(music)
My name is Nikoli, a.k.a. Socrates
and you are watching Singularity One On One
If you guys enjoy this show you can help me make it better
in two ways. Number one is you can write
a review on ITunes. Or number two, you can
simply make a donation. Today, my guest
on the show is Robert Steele. Robert Steele
is not only the author of Open Source Everything Manifesto,
but he's also a former spy, and CIA intelligence professional,
Marine Corps infantry officer, honorary hacker,
past presidential candidate and a top
Amazon reviewer devoted to non fiction
in 98 categories, who has done more than 1700 book reviews.
So, Hi Robert. Thanks very much for joining us tonight.
Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you.
Fantastic. So Robert, I introduced you
in kind of a very impressive paragraph
but, if I were to ask you to put yourself
in a sentence or two, how would you best do
that yourself?
Lived all over the world, had a great
many experiences and I am just stunned that
as a human race, we are not doing better.
Ah, interesting. We are not doing better.
So, let me ask you then, would you say that
in your view, we are making progress
or are we making regress? Are we going
forward or backwards?
You know, the answer is always some of each.
We have certainly made progress in poverty
and infectious disease and a few other areas,
but we have also managed to destroy the world
in the last fifteen years. We've gone from
25 failed states to 175 failed states. The policies
of the U.S. neo conservative government
not just under the Bush/Cheney administration
but, under Obama/Biden have essentially
destabilized the world. Europe is suffering
a two million illegal immigrants and I predicted
this in my second book in 2002.
I basically said, if you don't take care of
the poor, the poor will come to you.
This is fascinating, and there's so many
things I want to grab, so, I don't even know
which one to get first, but...Let me ask
you this. You said, 175 failed states, can you
please give us; elaborate on this more because...
Well, I don't have the graphic in front of me,
but if you look it up, just look up the
number of failed states. My point is, that
the United States government has chosen to
be the best friend of dictators, rather
than a champion of democracy. And, so for
example, in Saudi Arabia, which has an unemployment rate of 29 percent
among its young, we have chosen to allow
Saudi Arabia to export terrorism in the form of
wahabbism. We've asked Saudi Arabia to
create ISIS as a way of bringing down Syria
which is a totally unnecessary destabilization effort.
And, we are just generally allowing some
very bad things to happen. For example in
the Ukraine, we supported a neo Nazi fascist takeover.
And, the division of the country. We supported
a number of color revolutions all inherently
aimed at Russia, rather than at improving
the lives of the people in those countries.
Wow, you are already blowing my mind
here in the first couple of minutes,
so let me grab just one point. You said,
Saudi Arabia created ISIS. Can you elaborate on that?
If you look up online, who created ISIS, you'll
find out that ISIS was in fact created
out of the Libyan intervention, which was
started by the French, but exaggerated by the Americans
and CIA wanted to create a form of jihadist force
such as they created for Afghanistan and their
focus was on destabilizing and ultimately kicking Assad out of power
Assad has long been a Soviet client.
Some people call him a Soviet agent.
I personally think he's simply
the guy in charge of the country and we have no
business trying to kick him out of office.
I am totally opposed to the American
penchant for regime change. It should not
be our business to change regimes. It should
be our business to foster peace and prosperity.
So, okay, as a former political science
student myself, those are all very interesting
and very deep and profound and important,
vitally important topics, but, I'm going to actually have to pass on on that
and move on to the topic that I would like
to focus on today, which is, kind of, in a way, maybe
arguably more important than these particularities
so, let me ask you this, what is the
Open Source Everything Manifesto about?
Well, one of the things, I started the open source intelligence revolution
in the 1980's and as a spy I realized
one day how little we knew, because we were
focusing only on stealing secrets and so, I did an
inventory of what could be known using
open. legal, ethical methods and it turned
out that the U.S. government, because it relies
only on secrets, is working with roughly
2 percent of the available information.
It hasn't put into place a vehicle for actually
reaching out in 183 languages to collect
local knowledge and expert wisdom in languages
we don't speak from people we don't talk to.
And, so I created the open source intelligence
revolution and my soundbite at the time was
"Do not send a spy where a school boy can go."
Then I discovered the open source software
and open source hardware revolutions led by
among others The Free Software guy, ...(Richard Stallman)... Yes, exactly, RMS,
whom I admire very much. After looking at
open source software and open source hardware
I realized that they really weren't worth much
unless they also had open access, open data and
open spectrum and so then I started to
create a typology of opens. And, in 2007 I was
invited to be the key note speaker at Gnomedex
in Seattle and so I did a briefing on open source everything
and I identified about 30 opens. Then around
2011 I decided to write the book, The Open Source Everything Manifesto
and I was able to list about 60 opens.
Then after I published the book and got some attention,
the Guardian did a profile of me in 2014
by Nafeez Ahmed, then I realized that the opens
were chaotic. They were an arhcipelago.
They were not talking to each other. They
weren't collaborating with each other.
So, I worked with Michel Bauwens from the
Peer to Peer (P2P) Foundation and Marcin Jacobowski
from Open Source Ecology and we created a
construct of 9 core opens and within those
9 core opens, we picked 3 sub-opens for each
and our hope is that eventually we get all
of the opens to work together and create
smart cities that are not just on broadband
but, smart cities that eliminate all waste.
Mellissa Sterry is one of the wonderful people that
I listen to and pay attention to. She talks about
a bionic city and what would a city look like
if nature designed it? If nature designed
a city, it would have no fraud, waste or abuse.
It would have no agricultural waste, it
would have no energy waste. It would have
no waste of materials, housing and office
construction. It would have no wasted water.
We have systems, even if India builds
smart cities, they are about to builds 20
smart cities and they are making a huge
mistake, because they're defining their
smart city as solely and exclusively centered
on having broadband access. That's not a
smart city. That's a dumb city with access.
I have to agree with that part on India
and what smart city entails would be
much broader and bigger and deeper and
more profound then just broadband, but let
me push a little bit back on what you said,
"If nature designed a city, we'd have no fraud,
waste or abuse." I mean when I look at
nature, I see what Thomas Hobbs called
life being nasty, brutish and short and
often violent, so we have usually the
stronger killing the weak and old being
killed by the young, etc... etc... So, in
a way, maybe you could say that there is
no waste in nature because everything is
being recycled and reused but, I certainly
would say that it doesn't lack any abuse
or suffering or violence, but actually all
of those are abundant in my view.
