Editor david enrich talking about his book, the spider network. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon. We are delighted that you are participating in the 11th annual savannah book festival presented by georgia power. David and nancy sin terror, the Sheehan Family foundation and mark and pat [inaudible] many thanks to jack and mary romanos for this glorious venue, the Trinity Baptist church. Wed also like to extend thanks to our individual donors who have made and continue to make Saturdays Free festival events possible. In fact, 90 of the revenue for the savannah book festival comes from donors just like you, so thank you. We are very excited to have a savannah book festival app available this year. Please look in your program for information on downloading it to your phone. Before we get started, please let me go over a couple of housekeeping notes. Immediately following this presentation, our speaker, david enrich, will be signing festivalpurchased copies of his book in telfair square. If 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 crowds that are waiting outside to come in and be seated as easily as possible. Now, 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 if 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 usher will bring you a microphone. So, please dont ask a question until the microphone is in your hands. 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 today courtesy of ron and barbara coley, and we appreciate their support. David enrich is the finance editor at the new york times, and previously he was the financial Enterprise Editor for the wall street journal. He headed a team of investigative reporters, and he has won numerous journalism awards including the 2016 gerald loeb award for feature writing. So please join me in giving a very warm savannah welcome to david enrich. [applause] hello. This is a great crowd. I was standing here at beginning, and it was empty, and i was a little nervous. But this is my first time in savannah, and this is a really cool city. Im really glad to be here. And this is without a doubt ive been doing a lot of these events since my book was published this is without a doubt the coolest venue ive ever been in. So, yeah. [applause] its a beautiful day, its beautiful savannah weather, and i really appreciate you guys coming out of the sun to listen to a talk about finance. But i promise you, this is not going to be really boring, and its not im going to dwell as little as possible on actual finance. By book, the spider network, it is a book about finance, but ive really tried to make it a book about humans and psychology and things like that as much as about jargon. So im just going to kind of tell you a story about how i came to write this book. Which is kind of an interesting tale and i think says a lot about my writing process and just journalism, which people tend to find interesting. So the story starts back in 2008 when a group of wall street journal reporters not including myself who were based in the London Bureau started digging into something called libor. Its an acronym that stands for the london interbank offer rate, and most people have never heard of it, but its really important. [audio difficulty] its the thing that determines the Interest Rates that many of us pay on our mortgage, our credit card loans, auto loans, student loans. Its what determines the Interest Rates you pay if youre a big company and you borrow money in the bond market. Its the Interest Rate you way if youre a town or a city that borrows money. So this is its often referred to as the worlds most important number, and it touches trillions and trillions of dollars of financial contracts all over the world. Its a big number. Libors set every today around lunchtime in london by a group of the worlds biggest banks. And its done in a way that, with the benefit of hindsight, seems really arbitrary and inefficient and kind of stupid, but it made a lot of sense at the time. Basically, each bank estimates theoretically how much it would cost them to borrow money from another bank. And that number is expressed as an Interest Rate, and thats what those numbers could average together, the high ones, the low ones get kicked out, and rest of them are combined into an average, and thats libor. Its set every day, and its used all over the world. It turns out that no one was paying any attention to how this rate was actually set, the mechanics of it. It was a tax that was delegated to lowlevel, junior employees within these banks, and they would come up with a number sometimes basically out of thin air because it was very hard to figure out. No one was paying any attention. This was not a priority for the banks, so they would come up with this number in a pretty arbitrary way, split it to this trade group called the British Banker Association that would compile the number and send it to everyone. Starting about 20 years ago, so in the mid 1990s, a bunch of banks realized since no one was paying attention, there was a lot of opportunity, a lot of potential for them to make money off of this in a way that was not necessarily illegal, but certainly not very honest. And they realized that they were making, they were placing huge wagers every day on trades that were connected to libor. They were essentially betting, gambling really on whether libor was going to go up or down, very small increments in the near future, whether it was over the next 24 hours, the next week or the next month. And so they had a lot to gain or lose based on movements in libor. And they realized since no one was paying any attention whatsoever to how this rate was actually set, if they moved their submission, their libor data up by a fraction of a percentage point on a daily basis, that could be hugely influential in moving the overall rate. So by the mid 