machine learning and artificial intelligence in the digital age and it sets of two strand of the digital revolution. people like ada lovelace the believe the difference was to connect humanities and sciences that the imagination and creativity of us humans connected to the processing power of machines with each augment each other and that partnership, symbiosis' as she called it would always be stronger than machines alone. ..

>> it still says in 20 years they'l bring us artificial intelligence. there's a wonderful guy in my book who i'll get to in a moment. lickliter said maybe so, but in the meantime, why don't we connect ourselves more closely to our machines, because that's going to be more useful. so in all the data points we have of the 60 years or so of the digital revolution has been that the combination that ada envisioned of the technology of humans and machines has always proved more fruitful than the class of pure artificial intelligence. now, alan touring's own life, in some ways, is tragic, heroic and somewhat of a reminder that maybe we aren't machines. after he does the imitation game, he debates it with people. people keep saying, you know, you have to have consciousness,

you have to have impulses, you have to have sexual desires to be human whereas a machine wouldn't do that. he went kind of silence during those parts of the bbc debates because at that time he was engaged in the activity when the debates were happening human, a machine would have found them incomprehensible. he'd picked up a 19-year-old man, moved in, the young man moved in with him, gets burglarized he admits to the police that they have a sexual relationship, and i think the police somewhat reluctantly -- because he is somewhat of a national hero -- arrest him for it because it was still illegal back then. very tragic. and they sentence him to, as if he were a machine, have hormone treatments to change his orientation. it's really weird. it's as if you could reprogram the basic essence of who we are as humans. totally wrong. but he goes along with it, takes it in stride for a while, but then one night he takes an

apple, dips it in cyanide, bites into it and commits suicide. that's not something a machine would have done. the imitation game was over. it was clear, alan turing was human. and to me, that's an i saidational thing -- inspirational thing which is a great, heroic person who makes us understand the nature of our humanity and how we have to respect each aspect of our humanity. that machine that he built with his team, tommy flowers and others in england, was a great electronic machine called colossus which helped break the code. but it budget, oddly enough, a universal enough because it only had one purpose which was breaking the enigma codes or the german codes. to be a real computer -- because i ask myself in the book who did the first computer, who invented the computer, and you'd think it would be easy since the it's one of the most important inventionings of our time, is it

bell, is it morse, is it edison, who's the guy or gal who invented the computer. there are two computers that are really in contention in the united states for this. there's one in germany, but it gets bombed by the allies during the war, he never completes it, or the one that would be a full electronic computer. there's a guy at iowa state named john vincent -- [inaudible] and this illustrates the difference between the loners and the people who know how to build teams. he was a loner. he built a machine, an electronic machine that he hoped would be a computer in the basement of the physics building at iowa state, and whenever he needed to figure it out, he didn't have a whole team around him, he had only one graduate student working with him, he would get in his olds mobile and take long drives from iowa. actually he often drove to the illinois border, he would

clarify his starts that way. so he comes back and pretty much gets the machine conceptualized, but it doesn't fully work. why? because he doesn't have mechanics, the punch card burners don't work, they kind of jam, it has a mechanical element, and in 1942 he gets calledoff and goes into the navy, and he lees -- leaves the machine in the basement of the building, and a year later it gets dismantled and thrown away. it would be lost to history because, as i say, creativity is a collaborative and team sport, had it not been for the other person who i actually think is the foremost visionary of the computer in america and somebody you probably haven't heard of but i think is an exemplar of what the digital revolution was about, a guy named john mockly who from washington, d.c. was part of that crowd of people who loved sharing ideas. he was part of the smith sewn ya, and -- smithsonian, and he

was part of the carnegie institute, he loved going to book festivals and everything elsewhere he could be around and listen to people and share papers. so he goes around trying to figure out how do i make a computer. and he visits bell labs, he goes to the 1939 world's fair and sees things, he goes up to dartmouth, he goes up to harvard where there's a mach i electronic computer that grace hopper is programming and howard aiken is building, and he even hears about this guy out in iowa. so mockly takes his poor 9-year-old kid and puts him in a car and drives all the way out to iowa state to visit this computer. and he spends four days there kind of looking at the computer, learning what he can from it. this becomes a bonanza for those of you in this room who are intellectual property or patent lawyers because it ends up being a fight for 20 years of did he steal things.

but for me, it's not about stealing. if you're going to be a collaborator in the digital age, you really have to pick up ideas from all over the place. that's what innovation is. it's saying i found this idea, i'm combining it with this idea. as ada lovelace said, you combine ideas from all over. so mockly gets back to the university of pennsylvania with all of these ideas, and he says but i'm going to need a team. so he hires -- not hires, he partners with ec earth, a great mechanic and engineer who's, i think, one of his grandfather or something had invented the turkish taffy machine, so he knows how to, you know, make machines that don't get all gummed up or whatever. there are all sorts of mechanics, there are people who do information theory helping him, and there are actually two sixth grade women mathematicians who are there to program it just in the tradition of ada

lovelace. they were great women mathematicians because one of the things that surprised me -- grace hopper, for example, got her ph.d. in math from yale, and it stunned me to know that more women got ph.d.s in math in the 1930s than a generation later both in proportion and absolute numbers. it was before women were told that they didn't know how to do math, so they are at the forefront of this revolution. and what they do is the programming. and the boys with their toys, you know, they think that the hardware's the important thing. but the women actually know that it's not just how it's wired, you have to be able to reprogram it because it's doing ballistic missile tests, it's got to then do atom bomb explosions, and they write programming languages collaboratively. they create things like coe ball, and in the end it's the programming languages that become more important than whether it's honeywell or uniadvantage hardware.

it's what operating systems are you using. the unfortunate thing is that women have often been written out of the history of computer programming. the day they finally unveil this machine at penn that mockly and the six women and 80 other people created is valentine's day of 1946. because the war is finally over, they don't have to be secret about this machine. they have a huge demonstration for the press and all the dignitaries from washington. and the women have to stay up, two of them, jean jennings whose book "pioneer programmer" a memoir came out a couple of years ago right after she died. it's a great little book explaining what it was like to go from missouri to be programming the first computer. all these women, they program a wonderful demonstration that makes the front page of "the new york times." it's a historic thing, all of the lights blinking. and then everybody goes off to houston hall in penn for this

great candle lit dinner with all these dignitaries, but the six women are not invited. they take the bus back to their apartments on valentine's day of 1946, a cold february night. and you see after that the role of women begins to decline a bit in computing. even in 1984 i think close to 40% of undergraduates studying computer science at american universities were women. nowadays it's 17%. it's gone in the wrong direction. there are many reasons for that which you all, you know, can encourage people to write books on. my only slice at this is that women didn't have enough role models in a way. as my tower said when i asked -- my daughter said when i asked about ada lovelace, she said, you know, she was a math person, she loves computers, she said until i heard of ada lovelace, the only woman programmer i'd ever heard about was a character in a batman comic. so it's useful since my father was an electrical engineer, my uncles were, i had those role

models and loves electronics, it's useful for people to have role models if their going to be innovators, and that's, indeed, what we do when we write this book. these are people who can help you understand what innovation is all about. now, the commuter is a pretty cool thing -- the computer is a pretty cool thing, 17,400 vacuum tubes which means it's not something you can try at home. in order to make a great revolution, it had to be made personal because that's the narrative arc of the digital revolutions, taking wonderful devices and doing what ada lovelace said, connecting them more intimately to us making them more personal. so you have to have things like the computer. you have to have people like nick lickliter. as i said, he's one of the heroes in the book. he had been at mit, he was at a private company sort of aligned with mit. it was right after world war ii, and there was something that happened right after world war ii that really helped america become the powerhouse of the

digital age. and that was that there was a collaboration between government funding and government, universities and private companies. it was a three-way collaboration in which from bell labs to bbn and other places to sri at stanford and rand, you had these places in which the government was no longer building research labs like where they built the atom bomb, but instead funding research at universities, universities and government were collaborating with private companies to put into practice. that's now sort of blown up. we've cut our research funding, we're destroying the seed corn for future inventions. but also that sense that we're all in this together. now corporations think they're at war with the government, and universities. but j.c.r. lickliter was the heyday, and the eisenhower administration was the heyday of this combination. lickliter is doing an air defense system, and he realizes

