The internet is not the answer. Gocollects the original title, i cant say the original worldsds because im sure this is a family show. We had a long conversation with my agent. Add one point, morgan shouted that the internet is not the answer. So it wasnt my title unfortunately. Its a good title, isnt it . I wanted to ask about the whole chapter you talk about failing, failedcon. What is that . Im sure you been to Silicon Valley. It is a place of colts. Its in this a place of cult s. Its this idea of failure. The bigger you are, the more you boast about failure. I attended a conference called failcon. One of the speakers was a young man who boasted he is now the current ceo of uber, the darling of Silicon Valley, a Company Worth 40 billion. But he boasted about being sued by record labels for a quarter Million Dollars because he had a Company Called scour, which is essentially like napster. So the cult of failure is one of the most irritating aspects of silken valley. You have the black tim oreilly a wellknown publisher. He makes speeches like how i failed to come how i failed. But there are people who dont have jobs, people who are unemployed, who are underemployed, people who cannot get to college, they dont go around saying i am a failure. I think this cult of failure is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley is so profoundly out of touch with the rest of the world take as it is the one sector in the American Economy fortunately that is doing well. It is the one sector driving innovation, driving change. So when you have a cult of failure, it isnt great. What was your life like in london . My life in london was middleclass jewish, north london for those of your viewers i dont know what the equivalent would be in new york. What is sort of a lower medical us neighborhood it lower or middleclass neighborhood in new york . Brooklyn. My grandfather had come over from poland. He began in the east end of the docs, the old ox. He sold fashion fabric which was in those days most women made their own clothing. So he would wheel his card from the west end to the east end. Eventually my family did better and they had a store on oxford street, which is a major shopping street. So i was lucky. I had quite a privileged of bringing. School, how much . Enough. I was at school at northland in high school and then i went to the university of london and i went to a place called the school of slavonic y studies. This was before the collapse of the berlin wall so there was a big interest in the history of communism in precommunism, the history of russia and germany and countries that then existed like he was longer and czechoslovakia which have now fragmented. After i graduated from the school of slavonic studies in london, i was a British Council scholar, which is equivalent to a fulbright scholar. This was both before the civil war and the olympics, 1982 1983. Then i came to grad school in berkeley. I came as a clinical scientist. I had the fairly unique achievement of coming as a scholar and then being thrown out as a troublemaker. So i had my moments of failure too. I made fun of stodgy epidemics, career academics that have nothing to say for themselves. As you can tell for myself and you can tell from my work, i find hard to be not a little brutal. And i like to tell what i see is the truth. And american academia is so mired in tradition, in bureaucracy, it is so reactionary, whether its from the left or the right you have political correctness. In england, youre trained to fend for yourself to my teachers expected me to argue with men with them, to think of myself. So when i came to berkeley, it was a cultural shock when you have these professors who expected you to agree with them, who expected you to toe the line, who expected you to read their boring articles and theories and then spew them back to them. So of course, perhaps rather immaturely, i wasnt willing to do that and they were very happy so i was thrown out. The pinnacle of my career at berkeley if someone can call it the pinnacle, i had a particularly stodgy old hungarian officer. One day, he had some visiting students from harvard. He wanted the graduate students to behave themselves. And this was joined the period of chas esko, and awful dictator in romania. So i gave a rather entertaining presentation comparing him to vlad the and paler the in palerimpaler. This professor never spoke to me again. That was my kiss of death. Sometimes people think i am a defender of the old elite tradition. I like to think of myself and more rebellious terms. Where you live now . Santa rosa, california. Are you familiar with the movie shadow of a doubt . It is the ultimate film of smalltown life in america. I was a big fan of hitchcock. I like the idea the idea of living in innocent america. Going to run a clip from your text in ted x speech. Before we do this, you gave this speech in 2012. What is ted asked and what was it . It is the franchise of ted. There are a couple of main ted events which are very exclusive events for the Technology Elite who like to think they are improving the world and in order to improve the world, they need to spend 7,000 to socialize with each other for a weekend. By now anyone can buy into the ted brand and you can put on a ted x event. Some are better than others. But they are a lot less exclusive or elitist than the main ted. This is brussels. I have done them in brussels come in budapest, london. They are a lot of fun. Have you urban to them . Know i have watched them online. Do they pay you to do this . They pay expenses. But you get to meet interesting people. The one in brussels, i spoke just before Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of apple. And he was very funny afterwards. He said my speech made him cry. We have more than one clip. Lets watch this and then i will ask you more about it. [video clip] we