Transcripts For CSPAN2 David Enrich The Spider Network 20180219

So hes out sourcing the seeing part of the driving to his wife. Its an arrow, not that way. One area in my life where i can see the generation difference most clearly, when you do a book signing and the end of the book signing, often theres a line of people who get their books signed but they want their pictures taken with you. Everybodys got a picture with the author and this can happen sometimes dozens and dozens of times in a typical book signings over the course of the year ill have this same process repeated thousands of times and theres, heres how young people do it. They hold up the phone and they take a picture. Heres how old people do it. They hold up the phone, its sounds for about 30 seconds. They Say Something like wait, i think its on google. Then they stab at the screen for a while with a forefinger. Then they hold up the phone and say okay, smile. Then they smile again and say wait, i think its making a video. Then a stab at the screen some more and hold up the phone again and say okay, th smile. Then they say wait, i think it took a picture of me. Then they give the phone to a young person who takes the picture. That literally, ive seen that many times. Watch this and other programs online at cspan2. Hears live coverage of the savanna book festival continues now. Its New York Times finance editor david enrich talking about his book the Spider Network. Good afternoon. We are delighted that you are participating in the 11th annual savanna book festival resented by georgia power. David and anthony cintron, the Family Foundation and mark and patty win. Many thanks to jack and mary romanus, our sponsors for this glorious then you the Trinity United Methodist church. We like to extend thanks also to our literati members and individual donors who have made Saturdays Free festival event possible. 90 percent of the revenue for comes from donors just like you so thank you. Are very excited to have a savanna book festival available this year. Look in your program for information on downloading it to your phone. We get started, let me go over a couple housekeeping notes. Immediately following this presentation, ourspeaker , david enrich willbe signing festival purchased copies of his book , if you are your intention is to stay for the next presentation in this venue, please as soon as we are dismissed move forward so that we can allow the crowd outside to come in and be seated as easily as possible. Please take a moment to double check that your cell phones are turned off or are at least silenced so that we wont have interruptions during the course of the talk today and finally, we ask that you take photographs that you not use flash photography. For the question and answer portion, were going to ask that you raise your hand and an officer will bring you a microphone please dont ask the question until the microphone is in your hand. In the interest of time, and in fairness to other attendees, please limit yourself to one question and if you would please make sure that your question actually is a question rather than a story. David enrich is with us ecourtesy of ron and Barbara Coley and we appreciate your support. David enrich is the finance editor at the New York Times and previously was the financial Enterprise Editor for the wall street journal. He had a team of investigative reporters and he has won numerous journalism awards including the 2016 yearold low award or feature writing. So please join me in getting a warm savanna welcome to david enrich. [applause] hello. Its a great crowd. I was standing here getting a little nervous but this is my first time in savanna and this eais a really cool city, im glad to be here and this is without a doubt, i know a lot of you have been published, without a doubt this is the coolest venue. [applause] so its a beautiful day, beautiful savanna weather and i appreciate you guys coming out of the sun listen to me about finance. So i promise you this is not going to be really boring im going to dwell as little as possible on finance. My book the Spider Network is a book about finance but ive tried to make it a book about humans and ecology and things like that as much as about jargon. So im going to tell you a storyabout how i came to write this book. Which is kind of an interesting tale and i think it says a lot about my writing process and journalism which people tend not to find interesting so the story starts in 2008 when a group of wall street journal reporters not including myself were based in the london ymbureau started digging into something called libor and its an acronym that stands for the london interbank offered rate and most people have never heard of libor but its important and thats because it is the thing that determines the Interest Rates that many of us a our mortgages, credit card loans, auto loans. Its what determines the Interest Rates of a big company and you borrow money in a bond market, is the Interest Rate you pay if youre a town or a city that borrows money is often referred to as the worlds most important number and its trillions of dollars of financial contracts all over the world, big number. Libor set every day around lunchtime in london by a ef group of the worlds greatest banks and its done in a way that in hindsight seems really arbitrary and inefficient and kind of stupid but made a lot dof sense of the time. Basically estimates theoretically how much it would cost them to borrow money from another back. And that number is an Interest Rate and thats what those numbers averaged together. I love ones get kicked out and the resulting frest of the day doing average agand thats set every day and its used all over the world. It turns out no one was paying any attention to how this rate was set, the mechanics of it. It was a task delegated generally very lowlevel employees within these facts ti and they would come up with a number, sometimes basically out of thin air. Either it was very hard to figure out no one was getting any attempts, this was not a priority so they would, with this number in an arbitrary way, omitted this industry break trade group, and lobbyist organization that compiled the number