a few things. one is if you're going to have a good air defense system, you have to have quick, interactive computers. things that i've told you about, these were big old compute ors, and usually you had to bring your punch cards as if you were offering them to an oracle. i remember that, punch cards and then the next day you'd get your answer back. that doesn't work when the missile is coming in. [laughter] you need interactivity. secondly, you need really good graphical user interfaces. by that i mean what you see on the screen has got to be really easy to understand. can't be all those little command lines. so lickliter helps create a screen in which you can tell the difference between a passenger plane, incoming missile and a pigeon which is quite useful -- [laughter] and a console jockey can do it right away. but, you know, we don't think of that as being that important, but that is the key to doing what i said was the ada tradition, making us more comfortable with our machines. they're easy, they're friendly,

convivial it's sometimes called. and finally he knows that we have to network all these air defense systems together. he's a funny guy from missouri. he loves giving credit more than taking it, so he calls it the intergalactic computer network. when he goes to the pentagon, he gets made the first director of arpa, the advanced research project agency's information processing division. so he calls it arpa net and it becomes, of course, the backbone of what is now the internet. and he delegates this to all the people so that it's a collaborative process. lickliter was also, like everybody in my book, deeply into art, music because he believed that the connection between art and science was what creativity is about. he used to go to museums with some of his engineers, and they would stand in front of a picture for maybe an hour, one of them said, and they would look at each brush stroke, and they would say, okay, how did that add to the creativity?

what was the artist thinking? he said he tried to create that in the engineering as well. but it was a collaborative process to create something like arpa net or the internet. and what he does is all the research centers that are now being funded by the pentagon as part of this triangle i mentioned, they're told they have to be part of this network. and not only that, they have to figure out how their computers are going to communicate with the what are called imps, but basically packages or routers that are being sent to the universities. and being great universities, they do what professors at great universities do, they delegated this task to their graduate students. [laughter] so you have a group of graduate students at, you know, ucla, sri next to stanford and university of utah, all the -- unfortunate of california santa -- university of california santa barbara and, of course, cambridge, mass, where they're making the packaging switches

and routers, and in order to do it, they decide to make it very collaborative. there's a guy named steve crocker who i ran into years ago -- i'll explain why -- but he was one of the two graduate students who helped write down what they were doing in the early days of the rules for this new network. and he said that he wanted to make sure that everybody felt included. he did not want it to be top down. he wanted no hierarchy, no bosses, no commands. it was all going to be done collaboratively. he's standing in the shower at his girlfriend's parents' house -- it was the only place he can think when he's staying at his girlfriend's parents' house, i guess -- [laughter] and he doesn't want to call them the protocols or the instructions or the, you know, plans or the proposals even for how you would take, say, a packet, break it up, put a header block on it, have the header block tell the packets to, you know, recombine when they got to the destination,

those type of things you had to do. he says how can i do it so everybody feels included, and he finally comes up with the idea of calling it requests for comment. all they do is they write these things out, they decide how they think it might be done, and they call it a request for comment so everybody feels collaborative, as if they can be a part of it. the interesting thing is that dna is inbred into the internet as we see it today. there's no central hub, there's no command, nobody runs the thing -- as i should have told my boss when he first asked me -- nobody has a switch, there's no hub like a phone system or even regional hubs like an airline system. every single node on the internet has equal power to transmit, receive, whatever. store packets. and at one point we at "time" magazine wrote that the reason it was done this way was so it would survive a soviet attack. that if the soviets bomb, you know, the hub of any system, it could take out the

communications system. but by having a distributed packet switch network -- which this was -- nobody could take it out. you bomb any of the nodes, the internet routes around it. you try to censor the nodes, as we know today, the internet routes around it. so we wrote in "time" magazine this stuff was designed to survive a nuclear attack. we get a letter from steven crocker, someone i had never heard of. this was back in the '90s. he said, no, i was there, that's not why he designed it. we didn't design it to survive a nuclear attack. "time" magazine back then, believe it or not, was somewhat air gant. [laughter] so we wrote him back and said we're not going to print your letter because we have better sources than you, and our sources tell us it was done to survive a nuclear attack. i was there, i found it amusing, and so i walked the file back. the better source was a guy who had taken over from lickliter and ran the office in the

pentagon that was funding it and he says -- and he even writes a paper saying -- you know, we did it even though the people who were building it didn't know we were doing it and getting the funding from congress and from the colonels in the pent gone because it was going to be -- pentagon because it was going to be a survive bl command structure in case of attack. so you can tell steve crocker that i was on top and he was on the bottom, so he didn't know what was happening. i had coffee with steve crocker one day at a coffee shop in suburban washington. i mentioned that to him. and he said, well, you can tell him that i was on the bottom, and he was on the top, so he didn't know what was happening. [laughter] and in some ways they're both right. that's the beauty of the internet s that it is distributive and collaborative. now, in order to make a true revolution happen, you had to do what i mentioned early on which is connect the network to the computer. the computers had become, you k,

these big old things, but they kept getting smaller and smaller, and eventually you have the personal computer gets born. now, it gets born in the early 1970s in a really cool way. there are a lot of tribes that come together, especially in california in the bay area, people who are hippies, people with the electric kool-aid acid test, people who are in communes and reading the whole earth catalog once too often -- [laughter] access to tools, and they believe that the tools should be controlled by people, not by the government or the pentagon or corporationings. you have the free speech movement at berkeley, you have a lot of electronic hackers and people from the electronics industries and their kids who are trying to jack into the phone company and rip off ma bell. all these people are there in the bay area, and along with community organizers who want to bring computing power to the people. and so what happens is they all yearn for a personal computer, something the big corporations don't think there's any need for. but after a while, a few

hobbyists come up -- including most notably the old tear -- which was a hobbyist computer you could sauter in the 1970s, and you could make a computer. it was pretty lame. it had a few lights in front, toggle switches, but you believed you had a computer. everyone thought this was cool. it gets on the cover of "popular electronics," and a couple things happen. one is at harvard. i was there and, unfortunately, somebody who was a little bit cooler than me, bill gates, had convinced his friend paul allen to drop out of college, come live in cambridge. paul allen sees "popular electronics" the january issue, comes out in december of '7 3w, pops down his 85 cents and runs to courier house through the snow and says this revolution is happening without us. you know, they built a personal computer. bill gates blows off all four of

his exams and creates basic for the personal computer and, of course, drops out of harvard to join the revolution. the basic is brought to around, they're showing it off in places and is brought to something called the home brew computer club of palo alto. the home brew computer club by its very name, you can tell it's an amalgam of all these tribes, electronic geeks, people who want control of their own tools, and a couple things happen. one is people have been waiting for programming because, as the women knew, the programming is more important than the hardware. they find bill gates' basic, which they've been waiting for, and they take the tape, and they make 70 copies of it and give it away for free because that was the hacker mentality, software should be free. another thing happens which is steve wozniak is there at the first meeting, looks at this and says this is pretty lame. i can do something better. and he creates a circuit board

that will be able to connect a home -- a computer circuit like that using the intel 8080 processer which he lad looked at the spec -- he had looked at the spec sheet for and said this will be much better. so he does it, and he gets his friend steve jobs from down the street to help lug the tv to the next couple of meetings so they can show it off. and woz being, you know, wanting hacker information to be free is handing out the spec sheets for his new computer to anybody who wants them for free until his friend, steve jobs, says, wait a minute, we can go to my parents' garage, and welcome make these things and sell them. and, thus, out of that one small explosion there, you see the birth of microsoft and the birth of apple, the home computer. but initially, these computers are mainly used as personal devices. all these hackers, geeks, you know, commune types, they don't want to share their computers with the whole world, they want something they can take into the woods or whatever and have their

