civ civilians. and another says an marked 747 made a landing in the state. we are proud to be included in the list of twitter tweets i guess you call them. with that, help me welcome bill arkin. >> thank you very much. i am also a vermont resident. i live in pom prit. spending most of my time in new york city today. today was an annoying day for me like most days are. it was annoying particularly because i was driving to an appoi appointment and turned on the radio and was listening to a story about drones on the radio. i was thinking okay. i heard the introduction of who

would be on the show, some lobbyist, some lefty journalist, so i could have just turned the radio off and told you what they were going to say. and unfortunately my drive was long enough i had to listen to the show. they said pretty much what i expected which is pretty much what we expect. and three years ago when i started working on a book on drones my publisher said to me why don't you write a book on drones and i said i don't really care about drones and i don't really know anything and he said perfect. and that is generally how i approach most of my projects and the journey that i took in doing that really was an eyeopening one for me because i hardly

wrote a book about drones. i wrote a book about what drones are all about in our society and what they mean. and i am not sure that my publishers was particularly happy. i guess i see books as a personal matter. when i visited with team in the drone world and started to talk to people in the drone world it became clear to me really nobody understood what the world was. it was so new that no theory or real understanding had developed yet. there is a lot of -- i mean don't read this book. it has a hundred pages of

footnotes. it is dense. it is typical me. big words and theory. but here is what crystalizes it in my world. when i began to look at the drone world and get into the science of understanding how drones work and how they take pictures and what they take pictures of and what happens to those pictures and who looks at them and what is it for and where do we put it all. i discovered a really unknown area, to me, so if it is unknown to me it is probably unknown to most people of what is called hyperspe hyperspe hyperspe

hyperspectral energy. it is looking at something from the molecular level and looking at the electromagnetic waves that make up everything. we have a set of electromagnet waves. it is able to look at field and based on the molecular image tell you if potatoes or barley is growing in that field. what that imagery became important for is looking for what is called change detection. dirt being moved and moved recently which might indicate the presence of an improvised device. so they would look for disturbed dirt with the drones and there would be places they would

pinpoint for disposal ordinance people to go. and of course the next step was wait a minute. we can identify people are hyperspectal imagery. all we need is a library of people. so again without getting into too much techniicalties is you have this gigantic imager and the only way it can tell what it is looking at is by pulsing its own library of signatures. what are called hyperspectral signatures. this is what a toyota pickup truck looks like in such a scene, this is what a volkswagon beetle looks like. there are hundreds of thousands of hyperspectral signatures that have been created and stored in the national signatures

laboratory which is located in tennessee. and this has been going on in the world of weather forecasting for decades. this is how you can tell there is water in the air from space. this is how you can tell there is ice. this is how you can tell that -- this was really the bases of modern weather forecasting. but now we are doing it on such a level of intensity that we can actually, if we have, your signature, identify you from space. there is no other signature like your signature. and that is sort of the cutting-edge of where we are now in the world of imagery. so i wrote this chapter and sent it to a couple scientist friends

of mine because i sure don't know what to do with it. and they said i may not know the shot and near range is this and short range infra-red means it is emitting an infra-red signal as opposed to just absorbing energy. i was happy with the chapter. it is boring but the most important. i sent it to a friend of mine. an air force one star who is literally the head of intelligence for the middle east. and i got a note back from him saying interesting reading but a little too technical for me.

and that is what i got from a lot of people i talked to. we know how to look at the picture. we know how to process the data. we know that it is saying that is bill arkin walking down the street. we are getting closer to finding the target but how it works and threads together in this gino ginormmachine. and i started this book and i thought i am going to buy a drone, fly it, and learn the mystique. and i did. i will give you a reading of my experience with the drone i

bought. my first outdoor flight didn't go very well. i was worried about the wind. this baby only weighs 14 ounces, less than a box of pasta. i set the maximum altitude ad three meters to be safe. the barn, two trees, the house and the driveway before the battery ran down i had had crashed into them all. i just couldn't get the hang of the controls and couldn't for the life of me figure out how to get the drone to come back to me once it darted away. specks of dirt in the gear and the turn of propellers was my first maintenance job. but other than that, my patriot, my drone proved pretty hardy and not only that the video produced was beautiful and obviously intentionally hilarious.

the parrot ram came to a wedding with me next week where i hoped to find a big enough space far enough from the water in maine to practice. my son badgered me to break it out so we could fly. i am not going to let you fly until you watch the instructional video. two minutes later he was back and ready. it wasn't like i was teaching him to shoot a gun but as owner and commander of my own squadron i became efficient carefully showing him how to connect it to the i-phone and instructing him to land it and using words like aloft like i knew what i was talking about. it was breezy.