2000s and by the dawn of the financial crisis really, it had become common industry practice for banks to nudge libor up or down by small amounts in order to make more money for themselves. And thats where the story really starts. In 2008 a couple of my predecessor ises at the wall street journal started digging into this number, and they realized very quickly that something was terribly wrong with it. Libors supposed to be a reflection of how much it costs banks to borrow from each other, and that would mean that in times of Financial Stress like a financial crisis, that number would go up because banks would be charging them, charging each other more to borrow money because they were perceived as being riskier. And if that doesnt make sense to you, dont worry. It really isnt relevant. The point is banks were manipulating this number to suit themselves, and some of my predecessors at the wall street journal realized this was going on, and they wrote a couple of very big, front page exposes about this practice. And, you know, the great thing about working for a big newspaper like the wall street journal is when you do one of these front page stories, people all over the world take notice. And they get you know, its a very good way to affect change. Thats, frankly, why i got into journalism. Its something that you see the power of the media. You writing this, and people take action. In this case these guys wrote these a couple of very powerful, i thought, very powerful stories, and nothing happened. The world basically didnt react partly because no one knew about libor or cared about it. So nothing happened. I was in new york at the time. I moved with my wife to london to be the kind of finance correspondent for the wall street journal in london in 2010, and i really didnt care about libor either. Like most of you in this room. And i continued to not cower about it until 2011 care about it until 2011 when word started trickling out that a number of Government Agencies in the u. S. And britain had opened investigations based on this wall street journal article. It had been secret, but it was kind of leaking out into the press because some of the banks had disclosed that they had received subpoenas and were under investigation. And theres nothing journalists love more than government investigations because we love bad news in general, and, you know, it gets your papers, your stories more prominence. And the great thing about government investigations is its easy to write about because we can just report government x or government y are investigating this, and its much easier than to have to actually prove the misconduct yourself. So i and my other colleagues in the british media at the time really started aggressively reporting on libor once again. And of it was kind of a matter of institutional pride for the wall street journal because this was something that we felt that we had started. But again, there are few topics in the financial world, much less the real world, that cause peoples eyes to glaze over faster than the mention of the word libor. So these stories, while exciting to me, were not exciting to people like you or to most of our readers. And, you know, through 2011, through 2012 we kept trying to write these exciting stories about libor, and they kind of fell flat until the middle of 2012 when one of the worlds biggest banks, barclays which is based in london announced it had reached an agreement with u. S. And british prosecutors in which it admitted trying to manipulate libor. And they paid a very big penalty. But the more interesting thing was that the ceo of that bank had to fall on his sword and resign. And this was one of the first times since the financial crisis that wed seen an example of an actual human being being held accountable for misconduct at his institution. And the guy in question was a pretty colorful character. He was an american, bob diamond was his name, a brash, quintessential american banker in london. And i dont know if you guys know london or the u. K. Very well, but, you know, those types of people dont generally go over very well there. The british dont like the brash american bankers very much. And so bob diamonds resignation was a cause for celebration in the u. K. , and it was finally the thing that got on the front pages of the american newspapers, including the wall street journal. So that was a very exciting moment for me. And yet no one really understood how this libor scandal happened in any way. We still bob diamond wasnt really involved in it, he was just overseeing this corrupt culture at barclays and needed to go as a result. One of the things ive kind of been trained to do over 15 years as a financial journalist is you try to tell stories with human beings in them, with human actors. Not institutional actors, certainly not numbers as actors. The way to make stories compelling is for them to have a narrative and for them to have, you know, action verbs that are used in a nonmetaphorical sense. And so people walking along are doing things rather than just talking about nameless, faceless institutions. And the libor story really still lacked that. Until the very end of 2012 when the u. S. And british prosecutors arrested and criminally charged a guy named tom hayes. And tom hayes, very little was known about him publicly. We knew his age. He was about my age at the time, so i guess he was about 34, 35 years old. He we knew where he lived, which was in a very nice house in southeastern england. We knew the dates of his employment at a number of Financial Institutions in both london and in tokyo. So he worked for some of the worlds biggest banks including ubs, the big swiss bank, and citigroup, the big u. S. Bank. And we knew from prosecutors that he had engaged over several years in a series of what can best be described as