Comcastrodors, please welcome cloud computing thought leader Imran Anwar to the podcast. The founder of Internet email and the .PK ccTLD in Pakistan, Imran is a serial entrepreneur, technologist, published writer, and media personality, frequently found on leading global TV news channels and popular radio talk shows as an outspoken journalist and media expert on global affairs, technology, politics, and social affairs. Imran has created unique cloud computing offerings across a variety of industries from healthcare to financial services, public sector, retail, manufacturing, education, and service providers.
He discusses with us opportunities for both big and small businesses to utilize the cloud, the conflict of privacy and security, and the growth of data collection ubiquity. He also shares with us the present challenges to democracy through monied interests and the power of networks to spread positive ideals while also enabling extremist groups, as well as his ideas for enhancing democracy at home with digital solutions to lead the world in the creation and adoption of a more reliable democratic process.
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I’d like to welcome Mr Imran Anwar to our studios thank you so much for coming. So what brings you to Atlanta. Thank you so much for having me it’s such a pleasure. I’ve heard so much about the show and I’m really delighted to be here. And the timing was great. So I could do it here in your studio rather than over the telephone or something I happen to be in town for a great conference being organized by an organization called Green Book. It’s insight innovation. It’s a basically a summit really and idea exchange sort of marketplace or place where talk leaders and visionaries from the market research technology and marketing areas sort of get together and discuss ways that technology and big data are changing the face and shape of insight and market research. So that’s charge of the entire mind share of the public. Absolutely and to help companies understand exactly what sentiment is and market research itself is changing right now marketing is changing the actual way people and companies are looking at the market looking at the consumer and looking at how consumer behavior is changing is changing. So even the things that are changing are changing. So and that basically means that there’s obviously a lot of turmoil traditional industries obviously tend to keep doing what they have always done until somebody comes and disinter media to them so I got involved with speaking at these conferences somewhere about two thousand five timeframe. In this particular area and at that time the interesting thing was a lot of companies who work in industries say market research and others did not really realize that protect Knology that was coming up very fast on the Internet. Things like Google and later on being etc would also provide tools that would actually affect the market research industry and that companies like Facebook etc could become competitors are if not literally listeners of some of these. Companies there is a funny situation where there was the service that I was using but then to also the tool that like is measuring it and three like the people providing the data. You almost don’t know if you can trust it as like that it seems to be in their interest to just make a living. As for something I think that is going to be one of the biggest challenges. I was recently speaking at a conference in New York City where and also in Philadelphia recently and I said the same thing in both places which is that the technology is now not the problem the challenge if you can imagine that the technology can deliver whatever you need done. You have to have two or three things are very clear. One is you need to have a very clear vision of what you want to achieve. In an ideal world what would you want to happen. Second is how do you want to use that data. And thirdly what is the source of the beat and how reliable is it. Because these days data is the biggest currency it’s not just big data itself and whether it’s small or big and every one of these sort of data sources is is suspect in the sense that people are holding data that they do not even admit to holding the larger companies of course and they can use it to their own advantage in terms of tweaking their own business model etc and not share it with their own clients or even to the consumers knowing what type of data is well built. But even with the data that has become aware little Even the word with what is out there available for us to get and to process as whatever industry we’re in what every industry needs to realize and every entrepreneur and this applies as much to a guy running a startup in his garage if he has a garage. Parents were not funny. Our living room absolutely this is the studio is one of those. It reminds me of the friends. Where in New York City do you get a place like that in what has been a unique advantage for people putting people in comfort. Absolutely absolutely. So so again what I’m saying is saying applies as much to an entrepreneur in studio to a small company with five guys and a dog were playing because these views into God and also to big companies because for the small guy or the small entrepreneur the fact that ten years ago if I had wanted to launch something like a Facebook I would have had to come up with fifty thousand one hundred thousand dollars to buy this and we’re still have enough to be able to even proof of concept. But now it’s like if you have a credit card that just goes up and is on web services and just scales to whatever your audience. Absolutely absolutely and the irony is that it enables the entrepreneur who was unlimited in his ideas but limited in his budget to it pleased to get started and then build and pay as he or she goes. Right but the interesting Gregory to that is that become police even the big pharma companies can do things faster cheaper and more effectively than they could in the past. So a great example of that is no artist I think is the pharma company and they were working on their basically doing drug trials cetera right and there was a project that they were working on and this I think is on the Amazon success stories. They basically were looking at doing a certain amount of work on data that they had and they calculated it would be forty million dollars of infrastructure costs or using existing infrastructure it would take them nine years to process that amount of data and what they ended up doing was basically getting the numbers may be off a little bit. They ended up getting it to seven thousand which will sort of worse. On Amazon and deer and this and were able to get into weeks the Cortlandt study nine hours I think in one hour. They were able to do like nine years worth of work and a quarter of quarter forty five hundred dollars forty million versus forty five hundred dollars. That’s credit card money no but it is interesting like how it’s almost as if computer science itself is changing because it’s like the cloud attack. So like efficiency the problem is now very different from a single computer attack versus a scaled sort of large one. But nine years of conventional processing versus nine hours of just getting it done right in my hours to be off because the story was about a year old or something and when when I remember reading about it. But another example I think the F.D.A. about drug side effects etc and they do lots of data processing on that so the F.D.A. vs the taxpayer money at work. Apparently the way the F.D.A. processed the paperwork for drugs sort of into drug reactions or whatever I think the cost was twenty five dollars or twenty nine dollars per page or something that was the cost the physical cost of managing that data and putting it into a usable form. And once they sort of turned it into a digital process and put it in the cloud the cost dropped to about twenty