Guest thats how its being referred to now in copyright circles. It is really, its become a ridiculous, absurd system. Service providers spend a lot of money on dealing with these notices and from the author perspective dont actually achieve getting anything taken down. So we are asking for a number of change to that part of the statute. Were also looking at collective licenses for books so that libraries can access copies of books and actually pay for them instead of having libraries and the googles saying, oh, we cant possibly license all these books, so it has to be fair use. That takes away a lot of income, ultimately, out of the market and from authors. So those are the big ones, but there are a bunch of issues. Host when you look at where we are in publishing in 2016, has there ever been another period in history where this revolution is happening like it is now . Well, when the yeah. I mean, when the beginning of publishing. It was a huge change in terms of the written word. It was enormous. I mean, people who never had access to books before suddenly had access to books. It took a hundred years for the Publishing Industry to realize that, oh, we can use this technology for mass, mass distribution. Cheap books that, you know, many, many people could provide access to. So the digital revolution is just as big. I mean, the implications are huge, and were already starting to see some of that in terms of the ability to access knowledge. Its very, very exciting. We just want to make sure that authors get some of that money, right . Because right now whats happened, whats happened is a result of the information wants to be Free Movement is that its not as though no ones making money off of the content. The technology companies, the Service Providers are making huge amounts of money off of content. The googles, the amazons, apple, facebook, theyre called, you know, the big four, the four horsemen. They are profiting from content now, and every the creators are losing their shirts. And thats its not fair, but its also just very shortsighted because if creators cant afford to keep creating, they wont. Host mary rasenberger, executive editor of the authors guild, thanks for joining us on booktv. Guest thank you very much. Next on booktv, Joshua Cooper ramo, coceo of kissinger associates, talks about his latest book, the seventh sense, with authors Malcolm Gladwell and jacob weisberg. [inaudible conversations] hello . Hi. Thank you, everybody, for coming. This is great. You know, as a writer for most of the last few months, ive been getting up every morning saying to my wife what if nobody reads the book, and i woke up this morning and said what if nobody comes . So its very nice of all of you to come out tonight. The reality is were fortunate to have with us tonight two friends of mine who, i think, will be more interesting and fascinating to many of you. Jacob weisberg is the chairman and ceo of the slate group, longtime journalist, has recently published a book on Ronald Reagan that i cant recommend highly enough, particularly in todays political environment. And malcolm glad welshing Everybody Knows a writer gadwell, Everybody Knows a writer for the new yorker. Were going to talk a little bit tonight about my new book, the seventh sense, and one of the things youll discover quickly when we get into conversation is that one of the big ideas is theres just so many questions to answer that this model of kind of us talking to you is not entirely the right model. So well do that, but we also really want to open up to questions and debate, and i hope people will talk about the ideas that are interesting. With that, i think were going to have a little conversation up here. Jacobs going to talk to me, then were all going to talk, and well open up to questions. So, again, thanks for coming, its great to see so many people here. Its very nice. [applause] i was going to say welcome nyu graduates. I think i know you were probably tempted to go out and celebrate around graduation, but i think coming here and getting a start on your careers and figuring out what this thing is about is a good way to you outperform the people who are out drinking right now, i think. [laughter] as the or not. As sorry. I was going to say as the least famous person here, i decided i should be the moderator. Im going to try to direct the conversation a little bit at least to get started, and i wanted to start it off just by asking josh to explain a little bit of what hes trying to do in the book and how he got interested and so on. And just to get started, josh, what is the seventh sense . So, you know, the Historical Context of the seventh sense ill get to in a moment. Its really this feeling, this instinct for the way in which were enmeshed in all of these networks which fundamentally change things. When you look around the world and you see the most expensive war on terrorism in Human History not succeeding, an Economic Policy that was designed to try to help the middle class and stabilize the economy that appears to be accelerating in fragility and certainly causing problems and things like deflation, as you look at the political environment, there are all these things happening that are sort of unexpected. My idea was to roll up my sleeves and see if i could understand what was driving that. I came at that from a couple different perspectives. One was i had a very interesting experience back when you and i were first getting to know each other back in the 90s. I had briefly run a Startup Company that failed, so i got that experience under my belt. [laughter] and in the process of shutting it down, i got a phone call from this guy named mike moritz. This was in the mid 1990s, and mike said, look, you dont know me. I used to be a journalist at time, and ive now maneuvered into the venture captain moved into the Venture Capitalist movement. I just shut this company down, and i was about to join time as