Well, I take a more positive view and what
I am really thinking about in relation to
nature is energy and entropy. I'm not
thinking about the violence. You are
absolutely correct, but the bottom line
for me, is that we design things that are
very, very wasteful. For example, London
right now, is trying to create a smart city
and an internet of things and they're doing
absolutely nothing to get rid of all those
ugly highways. They are doing nothing to
reduce their dependence on petrol driven
vehicles. They are doing nothing to create
bicycle and pedestrian access. So, that's
not a smart city at all. That's a city, and
this is IBM's problem, that's a city in
which you are retro fitting gee-whiz
technologies for communications to really
absurd, wasteful, legacy, industrial era
artifacts. A smart city would actually be
a small city. It would be a city in which
agriculture would be integrated into every
neighborhood. it would be a city that you
could walk to work. It would be a city in
which all of the jobs were actually worth
doing. It would be the city in which the
arts and humanities would be present on
every level and in every neighborhood. So,
for me, we haven't had the conversation
about what a smart city really is and this
article that I have done for you on human
intelligence and open source technologies
is perhaps the beginning of that conversation.
I have to say that I really enjoyed your
article and I'm just about to publish it
so it should actually be published at the
time we publish the final edit of this
interview, so people will be able to check
it out and I have to say, as a cyclist myself,
and someone who is very concerned and
interested in sustainability and not wasting
things, I totally agree with you on the idea of a smart city. But you
know what? Allow me to, please roll back
the tape start at the beginning because
there is a kind of a seeming paradox
between your background and what you're
saying, so I want you to lead us through
the story of what led you to be where you
are, because, basically, you, in your book
even you say that in the 1980's you were
a republican, Reaganite, believer in trickle
down economics...
I WAS WRONG! I have repented my sins.
(Both laugh)
Okay but, but the question then is why
and how?
Well, let me tell you the story.
That's a very, very big shift.
I grew up as the son of an oil man. I went
into the marine corp as an infantry officer
and then from the Marine Corp the CIA came
in and pulled me out and I became a
clandestine service case officer. Now the
Marine Corp and the CIA are inherently
conservative organizations that do not
question authority. They basically obey
orders and do what they're told to do.
In 1988 I was asked by the Marine Corp to
leave the CIA and become the senior civilian
responsible for creating the Marine Corps
Intelligence Center, and I did that and I
spent twenty million dollars on very secret
equipment to access all secret information
and in one little corner I had a PC connected
to the internet and back in 1988 the internet
was something called "the Source", that was
the google of it's time. Well imagine my
surprise when all of my analysts started
lining up for the PC. And, I went to them
and I said, I've just spent twenty million
dollars so you can access everything that
NSA and CIA knows and you're standing in
line fora PC? And, they said, yes, because
CIA and NSA don't know anything about
Burundi, Haiti or Somalia, they only know
things about the Soviet Union and China
and North Korea and Iran. That was my
awakening. That was when I realized that
we had a cold war government with cold war
institutions that were focused obsessively
on a few heavy targets, like Russia and
China and were ignoring the entire rest
of the world. So, I started the Open Source
Intelligence revolution and in fact, I
testified to the Aspin-Brown Commission and
they asked me to do a competition of me
and my phone against a sixty billion dollar
a year intelligence community, and I won.
They set the target as Burundi and they
asked me to get whatever I could on Burundi
over night, it was over a weekend actually
and they asked the entire U.S. Intelligence
community to provide everything they had
on Burundi. They had nothing on Burundi.
Nobody cares about Burundi, but Burundi is
where the Marine Corps goes. I was able to
produce one to fifty thousand Russian combat
charts, maps for Burundi, French imagery,
spot imagery of Burundi, cloud free, less
than four years old, in the archives at the
1 to 50 level. Jane's Information Group,
my friend Alfred Rollington called in an
analyst for the weekend and he created an
order of battle for the tribes, not just the army
the U.S. intelligence community only does
armies that where uniforms they don't do
tribal orders of battle. I was able to get
from the Institute of Scientific Information
that the top hundred academics writing on
Burundi and Rwanda. From Lexis/Nexis I got
the top journalist writing on Burundi and
Rwanda, and I don't care what they've written
I just want them for debriefing. And, from
Oxford Analytica, I got the last twenty
reports they had done on the geo-political
implications of genocide in Burundi and
Rwanda. With five or six phone calls in one
day, I was able to put together more on
Burundi then the entire U.S. secret intelligence
community in the last ten years...
Because I knew who knew and was able to
reach out in the open source world and I
was able to pull this together. Okay? So,
that was my awakening. That's when I started
to realize U.S. government was actually a
military industrial complex that exists to
spend money to enrich the few. It's not
actually focused on furthering democracy
or creating prosperity for the average American.
And, what year was that again, when you...
1988.
I see.
In 1989 I ghost wrote an article for
Gen. Al Gray, in which I talked about
emerging threats as being non state actors
with off the shelf weapons, with no order
of battle, with no rules of engagement,
precisely what ISIS is today and the
Marine Corps tried to get the U.S. government
to invest money in preparing to go against
ISIS like capabilities and everybody refused.
Today we spend one percent on the infantry.
The other ninety nine percent is spent on
very heavy expensive things that don't do
what they're suppose to do and it turns out
that the U.S. government, U.S. military is
in the business of building really, really
expensive things that enrich a few corporations
but don't actually do anything to reduce
the number of amputees and dead, wounded
and suicides that we have. We do not have a human centric
military. We have a military that exists for
Lockheed Martin's convenience.
Yeah, and the F35 is a good example.
Absolutely, in fact the F35 is killing pilots
because nobody thought about the fact that
the chemicals that are associated with the
stealth covering would bleed into the cockpit
and kill pilots.
Wow, I didn't even know that.
Yeah, we are creating a lot of garbage and
oh, by the way, the Air Force doesn't know
how to run secure satellites so now all of
the Navy captains are learning celestial
navigation, and the army officers are trying
to figure out how they are going to know
where they are when the GPS goes out.
You shut down the GPS and the U.S. military
grinds to a halt. And, that's why I also
started getting interested in redundancy and
sustainability and survivor-ability.
I essentially realized that we have
a government that is spending a lot of
money creating things that don't actually
produce peace or prosperity.
Wow, and again, very dense answer with lots
of topics there, so let me see if I can
sort of lead the way to sort of reveal your
thesis and hopefully the most conducive way
possible. So, tell us... Perhaps the next step
will be best if we discuss sort of the
dichotomy or the tension or the opposition,
if you will, between secrecy on the one hand
and open source on the other hand, because
they do seem to be mutually exclusive.
So, we did already see your background
sort of, your 'A Ha' moment, your amazing
competition against the whole intelligence
community gathering that much on Burundi
over a weekend. So, now talk to us about
the shift from secrecy into open source
and how is that reasonable or the best
way forward?