five cents a page which probably still has profit margin built for the vendor and I’m sure it has margin built for government inefficiency because that is never going to go away. Right but it’s still your bills it’s going to let me write for the full Security ministration or analyzing the needs of that theme Elena’s disastrous Mary-Rose are absolutely C.T.C. to see how many trucks we need for the population. Absolutely so the incredible power of the cloud right now is that it’s available to you as a C. The long trip from New York to a group of five or six people building the next big thing or to the biggest company in the world trying to do something really massive either at scale or at speed and that in the past was you know it was an either or choice you could be a startup frequently do things very fast but you couldn’t scale you could be a big company you had the money you could scale but to take forever and now you can have both. So literally the only limitation right now on our listener say is my family. I directly say to everyone is if you can imagine it if you can imagine it if you can describe it. There is a combination of technology professionals programmers and actual Wenders who can put it together. Obviously we’re not talking about building a U.S.S. Enterprise to create Star Trek today because that that might be that might be worth some work on My Space. Exactly exactly that’s going to get there but that’s really next year we’re going to science going to shake in his grave. Absolutely if you don’t think about some of it all these people I mean or C. Clark I mean what amazing things to see the human race. Cheve is the cloud our Apple is standing at the brink of a new humanity as they evolve into a new sort of conceptual age I think the cloud will be part of the bricks and the foundation of it. Because even though I belong to the technology industry my most recent work was at big software vendor in on the West Coast that has a cloud when they are competing with Amazon even though I have a book in the technology industry I could still have business dealings with these companies. Quite frankly the cloud Wenders are providing you with the plumbing and I have to be careful using that word because I know there’s some congressman to write there’s going to be some congressman or some senator or listening to the show who will probably go on the Senate floor and talk about you know the public wanting something and you know and especially on. Here it is when there is no cloud in the sky. Going to get your data back and those writers do need to fix the memory leaks so it’s going to become the metaphors across in a funny way. Yep Solutrean Absolutely but it will turn out it will get to make the picture very cloudy. So but literally it will be cloud Wenders and the cloud infrastructure will be a little off the most important bricks at the bottom of that column because the layers that are built on top of that will be obviously things like machine learning except for the Internet of Things and all the data that’s going to come from the sensors that are literally around us right now and will grow many fold in the years to come. Well that actually leads to the next question I had which was as we get a complete data collection ubiquity of everyone’s lives as well as a capability constant process analyze and perhaps even predict it. Do we see these sort of personal freedoms or like practices are opportunities kind of slip away with this opportunity. So in one nine hundred ninety nine I think I had the privilege of being C.E.O. of a company called ever track that scary name as attracting exactly it was one of the pioneers of mobile e-commerce and location aware business is what we called it. But in a nutshell it was a two by two matrix. It was the indoor and outdoor tracking off people and objects. So indoor is a patient in a hospital or a child at Disney right. Outdoor is a soldier in the battlefield in Iraq at that time for example outdoor truck Fed-Ex U.B.S. whatever Indoor a fire off a patient moving between departments in a hospital or in the U.S. Patent Office or whatever. So the idea was that the tracking would obviously provide benefits but each of these tracking things would have some level of information. They have to give up and I remember being interviewed by information week or one of the other publications at that time and they asked What about privacy and my statement was and I stand by it and I’m actually seeing it come true today is that people are willing to give up a certain amount of privacy if the benefits outweigh the risks. Number two there is also that what are you going to do about it sort of attitude that has come more people because a lot of this data is there and when people said well what about people knowing where you are I said and this was one thousand nine hundred ninety two thousand I said you cannot go from New York City to Washington D.C. without you being tracked to out because and even if you did not have a cell phone you passed called Boots your license plate your license plate even if it was a rented car came with a credit card with a driver’s license associated with it you paid calls at certain places it’s cameras everywhere you went you can use your credit card even if you did not use your credit card you paid for McDonald’s with cash there’s a cash your camera right above the. So if somebody wants to track you. That was happening even in the ninety’s. So nothing has changed except it’s become more robust more efficient in both good and bad ways bad ways is that. So if we Americans do not wake up and realize that our own government and some of the people in Congress are actually the worst enemies of the US Constitution. If our own politicians are not stopped they’ve built turn this into a police state where mass surveillance of the citizenship is absolutely all right in the name of safety. And I forget what a great president had said that if a nation that gives up liberty for safety deserves neither basically it might not have been a president might have a dozen friends that might have been had he’s you know he’s one of the greatest thinkers of our time of this nature more in the private sector and sort of a more public service and I suppose that it was supposed to be never going to talk about C.E.O.’s of massive companies definitely serve the public don’t think. Absolutely because after all it. Six A lot of people to install Igor deployment and like I’m sure all those gold miners and vendors and whatnot got paid along the way and just wonderful luxury amenities. I mean you know I’m going to the bathroom hurts but you know it hurts to because you know it’s the economy relies on the cycle to flow it’s a will and it will not follow that this conversation will go down the toilet because exactly. But but yes absolutely and so that is the problem is that we have that level of sort of police state control that some people would want to have and then there is a sensible way to data collection and that’s why we have a nation that was built with the system of law where you have courts so if you want to spy on him or on their Macs or anybody else go right to a court and say Here are the reasons we want to listen to every single conversation these people have and the call to love you. But this thing about doing this dragnet kind of thing I am highly opposed to that. And but going back to the original thing that so the privacy is already being sort of ripped out of our lives for for many ways for many reasons beyond that obviously medical is is one of the more serious concerns that people have that’s really the most sensitive data or perhaps for people sexual personalize it satirize those are the other things people are sensitive about. And we’ve seen beaches like that can happen and that’s because it’s not like people giving up on somebody like the government looking into people’s lives but what website was it that just got hacked