But its more than that. Youve put them together in a way that takes us on a journey with you. Reading a book Still Matters in this age of bitesized social media and tweets and likes and so on. And there is i think nobody who has traveled in that space since its very early days when he wrote a book called siberia which almost didnt get published because his first publisher thought the internet was a fad and it was going to go away. So theres no one better to help us understand the times, the crazy times that were living in when technology seems to be bringing us more amazing innovations every day, and yet for some reason something about life doesnt seem right. So im really excited and thrilled to bring Douglas Rushkoff back. George bullen from the open Technology Institute where she is director of technology as part of new america is a perfect interlocutor to bring douglas here. So welcome them both to civic hall, and if youre interested in learning more about civic hall, go to civichall. Org, sign up for our emails, come visit the space and come join the community. Thank you. Youre on. [applause] hi. And thank you, everybody. This is my first time actually in the civic hall space. I used to be based in new york, but im down in d. C. , so this is really exciting to be here. So we were talking a little bit about the book beforehand, and one of the things you were saying to me is that this book is different from your other books. I was wondering if you could talk about why and how and what your goal is with throwing rocks at the google bus. I dont know if it started out different, but most of the books i write kind of end up meaning something to people about ten years after they come out. [laughter] which is cool in a way, because it means ive got foresight or im prescient or something, but it sucks in a way because the conversation i want to have at that time i cant have right. And ten years later when im on to something else, people want to talk about it. So then im trying to dig up what did all that mean. This book, i started to i mean, i was thinking about this book two or three books ago. But i didnt really have an answer. I was getting increasingly concerned about why things werent working out quite like they could be or should be, you know . Why were, was Digital Technology not yielding the, you know, the burning manlike rave that i had imagined society becoming in the early 90s . And i couldnt put my finger on exactly what it was. I understood that Young Developers were taking too much money too early and then having to change their companies in order to deliver to their v. C. What they wanted, 100x return, but killing the actual idea. And so i started writing about that, and i decided when i was going to write this book i understood what the problem was, but i didnt understand what the solution was. I said, look, if i get a year or so to write a book, i will figure out not only whats wrong, but how to fix it. And since most people havent read the book im guessing, because it came out today [laughter] do you want to talk about what the problem, like, whats your sort of [inaudible] for getting people to understand the problem . Well, the main problem is that we, in a nutshell, i mean, this has got to be unpacked, i guess. But in a nutshell, what weve done is weve optimized the Digital Economy for the accumulation of capital instead of for the velocity of money. And the latter, the velocity of money, is much more consonant with the distributed architecture of the internet itself. And would lead to a whole lot more happiness than what weve got. You know, the easiest way of understanding the problem is that theres all these Great Developers who are willing to disrupt one industry or another, you know . Theyll disrupt publishing or disrupt music. But then as soon as theyve got their idea kind of down, they run to the equivalent of Goldman Sachs or morgan stanley, and they surrender their disruptive idea to another operating system that they act as if out isnt even there. They assume that Venture Capital and ip o and act by its and acquisition and the stock market and 100x return, that thats just this preexisting condition of nature, that thats the real system that we have to somehow succumb to. And so you look at something, you know, when i saw and these are friends of mine. I mean, we all have friends now who are billionaires, which is strange in itself. [laughter] i saw the founders of twitter on the cover of the wall street journal the day they had their ipo. And under each of their faces was the number of billion dollars that each of them were worth. And im thinking here i know two different people who are over 5 billion each, but i found myself feeling sorry for them. Because i realize that these are the guys, they disrupted, you know, visa and mastercard with paypal, originally anyway. They disrupted journalism with twitter. And now here they were surrendering what they had done, surrendering all that disruption to the biggest, baddest industry on the block. You know, because when they let you ring the bell at the Nasdaq Stock Exchange [laughter] and clap for you, its not because you have done something disruptive, right . [laughter] its because youve confirmed the primacy of Corporate Capital to the whole scheme. And youve made, youve enslaved yourself and your company now to pithing towards pivoting towards 100x or 1,000x return and away from whatever it did. So now were here with twitter, one of my favorite apps, by the way. Twitter, 140character app that makes 500 million a quarter, and thats considered an abject failure by wall street. Thats a failure. And the company now has to go become, what, theyve got video advertising, blah, blah, and where goes twitter . So what i wanted to do was figure out what could they have done and what could we do to have a Development Path that leads to something other than just magnifying this growth imperative which is driving us off a cliff anyway. So, and you talk a little pit about what companies can do and what individuals can do. I mean, theres a role for government to play in all this as well, right . As a Public Policy person, like what should we how do we incentivize change . If the system is in place, how are we going to start to take