that was for people who are crazy or whatever it was so what she did was she got ahold of a pound of marijuana and she sold it and i pay for therapy. [laughter] while her dad was the governor and the future just say no first lady of california, none the wiser. she wrote of how her mother was addicted to pills and use their house as a state-of-the-art intercom system as a tool for orwellian surveillance. moring described the same intercom service as a providential gifts. .. a the

compromised, these have become two of the polarities that structure the very left-right order of battle in american political life as much as the debate over the role of government, led by barry goldwater, and the cultural war between mutually recriminating cultural sophisticates on the one hand and the plain or silent majority on the other that i labeled in my previous book nixon land. note well that reagan's side in this plait call battle of -- political battle of assets which is carried far above the minutiae of electoral tallies has prevailed. >> >> and here is their romney

and accepting the nomination in 2012 speaking of the day your son neil armstrong land on the moon all americans who went to bet that i knew we had the greatest country in the world many some people would have thought differently but by that formulation they're not americans. of google's search yielded 114,000 hits. with such utterances are meant to be an ideological approach always apologizing for america. of obama goes abroad to apologize for america. if only hours is a nation

like no other initial above misspoke of campaign journeys and how we are to live in the greatest nation on earth. then to accept the nomination knowing that provinces with us and we're surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on earth. here is a grant the power. at her confirmation hearings questioning a magazine article that she said it needs a historical reckoning permitted by the united states.

senator margot rubio the republican of florida demanded to know what time she was referring to. referring to is america and the greatest country in the world. and we have nothing to apologize for. this is a book of rhetoric came into being. in certain ways we live through global warming political polarization the economy nearly collapsed because of the banking regime. competition from china

overwhelms us and social mobility is a plus period generations of for those apocalypse that may come but at some time the official called of optimism for the greatest nation how did that happen cuxhaven this is one question invisible bridge poses. what does it mean? to wave a flag or for more searching alternative? to debate that question more or since. i hope this may renew that debate at a time with a

nation that has its own in the sense. thank-you. stick around we have some great questions. [applause] >> i am curious if rick has discovered from his research the current polarization begins with richard nixon nor ronald reagan or does is start earlier or later? >> i will say to the

constitutional convention. [laughter] >> with a society a piece by itself is ready for the biggest conflicts begin. >> we may debate that but if not for a compromise which took the slave states with the national bodies over race and is sufficiently traumatic when it comes to the floor hundreds of thousands of americans slaughter each other. then they would pass the gag

rule the cataloger debate slavery in the house to the senate. if we don't talk about maybe it goes away. give recognition today's november 2nd. but the idea where they settled paulist the -- politics the third world and ready for that it was more at peace with itself good table does not go away with

the wave of the hand there is no red america maybe we have a better time of it. so my question on this anniversary when he testified in 1973 with his beautiful wife behind him and his nerdy glasses. one of the things that was so fascinating is the culture of the white house how thin skinned nixon was. and compared to the fair hair boy the kennedy. >> it is just that type of

testimony where i explained the atmosphere in the nixon white house that this was the most devastating part of the testimony that we could never recover from that nixon's preoccupation with the kennedys rekeying jack kennedy ran for the presidency to arrive at the senate at the same time it wasn't jack kennedy as much as bobby and teddy he was quite convinced he would see

in the reelection bid that he'll raise red people like muskie if not mcgovern when they would buy for that nomination that could step aside. he never lets up. into zero almost the bitter end. with the no-holds-barred. and he realizes the prospects that was minimal but he did everything he could but i was regaled with some of the things they had done.

though we have questions from the audience. >> please discuss how much work conservative reagan was compared to nixon's. >> every time i do a talk they say now would he be a moderate republican? but this question is a little sharper. but politicians complain work off the shelf. in to say he was a great supporter of the environment. and it turns out 410 through five it does not show much

with the question is how conservative was he really? for that budget which was the big deal at the time and basically it was the reagin budget. with all of the great society budget at that point he appointed a new right activist which is the agency that administers the war on poverty and what people were commissioned to do. and in fact, he says after my reelection. i made haste to continue my

mandate for the majority of reagan democrats so he wanted it to the reagan. [laughter] >> i think basically i do but was more conservative. >> not at all but things like tpa and then would be active and then to say don't get me in trouble politically.

