Mooch and Stoll

00:00 Adam Curry, John C. DeVora. It's Sunday, May 19th, 2019. This is your award-winning Game of Nation media assassination episode 1139. This is no agenda. Getting hitched and broadcasting live from the frontier of Austin, Texas, in the capital of the drone star state, almost live. In the morning, everybody. I'm Adam Curry. And not from Silicon. Well, actually, right now, I'm in northern Silicon Valley. I don't know. I'm on the move. I'm John C. DeVora. He's on the move everybody yes, yes welcome to episode number 1139 of the best podcast in the universe a special day actually you know I've seen a lot of shows that are starting to Do different new numbering differently? Yeah, you've been talking about this for a while you talk about seasons and series and no

00:57 No, you know it's like I know what I know what you're thinking. I'm thinking season I'm thinking Season 11 ladies and gentlemen wow these guys are great. I need to be in the way to do it I need to binge listen to season 11 show number 39 or whatever it is. We'll think about it Yeah, yeah kind of it makes it sound more broadcasty Maybe that's exactly the problem with it. We shouldn't try to sound more broadcasting or podcast ease. Yeah, this is true So well today is a big day. Yeah, you're getting married. Yes, and so we this is actually I had to I know it's gonna be tough for anyone to imagine how we can do this, but we're doing a show and

01:44 just before the wedding. So like a few minutes before the wedding, we're doing this and then you're going to run right to the wedding right after we close this and ship it. Yeah. And once I say I do, then I go back to upload and do the RSS feed. Yeah. Workaholic. Exactly. So what we have today for the dedicated listeners is a couple of interviews that I did. Right. One with Anthony Scaramucci. Now wait, hold on a second. This is months ago you did this, isn't it? Yeah, but I knew it wasn't going to be used till the wedding so I made it very evergreen-y. So, okay, so evergreen-y as in ho-hum or just topics? No, no, it's very interesting stuff. A lot of personal stuff. We go into an actual discussion, for example, of Donald Trump's weight.

02:39 Now, but do you talk about, does Scott Mooch, doesn't he have a hot wife? Yeah, he's got a hot wife in New York. We also talk about his restaurant. He has a restaurant, did you know that? No, but somehow it does not surprise me. And even better, I'd like to know if I can go there when visiting Manhattan and say, tell Mooch it's a curry from no agenda. I can give you the answer to that. Yeah, get the fuck out. Not happening. Right. And so even with the interview, I couldn't get that leeway. Then we're going to have a little, just a little over an hour discussion with the Chris Stoll. Cliff, I said Chris. Oh, okay. Yes, Cliff Stoll. Very famous. He's an astronomer. You can go look at his TED talks if you want to see what he's like. He's very excitable.

03:33 And he's got a lot of thoughts and I worked with him for years back in the days of tech TV before, actually MSNBC. I believe he was on that operation for a while. Anyway, I've known him for, he lives nearby and so I figured, and nobody's heard from him for a while, so I thought an interview with him because he has a lot of interesting thoughts. So what did you talk about with him? A little more techie than Scarrett Mooch. Yeah, what kind of topics? We talked about the We talked about what your pal Professor Ted talks about usually. The plague of the internet, the negative aspects of social media, the negative aspects of computers in schools, the negative this, the negative that. The unintended consequences of technology. Yes, and so that's a fascinating interview, so I think people will enjoy it. Might as well get started. Let's just go right to Anthony Scaramucci.

04:33 We have here Anthony Scaramucci who just finished a book called Trump the blue-collar president And I will say at the beginning I've read this book, and I think it's I can highly recommend it. It is very entertaining It's kind of a interesting romp between Anthony's background and Donald Trump's background. And it was very well structured, I liked it. So what drove you to, anyway, welcome to the No Agenda Show. Well, John, thanks for inviting me on. And you joined my mother as the only two people I know that have read the book, so I'm very delighted to have met you over this podcast. But in all seriousness, thank you for the comments, because I really tried to structure it in a way

05:18 where I thought it would provide some entertainment but also some sociological background of why the president was able to gravitate so many blue-collar people to his base and to his agenda. A couple of things about the book I want to ask right away, which is I've read a lot of these types of books written by Italians and yours is probably the only one that doesn't have a more of an emphasis on the cooking of the grandma. You didn't read my first book. I got it all out of my system in Goodbye, Gordon Gekko. It talked about my nana and how she used to hit us with the wooden spoon if we weren't paying attention. If you read a lot of books about Italians that are my age, they are all reminiscent of the plastic covering on the furniture in those people's homes. My grandmother and grandfather had rugs that were

06:13 They had plastic runners over them and they, I think my grandmother waited until she was about 65 to take the plastic off the couch. That was an uncomfortable 40 years of that couch, man. Yes. In fact, I recall that era personally. I remember seeing people that had everything covered with plastic. I said, what are you saving it for? Somebody else? Right, exactly. That's how you sound like me. That's how I used to say to my Nana. What is it? What is all? I mean, it's going to be in the next generation or what? So, so are you the cook? No, I'm actually an Italian mama's boy which makes me the eater and not the cook. I'm the guy that dropped his underwear right where I took it off and my mother swooped in behind me and the next thing you know, it was ironed and pressed. So unfortunately that ended for me in 1982 when I went to college. So no, basically I'm very clean. I probably shower twice a week.

07:08 But I'm the most disorganized train wreck because I had an Italian mom and I'm an Italian mama's boy. You are a hedge fund guy. Correct. And I want to just ask for just the general listener, can you describe what that means? What does running a hedge fund entail? What I think the public generally thinks is you just rake in lots of money doing pretty much nothing. Yeah. I mean obviously that's, you know, there's a lot of jealousy in the media and so the media wants to characterize it that way. But there's $3 trillion in our industry in terms of assets under management for a reason. We actually do a pretty good job for people.

07:50 You would come to a hedge fund manager if you were looking for like a high single digit rate of return, a 7, 8, 9 percent return with very low volatility and relative consistency. And so a lot of people have money in the stock market, but there's a lot of volatility there. We just saw a 10 percent correction in the month of October 2018 as an example. But what a hedge fund manager, if they're doing their jobs right, they generate a high absolute return with low volatility. And so it takes a lot of work. There are 60 people in my organization. I started this company.

08:28 We're about to celebrate our 14th year in business this coming March and we've got about $10 billion under management. One of the things that we try to do is we try to democratize the industry and so I set up a structure. Having gone to Harvard Law School and understanding the security regs, I set up a new structure which has been replicated now where we're able to have investors with minimums of about $25,000. So I've sort of opened up the hedge fund investing to the mass affluent. I wrote a book about this in 2012 called The Little Book of Hedge Funds, which was basically

09:09 a primer or an explanatory book on what people should know about hedge funds, the pluses and the minuses for that matter. So and that was well received and we have about 41,000 clients, over $10 billion under management and you know one thing about the president, he made me as famous as Melania and Ivanka. I didn't have to sleep with him or be his daughter but he made me pretty famous and so it's raised the profile of my business which has been helpful. Publicity is good. Yeah, no question. And in my business certainly because we've got good performance that back up the publicity. Well you've been on a lot of shows. I mean you've been on Dr. Phil. Yep. You did a thing for Facebook. Yep. You went on Stephen Colbert right after you were released from the White House. Yep.

09:57 What did you think of that experience? Because I watched that episode and I thought it was, I thought they were rude to be honest about it. Well, I mean look, they're angry about the president, they don't like the president, they're building a fan base of anti-Trumpsters. When I expressed the willingness to go on the show after Steven was excoriating me during my time inside the White House, I think they were all taken aback. But I know how to take incoming. I was happy to go on and give my point of view. I was on Bill Maher's show this past weekend. I've done his show a few times. Again, it's like being a Yankee in Fenway Park.

10:33 or a Dodger in Fenway Park. It's a rough place. But I feel that we've got to get back to talking to each other. We may not agree ideologically. We may see the country going in different directions for different reasons. But if we don't talk to each other, I think it's a very big mistake. I like to tell people I'm a patriot first. and I'm partisan last. I have a certain philosophical view based on my years of experience in business and my observation about what works from a point of view of policy. But what I don't want to do is ever close myself off to the other person's point of view. John Kennedy had a great line which I share with everybody. He said, I spent a lot of time understanding the other side because there's obviously very smart people on the other side and I may learn something from them

11:23 Or, conversely, they may sharpen and provide me with more ammunition for my own argument. And so we have to do that in our society. You get a perverse thrill when you try to describe a situation and Bill Maher – and part of that description entails somebody getting all worked up and Bill Maher actually goes kind of ballistic right in front of you. Well, I mean I can't tell you I'm getting a thrill because I'm trying to explain something and you know, but they sometimes they have a hard time. It's very emotionally charged, you know, so what I think what I'm able to do though is I'm able to

12:00 Detach myself a little bit from the heat of the argument and try to relate to people Where I think they really live is when all the emotions die down where they really live is in that common sense altimeter Where they can sense when someone's speaking? common sense as opposed to spin or ideological pablum and I like going on these shows because I I experienced Washington. I felt everybody in Washington was on spin cycle, but most New Yorkers are on a rinse cycle. So for me, I can sit there and I don't have any prepared notes. I don't have any sound bites that I'm ready to spill out of my mouth at a moment's notice. I'm just trying to respond and interact with somebody on an intellectual basis.

12:50 And hopefully, you know, if I'm not winning them over, at least I can explain directionally why half the country feels the way I do. What do you think Trump's top skills are? He's got an unnatural, unnatural level of charisma. Unnatural. It has to do with the fact that he has decided that he is going to be completely uninhibited. in a media environment. That's 45 years of doing radio, television, public speaking, signing books, writing books, promoting his brands. He has a completely uninhibited approach. And again, I'm not picking on these people, but let's go over the 17 other candidates that were in that race that were running against him for the Republican nomination. You know, they are

13:46 They've got the millstone on their necks of consultant speak, the millstone on their necks of practice, can't say certain things that could be offensive. And so he has that capability. He's got unbelievable political instincts, unbelievable. And I write about that in my book. At the end of the day, he could have had ten political consultants telling him to pick choice A, but he felt choice B was the right choice. He would go with choice B. He had people telling him, listen, you're not going to win in Wisconsin or Don't spend any time there and don't spend any time in Pennsylvania. That state is really not purple. It has been blue for 32 years. Don't spend any time there." And he looked at that and said, no, there's an opportunity there. There's a vacuum of advocacy for these blue-collar people. The left spent their time in Pennsylvania.

14:38 focused on, listen, a couple of dolphins got killed from eating plastic straws. Absolute tragedy. I'm not trying to make light of it. But they spent their time focused on that or the polar ice caps melting. Again, a disturbing fact and I'm not trying to make light of it, but they left out of the equation for at least a generation what was going on in the middle class and the lower middle class. And whether you like the president or not, he saw that opening and he did something that has to be marveled at if you're a political scientist. He hijacked the Republican Party. from the establishment Republicans who hate his guts and then he reached into the Democratic Party and he stole their base and moved it over to the Republicans. So again you hate him but this guy's got incredible political instincts and he's a showman and by the way he's an entertainer. Don't lose sight of that. He's the entertainer in chief. He knows

15:33 I had to get a crowd riled up. He once said, or somebody wrote about him, that he's the only guy that can fill an arena without a musical instrument. He just shows up, He's going to say some crazy stuff. At any moment, it looks like there's going to be a car crash. He's out there malaproping and talking in his usual zaniness. And there's 8,000, 10,000 people waiting on line to get into the overfilled capacity of that arena. Those are his skills. He's also a gregarious guy. The media will paint him as not being the case. But when you're in his presence, he's a lot of fun to be with. Does he get a lot of sleep?

16:13 I actually cannot figure that out. I mean, somebody should examine this guy because he has a supernatural capacity to not get sleep. And I'll just quote one of his doctors. He's the only human being that we've met where his eating habits are not affecting his health. So I can't figure that out either. OK, I've had more than one meal with him. One interesting one in the White House where he was pounding down the beef Wellington, which is like a filet mignon wrapped in this bakery crust. And he was like, yeah, pass the sauce over here. Pass more of that gravy. I'm like, I mean, this gravy's probably like five million calories. You know, I mean, but he pounds it down, no problem. Has unlimited amounts of energy. This is a guy that can do 11 campaign stops in four days prior to an election. This is a guy that was speaking in Altoona, PA at 1030 at night. We were all exhausted. He gets back on the plane, wants to fly to Michigan, do one more campaign stop at 1230 in the morning. That's him.

