To my children, i will try to read this without crying. These thoughts, words, recipes, to cherish. Christy and i will die one day. We all will die. We do not know the future but i know these things are true and want my children to know they are true. I worry more than i should about my kids, my mind races to order stories, if it gets lost or snakebites, devlin going swimming, what if she falls in and around. I hope it is natural to be overprotective and over worried and overthink the dangers that lie ahead for our kids. I just want them to love god, love us and be kind, most of all your mother and i love you so much. We go into your room and watch you sleep. Iq part of the fabric from your favorite stuffed animal in your travel bag, and rub it in my hands to remind me of you. I can listen to it and here you. I love you, your mother does too. When the day comes you can no longer see a facetoface, we will be behind the veil of eternity watching and waiting to hold you once again. Thank you. [applause] im happy to take any questions you have. They told me you have to go to this microphone if you have any questions would otherwise i have to talk another 20 minutes because we are live on cspan. I am capable of talking. What i write in the book that i fell into everything i have ever done, one of the jobs i hated, i would have been great at being a lawyer but there are these things called client and they are often terrible and have problems with easy solutions and refused to go with the easy solution because they would rather sue the person who made the mad but after that when i was at red state someone from msnbc called and asked if i could be on msnbc and i did and years later av who wanted me was at cnn, and asked if i wanted a job at cnn and after that the local Radio Program director called me and asked if i could fill in for a man on the radio the next day and i said sure, i have been on the radio before and they remembered me. When i got to the station the next morning it turns out the individual was arrested in a crack house. The day turned into a week and the weeks turned into three months, expired Gift Certificate in the steakhouse. When i was there, the radio people in atlanta, one of them read my website, and asked if i wanted a weekend show. I said no. I was doing cnn, never saw my family to begin with and asked if i could fill in for herman cain and i filled in for herman cain and at the end of the show a group of people in suits came into the room and i thought that was the second they were going to say i was never allowed in the building again and instead they said herman cain is going to run for president. We dont want you to have a weekend show. Can you take his spot on the radio. I never had a job in radio before and they did not know that when they asked the question. They assumed i had been on radio more than the week i had been when they heard me. From 9 to midnight for three weeks until herman left and then 7 00 to 10 00 and 6 00 to 9 00, 5 to 7, the largest in the southeast, the most listened to radio show on any station regardless of format and spend two hours a day talking about whatever i want to talk about, having a wife and two kids at home. I stopped to check traffic, i have a captured audience, to figure out how to get home, not me, the traffic guy but i can talk about what i want to talk about and i found more than nobody wants to talk about. People are tired of the news of the day. We are not 9 months into this presidency and people are exhausted and doesnt matter what Political Party you are and people yelling at each other and the most inconsequential things on the planet are the most consequential things on the planet and getting online finding people who agree with them to get together and have cathartic experiences and community is collapsing around them. People losing their minds turning into the tv station where everybody agrees with us and coming out as a conservative in 2016, being a guest host for Rush Limbaugh saying i wasnt going to support the president and his election everyone was pretty sure it destroyed my career and it never dawned on me that i could lose my job and Health Insurance and kill my wife. Her medicine is 20,000 a month. I looked and the alternative the Affordable Care act, it wouldnt be affordable for that medicine. If i lost my job we would been in a world of hurt. My ratings went up instead and part of it was i spent less time talking about the daily news because i didnt want to talk about it, didnt support to my listener supported who called my station demanding i be fired and spent more time talking about other news and when i would talk about the president ial race, spend time critically of my own side, particularly people of faith who put their faith in a politician instead of a savior in heaven and my disappointment with that and the ratings kept going up. A diverse audience over time. Everybody thought i was destroying my career the show grew and i got a book out of it. I for a long time to ask people this question and one word of prep. You know the definition i am sure of profane. I personally think the price we have to pay for medicine, that was prompted by your 20,000 a month, is absolutely profane and knowing there is a just god in heaven somebody has got to answer for that i think. What do you think . I will be a lot of people answering for a lot of things on the last day. The importance is believing theres going to be that last day. Somebody asked a while back if i really believe that . Yes i do. Not only do i believe it, it gives me comfort we may see no justice in this lifetime but we will see what it really is in the next lifetime. My wife is a miracle of modern medicine that genetic medicine could be developed for a particular form of cancer very few people have. I understand the cost of her medicine because few people have it. And jacked up the price, things like that, you wonder