which will kick you paid or some some some other Web site that was not Ashley Madison but one of those Web sites and one thing about my mind that there would be a nice target I think people would like to expose it because people have their fetishes and you know everything I mean that’s a lot of data to like to exploit people or back meal people with and I can see why ACARS would go off. But that’s criminal activity that can now happen on the Maskil keep in mind they were peeping toms and people who would tap your phone and record your conversations even in the eighty’s and seventy’s probably. It’s what has happened now for the bad guys unfortunately what technology enables is that they can target a lot more victim now is my next question is this knowledge is greater vulnerability. As we all become part of the cloud basically. Well yes and no because at the same time when we’re all on the electric grid our lives depend on it you couldn’t make your coffee without your coffee maker for example the microphone wouldn’t work the fan wouldn’t work in Atlanta you definitely need to have your conditioning. So where will buy a bunch of milk and bread since we’re ready for it. But but the challenge is obviously when the only way to live completely independently of that would be to move to for example the middle of Pennsylvania somewhere to have a farm and get off the grid completely but the fact is as humanity has moved to the cities the butler ability started right there. That’s why terrorists do not strike firms they strike big cities right. But it’s keeps ratcheting up right. As we trust all of our private stuff to our like Dropbox sinking like in systems we trust all of our credit card information to like an automated Google or Apple pay service as we rely on all of our business documents to be maintained on a back end and some invisible clouds are like it could be just a small thing and suddenly everyone could completely lose their minds. One thing to be absolutely agree with the possibility of that. But here is the country point I would give to better which is that nobody is forcing us. There is no government mandate that now shall keep all your ideas. While I criticize it I also find it wildly convenient I can do the exact because I love it and I’m just thinking this is going to be our downfall. The same time and so for example before there are I have every cold winter out. It I have an account there I have the free space and I will use it and I’ll be very honest because I do not trust the cloud vendors all of the whether it’s Dropbox or Apple i Cloud or Azure. I do not trust them but the security enough to put my personal data out there and so what is personally to obvious to make address book is there you know at the end of the day ninety percent or eighty percent of that data is available somewhere somehow. Right maybe what on this tip number that I may have is not but it it won’t be the end of the what you can change a new phone number. But for example if you have a medical records or personal photographs or things like that I don’t think the cloud is the right place to put them. Now the interesting thing is it is still very possible to be able to build your own microcode and some companies are doing that you know with a little hard disk that connects to the network. Do you still have a threat Waechter on that you know cable or Internet service provider connection coming in that’s going to secure your neighbor’s affair like really clever. Exactly exactly right so. So my my point is that in that particular sense you can keep all your pictures in an encrypted folder on your hard drive and keep two or three backups off it on a hard drive and you can actually leave a backup drive if your parents you can leave one in there is definitely the solution. Absolutely so as to prepare for it and the cloud gives you should people be preparing more for that should they I want to take these things I always saves anticipate for and just need to watch for several reasons one is I won’t name the company that give this answer to a client that raise the question. They were very concerned about the security of the hypervisor from this from this company and the answer that the company provided the client was. Well we haven’t seen that as a threat. Rector well before the first computer virus originated in Pakistan. My partner and I also marketed the world’s first antivirus in one nine hundred eighty or whatever it was where the source rated it was called zap it was the first antivirus listed written about in like the first malware cop ever but I do remember Byte magazine Yeah. So I built for the you know for computer geeks in the eighty’s. Yeah and so on the Radio Shack battery club source a bike magazine actually did a story on that but going back to the thing is so before that Lattice was written the computer virus was not a protector. So that’s not the right answer. Everything is a protector and so is your front door somebody can just come in and if you don’t have a good password. So many people tell me on Facebook why I have a very secure password and three days later I’m like I’m sorry I got hacked and that’s where you got all these profane messages on my wall because and then you have to tell them hey did you change your password did you do this and that. Well I had a great password you know my kid’s name one two three four you know so that’s was a fine one because like they get they improve like this the length that they are right. More opportunity for entropy so I remember the X. case of the comic where he said we need one hundred character passwords that are like your favorite movie quote right or something like. Or now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party or whatever or there’s more never an art object of your philosophy Horatio them like you know capital C. change me two thousand fifteen let me just write down your passwords here but what do you say yes but again the problem again is long passwords and this gets a little conceptual right. There’s a gatekeeper that asks your password and you give it the password it compares it to hash and then you get to your data. But if the computer systems are not architected safely enough if there’s a backdoor there are some who are undiscovered and or some really clever programmer or hacker finds it doesn’t matter if you have a hundred twenty eight character password somebody can still get your data. That’s the part where I think companies like H.P. etc are talking about new ways of computing where it’s more memory based rather than processing based rather than processor based etc I think what is needed is a new look by computer scientists and computer architecture board ship architects as well as literally the U.S. architect. The time has come to literally build from scratch in next generation operating system that will that in the least minimize these possibilities of back doors that exist because most of today’s operating systems have basically been built up piece by piece trying to either feature magic compared to a competitive product or because of a market demand or because there were two standards that were taking off and barrel and you had to push them together and I want government to manage their backdoor into it and that’s that’s because at the end of the day people forget that government is still run by people just like there are good cops who can look up your license plate and give to somebody else of your address that same way it can be a crooked person and government will misuse that power. Before that point when you’re describing infrastructure of all Norbit vulnerabilities and to sleep well more than thirty six hours so I think you know and you don’t drink coffee. I actually just gave up my my poison was Pepsi and I just gave it up about ten days ago so I’m basically on two phases of three hour sleep daily just like keep this whole life thing happening and I’m losing it. So I don’t know how you