17:12 I don't know how he does it, but that's him. And he's 72. But here's a lesson for your listeners this podcast. Don't smoke and don't drink, which neither thing the president does. And you too can fly around on Air Force One like a maniac. What do you think he weighs? Oh, wow, you're gonna get me in trouble. This is like breaking news. Well, how about this? How about not 239? How's that? I mean, I think his published weight is 239. I will take the over on that He'd be mad at me for saying that I don't know what he weighs, but it's not 239 One thing in so far his as his skills are concerned something that you kind of pointed out in the book which is the skill of timing and This is related to his doing the New York skating rink. Yeah, and it seems as though he was a

18:07 in the right place at the right time or if he was premature in trying to do something he would come back at exactly the right moment and then kind of swoop in. Which is the way I kind of felt he ran for president. No question. It was a timing thing. to potentially grab the nomination of the Reform Party, flew out to LA. He was practicing his negatives on John McCain, who he thought was going to be the Republican nominee. The first time I heard the words, I like my heroes uncaptured,

18:53 were in an interview, you can go back and Google this, he was being interviewed in 2000 by Dan Rather for 60 Minutes. And he was testing that out because he thought John McCain was going to be the Republican nominee in 2000. He abandoned that because his political instincts correctly dictated that you're not going to win the presidency in this country from a third party. And so he stayed out of the fray, really contemplated the 2012 race, did not want to run against a presidential incumbent. Good instincts there because very hard to defeat an incumbent unless you have a disaster going on in the economy. And so we didn't have a – if anything, we had a stable economy in 2012, improving an economy, very hard to beat a sitting president. So he waited it out and then he struck the nerve.

19:38 of the anxiety that's taking place in our system related to the blue-collar experience and the decline in living standards. And he went out there and preached that mantra. And that mantra by the way is tied to immigration because the illegal immigration has certainly affected wage growth in our society. And he went out there and he made that case and he made the case in a way that was unbelievably unorthodox. And even though we were outspent almost two to one by Secretary Clinton's campaign and we were outmanned. I would say almost three to one by her. He was able to capture the presidency because he was able to get his message out in the American media in a way that was nothing short of staggering. It was billions and billions of dollars of free media, whether they were televising a rally or they were interviewing him or he was calling into their shows.

20:36 He literally was able to use the media as almost a third arm of his campaign strategy. Do you surf? I don't, but did you catch that analogy about surfing in there? Yeah, I mean so – Yeah, as soon as I read this, I said, what is this doing in here? He doesn't seem like a surfer to me. No, I'm not a surfer but I can discern waves because there's a conjurative wave in our economic system and there are other waves, the Elliott Wave Theory for investing and my point, the metaphor of the surfing for your listeners was I really feel that these politicians are surfers.

19:38 of the anxiety that's taking place in our system related to the blue-collar experience and the decline in living standards. And he went out there and preached that mantra. And that mantra by the way is tied to immigration because the illegal immigration has certainly affected wage growth in our society. And he went out there and he made that case and he made the case in a way that was unbelievably unorthodox. And even though we were outspent almost two to one by Secretary Clinton's campaign and we were outmanned. I would say almost three to one by her. He was able to capture the presidency because he was able to get his message out in the American media in a way that was nothing short of staggering. It was billions and billions of dollars of free media, whether they were televising a rally or they were interviewing him or he was calling into their shows.

20:36 He literally was able to use the media as almost a third arm of his campaign strategy. Do you surf? I don't, but did you catch that analogy about surfing in there? Yeah, I mean so – Yeah, as soon as I read this, I said, what is this doing in here? He doesn't seem like a surfer to me. No, I'm not a surfer but I can discern waves because there's a conjurative wave in our economic system and there are other waves, the Elliott Wave Theory for investing and my point, the metaphor of the surfing for your listeners was I really feel that these politicians are surfers.

21:16 And they have to get on that surfboard and ride a wave into shore that fits their personality. As an example, Jeb Bush would have been a phenomenal presidential candidate in the early 90s to mid-90s. Wrong candidate for 2016, but a phenomenal guy. Governor Romney, same sort of thing. Their personalities are just too bland. You were a supporter of Romney and then you kind of switched over to Jeb Bush before you finally latched on to the Trump bandwagon. Yes. How did that happen? Well, because I didn't believe him. I write in the book that I'm sitting with him the day after The Apprentice ends. We're having breakfast in the Trump Tower and he's telling me he's running for president. I'm laughing.

22:02 I'm like, yeah, I'm running for president. You weren't the only one doing that. Of course. And he said that. Yeah, I said to him, you said you weren't watching The Apprentice last night? I said, no, of course not. He goes, well, you were the only one that wasn't watching it. I was fantastic. I said, oh, I'm sure you were. But he's like, well, it's over now. I'm running for president. I said, no, you're not. He said, no, no, I totally am. I said, let me tell you something. You're at 2% in the polls. You're not going to run for president. He goes, I'm at 2% in the polls because people are like you. They think I'm not running. But the minute I start running, I'm going to shoot to the top of the polls and I'm going to stay there until I win the presidency. And I got to tell you, at least on the Republican side, that's what he did. Go take a look at those polling numbers. There was nobody

22:44 in shooting range. Yeah, a couple of guys won because of the party system and the establishment. They won a few primaries against them, but very few. He was right at the top as it related to the popular vote among registered republicans. So I didn't see it. I admit that in the book. I also didn't see the level of economic desperation despite the fact that I grew up in a blue-collar family. I have spent too much time with wealthy people and I have to confirm biases. of running my hedge fund and interacting with wealthy people. And so when I descended into these towns with then-candidate Trump, I write in my book that it was quite eye-opening what I saw in those towns and the composite of what I saw.

23:29 is that we went from a generation of aspirational working class families to desperational ones in about 35 years. And the public servants of the established class didn't really see it, and if they saw it, they were indifferent to it. And so he was able to capitalize on that in a way that I think will be viewed as historic. Well, talking about hanging out with the rich, can you explain to me, and I'm from this area, how the richest guys in Silicon Valley, many billionaires, there's quite a few of them, are all Democrats. Well I can't, but I mean what I often think about, there's a level of guilt and there's a level of self-preservation that's more important to some of these people than actual public policy. And so what ends up happening is they

24:22 are sitting there with a boatload of money. They feel very guilty about it and they feel that they can be progressive or ultra-liberal and that will give them a pass and that's by and large been true from the American media. So if you're super rich but you're liberal, American media leaves you alone. If you're super rich but conservative, they burn you in effigy and they try to demonize you. To me, I think it's more of a self-preservation thing than it is a principle-based thing because how did you get the money? You got the money because we've set up a market-based system in our society which has led to incredible growth and innovation and job creation and unbelievable success for people. And we have a society that will reward people for their ingenuity and risk-taking. You cannot systematize. Despite what the left says, you're never going to be able to systematize an equal outcome. We should be way more focused.

25:21 from a policy perspective on figuring out ways to create more equal opportunity. Where our educational system K through 12, the public system is a failure. It's broken. It's very uneven. We should be spending more time figuring out a way to get a kid who's living in a less than affluent neighborhood a good public school education as opposed to trying to figure out how to overtax people and and and wealth redistribute it doesn't work it slows down growth it slows down opportunity uh... and it and it stunts the system and if you don't believe me we have a hundred fifty years of documented history on this throughout the world where people have tried it when you left first showed up at the white house and then left eleven days uh... later uh...

26:08 My take on it was that, well, here they brought this guy in as a hatchet man to get rid of Rance Priebus. And Bannon? As I read the book, it obviously was a more convoluted… It wasn't as though they just brought in you as a hatchet man to get rid of Rance Pribis. But that's kind of what it looks like in hindsight. Yeah, well, listen. I mean I definitely served that purpose. There's no question about that. But if you remember in the book, I was offered the OPL position. I accepted that job. Pribis and Bannon tried to block me from that job. And then I did something really, really stupid. I mean, I did many things stupid, but the biggest stupid thing I did was I put my pride and my ego into trying to secure that job. You see? That's what I did. Let's back to the – you mentioned Bannon and Priebus forming a coalition of bad guys, which you thought was peculiar because they weren't similar characters by any means.

27:11 And they wanted to block you from that particular job. Why do you think that was? I mean, did you have some sort of a better in with Trump? Did you, because you knew him more personally, you knew him personally. Or what was the purpose of their trying to block you? Why didn't they just let you go there and then just... you know, leave you there. Yeah, I mean, that would have been a better strategy, I think, for all of us. If they just let me alone, I wasn't, I think, Priebus probably figured I was tight with the president, who knows, you know, him and me together. You know, remember, Priebus was an establishment guy. He was flooding the zone inside the White House with RNC people that were not necessarily loyal to the president, but were, you know, more loyal to Priebus. And so,

27:54 I think he looked at me and for that matter, not to take it so personally to me, he looked at guys like Giuliani, Chris Christie, John LaValle who was a Suffolk County chairman out here on Long Island. He looked at all those people and said, OK, these are New Yorkers. I'm going to do everything I can to block these New Yorkers from coming down here to Washington. And he was successful at doing that. So he slow-rolled me and he slow-rolled those guys. I was probably the only guy due to the determination of my personality and the persistence where I was like a dog on a bone. I wouldn't let up until I found my way through the door at the White House.

28:32 And then once I got the job, I probably mishandled it in a number of different ways. You probably shouldn't start your first day at the White House with a chainsaw and a hockey mask from Jason's Friday the 13th movie. Once I started the chainsaw, I went after those two guys with a vengeance and I should have been more careful about that. You go after Bannon in the book a little bit, not as much as you could. It's a lot of it's subtle, which brings me to the question – well, that brings me to the question of you claim – I don't want to use that word claim because I don't like it. But you say you are a class clown. I'm a class clown or he was a class clown? No, you were a class clown. Yeah, I was a prankster in school. No question about that. Are you still? Well, I don't know. Look, I had a reasonable IQ and I had an okay work ethic. I got serious once I got to college, which helped me get into Harvard Law School.

29:29 I don't know. I play for laughs. There's no question about that. There's an entertainment streak in my personality. You can see that there's some irreverence in the book in terms of the way I describe certain situations, myself included. But I would say about Ben that he was a guy when he thought he needed you, he was very polite, very seductive. But he was a guy when he didn't need you, you were a disposable piece of tissue. And so all of that stuff is coming back to roost on Bannon now. He is spitzerized. And what do I mean by that? When Eliot Spitzer went down 10 years ago because he was so mean and nasty to so many people,

30:12 there was nobody there to save him. And so he spitzerized and now he's going to rallies where five or ten people are around him and he's lost an element of his self-proclaimed guru nature. And so look, I mean, but for me, I thought he was just very dishonest. He's an unbelievable leaker. If you look at what the president said about him in the press release in January of 2018, it was virtually identical to what I was saying about him. Unfortunately, I got caught on a hot mic, which is fine. But the journalist took it totally out of context. He was trying to get me to do a profile with him in his magazine. And I'm like, I'm not self-promotional like that, like Steve is. And then I used an inappropriate word. And he said, OK, I've hit the jackpot here. Let me run this over to CNN and exaggerate what happened. So it's fine. I'm a big boy. I paid the price with my job.

31:06 I write about it honestly in the book. I'm very accountable for the mistake. Actually, you don't write about it – I don't think you're necessarily as firm as you could have been. I mean that was a chicken shit thing that happened from a journalist perspective. Generally speaking, it doesn't happen. No, it doesn't. Howie Kurtz said in 40 years in Washington that he's never seen a journalist do that to a governmental official. But that's okay. This is the first time for everything. I made the mistake by talking to the guy, right? So I mean I have to own that. I shouldn't have talked to him. Back to Bannon. Early in the book you say that Steve Bannon – you compare him to a blood-sucking vampire bat. Yeah. And then later in the book you have this sentence, which is the only thing I've actually excerpted for this interview because I thought it was pretty funny because it was subtle. It was like – it was kind of literate.

32:05 But at the same time, Rude, active leaking addiction never ends well. Bannon's sure didn't. Remember how he looked leaving the White House? A Harvard-educated cuck draped in contemporary hobo. Yeah, that's pretty good though, right? I thought it was quite good. I thought it was – you actually put some thought into that. I think you probably – you wrote the book around that couple of sentences. Yeah, he's a cuck. He's ultimately a cuck. At the end of the day, he went to Harvard Business School. He worked at Goldman Sachs. He was in Hollywood. I mean he's hit the triangulation of every one of those nexuses and then he tries to pretend.

32:44 that he's some outsider that's focused on ethnocentrism and white nationalism. I mean I think the guys are an incredibly flawed guy but wickedly smart and very well read. I made a joke at one of the college campuses that – you know, if you ever are doubting God or if you're falling into the trap of atheism, just remember this. As seductive and as smart as Steve Bannon is, God made him so ugly and made him dress so inappropriately. that his ideas will never be taken seriously, thankfully, by the civilization. So to me, he's not my cup of tea. I've offered to debate Steve Bannon. I've offered to debate Reince Priebus anyplace, anywhere, and I'll continue to wait on that. Hugh Hewitt, I think you know who he is. I was on his radio show.