down the system . Well, i hate to sound libertarian here, but i will for a moment because be im not. But one thing the government can do is change the nature of their regulations. Im not saying deregulate the marketplace so that wall street can go crazy or deregulate so that the rich can have rich. What im saying is dont right now regulations arent really being made in the interests of people anyway. The people who write the regulations are the very largest players in the industry. So when a simple nontech example would be there was a big lead paint scare in the toy industry a bunch of years ago. A bunch of dora toys had red paint in it, they were all outsourced from china. They came in, they had lead paint. So what do we do . Were going to form a commission, get the leaders of industry together with the leaders of government, and the regulations they came up with was a Testing Process that required 40,000 per toy that youre going to release on the market. What are small toy manufacturers supposed to do with that . If you make handcrafted toy train that is you want to sell to a toy store, how do you participate in that . Well, you cant. So industry used their own mistake, their own problem of bigotry as an excuse to regulate the marketplace so that it would advantage them even more. Right . So regulation right now favors, favors the largest players on the block. Right . The reason why uber can move into new york is because they have a war chest. The investment in uber is not paying for the app. The investment in uber is paying to deregulate the marketplace in their favor. So thats one. The other biggie, and its a simple tax shift, is, i mean, the simple way to say it is right now in the way i sound like bernie here. [laughter] right now our tax should people write you in . [laughter] our simple problem with our tax code is that Capital Gains are taxed much, much less than real earnings, than dividends, right . So what is that . If youre thinking of it as a Computer Program and now youre biasing it so that people who make money dont have to pay taxes, but people who make money by earning money have to pay taxes. What are you build boog that system . Building into that system . If you want to optimize your economy for the accumulation of capital, for the extraction of poker chips from the playing board into the accounts of shareholders, then optimize it that way. If you want to optimize the economy for the circulation of capital through the society so that people can create an Exchange Value between each other, then you want to reverse that buy bias. You want taxes on dividends and earnings to be really low and taxes on capital accumulation to be high. So how do we make that happen . Like, how do we actually get people to change, and what can what could people who are here do in daytoday choices or in choices with their startups that theyre working on . Well, i mean, the easy way to disempower the sitting bags of capital that are there is to try, in some ways try to ignore them, which is hard to do. You create an application with two friends, and you can build it pretty much on a laptop and then use a scaleable server, even go to amazon cloud, i dont care. Go to something scaleable. You dont need tens of millions of dollars from y come by nateer to get to the next level. Now youre no longer building a business for the prosperity of that business. Now youre building a business in order to sell it. So if your goal is to create a thriving, sustainable business, then think twice about selling it. Right . Dont sell it. You know, hold on to it. So thats sort of number one. As individuals its really as consumers, you can make way better choices about how you buy things. Its as simple if someone buys my book from a local bookseller instead of from amazon, and i mean their local bookseller, now there is money that is circulating in their community. Thats a dollar more, a dollar more for their book, but youre going to see that dollar circulate through your Community Five times. So youre going to get that dollar five more times than you would if you spent it on amazon, and it goes up into a share price, or youre spending it at a company thats taking a loss on the book in order to create a platform monopoly in publishing so they can hop over into whats called another vertical and take that over to. They dont care about the books. They care about the monopoly. Is so its a very different, a very different thing. You can, if youre organizing a company, consider how can your company make everyone who touches your company wealthy. The traditional corporate industrial tactic is to look at everybody else as a resource to extract value from that. But if youre extracting value from your customer base, vergingly they get too eventually they get too poor to be your customer. Thats the problem walmart is having now. The towns are going bankrupt. Theyre losing their customers, so now walmarts closing their stores, and the towns are having to figure out how do we rebuild, how do we create a drug store and a bookstore and Everything Else that we need to replace this big vacuum that came to our community and wiped out our connective tissue . Companies can start thinking about communicating with their shareholders differently. So instead of being beholden to the growth of the share price, start telling your shareholders theyre going to get dividends, theyre going to earn real money for owning a portion of your company. Create companies as platform cooperateives where your workers are owners in the company. Theres a competitor to uber in new york called juneau in a few weeks, and its the same basic idea as uber except they pay the cabbies more, and the drivers own 50 of the company. What does that mean . It means that when that company eventually pivots as they all will to mechanical cars driven by computers, you havent done the research and development for the thing that that will replace you. Youve done the research and development for the company that you own. So now the drivers are going out doing your work, your job has been replaced, but your income hasnt been taken away because you own the thing. So these are really, they sound complicated, but theyre really simple things to do. Theyre just the basic steps you