October 10, 2019 • 47 mins
You might know Walter Isaacson as a legendary biographer, or as the former Editor of Time, or as the Chairman and CEO of CNN ... but did you know he was a high school crime reporter for the Times-Picayune? Or that he was recruited to be in the CIA? Or that he actually invented the cable news ticker? This episode, Bob sits down with Walter to discuss why Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs aren't that different, why technology and job creation will always go hand in hand, and how curiosity has been the driving force in his career.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My
Heart Radio. I got offered three jobs that week, as
a matter of fact. One was Time Magazine, the other
was a guy named Rick Tonry had just been elected
to Congress. And the third, rather weirdly, a guy named
cord Meyer, ran counter intelligence in the CIA. I met
(00:26):
with him and he wanted to recruit me for the CIA.
He made one mistake though, he said, of course, we
wouldn't want you to be a double agent or a spy.
We'd want you to be an analyst at Langley, thinking
that would make it more appealing, and I thought, well,
that's boring, and I accepted the job. At times, I
(00:50):
am Bob Pittman, and welcome to Math and Magic, Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing, where we explore marketing through
the stories and lessons of those on the front lines.
Before we jump in, I want to pause for just
a second to congratulate our I Heart podcasting team. Although
we've been the number one commercial podcaster for a while,
we just passed MPR and became the number one overall
(01:11):
podcaster in the month of August. According tood pod Track,
we had over a three increase in audience last year,
but also want to congratulate MPR and companies like Wondering
who are also growing at a fast space and working
together to build this new podcasting industry. Podcasting is probably
the hottest new medium, and I'd like to thank all
of you for listening. Now back to the fun stuff today,
(01:34):
we have someone who has studied those great minds and
people who have changed the world, as well as being
a creative and business practitioner himself, Walt Riz Excep. He
has probably known as the greatest biographer of our times,
(01:54):
and he has also had other important identities at other moments.
In time head of CNN had editorial Time magazine, in
Time Inc. Had the first efforts of a major media
company to join the emerging Internet revolution. He was in
the attack even as a kid in the days before
geeks built apps and made millions. Back then, they were
Ham radio operators and built heath Kit electronics with a
(02:17):
soldering iron. He's the former head of the Aspen Institute,
now professor at Tulane, and his native New Orleans he
played jazz clarinet and he might even know something about
voodoo and the Bayous of Louisiana. Let's welcome Walter. Good
to be with you, Bob after many years. Let's tell
our listeners and I go back, way back. We're going
to get into your story, but first I want to
(02:39):
do you in sixty seconds. If you don't mind, just
say the first thing that comes into your mind. So
do you prefer New York City or New Orleans? New
Orleans for the food? Louis Armstrong or Dr John Luis?
I'm strong Early Riser or night Owl. I'm definitely a
night owl E reader or paperback the reader, William Shay
(03:00):
Experience Tennessee, Williams Tennessee, Williams Tulane, Green Wave or Harvard
Crimson Tulane, Roll Wave, Bignet or Donut Ben You why
would you need the whole fiction or nonfiction? Alas I
read too much nonfiction, I probably should indulge in novels,
Oh Boy or Gumbo Gumbo. Smartest person you know Bill Gates,
(03:23):
childhood hero Walker Percy novelists from New Orleans area. Sure,
first job writing for The Times picking of New Orleans
Police Headquarters five am to noon beat Something you wish
you had written? I wish I had written a novel.
I keep trying you know my agent. She says, give
it up, give it up. Last vacation with my daughter,
(03:46):
we drove around Grant earlier in the summer. Favorite TV show,
The PPS News out, Favorite New Orleans jazz musician went in.
Marcellis most prized possession. Some of the art I bought
when I was a kid, when I could afford it.
Favorite book when you were a child, The movie Goer
by Walker Percy. Quote to live by Steve Jobs is
(04:09):
the people are crazy enough to think they can change
the world. Are the ones to do? Okay, we're in
theo with this one. Who would write your biography? The
only thing I desperately fear is that my daughter will
write my biography because he's a great writer. Okay, let's
start off. Let's go back in time, no pun intended.
You grew up in the nineteen fifties and sixties in
New Orleans. Can you paint the picture of what that
(04:31):
felt like and look like? Air conditioning had just come in. Well,
the cool thing about air conditioning coming in is that
my father, my uncle, and my granduncle had been engineers
for ice making companies, and they figured out how to
do industrial air conditioning for the department stores. And movie
theaters of New Orleans. So I got to watch them
build air conditioning, and of course it helped pay my
(04:51):
way through college. It's at the fifties and sixties that
they were air conditioning all these Right after World War Two,
my dad and my uncle's came home. We had a house.
My brother still lives there, right near here on Napoleon Avenue,
and they built a very long pool in order to
test out it was before Freon had been invented, to
test out air conditioning, you know, like cooling towers. But
(05:14):
it was just this huge pool, and it was a
swimming pool. Nobody had swimming pools back then. In ground.
Long swimming pools is not that deep. But we grew
up with this weird swimming pool because my family was
in the air conditioning because it must have been very popular.
That was particularly popular, so was my brother. When our
parents would go to Deston, Florida for the weekend. No,
we don't feel like going to Florida. So talk about
(05:36):
back then Louisiana politics, French Quarter, architecture, gumbo like poncha train.
I remember that long bridge, the old bridge Acrossolosolgical that
was very scary. To tell you what I remember most,
that's most important is race desegregation was just happening. We
lived in a very integrated neighborhood, Napoleon Avenue and Broadmoor.
(05:57):
Of the house I told you about, I rem remember
vividly the first time my cousin and I we were
walking to Ottoman Park and we were with a young
African American kid. You know, we're all about five or six.
My cousin said, hey, let's go to the merry go
round in the carousel. And then I remember just had
a sign which I had never figured out. I never
(06:18):
thought about what does it mean? Though I remember your
sign saying white only. I mean, I just learned how
to read, and it struck me at that moment. Oh,
I get it. They don't allow blacks into this park,
which is a private park. That's why I say I
don't want to go. I don't want to go because
I was embarrassed. But Alan insisted. I think all of
us who grew up in that era in the South
(06:40):
had that. I have my stories from Mississippi. When it
sort of dawns on you what's going on, as you say, embarrassment.
When we got a little bit older, I remember we
led a group of kids, a big march of black
and white kids together to reopen the pool, and it
was sort of my first little bit of activism. Any
voodoo down here, you know, I love going to St.
Louis Cemetery. That's where Marie Lavo is buried, so you
(07:02):
can always put a little cross on her grave. Allay
a little Gregory the dried bones, if you really have
to cast a spell doesn't work. It's worked for me
so far. I wouldn't be sitting here on a podcast
with you if the voodoo Gregory hadn't worked. So why
do so many storytellers come out of the Deep South?
Walker Percy, the guy I told you about, the novelist
(07:24):
to a sort of a mentor, I never quite knew
what he did. We would go over across like Poncho
Train to the Buga Fly where he and his daughter
who is my age all lived, and we'd go hunting
or water skiing or searching for turtles. We always just say, Anne,
what does your daddy do? He's always on the doc
drinking bourbon, eating hogside cheese. She would say, well, he's
(07:46):
a writer. I couldn't figure out what that man. I
knew you could be an engineer like my dad, or
a doctor or a fisherman. But writer. When I guess
I was about twelve, I read the movie Goer It
just come out. I realized what that meant. So I
asked Uncle Walker walcome person, tell me, because you're trying
to teach lessons, you're preaching some things in this book.
Tell me what it's about. And he said, there are
(08:08):
two types of people come out of Louisiana. Preachers and storytellers.
He said, if I haven't said be a storytelling, the
world's got far too many preachers. And so why do
you think the South has so many storytellers versus other
parts of the country. Maybe it's the Bourbon. Maybe it's
the fact that we lost into the loss of Civil War.
Maybe people sit on porches a lot. Alex Haley, who
(08:31):
wrote Roots, somebody once asked him said he was trying
to give a speech or something and he was scared.
You didn't know how to begin, And Hailey said, here's
the six words you have to know. Let me tell
you a story. Well, you know, it's funny. When I
was growing up, I had uncles who would tell stories,
and if you ask him a question, you get a
long story and the moral of the story was the
answer to your question. Do you think in this new
(08:53):
digitally connected world that goes on? Or is this storytelling
a lost art? Now? This is podcast is so important
why they're such a popular medium and why they're a
crucial medium for us to have now because of the
past twenty five thirty years in the digital age, we've
lost the art of narrative. Paper is a good technology
(09:15):
for narrative. You go page, have to page, you can't
hop around. Likewise, linear television, linear movies, they're great for narrative.
But digital media tends to be great for hopping around,
making links, jumping to gather more information, following and charting
your own course. It's interactive, which means you're not consuming
(09:36):
a narrative. Now that's fine. I love interactive media. I
love being able to hunt and peck and figure out
you know who the Saints are going to be playing,
and hear all the opinions about it. But every now
and then we need to get back to narrative and
to storytelling. I think it started for me listening to
this American Life was doing a podcast a long time ago.
(09:58):
I said, wow, they're gonna say the art of storytelling. Well,
you know what's interesting? Young people, teenagers, young adults are
flocking to it, whereas people thought, oh, talk shows, that's
for old people. And I think it's just turned everybody's
understanding upside down. It has sort of the best of
both worlds, meaning you get it on demand, you don't
(10:18):
have to tune in at nine am. On the other hand,
it's a narrative. You have to go with the flow.
So let's put you in context a little bit. You
played with electronics as a kid, building heath kits. You
were Ham operator. Was at w A five J T.
P w Ay very good. Yeah, in my basement of
our house w A five John Thomas Peter. Is that
(10:40):
what you said? Because I remember, I still remember being
a Ham radio dude. Can you still use morse code?
