i found a magazine this morning called middle east for the

perplexed. it's a guy who is handpicking great content from around the world about the middle east to help explain it to normal people without all the hype. that's a really big deal. that idea that that person is forming a new node in the web with a collection of all this great content. so for publishers it's important to think about that. that person could be in this case of flipboard but they might be on facebook or twitter or all the above. that's how the web works now. >> the research in august, the average u.s. smart phones user downloaded zero apps per month. in a world, how do you reach new users when people are not using, or not downloading new apps? and in many cases are using only a handful of apps? >> the good news is there are

literally billions of apps being downloaded. definitely people downloading apps. so we have, for example, 250,000 new users every single day on flipboard that are coming in and setting up flipboard. so people are definitely still downloading but i also think you have to figure out smart strategies. so, for example, our publishing partners help promote flipboard. you need to make another people's best interest to promote your out and create an ecosystem ideally. that will help get you to rise above the noise of 1 million apps firstly could possibly download speed of the two questions i want to make sure we get too. one is about the future of the company and one is your own future. the future of the company first. you have raised around $169. you launched about five years ago. how close are you to either ipo or a sale or some conclusive

event around flipboard? >> we are just beginning our journey. the thing that is so exciting about the space that we are in and flipboard itself is this is just the beginning. just the beginning. there is so much more is going to happen with great content, media, this curated web. just the beginning. if you look at a screenshot of the web from 1996, which wasn't that long ago, it's amazing the difference between where we are, where we were then and why we are now. again, just the beginning to flipboard has a long journey ahead of it. and ipo is a milestone along the way but i don't think so much about that as i think about the entirety of the journey. >> you have said as a boy he dreamed of being an astronaut. just hasn't happened yet. >> not yet. >> but you're in a place cover surprise lake in some ways that

is at the center of a lot of the private efforts, for private space exploration. elon musk who is talking openly about trying to start a colony on mars i think. are you tempted to rekindle your astronaut -- >> am a little tempted after the explosion yesterday. i did promise my wife that it wouldn't go into space. which at the time seemed like an absurd promise. of course, i'm not going into space. now i'm realizing, actually i could go into space if i wanted to. i could actually, we're probably not that far away where i can buy a ticket into space in my lifetime. that's unbelievable. i promised i wouldn't do it because, you know, it is dangerous and i am the father of four kids and they have an amazing life. >> you don't think she would reconsider?

>> no, i don't think so. >> we will leave it there. mike mccue of flipboard, thank you so much. >> thank you. [applause] >> thank you, mike and kevin. great, great session. thank you, guys. for those of you were moving downstairs, grab some popcorn in the back, there's some popcorn, really good popcorn. i've been having too much popcorn. our next two guests lita versus the next technology in education. mit computer scientist anant agarwal runs the massive open online course for edx, making educated content for professors at harvard, mit and also able to anyone online. tech entrepreneur jim mckelvy is cofounder of the payment platform square as well as the nonprofit launch code which pairs people want to work in technology with apprenticeships and i want to just say is a slate editorial i recently had the opportunity to see jim

mckelvy operating in st. louis, missouri, income will let steve case later with some the coal rise of the respite i've never seen someone more dedicated to helping people who a job issues, job problems get connected to just sort of knox or companies. i wanted a special trip to jim mckelvey in st. louis that deserves a shadow. so please welcome michelle jaconi, jim mckelvey and anant agarwal. [applause] spent i feel like i won the moderators lottery by getting to it if you these two gentlemen who by themselves are phenomenal and together are the superpower team. i told them that washington is big, once you get past the ego's and get to the other level want to make our country better and these two gentlemen are doing it. i want to start with you, jim, and tell us about the st. louis experiment. >> i'm from st. louis, missouri. we have the same talent shortage is worldwide which is what don't

have enough programmers. about a year ago i was invited to a group that wanted to teach a programming class but to teach this class it's not going to work because the student to graduate from this nontraditional class can get hired. employers have this huge bias that is not take take election a certain pedigree from certain institutions. i said we should do this experiment and we should try to change the employment landscape. what i did was i called all the ceos at 100 companies in town and i got them all to agree to change their hiring practices. a deal and made, i will give you qualify person but that somebody your h.r. department will like. you will pay disqualified person 15 bucks an hour, pair the next one of your existing programmers and then it's up to you, hire them, fire them, would've. no guarantee of a job. today 90% o of the people that e placed, over 100 of them, have gotten full-time jobs out of this program to these are not your normal placement. these are people who are over 40, minorities, women, people

who 82% of our people don't have technical degrees and half of them didn't even go to college. so we are placing people into programming jobs, real jobs, not charity jobs call solving the need for the companies and getting real jobs for people. when we started this we were just taking people that would come through the door but we realized there was an education problem so i looked for a resource where we could point people that wasn't going to basically raped them like some of the for-profit educational providers have. even some of the nonprofits. my wife had been taking, as a harvard student and she said my god, this class has been made free through edx and she introduced me to a nonprofit corporation and this event has a. we now refer people to edx at a secret operation. >> so into a non-edx. what i love in reading about you

a great cool, education should be like air. everybody should have access to it. the thing that's kind of staggering to me as imam of three young kids, i would have to win the lottery to send my children to my alma mater. what sony is you are taking the lead institutions and sing will give it away for free but has yet any pushback? >> by and large, you know, you never hear a professor or a university, general and nonprofit. why would anybody say we should not be giving away a good thing? something that's a basic human right. no professor or university with a let's not get away our education to the world. so i edx we have about 3 million learned from every country in the world. we have 350 courses from the best universities in the world, georgetown, right here, harvard, uc berkeley. these are great courses in every field conceivable including coding and css key.

everybody really wants to have students take these courses. so there has been no pushback. the real challenge has been the execution. just saying how on earth do we keep doing this good thing? we are a nonprofit. many of our university are nonprofits. nobody looking to make money for provide for investor but the key is reducing courses and supporting courses and building a platform and supporting takes resource. the real challenge is how to build a sustainable model? giving away something for free, how did it some substance that enables you to continue doing this for ever? philanthropies are helping us a lot. universities have contributed $60 million to the effort. many of universities are also helping us. but the same time also working on sustaining revenue models. i firmly believe that in three to five years we will be

self-sustaining. and our partners will be self-sustaining. self-sustaining. >> amazing. let's go to the st. louis experiment as you were saying to another you guys have plans to replicate this. baltimore, denver, could washington be on your next experiment of this? >> yes. launch code right now is severely resource constrained to let me take a launch code is me and for people. it was five but one of them got deported. this is not, this is not funny. good people can stay in u.s. i'm about to lose another what if we can't figure out something to do with his visa. my staff is all under 25 and they're all very, very dedicated to this, but we have no resources to expand. >> washington has a lot of smart people that loves causes. so we're hearing resource opportunity on the stage. hope washington answers the call. keep going. >> miami has offered a $1 million to open up a launch

code operation down there. there's some philanthropic organizations that said we've got 1 million bucks committee to bring launch code to miami we need jobs in miami. going to be employers to have these people. we are using that model nationwide, basically saying any city that can come up with the funds will open up a branch there and put people to work in real numbers. put people to work. >> one of the -- >> we will go anywhere. >> is thinking washington, you mentioned immigration and deportation but is there anything that policymakers can do to help you guys? >> do know, let this keep some smart people in the u.s. that's our main right now but i don't know much about politics we don't know what can be done from a government level. but certainly if we could keep some smart people we've got here, that would be a huge help. >> we can think of many ways in which the government can help the the one most important way

is to keep out of the way. >> keep what? >> keep out of the way. [applause] i think part of a problem, we are doing good we are a nonprofit. getting people around the world. we have three courses from some of the top universities in the world like a course on globalization from georgetown for free to students all over the world can take. so a lot of the laws and rules and policies are made in an age where he read things on a piece of paper, got to walk to get an education, you could not get free resources. the internet doesn't exist. we are running afoul of the lot of h.r. policies and so on, and things are coming at us from different directions and learning all kinds of three letter department agencies in the u.s. where he ran afoul of this. we did know that existed. we are doing a good, drinking for free. is something he ran afoul of. so the challenge is oftentimes you doing good.