and then send it. Starting about 20 years ago, a bunch of banks realize that since no one was paying attention, there was a lot of opportunity , a lot of potential. There was not necessarily illegal but certainly not very honest and they realize ma that they were making, they were placing huge wagers on trades that were connected to libor, essentially betting on whether or not libor was going to go up or down, and your increments in the future whether it was over the next 24 hours or the month and they had a lot to gain or lose based on this. They realize that since no one was paying any attention to how this rate was set, if they moved their submissions, their libor data of a fraction of a percentage point, that could be hugely influential in moving the overall rate so over the next 10 years, by mid 2000, by the dawn of the financial crisis, have become common industry practice for banks to not nudge it up or down by small se amounts. Thats where the story starts. In 2008 a couple of my predecessors of the wall street journal digging into this number and realized quickly something was terribly wrong with it. The number, libor is supposed to be a reflection of how much it costs to borrow from each other and that would mean in times of Financial Stress , that number would go up because banks would charge each other more to borrow money because thats this year and that doesnt make a trend. It really, the point is banks were manipulated with numbers to give themselves and some of amy predecessors realized this was going on and they wrote a couple of very big page exposes about this practice and the great thing about working for a big newspaper like the wall street journal is that when you do one of these new frontpage stories, people take notice and its a very good way to set the chance. Thats why i got into the term because its some things that you see the power of the media. You write and people take action. In this case, these guys this very powerful, i thought very powerful stories and nothing happened. The world basically didnt react no one knew about libor cared about and so nothing happened. I was ovin new york at the time and moved with my wife to london to be the finance correspondent for the wall street journal in london in 2010 and i really didnt care about it either, like most of us. And i continue to not care about it until 2011 when word started trickling out that a number of governmentagencies , the us and in britain had opened an investigation based on this wall street journal article and it was a secret that was leaking out into the press because some of the banks and received subpoenas and were under investigation and theres nothing journalists love more than government investigations because we love bad news in general and your stories more prominent and the great thing about government investigations, we can just report lies or investigating and its much easier than going and approving the misconduct yourself. So i and my other colleagues in the british media at the time aggressively reporting on libor. It was a matter of the wall street journal because it was something we felt like we had started. But again, there are a few topics in the financial world like the real world cause peoples eyes to glaze over faster than the mention of libor the stories while exciting to nerds like me were not texciting to people like you. And to most of our readers. And through 2012 we kept trying to write these stories about libor and they fell flat until the middle of 2012 when ldone of the worlds biggest banks artemis which is based in london announced that it reached an agreement with the british prosecutors which admitted trying to manipulate libor. And they paid a big penalty, but the more interesting ha thing was the ceo of that bank had to fall on his sword and resign and this is one of the first times since the financial crisis we seen an example of a human being being held accountable or misconduct at his institution. The guy in question was a powerful character, an american mob guy and he was kind of a brash, very quintessential American Banker in london. I dont know if you guys know london. But those types of people dont generally go over very well there. The british dont like the brash American Bank district so bob diamonds resignation was a cause for celebration in the uk and it was finally the thing that got them on the front page of the american newspapers in the wall street journal. So that was a very exciting one for me. No one really understood how this libor thing happened. Diamond wasnt really involved, it was just overseeing corrupt culture and needed to go as a result. One of the things i have been trained to do over a few years as a financial journalist is you try to tell stories as human beings, the human, not institutional actors, clearly not numbers. You want the way to make note stories is compelling is for them to have a narrative, or that you have an accident and a nonmetaphorical sense so that people walking along, theyre doing things and rather than than talking about nameless faces or institutions. So rthats really still like that. Until the very end of 2012 when the us and british prosecutors arrested and criminally charged a guy. And tom hayes, very little is known about him. We knew his age, so its about 34, 35 years old. We knew where he lived which was in a nice house in southeastern england. We knew the date of his employment and the number of Financial Institutions in london he worked for some of the biggest banks including ubs, any group and the us banks. And we knew it from prosecutors that he had engaged over several years in a series of what can best be described as incredibly corruptive email messages, Text Messages, recorded phone call where he said in a very breezy and unequivocal terms, move libor higher for me, ill pay you this for doing it. Use colorful language, seemed like not a very nice guy from the tenor of the emails, kind of a bully and he just seemed like the quintessential wall street corrupt trader out of central casting. Its a human being doing bad things that we can write stories about him. And so we did. And i was very pleased with myself and 2012 ended and i came back to