have to think of things. Were in a digital age. You have to think of the mechanisms that youre using and that the instruments that youre putting into place. You have to think of them like programs that are going to keep going, that are going to have operating principles and bias them towards circulation, bias them towards making people wealthy. I promise you if you have a business thats making us customers its customers wealthy, thats making its suppliers wealthy, its competitors wealthy, theyre going to keep you around. But its just not the way we think. Oh, make other people wealthy . Yes, make them wealthy so they can buy stuff from you, you know . Its not Rocket Science to do that. And, i mean, to that point, thats another policy suggestion, right . Building in mechanisms for other types of businesses. Because cooperative businesses of that model that youre describing arent actually possible in a lot of places. So thats another right. I mean, luckily theres things like b corps and multipurpose theres a lot of alternative structures you can adopt now that let you value things other than your fiduciary responsibility to your share holders. You know, its from an economics perspective, its understanding that when you take in capital and you let a Venture Capitalist be in charge of your company, then the only contribution hes going to value is capital. But if you understand economics, you understand theres three main factors of production. Capital is one of them, but land and labor are the other two. And this is back to adam smith and any economist, any libertarian will tell you land, labor and capital. So how do we value the land and labor again . Thats by building it into the core of the company to understand that there are three kinds of contributions, and all three have to be rewarded by the company. You cant just look at a company as Venture Capital thats extracting value there land and labor from land and labor, or you end up with a world thats going to die and with people with no jobs. I dont its interesting, like you mentioned y come by nateer earlier, and a portion of why people are going to them is for the v. C. Funding, but its also for the mentorship molds. Theres a question, does everybody know how to do this, right . I think the answer is probably that they dont. So if theyre not if some of what needs to change is actually the advice theyre getting, like how do we build a better support system for changing the thinking around how business happens . Like, are there advantage lists that exist evangelists that exist that we can start to tell their stories more . Does it need to be a special, different type of incubator that focuses on this model . How can we change the Community Around i mean, lets do it. [laughter] you know, its part of what civic hall is for. Its part of why were here, part of why i wrote this book, to say heres a manual. Understand what went wrong and understand how to do it right. Theres people around. Talk to Trevor Schultz at the new school whos starting a whole organization is he here . Oh, here. Platform cooperatives with nathan schneider. Talk to Michelle Bowens at the peer to peer foundation, go to p to p. Net, talk to robin hood in finland, spiral in new zealand. I mean, there are a lot of groups out there. A lot of them are looking at block chain even, a lot of those folks are sort of looking at how can we do authentication in a peer ortopeer way. Those efforts get sidetracked because people invest in them. Oh, wit coynes bitcoins once you see the winklevoss twins anywhere, stay away. [laughter] they did a bunch of investing in bitcoin. There are mentors out this but, honestly, i feel like a lot of people know in their gut what theyre doing right. Its not Rocket Science. The young people that when theyre in their dorm room in stanford or columbia and they come up with that idea, i feel like so many of them would be better off with 50,000 and no mentorship than 5 million and the mentorship theyre getting. And the mentorship theyre getting, theyre not dumb. Theyre smart people, the v. C. Guys. But theyre smart at doing a very particular thing which is bringing something to exit, right . Bringing something to an exit event. And, i mean, gosh, ive got friends, davids in here right now with a product called ready, you know . Which has just gotten away from Venture Capital, and now hes like, oh, we can just do this thing, you know . It used to be called bootstrapping, but these days they call it bootstrapping, but it used to just be called building a business. You build a business, you get some revenue, you invest some of that revenue back in the company. Its a Slower Growth thing, but when you grow slower, so much easier to develop a product that your customers like because then you can see your customer reaction, you can use good, oldfashioned quarters and semiannual feedback and adjust and change. Youre not stuck on the clock of 18 months, ive got 18 months to turn this thing around. Thats not fair to any real business thats in the real world. People dont see these things, right . Of the initiatives that you just mentioned, how many people in the room know of one of them . Have herald of one of them . Have heard of one of them . Okay. Thats about ten you heard a lot of them. Youve heard of lumio, theres a lot of them you wont hear of, right . Just like a lot of the best candidates for president you probably never heard of, you know . We heard of trump. Just because you dont know them doesnt mean theyre not great. And the fact is a lot of them are local. There is nothing wrong with creating a business that doesnt scale up. Not everything scales up. Scaling up is an artifact of the Industrial Age where youve got to become the one, the winner, the king of the hill. You can actually be one of many in your business. Thats actually cool. There used to be these guilds. There were many people who built bridges and made houses and made shoes, and they had guilds, and they shared technologies and innovations with each other, and they understood that if everyone gets better, were all doing better. They built a culture around what they did. You know, now its as if, you know, the economic term is the ginny number. Its as if juneny number is if ginny number, if its