33:33 He said that he's in love with Reince Priebus, one of his best friends. I said, oh great, invite Reince Priebus on your radio show with me. Let's have an honest and candid conversation about what he's really like with the people that he worked with inside the White House. You think that'll happen my brother? OK. Hell will freeze over before that happens. Well, there's no reason for him to want to do that. Where is Rance Pribis now? I don't even know. Apparently I think he went back to his Wisconsin law firm and I think he's keeping a low profile because… You know, I mean he burnt up a lot of people. I mean, forget about just me, he just burnt up a lot of people. And so he exposed his full-blown insecurity in that job and he exposed his levels of low self-esteem and low self-confidence. A players go out and try to hire A plus people. C players like a guy like him, they'll hire Ds and Fs. Why did Trump hire him?

34:33 Well, I think Trump felt that he had helped them with the apparatus and technology around the RNC and I think Trump felt a level of loyalty and Trump also felt that if he had him in the White House, he was tight with Paul Ryan and he was a member of that Washington sediment, that he could help him. drain the swamp. But what the mistake that the president made is that he put a cesspool operator in the most important job in the system. And so all that guy was doing was pouring more sewage into the system. You're not going to drain the swamp by bringing a cesspool operator that's lived in the swamp for 15 years

35:13 into drain the swamp. They're not going to do it. Their goal is to outlast you and to continue to work the lobbying and currying of favor business inside of Washington to line their own pockets. They're not there to serve the American people. The American people are on to that. The American people know that. One of the biggest reasons they had to get me out of there, I don't know if you saw my first press conference, but the critics of my first press conference were like, you were too honest. You can't talk the truth like that from the White House podium? What are you nuts? And that's... but the American people know it. You know, one thing that the president has done for the society is he's fully exposed the cockroaches that live in the kitchen known as Washington. Okay, the lights are on now. They're crawling around stunned that they're being caught with all their nonsense. We'll talk a little on the subject of cockroaches. Do you think the White House was bugged

36:12 I don't know. I would, I gotta believe no, but I will say this, they dismantled the Oval Office in August of 2017 and rebuilt it. So I'm hoping that the answer is no. I don't know the answer. It just seems like a lot of the stories that the media was picking up on always predate the moment that the Oval Office was reconstructed. Just coincidence maybe? Not sure. Coincidence, but it's also previous abandoned. There were 60 to 70 percent of the leaks. Once they were removed, the leaks really did go down dramatically. Still leaking. Every White House is going to leak, but it's not leaking with that level of animosity and that level of venom towards each other. That's gone down a lot.

37:06 You, what do you think of the New York Times hit piece on Trump, which if you read in great detail, this is the recent one where Trump apparently never had any money to begin with and he was pretty much financed by his father Fred. And if you read between the lines it kind of implies against all logic that Fred Trump was a multi-billionaire that could just throw tons of money at his son. Yeah, I mean, listen, I've seen the documentary Active Measures. He's apparently he's a puppet of Vladimir Putin. And now he made, you know, he just siphoned all the money off from his dad illegally. And, you know, I've heard all of these different things. But if you really look closely at the article, whatever happened there between him and his dad, it was clearly inside of the seam of the tax code. And I took

38:02 Taxation in law school, there's a very famous decision. The name of the justice is Justice Lerner Hand. You could Google the decision. It's about what you're allowed to do and not allowed to do as it relates to the tax code. And Justice Hand basically says you can be aggressive as long as you're inside the seam of the code. And so I think that they're stretching things a little bit in that story. I don't know if the president got a million dollars from his father to start his business or $413 million to start his business, but it doesn't really matter to the average American. I think that's the point. The average American views him as a very successful guy.

38:43 He was successful in real estate. He had a rise and fall, which I describe in the book, and then he rose again. So there's a level of force and determination in his personality. He went on to become a television star. I don't think anybody can take that away from him and then from the process of being a television star, he went on to become a billionaire. he switched over to American politics and in 17 short months became the American president. So, you know, I'd like to think that given the high-profile nature of the president's life over the last 40 years, if he was really doing something aggressively nefarious as what is being described, he's such a high-profile target for a DA that wants to be the mayor or the governor, they would have gone after him with a vengeance. So I put

39:30 about the same level of weight on that story as most Americans do, which is moving on. I think that's probably what the reaction was, but it was followed up then by an anonymous op-ed, which was rare. Written by some supposed insider in the White House. Do you think that was an insider in the White House? You think so? What do you what's your take on that and who you think it might be so, you know, I got an 11-day PhD in Washington scumbag ery Okay, so I can tell you that there's no way a senior guy would have written that and so what they would have used as they cut out a

40:07 they would have gotten one of the junior guys to write that and put it in there. And so what that is, is that's a cockroach survival note. And so the chef is in the kitchen, he's going to be here for four to eight years, but my fellow cockroaches, I'm going to survive him and so will you. And when I return back to cockroach land after serving this guy, I want you not to treat me poorly. And that's basically what that was. That was – to me, it was the most dishonest and most disloyal thing. You're serving the elected president of the United States, the leader of the free world. You may not like him. But if you don't like him and you don't like his policies, then leave.

40:51 I just think that was the most dishonest, most disingenuous thing and again another example of why the American people actually hate the swamp and they hate every aspect of the swamp. What's the New York Times grudge against Trump? He has been right and they have been wrong. That's the grudge. They had a circular two years ago They had a seven or eight-page circular on the case against Donald Trump and it wasn't just an editorial. It was like an eight-page circular that they inserted into the newspaper and then they had to apologize to him after the election. They had to apologize to him.

41:36 Do you follow what I'm saying? So I mean … What was the form of the apology? Well, the apology was we were too bellicose with our rhetoric. We were too negative. I mean they've ramped it up subsequent to that, but I'm just saying that The New York Times … They don't like the president's policies. They don't like the president's personality and they don't like the fact that the president is winning and they've been on the losing side of the argument for the last 36 months. So they're going to continue to be in that camp and he's done a masterful job. of getting these left-leaning media establishments to hate his guts. He has figured out by throwing Molotov cocktails or puffery or exaggerating statements, they're going to act like hall monitors, fact-checking him and the whole Charlie Brown teacher, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's what they're doing on their television shows. And he's laughing. He's laughing.

42:35 He knows that he's got them totally distracted and as John Stewart said the other day, that he has figured out that he may be a narcissist but they're as narcissistic as him and he's made it about them and they love talking about them on their shows and so that was a masterful thing that he's done so far. Masterful. You liked Stone's movie Wall Street. I did. You mentioned this in the book. Yeah, I did. But you didn't mention the wolf of Wall Street. Yeah. I would like to know – I mean Wall Street is the Gordon Gekko movie for anyone who doesn't remember it with Greed is Good and all those sorts of –

41:36 Do you follow what I'm saying? So I mean … What was the form of the apology? Well, the apology was we were too bellicose with our rhetoric. We were too negative. I mean they've ramped it up subsequent to that, but I'm just saying that The New York Times … They don't like the president's policies. They don't like the president's personality and they don't like the fact that the president is winning and they've been on the losing side of the argument for the last 36 months. So they're going to continue to be in that camp and he's done a masterful job. of getting these left-leaning media establishments to hate his guts. He has figured out by throwing Molotov cocktails or puffery or exaggerating statements, they're going to act like hall monitors, fact-checking him and the whole Charlie Brown teacher, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's what they're doing on their television shows. And he's laughing. He's laughing.

42:35 He knows that he's got them totally distracted and as John Stewart said the other day, that he has figured out that he may be a narcissist but they're as narcissistic as him and he's made it about them and they love talking about them on their shows and so that was a masterful thing that he's done so far. Masterful. You liked Stone's movie Wall Street. I did. You mentioned this in the book. Yeah, I did. But you didn't mention the wolf of Wall Street. Yeah. I would like to know – I mean Wall Street is the Gordon Gekko movie for anyone who doesn't remember it with Greed is Good and all those sorts of –

43:17 cliches. And The Wolf of Wall Street, of course, is more about the excesses. What do you... and you're in the business, so what do you think about comparing those two movies? What do you think of The Wolf of Wall Street? Well, you know, the reason I like The Wolf of Wall Street movie is that I was a young man. I was in my mid-20s when that movie came out. I was 23 or 24 and I was aspiring to go to Wall Street. And so even though it was a cautionary tale about greed and excess, I thought it was well presented. And Michael Douglas won the Academy Award for it. And in the second movie, Oliver Stone came to me and gave me the opportunity to play myself in the movie. And so there's pictures of me in my office here with Josh Brolin and Michael Douglas with my kids.

44:04 So I learned a lot about the artistic interpretation of Wall Street and my first book was called Goodbye Gordon Gekko, How to Find Your Fortune Without Losing Your Soul. It was titled that way to talk about the fact that greed actually isn't good and you have to take a long-term approach to things in the world of financial services. So I'm fond of that movie for those sentimental reasons. I was asked to be in The Wolf of Wall Street. I have a good relationship with Leo DiCaprio and Bo Deedle who played one of the roles in the movie and I elected not to be in that movie because that movie was not

44:45 There was a fact set related to this guy Jordan Belfort where he literally did everything that you're not supposed to do as a money manager. He fleeced the people. He sold them things that were not worth anything. literally dreams, pipe dreams and he did many, many illegal things. And so for me, I'm not saying there isn't a darker side to Wall Street. There clearly is. I believe there's a darker side to journalism. There's a darker side to medicine unfortunately where human beings and darkness lives in a lot of different sectors of the economy. But I was not a supporter of that movie.

45:25 because one of the problems with a movie like that, because it is factual, it's back to that cliche that one bad apple could spoil the whole basket of apples. And so to me, you know, I've had my 30th year on Wall Street, but for my brief interregnum at the White House. And by and large, we've tried to do a good job. The reason why we're running $10 billion is we have a good track record and we're honest people. So that's the reason why I compare and contrast the The two things. In the early days you were a supporter of Obama in some way because you raised money for him after you met him at the University Club. Yep. Well I had gone to school with him. I can't honestly say we were close friends in school or anything like that but I had a lot of friends of mine at Harvard Law School that were friends with him. I was less

46:14 involved with politics at that time. I was a right of center person and I'm reasonably far left on social issues. I believe people should be able to express. I don't think life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is only for straight people. I think that everyone should have that opportunity. And so when he presented himself, I said, okay, that seems like you guys like him, you know him personally. And I said to myself rhetorically, how many times in my life am I going to know somebody It's actually running for president and could possibly be the president. Little did I know that that wouldn't be the first time and ended up working in the White House for a short period. But when he started becoming more progressively left-driven on the economy and more progressively left-driven on business, I sort of returned to my republican roots. But I do like the president. I like President Obama. I have a lot of respect for him and his life. He's the Jackie Robinson of American politics.

47:10 And we may not agree on everything related to the business side of things or the economy, but I am happy with the social progress that was created during his administration. You used the phrase, he slam dunked you in the book, maybe twice. Yeah. And it was – even in context, I can't figure out what you're talking about. Well, I was on a television show with him in 2010. It was at the CNBC Town Hall Public Life at the Newseum down the block on Pennsylvania Avenue and he came in there and they were interviewing him and I was an audience participant. I asked him a question.

47:53 Mr. President, it's nice to see you again. We've reacquainted ourselves and then I said, when are you going to stop whacking Wall Street with a pinata stick? So the first thing is if you're an Italian-American, don't use the word whack on live TV in front of the president. I think that was mistake number one. And then mistake number two, is you know he was adamant that Wall Street was a big cause of the financial crisis and so he came back at me very hard and of course he's the president I'm not I didn't get a chance to rebut him and so he metaphorically slam dunked me on that live television show so much so that Jon Stewart that night on Comedy Central lampooned me to the great delight of my teenage children at that time. What do you say?

48:38 John Stewart basically… No, no. What did Obama say? Oh, what did Obama say? Obama said that I was wrong about him hitting Wall Street with a pinata stick and that Wall Street was the real cause of the problem, of the crisis and that the greed on Wall Street had overcome wisdom and it was a pretty heavy, healthy invective at our industry, not necessarily me personally, but he came back very hard. at that question. And in hindsight I was trying to lob in a softball. I thought he was going to say, well, there's definitely a nexus between Wall Street and Main Street and we have to keep that harmony. But he was not hearing it. You know, that was playing... Jokes on you. Yeah, exactly. Right. And by the way, that was a month or so before the 2010 midterms. And so being a politician, he was like a dog with a bone and he was going at that thing very hard. You can do this thing called the SALT Conference, which is

49:38 A gathering of hedge fund folk. You booked Bill Clinton once. I did. I booked President Clinton. I've had John Brennan. I've had Vice President Joe Biden. I've had James Carville. I've had Donna Brazile, but of course I've had Governor Romney, George Walker Bush, Tony Blair. I really try to make the SALT Conference an all-party, all-ideological experience. I'm not looking to – make it a conservative conference event or anything like that. I may have certain conservative ideas, but I also brought the human rights campaign guys who were working on the legalization of gay marriage in the US and I'm a believer in that. So I'm not – I mean I guess one of the main reasons I could never run for office, the fact that thank God I would like to keep my family together and stay married. But another reason is I don't fit ideologically in either one of these parties.