I no, no, But I had to learn it because
if I remember correctly, boy, you're bringing back some memories here.
You had to somehow another passive test and morse code.
I never got my operator's license because I could never
get my speed up a Morse code enough, and I
gave up. So I appreciate how hard it is to
(11:03):
do that. So let's do a factoid. Wire transistors better
than vacuum tubes because vacuum tubes use a lot of electricity,
they burn out their filaments. There he did. And a
transistor is a semiconductor. It's on a piece of silicon.
When I was growing up, I remember early radios and
we have a twelve transistor radio and you got twenty
(11:24):
four transistor radio and then you can make your own.
Remember that they were talking about the more transistors, the
better than the radio transistors. That I could hear w
l S which is this great station in Chicago where
I could hear Dodger games. You know, that was my
thing I was a kid. We saw the transistors onto
a circuit board. But what happens with Bob Moore and
others that Intel is they figured out, oh, we can
(11:46):
etch these on a chip of silicon. You can never
etch a vacuum tube on a chip. So where did
that builder's love come from engineering dad? Or did it
come from somewhere else? Yeah? I think it came from
having an engineering day. We all learned that the kneeds
of our parents. I'm just old enough to remember having
(12:07):
my earliest computers where you could open them up you
could jack in, you could put more memory, you knew
how the insides were. I think you get alienated from
your technology if you have no clue what a circuit is,
If you have no clue how a logical algorithm that
has yes, no, yes, no answers gets translated into on
(12:29):
off switches, which are basically transistors on a circuit board
in order to make something happen. No kid in my
two lane class today has any clue what goes on
inside of the computer. They don't even know what digital
really means, which is just an on off switch type circuits.
Do you think young people should all know coding? People
(12:50):
say you got to learn how to code as a kid.
They can get a job ten years from now. Now
you need to know how to think in algorithms. Ten
yearsome now, machines are gonna code for us. You is
gonna do it by voice, say turn on screen, make
trash can move to bottom right, It'll do the coding.
What you need is the creativity. And I also think
(13:11):
it's useful to know something about the hardware. One of
the first twist in your story is that you were
also popular. You were not the tech nerd outsider. You
were student body president. You're voted most likely to succeed,
one of the few that actually succeed. You're also very ambitious.
You interned in Washington for legendary House majority leader Hail Bogs.
(13:31):
You also worked for the local newspaper, and you're in
high school. Where did all that ambition come from? I
think one of the driving things for me was a
pretty keen sense of curiosity. I certainly wouldn't smarter than
the other kids I grew up with, especially at Newman.
You know your friend Michael Lewis. All these people went
to was a school with a lot of smart people.
(13:52):
But my dad was always curious as an engineer, and
he was always taking things apart to see how they worked.
And he loved of telling things like why is the
sky blue? And then we try to figure it out.
I was lucky enough when I worked with you many
many years ago. At Time Warner we had general interest
magazines like Time magazine where I worked, and so you
(14:13):
could be driven by curiosity about everything. One week I'd
be writing music. Next week I'll be writing the medicine section.
Next week I'd be writing in Foreign Affairs or the
Nation section. And so my success has not come from
being a great master of any field, but by having
more curiosity about more things than most people around me.
(14:34):
How did you make all this happen? Though, yes, you
were curious, but you wound up as an intern in Washington.
You wound up actually writing for the local newspaper. How
did that happen? As for the newspaper, this was in
the days when newspapers were flourishing, So as a summer job,
you know, I just went in. I didn't know the
editor publisher of the paper. But if you were willing
(14:55):
to be a reporter, the Times picked you and had
hundred and fifty reporters. I did police headquarters, as I said,
were seventeen, you know, in high school. I know I
was in high school because I remember applying to college
and I already had a whole stack of newspaper clips,
including mostly crime stories. But I think by actually having
(15:17):
a bunch of front page newspaper clips that seemed to
impress the people who let you into college. Well, let's
talk about college for a minute. You went on to
Harvard and then you were a Rhodes scholared Oxford and
in that area geographic diversity for an ivy League was
much less than today. Why Harvard and not l s U.
Harvard was Harvard. You'd heard of it, and so I
(15:37):
went to my you know, high school guidance counsel, and
she said, okay, we'll try to get you into it.
And you know, I was lucky he had the newspaper clips.
But you're right, geographic diversity. You know, people who are
against affirmative action say I always reminded, say, we've always had.
I had affirmative action. Harvard was thought it was cool
to get a person from Louisiana and back then, so
(15:59):
you hit Boss. Then the IVY League. I guess it
was newly co ed about the time you went there,
and there was a long and honored traditions up there.
How did that change your view of the world New
Orleans versus Boston in that life that you I tell
you what ingrained in me when I went up to
Boston and Harvard and then Oxford. You learn tradition, You
(16:21):
learn to respect the past, which also comes from being
a Southerner and storyteller. You learn when you look at
Harvard Yard or the quad at Oxford where I was
that Oh my goodness, you know, Dr Johnson was in
this college. So it puts things in perspective, and that's
why to get to when you and I started working together,
(16:44):
I kind of went to Time magazine. It seemed like,
all right, that's an institution. I don't need to start
Spy magazine or start some new magazine. I kind of
like something that has a history and a tradition. Back then,
there was no such thing as a venture capitalists giving
you money. If you started something, you did it with
(17:05):
somebody else's money. MTV we started. I have one percent
of MTV and thought I was lucky, but you know,
you were somebody in that category. The first wave of
people I knew who said something like why don't we
start MTV. That's the downside of being the personality I
am with a reverence for institutions and history and preservation.
(17:26):
I don't wake up one morning and say, hell, let's
start a music video and I want to destroy the
institution engine you build them upways good to have both sorts,
especially in our friendship. And this time you were college
student developing who you were. What did you envision doing
for a living as an adult when you got out
of school. I studied philosophy for a while, both at
(17:48):
Harvard an Oxford, and I remember going back to the
greatest of all philosophy professors I've ever had was John
Rawls or a Theory of Justice, and I've done something
like that at auction. So I went back him and
showed him my Oxford dissertation, and I said to him,
I can't quite figure out what I should do. I'm
thinking I might want to become an academic philosopher, but
(18:08):
I also have a job. Offer to go back to
the newspaper in New Orleans where I worked, maybe I
want to be a journalist. He read the paper and
then he said to me, very politely, you'd make a
good journalist. And so I ended up becoming a journalist
again in New Orleans. As I say, I had done
it in high school and then at time it was
almost a placeholder, like Okay, I'll do this and then
(18:31):
I'll figure out what I want to be when I
grow up. But after about forty years I was I
kind of like I might be a journalist. Before we
jump to your time after college, narrow escapes or near
death experiences almost always have a lasting effect. You had
one back then. I think it was in Ireland when
you were covering. Oh yeah, oh yeah. I was covering
for the Sunday Times of London and I went to
(18:53):
Belfast with a guy named David Blundy, who was no
longer with us because he was killed by a sniper
and salvit. I remember we were in the Europa Hotel.
The Sunday Times, as the name implies, comes out only
on Sunday, and this is like a Wednesday, and David said, oh,
there's gonna be a mass protest down in this part
of Belfast. We gotta go. I said, David, it's a Wednesday.
(19:15):
You know, it's not like we have a paper to
write for. And I kept saying we should just go
to the bar and the Europa and have dinner. There
were a lot of other journalists there and he said no,
So he dragged me down there and it was totally safe.
I mean, there are protesters and all. And we get
back to the hotel. The hotel had been bombed, including
the pub on top of the hotel, and David said,
this is a lesson to you. You never know where
(19:36):
you're gonna be in danger. Alas he's the one we lost,
And did that have an impact on you to be
that close to being at the wrong place at the
wrong time. No, I think what had an impact on
me was the adrenaline that comes from covering something amazing.
There are always a people who run away from the
World Trade Center and the people who run towards it.
(20:00):
I always wanted to be there when things were happening,
even if they were somewhat dangerous. Remember, I'm almost looking
out of the window here. You can almost see it
from where we are. In New Orleans. There was a
Howard Johnson's was a sniper on it right down the
street in City Hall, and I remember hearing about it,
even though I was off duty. It was late afternoon,
(20:20):
going down there and wanting to cover it. So I
think that you know, we each have our braveries. Mind
is not very strong, but it is that curiosity that
drives me to be places, even places that might not
be the safest at times. Just hold on a second,
because we've got so much more to talk about. We'll
be back after a quick break. Welcome back to math
(20:45):
and magic. We're here with Walter is Sison. After school,
you came back to New Orleans. You went to work
for the newspaper, and through a mixture of right place
right Time and great talent. You get hired by Time
Magazine at a really age. This, by the way, was
when Time was absolutely one of the top news organizations
(21:05):
in the world. Why did they pick you? You know,
this is really the golden days of journalism, and I
guess it was the late eighties. They had sent a
senior editor around America to find talent out therehic diversity
into geographic diversity. They were recruiting. Time Magazine was growing
and wanted young people from around the country. I had
(21:28):
been covering city hall by that point in New Orleans
and had written columns about the mayor's race. Had called
the race, and so they were paper had been touting me.
A business editor of Time arrived and here's about me.
Takes me to lunch and I got offered three jobs
that week, as a matter of fact. One was Time Magazine,
the other was a guy named Rick Tonry had just
(21:50):
been elected to Congress wanted me to go up as
his administrative assistant. And the third, rather weirdly, the guy
named cord Meyer. Remember who he no. Corde Meyer was
a famous CI agent ran counter intelligence in the CIA.
He had been in the London Embassy and he had
met lots of kids from Oxford. We never quite figured
(22:12):
out why did Corde Meyer wanted me to us alve
But one day I got a call saying Corde Meyers
in New Orleans wants to meet you at the Hilton
Hotel next to the airport. I thought that's weird. I
met with him and he wanted to recruit me for
the CIA. He made one mistake though, He said, of
course we wouldn't want you to be a double agent
or spy. We'd want you to be an analyst at Langley,
(22:32):
thinking that would make it more appealing. And I thought,
well that's boring, and I accepted the job at time.
