Transcripts For KQED Charlie Rose 20140508

Time that pointed to this. We wanted to build that got to the substance but talk to the people. Rose we conclude talking about robots with Rodney Brooks. I think were going to see a lot of mixing of Material Science Technology with robots. We havent had that up until now. More like material thats in animals and humans and flexibility and complexity. And then the way we can interact with 9 robots is critically important. They understand us and we understand them. Rose louis c. K. , David Leonhardt and Rodney Brooks when we continue. Theres a saying around here you stand behind what you say. Around here, we dont make excuses, we make commitments. And when you cant live up to them, you own up and make it right. Some people think the kind of accountability that thrives on so many streets in this country has gone missing in the places where its needed most. But i know youll still find it, when you know where to look. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose louis c. K. Is here. Gq magazine calls him undisputed king of comedy. New york times says hes the performer on of the moment getting bigger and bigger. Louie is around a father who struggles to balance his comedy career with being a single dad. He returned after a nine month hiatus. He was the teaser for the new season. The all new season of louie on fx. Rose not only do they talk about you being the undisputed king of comedy. People love this show. You have deeper and broader comparisons to lenny bruce. Compared to bob dylan and being a philosopher king. Do you want to not talk about that because. Where does it come from and how do you see what you are. I dont know, im just a comedian, you know. I think thats better of what i am. I do a lot of other things. I have a tv show and i have, i act a little bit. But im a dad and im a comic, thats really mostly what i am. Anything beyond that i get a little uncomfortable. Im good at writing and stuff, im good at that stuff. Rose youve been doing that. Ive been doing that for a while. I love doing those things. I feel like im trying those things. I always feel like im just trying that. Rose but it takes a while to make a comedian, doesnt it. Yes, it takes a long long time. To make a really thoroughly, to a ripe baked ready for, you know. Ready to actually look at it from all angles. Rose what does it take, writing. It takes an understanding life through living it and being on stage an awful lot and not giving up, thats all. Rose and being prepared to fail. Oh yeah. Thats really the road, failure to the road to being a great comic. If you always kind of back away from the tough things and find easiest routes youll do okay sniffle failure is whatnot being funny. Maybe not in the moment. Rose maybe being funny but not everybody got it. You did a bad show. Theres a comfort factor that feels real good and its nice to wear it once in a while but if you stray off the road. Its like if youre on a vacation and youre seeing everything thats sort of laid out for you where everybody else has been. But if you take a road off to the side and you feel a little uncomfortable all of a sudden do you know what i mean. Theres no obvious tourist things but youre seeing and learning an awful lot. Rose but failure has been a subject of yours too. Yeah. Rose not just failure shapes you but you talk about failure. Yeah. Its a fascinating thing because most people avoid it. So if you can get to a place where you kind of like it, you know. I mean you like when you get out of it. Then its new territory, you know. Rose what do you learn as a comedian. In that 25 years, it takes 25 years. What is it you learn. You learn presence, you learn a oneness with the audience. Yes. Rose you learn a sense of who you are, what your own strengths are. Those are obvious to me and im not a comedian. Those come pretty quickly i think. The stage presence comes pretty quickly, depending on who you are. How to write jokes and how to generate material and know its going to work. That sort of comes, you know. First ten years youre building the skills. Rose the skills are what, timing, delivery. Yes, timing and delivery and material. Rose material that works. Generating the jokes because most comedyians you write your own stuff, you come up with your own thing. Connecting with an audience and then theres all sorts of other things that happen. You know, your best show keeps getting higher and higher, thats the first thing. How good you can do keeps increasing. But then the really important thing is how bad your worse show starts coming up. I think thats for any performer. Your worst show needs to come up close to the best show so that even on your worst night you still. Rose and you seize it. Yes. Rose your best show, the worst show should be much closer. The margin should be like that, yes. Rose how does that happen . Well, experience. Just experience. Just you know, theres hardly any situation that i havent seen, so you know when i feel an audience, you get an instinct for things. Rose did you have the power of observation always . You just had to learn how to shape it and form it. To see life with a comedic eye. Yes. Thats just the way i look at things and im very curious so i like to look at a lot of things. So im always out there looking at life and thinking about it so i guess thats just observation. Its being able to have people understand an observation even if its from a strange place or very personal. The thing is once you get really good at the skills and your bottom comes up, youre able to go try stuff thats probably not going to work and thats where you find, thats where you get more, thats where you get better and more interesting. The good comics do that anyway. Rose to read but is to know nothing close is