 Hey, Facebook friends. We're here for the Silicon Valley Friday Show at John Markov right behind me. I'm about to go live, so stay tuned. If you're watching this video, stay with us and make sure you comment. Live from Cube headquarters in Palo Alto, California. It's the Silicon Valley Friday Show with John Furrier. Well, welcome to the Silicon Valley Friday Show. I'm John Furrier. We are here in Palo Alto at the Cube studios with John Markov. My guest this week, formerly of the New York Times, now still with the New York Times, legend scribe in the tech industry, goes way back to the old, you know, computer world, info world, government days of IDG, which was us sold to China, John Markov. Great to have you. Good to see you. Hey, great to see you. We did a podcast 12 years ago in 2004 before podcasting even became big when I founded PodTech. And that was supposed to democratize media and the blogs emerged and now we have full circle back to 1984 with Donald Trump and the media like almost like it's the reverse of what was supposed to happen. It is a very strange time. And I mean, I think you figured out a lot more than I have. Remember, I'm a print guy. I started as a print guy and I ended as a print guy and the world has moved on. Well, we're investing a lot in print. I think that's the final leg of our stool, but video obviously is compelling. We have to do in the Cube and ultra successful in the Wikibon research team has been great. But the media landscape is just one, I think backdrop to the bigger picture, which is there's a whole new world order and this whole fake news thing really was interesting because some of the conversation was some of those new generations have never even seen real news before. So they couldn't tell the difference between fake news and real news. And it's just, there's a new, the new signals are out there. Google's not driving. It's really more Facebook. You're seeing this new platforms. Well, it's even more complicated. I mean, there has been this rich discussion of riches. I use a word I use advisedly of fake news, but I've actually been more obsessed with what's called fake traffic. How do you know humans are watching what you're doing? Increasingly, people don't. And I think it's richly ironic at this point that this model advertising based model is being infected by robots. And what does that mean? I mean, it's interesting. And what a funny story from the old McGovern days IDG, Dave Vellante, co-CEO with me, it's from Engel. Imagine that McGovern once said to the writers, imagine your audience that you're writing for and they had measurement of you knew what the audience was. You knew their IT guys are interested in PCs or whatever, whatnot. Here, you don't know who your audience is because Google controls it. Now Facebook controls the identity. The publishers don't have no iteration, no feedback loops if they're not tied into some sort of loop. That was one of the things that undercut the New York Times effort to go in that direction is there are these intermediaries who could actually sell our audience better than we could and for less money. And so, the Times went back to the subscription model and it's still not proven, but it looks like it's got a chance, not dead. One of the good things is you know they're human beings out there and you know something about who they are. Yeah, I think there's a whole new revolution going on. You know, obviously we're betting big on video. We believe original content is gonna be, come and make a huge comeback right now. It may not be value, but original content, really to me will just kind of just vaporize all this noise I think, so that's our bet. But in general though, I think you know, you were at New York Times, you just left, now you're back freelancing, you're doing some stories. What are you up to? What's going on with your life? You got a book coming on, what's happening? It's complicated, so I have four desks now. One is still at the New York Times, one's at home. I'm at the Computer History Museum as a historian, which is just down the street. And they basically brought me on to work with their program and also they're subsidizing a book that I'm working on which is a biography of Stuart Brand. And Brand, most people know as the guy who put together the Holers catalog, a whole generation was influenced by that. It was sort of the web before the web, if you will. But Brand was involved in a whole set of things, the Hackers Conference, the Well. He wrote this article in 1972 in Rolling Stone where he really was the first person to sort of introduce a broad audience to personal computing and video games and computer networks. I mean, this is really early stuff. And I'm writing about him, it's kind of a social history. He's the spine of a set of events that created what I think of as a California sensibility, which has kind of infected the world, if you will. Yeah, and certainly has one of the things that really kind of gets me focused on the team here and what I want to talk to you about. It's how outside of Silicon Valley there is now a weird vibe