>> Announcer: Live from
Las Vegas, it's theCUBE,
covering Dell Technologies World 2018,
brought to you buy Dell EMC
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back to
SiliconANGLE's Media Production
of theCUBE, live here from
Dell Technologies World 2018.
I'm Stu Miniman, and I
have the distinct pleasure
of welcoming Walter
Isaacson to our program.
Author, podcaster, I read every
biography that you publish.
I listen to every podcast, so thank you.
So, Walter, this is a
conference of geeks, you know?
And I say that lovingly,
14 thousand people.
They love technology; they love ideas.
You have the chance to
study and research some
of the, you know, most brilliant minds,
that we've had the last
couple hundred years.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
>> You know, I love the fact that
the most creative of people,
from Leonardo Da Vinci to
Einstein, Ben Franklin,
Steve Jobs, Ada Lovelace,
whomever they may be,
all love the humanities and the science.
They stand at that intersection
of sort of liberal acts technology,
and that's so important in today's world.
We can have enormous amounts of data,
and the question is, how do
you connect humans to it?
How do you add the human factor?
And so, that's where I get my inspiration,
from people who stand at that interaction
of humanities and technology.
>> Yeah, one of my favorite
books of yours is the Innovators.
You talked about history,
and there's things that we've
been looking at or trying.
When you talk about forecasting
or predicting something,
sometimes we have great ideas,
but if I take us, you know,
decades or longer to get there,
any kind of, you know, big inspirations?
What do you say to people
that work in the tech world,
just how they should think
about things like that?
>> Well, first of all, things
happen sometimes slower
than you expect, until
that inflection point,
when they happen faster than you expect.
>> It's like going broke, you know?
It happens really slow,
and then it happens fast.
>> I guess we shouldn't say that in Vegas,
here where we are for this conference,
but I think that the main thing to do
is to be one of those people
that has an intuitive feel
for how humans are going to
find a product or service
to be transformative to them.
And, you know, we didn't know
we needed a thousand songs
in our pocket till the iPod came along.
You know, likewise, we didn't
know we needed transistors
until somebody invented
the transistor radio,
and we could take it along with us.
So, what turns us on?
What makes us human?
>> Yeah, so many things out there.
You've been not only writing;
you're doing podcasts now.
What do you think of kind
of the state of content?
People say sometimes nobody reads anymore.
You do hard research, a team of people.
What's your thoughts
about content these days?
>> Well, I think the
business model for journalism
and production of content
has been decimated at times,
partly because it's all
ad-driven in terms of journalism
and, you know, video,
and we need to get back to a time
when people valued content
and are willing to have
a direct relationship
with the content provider.
About 80% of the revenue now for, say,
reported or journalistic
content does either the Google,
Facebook, Instagram, some aggregator,
so I think we have to look at the next way
of finding micro-payment
subscription models
that work in addition to the
advertising-driven model.
>> Yeah, there's so many people sometimes,
they look at all of this change,
and they get kind of pessimistic.
You know, we're going to
have the AI apocalypse,
or the robots are going to take over.
Shows like here we're,
that technology is, I say,
by definition, are
positive about technology.
When I read your writings,
you seem to have a very positive outcome.
>> Oh, I'm definitely optimistic about
where technology takes us.
You know, I write in the Innovators,
begin with Ada Lovelace, who
was Lord Byron's daughter.
Her father was a lud eyed, you know,
defended the followers of Ned Lot,
who was smashing the looms of England,
thinking that technology
would put people out of work.
But Ada was somebody who said, "I get it.
The punch card's telling
those looms how to do patterns
could make a calculating
machine be able to do numbers,
as well as words, as well as pictures."
She envisioned the computer,
and the notion of technology increases
the number of people
in the textile industry
in England in the 19th century.
And the computer has
led to so many more jobs
than its destroyed,
so I think technology will
always augment human creativity,
not destroy it.
>> So, last thing I
wanted to ask you, Walter,
is, we're here at Dell Technologies World.
34 years ago, Michael Dell started this.
And he's a special individual.
We've had the opportunity to
talk to him, get to know him.
I've told people that, you
know, inside the company,
if you reach out to him,
he actually will respond.
He seems very special
in today's day in age.
You've got background with Michael.
Tell me, how do you-?
>> I think it practically
begins with his parents,
his late mother and his father,
you know, his father's still alive.
Care a lot about education;
care a lot about creativity.
Deeply humane in the sense
that they love all of society,
human civil discourse, and
that's why there's a humanity
I see that Michael Dell is
able to embed in his products,
whether it's a Dell laptop I always use
or the new servers, and Dell EMC,
which enables people
across platforms to say,
"How do we collaborate;
how do we be creative?"
>> All right, well, Walter,
I just say thank you so much.
A pleasure having you on the program.
And you've been watching theCUBE.
I'm Stu Miniman.
Always check out thecube.net
for all of our broadcasts,
and we also, like Walter, have a podcast.
Check it out on iTunes.
>> Walter: Thank you, Stu.
>> Thank you.
(upbeat music)