london, eager to take on and move past libor and start writing things that didnt make peoples eyes glaze over to one of the things i did is the beginning of each year he would go and, with figures, schematic listen stories that youre going to pursue and your ambitions for the following year. I had a great one. My idea was a series of stories that i already entitled to and it was called dirty london and it was going to be about all the malfeasance and shady stuff happening all over london and i was kind of a bunch of halfbaked stories. And i really thought my boss would be excited, he was going to pat me on the back and say go get them and i went in and he was like, that was fine but first, you need to do the definitive profile of tom hayes. We dont know anything about him. And ive thought this sounds like a miserable task. The guys been arrested in london, criminally charged and the attorney general at the time i got up at an election and, theres no way that i ever be able to talk to desire his family and those are the crucial things of the story. And nothing is known about him. Nobody knew what he looked like. I didnt want to go down this radical. So my boss said yes. And i said no, he said yes. I threw a small tantrum and stomped out of his office and went back to my desk and was like im going to get it over with. Im going to put in a days work and be done with it. The first thing you do in a situation like this Google Search so i did a Google Search for, hayes and libor and it printed out all the dozen stories about the guy, not a whole lot there was nothing interesting about him really, nothing that wasnt already in the Public Record except for one story in the daily telegraph. One of britains kind of , i wont even say it. Its one of the british newspapers. It was a short story, 200 or 300 words long and insinuated that tom hayes had sold this at Technology Company he owned to his wife and insinuated it in a way that he was trying to hide assets from the t government or Something Like that and it didnt mention his wifes name or the companys name but in the uk its easy to track this down so i went into whats called the Company House and sure enough, there was a Company Called title X Technologies and sure enough, hayes who had the same address and created a company a couple years earlier and recently sold it to someone, a woman named jennifer and i thought to myself well, thats, hayes wife and thats a good starting point. I Googled Jennifer ophir he and she was not, hayes wife. She was very tclearly an american and i could tell this cause she put pictures all over the internet of herself in various degrees of undress draped in an american flag. Gh the good thing about that is i love living in london but at least until the very end i never learned to talk to british people and i dont think they liked me either though it was always a struggle. Im very direct and they are not and but its all, this woman is clearly my type of person. Shes american and it was very important to know i had an american i could talk to. I started asking her, who is this guy . Who is tom hayes. I know his dates of employment and he sounds like a not nice guy from the out of context Text Messages within. Jennifer open my eyes this guy in a way i didnt expect to turns out tom hayes is mildly autistic, hes incredibly socially awkward, completely incapable of maintaining eye contact during conversation. He has some personal hygiene problems, notf the type of banker, he earned aoi tremendous amount of money but he was up, guys i was going out to fancy dinners or clubs. He was known in financial circles for going out to kfc to get a bucket of fried chicken, a bottle of orange juice and go watch seinfeld. Right away g this guy seemed a t more interesting than i expected because you want someone whos not just head of a cookiecutter naperville and not so predictable. Then i got better because jennifer gave me what to this day is maybe the best, im overselling this but it wasas areally good quote about what e has done. She said his defense was that basically everyone was doing this, his bosses know about it, sometimes participated, the entire industry was trying tote manipulate it. He said it was like spanking children in the 70s, everyone was doing it and no one considered it wrong. Anytime you can get the word spank into a business story, that is a big win. So i was feeling really good and in a slight euphoria. At the end the conversation i said jennifer, the thing i really need to make the story good is i need to talk to tom or get someone in his family to talk to me or his lawyers but they were refusing to talk to me. She was obviously with, all time. I said why dont you pass on my phone number, say i am an honest, openminded guy, which i am but im also a journalist. She said absolutely not. You will laugh me out of the room. Then she finally agreed with the caveat that i probably would never hear from him. At least i could go to a bosses office and say im really trying. That night, i went home and i was sitting on the sofa with my wife and we were watching tv and i dont hope you were here for the previous speaker, but she really doesnt like people using cell phones when this post be talking to people. I had my cell phone on my lap the way i always do and sure enough my phone buzzed and it was a text message from an unknown number and it said im willing to talk to you i need to make sure iea can trust you. This goes much higher than me, not even the Justice Department knows the whole story. It was tom hayes. I couldnt believean it. If youre ever in criminal trouble, do not talk g to journalists. I hate to say it, but that is not a good plan and dont, if the Justice Department is coming after you, dont poke them in the eye. Dont do it. I mean do do it with me but no other journalist can you do that way. I was like okay, can we meet. He said okay ill meet you tomorrow morning at Victoria Station which is a busy train station in london. Ill stand outside burger king with a Brown Leather coat. No one knows l what he looks li, including me. Im thinking to myself ive just walked into all the president s men and im bob woodward and can already feel the weight of that fourth