Of failure. Of course the reality is the reverse. The more you post about failure. In one of the chapters i attended a conference, and one of the speakers there was a young man who boasted now he is the ceo of the work, the darling of Silicon Valley. But in his speech he boasted about being sued by record label for a quarter of a billion dollars is he had a company that legitimized. So the cult of failure is really one of the most irritating aspects. You have people like tim oreilly, very wellknown publisher. But the real truth is they are the winners. The real failure is people who dont have jobs, people who are not employed, people who are underemployed and can get in the college. They dont go around. Do you ever say you are a failure . I think this is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is so profoundly out of touch with the rest of the world because it is the one sector and the American Economy that is doing well, the one sector driving innovation and change. When you have a cult of failure where did you grow up . London, north london. Cspan what was your life like . Guest middle class, jewish. For those of your viewers, what is the middle and lower class in new york . I had aspecialized and balkan history it is a franchise, very exclusive events. They like to think they are improving. Six or 7,000. You can put on an event. A lot less exclusive. The main character. I found them in harlem. Have you ever been to one . No, i watch them online. They pay expenses. You get to meet interesting people. I spoke just before Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of apple. He said my speech made him cry. It certainly had an impact. More than one clip. We will watch this. We are data. That isthat is the thing that Steve Wozniak for better or worse put into motion, the industry that most of us are involved. And as we look at each other in the future and the latter part of the 21st century we will see data, information, and indeed one company in Silicon Valley he may have heard of it called google are designing glasses which when you put on the oc these physical . Questionmark spectator. Bang bang. That is cspan it refers to a song. That was the theme of the show. What are you trying to do in a speech like this . That particular event which is the largest in the world, brussels, downtown brussels, the tickets are relatively affordable. So the audience will be made up of technology students. I did a similar one in budapest. Trying to engage. Everyone gets 16 minutes to speak. And you are supposed to make it engaging, memorable experience. So it is just off the top of your head. Off the top of my head. They like to get people to prepare. I never do. And i can onlyi can only get motivated if im in front of people. The books are always late for my articles are always late. So the thought for 3,000 people, you dont want to screw up. It is an invigorating experience. For me the experience is excellent. I have been able to prosper in this economy because of it. And i dont necessarily celebrate that because there are many very fine writers who struggle in front of a live audience. The real opportunity now the digital age ironically is the physical experience. But the digital has done is modified the copies. No one pays for anything online. Once that is done is made the physical experience a lot more valuable. Is why people go to events. That is made us want to physically made people more. Theyve always be the physical experience. But so do well in this world particularly as an entertainer you have to be able to perform 20 after the above entertain. Cspan in your talk, we will see an expert an excerpt of it, the vertical clip, and where did you get the idea . The vertigo clip of Jimmy Stewart. Well, for me. I think i 1st saw when i was about 16. Its one of those films. Because there are so many layers. And of course for me it was a wonderful opportunity. Because i have always thought of technology as a thing that you fall in love with and you think your falling in love with one thing and youre falling in love with something quite different. Vertigo is the ultimate movie of falling in love with something that doesnt really exist. Sure most of your viewers are familiar with the movie. A film about aa man who falls in love with the blonde who turns out to be a brunette. Falls in love with what he thinks is a blonde beautiful woman who turns out to be a brunette from kansas who works as a shopgirl. Cspan lets watch it. We will watch this clip. Here she goes. He has not even matter command is not even talk to her. The great slovenian philosopher call this the parallax view. Here she comes. Beautiful blonde american errors from San Francisco who drives a green jaguar around town. He has fallen in love. What does vertigo have to do with information and data . The truth of the movie is that the blonde is not really a blonde. She is a brunette shopgirl from kansas. All women from kansas i think work in stores. And he is about to be set up , about to be sucked into this war tax of heartbreak and murder, and that is what we are here to talk about today. Because just as Jimmy Stewart we are being sold something also which is a scam, something which is undermining who we are. Cspan what is the scam . Guest the scan is the ideal of being able to self publish online. The scam is facebook, instagram, twitter. I am is easy to seduce is anyone, so i want some of these things. The scam is the idea that these platforms give us the opportunity to tell the world what we think all bc, the contributor photography, music, movies, allow us to become online bloggers