own creativity tool. so even by the 1990s when i was running new media and digital media for "time," personal computers were generally not connected into the networks. the real revolution hadn't happened. the steam engine had not been connected to the mechanical devices to be the combustible mix that makes a revolution. but in 1993 or so, right when i'm there, a few things happen. one of which is to give al gore his due which, you know, he's always sort of the joke when you say who invented the internet. he passes the gore act of '92 and then the gore act of '93 when he becomes vice president which says that the internet should be open to anybody who can get online. instead of just being for people at research institutions, it should be public, it should be open, it should be free. and so until then we were on things like america online and compuserve and prodigy, and it was illegal for you to be on aol

and go directly to the internet. you'd dial up, you'd get the modem, but you'd be in the walled garden of your online service providers. but in 1994, the very beginning of the year the web comes along, marc andreessen helps invent, it all comes together with the gore act. and soon instead of just being online, you go out into something that's like the worldwide web. it's really cool, and it helps bring it all together. we in the media business made a couple bad mistakes then. we started pouring old wine into new bottles. we should have realized what we were doing on the online services was we were creating community. because we're a social animal. we use our tools to create connectivity, community, communication. online services were doing that with bulletin boards and chat rooms and auditoriums. but we get to the web, and we start dumping "time" magazine online with maybe a comment

section on the bottom that nobody ever read. but cool things happen because the street finds its own uses for things. people take over things. there's a kid i met back then, he said you're doing it all wrong. he was a sophomore named justin hall. and he said you're doing it all wrong. you're turning this into a publishing medium, it should be a community medium where everybody gets to be a part of it. so he was keeping not only a list of cool web sites, but he also called it a web log of his activities, what girls would date him, what happened when they did, pictures of his private parts, poems about his father's suicide, it really skirted the line of too much information. [laughter] but it became the way we communicated online. and soon other people were doing web longs, they shortened the name of it to blogs, and all of a sudden the street has found a use for this web and it becomes once again a community medium. i give that whole story this way

and i'll open up for questions in a moment or two because if you see everything i've talked about, it's been ada lovelace's vision that we end up connecting more carefully, more closely, more intimately with our machines instead of creating machines that as lord byron or alan turing would say will replace us and get rid of us. and people say, well, haven't we gotten near artificial intelligence where machines can think in ways we can't and that, you know, isn't that what, say, wikipedia is? it has all this information. you can find anything there. i say, no, wikipedia is simply the connection of a great piece of software, wiki software, with human creativity. millions of humans who are creating things every day for wikipedia. i remember the wonders of cloud sourcing when it first happened, and when wikipedia came out, i was writing my einstein book. early on in that processing a geek, you know, i start editing stories on wikipedia the way

millions of ohs around the world -- and i get involved with the einstein story on wikipedia which is actually very great, the article on einstein, except it had one passage in it that said in 1937 einstein secretly traveled to albania so that king -- [inaudible] could give him a visa to escape the nazis. everything in that sentence is wrong. [laughter] he didn't go to albania, he didn't travel on an albanian visa, so i took it out. you know, anybody can edit, as you know, on wikipedia, and, boom, it comes right back in. i think, this is ridiculous. but, you know, hard core albanian, you know, partisans and nationalists are proud of this, and they can point to some welcome back site with some uncle somewhere said that his could sin told him they saw einstein on the street in albania, you know, whatever. [laughter] so i keep trying -- finally, i'm about to give up, but then all of a sudden it's no longer there. now, i do not attribute this to

the wisdom of crowds. i say the wisdom of crowds was messed up. they got it all wrong. it was me, i helped fix that. then it slowly dawned on me that i'm just part of the crowd, one little person adding my tiny bit of wisdom occasionally to a crowd source medium, and that's why something like wikipedia works. and even with google people think, well, doesn't it -- no, wait a minute. first of all, you could ask google a really, really hard question, and it'll, like, what's the depth of the red sea, and i don't know, but it'll say 5,347 feet or whatever. that's something your smartest friend doesn't even know. but if you ask it an easy question like can a crocodile play basketball -- [laughter] you maybe get the gators' schedule -- [laughter] but you don't get anything close to an answer. it's something a 4-year-old could give you the answer after giggling a bit. so machines are still fundamentally different from the human mind, and there's no reason to separate the two.

the ada connection is what makes things work. and that's what larry page and sergey brin figured out when they were at stanford. by the way, on a government-funded project, that's back when it still worked, that government research/private company/university collaboration. and they realized instead of having a web crawler go off and find out the answer to everything, what it should do is find out what other people, real humans had made as links on their web sites. so what it does is it combines the thought and wisdom and links of millions of million of -- millions and millions of people who create web pages with a computer algorithm, and that has always been the strength of our digital revolution. so the upshot of this story is, as i said at the beginning, it's always important to be able to stand at that intersection where the humanities meet technology. because if we cede it all to the engineers, it won't be beautiful, it won't be like the ipod where steve jobs did it

or the beautiful fonts on the original mac. it won't be truly creative. and, indeed, as we figure out our education, we have to make sure people are curious, that they question authority. because that's one thing these innovators have in common, is they always say how do we know that? whether it's alan turing or einstein looking at the first paragraph of newton's -- [inaudible] that tells us time marches along irrespective of how we observe it. how would we test it? or as steve said in his unbelievably beautiful 1997 ad when he came back to apple, here's to the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who think different because the people are crazy enough to think they can change the ones are the ones who do. so it's that notion of questioning authority, being a rebel, being -- having that sense of art and humanity that's very important. but the other reason i wrote this book is it works both ways.

a lot of you are nodding. i can tell the people nodding most vigorously in this crowd are the humanists, the ones who go to the museums, the ones who believe in the importance of art. but those of us who are in that camp who would be appalled if somebody said i don't know what a picasso is or i don't know the difference between, you know, hamlet and mcbeth, and you'd say, whoa, what a philistine, but people like that sometimes are too willing to joke that they don't know the difference between a gene and a chromosome or the difference between an integral and a differential equation or the difference between a transistor and a capacitor. those are hard things but, frankly, they're not as hard as hamlet or macbeth or by cat sew's paintings -- picasso's paintings. i hope you'll read this book and make an effort to see how

beautiful it is to imagine how the electrons dance on a piece of silicon and how it becomes a semiconductor and how you can juice it and dope it with impurities so it can become an on/off switch and replace that vacuum tube. i hope you'll understand the creativity of the engineers just as they should understand the creativity of the humanists. because, as i said, if you're like ada and you stand at the intersection, you can be like her. you can understand the beauty of a piece of poetry like one of her dad's lines, you know, and visualize it. she walks in beauty like the night. you visualize that even though it's a hard line to understand. but like ada, she also could visualize what an algorithm did, what a step-by-step set of instructions did, what a mathematical equation would do and how it would work. because she knew that a feat of engineering or a piece of coding or a mathematical equation was just as much as a piece of poetry the good lord's brush

stroke for painting something in our universe. and that, to me, is a lesson of the digital revolution. thank you all. [applause] >> i see people lining up. this is good. it means they're here to correct me and is say why did you leave out so and so, which is a great thing i regret. i think bob metcalf is here. he should have been in the book more too. there's so many heroes, i hope everybody can add to the book. go ahead, sir. >> yes, walter. >> hi. >> my name is kai byrd -- >> i know you, kai byrd -- >> as an author, i've always

wondered how you can write so many books and still have a full-time job -- >> everyone knows i don't work that hard at the aspen institute. >> but more seriously, on your current book what is your take on edward snowden's revelations, and what, how are we going to save ourselves, our privacy from the internet? >> well, i am an optimist, as you can tell, and i think that i don't really approve of what edward snowden does, but i can certainly see the silver linings that come from the fact that what's happening now. we're having a great debate. laws are getting passed and not passed, and people are agonizing over it. and the most important thing, because you've written about this a lot, you've written everything, you know, whatever, can we keep a step ahead of our technology. will our moral sensibilities keep up with our technological advances?