you can run afoul of stuff coming to we need to find ways to get past a lot of these things. and i think leadership and help from u.s. government has helped. state department has been helpful to the leaders and state department, leaders in the department of education have been helpful to us. the white house has been very helpful to us. but again we just, helpers, godfather concerned departments of the government have been helping us with some of the other agencies that didn't understand why this is a good thing. hopefully our helpers will continue helping us with those that may put impediments in our way. >> one of my favorite things about the bigger biographies, you are overcoming impediments. jim, to the great star we're talking about that i would love you to share with the audience about being a little smarter ass about your textbook when you got to freshman year. >> i started in washington university in st. louis as an undergraduate economics major, took a computer size class of

the textbook was terrible and i was spouting off about how bad the textbook was and i said i could write a better thing than this. so i really said why don't you? so that's what i did. on a dead basically rewrote the textbook from a computer size class when of the freshman. i think it's published an agenda publisher as for his second book. by the time am by the time on the software i basically have to textbooks that led me to add a second grade which is an engineering degree. so i got sort of rope in technology because i was a writer. writer. >> that's a great. when the good things about you is you actually failed a physics exam. 25 years later were teaching at mit. >> i had the opposite problem, yes. exact opposite problem. you all have heard about this college gap. between haiku -- high school coach of a readiness get. we have a skills gap. iphone into the college

readiness get. my school joined, southern india i joined -- [inaudible] ranran afoul of the college readiness get. had not learned calculus. so the professors assumed you know calculus. the 300 students in my class, and to students failed and i was one of them. >> one of my favorite things in life to look at this technology. making some things move so fast another think just not move. like the price of education has not gone down. it's just gone up. win is a tipping point going to happen? >> i think, you know, it's funny you have a system where professors that go to university would not be able to send their children to the same university for an education if the professor had to pay the tuition. something is completely broken about education system, particularly for something like education which is basic human right to issue be of help to

everybody as you said, like the air that we breathe. so i think one of the things we can do is bring technology to education. i think we can do one of two things. wasn't convinced that issues in technology for the same cost, i'm convinced into a lot better in quality. either online. we are seeing results that show you can do much better, much better pass rate either on campus or online. second is that for the same, i believe we can reduce cost. i think it's hard to do both. in a large measure but i think you can either reduce the cost for the same outcome, or for the same cost you can improve the outcomes. look at the racial of outcomes to cost, that's efficiency of a system. i believe that technology can be used to improve education. >> i love that. anant had a great analogy. he said we have a replay in sports. why can we have that in education.

i would love to play that again. >> i'm not sure i should say this here, but i was at a patriots game in foxboro in massachusetts, and we were up in the nosebleed region and i could not see anything. and so i wasn't sure i -- why i was there about these things, if you look at your living room your instant replay. just imagine watching football without instant replay. sports would not be sports but instant replay has changed sports completely. so why can we have that in education? i go to class, on the fifth amendment mark i would lose the professor and i went out for anything with the professor said to imagine if you give the students older we want a button. on education we can get everyone, give them a cause. heck, we did even give them a mute the professor but not. [laughter] >> and it's not just configure pitching what caused pitching a 23 year-old, 19-year-olds. it's not just people at that age

group. whizzing people that need retraining in the '20s and '30s. we just place a guy who was 58, got to make nuclear program job. it is something that goes throughout your life. what your doing at edx is profound that you because of what does at the college campuses but because it makes that learning available lifelong. what we are seeing in the changes with job placement is that people need to rescale. especially program which changes every year. if you don't have access to good education or good reeducation, then you will never keep up. >> one of the things that so interesting about your success is you don't stop with education. energy use kind of data and your brilliant minds and say okay, these people are being passed over by as you said the h.r. department, there are people that either look different or seven different or have different habits like to work at night. that's in is so fascinating. talk me through how you figure that out as a problem and how

the data help you solve it. >> we realized there was a definite disconnect between the demand for programs on one side, the companies want these people. these are great jobs, and a lot of people want to take these great jobs. i couldn't figure out what the market hadn't solve the problem. there were a couple of problems in the market. one is that education is sort of broken. people who take this path want to get one of these jobs get routed into an educational institution that gives him a lousy education. that's not just the for-profits although they're pretty terrible, but there are some nonprofits that are just getting that education. there's no way for the learner to choose correctly. they cannot get screwed in the. the other problem is the companies themselves are hesitant to our new programs because new programmers can do damage. if i how you as a newbie and let you lose my database you could write a query and wipe out some table and screw up my company. companies are only hiring people who have experience. if you only hire people with

experience, you will never get people with expensive but we try to do was break this by negotiating with the companies. with a special way upon boarding the talent that doesn't endanger the productivity of the country. that's the key. i can take any firm that needs programmers and i can give them new programmers in a way that doesn't decrease their overall productivity. >> so since we're in washington where to talk politics a little bit. and so guilty pleasure of mine, and one of the things that's interesting about you, in any presidential cycle or any race like small business is always from both sides agree on like let's help start its, let's hope business. you, jim, your cofounder of square which makes entrepreneurial, entrepreneur's everywhere, right? you talked about how you solve the problem in your hometown. why don't you run for office? [laughter] great platform. >> and other to announce -- no. >> do it.

[laughter] >> souza, i never really thought about politics because i've never needed to solve the problem. as i see bigger problems it may someday -- it looks like the problem from my perspective right now. it looks like the solution, then maybe i will consider it seriously but right now i'm so neutral it's amazing. i just don't have any sort of political interests right now. >> and anant come you're such a well-connected individual. i notice you only follow 23 people on twitter. one of them is chelsea clinton, yet you don't follow her mom. do you know something we don't know? [laughter] >> what i'm amazed is how did you know that? >> i do my research. >> everybody knows everything about everybody. know, i think, i think i was on a panel with chelsea, and she's been doing some amazing work

with education and with children and others. i only follow her tweets in terms of reporting a lot of interesting resources and so on. i don't follow politics so much unless i see a politician that really wants to do something big and innovative and radical. and i think when obama for his candidacy and i was absolutely blown away. i used to go around saying sixers ago that he will be the greatest president. >> and what about notes the? i think he is getting there. >> i know we're running out of time but just want to say that thank you so much for your time, and i know we will all be following you. individual have a lot of those politicians knocking on the door because 2016 education is top issue. thank you, guys. >> thank you. thank you so much. [applause] >> great job, thank you. thanks, guys. >> okay. now have a very cool session.

we are now pleased to welcome a soon-to-be new phase inside the beltway. david skorton who of course is president of cornell university, i don't know if it's quite the same as a presidential lame duck but he is a lame duck at cornell not because he's going to be the incoming president of the smithsonian institution, taking the reins next summer, compassing everything from the air and space museum to the gallery of art to the national civic he joins the "washington post," great philip kennicott. please welcome them to the stage. [applause] >> good afternoon. it's a pleasure to get to know briefly but help a longer process david skorton from cornell. the announcement that you would be the 13th secretary was made back in march. you will assume the position next summer, but as your thinking clarified at all? since the announcement was made

about broad -- >> not really but it's a fair question. i'm hugely enthusiastic about it, and very excited about being able to work at the intersection of culture and science. and i'm a doctor. i spent my life in science and medicine, i think the humanistic disciplines, art and culture are unbelievably important we're living in a stem oriented age. and so it's a found this opportunity to work at this institution. that's the way of sidestepping a question i really do not have specific ideas of what could happen. and still going to the learning curve which is pretty steep for me. >> one of the things you did say which gave some of us in washington a bit of a pause was i think you're asked by one of my colleagues about admission fees, dismiss sony. you said something, i will just become it's too early for me to be pinned down a specific question but i'm not working aspect of a nonprofit or for-profit world that is have to take another look at the business model. that sounds like the door might

be open. is, in fact, the door open to the idea of charging speed was not as far as i'm concerned to me say that i can be more clear. i think one of the five is aspects of the system is the fact that everybody can get in there. effect is usually have to go to washington to do it, thank you the sectors work on digitizing part of the collections. i think it's a fabulous idea to make it more accessible. but in washington one of the beauties is you can come and it's very populist idea and a populist ideal. what i did say, maybe my fault, two different thoughts got conflated, was that business models of everything that depends on government funding are going to be more and more created. i think we're all dealing with the, leasing universities we are, private public partnerships are springing up in court because of the reality of revenue. but no, i've no intention of making those institutions less accessible. >> fundraising for the smithsonian may be more difficult perhaps than four or

know. the bbc had a piece same cornell was number six when it comes to the number of its alumni who are billionaires. i don't think -- under the tenure, a lot of debate about where the line should be drawn when it comes to entering into private ark mark relationships for the smithsonian. in one case in particular was arranged with showtime that would've given them apparently exclusive alleys first right of refusal over the use of archival materials, smithsonian objects. a lot of people complained about that, that is seen to be taking a public resource and privatizing it. any sense from your work in university with the red lines need to be for something like this smithsonian when it comes to those sort of arrangements in the future? >> a great question. we talk about fund raising a little bit. the way fundraising works in most organizations, everyone i've ever worked at, and it worked at a bunch of them, is a