50:41 You know, I'm... Well, I asked about the Clinton thing because I was wondering if you recall what his speaking fee was. At that time it was a lot less than it is now. I think he's two and a quarter now. He was probably one and a quarter, 150 back then. Remember, that's almost 10 years ago though. That's a million, 500,000? No, I'm sorry, 150 US thousand. Oh, 150,000. Yeah, and he's probably 225,000 today. I hear him say that. Those are probably... That's not a... That's not me breaking any rules of confidentiality. Those are published. Those are records. I know this. I've been represented by a number of speakers bureaus and I know what the rules are.

51:27 If you want to book – if you want to find out Bill Clinton's speaking fee, create some sort of a function and then call one of them up and ask him what it costs to get him and you will get that number. Yeah, I think that's his – I think that's his going rate right around now. By the way, he did a very good job. He was articulate and thoughtful and he answered questions and – Again, you know, you may not agree with everything that he has to say and there may be elements of what he had to say related to the economic stewardship of the 1990s under his watch. But, you know, at the end of the day, I think it's a valuable voice. You know, I would as an example, I don't know if he would ever be available for this, but I would be interested in booking President Obama. No problem. And of course, at some point, President Trump.

52:14 I'm thinking he's going to be available. Okay, well I'll have to see. I'm sure it'll be a lot of dough though. That'll be another consideration for me. Can you explain the Trump-Cruz relationship? No, I actually can't. I mean, I don't think anybody can, but I can offer up some things about life and the political expediency. I think that the scarring and the battering In terms of the way these guys went at each other in 2016 has been subordinated to political survivorship and the president's need to have somebody that's right leaning in a red state and keep the red state red. And so they've subordinated some of their personal invective towards each other. And it goes back to that age old adage that politics makes strange bedfellows. So you could read what they've said about each other.

53:14 and you would say okay those guys are probably not going to be talking to each other anytime soon but yet they had a rally where there were tens of thousands of people at the rally in Houston so it's going to be close but I do think Ted, Senator Cruz wins in Texas if you look at the latest polling. Do you have a publicist? I have a PR person for Skybridge. I had a publicist coming out of the White House because I thought I needed somebody to bounce some ideas off of in terms of how I was going to recover from that media excoriation. But that was more of like a crisis management person than anything else. You mentioned you have a restaurant. Yeah. What is it? What's it called? Yeah, so I have a restaurant on 44th Street called The Huntin' Fish Club.

54:00 If you know anything about the Mafia, I named it after John Gotti's social club. He used to call it the Bergen County Hunt and Fish Club. So I figured if they're going to stereotype me in our civilization, why not put that on my restaurant? So it's a great steak and seafood place. It's located in the theater district on West 44th Street, 125 West 44th Street. It's got great ratings, very strong clientele. It's a beautiful setting. Pursuant to the free market and market-based economics, I made the chef an owner of the place because he's that good. Always a good idea. Amen. Right. Can I get – I'm going to name a bunch of people and if you can just give me a quick response because we're getting near the end here. Yeah, yeah, sure. Just tell me what you think of kind of – I think we already know what you think of Prebys and Bannon. Yeah. Kellyanne Conway.

54:55 Nice person, very loyal to the president, great messenger. I think she clearly helped him win the presidency. 52% of the white women voters voted for President Trump and I think you could really point to her as being one of the reasons why. I used to follow Kellyanne Conway before she was Kellyanne Conway in the 90s and she was one of the sharpest wits on talk shows. No question. Very impressive. Very impressive person. Jared Kushner. Super smart. He's shifted into a down gear to be a little bit less high profile because of the flack that he was taking from John Kelly. But I think he was very instrumental in the renegotiation of NAFTA and I think he's helping the president on the China trade issue as well. And I mean, he's obviously a very loyal, very smart guy. John Kelly.

55:55 You know, I applaud his service to the United States, 40 years in the Marine Corps. He also lost his child, so he's a Gold Star family member. And so I applaud him for his record in the military, but he's just, in my opinion, as I express in my book, he's just not well suited. His management style and the militancy of his management style is not well suited for a civilian organization. And I think he's hurt the morale inside the White House. In the book you say he hates Trump. Oh, there's no question about that. I mean, I don't think anybody believes that he likes him. He's made it clear to people outside the doors of the West Wing. So it's not like I'm saying something that isn't true. Ivanka. Ridiculously smart, gifted person, great public speaker. Obviously she's got some elegance and class

56:49 to her style and personality and I think she's invaluable to the president. I think she's helped him in so many different ways. Mnuchin. Extremely competent, very cautious guy, has done a good job of pushing through the tax reform and other regulatory reform and extraordinarily bright and again he's an unsung hero of the Trump campaign because he was the fundraising chair and he did a great job on the fundraising side. General Flynn. An American hero. I think he got treated badly. I'll just echo what President Trump said. I don't know all of the facts of the case, but I think he's a guy I like a great deal. I hold him in very high personal regard and I hope him and his family are okay. The writer Michael Wolff.

57:44 He's a total liar and fabricator and just a dishonest representation. So he would be like the Jordan Belford of journalism. He would be like the guy, if you're an honest journalist, you'd look at a guy like him and shake your head. Very dishonest guy. Sean Hannity. He's one of my best friends. We grew up very similarly on Long Island. Obviously he endorsed the front cover of my book and the back cover for that matter. He's a fighter. Sean Hattie's a street fighter. And so when I wake up in the morning, I say, man, I got to get to work because I know Sean's working three times harder than me. Mueller. Don't know him. He's got an impeccable reputation. And I do believe that whatever process is going on there, I think he will treat people fairly. That's just based on reputation. Don't know him personally. Comey.

58:38 Just, you know, again, don't know him personally, but he seems very sanctimonious. He's another guy I would love to debate because I read through his book. I can't tell you honestly read the entire thing, but there's a lot of sanctimony there and there's a lot of righteousness and no one is that infallible. So, you know, when you look through my book, you'll see that I'm citing a lot of my mistakes and missteps in life and things I wish I could have done better. And so I just think there's a lot of sanctimony in Comey's book. You know, it's just too disingenuous for me. George Papadopoulos? Don't know him. He probably got set up. That's what it feels like. And I think the court system knew that, which is why they gave him such a lenient sentence. Don Jr.? Very good guy. Super loyal to his dad, down to earth. He's a great campaigner. He's got a great message out there. I campaigned with Don in the month of September throughout Pennsylvania.

59:38 And Don is a very high quality guy. Eric. I don't know Eric as well. We've interacted briefly, sometimes on the campaign and sometimes in joint television appearances. But he comes across incredibly articulate. Hope Hicks. Well, Hope and I were very close on the campaign. We worked super hard on the campaign. And she's incredibly loyal to the family and to the president. She's got a great new job now. I don't think anyone's ever said anything bad about Hope Hicks. Super, super person. Amorosa. You know, Amorosa bizarrely, even though she said I cried like a little girl when I got fired, which I'll let your listeners determine whether or not I actually cried like a little girl when I got fired. I like her. So my attitude is Amorosa came from nowhere.

1:00:33 And I don't think you should be firing a person like Amoroso after she worked for the president for 14 years on and off by sticking her in the Situation Room and leaving her there for two hours. I don't think that's the right way to fire somebody like her. So I'm not surprised at the current vitriol that's going on in the Trump-Amoroso relationship. I predict a I do. I do. I predict that Bill will figure it out. Scott Walker, a very solid guy. He's got a tough race in Wisconsin. Did a good job for the state. Always found Scott to be one of the more honest politicians. You know, he was often, he was friends with Previs and when I called Scott, explained to him what Previs was doing to me, he was scratching his head. He said, this is just nonsense. It wasn't good long-term strategy on Previs's part. Dr. Phil.

1:01:25 Great guy. I went on there with my wife. My wife and I were on the verge of divorce. Some of it was personal, wasn't just political as has been reported. But we love each other, trying to patch it up. Dr. Phil and Tony Robbins are friends of mine. And I have to tell you, they were instrumental in helping me keep my family together. So I love those two guys. Schumer. I've always had a good relationship with Senator Schumer and fully disclose to you that I've been one of his donors. He's always been good to me and he had a funny line. He may not even remember this but he said, we thought you were so good at your press conference we were looking for ways to kill you. He said, but the Republicans killed you before we could get to you. I thought that was very funny, very honest. Yes, it's cute. Pelosi.

1:02:11 So, believe it or not, I've actually interacted with her. Her daughter is an award-winning documentarian and so I don't believe in her political views, but I do have a respect for her belief in her political views. And she's always been gracious to me. How about Duncan Hunter? Do you run into him ever? I haven't. I can't really comment on him. I mean, I know from the paper, but I don't really know. In your book, you do mention some people I've never heard of. Yeah, go ahead. And I think – I didn't hear of Hope Hicks right away either because no one has ever done a good flow chart of the White House. Right.

1:02:51 It would be nice if someone did, just to hint it for anyone. Rona Graff and Johnny McEntee, who are these people? So Rona Graff has been the president's assistant. She stayed at Trump Tower in the Trump Organization but for probably 25-30 years she's been his personal secretary. enormously talented person and a great person. And Johnny McEntee was the president's bodyguard throughout the campaign and he's now working on the re-election. But he's a terrific guy, young kid, very, very smart and was there from the inception. What about John Brennan?

1:03:29 So John, I know he's spoken at our Salk Conference. I have a lot of respect for John. I know the president soared him and John soared the president, but I will remind your listeners that. He's been at a pivot point in all of the security related to anti-terrorism since 9-11 and he's made a great contribution to our society and kept countless innocent American citizens safe. And I wish that him and the president would dial back the rhetoric towards each other. What do you think of CNN? You know, they were rough on me. I write about it in the book where they were... They're still rough on you. They made up a story. Still rough on me. But, you know, they have a right to do that. I believe in the First Amendment. I have no problem going over there. It's like being a Yankee in Fenway Park. But I have no problem going over there and articulating my view or my opinion. But yeah, I mean, they're not the president's favorite news organization. That's for sure. MSNBC.

1:04:32 Probably a little fairer than CNN, believe it or not. I think that their coverage from like say 9 o'clock to 7 is probably more fair, more straight up news, less editorialization even though it is slanted to the left. Obviously the evening stuff is very left leaning but listen, I mean that's the business model now. There's left leaning and right leaning outlets. What did you think of the Mitt Romney moment when he comes out and trashes Trump with one of the really just excoriating commentaries, calling him a criminal more or less? I thought that was a mistake. I suggested to Mitt's body guy and Chief of Staff Spencer Swick the day that he was making that speech to please not make that speech.

1:05:20 But I think that was a mistake and I think that that's – Mitt will go on to win the Senate race in Utah and hopefully he'll find a way to bridge that gap and work closely with the president. They're two great guys but man, they've got very different personalities. I think that's me overstating the obvious. What do you think – you said that you followed a couple of these economic cycles. Do you think that right now the way the market's acting, I also do a stock market thing. I used to write for Forbes and Barron's and a number of other publications. I'm into cycles. Do you think that the market right now is at a top?

1:06:03 and it's kind of splashing around up there or it's creating a kind of a high bottom. I think it's more of a high bottom just because of what I know of the economic stimulus and the furthering of that and how that's going to affect the economy. I do think the Fed will be forced to slow down their rate rises as these interest-sensitive areas of the economy start to slow down. The Fed – you will start hearing from the Fed that they're moving back to data dependency as opposed to just quarterly or monthly rate rises. And so I meant to say quarterly rate rises. And so to me,

1:06:43 I think we're at an interregnum in a bull market. I think the bull thesis is still intact. After all these years. Yeah, exactly. It's 11 – remember, these things don't die of old age. They die of deteriorating fundamentals and so we are cheating history. Your listeners probably know this but it's worth repeating. The American economy goes through a recession once every eight or so years. And so we're cheating history right now. We're in the 11th and a half year of an expansion, but I still think we have some room to go because of the way the tax stimulus is affecting our GDP. It's been a real pleasure to be on with you though. Thank you. You're a good questioner. Well, I want to thank you for being on this interview. We do these every so often and we put them together and as part of our show process, we take a day off and we put these interviews on and that's – I read your book. I thought it was a book

1:07:38 book I could easily recommend. I think people, especially travelers, you could read, probably read the book on a round-trip flight. That's what I was hoping for. Exactly what I tried to create. I tried to create a airport book where you're going to your destination and returning home, you'll finish it, and hopefully I've left you with some honest insight into what I saw at the White House but also during the campaign. Yeah, it was very, very entertaining and had a lot of good chunks of irony and other screwy things in it that The gossips out there would love this book. I think you're gonna have a good time reading it. I want to thank you for being on and we'll talk again maybe sometime. I'm in New York. I can buy you a cup of coffee after the market crashes. Please, please, come, exactly, come in and we'll lament the market together. God bless. Okay, hope to see you soon. Bye, thanks. I'm gonna show my salute by donating to No Agenda. Imagine all the people who could do that. Oh yeah, that'd be fab. On No Agenda.