(pause)
First, let's go back to the beginning of
the U.S. Secret Intelligence community,
people are only now starting to realize
that Allen Dulles was a traitor.
Allen Dulles went against Eisenhower and against
Kennedy and he single handedly rescued the
Nazi regime and much of the wealth of the
Nazi regime. Allen Dulles helped Nazi's
escape justice. He imported thousands of Nazi's,
not just scientists but leaders and people
that had run death camps and so forth.
--- We also captured all of the gold in
the Philippines, that the Japanese had
taken from China and elsewhere and then
they buried it in the Philippines when our
submarines were interrupting the return of
the gold to Japan. That gold, it's a story
that's told in a book called "Gold Warriors"
by Peggy and Sterling Seagraves, that gold
became the Black Lilly covert action fund
and Allen Dulles used that fund to restore
fascists in Italy, Japan and Germany and it
became.... what's that?
Guatemala perhaps?
Also. We love fascists. We love fascists
in Indonesia as well. Essentially CIA became
a, something that Harry Truman never, ever
anticipated. And, Harry Truman himself wrote
a letter in the Washington Post in 1968 that
said that he had never intended for CIA
to become a covert operations organization.
But, it was able to use secrecy under
Allen Dulles to escape accountability.
I have testified to the Secrecy Commission
of Senator Patrick Moynihan and I testified
to the effect that secrecy nine times out of
ten is not used for good reasons, it's used
to avoid accountability and it's used to
do evil in our name, without being discovered.
Now, openness is actually important because
openness is subject to audit. One of the
problems with the secret community is that
it believes in what are called bi-lateral
relations. So, for example Americans will
meet with the Germans one on one and they
will meet with the French one on one then
they will meet with the Jordanians one on one
and what happens is that two governments
lie to each other...because there is no third
party present, there is no real quality
control. Now the neat thing about the
openness environment is it's multi-national.
And not only is it multi-national, but you
have eight tribes. I call these eight
tribes of information. The academic tribe,
the civil society tribe, which includes labor
unions and religions, the commerce tribe,
which is especially small business, governments,
especially local, law enforcement, media,
military, media, including bloggers like
yourself. And then, military and non-governmental.
Now, I did my first graduate thesis on
predicting revolution. My second graduate
thesis was on strategic information management
and what I discovered was that the
government was essentially operating on
two percent of the relevant information.
Most of the information that we need in
order to make good decisions is known to
people who haven't put it on-line, don't
speak English, don't have security clearances
and generally don't like the U.S. government,
but because of the way in which we are
structured...If you look at a typical
embassy overseas, the diplomats are
outnumbered, by all the other people from
other agencies that don't trust the Department
of State to do it right. The embassy officers
don't have money with which to buy legal
ethical information from private investigators,
or investigative journalists or information
brokers, or commercial intelligence companies,
the only people with money are the spies
and the spies insist that you commit treason
before they'll listen to you.
This is a very perverted way of collecting
information. So, what you end up with
is a country team, that essentially collects
twenty percent at best of what can be known
and then, because they are supposed to
coordinate anything that goes out electronically,
instead of coordinating electronic messages that can
be shared with everybody, they send what
they collect back in the pouch, a physical
pouch. And, what that means is we spill
eighty percent of what we collect,
because once it gets back in a hard copy
volume to a desk officer that's overworked,
that desk officer will either file it or
throw it away. They will not exploit it.
And this comes to the whole big data issue.
Mary Meeker has said we process less than
one percent of the big data that we collect.
While the intelligence community and the
U.S. government are in the same position,
we have spent the last fifty years developing
collection systems. We haven't been developing
processing and analytic systems.
I wrote a forward to a book on cyber hosting
by Stephen Arnold and my forward outlines
the failures of the intelligence, of the
information technology community over the
last fifty years. We focus on big, expensive ways
of collecting and storing information, we
have not focused on ways to help people
share information and make sense of
information across all boundaries.
Wow... (smiles)
Okay... Fascinating. So, basically
intelligence, as you describe it is in a
big mess but, let's perhaps define.
What do you mean by the term "intelligence"
when you speak of it? What is it that you
are referring to?
I'm so glad you asked that because
properly understood, intelligence means
decision support. Data is a single element
whether it's a signal or an image or a
text document, that's data. Information is
data that has been integrated and had value
added and is then broadcast generically.
So, for example a newspaper is information,
where all these journalists have taken all
these sources of data, they've created these
generic articles and then they broadcast them.
Intelligence is decision support that seeks
to answer a very specific question by a
very specific decider or decision group.
When I was lecturing in Spain, one of the
things I found, was that, when I asked people
who was the client, they would say, oh well
IBM is the client or the trade ministry
is the client, I would say, no. The client
is the specific human being that is going
to be making the decision. If you aren't
focused on what that specific human being needs
to know, wants to know and has to know
than you are nothing more than a classified
newspaper.
So, we've described how intelligence fails
today. We've defined it. Now let's take
the next step.
What is open source intelligence
as being distinctive from secretive classic
traditional intelligence?
Well, one of the dirty little secrets of
the secret intelligence community is that
it doesn't really produce a lot of useful
information. It doesn't actually produce
decision support. I wrote an article for
Counterpunch called, "Intelligence for the
President and Everybody Else", the CIA for
example does not produce useful decision
support for the Department of Agriculture,
the Department of Energy, the Department
of the Interior, the Department of Housing,
Health and Human Welfare, it doesn't do
decision support, for the rest of the government,
and part of the problem, which is understandable,
is that they think that they are in the
business of secrets for the President, and
they believe that open source intelligence
should be done by the customers themselves.
And that's a mistake. Because the craft of
intelligence, I've written ten books...
One of my favorite books is my second book
"The New Craft of Intelligence - Personal,
Public and Political". More recently I've
written a book called, "Intelligence for Earth -
Clarity, Diversity, Integrity and Sustainability"
and that's more or less my magnum opus.
It has over a thousand five hundred links in it,
so, if you buy the kindle version, you can
then link to all of my book reviews and all
of the other documents that I support it
with. Okay? The craft of intelligence is
about having an objective, professional
group that is able to craft a requirement
and partnership with the person being
supported. That's requirement's definition.
Then they do collection management,
they know who knows, they go out and they
pull in all these sources from many different
places, and this can also be done discreetly
whether you are doing it open source or
closed source. Then they do processing,
man machine processing and one of the
problems that we have with machine processing
is that I was ignored. In 1988 I told the
General Defence Intelligence Program Committee
that we had to have geo-spatial attributes
on every datam or we would never be able
to do machine speed visualization of all
data all the time. We still don't have that.