pyramidal structure where many people give about that accountable with, or modest amounts and fewer give more and fewer give more, and as you mentioned sometimes you're able to get these enormous breathtakinbreathtaking gifts fh the capacity to do it. and i think that kind of gift pyramid is true for every nonprofit that raises money. and i'm hugely impressed, hugely impressed that the smithsonian has only raised it was announced 10 days or so ago $1 billion toward the campaign goal of 1 billion have. an organization that does not alumni. ilya mayors are not, so i put the brand of the smithsonian if i could use that word is fabulous. is that you? good. not me. i've been trained to turn that baby off. but anyway, i think the fundraising will be different but i think it will be doable and i think a lot of people are supportive of it. but despite the fundraising and despite the very generous money

that comes from the u.s. government, there will be a push to find other what i will call enterprise type of funding. every nonprofit that i know about things about this broad range of revenue streams. i can't comment on the showtime contracted i never looked at it. i will become smug with it of course when i'm in the saddle, but i will say that defining where that line is legally and ethically in terms of what fits the feeling the ethos is completely important that will be part of my job. i will try to be open about it and hope that people will comment on what they think that line should be done. i can't say much about the showtime. i do think it's important to think about enterprise functions and public-private partnerships but it's got to be done in a way that everyone feels good about. >> the other sort of controversy the smithsonian seems to be wandered into course is cultural issues. not so long ago there was an exhibition at the national

portrait gallery called hide and seek to cut the current secretary and a good deal of hot water. this was an exhibition of gay and lesbian themes in portraiture. one item in the exhibition was deemed offensive by effort small number of people but fairly loud protester and the secretaries i did pull it from the exhibition i'm they don't want to necessarily second-guess your predecessor but coming out of university context, where you have been quite strong about is dressing that free speech aspect over the civility question, does that, to those issues com come l transfer? can essentially run the smithsonian with the same emphasis on free speech as you try to do at cornell? >> well, yes, i think it's very important to do so. at a think in general the smithsonian does that, does that. and she suggested i not going to second-guess what i'm sure was ever hard decision. i will not second-guess my

process on any decision to i will say that as we talked about a few years ago as we're getting ready, creative activity of any strife tends to foster controversy. recently the smithsonian came out with what i view as a bold statement on climate change saying that based on a lot of data and other kinds of data that it looks as if the warming that's going on that you can really argue about is due in great part to human activity. it wasn't too long ago is to collect that wouldn't wildly controversial and may still be controversial in some quarters. i think whether it's size and certainly arts and in my 20s the humanities, very frequently foster controversy. so i think that we need to be able to embrace that controversy and be part of the culture world and the science world in a way that makes sense, in a way that is done carefully, thoughtfully, but not necessarily back away

from controversy. but also i can't comment. >> at cornell you've been willing to attract a bit of controversy with your position on immigration reform and other issues like that. when it comes to kind of cultural controversies, let's say communities as the secretary of the smithsonian do you think you can say we need robust funding for the nadh? can you be a public advocate for the humanities in that since? >> well, i've been pushing very hard as you were alluding to for any age funding, for years and years and years. -- neh funny but i been successful, teacher i've worked on this the funding has gone down a look at each new. they got to the point where some of my always said once you work on some sites funny for a couple of years. [laughter] so we can catch up. i think it's very, very important. exactly what i advocate for i think is going to be less important than i think calling attention to the fact that the

humanities and the arts as well are very, very, very important. and again the student oriented age which is very understandable in a recession, even though some parts of the economy has bounced back a lot, which all know the economy is not totally bounced back. i think it's very important we don't lose track of these disciplines. so yes, i think it's important and hope to be able to work with and learn from the other leaders of the cultural institutions in washington who know many, many times more than i know about the washington scene and about what flies and what works. but i think that the bully pulpit, if you will, platform of the secretary should be used to point out the broad needs of the country in a way that's reasonable. and since i've garnered a chance to comment on it, whatever public positions i've taken in higher education have been linked to higher education and link to something that had some familiarity with. and as i said again and again, you won't hear me talk about

things in washington that are not directly involved in and don't know anything about. but i think arguing that the country should not turn its back on the social sciences, communities and arts is very important. i'm proud to been one of the authors of the report from the american academy of arts and sciences called heart of the matter that was released a couple of years ago. and that argues that the broad range of discipline needs to be pursued, no matter what we talk about, whether we're talking economic competitiveness, talking about placement for students at whatever level. we had to think broadly and not just about the s.t.e.m. disciplines. this is a s.t.e.m. guy talking to you. >> in several interviews since you announced you becoming to the smithsonian usage of greatest regret at cornell has been about the causes of affordability of tuition there. you've also been a remarkable fund raiser. fiscal year 2014-$732 million came in. of which only 39 has been earmarked specifically for

student aid. is that the right balance, if it's a real problem facing cornell? >> a terrific question the don't you like what i grade your questions? >> i will try to ask some bad wants. >> you are have asked some bad ones. [laughter] at in any case, in any case, i will tell you, the broad broad -- lets you to put is exactly the to me the last one phrase you were asking. >> look, 39 is about speed which are asking is disconnect between the rhetoric and the meta- money he raised him okay? i was looking for that. let me think about it from two different aspects. first of all it is true and i sent me times in public and apply to say it again in public know that my biggest single regret from to university presses is the universe of iowa and the cornell university is that i was unable to change the

balance more effectively between access and affordability. and at cornell which is an unusual place because a place with a big and dumb, very few american institutions, about 100 of the 4000 colleges and just has substantial endowment. so a little tiny piece of american education, of course an important piece. we are able to, for half the families in america, half of that comes in america can go to cornell and have no parental contribution and not borrow any money from student loan. then at the other end of the spectrum there are people whose salaries are assets permit them to pay cash, even for very expensive education as an ivy league education. but between those aspects of the socioeconomic spectrum, between those that have had the films in america we can help, people who make too much to be considered needy in that sense, but don't

make enough to pay for this, especially if they have two or three kids in college, i didn't do good enough job of organizing the. it takes two parts to organize a. it takes some series of change in the cost majors of the university so cost less to run. during the recession, the beginning of the recession i eliminated two vice presidenci presidencies, took my salary cap, and other things to reduce costs but that wasn't enough. the other end was to increase revenue. a lot of it was tuition and somewhat financially. let's talk about the other half of which are asking and that is the path between the rhetoric and how much was raised. it cost will be $50,000 in tuition and fees to go to an institution like cornell, a little bit more than that but let's call it 50. if a person wants to donate a scholarship in an endowment that would last for ever and in perpetuity about the student what kind of a free ride through cornell, that's $1 million contribution that will yield a number earnings of about 50,000 a year and that's about the cost of going there. $1 billion, huge amount of

money. but if another country better wishes to contribute to a capital project, construction project, and we're fortunate enough to get $59 or $100 million or $200 million gift that greatly outweighs the balance. but the bottom line is that i'm guilty as charged. we so much without a better way and still need to comment about shrinking the cost matrix, and some of bringing more revenue in. and not basing the revenue increase so heavily on tuition which is been the most obvious lever to pull for revenue. so yeah, we need to keep pushing. when i run into people who want to contribute and don't have a specific idea what they want to do, my top order is always student aid because of my own background. i didn't do enough, either on the cost matrix side or the revenue enhancement side. >> before but because we getting out of time, i'd ask him this is a man who plays the flute and the stunts on stage with billy joel. and you said you have stage

fright. >> i'll tell you the problem with the whole billy joel and since were bragging about me in which i like, i've also set in twice with winston marsalis. both apparently have lost my cell phone number. [laughter] and when i saw mr. marsalis recently, i said, as people my age do, call, you don't write, i don't hear from you. and i was going to be a studio musician growing up in l.a. and it turned out much to my disappointment and chagrined editor but in l.a. was a better musician than i was. i still do it as an application. i do it to th to i enjoyed a lof taking the video course which is very instructive. and playing a little tiny bit as your talk about of classical music slowly to i will make it very hard for you ever did what that sounds like. >> it's on youtube. [applause]