1:08:36 I just want to say nice. That was different. I haven't heard the mooch that way. I like that a lot. That was good. Tom Stark weather. I was just gonna ask you who set up the who set it up for you because I was going to produce the show. Oh good. And this is when I had on my screen my my Skype screen. I had the picture of of of Al Gore with blood all over his face holding a big machete. Like the Friday the 13th or the... Yeah. Oh my God. And so apparently Mooch looks at it and he starts to give his second thoughts about doing the interview. And I remember Starkweather, Tom, I think he had to... He tried to go a day beforehand and they were giving him a hassle like security clearances and all kinds of weird stuff. It wasn't easy. Yeah. Well, thanks to Tom for that. And thanks to Anthony.

1:09:26 That was good. I like that. That was interesting. So we don't have any people to thank because on one of these interview shows we don't, we're carrying over all the donations to the next Thursday show. Right. Which of course will also have a wrap up of the festivities which are taking place as we speak. The wedding and maybe some interviews at the wedding. Oh God. Wait a minute. Are you bringing your, are you bringing... You think this wedding's... Are you bringing your Zoom recorder? I'm bringing the Zoom. Yes. pick up some material. Oh God, well make sure you talk to Tiffany and Willow then. Yes I will definitely, oh yes. I'll bring the big one then, the good Zoom. Well, Zoom, Zoom, not a Zoon. No it's a Zoom, Zoom H. So I want to remind people that this show is also requires support so if you can help us to

1:10:21 to go to know it. You will get a newsletter, but some people don't get that. And Dvorak.org slash NA and you have all the links there for donating. Yeah, and you can see how the value network works. We had Tom Starkweather who we only knew from end of show mixes. All of a sudden Tom is like available and producing an entire interview segment with us in New York. And I think he gets a kick out of it as well. And he has an actual executive producer credit like a big one in fact as the executive producer because you know we have nothing else nothing else the producer yes and the producer exactly you're right exec and producer

1:10:59 He's the showrunner showrunner. Oh, yeah, we should add that to his to his credit showrunner showrunner Yes, move on to cliff Stoll who I interviewed in person at in at his house very interesting place in Oakland and here we go I've known cliff on and off for a long time and he used to do a yeah What's weird about is I used to know you for a long time still do no I? Yeah, I think so. Usually if one person knows another one for a long time, the other one will be similar. Cliff used to do these editorial spots where he would more or less just say, get off the computer and go outside and get some fresh air. And that was his message. And it was his message every time he gave an editorial. And I think it's still your message.

1:11:53 My... I don't have any messages anymore. Is the medium the message? No, I'm... my feeling is enjoyment of life, having something to do, having something worthwhile in your mind and worthwhile around you, you can get it in a lot of places. Unfortunately, there's a lot of places that you can spin your wheels and avoid doing cool things or do what feels really cool and neat but ends up At the end of it all, feeling, well, I'm not sure I did anything. That's my day. Yeah, yeah. It's everybody's day. Now you had, do you still give speeches? Occasionally? I saw an old TED talk of yours once. I did a TED talk, yeah. It was silly. Well, you're jumping around on the stage and you were... My idea is don't give them a standing target. Yeah, well, this is a... comedians do this. They walk back and forth on the stage for the reason that it keeps people from falling asleep. Yeah, I'll put them to sleep, sure.

1:12:55 But to me it's also, what did my father say? If they're gonna throw tomatoes at you, make sure they usually miss. When I went to this TED Talk, I thought, oh, I'll have an hour to talk. I thought there's only 18 minutes. That's right. I get there and the guy says, oh, you've got 18 minutes. I say, yeah, but I've outlined an hour's talk. He says, well, compress it down. So instead of... It's just that easy. Oh, yeah. So I just said, oh, I'll keep the same things. I'll just talk really fast, which is pretty easy because one of the very few things I learned in grad school was talk fast and get out of there before they can understand what you're not saying. That's a good...

1:13:40 I never learned that, but I can understand it. Now, let's go over some of the things, some of your ideals. One that I wanted to talk about, and the one right at the top of the list is something we always talked about a little while ago, which is computers in schools. Throw them out. Well? I'm not sure whether you should throw the schools out or the computers out, but throw one of them out. Explain yourself because people say well you know the computers are what the kids are gonna have to work with when they get into business and they get in the real life they're gonna have to learn how to use these computers. Of course. And of course all I see them using them for is to play games and message but I would assume that if you had a good course in how to do Google search might not be a bad use for a computer. Or is it that

1:14:25 The nature of computing, especially commercialized computing, is that it becomes easier and easier to get things done. Fifteen years ago, oh, we have to teach computing in school so that kids won't be left behind. No! Kids learn computing real easy. The hard stuff to learn. How do you put together a legible and understandable sentence? How do you write a How do you write a page of prose that is reasonable to get you, say, to put on your resume or to get you into college or to get through your classes next week? My concern is not can kids use computers. My concern is can kids use their minds. It's

1:15:22 We all know computer skills go out of date real fast. Oh, yeah. You try to go back and use a Windows 3.1 system and see how far you get. Yeah, the language that you learn today, Python, Haskell, oh, in 10 years it'll be obsolete. There'll be something new for you to learn. And the same is true of various applications. Every application is evolving. Few of them are static. No, I... there are some things that it's really useful to know. And I think these can and should be taught in school. For example, how to read for meaning, how to write a concise expository statement, how to write prose, how to write... how to put together a mathematical argument, how to... how logic works. That... that students

1:16:24 Very few students graduate from college today having read Shakespeare. Well, which is more important to figure out how Microsoft formats words or how Shakespeare formats words? I don't know which is more important. I'm astonished that the question isn't even brought up. And, well, lots of people spend lots of times, lots of time playing games. Nope, nothing wrong with it. But we have so much time in our life that can be distributed in lots of different ways. And some of the cool ways that you can spend your time is, oh, I gotta watch a movie tonight. I gotta visit so-and-so. I've gotta talk to somebody. I've gotta play a game. I've gotta cook. We have a finite amount of time every day and, of course, in our life. And the time that we spend spinning around in an artificial world

1:17:22 It's time that we're not learning challenging life skills and practicing them. Obvious example, for the past 20-25 years, there have been surveys on campus of shyness. A psychologist at Stanford does an annual survey asking people, how shy are you? They rate it and normalize it. Turns out that there's a great deal of shyness. And it's increasing year after year. Well, nothing implicitly wrong with this, but why are people more shy? Why are people spending less time talking to one another and are more afraid of talking to one another? Well, it's because through their life, it's easier and far more welcoming to interact with a silicon screen than it is to interact with a real human being.

1:18:25 It's hard to say, oh yeah, I'll just come over here and say hi and hack around with you and fool around. It's much easier to say, oh, I'll go type on this, tap away on this tablet. There's less investment in local community today. Where 50, 100 years ago, it was commonplace that people would volunteer free time at churches, Red Cross, Elks Clubs, things like this, just volunteering time at the hospital. Today, they do not. There's much, you know, there's several books, one of which is called Bowling Alone, that points out that bowling alleys are finding lots more people bowling, but fewer people joining leagues. It seems that people don't have time to coordinate with others to see them face-to-face.

1:19:22 but they still want to sharpen their bowling skills. It's that our larger community loses out when we, when I, when you, don't volunteer and put hours in meeting people, hacking around after school, after church, fooling around after school. There's a sense of, hey, I'm really busy. I don't have time for that. Well, I'm really busy, but still I'm... How busy are people if you go outside? And I've made a collection of photos of people who are just like this all the time. Yeah, looking at their screen. Wherever they go, they go to a platform at a rail station, they're all there like this. And it's actually very picturesque pictures because of the

1:20:18 the comedic nature of it to see a whole bunch of people lined up. I mean, a train could come through with a big buzz saw and kill them all and no one would notice it. Or they could put a chainsaw and just chop off their hands holding their cell phones. It's a fascinating problem. My thoughts are I'd rather be talking to somebody than collecting messages and reading email. You believe there's an addictive nature to this? Addictive? To this thing? I mean, and what causes, what's the model of addiction? Essentially everyone who writes... It's hyper social. I mean, you just went on about this anti-social behavior, but at the same time, don't you think it's kind of hyper social? It'd be all plugged into 35 people you don't really know? Okay. When somebody friends me on Facebook,

1:21:14 Are they my friend? You have a Facebook account? No, I don't. Put it in when somebody friends you. Blah blah blah friend blah blah blah. Are they my friend? Is the definition, is my definition of friend someone who's connected to me by way of a social medium? My idea of a friend is, hey, I've got an inner circle of a half dozen people that if I'm feeling down I can call them and talk. If I'm hungry I can say, hey, let's go out for coffee and lunch people that I can wander over to their house with little or no warning and just talk and catch up on things. My definition of friend isn't someone who sends messages to me by way of a widespread application. There are many, many people who have thousands of friends on Facebook, probably many people who have tens of thousands of friends.

1:22:13 But if one of these people stops them on the street, do they say, oh, how's your daughter? Is your dad still sick? Can they converse and have a heart-to-heart conversation? Or putting it another way... Why don't we back off from that concept and say to ourselves, we've redefined friendship. And so friend is now defined as, so there may be two categories. You have the Facebook friend and you have a real friend. And do people realize that the Facebook friend is not, is a faux friend or are they seriously thinking these are real friends? I don't know. I have no experience in social media. I'm the wrong person to speak of it.

1:22:58 I wish that there were more analysis of it by those who are professional sociologists and community leaders. I think that sociologists are very happy to work academically and here's something that's screaming out calling, analyze me. Why is it that people say, oh, I've got 2000 friends on Facebook and yet they're going around sort of unhappy? I don't know. I'm a physicist. I'm a computer jock. I'm a mathematician. I'm sure, but... I'm concerned. You don't find any attraction of social media? You're not attracted to any aspect of it? Like a Twitter account where you can make snide comments to the public at large? I don't wish to make snide comments. No. Snide is... Yeah?

1:23:57 This is the only valuable thing you can do on these systems. No, no, no, no, no, you reminded me of, of, of, of what is it? Um, it's crackers to slip the raser, the drop ski in snide. Hot damn, I remembered that. Right? Is that an E.E. Cummings? No, it's from Mad Magazine of the 1950s. Oh, Mad Magazine. It's crackers to slip a raser the drop ski in snide. It means, um, it's foolish, to bribe a policeman with counterfeit money. Snide meant counterfeit money. So, yeah, what I'm getting at is more what email, Twitter, online communications is fantastic for staying on top of things. But I want to get to the bottom of things. What I want to do is understand things more deeply. And that means

1:24:59 Not being interrupt driven, not being pushed around by every notice that comes to me, but rather researching and learning and working in a few small areas and becoming as direct as possible in a small area and not try to keep up with a thousand online friends. More, I'm... I'm... I'm... And... This is not a critique of people who spend a huge amount of time online or on Facebook. It's more what I find works for me. In my heart, I want to be closer to my wife. I want to be closer to my kids. I want to be closer to my community. My neighborhood. We're going to be making plum jam, sharing it with the people next door.

1:25:55 I can't share my plum jam with people who are on social media. Sorry, there's only about three dozen jars of it and the first call are people who live next door. Help me pick the plums. It's not like I'm saying this is a wrong thing to point your life at. It's more I'm saying for me, and I suspect for many, though not all others, There's something lost if I spend a lot of time poking around at a computer, poking around at a screen, rather than screwing around with friends, with relatives, and having depth with a few people rather than shallowness with a large number of people. Who am I to say? Laugh at me and say I'm all wrong. That's all right. Nobody says that because nobody knows what's right, A.

1:26:58 And I've never heard anybody defend social media. They just find it as a fun thing to do as a side. I don't know. To be honest, I don't have a Facebook account either. And so I've always baffled by something like Facebook because it just kind of stirs you up and it doesn't really accomplish anything. Ten years ago, I ended up on something called LinkedIn. A day doesn't go by that I don't get notices saying XYZ wants to connect to you on LinkedIn. Oh yeah, LinkedIn. I just have no idea what to do with these things. People from across the globe want to connect with me as if I have something to say or something useful to help them with, and I don't. You may be exaggerating, but LinkedIn is really, its purpose is to create a kind of faux networks of people who maybe could offer you work.

1:27:55 Well, I can offer nobody any work. So... You don't need to be on LinkedIn. Yeah, it's a... I just have concerns that... Well, popping the stack, you're asking about schools. My feeling is the things that we should get out of education are not how to use computers. That's pretty easy. In fact, it's hard to find a teenager who doesn't know how to use Facebook, who doesn't know how to efficiently search on Google. It's hard to find a teenager who's bad at texting. They exist, I'm sure, but they're probably pretty rare. Find a teenager who can stand up in front of 30 students and recite a poem, play the clarinet,

1:28:52 explain how, explain the importance of Pericles in the Peloponnesian War, how his speech laid the groundwork for Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. You know, that's something that I'd hope at least some of the better, better kids in high school would be able to do and would be a little bit nervous about it, but would be capable of doing. Yet, if we consider that point of schooling is to teach you a trade. Well, okay, learn C++. Here, here's how you use pointers and here's how... Yeah. But they don't do that, by the way. They don't teach kids how to code in C++.