at zero, everythings distributed everywhere, and if it goes to one, all the moneys been scooped up by one player. It feels like the Digital Economy is structured so that theres going to be one big winner. Its like at the poker game at the end of the night when the one guy gets all the chips, will it be jeff bezos, mark zuckerberg, sergei . Whos going to get everything . And thats because theyre so addicted to scale. And even in our, in our good lefty, progressive world, i have so many kids come up to me and that i want to i want to create a platform that can aggregate all of the web sites that are aggregating the people who are doing social change. [laughter] and everybody wants to do that, because everybody wants to have the thing that frames the thing that the frames the thing that frames the thing. And i get thats sort of Industrial Age thinking, and its not as much fun as just doing the thing locally. Its so hard in a world or where we all want 20,000 twitter followers, and we all want the recognition. But the satisfaction you get in creating, like, green light bookstore in green point and having a community of people who love what you do that youre supporting becoming humanscaled economies are local. They just are. And when theyre local, they necessarily respect land. When theyre local, they necessarily respect labor because those are the people who are paying the taxes to put your kids to school, so you need everybody to be participating. Its so much more ene joy bl. So enjoyable. So, sure, you can come up with some mechanisms that people can model in lot of different places, but in terms of having a satisfying business, you know, this is part of what were retrieving in the digital age, is a very almost medieval approach to business, you know . Where its part of my city, its part of the place a i live and i do something, you know . We make fun of people making artisanal beers and heritage yams or whatever. [laughter] i mean, what are the wealthiest people doing when they retire . They go and make beer and yams and orchids and stuff. [laughter] thats actually fun to do. And if you can do it in a way that supports your community and theyre doing something that supports you, you start to see not all of it, but a larger percentage of your Economic Activity ends up taking place in the sphere between people on a more local scale. And, yeah, youre going to till buy your i still buy your iphones from apple and multinational conglomerates, but it doesnt have to be the entire economy. Its interesting, lumio is a good example. I was on the phone with ben knight last week, and he was telling me about what started as the occupy movement in taiwan x theres been a lot of organizing on lumio for that group, and now a lot of them have actually the government sort of had a turning point and it was like, all right, we hear you, were in. What do we need to do. And have hired a bunch of them. And so what youre seeing is these nowactivists are becoming Government Employees and starting to do process change internally. And its hard for me i was listening to him, and i was, like, that sounds awesome. How does that, how do we see Something Like that happen here . You know, there were inklings of it, i think some of its still going on, but its less of the narrative that were seeing at the moment, right . Especially today on election day. But its how do we change that or how do we find those local stories and get people paying attention to the local issues and the sort of local economy questions . Is that possible here . What needs to be that breaking point, i guess, is sort of the question. The attentiongetting media that we currently employ are not the very best ones for telling the kinds of stories that youre talking about. In order, the click bait, you know, donald trump insulting black people is way better click bait than General Assembly tool employed for civic reengagement in thailand, you know . [laughter] but the people in thailand where that app is being used end up having a lived experience thats different. You know, im actually becoming okay with National Global media being the disconnected freak show that it is as long as ive got a real life of actual connections with other people that is something else. I mean, theres a certain what were the big picture of what were doing is reasserting the human agenda. Thats really what were doing. I mean, the, my bigger case here is to get people to join team human. You know . Rather than Team Computer or Team Capitalism or team system. We are mistaking the metrics that weve put on the wall for the betterment of humanity. And the way to get in touch with whats good for people really is on a local level. Theres these good, oldfashioned things like making eye contact with people. Its so rich. Its like such a weird thing to do if youve been online for so much of your life. Make eye contact with people. Sit in spaces with people. See how your town is actually functioning, you know . Go to a school board meeting. Join a communitysupported agriculture group. Set up a local currency in your town. I mean, theres so many things you can do. And, no, youre not going to get i mean, you might get some late night msnbc, you know, Small Business innovation. You might get a little something, but in some ways getting a lot of Media Attention for something in some ways is a reverse indicator. Its a reverse indicator, because it means that in some way theyve been able to frame it as part of industrialism, as, oh, this is going to scale up, this is going to work for everybody. The fact is things work differently in all different places. We all love lots of different models. Some of those models can be, you know, modeled and shared, but theyre always going to be tweaked. And thats what you really want to be able to do. You know, the beauty of a digital age, this is the digits of a digital age, its the fingers. Its a handson thing. It can restore the human scale to stuff. And when youre restorying human scale, concern restoring human scale, you think about how are we going to create circulation of currency between the Business People in our community already. So, i mean, i dont mean to not answer your question, but i think [laughter] the object of the game is not to get attention