>> for those of you don't understand my with introducing the guy who introduced government and the segue, that was what i was doing. what we're going to have now is if you ever find yourself annoyed by the tourist rolling around the mall on their segue is, our next speaker is a man to blame. dean kamen is the inventor of the cybercom who most recently as been working on it prosthetic arm in for injured veterans that can be controlled by the printer is also the founder of first, national competition that encourages students to pursue a life in science and technologies being described after morgan freeman, let's take a 30-second look. >> this is the super bowl. the super bowl of smart, that is. it's a life-changing

competition. students having fun, competing, working together to dream up, design and build robots. spent it's an exhilarating feeling. i'm using power tools. >> having the hardest on they will ever have, and they are becoming our next generation of engineers and innovators. >> for inspiration and recognition of science and technology,. >> please welcome to the stage deka research in the public corporation founder, dean kamen, and the atlantic's rebecca rosen. [applause] >> thank you. >> hi. thank you so much for joining here. why don't we just start by you talking about first what it is, why you started it and what you seem in the years since it began? >> let me start by what it isn't.

it's not an education program. 25 years ago as today, it's a topic that most service people are pretty concerned and passionate about, parents, teachers, corporations, government. but the prevailing concern is we have an education crisis in this country. i think, i'm an inventor. inventors look at the same problems everybody else look at and see them differently. it's really quite silly to imagine that america has an education crisis. we have more schools a different level university. with more money spent on education than most of the rest of the world combined. it is not an education crisis. it's a culture crisis. it's not a supply problem. it's a demand or lack of demand problem. we have a culture that's free, even kids are free. in a free culture get the best of what you celebrate. kids celebrate sports heroes and movie stars.

25 years ago i said why do we form an organization, a not-for-profit that use of the powerful model of sports and entertainment but the content isn't bounce, bounce, bounce, throw. that's not a useful skill set for all but a few dozen people. i figured it would make science and engineering as fun, accessible, attractive to kids as the of the things they aspire to do, we will change their attitude, we will change the direction of their life, particularly women and minorities that really our culture convinces them by the time they're 10, science and engineering, its board, esoteric, difficult than the delivery guys. white guys. yard megan smith this point, a lot of doubletalk about this issue. investment and get our culture reemerge as to be passionate about inventing, solving problems, working hard at things that matter, we are going to become what we deserved to become. specs of the basic ideas how to create a demand toward that

science education. >> at first was set up with a single goal, create demand, particularly among women and minorities, to excel at something that could be a career choice for them. we claim we have a job shortage in this country. that's not true. we have a skills shortage in this country. i've had a little company with six indigenous and by 100 openings. every tech company i know would kill to get more people. we do not go rent any major university, go to any place whether doing genomics, code, nanotechnology, advanced materials. everybody is desperately looking for smart people. technology has moved so quickly and, unfortunately, our education system hasn't kept up with it. we are seeing a problem. i think the political rhetoric is even insulting. we need jobs for kids. nobody gets up in the morning want a job at we want a career. want to do something exciting. kids should expect that more

than a job. we should give them a skill set to succeed at those dreams. >> so what do you see at first? what excites kids now? what is changed in the 25 years since first was established? what is there for them and what's making them -- >> i can tell you that we have some actual academic longitudinal studies funded by people like the ford foundation and brandeis universities, but we are just literally tens of thousands of anecdotal facts. kids that go through first are dramatically more likely to stay in school, to go on to college, to study science technology. we hire them now. 25 years ago doesn't seem like a long time in the scale of the country or the company. for use as an entire generation of high school. the ones that sort 25 years ago went to high school, went through college. they are now out either working in some of our great sponsoring companies or starting their own companies, we have 23 teams

compete in year one. last year we had 35,000 schools from 81 countries, and 180,000 volunteers scientists and engineers as mentors to these kids. most companies would like to growth like that. >> this year it will be again in january. how many -- >> this year in january we expect and the closer to 40,000 kids. we have 182 universities sponsor teams last you. that gives about $25 million scholarships handed out at the chip and chip and 76,000 seat domed arena in st. louis. we will be bigger and better this year. >> that's great. i would like to talk about kind of some of the ways in which science and technology, particularly for your work in prosthetics, when, just the real ramifications of people's lives that you can see and you have, in fact, brought about. i want to hear about your work

in prosthetics and i got into that and what you've seen just in the past few years how much has changed spent the prosthetics is easy to most things i can tell you how we get into it. just like the other things. the prosthetics, i was money my own business, which is rare for me, doing my day job stuff most in making medical equipment, insulin pumps, and then, which that's my day job. it finds my fantasies like water and power and first, not-for-profit. the virtual knock at the door from the department of defense, and darpa, a very passionate colonel who happened to be coming back from his fourth defensive trip to afghanistan and iraq. by the way, this colonel is a neurosurgeon. and it is in my office saying i can't believe it, at the end of the civil war when a soldier lost his arm, we put a wooden stick on them with a hook on it. now look at the technology we do

these young people to defend us, but when you lose the arm to an ied, we give them a plastic stick with the hook on it. these young people deserve way more than that, and you're going to deliver it. and then he described he wants full capability, fine motor control. he wants to flex at her wrist and elbow, flex at the shoulder, fully autonomous, complete a self-contained, carrying its own power, and be done in two years. >> and makes you appreciate how complicated and aren't is. >> i'm happy to say we delivered something that i think they were very excited about. we made a second generation when you have them on about 30 soldiers. >> wow. [applause] >> have you gotten to meet with the people are using them? >> oh, yes, and it's a stout. but the most astounding thing to

me, i don't know what your backgrounds are, but the rest of my life is mostly medical equipment. and no matter who you put it on, people that have been issued, they need an artificial organ, people inevitably feel like victims. they feel entitled. they feel as i would afraid and sorry for themselves. they could be 90 and they want that the replacement so they can play tennis. these young people put these arms on, and without exception they sit there thinking you. they have given their arm, and they want -- i've never seen a group of people so committed and so passionate. they are not despond. they're not angry. they are not depressed to most of them want to go back and help their buddies to its msn group of people and you still good that you can help them spin back one of the things -- [applause]

>> one of the things i heard you say in one of your tent talks was is isn't about the technology. but it's about the people and the stories. what do you mean by that? how does that motivate you in your work? >> well, life is short, and everyday i work hard and everyday i'm frustrated because i don't get enough done and i decided a long time ago, i would probably go to bed every night frustrated that it didn't succeed. alisa might will be working on problems that are really difficult. well, nobody else did either. if you fail at something, some else can do, you are dumb. the other thing that makes it work on medical stuff is again, life is short but you want to make sure you work on something meaningful and how do you know? there's so much technology out there, and for a lot of great technologists spent their time making nonsense. and life is too short to take a

beautiful natural stuff and make nonsense out of it and waste your time. so working in the medical field and working on our water systems so the developing world or electrical generation systems that can maybe help in this country in terms of the environment and security. i have to believe that the stuff i'm working on, if it works, will be a big deal for the good. >> to toggle bit about the electrical generation system? >> it's odd that this morning i saw the head david crane here. i don't know how many people know david crane, but he's the ceo of like the largest coal burning entity in the united states. and yet he is taking a real leadership position in energy of saying this can't continue. and we told him about a small appliance we were making that you could put in any building, high to a natural gas line or propane line or heating oil. anyplace as a hot water here or furnace is already pre-wired for

this little device, like a home appliance. it's the size of a refrigerator. smaller. and it will turn 20% or whatever the fuel you put it in directly into electricity and give you the rest of it in hot water or heat. you build a few million of these things and started, a significant piece of base power and certainly power in the united states. is a guy who you would think would think i'm the devil, and he said i want to support that thing. and he did support and we don't these units for him and we're going into next generation. i've been in rooms where people like wall street people have said to them, why are you supporting this? his answer is pretty much welcome the future has got to go some way different than the past, and i would rather be on that bus than under it. so you know, i think he sees big counties have a kodak moment and he does want to be one of them. >> so where is the generation system being used today, and

how, what do you seem done with that? >> so we built a couple thousand of our latest version. one i believe is running in his home. we are testing them in industrial environments, commercial environment, residential environments. and again, if they become scaled, i think they have the chance to do the coal plants what pcs did to mainframes. >> and any fuel can be used? >> anything that will make you. we will turn about 20% of that heat into clean electricity. >> and people using that electricity for light, refrigeration. what you see as the most prominent need? >> electricity is about the highest form of energy, you know, whether for your computers, i may come electricity drives pretty much everything else. the byproduct and waste of electricity is heat. lightbulbs are hot. tv monitor is hot.