as important as your children. Yes. Easily being a dad thats the most important job. Rose what do they think of the comedy. Do they love it. Do they say its not me dad, its funny how you use us but its not me. Well, the stand up that i do, ive changed the way i talk about my kids just because i like sharing my kids, i like showing them what i do. The first time i ever showed, i showed my oldest daughter a bit i used to do about hide and seek. Rose tell me that story. With her. Its about getting really frustrated that she would hide it in plain site literally. And i would have to pretend she wasnt, that she was hiding better. And on stage i would say what bs this was because i had to pretend shes good. And i would rail about it and get angry. And i showed to her when she was six. And she laughed a lot because her younger sister was like that now. Like she was having to patronize her younger sister. Rose she was doing the same thing you were doing to her. I know exactly how you feel. She was able to make that connection. And she although thought it was funny that i got so upset. She knew it was funny because in real life at home im not like that, you know. I mean i get upset like any parent does but not unreasonably so. So she thought rose did she say to her friends i have the funniest dad in the world. Geez, i dont know. What i hope is that her thoughts about me are as of a father. Im there for her when she gets off the bus from school, im there for her i take her home i cook her dinner we do her homework together and her sister same thing. So i take care of them. To me thats what i want them to remember. The work is something that hopefully when theyre like 18, 19, theyll google me and go wow this guy did a bunch of stuff while he was doing that, you know. Its not important to me that they, i like to model for them the good, a good life in my career as far as trying really hard and being responsible. I tell them when Something Big is at stake when it doesnt go well or when it does. I tell them that stuff as a role model you know but i could be doing the same thing if i was working in some Company Making widgets or something, you know. Rose whats interesting about you too is you seem to be fascinated by how show business works. Yes. Rose not only a student but understanding the Business Model, understanding, there was a story i read but once understanding how much you would charge for a night to a venue would affect how they did with ticket prices because they had to suffer if they had not enough people there, didnt fill it up. They had to charge tickets as a kind of safety valve. When you go work at a theatre as a comic or as a musician or whatever, you know, you try to get a big guarantee thats sort of the conventional thing. You get a bunch of money up front. What that means is that whether the show goes well or not you get to keep all that money. Thats asking a lot, you know. So in order to hedge against that and make that not such a big risk, the venue needs to spend a lot of money on advertising. Rose promotions. And they need to charge a lot of money for the ticket so that anybody that does buy tickets they get a quicker, you know. So in the end, you end up making less money. If the place is sold out, your guarantee will have caused so much money to be spent. Because once the place is sold out you divide the profits with the promoter. That you both dont make that much money and the audience pays a lot of money for tickets. But if youre willing to, i started to say lets not have a guarantee lets just both do our best. And then we could ask them to keep advertising budget lower. Rose and you have an investment in this. And also i didnt want it to be difficult to come see me. I guess really sick physically when i see that like a ticket of mine costs like 75. Thats just too much money. Rose also i mean you did an amazing thing to me. I certainly identified with it. When you put the thing on your website and you said you would charge 5. Right. Rose and i hope you wont parrot it. Please dont steal it. Rose pay 5 i hope you enjoy it but dont do it. David carr wrote a piece about this in the New York Times. I talked to him, i remember. Rose and it worked. Yes it did. Rose and it said something very very good. I kind of closed the gap. I also made the website very easy to use so i closed the gap between how easy it was to steel it and how easy it was to just buy it. And so you know it was just so much because you could go to my site and the 5 purchase was such a little bump in the road. It was almost like a viral video. Click on it and it was over. That was easier for more most people than to go to some pirate site and find a way to torrent. If something doesnt exist people will take it if its on the internet. They feel entitled to it if its on the internet. A lot of Companies Put stuff out on the stages and say you can only have it for one minute and well take it back. When i went to australia the first time they all were watching my show and it wasnt on tv there and it wasnt on itunes or netflix. Rose it was on the internet. Regular people not like crazy nerds, regular family. Rose they all what. They all stole it, downloaded it because were not letting them watch it. Were not giving them the opportunity. And they all told me if your show was available we would buy it. But its not. And the whole world knows about it but us doesnt seem fair so they just take it. Rose whats your relationship with comedians. Do you watch them, learn from them. Sure. Im always a student of comedy. I really love watching any comedian. Ill watch any comedian and just hear, you know its like studying the ocean and the waves. Rose its interesting to me because im fascinated by watching painters have told me they go to a museum and look at it