Okay? So, machine processing is actually
severely limited due to lack of the geospatial
attributes on every datam. And then you do
man processing, one of problems that we have
in both the intelligence community and the
customer base, is we have a mix of young
people and political appointees, not subject
matter experts. I wrote an article for the
U.S. Institute for Peace in 1997 and we
talked about the chasm, the gap between
people with power and people with knowledge,
that gap is now catastrophic. Decisions are
made in Washington on the basis of who has
paid for that decision, not on the basis of
evidence or the public interest.
So, Open Source intelligence is the
application of the craft of intelligence
legally and ethically to create smart cities,
smart nations, smart companies, smart citizens.
It's about not being a sheep.
--- Wow. Okay, not being a sheep.
Bahahahaha...
---
I love that. I absolutely love that.
So, but you are going to be giving the tools
for people not to be sheep any more, but
then you have to really kind of presume or
assume that they would care to do that,
wouldn't you?
You know, one of the things I've decided
that if I ever work for a President and I'm
ever offered my dream job, I want to be
Secretary of Education, Intelligence and
Research, together.
One of the problems we have, is we have
an educational system that trains sheep.
---
It basically requires kids to sit still for
eighteen years. That's a crime against
humanity. It beats the creativity out of children.
It tries to teach children to not question
authority. It completely closes them
off from the real world. I think we need to
radically alter education, and we need to make
education a life long endeavour, at the same
time that we make meaningful work and creative
artistic work, including the arts and music,
and everything. I mean music helps your
brain. The arts help your brain.
So, we have, we're at the end of the
industrial era. The industrial era was
about turning the population into obedient
sheep and factory workers and now we're
getting into an era, and part of the problem
with the singularity approach is it doesn't
understand the true costs. Okay? So, you're
smart phone for example has at least 5 dead
Chinese in it, because the Chinese are
required to dip their hands into class A
carcinogenic in order to build that smart
phone and what that means is that the
Chinese that have touched and built your
smart phone have essentially come down
with leukaemia and they are now in a
leukaemia ward or they're dead and buried.
So, there is a human cost to the singularity
that has not been properly evaluated.
That sounds a little bit too much to me,
I mean in the sense that I totally agree
on the, on the, sort of, carcinogenic
things but, Apple has sold, on their own
like hundreds of millions of phones, if we
had five dead people for each phone, the
whole Chinese population would disappear.
All right, you just killed my math, but,
it's a very good idea, we need to run the
number up to five. Look for an article...
Nikoli: (inaudible)....if you were more specific. Roberts: ...I have a link, I have a link
I have a link in my article for you called,
"The Human Cost of Computing" and so you'll
see the data there on Chinese coming down
with Leukaemia, you're probably right. You
are probably talking one Chinese for every
thousand phones, or something like that.
I don't know what the number is. The point
is people do come down with leukaemia
while building smart phones.
And I agree on that point, I just disagree
it's going to be five because I actually think
that that's actually...(inaudible)
You've got me. I'm wrong. I confess my sins.
Yeah...okay... And one of the ones that I
liked from those examples you have listed
there is actually a very kind of obvious
one, in a sense that, for example each
plastic water bottle requires water equal
to six or seven water bottles.
It's insane.
Right. To hold one water bottle worth
of water.
Then now, what's interesting is in the last
few years, several excellent processes have
come up for recycling plastic, but we're
still not doing it. There is just this
attitude of waste. I think the
day is going to come when trash dumps
become gold mines.
That's part of the singularity crowd though.
I like that. I didn't know that.
Yeah...The sort of, the fact that there will
be lots of treasure buried there for recycling
and for future entrepreneurs, at least
that's one of the ideas anyway.
It's a good one.
But, how and when it's about to be seen
at least the the scale, to the exponential
scale that we are hoping it will be.
But, I'm not seeing it yet and I'm on
your side to the extent that waste and
sort of negative actualities that we see
in the exponential production of many of
these things.
Well, let's talk exponential and scale.
One of the reasons open source engineering
is so important a concept is because
open source everything engineering is also
distributed, no barrier to entry engineering.
So this means that anybody can recycle
waste. Anybody can be an entrepreneur
without having to get a lot of capital
investment without having to create large
organizations and fixed plans and things
like that. So, the whole concept behind
Open Source Everything is that you have
open money, open politics, open standards,
you have open energy, open food, open water.
All of this is way of unleashing entrepreneurial
capabilities among humans.
Yeah, and I agree with you on that end and
I have huge problems personally with the
(inaudible) system as it is right now etc...
But you know, the classic counter arguments
to that is of course is the issue of innovation
and, or the incentive to innovate, so, how
do you address that? If we open source
everything, people say, no one be innovating
any more because people don't get any
incentive...
I, I, I, I don't think that's true. Now I
will grant you there is still a lot of
struggling about Open Source revenue models.
The way that...
I'm a good example of that myself.
No, I understand and one of the discussions
I've had with the Open Source software guys
is that essentially the open source software
that they create is in theory a calling card.
It's an example. It's a way of announcing
themselves and then, in theory, they get
paid for being part of a larger team that
goes on to migrate and transform and so forth.
There's actually a number of open source
revenue models and what they all seem to
focus on is that the money is not made in
the foundation, but in the finish.
It's made on the edges. I, myself have not
been in a normal job since the first of
January 2008. I have been working on the
edges, on the margins. I mean, today
I gave a briefing for a thousand dollars
and, it's a very uncomfortable existence,
it's a very....
unpredictable and (inaudible)
Yes! Yes! Now part of this larger concept
is a basic income for everybody.
In an open source world with an open
government that is totally honest and
transparent you would no longer have the
concentration of wealth. You would no
longer have the tax avoidance of the
very rich. You would in fact have more
then enough wealth for everybody. If we
had... If we had gone into Afghanistan and
Iraq with all the money that we spent
destroying those two countries, and we had
instead given everybody an annual salary and
created two story houses with swimming
pools with water and electricity and free
internet for the kids, the middle east
would be a better place today and we
probably would only have spent half as
much money and we would not have all
these residual costs of the Falluja
uranium babies, and the Iraqi military
officers now running ISIS units
in opposition. So, I talk about holistic
analytics, true cost economics and
open source engineering and all three
need to be together. The problem that we
have right now is that we are at the very
end of the proprietary technology,
scientific, financial paradigm. And that's
the paradigm which says everybody is a
slave and I own the intellectual property
and I can sell it and profit from it and
become a millionaire.
And do you think we are at the end of it
because international treaties like for
example, TPPA most recently...
TPPA is a crime against humanity and anybody
who voted for that should be impeached.