>> you have hundreds of patents to name. and talk about the ones that kind of stand out to you as the most of the ones that mean the most to you are the ones you think can inspire a new generation of engineers and scientists to demonstrate what can be done with the type of skills are hoping to instill through first? >> if the question is either what's the technology we've developed a like the best, i guess my answer, and i've been asked that question, i don't have kids but i can imagine if it's like asking a parent which other georgia like the most. i can't compare them. he put an arm on one single marine, there's no business there. i hope there's never a big market by the help of 200 is enough. on the other hand, on the other hand, you make an insulin pump

that if you mean people can live with. we've delivered a quarter of a billion therapies with her home dialysis machine. some of these things scale. some of them are for that one person but if it's one person that needs it, you can't compare. i guess my safest state and live, what's your favorite invention, water machine in the works could supply clean water to a few billion people. and clean water, just giving people clean water would wipe out 50% of all human disease. it matches everything else. of my long answer to what's your favorite thing, and i'm not politically correct, is i don't know because it hasn't happened yet. i think, i think people that look back at what was the biggest, the best, the most, our old. they're mentally if not physically old. young people look forward. what's the next -- and people always want to be but at the end of the day. old people and hold onto what

they have. i made a deal with peter pan a long time ago. i'm not getting old and i just keep looking forward. [applause] >> we haven't talked about that water filtration fishing. can you talk about that and how it works and what, where you're using it to the? >> so about the same size as our electric generator, which also is made to do with the fact that about 20% of the people alive today have never used electricity. we whine and complain when we lose power for a few minutes a year. there are 20% of the people who have never used electricity. how are they going to become productive parts of the global environment without access to the internet, oregon future or communications or lights at night? the probability that in your lifetime or mine fabled wake up in these small distributed places, look, transmission lines, just to visualize, switching stations. isn't that nice? not going to happen any more than they have land lines.

but once the cell phone became cost-effective, the marginal cost after a billion of them in japan and europe and north america said that africa, wanted 1 million cell phones. what if we could make a small box, i can just like cell phones to land lines or pcs to make friends, what if we could make a small box that produces locally clean water and locally electricity out of any form of electrical fuel to we ran two villages in bangladesh often the thing gas coming off the pitfall of cow dung. it ran for six months without interruption. con edison can't do that. [laughter] so we think that the 21st century is going to be about small distributed systems. personal computing, personal communication. if you commit a little box that's big enough to make 1000 leaders of water a day, enough for one of people, and small enough to carry into a clinic or a school or a village, it would

be a pretty neat thing. and you could make these the same way you make appliances, and do the same thing for electricity which runs them, and you could deliver to the developing world the two most basic human needs to get on the ladder, clean water and electricity. everybody ought to have a little of that so that they can start worrying about education and health care and all the other stuff. if we have come again the world where people are vested in working with each other instead of standing on top of each other, you would have a happier future. >> i think it's time for our final question. [applause] >> i'm just curious, what do you see as the challenges of science and technology have the most leverage going forward to really improve the most lives? you if your doctor roomful of kids where did you tell them to direct their energies to a?

>> you are determined to ask me the unanswerable -- that's another version. i would talk to stay, and again it's not a politically correct answer, it's the facts. i would say, you become everybody is whining about what's going to wipe us out. it is a bird flu? terrorism? we're running out of fuel, running out of clean air. there's no shortage of technical crises about to consume us. none. i would tell all these kids that most adults haven't figured that out yet, and so they each have their concern. but when is your philanthropy or anybody who wants to focus on, it's this or discourse health care, the energy, and fiber, food, water, it's treating a symptom. ..

love what they do and figure out how they can create it for themselves. [applause] >> thank you so much. somebody stop me when i was

doing one of my high plains of the conference and they said we are seeing so many diverse presentations. what is the big idea that you want us to get. the idea is that there is really cool stuff going out in the united states and around the world of there are things happening and this is giving people in washington otherwise paralyzed a glimpse of the possible. and i think that what we just saw with dean kaeman. so many companies in the 21st century are staggering. he cofounded paypal, the data analytics which i haven't another is the largest employer in the palo alto which was ground zero for so much of what we have seen shape our current century. he was the first outside investor in facebook and he has funded the companies like space acts and linkedin.

he's giving young people a 100,000-dollar grant to leave school to pursue their work. thiel shares his insight on creating new things in his brand-new book "zero startup to build a future," and he is here with the editor david frum. please welcome them to the stage. / >> thank you for joining us. we are going to move briskly because we have a lot of ground to cover select me put this to you directly. you created controversy with your claim that the rate of innovation is slowing down. how to do users dan g-8 ? is this is this an assertion or assessment, is that based on data or question is hard to leverage how much we have and what goes under the rubric of technology on the science and technology.

my claim is that over the last 40 years since the 1970s we have continued to have very fast progress in the world of computers, internet, mobile internet and that whole ensemble of things. we've had progress in just about everything else and so a lot of things in the 50s and 60s, supersonic aviation, space travel, underwater cities, plans turning deserts into farmland or forced into the green revolution by a culture that has been bob as much progress. they even consider the technology today. and so we have a very narrow cone of progress and it is i think reflected in a general sense of stagnation. so even though people in the technical industry and the science industry are always

bumping their companies and inventions and research into the venture capitalists are guilty of this and so you always have to discount a little bit of that. >> in your book "zero to one," you urge that people should seek big changes. let me push back on that. in the area of transportation, you look at the window and the technologies that are conceptually identical. they are the same except when you look at the cost of moving goods has dropped by over 90% in the past hundred years. the safety of people being killed in a car accident are one 17th of what they were in the 1920s. humble technologies like a

container may have contributed more to the globalization and all of the amazing things you do in the silicon valley. karl marx said that at a certain point the changes become changes in quality. can you explain why you think those things are less important than the kind of visionary things you talked about a moment ago? the >> there are certainly a number of these that have an effect of being an incredible valuable. in my approach people are going to stop companies and if you want to start a successful company you want to do something nobody else in the world is doing it. you are doing what no one else is doing. and i think software has been characterized by these fairly large breakthroughs which is why people of software is made so much money.

it's not because of the valuables but the economics of software are very monopoly prone and lucrative. and i think that the history of innovation the inventors and scientists and technologists never made any money. at the right brothers the right brothers didn't make money, tesla made no money and even if we go back to the mansion and the first industrial revolution. from 1780 and 1850. the people that started the textile factories is competed away. we have a very successful business business to described the manufacturing and 1980s you could describe it better than anything else but then it would be superseded one and a half or two years later and over

the course of a decade they lost all their money. but between the great investment and company. so, when you talk about these concerns of yours, you're talking about them fun from the point of view in the technologies and not from the point of view in the business or the consumer. >> well, it's all of the above. certainly if we build more breakthrough technology there will also be valuable to society. that's how things come of it is one that nobody nobody of how things progress. you could meet a lot of progress through the incremental innovation. i would argue that most of that happened in the first half of the 20th century and it's been slower in the last 40 years even in the incremental areas. >> when you talk about the

slowdown what you are really lamenting is the fading of what might be called big engineering schemes. superhighways. you talk in your book about the project on the term to the freshwater. i was startled that was your point of view because what drove the big engineering is of the state power and whether it was the new deal in the united states or the soviet union or italy. with the application of the state's power on a massive scale that made these things possible. and what prop them into the era of the big engineering is the set of ideas that i would have thought he would have endorsed. it was jane jacobs overcoming robert moses and saying that your big engineering project only exists because you've overridden property rights and because you haven't done your cost accounting up early. and if you actually had to pay every urbanized and whose house you just demolished in the name of the urban renewal come if you have to pay all of the farmers and all of the fishermen whose

livelihoods are taken were taken away by turning san francisco bay to the freshwater lake you would see that it made no sense. the project never made sense except the point of view of the central government state. i'm somewhat partial to robert moses and i think that ever since he won the battle in the 60s there is a sort of tricky trade-off. a tuesday we can distinguish three different modes of innovation doesn't come into progress and i think that we say we've done less but there are breakthrough point technologies which we still do occasionally and then there are things where you involved complex coordination getting a lot of different pieces to work together in the right way and that is a form of progress we used to do that we don't do any more. part of the government like the manhattan project or the apollo space program i think a lot of it had a private sector field.

so the 19th century and early 20th century america was dominated by the sword of engineer type of people that had some complex plan to build the transcontinental railroad or a canal through pamela or all sorts of things like this and ford motor co. company was an integrated complex monopoly. and there are sort of interesting companies like that that are being done but they are notable for their visa with you ask what did tesla do that is new? they didn't invent a single new thing that they combined a bunch of different things together in just the right way to create a dramatic and a better car. this is also a big part of what steve jobs did successfully when he had the apple computer to the electronic company the original iphone and ipod. there was no single massive breakthrough. it wasn't an incremental

improvement or certainly incremental improvement it wasn't a point breakthrough there was a lot of coordination. so i think it is a modem modem of the of progress that is underexplored. i am politically more libertarian and so i am skeptical of the government being able to do these things but not in the absolute sense. our government was able to do that in the 30s and 40s and 50s and the way that it's no longer does today. this is a very important policy question we should think about really hard. a butterfly and scientific white house would get lost in the mail room and there is a sense that we couldn't do apollo and whatever you think of the affordable care act i would maintain that an internet website is a demonstrably inferior and simpler and easier technology than sending someone to the moon so there has been a strange decline that we need to think about really hard.