surprise in my back pocket. I was so excited. I called my boss and said youre not going to believe what just happened and i called my wife and i didnt sleep at all that myself i was way too excited and the adrenaline was going for the next morning, still totally amped up, im getting ready to walk out the door and i got another text messagemp from tom and he said i cant do it. My wife on my phone, she saw i was about to meet a journalist and she took my phone away and wont let me do it. Turns out his wife is a lawyer. [laughter] , a pretty good lawyer, in fact, and had wisely put a compassion on this. I begged and pleaded and he said no and finally i was being a little too persistent and his wife took the phone away from him physically and said hi this is sarah, toms wife, you need to leave my husband alone right now. His wife is on the line. If you leave him alone now maybe we will talk to you in the future. So i went away gave him some space but at this point i had something really good which wasnt on the record quote from tom hayes thing this goes much much higher than me, not even the Justice Department knows the full story. This guyuy hadnt entered a plea yet so in journalist terms this is like a pretty nice if i had so i feel pretty good about myself. I came close to finish writing the story but then my boss, my boss is a real pain. He is one of the best editors ive ever had but kept telling me to go back and try again the guy had made it really clear you wanted to be left alone but i kept trying and eventually it came time, he wouldnt respond at all, and i told tom i got you Fact Checking questions to go over and i fully expected him to not respond again but he did respond and he said something to the effect of work, i would love ton, help advantage. I wrote back to tom and i noticed on tv but i said i know its like to have a ball buster wife. Us. An keep this between it worked. I couldnt believe it. He started texting me and said okay, find what you want to know. Where do i even begin. So i spent the entirety of that day thinking of things. It was like i had uncorked something. He just needed to get stuff off his chest and i got this barrage of Text Messages i just would not stop her the condition at this point was that this was all off the record. What that means in journalist terms is that i cant quote it or use it, i can use it to help myself so if you said you should look into this thing or that thing you talked about personal do that and i can inform my reporting but im definitely not, line have been drawn after he said this goes much higher than me. This gave me all these new lines of inquiry in my stories getting really good and the day before i was about to publish a set ahead a few more things to check in one of them was that we were wife, onlyntion his in the sense that his wife is an interesting person, we knew her name and occupation and i was just going to mention im passing. It didnt really matter. At this point i had never spoken to him we had exchanged 200 Text Messages over the course of a but was no actual facetoface or oral medication. My phone rang and it was tom hayes and he was worked up. The notion of his wifes name being mentioned, he was already pretty get that touched a nerve. This guy, he was a traitor so he engaged, hes basically a professional gambler using other peoples money and hes very good at it. He was such a trader that he now proposed a trade to me which was that if i promise to take his wife out of the story entirely, i wouldnt mention her name or occupation or law firm, he would agree to meet me the following day and help me understand the scandal that more. This was an easy trades take. I dont care about his wife, her name was mildly interesting, but i talked my boss bruce and we immediately agreed, except the trade. We did this knowing full well he probably wouldnt follow through on it. We had no collateral we could seize for him, he could probably vanish but it was a risk worth taking. We publish the story on the front page of the wall street journal. I was feeling so good. I felt was the best i had ever written. 9 00 oclock that morning my phone rang and it was tom and he says that was disappointing. He thought, eight he said theres nothing new in their and this guy, he has aspergers syndrome, he lacks the filter and doesnt come he just says what he thanks which is kind of refreshing but he did not like my story and was not shy about it and i setting i was sorry he and then he hung up. I didnt even have a chance toou ask him to follow through on the trade we made. That evening he went into meet with his lawyers who were not happy with him. He had just been quoted on h the front page of the story not only speaking but giving theak finger to the Justice Department which is not smart. His lawyers were understandably furious and told him you cannot ever do that again. If you talk to the media without our authorization again, we will fire you. He got out of his meeting and called me and said a major promise ill keep it, lets meet. It was a coldd rainy day. It was for five years ago and i sprinted down the street to meet him. He told me heow would meet me in this dingy cafe right next to his lawyers office. [laughter] the guy doesnt make eye contact and i asked him to questions and he went forta like an hour and a half to hours nonstop. Most interesting thing was that he was drinking tea from a paper cup and he had a plastics during devices, theyre not a straw but they look like straws, he took one of those and he turned it into origami. He turned it into this elaborate structure while he was talking to me. It was fascinating to see him create this origami straw while i also sitting and telling me all the secrets and being only a hundred yards from his lawyers office. This would become a yearlong relationship with tom. His lawyers didnt know, his wife didnt know, at least at first and the condition was i couldnt write anything, i couldnt quote himth ever again. It had to be background or off the record purposes. This was enormously helpful for me and it turned into a source of numerous big stories exposing dirty london and the underbelly of the financial world. Tom came to trust me and he