more clinically. Youre studying it. Youre saying thats how he did that. Look at that i you do the same thing. Its hard to go out to, if i time to go like if i get a babysitter and run to a club and do a set i might watch the guy before me but then ive got to go home so i dont get to do it like i used to. When i started, i just devoured comedy. I went to clubs every night even if i was the, i would be on stage twice a week but i was at clubs seven nights a week. I watched every comedian i could, good or bad friend or foe, it didnt matter i just watched it and loaded it into my system. Rose im the same way about the internet. See how theyre doing it. If youre in london watch everybody you can see. Are they doing it differently, is there a style thats interesting because in the end you have to be yourself, you have find your own sense but theres always something to learn about the approach that somebody makes whether its baseball player watching another baseball player. Right. Because the baseball player is watching another player but hes watching baseball theyre all doing the same game you know so the game is, so the same stand up, whatever the comic is doing is not in a vacuum youre watching standup happen. Youre watching how audiences are reacting and the audience in such a mysterious animal to us, you know. So youre always kept guessing. There are some nights you go to a club and youre like i feel good im ready to have a good show but the audience has a change unanimous grumpy feeling to them or something and these people are all strangers to each other but theyre all sitting there we hate this show. How is it happening. Rose its all in the fun. Ill never see enough shows to go okay i get this. So its an unquenchable thirst. Rose you like chris rock. Hes a great guy and were both very similar. We grew up around the same time. Were both listening to van halen and led zepplin in two different worlds but in the same east coast feeling. And we always new each other coming up but then he gave me a great job working for him. You know i remember i was writing for his show and were all winning emmys, everybodys happy and i was next to him during a monologue rehearsal and he turned to me and said when are you going to direct and go out there and do your own thing. Im happy to have you here. I have a Minor League Team and im glad i have barry bonds. But you look at him and say hes benefiting from my work but he wanted me out on my own. Hes always been a big brother and little brother to me is he same time. Rose did it come to you at the moment and say that thought comes to you yourself, i got it. I know theres been a cumulative mass so that i can go out. I dont need to write for somebody else, i need to write for myself. I need to get out there and face an audience. I was doing stand up at the time and i was getting off that way performance wise but i was putting all this sort of like knowledge of how to make visual television known and stuff and i was doing that with chris and i had done it with conan and letterman and a few other people as a writer. But yes, around that time i started to think i should try to do this for me, you know. Rose it used to be said and david in an interview i did with David Letterman at the time at the kennedy honors, we talked about carson in a sense. Was anybody playing that. Not really. It used to be you did one set on carson and they called it a three ring sign and it was a thing. If he did this, that meant you know, youre going to fill every club in the country for at least a year. And then there was he would bru over to the couch. Thats how it was when i started out. Everybody was trying to get on carson and then trying to get on letterman. I was writing for dana car vey. And that changed your life. I did letterman i dont know, eight, ten times. And all these shows. Rose is it the same set going on for a while or do you constantly change it. You cant repeat it really. Rose between those shows, youre constantly at clubs. Like seinfeld and chris. Yes, i go there all the time. Rose would you stand up. Try and bunch of stuff out yes. Im always trying out new stuff at the clubs and chris comes in, jerry comes in. Theyre excited to see but the thing with standup the first joke you do and its not funny thats it right there. Chris and i weve done this you try to ground their expect. You try to do something that you know isnt going to please them. You get to work do you know what i mean. You go on stage because they see you on tv. Theres nothing useful going to come out of that. So you Say Something i dont know not insult the crowd but you Say Something to take them down or bore them for a minute and then you can get an honest read for the material. Rose what youve been doing for the last nine months youve been off. Ive been doing shows, theatres around the country, england, norway, a bunch of places and i diduiln hbo special that came out of that tour. Then i worked on the show. I work, i spent more time, i usually start working on the show like in january and it would go on the air in june. So i would do all the writing and everything and shoot it and cut it. Rose you write everything. Yes. But this year i started writing in april for a show that went on the air in may. So i spent a whole year on, i worked on the show for a whole year which is longer than i ever spent on it. So i did it more care employ this time. Rose is it like sculpturing. I was talking to a friend of mine recently about how well you know theres two kinds of sculptures, theres Edition Sculpture and its attraction. Edition is where you have, you keep adding clay until you get the right shape and subtraction is where theres a block and you cut away what isnt it thing so youre left with the thing. So with the show, its both. You