>> you are conscious that the pattern of growth has many americans behind. there was a survey released by an agency that reported 45% of americans say their personal finances have not recovered to where they were before the financial crisis. this is something that preoccupies you. can you suggest and maybe i'm putting you too much on the spot. one policy change that might make a difference for the 70 to 80, 90% of americans who are not experiencing the benefits of economic growth. >> it is three separate debates. one of those is broadly yes and then there is a second question that includes why is this happening and that is a different question.

the answer to that is determined that there is a number of different factors that need to be sorted through very carefully and then there's the question what do you do about it. if i had to answer the why question we tend to put too much blame on the technology that displaces workers and not enough on the challenges of globalization so i think the competition from people in china and india has been a greater source of pressure on the middle class in the replacement by computers and the simple reason for this is that people are much more like computers whereas they are fundamentally complementary and not really substance. we tend to scapegoat the technology and downplay some of the challenges with the globalization. i think that's where a lot of the challenges come from.

from the policy perspective that is quite challenging. >> i'm not asking you to solve the whole problem but just suggest one thing. >> the thing people experience is a stagnation of not getting ahead and in the places like new york or silicon valley, one of the main things is "of the high cost of housing. so if we could turn the affordable housing back into something that was a real thing rather than just this weird racket people used to get the zoning permits if we turn it into a good thing the interesting question is why does the housing shift to and therefore using your point in the investment we are happy of the housing prices go up and disturbed if they go down and i

think that we should shift our perspective on housing and see it as a consumption good and something that you want to produce. i would be much less restrictive on the law. you are the order of an extinguished degree. i want to get to the bottom to make sure that they understand the nature of the critique. is your complaint that students are studying the wrong thing or is your complaint is that they are getting too little value for the money? you are also skeptical of the degree. is there a risk that we are being blinded by paying too much attention i just talked about the 1.7 million bachelors degrees in four year degrees in the typical gear.

it's up to 6.7 million in the business or commerce. >> my focus is the elite universities because that is what sets the tone of the template in a society. and i think that there is a problem where people are incredibly trapped into these places and then our townspeople all go to the same schools ended up in this theme list of careers so there is an autobiographical per to this where one of my friends wrote i know that during the naked and stanford in four years. i got into stanford law school and ended up at a law firm in new york from the outside was a place for everyone to get in and of me outside for everyone to get out. after i left overs after -- [seven months to do a better alcatraz to go out the front door and never come back the

identities were so wrapped up in the competition it's not about a learning but a tournament. if you are one of the top universities and want to get fired up the next day. you want to sort of get the students, alumni and faculty to work after you with pitchforks to one thing you should propose is to double the enrollment. why shouldn't harper to double or triple its in rome and? people in the 1970s now you have 7 million people in the world and they are not doubling enrollment because the model is not to educate people commits to be a studio 54 where we have a large velvet rope with definitely -- preferably a long number of people that get in with a terminator driven around the exclusion and i do not think that there's a right way for us to think about our future. it shouldn't be that you go to yale or to jail.

we have to create new alternatives. [applause] >> we have a minute and a half but i don't want to let you go past that so quickly. we are not talking about the super delete. we are talking about the broad. maybe it would be true of 100% if 100% of americans but so long as 35% but for the 1.7 million people who do every year that makes a huge difference. are you telling them don't study english? >> i don't want to talk about those people because if they fall to the cracks, they are in trouble. that's why i'm focused on the students at the elite colleges because it is much less risky for them to try some other things. i do think that the tricky questions why is that there is

no safety net and that you have to get these degrees to get ahead and i think that you have all these questions. so the degree is that what gives you the advantage or is it the signaling or the selection? and so if you are able to get into a four year college if you were able to complete it, that signal that selects people that you are disciplined enough to sort of plow through this it doesn't necessarily mean that you learn something. and as i do think that the amount that is being spent is very disproportionate. and many cases things go wrong about 40% of the people that start before your colleges do not finish them. they still end up with a lot of student debt and if you start a college and don't finish it you are probably worse off than if you didn't even start because of the enormous student of problem. when i talk about people in their 50s and 60s they think i'm crazy because they went to college at a time when it was --

it gave you a tremendous advantage and didn't leave with a lot of debt. when you talk to people in their 20s they still feel like they have to go to college and they can't imagine doing anything else it is a failure of the imagination but there are some serious downsides to the data that users that users begin to disintegrate place to start with $100,000. you can't get out of the college that even personally bankrupt the rest of your life they will garnish your social security check to pay it off in their 60s and 70s. >> we are overtime. thank you peter thiel for your time. [applause] >> thank you very much. i have an announcement about the innovators stage. if you want to go down there now you will be treated to todd hyams who is the founder of xl

hybrid and he can tell you how you can turn your gas guzzlers into an energy efficient hybrid. you're going to be interviewed by kevin delaney. now we have my old boss, walter isaacson, the former editor of "time" magazine and he is going to interview the two steve's. the two steve's are featured in walter's book about innovators, and it's about how you can be a genius but you are not a genius on your own if takes a village. walter, steve case, steve crocker. [applause] steve crocker, steve case, we had al gore here last year so we can get rid of that joke really

fast. i worked for him as the importance of the september when aol opened up to the internet and what people in and certainly they didn't know the importance of steve crocker. i'm going to start with steve because then it is woven into the internet and it starts with a graduate student at the university of california santa barbara ucla. and they were the first to get to these nodes and message processors that were going to be part of the internet. and they thought that the u.s. government and the pentagon and all these people were creating it with todd and how to do it. the research universities just updated it to the graduate students and you became the lead graduate student. tell me the story.

>> i didn't know it was going to be important either. [laughter] so as you said, the project which was the seedlings for what became the internet started out as a project to connect to the research site that the defense advanced research agency was already supporting the research at so it was sort of imposed on this existing set of sites. the first four sites were chosen as you said and each of the sites already had a research agenda and a principal investigator who was leading the research and this side project was imposed and brought it down to the grad students. the long lines connecting them to each other was done through the formal contracting process but it is open what to do with

this thing and how to connect the computers to the initial routers and what they should say to each other. they started getting together and having these free discussions and we knew basically there were some simple things we wanted to do. but we also understood that there were a vast number of possibilities and that there was no chance that we were going to be able to completely define all of that. so, we picked around a handful of ideas. we anticipated that downloading software and the work by about 25 years but we didn't get to implement it right away that we could see it coming. and we also decided we better leave a lot of room for other people to build on whatever we do. and after several months of meetings we started to write

down some notes and i was very concerned that there might be some adult and some authority figure from the east. whether as washington or boston some figure was going to show up and ask hard questions. who are you and who gave you the authority to do anything. after a couple of weeks of procrastination. it means nothing. you can be incomplete. just put your name and the date and title and institution and in order to emphasize that these were not the sort in any kind of a final authority they hit upon this device and labeled every one of them as a matter of form request for comments.