So you show up in New York and you've come
from the Times, pick a junior now at time? What
was the difference in journalism? What sort of struck you
that first impression of this is different? The writing was
done as a group. In other words, you had correspondence
(22:53):
to which and then things that'd be a writer who
would compile it. So it was all done as a collaborative,
collegial thing. Time to even have by lines back then,
and I like that notion of team mark. It made
it feel very magical and distilling huge amount of wisdom.
The other thing that struck me immediately was the power
of this institution of time. If I wanted to meet
(23:16):
Garth Brooks because I heard he was an up and
coming country star, you just call some publicist or whatever
and you'd be having And that was true of Ronald Reagan.
It was heavy, and for somebody who's adrenaline fix comes
from curiosity, it was just like a kid in the
candy store. I think I remember you telling me once
(23:38):
we were talking about impartiality and how important that was.
It was you or someone else said it's so important.
They didn't even vote. The entire time I was at
Time magazine or CNN, I never voted in an election
that we might cover presidential race or even a Senate race.
I sometimes voted like city counts, of course, where it mattered,
(24:01):
or I knew somebody running. And the reason was if
you voted, you had to force yourself to figure out
which side do you want? If you knew you weren't
going to vote, you didn't join aside as easily, and
you really could keep an open mind better because you
hadn't push yourself to decide who am I going to vote?
For that stuck with me all these years. These days
(24:22):
people would think it's ridiculous to be that way, and
they'll say, oh, you can't be objective. Well yeah, you
can try, you can try real hard. I remember one
of the first cover stories I wrote at time was
about abortion, one of the big marches, you know, right
to life Mark and I wrote a cover story on
abortion and which I tried to be one hand other
(24:44):
different hands, many hands. This is what people are saying
the whole march, and I got and I still have it.
I've treasured it, even though it was tough. Letter from
Walker Percy, the novelist who was a deep practicing Catholic,
very against abortion, and felt that I had betrayed the
fact that I was pro choice, even though I tried
(25:07):
to be objected me even handed, and he just pointed
out passages in this cover story in which it was
clear I didn't fully understand the anti abortion side as well.
But I do think there's still for me a hunger
for here's a journalist who's not trying to get in
the way of wherever the facts lad him. You were
one of the first to cover technology, and he became
(25:29):
one of the leading experts on it. You got Time Inc.
And Time Warner into this new world as the head
of Pathfinder. When I arrived an America Online in the
mid nineties, you were the only major media company in
the space. Why I remember once I was editor and
we wanted to do a story of on the world
(25:51):
of online. It was before you had really pushed a
O L to be what it was. I tried to
understand cyberspace, what was this? And I guess it's just
because I was interested in engineering. I was interested in
the network. Back then it was the well What's an Email?
Had an email account at the Well and Stewart branded
helped creative and it said you own your own words,
(26:11):
which I tell my students now because that's what it
said when the screen opened up, and it meant you
had to take responsibility for which is said unlike nowadays
on Twitter, you know, many other places. So I became
mesmerized by this online world. And that's how I met you.
That's how I'm at Steve Case. That I'm at ted leonsis.
Back then, Time Magazine in nine one, I think, was
(26:36):
the first publication outlet to go online. And when it
was online, not the internet, back then is not until
the Gore Act that you have dot com that it's
open to the public. Up until nine, when the Gore
Act goes into effect, it was limited to research. Mark
and Reeson writes the browser and becomes easy and oh,
(26:58):
by the way, our board meetings at a o L
in those days where should we embrace the internet or
should we fight it? In our meetings at time where
should we embrace the internet or should we fight it?
You did a great job stewarding a o L. So
what did the Pathfinder success and failures teach you and
teach the company about the new digital world. I think
we embraced it very fast. One mistake we and everybody
(27:23):
made in nine when the web comes along and we
move from proprietary online having websites. Pathfinder and road Runer.
My childhood nickname in Orlenge is Pathfinder. That's why we
named it that. And road Runner was a Warner Brothers.
So those are the tune services we created. We decided
it was gonna be like everything Time magazine did. You
(27:45):
could subscribe and pay money. You could get it by
the you know, by by the drink. We'd call it
mean a newsstand sales. You could just buy an issue
for dollar, and we had advertising revenue, so we have
three revenue streams. And then we blew it because people
coming a Madison Avenue almost carrying sacks of cash wanting
to buy advertising, banner ads, and so we said, well,
(28:07):
let's make all the content free so we'll have more
eyeballs to sell to advertisers. That was a doomed business model.
By the way. It turned out for real well too,
when they dropped subscriptions and they went free. With sort
of the demise our founder Henry Lose, he said in
his perspectives, any magazine that only has advertising revenue and
(28:29):
doesn't have subscriber revenue, that's not only economically self defeating,
it's morally abhorrent. Now having known about Henry Lose, I
think the economically self defeating was a more important But
he realized that the controlled cirque magazines, you'd call it,
you become beholden to advertisers but not beholden to readers.
You lose your focus. If the water ice extent of
(28:51):
nine could see the world today, what would be the
biggest surprise mobile? I remember early cell phone because I
was on the road and the amazing thing to be
able to be somewhere and be able to call. I'm
calling you on the phone on a cell phone. And
this is why I think Steve Jobs is the most
transformative leader of our day. In generation, I didn't realize
(29:16):
the notion that we could all be connected at all
times on our mobile devices and have GPS, and that
could help create ubers and lifts and for that matter, airbnbs.
So in two thousand and one I convinced you to
go run CNN as chairman and c you know, what
skills did you bring to that and how do you
(29:37):
envision CNN's future. And before we get to that, I
do want to give you this credit, which I suspect
you don't often get. But you know the little ticker
along the bottom of the news services that was you scroll.
We called it, I mean, a sad thing, but after
nine eleven, to keep the news so much news, we
wanted people to be able to read it. Other news
networks soon copied it. But that was sort of your
(29:59):
lasting agacy because it's still here today. Well, I guess
I just wasn't really suited to run CNN. I was
not a TV person, So when I was at Time
magazine and we wanted to do a layout, and I
wanted a picture to be a certain win. They said
we can't do that. Say, yeah, you can just crop
it here and run it over the God and bleed
it on the sides. I knew what I was doing.
(30:20):
I didn't have that fingertip field for television. Right after
I came nine eleven happened, and I did have the passion,
the curiosity wanting to know everything I wanted you to
know about al Qaeda, wanting to know him, about the whole.
Sooni shea divide getting Christian. I'm in port, Nick Robertson.
So I had a driving editorial curiosity. There are a
(30:41):
couple of things you learn at a certain point in
life that you wish you had learned earlier. I am
very good at content and ideas. I am not a
great manager executive. I've watched you because you were the
co president. I think of this entire empire of the
all time Warner of which I reported up to you.
(31:02):
You really knew how to manage and run a big enterprise.
I was not as crisp as a executive or somebody
could run an enterprise. It was like overwhelmed every day
by the thousands of management things. And then after the
war and after my contract was up, it was like,
you know, I don't want to spend the rest of
(31:24):
my life as a manager. There are people really good
at this. People can be great CEOs and chief operating officers.
I'd rather make the content have somebody have to manage
me than have to manage a whole lot of content.
Although I must say having you at the top of
CNN gave everybody in New York great comfort that we
were not going to lose the journalistic standards. And if
(31:45):
you were called that moment in time, there was a
real danger of that. Yeah, and that's when Fox and
then MSNBC we're coming up. At least with nine eleven.
It was absolutely clear that we had to just report
this straight down the middle. But even then it became
Foxes running flags all over their thing, and we're not
putting the American flag up enough. And it was always okay,
(32:08):
we have to figure out and wrestle with the partisan thing,
not just getting the story right. I think CNN has
great people, so love Wolf Blitter and all the people there.
I do think that there is a hunger for a
network that just says, let me report it. I think
we've become too opinionated in cable news if you've talked
to people, and obviously we do in our business because
(32:29):
we do a lot of news and opinion on all sides.
I think what is missing is, let me give you
all the information you need to make a good decision.
Let me lower your blood pressure instead of elevating your
blood pressure. Most of TV today is by elevate your
blood pressure. I get more response, I get more passionate,
I get a better rating. I think the algorithms of
(32:50):
the digital age, and especially of social media, but also
the ratings on digital media and television reward what they
euphemistically call engagement, meaning you retweet, you put a little likes.
It shouldn't be called just engagement, it's enragement because if
you enrage people with something, they're more likely to say,
can you believe this, or respond to it, retweet it,
(33:14):
or stay tuned. I'm watching in the gym today, Fox
and MSNBC and CNN, and they're not trying to parse
it and enlighten They're trying to stoke you up, get
your blood pressure up right. That's why I'll go to
the swimming pool because there's no TV in the pool.
From the Wise Men to Leonardo Daventia, including Steve Jobs
(33:34):
in between, you've studied great successful people. Were these people
also great at marketing their ideas and themselves? Was that
part of the success? I mean, obviously Steve was the
greatest marketer of our our tration. He was a marketer
not just because he can make an Apple add like
here's to the crazy Ones that misfits the Rebels, or
(33:55):
do the four ad which introduces the Macintosh. His marketing
was things like I will get the perfect color slate
to the floor of this store, and I will have
beautiful big panes of glass, and I want this type
of wood, and I want you to feel this way
when you walk in. All the Apple Store is is
(34:17):
just the greatest piece of marketing Steve. When he was
building that Apple store is first one. He first wanted
it to be in the Time Warner Center which was
just going up, and they didn't want a computer store
there and they told him no. So he called me
and said, I need you to see if you could
get the store. So, in typical Steve fashion, I use
every favor I've got. We call it in and probably
(34:37):
say okay, we'll put in an Apple store, and he goes,
never mind, I have another idea. Before Steve died, one
of his last things was I want those glass panes.