around, you see some corruption come out from that venture-backed company, Theranos. And then you got the collection just happened. Obviously everyone here pretty much for Hillary, pretty obvious. But the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley and the risk-taking and the freedom people have here has spawned a lot of innovation. You've written about it. Certainly your book, What the Door Mouth Said was all about counterculture, spawning the computer revolution. But the people outside Silicon Valley want to be Silicon Valley, but at the same time, there's a lot of bashing going on. There's a PR problem. And the journalists are writing about it as more of a, I don't want to say Machiavellian kind of approach, but Silicon Valley's got a PR problem and I don't think there's a problem. Yeah, I think it's really possibly easy to kill the golden goose, if you will. One of the things that I've seen over a long, long time why was Silicon Valley here? What was the spark that created? What's the chemistry? One of the key aspects of Silicon Valley is it was a magnet for the best and brightest from the entire world. And that's a big deal. And I think if you basically block that, if people go elsewhere, if people go to China or they go to Europe, the chemistry falls apart. And I don't think it's guaranteed that Silicon Valley will survive forever. I saw the article in New Yorker this week about the Doomsday and about all the rich kids who want to get this place and protect themselves. And I thought it was pretty dumb. I mean, it was pretty, I mean, I wrote that on Facebook and on my way back from Boston, maybe I was a little bit jaded being on the East Coast, but it didn't really encapsulate in my mind what the true Valley's doing in the sense of that's not the social norm. It was kind of a fringe, if you will. And it was a big time people mentioned on that. Mayfield Venture Capitalists, the people that I knew just seemed a little bit off. And yeah, the article did point to people within the Valley who were also very skeptical about this. There were entrepreneurs in the Valley who said, maybe you should think about giving to the homeless shelter rather than trying to sort of protect yourself by running off into some fortress that you've created in New Zealand or something else. But he wrote it about a particular time and place, which is right now, but that notion, that survivalist notion is not new. Survivalist culture has been around with us for some time. There are people who think that the world is always about to fall apart. And somehow, until now, it hasn't fallen apart. We had a good Venture Capitalist on last week, Greg Sands, who's not well-known, but he's a Stanford guy, Harvard guy, and good VC, worked at Netscape as the first product manager, wrote the business plan. So he's about my age, seen the cycles from the internet side. And he was talking about, yeah, mercenaries are, everyone wants to be a mercenary, but there's always a ratio of mercenaries. Or as one of our other guests, Alan Cohen, said bomb throwers to kind of shake things up. And then missionaries, people actually do in the work. So if you go back to like the Intel days, those guys were just trying to make DRAMs. They weren't really out to change the world. Were they missionaries or were they mercenaries? I mean, jobs certainly was playing a different role, but your thoughts on this cultural thing. I mean, the culture of Silicon Valley, I've seen over and over again, this chemistry that comes together, which is a Jobs and Wozniak kind of mix. These companies frequently have a guy like Jobs and a guy like Wozniak. Now Wozniak just wanted to build computers to share with his friends at the Homebrew Club and Steve Jobs saw that there was a market for it. And it was that chemistry that made Apple. I don't think it would have happened without both sides of that coin. And the dynamics now, money making also plays into it. One of the things that happened just this week was Cisco bought app dynamics for 3.7 billion. I mean, back in the old days, not that it's downdated, but people went public to raise money. Now they don't even have to go public that's 3.7 billion dollars. So you see a shift. So the question I want to ask you on this point is, the Hewlett Packard days where I worked for nine years back in the 80s and early 90s, was they had a sustainable company and they created jobs. They were doing tech for obviously to make profit and they were obviously profiteers, but they had this view of culture and citizenship and they actually worked on important stuff that mattered. And so we're seeing the shift. I mean, the Cloudera founder was also on theCUBE and he said, we have the smartest brains in the world working on how to optimize ad placement rather than solving big problems. And this comes down to a new demographic kind of column post-911 children that actually look on the world differently and say, hey, I don't really give a crap about ad optimization. I want to actually solve the energy problem or cure cancer. So my last book was called Machines of Love