and photographers. But the scam is that we are being used. The very busy venture capitalists the data economy that we are the ones who package the product because with these companies are doing is learning more and more about us from our behavior, what we publish, photographs, ideas, what we buy and say and dont say. And learning about us they are creating a phantom and then they transform us, repackage us as product. We are the ones being sold. Not only are we working for free but we are then being sold. It is the perfect fit chart movie. Cspan what is a phantom can opt to come . Guest early 19th century british totalitarian philosopher, and he invented this idea, prison which had a tower which could see everyone. He believed that the idea could be used in schools and hospitals. Believe that this would create discipline in the new industrial society. Written extensively. Interestingly enough that felt inspired john stuart mill. Miller reacted against an order book in which he went beyond utilitarianism, the pleasure and more complex terms. I love the idea. He and his ideas play a central role. Cspan you mentioned twitter. I want to show you a list. The top ten people in the United States have 200 followers and look at the numbers and just tell us what this means when you see it. We have katy perry, the most followers at 63 million, justin bieber, 59 million, barack obama at number three. Taylor swift at 50, youtube, 48 million followers. Lady gaga, britney spears. The bottom of the ten. Justin timberlake a 40 million, finally ellen to generous. What does that say . The internet again has created a world, not what they call the flat world. It is rocky, hilly, this is the old world. The winner take all system in which a tiny group of entertainers are controlling our attention. A very brilliant blogger, business writer, i needed help burger has written an important part. And what she said is she compares the Digital Economy to the Old Industrial economy, the internet, the internet, democratize and sweep away the elderly, the record labels, but we have more of the same. What we have aa system where a tiny group of people control our attention. And if that is about enough, this economy is hollowing out the middle. The old entertainment economy, not defending the labels. They produced a lot of garbage and were corrupt. I dont deny any of that. But the infrastructure of the ecosystem of the middle class economy. They gatekeepers and editors , journalists, people who have regular middleclass. With the internet has done is swept away the middleclass. I dont think people have any role, and it enables a superstar class with 1,050,000,000 followers and destroy the old middleclass. This is a lose lose other than the Silicon Valley notion of winwin. Cspan the only person on the list is a politician. But i want to show you a clip. It is a seven minute video the day before he went to iowa to make a speech. Get it in the oval office. As president is using this media all the time. One of the things im going to make an early announcement about is the issue of getting faster. I want to take a look at what ive got here. This is internet download speeds. I can zoom up if you want. You have south korea, hong kong, tokyo, paris. These cities all have really fast access to the internet because they have made the investment in broadband. Right next to it you have seen your falls iowa. Billy have 40,000 people in cedar falls, but the reason they can compete is because citizens got together and made the investment to bring competition in and make sure the internet speeds were just as fast there is anywhere else. What is your reaction . Well, broadband is a tough issue. It is not an area that i am an expert in. What i would say is there is an exaggerated quality. Actually better in broadband and some people think. Having said that, i do like the korean model. I myself have no problems with investment in the same way as a total story, the internet came out. It came down as a topdown projects. So i am not an opponent of public investment. The 1st president has ever done this. The whole list of people at the white house the director of online engagement, 73,000 a year. Great for the office of digital strategy. Progressive media and a response. Makes 95,000 year. Then we have another right what has profile. 72,000 year guy. Video director of the office of digital strategy. There is more. Director of Digital Content and finally acting director for the office of digital strategy, 80,000 year men. Guest do you think they are overpaid . Cspan i think it is interesting and order your comment. What is the impact . Guest like cant comment on those guys. Used to be in charge of development. If not you can look it up online. I can google it. And theyre seems to be that intimacy that i find trouble. Because google has legend of one of the two or three most powerful companies in the world. If he surrounds himself with transportation policy come all of these people who used to work for forte, theyre would be a little troubled by that. Google has an agenda. They are the owner of youtube. It is not surprising because youtube is one of the biggest users of broadband on the web. So i think i am a fan of obama. If i did not i would have voted for obama. Im troubled by the way in which obama and the Company Seems to be a little too. And after the last election when obama made the announcement that he was going to sue the Network Neutrality legislation hes played in to the bogus of the fun notion. Trying to destroy. Large Companies Like youtube or netflix who has an agenda. Its a fight between