Creating Tailwinds for Growing Cutting Edge Technology Ecosystems with Celia Merzbacher #18

Hello, everybody. This is David Goldsmith. And welcome to another edition of Redefining Tomorrow. It's here where we discuss topics that may redefine your future, that may redefine how we live on this planet or any other type of redefining you might consider a quote that I've lived by since I've been a young boy. I've got quite a few of them. And one of them is this. You can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. And today we're going to be redefining tomorrow. What we're going to be exploring is this amazing topic, creating tailwinds for growing cutting edge technology ecosystems. Oh, my God. How apropos for this time. Well, it's actually for many times over history, but I think today this is going to be extremely exciting. And we have with us Celia Merzbacher. How are you, Celia?

I'm fine, David. Good to be with you.

Celia is the director of Quantum Economic, the Quantum Economic Development Consortium at SRI International. And throughout her history, she's been involved in emerging technologies, developing public private partnerships, focusing on innovation, and establishing programs to grow a diverse stem, a diverse workforce for, I would assume, the tomorrows of our world. So I'm assuming you have an outline for us today?

I do. Can you please share three points?

Wow, three. Go ahead. What are. What are they?

Number one is technology advances. Period.

Perfect. Number two.

Number two is how technology advances.

Advances.

And number three, how to accelerate technology advances.

I've got. I'm so used to six, seven points that are so long, I'm almost like, where's the rest? But I know you well enough that we're going to have amazing content in here. So let's. I'm ready to learn. Let's start with this. Number one. Technology advances.

Okay, so technology advances. I think of this as sort of the. Whereas part of the discussion that we're having. So it sort of is my presumption that technology does advance and that we live in a world that's really dependent more and more on technological advances. Dependent for economic growth, for national security, for public good, for personal use, personal benefit, entertainment, all of the above. Technology, we're swimming in it all the time. I want to acknowledge that there are downsides, misuses are possible, unintended consequences of new technologies. And all of that requires our attention. And we should be considering that as we develop new technologies, there may be need for regulation and governance, but nevertheless, technology advances. It's inevitable, in my opinion. And in fact, I think it's really part of being human because Technology is really a tool, and humans make tools and use tools. And so I think it's important for what we're talking about to agree that technology advances.

It's interesting that you say it that way, because I actually, the first time I read it the way when you said it, I thought of technology advances.

Where advancements.

Like, advancements. Yes. And that was. And I say, okay, where are we going with this? So it's interesting just that you started off this way, going, technology advances in a different context.

Right. So here I'm using it as a verb. Right. And that was intentional. But it's action. I mean, advancing technology requires action, and it involves the action of a lot of different. It's a somewhat overused word, but it's somewhat useful. And that is stakeholders. So I'll get into that a little bit more when we get to the next part. But so lots of stakeholders have an interest in advancing technology. So those stakeholders include governments. They include those who produce goods and services. Obviously they use technology. And even at the individual level, so that's this sort of hierarchical, governments being massive organizations. Then the producers can be small, mid large companies and businesses, and then actual individuals who have problems and needs. Right. The individual, the guy in the garage, may come up with something innovative and advanced technology. So there's lots of different parts of this, what I call the ecosystem that are feeding into advancing technology. And you can pick your favorite, whatever it is, and look back at the way that things happened and how the particular technology emerged, and you'll likely see roles and contributions from a lot of these different stakeholders. So that sort of is my premise, I guess, that technology advances and that it's somewhat inevitable and we should embrace it, we should manage it. And there's lots of different actors and stakeholders involved.

There's an interesting individual. I was going to say character. He's also probably would not be insulted by me saying that. His name is Chris Roofer out of California. He started a company called Morningstar Packaging. You probably never heard of him, Morningstar Pack. This guy, he looked at tomato sauce and he looked at how it was transported across the country, in the United States at least, or anywhere in the world. You made a sauce and then you transported it. And one day he said, why don't we just take the water out? And he completely revolutionized the entire industry and created tomato paste. He then created a vertical operation. He has, I think, 4,000 employees today. There's no management structure. Everybody's on the same level. It's really kind of cool. But one thing he shared with me one day was David. Humans need food, water, shelter, transportation, communication, and entertainment since the beginning of time. He said, what's the one thing that changes? The word is technology. Technology is always evolving, but we as humans still need food, water, shelter, transportation, communication, and entertainment. And we've had that since the beginning of time. So, yes, I would understand that the technology advances because that's how we differentiate one day from the next.

Yep. Okay, so that's the sort of short intro on number one, Technology advances. So then the second, and I guess each of these sections is progressively more lengthy. Number two was how technology advances. Okay, so the subtitle here is Sort of Light Bulbs. Eureka. Aha. This is kind of what we think of when we think of technology advancing. Like, there's some discovery, there's some breakthrough. There's, you know, somebody has a real light bulb that goes off, and that's definitely part of it. But those moments are really the coming together of elements and knowledge and underlying technology. Often moments motivated by a problem or a need. And there's lots of examples of simultaneous discovery happening because all the pieces were there and the time was right, in a sense. And a person skilled in the art, if you will, could come up with that idea. And I was just reading earlier about who got credit and who didn't for the invention of the telephone, for instance. And there's actually been. There were lawsuits, and we think it's Alexander Graham Bell, but in fact, there were others who had the same idea, and he was the first patent, but he wasn't the only one to make that invention. So there's these technological advances happen, but they are really happening on top or of a platform or a foundation of other technologies and knowledge and problems that motivate, or you're, you know, whether you think of it as a foundation or you're swimming in a sea of it or whatever. And so there's really. This is kind of gets to this whole idea of creating tailwinds, like, how can we as a society. And later, I'll probably focus mostly on what government can do to. To make it more likely that advances will happen or they'll happen more efficiently. So we have to understand a little bit about how they happen in order to make them happen more efficiently. So that's what we're talking about here.

Okay.

So there's a book that I really like, and it's popular with people who think about innovation policy. It's called Pastor's Quadrant. Have you ever heard of that?

No, I haven't. And I was saying, I'm hoping I did, but tell me more.

So it's written by Donald Stokes, it was published in 1997, and he came up with a construct for thinking about the type of research that happens and that government funds. So he was coming at it from a sort of what should government be focusing on with its research investments? And I'll talk in a moment about the sort of existing linear model for thinking about it. But he came up with a two dimensional model and on one axis he put the quest for fundamental understanding. So. And on the other axis was consideration of use, or, you know, how practical the research was. And on the high quest for fundamental understanding, but not so motivated by its use, was the research of people like Niels Bohr, you know, looking at quantum mechanics and the physics of the nucleus. And at the time that was not because there was some practical use, he was just trying to understand the physics of matter. Yep. On the other axis, this axis called consideration of use, you have at the high end, but low on the quest for fundamental understanding, people like Thomas Edison, who really didn't know or understand or care why something worked necessarily. He just kept, you know, trying things and trying different filaments until he got a good light bulb. And he was smart, presumably, and he knew something about materials and engineering, but he was really an experimenter and not trying to come up with fundamental laws of nature. I would agree. Yeah. Yep. So at the corner where you have both high quest for fundamental understanding and consideration of use or inspiration by need, is Louis Pasteur, who is considered the father of microbiology. And he made fundamental breakthroughs in biology, but he was motivated by industrial processes and fermentation and how to actually manufacture in biological systems or using biological systems. So he was doing basic research in a sense, but it was for a purpose. And so that's a really powerful combination. And I think one way to accelerate, and we'll get to this more later, advancing technology is for the people who are doing the research to understand what the problems are and bringing together this consideration of use and quest for fundamental understanding. Now, these linear models that are often relied on are there for a purpose. They're appealing and they're useful and they generally have. They're one dimensional. So you start with basic research and then you take that and you do more applied research and then you start doing development and prototyping and then once you have that, you scale it up and then you work on manufacturing and you actually make a product and sell it, and that's the end of the process. And There are a lot of examples of those kinds of ways of thinking. There's a scale that was developed originally by NASA for their work on developing space systems called the technology readiness levels. It goes from one to nine and one is pretty much just what I described, basic research. And it goes through and TRL 4 through 6, you got prototypes and then you have to demonstrate them in the lab and then you demonstrate them in the field, and then you demonstrate them in space. And you've gone through the whole technology development process very one dimensional. And you can only progress in a sense from one to the next. You graduate along that line. And in the Defense Department they have ways of categorizing their spending. They use a scale that goes from 6.1 to 6.7. They have seven levels. 6.1 is the Department of Defense investment and basic research going for presumably research that doesn't have a particular application, but in an area that's important to their mission. 6, 7 is called operational system development. So you've got this stepwise progression of developing technology by going from one step to the next. And there's even attempts to connect them to a certain extent and move things from one to the next, which is. Makes sense. So this is all sort of by way of explaining and understanding how technology develops. And these linear models are really so.