and Grace and it was actually based on something I saw when I was working on the book before that which was called What the Door Mouse Said and that was that at the very dawn before the valley, the dawn of interactive computing, early 1960s, there were two laboratories on either side of the Stanford campus. One was created by John McCarthy. It's called the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one on the other side of campus which was Doug Engelbart which was called the Augmentation Research Center and this was just when interactive computing was getting out into the world. McCarthy thought that it would take him a decade to build a thinking machine, an AI and they would replace humans philosophically. That's where he was going. On the other side of campus, it was Engelbart and at that point he was thought to be kind of a weirdo. He thought that computers could be used to extend people and that philosophical dichotomy really fascinated me because it's a dichotomy but it's also a paradox because if you extend people, you need fewer people. So I wrote about that dichotomy and the rise of AI and robotics in the Valley and now to your point, what's going on is a lot of the big companies in Silicon Valley are actually thinking seriously about that and they're thinking about their ethical responsibilities and it's actually kind of heartening to me. I mean, I'm not entirely fooled by this. Sometimes it's just marketing but I know the technologists inside these companies and they're very serious about it because they realize the consequences of these technologies and so I don't think that, I mean, I think that I give Silicon Valley technologists relatively high marks because in some industries people don't care at all about the consequences. In this industry, there's actually an active discussion about what the consequences are of the technology. What's your opinion to people out there was saying Silicon Valley, a bunch of people have their head up their butts, they are a bunch of crazies, loonies, they're out to make a quick buck, you know. I mean, there's still so much work going on. Look at the automotive, you see GM, Ford, BMW, moving all their R&D out here. There's a Detroit Silicon Valley connection going on. You mentioned Wozniak and Jobs and Engelbart and the other guy. It's the collision of these approaches that makes magic and I think that, yeah, it's a libertarian culture. I mean, this is a whole new thing and what do you say to the folks out there that don't get this? How do you describe the magic of Silicon Valley? The first thing I have to say is there's not one Silicon Valley. I've always thought that there have been multiple cultures inside the Valley. I mean, going back to the period before personal computing, I mean, there was a semiconductor industry culture which was basically white shirts and pocket protectors and then up the road in Palo Alto, you know, there was this much more long haired culture out of which you got personal computing and those cultures, they were separate, they mingled together and that's still true about the Valley. The Valley as a place has moved from Santa Clara. I mean, if you look at where the center of Silicon Valley is today by venture capital investment, it's at the foot of Petro Hill in San Francisco, it's actually physically moved and it reflects this kind of more cosmopolitan urban center. It's still this kind of vast magnet for the best and the brightest from the whole world and I think that's a good thing. What would Stuart Brand be doing if he was alive today in this culture? Well, Stuart, would he be doing movies, Silicon Valley? Actually, I'll tell you what he's doing because he's still alive, he runs this thing called the Long Now Foundation which is up in San Francisco and there's this wonderful arc. So if you go back to the very first whole earth catalog which Steve Jobs talked about in the Stanford commencement duress and you go to the first sentence, what he said is, we are as gods and we might as well get good at it and draw that arc forward to what he's doing now and inside the long now he has this project called Revive and Restore and it's gotten a lot of attention for the idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth but what he's really doing is he's looking for species that are endangered and under pressure because of climate change and what happens is their genomes become more homogeneous and they are more at risk and so he's basically playing God. He's trying to diversify the genomes of entire species that are under risk. So that's a sort of hot potato from an ethical point of view but I think that it's a, he's still doing interesting and creative things. What do you think about the cult of Silicon Valley? This is the hard question because the venture capitalist, you go back when I was in business school in the 90s and graduated, VCs walked on water and there weren't a lot many of them, right? So now people pretty much aren't looking at them as the gods that they once were. Now it's shifting back to kind of democratizing with Angel, let's