1:29:47 Okay, just like that, no. To be honest, well, you know, I don't know as much as I should. But from what I can tell, the computers are considered ancillary to like a history course. So you can teach a little bit, have you read a book, and then do a lot of research online, and then write a paper. Suppose for a minute, suppose for a minute I was an evil, horrible, terrible human being, it might be true, and my idea was I want to wipe out curiosity. I want to get rid of curiosity.

1:30:24 One way to do that would be to say, I'm going to lock people up and not let them near any information. I'm going to keep the books away from them, keep the internet away from them, make sure that they don't have access to information. Will that get rid of their curiosity? Hell no! They'll be more curious than ever. What's out there? Let me turn it around though. If I want to get rid of a kid's curiosity, What if I gave this kid a machine that answered every question the kid came up with correctly? With, you know, in a nice high-res screen. Right, doable. Doable! And it even had movies and videos to show. Kid says, you know, how do flowers grow or what, why is the sky blue? And it comes up with a perfect answer.

1:31:19 That would be a wonderful way to eliminate curiosity, because you never experience the joy of doing an experiment and figuring it out for yourself. All you have to do is ask that question online and get a wonderful, easy answer right back to you. If you want to eliminate curiosity, provide people with facile, immediate answers, well, what does any of the search engines take your pick? What do they do? They provide us with facile, easy, quick answers to essentially any question we ask. What effect does this have on students? Well, it seems to me

1:32:12 that it's a wonderful way to throw a wet blanket on our indigenous curiosity that each of us is born with. Why should I? Why should I explore the world and ask questions? If I want to know what life is like in Shanghai, China, I'll just ask this computer and it'll give me a bunch of... You can be on a train anywhere in the world and you see the same kids that you're talking about. Instead of looking out the window at the crazy sights, you're seeing this. Yeah! Instead of

1:32:48 Instead of looking around saying, wow, I'm looking at some nasturtium flowers. Oh, what do they do at night? Do they close up or stay open? Oh, no, I'm going to look at a screen and stay up on social media or I'll be asking questions or trying to copy and paste together some report. My point is not that, oh, computers are harmful. Rather, my point is that we should be asking ourselves, what is it about an interconnected world that gives us the heebie-jeebies? And one of my points has, when I taught, I taught eighth grade about nine or ten years ago. In teaching eighth graders, there were lots of kids who were fantastic online and texting

1:33:42 And it was surprisingly difficult to get them to just do ordinary curious stuff. Stuff that, you know, eighth graders, you know, they were perfectly happy not to be doing athletics, but sitting on the side texting. They were... It was sad to me. It's always been pathetic to me, but sad is a good way of putting it. I'm not... What I'm not saying is these kids are turning out all wrong, Rather, I'm asking, could it be that our love affair with a high-tech information system may be leading our kids and adults into rather dreary, unhappy lives? Don't know. I hope not. But it might be. That's not what you asked. I think the... I don't know what I asked. I think the unhappy life is ahead.

1:34:43 You see too much evidence of kids being suicidal for, you know, why is a 17 year old... But of course, but we're also drugging these kids. There's a great deal of... Okay, nobody has it easy between age 3 and age 30. What am I saying? Nobody has it easy at any age. It's real tough to be a teenager. I don't know whether teenage suicides are remaining the same, going up or going down. It saddens me deeply to hear of any suicide at any age because people have so much to contribute to this very mundane, dreary world. And the only way the world becomes more interesting and

1:35:34 a livelier, more wonderful place is by people doing things and making it a better place. And to the person who's saying, ah, what do I have to live for? I've screwed up or there's things are boring. I can look around and say, there's so much to learn. There's so many cool things going on here. There's so much to do with your hands, with your heart, with your head. And yet some people let go. Again, I find it very sad. And my concern goes to something you said before a few minutes ago about the word snide. It's easy to be snide. It's easy to be sarcastic. But that is something to do. Oh, of course it's something to do. Be critical. Be mean. Yeah.

1:36:28 easy to say mean hurtful things to a classmate, to, it's even easier to say a mean hurtful thing on a posting on some, some board. And, of course, and people specialize in it. Oh yeah, people work hard to troll around and you know, they're the whole institutions in St. Petersburg where they train people to do this. And at the same time I feel, you know, the community I want to be a part of. Yeah, it has some sarcasm in it. Yeah, there's people who scoff, but on the whole, it's largely self-supportive and friendship is oftentimes built upon mutual interests and mutual support rather than, oh, I'm more snide than you are. I can make a flashier piece of sarcasm than you can.

1:37:30 I don't know where I'm talking myself into. It's a corner, I'm sure, and people will blame me for it. You're talking yourself into a corner, yeah. But I'm still... But I think you're right. Generally speaking, it's everything you say is accurate. It's like there is the situation as it now exists is terrible. And then they want to move on to things. And then when the other issues crop up based on technology, you end up with people advocating, for example, voting over the Internet. which seems to me to be just fraught with insanity. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's lots of problems with online voting, not least of which is identity, but also is the implicit lack of temporal thought of, oh, I'm going to actually think about this for a long time rather than, oh, I'm going to click on a checkbox. How do you feel about this? Check here. Click here. Oops. Ah, 10 minutes later, maybe not. There's a certain

1:38:31 seriousness that happens when you actually vote, walk to a voting booth and that you don't, that I don't get at least. I log into a website, it says what's your opinion on XYZ? Oh, SurveyMonkey wants to know, you know, how long do you cut your shoelaces? It's a... How often are you online? On a daily basis, do you have a computer in the house? You have one downstairs. There's one downstairs. Do you get on it? Do you get stuck on it like most people? You get what's called falling down the rabbit hole. I have a little business making and selling glassware, glass Kleinbabs. And I'm in communications with mathematicians who like to send and receive email. I answer a bunch of email several, probably a couple hours a day. Outside of that,

1:39:27 Well, what did I do this morning? I unpacked a bunch of glassware. I cut some tiles with a diamond saw. I'm putting together a kitchen counter using some kind of Penrose tiles. So I'm... And last night I was up till 10 o'clock with my wife. We were both reading books from seven till ten. So I try to keep my computing in, my screen time is 11 in the morning till over lunch till two in the afternoon to three. And I try to minimize it a day to me.

1:40:15 A successful day is a day that I don't get in a car and I don't see a screen. That to me is a completely successful day. Now if you, have you ever been, since you do a go, you're not computer illiterate by any means, do you, is there anything online? Everything's online now. Or have you seen... Oh no! No no no no no no no no! No? I planted some tomato plants two weeks ago. They're not online. No, okay, well you guys... I'm making some plum jam. I'm just saying... It's not online. I'm... No, I'm... right. Look at this. This is... This is glass. It's not online. It's for sale online. You're here. You're not online. What I meant by that on the computer specifically, not in the world in general, most things are online and have you ever been surprised by anything you've seen in the last few years where you go, oh my god, this is really great. I didn't think I'd ever see anything like this before and here it is. I've seen an enormous number of things online that I've

1:41:19 open my eyes and say, wow, this is impressive that this is available to me online. It's close to magic. At the same time, for all the Flash, for all the HTML5, for all the glitz and astonishing websites, I don't think I've ever seen a website or really anything online that I'd call caring, kind, supportive, deeply touching. Maybe it's not possible. The things that move me most deeply, like the difference between seeing a child grow up in your home and become an adult,

1:42:12 Well, there are billions of photos of people growing up and becoming an adult online. They're nothing like the experience of being a parent. Of course. And there's millions of websites that tell you how to be a parent, but inevitably you'll learn yourself. And the advice that you get online is worth every penny that you pay for it. It's a... yeah, I've seen plenty online that's opened my eyes. What I don't go around saying is, wow, if only science people or math people had this available to them 200 years ago, think of what they could have done. No, when I see what people like Gauss, what Einstein, what Maxwell, what Newton did, they were phenomenally constrained with

1:43:10 us with incredibly primitive tools. Yet with those primitive tools, they were forced to be creative. Today we have extremely high quality digital tools. And as a result, we needn't be creative. What do I mean by that? Give me a minute to think this one out. When I was a kid in art class, class was sort of divided into two. Those people who could draw a tree that looked right, and those who, like me, couldn't draw a tree. I couldn't draw a tree. I had to look at it, stare at it, and it didn't look like a tree. And the art teacher said, oh, you know, a way of discarding us. We were the creative ones. And it took a while for me to realize that creativity

1:44:00 is the inability to copy. Those who were able to look at a picture and make a copy of that, they got along well in this art class. Those of us who just couldn't copy, no matter how we tried, we couldn't copy, we were at the severe disadvantage, we were the ones who were called creative. You don't think that was just disparaging? Of course it was disparaging. Oh, certainly. You should have been there. Through my life, I've realized that creativity, that institutions, whether they're schools, businesses, institutions don't value creativity. They value the ability to get along and fit in properly, you know, square peg in the square hole. Creativity is rarely valued. I want something to drop, drop, the way it looks over there. Just copy that.

1:44:55 Well, the one thing that you find across the board in computing is copy and paste. It's built into every operating system at the most fundamental levels, copy and paste. Well, to me that says it's the nature of deep down computing that it encourages working within a system that's built by, you know, that fits into OSX or Linux or Unix or a Microsoft operating system. Yet making photocopies or duplicating words or duplicating images sort of tells me this isn't a very creative process. If it's creativity that I want, I think I'd rather see somebody use their hands or get away from the screen. Maybe I'm all wrong about this.

1:45:56 Certainly there's lots of creative people who are online, no doubt. There's lots of creative efforts. Oftentimes it's... the tools push us towards... Oh, I'll just copy it out of here, slightly rewrite it and paste it over there. Well, it looks like my work. Yeah, good enough. I wish someone smarter than me would explore what do we mean by creativity in a digital world? domain. Not just, oh, that's a really creative thing that I see online, but rather, I mean, like you, I've sat through so many horrible PowerPoint talks. I've given them. Yeah, I mean, that's just what a fantastic way to poison a talk. Use PowerPoint. So refreshing. So wonderful to hear somebody do a talk entirely improv.

1:46:54 you know, without, you know, without using a projector, without using a computer, without being organized in advance, just saying, hey, I'm going to talk about... And what you've done. No, of course. We all have. Well... To me that's the nature of doing public speech, to come up with something on the fly. I don't want to be pre-programmed. That's why I didn't bring a bunch of questions for you if you haven't noticed. Well, that's... that's the nature of you. I... come on. I can do... You don't pre... come on. I do. No, you don't. I do. Yes, I can do it. I can actually have questions and I go through them. Let me throw a wet blanket on you. Hold on. If you're going to throw a wet blanket, I've got to get some more tea. Okay. Yeah, so I'm, I don't know, for me doing a talk, it's improvisational performance. I like... Well, actually what we do, our podcast is all, it's improv. It's improv. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But let's talk about it. Let me throw the wet blanket.

1:47:52 Because I want to hear, the reason I'm going to do the wet blanket is because I want to hear your analysis of it. Sure. Early on in the days when you were more of a prognosticator pundit, you made the prediction that e-commerce is never going to go anywhere and it's just a big joke. Meanwhile, of course, I was wrong. You were wrong, but can you analyze why you were wrong? I was invited to do a talk on e-commerce actually, not e-commerce, I was with a couple of friends of mine, I was sitting around talking. At the time, what you could get online were essentially magazine subscriptions. I thought, no way. And my interest... That's ironic. Yeah, of course. Today, of course, magazine subscriptions, what's a magazine? Rather, what I felt at the time was

1:48:47 The richness of going to a store, retail shop, couldn't be matched by things online. Still can't. I felt that that was far more important than it actually turned out to be. People are perfectly happy saying, I'll order this, I'll click on this, and it'll be delivered to me, and I'll have the thing without the experience of going to the store. For me personally, I felt then, and unfortunately I still do feel now, Purchasing and shopping should be an extension of one's persona and shouldn't simply be picking things from a menu in the sense that my feeling is if shopping means acquisition and acquiring stuff, buying something by simply clicking on it, I want that, I want this, I want this other thing, click on it, pay for it, and I get the stuff. To me that's a

1:49:47 It feels shallow compared to, oh, getting something and supporting the small business or the bookstore that provides it. Yeah. And I realize now that this mental image that I had then may very well have applied to me, but it sure didn't apply to very many other people. There are lots of people for whom, oh, I don't want to go to a grocery store. I'd rather have it delivered. I don't want to meet the person who's… Well, this brings you back to your earlier discussion about the antisocial behavior of people who are on Lent all the time. Oh, yeah. I have discussed with people the fact that they don't like to go to the store, the grocery store to buy stuff. They'd rather have it delivered.