And let me jump in because I'm trying what came to mind when you said it is a little bit different than the linear. So maybe you'll explain it in a moment, but just so you might be able to address it going forward. When you do basic research for the purposes of research to discover something you don't know, A, if you're going, I'm not going to do A, B and C, but then it might get lost. You often find, don't discover what you're discovering or planned on discovering. You discover something different than what you want to discover. And you do discover something that might have some use and that in and of itself can get you to one step. Yet in the form of developing new technologies and advancing. Oftentimes you need sometimes disconnected research projects that don't that are, you would never assume have any value together. And until that piece of the puzzle is developed, you can't move ahead anyway. So if you take linear and you say we're going to develop in 1, 2, 3, 4, but let's say you do still need Niels Bohr's his thinking in order to have gotten there also. So there's a, there's a convergence of many of these fundamental constructs in order to do this applied type system.

Absolutely.

Did I say that? You understand what I'm saying? There's a.

Absolutely. So there's a nice. You can go and find probably pictures on the web that show this very graphically. Like if you take the mobile phone there. I think it was envisioned by Apple and Steve Jobs and he knew what he needed in order to make it. And one of the things he needed was really tough glass. The touchscreen needed to have certain characteristics and that material did not exist and he went and found it and I don't know whether he was able, I think Corning or some.

It was Corning.

Yeah, yeah. So he, he found it or he got a company that met the challenge and made it for him. So he knew what he wanted and he had to wait until he kind of pulled together not only the microprocessor with a certain power and size and etc. But all those pieces that needed to come together. So again, he had a very vision of the final product, but he didn't have the capability to make it yet. In other instances it's much more like you're saying or you started, I think I was thinking you were sort of going to say that. Well, serendipity, you know, can play a role.

That's what I was. That's kind of where I was getting at. You, you, he, he. At this point, what you're saying, Steve Jobs, but he's also building on the shoulders of so many other people and, and luckily at the time in which he wanted to do this, microprocessors got small enough. There had to be a series of things that happened that are out of his control.

Yes. And I think this is an example. The semiconductor world is sort of full of examples like this because of the power of Moore's Law and the shrinking size, but increasing capability made possible applications that were not. And because Moore's law actually continued, it was almost predictable. And so there are, I think examples of companies that built planned on future technology capability before it was even available, knowing that it was going to progress the way it did or assuming that it would.

I this, this week we're working on a. Call it a statement of work. It's more of a feasibility we're trying to do for our Project Moon Hut. And one of the things that the. The team had put together some pages, but then I took it, it was five, four pages long and I went to 22. And what I did is I did this extrapolation of what I believed that within three years and five years, and nine years, and 12 years has to happen. Price compression, markets, exposing to new innovations, processor speed or new materials. And I'm trying to intersect the future, which I don't know will happen, but I'm hoping, based upon my knowledge, that it will. So that's kind of what you're saying, correct?

It is. And you know that it is hard to predict the future. And that's another thing that was for decades unusual about the semiconductor industry, that it was on a trend that nobody really knew for sure it was going to maintain, but it did. And so I think it's more difficult. And now I'm playing in this world of quantum technology and quantum computing and we can't really prevent project very. There's a lot of uncertainty as to when capabilities are going to be realized because there are a lot of advances and hurdles that need to be overcome. And just like what you're talking about, you can, you have to plan, you have to say, here are the barriers and gaps that need to be overcome. And then, you know, hopefully, especially if you put it out and we'll talk a little bit later about, you know, how to accelerate progress, you've got to somehow get through crowdsourcing, through getting the word out that, you know, here's an opportunity, a need, inspiring school kids, whatever, to overcome those barriers.

Great. And I'm glad you mentioned that you will go over those, those areas, because that's where my mind is going in, in 2021 is how do you leverage the ecosystem more than just the ecosystem that you're used to? And I'm hoping at some point, just because you and I have never really discussed quantum computing, at some point, if you could feed it in or what you're engaged in, what the work is. So I have a better understanding of where you're taking, for example, quantum, whatever you can share.

Sure, yeah. I think that'll fit in toward the end. Okay, so. So back to our sort of linear model. And it's really, it is sort of baked into our system, our innovation system, in a sense, partly, maybe out of convenience, it's a way of dividing things up. 6.16263. But we have the academic world that does basic research. They produce ideas and to some extent intellectual property, and they produce talent. Right. They educate students. And these research and education are sort of yin and yang. You can't have one without the other. And so government funding, you know, supports this whole enterprise. It's really predominantly government funded. And it's a mix of fundamental inquiry, the blue sky research, the Niels Bohr type work. And by the way, the fundamental principles that Niels Bohr developed became the basis for things like the laser and MRI and very practical things. But it just wasn't what was motivating him. So it's great we've got fundamental inquiry going on and we also through that have what we think of as youth inspired research, fairly high risk. So academic research isn't expected to deliver return on investment in the form of dollars. But so that's sort of step one, step two I think of as well. Okay, you've got new knowledge and ideas. How does that get out? Well, you've got startups, you've got incubators. More and more universities have incubators on campus, you have corporate R and D, of course in house. And different sectors of technology rely on different paths. So you're probably sort of aware that in the biotech space there's a heavy reliance on startups that then if once they develop something they get to certain stage of proof of efficacy or sort of product capability, that they'll be acquired by a larger company because it's a very expensive process to develop.

It's, it's baked into the design. It's, let's see what all of these smaller entities will create and then we'll cherry pick those that are valuable to us.

Right. And so that's evolved in that sector. In others it doesn't work that way so much. I mean in the semiconductor industry, you know, you don't have fabs in your garage. So there's, we don't certainly parts of the ecosystem just don't make sense for a small startup to do. So it depends on the sector, how ideas get sort of into the pipeline. There's more private investor investment at this stage and that can be in the form of everything from self invested friends and family, angels, venture capital, private equity and so on. And then if something is proven viable, then a market will grow, the business grows, there may be an acquisition or the company itself may just grow again. That's sort of the linear vision, I guess of technology advancing and getting out into practical application. But the pathways are often much more complex and you alluded to this. So if you, there are studies that have done look backs at how a large market that today is a, you know, whatever number, hundred million dollars or billion dollars, whatever, how it came to be and what were the sources of investment and paths and when did it maybe you know, did it have some roots in academic research, when did it jump into the industry or into the private sector and so on. There's some interesting studies that have been done looking back, which is very informative. And also you get a lot of iteration. So something will go forward to a point and then you'll realize, wait, there's something that I need to kind of get a little bit more understanding of. And you almost go backwards and then forwards again. So there's a combination often of what I think of as push and pull. So the push is I made this, you know, fabulous material. It's lighter but stronger, and I don't know what it would be necessarily good for. So I'm going to kind of push it out there and people will figure out this could be great for something practical, that I don't know what it is. And then there's the pulse kind of version where somebody says, I've got a problem. And are you familiar with Innocentive and platforms like that?

Yes, but I'd like you to go into them the way you see them.

So this is Innocentive is sort of hosted. It's a sort of crowdsourcing approach, but it's basically people posting challenges with a prize associated with them. And they can be small or they can be really big. And so it can be a company. Some government agencies have used the platform to say, we've got a problem. We need the ability to clean up oil spills under these conditions. And they give a very specific set of capabilities that are sought. And they say, whoever can demonstrate this, we will give them $200,000 or whatever they feel is a reasonable amount. So that's a pull. Right. That's somebody putting out a problem, saying, I need a solution and I will pay for it.

And to give another example to piggyback on that is when I. There's a lot of this going on in the tech sector when it comes to software development, we need something that's $20,000. Solve it and we'll pay you 20. So it's a gamification to some degree. It's an open environment for companies to be engaged in and there's a winner take all often. Or there's multiple levels of winners that technology can come out of it.

Right. And by putting it out there, you tap into performers or inventors or developers who might otherwise not be part of the pipeline at all. Right. And also someone who like the oil spill one. There was an example of somebody who I think was in the hair business, barber or something, and knew that hair is very absorbent of oil, and they came up with some way of taking hair and making it into these booms or something that would really be super absorbent. So, you know, that's somebody who you never would have gone to for a solution. But when they heard about it, they put two and two together and came up with something so. And often. And this is really kind of interesting, people will spend more coming up with a solution than the prize. The amount of the price.

Yes.

So it's kind of a good ROI in that sense.

