>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the cube. covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Boston Seaport everybody. My name is David Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman and you're watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're at LiveWorx PTC's big IOT conference. Jaron Lanier is here, he's the father of virtual reality and the author of Dawn of the New Everything. Papa, welcome. >> Hey there. >> What's going on? >> Hey, how's it going? >> It's going great. How's the show going for you? It's cool, it's cool. It's, it's fine. I'm actually here talking about this other book a little bit too, but, yeah, I've been having a lot of fun. It's fun to see how hollow lens applied to a engines and factories. It's been really cool to see people seeing the demos. Mixed reality. >> Well, your progeny is being invoked a lot at the show. Everybody's sort of talking about VR and applying it and it's got to feel pretty good. >> Yeah, yeah. It seems like a VR IoT blockchain are the sort of the three things. >> Wrap it all with digital transformation. >> Yeah, digital transformation, right. So what we need is a blockchain VR IoT solution to transform something somewhere. Yeah. >> So tell us about this new book, what it's called? >> Yeah. This is called the deleting all your social media accounts right now. And I, I realize most people aren't going to do it, but what I'm trying to do is raise awareness of how the a psychological manipulation algorithms behind the system we're having an effect on society and I think I love the industry but I think we can do better and so I'm kind of agitating a bit here. >> Well Jaron, I was reading up a little bit getting ready for the interview here and people often will attack the big companies, but you point at the user as, you know, we need to kind of take back and we have some onus ourselves as to what we use, how we use it and therefore can have impact on, on that. >> Well, you know, what I've been finding is that within the companies and Silicon Valley, a lot of the top engineering talent really, really wants to pursue ethical solutions to the problem, but feels like our underlying business plan, the advertising business plan keeps on pulling us back because we keep on telling advertisers we have yet new ways to kind of do something to tweak the behaviors of users and it kind of gradually pulls us into this darker and darker territory. The thing is, there's always this assumption, oh, it's what users want. They would never pay for something the way they pay for Netflix, they would never pay for social media that way or whatever it is. The thing is, we've never asked users, nobody's ever gone and really checked this out. So I'm going to, I'm kind of putting out there as a proposition and I think in the event that users turn out to really want more ethical social media and other services by paying for them, you know, I think it's going to create this enormous sigh of relief in the tech world. I think it's what we all really want. >> Well, I mean ad-based business models that there's a clear incentive to keep taking our data and doing whatever you want with it, but, but perhaps there's a better way. I mean, what if you're, you're sort of proposing, okay, maybe users would be willing to pay for various services, which is probably true, but what if you were able to give users back control of their data and let them monetize their data. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, you know, I like a lot of different solutions, like personally, if it were just up to me, if I ran the world, which I don't, but if I ran the world, I can make every single person of the world into a micro-entrepreneur where they can package, sell and price their data the way they want. They can, they can form into associations with others to do it. And they can also purchase data from others as they want. And I think what we'd see is this flowering of this giant global marketplace that would organize itself and would actually create wonders. I really believe that however, I don't run the world and I don't think we're going to see that kind of perfect solution. I think we're going to see something that's a bit rougher. I think we might see something approximating that are getting like a few steps towards that, but I think we are going to move away from this thing where like right now if two people want to do anything on online together, the only way that's possible is if there's somebody else who's around to pay them, manipulate them sneakily and that's stupid. I mean we can be better than that and I'm sure we will. >> Yeah, I'm sure we will too. I mean we think, we think blockchain and smart contracts are a part of that solution and obviously a platform that allows people to do exactly what you just described. >> And, and you know, it's funny, a lot of things that sounded radical a few years ago are really not sounding too radical. Like you mentioned smart contracts. I remember like 10 years ago for sure, but even five years ago when you talked about this, people are saying, oh no, no, no, no, no, this, the world is too conservative. Nobody's ever going to want to do this. And the truth is people are realizing that if it makes sense, you know, it makes sense. And, and, and, and so I think, I think we're really seeing like the possibilities opening up. We're seeing a lot of minds opening, so it's kind of an exciting time. >> Well, something else that I'd love to get your thoughts on and we think a part of that equation is also reputation that if you, if you develop some kind of reputation system that is based on the value that you contribute to the community, that affects your, your reputation and you can charge more if you have a higher reputation or you get dinged if you're promoting fake news. That that reputation is a linchpin to the successful community like that. >> Well, right now the problem is because, in the free model, there's this incredible incentive to just sort of get people to do things instead