the answer starting when aristotle and -- socrates and plato are worried about writing helping destroy memory and the way our minds work is, yeah, we tend to keep up with our technology with a few bad mistakes like the atom bomb. we hadn't thought that through enough. but nowadays we have thought it through. i mean, you know, it's somewhat amazing that we wrestle with these things, that we are a moral animal. so now we're wrestling with the balance of privacy versus security and other things. i think we got the balance wrong, obviously -- well, i shouldn't say obviously, but i think even the head of the nsa would say we got the balance wrong, and we got the balance wrong. why i'm an optimist is i do think this debate is happening in public, that we live in a country where an edward snowden is being prosecuted, but we can all stand up and say he shouldn't be, and you could even have michael hayden, i thought, on "60 minutes" saying what

james risen did is wrong, but i wouldn't put him in jail because the reason we were doing that at the nsa was to protect the freedoms and liberties of our country. so we got the balance wrong, but have to struggle to get it right. it's a messy process, but i'm kind of -- i love living in a world where we can be debating edward snowden, because it uses -- and i'll end this part by saying you need to have the humanities, the philosophy, the politics and the history. those are the muscles you have to use to combine with the technology such as we can snoop. well, what do we do when we had the postal system? what did your friend, colonel stimson, say about reading other people's mail? we have to sort that out, but it helps to know history, it helps to know the humanities in order to do -- and philosophy -- to do the moral wrestling that we have to do every single day whether

it's being the head of a cab-hailing app that can then track people where they're going and what they do with it, every day we've got to figure out what's right, what's wrong. yes, sir. >> yes, walter, i'm brad -- [inaudible] and we met at your aspen institute in 2004 at the einstein conference. that was excellent. i think your book came out right after that on albert einstein. my question is, walter, i've just recently finished a research paper entitled planet theory. that is the theory of everything. it includes under its umbrella unified strings theory. and my question is, can i simply just give you a copy of this? >> sure. break it on up -- [laughter] i promise you i will not understand it because on his death bed, dr. einstein was still trying to figure out the unified theory. and he sat there until the lines

went off the paper. i'll give it to my friend, brian green. yes, sir. [laughter] >> thank you. i have no paper for you. my question is for about the last eight years, about two-thirds of the country has felt america's on the wrong track. i want to know what role you think rapid technological change plays this that, and do you have any advice for people living with innovation and change at the pace that it's happening? >> yeah. embrace innovation, embrace change, embrace technology and understand technology. i wrote this book partly because if you're alienated from your technology, if you think your iphone is magic and you don't quite know how the gps works, you're going to be a little bit detached, maybe alienated and maybe not understand and be able to deal with it. we should try to understand our technology because our technology is just a tool, and it's only as good or as bad as we are. i'm quite optimistic. and everybody, i live in washington, d.c., trust me, this is a town where everybody thinks

everything is coming apart at the seams. you know, it's not. we live in a country that's still the most creative country, that still does the most innovation, that still pops up with, you know, whether it's google or facebook or apple, that still has an economy that even though we couldn't get congress to figure out what the heck to do, somehow the american people got an economy that's now growing much faster than europe where everybody thought they knew what to do. we have unemployment going down. the problem we most face in this country is not that everything's going really bad in this country, it's that we have finally a new sense of prosperity, but not everybody is sharing equally in it. we have to include people of color -- [applause] women, others. that's why i love, you know, the coding project i mentioned that jim was doing, launch code. we need to make sure that every kid in america understands the arts, understands the humanities, understands the technology and learns how to code, and then they're going to understand, and our moral sense will be able to keep up with our

technology. yes, ma'am. >> hi, walter. i didn't write anything either, but -- [laughter] i'm the daughter of a man who, he majored in philosophy in college, went to graduate school, was trying to get a ph.d. in philosophy at penn and was told there are no jobs out there for philosophers. so he left with a master's degree instead of a ph.d. and then started to work in the telephone industry, independent telephony specifically, and had no training in electrical engineering but was trained as ap apprentice in the industry -- an apprentice in the industry and ended up inventing a number of machines for the telephone industry. so there he was, a humanities person -- >> yeah. >> -- and was trained in all this. my question for you is how can we encourage this today without a degree in engineering? he was a member of ieee. >> right.

i do think that one of the lessons from that story is that he was able to embrace engineering and apply what he thought about his philosophy to it. i will say i'm not quite probably at his level, but i was going to become a philosopher. i got a graduate degree in philosophy, and i went back to the place where i'd done my undergraduate degree and talked to a couple of professors and said i'd like to pursue a course in philosophy or maybe if not journalism. and they both read the dissertation i'd done at oxford, and they both said i would be a good journalist. [laughter] so i ended up in journalism. but i do think the understanding of philosophy helps me understand alan turing wrestling with free will, albert einstein wondering whether god plays dice with the universe meaning things happen by chance, and everything i've done seems to come back to -- including when i wrestle with ed snowden or any concept. so i do think we've got to get unsilod, that the people who

study philosophy need to have engineering, engineering backgrounds should embrace philosophy. yes, sir. [applause] >> good afternoon. >> thank you. >> mr. isaacson, what an honor to actually hear you. i have two sets of friends, and you had a brilliant throwaway comment that said hackers and people who write software give it away for free, that's their culture. >> right. >> and you can get the chink in the armor and ultimately get a six-figure job rewriting their code, but the idea of commodification of these innovations, i also have friends who are trying to pay off their student loans by just writing an app. let me write the app. so my question is from your perspective looking at centuries of genius and scientific innovators, does the current culture today of what i view as a price tag on genius affect genius? >> yeah. i think that, you know, when i asked steve jobs about that, he said if you are motivated mainly by making a profit, you're going to cut corners in the product you create. you're going to make the circuit board inside just a little bit

uglier because you think nobody will see it. but if you really care about your product, that circuit board's going the look beautiful. he said that may not seem like the best way to make a profit, but in the end you'll have a more lasting, more profitable enterprise that will create more value. so to me, we all have to take pride in whatever we do and keep our eye on what we're going to put in the river of history, as steve jobs said, instead of how much we're going to get to take out of the river. [applause] >> mr. isaacson, first of all -- >> all right. sorry. actually, i'm going to -- [inaudible] one last question, a quick one from senator graham, and the rest of you can come on up and i'll answer the questions personally. i'm sorry -- >> i'm selling my place at the mic -- >> on ebay. >> on ebay.

sorry. first of all, i've read everything you have written, and so i hope you keep on writing. maybe you won't tell us what your next book's going to be, but i want to make this comment -- unless you do. i want to make this comment. i am now retired, but an attorney who practiced for 41 years in silicon valley and represented many of the companies and many of the individuals -- >> i'm sorry, i'm getting the hook. >> you're right. don't worry about the hook. >> all right. >> now -- >> the hook's the hook. [laughter] >> an aspect of your book that maybe appeals more to to the humanist side of it is bill davidow who wrote a book said it is marketers that create products, not -- >> okay. let me take that on because steve also and all the people i've looked at said you have to have the product person be a visionary. that is really important how marketers finance people, legal people and everything else. but companies get in trouble where the people running it care

more about being the cfo or being the marketer than being the person who just has the passion for the product. i know senator bob graham, one of my heroes, was here -- [applause] and he said can i ask you a question, so i'm going to do real quick, if i may, a last question from the senator. and congratulations on your daughter becoming a new member of congress. [applause] >> [inaudible] >> well, i'm not absolutely sure, but here's what i'm chewing on. the question is what's the next project. and i've always, as you know, been interested in the intersection of art and technology. that's the ultimate. and for many years i've been interested in the person who

best exemplifies that in all of human history. and it would take a long time to climb that mountain because a lot of people have written about him, especially his art. but if you look at the last page of this book, you'll see facing it a drawing. and the drawing is, of course, of a truth january man, leonardo da vinci's, you know, akimbo draw anything which art and science are brought together in a thing of beauty. so i'd love to spend a decade or so, halftime in florence -- [laughter] i wish he had lived in venice a little bit more than, you know, because i kind of like venice too. [laughter] but i would love to try to capture what it was like in the renaissance to not just combine art and science, but to believe that there was no real difference between art and science. thank you all. [applause]