1:50:38 I don't understand the mechanism, because I like buying stuff online. I use Amazon extensively, but I love going to the grocery store to see what's fresh, to see what I'm going to cook based on what's available, as opposed to just randomly picking something out of a recipe book and then having it delivered to me. So I don't know why both can't exist in the same sphere. They do, but... Okay, okay. Way off topic. I live right next to Berkeley, as you know, I'm in Oakland. About 10 blocks from here, 5 blocks from here, yeah, 10 blocks from here is a little tiny grocery store. Truly a ma and pa grocery store called Star Market. It's been there since the 1920s during the Depression. The owner of the store gave out credit to local neighbors so they could get through the Depression. Old-fashioned. Very old-fashioned. That man's grandson still runs the same grocery store

1:49:47 It feels shallow compared to, oh, getting something and supporting the small business or the bookstore that provides it. Yeah. And I realize now that this mental image that I had then may very well have applied to me, but it sure didn't apply to very many other people. There are lots of people for whom, oh, I don't want to go to a grocery store. I'd rather have it delivered. I don't want to meet the person who's… Well, this brings you back to your earlier discussion about the antisocial behavior of people who are on Lent all the time. Oh, yeah. I have discussed with people the fact that they don't like to go to the store, the grocery store to buy stuff. They'd rather have it delivered.

1:50:38 I don't understand the mechanism, because I like buying stuff online. I use Amazon extensively, but I love going to the grocery store to see what's fresh, to see what I'm going to cook based on what's available, as opposed to just randomly picking something out of a recipe book and then having it delivered to me. So I don't know why both can't exist in the same sphere. They do, but... Okay, okay. Way off topic. I live right next to Berkeley, as you know, I'm in Oakland. About 10 blocks from here, 5 blocks from here, yeah, 10 blocks from here is a little tiny grocery store. Truly a ma and pa grocery store called Star Market. It's been there since the 1920s during the Depression. The owner of the store gave out credit to local neighbors so they could get through the Depression. Old-fashioned. Very old-fashioned. That man's grandson still runs the same grocery store

1:51:36 And the prices are probably 20% higher than the nearby Safeway that's two blocks away. And Safeway sells the same stuff cheaper. Well, my wife and I go to the Star Grocery Store. We have for 30 years, well always. And we know the owner, we know the checkout clerks, we know who's who. We get together. There's friends of ours that we talk with there. We can... It's a meeting hall. in the way that the Safeway isn't. And if the Safeway isn't a meeting hall, having goods delivered to my doorstep certainly is not. You don't even see the person who drops the stuff off. If I want a rich community where I know the people around me and I'm invested in them and they're invested in me, necessarily I'm going to have to go out and meet them someplace at times. I did not understand that

1:52:39 20, 30 years ago, that this really was a rather silly, rare thing to ask of people. People genuinely, hey, I'd rather save money, and especially I'd rather have it delivered to my door, rather than go out and walk along an aisle and pick things off a grocery store, off a grocery shelf. Yeah, I was wrong. Boy, was I wrong. And... Well, you can't... I was... You may not... The wrongness of it is always a variable. And what I mean by that is that if it wasn't for Amazon,

1:53:22 and the genius of Jeff Bezos, an insane genius, you don't know that it wouldn't have caught on. I mean, the differences, structures were there for it to go either way. This is something I've noticed because I've been writing about technology since... Efficiency, economic efficiency is a powerful, powerful engine. And online ordering and Personal delivery is damn deficient and more power to it. Turns out at the same time I'm rather I guess I live in a quaint world and I'm

1:54:01 I've never escaped from it. I'm looking around. Looking around. Yeah, right? It's all quaint. What are you looking across? Well, what I see... Well, also some old wallpaper that seems to have been from the... 1920s. It's the original wallpaper to the house. Yeah. And it's yellowed, but it's quite attractive. I kind of like wallpaper in general. People... Yeah, it's a... Oh, that's the house when it was... Yeah. When it was built. And this guy right there, he's a member of the Wobblies. the International Workers of the World. Oh yeah, I remember that group. Yeah, yeah. And about... oh, okay, okay. No, this is... don't broadcast. Chop the following out. You sure? Yeah, seems silly. Well, let's see. Story to tell you. So about 30, 35 years ago, 1984 or so, I'm in Berkeley and I'm working up at Cal at the

1:54:59 physics department and I bicycle by this house and the sign on the house says, house for sale, this house, right here. House for sale by owner. So I walk in, there's a hundred people crowded in. The house costs a fortune. I walk out and say, no way, I'm not gonna buy a house like this. So don't think anything of it. Next day I bicycle by, there's a guy sitting on his porch looking over papers and I yell out to the guy, hey mister, did you sell your house? Guy yells back, yeah I sold it. So I get off my bike, walk up to him, start talking. He says, yeah I sold it, I got three offers. I say, well what do you do? He says, oh I'm a labor lawyer. I say, you're a labor lawyer? Do you know about the IWW, the International Workers of the World? He says, boy do I.

1:55:46 I'm writing a book about it. Really, I say. Tell him, you must know songs of Mr. Block. And he says, I sure do. And he starts going, Oh, Mr. Block, you were born by mistake. You take the cake. You make me ache. So I join in. I take the next song. Verse he takes the next verse we're singing all these old labor organizing songs from the 1910s to each other yeah, and it's going back and forth paddling and we're talking about the international workers the world there he and Half an hour an hour goes by I said geez I gotta get up to Cal it I'm a postdoc there. I gotta get in the guy says to me. Oh, you can't go yet You got it by my house

1:56:31 I say, come on, no, seriously. He says, no, I want you to buy this house. I say, first, you got three offers. Second, I can't afford it. I'm just a postdoc. They don't pay me nothing. Third, I got an apartment in downtown Oakland. It's cheap. He says, the house likes you. Everybody else who wants to buy it is an investor. I say, OK, I'll buy it. Pay you whatever anybody else says. He says, shakes my hand and said, sold, $160,000. And I say, yeah, but look, I ain't got that kind of bread. He says, I don't care. I like you. True story. So what was the year that this took place? 1983, 84. And the guy says, so we go over, this guy's mortgage broken. He laughs at me. He says, you're a postdoc in physics at Lawrence Berkeley Labs? I say, yeah, they pay me $20,000, $22,000 a year. And he says, you're going to have to make $35,000, $36,000 to afford that kind of mortgage.

1:57:32 So I said, well, ask my boss. So I had my boss, a guy named Louis Alvarez. He's a Nobel Prize winner. Oh, he's very famous. Yeah, so you know Louis. Yeah, I went to Cal. Yeah, so I go up to Louis and say, hey, you know, I wanted my house and got to make $35,000. And Gruffle, you, you're never a complicated thing, you're a son of a bitch. You want $35,000 for screwing around? OK, for the next six months here, get this paper signed. So he gave me a raise as a research associate for $35,000. I get this thing signed, show it to the mortgage broker, the mortgage broker looks at it and says, you work for Louis? Louis Alvarez? Wow! Yeah. He says, well yeah, you got enough money for it? And he stamps things, we bike over to a bank, blah blah blah. Three months later, I own this house. I've never had it inspected. I don't even know how many bedrooms there are in it. I don't know whether I'm being ripped off,

1:58:27 All I know is the guy who's selling it and his wife are labor lawyers, and they're really friendly. And so I move in, and the guy was right. The house liked me. And I like the house. And so that's what you see here. That's the original of the house. Very little embroidery in that story. Well, these things happen. That is actually a pretty funny story. And it's sort of, if I had done it the right way, talking to a real estate agent... Oh yeah, you wouldn't have gotten a house that liked you. Yeah, yeah. You know, and who's not saying this is the way to do things? But it works. It sometimes works. Since you were up at that, did one of the guys up there, one of the, just as an aside, one of the researchers, physicists up at the lab,

1:59:24 And I can't remember which one it is, but he's got this theory that he brings out once in a while, that the Earth is on a collision course every something like 70 million years. Rich Muller. Is it Muller? Yeah, Rich Muller. He's great. It goes through the asteroids and it kills off everything. Nemesis. Yeah. Rich Muller. He's sharp. In fact, he was one of Louis' students. Is he still up there? I'm sure. I haven't seen him in three or four years, but he's... I'd love to sit down with him and chat with him. Just about that. The theory makes nothing but sense and it seems to, you know, you can't, it's almost, it's unprovable, but the... The wipeouts, yeah. Yeah, the historic record going back millions of years seem to indicate... Yeah, Rich Muller, Nemesis. In fact, Rich was one of the guys who figured out after

2:00:21 Louis and Walter Alvarez figured that it was a giant meteor that hit the earth, wiped out the dinosaurs. Rich was one of the people who figured out what happened. Oh, enough crud was put in the air. We had a climate change for a few hundred years. That's what killed the dinosaurs, not like they were hit by meteors. The vegetation. Yep. Couldn't. These guys needed big plants. Yeah. Yep. Yep. And suddenly things turned cold because sunlight wasn't getting down. So it was a... Working with people like that was such a joy. It was... I'm sorry. Don't get me started. But yeah, that's how I...

2:01:02 Yeah, well that group was over. You were around. Yeah, I was as a matter of fact. What were you doing at Cal? I was a history student. With whom? Well, Kenneth Stamp was my... Oh, Kenneth Stamp! I just read his book on the Civil War! Which one? It's right over there. The Causes of the Civil War. Oh, the one where he's got the seven or ten essays? Yeah, yeah, it's like two dozen essays. Just read it. Very good book. Yeah, this guy right here. Just re-read it two nights ago. Yeah, I read this book a couple times. Yeah, I mean the guy's smart. Just collecting. You know, he has a Marxist revisionist view of why was there a civil war. He has... A little bit. I think the whole department is somewhat like that. But it really... Yeah, he was my counselor. Damn!

2:01:52 Every time I tell people that they go, what? Who? And the thing was he was a very funny guy because he's a rubber stamp counselor for one thing. And he'd look over what you're doing and he's very casual about everything. He's very funny. I never took a, I don't believe I took a course from him. I took a course from May and Winthrop Jordan and some of the other hot shots. But it was always funny to have him as the guy. It was very impressive. Well this reflects back to what I was trying to say earlier. I'm no good at saying it. I believe that the ability to read and review history is damned important.

2:02:35 and allows us maybe not to learn from mistakes, but at least to better interpret what's going on in current events. And one of the things that I'm saddened about in schools today is that... They don't know anything. Well, they're not... History is considered, oh, we'll teach you the following facts, rather than... No, they don't, yeah. Rather than, oh, there's five ways to interpret what happened here. Here, in Stamp's book is, there's 50 ways to interpret the Civil War. It's a superb example of why, why saying, oh, the Civil War was caused by slavery. A lot of people say that. A lot of people say, no, it was caused by economic forces. Others, oh no, it was caused by, it was inevitable given the Marxist,

2:03:27 I'm, again, I love computing. I love programming. I love technology. But I also like, appreciate, and admire critical thought. And I don't see enough of that being promoted. It's a reason why I think history especially needs not just to be taught, but needs to be appreciated. That's the hard part. You have to find enthusiastic teachers that can teach it to people who don't know that they will like it. People don't know, you know, it's like the good marketing, this is what they always said about Steve Jobs, he says he doesn't study the market, he tries to guess what people don't know they're going to like.

2:04:15 Because if you ask somebody, would you buy this? It's brand new. And you'd say, I don't know, I don't think so. It's too weird. But if you could show someone, you know, you get them to say, well, try it. You get them to start using things and get them to go on and start thinking differently, then all of a sudden it becomes a huge thing that would have never been predicted. If you remember, the Xerox machine were the first copying machines. They studied it. They said nobody wants these machines because nobody wants to make copies. They've said the same thing with database management. Nobody wants these things because... Kodak and the digital imaging systems. Oh, that's a pathetic story. Rochester, New York. They invented it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. More than invented it, they promoted it within a very small community thinking, oh, if we keep the secret over here, we'll be able to keep this cash cow running. Coast, yeah. But it's a... But people don't appreciate history because they're not...

2:05:10 kind of convinced or they're not there's the enthusiasm. This time it's different. This time it'll be different. We're not going to make the same mistake. Cassandra keeps walking out saying, oh no, no, no, no, bad things are going to happen and go away Cassandra you bother me. We'll do it the right way this time. Well it's never done the right way that's the problem ever. Of course. So yeah. Ken Stam. Wow! Just absolutely cool. Yeah. He was the, he is the most brilliant of the analysts of the Civil War when it comes to causation.

2:05:47 Everybody else discusses various aspects, but causation is still up in the air and there's been life. I think you're right. Now it's just slavery. None of these, and there's some wacky things in this particular book. There's one or two of these things that are just like, what? I can't remember them offhand, but I do remember. Enormous. And this is 40 years old. Yeah, this book. The book we're talking about is The Causes of the Civil War. edited by Kenneth Stamp. It's a bunch of essays including Lincolns and Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass, and a whole bunch of crazy off-the-wall stuff. And the interviewer studied under the Sky Ken stamp, which impresses the hell out of me. It's like, wow. He had a lot of students. Yeah. So anyway, that's Berkeley for you. You know, similar feelings of... Yeah, well, you're working with Louis Alvarez for a guy. I mean, there's other guys. There's a lot of famous people at the lab in those days. Yeah, there's Glenn Seaborg and people there. Yeah, Seaborg. But it was all... You work with these people and...