of normal capitalist. And when you say buy my thing, it's like you don't have to buy anything, but I'm going to try to trick you into doing something, whatever it is. And, and, and if you ever direct commercial relationship, then the person who's paying the money starts to be a little more demanding. And the reason I'm bringing that up is that right now there's this huge incentive to create false reputation. Like in reviews, a lot of, a lot of the reviews are fake, followers a lot of them are fake instance. And so there's like this giant world of fake stuff. So the thing is right now we don't have reputation, we have fake reputation and the way to get real reputation instead of think reputation is not to hire an army of enforcing us to go around because the company is already doing that is to change the financial incentives so you're not incentivizing criminals, you know I mean, that's incentives come first and then you can do the mop up after that, but you have to get the incentives aligned with what you want. >> You're here, and I love the title of the book. We interviewed James Scott and if you know James Scott, he's one of the principals at ICIT down PTC we interviewed him last fall and we asked him, he's a security expert and we asked them what's the number one risk to our country? And he said, the weaponization of social media. Now this is, this is before fake news came out and he said 2020 is going to be a, you know, what show and so, okay. >> Yeah, you know, and I want to say there's a danger that people think this is a partisan thing. Like, you know, if you, it's not about that. It's like even if you happen to support whoever has been on, on the good side of social media manipulation, you should still oppose the manipulation. You know, like I was, I was just in the UK yesterday and they had the Brexit foot where there was manipulation by Russians and others. And you know, the point I've made over there is that it's not about whether you support Brexit or not. That's your business, I don't even have an opinion. It's not, I'm an American. That's something that's for somebody else. But the thing is, if you look at the way Brexit happened, it tore society apart. It was nasty, it was ugly, and there have been tough elections before, but now they're all like that. And there was a similar question when the, the Czechoslovakia broke apart and they didn't have all the nastiness and it's because it was before social media that was called the velvet divorce. So the thing is, it's not so much about what's being supported, whatever you think about Donald Trump or anything else, it's the nastiness. It's the way that people's worst instincts are being used to manipulate them, that's the problem. >> Yeah, manipulation denial is definitely a problem no matter what side of the aisle you're on, but I think you're right that the economic incentive if the economic incentive is there, it will change behavior. And frankly, without it, I'm not sure it will. >> Well, you know, in the past we've tried to change the way things in the world by running around in outlying things. For instance, we had prohibition, we outlawed, we outlawed alcohol, and what we did is we created this underground criminal economy and we're doing something similar now. What we're trying to do is we're saying we have incentives for everything to be fake, everything to be phony for everything to be about manipulation and we're creating this giant underground of people trying to manipulate search results or trying to manipulate social media feeds and these people are getting more and more sophisticated. And if we keep on doing this, we're going to have criminals running the world. >> Wonder if I could bring the conversation back to the virtual reality. >> Absolutely. >> I'm sorry about that. >> So, but you know, you have some concerns about whether virtual reality will be something you for good or if it could send us off the deep end. >> Oh yeah, well. Look, there's a lot to say about virtual reality. It's a whole world after all. So you can, there is a danger that if the same kinds of games are being played on smartphones these days were transferred into a virtual reality or mixed reality modalities. Like, you could really have a poisonous level of mind control and I, I do worry about that I've worried about that for years. What I'm hoping is that the smartphone era is going to force us to fix our ways and get the whole system working well enough so that by the time technologies like virtual reality are more common, we'll have a functional way to do things. And it won't, it won't all be turned into garbage, you know because I do worry about it. >> I heard, I heard a positive segment on NPR saying that one of the problems is we all stare at our phones and maybe when I have VR I'll actually be talking to actual people so we'll actually help connections and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. >> Well, you know, most of the mixed reality demos you see these days are person looking at the physical world and then there's extra stuff added to the physical world. For instance, in this event, just off camera over there, there's some people looking at automobile engines and seeing them augmented and, and that's great. But, there's this other thing you can do which is augmenting people and sometimes it can be fun. You can put horns or wings or long noses or something on people. Of course, you still see them with the headsets all that's great. But you can also do other stuff. You can, you can have people display extra information that they have in their mind. You can have more sense of what each other are thinking and feeling. And I actually think as a tool of expression between people in real life, it's going to become extremely creative and interesting. >> Well, I mean, we're seeing a lot of applications here. What are some of your favorites? >> Oh Gosh. Of the ones right here? >> Yes. >> Well, you know, the ones right here are the ones I described and I really like them, there's a really cool one of