Large Companies whether or not the should pay a toll. It doesnt pertain to ordinary Internet Users. It is not going to slow the network down. Down. It is an example of the way the internet gets used by certain marketing departments to exploit people and get involved in issues that are so complicated. Five people in washington know what Network Neutrality isnt you will get five different answers. The most complicated question of the 19th century as the eastern question. I think it was ever gladstone, there was no appetite. The 1st is mad. The 2nd is that in the 3rd is my wife percent right back. Network neutrality. These by various governments and eventually the catastrophe of the 1st world war and hopefully that will give us into another global war but it is an incredibly complicated issue being used by different groups to pursue their own agenda. Cspan someone you talk about in this book, a guy named kim bernerslee. We found this from it ted asked. This is a ten speech that he gave, fast talking, you have to listen carefully. How he fits. How about we do that. In a way the coming fundamental. What would be on your list . The student. Lets use the energy from the 25th anniversary. Do me a favor,. Cspan classrooms. It is many thousands of people online contribute to the creation of something, wikipedia is a crowd sourced and encyclopedia. If you like the internet you can think that man. If you dont you can blame him. That man is incredibly important. In 1989 when all our eyes are on the collapse of the berlin wall, we were told that history had come to an end, the 20th century was finished. That guy is just saw, a recent graduate of Oxford University a queens college, the same college that Jeremy Benton attempted 200 years earlier, the creator of the industrial complex. That man was at the siren Research Center in geneva. And he invented the World Wide Web. He did not invent the internet probably invented the World Wide Web that sat on top of the internet and made the internet accessible for everyone. The achievement of the World Wide Web was it took the internet are made it popular. The reason we bring in 1989 as we all thought history came to an end. And while emigre fan of his integrated meyer, and i think hes a great principle and grant men i would say that his romantic vision of the internet is putting everything together has me realizing when he stands stand there and talks about the bill of rights, i would stand there and say sure bills of rights are very nice but we have enough bills of rights. The internet is too much about the bill of rights. We are going to make the internet a habitable place. We are going to make the internet a successful base image that is going to be the opposite tour challenges of the 21st century life. We need to be responsible. The internet needs a sense of responsibility. Become respectable for our culture predicament thanks it was delivered in middle of night it was delivered in the middle of the night it was a gift to the people a reflection of our own virtue of good and of course the story is much its story is much more complicated. If we are going to make it a good place, if we are going to make it a reflection of our best qualities we need more responsibility and less rights. Cspan i want to bring up the tab thing again because it fits in. Guest are you trying to get an invitation . Cspan now im not at all. The reason i bring it up with it even exist without the internet and is not part of creating a community . Guest ted used to be a fairly exclusive small thing run by a guy whose name was sullivan in Southern California and then ironically enough a guy named Chris Anderson who had run a Publishing Company called Future Publishing which went bust after the first internet foam is one of the examples of an internet cowboy who tried to make a lot of money. One of his investments was ted and when Future Publishing went bust and he lost his job and i dont know what happened to him he bought ted and built it into a successful franchise. I think ted would exist. Ted is essentially a selloff. We dont rely on the internet. Theres a great first enlightenment. People want intelligent conversation. One of the reasons ted does so well is because her general media so bad, not just the internet and television. Theyre such an absence of serious thought and commentary that people want that not a thing. In the 21st century get a thing that ted offers us a valuable as network. Im ambivalent about that create it on like the networking but the challenge in this postindustrial world is to build their own personal brand. We are not going to be doctors or lawyers. We are not going to work report or kodak for the rest of our lives. We will be continually inventing and reinventing ourselves and networking is really important. The more people you know the wealthier you are. That will not be in your bank account but who you know. The founder of linked in is perhaps the great visionary and a brilliant man a graduate of stanford and a philosopher attacks at oxford. He was a believe the fulbright or Rhodes Scholar in the interest of this better than anyone. He essentially vote invented social networks. Cspan here you are back at that ted speech back in 2012. We are being sold something also which is a scam, something which is undermining who we are as a species. One of the previous speakers talked about the importance of community, what i call the cult of the social. This idea that community is everything. You come to these events because i want to shoot all of you. All you have to hear about his community, community, community. Community is