2:06:50 Hell, what? It was like midnight. I was writing code. Midnight or so. Louie walks in the door and says, what are you working on, kid? And I'm saying, well, I'm writing computer code. What's it for? It's 1130, midnight or so. And I'm, you know, writing. Was he that gruff all the time? Oh yeah, he was gruff. He was gruff to those who he felt needed gruffness. And if he didn't know you well, you got gruffness from him. He tried to be a son of a bitch, but he wasn't a very good son of a bitch. He turned out to be not a nice guy. But I said, well, I'm working on this rating code. What's that code? What's that line there for? And he said, well, I'm working on off-axis hyperbolic mirrors for the Keck telescope. Yeah, but what's that line for? Well, I'm trying to figure out what the Fourier transform is of an off-axis hyperboloid that's a hexagon. He says, well, what's that line for?

2:05:47 Everybody else discusses various aspects, but causation is still up in the air and there's been life. I think you're right. Now it's just slavery. None of these, and there's some wacky things in this particular book. There's one or two of these things that are just like, what? I can't remember them offhand, but I do remember. Enormous. And this is 40 years old. Yeah, this book. The book we're talking about is The Causes of the Civil War. edited by Kenneth Stamp. It's a bunch of essays including Lincolns and Jefferson Davis, Frederick Douglass, and a whole bunch of crazy off-the-wall stuff. And the interviewer studied under the Sky Ken stamp, which impresses the hell out of me. It's like, wow. He had a lot of students. Yeah. So anyway, that's Berkeley for you. You know, similar feelings of... Yeah, well, you're working with Louis Alvarez for a guy. I mean, there's other guys. There's a lot of famous people at the lab in those days. Yeah, there's Glenn Seaborg and people there. Yeah, Seaborg. But it was all... You work with these people and...

2:06:50 Hell, what? It was like midnight. I was writing code. Midnight or so. Louie walks in the door and says, what are you working on, kid? And I'm saying, well, I'm writing computer code. What's it for? It's 1130, midnight or so. And I'm, you know, writing. Was he that gruff all the time? Oh yeah, he was gruff. He was gruff to those who he felt needed gruffness. And if he didn't know you well, you got gruffness from him. He tried to be a son of a bitch, but he wasn't a very good son of a bitch. He turned out to be not a nice guy. But I said, well, I'm working on this rating code. What's that code? What's that line there for? And he said, well, I'm working on off-axis hyperbolic mirrors for the Keck telescope. Yeah, but what's that line for? Well, I'm trying to figure out what the Fourier transform is of an off-axis hyperboloid that's a hexagon. He says, well, what's that line for?

2:07:42 I say, well that particular line you're pointing to figures out, you know, what's the sign side of the angle of incidents coming out to the mirror, blah blah blah, explain it. Half an hour later, he says, okay, keep going. Okay. See you tomorrow. You know, it was like, it was like I had to explain after town. He needed to understand down at the grain of sand level. Yeah. And if I could do that, If I could actually explain it that level, he felt I was okay. And I was able to, so I was okay in his mind. And he... So he didn't put up with bullshitters? Oh no, no, no, no, no. You got nowhere if you... Every Friday at his house, there was a Friday meeting at his house of physics jocks. And it was scary stuff. You were... You got in front of

2:08:41 two dozen physicists, all of whom were out for blood. You better be able to defend yourself. And I had just caught a computer hacker who was breaking into our Unix boxes. Right. This was your, uh, this was your cuckoo's. Yeah, cuckoo's egg. The book, what was the full title? Yeah, cuckoo's egg, stalking the wily hackers, something like this. And you invented forensic computing. Yeah, yeah, it was the first, yeah. So, anyway, so I go to Louie's house to do a talk and I start talking about this and It was the first time that I ever had to explain what it means to break into a computer. I had to explain what is the ARPANET, what is the Internet Protocol, what's TCP? And I had to explain it from the register stack all the way up to the highest level. What's, you know, how does the email work and how do you... What year was this? This was 1986. Okay.

2:09:37 doing this in front of Louis, I mean, and the rest of the gang, you know, it was scary stuff. Because, not because you don't know it, it's because you're in front of You're in front of the real examination group. And I passed, you know, people said, ah, flying colors, no problem at all. You showed the old man your stuff. You did okay. And that was enough for me. You know, that's, that... It became a bestselling book. It was amazing. Yeah, it became a bestselling book. It gave me the license to do stupid things. And I've done plenty of stupid things with that license.

2:10:15 mathematical modeling, but the, the, I'm, it's time for other people to be doing cool things. Yeah, I'm sort of... Are you seeing anybody out there doing cool things? Oh yeah, there are... I met some people doing 3D printing of completely bizarre mathematical shapes. I'm saying, wow, real neat to see people taking weird fractal images and poking them into into plastic. I'm seeing people do... There are some cool things that I've bumped into. There's a guy that I know who's working on the collision frequency in planetary rings and modeling it in a computer in a most creative way using Markov chain and stuff like this. Just

2:11:13 Stuff that I know that, oh, I see somebody doing it so much better than the way I would do it. And I'm saying, wow, very pleasant, very nice. And then there's lots and lots of pedestrian stuff, just like when we were in Berkeley. There's people who waste their time saying, oh, I gotta level up to level 17 in this. And big deal. So, which is where we started talking to begin with. It's I guess I'm not cynical saying, oh, get off my grass. I did all this great stuff. Nobody will ever... No, people... I'm thoroughly impressed with some of the stuff that I see happening in computer security. I regularly follow... Oh, you've kept up? I've kept up and I'm really impressed with how forensics people, you know, people unwind digital attacks

2:12:15 and can find signatures of just what group was it that did this? How are they hiding? How are they pushing things around? And it impresses the hell out of me. I'm impressed with companies that are organized to let their computer jocks just watch to see what the traffic is and see what's weird and unwind it. Really impressed. I'm impressed with Frankly, I'm impressed with the security systems that are growing up in places in our modern operating systems. Security itself is being pushed sort of further and further to the left in the development charts. It used to be, oh, tell me a problem and we'll patch it.

2:13:12 but build in security, bake it into an operating system. No, no, that's not for us. We got to meet this deadline, get it out the door. Security will become important. As soon as you tell us you got a problem, we'll fix it. Increasingly, it's, oh, security is a spec at the beginning, and you don't start writing code without having first baked it in at the start. Very impressed. Is there anything specific that catches your eye? I'm seeing a major company in Silicon Valley essentially freeze releases, not freeze releases, but make

2:14:12 semi-major releases that do nothing but more deeply address security problems, which to me is astonishing. In other words, a major release coming out that does look, adds almost no features, but just makes the whole thing more solid. I'm delighted. I'm impressed. I'm seeing the I'm seeing less and less reliance on passwords, more double-factor authentication. I'm seeing good things in that direction. Enormous popularity of capture the flag and even lockpicking amongst computer security people just tickles me and I just have

2:15:02 big smiles when I see this happening. We have a number of listeners to our podcast who are technical to say the least, but a lot of penetration testers. Pen testing. I hear the stories from them, they're fascinating. To the point where some of them actually have to break into the facility. Yeah. Oh yeah. And then get to the computer and put something in and see what happens. It brings a smile to me that once upon a time there Once upon a time, this stuff didn't exist. And now it's in one sense a game to people, to others, it's, oh, I'm actually going to break in and leave a little poop for somebody and see if they stumble across it.

2:15:44 Still others, you know, a friend of mine at a computer security get-together showed me how to repin all the locks in my house. And I'd sort of known how to do it before, but then he said, oh, you show me how to do master and sub-mastering? Sure. Now I have master and sub-mastering on my Schlage lock on my front door. Big deal. You know, somebody from your podcast will probably come by and pick it now. But that's so loud. I'm tickled to see this happening. It's like, yeah! Do you do any work in the field anymore? No. I speak occasionally in a most embarrassing way for me to talk about computer security. It's like inviting Dwight Eisenhower to talk about politics. No, I'm old hat.

2:16:37 I felt long ago that the network, the ARPANET, which evolved into the Internet, really was an academic playground for fooling around and having a fun time. sending email. You didn't have to put a stamp on a letter. You could send email. It would get across the country in the same day, sometimes within the next few minutes. Now, the academic playground soon became commercialized, became a playground for people to develop cool things and for a few people to

2:17:16 make bad things happen. The development of malware leaves me not very happy. The use of computing as an intermediary between peace and war leaves me very cold. I'm very sad at what I see happening using, going back to the Stuxnet days where computers were weaponized as a, to promote political points of view and now that what happened in the 2016 elections leaves me really cold, that theft of information online is used to cause, to bend elections. It's, I find it very upsetting, but then, hey,

2:18:10 I'm, it's not, this ain't my world anymore. I sure, not. Well, that's not going to end. Yeah, it's going to get worse. Yeah. It's going to get worse. Everything is going to get worse. With the one minor thing that I'm observing, and I hope that the people who are listening to your podcast, who are really tuned into computer security, I hope they'll say, yeah, you know, you have a good point there. Maybe I have a bad point here. I think that OSs and widely deployed applications are becoming more secure. There are more people working to detect problems and fix them than there ever has been before. That gives me hope. It means that it's, I hope, in the long run, going to be more difficult to

2:19:07 steal credentials to pose as somebody else. The spread of false information, I think, will always be a challenge. But the theft and manipulation of information, I hope, will become increasingly difficult. Maybe I'm all wrong. Well, how about this? You know, you do have an issue with the people who are the computer users that are ignorant. And for example, you talked about the stolen data, the Podesta data was stolen on a phishing attack. You know, some click on this, boom, this whole thing's done. Is that, that seems to be the bottleneck here, the... Oh, ignorance. Oh, surely. Yet at the same time, two-factor authentication, quality crypto being used that requires, oh, I have to use

2:20:02 facial recognition and a fingerprint to only get into one email. I hope that with time phishing will become less and less effective just as people become better at it. Something I was going to mention that I've been thinking about, and you probably can say this better than I can, I've been thinking that What happened to the fax machine? Remember the fax machines? Oh yeah, doctors still use them, so do pharmacies. Yeah. What killed the fax? Well, my theory is we don't have any faxes, not because they didn't work well, they were great, not because they were expensive, they were cheap. What killed the fax

2:20:51 was the exploitation of the fax machine by fraudsters and places like fax.com that just bombarded people's fax machines with crap. It drained the paper. Yep, yep. Drained the paper and used it until finally people said, I don't need this stupid fax. And people stopped using it just because it was such an annoyance. My claim is that's what's going to happen to voice telephony. that people are slowly refusing to answer their telephones because, hey, there's so much scam. There's so much just robocalling. Oh, it's unbelievable. And I think what we're going to see happen in the long run is people will simply say,

2:21:43 I'm not going to use the phone. If I don't recognize the person calling me, I'm not going to answer it. And what will happen will be the telephony system that has taken, you know, what, 150 years, 130 years to develop. I think it'll slowly wither. And the entire reason being that it's so cheap and easy to scam people. And I don't know if I hope I'm wrong or I hope I'm right, but I think that with time people become immunized to it and say, hey, I'm not going to answer the phone. And

2:22:26 As things get exploited, people develop immunological responses. Yeah, stop using my... a lot of the Millennials to this day don't use the phone hardly ever. They just text everybody. Yeah, text it. Sure. And the people who are most exploited are old people because they're accustomed to trusting... Well, they're also more susceptible to getting scammed. Yeah, yeah. Often. Sure. Well, on that note, I think we've got enough material here. I think I'm going to stop this thing. Yeah, turn it off. I'll show you something cool downstairs. Okay. Here.

2:23:02 And that was Cliff Stoll in Oakland. I got a lot out of that interview. I haven't seen Cliff for a while and I thought it was fascinating to chat with him like that. And the cool thing about him? is he's one of those guys who can just talk. So if you're like the interview people and you don't want to get yourself too involved, you know, with your own opinions. People hear us all the time every three weeks. That's true. That's true. So why do they want to hear more of me? So Cliff loves to talk. So as you could tell, it was quite entertaining in every which way. I loved it. And thank you for doing that, John. It was extra, extracurricular activity.

2:23:41 For the wedding, for the show, for humanity. It gets me out of the house. This is true. All right everybody, we'll be back next Thursday with a regular episode on Deconstruction of the Best Podcast in the Universe. Remember us at thevorac.org slash NA. We'll have double donations, people to thank on the next show. Coming to you from Austin, Texas. In the morning, everybody, I'm Adam Curry. And from on the road, I'm John C. Dvorak. We return on Thursday right here on No Agenda. Until then, as always, adios, mofos, and such. The best podcast in the universe. Mofo. Dvorak.org slash N-A. Now everyone hug and share a secret.