start with addition shooting, your glomming pieces and youre compiling pieces. Editing is really the creation of the show youre carving away what doesnt belong. Its the negative space around it that defines it, you know. Rose its amazes me then you talk about, it takes a year to build a show. Yes. Rose thats a lot of sculpture, isnt it. Yes. And you just keep layering and making sure its good. Rose every moment is perfect . No, no. Its all wild. Its like, i mean now no more perfect than if youre growing like a garden, you know. Its not perfect. I mean maybe theres English Gardens where theres roses. Its more like a wild crazy womans garden and shes got too many dogs and stuff, you know. Rose how important is the beginning. When you first hit the stage. Pretty huge when you start, because if you dont have the right footing with the crowd, youre lost. But when you get to be a veteran it doesnt matter. I really doesnt matter. Rose you mean you walk out there and if you dont get them right there, youll get a pause because they know you and youre a big king of comedy. But you know that even for whatever reason you can get them. Yes, it doesnt matter. As a matter of fact, you can throw them back and get them back again. Thats where you get really great. Thats where you can get really good, you can just go you guys go away. You can piss them off and go yeah i know you seem like youre upset. Because when youre on stage you know the future. You control the future. They dont know what youre going to say but you do. Its a very unique thing that way. You cant, you can never fail if you think of it the right way. So once you get to that place where you can just kind of go backwards and forwards, anger them, make them happy, get them in a frenzy, bore them and you know how to control that. That gives you the ability to try a lot of different things. Rose what has the addition of movies made to you. The fact that woody allen, the fact that you win the american hustle. Yes. Rose pretty good directors in both cases. Yeah, yeah. Rose what does that add to you for you in terms of satisfaction. I loved working with both of those guys. Theyre both great and dynamic interesting to watch directors. So i like being a spectator so being on, i mean like going to woodyjasthe in the front, thata front row seat as you can get. Rose while hes making the movie. Youre in it, youre actually on a set do you know what i mean. Its look a floor seat at the celtics knicks game. These were short enough shoots. Rose you can do drama as well as comedy. I like to. I like to act a real scene where something reals going on. Davids movie was funny but it was more of a drama, i guess. Rose take a look at this. This is a scene from an earlier season of louie talking about the car he drives. Here it is. My life is really evil. There are people who are starving in the world and i drive an infinity. Thats really evil. There are people who just starved to death. Thats all they ever did. Theres people who are like bored and they go oh, im hungry and then they just die. And thats all they ever got to do. And meanwhile im in my car boom boom like having a great time and i sleep like a baby. Its totally my fault because i could trade my infinity for like a nice ford focus with no miles on it and i get back like 20,000. And i could save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with that money. And every day i dont do it. Every day i make them die with my car. Rose when was that, do you know. That was 2010 i guess. That was the first year of the show. I didnt know it was from the pilot. Rose it was from the pilot. 2009, 10, Something Like that. Rose chris rock told you make specials a masterpiece. Yes, you try to. Because they have longevity. You want to make them something. Rose almost a sculpture thing that we talked about. Yes. Species are something. I used to describe it like the way they make Samurai Swords or used to that they bang it and fold it and bang it and fold it and keep banging it. They pound on it and they fold it so theyre squeezing out all the oxygen do you know what i mean keep making it perfect. Every time you think ive got an hour no you dont. You write another hour and you fold it into that one and then get real. All the impurities and all the bad stuff and then keep doing that. I had a lot of process i used to do like everything that was my, you know your big closing bits. Your closing bit can make you very sluggish, you know. Kind of lazy because 20 minutes into your set. Its a 60 minute set usually or maybe 90. 20 minutes in youre now 20 minutes away from your big 20 minute closer when you know is not going to fail. Rose 20 minutes. When got a really good strong one. So 20 minutes in youre like i can coast for 20 minutes because ive got this thing so i started making life hard for myself by hoping with the closer. Lets open with the hardest material. Rose then youve got a long way to go. Then i have to follow my toughest material with stuff thats pretty weak and i have no closer. I have nothing to depend on. Theres just an open wound at the end. But if i did that, then this bit would just through need it would cauterize and become the closer and you put that at the beginning and you keep doing that until you have hopefully 90 minutes of closing bits where you could just flop them out and it doesnt matter. Rose that a other to be a prescription for everybody to take a hard look and make sure youre not coasting and turn it upside down. Someone once said about a Business Model you have to pull it up every ten years. You might as well. What would be the point of doing this kind of crazy stuff the youre not doing the best version of your. Rose can you imagine doing something in five years. Not whether its under the broad umbrella of comedy and