Something people are curious about. I get asked how my mom is doing, she is doing really well. Host not married but living in ohio. She has been clean for a long time and mom may not be ready to play this role so i wont foist it up on her, she is a really good example what can happen when even after 5 or 6 times you get knocked off the horse of addiction and back into relapse it is still possible to climb back out, find the right support and make another go about it. She is incredibly tenacious. [applause] host does she now have a Business Card that says j. D. Vances mother . Guest she does not. Host your biological father . Do you have contact with him . Guest i got a text message before i went up here. My dad and i are still close, he is doing pretty well, he is a great guy and he and are most often talk about his grandson and that is what hes most interested in and that is true of a lot of grandparents. Host you grew up with your sister. What is she doing now . Guest she has three kids back home in middletown, been married for 20 years or so and doing well. What lindsay and i wanted to accomplish like what we thought of as success in our lives was being able to give our kids the stability and comfort and security we didnt have as kids. She has done that for 20 years was her oldest kid is 18. I have done fat for three months. I am hopeful i get there too. Host your friends from high school laugh at your jokes more than they did before treat you differently . People you grew up with, now that you are so famous . And wealthy . They ask you for money . Guest sometimes people ask me for money but that is not a common occurrence. There are definitely some people who laugh louder at my jokes but my real friends do not. One of the good things about having a successful book or what a successful book can do, you realize people who are loyal to you no matter what and dont you get too big for your britches are the people i latch onto. Host leaving aside your potential political career, right now you are not practicing law, you are in what i call the highest calling of mankind, private equity. So why did you choose to go into what i call the venturecapital space, a narrow niche of private area, why go into that area and in a firm that is based here and living in ohio . Guest what i find so interesting about what i am doing right now is if it is done well it can actually help create amazing new product and amazing new companies and amazing new jobs. One thing i realized in law school, i came into this with my eyes listed, the people who frankly call the shots in our Economic System are those who are figuring out where capital goes and when i realized that i thought i would like to be a guy who is trying to figure out how to get capital going to good places where it will do a lot of good and create a lot of value not just for investors but people on the receiving end. [applause] host some people write a book, margaret mitchell, ralph ellison, their book is so successful they have a hard time writing a second book, they get Writers Block because nothing can be as good as the first, you dont worry about that problem. Guest i dont know. I dont feel my first book was that good, i dont know if any follow up would be measured well or poorly compared to it. It was very successful and i would be an idiot if i expected any other book to be as successful but i will let other people decide. Host what do you want to do with your life . A role model for people who come from the background you came from. Rightly or wrongly whether you are a role model for people who come out of your background. As a role model you feel more responsibility to live life a certain way, you feel you should give back to your community a certain way, how has your life changed as a result of this book . Guest i feel a certain responsibility when i go on tv not to make my community seem like an idiot. One of the things i have not appreciated but accepted as reality is a lot of people see me as a spokesman for the white working class. A lot of times im asked to go on tv and say what does the trump voter feel about this or that issue, that is unfair. I dont think any person can speak for that many people or all the trump voter writ large, but what i try to do is recognize some people see me as is and representative. I try not to sound like a total buffoon when i go on tv, that is one way things have changed. A year and a half ago, i was not sitting in an auditorium in front of hundreds of people. It is impossible to describe how my life changed. It changed the way any person at life changes when they go from sitting at home eating ice cream watching netflix to sitting here in front of hundreds of people. Host the president called you and that i read your book and you to provide the kind of voter i appeal to or you havent heard that kind of reaction . Guest i never heard that from donald trump. I heard people who work at the white house said something similar to that but no. I never got a phone call from donald trump, still waiting. Host today you are a happy person, you have a child, a wife, a mother, father, doing well, you are a happy person today. It made your book better . Guest things are going great, in a positive way. Host i thought it was a great book, i recommend it to those who havent read it then or those who read it once read it again. It is instructive, wellwritten and i think you for entering the conversation. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] that is author j. D. Vance, hillbilly elegy, bestseller for the past year or so. The next arthur you will see at the National Book festival will be New York Times columnist thomas friedman. Thank you for being late, thank you for being late an optimists guide to thriving in the age of accelerations is the name of his most recent book. In the meantime we are pleased to be joined at the Washington Convention center by historian David Mccullough whose most recent book is the american spirit, who we are and what we stand for. 202 is area code, 7488200, east and central time zones, 2027488201, for those in the mountain and pacific time zones. You are familiar with his books. John adams, the johnstown flood, the wright brothers. That is a couple books. American in paris. There is a few of the books, we are here to facilitate that conversation. Jeanette in sarasota, you are on booktv with historian David Mccullough. Caller hello. Guest good afternoon. Caller i love your work, in bradenton i want you to autograph my john adams book but i couldnt get a ticket. Here is my question, writing about Abigail Adams and we all know john adamss wife was the most liberal lady in america but when she was in england and went to see a fellow, she said some things had prejudice in her she didnt know was there, talked about the blackest man she had ever seen. And a fellow was touching the skin, the moment she called, and held more. Hello . Host what would you like him to respond to . Caller i would like him to respond to that. I dont know jeanette, David Mccullough. Guest im unaware of the incident you are talking about. I do know Abigail Adams, passionately convinced, dedicated abolitionists. She and her husband, her husband was the only founding father who became a president who never owned a slave and largely because she was so adamant on the subject. The next president who never owned a slave was their son john quincy adams, if she ever did say anything, and her actions as they do speak louder than words. Host would you agree with jeanette she was a socalled liberal . Guest i dont think she was a liberal, i think she was a puritan. The puritans were adamantly for education, most of them against slavery. And adamantly for freedom of religion and for opportunity and they werent a bunch of stiffnecked unemotional people as they are often portrayed. In many respects the puritan tradition this where a part of the bedrock superstructure of our country and our way of life. Abigail adams was one of the bravest women of her time, as an ambassador in europe, her oldest son was also gone. She minded this home, my did the farm and one of the best writers of anybody. Her letters are phenomenal, one of the most admirable women not just women, extraordinary formative time. Host bob calling from pennsylvania. Caller good afternoon, a pleasure to ask you a question. I enjoy your writing and your speaking very much. Can you describe a typical day when you are at home, you live on the vineyard. Your writings, what you do during the course of the day. I like to get up early, my favorite part of the day the early morning. When i was working on my book about harry truman. I read how he took a walk every day to get his machinery going so i tried to take a walk every day, usually first thing in the morning and have breakfast, i love breakfast, the most important meal of the day, the most delicious and go to work, try to get to the office and work all morning and come in for lunch, see if there are any phone calls or messages, then go back to work and work every day, 7 days a week and the time goes by faster that way and anything i do. I love my work, i dont play golf, i dont play tennis. I am not a big sailor. I just enjoy my work. I love to paint, i am often sketching or painting particularly when the weather is good. And in the evening we have dinner and i usually read for a while after dinner and go to bed. A good day. If i have had a particularly productive day, have written two pages, typewritten, doublespaced pages that i consider all right for the time being at least and when i finish a chapter usually around 25, 35 pages, i put all those pages together and if it is good whether i find a nice comfortable outdoor chair to sit under a tree and i show that mug who wrote these pages as a brilliant editor i am, how to make it into something more or less acceptable. One of the requirements of being a writer is to be a good editor of your self. I often tell students and others that aspire to write, learn to edit your self and you are almost halfway or more. Host do you use a typewriter . Guest i work on a typewriter, manual typewriter which i bought when i started my first book, started working on my first book, this was more than 50 years ago. The manual typewriter was secondhand when i bought it. I paid 75 for it, it was 25 years old and i have written everything i have written on that