i let gaylen take the control. the wind from the ocean pushed our parrot around. he got the hang of it right way. crossing the road between two electrical powerlines. watch out, i yelled. fly it this way, that way, and landing it. he loved it. i loved it. i was humbled. when i debriefed gale and my squadron assistance he said the trick was calibrating himself to the rhythm of the drone. what actually pilots call feeling the plane. although a drone pilot doesn't feel the inertia and

acceleration. they call his generation digital native. his instinctive ability tells us something about the world and what drone represent. whatever happens in the wiring of a brain to so easily pick up a second language the digital natives have found a new way of interacting with our wholly world. it drives me to distraction when i watch gaylin and contempries operating. they have several chat sections, texting on the phone, watching a show and watching a ball game and they will have a youtube video running and they are listening to music and sometimes they have a couple homework assignments going with actually

brick and motor books. the relentless demand to commend all of this data is only compounded by the speed at which music and videos are transmitted globally. not just to the home wi-fi network but through the cables and fiber optic network to move it all. his generation didn't conform to the machinery of our day. the machine conforms to their expectations. that is what i learned. the machine conforms to our expectations. why do we have drone? 14,000 today and climbings. 70,000 world wide. why was there a radio show this morning about regulation of toys that are going to be under the christmas trees this year in great abundance and under the christmas trees in great abundance because the price has

gone down. the very parrot that cost be $400 is now selling for less than $200. that is the way of the world electronically. all of these people are talking about well the federal government is going to have to regulate it because drones are being flown in bad places and bad people could be flying drones and pretty soon we will have drone licenses for toys. but what it represents is it really represents a change in our society. because the accumulation of the data and the availability. i can fly a drone from my house to distances as far as i can create a line of site so in wireless terms it is like 160 feet. and that is $200. if you want to spend $2,000 you

get the drone you pay and if you want to spend $20,000 you get the drone you pay for and if you want to spend $2 million you get what you pay for. and we even have billion drones. drones that stay up over 24 hours and can survey the entire landmass of asia in one day. we get what we pay for. but like my little parrot choosing where to take it, what to do with it, what to point it out, how to evaluate the information coming in, how to store it, how to find it later on when you want to find it the second time, this is what it is all about. so when i was in the army as an intelligence analyst the ratio of intelligence analyst to

soldiers was about 1-100. that is to say for every person who carried a gun in the military there was about one intelligence person behind them. so at a battalion level of say 1500 people there might be about a group of 10-15 intelligence people as part of that battalion. today the ratio is exactly reversed. for every one soldier in the field today there are a 100 intelligence people behind them. now that is just the reality of the back end of doing anything. i mean for every car on the road there are thousands upon thousands of manufacturers, repairers, insurance people, you think of it. think of it in your head of the

industry behind cars. drones are no different. and drones are no different so therefore undifferent than manned aircraft that are taking pictures or satellites taking pictures or eves dropping or cyber spying or all of the data we are collecting today our real problem is utilizing that information in a useful way. and our real problem is that we have experienced this revolution in information so rapidly over the last 15 years of constant war that we don't even understand what it is that we are doing. so, let me give you an example. it is really simple to get today. about a year ago, president obama announced that the united

states was going to take military action against isis in syria. a new campaign. and what did he say? first he assured the american people there would be no boots on the ground. what does that mean? therefore it means we set out the unmanned machine to do what the unmanned machine has become so perfect at doing. second, he said once we collect the intelligence we need we will be able to eradicate isis. fast forward a year, i know you will read in the newspapers, you watch, you will read it: united states has only dropped 6, 900 bombs in a year.

ergo we are doing a terrible job. when the russians started bombing a couple weeks ago they were dropping 60 bombs a day. they are up to about 3,000 now. so in less than a month they have dropped half as many bombs as the united states has dropped in a year. but it doesn't matter because if every bomb that we are dropping is hitting a meticulous target, a selected individual, or a selected command center or something important and i am not saying it is, i am saying this is how the strategy is designed. the economy behind it determines what the strategy is. we don't like to go out and carpet bomb anymore. when the russians go bomb in

syria and drop gun and barrel bombing i can literally tell you the guys in the air force and pentagon talk about how primitive it is. yet those 6900 bombs represent the culmination in a way to mask the this is even the right strategy. that is what drones represent. they represent this sort of perfection that we demand. we demand that we are not bothered by conflict in the world. that our sons and daughters don't have to go to war. that we are not affected by it it. and as this machine has become more and more capable we have