do it and I was pointing like a civil engineer could find criminal charges if it’s approved designs like a bridge or like completely failed technology probably moved too quickly to have that kind of salvation. However do you see like a public sentiment going towards that degree I think that that would be a very dangerous path to go on simply because it would stifle innovation it would become it would become there would be more lawyers and companies than engineer. Isn’t programmers and literally the B.S. or features one has anyone ever said think that the lawyers are here. It wasn’t me. So but seriously. And again at the end of the day bridge falls can kill people right of Well sure yeah your form doesn’t give you service in the middle of an emergency. Out in the middle of the desert. But there was no guarantee that you would have service all over the planet unless you had Iridium or something I guess. So I think what needs to happen is that the industry needs to realize that on top of the general practice of we’ve got to make our products better and safer and stronger and faster. There needs to be. Oh my God we need to make our products more safe and more secure. As a matter of fact we may need to architect the next generation completely from scratch. Knowing all these traffickers are out there and that needs to be done not just by the operating system companies whether they’re Apple or Microsoft or anybody else. But it needs to be done by companies like Cisco it’s a trial networking again one of the places where most of the attacks come from or the network the networking protocols that we use today some of them will back you know five hundred years I’m exaggerating slightly but you know what I mean telephone codes you know things like that. And even even when you look at T.C.P. IP It was not designed for the kind of attacks and the kind of traffic and the kind of uses we are seeing in it I P V six people talk about it so I think that the all the time has come for us to start looking and this may not happen for ten years from our conversation today to when this actually happens it will be about maybe a ten year or maybe even more effort when we are at that next generation but don’t forget hackers are brilliant people too. Not all of them obviously but many of them are brilliant people too who may be able to find back doors even and that’s what people have to understand. Just like any home and the door. Can be broken into. Same will always happen with computers and technical technology devices you can put up you know you can put basically bulletproof windows on your glass in your car right. But somebody can come out of the trunk. Yeah. Well do you see virtue in that relationship between security and hackers right. The Black Cats vs. Why that is a pose and just advancing the science each step of the way or is just too tough to keep the bouncer. I think I think there will always be troublemakers there will always I mean you know people who thrive on the idea of chaos generally do so in the comfort of their commission home sitting on the chair with a nice computer which would not exist in a true anarchist. Right absolutely. Because guess what you would be able to do what you’re doing in that society it would take a look at Mad Max and they call themselves like Lulz Sec and want that right just for the joke. Absolutely so some of them have made valid points I mean some of the people who go on and in fact for example be the ISIS websites or or or hackers like that or defaced them may have a good motive. Obviously there will always be people who will go shoot up a movie studio and off innocent people. That same way there would be people who would just create destruction because that’s what makes them happy. But in general my biggest fear is if the element of organized crime and rule state combine weird hacker groups and not accusing any particular group but in the future of any of those black cats or whatever color hats people want to wear and that combination is very important because as we saw shame on our faces for the fact that the how easily the Chinese or whoever did it was beating the White House. Get a security. Not to mention other medical institutions etc etc But the White House for God’s sakes. So whether it’s a law level you know network or whatever. The point that that was that was happening and was went undetected for so long Russia China I mean they’re all guilty of that apparently the fact that this is still happening in today’s day and age is absolutely inexcusable. And if this rock. Well what are we going to do about it you can go to bomb a country because you think somebody from one of their data centers act. So what exactly is the solution to that and I think that’s where the architectural changes and improvements to the systems that we are increasingly dependent on as individuals as businesses as city states as governments and as a civilization that is so key that if that conversation does not start today a year five years from now it may be too late when it’s going to be so complex to make responses against nonsense. He’s right some of us have in additional context are in a state borders. I decide part is as al Qaeda showed us when it was originally born Pakistan and a proud Pakistani born American twenty six years ago I remember when the original of when bin Laden was still alive and my fellow Americans would ask me and say why don’t the Pakistanis just go and catch all the al Qaeda people where and these are physical entities these are human beings on donkeys or motorcycles or jeeps who disappear into mountains that have no G.P.S. There’s no I mean there’s no maps to go and say Here here’s I don’t know where one is I don’t know what to do so in the world to a little man that becomes ten times more difficult of course and increasingly the track record I see is not your vector anymore it’s more like a threat sort of. They really are upset beam you know like a spotlight which is the combination of the fact that you know a little sidebar. Apparently are using the social media battle places you know and we have to get all American kids trying to sign up with an organization that drops heads and burns people alive and these are people living in America and the greatest place in the world to live where I can guarantee you if you go to a protest that’s happening even in my former motherland Pakistan or Iran or Saudi Arabia wherever there’s a procession of a hundred people burning an American flag. I always say is all you need to kill a person in the profession like that besides a drone strike. His is literally go in and say hey guys they’re giving away free visas at the American consulate and some white boy born bad procession will disappear because everybody wants to come and live here this is the greatest place in the world to be. I just wish my fellow Americans gave a little critter a damn about our own country because we keep electing people who literally whose interests belong far more to states to other states and economic more sort of pressure groups rather than to the interests of the United States of America and the American people. Well under that interest them like particularly for the vulnerabilities of engineering in such an artificial structure. He’s saying you know elect fewer lawyers and more engineers and doctors or I’ll Here’s that that’s such a great question because I’m all for what it says on the Statue of Liberty right. But at the same time you also have to remember national policies have to be in the national interest while being humane to the rest of the world. So if we want to be literally live up to that word of give me the you know the oppressed masses. I got a billion people for you in China ready to come over and really pick them and I got probably another half a billion in Africa ready to come over. I can probably get you an equal number from India Pakistan Bangladesh. And all those combined where exactly are we going