Well, the Canadian government believe it
or not is kind of considering it now and
I'm huge opponent of them doing it, but
that was negotiated in secret by the previous
government and I don't even know...
It was negotiated in secret, it has secret
clauses, it is essentially a fascist treaty.
It allows corporations to tell governments
what to do.
And sue them and force them to do stuff
in their own country.
Look, one of the cool things about the
future is that absentee landlords have no
standing. The day is going to come when all
these big agricultural tracks are taken
over by individual human beings. And,
there is going to be nothing that the big
agricultural landowning companies can do.
They are literally going to lose their land.
Because it's not their land. I believe in
the French and the Mexican system with
community land ownership. This is the
original indigenous Native American concept
so that a family can have a hundred year
lease that is transmittable forever to
other family members, but it cannot sell
the community land, it can use the community
land that is assigned to it to make a profit
but it cannot do any harm to the land.
So, for example no Monsanto GMO seeds
no pesticides. You know, we're...
There's a book called "1491" that says that
the average Mayan head of household had
to work sixty days a year in order to
support a family of five. The rest of the time
they were doing arts and crafts and
killing each other.
Okay, so again, many, many things there.
So, but, if TPPA is what it is, then it seems
to me that that regime that you're saying
is coming to an end, I think, the way I
see it is pretty strong and powerful and
perhaps ever present and overwhelmingly
so ...
It's an illusion...It's an illusion that has been
carefully crafted using movies and the media
and the educational system. There is
a wonderful cartoon of the ninety nine
percent standing on a plank and the other
end of the plank is out over the grand
canyon and the one percent is standing
on the end of the plank that is out over
the grand canyon and on the ninety nine
percent side, one of the 99%er's turns
and says why are we standing on this plank?
That day is coming..
I sure hope so, but then the concern is,
of course, how is that look like, because
there's many ways, shapes and forms that
can come of it and there's many alternative
visions to the world that that can come...
And I think the answer to that, I've read
a number of books on self determination
and secession, Quebec for example,
I believe will be it's own country within
the next five to ten years. Catalan will
be it's own country within five to ten
years. Scotland will be it's own country.
Hawaii will be it's own country within
five to ten years. There are five
thousand secessionist movement around
the world. There are twenty seven
secessionist movements in the United States.
Vermont, Alaska, Texas, Hawaii and a portion
of California and also Oregon and
Washington among others, Long Island,
New York City has talked about leaving the
state of New York, but my point is
I think eventually we are going to get to
a world in which diversity is appreciated again.
We have centralized too much.
I think we call that Canada, where I come
from, but anyway, that's of course a partial
point of view and I don't see the...I see
what your saying and I agree with most of
it, the Quebec example I kind of tend to
disagree with because most of the young
people that I talked to today from Quebec
are not concerned with that issue as
one of the major issues of our time.
They're more concerned with ecology,
with the economy, with security, with their
future job prospects, with things like that
and, probably Quebec as a sovereign state
is not probably even in the top ten, and
certainly not in the top five, as far as I
can tell. But, the other ones maybe I see
that more in Catalonia for example, of what
you're talking about and we see lots of
recent signs of it. I don't see those signs
in Canada per say.
Well, I guess what I want to say to you,
there is an excellent book by a former
Professor of mine, Charles Bednar, called,
"Transforming the Dream", and what he talks
about essentially is that the industrial era
paradigm has now reached the end of it's
supportable life. We're going to see
increasing collapses. I'm looking for
an economic collapse in the United States
in the next year. I'm looking for a collapse
in Europe. This whole... I mean, we've had
two million illegal immigrants go to Europe
in the last two years. Two million! Okay?
So, what's happening now is that governments
are no longer legitimate in the eyes of a
majority and you have concentrated wealth
and I, I, I don't have it in my article for you
but, I can certainly share it with you.
The most popular graph on my website
is "The Preconditions of Revolution Graphic",
because it outlines all the things that
can go wrong in political, legal, socio-
economic, ideal cultural, techno-demographic
and natural geographic terms. And what's
happening right now in the west is all of
those conditions are present.
Do you think that the situation in Europe
and the United States and Canada is all
the same, because I see...
No. They are all different.
Right. That's how I see it. I see that
first coming to the United States if
any where, and secondly is that necessarily
a good thing or not?
Well, you know, going back to your comment
about nature being nasty and brutish,
if the United States government is so
stupid as to not focus on the well being
of its population, then all of the chaos
that occurs in the United States has been
brought on by the U.S. government and what's
going to happen is the states are going to
devolve. They are going to begin nullifying
federal regulations. They're going to be
ending federal ownership of land.
The federal government was intended to
be a kind of administrative convenience.
It's the United States of America, not the
united people of America. It was the states
that created the federal government and
I believe the future is going to eventually
see the federal government forbidden from
owning land or taxing citizens directly.
And the states will be providing a portion
funding for services of common concern.
I expect the U.S. military to be cut back,
not quite to Canada's scale, but I expect
some major, major cuts in how we spend
money. I expect an end to borrowing.
I expect a balanced budget. We're, I mean,
we've literally been living a criminal dream.
Okay, but, to me, what you're saying
sounds like, I mean, from a former political
scientist, as I am, the definition of a state
is "that body which has the monopoly over
the organized means of violence."
In a certain graphical.. (inaudible)
Well McIver wrote a wonderful book,
"The Origin of the State" and he talks about
a number of functions not just the ownership
of violence. Chris Hedges wrote a book
recently on wages of rebellion and, of course,
Russell Brand has written a wonderful book
on revolution. Revolutions happen when
three things ...
The comedian Russell Brand?
What?
Yes. Yes. He wrote a book that I reviewed on
revolution. I liked it very much. Three
things are coming together. First is
concentrated wealth together with unemployment
which is no less then twenty three percent
in the United States today. In some groups it's
forty percent. Single Mom's with a kid,
people of colour, young people with new
college degrees and older guys like myself
it's forty percent unemployment. Okay? So,
concentrate...
Why do official statistics are so different?
Because the government lies.
The government doesn't count everybody
that's given up looking for work, doesn't
count people are holding three part time
jobs with no benefits. It's literally a
theatre, I mean Chris Hedges wrote a
wonderful book called "Empire of Illusion"
The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle. More recently he's written a
book called "Wages of Rebellion" which
contains the third condition for revolutiion.
The first two are concentration of wealth
and illegitimate government in the eyes of
the people. The third is when the military
and law enforcement stop enforcing the law
and no longer support the elites in their
control of the population, we are very
close to that point.
But to me that sounds like a very concerning (inaudible) thing (inaudible)... you know,
to me, that sounds like a civil war. I mean, one of the French
revolutionaries, I can't remember who it was,
but he said, "Revolution is a blood thirsty
monster that once let out, you cannot easily
put back in."