lost sight of what it is we are fighting were and about because merely mastering the data and merely mastering the machine has become so intense. and secondly, when i saw this in people that i interviewed from the top lawyer to the cia director, the current cia director who is the architect of the drone war when he was in the when you say, they all said the same thing. there is an inefficiency associated with the operation that makes it seem like its right. if i come to you and say to you i am going to bomb the norwitch high school and here is images and my weapon and it has a 96%

reliability rating. i will have two weapons on the drone to make sure. i know exactly what the weather is going to be. i have been studying this school for three weeks. here is going to be the results. here is the expected civilian c c casualties. now translate that to bad guy everywhere. that is a pretty good briefing. okay. go do it. what am i supposed to say? what are we doing the day after tomorrow. we have been doing this for 14 years. nobody asks what do we do the day after tomorrow. we have become so good at doing it not nobody dare asks it. and that is what i ask in my

book in a respectful manner. not saying people doing it are evil or the war began because of bush. clearly this is a bipartisan war. clearly the obama administration, contrary to poplar belief, didn't create the drone war it inherited it. and it inherited it because technology advanced. there is a reason why we killed osama bin laden in 2011. it was because we killed boo in 2006 because everything we put together to find that one person in iraq and kill him in the air was the model that then became

the model to kill an important person, a single individual, who is trying to hide on the planet anywhere. all of the same techniques came into play. you have seen the movie and i will not say the movie isn't for real. but what the movie doesn't really show is that it is just all the same techniques. if you map the world meticulously enough then unlike the days when i was in the army and we approached -- i was in b b berlin and knew east berlin like the back of our hands and you could say this building is that and this is that and this is a tree and this is a road and this is maybe the line of sight for fire and this is the safe area. today is joe blow lives in apartment one.

mary joe lives in apartment two. henry smith live in apartment three. the building is made out of reinforced concrete. and that is mapping. it is geospatial -- geospatati something is out of the place it is the tip off to take action. and so we read in the new york times that this is an awful development that we are being sloppy, that we are conducting signature strikes that we don't really know the people we are killing, etc. and yet it is exactly the opposite of all of that. this is the reality of evil.

this is god-like power. we are so meticulous at what we are doing that we are completely and utterly convinced of the rig rightiousness of doing it. we are overwhelmed with the mapping of the world just in the same we are overwhelmed with our i-phone, our music, where i put that document, where is the attachment. everything we face in our day to day lives is what they face on scales of billions. and not just that. remember the day when you used to go to an atm and you would put your card in and press your password and you thought i might get money? it wasn't that long ago.

remember the blue screen of death? you probably had that on your computer once a week. those things don't happen anymore. you put your money in the atm and the money comes out. you put your card in and the money comes out. the machine has advanced. it really has. we have now talking gps machines in our car, we have backup cameras, we have all sorts of electronics, we have computers. we don't see it necessarily with our eye but the advances that have been made in the last 15 years are astronomical. and we do it on $70,000 a year in the state of vermont. and they do it on $700 billion a

year. so that gives you a sense of how large this machine is. the answer? i think the last red pencil on the end of my manuscript on the last page was is there no hope? that was what my editor wrote. i guess the only hope i would give you is they don't know what they are doing. because they don't know what they are doing at least we have some possibility of influencing the future. if we were actually fighting a right war and everyone had a n

consenus but we have idiots running a system they themselves barely understand in a part of the world they truly don't understand and fighting in religious battles they don't even care about to find individuals to kill them as if that is going to make the world a better place. name me one country in the middle east that is in better shape today security wise than in 2001 and you get a free book. but there ain't one. so to me that is the bottom line. we have been warring to create security for 14 frickin years and there is not one country in the middle east that is in

better shape than 10 years ago. you tell me does that make you proud? does that show our system works? does that show you our national treasure is being wisely expended? yes, it is true. here is the fact. in 14 years of war, combining all military and civilian ca casua casua casualities and everyone that died. whether it was at our hands or terrorist hands or iraqis killing iraqis.