There are too many of them. I think they were
like twelve on the side, and so he said I
wanted to be three. And we're making them build clays
and China. Who can make the glass that big? And
when it opened a few weeks ago and I went
(34:59):
to see it, I got tears and I got choked up, saying,
you know, nobody knows this. That weird passion for perfection
is why the reopening of the Apple store. You know,
Ben Franklin also as a marketer. I mean, what I
love about him is when he comes to Philadelphia and
he opens a media company, meaning he's a printer, publisher,
Poor Richard's Almanac, even postal service. He likes a distribution.
(35:21):
He takes the rolls of paper he needs and puts
them in a wheelbar and marches up and down the
street because he wants people to see how early in
the morning he is up and how industrious he is.
And even as an old man in Paris, he's marketing
the United States he's wearing a coonskin coat and a
fur hat, which you know he had never been off
of Market Street in Philadelphia or Craven Street in London.
(35:44):
But he wants to be the backwoodsman. And Leonardo was
the master at it too. I mean, the best piece
of marketing for who you are, what you do, and
what you look like and how you fit in is
Patruvian man. That Leonardo drawing of a nude guy, the
jumping jack's in the circle in the square. It's a
self portrait and it's almost Leonardo saying, here's our essence.
(36:07):
So they all have a mission, and they all had
a purpose which drove them. They had a couple of things.
The mission was that they were curious about everything, which
is I say, why it reflects my own curiosity. And
they love to stand at the intersection of the arts
and sciences. When Steve Jobs launched a product, the last
slide on the screen would always be street signs of
the arts and technology. He said, you stand at that intersection,
(36:30):
that's where creativity occurs. And he's the one who said
the ultimate in doing that was Leonardo da Vinci. Because
Leonardo is an engineer as much as he's an artist.
He calls himself the engineer, an artist to the Duke
of Milan, and that's when he draws Vitruvian Man, which
is not just a work of art, it's a work
of engineering and spirituality. What life lessons do you see
(36:51):
emerging from an examination of these greats. I think that
you should try to stand at the intersection of many disciplines,
that people who can see across disciplines see the patterns
of nature and tend to be more creative. That is
not just about the engineering. Where's about the beauty. Steve
Jobs taught us a simple two word lesson, which is
(37:14):
beauty matters. And he did it because he took calligraphy
and dance and art and poetry at read whereas Bill Gates,
who's much morder. You know, greater computer scientists, only took
applied bath. So I think that lesson is to love
the arts and the sciences. When you ran the Aspen Institute,
you created the now iconic Aspen Ideas Festival. What was
(37:36):
motivation for that? Part of it was in the digital aid.
We were all getting our ideas electronically. We were all
part of communities, but they were virtual. We all had
Facebook friends that we all debated things on Twitter, and
I felt a hunger and a need that people should
get together every now and then. That the blood pressure
(37:58):
lowers a bit and the hair quick it's going on
fire when you're sitting in a room and it maybe
Dick Cheney there and you know John Carey or something,
but you're listening to people in the flesh. I think
that's one of the things we had lost in the
digital age. Also, we had lost that ability to just
be open minded and curious. The idea Assescil was just that,
(38:21):
let me tell you about Christopher gene editing technology, but
also about how France is dealing with labor issues, or
whether the universe is expanding, or what type of tax
might be you know, Elizabeth Warren's new idea and so
as for people who just wanted to hear ideas, and
I think there's a hunger for that as well. That's
(38:42):
what podcasts are. Well. The last ten or fifteen years,
you've seen a squelching of dissenting opinions no matter where
you are. It's almost as if people don't want to
hear the other opinion and study them. It aspen institutes
you brought people together who were often polar opposites and
you managed to get them together. Is this lost to
(39:02):
us forever? Are we going through? Just we're going to
a phase. We're going to a really bad phase. It's
getting worse and worse. I mean, we never used to
have it where the parties would deeply polarized on pure
ideological lines. It used to be you could have liberal
Republicans and you've got conservative Democrats, and people put together
civil rights bills. By getting coalitions, we become much more polarized.
(39:24):
And as partly our media, because we each go to
our end of the talk radio dial to be yelled
at by our favorite talk radio hosts, or we go
to our cable news station that we like the most,
and we find parts of the blogosphere. Well, we get
our opinions reinforced. And so that's why having people together
face to face often allows you to get out of
(39:45):
that bubble that you're allowed to be in in the
virtual world. Do you think there are other forums emerging
to pull opinions together as opposed to shut them off. No,
I think that's what we're lacking right now. I tell
my students that too. Lane Zuckerberg invented Facebook to connect us,
to make us all understand each other better and to
(40:06):
be connected, and likewise Twitter we're supposed to do. Then
some of the other ones they failed miserably in the end,
the algorithms and scented people to get into their own
corners and share enraged information to each other. And that's
why I think social media has ended up being more
polarizing than connecting. And I say to my students, Okay,
(40:28):
why is it the anonymity that does it? Is that
the algorithms said, oh, you just said this. You might
like following Hugh Hewitt, or you might like Bob Pittman's podcast,
in which the algorithms almost push you to hear more
of what you apparently like. And so my final challenge
to them at the end of the course, which is
(40:48):
of course, on the digital revolution, is how would you
invent a social network that actually healed and brought us
together as opposed to divide us the way social networks do. Now,
So what would history see just it's going to happen
to pull us back together? Or does this keep going?
Einstein once said when he watched the McCarthy era happened
(41:09):
in which people are like his friend Jay Robert Oppenheimer,
were being accused of being communist. He said, I've seen
this before. I saw it when the Nazis took over
in Germany. So when the Communists took over, America is
about to go off the cliff. And then Edward Armorrow,
Dwight Eisenhower, a whole lot of people knock McCarthy off
the stage, and Einstein writes to his son, you know,
(41:29):
America democracy has a weird gyroscope in it. When you
think it's gonna fall over, it rights itself. So I
think it will take people like the Edward Lmorrows and
the Dwight Eisenhower's to say I'm not just there to
win my primary or to win ratings, but I'm there
playing for history. In the end, the enemy is us,
(41:50):
meaning unless we as people as a nation want high
value information and want to be open minded, then the
people who are politicians and our media stars, they're not
gonna be that way. We'll get them media and we'll
get the politicians we deserve. So we all have to
wake up each morning and say what can I do
(42:13):
to be just a little bit more embracive, a little
bit more tolerant to help bring people together. I think
it's starting at a community level. I moved out of
Washington three or four years ago. I said, man, this
divisiveness is getting brutal. Our country will build back its
civic spirit from the bottom up, meaning city by city,
(42:33):
town by town, which is why I moved back here
and have tried to get involved in the politics here.
One more scary topic is tech destroying more jobs than
it's creating. Now. Tech never has done that ever since
Ada Lovelace came up with the first computer algorithm. Her
father was Lord Byron, who was a lot I literally
because his only speech in the House of Lord was
(42:56):
defending the followers of Ned Lad, who thought that the
weaving machines using punch cards that made these patterns would
put weavers out of work, and therefore they were smashing
the mechanical looms. They were wrong. The mechanical looms do
find there's about a hundred times greater number of jobs
in the fashion and textile industry at the beginning of
(43:16):
nineteen than there were in eighteen forty when Lad was
smashing them. I think technology increases productivity by definition, and
if you increase productivity you'll have more demand for more things.
Who would have thought there would be a demand for podcasts.
We did not know when you asked me to go
(43:36):
back to that there would be a demand for people
to make services that you could do on mobile phones.
And people would say, Okay, I'm gonna make a food
delivery service, or I'm gonna make a car service, or
I'm gonna make a share your house service. These are
the jobs we didn't know would exist. And I'm clueless
(43:58):
about what jobs are going to be twenty years from now,
but I tell my students, don't worry. There will be
new jobs, and it will go to the people who
are creative and open minded and curious, not just people
who have just learned how to code. Let's go to
Walter today, how's the life of a college professor? It's good.
I mean, I love two Lane because the students are
not the way you said many students are on campus
(44:22):
where they get closed minded and they're always curious about something.
The students at two Lane seem to have a earnest curiosity,
So I love that part of it. I love being
involved in the community. We end each episode with our
shoutouts to the people who have made a contribution to
marketing on the math side and the creative side. You've
studied and met the best who is the greatest analytics
(44:46):
person the math side of marketing and business? And then
Bill Gates ctually understood that software ward rule and was
able when he created the original Doss operating system to
make the hardware manufacturers use it. But then he would
study how it was being used because nothing, with all
(45:06):
due respect to Microsoft, that they make at first the
one point, others are never very good. But he really
is good at gathering data and improving the product. So
who is the greatest creative The magician ste of course
has the course. And the interesting thing is he and
Bill Gates are both born the same, you know, nineteen
fifty five. They're like twin stars in the universe there
(45:28):
captured by each other's gravitational field. And one was the
most creative and one was the most analytic person. And
by spending together they create the computer revolution, perfect for
math and magic. Walter, You've got a perspective no one does.
Thanks for sharing it, Thank you, Bob. Here are a
few things I picked up for my conversation with Walter.
One While Walter thinks it's useful to learn to code,
(45:51):
he believes it's more useful to learn to think creatively
and conceptually. That's one skill, as he puts it, that
will always be in the band. Two. Walter is a
big opponent of multiple revenue streams. Being too focused on
ad revenue can make you lose touch with your consumers. Three.