Well, the way my mind jumped was what you're doing when you ignite this type of thinking is you don't just ignite the ecosystem you're in, you ignite multiple ecosystems. And within each one of those ecosystems, these individuals pull on new sets of people. New, if you want to say your. I don't know if you gave a term for them in the beginning for new principles that are developed for other ecosystems. So there's an ecosystem, let's say there's an ecosystem for the development of backpacks and someone had developed a new type of machinery and no one would have ever thought in the ecosystem of that question to use backpack machinery. Oh, here's a great one. Was what's the name of the shoe company? There's Under Armour. The heels for the shoes, the sneakers for women were created and outsourced by a company that created bras in China. Was the guy who handled all of the pipeline, the manufacturing in China. Hong Kong. Was a good friend of mine. Still is a friend of mine. And what they did is they went to a bra manufacturer because the women's heels are narrower. And this bra manufacturing company had the tools to create heels that would hold a woman's foot better than anything else that they had been able to develop.

Cool. Yeah.

Isn't that kind of cool manufacturer?

So any. I always appreciate people who think of a good material solution to a problem.

Yeah, it was the machinery. The machinery for making bras could adapt better than anything that Under Armour was using.

Very interesting. I did not know that.

Yeah, it's a cool one.

So back to our story.

Yeah. So we had.

Innocentive.

Innocentive. And then you were going to give another one.

Well, your mention of that example that you just gave made me think of something in the quantum space. So There was a DARPA DoD funded program to develop what they called chip scale atomic clocks. Atomic clocks are these really, really super precise measurement devices, but they really take up whole room. And the National Institute of Standards and Technology is the institute, the laboratory where they develop the more and more precise clocks based on quantum technology. But they take Up a whole room. And the government DARPA said, well, we want to be able to put some of this technology on a satellite so we can't have it be so big. And we want to develop something that fits in the palm of your hand. They did a program to make the trade offs, do the engineering, come up with a way to make something not quite as super precise as the room sized one, but good enough that was really fit in the palm of your hand. And they were successful. And it's turned out that the biggest consumer of these small clocks which are used for navigation. Clocks and navigation go way back and the biggest consumer of them is oil exploration. Undersea. Oh, wow. So, you know, completely unintended. So this idea of adjacent markets and applications that again are not understood or envisioned at the time that the technology is developed are often outweigh the expected market. And so I think again, that linear model where you're going step one, two, three, up to whatever and then you have your product kind of loses. That's got blinders on it.

Yeah, it's huge blinders and people. I've had these conversations recently with individuals where they do still think in that way. And Victoria Coleman, I don't know if you know Victoria.

Yep.

So Victoria and I were talking. She's going to potentially do a podcast, but then she was promoted to the. The chief scientist of the Air Force. So we're kind of. She might not be able to do it for some time. The. What was I getting at with?

Was she thinking of some. She's very thoughtful person.

Yeah. The crossover and the spillage, I think that individuals are not. It's not that you plan for random collisions of innovation. It's that to live in a bubble of an ecosystem where you believe that there is a linear progression without the dynamic forces coming from multiple crossover sectors is a blind's eye to a person, to an individual who wants to do what you're saying. Creating tailwinds for growing, cutting edge. Why not fill your sales?

Exactly. So the last part of this sort of how technology advances discussion, or in my mind part is to kind of review all these different sectors because they're key. And so just kind of running through them all at this point I think would be useful. We've got the researchers, the discoverers, however you want to frame them. And there are people in universities and other academic institutions. There are people in national laboratories. So we have a kind of big network of federally funded laboratories in this country. The ones that are funded by the Department of Energy have their roots in Many cases in the Manhattan Project and really came out of that World War II science for a purpose effort and they're all across the country. And then there are research institutes like SRI that I work for, which is a not for profit research institute. It has its roots also in World War II and does more applied research typically than a university generally for a government sponsor, but for private companies as well. So it has people and facilities and capability that can be pointed in whatever direction a customer or client wants. So that's the often overlooked piece of our national innovation ecosystem. Going from academia to industry is a big leap and sometimes you need some development in between. And there are various research institutes that sit in that space. So those are sort of the people who are doing the earlier stage, sometimes use inspired research. You have the government and the government plays two main roles. They're the funder of research through agencies like the National Science foundation, the National Institutes of Health and NASA and Department of Defense and others. And they're also a customer. Right. So the government does buy certain things and especially in the defense and space sectors. So they have an important role in this whole technology system in those two ways. And then there's also, I don't want to overlook, and I'll mention it a little bit later as well, but government of course has the agencies and, and the part that's in the executive, but then there's the legislative part and that's where the funding originates. Right. Congress is the check writing part of government. And so when it comes to making these investments, there's a role that's important to consider over there on the congressional side. Okay, so then you have before we, when you.

My world is the world world, so I'm immediately looking outside when and I don't know much information you have on these different types of structures. If you look to the European Union or you look to the very distinctly separate countries not in your union like South America, or you have the Chinese, Russian, which are the typical, the Indian. How different are they in your with your knowledge as compared to what you're.

Stating in the U.S. well, so this is interesting and I'm not claiming to be a deep expert in the way other governments and countries are organized. However, it's my belief that the success of the US model has gotten attention elsewhere and more and more other countries are putting in place similar structures with their own spin on it. And in a country like China or Russia, it's got its own culture and organizational the way the government's organized. But governments around the world are seeing the benefit or believe there is a benefit in funding universities and research. There's differences in the, what we call in this country industrial policies and the degree to which governments fund industry in their country. Our country has a generally stated policy of not the government doesn't pick winners and that we want competition in the marketplace to decide who has the best product and solution. In some countries and regions there is a belief that the state has a big role to play in supporting certain industries. And you can imagine and think of some of them, I'm sure. So the state owned enterprise spectrum is pretty broad. But I think people. Well, and I'm going to get to in a moment with some of the sort of policy thoughts. The idea that, you know, a good university system leads to smart people and good ideas and they sprout companies that generate economic value is one that I think is embraced pretty much everywhere now.

It's embraced yet it's. The constructs are very different. The belief in, how do I say it? The best way. In the United States there is a tiered system where you have the profit, the nonprofit, the government innovation that's put in where the government is involved in putting out proposals and looking for information on the military, non military, whatever sector you're talking about. When you get to Europe, because they're just distinctly different countries, the ecosystem just doesn't evolve the same way. And when you get to Asia, where you're talking about Malaysia, Cambodia, Singapore, Japan, there are different governance models, there's different, there's different scientific and research needs, there's different protectionist needs. And so there are a lot of huge differences. And I think the scale and the history of the United States has given it an advantage. And yet at the same time, my discussions around the world is it's also the same thing, the same type of structure that's wading down the country because they're not moving as quickly as other countries can in certain categories.

Yeah, I mean I think we're. And also I think smaller countries recognize that in order to compete they have to focus. And the US doesn't think that way because we are so big. We feel like, you know, how can we prioritize? We're going to fund everything and we want to be number one in everything. I don't think we've really come to terms or acknowledged that that may not be feasible. Well, the quantum is one area where that may be the case.

And that's where I think that there's. Let me say it in a. I'm not trying to be politically Correct. I'm trying to get it in my head is that the, the United States, as you've said, is trying to be good at everything. And yet when you, when there's a prioritization of certain types of categories by countries often with limited resources or limited talent, you can progress even faster, I think, whether you don't have to agree with China's policies or not, just like you don't have to agree with American policy or Russian policy. Nothing to do with it is that China has picked their winners, the categories they would like to be good at, and they promote that very openly. While America to me is more an open, we're going to let the system decide what's more valuable. Yet underneath it, it's not exactly as clear. I don't know how I'm saying it.

I'm trying to say so. Certainly some systems are much more top down and ours tends to be more bottom up with some of each. So having been a government scientist, I felt like I had a lot of ability to, I could go out and propose and if I could, you know, convince somebody who had a program that my idea was a good one, then I could go and do that. But there were and there are, and we just had, had, you know, a change in administration and everybody sort of looks to see what are the priorities. This administration's putting more emphasis on this and you know, and so the priorities do tend to change and they drop.

Every four to eight years. You can see a discontinuation of something and a refocusing on another.

Yes. And some areas, it's more sort of broader swing than others. Typically defense programs don't shift quite as much.

Energy programs, they're longer term projects. Yes.

And so yeah, and it's very frustrating actually. And there are proposals out there that, oh, you know, funding for just basic science should be decoupled from these winds of change. There should just be sort of a steady funding. It should become almost like an entitlement, which, I mean, I don't. There's pluses and minuses to everything. That's my opinion about policy is almost always there are pluses and minuses to everything.

It's, it's a challenge in my mind.

Because.

Certain economic systems, certain political systems, well, they all, every political system, every economic system, every structure has its own narrative of what it anticipates happening through it. And it doesn't matter what country it is, that country believes that it will support the people who are whoever they believe deem to be in the best way possible. And I Think the challenge when you have a structure in the United States that is research, research you put research and discoveries, research institutes, governments, agencies and legislative. It is, is that system optimized enough to be ahead of the curve, enough to deliver value not only for its citizens, but to ensure the longevity of this is kind of going real top species or individuals. And the reason I say it is I just was showing one of our team members on our project Moonhot Foundation. I was just showing him is it Bolivia? No, it's not Bolivia. Who's in South America?