some people getting augmentation to help them maintain and repair factory equipment. And it's, it's clear, it's effective, it's sensible. And that's what you want, right? If you ask me personally what really, a lot of the stuff my students have done, really charms me like up, there was just one project, a student intern made where you can throw virtual like goop like paint and stuff around in the walls and it sticks and starts running down and this is running on the real world and you can spray paint the real world so you can be a bit of a juvenile delinquent basically without actually damaging anything. And it was great, it was really fun and you know, stuff like that. There was this other thing and other student did where you can fill a whole room with these representations of mathematical objects called tensors and I'm sorry to geek out, but you had this kid where all these people could work together, manipulating tensors and the social environment. And it was like math coming alive in this way I hadn't experienced before. That really was kind of thrilling. And I also love using virtual reality to make music that's another one of my favorite things, >> Talk more about that. >> Well, this is something I've been doing forever since the '80s, since the '80s. I've been, I've been at this for awhile, but you can make an imaginary instruments and play them with your hands and you can do all kinds of crazy things. I've done a lot of stuff with like, oh I made this thing that was halfway between the saxophone and an octopus once and I'll just >> Okay. >> all this crazy. I love that stuff I still love it. (mumbling) It hasn't gotten old for me. I still love it as much as I used to. >> So I love, you mentioned before we came on camera that you worked on minority report and you made a comment that there were things in that that just won't work and I wonder if you could explain a little bit more, you know, because I have to imagine there's a lot of things that you talked about in the eighties that, you know, we didn't think what happened that probably are happening. Well, I mean minority report was only one of a lot of examples of people who were thinking about technology in past decades. Trying to send warnings to the future saying, you know, like if you try to make a society where their algorithms predicting what'll happen, you'll have a dystopia, you know, and that's essentially what that film is about. It uses sort of biocomputer. They're the sort of bioengineered brains in these weird creatures instead of silicon computers doing the predicting. But then, so there are a lot of different things we could talk about minority report, but in the old days one of the famous VR devices which these gloves that you'd use to manipulate virtual objects. And so, I put a glove in a scene mockup idea which ended up and I didn't design the final production glove that was done by somebody in Montreal, but the idea of putting a glove a on the heroes hand there was that glove interfaces give you arm fatigue. So the truth is if you look at those scenes there physically impossible and what we were hoping to do is to convey that this is a world that has all this power, but it's actually not. It's not designed for people. It actually wouldn't work in. Of course it kind of backfired because what happened is the production designers made these very gorgeous things and so now every but every year somebody else tries to make the minority report interface and then you discover oh my God, this doesn't work, you know, but the whole point was to indicate a dystopian world with UI and that didn't quite work and there are many other examples I could give you from the movie that have that quality. >> So you just finished the book. When did this, this, this go to print the. >> Yeah, so this book is just barely out. It's fresh from the printer. In fact, I have this one because I noticed a printing flaw. I'm going to call the publisher and say, Oh, you got to talk to the printer about this, but this is brand new. What happened was last year I wrote a kind of a big book of advert triality that's for real aficionados and it's called Dawn of the new everything and then when I would go and talk to the media about it they'd say, well yeah, but what about social media? And then all this stuff, and this was before it Cambridge Analytica, but people were still interested. So I thought, okay, I'll do a little quick book that addresses what I think about all that stuff. And so I wrote this thing last year and then Cambridge Analytica happened and all of a sudden it's, it seems a little bit more, you know, well timed >> than I could have imagined >> Relevant. So, what other cool stuff are you working on? >> I have to tell you something >> Go ahead. >> This is a real cat. This is a black cat who is rescued from a parking lot in Oakland, California and belongs to my daughter. And he's a very sweet cat named Potato. >> Awesome. You, you're based in Northern California? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Awesome And he was, he was, he was an extra on the set of, of the Black Panther movie. He was a stand-in for like a little mini black panthers. >> What other cool stuff are you working on? What's next for you? >> Oh my God, there's so much going on. I hardly even know where to begin. There's. Well, one of the things I'm really interested in is there's a certain type of algorithm that's really transforming the world, which is usually called machine learning. And I'm really interested in making these things more transparent and open so it's less like a black box. >> Interesting. Because this has been something that's been bugging me you know, most kinds of programming. It might be difficult programming, but at least the general concept of how it works is obvious to anyone who's program and more and more we send our kids to coding camps and there's just a general societal, societal awareness of what conventional programming is like. But machine learning has still been this black box and I view that as a