>> and he was cynical and supported affirmative action and he thought to have a democratic union said his throat to report in destroy the democratic party what with the office is broken into was a fishing expedition or something specific being sought? >> i went to the tapes their time i saw something in the tapes when they talk about their knowledge of why the of the break-in occurred by a put the in the appendix it does not explain what i know but everything that they knew.

but it was a fishing expedition to give informational their real bright and. to all the sworn testimony from the cuban-americans tour the of blur -- burglars to go through the entirety that is what they we're doing. it becomes quite clear. become so boggled and people think there must have been something more going on. beach says of the and explained factors and it was

not part of a conspiracy. >> how did reagin give voice and sentiment that was too extreme to be taken seriously? demonizing the port and the social programs begun by fdr continuing through the great society? >> it is central to the core of why he could succeed politically where barry goldwater could not. i went to the hoover institute to radiobroadcast he made after he was governor in london the things he is so good at, the liturgy of absolution.

the things that poor people get too much money that black folks are at the federal trough the first person who describes black voters as the democrats plantation. people who are concerned about crime. if he is so good to look get them in the eye to say you're not a bad person. and then to say i was the fdr democrat these are good people. but they just don't

understand there will achieve the opposite of what it -- intent. he is good at'' the survey's and he can check of people in washington d.c. 70 percent want tougher crime laws etc etc so they will tell you that you are racist in law and order is a code for racism but it proves that maybe they are the racist. view was so good at developing a the audience to do things that the previous generation was beyond the pale. >> a two-part question so what do thoughts of intelligence gathering and

the money spent on ads? with watergate had that happened what would you be doing today? [laughter] >> i would be president. [laughter] the first car was campaign intelligence gathering and all the money spent on the advertising. >> while it clearly goes on, it is not the rough-and-tumble that it has not surfaced on in a broad basis at the presidential couple planning secretaries or wiretapping to manipulate the campaign the kennedy want to run against other who surfaces of the primary

system. this was the aftermath of watergate the people of this system to work fairly. so i don't see it comparable to watergate but what would i do without watergate? i would still be buried and that is the best part in and never planned to make a career out of their grip. i resigned into timber 71 i was on a vacation with interactive job offer to having good terms of the administration and i explained to the chief of staff that my deputy who would later become reagan

and bush council he is quite capable to handle the job so this is a level like to pursue. he said you cannot leave you owe it to us tuesday and if you leave you will be person on the non grata which is blowing away the job did i suspect years later he wished he had let me go. [laughter] so i stayed. so i pretty much of them post watergate what i set out to do and have fun and returned to writing after a successful career in business which was working in mergers and acquisitions and had gone back to school to study accounting and thought cpa and thought i did not want to do that but i needed the skills and knowledge.

i found something important that if you find the right way for business partners and i was blessed by those. we had a lot of sun and i could retire at 60 returning to other wanted to do noway eighth book in retirement. [applause] on behalf of this wonderful audience thanks for a great conversation. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> this is booktv's live coverage of the miami book fair

held at miami dade college, "latino america: how america's most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation" -- john dean and eric peristein. later john dean will be joining us for a call in, if any questions come up during his talk feel free to participate in that call in. in a few minutes, walter isaacson will talk book "the innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution". at 11 will be our guest on our in-depth program in february so you have three hours to talk to him as well. we are on the street in when the miami. joining us now is gary segura, professor at stanford and co-author co-author america: how america's most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation". how do you define latino. >> largely they define themselves. the government definition is

anyone who identifies as a descendant of immigrants or an immigrant mom of spanish-speaking nation. these include portuguese speakers. the basis on which we will the book we asked people if they think of themselves that way, latino or hispanic. largely this is the u.s. population, let american nations. >> host: you said survey. what the mean by that? >> guest: the book is based on the work we have done at the survey firm, a polling and research firm, merely for political purposes and also for personal and advocacy work and we have interviewed 80,000 people over the last seven years who see themselves as latino and literally hundreds of different of questions about their views of government, politics, society, life in the united states, their families, their health, any topics you can imagine. >> host: what percentage of the

u.s. population is latino? >> guest: as of the u.s. census in 2010 it was up 7%, those population numbers change quickly but the 2020 census it should be creeping up in the 20% range. >> host: translate that into numbers. >> guest: there are about 55 million latinos in the united states. >> how many citizens, how many are here illegally? >> there are 11 million undocumented persons in the united states. 60% of them are hispanic, maybe 5.54 so. the rest of the population are either be goal immigrants or naturalized citizens, native-born citizens. the distribution depends on the age group. if you look at the adult population, 50% of adults are citizens of the united states. the first 40% are native birch, 20% are not. the remainder, most are legal