Talented creatives don't always make the best executives. While Walter
(46:11):
was a remarkable executive, he says he would rather have
a spart manager manage him so he can stick to
doing what he truly thinks he's good at, or be
curious and a field like journalism. Walter says curiosity is
more important than mastering anyone's skill. Thanks for listening. I'm
Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much
(46:34):
for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special
thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent,
which is no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research bill plaques,
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayl Raoul Eric Angel, Noel Mango, and
(46:54):
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My
Heart Radio. I got offered three jobs that week, as
a matter of fact. One was Time Magazine, the other
was a guy named Rick Tonry had just been elected
to Congress. And the third, rather weirdly, a guy named
cord Meyer, ran counter intelligence in the CIA. I met
(00:26):
with him and he wanted to recruit me for the CIA.
He made one mistake though, he said, of course, we
wouldn't want you to be a double agent or a spy.
We'd want you to be an analyst at Langley, thinking
that would make it more appealing, and I thought, well,
that's boring, and I accepted the job. At times, I
(00:50):
am Bob Pittman, and welcome to Math and Magic, Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing, where we explore marketing through
the stories and lessons of those on the front lines.
Before we jump in, I want to pause for just
a second to congratulate our I Heart podcasting team. Although
we've been the number one commercial podcaster for a while,
we just passed MPR and became the number one overall
(01:11):
podcaster in the month of August. According tood pod Track,
we had over a three increase in audience last year,
but also want to congratulate MPR and companies like Wondering
who are also growing at a fast space and working
together to build this new podcasting industry. Podcasting is probably
the hottest new medium, and I'd like to thank all
of you for listening. Now back to the fun stuff today,
(01:34):
we have someone who has studied those great minds and
people who have changed the world, as well as being
a creative and business practitioner himself, Walt Riz Excep. He
has probably known as the greatest biographer of our times,
(01:54):
and he has also had other important identities at other moments.
In time head of CNN had editorial Time magazine, in
Time Inc. Had the first efforts of a major media
company to join the emerging Internet revolution. He was in
the attack even as a kid in the days before
geeks built apps and made millions. Back then, they were
Ham radio operators and built heath Kit electronics with a
(02:17):
soldering iron. He's the former head of the Aspen Institute,
now professor at Tulane, and his native New Orleans he
played jazz clarinet and he might even know something about
voodoo and the Bayous of Louisiana. Let's welcome Walter. Good
to be with you, Bob after many years. Let's tell
our listeners and I go back, way back. We're going
to get into your story, but first I want to
(02:39):
do you in sixty seconds. If you don't mind, just
say the first thing that comes into your mind. So
do you prefer New York City or New Orleans? New
Orleans for the food? Louis Armstrong or Dr John Luis?
I'm strong Early Riser or night Owl. I'm definitely a
night owl E reader or paperback the reader, William Shay
(03:00):
Experience Tennessee, Williams Tennessee, Williams Tulane, Green Wave or Harvard
Crimson Tulane, Roll Wave, Bignet or Donut Ben You why
would you need the whole fiction or nonfiction? Alas I
read too much nonfiction, I probably should indulge in novels,
Oh Boy or Gumbo Gumbo. Smartest person you know Bill Gates,
(03:23):
childhood hero Walker Percy novelists from New Orleans area. Sure,
first job writing for The Times picking of New Orleans
Police Headquarters five am to noon beat Something you wish
you had written? I wish I had written a novel.
I keep trying you know my agent. She says, give
it up, give it up. Last vacation with my daughter,
(03:46):
we drove around Grant earlier in the summer. Favorite TV show,
The PPS News out, Favorite New Orleans jazz musician went in.
Marcellis most prized possession. Some of the art I bought
when I was a kid, when I could afford it.
Favorite book when you were a child, The movie Goer
by Walker Percy. Quote to live by Steve Jobs is
(04:09):
the people are crazy enough to think they can change
the world. Are the ones to do? Okay, we're in
theo with this one. Who would write your biography? The
only thing I desperately fear is that my daughter will
write my biography because he's a great writer. Okay, let's
start off. Let's go back in time, no pun intended.
You grew up in the nineteen fifties and sixties in
New Orleans. Can you paint the picture of what that
(04:31):
felt like and look like? Air conditioning had just come in. Well,
the cool thing about air conditioning coming in is that
my father, my uncle, and my granduncle had been engineers
for ice making companies, and they figured out how to
do industrial air conditioning for the department stores. And movie
theaters of New Orleans. So I got to watch them
build air conditioning, and of course it helped pay my
(04:51):
way through college. It's at the fifties and sixties that
they were air conditioning all these Right after World War Two,
my dad and my uncle's came home. We had a house.
My brother still lives there, right near here on Napoleon Avenue,
and they built a very long pool in order to
test out it was before Freon had been invented, to
test out air conditioning, you know, like cooling towers. But
(05:14):
it was just this huge pool, and it was a
swimming pool. Nobody had swimming pools back then. In ground.
Long swimming pools is not that deep. But we grew
up with this weird swimming pool because my family was
in the air conditioning because it must have been very popular.
That was particularly popular, so was my brother. When our
parents would go to Deston, Florida for the weekend. No,
we don't feel like going to Florida. So talk about
(05:36):
back then Louisiana politics, French Quarter, architecture, gumbo like poncha train.
I remember that long bridge, the old bridge Acrossolosolgical that
was very scary. To tell you what I remember most,
that's most important is race desegregation was just happening. We
lived in a very integrated neighborhood, Napoleon Avenue and Broadmoor.
(05:57):
Of the house I told you about, I rem remember
vividly the first time my cousin and I we were
walking to Ottoman Park and we were with a young
African American kid. You know, we're all about five or six.
My cousin said, hey, let's go to the merry go
round in the carousel. And then I remember just had
a sign which I had never figured out. I never
(06:18):
thought about what does it mean? Though I remember your
sign saying white only. I mean, I just learned how
to read, and it struck me at that moment. Oh,
I get it. They don't allow blacks into this park,
which is a private park. That's why I say I
don't want to go. I don't want to go because
I was embarrassed. But Alan insisted. I think all of
us who grew up in that era in the South
(06:40):
had that. I have my stories from Mississippi. When it
sort of dawns on you what's going on, as you say, embarrassment.
When we got a little bit older, I remember we
led a group of kids, a big march of black
and white kids together to reopen the pool, and it
was sort of my first little bit of activism. Any
voodoo down here, you know, I love going to St.
Louis Cemetery. That's where Marie Lavo is buried, so you
(07:02):
can always put a little cross on her grave. Allay
a little Gregory the dried bones, if you really have
to cast a spell doesn't work. It's worked for me
so far. I wouldn't be sitting here on a podcast
with you if the voodoo Gregory hadn't worked. So why
do so many storytellers come out of the Deep South?
Walker Percy, the guy I told you about, the novelist
(07:24):
to a sort of a mentor, I never quite knew
what he did. We would go over across like Poncho
Train to the Buga Fly where he and his daughter
who is my age all lived, and we'd go hunting
or water skiing or searching for turtles. We always just say, Anne,
what does your daddy do? He's always on the doc
drinking bourbon, eating hogside cheese. She would say, well, he's
(07:46):
a writer. I couldn't figure out what that man. I
knew you could be an engineer like my dad, or
a doctor or a fisherman. But writer. When I guess
I was about twelve, I read the movie Goer It
just come out. I realized what that meant. So I
asked Uncle Walker walcome person, tell me, because you're trying
to teach lessons, you're preaching some things in this book.
Tell me what it's about. And he said, there are
(08:08):
two types of people come out of Louisiana. Preachers and storytellers.
He said, if I haven't said be a storytelling, the
world's got far too many preachers. And so why do
you think the South has so many storytellers versus other
parts of the country. Maybe it's the Bourbon. Maybe it's
the fact that we lost into the loss of Civil War.
Maybe people sit on porches a lot. Alex Haley, who
(08:31):
wrote Roots, somebody once asked him said he was trying
to give a speech or something and he was scared.
You didn't know how to begin, And Hailey said, here's
the six words you have to know. Let me tell
you a story. Well, you know, it's funny. When I
was growing up, I had uncles who would tell stories,
and if you ask him a question, you get a
long story and the moral of the story was the
answer to your question. Do you think in this new
(08:53):
digitally connected world that goes on? Or is this storytelling
a lost art? Now? This is podcast is so important
why they're such a popular medium and why they're a
crucial medium for us to have now because of the
past twenty five thirty years in the digital age, we've
lost the art of narrative. Paper is a good technology
(09:15):
for narrative. You go page, have to page, you can't
hop around. Likewise, linear television, linear movies, they're great for narrative.
But digital media tends to be great for hopping around,
making links, jumping to gather more information, following and charting
your own course. It's interactive, which means you're not consuming
(09:36):
a narrative. Now that's fine. I love interactive media. I
love being able to hunt and peck and figure out
you know who the Saints are going to be playing,
and hear all the opinions about it. But every now
and then we need to get back to narrative and
to storytelling. I think it started for me listening to
this American Life was doing a podcast a long time ago.
(09:58):
I said, wow, they're gonna say the art of storytelling. Well,
you know what's interesting? Young people, teenagers, young adults are
flocking to it, whereas people thought, oh, talk shows, that's
for old people. And I think it's just turned everybody's
understanding upside down. It has sort of the best of
both worlds, meaning you get it on demand, you don't
(10:18):
have to tune in at nine am. On the other hand,
it's a narrative. You have to go with the flow.
So let's put you in context a little bit. You
played with electronics as a kid, building heath kits. You
were Ham operator. Was at w A five J T.
P w Ay very good. Yeah, in my basement of
our house w A five John Thomas Peter. Is that
(10:40):
what you said? Because I remember, I still remember being
a Ham radio dude. Can you still use morse code?
I no, no, But I had to learn it because
if I remember correctly, boy, you're bringing back some memories here.
You had to somehow another passive test and morse code.