It's true but...
all of them got guillotinized in the end.
Well, let me point out to you the difference
between a civil war and a war of succession.
A civil war is one where you are trying to
become the owner of the state and have a
monopoly on violence and be in control
of everything. A war of succession is much
easier to win. A war of succession says
do what you want, I'm out of here. You no
longer have authority in my state.
Take the state of Texas for example,
that is a state that could very, very
easily kick the federal government out
and there is absolutely nothing Washington
can do about that.
Really, but Washington commandeers the
army, Texas has just some militia.
Texas has the Texas National Guard and
I think you will find that two out of three
U.S. soldiers will not fire on U.S. citizens.
I hope so, but I'm not sure about that
because if you look at the1960's, there was
this famous case, I forget which University
was it that...(inaudible)
Kent State.
Right. And, people got killed and those
were protesters and many of those...
One person got killed and it created
national outrage. Look, the times have
changed. I mean the videotaping of
Rodney King.
Look how many black people get shot
all the time.
And what is happening now is that the
police are now under scrutiny. I mean,
we, the police killed 140 people in
March of last year. What's happening
is that the internet is making cell phone
cameras a major resource for citizens
and it is helping share outrage. Where I
think we're going and I'm actually optimistic,
because for example Lady Lynn Rothschild
ran a conference on inclusive capitalism.
That's code for stop the pitchforks. There are
silicone valley billionaires talking about
redemptive capitalism. That's code for
stop the pitchforks.
Tony Blair use to call that capitalism with
a human face ...
Or compassionate capitalism. Frankly, I
think capitalism is a bad term that should
be ex-sponged, because laborism is the
human side of it. I think we need to
reorient our economies to people and
communities and we need to get away from
these, these, huge supply chains that have
absolutely no respect for true costs.
If you look at a single...It took one of my
guys a whole year to identify the true cost
of a single cotton t-shirt. And, I include
that in your article, in the article that
I did for you.
Yes.
I mean, a single cotton t-shirt has
x gallons of water and all this fuel
and toxins and child labor.
We need to start doing more localized
manufacturing. I mean Buckminster Fuller
was the first person to say, that most
people's jobs are not worth the petrol
they use to get to and from work.
That's a very profound observation.
I would agree like with a couple of street
blocks in New York City and here in Toronto
we call it Bay Street by the way. We don't
call it Wall Street we call it Bay Street.
I would agree with that mostly, but
I don't know. Especially for the Texan
example, going back again to it. I don't
see Texas going to laborism any time soon,
myself. I see Texas even if it succeeds,
being very kind of laissez-faire, hard core
Baptist, Presbyterian, Capit...
Laissez-faire is the key term. Live and let live,
But laissez-faire is kind of the libertarian
pro-capitalist moniker isn't it?
Yeah, and one of the concerns, I was going
to run as a Libertarian candidate for President
but it became clear, they didn't want me.
One of the problems with Libertarians is
that they don't understand communitarianism.
It sounds like communism to them.
Well, they're so individual that they think
that an individual who is owning land
for example at the beginning of a river
has the right to crap in that river
and never mind the people downstream.
So, you have to have a community spirit
in which you have holistic analytics and
true cost economics and everybody understands
what the costs and the benefits are for
having civilized codes of behavior.
Okay, let's move on our conversation here
to a couple of examples and a couple of
terms, terms that you use in your book that
important, I believe. Let me just bring
in a couple of criticisms or critical
points of view. So if we are going
Open Source Everything, for example,
one of the things that we are open sourcing,
engineering, software engineering, all of
software, etc..etc... So, let me ask you first,
Are you a Linux user yourself?
No, but my next computer is going to be an
open source computer that only runs one
program at a time. With no Microsoft.
I still have a computer that's seven years
old. So I'm still using my company computer.
And, what OS is it running?
It's Microsoft.
It's Windows.
Yeah. Which is horrible. In fact, I just
found out if I deleted all the Windows Live
stuff, my computer runs better.
One of the shortfalls that we've had in
recent years is, is we haven't had a proper
open source laptop. Now there are a couple.
There's a company, a penguin company,
that builds an open source laptop. There's
another company that just came out and
they build a laptop in which they advertise
that every single software and hardware
has no back doors.
Yeah, and those are all Linux based.
I mean, no, what I meant to say is they
have no messaging, they have non of this
unauthorized stuff that goes on in the
background. One of the things that
infuriates me about Microsoft is all of
the processes are running without control
when all I want to do is type a memo.
That's the only thing I want running, not
all that other stuff, but no, I'm not a coder,
I am more of a meta-guy.
Yes. Yes. Clearly. But, so anyway, so you're
leaning toward Linux but you're not quite
there yet. Because, the reason that I ask
this or one of the reasons anyway was that
I don't know. You've read a lot of books,
a lot of books. Have you read Jaron Lanier's,
"I Am Not a Gadget" and then I forget what
his latest ...
I like him very much. He has a chapter in
a book that I published called,
"Collective Intelligence, Creating A Prosperous
World at Peace". I know him and I like him.
He's a big opponent of open source software,
he says in his book that all of the
innovation, historically speaking, has
happened in for-profit software and
the open source community at best has
always been just following behind and
kind of implementing the innovation that
has been done by (inaudible) ...
Well I would disagree with him and
I'll tell you why. Time is the one
strategic variable that cannot be bought
and cannot be replaced. Time really matters.
And, right now all of the proprietary technology
if we wanted to transfer it to the five billion
poor, it's unaffordable, it's not interoperable,
and it will not scale.
You think open source can do that?
Yeah. I do. Yes I do and in fact I proposed
an Open Source Technology's Agency in a
memorandum which I link in this artlicle
that I've given you.
And, why would it be able to accomplish such
scaling for five billion people whereas,
the alternatives from be it Microsoft or
be it Apple will not?
Because it's open. Because it's adaptable,
cause it's transparent. Because it will
essentially harness the distributed intelligence of the
five billion poor. See part of the problem
with proprietary technology is it's not
teaching people how to fish. It's giving them
a closed program. It's giving them a
closed box. If you give them an open box
then they will invent new things with it.
And I don't have all the answers, but what
I do know with certainty is that what we
are doing now is not working and it's not
scalable. Now I wrote a white paper for
the United Nations called,
"Beyond Data Monitoring" and that's also
linked in this article that I've done for you.