just see all these crowdfunding you see incubators popping up. Is that the new culture of the cult? Is the cult still chasing the dream or? Okay, so I really enjoy Silicon Valley the series. I thought I was going to hate it and I look and I go, I know that guy. I know that guy, I mean they really nail some of the foibles of Silicon Valley. So the foibles are there. They have the inside jokes too, that just the beautiful. Yeah, it's very entertaining. As opposed to Black Mirror, which is another series that I can't watch because it's too painful because it's too close to the truth for the same kind of reason. Do you think Silicon Valley is the animal house version of the parody of Silicon Valley animal house and college reflection? It's a little bit over the top. It's good, it gets great content. But isn't it interesting that that's the view of Silicon Valley that the broader world gets? I mean people have no sense of what Silicon Valley is. They think that that's real. And actually it's pretty close in some cases. It's hard, I mean a lot of people come in. This has been the Silicon Valley dynamic for a year. People come in and they think they can make a quick buck but they realize pretty quickly that it's pretty boring and pretty freaking hard to start a company. Most of them fail. Right, and there's a community going on and there's a lot of back channel, a lot of information flowing around because of that culture of bringing people together. Well, you know, recent book of the moment was a book called Chaos Monkeys written by a guy who went from start up to why. And I thought it was interesting because I thought he did capture a particular moment in Silicon Valley. But when I read his, any time he tried to write about history, he was wrong. Silicon Valley tends to look forward and not back. But you're going to write a history book. Well, I'm a historian now. Yes. And you're employed by the communication to do that. Well, we're going to talk more about that in our next segment. John Markoff here in theCUBE. Great, great conversation. He's seen the perspective now going to be documenting history, which I think is worthy. I think, you know, we want, we do our part with theCUBE videos to get the historic moments. Appreciate that. But I think the Stuart Brand thing we're going to talk more about this whole earth catalog impact. And is it still relevant today if you can read this book? And certainly it's, what is it going forward going to look like and how does that get modernized? We'll be right back with more at the short break. Why wait for the future? The next evolution in IT infrastructure is happening now. And Cisco's unified computing system is ready to power your data center in the internet of everything. Urgent data center needs went unaddressed for years. So Cisco wiped the slate clean and built a new fabric-centric computing architecture that addresses the application delivery challenges faced by IT in the dynamic environments of virtualization, cloud, and big data. Cisco UCS represents true innovation with revolutionary integration. It improves performance while dramatically driving down complexity and cost far lower than alternatives from the past. 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And there's a lot of history to look at now, but you know, you talking about the, your first, one of your, not your first book, you think your second book was the door mouse. Is that the third? Exactly, we've written two before, three before. So your fourth book, what the door mouse said, there is a, it's a short history in here in Silicon Valley. I mean, you have the HP going back to 1939 and the Stanford, but the real computer revolution, the gates in the jobs, that intel dynamic, really to me was the big wave. It started in the mid-70s. And what, we're only a few years, decades from that. So we're still early. It's a young Silicon Valley. Well, it's an interesting question. I mean, so I spent most of my career writing about this thing called Moore's Law. And Moore's Law is about the ability to put at regular intervals more transistors on a piece of silicon. And we're at a stage now, 50 years in, where it's a real question of whether we're still on that pace. You could argue that we're at least stalled for a while. The cost of transistors has stopped falling in the last couple of years. And that was a big deal because Moore's Law was about not getting faster and cheaper. It was about getting faster, faster and cheaper faster. It was exponentials. So if the exponentials are over, is it going to continue to spin out new industries? Because that was a driving force. And so, I mean, it's a real open question to me. Well, this is the thing, Jim Frick and I talk about the line art and all the car stuff. The Moore's Law kind of is kicking in there. It's the prices dropping down from 50,000 down to nothing. Now you've got NVIDIA, the star at CES this year. I mean, NVIDIA, a graphics car. Now they're an AI company. Now they are an AI company powering the gaming, the car experience of their software. I mean, that's an interesting