supposed to be so wonderful. Community brings us together. These books, too many of them all about how important it is for us to work together. All premised on this absurd idea that technology will finally enable community. For those of you who read marks posner german question its taken lock stock and barrel from marks the idea that Technology Allows us to realize our species , that we have this network 2 billion people in all this data, dna. We are all becoming information we can share that information and become community. But of course its nonsense and worse than nonsense its dangerous nonsense. Cspan why is it dangerous . Guest its dangerous because its not true. Its dangerous for two reasons. Firstly as he realized in his great work its the interior thats so important and the role of government, is to protect that interior. I am the book at the museum in amsterdam gazing at the great artists of the interior. Im a believer in that liberalism and im a believer in now and the idea of protecting the individual to think for themselves and the social tends to lead itself to conformity. Thats the first thing. The second thing is that the social, i dont think being social is a bad thing. Dont think we should lock ourselves in our rooms. Im not in favor of going back to the cave and separating myself from my fellow man but the other problem is that social media in the digital age isnt social. Its an extension of the south. Its an extension of the culture of narcissism that increasingly pervades the internet. When you go on facebook you are not really networking. You are not really being social and some people of course are bit more and more people are using instagram are these other networks or twitter using it to broadcast yourself, to show off yourself. Ironically enough gets more and more alienating as i show in the internet is not the answer. A lot of Research Shows the more people use facebook to lonelier they are the more separated they are. The social is actually fragmented. Its alienating. Its atomizing and you see that particularly in political terms. We are told that social media would create these great movements, the arab spring, occupied but look what happened to occupy. I keep i was simply an explosion of individual voices. There was never any successful molding of those voices. It was a quilt of individuals and that quilt never formed into a Political Organization and the middle east we know the catastrophe that followed the arab spring. Cspan you mentioned karl marx in this last clip. Whered you put him in importance and how much of a follower are low pam . Well im not a follower of marks. In this book, the internet is not the answer i write about my great uncle who was a follower of marks who was the bagman of English Communist Party and he was the guy who recycled soviet money through england. I have a history of that in my family like so many, our families are made of either merchants or idealists and perhaps i have a little bit of both in me. But im not a follower of marks. I think he was wrong but i also think he was wrong in a fascinating way. The german ideology for example which is one of his more useful books, he writes about it postcapitalist age where technology will free us from work, so he says very famously in the german ideology you can fish in the morning and farm the afternoon and right poetry in the evening. And you see that echoed in a lot of these idealists somebody like Chris Atkinson or so many others. Technology will free us, free us from the finality of work, free us from having to rely on going to the factory but of course the catastrophe of our current wave of technology of digital revolution is it isnt freeing us. What its doing is actually destroying jobs. Its doing away with land which means we want have the cash to the farmers are fishermen or poets. Right now you mention you run a salon. Its a televised . Guest i hope you guys are going to televise it. Its called futurecast. Its how the at t foundry in palo alto and i wear your hat symbolically. Im the guy who sits with someone interesting gavin newsom for example and we talk about the impact of technology but in contrast with this show its not broadcast. We have an invitationonly group of about 50 people so its a kind of ted. Supported by at t and the big Swedish Telecommunications company and so wonderful events. Its held about six times a year. We have taken it on the road. We do some in San Francisco. We go to atlanta dallas and gives me the opportunity to ask the hard questions. Cspan you do an interview series. Is it still on techcrunch . Guest my techcrunch has shifted to ticona me. Cspan how often do you do interviews . Guest i do them about once a week. Cspan here are excerpts of about three of them. Guest you were on Google Google and you will be watching me brian. Is there anything you dont know about me . Cspan oh yes. Lets watch. Technology continues to the matter medically change the world, so dramatically even politicians, current politicians are realizing that Digital Technology can change dramatically revolutionize government. The latest politician are perhaps the first politician to realize this is gavin newsom, Lieutenant Governor of california, the number two guy. He is famous, most legendary for his insight into technology and particularly into search. Steven wolff from the founder and ceo of warfarin research. Hes come out with a new book out this week called who wants the future not to book on welcome to techcrunch tv. Seen it thanks for having me here. Its full of optimism. Would the mean full of optimism . He said he admits the