incredibly reckless, selfdestructive email messages, Text Messages, recorded phone calls where he said in very brazen, unequivocal, unambiguous terms, move libor higher for me, ill pay you this for doing it. So he used very colorful language. He seemed like not a very nice guy from the tenor of these emails. He was a bit of a bully really. And he just seemed, you know, this quintessential wall street crook straight out offing central casting. And this finally was an exciting thing because finally a human being doing bad things that we as journalists can trace and write stories about him. And so we did. And i was very pleased with myself. When 2012 ended and i came back to london in 2013 eager to take on to move past libor and start writing about things that didnt make peoples eyes glaze over. One of the things my boss always did was at the beginning of each year, you would go and come up with your thematic list of stories you were going to pursue, kind of your ambitions for the following year. I had a great plan. My idea was to do a series of stories that id already given a title to it. It was called dirty london, and it was going to be about all the malfeasance and this shady stuff happening all over london, kind of a bunch of halfbaked stories that i was going to pursue. I thought my boss was going to be excited and just pat me on the back and say go get em. I went in, and he was like, that sounds fine, but first you need to do the definitive profile of tom hayes. Because really we dont know anything about him. And i thought to myself, this just sounds like a thankless, miserable task. This guys just been arrested in london, hed been criminally charged. The attorney general at the time, eric holder, had gotten up at a lectern like this and just attacked the guy. Theres no way i would ever be able to talk to this guy or his family, and those are the crucial things for doing a story like this. And, you know, no one even knew what this guy looked like. It i did not want the thankless task of going down this rabbit hole, and so i said no. And my boss said, yes. [laughter] i said no, he said yes. I threw a small journalist tantrum and stomped out of his office and went back to my desk and was like, look, im just going to get this over with. Im going to put in a days work and be e done with this. In the first thing you do in a situation like this is a Google Search. So i just did a Google Search for tom hayes and libor, and it presented out, you know, there were a dozen stories about the guy, not a whole lot. Theres nothing interesting about him really except for one little story in the Daily Telegraph which is one of britains, you know, kind of i wont even say it. One of the british newspapers. [laughter] it was a very short story, like 2300 words long, and it mentioned, end kind of in it kind of insinuated that he had just sold this Technology Company that he owned to his wife. That he was trying to hide assets from the government or Something Like that. And it didnt mention his wifes name, the companys name, but in the u. K. Its very easy to track these thing done. I went into an online database of corporate registries in the u. K. , and sure enough theres a Company Called title x technologies, and sure enough, tom hayes with, you know, the same address as the guy who had been criminally charged had created a company a couple years earlier and then very recently sold it to someone, a woman. Her name was jennifer. And i thought to myself, well, thats tom hayes wife, thats a good starting point. So i Googled Jennifer arteri, and she was not tom hayes wife. She was just very clearly an american, and i could tell this because she had posted pictures all over the internet of herself in various degrees of undress [laughter] draped in an American Flag [laughter] and so, you know, the good thing about that is that, you know, i i love living in london can, but i never at least until the very end learned how to talk to british people. And i dont think they really liked me either. So its always a struggle. Im very direct and in your face, and they are not. So i saw this woman is clearly my type of person, you know . [laughter] shes, you know, or shes american. And that was very exciting to me to know that i had an american i could talk to. And that was a breakthrough and an advantage i had over most of the other journalists who were british. So i found her phone number, i called her. And sure enough, she was driving. I got her on her cell phone, and she was driving on a freeway in los angeles. And it turned out i was like how to you know tom hayes . Youre not his wife. It turned out theyd been Business School classmates together. And sure enough, she had volunteered, after tom got in so much trouble, to talk possession of this company. So i just started asking her, so who is this guy . Who is tom hayes . I know his birthday, his dates of employment, and he sounds like a notnice guy from the out of context Text Messages weve seen. And jennifer opened my eyes to this guy in a way i really did not expect. It turns out tom hayes was mildly autistic, he is mildly autistic. He has people who are he had aspergers syndrome. Incredibly socially awkward, completely incapable of maintaining eye contact during a conversation. He had some personal hygiene problems. He was not the type of banker he earned a tremendous amount of money, but he was not the kind of guy who was going out to fancy dinners or clubs or things like that. He was known in financial circles, it turned out, for he would go out to kfc, get a bucket of fried chicken, big bottle of orange juice and go home and watch seinfeld reruns. So right away this guys seeming a lot more interesting than i had expected because you want someone whos not just kind of a cookie cutter caricature of a banker villain. Thats so predictable. And then it got even