residents. among young people it is 93% native birth. almost every young person and the age of 18 is a u.s. citizen. not everybody that 93% so that is a really interesting political -- it means most people turn 18 are all entering the eligible electors read. not your naturalization or crossing the border ernie els but turning 18. >> host: 17%, going into the 20% of the u.s. population. what about voting population? what percentage are latino? >> guest: in the 2014 election about 8%. in the 2012 election about 10%. the reason for that fluctuation is working class people and people of color of all racial and ethnic groups turn out less in the midterm elections. it is a lower turnout, turnout in the 2014 election was the lowest in recent history. for a variety of reasons.

the first is the level of democratic turnout was low. turned out by politics. the interest in government in the country is unhappiness at the center because the politics in washington. going back to 2012 it was 10 percentage if you look at our history there was a% in 2008 or 9% in 2008, 10% in 2012, 11% in 2016. those numbers lag the population numbers and variety of reasons. and that group, the age distribution, u.s. citizens on the age of 18 eligible as well. >> host: where the shoes latinos

in america look at, focus on, percentage of republican and democratic? >> guest: there is a variety of issues that are important to latinos, prior to the immigration debate the interest of latinos most often told us about when we talk about the most important issue facing the country from their perspective is always in education, jobs, health care and public safety. the speaker in california, the american agenda. every one wants quality health care, everyone wants -- those of the aegis latinos must identify. until we get to immigration, it is a really big issue, the last four or five years have been fluctuating at 1 and two depending on the political environment of the times, had a

big impact. >> host: democrats, republicans. >> in terms of party legislation the numbers are going to be lower because there are great works and showing form of registration. >> host: we may turn out to vote. historically for the last 30 years, two thirds, one third, democrats or republican, the last election, democrats percentage from a few notes up 70% in the presidential election because of the immigration debate. >> host: legal latino immigrants, do they tend to be more republican than guest workers or undocumented? >> guest: foreign-born latinos and citizen populations in the elected and are likely to be democrat with another latinos.

the first is in miami. and was politically active. and the other group would be third generation, highly assimilated latinos. and more republican until the immigration debates the top 87 and ran back to the democratic identity. i want to make a point about cubans in miami. and cuban american politics, and the latino population. >> host: dynamic's most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation. why do you call them the most

dynamic? >> guest: they are dynamic in a variety of ways. first of all they are on the move. if you go back two censuss ago, a substantial percentage in the southwest. if you look today latinos are the largest minority, the plurality in california, the plurality in texas, latino voters made at difference in georgia, they needed difference in kansas. there's a growing latino population in iowa and arkansas, the population is really on the move. the second thing is they are politically dynamic. we look at two thirds to two quarters of the bills democrats are getting now among latinos, it is not a particularly interesting -- we don't have to go back very far, just to 2004 when george w. bush running for

reelection, and 40% republicans through elections, that is a movement we don't get in any other racial or ethnic population in the united states and it is a really interesting one. >> the other word is transformed. >> i think the presence of latinos in the political structure has the opportunity to change the political dynamic in a variety of locations. if you look at the southern states like georgia, latinos are moving in, what has long been a black/white racial paradigm in politics and in society is a multiracial paradigm, changing correlation, and african american politicians are taking immigration reform, to make the politics work in the state of georgia, you look in places like

texas, the opportunity to become a democratic state if the latino population was engaged and registered and motivated and that hasn't happened yet. people have a secret data on march 18th, 2017. it doesn't work like that but i always like to answer the majority of texas going on tonight and it is probably the case the majority of texans and latino populations, a policy outcome they are not getting. it is just not happening. >> host: 32% of the 2010 or 2018 election, the electorate in texas was latino. give us your assessment of the president's recent executive order on immigration, politically i know from a little earlier to make that judgment to a medium assessment.