to be as a country if that were really possible in the meantime we have a quote unquote porous borders we’re the only country in the world that makes a mockery of its own laws of the border laws the immigration laws. And so if I was a drug dealer I can simply drive across march across and literally hop over a fence across with cameras and we have two camera and come right in here with a backpack full of drugs if that’s what I want. But my brother and sister are both doctors in Pakistan did medical doctors. So that’s four doctors. If the four of them were to sell their homes in Pakistan does fewer market is there. Everybody owns their home. So if those four doctors were to sell their homes and come to America tomorrow they would come in they would buy two homes they would buy the clinic. They would set up a little medical practice but for doctors probably six nurses two receptionists or one gatekeeper or whatever etc You create ten jobs right away. They’d start paying taxes because they would buy property here there would be property taxes they would be whatever the transaction charges would be nice schools and these would be people who would do two things one they would be adding monetary as well as economic as well as social value to our society from day one and on top of that they would also be doing something else. They would also be bringing a generation of kids that would that speaks English and will want to become these couriers right. So you’d be in favor of the expansion. It’s one you know but but here’s the thing. If they were to immigrate here and talk about immigration if my brother and sister want to come here it would take them twenty years. My sister is a professor of medicine. My brother is the director general often and a terrorist organization and I said Anti Terrorist organization I want to be clear and and my my sister in law and my brother in law are also senior. Your doctors if these people were to take twenty years to come here they’re not going to be wanting to work. They will decide to live out their days where they are. So we make it impossible for people who could add to value off as Americans living here. The H one is an interesting program but as an American I am opposed to the abuse of it when companies literally lay off American workers American tech workers and say to them by the way here’s your pink slip. But the two weeks that you are here I want you to train to C H one B. guy. I think that’s criminal that’s an American that’s absolutely mind boggling mind bogglingly criminal to me. It’s a weird conflict because it feels like it’s hard to find the middle ground between the two things you propose right I’m talking about. One is one the failure of the program there versus what I say that there are no particular skilled people right so for example nurses there thankfully did as in there’s a greater number of Americans becoming nurses. That’s great but if we bring in ten thousand nurses from the Philippines or India Pakistan China I don’t care that’s a social need and that’s a skill shortage that we do have. But when a company is laying off people right to do it with cheaper each one B. foreign workers are only paying them with a view as opposed to what happens. That’s criminal on two levels because you’re basically selling out American interest and you are selling out the American worker who worked hard to make your company what it is today. So that’s the difference. Second thing on the immigration thing is again purely humanitarian. Absolutely we need to have those doors open to certain limits because there is no such thing as an open door because the planet is not the way it was five thousand years ago and we need to become more open and I’m not talking about my brother and sister and their families they’re not trying to move here. But if people like that want to come here and add. Value even said a million dollar bar and say we don’t sell citizenship but say invest in million dollars and we will actually rate your immigration don’t even sell it to them and let them prove that they’ve built a business they’ve given ten or twenty people jobs and it’s sustainable. And guess what. That’s what America was all about. It was not just about literally saying you know if you were all the huddled masses of the world who came with more skills and also did not have the respect to learn the language that we speak in this country. I am a foreign born American and I am I did not speak English. I barely spoke English till the age of seven. I still speak it with my accent but the fact that I come to a different country if I don’t have the decency to learn the damn language that irks me beyond belief no matter what country somebody comes from. And my thing is if somebody is grandmother is coming to live her development is fine. Don’t learn the language but if you do not learn the language your children are not going to learn the language you are going to set yourself up for the getaway zation of American society and I would love for my fellow American Skin or five languages I myself would love French and German and Italian and Spanish like Netherlands and just learn everything and that is one of the trailers. Absolutely but I do not want to have to press one for English. I do not want to have forms in two different languages. When I go to a place well that’s the strength of the club. But but I understand it’s because I got irritated and I’ll get I’m a foreign born I’m a foreign born American. When I dialed in. I think it was going into hotels it was a new hotel in in the United States. If it was Florida that I understand for Spanish but you know I have a place in Florida and my daughter speaks English so I said but my my thing was that. AT I had to press for English. And and and that that irritated me as an American. Well I have kind of a philosophical question for them. I was reading some articles that cover your foreign conversation and I was imagining the hopefulness and like the beauty of the opportunity of life with the cloud technology brings us seems to rely on the network that you do have. And if a network that you have a sort of like like you said get over fired or like closed down it’s like the sort of ideological closed off place then it doesn’t sort of like grow out. I guess the philosophical question is is the strength of the Internet sort of a thought democratizing. And I like to do what I guess is fixing the world basically. I think that the Internet that’s a great point. The Internet actually has been one of the greatest inventions not from the technology perspective but from the fact that it has opened so many hearts and minds yes it is a weapon of hatred also because any means of communication can be used to communicate hate or anger or vulgarity or whatever you want to say. But at the end of the day the Internet and things like Facebook or even like just Web sites like Flicker and whatnot they have enable people to see pictures of places they have not been be able to see newspapers and reports or cartoons of a president being made. And the cartoonist not being hanged or whatever that kind of stuff has happened over the last twenty years. Here’s an interesting story that that I shared with a friend last year at this time of year I was visiting my siblings in Pakistan. My parents passed away so it had been a while. So I visited them and around. It was the it’s the holy month of Ramadan for Muslims around this time of year. And so people see they have a meal before sunrise. So I had they had that meal with my with my brother in law and his family. Even my my sister and her family and then I had a call from America so I went for a stroll in the neighborhood to people get edgy during the festive season. Little tempers there. No actually it’s amazing like it’s a people fast you know like basically eighteen hour days or fourteen hour days with one hundred eighteen degree temperatures and when I was there I was able to do it I