better because jennifer gave me to what day is maybe the best and im overselling this, but it was a really good quote about what tom hayes has done. She said that tom hayes defense here was that, basically, everyone was doing this. His bosses knew about it, sometimes participated. The entire industry was trying to manipulate libor. And her quote was something to the effect of rigging libor was like spanking children in the 70s. Everyone was doing it, no one considered it wrong. [laughter] and anytime you can get the word spank into a business story [laughter] that is a big, big win. [laughter] so i was feeling really good, and in a kind of a state of slight euphoria at the end of this conversation. I said is, jennifer, look, the thing i really need is i need to talk to tom. Get someone in his family or even his lawyers who at this point were refusing to talk to me. Why dont you she was obviously in close touch with tom all the time, and i told her why dont you just pass on my phone number, say that im like an honest, openminded guy which i am, but im also a journalist, but, you know . [laughter] she was like absolutely not, thats ridiculous. I kind of begged and pleaded, and she finally agreed with the caveat theres no way i would ever hear from this guy. It was worth a try so i could then go into my boss office and say im really trying. So that night i went home and i was sitting on the sofa with my wife and we were watching tv. I dont know if you guys were in here for the previous speaker, but she really doesnt like people using their cell phones when theyre talking to people. Sure enough, my phone buzzes, and it was a text message from an unknown number, and it said im willing to talk to you, but i need to make sure i can trust you. This goes much, much higher than me, not even the Justice Department knows the full story. And it was tom hayes. And, i mean, i couldnt believe it. And because who, first of all, if youre ever in, like, criminal trouble, do not talk to journalists. [laughter] i hate to say it, but that is not a good plan. [laughter]. And i was like okay, can we meet . I will meet you tomorrow morning at Victoria Station which is a busy transition in london, standing outside burger king wearing a Brown Leather coat. I am thinking to myself i walked into all the president s men and i am bob woodward and the Pulitzer Prize in my back pocket. I am so excited. I called my boss and you wont believe, didnt sleep at all that night. The next morning totally amped up, and i got another text message, i cant do it. My wife found my phone, took my phone away and wont let me do it. And a pretty good lawyer, kind of wisely and i was being a little too persistent, and this is sarah, toms wife, his life is on the line. If you leave him alone he will talk to you. At this point, from tom hayes, in the Justice Department, no one knows the full story, that is an exclamatory thing. He hadnt said a word. This is, in journalist terms a nice scoop ahead and i was feeling good about myself. I started my boss is a real pain, bruce orwell, one of the best editors i ever had, kept telling me to go back and try again and made it clear he wanted to be left alone. It came time, i told tom i have a few Fact Checking questions but not respond again, i would love to help you. My wife will literally kill me. This is saturday morning. I was ready to go out with him and i looked at her and i love my wife and i looked at her and i could use this to my advantage. On a whim i wrote back to tom, i hope this is okay, know what it is like to have a ball buster wife. We will keep this between us. Do you know what . It worked. I couldnt believe it. It worked. What do you want to know . What do i want to know . Where do we begin . I spent the entirety of that day, it was like i had uncorked something. He just needed to get some of his chest and i got this barrage of Text Messages that would not stop. This is all off the record. That means in journalist terms that i cant quote it or use it but i can use it to help myself. He says you should look into this thing or that thing, i will do that and inform my reporting. The line has been drawn after he said this is much higher than me. He gave new lines of inquiry in my story is getting good at this point. The day before i was about to publish, a few more things to check the one was we were going to mention his wife only in the sense that his wife is an interesting person, we knew her name and occupation, a big London Law Firm and i was going to mention that. I had never spoken to tom hanks. We had 200 Text Messages over the course of a few weeks but no facetoface or Oral Communication and the phone rang and it was tom hanks and he was worked up. The notion of his wifes name being mentioned in the story was pretty scared. He had touched a nerve for some reason and he was a traitor. He engaged basically a professional gambler with other peoples money and very good at that. He was such a traitor that he now proposed to trade to me which was if i promised to take his wife out of the story entirely, not mention her name or occupation or law firm he would agree to meet me the following day and be my sherpa to understand the libor scandal a bit more. This was an easy trade for me to take because i dont care about his wife and hid her name and occupation, mildly interesting but i talked to my boss and we immediately agreed to accept the trade and did this knowing he wouldnt follow through, no enforcement mechanism, no collateral, he was probably going to vanish. We published the story on the front page of the wall street journal, i was feeling so good, the best story i had ever written and 9 00 that morning my phone rings and it is tom hayes. He says that was disappointing. He thought that i had you dont know the nothing new in there. He is has a lax filter and doesnt