normal way. that's the meticulous quality of it and the crisp, efficiency associated with modern warfare, that makes it seem so sensible. i'll stop there. take questions. we are being filmed, so there's a gentleman who has a microphone, and he would like you to signal to him so that he

can thrust that microphone in your face and you can be heard. anyhow, question? come on. >> we are so spectacularly successful in using this technology, what makes us think that others won't be equally spectacularly successful and return the favor in our country? >> well, the question as to whether or not this technology isn't just harbinger of what is going to be used against us, is a good one. but i also will say to you, it's still a bad system and a bad strategy, even if no one has the capacity to do it. so let's just clear that up, because what i'm about to say,

then, is important. if everybody had the ability to fly drones the way we did, if everybody had the ability to operate precision guided munitions. if everyone had a flat system of command and control and a democratic military like we did, if everybody did, pakistanis, north koreans, et cetera, there would be no war. because in order to build those systems, you have to basically have education, democracy, and decentralization, and so auto -- -- ahtisaari tocratic systems adopt do what we do. when the dutch fly their f-16s with their bombs over syria, they cannot do anything because we have to tell them what the targets are. a pilot doesn't leave on a

mission think, i'm going to hit the first thing i see; that every mission starts with what is called the target deck. these are your targets to hit. this is the one, this is none two, this is number three, and this is your alternate if you can't hit those ones. the dutch can't even do it. the germans can't do it. so, why are the russians dropping bombs by the ton in syria? because they can't do what we can do. so, part of the answer to your question is, who cares? the chinese have thousands of drones. the russians have thousands of drones. am i worried they're going to come attack us in a world in which there's still eve 5,000 nuclear warheads? no. i don't care. but the process of building this

technology is ultimately a positive one. it's how we utilize the technology that is the challenge. so, the reason why, with all of his tanks and all of his soldiers and all of his magnificent artillery, saddam hussein lost to the united states not once but twice, is that he handcuffed every one of his soldiers because his fear of a coup d'etat, his fear of a military takeover, was greater than his desire to have an efficient military. so they had all the equipment in the world, and on a ledger sheet it looked awful the fourth largest army in the world. but they couldn't operate their own machinery effectively or maneuver in an effective way because they weren't allowed to communicate, they weren't allowed to decentralize their

command. they weren't allowed to develop military expertise because that is a threat to the state. so, if you have a world that begins to look like the united states, a professional military, with all of this equipment, my fess is that's going to be a pretty peaceful world. it's just not the world that we have. it's not the world that is going to get developed, either. the world that -- the world of drones is pretty much the world of warfare yesterday. we did the same thing with crews missiles in d cruise missiles in the clinton administration, just not at proficiently and not as efficiently. and before then, we did the same thing with the cia. overthrowing iran's socialist president, overthrowing the guatemalan elected president,

et cetera. we do things that others can't do, and so i think your question is a really good one, but i don't think the danger is that someone bad is going to build a drone. because regardless of what happens in the world, someone bad is going to take an airliner and fly into it the world trade center or walk into the middle of times square and blow themselves up, or they're going to do whatever they can do to hurt us if they want to hurt us. and they don't need fancy equipment to do it. 9/11 occurred with a $300,000 budget, 19 guys. working for a year. so, i don't think it's the technology itself that is the issue. question?

>> you, in the back. >> if hyper spectral images is on the current cutting technology, what are the wits speakers of things to come? >> the question is what i have describe as hyper spectral images, what is next? my sense is next what hyper spectral -- now here is fantastic hollywood intelligence, okay? we don't know who the enemy is. we don't know who the terrorists are. but if we collect enough information and follow their actions, follow the actions of a place, then we'll be able to

detect who the bad people are based upon activity. so let me give you an example. we can do this right now. it's the -- the system is called gorgon stare. it's on a particular kind of a drone, a reaper drone. and with its billion-level pixel, multicameras, it's able to take a high definition image of a city the size of, let's say, washington, dc, baghdad. and it doesn't -- the refresh rate, like on a camera that's filming me right now, is like 60 frames a second. 60 frames a minute -- a second.

and the refresh arrest of dorgon stare is two frames a second. so they're taking spot photographs of the city, we're doing this right now. so, an improvised explosive device explodes in the green, people are killed, blah blah blah. well, what exploded? oh, a truck. well, let's wind the tape back and see where the truck came from. we can do this now. and let's watch everyone who ran from the scene and see where they went to. we can do this now. and so the truck came from this

warehouse. that's tomorrow's target. and this person ran to the corner and started taking video. that's the day after tomorrow's target. activity-based intelligence. and think about what it means -- we imagine that the government has the ability to, like, fiddle with the keyboard and find out the name of your dog because that's what happens on "24"? we're so far from that and yet at the same time so close. so activity-based intelligence also means, let's come up with the model of a hijacker. let's come up with a middle of a suicide bomber. they send 8.7 e-mail messages on the day of their typical suicide bombings to friends and family

saying goodbye. so let's look for everyone who sent 8.7 messages on a typical day. and when we get that tip-off, those will be the spots on the map of potential suicide bombers. i'm not saying this is a global effort. i'm saying this can literally be done in a kabul in a baghdad in iraq in syria, can literally be done. and so i'm sorry i've sat for days in these command centers watching this work unfold. and i've done it for 30 years, watching it. it's really impressive. it's just wrong. it's not incompetent. it's wrong.

