper, where i write from the start or its initiators. and eventually that's beneficiaries. but then it's bradby on anybody's control. i mean, now just to jump ahead a little bit, i was just looking i fi

but a military judge, colonel lanny acosta, jr., recently tossed that confession, writing -- "any resistanceaccused might have been inclined to put up when asked to incriminate himself was intentionally and literally beaten out of him years before." acosta went on to write -- "even if the 2007 statements were not obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, they were derived from it." during a hearing last year, the psychologist james mitchell admitted he and another psychologist bruce jessen had waterboarded al-nashiri at a cia black site. al-nashiri was also subject to mock executions, isolation, sleep deprivation, and confinement inside a tiny wooden box. in june, the u.n. working group on arbitrary detention called for al-nashiri's immediate release. the two psychologists involved in his torture, mitchell and jessen, had been paid at least $81 million by the cia to develop and then implement the cia's post-9/11 torture program. according to the aclu, torture methods devised by mitchell and jessen included slamming detained men into walls, stuffing them inside coffin-li

and i went to see -- at that time, it was the speaker of the house, it was pete lanny, a democrat.s idea of writing a movie or a television series. he said, it's been the dream of my life to have a television series set in the house of representatives. i said, here i am. it's gone a long way since then. it has wound up as a novel. >> you see, we talk about some of the real life characters. i'm just remembering one you mentioned. mike martin? can you tell the story of mike martin. part of the inspiration? >> he's a representative from longview, texas. he was worried about his reelection chances so he had his cousin shoot him. so he got the sympathy vote. he said he was shot by the mafia. which we don't have much of in texas. and then the texas rangers tracked him down and he was hiding in his mother stereo cabinet. molly ivan said he always wanted to be the speaker. >> did he win reelection? to get? work >> no, it didn't work. >> so let's talk about the protagonist in the novel, sonny lam, who is he and how much of all these real life characters are built into him? >> there's a bit