really think which is refreshing actually but he did not like my story and wasnt shy about it and i was really sorry he felt that way and then he hung up. I didnt have a chance to ask him to follow through on the trade he made. And to meet with his lawyers who were not happy with him. Not only speaking but the Justice Department which is not smart. His lawyers were understandably furious and said you cannot ever do that again. If you ever talk to the media again without our authorization we will fire you. Which is tough but fair. He got out of his meeting with the lawyers and called me and said i made you a promise and i will keep that promise, lets meet. It was a cold rainy day, almost exactly february. Four years ago i guess and i sprinted down in london, a dingy cafe right above the tube station, right next to his Lawyers Office and the guy doesnt make eye contact and doesnt have an office which either. I asked two questions that he just went for an hour and a half, im not taking notes, just trying to remember everything and the most interesting thing out of a paper cup, those little plastic devices that are not quite straws, he took one of those and turned it into origami or something, turned it into an elaborate structure while he was talking to me. I was so impressed with his ability to focus on creating an origami straw while also devoting all the dirty secrets of the financial industry while sitting not 100 yards from his lawyers or their offices. This was the beginning of what would become a years long relationship. And at least occurred by text message which he was most comfortable doing. s lawyers didnt know, his wife didnt know and the condition was that i couldnt write anything. I couldnt quote him ever again, i could use it. It was enormously helpful and turned into the source of numerous stories exposing dirty london, the london financial world and came to trust me. He was desperate to have someone in his life who would listen to him and actually hear him and not judge him through the lens of this is an evil criminal. I am pretty empathetic usually, like most other journalists at the time i viewed him, and i loved the idea of cops busting as a journalist, nor bankers need to be locked up and i was a cheerleader for the idea and the irony is a banking criminal, and i was meeting with tom at least once a week. This guy is not the big party guy, really true, he loved me taking him out to tgi fridays where he would get something really fancy and didnt drink at all. Eventually his wife found out we were secretly meeting and threatened to divorce him and if he continued and we had to develop a more clandestine way of arranging to meet. After a year of this, tom has not been on trial yet, he is awaiting trial, started cooperating with the british authorities to help build cases against alleged coconspirators and the year or two of jail time, very nice jail inside london and move on with his life, he and his wife had a kids at this point, getting in and out of jail is a big priority for him. Halfway through the process after ive known him eight months or so, he had lost his mind and decided even though he had spent 80 odd hours being taped confessing to these crimes and pointing in the direction of people who were acting with him he decided he couldnt keep going, had to fight the charges and the reason he told me was he couldnt bear the thought of growing old and watching his son grow up and tell his son that not only is daddy a criminal but is permitted to be a criminal and didnt feel he had done anything wrong he had pushed the envelope. That is when they are paid a lot of money to do in the entire Financial System in his view was based on traders like him searching for little inefficiencies to exploit, whether you have a better trading system or better information or stupider clients or inability to manipulate things around the edges. He viewed that is something he was paid to do, his bosses knew about it and his bosses boss is new, and participated alongside him. If he didnt see what he had done wrong he couldnt bear the thought anymore of pleading not guilty or pleading guilty, he decided he would plead not guilty and fight the charges and at that point his life went into a downward spiral and he got caught again meeting with me and instead of getting divorced he introduced her. And his wife in many ways was the polar opposite of tom, really charismatic and they are both really smart but she was smart in a way that she could have an interesting conversation, to drink a lot and a journalists best friend, and so we would drink to gather. I was spending more time with tom and sarah van any of my friends. This is for two years with all the while the condition with both of them, i cant quote anything they tell me but i am dutifully keeping notes. And very strange couple. In london in summer of 2015, and the name in this book somewhere, he told me you have so much great material here, you have to get them to let you put this on the record. All your meetings with them. You tell the story of getting to know him, and his life and his world circling essentially. I decided i would ask. And regardless what the verdict was, use everything they told me. Thousands of Text Messages are documented every little twist and turn, and that was exciting to me. It lasted about three months, and an actual cage, a little more civilized, a bulletproof glass box. Anyone else would stare at tom, and maintain this fiction better than journalists. And a number of occasions where they found ourselves at urinals and next to each other and unable to acknowledge each other and the trial went on for three months, ended the jury came up with the verdict and he was convicted on all eight counts of fraud. Sitting there wasnt thinking about writing a book, how to turn it into a story, and sitting there in