for the ideas. Right. I mean, thats my job right now, right . I wrote this book, im going to go out there, im going to stump, and ill fight, and hopefully some people will read it. Thats what books were for. The boy scout manual was one of them. This is another one. Get it out there, let people see it. Its as easy as a pdf. The trap we dont want to get to the trap that obama fell into, okay, business as usual, what do we do . Ive got to get bank to lend money to a corporation to build a factory in that town to hire people and get them jobs. Huhuh. Thats the thing that just failed. What he should have done was sent a pdf to lansing and say heres how you set up a time bank, heres how you set up a favor bank, heres how you do local currency so that people understand. If you have people with skills and people with needs, thats all you need for an economy. And thats all we used to need for an economy. And thats why in the book i go all the way back to 1100, the last time we had a freeform bazaar, a marketplace with market currencies that were only good for the day that were biased towards transaction. How do we get people the bread they need, the chickens they need, the shoes they need and to invest in the local bridge . That was what they were thinking x they optimized their currency for that. The problem was wealthy people were guess Getting Press wealthy, so they made local currencies illegal. You had to borrow money from the central bank. They created the chartered monopoly which became the corporation today. Chartered monopolies were defended by laws. Today platform monopoly is defended by technology [speaking spanish] meaning, these are oneway technologies. Once you bring this technology into your business, into your life, its really hard to get it out because you become dependent on it, right . They use whats called defensible outcomes. Thats the startup term. You want defensible outcomes. That means people use what youve got but then cant go to something else, right . And thats not the way to do business. Some of what youre getting at is actually, it seems to me, is at odds with using technology to solve a problem. One of the things i always think about when you look at Something Like lumio, that technology isnt super crazy, innovative, out there or advanced. Its actually, its a Pretty Simple tool. And what it comes down to is people enforcing the rules of using that tool. Yeah. Its still about, it is about the human interactions. Its nothing its just it is, absolutely. You know, im not a technosolutionist. I dont think theres a new operating system that changes everything. Theres not an app to fix this. You know . We cant just do an update overnight and then the economy and the government and everything works. It doesnt happen like that. But we have moved from a broadcast era, an electronic age into a digital age. Were liveing in a Digital Media environment. And that doesnt mean digital just that were all going to use digital tools, but it means the way in which we make decisions is going to be informed by a more digital, problematic, algorithm sensibility. And thats one thats more valuable to us. These are simple human solutions, theyre not complicated technologies. Its not a matter of better encryption, right . Its a matter of better listening, you know . Its a matter of better connection, better contact. Guys, the thing i think is interesting is right now we have such a focus on the tools, solving the problem. So even when we tell the stories of where there are good things happening, we focus on the technology as opposed to the human interaction. Its the perfect ted talk. Where its actually the tool facilitates getting people in the room together. Even taking twitter as an example, when people actually organize online to end up somewhere together to do something. Which we still see a lot of. But, i mean, how do you negotiate that . How does twitter stay right . They do have to figure manager out to function. Something out to function. They could ask for donations from people the same way. They could go private, you know . Get out from under their shareholders. Theyre more than profitable. Yeah. You know, thats kind of an easy one. Its funny, you know, i did this talk a long time ago where i quoted timothy herely, he was doing these talks at berkeley x a girl had just had her first big psychedelic experience, dr. Learly, i had the experience, and i understand were all connected, now what . And he said, find the others. [laughter] and i gave a talk where i explained that, and then scott helperman was at that talk, and that week with he came up with the idea to do meetup. And the idea of meetup was lets do Something Like yahoo groups, except the purpose of the net is to get people connecting in real places offline, you know . To facilitate the real world rather than replace it. The only people who want the met to replace the real world are people who dont mean us any good. These are people who want to just market us to death and monetize our social [inaudible] and make our behaviors more predictable. Thats what big data is for. They use big day a that of our past to advertise the future to us that we havent yet realized were going to live, right . And turn us from 80 probability of going down that lifestyle path to 90 . So theyre trying to reduce anomalous, strange, unique Human Behavior in order to amp up their returns. Technology should be for the opposite purpose, right . Technology should be, should get us together and get out of the way. Because were only here for so much time. Lets say youve got 100 years. What do you want to do with that . What do you want to do with that . Do you want to do that with Google Cardboard . Or do you want to do that with [laughter] its 3d already. [laughter] [applause] i feel like thats a good moment to see if people have questions, because thats [laughter] yeah. Im seeing theres a hand back there. Im a little bit confused. You began with the argument that velocity of money, superior. You articulated a bunch of ways in which communitybased solutions can develop real goods that are both economic and social and moral and all those sorts of things. But at some point along the way you noted, oh, and you still are going to have your iphone that got made