danger. Like you can't have society run by something that most people feel. It's like this black box because it'll, it'll create a sense of distrust and, and, I think could be, you know, potentially quite a problem. So what I want to try to do is open the black box and make it clear to people. So that's one thing I'm really interested in right now and I'm, oh, well, there's a bunch of other stuff. I, I hardly even know where to begin. >> The black box problem is in, in machine intelligence is a big one. I mean, I, I always use the example I can explain, I can describe to you how I know that's a dog, but I really can't tell you how I really know it's a dog. I know I look at a dog that's a dog, but. Well, but, I can't really in detail tell you how I did that but it isn't AI kind of the same way. A lot of AI. >> Well, not really. There's, it's a funny thing right now in, in, in the tech world, there are certain individuals who happen to be really good at getting machine language to work and they get very, very well paid. They're sort of like star athletes. But the thing is even so there's a degree of almost like folk art to it where we're not exactly sure why some people are good at it But even having said that, we, it's wrong to say that we have no idea how these things work or what we can certainly describe what the difference is between one that fails and that's at least pretty good, you know? And so I think any ordinary person, if we can improve the user interface and improve the way it's taught any, any normal person that can learn even a tiny bit of programming like at a coding camp, making the turtle move around or something, we should be able to get to the point where they can understand basic machine learning as well. And we have to get there. All right in the future, I don't want it to be a black box. It doesn't need to be. >> Well basic machine learning is one thing, but how the machine made that decision is increasingly complex. Right? >> Not really it's not a matter of complexity. It's a funny thing. It's not exactly complexity. It has to do with getting a bunch of data from real people and then I'm massaging it and coming up with the right transformation so that the right thing spit out on the other side. And there's like a little, it's like to me it's a little bit more, it's almost like, I know this is going to sound strange but it's, it's almost like learning to dress like you take this data and then you dress it up in different ways and all of a sudden it turns functional in a certain way. Like if you get a bunch of people to tag, that's a cat, that's a dog. Now you have this big corpus of cats and dogs and now you want to tell them apart. You start playing with these different ways of working with it. That had been worked out. Maybe in other situations, you might have to tweak it a little bit, but you can get it to where it's very good. It can even be better than any individual person, although it's always based on the discrimination that people put into the system in the first place. In a funny way, it's like Yeah, it's like, it's like a cross between a democracy and a puppet show or something. Because what's happening is you're taking this data and just kind of transforming it until you find the right transformation that lets you get the right feedback loop with the original thing, but it's always based on human discrimination in the first place so it's not. It's not really cognition from first principles, it's kind of leveraging data, gotten from people and finding out the best way to do that and I think really, really work with it. You can start to get a two to feel for it. >> We're looking forward to seeing your results of that work Jared, thanks for coming on the cube. You're great guests. >> Really appreciate it >> I really appreciate you having me here. Good. Good luck to all of you. And hello out there in the land that those who are manipulated. >> Thanks again. The book last one, one last plug if I may. >> The book is 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now and you might be watching this on one of them, so I'm about to disappear from your life if you take my advice. >> All right, thanks again. >> All right. Okay, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering Knowledge 16. Brought to you by ServiceNow. Here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Welcome back to Knowledge 16 everybody. This is Dave Vellante. It's our pleasure to have Dr. Robert Gates here, American statesman, scholar, author, and the 22nd U.S. Secretary of Defense, Dr. Gates thanks very much for coming on the Cube. >> My pleasure. >> So we just came over. We had a nice walk over from the CIO event here at Knowledge, you were speaking on leadership. Your book, A Passion for Leadership, which I can not get on Amazon so I have to carry it around with me. It's nice, it comes in handy when we're on the Cube. First question. Are leaders born or are they made? >> I think that they are not necessarily born, but there are certain aspects of leaders, of leadership that I think cannot be taught. If your empathy with other people, character and honor. Courage. Sincerity. A liking for people. A vision. I think these are things that are very personal, you're not necessarily born with them, they develop during the course of your life. But I also believe that they can't be taught in a university. >> Now we were talking on the way over, I mentioned that there's no co-author on this book, you told me you write all the books yourself, do all the research yourself. And you said one of the things you're proud of, I'll let you explain it, there's been no factual, claims of factual error and you do all your own research, is that right? >> Well it's one of the benefits of the IT revolution is access to a lot of databases and things that even a non-technical person like me can use. >> So how much time does it take you to write a book like Passion for Leadership or...? >> I would say that that book probably took about 18 months. Two years. The previous book, Duty, the