film and entertainment but can you imagine doing something that would just never occur to you. Is part of your mind set today being as successful as you are i really want to push the boundaries and frontiers of whatever. Well, i would love to do new things. I love to learn, learning is my favorite thing. So something came across. I dont look at my career as like i want to do the biggest thing. So like if i get offered something lets like youre going to be the blockbuster, youre going to be the, you know, youre going to put on this animal suit and be this guy. Youre going to get paid 50 trillion. To me thats not interesting but something, yes. I mean i dont know what it is. Somebody said they want you to go do this, yes, i would, im excited for that. Rose thats where your head is. Yes. Go to hungary and make a tv station in hungary, all right, ill try it. I dont know. Rose this is another season from the show. Talking about being single. Here it is. Its not fun to be single at 41. I was married for ten years. Im divorced, i got two children. Its hard to start again after marriage. Its hard to really like look at somebody and go hey, maybe something nice will happen. You just dont. I know too much. About life. With any optimism. I know even if its nice, its going to lead. I know that if you smile at somebody and they smile back, you just decided that something is going to happen. You might have a nice couple dates but then shell stop calling you back or youll date for a long time or shell have sex with one of your friends or you with one of hers or youll get married and then get divorced and plight money and thats horrible or youll meet the person who you love infinitely and you even argue well and you Grow Together and you have children. And then you get old together and then shes going to die. [laughter] thats the best Case Scenario is that youre going to lose your best friend and then just walk home from dagostinos with bags every day and wait for your turn to be nothing also. Rose what are we expecting for the new season. Well its a very different season than the other three. Theres bigger stories. I have one story thats six episodes long. And its, and then theres another one thats two episodes. Its all connected this year. I mean each episode stands alone and has its own little story. Rose what does that mean. Well when i write this show because my network does, fx doesnt make me turn scripts in, this dont read it first. Rose they dont give you notes either. No they dont. When you turn in scripts to a network means you have to finish it and define it all and have it all be very neat heres episode one, heres episode two. But i just write stories however long they are. Theres one story that kept going and it was like a hundred pages. So i just shot it. We didnt care, we didnt say when we were shooting it what episode were shooting. We just shot the hundred pages. Then there was another one there was 60 pages and one that was four pages and i just 14509 the stories and it doesnt matter how they fit together. When i edited this ones six andahalf episodes really and this ones three. So it kind of, most people watch a whole season just all at once now anyway so it doesnt really matter. Rose its great to have you here. Same here, great to be here, thank you charlie. Rose louis c. K. Back in a moment. Stay with us. Rose David Leonhardt is here, hes a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times. He has papers from the Washington Bureau chief. Last month the times lost a new digital designation for readers hoping to better understand the news. It is called the upshot. The tone is conversational and data driven. Its the story of the dampening reality of americas middle class. David leonhardt is editor of upshot and im pleased to have him at this table. Thank you charlie, great to be back. Rose tell me the idea behind upshot. I spent six years as an economic columnist for the times. Ones of the thing i discovered during the period lets saturation of information out there. To help people understand whats going on you need to go deeper and to be needier if you will. Some people say long hair. And you need to talk to them in their own language. You want to go deep deep into the substance but then you dont want to talk like an expert. You want to talk to people as if you treat everyone like a smart nonexpert. And from that experience, i came to think theres an opportunity to do this more broadly than just in economics and it wasnt just me. We had otherring periences at the times that pointed towards there. What we wanted to do is build a site that would get deeply into the substance. But talk to people in their own language. Rose is it fair to say that in the last year or two, digital journalism has arrived. Weve had a series of conversations on this program about walt mossberg, bill keillor, you. In a sense that people, its almost like theyre not leading the newspaper to do what they want to do, what they do online, theyve leaving the newspaper, youre staying but its the same idea. You do something different, perhaps because digital gives you the opportunity to do something different. Yes. Rose not just the transparence of what was happening on to a digital platform. It is unique to the digital platform. No, i agree. If you look at the New York Times for a long time the times in the process of building what may be subjectively i think is the best website in journalism. But even at the times it still came second to the paper. When we hired young people to work on the website we would have these conversations internalliment we hired them to work on the website. Weve got to be careful theyre going to try to drift to the paper. This department that hired them to work online has this conundrum if theyre successful theyll