think I’ve I’ve become the fight living through a little easier life in America but I don’t cook so I have a good excuse. But there’s a lot of miles. Exactly exactly that’s exactly right. You know knocking on the McDonald’s door asking for a fairy meal but so the interesting thing was as I was out for a walk I was talking to a friend in America so it was like four forty AM in Pakistan or five A.M. in Pakistan so it was probably a little evening in the U.S. as I was out for a walk. There were a couple of homes being built in my sisters neighborhood and in one of them the construction crew basically lived on site and these are poor people who live basically you don’t like one hundred match on the floor kind of thing and there or thirty five in the morning the husband and wife are sitting talking. And there are seven or eight year old kid was sitting there with a mobile phone. He was using free internet service provided by the cell phone company for Facebook or something or the other. And here are the seven or eight year old could get who is now exposed to be not all the right images but but enough exposure to make it realize you know these people don’t look like my enemies these people don’t look like people I need to go and learn to hate and to go to kill one day and blow myself up for. And those are the things we need more of the downside I see is that there are fewer and more educated but equally dangerous bigots in our country in our society here and they are the ones who basically want that war of civilization that will make it my God is bigger than your god regardless of if the fates say that it’s the same one God. It’s that problem where the hate mongers as some might have their connection they’re reinforcing their network based upon their focus. Absolutely and then some. One of them like this woman who goes creating the events that then some jerk wants to go blow up. That gives the run of the mill people. So if somebody goes makes creates a new event about cartoons of the holy prophet then most Muslims are hurt by it but they’re not going to be going to will blow something up or kill somebody but one person goes and people go and try to bomb that event or killed the person organizing the event that gets in the news. And now the other Americans who may not have liked the idea of the cartoons also does not like the idea of the cartoonist being killed and they now have a more negative perception of the people who are up in arms. And so the divisions become stronger the number of people who are now polarized becomes larger and then the likelihood of somebody else saying something that somebody else on the other side finds offensive. Does something about it hence reinforcing the negative stereotype ten times more. Who then does something ten times more offensive. And guess what one hundred then the government over response Americans look at every network for an incendiary. Absolutely souls having an honest opinion so it was a criminal thing. So You Tube is banned in Pakistan Face to Face Book gets banned on and off in Pakistan here or you know in Germany it was funny the same day that in France that there was the democracy there was this million man march in support of the cartoonist who made prophets cartoons of the probably prophet and the next day they actually put somebody in jail for painting swastikas or something so I don’t know what happened to free speech there. So hate speech is hate speech and we all need to realize that you cannot regulate it you should not regulated because. It’s a slippery slope when you try to make it a controlled speech and that’s what I tried to tell my fellow Muslims and here’s the tragic irony. If Prophet Muhammad were alive today and was to come back in his day and age when he was alive when he was actually in oppressed minority leader he would people would he felt on him when he would say his prayers they would spit on him they would do unheard off things when he was saying his prayers and when he came back as a conqueror of Mecca not a single person was killed every single one was forgiven. So I ask these people who become has these so called self appointed custodians of his honor who go visiting the blasphemy flag the Prophet did not need their support when he was alive he was well capable of coming in as a conqueror and chopping off plenty of heads because they did have a lot more swords back then and he did not need that. What did he do. He forgave. Just like Jesus would have said didn’t or not or did you forgive them but that’s not what these people are doing. It’s a political thing. They’re using religion to expand the range of hatred so they can get more recruits. That gives them more people willing to blow themselves up. That gives people on the other side more impetus to go bomb somebody and then that becomes the war of civilizations that bought these nut case groups on the west and on the East Side want and that’s what scares me more than anything else. It’s like a weapon of centralizing power by creating a terrorist is now actually read an instant comic book is A Memoir of a girl who grew up during the Iranian Revolution was called Persepolis and just basically being like ten years old being told You have to wear a veil now and I don’t like what the hell does this mean. You know and just seeing sort of the decline of incredibly educated and just like sort of inspiring population turn into ignorant terrified you know clinging to it. Very polarized and violent perception to try to get day to day. And here’s another thing I try to remind my fellow Americans off and obviously we love our country right so people love to say you don’t like my country right or wrong. Cetera Absolutely. But when our mistakes cause harm to us from the reaction to those mistakes not learning from our mistakes not learning what we did wrong and continue what today and staying safe. Frank keep doing the same thing over and over the definition of insanity in center right. So few people realize that the Iranians were so modern that moderate modern Pakistanis they would look down on moderate modern Pakistanis as well were conservative and now even though the Pakistanis have become more conservative they look down on and do not look down but look at the Iranians as like oh my god you are fanatic you’re the crazy right. Right exactly and so so the Iranian swung from this far right of the pendulum where when I was a teenager my dad was in my late dad was an engineer and he hosted the Indian engineers at that time. Both of these countries Pakistan Iran and actually Turkey were in fact called the Regional Cooperation for development R.C.D. and they were very close allies of the United States all three of these countries and at that time these two million units in years came to stay with our family and there were visitors and they wore like mini skirts which were a teenager’s dream. That’s all I will say. And these same Iranian women probably five years later were forced to the real rails if they were not beheaded by them or hanged in public and that’s the problem that I saw that they went from one extreme to the other but what brought that out was us sticking us Americans. I was an American then but you Americans in that case but not from there. Taking a Democratic leader out in Starling a fake shop a king who was the worst tyrant that at least I had read in my own sort of studies and until that time and we kept him in power brutally until the man who ousted him was the Ayatollah who actually then came in as literally in a Shiite Islam was and of the pope because he’s not infallible and whatever he says is more important than what the elected leadership says it cetra be set up the motion for that to happen. The set up the traditional crisis by going into Iraq which had nothing to do with September eleventh. It had nothing to do with any attack on anything that ever belonged to us for weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. We