I never got my operator's license because I could never
get my speed up a Morse code enough, and I
gave up. So I appreciate how hard it is to
(11:03):
do that. So let's do a factoid. Wire transistors better
than vacuum tubes because vacuum tubes use a lot of electricity,
they burn out their filaments. There he did. And a
transistor is a semiconductor. It's on a piece of silicon.
When I was growing up, I remember early radios and
we have a twelve transistor radio and you got twenty
(11:24):
four transistor radio and then you can make your own.
Remember that they were talking about the more transistors, the
better than the radio transistors. That I could hear w
l S which is this great station in Chicago where
I could hear Dodger games. You know, that was my
thing I was a kid. We saw the transistors onto
a circuit board. But what happens with Bob Moore and
others that Intel is they figured out, oh, we can
(11:46):
etch these on a chip of silicon. You can never
etch a vacuum tube on a chip. So where did
that builder's love come from engineering dad? Or did it
come from somewhere else? Yeah? I think it came from
having an engineering day. We all learned that the kneeds
of our parents. I'm just old enough to remember having
(12:07):
my earliest computers where you could open them up you
could jack in, you could put more memory, you knew
how the insides were. I think you get alienated from
your technology if you have no clue what a circuit is,
If you have no clue how a logical algorithm that
has yes, no, yes, no answers gets translated into on
(12:29):
off switches, which are basically transistors on a circuit board
in order to make something happen. No kid in my
two lane class today has any clue what goes on
inside of the computer. They don't even know what digital
really means, which is just an on off switch type circuits.
Do you think young people should all know coding? People
(12:50):
say you got to learn how to code as a kid.
They can get a job ten years from now. Now
you need to know how to think in algorithms. Ten
yearsome now, machines are gonna code for us. You is
gonna do it by voice, say turn on screen, make
trash can move to bottom right, It'll do the coding.
What you need is the creativity. And I also think
(13:11):
it's useful to know something about the hardware. One of
the first twist in your story is that you were
also popular. You were not the tech nerd outsider. You
were student body president. You're voted most likely to succeed,
one of the few that actually succeed. You're also very ambitious.
You interned in Washington for legendary House majority leader Hail Bogs.
(13:31):
You also worked for the local newspaper, and you're in
high school. Where did all that ambition come from? I
think one of the driving things for me was a
pretty keen sense of curiosity. I certainly wouldn't smarter than
the other kids I grew up with, especially at Newman.
You know your friend Michael Lewis. All these people went
to was a school with a lot of smart people.
(13:52):
But my dad was always curious as an engineer, and
he was always taking things apart to see how they worked.
And he loved of telling things like why is the
sky blue? And then we try to figure it out.
I was lucky enough when I worked with you many
many years ago. At Time Warner we had general interest
magazines like Time magazine where I worked, and so you
(14:13):
could be driven by curiosity about everything. One week I'd
be writing music. Next week I'll be writing the medicine section.
Next week I'd be writing in Foreign Affairs or the
Nation section. And so my success has not come from
being a great master of any field, but by having
more curiosity about more things than most people around me.
(14:34):
How did you make all this happen? Though, yes, you
were curious, but you wound up as an intern in Washington.
You wound up actually writing for the local newspaper. How
did that happen? As for the newspaper, this was in
the days when newspapers were flourishing, So as a summer job,
you know, I just went in. I didn't know the
editor publisher of the paper. But if you were willing
(14:55):
to be a reporter, the Times picked you and had
hundred and fifty reporters. I did police headquarters, as I said,
were seventeen, you know, in high school. I know I
was in high school because I remember applying to college
and I already had a whole stack of newspaper clips,
including mostly crime stories. But I think by actually having
(15:17):
a bunch of front page newspaper clips that seemed to
impress the people who let you into college. Well, let's
talk about college for a minute. You went on to
Harvard and then you were a Rhodes scholared Oxford and
in that area geographic diversity for an ivy League was
much less than today. Why Harvard and not l s U.
Harvard was Harvard. You'd heard of it, and so I
(15:37):
went to my you know, high school guidance counsel, and
she said, okay, we'll try to get you into it.
And you know, I was lucky he had the newspaper clips.
But you're right, geographic diversity. You know, people who are
against affirmative action say I always reminded, say, we've always had.
I had affirmative action. Harvard was thought it was cool
to get a person from Louisiana and back then, so
(15:59):
you hit Boss. Then the IVY League. I guess it
was newly co ed about the time you went there,
and there was a long and honored traditions up there.
How did that change your view of the world New
Orleans versus Boston in that life that you I tell
you what ingrained in me when I went up to
Boston and Harvard and then Oxford. You learn tradition, You
(16:21):
learn to respect the past, which also comes from being
a Southerner and storyteller. You learn when you look at
Harvard Yard or the quad at Oxford where I was
that Oh my goodness, you know, Dr Johnson was in
this college. So it puts things in perspective, and that's
why to get to when you and I started working together,
(16:44):
I kind of went to Time magazine. It seemed like,
all right, that's an institution. I don't need to start
Spy magazine or start some new magazine. I kind of
like something that has a history and a tradition. Back then,
there was no such thing as a venture capitalists giving
you money. If you started something, you did it with
(17:05):
somebody else's money. MTV we started. I have one percent
of MTV and thought I was lucky, but you know,
you were somebody in that category. The first wave of
people I knew who said something like why don't we
start MTV. That's the downside of being the personality I
am with a reverence for institutions and history and preservation.
(17:26):
I don't wake up one morning and say, hell, let's
start a music video and I want to destroy the
institution engine you build them upways good to have both sorts,
especially in our friendship. And this time you were college
student developing who you were. What did you envision doing
for a living as an adult when you got out
of school. I studied philosophy for a while, both at
(17:48):
Harvard an Oxford, and I remember going back to the
greatest of all philosophy professors I've ever had was John
Rawls or a Theory of Justice, and I've done something
like that at auction. So I went back him and
showed him my Oxford dissertation, and I said to him,
I can't quite figure out what I should do. I'm
thinking I might want to become an academic philosopher, but
(18:08):
I also have a job. Offer to go back to
the newspaper in New Orleans where I worked, maybe I
want to be a journalist. He read the paper and
then he said to me, very politely, you'd make a
good journalist. And so I ended up becoming a journalist
again in New Orleans. As I say, I had done
it in high school and then at time it was
almost a placeholder, like Okay, I'll do this and then
(18:31):
I'll figure out what I want to be when I
grow up. But after about forty years I was I
kind of like I might be a journalist. Before we
jump to your time after college, narrow escapes or near
death experiences almost always have a lasting effect. You had
one back then. I think it was in Ireland when
you were covering. Oh yeah, oh yeah. I was covering
for the Sunday Times of London and I went to
(18:53):
Belfast with a guy named David Blundy, who was no
longer with us because he was killed by a sniper
and salvit. I remember we were in the Europa Hotel.
The Sunday Times, as the name implies, comes out only
on Sunday, and this is like a Wednesday, and David said, oh,
there's gonna be a mass protest down in this part
of Belfast. We gotta go. I said, David, it's a Wednesday.
(19:15):
You know, it's not like we have a paper to
write for. And I kept saying we should just go
to the bar and the Europa and have dinner. There
were a lot of other journalists there and he said no,
So he dragged me down there and it was totally safe.
I mean, there are protesters and all. And we get
back to the hotel. The hotel had been bombed, including
the pub on top of the hotel, and David said,
this is a lesson to you. You never know where
(19:36):
you're gonna be in danger. Alas he's the one we lost,
And did that have an impact on you to be
that close to being at the wrong place at the
wrong time. No, I think what had an impact on
me was the adrenaline that comes from covering something amazing.
There are always a people who run away from the
World Trade Center and the people who run towards it.
(20:00):
I always wanted to be there when things were happening,
even if they were somewhat dangerous. Remember, I'm almost looking
out of the window here. You can almost see it
from where we are. In New Orleans. There was a
Howard Johnson's was a sniper on it right down the
street in City Hall, and I remember hearing about it,
even though I was off duty. It was late afternoon,
(20:20):
going down there and wanting to cover it. So I
think that you know, we each have our braveries. Mind
is not very strong, but it is that curiosity that
drives me to be places, even places that might not
be the safest at times. Just hold on a second,
because we've got so much more to talk about. We'll
be back after a quick break. Welcome back to math
(20:45):
and magic. We're here with Walter is Sison. After school,
you came back to New Orleans. You went to work
for the newspaper, and through a mixture of right place
right Time and great talent. You get hired by Time
Magazine at a really age. This, by the way, was
when Time was absolutely one of the top news organizations
(21:05):
in the world. Why did they pick you? You know,
this is really the golden days of journalism, and I
guess it was the late eighties. They had sent a
senior editor around America to find talent out therehic diversity
into geographic diversity. They were recruiting. Time Magazine was growing
and wanted young people from around the country. I had
(21:28):
been covering city hall by that point in New Orleans
and had written columns about the mayor's race. Had called
the race, and so they were paper had been touting me.
A business editor of Time arrived and here's about me.
Takes me to lunch and I got offered three jobs
that week, as a matter of fact. One was Time Magazine,
the other was a guy named Rick Tonry had just
(21:50):
been elected to Congress wanted me to go up as
his administrative assistant. And the third, rather weirdly, the guy
named cord Meyer. Remember who he no. Corde Meyer was
a famous CI agent ran counter intelligence in the CIA.
He had been in the London Embassy and he had
met lots of kids from Oxford. We never quite figured
(22:12):
out why did Corde Meyer wanted me to us alve
But one day I got a call saying Corde Meyers
in New Orleans wants to meet you at the Hilton
Hotel next to the airport. I thought that's weird. I
met with him and he wanted to recruit me for
the CIA. He made one mistake though, He said, of
course we wouldn't want you to be a double agent
or spy. We'd want you to be an analyst at Langley,
(22:32):
thinking that would make it more appealing. And I thought,
well that's boring, and I accepted the job at time.
