In the back of the room we have events news letter, stay on top of everything that we have in the store, also we are pleased to have cspan book tv in the house tonight. There will be time for a q a afterwards, but if you want to ask a question, please let us come to you with the microphone so you can be heard here in the store as well as those watching at home. Its my pleasure to introduce our guest for the evening, david kushner. [applause] are here tonight to honor and discuss david kushners latest book, genius man in history of internets rise, the players ball is a deep, deep dive into a lawsuit that defines internet, let me try to set up the basic story for you and give you a sense of how fascinating and unbelievable it is, in 1994 when gary founded the internet dating site match. Com anyone could register, domain name, despite sending certified letter to government contractor, so he had register not only match. Com for date site but sex. Com, but its all it took to register domain name, so at the same time trying to get match. Com off the ground, the con man of the title was struggling run his Online Internet bullet and Board Service for swingers called French Connection from the jail cell where hes doing 3 years for impersonating a lawyer. [laughter] after release he was forged back to reregister under his own name, cohen had turned sex. Com into absolute power house bringing in like 500 grand a month. It was unclear whether domain name was even property or steal one and the players ball is a tale that reconstructs every dirty trick and deposition on the characters vendetta, tried repeatedly to ruin each others life as they fought ownership of the most valuable domain in the world, sex. Com, please welcome david kushner. [applause] thank you, what a wonderful summary of the book that made it sound fun. Well, thank you for coming tonight on the rainy night and here celebrating the publication of Howard Sterns book which is out today, im very excited. I love in the area, i taught at princeton so to have everybody here tonight is fantastic. I want to thank labyrinth books and thanks cspan for covering this, and the players ball, i have spent about 20 years covering among other things the rise of the internet and sort of what i call digital culture, and ive written books about game makers, hackers, cyber crime and you name it, but ive always for about 10 years i wanted to write a book about what i considered to be the wild west days of the internet and these were the days in the early 90s when there really were no rules and there were, the internet was ruled by a lot of outlaws and rebels and innovators and, you know, they were figuring out how this would work not only as as means of communication but also as business, how can you make money with this machine . And its become sort of cliche that we think of the adult industry as being a reason that the internet made money early on. I feel like the story hadnt really been told and i thought specifically the story of how love and sex fuels the rise of the internet hadnt been told and took me years to find the story, when youre writing a 300odd page book you need characters and you need some drama to keep it going and i was looking and looking and eventually came across gary kremen and i thought i would start out tonight by reading you a little bit from the introduction about what gary kremen did and how he ended first getting involved with the man who became his nemesis steven khan, im going the read to you a couple of quotes from the beginning of the book. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect and the beast and the monk robbed of isolation thats life to either will die, singing, the internet is really, really great, monster, for porn, gary kremen is the father of Online Dating. In 1993 he founded what was essentially the first and now biggest site match. Com, despite with only 5 of americans being online around that time, kremen told a skeptical tv reporter in 1995 that his invention was going to change the world, match. Com will bring more love to the planet than anything since jesus christ, 31yearold declared in his tone chicago accent. The fact that this prediction was coming from some in stained tidedye tshirt, but his hunch was right, match. Com became an international phenomena spread to go more than 25 countries and 8 languages with more than 42 million members and becoming the basis of todays 2 billiondollar Online Dating industry. Anybody here date online . Who wants to admit it . The Company Started with 2,500dollar credit card loan, now has a value of 3. 5 billion. At a time when most Business People barely understood let alone paid attention to the internet, kremen among the first to figure out how to make money online. Even more radically, he transformed the way people meet and marry in digital age as he also once said, im responsible for over 1 million babies. [laughter] but according to to his distracters he was responsible for much that was wrong with the internet too. The genius of love was also the sultan of sex specifically sex. Com, one of the most notorious websites ever online and it was his epic battle over sex. Com that made him most legendary of all. It started in early 90s, before he pioneered Online Dating, vision another new frontier, he saw domain name, dot coms and others that signified ownership online one day would have value because domains were deem worthless at the time they were essentially free to register, so jobs. Com, housing. Com, autos. Com, match. Com and the like to later monetize. It was the online equivalent of coming to america and staking claims across the country. He had no intention of becoming a porn grapher, in 1995 he registered sex. Com too thinking it could become a health and wellness education site. [laughter] someone named Steven Michael cohen had stolen web domain earning millions of dollars a year. Kremen wanted the