And, I make the point that the current plan
to achieve the sustainability development
goals is ridicules. Not only are the donor
promises not going to materialize, but
eighty to ninety percent of the money is
then consumed by United Nations and
intermediate organizations. Less than ten
percent of the money gets to the village
level. Now if you combine an open source
everything approach together with what
Ghani from Afghanistan has recommended,
which is electronic bank accounts at the village
level, then you can put one hundred percent of
the money to the village level and bypass all
these intermediaries that are buying
themselves first class tickets around the
world.
Yeah, that's a good point per say.
I think the whole idea of an
open source world is you move away from
the fenced commons.
I mean, proprietary technology is a way of
fencing the commons and it is too
restrictive for the kind of scale that we
need to achieve in the next ten years.
You see, and I agree with you entirely on
the theoretical end of things and I've been a,
a strong sympathizer to open source software
yet, I've been using Microsoft myself and
the last time I did actually a deeper analysis
on the potential for me migrating to Linux
was maybe a couple of years ago and at the
time there were all kinds of issues with
drivers for video cards and you know, video
codecs, which are of course proprietary and
you know I am a blogger and a podcaster
so I need to be able to edit my audio and
or video for things like that...
But, imagine if you had an open source
alternative for every single one of those.
Yes, that would be fantastic, but there
were problems because of course the
companies are creating those motes, those
barriers, those impediments.
In 1994 we talked about Microsoft and how
it mutates and migrates it's application
program interfaces. I mean Microsoft has
done some great things, but it has set
information technology back twenty years
because it has retarded the ability to create
sense making programs and data
management programs and all these other
things. Microsoft basically said, just,
this is just like Facebook, Facebook is making
the same mistake with facebook basic.
Microsoft is saying screw you, were gonna
go five miles and hour and you better like it.
That's what Facebook is trying to do to India,
okay? That's insane. We ought to put Facebook
and Google and Microsoft out of business.
And, Cisco and Oracle.
But, the Indians turn them down I think.
Didn't they?
Yes, which is good. Which is very good.
Yeah, that was quite impressive and I think
they are going, and even in places like
certain municipal cities in Germany I noticed
just in the last couple of years they did
migrate from Microsoft administrative systems
to Linux.
It's not just them, the Norwegians, the Chinese
a whole bunch of people have said, we should
not require our citizens to buy a proprietary
product in order to read government information.
And that comes back to my vision for
open access, open data requires open
software and open hardware, it also requires
open spectrum. WIFI should be free or this
new thing LIFI with the light bulbs, it's wonderful.
Tell us a little bit about what you called
the panarchy model. Can you unpack that
for us?
The what?
Panarchy.
Oh panarchy. Well that's more Micheal Bowens's
thing, but you know panarchy is essentially
informed self governance. It's extreme democracy.
It's everybody working together and having
voice and vote on any issue that they wish.
Let's us, pick up the pace then. Let's talk
about the importance of what you call
ethics and integrity.
Oh I love that question. There's a guy
named Robert James Beckett in the
United Kingdom and you can look him up on
my website PhiBetaIota, but he talks
about we're moving from the age of information
into the age virtue. I agree with that.
In their book, "The Lessons of History",
Will and Ariel Durant who wrote the eleven
volume story of civilization say that morality
is a strategic asset of incalculable value.
Ethics is about the truth and transperancy
and trust. Ethics is how a civilization hands
on the lessons of history from one generation
to the next. Ethics is the cultural code
for getting the most out of any group
in any situation with the least amount of
damage and the least amount of waste.
So, ethics is an operating system.
I love that actually. Ethics is an operating system.
Yes.
Hmmm. I like that very much. Interesting.
That, I would have to ponder on that and
maybe I'll steal it from you.
You drew that out of me. That is the first
time I have ever said that.
Awesome. Excellent. And, so perhaps I'm
contributing a little bit which is...
Ethics is an operating system. You have my
permission to take it.
I'll steal it for sure but, you should...
No, it's open source.
Exactly and because it's open source it
wouldn't be a problem but, tell us a
little bit about, since we are that topic,
the importance of bloggers like me,
because you see I'm a blogger and people
have often a misconception that I blog
about technology, but I actually do not blog
about technology. Technology is just a context.
I actually blog about ethics.
Look, I was Ithe opening speaker at
Hackers on Planet Earth in 1994
and in my speech I said that hackers were
the only people who had the combination
of intelligence and integrity to identify
deficiencies in communications and computing
systems that the companies themselves
were either unaware of or trying to hide.
And, I said that hackers have a social
responsibility to reveal those vulnerabilities
and my proposed approach to them was
report the vulnerabilities to the company
and give them thirty days to fix it. And at
the end of thirty days announce it publicly.
So, since you are mentioning social
responsibility, that means that you actually
would remain in support of people such
as, for example, Julian Assange or even
Edward Snowdon.
Yes and let me point out that I think
Edward Snowden is a CIA operation.
Approved by the White House.
That kind of blows my mind now.
Well, we could talk about that.
Look, Snowden was a nobody. He went from being
a security guard to being a CIA technical
specialist and placed by Booz Allen in
Hawaii as a contractor. Snowden, and I've
met his parents. I like his parents very much.
They're loyal, patriotic Americans. Snowden
has all the signs of being a classic operation
and our state department is stupid, but
they are not so stupid as to take Snowdens
passport away so that he has to stay in
Russia unless we want him to stay in Russia.
That's an interesting point.
Okay well, that's another point I need to
Look, the bottom line is everyone has
different motivations. I like to quote a CEO in New York
Bob Seelert from Saatchi and Saatchi Worldwide.
He says until you get the truth on the
table, no matter how ugly it is, you're not
in a position to deal with it. And one of the
problems that we with western governments
and western banks and western corporations
is that they lie. As a persistent characteristic
of how they do business.
The war in Iraq was based on nine hundred and
thirty five now documented lies. There's a
book by that title, "935 Lies" and what it
actually talks about is the loss of ethics
in politics. In theory, and I wrote a
wonderful post many years ago that
was featured in a profile in which I talked
about how politics and intelligence are in
theory the highest forms of serving the public,
but only when they are both ethical.
I agree with you completely on that point too.
Okay. So, what we have now, Matt Tabbi has
written a book called "Griftopia", and on
page 32 he has a quote and my summary of
that book is on Amazon, in which he says that
what we have now in the United States is a
state of griftopia, in which political crime
and financial crime have merged. The reason
political crime and financial crime have
merged is because the citizens have abdicated
their responsibility for paying attention.
Now, when I spoke at Gnomedex in 2007.
Gnomedex is a conference of bloggers.