typewriter, every article, every speech, every book, and there is nothing wrong with it. Full service for over 50 years. I have to change the ribbon once in a wild but other than that they didnt have any notion as yet about obsolescence, theres nothing obsolete about it. It is a marvelous machine. Sometimes i think maybe, just maybe, it is writing the books. Host next call from hawaii, stu in hawaii, hello. Caller aloha, how are you . Host go ahead, we are listening. Guest the question for mister mcculloch was the will of the American Voters been thwarted twice in the last 16 years because of the electoral college. In his opinion, in his learned opinion is there any future for the American Electoral College and americas future . Guest a very good question and as we know, mrs. Clinton received almost 3 million votes above who voted for donald trump. That raises a big question. I have learned not to talk about something i dont know as much as i need to to talk about it. My sense is yes, we need to reexamine that process and do so seriously. Because it is a violation of the will of the people. We have a lot of problems to solve before we get to that one. Host David Mccullough won Pulitzer Prize is on his biographies of john adams and harry truman, next call from kevin in hartford, connecticut, you are on booktv. Caller i have a question for you. First book i ever bought of yours was 1776. I followed that up with john adams. I loved what hbo did with the miniseries, you put a lot of working on that as well. I cant help but wonder if you ever thought or if had any desire on your part to be involved in a similar project for 1776. That would make a fantastic miniseries or docudrama . Was that a consideration on your part . Guest not only is it under consideration, we have a number of people who have already done important work on the idea. Tom hanks is the one who is interested in it and as you know, is the one who produced and had a very Important Role in the creation of the john adams miniseries on hbo. The answer is yes and i hope it will happen. Host who was running the country between the Constitutional Convention of 87 and George Washingtons presidency . Guest congress. Congress had issues to settle. For once we were in the midst of a terrible depression. People dont understand that. The depression lasted as long as the war and most people dont understand how long the war lasted, 81 2 years which except for vietnam the longest war we have been involved in. Flight of people particularly in new england was really serious. People were going to jail for debt, which was not what they had fought that war for for and it led to what was known as shares rebellion. It was a very unsettled and unsettling time. There was the northwest ordinance passed by that congress. One of the most farreaching decisions any congress ever made that provided the opportunity of inexpensive land for veterans of the revolution in lieu of the money they had been paid which was called scrip which was only worth . 10 on the dollar. It was the opening up of the west as it was then known, the northwest, north and west of the ohio river, which ultimately became immensely important states of ohio, illinois, indiana, michigan and wisconsin. That was among the most important decisions that congress and that came just before the decision on the constitution which happened that same year, 1787. Host there is a new book on the Northwest Territory coming out. Guest it is in the books. Im deep into it and enjoying it greatly. Host next call for David Mccullough from maryland. Are you with us . We are going to move on. Lets hear from ron calling in from valencia, california. We are listening, go ahead. Caller i own and have read several of your books, but one of my most fond memories and thoughts of you is you did a political roundtable with David Halvorson and george will. I wonder if you could talk about that for a minute. Guest both david and george are wonderful men, david no longer living. The honor of sharing innermost thoughts, feelings and interpretation this, and Good Spirited men, one of the delights of my professional life. David was always full of good cheer and he spent his summers on the island of nantucket. I went over to give a talk on nantucket which i dont often go to and my wife and i before the event took place were taking a stroll on the main street and a car came along, window rolled down, a voice shouted out get off this island, there is not room enough for two of us and i thought there is a truly good guy, never let his fame or his importance go to his head. He maintained a sense of humanity which is what we all need to maintain, dont get too filled up with ourselves no matter who we are or what we do. How anonymous can you be these days . Not as much as it once was but i enjoy it. I dont mind people talking, i like it. I have always liked being with people, i have always been raised to be open to everybody and i try when i am teaching or lecturing at colleges or universities to encourage students to talk to people, ask them questions with the idea that you will never meet anyone who doesnt know something you dont know irrespective of how much education or opportunity