did that we set up the basis for ISIS. If we do not learn from these mistakes be able to decide get and again and again and then we are still sitting scratching our heads and saying why do they hate us. I’m sorry but the answer is because we brought it on ourselves. And when you say that to my fellow Americans sometimes they say well you are saying is we brought September eleventh on ourselves. No that’s not what I’m saying. That was evil that was terror that was an unprovoked act by a group that felt that they were wrong but it was the worst possible way to show it and they started this battle of civilizations basically fit into that and it is time for us to find ways to resolve the issues that are festering. Because if we do not this same stuff keep happening and something I predicted on Fox News and C.N.N. in two thousand and three. I had said that I was not afraid of another nine eleven. Well don’t get me wrong it’s still possible. I said I was more afraid of the lawn was perfect. And from Boston to the recent ones who have gotten caught I literally see that coming to Moore and that’s where the power of the Internet is more dangerous. Because a lot of us can be fed remotely. It’s a very difficult place to look for at least a solution or policy that gets to some of the trustees. That’s because the further that it gets to insane government favoring chaos worldwide you know it for the sake of their own power. This is a rise in the likelihood of violence as well. It’s like it’s it seems as if no one no one’s ready to be the guy who had the attack during his administration right. But if the cause of the behavior is the paths past created a more violent present world it’s like they don’t know where this choice is that gets in the middle of it instead of anticipating more violence I think one of the things that has been a casualty of the media world that we live in and love is that true leaders don’t exist anymore. It is leadership by the balls its leadership by surveys its leadership by what the Media Journal is what will the op ed pieces say the next day. And when that happens that’s when you do not make the difficult unpopular decisions that are the right decisions for the long run and that leadership vacuum has existed for the last twenty years or so and we have had great presidents whether it’s going to be pads some you know presidents I would rather not say anything about George W. Bush will bomb. I’m very proud that the country that would not have served the father of this man in the restaurant forty years ago would serve President I’m very proud of him as an American who created a cloud solution to give a polling for every American there is a kind out how to make his policy to become like you said Poll business leaders Exactly. And now to that stage where it’s and a big disappointment in the second term so I just for our listener sake. Completely independent of any political party. I am an equal opportunity offender and I because I criticize everybody is going to be have an opportunity. Angry at everybody. I’m actually I’m a very happily critical person because life is too short to be angry. And so besides my happily single trademark T. shirts. But the reality is I think our tragedy is indeed that we are living in an Age of you know you had the Age of Enlightenment and all these previous ages. I think we’re going to be in the age of disillusionment and disappointment for a while on the leadership front at least and partly we deserve it because rather than hold our politicians feet to the fire where in a country where most people cannot even name their own congressman but they can tell you who was on American Idol or The voice you know and you know how many points they had. That’s a recipe for disaster too. And if the Americans do not get our collective heads out of that you know enter infotainment whatever world we have some car sells into and be at least five percent more attention to what really matters our decisions will be made by corporations. Our decisions will be made by politicians who sell out to the highest bidder and our politicians will be driven by polls not by American interest. Do you see the I agree that the American interest in politics match is much more an infotainment style than perhaps a civics and civil science perspective of what can go. But do you see greater interest from Americans in the political process than other countries. Unfortunately no. I see it as the interest now is a special interest when you can not when I do not know how many parents can honestly look at their kid and say son or daughter you can be president of the United States and mean it if they know that it. It’s a billion dollars that’s billion with a B. Actually this is a huge interest of mine. We have data on every one. Dirt on everyone. Your entire childhood of every stock up you’ve ever had is from now on documented and on record for the rest of the world. All right to the point where Eric Schmidt is joking that kids will be able to change identity or something right at that point. When do you become a less trustworthy for having a clean background. Because are you going to person now. Right it’s like I don’t I want to know what the outcome is. One. Everyone’s ashamed all at once for their entire past knowing this to be self-righteous anymore and like do we suddenly get to speak our opinion or do we all feel like dirty Congresses. I don’t know I will stay away from the cockroach analogy but here’s the let me to a counter point to you which is doesn’t that go back to ancient times too didn’t Jesus say he who is without sin cast the stone totally And it’s but it’s so we’d all shame wordly from day one hour like T M Z sort of reaction thing but you’re talking about like it’s all about trying to bring down whoever gets too high in this thing and one little ad hominum will like ruin their public image around. But it’s but you know where that is because they build that image they try to build if false image because they are trying to become false gods because they are now demi gods being sold to the highest bidder rather than go and say I am the simplistic guy I should be thrown out of office after four years. So I need like a religion of sales as opposed to absolutely absolutely and our Supreme Court unfortunately with that decision which which truly disappointed me saying that you know corporations have feelings too basically But you know that basically they can spend what they like they can spend what they like because they are people too. So you know I’m just waiting for you to be legalized gay marriage and mixing up. Eating for is actually no corporations can already marry called mergers and acquisitions. So I’m just waiting for corporations to be funny. The reason Comcast and Time Warner were not allowed to merge is because marriage is not allowed in Texas. Vertically integrated within the camera versus the whores on the So So I think the challenge is that we have and again like I said I don’t agree with the with the decision but the problem is that laws will not be changed by Congress and Senate and politicians who literally are corrupt to the core and I say that sadly because when I was a Pakistani student leader I used to. I knew that Pakistani politicians were corrupt and that I came to the United States and I realized that the Pakistani crooked and corrupt politicians are really efficient. You need something done you go with a briefcase of cash and it gets done. And here in America we have a two step process. You dig that briefcase full of cash to a lobbyist who then finds a way to put it into little and lopes or checks or parts and gives it to the politicians it’s a less efficient way of being good and corrupt. So jokes aside though but the fact that the profession of lobbyists exists that it’s illegal for politicians to take money from anybody is absolutely the fundamental flaw in our politics today. And until that is taken out and then they have