>> my initial reaction was it is a very big policy wind and the big political win. in either instance is it ideal. immigration advocates would like a piece of legislation that they can be certain would extend beyond the life of this administration. that was not going to happen. 515 days and counting in the senate bill and refused to bring it up. most advocates in the house of representatives including republicans will tell you there's a majority in the house to talk about the senate bill which is what brings to the floor. in that sense, the president acting the political wind for democrats is huge. it is huge because latinos coalesce behind democrats more enthusiastically than they have so far. turnout was down a little bit, a little disappointed. this will be a big political bone when they see obama at the

top of the ticket in 2015. >> host: do you understand the frustrations some people feel with all of a sudden allowing an executive order with regard to immigration instead of going through the congress? >> i do and i don't. some of the frustration is manufactured because they are being told the president is acting unconstitutionally, the president is breaking the law which was nonsense. if that was the case ronald reagan broke the law and george herbert walker bush broke the law. in terms of the frustration, there should be frustration in the house of representatives, they offered a bill of their own and the president said yesterday in a large rally, pass the bill. the republicans have it within their ability to pass it. the other reason i reject the frustration, we have to remember what it is undocumented immigrants do in the united states.

they fixed the problem, they roof houses, they do the ugly, nasty, painful, unpleasant job but very few americans have tried to apply. anytime one of our listeners today eat a strawberry or piece of chicken, their life has been subsidized by the labor of those undocumented workers. if you really want to deal with the frustration, we need to have an environment where we are not exploiting those people. >> host: gary segura is the co-author co-author of this book america: how america's most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation". thank you for your time. booktv is live at thought miami book fair, the seventeenth year in a row we have come down here and given full coverage over the week and will be broadcast from

chapman hall at miami dade university. these are nonfiction authors we cover coming up in just a minute, walter isaacson will talk about his recent book "the innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution". you can see the room filling up and he will be in there in minutes. walter isaacson will be our guest on c-span2 in february for our in-depth program the first sunday in february, we will have three hours with him to talk about this book and to take your calls as well. on our in-depth program, arthur brooks, president of the american enterprise institute is our guest in december. that is the first sunday of every month. noon to 3:00 p.m. eastern time. the full schedule for everything we are covering this weekend in miami is available at

booktv.org. we have walter isaacson coming up in a minute. you have the opportunity to talk with john dean, in nixon's defense. you saw him a little earlier live at after that, television producer norman lear, even this i get to experience, he will do a call in so you will talk with him. he is the founder of people for the american way as well. lots going on. cornell west will be out here all little later. a couple of the guards who were in benghazi on september 11th, 2012, will be here as well. lots going on here in miami. now let's go up, you can see one of our camera guys on those green.

we will go live in chapman hall, walter isaacson will stars in a minute. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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coverage of the miami book fair, chapman hall is on your screen, walter isaacson is not in the room just yet, they're still filling the room up, latecomers are still coming in. once that room gets filled up we will be live with walter isaacson. we are just down the escalator on the streets of miami dade college and the c-span bus is parked out here. we are handing out book bags and giving tours of the bus. you can see the wind storm, that is a bus driver, rachel nickerson handing out bags so if you are in the miami area today or tomorrow, pick up the c-span bag, c-span's bag after walter isaacson's john dean will do a call in to us. because of the wind we are going

to move all our cameras on to the c-span bus and to our call ins from in there. a typical miami day, a little over the top, thunderstorms coming out but the wind is atrocious. it is of hurricane force winds so we will move to the bus and make sure it is easier. you will hear a little better with the audience. this is booktv's live coverage of the miami book fair. if you are leaving the tv and still wants to listen, you can listen to our coverage today on our c-span radio apps. you can download that android or apple fun, just go to your search engine, your apps engine and type in c-span radio and listen, it is free of course, when you get in there, just cap on c-span2 and you will be able to do that anywhere in the

nation. walter isaacson is now in the room as you can see. we will go back to chapman hall and wait for mr. isaacson. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] >> good morning. >> good morning. >> good morning. saturday in miami, welcome to the 2014 miami book fair international. i am the dean of the honors college at miami dade college, it is a pleasure to be with you today. the book fair is grateful for the support of the night foundation, american airlines and many other generous supporters. we would like to acknowledge friends of the book fair and i see so many of you today, thank you for your continued support. at the end of today's session we will have time for questions and

answers. the author will also be autographing books to the right side of the elevator near where you were standing on line. nestle at this time my but like you to silence yourself phones. it is my pleasure to introduce the founder of square and launch code, a new nonprofit in miami who will introduce our guest author. [applause] >> thank you. they gave me a script and they just gave me permission to deviate from it. that is what i am going to do. i first met walter isaacson a month ago washington d.c. and he gave me a copy of his new book and i was excited because i love coming come from trips with something for my wife and i got home and i was like i have got a copy of walter's new book.