future. You are nostalgic for the future. Cspan this is another example of something that the internet to provide you with an opportunity to do. Is this mix them tons of thing to put together . Guest why dont pay for it. Techcrunch pay for it. Cspan has a work for them . Guest it works for me but its a loss leader. I shouldnt admit this publicly, do you have a large audience . If ive missed something or will everyone know about it . Cspan everybody. Guest you do certain things and this is why this economy is so challenging and this is why people oversimplified it. I do the techcrunch interview. I did the techcrunch interview previously. Allows me to meet interesting people and secondly gets my name out there. Thirdly its a great way to research. In the acknowledgments in the book i think everyone who was on my show, it was my way of doing research. It paid something but not a great deal of money so techcrunchs Main Business model is advertising an offense but videos dont get the page news that tax does so i dont think techcrunch tv tv was a number so profitable that was profitable for me. I loved the opportunity to ask questions. Theres nothing more fun than being able to sit down with someone and have them anything you want. As i said to you before they usually answer. Right now to economy, how much of a competitor of a . They are slightly higher. The problem with techcrunch as they techcrunch they had a huge audience. It was mostly those who believed they were the next marks zuckerberg. The conversation he was the guy who did his part with his son albert who was my grandfather to the west bend. They eventually ended up buying a store in london soho. I use it in the book not just nostalgically and not just for the opportunity to talk about myself, because it represents an example of the way in which technological change affects them. I write about them as people who first rode the wave of technological and innovation with the invention of the industrial sewing machine. It allows them to sell their stuff to women who would take it home and make their own dresses. Then you had another technological revolution which made cheap offtheshelf dresses and clothing particularly for women. It made womens lives change. They didnt have the time or just in making their own stuff so suddenly their business became redundant and ironically enough is coming back now to 3d printing out everyone can. As i explain in the book there are challenges with Business Models because if everyone has that same software and all you are doing is buying 3d printers which are essentially factories its not clear what where the Business Model is and is not aware whether not the traditional fabric industry or the traditional fashion industry is going to get swept away. Cspan you talk about a 9yearold boy that you had in the video i watched on our network from the Strand Book Store in 2007. Did that make him 16 or 17 . Guest 16. Cspan how many kids do you have . Guest i have two, 16 open a 17 year low. Cspan what do they think about all the stuffy writing about . Guest they are embarrassed. My son is an avid Internet User so he is typical of his generation, very smart but i have a feeling is much more glued to this little device funniest of books, and i think hes an example of someone that all the strengths and weaknesses of this new digital age he someone that doesnt read enough books. As Nicholas Carr the author of the shallows writes, my son is a typical generation at speeds across the surface of these very quick in making connections. Hes very quick with getting things but on the other hand i think he struggles to get beneath the surface. My 13yearold daughter is at the waldorf school. Im not sure if you are familiar with waldorf education. Swear they screen is outlawed. You sign an agreement as a parent which will discourage kids from using devices like this, screens, ipads, computers are not allowed in the classroom. So she has a more traditional kind of education. Ironically this education came from a 19th century austrian educational school. So she has a different kind of experience and she still reads a lot of looks. Eventually when she gets to 15 or 16 she will get her hands on these devices and will probably become more like my son. Cspan where to meet your wife . Guest my exwife, graduate school. We were both graduate students. She was a student of history, chinese history and i was student of Political Science soon to be thrown out. Then she went to the Harvard Law School and became an environmental lawyer and now is the waldorf teachers so he has an we are still very friendly. Cspan did you actually get thrown out of uc berkeley . Guest yeah. Cspan what happened then . Guest i became unemployed and in some ways unemployable which i remain. Actually i think it was rather lucky because i didnt have a career which meant that when i happened to turn up in Silicon Valley or San Francisco in 1995 because my exwife would move from cambridge to San Francisco i really didnt have much. I was sort of a parttime music journalist, parttime this, parttime that. In reality it was doing very little trying to be a journalist and do different things. I was very lucky to turn up in San Francisco in 1995. I have the eclectic skills, the ability to talk and sell and think and write which allowed me to be that first wave of internet entrepreneurs. It was a great time to be in San Francisco. They were there people like me sort of layabouts without any clear skills who try their hand in some of them succeeded. And still very proud of that failure. I shouldnt idealize billiar. Cspan what was