So you show up in New York and you've come
from the Times, pick a junior now at time? What
was the difference in journalism? What sort of struck you
that first impression of this is different? The writing was
done as a group. In other words, you had correspondence
(22:53):
to which and then things that'd be a writer who
would compile it. So it was all done as a collaborative,
collegial thing. Time to even have by lines back then,
and I like that notion of team mark. It made
it feel very magical and distilling huge amount of wisdom.
The other thing that struck me immediately was the power
of this institution of time. If I wanted to meet
(23:16):
Garth Brooks because I heard he was an up and
coming country star, you just call some publicist or whatever
and you'd be having And that was true of Ronald Reagan.
It was heavy, and for somebody who's adrenaline fix comes
from curiosity, it was just like a kid in the
candy store. I think I remember you telling me once
(23:38):
we were talking about impartiality and how important that was.
It was you or someone else said it's so important.
They didn't even vote. The entire time I was at
Time magazine or CNN, I never voted in an election
that we might cover presidential race or even a Senate race.
I sometimes voted like city counts, of course, where it mattered,
(24:01):
or I knew somebody running. And the reason was if
you voted, you had to force yourself to figure out
which side do you want? If you knew you weren't
going to vote, you didn't join aside as easily, and
you really could keep an open mind better because you
hadn't push yourself to decide who am I going to vote?
For that stuck with me all these years. These days
(24:22):
people would think it's ridiculous to be that way, and
they'll say, oh, you can't be objective. Well yeah, you
can try, you can try real hard. I remember one
of the first cover stories I wrote at time was
about abortion, one of the big marches, you know, right
to life Mark and I wrote a cover story on
abortion and which I tried to be one hand other
(24:44):
different hands, many hands. This is what people are saying
the whole march, and I got and I still have it.
I've treasured it, even though it was tough. Letter from
Walker Percy, the novelist who was a deep practicing Catholic,
very against abortion, and felt that I had betrayed the
fact that I was pro choice, even though I tried
(25:07):
to be objected me even handed, and he just pointed
out passages in this cover story in which it was
clear I didn't fully understand the anti abortion side as well.
But I do think there's still for me a hunger
for here's a journalist who's not trying to get in
the way of wherever the facts lad him. You were
one of the first to cover technology, and he became
(25:29):
one of the leading experts on it. You got Time Inc.
And Time Warner into this new world as the head
of Pathfinder. When I arrived an America Online in the
mid nineties, you were the only major media company in
the space. Why I remember once I was editor and
we wanted to do a story of on the world
(25:51):
of online. It was before you had really pushed a
O L to be what it was. I tried to
understand cyberspace, what was this? And I guess it's just
because I was interested in engineering. I was interested in
the network. Back then it was the well What's an Email?
Had an email account at the Well and Stewart branded
helped creative and it said you own your own words,
(26:11):
which I tell my students now because that's what it
said when the screen opened up, and it meant you
had to take responsibility for which is said unlike nowadays
on Twitter, you know, many other places. So I became
mesmerized by this online world. And that's how I met you.
That's how I'm at Steve Case. That I'm at ted leonsis.
Back then, Time Magazine in nine one, I think, was
(26:36):
the first publication outlet to go online. And when it
was online, not the internet, back then is not until
the Gore Act that you have dot com that it's
open to the public. Up until nine, when the Gore
Act goes into effect, it was limited to research. Mark
and Reeson writes the browser and becomes easy and oh,
(26:58):
by the way, our board meetings at a o L
in those days where should we embrace the internet or
should we fight it? In our meetings at time where
should we embrace the internet or should we fight it?
You did a great job stewarding a o L. So
what did the Pathfinder success and failures teach you and
teach the company about the new digital world. I think
we embraced it very fast. One mistake we and everybody
(27:23):
made in nine when the web comes along and we
move from proprietary online having websites. Pathfinder and road Runer.
My childhood nickname in Orlenge is Pathfinder. That's why we
named it that. And road Runner was a Warner Brothers.
So those are the tune services we created. We decided
it was gonna be like everything Time magazine did. You
(27:45):
could subscribe and pay money. You could get it by
the you know, by by the drink. We'd call it
mean a newsstand sales. You could just buy an issue
for dollar, and we had advertising revenue, so we have
three revenue streams. And then we blew it because people
coming a Madison Avenue almost carrying sacks of cash wanting
to buy advertising, banner ads, and so we said, well,
(28:07):
let's make all the content free so we'll have more
eyeballs to sell to advertisers. That was a doomed business model.
By the way. It turned out for real well too,
when they dropped subscriptions and they went free. With sort
of the demise our founder Henry Lose, he said in
his perspectives, any magazine that only has advertising revenue and
(28:29):
doesn't have subscriber revenue, that's not only economically self defeating,
it's morally abhorrent. Now having known about Henry Lose, I
think the economically self defeating was a more important But
he realized that the controlled cirque magazines, you'd call it,
you become beholden to advertisers but not beholden to readers.
You lose your focus. If the water ice extent of
(28:51):
nine could see the world today, what would be the
biggest surprise mobile? I remember early cell phone because I
was on the road and the amazing thing to be
able to be somewhere and be able to call. I'm
calling you on the phone on a cell phone. And
this is why I think Steve Jobs is the most
transformative leader of our day. In generation, I didn't realize
(29:16):
the notion that we could all be connected at all
times on our mobile devices and have GPS, and that
could help create ubers and lifts and for that matter, airbnbs.
So in two thousand and one I convinced you to
go run CNN as chairman and c you know, what
skills did you bring to that and how do you
(29:37):
envision CNN's future. And before we get to that, I
do want to give you this credit, which I suspect
you don't often get. But you know the little ticker
along the bottom of the news services that was you scroll.
We called it, I mean, a sad thing, but after
nine eleven, to keep the news so much news, we
wanted people to be able to read it. Other news
networks soon copied it. But that was sort of your
(29:59):
lasting agacy because it's still here today. Well, I guess
I just wasn't really suited to run CNN. I was
not a TV person, So when I was at Time
magazine and we wanted to do a layout, and I
wanted a picture to be a certain win. They said
we can't do that. Say, yeah, you can just crop
it here and run it over the God and bleed
it on the sides. I knew what I was doing.
(30:20):
I didn't have that fingertip field for television. Right after
I came nine eleven happened, and I did have the passion,
the curiosity wanting to know everything I wanted you to
know about al Qaeda, wanting to know him, about the whole.
Sooni shea divide getting Christian. I'm in port, Nick Robertson.
So I had a driving editorial curiosity. There are a
(30:41):
couple of things you learn at a certain point in
life that you wish you had learned earlier. I am
very good at content and ideas. I am not a
great manager executive. I've watched you because you were the
co president. I think of this entire empire of the
all time Warner of which I reported up to you.
(31:02):
You really knew how to manage and run a big enterprise.
I was not as crisp as a executive or somebody
could run an enterprise. It was like overwhelmed every day
by the thousands of management things. And then after the
war and after my contract was up, it was like,
you know, I don't want to spend the rest of
(31:24):
my life as a manager. There are people really good
at this. People can be great CEOs and chief operating officers.
I'd rather make the content have somebody have to manage
me than have to manage a whole lot of content.
Although I must say having you at the top of
CNN gave everybody in New York great comfort that we
were not going to lose the journalistic standards. And if
(31:45):
you were called that moment in time, there was a
real danger of that. Yeah, and that's when Fox and
then MSNBC we're coming up. At least with nine eleven.
It was absolutely clear that we had to just report
this straight down the middle. But even then it became
Foxes running flags all over their thing, and we're not
putting the American flag up enough. And it was always okay,
(32:08):
we have to figure out and wrestle with the partisan thing,
not just getting the story right. I think CNN has
great people, so love Wolf Blitter and all the people there.
I do think that there is a hunger for a
network that just says, let me report it. I think
we've become too opinionated in cable news if you've talked
to people, and obviously we do in our business because
(32:29):
we do a lot of news and opinion on all sides.
I think what is missing is, let me give you
all the information you need to make a good decision.
Let me lower your blood pressure instead of elevating your
blood pressure. Most of TV today is by elevate your
blood pressure. I get more response, I get more passionate,
I get a better rating. I think the algorithms of
(32:50):
the digital age, and especially of social media, but also
the ratings on digital media and television reward what they
euphemistically call engagement, meaning you retweet, you put a little likes.
It shouldn't be called just engagement, it's enragement because if
you enrage people with something, they're more likely to say,
can you believe this, or respond to it, retweet it,
(33:14):
or stay tuned. I'm watching in the gym today, Fox
and MSNBC and CNN, and they're not trying to parse
it and enlighten They're trying to stoke you up, get
your blood pressure up right. That's why I'll go to
the swimming pool because there's no TV in the pool.
From the Wise Men to Leonardo Daventia, including Steve Jobs
(33:34):
in between, you've studied great successful people. Were these people
also great at marketing their ideas and themselves? Was that
part of the success? I mean, obviously Steve was the
greatest marketer of our our tration. He was a marketer
not just because he can make an Apple add like
here's to the crazy Ones that misfits the Rebels, or
(33:55):
do the four ad which introduces the Macintosh. His marketing
was things like I will get the perfect color slate
to the floor of this store, and I will have
beautiful big panes of glass, and I want this type
of wood, and I want you to feel this way
when you walk in. All the Apple Store is is
(34:17):
just the greatest piece of marketing Steve. When he was
building that Apple store is first one. He first wanted
it to be in the Time Warner Center which was
just going up, and they didn't want a computer store
there and they told him no. So he called me
and said, I need you to see if you could
get the store. So, in typical Steve fashion, I use
every favor I've got. We call it in and probably
(34:37):
say okay, we'll put in an Apple store, and he goes,
never mind, I have another idea. Before Steve died, one
of his last things was I want those glass panes.