we have a model of fighting warfare and countering terrorism that is just wrong, because it's not achieving the goal that it purports to achieve. it is not increasing our security. and that's what is to come and those skill sets will be applied locally. what did you vote on in norwich this year in your election? whether or not the police department of norwich, vermont, should have a license plate reader. what is a license plate read center it's a connection to a database of suspicious people, and to create a database of suspicious people, that means you have to move the data and collect the data and have the data. so they're not just looking for people who have traffic infractions because once a police department acquires a license plate reader, then they

sign a memorandum of agreement with the state police and they get the national criminal intelligence center database and then the sign an agreement with the department of homeland security and get the illegal alien databases and then signed an agreement with the department of defense and they get another database and another databases and pret soon on that laptop over police department, he could be a terrorist hunter. it's coming. that's coming. next question. here, in the front. wait for the microphone. >> you're talking about the capability, the same type of technique that basically caused the boston massacre -- i mean the bombing on patriots day.

>> so, the question is whether or not all of this accumulation of information and social media wasn't a key to catching the boston marathon bombers. so, the answer is, it's a great story but it's not true. but the bigger answer is, thereñ were 3500 law enforcement officials at the boston marathon that day. 3500. local, state, federal, friend-a-guards. 3500. the fbi already had information about these two brothers. the cia had information about them. all of the preventive measures that we should expect, that we

should have been enraged about, that such an incident could occur after we have spent this billions upon billions of upon billions of dollars to feed this system of collection, they still failed. even when they were in possession of the information, even when there were 3500 guards on the scene. what are the 3500 guards doing? what are they doing? so, again, i say to you, yeah, okay, maybe some people tweeted, i saw the guy under the boat in the suburb and that was the one victorious end point, but it was just a manhunt. i remember he days. but the first thing i thought when i heard that the boston marathon occurred and i saw the same fricking shrugs from people in the government saying, how could we have san antonio how can we stop it?

it's like, wait a minute. you're there. you're 3500 guys on the ground. you're the fbi. you've got all the intelligence in the world and you even now we know you have the intelligence, you can't knock on the doors of the 35 people who are on your watch list before the boston marathon, to make sure that they are safe? you can't knock on the doors? i see that incident and i don't see it as a triumph of social media. i see that incident, and i say to myself, warfare is the accountability for our system in america. we're just going to put up with having 3500 law enforcement officers at every big event, and not ask whether or not they can do their jobs? and that's 9/11 in a nutshell as well. next question. that was fun, huh?

you must have a question. >> the bombing of the united states -- the united states bombed a hospital in afghanistan. the united states does not recognize international court of law. the head of -- said this is a war crime. all evidence points to the fact it was indeed a war crime, and that the united states' response to it is that it's being investigated by the united states military, and that it was actually a mistake. so i don't know exactly -- what the question i'm asking is, but this is a war crime. >> okay so, the question is

about the bombing of the hospital in afghanistan, and what really happened. i'm not going to tell you i have any magical information but i know how things happen. i do know that things go wrong. apropos the last question. there are 3500 guys on the scene and things still go wrong. my first assumption, my first assumption, something went wrong, because the united states, as a willy-nilly matter of fact, not the people i know in the military or the intelligence community, gets up in the morning and says i want to bomb a hospital today. that's not the country i live in. and that's not my military or my intelligence community. that i know. that's my first answer.