>> thank you so much. our next program is starting at one. if you already have a ticket, you may stay in your seats, but if you do not, please exit gracefully. thank you. [inaudible conversations] knox. [inaudible conversations] >> walter will be signing books in the author area by the

elevator. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> host: live coverage of the

miami book fair on booktv, this is the 17th year in a row that we have been down in miami bringing live coverage from chapman hall which is where a lot of the nonfiction authors are coming up. this amp you'll hear from cornel west, richard dawkins. full schedule available at booktv.org. by the way, you can also follow us on twitter and facebook to get schedule updates to get behind the scenes pictures as well. @booktv, facebook.com/booktv. well, coming up in just a minute, a call-in program with john dean, you saw him in the room with rick perlstein, and after that a call-in with political activist norman lear. cornel west will be another call-in guest, this is the only place on the dial where you get to talk to authors on a regular basis. well, earlier in the day from

our outdoor set here at miami-dade college we talked with mitch kaplan who is the founder of the miami book fair. here on our outdoor and windy set is the founder of the miami book fair, mitch kaplan. mr. kaplan, what's with the wind this year?ok it's nice and warm, but -- >> guest: it's going to be a beautiful day. i spoke to the weather gods,e they assure me that the sun's going to break, come through th clouds, and we'll have enough great day. and i also want to personally thank you forha coming. it's hard to believe it's been t 17 years. seems like a blink. and your support of what we do has been immeasurably important to the growth of this book fairt as well. easurably important to the growth of the book fair as well. >> we are covering 25 authors broadcasting 20 hours this is a small part of the miami book fair. >> we have 600 authors, 300 exhibitors, we run through a

full week, sunday through sunday and we have a quarter of a million people that come through, not to mention during the week we provide authors schools, we bring schools to miami dade community college. so we look deep into the community to further literary culture and help that next generation of readers find themselves as well. >> host: when you came up with this idea, when was that and how big was it? >> it was a group of us, not just me but in 1982 we started talking about it. we had the first book fair in 1984. this is our 31st one. we are about 100 authors in. right off of the beginning it started off with a book fair. we knew their rooms were filled and people were coming out and clamoring for more. there was never a question of

the second year. friday, saturday and sunday, the campus building another building so we decided to fill that up with more and i would like to say, miami dade to billboard buildings. >> it was funded in numerous different ways. we have incredible support for the nights foundation or the society of america, lots of private individuals. and they provide -- miami dade colleges to the community. >> host: you have a full day ahead of the. we appreciate you stopping by.

>> guest: thank you for being here. abyss the day for you >> host: we have moved inside the bus where we're joined by john dean whose most recent book is called "the nixon defense: what he knew and when he knew it." mr. dean, how and when kid you become richard -- did you become richard nixon's counsel? >> guest: peter, john please. [laughter] anyway, july of 1970 when i was 31 years of age, i became white house counsel. i wasn't a part of the nixon entourage, i hadn't been in the campaign. i had been in washington quite a while, i'd worked as the chief minority counsel of the house

judiciary committee, i'd gone on from there, i'd been an associate deputy attorney general. that's where i joined the nixon administration. while at justice i had a lot of dealings with the white house staff, and so when john ehrlichman became assistant to the president for domestic affairs, that chair sat empty for a little while, and then the president invited me to come over and serve as white house counsel. >> host: what is the role of the counsel? how often would you meet with the president? >> guest: very seldom, actually. the best description i've ever had of my job, i actually put in the early part of this book -- because alex butterfield, who worked for bob had match, the chief of staff -- haldeman, had a pretty good overview of the white house. he handled a lot of administrative functions. he said i had two masters. i actually had three; bob haldeman, who i reported to, john ehrlichman never gave up the counsel's job actually and nixon continued to turn to him

for an awful lot of things that related to the counsel's office, and ehrlichman just had me do the work. and then, of course, when the president started calling on me, i had that third master. >> host: how often would you meet with bob haldeman? >> guest: regularly. he had morning staff meetings. he was a good administrative chief of staff. he was easy to work with. a lot of people found him tough to work with. i think that was his immediate staff that he was hard on. but the other professionals on the staff he really treated as peers, and it was a pleasure to work for him. >> host: john dean, june 1972, what was that month like in the white house? >> guest: well, that's, of course, the month where the arrest occurred at the watergate. i happened to have been in manila in the philippines giving a speech at the time the break-in occurs and the arrests occur. first mistake might have been coming home. but i did. [laughter] i stopped in san francisco,

called my deputy who later would become a white house counsel, and i said, fred, listen, i'm wiped out, i've been across the time zone, it's been a very quick trip, and i'm coming back, and i'm going to delay a day at least. he said, oh, no, they're looking for you. there's been a break-in at the democratic national committee. so that's -- i did. it was a sunday, i jumped on the plane and was in the office on monday morning, and from the get go i get instructions to get involved and find out what happened. >> host: did you have a sinking feeling when you first heard it? >> guest: it was not good. it was not good. my first reaction when i got home on sunday night was, oh, my god, coulson has finally done something to get us in trouble. coulson was a special counsel to the president, he was known as something of a hatchet man, did the president's dirty dealings. but it wasn't coulson in the long runful he was not

uninvolved -- run. he was not uninvolved, but he was not directly involved. i did have a sinking feeling, and it took me only nanoseconds to put together once i found out a few more facts what had gone on and that it had been gordon liddy's operation over at the re-election committee. >> host: john dean, your book's called "the nixon defense: what he knew and when he knew it." what did the president know and when did he know it? >> guest: wow, that's a -- [laughter] to do that book, peter, i had to go through and transcribe all the nixon watergate conversations. i pulled all the conversations out, i cataloged them first which nobody had ever done, and then i had a team of transcribers help me so i could go through and really follow from day-to-day to day what nixon knew, when he knew it and what he did about it. one of the surprises, there are lots of surprises, in fact, there's not a page of that book that i don't learn something new and report it. ..

the cuban-americans that howard hunt had worked with going way back to the bay of pigs during the kennedy

administration, he was a cia officer, one of the senior operatives in the bay of pigs, and some of his key men were down here in miami. he had recruited them while in the white house to do the ellsberg rake in. when he went over when he went over and joined the reelection committee he brought the same people in. and now here after the arrests, two of them are in jail. he assured that these people would never talk, which they didn't, but there were still multiple problems. >> and there was some money. >> that is a bizarre story, and you are mixing to thing. howard hunt left a check in one of the rooms of the watergate hotel for $6.39 $6.39 which he wanted bernard parker to mail from

miami to his country club in maryland to pay his out-of-state news. this led, of course, the police immediately to howard hunt gizzi has a personal, handwritten check. one of the of the things i never knew about in detail is nixon is down here at the time of the break-in as well. keep this gain is his vacation home. when he gets back on the 20th that night he comes up with a plan around the cuban-americans. he says, listen, if it bounces this way will we will do is set of a acumen defense fund because these guys are going to need support money, attorneys fees, going to have to pay fines, who knows. his plan is. his plan is to create a cuban defense fund. now, he was not going to do it secretly but very openly and playing against his opponent, mcgovern, move the

cuban community did not want to become president. so he was going to play it politically. had he done that it would not have been an obstruction of justice. in fact, there are some wonderful conversations late in here where he is talking with henry peterson, the head of the criminal division, about this pan and peterson agrees. but halderman with whom he discusses the cuban defense fund never tells anybody. anybody. in fact weather is another conversation with me. he runs by me they cuban defense fund. i don't know what he is talking about. it just goes right by me. i continue because i realize i don't know everything, everything, but it was kind of an ingenious plan. >> june 23, 1972. >> the day that. >> the day that became famous or infamous, however one looks at it, for the

so-called smoking gun tapes. what is interesting about the smoking gun tapes is, they are really firing blanks. and i say that because what happened is, so much time had passed that nixon could not figure out what it was all about. halderman was not communicating. no one was asking the. they take these they take these tapes at face value and read them out of context and when they finally surface is toward the end of his presidency but he has set up a defense saying, i knew nothing about watergate until john been told me of march 21 of 1973, and here three, and here we are now back on june 23 of 72, and there are conversations that appear that he is trying to get the f ei to kill the entire investigation. that is not what he is talking about. he is talking about having the fbi's a out of something