So Bolivia.

Now we're getting my geography screwed up. I showed him a picture, was an absolutely wonderful picture and he said, oh, that's beautiful. What it was is it's cadmium and mercury and all the pollutions that have come out of their industry to be able to be advanced. And when the challenge long term is, is our society capable of this type of disruptive world where we really haven't defined what tomorrow is going to be safe for us to live in and the way in which developing might cause more damage than it does solve the challenges?

Right. Well, I mean I think, yeah. And I think the idea of sustainability and these are all signs of advancement and the ability to take into consideration and not be driven by, you know, the immediate near term benefit of something stripping something, you know, doing extraction of natural resources, not worrying about reclamation or not worrying about runoff and so on. You know, now we, we're advancing, we can afford in a sense and this is all gets very complicated. But back to your question a bit about the sort of ecosystems in different countries and regions. I think one element of the American system is merit based. Right. It's a meritocracy. And so seniority shouldn't be the reason you get something because you have certain, you came from a certain university, your degree is that shouldn't be the reason you get something. And so whereas in some countries and regions seniority really is the reason, right. You have been, you've risen to the top through longevity. And so you're running the lab and you get the grant and it's not really the winners.

And, and I. And to some degree, at times, depending on where the society is and how they vote and how if they can vote, we do run amok because we're allowing certain things to happen that might not be positive long term. I think on the global, if I was to rate the world, which I don't know if I've ever done or maybe I shouldn't be doing this, I would say that we don't look far enough into the longevity of species on Earth or our lifestyle. And I'd rate us about a five. We want to have good things, but we don't realize what that tomorrow will bring.

You know, especially on the congressional side because you know, if what you're next if what you care about is getting reelected then being able to think about and this is somewhat unfair. I've talked to many policymakers who do think about long term issues and consequences and they want to put in place policies that are going to make sense for the long term. But at the end of the day, you know they do if they want to get reelected have to make certain choices and take certain decisions.

So I did very quickly I did pull up the it is Bolivia I was talking about the largest lake in Bolivia is so polluted that it is beyond the there's just so much in it. Cadmium, you go down the list. Arsenic to survive in our planet. We're with governance. The way it is might be a challenge long term for humankind. And that's why I believe one of our team members on another team had some showed me in There was a research project in China, but it's been done other places that male sperm around the world is decreasing every year. The potency and capability of reproduction for the human species is declining every single year. And so with our policies and what we're thinking about when you had given those categories research discovery, research institutes, governments agencies I was trying to say is there another construct out there that you might admire or think that they have that's beneficial to humankind as a whole for redefining our tomorrow?

I'm not sure. I mean you can look back and see examples like the regulatory and I guess I should add to the government function that a regulator because they certainly have the ability to control technology through regulation. And so when the ozone hole was understood or there was a plausible theory that seemed to explain what was going on, the world did take measures and it had to happen on the global scale. And science had a role in explaining what needed to be done. And the underpinning I guess I like to be an optimist and I think that when the more sort of immediate the impact so when you can't go out of your home because of air quality eventually that is not you know people won't put up with it I think. And so if pollution is leading to the loss of you know the ability to enjoy or use natural ecosystems fishing is no longer possible because of it or something then I think again at Some point, there's a crossover between the broader.

You're defining to me a self regulation that happens naturally. The way you made it sound is that you believe that the ecosystem itself, humans in general, if in fact they come to this challenge, will fix it.

And even in authoritarian systems, they only can maintain their authority by people not, you know, being motivated to uprise. Right. And so they have to pay attention to the good of the, you know, people at some point, at some level, their methods and so on may vary. But. So I think that there's, you know, that's my.

I was just trying to see.

Getting a little bit away from my fields of.

No, that's okay. The reason I'm asking is, in my view, and this is my perception, there's a lot of crossover of human cultural experiences, as if they're ubiquitous around the world. And I hear it in language. That's one reason we do these podcasts with no video, because I don't want to see the person. I don't want that interaction, you thinking, you looking up. I want to hear the words. And anybody who's listening in is only hearing the words. In most cases in this type of podcast, they can only hear words. So this way, you have to be precise. And yet an example that comes to mind is the Japanese language doesn't have certain words that talk about the individual. So when we describe. When you and I are talking, we both live in America in terms of our history and our makeup. Even if we've lived out, I've lived out for quite some time, we still have certain constructs. So when I ask the question, I'm trying to find out, is there a discovery of something we're missing, something we're saying that tends to be very culturally specific just so that we're more inclusive in the dialogue. Does it make sense?

Absolutely. And I'm going to speak a little bit to culture later on. Culture really does play a huge role.

Oh, the number. And we'll hit it later. But I don't want to forget right now. I remember having lived in Asia for some as long as I did. I remember one discussion I had with this one individual, and he was giving me a tour. So the guy was a former. He was an engineer. He had retired, and he was now a tour guide operator. And I said, do you like what you do? And he said, what do you mean? I said, what, do you like what you do? He says, you don't understand, David. You don't do what you like. You like what you do because that's what's been assigned. That's what's been told. That's what's available. So you like it. And it's a different construct, yet it's more. It's not as individual, as much about individualism as it is about the community.

Right.

And that's all that huge difference. You have to be cognizant of. Of whatever country you're talking to, and you have to be cognizant of why certain things happen in all of these countries around the world. Why does. Why do Brazilians act different than Colombians, than Panamanians? Why in Malaysia, Cambodia, Singapore or Bangladesh and India and Pakistan, why do they act that way? It's not because of the construct I grew up under or you. I'm using myself as the example. So I have to be conscious or cognitive of those. Those structures, those mechanisms and how they see the view of the world and how it can be changed. Okay, so we can go on if any more to add to that. I know we went off on the tangent, yet I was trying to find a little bit more about you in asking the questions. So we had. We more or less stopped with government, legislative, the agencies.

Yep. So we said that in. There are these. I think of them as sectors. I don't know what the right word is. So the sort of research piece which has multiple parts. There's the government, which has certain roles. There's industry, of course, and there. There's a whole supply chain. So there are kind of the people who make components, and then there are integrators and developers of systems. And then there are customers in each company in the whole industry supply chain has its own customers at the end of the day. And again, so technology. And you can sort of think of whatever your favorite one is. So computer chips go into all kinds of systems. And then the end users may be banks or whoever. Then you've got investors really important to the fuel that goes into this whole thing. And that can be traditional financial banks and so on. And again, we sort of listed them before private equity venture foundations are an important investor in research these days, a growing one. And it's partly. Well, so there's a lot of foundations in the health care and. And medical space, often kind of organized around a particular disease or something. So, you know, cancer or heart disease or whatever. And then there also are foundations that are the result of hugely successful companies, tech companies. So the Gates foundation, for instance, has a big role in supporting research in certain areas. And there are a number of examples like that. Standards development is something I just wanted to touch on because it's something that people don't think about very much, but it's an interesting area and it's evolved. So standards grew out of. There's a story actually of a terrible fire I think in Baltimore where it was a five alarm fire. All these companies showed up from different directions and they didn't have the same couplers and they couldn't connect their hoses to the fire hydrant and put out the fire. Examples like that led to standardization in certain areas and interoperability that's critical for commercialization in certain areas. So there are organizations that have been set up to create standards and it's sort of a bit of a patchwork and it applies to everything from building codes and standards to standards for measuring properties of things and so on. And standards in, in areas like telecommunications, that's an important one. So when I think I'm gonna forget which one, maybe it was 3G rolled out. There wasn't harmonization of standards in different countries and regions. So you had to use a different SIM card. Right. When you went to Europe you had to change. So the telecom industry said, well, we don't want that to happen to again. So they've been working very hard on 5G to make global standards. And I heard a presentation by someone who's very much involved with that and he said they have meetings where six or seven hundred people show up and it is so sort of heavy and bureaucratic and hard because standards are developed by consensus. It's so hard to move forward with, with such a large effort. He said the feeling is that we'll never do that again.

So there's, and, and everybody has their own, and people have behind every one of these things their own desires to get out of it. I want to be first, I want to set the standard. It's easier for me to comply to this standard than that standard. We'd have to change everything over to get there.

Big business is at stake.

Yes.

Yeah. And telecom is particularly interesting because it is an area where some companies had intellectual property that got incorporated into standards and they made a lot of money as a result because they sold licenses. Again, this is an area where China has decided, okay, we understand now how this works and we're going to be sure that we are right in the front row and they are, you know, the government is paying for companies and people from universities and all the experts to be part of these standards organizations in all areas or in the areas that they've identified as particularly important to them. And so there's a feeling like China is going to control standard setting perhaps, even though the process is very open and transparent and everybody sort of has a voice and in a sense a vote. And so hopefully the process will work regardless of how many people are in the room, in a way, from any particular.