lose them. That doesnt happen anymore. We hire people to work on digital parts at the times and they dont want to run away and work for the paper. People working for the paper are running to do digital. You listen to Joel Abramson talk and you have no illusion at all about what the center of the times is, they have the paper and the website. They actually have more readers online. It really now is the center of what we do. Rose its the center of what we do, its not something where we put what we do. No, thats right. And i think thats an important change. So for a long time what were doing is we took the journalism youre putting in the may and we said oh wow we can put that on a web sight. We said wait a second we dont have to wait until the next may we can put the journalism we would on in the paper online earlier. I used to write stories about job reports and it would come out at 8 30 and i would say i can write that story and put it on at 9 30. Thats progress and an ambitious form of progress. What were realizing is wait a second the web allows us to do journalism better. I reject this idea that journalism is somehow in a crises. We have challenges for our Business Model but journalism is better than its ever been before. When you look at some of the work weve been able to do in our first few weeks at the upshot, you look at some of the stuff the times has done in the last few years. We couldnt have done that journalism a few years ago because it depends on being digital. I mean the most viewed article in the history of the New York Times is the dialect quiz. Where you answer 25 questions about how you speak and it tells you what regional dialect thats similar to. We literally could not have done that before we had a website. We just could have put a little chart. Rose right. Who was the audience. I really think my audience as smart. So when i rose thats exactly what i think. Ive always said that. Theyre smart but theyve not had the opportunity to assimilate as much information as youve had. And a doctor doesnt have time to spend four hours on his day or a teacher doesnt have time but theyre interested, they care. They dont just care because how it affects their live, they care because theyre engaged with people. One of the things thats important to point out here we had this bubbling up of new sites broadly of this kind theyre all different. Some people suggested its some kind of revolution. I dont think its a revolution i think its an evolution. Weve seen the growth of journalism like this over the last 20 or 30 years. I think quite frankly some of the same stuff you were doing at this table, right. You were engaging people on highly substantive issues but youre talking in a voice that someone who wassable part of the mid east Peace Process or at the last fed meeting. Rose youve chosen to emphasize facebook when most of your peers are looking at other things too. Yes. So we journalists love twitter. It is tailormade for journalists. You go on, you throw out ideas, you hear ideas. We dont tend to spend as much time on facebook. Facebook feels more like the kind of thing wed go home after a day of work. We tweet about our articles and we go home and post photos of our kids or of ourselves when were in eighth grade. Thats a mistake. If you look at the numbers, face book is an enormously important driver of traffic in the media. Twitter is important too. Im not saying twitter, im a huge twitter fan, i love twitter and im on it every day. But its easy to get journalists to be on twitter. What im trying to do with our new group is nudge people a little bit more to use face book because a lot of our audience is there and not only rose youre looking to do what with facebook. Engage with readers. So ive done two chats on facebook in the last week andahalf in which i published an article and then i went on to facebook and readers got to say hey i disagreed with that bart of it or hey did you think about looking at this part. Engage with readers. See what other people are saying. One of the things weve been talking about here is the importance of clarity. Facebook is a place where you can hear readers say hey i dont understand why this is happening in the economy right now. And when i hear that i realize wait a second theres an opportunity for us. We can explain it to people. Rose some ask why did you stay at the New York Times. Ill just take when mossberg left, bill keller left the New York Times. Why did it under the umbrella of the New York Times. First of all i mean i can give you the intellectual answer but ill start with the emotional answer. I love the New York Times, i grew up reading it and i love working there. The intellectual answer is the times is having more. We have a huge digital audience. We have this incredibly talented graphics staff. One of the best things working with the New York Times is wet getting to work with the graphic he had urs. I work with amanda cox and kevin kelly, a whole team of some of the smartest journalists i ever met. The times has enormous strength. The reason traditionally why its a mistake to innovate while being part of a Legacy Organization is the organization is afraid of innovation. They say we cant do that, that will cannibalize our existing business. And what rose walt expressed some of that based on his own experience walt modelberg on th i understand it. If you have been running a es about for 50 years, 150 years and youve been successful and someone saying lets do things different and its going to cannibalize our business of course the initial instinct is now. But what people fail to realize this isnt journalism its true of the Car Companies its true of everything. You dont get to choose quhoo youre going to be cannibalize in times of big change. You get to choose whether