i figured this would last a few months until we have documentation and that was april april 1969 when i was asked to write the introduction to the 1,000 i was genuinely surprised and thought like a thoughts like a sort of phenomena you can't turn off and then sometime later the term got adopted by the oxford english dictionary and it's one of these small little things on the side. >> but it's not small because by calling the request for the comment you made everybody like they could be a part of it so that is collaboratively designed. if you think it is ingrained in the genetic code of the internet that is not a top-down system but a collaborative system? >> it worked well that way. it was part of a culture in which anybody could participate. we had open meetings and open documentation, no cost to anything. 1994 and made my first trip to india and i gave a talk at

institute of science advisors introduced a graduate student that had built some software. i got quite choked up about it and it's been quite amazing. today the task force operates in that way. i heard an interesting anecdote deputy director of the nsa was talking about interacting in the court and saying well if hundreds of particles and explaining the complexity and the judge said give me the precise number so she said okay we will go figure out the number and he came back and a couple of

weeks later he's back in court and quotes a different number the judge said why is the number different from the one you told me and he said the 15 new particles. accurately pretreated the distance from what actually goes on versus what the images are. >> steve case when you and i first started working together in the 1990s and when you were growing aol, the online services were the only way that normal people like us could go online and you made it burst into a community service. explain why the community was important. >> they were the sole medium. now we call it social medium before the chaperones and instant messaging. we were ready to build a vision

is about division is about collaboration and ways of innovation over to build on each other and actually we started aol in 1989 so tall beers ago and it was still it legal to connect to customer service. it was still for educational use, military using things like that. it wasn't until 1992 that the internet opened up so there was the decade of online services with aol but they served the well and it was in the early '90s that we could bring those worlds together but we always be weakened the power of the idea of the internet and society would be better if everybody could connect into that kind of leveled the playing field. so our focus was how do you make it useful and fun and affordable and that was around people they

already knew that they would benefit from knowing because of a shared interest. >> you said that it is illegal and that is where we do give the al gore shout because it was developed 92 that opens up the internet to everybody, so if we hadn't misspoken slightly he would have been getting a lot of credit so what happens is that aol actually does -- i rented this is called the eternal september because although the sudden you go on aol and did you have trouble deciding to open up the garden gate? ..

the peak in the late 1990's, over half of the internet traffic in the united states , consumer traffic was through aol. >> the business model for the content going south when everything gets put on the web. how do you see a business model that would have or could work better for content providers? >> i think it is evolving. because -- the good news is the playing field that level, and everyone has the opportunity to have their voice heard, that is the good news. the bad news is, there are a lot of voices and can be a little bit noisy.

the role of a duration is important with interested brands and journalists is important, and you are seeing people migrate to that. usually it is a mix of things they choose to rely on as well as things they want to be exposed to whether it be twitter with facebook or other types of social platforms. that continues to evolve in an interesting way. >> dr. steve crocker, you were involved in something that included payment systems. what do you see the future of the internet being, and how would that relate to things like bit. >> in the mid-90s i was involved in a startup. the big success of that venture was credit card payments moved over the internet but then into the existing, classic banking system, a musical master card, so forth, things that

we tried to build but did not go so successful were micro payments insects and other things. and those involved paypal came -- became successful sometime later i actually have some concern. not that i want to say something negative about the bitcoin, but something cautionary about the idea of exotic company payment systems. we didn't entirely, the whole society depends upon the stability of the monetary system. and if there is something that disrupted that, if a dollar bill taken out of your pocket suddenly became worthless when there was a big inflation, the level of havoc we would have would dwarf anything that we have seen. the meltdown in 2008 would be nothing compared to what we see. so there is a lot to be

protected, and one has to proceed -- the country has to proceed and the world has to proceed quite carefully. the other thing is that there are some very interesting to payment systems. in kenya, for example, you can make mobile payments breezily. underneath that, it turns out that the cost of those payments is enormous. i am not sure i know precisely, but i have in mind it makes -- it costs 30%. that is not the kind of percentage we are used to year. the cost of writing a check, at least the charge -- the price you are charged is very much less than that. so there will be an exploratory process and a settling a process. i think we need to be very, very cautious. >> payments disrupted? >> sure. i think we are seeing the first wave of the internet, aol and others were part of it, beyond building the

consumer access. 85-2000 where that came of age and get everyone connected and build a core infrastructure. the last 15 years or so, the second wave, has been building upon top of it, facebook, twitter, and so forth. the third wave is integrating the internet seamlessly into almost every aspect of our life's, payment, health care, education, energy, food, a lot of parts of our lives that are pretty important sectors of our economy that are significant that have not been disrupted. >> like health. >> health is a part of it. and will be different if -- and this builds on what you said it your book. the first is, you will have to have partnerships. you cannot go it alone if you are trying to change the health care system. you have to partner. with that is the silt @booktv skill set some on to paris are successful in.

the second is policy. regulators and customers. the government is the largest customer of health care. too bad. you have got to engage in them. the third is going to be perseverance. there have been some products, services that have the essentially been overnight successes. the most recent example. next wave will require more perseverance. if you want to revolutionize of these sectors, education, health care, it will require more partnerships coming days man on a policy level and more perseverance. creates enormous opportunity these are central parts of our lives, and health care alone is one sixth of our economy. a big opportunity to create great, iconic companies that will require a little bit different skill set. >> rise me of a line that i had to be to you, which is

that vision with that execution is a hallucination . >> the other one will really be a key idea that really kind of drives this third wave is an african proverb. if you want to go quickly you can go a lot. if you want to go far, you must go together. that idea, driving collaboration, across sectors, working with governments, nonprofit, that will drive this next leg. it will require a little bit different action. >> which gives you the most excitement about what may happen or the most worry about what may happen to the internet over the next five years? >> the excitement is the dramatic expansion.

by some measures have the people in the world, billions are using the internet in one form or another. and so it feels a little weird, but you can actually have a conversation about how to get the other half of the people on the net. in some sense that is like looking at completion. there are a lot of hurdles. things are always difficult when you are dealing with the non early adopters and the digital divide and so forth, but nonetheless, you are talking about the possibility of a world that is pretty well connected globally. the difficulties i that the internet has become so important and apropos, you have politicians and big money interests concerned about control, concerned about power. >> corporate-owned government.

>> corporate-owned government, and each with their own interest, and those interests differ around the world. in some cases you have -- some governments want to have a lot of surveillance, and other cases they want to keep content out. and we will have a very difficult time. we are in the middle of a difficult time sorting all that out. a lot of downside is possible, and if we're lucky we will steer away from that and have good communication. the other thing i want to say quickly is that, and interesting marker will be when we stop talking about the internet, when it is so pervasive that it is inside that typically in most developed countries one does not ask the question, are you on the lecture grid. >> right. [laughter] >> the same thing, i think, will eventually happen. this will not be as subjects for, are you on the internet? of course you are.

>> i know that the commerce secretary give a good talk to to this group but spoke to you wall and put a finger on that very problem. to many other interests try to take over the internet. >> she graced our meeting in los angeles a couple of weeks ago parisi gave the rock, soccer and talk. >> i love that. we look up this morning. in ohio on tv talking about the rice's arrest theory explain that whole fifth theory this will be, last question. >> make sure we remain the most innovative entrepreneurial nation. a few places, silicon valley, new york city, boston, recognizing there are great entrepreneurs created all over the country

this year most would go to three states. 76 percent of fortune 500 companies are the other 47, and so there is an imbalance. we need capital spread more evenly, build up communities in some of the city's, a lot of different things that make it possible to be it social things making it easier. will we can to build up those communities. i did this with the atlantic, visited nine cities on a bus tour of detroit, pittsburgh, cincinnati, national, minneapolis, of great american cities, but not just crazies in the past but the future because of what is happening. we just need to recognize that and celebrated, and remember -- not to be negative about silicon valley, but 50-60 years ago detroit was silicon valley. that was the most innovative company -- city at the time. six years ago silicon valley

was like gorgeous. a hundred years ago puts work was silicon valley because it was the steel capital powering the industrial revolution pbgc these waves of innovation. america itself was a start up. we led the way in the. that is why everyone now the leader of the world. when we need to there be the most innovative, entrepreneurial nation. supporting these communities and try on a policy level to get things like immigration reform passed so we can win what is now on our global battle for talent. it is important that we all do whatever we can to embrace the next generation of entrepreneurs wherever they might be in provide capitol, making easier to attract talent and spotlight what they're doing so we have a more broadly dispersed innovation economy that maximizes our chance of remaining the leader of the

world. is pretty important. [applause] >> that was really good. good ending. >> thank you. this is of little like at time reunion. the former washington bureau chief of the times's joining us for the next segment. first, let me describe the shane smith perry described as the voice of a generation, vice magazine was launched in montreal during the mid 90's as every punk magazine. chief punk, shane smith, already had an hbo show, a record label, and he is going to build a news and entertainment platform ten times the size of cnn. smith is joined to today by former obama white house press secretary jay carney who understands washington media like few others.

it long sparred with the white house press corps before leaving his post with the president this summer. they are so good that and i am not going to have a moderator. they're just going to go at any mind meld with each other. welcome. >> thank you, margaret. [applause] >> i thought i was the moderator. >> they told me i was the moderator. >> sue will reel them in here. >> i am going to interview you. >> you this started. >> so, obama gets elected. [applause] [laughter] >> i was in new york city, union square, joyous, a triumphant, people hugging, crying, a real feeling that the world was going to change. and now, you know, the mood is different.