they have no business investigating, which is investigating, which is campaign finance, if not national security. it is a legitimate worry. given by his staunchest supporters in the impeachment committee finally throw in the towel and say this is beyond all we are willing to defend. not that there were not other smoking guns that same week. in fact, there were other worse conversations but that was the one that surfaced when it surfaced and ended his presidency when it did because it put the lie to his defense that he knew nothing about the cover-up. >> how did that 18 and a half minute gap happen, in your view? >> i think it is pretty clear that there was an intentional erasure. i decided to put an appendix in the book where i would

focus just on the 18 and a half minute gap, when it happened, who had happened, who had access to the tape at the time, the fact that there were five to nine erasures, intentionally erased the content. it occurs on june 20, 1972, which is his first day back in office after the arrest, his first conversation with halderman after the arrest. we know that we know that they are clearly talking about watergate. the content? i think it is simple. it is something because of the timing of when this comes up that, again, shows that his defense that he knew nothing until march 21 is a lie. again, it is ironic. there are more conversations that same week. this week. this happens to be one that the watergate prosecutor had not subpoenaed. they also include everyone

who had access to that tape at that time, and it runs of wide gambit to some people who are widely known, some who are still alive and not well-known. someone may confess yet. >> it is always surprising to know when the taping system was actually in play in the white house. it was not that much of his presidency. >> no, it was not. he puts it in at the suggestion of halderman in february of 71. the reason is pretty basic. he had a system and his white house that his staff took regular notes and wrote up notes before the meeting started particularly with outsiders and then afterwards as to what had happened, focusing on any decision he might have made to tell somebody who was in there with the decision was and then he would have a contemporaneous record out

of so the person could not go out of the office and say that the president said such and such. that is just t5 the system broke down pretty quickly. so he wanted not only for the purpose of not having somebody say he had said something different, but different, but he wanted it for historical purposes. so when the system breaks down, halderman said what, you know, lyndon johnson suggested we put in the taping system to read he urged you to do it. so let's put it in. what happens next is not covered in the tapes, but they decide to put in a a voice-activated system, and this was the killer, if you will thought johnson had a switch under his desk that he could control, next and,

if he is in the room the recording equipment comes on. on. his executive office, building office, oval office. the cabinet office have a physical switch. camp david's voice-activated as well. by voice-activated, by voice-activated, it means the president had a device on him that sent out a signal so the secret service knew where he was. and that is key to the locator system. so it only so it only plays if he is in the room. in other words, talking while they're cleaning it will not start the taping system because it needs the president there with his locator button on him. even al haig who later became his chief of staff has no idea it's a voice-activated system and does not learn and told the senators tell him of it. actually, in response, excuse me, to my testimony.

>> john dean, when did you leave the white house? >> i leave on april 30. i i was very open with my colleagues, when i broke rank in the fact that i was trying i was trying to convince them that this was not going to work to read we have to ended. >> april 30, 30th 1973. >> april 301973 he removes all of us. as he as he says on the tapes, he fires us. he put a cover on it. he has accepted my resignation. but it is interesting, you can tell, from the conversations, how frightened he is of all of us because he does not want anyone to turn on him. and at that.i had never talked about the president to prosecutors or anybody else. else. i did not know if it was

privileged. you know, peter, i started this process to figure out how nixon could make such a mess out of this. i was very curious. the bottom the bottom line is, he is just not as clever as we thought he was. he fumbles, makes terrible decisions,, leaves evidence that is conspicuous on his desk for no logical reason. i i am wondering how many other areas of his presidency when people say where else to do supply. maybe china happens because kissinger is able to push it and follow through. maybe some of maybe some of his other accomplishments are really the result of his staff. >> what was it like to work

in that white house? when you listen to tapes and read some of the books, and seems a lot of conspiracies, a lot of different groups working against each other. >> i had not worked in other white house staffs. i have followed them since. i was i was friendly with people in the johnson white house, but there was a unique feature that i think was somewhat fatal. it was a need to know white house. in other words, if you are working on something you were pretty much for been to talk to anyone else about it which caused many of the problems of that presidency. watergate is completely out of the normal staffing system, and that is part of the problem. >> all right. very quickly, right. very quickly, and then we will take some of your calls

when did the white house watergate hearings happen? when were you when were you testifying? what happened to you after? >> they start in may 1973. i do not 1973. i do not testify until june 25. i am an early witness. i have been cooperating with the committee. they knew the general areas of my testimony. they had no idea i would bring in as 60,000 word document that had i been told i was going to have to read i never would have made it 60,000 words. but nevertheless i ended up spending the entire day reading it in monotone as well.

i did not want to emphasize anything. i just figured, i will put it flat out out there. eight hours of reading. the next four the next four days or question-and-answer. >> then what happens to you? very quickly, and i apologize to our viewers. how much did it cost you financially to go through that? >> i have never really try to figure it out. i hired a lawyer, and he was fair. fair. i was in a position where i could afford it. so it was, and also i had a_lawyer, i had a next line lawyer, and he insisted we do it his way or no way and he for a long time pushed for immunity, and it turned out to be a smart move.

it delayed things, gave me time to prepare testimony, gave us time to see how things were going to shake out, and ultimately when it came down to what the government could or could not do with me they would have had great difficulty prosecuting me because of the immunity. immunity. i have the case that oliver north would later have where it was clear the court said, you cannot said, you cannot have it both ways. you can't have somebody )) testify under immunity and then turn around and prosecute them. it has to be one of the other. i have been informally immunized by the prosecutors, formally by the senate, and as my lawyer said, it will take them years to even figure out they can't do it if they want to litigated. i didn't start down this road to beat the rap. i will take responsibility for whatever i've done. i wish you and your good

lawyering that gives me the options. so that sorted itself out. >> of what were you convicted and what was the penalty? >> i pled guilty to conspiracy to obstruct justice, which is the only offense i know. i was originally sentenced to two to four years. i testified in the trial of ehrlichman and others, and others, and it looks pretty clear that the judge was trying to make it look like i would get the strict sentence. i i was in the witness protection program for a year and a half. i don't actually go to jail or prison. i am in the safe house, and and every day they bring me into the prosecutor's office it is not exactly a hard time. time. i eat in restaurants and sleep in this place at night

and that i i picked up the next morning by the marshals my so-called incarceration lasts 120 120 days and the judge says time served. >> you have been patient. >> very patient, since 1963 when john kennedy was assassinated. just trying to get to the bottom. i hope you i hope you don't cut me off. am i still on the air? >> we are listening. go ahead. be quick. >> thank you for mentioning oliver north. all the way from john kennedy's assassination, i i don't know if you have seen the new photos of george bush senior and dealey plaza on the day kennedy was assassinated, through watergate when george bush senior asked nixon to resign through iran contra when george bush senior.