transition. It's a big deal, and it's had this huge impact, but is it going to continue to accelerate at the rate it was? There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley that believe it will. I'm a bit of a skeptic. I think that we're a bit of a plateau. I think we're hyped up, and I see that we have a tool that looks at all the trending hashtags globally and in tech as IoT. IoT by Internet of Things is IoT is number one. Trending item across the board, consistently every day. Internet of Things seems, because it hits AI, hits the human, it's that intersection of industrial to IT, at least in our world. But I want to add- That's a very enterprise thing, though. Well, what's interesting, the analog, well, this is from our cube, go to hundreds of events kind of horizontally out there and look at the space, but here's what we observed. The analog world is digitizing, right? And I think that is the digital revolution and one of the things I've been saying is that we are in a counterculture opportunity where there's a digital hippie. I talked with Virginia Heffernan when she came on the cube about her new book, Magic and Lost, which kind of teases out this notion of there's now the rebellion against analog. I'm going back to analog. So there's now a kind of like digital hippie. Does she see a counterculture, a new counterculture? Does she argue that there's- She argues with me that there's a counterculture where kids are actually leaving their cell phones on the weekend and that that's a cool thing. Hey, I left my cell phone for the weekend. They're taking LSD down the way to school micro dosing. They're actually going back to flip phones and vinyl records. There's an anti-digital, this is not online. Therefore, it's more scarce and more relevant. So it's the hippies and they might not be smoking bad weed, but they're certainly smoking, doing something differently. Well, but so even in the original counterculture, there were people who were Luddites, basically rejecting technology, but Stuart Brand represented a wing of the counterculture that was very positive toward tools and to digital tools. And basically he was instrumental in reframing the way we looked at computers. Because remember, the free speech movement at Berkeley was about do not bend, fold, or spindle, or mutilate. They were, computers were seen as instruments of control. And then over the next decade, we went to this new kind of culture where computers were seen as instruments of liberation. So where are we now? Well, this is kind of why I'm trying to grok this because my vision is that I think that everyone who's digitized realizes, okay, I'm instrumented, I have no privacy, all these things are, and now the election, we look at their world and say, what's going on? We're actually living 1984, which is Steve Jobs actually through the hammer against what actually is existing now, you could argue. And people have talked about that. So my thinking is, I think people are gonna recognize that it's not the end all be y'all to be digital. And that you can actually do some things with digital that integrate the real world space, whether it's VR or other experiences that are not so automated or stale. And I don't know, I mean, I just think that's, if I was a young kid, what would I be doing? What I worry about most actually, and I'm not certain about this, but you know the term, the Borg from Star Trek? The A.K.A. Microsoft? Once a month, once a month. And when Gates was there, that was Gates was referred to as the Borg. They own everything. Yeah, resistance people, you will be assimilated. So I see a generation, I come from a generation where we really hated taking direction from anybody. But I see a direction of younger people who take direction from the palm of their hand, from these algorithms that sort of come from their, from their, you know, everything from where to get Korean barbecue to who to marry. And that's a cultural shift that really kind of, it's eerie to me, in the sense that if some sort of algorithm is making all the decisions, what's left for human creativity, so the augmented reality is interesting to me too, because if you can augment reality, then don't be afraid to wish for what you want, you might get it, but the downside is, this is first time societal problem. I mean, this is not something, I mean self-driving cars, who's going to manage that service? Although I think AR is a little farther away than people think. A lot of these things appear like for 15 or 20 years before they show up and fries in a reel, right? I mean, and I think this might be the first failure of AR as opposed to the arrival of the AR universe. I mean, VR I think is just, it's just all like, I mean the chatbots to me is a great example. The rage of chatbots is just a, something people can put their mind around something, a mental model or products. Oh, that's AI and that dies away, but I think AI is just a refunction, rehashing of neural networks, software. You're starting to see Moore's Law kind of thinking off with Amazon cloud technologies. But I want to give you