I suggested to them that they attach
themselves like leeches to individual
corporations and individual issues and
that they become citizen intelligence
minutemen, which is a phrase that
Alisandro Politi coined in 1992 when he
attended my first conference on
open source solutions. So in the ideal,
every citizen should be a citizen intelligence
professional who is focused with laser like
intensity so that they become the world's
top expert on x, y or z and nothing escapes
their notice. I want to do for open source
what Linus Torvalds did for Linux.
In other words I want all the poverty authors
and all the citizens observing poverty to
be part of one massive global brain
poverty slice. The same thing for infectious
disease, the same thing for environmental
degradation. The same thing for potholes.
I mean, there are now wonderful apps
where a citizen can tap there phone and
report a pothole. I want to create the world
brain. And, in fact I have an essay on saving
civilization.
Well, tell us a little more about the concept
of that world brain looks like.
Well, I own three of the url's, worldbrain.net
dot org and dot com. And I have a graphic
on the world brain. Basically worldbrain.net
should be permenent identities
that also include anonymity and privacy
and rights and security and worldbrain.org
should be, like the global library. It's free
to everybody. Worldbrain.edu should be
global education one cell call at a time.
So, I don't care what it is that you want
to know you should be able to get it in
a five minute video that is directly related
to the moment in time.
And then worldbrain.com would be a profit
making activity in which communities would
agree to crowd fund very specific developments.
Well, I want to tell your listeners, if they
go to tinyurl.com/steele-future - and I think
I have this link in the article that I wrote
for you. but, steele-future as a tinyurl
has all of my latest work, including
the saving civilization essay and that calls
for a school of future oriented hi-grade
governance. It calls for a multi-national
decision support center so that the U.N.
will stop making decisions based on
American lies. It calls for an open source
technologies agency. Let see, what else,
oh, it calls for a United Nations Open Source
Decision Support Information Network.
Eventually, we should be able to connect
all information and all languages all the time.
But let me ask you, all of those things so
far that you said like, open source
intelligence world brain connecting
everything, all the knowledge and all the
languages all the time. All those things to me
sound like Google. Google.
No, you know, I, I really like and admire
Vint Cerf. He and I met in 1992 when I was
attending The Annual Internet Society Conferences.
And, I bought Vint sushi before he went to
the dark side. You know and I said, "Vint,
for God sakes get Google to give us some
tools for making sense." And I'm sorry to say
that hasn't happened. Now you know, now
are you aware Google started basically on
the basis of three crimes. Google stole
the yahoo search engine.
I don't know about that.
Yes. They have recently paid one billion
dollars as a quitclaim, so Google stole
the yahoo search engine and then modified
it to become Google. They received funding
from the CIA Office of Research and Development.
And they were able to pick up all of the
AltaVista employees that Hewlitt Packard
closed down. Those are the three things
that created Google
and my friend Stephen Arnold has written
three books about Google. The Google Trilogy.
Google, in my view has done some really
excellent things, but Google is also a fraud.
It hasn't actually made money. It's operating
on shareholder cash, okay. Google is driven
by search engine advertising revenue
and that is collapsing. I think Google is gone.
And, frankly I think Facebook is gone
at some point. If India really, really wanted
to create a smart nation and smart cities
they should be harnessing all their universities
to create the anti-google and the anti-facebook
and then on top of it put the tools that I've
identified. Eighteen different tools.
Well, I can sympathize with sort of the
desire to have alternatives to Google and
Facebook and perhaps in sort of the
open source realm of, but
that's great, I just don't see the end of either
Google nor Facebook any time soon.
Well, I see the end of IBM
you know, I mean this is gonna happen
inevitably. Google and Facebook serfed
the wave perfectly. They are utterly brilliant
and I don't begrudge them for a moment,
their great success, but they're not good
enough and that's my bottom line.
Okay. Let me ask you this then. First of all,
it's just a curious question. How in the
world have you managed to write seventeen hundred
book reviews? Like, I read a lot of books
myself, probably in the five to seven,
eight hundred range maybe...
Right. Let me say first off when Google,
I mean when Amazon started the review system,
I had already written two books and each of
those two books had a hundred fifty
annotated bibliographic entries. So I had
a total of three hundred mini book reviews,
one paragraph. I loaded all of those to
Amazon on the fourth of April 2000 and I
was instantly a top thousand five hundred
reviewer, because it had just started.
So that's three hundred reviews right there.
Then I was invited to speak to a parliament
in Europe. I can't remember, a French Parliament,
a German parliament, whatever and I was very
intimidated, so I read fifty books to get
ready for this mission and I wrote short
reviews of those fifty books and I loaded
that and now we are at three hundred
and fifty. Then I kind of got hooked and
buying books is a business expense, so
there was a time when I was spending
five thousand dollars a year on books.
And it basically boiled down to my
reading one or two books a week. Now I read
books in three ways. I glance through them
and if I don't like them at all I just set
them aside and I don't review them.
Some books I will read the introduction,
the conclusion and maybe one or two chapters
and the table of contents and the index
and then the... Some books I will start with
the index and then read all of the end notes
and then read the entire book word for word.
So out of the two thousand one hundred or so
books reviews that I have now, I would say
I have read every word in at least half
of them. And the others are partial things
because at my level with what I know you
could pick up a book and you can see very
quickly does this book make an original
contribution or is this regurgitating stuff
or whatever... and so my reviews do two
things; they summarize the book and they
provide ten links which is the maximum
allowed by Amazon. So, I've actually created
a collegy, a non fiction, a collegy of ninety
eight linked categories of books and if you
go to phibetaiota.net, at the top you'll
see the review page and then within that
review page I have a whole series of lists
of book reviews, like I have a long list,
list of lists of books about the future
and lists of lists of books about the past.
I have one list of three hundred books on
secret intelligence. I have another list of
books on self determination and secession
and so forth. So, I would certainly say take
a look at the review page where I also have
essays on leadership and education and democracy lost.
And, now give me your homepage, Robert,
but unfortunately time is advancing here
I'm going to have to bring our conversation
to an end, but let me ask you what's the
best place for our viewers and listeners to find more
about you and your work.
Well, I would say the blog which has no
advertising and offers a free subscription.
That has over nineteen thousand posts
from over eight hundred contributors.
Eighty of which are active now and that
is PhiBetaIota.net.
Very good, okay, now link to it. And, then
the final question that I always have to ask
my guests on my show is this, "How do we
wrap up our conversation? We kind of jumped
all over space and time and subject matters
and went all kinds of...
Well, you're going to be publishing an article
that I have written for you especially and
what I would say is let's keep the conversation going.
Let's keep the conversation going. Interesting.
Okay, I like that. All right and of course, by
the time this interview gets published, I
will already have published the article, so...
Robert Steele thank you very much for
being with us tonight.
It's an honour. Thank you.
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