i knew she was a big fan. now we have two copies. she has gone out and bought it that afternoon. it was a spectacular book and if you haven't read walter isaacson, it is a joy to read him because he connects us with the devices that connect our lives. these days every one of view is carrying something that has dozens and dozens of independent technological streams that merged together to give us activity that we just assumed today. walter is the best person i know at explaining the connections that lead to the things that change our lives. in his new book "the innovators: how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution" walters drinks together not just the hero stories but the stories that you wouldn't here because these things are not made by individuals. walter does of phenomenal job

explaining how the team work involved and the history is exciting and reverting. i will go back to my script for one thing i could not say better. i will quote salon.com and say if anyone in america understands genius, it is walter isaacson. [applause] >> notice he didn't say i was a genius, i have just written about a few people who are. it is great to be back here at the miami book festival, something i love for many years and tom healey has taken over. i particularly want to thank the president of miami dade community college, because they are doing in their own different ways something that is important for the digital revolution which is make it inclusive, make it

part of this revolution and you may know something called launch code in st. louis will come to miami and soon will be all over the world but what it is is a very easy time. in six weeks you can learn coating and be part of the revolution. this is the greatest community college in america and thank you for hosting it. [applause] >> i have been working on this book, the innovators, off and on. it began when i ran digital media for time magazine back in the days before we knew what digital media was before we could get on the internet and before there were web browser is in the early 1990s. when web browsers and the idea of putting a magazine on the internet came along we started to do it and i got called in by my boss who asked me as simple

question which is who owns the internet? that is the clueless question. then he says who built it? who runs it? who is in charge of it? i realize besides being a clueless question, i did not know the answer to that question and i started gathering -- i started to meet all these people, people i never heard of, like ben franklin george washington, people like bob conn who did the internet protocols and who created interactive computing. bill gates, larry page, the people we all know as leaders of this revolution and i was lucky enough to meet these people and started gathering strings, collecting stories about them. i would say to them gordon more,

when you founded in tel, and southern florida is a place filled with storytellers and it is great to be a journalist u.s. the simplest of all questions. we gathered aside as you may know when steve jobs called, i had done a biography of benjamin franklin, why don't of benjamin franklin, why don't you do me next, my first reaction, when i was told i was fighting off cancer it would be a great chance to be part of being up close, a revolutionary, and we biographer's know that we destroyed history little bit, we make it seem there is the visionary, steve jobs or bill

gates and einstein, in a garage and they have a light bulb moment and innovation occurs. one thing about studying steve jobs, he was a visionary, headed dent in the universe by his creative position. but did a collaborative free, and those of you who know about it, everybody i talk to said he drove me crazy but wouldn't have given up a chance to have worked for him. he drove me to do things i didn't know i would be able to do. at the end of my time with steve when he was stepping down from apple and was sick i asked him acquistion which was what products are you most proud of? i thought he would say the original macintosh or the ipod or iphone, you were to listening. he was always a bit tough. he said those are hard products to create but what is hard is to create a team that indoors and

continues to create great product, the product i'm most proud of is apple and that is when i realized as jim said in his introduction this is not just about lone geniuss but how to form creative teams and that is what all this do in our lives, we realize we bounce around with people, some might be a visionary, some person might be good at execution and vision without execution is hallucinations so you need to put these people together. steve jobs and steve was neck and a lot of engineers and create apple. that was the first lesson i learned from steve jobs was when i had my first long walk with him, and that he was a humanities kid as he put it growing up. he loved literature, novels. also an electronics geek, i felt that this strange.

i was one of those kids, got radius and made ham radios, john thomas, knew how to make circuits and use a soldering iron and not messed things up too much but i was a few manatees' kid and he said i learned that the people who stand at the intersection of the arts and sciences are going to be the place where creativity occurs. that is what we're learning in our education today, and those of us in the humanities and arts, want to be sure we understand the technology so we don't see a that grounds to the engineers. we have a framework for the book and my daughter who is in what everett is when you are applying to college, was applying to college and being the type of parents my wife and i are felt we were supposed to be involved in this process, and say what you read in your entrance as a about? are we supposed to edit it?