my second answer is, there are some people in the united states military and the intelligence community who think that the rules don't apply to them. they're called special operators, called covert operators, called black special operators, and i know them, too. and they really do think the rules don't apply to them. and so there is a possibility that they could have done it. and so you can't dismiss right away that this spent intentional. in fact i think there was an article in "the new york times" yesterday that basically said it was intentional. now comes the tricky question. have your lawyer call my lawyer. okay? you want to label it's war crime? well, then, we'll have to start talking about what the law of war is. and if the law of war states clearly that you can strike a civilian target when it has

been -- when its immunity has been removed by the presence of combatants and that it's the responsibility of the commander to make a decision to weigh the benefits and the deficits. i know i'm going to kill civilians in hitting this target, but the military utility of doing so is necessary. that is what the law of war is. the law of war is not, you can't hit hospitals. take that from your mind because it's nothing -- never been written down, no one believes that, not even the dutch. you have to mark hospitals so that it warns the military, this is a hospital. and you're not allowed to be presidous about the marking of hospitals. you have to be real about the mark of hospitals so you're not

shielding things that are military in nature give them immunity. now we have all the facts on the table, and i still say i don't really care whether or not it's a war crime, but who is so important last tuesday that we want to risk killing civilians to bomb a hospital. so ipso facto, there's no military utility associated with this because the devil was not in the hospital. we've never heard of who was in the hospital. whoever it was that was killed and was justified in the mind of that demented commander who said, go ahead and bomb the hospital. but war crime? this is the war crime. not a very good book. but i've reviewed it, so i've

read bit. about the killing of al-aulaqi, the american citizen killed bay drone strike in yemen in september 20. that the war crime. that when we start assassinating people without due process, american citizens, without due process, that the war crime. i'm truly sorry this hospital, this wedding party, this border post, this civilian structure was destroyed in warfare, but you of all people -- i know you. you hate the whole war. you don't like a good strike. so why waste your time with the bad ones? [laughter] [inaudible conversations]

>> there is an enemy. >> so, in -- but if you want to play by the rules of war, if you want to use the terminology of war crime, if you want to speak about the international criminal court, know they've got better lawyers than you do. so i'm saying to you, bring the discussion back to human terms. human terms. could we have possibly gained anything from bombing a hospital in 'kunduz, yaz, and when you bring it back to that point you don't open yourself up for the government saying if you really understood the law and understood the circumstances cid the capabilities, of course you would understand the decisions made at the time -- >> we have policemen who shoot 12-year-olds in parks for no

reason at all.ñr and policemen who get off -- so, i see it very much as the same thing. if you are armed and you can do it, you do it, and nobody is ever -- there's no rep percussions, no consequence of that. and there isn't going to be any -- doesn't matter. >> host: -- >> well there, is consequence. it may be true there are policemen who kill civilians and do so without cause. i don't doubt it. but no one -- but many of those policemen, the utter majority of them, go to jail, and it points to the need for greater training, for greater oversight, for more accountability, so everything that is happening in the police world that is synonymous with the world of warfare, better training, better

oversight, better sense of what the point. if the point in ferguson is to reduce the level of violence and protect life and property, then sort of a fundamental rule of policing is, you don't want the police making things worse. well, we can apply the same rule to warfare. and so i think what is missing -- it's missing because it's unmanned -- is that we don't have a dog in the fight. we don't have a reason to say to them, you're not making the world a better place. and until we do, or until we're willing to say it regardless of the fact we don't have a dog in the fight, we're not going to be effective. in our own political -- in

getting our political will understood by our own government. and i think this is across the boards, from the tea party to "occupy," everybody believes the same thing, we are not a safer country today as a result of the war of the last 14 years, and washington is in a bubble that doesn't hear it and doesn't see it. okay. >> thank you. >> food for thought and -- [inaudible] >> so the first person who goes out there and buys a book and brings it back for me to sign, would you bring me a cookie, please, and thank you for coming tonight, and please buy a book, and i'll sign it for you when you bring it to me at the podium , and thanks c-span being here and our local tv. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> greg gutfeld is next on booktv. he says his book holiday pow to be right "is designed to help consecutive conservatives deliver fact-based persuasive arguments. [applause] [cheers and applause]

>> good evening. i am john. i have the honor of being the executive director of the reagan presidential foundation. [applause] >> thanks for coming this evening in honor of our men and women who defend our freedom in the world, please stand and join me in the pledge of allegiance. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> woo! >> please be seated. >> okay. greg, if i could have your attention -- greg -- this may

come as a surprise to you, but before you arrived here this evening, we conducted a three-question survey of all those that came here tonight. most of the people. the first question we asked, as they came through the door, is whether or not they wanted to hear a long-winded introduction of you by me. one that recounts all the successes you have achieved in life -- >> that would take forever. >> i know. it would also include the previous best sellers you have written, the models you have dated -- who you are wearing and the fact that you are star on "the five" and your show on fox. now, we had 700 people here this evening and only three said they wanted us to do that. so, the second question we asked the audience was whether they wanted to spend an evening politely listening to you