There are too many of them. I think they were
like twelve on the side, and so he said I
wanted to be three. And we're making them build clays
and China. Who can make the glass that big? And
when it opened a few weeks ago and I went
(34:59):
to see it, I got tears and I got choked up, saying,
you know, nobody knows this. That weird passion for perfection
is why the reopening of the Apple store. You know,
Ben Franklin also as a marketer. I mean, what I
love about him is when he comes to Philadelphia and
he opens a media company, meaning he's a printer, publisher,
Poor Richard's Almanac, even postal service. He likes a distribution.
(35:21):
He takes the rolls of paper he needs and puts
them in a wheelbar and marches up and down the
street because he wants people to see how early in
the morning he is up and how industrious he is.
And even as an old man in Paris, he's marketing
the United States he's wearing a coonskin coat and a
fur hat, which you know he had never been off
of Market Street in Philadelphia or Craven Street in London.
(35:44):
But he wants to be the backwoodsman. And Leonardo was
the master at it too. I mean, the best piece
of marketing for who you are, what you do, and
what you look like and how you fit in is
Patruvian man. That Leonardo drawing of a nude guy, the
jumping jack's in the circle in the square. It's a
self portrait and it's almost Leonardo saying, here's our essence.
(36:07):
So they all have a mission, and they all had
a purpose which drove them. They had a couple of things.
The mission was that they were curious about everything, which
is I say, why it reflects my own curiosity. And
they love to stand at the intersection of the arts
and sciences. When Steve Jobs launched a product, the last
slide on the screen would always be street signs of
the arts and technology. He said, you stand at that intersection,
(36:30):
that's where creativity occurs. And he's the one who said
the ultimate in doing that was Leonardo da Vinci. Because
Leonardo is an engineer as much as he's an artist.
He calls himself the engineer, an artist to the Duke
of Milan, and that's when he draws Vitruvian Man, which
is not just a work of art, it's a work
of engineering and spirituality. What life lessons do you see
(36:51):
emerging from an examination of these greats. I think that
you should try to stand at the intersection of many disciplines,
that people who can see across disciplines see the patterns
of nature and tend to be more creative. That is
not just about the engineering. Where's about the beauty. Steve
Jobs taught us a simple two word lesson, which is
(37:14):
beauty matters. And he did it because he took calligraphy
and dance and art and poetry at read whereas Bill Gates,
who's much morder. You know, greater computer scientists, only took
applied bath. So I think that lesson is to love
the arts and the sciences. When you ran the Aspen Institute,
you created the now iconic Aspen Ideas Festival. What was
(37:36):
motivation for that? Part of it was in the digital aid.
We were all getting our ideas electronically. We were all
part of communities, but they were virtual. We all had
Facebook friends that we all debated things on Twitter, and
I felt a hunger and a need that people should
get together every now and then. That the blood pressure
(37:58):
lowers a bit and the hair quick it's going on
fire when you're sitting in a room and it maybe
Dick Cheney there and you know John Carey or something,
but you're listening to people in the flesh. I think
that's one of the things we had lost in the
digital age. Also, we had lost that ability to just
be open minded and curious. The idea Assescil was just that,
(38:21):
let me tell you about Christopher gene editing technology, but
also about how France is dealing with labor issues, or
whether the universe is expanding, or what type of tax
might be you know, Elizabeth Warren's new idea and so
as for people who just wanted to hear ideas, and
I think there's a hunger for that as well. That's
(38:42):
what podcasts are. Well. The last ten or fifteen years,
you've seen a squelching of dissenting opinions no matter where
you are. It's almost as if people don't want to
hear the other opinion and study them. It aspen institutes
you brought people together who were often polar opposites and
you managed to get them together. Is this lost to
(39:02):
us forever? Are we going through? Just we're going to
a phase. We're going to a really bad phase. It's
getting worse and worse. I mean, we never used to
have it where the parties would deeply polarized on pure
ideological lines. It used to be you could have liberal
Republicans and you've got conservative Democrats, and people put together
civil rights bills. By getting coalitions, we become much more polarized.
(39:24):
And as partly our media, because we each go to
our end of the talk radio dial to be yelled
at by our favorite talk radio hosts, or we go
to our cable news station that we like the most,
and we find parts of the blogosphere. Well, we get
our opinions reinforced. And so that's why having people together
face to face often allows you to get out of
(39:45):
that bubble that you're allowed to be in in the
virtual world. Do you think there are other forums emerging
to pull opinions together as opposed to shut them off. No,
I think that's what we're lacking right now. I tell
my students that too. Lane Zuckerberg invented Facebook to connect us,
to make us all understand each other better and to
(40:06):
be connected, and likewise Twitter we're supposed to do. Then
some of the other ones they failed miserably in the end,
the algorithms and scented people to get into their own
corners and share enraged information to each other. And that's
why I think social media has ended up being more
polarizing than connecting. And I say to my students, Okay,
(40:28):
why is it the anonymity that does it? Is that
the algorithms said, oh, you just said this. You might
like following Hugh Hewitt, or you might like Bob Pittman's podcast,
in which the algorithms almost push you to hear more
of what you apparently like. And so my final challenge
to them at the end of the course, which is
(40:48):
of course, on the digital revolution, is how would you
invent a social network that actually healed and brought us
together as opposed to divide us the way social networks do. Now,
So what would history see just it's going to happen
to pull us back together? Or does this keep going?
Einstein once said when he watched the McCarthy era happened
(41:09):
in which people are like his friend Jay Robert Oppenheimer,
were being accused of being communist. He said, I've seen
this before. I saw it when the Nazis took over
in Germany. So when the Communists took over, America is
about to go off the cliff. And then Edward Armorrow,
Dwight Eisenhower, a whole lot of people knock McCarthy off
the stage, and Einstein writes to his son, you know,
(41:29):
America democracy has a weird gyroscope in it. When you
think it's gonna fall over, it rights itself. So I
think it will take people like the Edward Lmorrows and
the Dwight Eisenhower's to say I'm not just there to
win my primary or to win ratings, but I'm there
playing for history. In the end, the enemy is us,
(41:50):
meaning unless we as people as a nation want high
value information and want to be open minded, then the
people who are politicians and our media stars, they're not
gonna be that way. We'll get them media and we'll
get the politicians we deserve. So we all have to
wake up each morning and say what can I do
(42:13):
to be just a little bit more embracive, a little
bit more tolerant to help bring people together. I think
it's starting at a community level. I moved out of
Washington three or four years ago. I said, man, this
divisiveness is getting brutal. Our country will build back its
civic spirit from the bottom up, meaning city by city,
(42:33):
town by town, which is why I moved back here
and have tried to get involved in the politics here.
One more scary topic is tech destroying more jobs than
it's creating. Now. Tech never has done that ever since
Ada Lovelace came up with the first computer algorithm. Her
father was Lord Byron, who was a lot I literally
because his only speech in the House of Lord was
(42:56):
defending the followers of Ned Lad, who thought that the
weaving machines using punch cards that made these patterns would
put weavers out of work, and therefore they were smashing
the mechanical looms. They were wrong. The mechanical looms do
find there's about a hundred times greater number of jobs
in the fashion and textile industry at the beginning of
(43:16):
nineteen than there were in eighteen forty when Lad was
smashing them. I think technology increases productivity by definition, and
if you increase productivity you'll have more demand for more things.
Who would have thought there would be a demand for podcasts.
We did not know when you asked me to go
(43:36):
back to that there would be a demand for people
to make services that you could do on mobile phones.
And people would say, Okay, I'm gonna make a food
delivery service, or I'm gonna make a car service, or
I'm gonna make a share your house service. These are
the jobs we didn't know would exist. And I'm clueless
(43:58):
about what jobs are going to be twenty years from now,
but I tell my students, don't worry. There will be
new jobs, and it will go to the people who
are creative and open minded and curious, not just people
who have just learned how to code. Let's go to
Walter today, how's the life of a college professor? It's good.
I mean, I love two Lane because the students are
not the way you said many students are on campus
(44:22):
where they get closed minded and they're always curious about something.
The students at two Lane seem to have a earnest curiosity,
So I love that part of it. I love being
involved in the community. We end each episode with our
shoutouts to the people who have made a contribution to
marketing on the math side and the creative side. You've
studied and met the best who is the greatest analytics
(44:46):
person the math side of marketing and business? And then
Bill Gates ctually understood that software ward rule and was
able when he created the original Doss operating system to
make the hardware manufacturers use it. But then he would
study how it was being used because nothing, with all
(45:06):
due respect to Microsoft, that they make at first the
one point, others are never very good. But he really
is good at gathering data and improving the product. So
who is the greatest creative The magician ste of course
has the course. And the interesting thing is he and
Bill Gates are both born the same, you know, nineteen
fifty five. They're like twin stars in the universe there
(45:28):
captured by each other's gravitational field. And one was the
most creative and one was the most analytic person. And
by spending together they create the computer revolution, perfect for
math and magic. Walter, You've got a perspective no one does.
Thanks for sharing it, Thank you, Bob. Here are a
few things I picked up for my conversation with Walter.
One While Walter thinks it's useful to learn to code,
(45:51):
he believes it's more useful to learn to think creatively
and conceptually. That's one skill, as he puts it, that
will always be in the band. Two. Walter is a
big opponent of multiple revenue streams. Being too focused on
ad revenue can make you lose touch with your consumers. Three.
Talented creatives don't always make the best executives. While Walter
(46:11):
was a remarkable executive, he says he would rather have
a spart manager manage him so he can stick to
doing what he truly thinks he's good at, or be
curious and a field like journalism. Walter says curiosity is
more important than mastering anyone's skill. Thanks for listening. I'm
Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much
(46:34):
for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special
thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent,
which is no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research bill plaques,
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayl Raoul Eric Angel, Noel Mango, and
(46:54):
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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