thoughts, one final parting thought on patterns recognition. I mean, obviously, you can learn a lot by history, but you don't need to bank on it, but now we have a body of work within Silicon Valley. Of what you were in the front lines, how you were called the scribe of that generation at the time documenting it, New York Times in previous life. But what can we learn from that? What's the pattern you've seen over the past few decades of success, entrepreneurial? What can people learn from the history? You know, I've watched people sort of make inaccurate predictions over a long, long time, and I've been curious about this. I have a theory and I'm not saying I'm right, but I think that one of the problems and one of the interesting things about Silicon Valley is that people live in linear time. And for the longest time, the Valley was on this exponential. And so it's very difficult to predict something that's not changing in a linear way. And so I think that, so if we're still on that exponential, it's still gonna be very hard to predict. Maybe it'll get a little easier if we're flattening out. I talked with Jim Anderson, who used to be one of the early venture capitals, Anderson Pickering, that he's retired now. And we were having a glass of wine, and he goes, you know, John, the key thing about venture capital is that you know one really knows. And that it's often the ones that people hate, the contrarian approach that ends up being the big thing. And I think the movies people watch, the jobs movie, the social network, these things kind of have to encapsulate and kind of story tell, kind of probably more awkward moments than actually played out. I mean, it's not a fairy tale sometimes like that. Yeah, no, I was part of this culture that grew up in, believing in digital utopia. I mean, John Perry Barlow in what, 96, you know, a Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, and I've gone 180 degrees. I used to be a utopian, and now I feel that this online world that we've created, this cyberspace, is merely a mirror of the physical world, and it reflects everything good and bad about our world. And there's also- So I wanna ask you a final question. Final, final question. You know, I appreciate you being an advisor for our Tech Truth Initiative. One of the things we're passionate about is next generation journalism being someone who's not trained in any kind of journalism myself, but kind of doing it for 10, 12 years now in this new medium. I wanna get your thoughts for the young people watching. You know, you have a great pedigree, you're send off at The New York Times, all these of you, though you're still there, it was pretty awesome watching your medium post. A lot of people love you and you're well regarded. Certainly your work speaks for itself. What are the young journalists should take away? Because you have a lot of wisdom, but they're looking at down the shotgun of a media landscape that is so fubard and so screwed up and so wacky. I know. I mean, the stuff that's happening is surreal. I know you talk about it on your Facebook page, but what's the secret to move forward in a positive way? Since the terrain changes so quickly, I think if they really want to be journalists, if they wanna be reporters, the simple thing to do is get an area of expertise and become a journalist. And you know, what I did is I got in and I decided I was gonna starve for five years and try to make it to a mainstream journalist publication and it worked out. Now, and I was telling people the same thing. What's confusing about today is there's been a huge decline in employment in the mainstream media and I was telling people, look at this proliferation of new sources, go find one of them and grow up with them. And I've been a little disheartened because that seems to be plateauing for the moment. But I think if you look at things over five or 10 years, if you wanna be a reporter, the cost of entry is so inexpensive. Remember, one of the best- But now they're looking at a mainstream media that there's not a lot of seats at the table. No, but I mean, look at what I.F. Stone did during the 1950s. He ran something out of his garage, right? With his wife. Well, now people have Twitter. You can actually blog now. Blogging actually is democratizing. I mean, you can put just. I don't think that's gone away. Yeah. I think that's still possible. I would still tell someone who wanted to be a reporter. And the difference between journalism and reporter is what? What's journalism and what's reporting? And isn't reporting like the key thing? You're actually reporting things. Well, facts. Not alternative facts, but like actually facts. They're. Got it in. Got alternative facts in. Journalism is a more pretentious way of calling yourself a reporter. Yeah. Well, we're reporting here in Palo Alto at Facebook Live with John Markoff. A reporter in the journalism field now on his own as a historian. John, great to see you. Thanks for coming by for our Silicon Valley Friday show. Every Friday morning, Silicon Valley Friday show with John Furrier. Thanks for watching.