Honestly, if you were to, if you had to bet. Bet whatever I was gonna say life. But if you had to bet, do you believe there will be a consensus or it will be driven by certain.

There kind of has to be. Oh, well, so no, there doesn't have to be because what can happen is there could be two Internets or something. Right. There could be two paths taken.

Correct. And there already are some of those conditions that exist, whether you're inside the walls of China or you're outside. What is blocked, what is not, what's allowed, what is not, what discussions, what is not. But we also see this with the pandemic. We saw South Korea putting a clamp down very quickly, doing massive testing, genetic testing, to find out where the spread was, doing contact tracing. And they've been able to minimize. I don't know if it'll continue, but they've been able to minimize, minimize their entire spread of the coronavirus. Yet the rest of the world that didn't do these types of control mechanisms and genetic testing and following contact tracing, the countries have had challenges. And yet you would think in a position of a global pandemic, everybody would get along well.

I mean, this sort of highlights the government's view of worlds where boundaries have a different meaning from a business perspective. And so, you know, governments that have a responsibility for their population, their people and their authority is limited to within that boundary, you know, that's going to lead to these differences and they reflect culture and willingness to give up certain privacies or, you know, the GDPR in.

Europe as compared to the rights of the private citizen in America. These are all part. So my take on what you were saying is the 5G, I don't believe there will be, will be a uniform global standard that won't have certain technologies that will have advantages in one place and not in another.

Possibly. And there's a lot of. There's probably, you know, hundreds of different standards in a telecommunication system. And so there may be agreement on this and this and this so that we can, you know, connect our fiber and, you know, communicate on these frequencies. And then in these other areas, not so much.

That was, that was kind of. My point is that we'll get to. There's a Lot of complexity within the complexity.

Absolutely. Okay, so standards. And then the last one I had on my list was services, which I think of as sort of legal, you know, IP attorneys, consultants, maybe these are all support services in some way to technology advancement. So I didn't want to leave them out. So these are. There's this web of stakeholders and players and they all are important. And one of my conclusions that I'll sort of talk about as I go into the how to accelerate part is these don't always play with each other very well and there's a sort of lack of connection among them. And so if you wanted to do better, then trying to figure out how to connect them better would be one way to do that. So that leads to actually step three, how to accelerate technology advances. Do you have any other questions?

No, no, no. That's good. Because my mind is racing as I see this web of interconnectivity of all of these stakeholders, all having different, well, economic incentives, social incentives, biological aging of population incentives. There's the plethora, the volume of incentivization across all of these is just massive.

Right. The reward systems are just different in all of them. And that's part of why they're stovepiped. Okay, so how to accelerate technology advances or how government policy can accelerate technology advances. So I'm going to focus on sort of the knobs and levers that government. So when I say policy, I think of government. I guess others can make policy, but I'm thinking of the government type of policy setting that can influence all of these, touch all of these different stakeholders.

Before you get into it, why select government and what's your rationale for highlighting government in this section?

Well, it's sort of where I have come from myself. I spent time in a government laboratory as a researcher. I spent time in government doing policy work at sort of the highest levels. And then I went into the public private partnership world where I was trying to connect industry with government funded technology development. And so I sort of am most familiar with that, I guess.

I don't disagree with you. It was more of a question of why policy? Because governance is such a huge lever that it's often overlooked that the decisions that you make in the country in which you live or, or the ecosystem in which you live are driven by governments. You think you have your own say, but if policy changes in the country that you live in that you cannot do X, or you cannot apply for Y, or you do not have access to Z, you have to do workarounds you have to re. Change your entire model.

Well, that's right, exactly. And when I worked in government, I would sometimes remind people I was actually negotiating technology licenses at one point, but I was doing it from a government institution. And so I said, look, I can only do what I am allowed to do. The government has certain authorities and that's as far as you can go. And if you don't have permission, you cannot do it. And the rest of the world in the business and the private sector, they can do everything as long as it's not illegal. Pretty much you can do anything as long as it's not illegal. And so there's a sort of different reference frame which is part of. And so government has this sort of tentacles that go out and touch all parts of society. I mean that's what government is. And so to your point, it's a central piece that has a lot of potential for influencing all the other pieces.

Look at the blockchain space. Look at crypto. Space policy in the United States towards crypto is very different than policy in other countries. If you were to then travel to another country and the amount of bitcoin mining that is being done in China as compared to the United States, you can see how governance is determining the path of future. So the Chinese government is launching their own. Their digital currency or very engaged in digital currency. And part of that could be. This is more speculation than it is truth is that they're doing it to unravel the American dollar being the driving factor of how the world makes decisions going forward.

Yeah, I can imagine that.

Oh, it's a major why not? If you can take gold out of the equation, it's too risky today. But if you could change how the economic. If I said to you I want to do this in US Dollars, you would say, I've got US Dollars. But if I'm now on a currency system, a digital currency, I not only can control the population because it's all digital, but I also have the ability to stop and start different types of projects that couldn't happen otherwise because we're not tied to the same, the same construct as we were before. And it's a smart move. I don't, I give them, I give individuals credit for thinking of it that way.

Yeah, well, this sort of feeds into the next phase, the next step, which is sort of how governments do support various activities and in this case focusing on the technology advance goal. So just to kind of recap, why does government want to accelerate technology development? Well, government has these responsibilities or Roles for trying to do the best to make the economy strong. It's about jobs, jobs, jobs and, and creating wealth to a certain extent. They get more tax revenues if things are going well. There's national security, clearly a government role, and in some sense that goes into geopolitical power. But really they would frame it, I think, in terms of security. There's the public good, create a vaccine for Covid. And these responsibilities of government have been in place really since the origin of, of the country. And there's a very accessible report that was written right after was delivered in July of 1945. You may have heard of it, Science, the endless Frontier. And it was a report by the science advisor to the president. He was Roosevelt's science advisor for the Manhattan Project and so on. His name was Vannevar Bush. Of course, by July 1945, he delivered this report to president Truman. But the report was in response to a request that Roosevelt had posed to him. And one of the questions he asked Roosevelt asked for the reporters. And it was done with a sort of blue ribbon task force input. But really it was Bush's vision, what can the government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations? So the point we were just making, the role of government in influencing both public and private behavior. So in this transmittal letter, and you can find this report easily online. But there was a cover letter that went with it, and I'm just going to read a couple of sentences from that letter because it captures what is the underpinning of our, our government, our national research and innovation ecosystem. So it says the pioneer spirit is still vigorous within this nation. So they're referring to, you know, America is a country of pioneers. Science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for his task. So we're all pioneers, and science has got all kinds of places to go. The rewards of such exploration, both for the nation and the individual, are great. Scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation. Our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress. So he just listed out all of those things that I had said. Why does government do this? Security, national public health, economic benefits, standard of living growing, and cultural progress. So this report, if you read it, and I think it's like 40 pages long, is still entirely relevant and is the basis for government policies with respect to investing in science and early stage technology, I guess. So government strategies, if we kind of think about them, well, you could say fund Basic research and educate more students. And so that's done, you know, by. By funding the academic part of the ecosystem. The trick here is this prioritization of areas of investment. And here, and this is where I think, you know, sometimes people think that this doesn't matter to me. I don't Live in Washington, D.C. but here is actually where the public can weigh in. There are interest groups, there are advocates groups, there are advisory bodies, there are think tanks and organizations that have expertise and can write impactful reports and papers. They can develop research and data that, you know, can support a position. They can deliver that to their member of Congress. They can look online and see who are the members of Congress who are on the committee that cares about energy or defense or something else. And you can go meet with those people and you can deliver your report and you can say why you think Congress should do something. And so even at the individual level, it's possible to influence the prioritization of government investments. And I want to also sort of have a word of caution, because often the recipients of government funding think if. If they would just spend more, I could do things. I'm doing important things. I just need a little more. And there is sort of a. It needs to be done with some thought when you increase spending in a certain area, and we're in a time now when there's so much willingness to perhaps spend a lot more. And it will be an interesting experiment to do. And just an example that I sometimes describe was between 1998 and 2003, Congress made a pledge and acted on it to double the spending on biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. Their budget went from about $13 billion a year to $26 billion over five years. The growth was so fast that what happened, it was very difficult to manage in a good way. You could say university. So what does that research. Where is it going? Where are those dollars going? It's going to university biomedical researchers. And in order to spend and to grow it that fast, the universities had to scale up their departments and their research, their biomedical research programs very quickly, which they were happy to do. So they went out, they got donors, they built buildings, they filled them with researchers and wrote proposals and got funding. And at the end of five years, it went flat. And all of a sudden there was this enormous research enterprise that had to be fed. And it was. What happens when you fund research at universities? We talked about this. You produce graduates, students, because they're funded by the research to do the. Then they graduate, and all those people graduated and there was not jobs for them. They all wanted to be biomedical researchers, but there was no more growth. And there were people who were doing one after the other temporary postdoc job, waiting for an opening, trying to find a job to do what they had been educated to do during that period of growth. So you have to think about these proposed increases. And I think it's really, there are examples you can look back and see, see how it worked and what lessons need to be learned. So just funding more is not enough.