are a data or we are emerging as ada. That is what Steve Wozniak for better or worse put into motion. And as we look at each other in the future, in the latter part of the 21st century, we wont be question marks. We will see data. We will see information. And one company in Silicon Valley google, they are even designing glasses which when you put on you wont see these physical question marks, you will see data. Bank bang bang bang. Thats the murder. That was the theme of the show, bang bang, so i couldnt resist it. What do you do in a speech like this and who is the audience . The audience at that particular event, which i think is the largest ted x in the world, about 3000 people in the audience and the tickets are relatively affordable. So the audience would be made up of technologist, journalists students. Its a good audience. I did another one in budapest. You are trying to engage and entertain. Everyone a fed ex gets 15 minutes to speak at ted x gets 15 minutes to speak. Is it scripted . Not at all. So when we watch you, its off the top of your head. Its off the top of my head. The ted people like to get people to prepare and they like practice. But i never do. I never show up to the practice. I think speeches are worthless. I think they have to be spontaneous. I can only be motivated when i am in front of people. My books are always late. My articles are always late. I like this kind of experience because i cant put it off. I can only take something seriously if i have 3000 people because that forces you not to screw up. It is an invigorating experience. For me, the live experience is excellent. Ive been able to prosper in this economy because of that. As a pure writer, i think i would be struggling a lot more. While i dont necessarily celebrate that because i know many very fine writers and very fine thinkers struggle in front of a Live Audience the real opportunity now the digital age ironically is the physical experience. What the digital has done is commodified the copy, made it worse late made it worthless. You dont pay for anything online. What that has done ironically enough is made the physical experience far more worth it. That is why ted is so valuable. It is what people go to events. Which means that we are not going to disappear into the digital ethos and there will always be the physical experience. But to do well in this world, particularly as an entertainer or a thinker or as a writer, you have to be able to perform. You have to be able to entertain. In your talk, set it up if you dont mind, the whole use of the vertigo clip. . Did you get that have you use this for a long time . For me, i have always had an obsession with hitchcocks vertigo. \ i have always been a huge cinema person. Its one of those films that attracts excesses like me. Every time you see it, you feel another skin. For me it was an opportunity to write about Silicon Valley because i always thought of technology is the great seduction, the thing you love with. The thing you fall in love with. And you fall in love with one thing and you fall in love with something quite different. Im sure most of your viewers are familiar with the movie. But its a film about a man who falls in love with a blonde who turns out to be a brunette. He falls in love with what he thinks is a blonde, beautiful San Francisco heiress and turns out to be a brunette from kansas who works as a shopgirl. Well lets watch it and then you can it starts with vertigo. [video clip] look at it. He is already in love with her and he has not event met her. That doorway. Here she comes. Kim novak, a beautiful blonde american heiress from San Francisco who drives a green jag you are around town. Jag your jaguar around town. What does this have to do with information and data . The blonde isnt it really a blonde. She is in fact a brunette shopgirl from kansas. All women in kansas i think work in stores and they are brunette. And he is about to be set up sucked into this vortex of heartbreak and murder. And that is what we are here to talk about today because this is Jimmy Stewart just as Jimmy Stewart got sold the false blonde, we are as well. What is the scam . The scam is the ideal of being able to self publish online. The scam is facebook instagram. The scam is twitter. Im is easy to seduce as anyone. Im not claiming not to be. The scam is the idea that these platforms give us the opportunity to realize ourselves, to tell the world what we think and what we see to distributor photography come our music, and our musings text, allows us to become online bloggers and videographers. But the scam is that we are being used. Mike morris, the brilliant venture capitalist who invested in google and yahoo and many of the other bigots, describes this as the data factory economy. In the industrial age, people want to work in factories. They were paid for their labor. They worked 9to5 and they went home and did what they wanted with that money. Today, we are all working these factors, like google, like facebook, twitter. But we are unpaid labor. We are working 24 hours a day. We are not rewarded. We are not even acknowledged that we are treating the value for them. Worse than that, we otherwise who are being packaged up as the audit. As the product and what these companies are doing is learning more and more about us from our behavior, from what we publish from our photographs, from our ideas, from what we buy, from what we say, from what we dont say, then learning about his creating expensive [indiscernible] and then they are transforming us. They are repackaging us as the product. So we are the ones being sold. Not only are we working for free but then we are being sold. So its the ultimate scam. It is a perfect hitchcock movie. Jeremy benson was in early 19thcentury utilitarian philosopher. He invented this idea of the productive, of thepeno penopticon. He believed