>> ronald, where are you going with all of this? go ahead and wrapup. >> i want to compliment john dean for having the guts to say any of this because so many people have been killed their books about how many people have killed. >> a lot going on there. we are going to lose that caller. >> let me just say this. they have had howard hunt in daily plaza. i would be amazed if george bush senior was in daily plaza, two. there were hundreds of people there. >> how do conspiracy theories, connecting dots that may or may not be a part, how did it begin? >> some of the most aggressive conspiracy theories are pushed by what i call conspiracy theory entrepreneurs. they write and sell books. they are always fatally flawed because the

conspiracy pierced does not want all of the hard information. there is never an answer. they will invent a false fact to replace it. it it. it is just kind of a sad situation. too much currency, simplest against yours to complex problems that are bogus, distort history, and is not healthy for the body politic. i think they are pushed primarily by conspiracy entrepreneurs. >> jack, you are on book tv with john dean. >> good afternoon. first of all, let's be candid, the media hated nixon, in particular the "washington post". secondly, the roosevelt administration was corrupt to the t, loaded with

communists, harry dexter white being one of them. i'd like to talk about something. tell me about this lady, angel from asia. the south vietnamese as far as negotiating a deal concerning the paris peace talks. >> thank you very much. anything you want to address >> he mixes a lot of things in their. i have never seen anything in the material i have that in connection with the bombing called and alleged behavior, that he was somehow a back channel to make a deal for nixon is promised south vietnam he will give them a better deal

there has been a lot of hot air and conspiracy. but very little fact. >> were you surprised when he became known? >> not really. there was a conversation in this book. the justice department. and he told me that a general counsel for the major news organization which i assume that the time was time magazine or the "washington post" worried about the fact that they might somehow be getting involved in obstruction of justice and so i have not talked to the attorney general, the director of the fbi about this, but i think they should have it at the white house. the nixon knows about it.

when when he selects pat gray as director people tell gray about it. great is not want to believe it, but it was true. >> next call comes from jonathan in san carlos, california. >> hello. good hello. good afternoon. if he had not leaked information, with the cover-up have succeeded and thus nixon gone on to a second term? >> i don't think so. that is a good question. while he had good inside information, it's going very broad. have been a couple of good both. there is one call leaked which is excellent. he really wants the job of director. the old hoover the old hoover cronies were still

there helping him with this. i don't think this would have made a lot of difference. while he is aggravating the situation and as an fbi at times out of control and leaking information that makes it very apparently acting director does not have control. in the big nature, i don't think it changes anything. >> good afternoon, gentleman i am 52 years old. when you testified, i was a 12-year-old, and the 12 -year-old, and the one thing ever more than anything else is when you told people that you hope that it did not prevent young people from becoming active in politics. well, i did and have been ever since. i wanted to ask you, what happened to john dean since watergate in your personal career as well as anything in politics?

>> i had a i had a nice and successful career in business in california where i lived, retired at 60 years of age, now on my eighth book and have been cranking them out. i write columns as well, do a fair amount of lecturing. pretty active in politics through the perspective of a commentator. >> how could richard nixon have survived it? ow could richard nixon have survived it? >> very easy. very easy, peter. truth. the people who later went should have gone day one. he does not learn about the break-in until march 17 17th when i tell him. he should have been told and had all of those options, but he just could not do it. he just seemed, he adopted the cover-up. you can hear him.

while not active, he approves every key element until he gets deeply active in what is the end of the first cover-up, and in the cover-up of the cover-up. >> you are on book tv. >> years ago i heard, i believe it was john ehrlichman claimed that he was providing funds to the democratic party. did you hear anything like that? >> never heard that. never did. >> to diary entries have come out recently. >> what came out were not new entries. he did a written version of the diary that was

transcribed. he would dictate these things. i had my digitizer cannot and i was listening. i digitized some of those. it is kind of a flat voice where he is often in a car or someplace like that, being driven home and dictating the days events. he was very disciplined and detailed. it it is a wonderful document that was buried for years. my god, would watergate had sorted itself earlier. it was lost for years, just before he passed away he really started working on it, it, cleaning it up, not deleting, but making sure people understood the way

that it worked and put it out. and it is a value to five valuable document. i cited a number of times in my book. >> when you were sitting in the oval office and told richard nixon that there was a a cancer growing around his presidency, what was that like? >> things had kind of conflated. conflated. one of the lawyers of the reelection committee came to me and said, hunt said, hunt is demanding 120,004 he will talk about the things he did that happens on march 19. before that before that i have just started dealing with nixon really as of february 27. i am taking his temperature. he is taking mine, and i am not sure how much he knows. yet he is pushing me to write a bogus or work harder and harder. those two things come those

two things come together and i say, this man really needs to understand in as graphic a terms as i can put together what is happening and why and that it is criminal. i did not mince words with him. so that is what was going on the surprise to me is nixon reacts the way he does. he does not respond when someone is committing perjury that we should not be committing perjury. he said how much and i said a million dollars out of thin now which is air which is about five and a half today and he says, i know where we can get that. so one horrible after another he has an answer. perjury is a tough rap to prove. i am surprised that his reaction. and had the and had the next event in the sequence not occurred when one of the men arrested at the watergate released a letter to the judge saying there had been

perjury and he jumps in with both feet, that forces nixon to take action. otherwise i'm not sure he would have. but he is sending the watergate defendants to congress. if they do not testify they will get 30, 40 year sentences for a bungled burglary. he was just putting a hammer on them. so those events forced nixon to deal with the situation and bring it to ahead. >> who was the judge and how did he get this case? >> the chief judge of the united states district court for the district of columbia. he got the case, while it normally would come up in a rotation, it a rotation, it appears he picked this one off for himself. he may he may have gotten

the original break-in trial for those arrested and watergate and then as chief judge taken the option to stay with a successor trial. he became as knowledgeable as any judge. and he and he is a republican but takes on the president of the united states. he pushes the limits for a federal district judge, for example, 40 year sentences for break-in. that is pushing the fifth amendment a long way. so he does not necessarily get the hall of fame, but he does get a lot of credit for pushing this to conclusion. >> to people under 50 know who you are? >> you know, we have talked about this. i have been at usc.

i go over there and do two lectures a year. before come over to do the lectures the class i do it in, the instructor always said, call your parents or grandparents and see if you should attend this lecture, and they all show up. so they don't know, but they find out. >> here is his latest book. what he knew and when he knew it. you are watching book tv. now, coming up in just a a minute, another call an opportunity with television producer. we are live in miami. a lot of folks out on the festival grounds. we will be right back. >> book tv takes a look at the miami "herald" for this week's list of best-selling books. at books.

at the top of the list are two memoirs.

>> are there lessons in the camp david summit? i have authored several that i i think will help frame our current failed efforts. there are no perfect partners for peace. look at the men that came to cap david,, an assassin, terrorist leader, and a failing and a resident. it would be it would be hard to imagine three less likely partners for peace, but there was one quality they all shared and abundant, political courage. timing is not everything. this reverie of dominance, but the surprise attack only

reinforced in the minds of many, the need to keep the sinai peninsula as a strategic barrier against the main israeli t5, i mean, egyptian army. in egypt sadat was not just in egypt, and the whole arab world he was part alone in his belief that peace was possible or even desirable. two of his foreign ministers resigned following his trip to jerusalem, and the third resigned at camp david. in fact, the dissent in the egyptian delegation was so great that at one.at four in the morning carter woke worry that sadat was going to be murdered by his own delegation at cap david. they called and woke them up

he was running around in his pajamas reinforcing the security to protect him from his own people. of of course eventually it was his own people that killed them. that cap david agreement was probably his death. carter had his own problem, the crime rate was 20 percent, a revolution in iran and made him congressional elections. his political advisers unanimously opposed his decision to seek peace with so many pressing problems at home. finally, america plays a crucial role. egypt and israel simply could not make piece by themselves. so after the fifth day carter did something he did not want to do. he decided to create an american plan. there was already a

prospective plan in the works, but he made america a full partner in the negotiations. he made it clear to both men that their relationship with the united states was on the line. >> you can watch this and other programs online. >> book tv asks bookstores and libraries across the country. here is a look at the titles chosen by books and books and coral gables, florida.