was really desperate to have someone in his life who would listen to him and actually hear him and not judge him immediately and not view him through the lens of an evil criminal. I just assumed this guy had been criminally charged and it looked bad for him and that he is a villain and then you start to get to know the guy and i love the idea of cops busting villains. Especially when it comes to banks. I was a real cheerleader for that idea and then i meet a banking criminal and i start feeling really bad for him. I was meeting withal tom at leat once a week and jennifer told me this guy is not like the normal partying guy. He loved it when i take them out to tgi fridays where he would get a big virgin daiquiri. He really didnt drink at all. Eventually his wife found out we were secretly meeting and threatened to divorce him if he continued it so we had to develop more clandestine way of arranging to meet. After year, tom had not been on trial yet. He is awaiting trial and cooperating with the british authorities to build cases against alleged coconspirators and he probably get a year or two j of jail in a very nice fil outside london and would move on with his life. He and his wife had a kid who was about 18 months old. Getting out of jail was a really big priority for him. My halfway through the process after i had known him for about eight months, he had kind of lost his mind a little bit. Even though he had spent 80 some hours being taped and pointing prosecutors in the direction of those acting with him he decided he couldnt plead guilty and he said the reason was he couldnt bear the thought of growing old and watching his son grow up and having to tell his son that not only is daddy a criminal but daddy admitted to being a criminal. He didnt feel like he had done anything wrong. He had pushed the envelope, but thats what they were paid a lot of money to do and the entire financial system, in his view, was based on traders like him searching for inefficiencies to exploit, little advantages whether you have a better trading system or better information or stupider clients or inability to manipulate things. He viewed that is what he was being paid to do. His bosses know about it, they all participated in it so he didnt really see what he had done wrong and he could not bear the thought anymore of pleading not guilty, im sorry, of pleading guilty. He wanted to plead not guilty and fight the charges. At that point in his life when into a downward spiral and so its the time that he introduced me to his wife. She was the polar opposite of temperature is really charismatic and smart. She liked to drink a lot which was a journalist best friend and so we would go drink together. I was spending much more time with tom and sarah that i was with any of my friends and this became for about two years. All while the condition with both of them is that i cant quote anything they tell me and i am dutifully keeping notes after i meet with them and my boss bruce is living through my experience with this very strange couple. Tom was prepared to go on trial in the summer of 2015 and once again, at my bosses urging, he told me look, you have so much great material, you need to get them to let you put all this on the record so you can tell her story. You been watching his life in world circled a l financial dran and obviously do not let me do that but i decided i would ask. Lo and behold, they said yes. The condition was that i waited until after the trial was over. They agreed in writing regardless of the verdict i can write the story and use everything they had told me. All the Text Messages, everything. So that was very exciting for the trial started in the summer of 2015 and it lasted about three months and i went every day, and through that process, in london they put the defendants in whats called the doc so it used to be like an actual cage like a zoo animal, now its a little more civilized, its like a glass bulletproof glass box so all the journalists there and the lawyers and everyone else would stare at tom in the doc and i had a, and sarah would be there too. I had to maintain the fiction that i didnt know them any better than any of the other journalist did. Tom and i would catch each other making eye contact and immediately avert our eyes and there was a number of occasions where we found ourselves at urinal standing next to each other unable to acknowledge each other and the trial went on for three months. It ended, the jury came back with the verdict and he was convicted on all eight counts of fraud. Sitting there, at this point i was even thinking about writing a book. I was thinking about how i turn this into a story but sitting there in the courtroom, watching the life drain out of sarahs face and toms face when that verdict was read, it touched me in a way that i had never really experienced before because we are paid to be objective and stated it removed from our sources and i had clearly failed at that. The judge came back a half hour later with the sentence and he was sentenced to 14 years in prison and maximumsecurity. That was everyones reaction in the courtroom. Except for tom and sarah and i just looked at each other. It was very painful, upsetting look and they thought he was going to be acquitted which is crazy. He was never going to get acquitted. They had no idea he would get a 14 Year Prison Sentence megabyte and maximumsecurity. That was awful. It was also en great because journalist love nothing more than a sad mean story so this became the book, basically and its the story of how the system was built up upon the backs of people like tom were mathematicians but also mildly artistic. Au thats not a rare thing to find in this industry. You guys are really good at detecting patterns and being focused on innovative, new, underhanded ways of making money that rely on exploiting these tiny little inefficiencies in the system. When things go wrong, when the reckoning comes and someone will be held accountable for the edible portion, these are the guys who get mailed. To me that was maybe not surprising but really upsetting. We cheer for the financial cops and we want people to get busted, like everyone else we yearn for accountability