site back and we wanted to get the money cohen had earned through stealing it. What followed was an epic rivalry that established many of the rules that enable online commerce today. As kremen. Lauren said sets precedent that property that can be stolen, on one side was kremen, devoted father of 2, epitomized the entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley in quest to bring love and on the other side evil genius twin, 48yearold convicted flown from los angeles, as con man, cohen was among the best, he impersonated judges and lawyers, ran Swingers Clubs and scanned investors after promising to build fantasy island of sex outside las vegas. Kremen insisted that despite cohen insisted that despite kremens claims he was the real originator of internet dating and Rightful Owner of sex. Com right before kremen came on the scene. He says he invented online sex, thats the most ridiculous thing cohen said, i started everything, i invented that. The Los Angeles Times called cohen one of the most successful entrepreneurs of the internet age. The battle of cohen and kremen became personal, ran from the board rooms of Silicon Valley to bordelos in mexico. There was even a gunfight on the streets of tijuana according to cohen at least. But there was more than fame and fortune at stake, the war for sex. Com represents, overlooked chapter behind one of the greatest inventions of our time, the internet n. The public imagination the computer revolution is two main stories, the rise of apple and personal computing in 1980s and facebook, social media in the 2000s, in between those years is a lost era of innovation thats crucial to understanding the evolving world of today and tomorrow. The internet gold rush of the 1990s, american frontier of the 1800s, early settlers of net fought to make their claim and established millions, none of this would have been possible without the fuel that made the internet what it is today. Love and sex, so the over the years writing for magazines, new yorker, ive really enjoyed the opportunity to meet the innovators very really on in their careers, you know, whether it was creators of the first person, Mark Zuckerberg in 2005 when he was just starting facebook out of his apartment, one thing that ive observed is a threat between all of them and what it is is that they are filling a personal need first and by doing so they are tapping into a universal need and not everybody achieves that, but zoom, one of the first games, lots of blood and at the time people who made it were tired of the video games that were popular, they enjoyed mario and they enjoyed the idea of plumbers and mushrooms and gold stars but they wanted to make a game that was more like movie alien, evil death, like that, and they found a massive audience for it. Facebook, you know the story, not a directory, Mark Zuckerberg, said, well, i can make a better one than they have online, the youtube creators started out at dinner party where they had wanted to share videos that they had shot of them eating speghty spaghetti and this is a way to share videos online and on and on and with Online Dating it was very similar, gary kremen wanted a better way to date. This is how it started. Again, what you see is that it is all starting with a very simple idea why something exists somebody either had skills for creating itself or getting people to create for them. Let me tell you about gary kremen, ended up in stanford getting an mba, he did not fit the mold, he had an internship at goldman sachs, actually did not know how to tie a tie, he had never done it. This is a very different time in Silicon Valley, it was more conservative, its not like jeans and sandals that you might think of today. Goldman sachs paid him to leave the internship, they just said, this isnt working out, you can go. So he went back to stanford and he started a company that was basically selling software through disk and mail and nothing, software that you can find online and packaging it and this is when he stumbled upon the idea, the companys name was los Altos Technology and his partner was his friend, the idea had come as they often do by seeing something new and realizing what he could do with it, it came one day when he was in his Office Taking orders for los Altos Technology. At first many of the orders came in over fax, but they also began taking them in platform of email still relatively uncommon given that in 1992 only 23 of u. S. Households had computers. As the emails began coming in, kremen felt naturally curious about the people on the other end particularly when he got an order from a woman, do you think shes cute he asked dubin, what does that have to do asked dubin. Look, dubin said it was a 500dollar purchase this is good, kremen went on but do you this one is cute . And there was a new way he could find out, the year before computer scientists dr. Nathaniel wanted to come up with a way to email pictures of his grandchildren to family and friends but this was not yet possible, so he went about creating email format called the multipurpose internet extensions which allows someone to attach a file to email message. Earlier that year on march 11th, 1992 he sent the first one, photograph of barbershop who called themselves telephone cords along with audio of them singing harmonic tune, let me send you emails to the tune of let me call you sweetheart and thanks to the internet i actually have it. [music] okay. Innovation often follows a similar path, someone fills a personal need that also meets a universal need, email attachments would be just that, as kremen and other pioneers knew this was a huge deal, email equivalent of Alexander Graham bells message, i want to see you, the world is going to change with this kremen thought. People could do than just trade pictures of gran kids, they could trade pictures of each other and we wanted to know what this mysterious looked like on