the courtroom watching the life drain out of his face, touched me in a way i never experienced as a journalist. We are paid to be objective and stay removed, clearly i failed at that and it was a weird experience. Half an hour later with the sentence, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison in maximum security. That was everyones reelection in the courtroom except tom and sarah and they looked at each other. And they thought they were going to get off and be acquitted. And no idea he was going to get a 14 Year Prison Sentence and be in a maximum security prison, and violent criminals. That was awful. It was also great. Journalists know of nothing more than a sad story so this became essential the the system was built on the backs of people like tom who are mathematicians and mildly autistic and that is not a rare thing. They are mostly guys and detecting patterns and being laser focused on innovative sometimes underhanded ways of making money that rely on exploiting tiny inefficiencies in the system and a pronounced pattern not only that they are good at doing that but when things go wrong, when the reckoning comes in somewhat is held accountable for the envelope pushing, these are the guys who get nailed. Today to me that was not that surprising but upsetting. I like many other journalists, we cheer for the financial tops and wants people to get busted and like everyone else we yearn for accountability in the Banking System especially after the financial crisis where there is very little accountability. We in the press are very good at celebrating these come all charges being filed and prison sentences being handed out. It was upsetting to look back at that and realize a lot of the people who were in jail are not the people at the top of the food chain. It is not the executives, it is low and midlevel traders and brokers and guys like that, probably should have known better than they were doing but they are not the linchpins of the system. These are the ponds. These are the guys who bear the brunt of the penalties for what has gone wrong in the financial world for the last decade or so. And dakota of this story was hayes was convicted of conspiracy to defraud on eight counts of it. The word conspiracy means you are doing it with other people. A bunch of alleged coconspirators went on trial including one or two of his hire ups and what happened . Tom is alone in prison. His best friend is a man who is convicted of murdering his financial advisor, it is a mean prison. And he has really deteriorated, not in good shape at all. On that uplifting note i will take your questions. [applause] that was riveting. I cant wait to read your book. I want to know how and what lawyers two of his superiors and other people, how they got off and he didnt. Good question. And one of the idiosyncrasies of the british legal system is it is illegal to talk to jerrys after trial so in the us there would be a very easy answer. I wouldve chased down the doors and ask why they voted this way. So it is a bit of a mystery. I sat through the subsequent trials and the turning point to me and some of their lawyers as well was when it became public, the trial was largely about tom hayess interactions with his alleged coconspirators. In the course of that they had to explain why tom hayes was not in the dock with these are the guys. He was in prison. When it came out in subsequent trials with tom hayes was serving a 14 Year Prison Sentence you see the reaction jurors had to the notion that was the type of penalty we are talking about. What happened is the jurors thought to themselves it is illegal what they were doing. They violated the letter of the law but doing it in the context of someone much broader and the entire system of corruption. Coconspirators are being tried. They were lowlevel people in the grand scheme of things. A lot of jurors look at the conduct they had done and the punishment they were looking at and said they didnt want any part of that. The notion that those guys got away with it was not that surprising and they were very sophisticated, savvy and charismatic, much more than cookiecutter brokers who have, they know how to communicate, look you in the eye and players. Theres a lot of manipulating that has been going on during this alleged period. He probably the question was is it possible he will get released earlier. The answer is yes, he probably will. You generally dont serve, as long as you are well behaved you dont fall serve your full sentence. His kid was 4 years old when the trial started, one or 2 when i first met him. The kid will be 12 or 13. I have kids basically the same age. I cant even think about that. Why do you have two mikes adjacent to me . Have you sold the movie right yet . That is a complicated question. We had some interest from tv and film. I would love to see it made into a movie or a miniseries. Tom hanks and the doctor. If it becomes a movie and i minute i know who i want to play me, seth rogan. [laughter] microphone coming to you. I am a little confused. I thought he made a deal with prosecutors to lessen his sentence. Is that implied that the sentence would be even more extreme . He made a deal and backed out of the deal so he initially cooperated with prosecutors in exchange for what was going to be a very short sentence but after cooperating with them for 5 or 6 months, he gave 82 hours of testimony to the prosecutors admitting guilt and pointing the finger at his coconspirators, he changed his mind, he didnt think he was guilty. He had just he had been lying to the prosecutors when he said he was guilty just to get this reduced sentence. Everyone asked me, do i believe that or was he guilty . One of the things is from the first moment i started interacting with them over text message, i dont think he is capable of saying things not grounded