here and there. So im really curious about where is the division between this communitybased economy, this prioritization of the velocity of money, and what are the things that east must or either must or ought remain in a more industrialized society . Well, you know, im not, you know, the head of the politboro, so i cant come up with the specific, you know, the plan, right . Right now i would guess were at, like, a 90 10 industrial to local balance. In what we do, you know . And what i would encourage is that we make more of our choices on the local scale and then start to see how that balances out. You know . Its therell still be walmarts, but i think there could be fewer of them, you know . Its really, its about balance. I dont think its a we dont crash the gates. This is not about a revolution where we go and take down the big companies. Theyre all going to go. There are some things that industrialism is really good for; making power plants, making cars. Theres a lot of stuff that its good at, but theres a lot of tough that its doing that it doesnt need to do like industrial agriculture. Which is, ultimately, less efficient. Its less resourceefficient than permaculture or organic farming. Have you looked at a map lately of the topsoil condition of america, much less the world . Weve screwed it up. Weve addicted our crop to industrial agriculture. So unwinding that slowly is something id like to see, you know . And it might mean in some cases eating food that happens to be available in that season. I mean, whoa. [laughter] but then you start to find out that im not getting sick because im not eating stuff that my body isnt kind of ready to be eating. When you start doing, you know, you start reading all your natural stuff and what theyre telling you to eat and what season, and, oh, it happens to just grow right then. Its not a matter of me saying, oh, weve got to stop all this and do all that, but to say lets start making some choices. That theres a whole lot of companies that could be structured in ways that promote more either local activity or promote the velocity of money. So walmarts biggest competitor now is winco, a giant supermarket chain. They have these big box stores, and theyre taking walmart down. And the difference is winco is owned by the employees. Winco is a coop. So when you talk about efficiencies, walmarts efficiency is were going to pay these workers as little as possible, and were going to let their a health care be taken care of by welfare because they dont make enough money to even have insurance. Winco is saying we dont have to take 90 of our profits and deliver it up to these people who dont give a hoot what were even doing, they just want their money. So it is possible. And as you do that, theres going to be less shareholding opportunities for people. Uhoh, then what do we do . Then were going to have to start investing locally. Youre going to invest in the local pizzeria, in the local bookstore. And youre going to get in at the ground level because you know those guys. Youre not buying shares retail 90 layers of investment after you know, if youre buying a stock, youre at the bottom of the pyramid thats by definition if the Stocks Available to you, its too late. [laughter] its too late. You know . But if you can actually support a local business, you know, this is what ive been suggesting to banks, is that instead of just lending, if a pizzeria wants to expand and have a couple new bathrooms and another dining room, instead of just giving that pizzeria guy 100,000 that hes going to have to pay back with interest, what if you give him 50,000 con contingent on hs ability to raise the other 50,000 from the community . You get 100 from somebody, get 100 from a patron, and they get 120 worth of pizza when the new restaurant opens. That persons gotten a 20 return on their money in the first year which is more than theyre going to get in their smith barney account. The peatrrhea can pay pizzeria can pay it back in pizza which is cheaper than money, and its the facilitator of Community Reinvestment in that community. With that 100, ive got a more thriving main street, my Property Values go up, tax base goes up, my schools get better. Whoa, whats happened here . Its really simple, right . So its a matter of just rebalancing things, not shooing the banks out of the room, you know, but helping them participate as partners in a human economy rather than just as the extractors of value from human activity. I think we have another yeah. Go ahead. Thank you very much for all of this. I am someone who didnt read the book, of course, because my Speed Reading skills arent there. But im really listening to you bring up these examples, and, you know, im also reminded that for all the ones you say, like all the they can do this and they have done this or whatever, im thinking also about the places, you know, that have have problems. Rei is a memberowned coop, and theyve had some labor problems lately. Just being a memberowned coop or just being local does not insure that all these evils are away. Thats the one point about it. You know, this isnt necessarily a panacea for all things. And the other thing, too, green light bookstore which is in fort green [laughter] im sorry. Theyre doing the funding model for their second store which is in park slope. And i think about it, and its great that theyre doing that, i love the bookstore, and i thought about investing, but it also occurred to me that, okay, theyre going to do it in park slope, whats the chances theyre going to do it in bedstuy . Theyre not. For those communities without economic wealth and development, then the question becomes, okay, how do we insure that theyre able to participate in it . Say what you will about walmart, at least its bringing to those communities something. Maybe its taking more, but at least how do we then insure if youre saying regulation favors the big players, how do we put a mechanism in place that insures equity into this model . Well, i mean, this is not a, this is not a phenomenon of the cultural creatives ithaca, you know . All those stories about local currency always talk about ithaca or berkeley, but its also happening in east lansing, you know . And in the steel belt, you know . Look at