that they get like one hundred thirty seven thousand dollars jobs and whatnot are hundreds several thousand dollars jobs I was a publicly financed election which I think it is especially now all that mass media and electronic media and social media give every one of us literally the chance that was only offered to an American kid when he or she was born. You. My son or daughter can be the president of discrete country this is a cloud solution. People often complain that they criticize the idea of a public election because too many people running at the same time so I have to campaign too many of the cloud. Six You don’t even try to even count as a tool right. Because even how here’s I mean there’s many ways to do it. Even with the candidates right now it generally happens right now at a level where Jeb Bush and somebody Hillary Clinton go and Fox News and C.N.N. and M S N B C are already talking about them and their de facto candidates. But take out these media companies and take out the Clinton name and the Bush name for example I’ll say something about family politics later if we have time to take that out in the previous days we would be had the similar situation with how many candidates are running for the Republican nomination on one hundred one. I mean I’m being facetious but what is it sixteen eighteen twenty. Donald Trump and his hair separately. So But jokes aside again the fact is out of those sixteen eighteen or twenty four they will end up picking one nominee right. So why can’t we take that now with a more democratized Internet based global dazed country society and system where even to be among those twenty four you at least have to get ten thousand twenty thousand fifty thousand from your own state. OK then let the public and here’s where it could be doesn’t even have to be the election commission or somebody but that’s where cloud either through private public partnership whatever could weed out from the two thousand candidates who are left with the twenty or twenty four and then let the system begin and let’s not if if you cannot afford to go on T.V. If none of them can afford to go on T.V. they’ll all go on social media but it costs nothing. I have the same chance of running against Donald Trump on on Facebook. But isn’t like the success of social media. Like even better infotainment than it is now. But again depends on how you use it when I go and when I go to the N.P.R. website I can read an interesting story or I can read about cats that claim to trees and had a fire man describe them and they go Yeah right exactly so I can pick in more international politics and the other websites if I want to read one of my favorite magazines The Economist. I mean that’s media that’s what media was supposed to be and it’s less it’s not in for payment it’s it’s you know it’s information it’s news. Even Business Week etc I mean they can sort of them more useful than some of the newspapers that are so-called newspapers but the point again is today’s technology today social media already enables us to say if you are going to run spending money then that should tell people something. This person cannot stand in on the strength of his ideas or in the court of public opinion or in the social media and hence is having to buy his or her way whether it’s somebody from e Bay or somebody from H.P. if that’s what they’re doing they should be exposed for that. There are paid traffic mechanisms inside of social media that would be like the new filter mechanism right. Correct correct. But so for example right now I get every day I get like this message about Iran and we’re on Twitter. Is that is that the next you were saying mediate the team. Exactly. Bye bye twenty thousand followers for thirty nine dollars. Great. I now have fifty five thousand followers who do nothing do nothing then guess what my cloud is still going to be knocked out score with dot com But the clout with a C is still going to be easy or nobody’s going to listen to me if I have fifty thousand fake users. So those numbers were not bad or yes people will get numbers are always going to be gamed. Metrics are always going to be gamed but true Klout sadly you can see that from the fact that Kim Kardashian is better known than me and I think. My butt is as big as the things they are saying the pod cast are becoming more popular in television and it seems to be a platform where people are trying to have conversations more than I don’t know shouting matches or maybe just really idealized point of view on that and I think advertisers have to sit up and take notice of that boards to make it a more viable platform for the podcasts and the bloggers out there. While we have to be careful there too because there’s also a lot of bloggers who did shitty writing for money and blog. It’s not real journals and that’s a lot it’s a lot like every man but that’s they fed into that system so you so you will always have that. But today the fact that it costs one billion dollars So if I have a child that somebody tomorrow actually to be hard tomorrow but lets in nine months from now if I have a child with somebody next year what do you have a billionaire neighbor and make sure he grows up playing a park with his you know his kid. And if so then you can tell your kid to stay friends with and you can be friends preferably if it’s a daughter or son the you know to marry like the whatever you know like the billionaires. But but but but you’re right that’s the tragedy is that you cannot honestly say that to a child born this year and say unless you are a billionaire is that you can run for president because the only way for them to run for president would be to have that billion hard earned money or by selling out selling their soul or selling American interest. But unfortunately both and the only way to dig that out is to let media and I don’t think social media is just Facebook and Twitter because there are as yet undiscovered uncharted territory in social media and you let the net people or the people decide wired the natural Let’s not also say people on the net because that sounds a limiting also. Let the people use them. NET to elect. So here’s a few questions on solutions that might fall on that line. Mandatory voting or anything. Ha I it makes perfect sense to me the only thing I don’t like about that is because at the same time it takes away from the personal liberty right because it’s my choice because none of the candidates are attractive to me. The downside to that is most people use that as a crutch for laziness by saying there’s nobody I want to work for. OK so so I’d say my I might I’ll give you the percent of my vote to it but twenty percent. OK here’s an idea. And Social Security numbers. We all get privately and publicly is plugged in sent to your phone every election cycle you have your voting app put it in writing that’s a great idea. Stand in line I think that’s a good idea. That infrastructure needs to be more robust and more two things more robust and the user experience needs to be a lot simpler. So that’s where it’s still I mean if you want I swear America thrives entire app culture we consider voting easy. Absolutely. Actually that was a weird thing. Like Obama had the most technology for campaign ever and then like you expect the White House that was but the health care Web site that was a disaster. Yeah that’s so strange I mean I think you can never underestimate the power of government incompetence. So but my personal thing is that technology exists. The guy is right and the frustration is there because as fewer and fewer people sure there will be somebody charismatic like as magic like Obama who comes again and gets enough of the young people to come in and watch but we still need to be able to have people engage. Today I became a U.S. citizen that was last century or so to being I became a U.S. it. It happened to be the day before I think there was a school board election in my neighborhood in