>> you know, the feeling, and you can give your $0.2, with the feeling, the perception is that a lot of this stuff has failed and has not worked to run the government is now working. what happens? >> so two things. one is, i think a lot did happen, policies camino, policies growing, creating jobs, unemployment rate is down, universal or near universal access to health care, a project that was 100 years in the making. of what has happened. what i think you have tapped into is that when president obama was elected it was a sense of enormous possibility that as he had promised, the town could be changed in washington. the partisan superficiality of debate could be transcended and that the country would benefit. and i think that there is no question that that goal has never come close to being

met. the president would be the first movement that and to regret his own inability to make that go away. what i think it tells us as citizens is that no individual, no president can do that. we have to do it. if you think about it, the last three presidents have run on a promise to change the tone of washington. clinton, jurors told the bush, and barack obama. i think most recent and most associated with obama, but the two previous presidents have said the same thing and most oversaw more partisan and acrimonious and gridlock. this is why we need political reform. our system is broken this would agree with me, the gerrymandering of our house districts as a principal cause of the kind of nonsense that we all have to suffer through anyhow the

problem with political reform is not exciting. >> if they can't get anything done, how do the reforms? >> congress is not going to do. and we have seen some action around this. has to be state-by-state because they control how districts are written and drawn, and it has to happen there. some kind of popular momentum behind it at the end. most people say they want political reform when asked, but nobody votes on political reform, and that is what politicians -- if there was a payoff on the campaigning latter, politicians would campaign on it. >> because the payouts would be, they would get kicked out. >> yes. it you know, the other guy would win. the other candidates would win because people are not that motivated by issues proper answer motivated by others, national-security and the economy. >> as we are here to talk about media, do you have

this polarization that is happening in washington, the gridlock, how much of that is fueled by media? you have fox news on this side, which is sort of talk radio op-ed. and then you have on the left basically, the pointing fingers at the fat cat. not all guys because i am fat, young guy. so basically what happens is, you know, it is entertainment. and so therefore whatever is the craziest wins. and so you have no one saying, hey, let's reform this. but if you have to hit crews out there, it plays well in peoria, as they say. >> and i think what has happened is that self identified conservatives and liberals go with it -- they will find news that affirms

what they already believe. and that is obviously damaging to the cause that we are talking about, but fixing a broken system. the media itself is suffering from a systemic failure, and i think what is refreshing about -- and the transition here, but some of the new media ventures there we have seen is that there is a return to real news and non, you know, and is without the political -- you know, not seen from the political winds in the way that news is so often seen, especially television news, through the major channels the talked about which said documentaries and news channels. very old school in the new media form. similarly, nothing is more old fashioned. >> similar, but not as good. >> that may be the case, but

it is explanatory. it is providing information in a way that can be hard to find in some of the traditional media. >> so to go back to me being a moderator, we have this sort of polarization that is happening in media and politics. now, one of the things that i am personally passionate about but also i think is tremendously confusing as an issue in america is sea level rise, global warming. and i was talking to mayor bloomberg about this the other night. he was saying, is a media issue. i was saying, well, you know, go to texas where they have a three-year drought. all of the cows are gone. rick perry is like, we'll be as a state is seeking. what happened. so when you look at this issue and it is one of the only countries in the world

where we are still debating that it is an issue at all when you have 93% consensus, which does not ever happen in the scientific community, why is it that 47 percent of this company does not believe it is happening and politicians what go out there what is happening now is interesting because republicans who have been a virulently anti are now realizing they're not trying to be elected. how important is that and what the hell is going on with climate change to nile in this country? >> a couple of things. politicians are realizing that they cannot be in the nile permanently because there will be a political cause which will motivate politicians to act to do something about it. the problem is if you wait for the majorities of feel like they have an immediate self-interest to address by taking care of doing something like climate

change we may wait too long or something like that. the problem is, instead gratification, politicians seek and our political system rewards. if you are in georgia -- georgia that is not a problem that marker repeal or any other politician has to worry about today or next tuesday or the first tuesday of november and 2016. there is not a compelling interest to address it. what i do think in our sort of traditional media we have a problem that we on the one hand, there are not enough voices of authority. well, it is still a matter of debate. why? i think that there is a tendency to hide, to maintain your object to the pie simply saying he said this and she said that instead of trying what he

said as false and will she said based upon science. i think that this situation now has a similar aspects to it on the issue of how you contract and whether or not it could go airborne. i heard politicians say, we don't know. some experts say that it could be contracted, it could be airborne. no, they don't believe some do. >> philip morris. >> sure. it. >> used to be paid by philip morris. now are paid back -- >> the media, and not the partisan media, but the authoritative media needs to call out that kind of nonsense. >> but here is the fundamental problem or a fundamental problem, which is, as you know, i was old

school reporter from traditional media, time magazine, 20 years. >> this is where you make fun of me. >> no. i look to you for answers. which is, there has been an enormous amount of a downward economic pressure on traditional media, and that has come into play. there's no question major news organizations have fewer pierrot's. nor of the reasons their is a sense that all power is concentrated in the white house's every tv reporter does every story no matter what it is from the north lawn of the white house is because there are reporters anywhere else. so how come you seem to have faith that there is an economic model in producing news that is sustainable when all of these other organizations that have histories of doing it are struggling so much? >> because we are making a lot of money listen to.

>> are you keeping the secret formula to yourself director is a public good here that could be done. >> it is not -- it is not rocket science. it is basically, there is a changing of a guard every generation in media, and we are the changing of the guard. a different language, a different way of doing things, a different way of shooting, cutting. what was interesting in the beginning was the kid brother. all of those crazy kids. and then as it started getting bigger and bigger the but they cannot be generous because they have tattoos or beards or of from williamsburg. it was always like, well, if all your commenting on is our style and we are all right. and it was, you can't be journalists because you're not doing it the way that we delete. i think that you have to look at, you know, why is fox deal and? right? why is that new york times

june? they are doomed because fox news skew at 68 years old. and there are sort of angry, afraid of people. old people don't buy anything it is a problem. [laughter] at least in this cycle. >> so you look at that and say, well, you have the new york times, i love the new york times. so the problem is there galvanized into inactivity. we could do this. i don't know. video is hard. and so quite frankly you have to start from scratch. you have to start predigest to be organic. is kidnapping created in the border and.

when they, what should we do number-one for 40 quarters. they always say, you should enjoy it, get to watch and your pension and just enjoy. it's over parizeau there is no, i in your view, no model where traditional media is trying to make a transition because there is a lot -- there is still a lot of good products to be out of the new york times and you can find online and video and other things. to succeed in this environment -- >> with the new york times does is amazing, but newspapers will continue to shrink. it is all mobile. and if you don't have a mobile solution he should not even show up to the gate. unless you have been investing in technology, unless you have all of your

people who have grown up only having mobile devices of, you should not come out of the gate. my dad will read the new york times as a newspaper in your like, great. you should enjoy the time when people do that, but that is over now. we will not ever. the forecast for the future? it is definitely a struggle. it was becoming one when i left. so upset that organization and others have continued to fight to maintain relevancy in touch to make a profit, but it gets harder and harder. >> for me also it is the product. you are saying the product suffers. if the product is fox news or illness in b.c., i don't want the product. >> and it is a lot cheaper to produce that because it is just a lot of hot air often. and, you know, going out and getting the news, in getting

someone, senate seats of sending someone to liberia to report on the ebola and take that risk and find that story is an expensive proposition. so i guess people who are still at least partly tied to traditional media look at something like a vise and others and say, are you willing to make the necessary editorial investments, you know, to maintain levels of editorial standards that have become so expensive to maintain, or is do-it-yourself journalism, as is sometimes called was, you know, kind of viewer be where proposition? >> for example, when you look at our coverage, a lot of what we do is live streaming. so everyone is saying something.

we are showing it to you in real time with no commentary. i think the day of the voice of god, you know, for an hour night telling you what your watching and what it means and what you did she think about it is over, and i think that is good. generation why is the most sophisticated media : of all time, very smart and savvy. they can tune into something and watch it. that is why we call what we do emerge as some. more on the documentary filmmaking philosophy because you go and press record because the story evolves. so, you know, that whole era -- and it is funny. will you have the same standards to make you have to understand that generation y growth with weapons of mass destruction, saddam hussein harboring al qaeda demint even though