memoir of my time as Secretary of Defense under Presidents Bush and Obama took longer, but it's got a lot more factual information and a lot more synthesis of information. And this really was more all out of my head in terms of my experiences over 50 years in public service. >> So you've served eight presidents, six of whom had a great sense of humor. Why is it important for leaders to have a sense of humor? >> Well I think a sense of humor reflects balance. It reflects a perspective on the world that is healthy. And people who don't have, well to be specific, as I often joke, I mean the two presidents that as far as I was concerned had no discernible sense of humor were Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter and I leave people to draw their own conclusions in terms of the outcome for those presidents. >> Now in thinking about some of the concepts that you put forth in your work on leadership, one of the things that struck me is when you came in as the head of the CIA, that was obviously a tumultuous time, the Soviet Union was splitting apart. You're an expert in that field. You had to have intense focus, and the same thing when President W. Bush asked you to come back as Secretary of Defense. The focus was on Iraq so you had intense focus on the Soviet Union in the first example, and Iraq in the second yet you had so many other tasks that you had to do. Help us understand how you balance that need for focus which many of us in the start-up community have to have with all the other tasks that you have to do, how'd you adjudicate? >> Well I said as I write in the book, you have to, sometimes you're faced with a situation where you need to make immediate changes and take immediate steps to deal with a crisis situation that's in front of you. But sometimes, simultaneously, you have to be making decisions about the long-term future. So for example, when I became CIA director in 1991, we were literally five weeks from the collapse of the Soviet Union. So it was not only how do I provide intelligence support for the president in terms of what's going to happen when the Soviet Union collapses, what happens to 40,000 nuclear weapons, will there be famine, will there be riots, et cetera, et cetera. But also the longer term task was how do I reorient the entire American intelligence community away from this singular focus on the Soviet Union that we'd had for 45 years to deal with a world where there many more and different kinds of challenges. So I was dealing with both a short-term crisis and the longer term issue. When I became Secretary of Defense, we were, for all practical purposes, losing two wars. In Iraq and Afghanistan. So my focus entirely as Secretary of Defense was on how do we turn those wars around. The president had made what I thought was a very courageous decision to surge troops into Iraq, so how do I get them there. The decision is one thing. Getting 30,000 troops there with their equipment and getting them into the fight and providing them the support was quite another. And then we also had the war in Afghanistan, so there was a singular focus there and as I write in the book, it was only when President Obama asked me stay on that I then broadened the aperture dramatically in terms of how do we change the way the Department of Defense gets managed and how we manage big weapon systems. How do we ring overhead out of our costs and take the longer term view of repositioning the defense department. >> So when you think back to 1991, you had to make a lot of predictions, you and your colleagues. About what would happen with the Soviet Union. And while I'm sure there was a lot of data, we talk a lot on the Cube about big data and big data analytics. How has data changed the decision making process in government at that level? Or has it? >> I think when it comes to intelligence, data provides you more information about capability. But big data and technology still cannot help you when it comes to intentions. I always liked to say that in the intelligence world, all the information we want to know can be divided into two categories. Secrets and mysteries. And unfortunately the mysteries are the big things. Will the Soviets invade Czechoslovakia? Will they invade Afghanistan? Is China prepared to go to war over the South China Sea? And there is no data that can help you answer those questions. You can, the data can help you identify the capabilities they can bring to the problem. Or to the issue. But in essence, when it comes to figuring out what other leaders will do, sometimes figuring out what our own leaders will do, there is no data that can help you solve that problem. >> I want to change the subject, ask you about term limits. And specifically my question is, do you think corporations should have term limits on their executives? >> I think these kinds of broad rules are a mistake. I think that there may be certain companies where that has value, but on the other hand, you've got leaders, and I write about 'em in the book, who've been leading institutions, whether it's a university or a company for 20 years. And they are still the most restless, the most innovative, the most entrepreneurial people in the company. Even at 75 or 80 years old. So to have some kind of a general rule that says everybody has to leave, I think is a serious mistake. I first joined corporate boards when I was 50 years old. After I retired as CIA director. I thought age limits on boards then were crazy. And I was the youngest person on virtually every board I was on. But I would see somebody forced to rotate off at 70, who at 70 was making a bigger contribution than a lot of members of the board at 50 or 55. So I think these general rules are a mistake. I think it has to be very company-specific and personality-specific. >> Well in the technology industry obviously you have some big names like Dell still around and the other Gates who did quite a good job and so forth. What about at lower levels within the organization. Still senior but what's your philosophy in terms of