 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to SiliconANGLE Media's production of theCUBE live here from Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and I have the distinct pleasure of welcoming Walter Isaacson to our program. Author, podcaster, I read every biography that you publish and listen to the public. Hi guys, thank you. So, Walter, this is a conference of geeks, you know, and I say that lovingly, 14,000 people, they love technology, they love ideas. You've had the chance to study and research some of the most brilliant minds that we've had over the last couple hundred years. Where do you get your inspiration from? You know, I love the fact that the most creative of people from Leonardo da Vinci to Einstein, Ben Franklin, but Steve Jobs and Ada Lovelace, whomever they may be, all love both the humanities and the science. They stand at that intersection of sort of liberal arts technology and that's so important in today's world where you can have enormous amounts of data and the question is, how do you connect humans to it? How do you add the human factor? And so that's where I get my inspirations of people can stand at that intersection of the humanities and technology. Yeah, one of my favorite books is yours with the innovators, you talk about history and there's things that we've been looking at or trying. When you talk about forecasting and predicting something, sometimes we have great ideas, but it might take us decades or longer to get there. Any kind of big inspirations? What do you say to people that work in the tech world as to what they should think about things like that? Well, first of all, things happen sometimes slower than you expect until that inflection point when they happen faster than you expect. It's like going broke. It happens really slow and then it happens fast. Right, I guess we shouldn't say that in Vegas here where we offer this conference. But I think that the main thing to do is to be one of those people who has an intuitive feel for how humans are going to find a product or a service to be transformative to them. And we didn't know we needed a thousand songs in our pocket until the iPod came along. Likewise, we didn't know we needed transistors until somebody invented a transistor radio and we could take it along with it. So what turns us on? What makes us human? Yeah, so many things there. You've been not only writing, but you're doing podcasts now. What do you think of kind of the state of content? People say sometimes nobody reads anymore. You do hard research, team of people. What's your thoughts about content these days? Well, I think the business model for journalism and the production of content has been decimated at time. Partly because it's all ad driven in terms of journalism and video. And we need to get back to a time when people value content and are willing to have a direct relationship with the content provider. About 80% of the revenue now for say reported or journalistic content goes either to Google, Facebook, Instagram, some aggregator. So I think we have to look for the next way of finding micropayments, subscription models that work in addition to the advertising driven model. Yeah, there's so many people sometimes they look at all of this change and they get kind of pessimistic. Well, we're going to have the AI apocalypse or the robots are going to take over. Shows like here where the technologists I say by definition are positive about technology. When I read your writings, you seem to have a very positive. Oh, I'm definitely optimistic about where technology takes us. You know, I write and the innovators begin with Ada Lovelace, who was Lord Byron's daughter. Her father was a Luddite, you know, defended the followers of Ned Ludd who was smashing the looms of England, thinking that technology would put people out of work. But Ada was somebody said, I get it, the punch cards selling those looms had to do patterns could make a calculating machine be able to do numbers as well as words as well as pictures. She envisions a computer and the notion of technology increases the number of people in the textile industry in England in the 19th century. And the computer has led to so many more jobs and it's destroyed. So I think technology will always augment human creativity, not destroy it. So last thing I wanted to ask you, Walter, is we're here at Dell Technologies World. 34 years ago, Michael Dell started this. And he's a special individual. We've had the opportunity to talk to him, get to know him. I've told people that, you know, inside the company, if you reach out to him, he actually will respond. It seems very special in today's day and age. You've got background with Michael. Tell us, how are you framing it? I think it begins with his parents. His late mother, his father, his father is still alive. Care a lot about education, care a lot about creativity. Are deeply humane in the sense that they love all of society, humanity, civil discourse. And that's why there's a humanity I see that Michael Dell is able to embed in his products, whether it's a Dell laptop I always use, or the new servers in Dell EMC, which enables people across platforms to say, how do we collaborate? How do we be creative? All right, well, Walter Isaacson, thank you so much. It's a pleasure having you on the program. And you've been watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman. Always check out theCUBE.net for all of our broadcasts. And we also, like Walter, have a podcast. Check it out on iTunes. Thank you, Stu. Thank you.