>> and back outside at the miami book fair. miami-dade college. the 17th year in a row. broadcast live. this whole weekend will be live. from cornell west, west, get a chance to talk with him as

well. now joining us on the c-span bus is this gentleman. you have heard of all in the family, good times,, good times, princess bride, people before the american way,, norman lear is the man behind all of that. >> how did i get in television? i wanted to be a press agent i was a kid of the depression. i had one uncle used to flick me a quarter when he saw me. i wanted me. i wanted to be that uncle that could flick a quarter. while i was overseas, got me a job. it was as a press agent. when i was fired i came to

california to seek another job. i ran into a fellow who wanted to write comedy. that is what i have basically been doing all my life without realizing it. i fell into it. >> well, some of your shows, , and pick the phone lines up if you would like to participate in our conversation. some of your shows were known to have political messages, if that is a fair way of saying it. and you riding your book, the controversy that this shows set off, particularly some individual episode created a good deal of criticism. if you want to send the message i was told use

western union. >> who remembers western union now? i denied sending messages. that's not what i was about or am about. i am a serious individual. i pay a lot of attention to my own family and others. we were a group of writers. as we were put airing we were watching our kids, listening to our wives, reading our newspapers, dealing with dealing with the impact of the culture on us, and we were writing from the perspective. we. we happened to be people of the progressive.of view. and so i'm sure that we held that position. answering the question because before we did all in

the family the average father knows best, beverly hillbillies, greenacres had to do with this kind of problem,, the roast is ruined and the boss is coming to dinner. i was the nature of the problems those families faced. so we didn't do any more messaging than they did. hours where just about the problems of the new american family. >> did you get in trouble at the network for some of your shows? >> so. >> so much that they put on seven shows. but we did have arguments along the way. >> mod gets an abortion. >> yes, and that show ran in

october or november. you know, estimated to be 40 million people watching that show. nothing happened. the network got a handful of letters because nobody expected it. if it's not in your family, it's in the neighbors. then the reruns. political. then they have protests carried on, lay down in front of cars and got a lot of press as a result. >> in your book you mention

that you had kind of a consultant. >> i did a show called all is fair. candace bergen at the time was working for life magazine. i great, progressive liberal she played that kind of a character. michael keaton and so well-known conservative. is it more than a? >> a little bit on the phone and largely in the mail.

i would send him a script and he would send me my comments. armstrong williams, he came out to california therefore the beginning of the show. about six or seven episodes just to get us started. >> the american way. watching them on tv. glacier on television with me. i'm doing an interview and i have to hang up sweetheart or call you back and i door you. were here. by. >> were going to take your calls to.

five daughters and one son. >> this one, one of twins. they will be 20 next week. >> are those your youngest. >> those are my youngest. my oldest is 68. >> you are 92. >> ninety-two. >> how is your health. >> i think i think my health is pretty good. >> i was actually the beginning, there was an influx of television ministries swaggered, baker, etc. in a mixture of politics and religion. and that is exactly what i did.

i put a camera on a working guy who said he and his family and wife and kids talk about politics, they disagree. outcome these ministers that agree with him and say he is a better christian because he thinks politically the way that they think. he says there has to be something wrong. a fellow love with that one. i showed it to him. sent me him. sent me to a number of other mainline church leaders. in somebody's office somebody said, form an organization. >> and. >> and the american way came about as a result. >> is it still in existence today? >> it is. 300 some thousand members, young elected officials are

now something over a thousand young elected officials holding office. three in the congress of the united states now. it is doing very well. >> michael is calling in from edison, new jersey. you are on. >> a certain number of a certain number of episodes that permit you to go into syndication. is it true that you make no

money and tell you get into syndication? >> no, as a general rule writers, producers, directors, everyone is well paid on a salary basis. what you are talking about is ownership. that comes later when whatever percentage you own is often syndication. >> and you talk about needing to get a business ceo because you are getting ready to go to syndication and want to own your own programs. do the networks programs. do the networks have a lot of say-so over what you put on air? >> when i i began, of course i was in live television the networks had nothing to say, the sponsors had everything to say. they controlled what was on the air. later on it became the network. when i went into comedy,

situation comedy the networks had everything to say. >> next call. >> hello. i am a fellow arizona in. we met in boston before you gave the speech,, the people for the american way. welcome. i would like to say i enjoy t5 i have enjoyed your shows the fact that you showed a majority and that the american audience responded might say more about the american audience than it does about television. i was wondering if you were thinking about coming back to give a lecture on your book? >> the likelihood is i would accept.

emerson college in boston. a couple of hundred women and maybe six or eight of us men when i went there. >> grayson is calling in from athens, georgia. good afternoon. >> good afternoon. what a kick. this is a neat thing for me. i am me. i am 46. i cannot tell you how many hours i spent in front of the tube when there were only a few channels and watching some good tv by this find american. the reason i was calling, and he touched about it a little bit with the formation of the american way and your public service announcement. in the 70s i could see what was happening with the

moral majority in the amount of power and political power they were mixing with religion. there was something that was extremely distressing, even at a young age. and i felt like that it was going to be a very a very dangerous thing for this country and still think that it could be. but i have been encouraged by some of the responses we have seen on some issues like gay marriage and how that issue has changed in such a short time, could you talk a little bit about what you see in the future in terms of this religious facet of art holster and media and technology? >> well, i think often about

eisenhower when he resigned a retired, his farewell speech, when he warned us about the military industrial congressional. he took that word out of somebody suggested he take the word out, but as it was written it was the military industrial complex. and i find myself concerned about that. i think that t5 i have so much to say about that. we are more a nation of consumers than citizens because we are so poorly informed. >> do you think, what is your view on hollywood medical activists? >> i don't think it's very different from detroit where

manufacturers or executives might happen to be involved in politics. it just happens enough business. when i grew up in connecticut, it was an insurance town, and major people in town had a lot to say about a lot of things. now i live in hollywood. the faces are better known. the names are better known, but they are citizens using what they have to be as effective as they can be. >> kelly, sacramento, kelly, sacramento, california. >> what an honor. thank you for your contributions. my question is come out of all of the programs you were directly involved with, any that you are less proud of and conversely any you are most proud of? thank you for taking my

call. i will let you go. >> thank you. i had a lot of programs that did not make it that i was not very proud of. that that is the idea that inspires us every time. we never started out to do anything that we really really did not want to do or what we did not have good reason for. when i don't. what i don't find myself talking enough about in the interviews i have been doing is a soap opera that was on five nights a week, but a show that dealt with a topic which was the media affect on the simple housewife and opened with the housewife's involvement with buildup on the floor while the family around the corner was being murdered. she had become, by then, in

the order to tragedy through her television set. at the end of the show there were 500 or so episodes. at the end of the show she is sitting in front of the television set having been driven crazy literally. three psychologists, media faces. and that is the end of this later episode, sitting with other fellow lunatics in an institution, she says, is that what i think it is and she says, i can leave it. i can't believe it. the

other faces crowding around her, her, and that is the final picture. i can't believe that i am finally a member of the nielsen family. go blackout. >> died recently. >> very much alive. >> a lot of talk about drug use during the filming of that series. were you aware of it at the time? >> i? >> i don't think that is fair commentary. had played mary hart, she was, you could use the word drug buy everything she read and everything that was being forced on her, everything that made us all much more a nation of

consumers and citizens. >> was there ever an issue that you knew of with drugs in hollywood? there was a time especially especially when you were filming some of your shows. >> they were there were a couple of our shows where performers had problems and others were not in front of the camera with drug problems. >> nothing extraordinary. you write in your book even this i get to experience. my passion, my caring, and my giant need to express all of it. >> i am realizing in these interviews now related to my books even more how much i enjoy saying what is on my mind and how good i feel,

expressing the things i care about. and i learned that writing the book. i did not take the pleasure out. it took me 92 years. >> jack is in wakefield, massachusetts. you are on book tv. >> hello. long time fan of you and your work. i do have a question regarding a statement that you made earlier regarding western union and its relevance today. i just wanted to ask you if you consider the large number of foreign workers who do use western union to send funds back to their families and the impact that its have on the economy.

it is very difficult for someone in my position to get a loan when banks don't have money to lend us because so much money is being vacuumed out of the economy. >> i don't know how to answer that. you're talking to a man who who did not even know western union was in existence. i certainly have them i certainly have them to thank for the problem you are describing. >> please go ahead with your question or comment. >> i am a big fan. some really great television they were just wonderful. i would like it if you made some comments about how they came up with some of the various subjects they put on every week.

it is very memorable to be able to watch those programs again. thank you. >> thank you, sir. >> how did you come up with some of the topics? archie gets firebombed accidentally. semi-davis sammy davis junior kisses archie, the jeffersons move next door, how did you come up with some of those topics? >> as i said earlier, we were just a a group of hard-working writers, some men, some women, families. we read three and sometimes for newspapers today. we read, for example, the incidence of hypertension was higher in blac