in the banking system, especially after the financial crisis where theres very little personalac accountt ability. We are very good about celebrating these criminal charges being filed in these big prison sentence being handed out. It was upsetting to me to lookso back at how ive been feeling about that and realize a lot of people who were actually now in jail, theyre not the people at the top of the food chain. Its guys like that who really, they probably shouldve known better but theyab were not, theyre not the linchpin of the system. These are the ponds and these are the guys who bear the huge brunt of the penalties for whats gone wrong in the financial world. Hayes was convicted of conspiracy to defraud on eight counts. The word conspiracy means youre doing it with other people and so a bunch of his alleged coconspirators went on trial including one or two of his higherups and guess what happened. So tom is alone in prison, his best friend is a man who is convicted of murdering his Financial Advisor but its a mean prison. Ive been there to visit and its not a joke. Its very sad. He has really deteriorated. He is not in good shape at all. Anyway, on that uplifting note, i would a love to take your questions. [applause] there are two microphones. That was riveting and i cant wait to read your book. Think you. I t want to know, how and wht lawyers two of his superiors and the other people had, how they got off and he didnt. Thats a good question. One ofyn the idiosyncrasies of e british legal system is its illegal to talk to juries after trials so in the u. S. , there would be a very easy answer because i wouldve gone and chased down the jurors, why did you vote this way but you go to jail if you do that in the uk. I sat through the subsequent trials and the turning point for me was when it became public, the trial was largely about tom hayes interaction with his alleged coconspirators. In the course of that they had to explain why hee was not in e dock with these other guys and the reason is that he was imprisoned. When it came out in the subsequent trials that he was serving a 14 Year Prison Sentence you could see the reaction the jurors head to the notion that that was the type of penalty we were talking about and at that point, i think what happened is the jurors thought themselves its illegal what they were doing probably, they definitely violated the letter of the law but they were doing it in the context of something much broader, and entire system of corruption. They were some of his superiors but they were lowlevel people in the grand scheme of things make a lot of jurors looked at the conduct that they had done and thehe punishment they were essentially looking at and said they didnt want any part of that. To me the notion that those guys got away with it wasnt that surprising. Also those guys are very sophisticated. They were savvy and charismatic, they were much more cookiecutter bankers. They know how to communicate and look you in the eye. Their players little bit. You. There was a lot of manipulating of tom that having one on during this time of legality. The question was is it possible to go get released earlier. The answer is yes, he probably will. You generally dont sir, as long as youre well behaved you generally dont serve your full sentence, but his kid i think he was four years old when the trial started he was one or two when i firstd, met him. The kid willil be 12 or 13 by te time he gets out. I have kids were basically the same age as toms and i came to pick about that. Thats the yardstick by which a measure. Have you sold the movie rights yet . Thats a complicated question. Weve had some interest from tv and film. I would love to see it made into a meat movie or miniseries. If it becomes a movie and i minute, i know who i want to play me. Seth rogen. [laughter] the microphone is coming. Im a little confused, i thought he said he made a deal with prosecutors to hopefully lessen his sentence. Does that imply the sentence wouldve been more extreme. He made a deal and many backed out of the deal. He initially cooperated in exchange for was going to be a very short sentence but after cooperating with them for five or six months, he gave 82 hours of taped testimony to the prosecutors, admitting guilt and pointing the finger at his coconspirators and he changed his mind and decided he didnt think he actuallyy was guilty. His argument was that he had been lying to prosecutors when he said he was guilty just get this reduced sentence. Everyone asked me to i believe that or was he guilty and one of the things about tom is that he, from the very first moment i do think the guy is honest. Printed on the key saying things that arent true. With the benefit of hindsight, he said he was doing things he shouldnt of been doing and it was improper. He didnt know if it was illegal but he knew he should have been doing some of this stuff got is that his bosses had known about it and said tong sit alongside m so he thought that initiated this is definitely use some of what he was doing was wrong. He agreed to cooperate and backed out and the prosecutors came down really hard on him. Thats less than half and him what is happening right now to his wife and his family customers are they broke . Is he going to be able to have a life . I dont know is thehe short answer. Yes he issro broke. His wife has moved, they had to sell everything and they moved in with her parents. Statistically a few look at what happens to families when one of the parents goes to prison for a long time, the data is very overpowering. They break up. Not always, but, i dont know what the actual data is but in an overwhelming number of families they dont survive. I suspect that will happen here. Sarah once told me that one of her fears was that their entire relationship had occurred under the cloud of this criminal investigation so tom was really obsessed with this not following talk about. Though if tomom got acquitted, what would happen with the relationship. What would they talk about. What would dominate their lives. Even more so now, i havent actually spoken to tom but i exchange letters with him sometimes. I communicate with his wife with some regularity