What you just outlined to me is the challenge with, how do I say this in a nice way? The challenge with a lot of individuals in decision making roles across organizations, that the foresight, the ability to be able to predict the the future, to be able to say that in two years, five years, seven years, 10 years, we will need this is a great place to invest the money. This is going to be a positive return. There's a convergence of these type of technologies the industries will be able to utilize is often overlooked as an educational tool. And I'm not just saying education within school. I'm saying educationally across the globe. We don't sit down with our leadership and say predict five years from now, predict ten years from now. What do you think will happen in 15 years from now? What's got to happen for that to happen? And even if you're wrong, it's an exercise in forward orientation and we don't do that.

I agree. I mean it's. And probably the people who are in certain roles aren't inclined to do that.

Well, it's a simpler answer. It's that forecasting is, it's hard. Meaning this. I could sit down with you tomorrow and I could talk about the past years of your life in my life or last week and last month and I could talk, we could talk for hours, have a great time. We could talk about today and are current today meaning three months, five months, six months. But if I was to say to you, can you share with me what you think will happen in seven years and how your home will operate, how what your phone will be like, what technology will be available for most, I'm going to use a very broad brush term here. For most individuals, will we start getting out that far? It's work. It means understanding biotechnology, engineering, rocket science. It means understanding nanotechnology, aerospace, water and sewage construction. It means educational system. It means governance. I mean I could list 500 different things. And one of the challenges we have in leadership today I did a presentation in Luxembourg on this is that we're using an old paradigm about the future, meaning you go to school, you learn, and you get a job and you plan on it. And what I said to the people in Luxembourg, this was a few years ago, is I said the paradigm for tomorrow is you don't, if you're going to develop a banking system, you don't put five bankers in a room to come up with a new banking system. You put one banker in the room and the four others come from completely different disciplines. And at the same time, when you hire somebody, you would say, Kayla, you're going to work for the next two years on this. But at the same time, you have to go to school or you have to learn about this. And they say, why? Because in two years this will be gone, your job will be over. This will be automated algorithm, whatever it may be, and you're going to need a new role in the organization. So we have to prepare you for that. And after that? Well, what's happened after that? Well, that job will probably last about two to four years and then you're going to have to, in the meantime be learning about this. And that is the future. And we don't prepare, we don't prepare on a global scale, our society for the understanding of the convergence of things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, 3D printing, sensor tech, quantum computing. And what do those variables, what are those leverageable technologies, meaning platforms, the movement of goods and services. What does that mean for a tomorrow future? We just don't do that.

I agree. And organizations don't always lend themselves to doing that. So I think that's part of my challenges to the old model list that we're going to get to.

Okay, perfect.

So yes, government can fund more basic research. Certainly a knob. They can twist. They can. Now our government, as I've already mentioned, is focused more on the early stage basic research, part of the whole pipeline. But they do fund some, what they call innovation research. There's a program called the Small Business Innovation Research Program where they set aside a certain amount of research dollars for small businesses that have ideas. It's a great concept. The recipients need to graduate. Some of them kind of get stuck writing proposals and getting these small business grants. And ideally, of course, you want them to use that to get to the next stage and progress. So maybe there's a need to help make that happen. Better government funds what I call mission research. So defense, health, agriculture, energy, space, these are all departments that have a mission and they fund research in that particular area. Defense is probably, and to some Extent, maybe health are the ones where the government's a customer and space. But in some of them, like agriculture and energy, that's more open loop. So the government funds the research, but then the, the industry is non governmental or it's not federally government controlled. And so it's regulated but not owned in a sense. So that's a challenge. Sometimes they have to transition to the private sector. They can incentivize industry to spend more on research. So the government isn't the only investor. So there's policy levers like tax credits that can be used to cause others to spend more on research. The government can be an early customer and in the past it's done this in important ways, especially with space programs. A lot of people point to the early semiconductor industry and the way it was brought along at that early stage by government programs in both the military side and space programs. And the government will pay a premium in those types of application areas. And that's really important to developing new technologies sometimes. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. And then the government can private partner with the private sector. And an example is often pointed to is Sematech, which between 1986 and 1996 the government invested about 100 million a year in semiconductor manufacturing technology development, R and D with the semiconductor industry. So that's an example of government coming in and saying we care about this particular industry. And actually we're having this conversation again now. And so the government, because they think it's an important industry to have here in the US they're willing to subsidize, subsidize certain amount of the R and D. And so these are all areas where government can sort of play a role to accelerate technology advancement. Now while go through here last list is what I call challenges to the old model, the way of doing this. So starting again, back with the university piece. The business of higher education has changed. The market is broken. The cost of going to a university has gone up way faster than inflation. Universities, there's all kinds of reasons for that. But costs are up, there's no question, especially for research. It requires more expensive equipment and so on. But the traditional sources of funding, universities haven't kept up. And especially state universities get a smaller and smaller percent of their operating costs paid for by the state. So they have to be entrepreneurial in a sense and figure out ways to support their operations. The pandemic could cause some irreversible or very slow to reverse changes in, in that business model. I have to imagine I Am not in the university business model.

No, it's, it's got to, there's, there's already it's happening in multiple industries where you're saying that the value of this is X but because I could not show up you're going to the. I only see the value as Y and the one I can use as an easy is that a speaker would go out and get paid 20,000 but because they're not showing up on site they're taking the deal for 3,000. So you're saying that it's $17,000 for you to fly and show up and what that does is form price compression. So what you're just describing here when it comes to academia. My son, my son Jake, our youngest son is going to law school but he doesn't go to law school. He sits in his home not here in his apartment. He sits in his apartment and goes to school. So he doesn't have the college experience. Is it the same cost now?

Right. And that's I think it's going to be very interesting to see what happens. And what I was observing was this competition on non education related factors like do you have a climbing wall or whatever. I mean it seemed like there was a competition right? I mean the universities I could only kind of imagine the conversations happening at the president's office about what they had to do to compete to and I remember talking to a student who was in high school thinking about colleges and I asked where they were applying and listed off a bunch and I said these are all great schools. Schools you're going to be get a great education no matter what you go to and which are you thinking you would prefer? And the answer was well I like the lifestyle at this one.

Yeah.

I'm like wow, that's a lifestyle decision you're making and not well they have a great department of X or something. So yeah, what you just said is.

Exactly what happened to me when I was going to school. I had my mom applied to nine schools. I applied to one and because I was pre med the university you go to doesn't make the difference back then didn't matter just get the grades in organic chemistry and a few other big things. My mom said where do I wanted to go to Syracuse University. I knew the lifestyle and I said I didn't want to go to RIT she wanted me was one of the schools and when I went to visit the dean at RIT he said he went over everything and my mom said see this would be great. And I said I Want to go to a place where there's, where there's life, where there's, where there's people, where there's. I felt like the school didn't have it, so I actually decided on a school because of lifestyle.

Well, and you know, if you have a selection of good schools, you, that's maybe that's the reason you should choose but you know, because you're gonna get, you're gonna succeed. There's so many, I think people sometimes I talk to students and they think there's one. Right. I've got to find the perfect match. There's only one and I've got to figure it out. It's like, no, you're going to be, have a great experience at most of these, if not all of them. And so you just need to. And maybe lifestyle is a perfect. If you're happy, you go in with a positive attitude. There's all kinds of sort of subliminal and subconscious, you know, reasons for succeeding. So I'm not saying it's wrong, but it did sort of incentivize some developments. And I think there's an opportunity to restructure higher education and to improve ability and to, you know, do more online and community college roles and things like.

That to be and cross university utilization of faculty and different structures so that you're not tied into a lecture environment but you're in more collaborative environments. So the options now with the acceleration of using digital media for some people like myself and probably yourself, this is not new. But for many this is a new means of being able to communicate with somebody. And yeah, there's going to be a plethora of new types of options. And if you add on top of it, Elon Musk is now saying which people are listening to, I don't care what your history is, show me you can. Your school is not important. Your grades are not as important. I don't care. Fill out this application. If you could demonstrate that you've got, got the grit and you've got the capability, I'm going to hire you and that's going to change the model.