a senior editor, and i said, why not . Ill go out. So i fly out, and mike this was my First Encounter with a Venture Capitalist, so i was not prepared for what i got, showed up at the San Francisco airport in his convertible mercedes, picked me up and took me down to this warehouse and said, look, this is really where you ought to work. I was like do i do this or go to Time Magazine which really was the icon of every possible dream you could have in journalism. So i looked at this company, i said, you know, the opportunity to be employee number four at a Company Called yahoo , that things not going anywhere and i very happily got on an airplane and flew back to new york city saying, whew, thank goodness i missed that one. I have the stability of Time Magazine, thats not going anywhere, right . Once you make an 800 million mistake like that [laughter] you sort of say to yourself what was it kind of missed at this moment . And it was clear to me as i moved through things over the years that there was this dynamic in the system, this possibility of the creation of incredible new basins of prosperity of information, of ideas that came merely from just connection itself. Part of where the seventh sense came from was the sense that, jeez, i wish id had it back then, but part of it also as you look around the world, so many businesses, this journalism business, are being disrupted by these huge forces. What i saw when i left journalism, you know, 10 or 12 years ago and went into the advisory business and moved to china was that these forces are really working out all over society. The things that have happened, unfortunately, to Time Magazine are happening to military affairs, economics, and all of our old ideas are being kind of upturned. My question was, was there some way that i could really get to the root of understanding this . We all know the kind of basic idea which is that connection changes the nature of an object. A connected phone, a connected journalism, its just different than one that a connected economy, to one thats not connected. What i saw was there were people, travis clannic looks at a car and seeing Something Different that produces uber. So its really that story of that instinct thats there. Its a learn bl instinct. This is something you can understand, it is something that is usable, you know, because people all around us have it, but it does often kind of challenge tradition always of thinking. Just to be traditionally minded about it, its a sense of history notice se. Knee chas view was in the Industrial Revolution, look, this is so crazy that my five senses are not enough, and were all going to go crazy, which he did anyhow. But he said we need an additional sense, and that sense is a sense of history, what he called the sixth sense. The idea that if you sort of had a sense where this change was on the ebb and flow of Human History, it would give you something to grab onto. I think we still need the five senses, the sixth sense, but we also need a sense of what does it mean to be enmeshed . How does that change things . Silicon valley people sort of say they divide the world into people who get it and people who dont get it. The people who get it, theyre talking about people who have this understanding of how connection changes the nature of business, changes the nature of politics, changes the nature of everything. And people who can take advantage of that. Yeah. And i think thats i think what ive tried to do in the book is say that ability to understand Network Systems is a piece, but it also incorporates a different element which is that its not enough simply to understand the networks. Youve got to understand the world into which theyre moving. So i think i almost have a sense of kind of the world one way to look at it is sort of on the one hand youve got a group of people who have a tremendous amount of power in economics, in politics, in traditional media who dont really understand how networks work. And in the process of trying to solve problems, often make them worse with. And then you have a group of people who understand networks really, really well, and they tend to be younger, they tend to sit at the heart of these companies where you can make the case the control of, you know, the google algorithm or the facebook algorithm, those are the most powerful handles assembled in Human History, in a way. And that group who i talk about in the group doesnt necessarily understand the larger social constructs of the ideas of, you know, whether its the classical philosophical ideas or the ideas about what makes an economy or a society function. So the rest of us are sort of stuck in the middle. So the cultivation of the seventh sense, maybe we can talk later about the issues around Artificial Intelligence, were not going to beat the machines. The idea that we should learn more about computers to save ourselves, we have to understand the networks and the history and ideas that surround them that really offer a path guard. But often this manifests itself, and you tell these stories in a reversal of a power dynamic or a kind of asymmetry in the dynamic. I mean, isis you describe as a sort of seventh sense phenomenon. You know, donald trump with just his little old donald trump with his twitter account versus the republican establishment and the thing that everyone expects doesnt happen because some seventh sense person or organization shows up and uses it differently. Yeah. That the networks fundamentally permit you they change the way in which these forces behave. And so when somebody looked at isis and thought these are just a bunch of, you know, 15 yahoos with trucks, what they discover is when youre part of a connected system, that ability to make these videos, these horrible videos of 12 people being beheaded has a kind of viral power that traditional power structures have a hard time competing with. Im going to sic malcolm on you in a minute. Do