the. Com name . What to do . Guest thats a good question, never figure that one out. We went from the two. To the selling of all the hardware. I think it was a great time to just try something. Its different now. You cant do it. Silicon valley or San Francisco is crawling with one of the entrepreneurs. Everywhere you go but when i was around no one really knew about it so i went from having absolutely no distance experience or skills to being the ceo of a company that raised several me on dollars. I had the head of intel asian operation is the present of my board that i had other distinguished people on my board so is a really exciting time. Out so you are really funny story about audio cafe. We were destroyed by amazon, not the first or the last and the original focus was to sell audio equipment hardware. This was in 95, 96. Thats when we got the Investment Company which was an ecommerce plan supported by intel. We were getting the launch and we raise money. We had a good team and is a very exciting time. Three months before we launched amazon at that point was an on line bookstore launch their electronic books. Launched their Electronic Store and they sold all the equipment so we were automatically dead. A few years later i was making a speech and afterwards i was in the mens bathroom. I turned around analysis very loud voice, this booming voice that kept on saying cults of amateur, calls of amateur amateur in this deep laughter. He had been in the audience and of course it was just these those. We had a very funny conversation in the mens room where i told you the story of audio cafe and how we inadvertently had killed my First Business which of course had a happy ending because and becoming a writer. I think bezos isnt example of one of those brilliant unspun dewars he was very brilliant and very articulate at the same times their business is explained in the book are somewhat questionable. Cspan when we have a couple of minutes left. Guest this has been quick. Cspan very quick. I have to ask you about two people you write about it and show some admiration for. Franz and hannah arent. Why were they mentioned in your book . Guest kafka was describing a world of surveillance throughout the city, a world where it seemed as if we were being watched and everything we were doing. The trial and the classic examples of this. And make it clear that i think go was a student of a different kind of Central European totalitarianism. Thats what happened today but there is something sort of pick you really kafko about whats happening on line. This world that we are embracing and yet we are being perpetually watched and kafko as his most brilliant and he was extremely brilliant even he could not come up with anything quite as outrageous. To add a third to that list i would put the argentine short story writer. In many ways he imagined this much more interesting than kafko and her rant as the person who argues totalitarians the origins of totalitarianism lie of the institutions that lie between the individual and the state. Thats what i fear is happening today with the internet. The internet is destroying so much tradition, so many of those institutions and whats 19th 19th arendt was brilliant it was observing the anger, the banality of evil of fascism. I fear in the right economic circumstances we could find ourselves in a similar kind of catastrophic situation. Cspan we have seen you speaking. We have seen you interviewing and we have talked about your bookwriting and you alluded to this earlier but how do you make your money for. Guest thats a secret. Cspan a secret . Guest i make my money in a lot of different ways. I make my money as a writer but writing isnt lucrative enough to pay for my kids school fees and mortgage payments and all the other things you need. I am paid as a speaker. I do some consultancy. I do some investment. Im paid as an executive producer of future past. Im paid is a senior fellow so im paid in many different ways. A friend of mine whose son was the original internet capitalist , he was on my original board, he grew up in detroit. He was in a poor family, grew up in the ghetto and they said to me when he was growing up and he was in the room he wanted there to be more than one door, more than one place to escape. The way i make my living as i dont want to be reliant on one thing. If the book doesnt work out theres a speaking at the speaking as doesnt work out then its the production. The production doesnt work out theres a consulting. I think my career is a kind of model for this new world because we have to be entrepreneurial. The idea of being a pure writer and sitting in a room and churning out masterpieces was fine maybe in the 20 century even though kafko had to work in an insurance company. So we need to learn if you want to be creative you have have to be a gubernatorial need to learn how to take risks and you need to learn that you need to play a lot of the boards. You need to play a lot of the table simultaneously because you should never rely on a single thing, not a Single Company or a single idea or single book, not a single enterprise. Cspan our guest has been andrew keen in the title of this book is the internet is not the answer. We thank you very much. Guest thank you. Husk of this and the communicators we are pleased to have with us ari schwartz the former direct or for cybersecurity and the National Security council. Mr. Schwartz wellwisher job at the white house . Guest my job was to cover a range of different areas. The federal Government Agencies and making sure they were prepared in cybersecurity protecting privacy