the idea could be used in schools and hospitals. Benson believed that this would create discipline in the new industrial society. The french historian michelle for cohas written Michel Foucault has written extensively about it. I love benson more, the idea benson, both his corpse and his ideas that play a central idea of a vertigo. People in the United States who have twitter followers, tell us what this means to you when you see it. We will look at the first five. Youve got katy perry who has the most followers at 63 million. Justin bieber up there and 59 million. Barack obama at number 3, 50 2 million. Taylor swift at 50 million. Youtube, i dont think youtube is a person, but they have 48 million followers. At the bottom, lady gaga at 43 rihanna at 39, and Ellen Degeneres and 37. What does that say to you . What it says is that the internet has created a world not through cultural democracy. It is not what Thomas Friedman calls a flat world. It is actually rocky and hilly and as mountainous as the old world. It has created this infrastructure for a winner take all culture, a winner take all Economic System in which a tiny group of superstar entertainers are controlling our attention. That is a very brilliant Business Writer at harvard. She has written an important book called block esters. Blockbusters. She says we were promised with the internet, we would sweep away the old elites. Ashley, weve got more of the same. Its even worse now. What we have is a system where a tiny group of people control our attention. And if that isnt that enough, the other thing that is an even worse consequences that this economy is hollowing out the middle. The old entertainment economy it wasnt ideal, im not to defending the studios and Production Companies but what it did at least guarantee was the infrastructure, the ecosystem of a middleclass economy. Gatekeepers of editors, people who would film shows like this, of journalists, people who had regular middleclass incomes. What the internet has done is swept away that old class. None of these people have any role in the Digital Economy and it has enabled a superstar class of rihanna and lady gaga with 10 to 50 million baldfollowers and destroy the middle class and we all lose. This is a lose lose rather than the Silicon Valley notion of winwin. I want to show you a clip he did a sevenminute video sometime back the day before he went to iowa to make a speech about the internet and he did it in the oval office. I dont know if you have seen this. This president is using this kind of media all the time. [video clip] one of the things that i am going to make an early announcement about this week is the issue of getting faster broadband. I want to take a look at something ive got on my head. This is internet download speed by city. I can zoom up if you want so you can see the names. So you have soul, south korea, hong kong, tokyo, paris. These cities all have really fast access to the internet because they have made the investment in broadband. Here is what is interesting. Right next to it, you have cedar falls, iowa. Cedar falls isnt a fairly big is it a really big place. But the reason they can compete with these other world cities is because citizens got together and made the investments to bring competition in and make sure that internet speeds were just as fast there is anywhere else. What is your reaction . Broadband is a very complex issue. Its not an area that im an expert in. Im more of an analyst of the broader internet economy. I would say there is an exaggerated sense of the poor quality of american broadband. Having said that, i do like the korean model. I myself have no problems with Public Investment in broadband in the same way as i tell the story that the internet is not the answer. The internet came down as a government project. I am not an opponent of Public Investment in things like broadband. I wanted to ask you also the political question about this, the president using this device the day before a speech. I think he is the first president to ever done this. I also found online there is a holistic people at the white house like corey shulman, the director of Online Engagement for the office of Digital Strategy, makes 73,000 a year. Her title is creative director for the office of Digital Strategy. Jesse lee, director of progressive media and online response. Whats the difference between progressive media and other media . I dont know but it says he makes 95,000 a year to and then we have another, adam garber, a 72,000 a year guy. And he doesnt have he is video director for the office of Digital Strategy. He probably did the video. Theres more. Lindsay holtz is the director of Digital Content for the office of Digital Strategy. Finally, defendant lubins acting director for the office of Digital Strategy and he is an 80,000 a year man. I wanted your comment on the idea that all of these kind of folks work at the white house. What is the impact on our country . I cant comment on those guys. But it seems to me to be a troubling intimacy between the Obama Administration and certain Internet Companies beginning with g. For example, the new cto, megan smith, used to be the vp in charge of Business Development at this company beginning with g. Im sure you can think of it. If not, you can look it up online. I can google it . You may have to google it. That kind of intimacy i find very troubling. Why . Because google has an agenda. It is one of the two or three most powerful companies in the world. Google has an agenda. It has an agenda on Network Neutrality. They are the owner of youtube. It is not surprising they are hostile to the idea of paying extra because youtube is one of the guest users of broadband on the web. I am a fan of obama. I am not a u. S. Citizen so i dont vote and if i did vote, i would have voted for obama. But i am troubled by the way in whic