what carter did in the south brocks. Its not bronx. Its not in some ways the people who are experiencing the greatest Economic Hardship have the laos attachment the least attachment to these bankrupt models and the most willingness to do things. You know, when i think about whats going to happen, i feel like either were going to do this by choice and those of us who have the choice to do it are in the best position to do it by choice, or were going to do it by necessity the way they did back in the depression. That thats when we saw local currencies come up, different kinds of community script evolve and all sorts of commie plots. So, no, as far as green light, the popes who came up with the theory of distributism and subsidiaryism in spends to marxism, the popes got asked, what are you guys, communist or capitalist . And they said, well, kind of both. We believe in the free market, and people should have the ability to make money, but we also believe in this thing we call distributism. What they believe is that workers should have access to the means of production. Right . They should own the means of their own production. And as long as they can, then theyre going to participate. And the other thing they argued for was something they called subsidiaryism. And the principle meant that a bigness a business shouldnt be bigger than it needs to be in order to do what it does. So they would probably argue, look, you probably shouldnt open that second store in park slope. What you should probably do is find someone in park slope and teach them how you did what you did. Show them and if they want to give you a little, you know, give you a percent for bringing them the model, the technology, then fine. But dont expand, dont grow for the sake of doing it. Its got to work for itself. Order to stay alive then it either has not found the right size or them right model yet. A few more hands appear. Two things. One, how do you think your ideas work in a world where the little guy trying to start of business is trying to stand out against large and competitors. While they cannot afford google ad dollars to make them selves shown they can make homegrown stories but people cant find him so how do they compete and how do they see this world like that . How do they open a Small Business in new york that only allow for the next nyu expansion the two that you are using our the wrong locations to try to start a Small Business. So if you are trying to start a small publication, you cannot compete with the generic internet, it is not going to work, theres bigger players there, say what you like about new church nutro talladega its gone. Its not neutral. Do know how bandwidth, it doesnt work. You know more about this than you i do. The idea if you have a publication that then you have to target it to the human that you can talk to. You cannot be in everything. You cannot compete with the New York Times. You cannot be a news site. But if you are the pizza site, then you can find your community and the net is very good at finding the community of people who want to be part of your community. I would not call it an Affinity Group that is what facebook does, those are affinities. If you want to start a publication it has to be so targeted, so take two to find those people and then build from there. Same thing if you want to start a store, starting in manhattan is tricky. If you you want to open a restaurant in manhattan you a much need d. C. Because where are you competing, youre competing and millionaire growth. I cant live in manhattan since the bloomberg bubble has been put around it. I cannot imagine how you do that. They have google and giant partners feeding into this. They are able to operate at that scale. But you can stake out real estate but it is going to have to be focused and specific, and in a way where you are going to have to address the need that is not being met, then people will come. A few more hands are up. A question a bout the global conversation. Are there, for example wikipedia or decentralized opportunities where the global aspect of it allows for certain virtues that i think sit with where you talk about. Im wondering how we differentiate between those two, does that make sense . Yes. Okay, how we differentiate between some of the Global Opportunities that allow us to first find the niche out there of all the weird people that we want for that but also the encyclopedia that can beat out the encyclopedia because we have the whole world, i dont mean big coin but the possibilities of global voting and things of that nature. Also a conversation about nationstates are probably not going to be the solution to most of our major climate problems. We are going going to have to have some kind of Global Coalition or initiative. Im just wondering where you see the virtuous possibilities . I can see where youre coming with the local and i completely agree but im just wondering where you leave the solution for the global opportunity . I see the global space to me is more idea based and commerce based. It is easier to disseminate an idea to a lot of different places and then different people can work on that idea in lots of different ways, sort of the way and open source caterpillar trucks and disseminate those in a lot of places and let people build things themselves. I love disseminating plants to a lot of places. I think back to the era when you could start date National Movement by sending out handbooks like the boy scout handbook so the qantas club. Like here is how you do it and then you do it your way. You community is going to decide what is good and what is not. Which is sort of the way it went. But it worked. In a decentralized fashion. The idea of Global Commerce is very different about idea space. Its an interesting switch because in the early internet we thought of everything globally and we wanted to get government out there because they wanted to put up boundaries but what we did not realize is that by getting government off we created an open market for corporations to come in. A sort of like if you get rid of all the bacterias the fungus rises. You actually need some bacteria to fight the fungus together so you can just live. So we should have let them be there instead of just declaring