these people who are the beneficiaries of the phenomenon, are they people who understand it, or are they just beneficiaries of it . I mean, does donald trump understand, networks understand what youre talking about intuitively, or is it just somehow hes harnessed it and latched onto it . I mean, i think it is maybe a little bit of both. I think there is this intuitive sense some people have of how the networks work, and then i think theres just there are many things. One of the things about networks is theyre very contagion prone. We build them that way because we want them to be efficient. The networks evolve in ways that suit what the networks want, and what they want is to be faster. They want to be connected all the time. They want to be super efficient. So were Building Systems that are hypercontagious without necessarily the kind of foundational belief, structure saying what do you do in a very contagious system . This is really germane in, you know, for better or worse in this kind of world of Foreign Policy and security because the larger historical narrative against which all this takes place is when power shifts dramatically, when the way power is structured inside a system shifts dramatically, that creates these incredible disruptions. So in the book i make this comparison between the enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution starting with the reformation wiped out many of the sacred european institutions architected for a different power structure, for a different idea of who should be in charge. And if its right now as you look around the world today, there are very few institutions that we trust more than we trusted, you know, ten years ago. Almost everything has kind of declined. And thats a worrisome sign. The question of what basis do you build this kind of new order . So, malcolm, another thought i had reading this book was, oh, my god, david and goliath. Your most recent book is about asymmetries that work out in surprising ways, and why there are cases in which underdogs are successful. How did reading joshs book, how does your here to toly match up with his theory . Oh. You can tell we didnt prepare for this. Hes completely flummoxed by that question. I hadnt thought about that. I suppose the network is a, a lot of what josh is talking about is the deceptive power of networks that you because we have a tendency to focus on a component of a network, we miss the kind of hidden power that comes from the connectivity. So, in essence, it does it is a version of a david and goliath argument which is that david is actually much stronger than he appears. Although im actually more, what im more what i was more interested in after reading the book was the downside of networks. You know, what they i wish you could, id love for you to explain it a little bit more, josh, what they cant do. And so if the opposite of a network is a hierarchy, what sorts of situations are networks beth optimized for, and what situations are hierarchies most appropriate for . Yeah. And i think theres another question which is related to that which is, and i think, you know, were early in this process of figuring out what Network Power means. The other question is like why Certain Networks structure themselves in certain ways, and can we predict in advance which Network Structures are likely to emerge. So one of the classic models is this socalled winner take all network structure. Today we have in the world, i think, nine platforms that have more than a billion users on them, facebook, google, microsoft office, microsoft windows, so on, youtube. And these systems, as we all know, have this winner take all effect. More people use facebook. So, first of all, it creates these natural monopolies which were really not necessarily used to dealing with. The economic structures, its cheap for facebook to add every additional user so they just get more and more profitable as time goes on. And it has the effect of concentrating a huge amount of power in the hands of very few people. Not only power, if you look at the deal around whats app which was, i think, a 19 billion deal, to the its almost a billion dollars per employee at that company. One of the questions is why do certain topologies, Network Spaces are defined by so maybe just slow down, explain yeah. Those who have forgotten what a topology right. [laughter] the idea of a topology is that it comes from mathematics and Computer Network theory is that there are these sort of invisible, like theres a geography that you can see, right . Theres a geography of new york city, of europe that shaped all kinds of decisions, where the rivers ran, where the mountains were, the coastlines were. And for the most of Human History, the thing that mattered most was geography. If you were fighting a war, you wanted to control the coast, the air space, the mountain passes. Well, topologies are things that emerge as a result purely of connect it. So, for instance, the distance between st. Petersburg and moscow is always 450 miles. But depending on how its connected, it can take you a week to get there, or it can take you a millisecond to get there. They change shape depending on the nature of the connection. And there are topologies for currencies. Facebook has a topology of how people are connected, that famous six degrees of separation idea never heard of it. Yeah, exactly. All kinds of networks have top logical features and designs, and they tend to optimize themself for the design that makes them most efficient. So the interesting question is, you know, are there areas so we know, for instance, why the facebook effect works, right . The more people use it whats interesting is when you look at businesses like amazon that at the beginning, it wasnt inherently clear that a merchandise business was going to have that effect. The more people used amazon, therefore, more people would want to use it. Why couldnt more people use ama