youre one of the cannibalizers or you leave it all to your rivals. My bosses at the time have been so encouraging of innovation. They say we want you to experiment. We want you to try new things. And so from my perspective, the idea being able to do it not only with the huge strengths of the times but also doing it at the time when the time says go try new things. Go make mistakes. If they dont work out, well change. If they do work, maybe they spread to the whole news room. Its deeply exciting and its also a lot of fun. Rose good luck, congratulations. Great to have you. Thank you for having me. Rose David Leonhardt, upshot. Back in a moment. Stay with us. Rose Rodney Brooks is here. In 1990 he cofounded irobot and if you know what the rumba vacuum and what robots are then you know what he does. Hes also the former director of m. I. T. Computer science and Artificial Intelligence Lab Treatment hes currently the founder, chair are and chief Technology Officer of we think robotics. The Company Makes industrial robots for small to medium size manufacturers that couldnt otherwise afford them. Time magazine named its too robot baxter one of 2012s mow innovative inventions. Im pleased to have Rodney Brooks at this table. Tell me how rea bottle will influence the way we think about technology. Were going to so robots in our lives that we cant imagine right now. Think back to 1980. You think its weird because computers are these big things with spinning discs. Now the 90s with processors. We have robotic elements in our lives which is going to make the life easier for us as we get older. This whole self driving car thing. Whats really happening is cars are turning to robots and its going to let the only drive longer. I dont think well have totally self driving cars for quite a while but because theyre safer and they know theyre trying to do better. Rose you know from ted talk because you were from the audience believes they serve an incredible function they will save lives. When you look at how many people are killed in automobile accidents its a huge factor. Absolutely. Theyll save lives and theyll give us dignity to be able to control our own lives. Robots in general, they ought to control our own lives longer. Rose how they will do that in the future. Its incredible demographic shift happening where theres going to be a lot more elderly people and lot less working age people. So we the babyboomers are going to want to stay in our homes longer than our parents generation did but theres not going to be people to provide us services by having robotic help around the houses we live independently longer and with more dignity. Rose whats the more important break through in terms of creating robots that can do more. Is it software. I think its the realization you have to make the robots easy to use. Weve had this sort of engineer philosophy beforehand that robots are complicated. But in putting robots into the u. S. Military on the ground for bomb disposal during afghanistan and iraq. We had to make it easy for young kids out there with bullets around their heads to use the robots. In my own case irobots putting robots into people homes. They had to be easy to use. Rose a lot of them sold every year. Im not with the company. I believe its a million a year. Rose tell me about baxter. Yes. Baxters a robot thats meant to go into factories, u. S. Factories where were selling it and the key thing is its easy enough for an ordinary factory worker to figure out how to get it to do a task in a matter of minutes instead of having to understand six dimensional vectors, they show the robot what they want it to do. Grab its arms move it around show it objects. And then to work closely with. So industrial row bots, like the main frames many decades ago with the capital purchase theyre trying to make the pc of robots for factories. Rose this video, this is a video demonstration of baxter at work. Baxter is a great tool for unpacking transferring parts and packing. With baxter, you can pack and keep counts of how many parts you packed. You can also pack parts in a particular order, a grid with a kit. For example, create a mix pack. If you have two arms you can pack two boxes at the same time or pack a whole box with one arm and give an associate time to remove the previously filled box and replace it with a new box. Rose its amazing to me too is any modern Assembly Line and see things like that are taking place. Then there was the question of when you look at Artificial Intelligence. Is there a marriage between the two coming. Oh yeah. These robots like baxter have some Artificial Intelligence. Rose some. Whats the future of that . When you blue sky that, where will we be in 25 years in terms of the merger of robots in Artificial Intelligence. I think were going to have a lot of very intelligent robots in all aspects of our lives. Rose mainly in manufacturing in household. Manufacturing is a place right now where you can have a return on investment. And thats very important. I think its very important to be bringing manufacturing back to the u. S. But in the longer term its going to infiltrate many aspects of our lives. Rose the future depends on what . In order in the evolution of robots, what will be the crucial ingredient . I dont think theres one crucial ingredient apart from intelligence in general is going to really drive things. But i think were going to see a lot of mixing of Material Science Technology with robots. We havent had that up until now. More like material thats in animals and humans in terms of flexibility and complexity. And then the way we can interact with the robots is critically important. They understand us and we understand them. You go to your atm machine and every time you go it asks do you want to speak spanish or