the other end of the internet, all he had to do go to coffee shop, scan picture and put it on the computer and attach it as file to him. I wonder if i can convince her to find the closest kinkos and scan a picture of herself h. It was a problem that needed to be filled, and he knew this from firsthand experience. Like a lot of young people, dating had always been a challenge. He had met and connected with his share of women but nebraska found his perfect never found his perfect match. Stop eating at dinner just bacon, he told him. [laughter] dont pretend that swallowing a shot of scope for breakfast constitutes morning hygiene. Oh, and the next time you go on a date, make sure your stained tshirt isnt inside if out. But he had a different tack. He wanted to find someone who would accept him. And so, like a lot of people, he tried personals, spending a couple hundred dollars a month on taking out ads in the San Francisco papers and using the 900 party lines, number party lines. He approached it creatively such as taking out an ad with his friend simon, a corporate therapytist who helped companies therapy theist who helped Companies Make decision. He was also looking for love. Since he was gay, he thought it was a stroke of marketing genius because it would, as he put it, take the edge off meeting a total stranger. Beith are successful entrepreneurs, enjoy musics food, hiking and are in touch with their feelings. [laughter] even better, the plan worked. They had several dates, dates that had a built hundred buffer that made them all the builtin buffer that made them fun, but no matter how clever, personal ads had problems of their own. With classified there was no way of knowing what the person actually looked like. Plus, the profiles are so small, limited in scope. With this new technology though, he realized there could be a way to change all that. People could also write their own personalized profiles and include them along with their photos. He could harness the internet for human relationships in a way that no one had done before. He could build a business from a new frontier of dating online. This is insane, he thought. This is bigger than the vacuum cleaner. And, of course, if he built it, then he could use it too. As his friend phil put it, that became part of the mythology, the guy who couldnt get a date invented this love machine. And cremen hoped with all his heart this machine would finally help him to meet his match. People dont realize that match. Com and Online Dating started we mail. It did not start on the web, it was before the web. It started as an email service. But it was fortuitous the, because the web happened right on the heels of this, and we now have this massive culture and industry. The match that gary cremen ended up meeting was not who he expected. His match ended up being a lifelong con man, our friend steven cohen. Before there was the web, there were Bulletin Board systems. Does anybody remember Bulletin Board systems . So you would dial up, and it was just text over a mow if dem, and modem, and it was for hobbyists who were interested in star trek or the grateful dead. And this is where steven cohen had gotten his start. And while he was running a Swingers Club in Orange County and in between getting busted, he decided to try to do something for them on a bbs. So this is a little bit on him. Since he was a kid, cohen had always been something of a geek, tinkering with gadgets and take Computer Programming courses at colleges. He was among the early phone freaks. Hobbyists who circumvented the Telecommunications System to get free Long Distance calling among other things. Is so he wasnt, by his own accounts, much of a programmer. He had a hacker mindset that he could in that he could see where and how to exploit new systems to his advantage. And so when he read are about this new innovation of bulletin the board systems, he had just the idea to cash in. By launching a love society if the summer of 1979, he called it the French Connection bds. While most, in knot all, of if not all, were devoted to the conversation of early adopting hobbyists, computer nerds, grateful dead fans, scifi geeks, cohen had a distinctly forprofit model. He would charge 18 a month for subscription which would give members access to leave messages for each other on a variety of sexual and special interest boards, 9 for guys locker room. It didnt discriminate between straight, gay or anywhere else on the spectrum as long as a customer paid for the chance to get online, that was fine by him. Cohen created the bbs with the help of some freelance programmers and ran it from a computer net beside room inside a home hed bought in Orange County. He relied on word of mouth, posting messages on competing bbs. Once again, he faced the same challenges he had before which was getting women to entice the men. So he offered Free Membership to women and more expediently, he logged on under assumed feel names. Female names. He would sit there and type in different names and be different people, always women, his exwife recalled. Always women. He would secretly pose as tammy, one of the system operators. The title for someone who ran a bb s. Or even his exwife herself would leave messages for guys and communicate to them new customer service. He began taking local Computer Programming colleges where he gave speeches and to recruit new members including his professor. Slowly but surely the French Connection acquired members and curiosity seekers. Tammy would flirt with them and take their credit card numberses or checks which cohen would have sent to a variety of post office boxes. When he needed a name for the company, he made a nod to his mother as if this were all about proving her wrong. His mother used to say to him youre never going to amount to anything. Ynata, youll never amount to anything. As cohen explained, were going to build something that woul