but his Mental Health is really deteriorating. He cant let go of what happened and is obsessing even more and getting more convinced that hes a scapegoat and has been wronged in his life has been destroyed by the people. Hes just not in good shape. Sarah is struggling as well purge she is essentially a single mom, shes a good lawyer so she makes money but her life is really screwed up and she could be doing a million Different Things right now, and shes never told me this explicitly but i cant imagine a day doesnt go by that she doesnt resent this method shes in. Her life was run to. My guess, i dont know what will happen but it would surprise me at all if their relationship doesnt survive this, which would be sad. See you said the beginning of your comedic asian with tom was mostly via text message. As a journalist, how do you source a text message. Normally, thats a good question. Normally you would just say he said in a text message. This is a weird one though. The previous speaker was really good speaker and i cant remember her name but she was really focused on the evils of using our phones and Text Messages as a substitute for normal medication. I think theres a lot of truth to that. Ill say in this case, if itfo wasnt for Text Messages i dont think this relationship ever will happen because the distance that that allowed, the separation that that allowed me tom more comfortable talking to a stranger and talking to someone he shouldnt be talking to and it also, from my perspective, i normally prefer facetoface munication with normal people in normal circumstances you get ten times more information and get to know them better and i hope to understand them and write about them and ask better questions. In this case one of the huge advantages to me was that i had this written record of everything he and i had fed bak and forth to each other going back years, and as someone is writing a book is invaluable. I had one horrible moment where i lost my phone and that phone was worth like millions of dollars to me i felt like, not that much, but it was very precious to me and i lost it and thankfully one of my tech guys at work figured out some sort of which craft how to rescue all my Text Messages. We got to wrap up. But say thank you to david one more time. [applause] let me ask for cooperation with one thing. Outside there are volunteers holding buckets, any money youoe put in helps keep these free and if you could come to the front to make room for entering people. Thank you. [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] that was New York Times finance editor talking about his newest book the Spider Network. Live coverage on the tv from athena book festival. Did you know you can access our behindthescenes pictures and videos from the festival on our social media site on twitter, instagram and facebook at the tv. Now more live coverage of the savanna book festival will begin shortly. The next author is deeann stillman and she talks about the relationship between buffalo bill and sitting bull. [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] tells about how typographic in the brain. Can think of it as the outer line of the continuum. While humans seem to be endowed with the capacity for care as a result of having these babies we have to take care of, anything capacity can go awry during development and this is a developmental disorder that at least partly related to genetic problems, not completely but in part that seems to result in people having no capacity to care for anyone but themselves and its something that occurs in severe form in about one or 2 of the population. What we discovered is people who are psychopathic have brains to look through the opposite of people who are ultra stick. The title of your book is the fear factor, what role does fear or the ability to capacity to recognize fear and others, what role does that have back one of the things thats been observed about it is that people that are psychopathic have a bold personality. Theyre not susceptible toow punishment they dont respond to things that are threatening and thats why they tend to offend and reoffend over and over again because the way the punishment is supposed to work is that if you fear getting punished you wont do the same and will result in the punishment but that doesnt seem to be the case of people who are psychopathic. For a long time it was suspected something must be wrong in their nebulous because is essential for the ability to develop a normal fear response. Thank you and i have had this discussion, theres also the inability to recognize in others. How does that play out. Why does someone who cant really spot fear and someone else tend them toward psychopathic acts. This is some of the most Interesting Research that my students and i have been doing over the past couple years. What we have discovered is that when you see or hear or think about someone else who is expressing fear, in order to understand the emotion theyre feeling you have to recreate or simulate that within your own brain. We knowem thats essential and f you dont have a strong response when you see or hear someone else whos afraid, you cant recreate that emotion and you can understand what the other person is feeling. You cant empathize. So the brakes that would stop a normal person from hurting that other person, those are there. If you dont have the ability to do that you just go on ahead. You can watch this and other programs online booktv. Org. Heres a look at some the current bestselling nonfiction books according to the Washington Post. Topping the list, fire and fur, michael wolfs expose of the trump whitein house. After that fox news host by ryan recalls the war of 1812 battle of new orleans in Andrew Jackson in the miracle of new orleans. Next, clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson selfhelp books 12 rules for life. Then entrepreneur gives advice on building a brand and crushing it. Thats followed by when, daniel pinks latest selfhelp book. Our look at some of the bestselling books according to the Washington Post continues with mark mansons advice on leading a happier life. After that, is really journalist Ronan Bergman looks at the