mixing things up, putting executives in different roles? Giving them a flavor for whatever, running finance or information technology or logistics, et cetera? >> Well let me frame it a different way. I would tell rising military officers that they were not, as Secretary of Defense in my view, they were not competitive for senior command if artillery was all they'd every done. Or if flying helicopters was all they had done. Or supervising people who flew helicopters. I wanted people who had a breadth of experience, who knew different aspects of the defense establishment. So they had a broader perspective of the various challenges that we faced. So I think for someone who is going to aspire to the most senior positions, having some exposure to the other parts of the organization is valuable. By the same token, it seems to me, it doesn't make any sense to take somebody who is a CFO and who has a particular skill and then put them in charge of the production line or something, I don't know, I've never run a private company but it seems to me you have to be pretty careful about that. Of taking somebody who is in a technical specialty and then trying to get them to do something else. But once you rise to a certain level in an organization, if you want to have the big job, it seems to me you have to have a variety of experiences that give you a broader perspective. >> I feel I want to talk a little bit about cybersecurity, you mentioned in the CIO event that you were just at the threat of cyber, I feel like in our industry it's trivial compared to some of the cyber threats that you've had to deal with. But nonetheless, there seems to be the recognition within the executive community that it's not about just keeping people out anymore, it's about recognizing that you have been hacked, you will continue to be hacked, it's about the response. What should be on board of directors' check list, if you will, with regard to cybersecurity? >> Well I think cyber and the risks associated with cyber and IT need to be a regular part of every board's agenda. I think that there is value in having it an integral part of risk management. And so whether you focus specific attention, in the audit committee for example, and then have briefings for the broader board. Probably is up to each company but, there's no question in my mind that when it comes to risk, for most companies today, cyber is right up there with natural disasters and business continuity and so on and needs to be a responsibility in terms of oversight for a board. >> With regard to the board's use it on, do you feel like there's an honest and frank conversation about cyber and has that changed? >> Well I do, I do, I think it's very different, I mean I think people really take it seriously. >> Yeah sometimes I get concerned that this fail equals fire mentality has led a lot of organizations to sandbag the risks, is that a fair criticism? >> Oh, what do you mean by that? >> By essentially say, I've got it covered. The risk of us getting hacked is low, we have it under control. Verus an open and frank conversation of no, we're getting infiltrated, we have to think about the response versus we can't keep the bad guys out, we can try, but... >> Anytime anybody in an organization tells me he's got everything under control, I am automatically skeptical. >> Okay fair enough. I got to ask you, I know we're tight on time, you've been gracious with your time, but I have to ask you about the current tone of the campaigns. Your reaction to that. It's kind of comedic. There's not a lot of comedy. Comedy in the narrative. What's your take as now an independent observer? >> Well I don't think it's funny at all, I think it's very serious, I worry about the fact that there's no real discussion of specific, of the many challenges that we face expect in the broadest possible terms. Foreign policies being discussed in almost primitive terms. And not very intelligently in my view. So in terms of the challenges that the country faces, which are quite extraordinary, it seems to me, the campaigns at this point, across the board politically, seem to me to be pretty superficial. >> So I want to end with coming back to the Passion for Leadership. You know I have to say the brilliant part of this book, don't hate me for this, but you basically laid out a lot of common sense ideas but the brilliance of the book was the way in which you weaved it together and gave examples. If I may, it was listen, respect, reward people, delegate, empower, have fun. Care from your heart. Check your ego at the door. Hire smart people, honesty, integrity. These are very common sense things, but you brought them all together in a way that had meaning, I felt like some of the classics, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, I feel like there's a lot of timeless things in here. Was that your objective or did you just write from your heart? >> Well both. It seems to me that as I looked back and realized that I had let these three very large institutions, the American intelligence community, the fifth largest university in the country, and the Department of Defense, that I actually had been able to change a lot. And in environments where people said that was impossible. And so it seemed to me worth sharing here's how I got it done. It can be done, I guess one of the most important messages I wanted to convey was that institutions can be reformed. They can be transformed. And made more efficient and more cost-effective and more user-friendly. And better serve both customers and citizens. At a time when most people just throw up their hands and say this is all impossible. The theme of the book is it's not impossible, it can be done, it has been done, it can be done in the future. >> Dr. Gates, thanks so much for coming on the Cube, taking your time and really appreciate you at this event and really welcome the feedback. >> Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our wrap right after this. Thanks for watching. >> Service management is helping GE connect...