being the type of daughter she was she was having none of that. one day she came down and set i have done it, remind me again, a lovelace cobb robert byron's daughter was the first computer programmer. she was a good frame for the book i was trying to write. that is where the book begins, lord byron's daughter, in the early 1800s, she was growing up with a political streak. her father was a great romantic coin. those of you who know anything about lord byron, lady byron thought he was too much of a romantic poet, he wandered off never to be seen again. he was mainly in mathematics, as

if understanding mathematics was an antidote to being a poetic or romantic. it didn't quite work because what's a lovelace does is combines poetry with mathematics. recalls it poetics science. she stands at that intersection i mentioned it steve jobs talked about and as soon as i read that i remembered the intersection that was on the slides that steve jobs used to show every product launch. on the screen behind him when the product launch was over, there would just be a street signs that said liberal arts technology and he would say that is where we stand, that intersection. hy was reading about her. because she wandered around industrial revolution in flint in the 1830s and she saw the mechanical looms, using punch cards to do beautiful patterns, mechanized loomis.

lord byron was the money. i mean that literally. is only speech was defending the followers of ned led, who is smashing mechanical looms on the theory that technology was putting creative work -- creative people out of work. they thought technology would put people out of work, they were wrong then, they are wrong now when they think that. if you look at the punch cards, you have a french name charles babbage who was making the calculator machine, numerical calculate using punch cards and she came up with a concept that is basically the heart of what the computer revolution is all about which is with the punch cards or any type of programming you can make a numerical machine do anything that can be noted in symbols, words, music, art, patterns, so she came up and showed and published a

scientific paper which in that period was not usual for a woman to the publishing in scientific journals, she publishes a paper that describes how this would work and even publishes step by step and the first computer programming, to a particular task that she had undertaken, it is a program, it has recursive loupes and embedded things. something of kosher at miami dade. and a computer programmer. there are so many women that had been somewhat written out of history. i leap forward 100 years to the 1930s when real computers come into existence. it is like the industrial revolution because two things

happen. not just the steam engine and mechanical processes, the industrial revolution, not just a steam engine or mechanical process. it is combining the two, combining a steam engine with mechanical processors you get an industrial revolution. what happened for the digital revolution was a combination of computers with that network. personal computer and the internets eventually. to me it was a true revolution and i realized i had been writing about revolutions in the past. i wrote about the scientific revolution. we know about the american revolution and i did benjamin franklin because i felt you should know about that revolution, if you understand the values of america, where we're coming from and where we are going it helps to know how founder's got us started. and there was nobody who tried to tie it all together.

and here are the heroes in that revolution. and the writing of the history of the generation. and other people wrote the history of vietnam or world war ii or depression generations because the history of our generation, the revolution of the generation was not political or military, it was the digital revolution. so i leaped to the 1930s, having set it up with a lovely stand you get to an amazing character you are going to learn a lot more about next week because i wanted to take him out of the shadows of history, alan turing. i worked to take him out but benedict, batch is playing him in the movie so we will do a thousand times better than i will be able to do it is a really cool movie called the imitation game. what alan turing did was

threefold. and the general purpose computer, and the complicated math problem. won't burden you with the problem, and whether it is approvable or not in math and he wants to figure out. and the concept of the machine and computer any logical -- the logical computing machine and universal. uses it to solve the mass problem except for a few athletes here is not the more important part. the more important part was this concept of a universal or total loss of will computing machine that could do anything, then he goes to england secretly, trying to break the german wartime, and

there he works very much a loner, long distance runner. when he sent off to boarding school, gone to in the and foreign service and left alone, he rides his bicycle for two days to go to boarding school. at boarding school rediscovers that he is gay, has across on a boy who dies of tuberculosis. by the time alan turing gets there he is quite a letter and feels like the outsider but he learns as i was saying at the beginning it is all about collaboration and team work. you have to have people do these things. the german wartime code which they had done more than anything else to help us win world war ii. finally coming out of it because he wrestled with this question of homosexuality, free will, are we program, we are who we are because we are like machines that are preprogrammed or do we have free will, he wrestles with what he calls ladylove place's

objection because 8 of place at the end of her paper says machines can do everything and anything had a caveat. the one thing they in are not able to do is have imagination. they won't be able to originate fox. machines will never think. machines are different from humans. alan tearing says how would we know that? how can we test that? alan turing is wrestling with this notion are we fundamentally different from machines? so alan turing comes up with what he calls the imitation game which is the name of the movie. we now call it detering test but it is a way to decide whether or not a machine is thinking. you take a machine and put it in a different room with a human, send in questions and after a while if you can't tell the difference between the answers coming back from one side and the answer coming back from the other side you can't tell which is the machine and which is the cumin, he says there is no

reason to believe a machine isn't thinking. if you're in the philosophy department you can argue about consciousness and whether or not that is a good test but it has become the defining test of 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.