Yes. On my list of challenges, the old model, I think universities have historically what I called filled students with knowledge but little practical anything in a way. And there are some programs and you know, the great thing about this country is we don't have a top down sort of federal university system that dictates things. So you've got lots of different types of programs. Some schools now provide entrepreneurial education along with, you know, engineering and, but it's really, I would say, not part of a university culture because professors don't typically come from that world. Some programs, there's a program called I Corps that the National Science foundation created which aims to promote academic startups. So they try to equip the faculty who are interested in understanding how do I take my great discovery and make it into the business. More campuses are creating incubators. There's a push to start more apprenticeship programs and co op programs that connect students with real world experience, which I think people like Elon Musk and others that I do surveys of my consortiums members. What do you want? I want people with some hands on experience and schools didn't typically, you know, outside of the lab or something if you took a lab class. But again, it's not really part of the culture. So that takes a time to shift. State government, State governments here, you know, I'm focusing on federal, but state governments could probably play a role in, in funding those kinds of programs because in some sense they're localized or they could benefit from being localized. So a university could get some state money to do something with local businesses or something like that. Community colleges tend to operate more in that mode, but it could be expanded. So the whole sort of academic reward system of being rewarded for securing funding and publishing means that they spend all their time writing proposals. And that's, you know, there's a, there are people who think that there's so many. This is a vicious cycle because the more proposals get submitted, the lower the success rate, the more proposals get submitted. And so people just keep writing proposals in hopes that, you know, 1 in 10 will get submit, you know, awarded. And it's extremely inefficient. And so if there were a way to sort of fund people instead of proposals, if it made sense, or some of the funding could go to people. There are organizations like the Howard Hughes medical Institutes that fund the people and then they have the freedom to go in whatever direction they want and they have been vetted and you know, they're believed to have good ideas. And so they are sort of given the freedom. And at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a consideration of how the resources are allocated and given out. We have a sort of history in this country of attracting the best and the brightest. And my father came to this country from overseas and a lot of good people have. Over the years and centuries, the fraction of science, STEM degrees of science, engineering, math, technology that go to non US citizens, non US students has grown to about 20% overall. In some fields it's much higher. In the past, many of those people stayed. A lot of people who are getting those degrees, whether it's Bachelor's, Master's, PhD, a lot of those people who aren't US citizens are returning home to work. And partly it's because of our immigration policy here, partly it's because there are more opportunities back home and who wouldn't necessarily want to go, be closer to home. So there's a lot of sort of subtle reasons and there has been certainly a plateauing, maybe a slight decrease in, in the fraction of students who are not U.S. citizens. So I don't know if it's going to continue to increase or if it will go down. But the desire to attract the best and the brightest to come here and stay here, we shouldn't be paying to educate them and then send them away. That's my opinion. And there have been many calls for staple a green card to the diploma, things like. Like that. And it's tangled up. The immigration policy around allowing technology graduates to stay is often entangled with other immigration issues that aren't so agreed upon.

It's a very controversial topic. It's extremely challenging. I had a partner, one of our businesses, and he. There were at the time 100 Computational social science and artificial intelligence experts in the world. He was one of them. But the United States system, and this was in the past four years, he had to leave the country. And he's, he's brilliant at what he does, but he couldn't stay because of this entanglement, this challenge, this overviewing opinion of foreigners in this country. And yet my father was born in Germany. He came over to this country, your father came over to this country. And if we're talking about an American system, the challenge at the same time is if the rest of the world doesn't grow, then there becomes enemies of state, there becomes more, even other challenges that we have to address. And I don't know if there's a simple solution, because if one country is doing poorly and they feel that another country has it all because their best and their brightest left their country, you run into other significant challenges. It's not an easy answer.

Brain drains and whatnot. Yeah, sure, so exactly. Very complicated. But it is a government controlled knob policy. Knob. There are infrastructure costs associated with research. They're going up and maintenance has been deferred. And I'm referring here especially to government laboratories. I used to work in one. I was just talking recently to a former colleague who has decided that she can no longer stay at the government lab, even though she would like to, because the infrastructure is crumbling. And so if the government wants to keep these labs going for purpose, they need to maintain them. And maybe with the emphasis right now on infrastructure, some of that will go to those kinds of infrastructure facilities.

Do you know if in the, the bill that they're proposing there is infrastructure for things such as government labs?

There is some. I know there is some, yes. And there's all kinds of kind of barriers and hurdles. The lab I worked at happened to be a Navy lab and sort of capital equipment expenditures in the Department of Defense, it's such a massive department. But anyhow, I think there is some, and hopefully, because, I mean, if they don't want to support it, they should decide we're just going to shut that down and contract it out. And that's an option to consider. But I think they would be losing a certain type of capability, and they've.

Maintained it as long the politician doesn't want to put their stamp on that, even. Even if it's crumbling. Who's the one who closed it?

Right.

And that's not ironically.

So the laboratory I worked in was in the District of Columbia, which does not have representation. Yeah. So just a little wrinkle there. But. So next thing is, I mentioned earlier that the government can play a role as an early customer, and they backed off from doing that in a lot of areas, especially the Defense Department. So rather than pay for the development of some new capability, they now feel like often it makes sense for the private sector to be the developer and they take it and maybe modify it, ruggedize it, whatever they need to meet their needs. So rather than have, you know, and I don't have an example right at the top of my head, but a lot of IT systems, for instance, that maybe were at one time developed by the government for the government, now they're like, well, we'll just wait until the next tablet comes out and then we'll get our version of it made for us. And so the government doesn't serve that role the way it used to in advancing technology, frankly.

So a question, and let's look at it from a historical perspective in years ago as compared to today, the statement you just made that government plays a role as an early customer, some would argue that's a form of a bigger reach for the government to play in the future of technology and development of the culture, the society, that the private enterprise should make those choices. And what it sounded like the way you said it was that government needs to do more. Some would argue, at least today, possibly with lack of information, that the government should do less.

There is a balance between what I think of as government sort of stay out of the way. But the government being an early adopter can help justify the early R and D costs. And I'm seeing this, this is actually squarely in the quantum space where the cost of getting from where we are now to something that's commercially viable is still pretty big land across. And so waiting, you know, waiting for the markets to develop and for the private sector to do that is likely. I mean there's risk that won't happen and, or that it'll happen somewhere else. And I think the government in that kind of situation has an important role to play as some kind of an early adopter. And whether it's through buying products for their needs or whether it's by some other program to help defray those early non recurring costs of R and D. I think there's multiple solutions in a sense. But being an early adopter has traditionally been one way that the government helped.

I don't disagree with you. The challenge that I am when I think on a global scale, not just an American scale, is that the individuals who are making these choices in a democracy where there is a say don't tend to have a full understanding of the benefits of the technology, the costs associated with the technology, the types of education that are involved, the duration of time that these technologies take on and on and on and on. So when they hear we're going to give this organization 55 million or 200 million dollars to develop the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, we're going to make sure that they've got $200 million over the next three years to develop. Yeah, but we've got to take care of person X. And without going back to that forecasting capability, that futuristic view and the lack of understanding of governance and the lack of understanding of timelines and capabilities, we run into this challenge in a democracy, in any democracy, where the will of the people is lacking in the ability to make the choices. So therefore politicians can play on that.

Yes. And the. Yeah, the political.

I could say that maybe you can, but that's.

Yeah, no, no, I agree. I mean, I think that this is just part of the whole. And you know, you can look back and say it was like this then. Well, that was then. You know, this is where we are now. This is how people behave. This is how our political system has bifurcated how people can get primaried, whatever the reason is that you know, puts pressure on decision makers, policymakers, and you just have to work within that framework.

Do you? This is more of a, your philosophical view of how to solve this with the bifurcation of the government, with the lack of educational expertise delivered to the population, on governance or on technological advances and other things I've said, lacking all of these, how do you propose that the right technologies are selected or incentivized or funded or whomever you want to reiterate the wording, so that humanity, our world, our lives become better over time?

Time, yeah, that's so my, I guess my hopeful position is that while the initial drivers are often based on capitalism, that the all the other benefits kind of go along. And so whereas not for profit, profit may not be able to afford the development of a technology for its purpose, it will benefit from that technology when it's developed for some other purpose. And so I guess I sort of see that as being the way things typically happen now, whether that can be turned on its head. And I guess the question is, and there are the ability to, the government has the ability to impose certain requirements. Whether it's, you know, reporting on the diversity of your board or your carbon footprint or, you know, just reporting sometimes is enough to put pressure on organizations that otherwise are, you know, behaving strictly on a bottom line basis.

You luckily, in my opinion, have a sexy topic. This quantum, this, this sold as the next iteration of unbelievable speed and capabilities, which is also a fear for many. Is something that's sexy that you can go out and say we're involved in developing this and we have to make sure again using as an American, we have to make sure for competitiveness around the world, for our security of our nation, on and on. And yet other just as valuable types of initiatives can't pull that type of clout to move because of the lack of knowledge.