secret secret operations of israeli dispense. Steve and daniel examine the causes that lead to breakdowns and democracies around the world and how democracies die followed by Health Advice from doctor ben lynch. We also have James Pattersons look at the late professional Football Player aaron hernandez, convicted of firstdegree murder in allamerica murder many of these authors have or will appear on the tv. You can watch them on our website tv. Org. Let me put you back on the station again and talk about another trying time in your life, youre going along and you get asw call that your sisterinlaw, Gabby Giffords has been shot in at shopping mall. Whatat went through your mind. How do you deal, psychologically. You were coming home that day or the next day. What kind of challenge was that for you. Its challenging when you hear that your brothers wife, someone who has been very important to me as well was shot in such a violent, most shootings are pretty violent, i dont know, you can have a shooting thats not violent, but to be a victim off such violence and six other people were killed including a 10yearold girl, others injured, and she sustained significant injuries and then later i was told she had actually passed away when i was in space. I neatly got on the phone with my brother, talk to him as much as i could and tried to support him as best i could. It took some time. Eventually i tried to compartmentalize, separate whats going on on earth with whats my responsibility is in space and tried to focus as much as i could on that and at same time. I wouldnt say it was like a serendipitous kind of thing but it was actually goodll time that allowed me to kind of cut the cord a little bit with my two fellow crew mates. They had beenn there for couple months and i was going to leave them a couple months later so that was a little bit of a good thing that allowed me to set them free little bit, but its not easy. Thats the worst part about being in space for long time. Its not your personal risk or worrying about what could happen to you, its what could happen your family on earth with no way to come home. You mentioned very briefly that mark was also training and assigned to be a commander in the decision had to be made. I think i was in washington you wisely said mark is the person whos gonna make the final determination as to his fitness to continue training. Did you experience did it allow you to help him at all for makingng that decision. We talked about it, wee talkd about a lot of things but in the end, i think it was up to gabby, i think gabby really made the decision. Despite her injury, she recognized this was his last opportunity to fly in space. Its important to his group that he had been training with, otherwise have to start all over with the new commander. Clearly he was on the phone. This was a tragedy, i called it a national tragedy, and international tragedy. You had a call from president Vladimir Putin. Youve got a passage in your book review actually prepared and read the message to the world. Would you mind sharing that with us. First just to mention about something you said, i did get, it wasnt a call from president putin, we actually had a conference scheduled the next day for all three astronauts and all three cosmonauts and i was moved that he spent most of the time talking to me and saying hey, we support you, the russian people are behind you, this is a horrible tragedy and he just dedicated most of the conversation to checkinge on me and making sure i was okay. I will read a little bit about what i said after she was shot. This was during a moment of silence i said this over the radio to the control center and whoever else was listening. I would like to take some time to recognize a moment of silence in honor of the victim of the tucson shooting tragedy, i said. First, i would like to say a few words we have unique Vantage Point aboard the International Space station. As i look out the window i see a very beautiful planet that seems inviting and peaceful. Unfortunately it is not. These days we are constantly reminded of the unspeakable acts of violence and damage we can inflict on one another. Not just with their actions but with our irresponsible words. We are better than this. We must do better than. You can watch this and other programs online booktv. Org. Heres a look at some books being published this week facebook cofounder chris hughes shares his upbringing and argues that the 1 has a responsibility for the economically impoverished in fair shot. Major scott details how to his marine regiment survived the deadly a city in iraq. And its better than it looks, Greg Easterbrook explores the political and Environmental Issues impacting our globe. Also this week, feminist Brittany Cooper provides analysis of the role of women. [inaudible] educated as tara westovers expense growing up uneducated. Bestselling author looks at innovations that are preparing men to mankind for Space Exploration in his latest book the future of humanity. Awardwinning journalist reports on the growth of the White National movement in america and everything you love will burn. Look for these titles and bookstores this coming week and watch for many of the authors in the near future on book tv on cspan2. The National Book critics circle comprised of literary critics, authors and members of the Book Publishing industry recently announced its finalist for the outstanding books of 2017. Some of the finalists include jack davis look at the gulf of mexico. Frances fitzgeralds history of evangelism in america. Russianamerican journalists report on the generation of russians who came of age during the Vladimir Putin regime and the art of death. Kevin young bunked and roxanne gaze memoir hunger. It has covered several of this years finalists. I think most of us are afraid of death because it means losing people we love, but one of the things i learned from reading the riders, especially the dying riders who are writing about their own death, and even with my parents, oneri of the thingsi realized that dying people want to tell us is to live. Live the best life you can, live so you dont have many regrets. Do we do the living finding that message