this is a Government Free zone, we dont need any of you. But oops theres other players we do not recognize. Now when we say global and so many people think we mean global market. Which is what wired net like global internet, all with the nasdaq is going to go around the world and grow more. Here we go, we have have a new poster child for infinite expansion and we are going to be in the long move, is going to grow forever. That was just imperialism by another name. But it does not negate the fact that the internet is still a global network. It still has the potential to disseminate ideas and entrepreneurial ideas if you want to call them that. Entrepreneurial ideas that can say global time dollar would be really interesting, how do you network a bunch of global time dollars. Thats almost a holy grail so i can make money here and it somehow good over there. Its interesting stuff. Even if when you are on ebay and you think oh i just bought something from turkey, that was weird. Was that. But the facilitator commerce only one more question. Nobody once to ask a question. I was looking for a woman . Next week we will have a meeting about developing fiberoptic network what advice would you have a bout that . And i have flyers if anyone is interested. She would have better advice than i would. The advice i would have is to look out for the lawsuit that time warner or verizon, or whatever your Cable Provider is going to pitch against you. When people try to create municipal wifi or broadband, the company sue on the basis that locals have an unfair advantage because they are local that is horse pocky. Local should have a homefield advantage. That is the one thing us humans have is the local advantage on planet earth. Corporations are alien, they, they are abstract, they are not real. There just computer, their algorithms so defend your homefield advantage and argue that in a court of law which is still adjudicated, so far by human judges. Then you stand a chance. This is really all we are doing. Then you stand you stand a chance of fighting against the regulation that prevents people from engaging in commerce on equal or better footing than the corporations. Speemac, so happy to talk about it. There are many good examples to learn from. I love how you manage the partnership to have it allowed and owned by the community. With that, i think we are going to close. Which. Which means everybody can ask their questions individually. If you want to talk to me about anything you can do that. [applause]. Thank you so much [applause]. [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] when i tune in on the weekends its usually authors sharing good books. Watching the nonfiction authors on book tv is the best television for serious readers. On see spend they can have a longer conversation and delve into their subject. Book tv weekends, they bring you author after author, after author, and they spot light the work of fascinating people. I love to tv and im a cspan fan. Every day, books are reviewed by publications throughout the country, heres a look at some recently reviewed books. Chief correspondent for nbc news, richard angles the book on the middle east was reviewed by Kevin Canfield of the kansas city star. He writes that at heart the book is a nerveracking autobiography by journalist on the front lines covering wars and terrorism in lebanon, israel, iraq, syria. On another level its a portrait of a troubled region, one region, one that has been unduly influenced by madmen and poorly served by two consecutive american president s. In this sundays sundays New York Times book review david ocean ski, history professor at New York University reviewed adam cohens new new book about statesponsored sterilization in the United States. The president Setting Supreme Court case bucket of the bill. Professor notes that from the late 1920s until the 1950s forced sterilization in the United States would claim tens of thousands of victims in california and other states leading the way. The procedures were were performed to so often on poor white southerners that they acquired a nickname mississippi appendectomies. The george w. Bush institute recently released a book which profiles the lives of several women in afghanistan were fighting for civil rights. The review says this work sounds hears for more First Lady Laura Bush who wrote the forward talking about her interest in working with afghan women. Right after september 11 when the spotlight turned on afghanistan, american women, including myself saw women who are marginalized, who are left out. The very idea of the government that would forbid half of its population from being educated was shocking to american men and women. A lot of people started calling me to say, i want to do something, what can i do to help. One of. One of my best friends from houston called and said i used to be so glad i was not in your shoes, but now i wish i were. I am jealous. Because you can do something, and i cant. So right then we formed the american afghan womens project to support her sisters in afghanistan. That was really the beginning of my interest in afghanistan and the women there. Watch. Watch for these programs and more this weekend on book tv. [inaudible] [inaudible] [applause]. Hello everyone, welcome. We have a great crowd, thank you for coming out. I am susan on behalf of our owners and entire staff i would like to welcome you to politics and prose. Before we get started, can you you all hear me in the back . Just a few housekeeping things, this will be a good time to turn off or silence your cell phones. Also after the event please help us by folding your chairs, we would be grateful. We have microphones on either side, just right here this evening if you could step up with your questions that would be great because we are recording this event. You can also watch it in a few days on our youtube channel. Im very pleased to welcome richard angle this evening to talk about his new book, and then all hell broke loose. I am guessing you recognize that richard as the chief or correspondent for nbc news where he reports regularly from a variety of places mostly in the middle east, much of the time with things exploding in the background. We are especially glad to have him