in truth, this is not who he is. He admitted to me on a number of occasions with the benefit of hindsight he had done stuff he knew he shouldnt have been doing and was improper, he didnt know who it was illegal or not but he shouldnt have been doing the stuff he was doing. The caveat, his bosses had known about it and condoned it and participated alongside him and mitigated it but he knew what he was doing was wrong but he agreed to cooperate and backed out and prosecutors came down hard on him at that point. What is going to happen to him . What is happening right now to his wife and family . Are they broke . Is he going to be able to have a life . I dont know. Yes, he is broke, his wife has moved, and moved in with their parents. Statistically if you look what happens to families when one of the parents goes to prison for a long time the data is very overpowering. In the overwhelming number of cases, that is what happens here. Sarah once told me one of her fears was their entire relationship, not the entire, 80 of the relationship that occurred under the cloud of this investigation, tom was understandably obsessed with this and it is always talk about. What would happen with the relationship, what would they talk about, what would dominate their lives and even more so now. I havent spoken to tom in a couple years. And communicate with his wife with some regularity. His Mental Health has deteriorated. He cant let go. And and his life has been destroyed, and not in good shape. Sarah is struggling too. Essentially a single mom. Luckily is a good lawyer and makes money and her life is screwed up too. She could be doing 1 million things right now. I cant imagine a day goes by she doesnt resent it. Her life has been ruined too. I dont know what will happen but wouldnt surprise me if the relationship doesnt survive this which would be sad. You said the beginning of your communication with tom was via text message. How do you source the text message . Normally good question. Normally you would just say he said in a text message. The previous speaker, was really focused, and normal communication. Theres a lot of truth to that. And i dont think this would have happened. The separation that allowed made tom more comfortable talking to a stranger and someone he shouldnt have been talking to and from my perspective i would much prefer facetoface communication, normal people in normal circumstances you get we 10 times more information out of someone, that helps you understand command ask better questions. 10 huge advantages was i had a written record of everything he and i had said to each other going back years. Not as a journalist but someone writing a book, is invaluable. I had one moment i lost my phone and that phone was worth millions of dollars. And i lost it. And figured out witchcraft, and Text Messages. You got to wrap it up. Lets say thank you to david one more time. [applause] let me ask your cooperation with one. Volunteers holding buckets, keep Saturdays Free, make room for entering people. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] that was finance and are david enrich talking about his newest book the spider network. This is live coverage on booktv from the savanna book festival. Did you know you can access our behind the scenes pictures and videos on our social media sites . On twitter, instagram and facebook booktv. Now more live coverage of the savanna book festival will begin shortly. The next arteries Deanne Stillman and she talks about the relationship between buffalo bill and sitting bull. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] tell us how psychopathy works on the brain. It is on the other end of the caring continuum. It is true that humans seem to be endowed with the capacity for care, with the babies we have to take care of, any Human Capacity can go awry. Psychopathy at least partly related to genetic problems, not completely but in part. That seem to result in people having no capacity to care for anybody but themselves. Something that exists in severe form in 2 of the population. What we discovered is people who are psychopathic are the opposite of people who are very altruistic. Altruists have amygdalas larger than average, people who are psychopathic have the opposite, amygdala is smaller than average. The title of your book is about the fear factor. What role does fear or the ability to recognize fear in others, what role does that have in psychopathy. One thing we learned about psychopathy from the beginning that has been researched for 60 or 70 years now, people have a they are not susceptible to punishment or respond to threatening strongly. People are psychopathic are reassigned over and over. The way punishment is supposed to work is you view getting punished and you wont do the same thing. Doesnt seem to be the case people who are psychopathic have a response. It was suspected something must be wrong in their amygdalas. It is essential for the ability to develop this response. Host we have had this discussion. There is the inability to recognize fear in others. How does that play out . Humans cant spot fear in someone else, tend toward psychopathic acts. The most Interesting Research we have been doing for the past couple years. What we have discovered is when you see or hear or think about somebody else experiencing fear, in order to understand the emotions they are feeling you have to recreate or simulate that emotional state in their own brain. We know the amygdala is essential for experiencing fear yourself. If you dont have a strong amygdala response when you hear us someone else, you cannot recreate what that emotion is like and you fundamentally cant understand what the other person is feeling, you cant empathize. What would stop a normal person from hurting the other person is in there. Exactly right. If one of us saw somebody who was frightened by something we were doing our ability to simulate weather experience would be like would be enough to stop us from doing that thing. If you dont have the ability to do that you go right on ahead. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Here is a look at the current selling nonfiction books according to the Washington Post. Topping the list, fire and fury, michael wolfs expose of the trump white house. I look at the bestselling books according to the Washington Post continues with mark madsens advice on leading a happier life. Ronan bergman looks at the secret operations of the Israeli Defense forces in rise and kill first. Harvard professor Steve Lapinski and daniel cause prizes that lead to breakdowns in democracies around the world in how democracies die. And wrapping up our look from the books from the Washington Post from the nonfiction bestseller list, and Aaron Hernandez convicted of firstdegree murder in allamerican murder. Many of these authors have or will appear on booktv. Booktv. Org. Let me put you back on station again now. And breaks the news that your sisterinlaw, congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot at a shopping mall. What went through your mind, how did you deal psychologically . You werent coming home the next day. What challenge is it for you . It is challenging when you hear your brothers wife who is very important to me was shot in such a violent most shootings are pretty violent. To be a victim of such violence, 6 other people were killed including a 10yearold girl, others injured and she sustained significant injuries. Later i was told she had passed away. I immediately got on the phone with my brother, talked to him as much as i can, support him as best i could, took some time for myself. I was commander of the space station at the time, had a job to do. I tried to compartmentalize, separate what is going on from on earth with responsibilities in space and focus as much as i could on that. And take care of my brother. I wouldnt say there was anything like a serendipitous kind of thing but a good time that allowed me to cut the cord a little bit with my fellow crewmates that were up there and let them run with some of the stuff because they had been there a couple months at that point 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. That is the worst part of being in space for a long time, it is not your personal risk or worrying about what could happen but what could happen to your family on earth. Mark was also training. And the decision had to be made in washington mark is the person who is going to have to make a final determination as to his fitness, whether he wants to do that. Your experience on station absent not being able to do anything, did allow you to help him at all in making that decision or is that not even playing in . We talked about a lot of things about it but in the end it was up to gabby. She made the decision. Despite her injury, she recognized the last opportunity to find space, important the crew to be training with. And they start all over with the commander. He was on the fence about whether this was the right thing to do. In the end it wasnt his decision. I call it a national tragedy. A day of mourning the monday after. And it was a call from don from president putin, we had a conference the next day. And i was moved a little bit he spent most of the time talking to me and saying we support you, the russian people are behind you, this is a terrible tragedy and dedicated most of the conversation to checking on me and making sure i was okay. But i will read a little bit of what i said after she was shot. This was during a moment of silence, National Moment of silence, said this over the radio in the control center and whoever else was listening, i would like to take some time to recognize a moment of silence in honor of victims of the tucson shooting tragedy. I would like to say a few words. A unique Vantage Point aboard the International Space station, as we look out the window i see a 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 upon one another. Not just with actions but irresponsible words. We must do better. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. Here are some books being published this week. Look for these titles in bookstores is coming weekend watch for many of the authors in the near future on booktv on cspan2. National book critics circle comprised of literary critics, authors and members of the Book Publishing industry announced finalists for the outstanding books of 2017 including jack daviss look at the gulf of mexico. Francis 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 youngs bunk and roxanne gatess memoir hunger. Booktv has covered several of this years finalists. It means losing people we love. One thing i learned about the dying writers, writing about this, even with my parents one of the things i realized, to live the best life you can, dont have many regrets. Do we do the living find that message . Basically we want to put this on our minds and dont really want to concentrate on our mortality because it is depressing. One from christopher actions in his book mortality, he founded at the end or before that, the difference between living and dining and just living is you are constantly aware we have an expiration date. For most of us it is fuzzy, a possibility, but for dying people, they know every single day is a gift. Ideally it is great if we all lived like this. You can watch these programs in full on booktv. Org. And all six categories, head to bookcritics. Com. It is now time for the next daughter from booktvs live coverage of the savanna book festival at Trinity United Methodist church. In her latest book other diane stillman Deanne Stillman describes the relationship between buffalo bill and sitting bull