what is going on. All i can say to my kids in the book is dont believe the myth that people are really good at humanity is really good, we are a bunch of sinners. I tell people im a conservative because im a christian and i know everybody is a sinner and i want as few of them in charge of me as possible. The government and people in charge, i dont want my kids to have that to be so jaded nothing can matter. I was on city council for a term. When i took my radio job i had to resign 6 months early because i couldnt have a parttime elected official job and fulltime radio job and it was the most miserable four years of my life, somebodys trash does not get collected you will get yelled at in the Grocery Store even if it wasnt your fault. The reason i ran for office was it dawned on me when i had to do, and 10 asian theme massage parlors were closed but every one of them was open and flies out the door and couldnt figure out what was going on. It a reference for human trafficking. I ran for office and was shocked, encouraged the police to do investigations and more than one of these places was shuttered for fronts for human trafficking. They find local landlords were politically connected and rent from them knowing they can provide them to stop the investigations, the only thing i read on and refuse to leave the radio show until we can pass ordinance and the thing we kept running into with people say why are you directing police from bad crimes to this . This is consenting adults . Pay no attention to the human trafficking, doesnt really happen, they cant get proof. A conservative came up the greatest way to show these places down, the regulatory state. We went to the legitimate massage parlors and they all had lightbulbs and clean Running Water and people werent allow to live in or over the shop so we passed a law that said if you have a massage parlor you have to have a log of your customers, lightbulbs in every room the work and not allowed to live there. And amazingly none of these places were open anymore because they didnt want to comply with basic regulations which you dont need to send police, just a business license inspectors, they love to shut people down and it worked. I dont want my child to experience the cynicism that is pervasive today that i experienced about politics but what would you suggest we do to move ourselves and posterity away from the cynicism that is pervasive in our political culture . It is not a political deck and it will sound like that. Stop looking to a group of people in washington dc to provide your solutions. Look to your local government and local community and local nonprofits and local churches and find solutions locally. It is a philosophical thing and some of you disagree but when we concentrate all our decisionmaking in one location, in addition to allowing us to become cynical when it doesnt go our way it makes every fight a hill to dine on because every fight is about that and the founders wisely said federalism is the solution, you should be able to live your life the way you live your life and people of like mind and move to another state if you find disagreement in that state instead of 1sizefitsall everywhere Big Government and what i found, whether you are conservative or liberal you think Washington Matters most and it was never designed to be that way. By focusing on the problems and allowing it to become as powerful as it has we give up on our local community. The number of counties in this country that now have in my position a Single Person running for open seats on School Boards or city council or county commissions is growing because people are not looking to their local county for their solution so why run for office . It is the one guy that covets power who runs as opposed to the local person who has a kid at a local Public School who is a problem and wants the problem fixed, the local school board will fix that for you. Reengaging local communities around the dinner table, on the sidewalk, in city council, is so important as part of civic commitment. And looking at far off places, i really want i write about this. They are masters of their own destiny. No one will solve problems for them. I learned that with my wifes Health Situation and my Health Situation. It is us having to do that and people not coming to us. We have to engage, the lack of engagement breeds cynicism and engagements where we dont matter. We dont matter to washington because they know how to micro targeted if they get so many votes from certain people they can get elected. The individual doesnt matter. At the local level the individual matters and what you do whether you are from nashville or any other city in your local community matters. He will affect more people on a daily basis by going to local soup kitchen and helping them feed others then you will by picking up the phone and yelling at a College Student in washington who works for your congressman and if we could get back to that taking care of each other locally instead of saying someone else will do it, i will stop, in seminary we spent three weeks in the sermon on the mount and what is jesus talking about . Talking about the concept of the Old Testament that god takes care of his people and people are supposed to take care of each other and the rich person who has a lot is supposed to take care of the poor person, you cant compel them to go there supposed to because they are the president of the porcelain suddenly rich and the rich for us and find himself or the roles reversed and people take care of each other in their local community. Cs lewis, convinced god did not intend us to care about disasters or the disaster in our backyard, his point was the rise of global news we care about something terrible that happened on the far side of the world the 100 years ago we were heard about a month from now. It gets us amped up. Usa today story the other day, the supervolcano