english. These robots have to be, have to know who we are. Rose in terms of the u. S. , are we way ahead of the technology of robots or is it shared by china or by other. Intelligent robots i think the u. S. Is way ahead and thats really been driven by the advanced research project. Rose how have they played a role. They funded research at the major universities and that had various challenges. The set of challenges for self driving cars led to the famous google car and the challenge for rescue operations in the fukushima type situation. Rose back to baxter. Baxter has eyes. It has representations of eyes on the screen. Rose why is that. Because when its going to reach have it looks first and then reaches. If youre nearby, you dont have to train people. It looks when its going to reach so it doesnt surprise you. Rose it signals whats going to happen. Thats why it has eyes. Rose it costs what 25,000. 25,000 and its not made in the u. S. Rose where is it made. Its made all over. 19 different locations for subcomponents and one final assembly so its really producing about 20 different states. Rose theres also this. When people talk about robots and how fast theyre coming on stream what they can do, others say wait a minute, does this mean jobs will be lost to robots and what are the consequences of that. And can you retrain people who might be doing what robots are doing to do Something Else that robots cant do. In the manufacturing domain the average age of a manufacturing worker in the u. S. In the 50s people dont want to work in factories and do the same sorts of jobs that happen in chinese factories because theyre incredibly minded. Rose and long hour too. I see robots where ordinary factories can train as a tool to become more productive. We put them in factories we see workers come up and say can you get the robot to do this horrible job i dont like and thats the way people are looking at them. Rose fake us to health care what you mate do. I think these two things. Theres the manual labor in hospitals, you know. There are robots that are leaving the carts around with dirty dishes in hospitals. People are experimenting with baxter by the way, to do all the take the surgical instruments and go through the cleaning of them and packaging them for new operations. Because getting those getting people to do those its sort of boring jobs. And theres less people who work in those sorts of jobs. So theres the, and then youll let the nurses who interact with the patients have more time to interact with patients getting rid of the dull part of the job. I do see were going to see robotic devices. My mother needs people to help get her to bed. She has no control when she goes to bed. She has to wait for people to come help her. If she had a robotic device to help her get into bed they would then have control over her life. Rose after we move along on that technology the people working on how your brain can control those things by thought will double the impact. Yes. Exactly. We see that right now in terms of well people who lost an arm or a leg and are now able to walk. Theyre not prosthesis anymore theyre sensing what the people are going to do. Rose theyre sending signals to nerve endings. And sensing the environment around them and figuring out what to do. Right now thats something that we give to people who have suffered an injury. But who knows in the future, we might be wanting to wear robotic suits which gives us super strength for all sorts of jobs. Rose jay bezos is one of the investors in we think robots. Right. Rose how does amazon use robots. Amazon bought a Company Called kiva systems about a year, two years ago which brings the show to a human who picks out the objects to be packed. Because we know how to make robots move in straight lines. Were not good at being able to reach have a robot reach into a bin and grab something out. So the kiva system instead of having a person along shelf after shelf just brings the shelf to the person. Thats what we can make robots do today and let the person do the thing we cant get robots to do yet. So theyre putting them in and then amazon is putting them in the new Fulfillment Centers as they built the one. Rose whose making the most progress in Artificial Intelligence . I dont mean country. Is it m. I. T. Theres a collection. Rose you were going to say right now with a. Right now its machine learning. Machine learning is having a great run because weve got the whereabouts. This incredible data society all this stuff you can gore and look at and generalize over. With a big machine fashion right now and its a fashion in that its making progress. Rose youre saying theres a lot of focus there in terms of Artificial Intelligence. Thats where the big progress is happening right now in rose why is that . Because weve got this enormous competition with the claude, a researcher can harness 16,000 machines, 100,000 machines looking at big big data sets in ways we couldnt imagine. Rose thank you rodney. Great to see you. Thank you. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org this is nightly Business Report with Tyler Mathisen and susie gharib. Brought to you in part by thestreet. Com featuring stephanie link who shares her investment strategies, stock picks and Market Insights with action alerts plus. The multimilliondollar portfolio she manages with jim cramer. Learn more about thestreet. Com nbr. Upbeat outlook. Federal reserve chair janet yellen says the economy is growing but shes worried about the housing and job markets and gave no hints on when Interest Rates might start to rise. Yahoo s windfall. What might do it with that cash from alibaba . Will any be returned to shareholders . And hitting the books. Student loans were set today. And guess what, borrowers will pamo