in yellowstone may explode earlier than expected and wipe out all life on earth. If you read it we are still 400,000 years away from when that is supposed to be but you had to read to the bottom of the story to find it out. We and ourselves up on these things and care about things and worry about things. If nothing else this past year taught me my favorite verse of the bible is why worry about tomorrow, it will take care of itself. Focus on today. We need to do more of that, caring for people in our community and families and friends and not worrying about things that happened far off the we have no control and no power over and no one else does either. Not to say we are not supposed to know about him or maybe we can find answers or supposed to send people to help the poor in other countries but it is to say there is a great failure in the Christian Church in America Today where we send our kids to mexico to hammer nails and work on cans when we have Homeless People down the street we ignore because we dont consider that a mission deal. It is a damning indictment on the American Church that we have a lot of kids from inner cities with no fathers at home in crumbling Public Schools when you have great Church Facilities that are abandoned for 5 days, and give these kids a smaller education where the church is and open the facilities to these people but we lost our priorities, the American Church lost its priorities. So many Church Leaders decided to get political and cast their lot saying cyrus the great was returning us to jerusalem and letting us rebuild the temple, the temple has artie been built and rose again 3 days later and ascended into heaven, dont know why we are looking for that. It pains me to see so many people looking for Political Solutions for spiritual problems so thank you very much on that note. I hope you will buy a copy of the book and read it and pass it on to your family. If nothing else i have my family gumbo recipe in there. The most controversial part of my book because it doesnt have worcestershire in it which i point out to southerners is a british product which they dont care to have pointed out. Amazing how food can make people angry but around the dinner table, there are 33 recipes to accomplish that. Thank you for having me today, thank you. [applause] thank you for being here and thank you for joining us. And have it signed. We will meet you at the war memorial plasma. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] this is booktv on cspan2 coverage of the southern festival of books at Central Library in downtown nashville. We are halfway through the first day of live coverage. In a few minutes we will be back with our discussion on westward expansion. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] here is a look at upcoming book fairs happening around the country. Live from the southern festival of books with oscar talks from the city Central Library. The ninth annual boston book festival in louisiana book festival in baton rouge will happen the same day, october 28th. In early november live from two state capitals was at the texas book festival in austin and wisconsin book festival in madison. Last month, live from Miamidade College in the book fair, featured authors include senator our franken, walter isaacson, nbc news and many more. And book fairs to watch previous festival coverage, booktv. Org. Let me talk about a couple examples. I mentioned materials, what is used in laboratories, cells that grow in plastic dishes and grow successfully in the first of these was featured, the story of Henrietta Lacks a wonderful book and also a tv movie that is just out and a woman diagnosed with Cervical Cancer at Johns Hopkins in 1951, isolated Cervical Cancer and turned it into the worlds first set, tremendously useful line to be used in Biomedical Research around the world but this turned out to be cell lines, incredibly rapidly and if you make a small error, they are throughout all your cells and in the liver cell, ultimately realize these cells, huge problem for decades scientists recognized in the that these were taking over and a lot of concern about it and hand drinking and not much was done. Starting 13 years ago, there were good tests that could rapidly identify whether these cells were hela cells or what scientists thought they were using but those tests did not take off or used as widely as they need to be. 450 other examples of cell lines that are misidentified in Biomedical Research lab and they have these tools to check them out but theyll cost money, so these things dont get used. These tests are not used as much as they ought to be so that is one source, bad cell lines and a second i mentioned is the methods that are picked up. Scientists design experiments that dont have enough power, classic examples involve studies of lou gehrigs disease, they have led to a lot of drugs and all have been failures, the search for treatment for als. One of the problems, they dont think thoroughly about what they needed to do, how many mice they needed to use, to do an experiment you might take dozens of mice for your study group and dozens more for your control group, that could easily cost 100 and many academic scientists dont have that kind of money. I will do 10 mice and call my result a pilot study and they are constrained by resources but on the other hand there have been many occasions these things have been led to largescale Clinical Trials and lead to results that have been very disappointing that look promising when you do it in a small number of mice and maybe spend tens of millions of dollars trying to expand and discover it doesnt work. One example of a methodological problem that gives a flavor for what can go wrong. I mentioned bad assumptions. And the assumption about mouse work is if you study something in my sent it works in mice you can cure cancer in mice and strokes but those findings dont translate