Well, you know, you, it's a competitive world. Yeah, I agree. I mean the sparkly thing is often, and I advise people who are working in fields that aren't as sexy or attractive, you know, you have to, I don't know, you have to operate within the framework. And if you believe in it and stick with it, you never know. I mean, I remember being in a meeting once or sort of a talk where somebody made the statement that battery technology was old technology. This was some 20 years ago, let's say batteries were understood. There was no research to be done there. Well, this is one of the hottest areas now. It's enabling if we could solve energy storage problems, all kinds of things would be possible. And yet this was like an esteemed expert. Yeah. That electrochemistry has run its course and there's no more research to be done here. So you know, if you're working in a field like that and you understand. No, that's actually, you know, not true. You kind of do have to stick with it.

I think the, a lot of the technology for battery or cordless power tools, one of the first examples that's more readily available is the use on spacecraft and used on the moon as a means of doing something. One of the most advanced battery development companies that I've worked with, Tektronix based out of Hong Kong, they own Ryobi, Dirt Devil, Milwaukee, aeg, On and on and on and on and on. Of the tools that you use, I use and home appliances that are built around the world. And this technology is being developed out of Asia based companies. And so the challenge when we've got that lack of information or lack of foresight that you were talking about with this one individual professing to know is devastating on an economy, but also can lead to the loss of entire industries to other parts of the world from anybody. If you are, if you're South African and you have a technology, the same thing could be said as what I'm sharing. So is there a way that you think we can equalize or be able to make prioritization or is there a better mechanism so that we can prioritize as the human species into areas that we can have better and more fulfilling lives?

I mean there sort of is a famous and I'm going to kind of garble it quote that you can't make progress unless you're measuring or you know, you can't see how you're doing unless you have some way of measuring. So you need something you can measure. And what you just described was something that I don't know if we all.

Agree on how we measure that yeah, it's non measurable.

So then you have to find proxies or you have to come up with some. Something that. Because I think ultimately it's hard to justify. I mean even if it's relative progress, not absolute, you're not measuring. We've gone from eight to nine. But we're better. You have to something that you can see progress by.

There's a, there's a great TED talk, I think it's in Hungary about an individual. I believe he's American. I don't. I think so. And he talked about his whole life. He, he was Anti nuclear and he had all the reasons. And then what happened was he had gotten very involved in solar. He thought it was the next iteration of saving the planet. What he ended up finding out was when they put in solar farms, solar fields, they destroy the ecosystems. He said he was crying when he had to move turtles from their homes when they had to cut down the trees. There's sometimes the solutions that are being proposed are really not the answer that we should be pursuing.

That's in the I think of unintended consequences kind of.

Yeah, yeah. So. So to get for we're talking about your risk and the, the reoccurring R and D and the. And a country I'm taking it larger and a country making a decision on the initial drivers and that capitalism will select it and non for profits will benefit. There's no crystal ball are we going down the right path in using this construct?

So I think you have to have feedback mechanisms that allow for adjustment and that's true. I think a lot of government systems especially don't really have very good feedback mechanisms. Right. And we see that even in the drug regulatory FDA once they approve something it's approved. Like well wait a minute now there's more data, you know that should feed back in and we should be constantly improving our or reaffirming our decision.

They don't do that. There's no re upping.

They can, I mean they can step in if there are adverse effects but there's not and I'm not. This isn't an area that I have all the expertise in. That's okay. There was, I mean when I was through of tracking at one point it was a sort of big innovative concept that they would go back and it was a concept decision, change something. I mean there are all kinds of examples I'm sure whether where they have added labeling added. Right.

Well there's 1300, don't quote me exactly but I believe there are 1300 chemicals that are used in cosmetics in the United States that are not allowed in Europe. Not allowed.

Yep. So there's sort of different regulatory approaches.

When it comes to quantum. I'm going to take a jump for a minute because you probably have some more. But when it comes to quantum, do you see quantum in a way that I may not see in salt? Some of these answers. I've got 12 pages of notes. Do you see this, this mechanism, this capability, this ability to analyze data, to be able to superimpose, to be able to create options. Do you see some answers to these questions coming out of just being quantum capable?

I guess I would say yes, in the sense that, and I kind of referenced this at the beginning, technology is a tool. And this will be a tool that enables certain computational and information system capabilities that we don't have now. And so how you use a tool is another thing. And so it will put in the hands of people the ability to make certain kinds of analyses of data. So there's sort of our implications for AI for optimization, being able to sort through information and so on. So. But it's a tool at the end of the day, so possibly, yeah.

I just had this discussion with someone today or yesterday. I picked up my book and I showed it to him and I said this book could be used by terrorists just as much as someone who wants to build.

Right.

It doesn't, it's, it's doesn't define its usage. It's a tool. A hammer could be used to kill somebody or to put in nails and build a beautiful structure. When it comes to the ability to be able to find out answers or forecast answers or to create, do you believe quantum will give us that edge on the insight?

I mean, it's going to be a next level of capability. But you know, I mean, did Watson that IBM developed and produced provide that insight? It solves some problems, I'm sure in some important ways it solved the whole world's problems.

Oh, no, no, actually the, the, the barcoding that was used on, in Nazi Germany, those numbers were punch card numbers. That, that's how that was fed in. It was a, it was a numbering system for being able to track and monitor people. So yeah, it could be used. Anyway, I was thinking, did you have any. When you're working in this field and we're talking about continual cutting edge technologies and creating those tailwinds, do you think quantum, is that not only just a leap in tack, but a leap in answers potentially.

And I think if the potential is realized, an area where there are, where it would impact a lot of different types of problems is in this sort of field of optimization. And it's everything from optimizing delivery trucks and the electric grid and supply chain so that you have security in your supply chain, more security, you're not having manufacturing problems. So, and I'm thinking of sort of industrial applications in a sense first. But the ability to find the optimal path or solution touches all kinds of parts of our lives. And so I mean how you deal with a pandemic and so on, so that if that is made possible by quantum computing, I think it Will have usefulness in many, many ways. In some of. You know, I think that the use of quantum computing capabilities that might be most, and this goes back to one of my early examples that might be most impactful is one I can't even think of right now, I haven't imagined. So I think it's going to be incredibly enabling and powerful. But when we have that capability is still a little bit uncertain.

I will often in discussions go back to one framework that I've used where we talk about all these advancements. And then I say I woke up in a bed this morning, I had sheets on me, I went into the bathroom, used the toilet, I took a shower, I didn't have ray beams. I went downstairs, I opened up the microwave, which is 60 years old. I have a stovetop, we used water, have a refrigerator. We didn't get that far. I had all these things when I was a little boy. And we still have a lot of our lifestyle is still that way. We do have other advances, but not as drastically advanced as one might think. And I think with what you just said, and I'm not trying to take it down or up in my mind I said I think I put quantum at another level and maybe I need to downplay that level and say it is a value iteration of the next capabilities. Yet it still has the same dynamic challenges that we have today.

I think that's probably true. Let's not set expectations to too high.

Well, I think we have as society, quantum computing is going to be able to, instead of reading the lot, the library in a row, we're going to read it all together. But what difference does that make in many cases?

Well, and you know, humans are still humans. So again, back to the tool thing. It's not going to replace humans. And there's certain things, things that, and even it's not going to replace classical computing technology, which will always be better at certain things than quantum computers. So it's not the. It could be a next revolution and it could certainly have enormous implications. But hopefully we'll be around to see those.

So with, with your government. Sorry, with your government. These, these new structures, are there any others that you think are valuable? And what else is necessary to create those tailwinds?

Perfect. So my last concept, which is this idea of connections, connectivity among the stakeholders and what can be done to bring together all of these different parts. The government has these levers, it can do taxing, it can invest funds, it can, can pay for infrastructure. But the connections are, I think, a weakness. And so I have sort of the last list of ideas and they're not clearly sort of described or fully fleshed out. That's okay, so I'll throw them out. One is promote mobility and exchanges among the sectors. So people tend to go into, to one or the other and stay there for the rest of their life. And so getting people moving back and forth between universities and industry and government even would, I think have enormous value for all of the different parts. So how you, you know, what those programs might look like and how you overcome the barriers would take time. Obviously you have to be clever and think about it. Incentivize industry to support university research. So industry gets a tax credit for spending money on research, but they can spend that money in house, in which case they capture all of the value more or less themselves because they're doing it themselves. If an industry spends money at a university supply, supporting a project or a student or paying for some research to be done, they're much less likely to capture all of that themselves. There's a lot more likelihood that the student's going to go and work for our competitor or you know, the professor is going to include something in a publication or a talk. And so there's just this sort of loss of what you're doing is you're.

You'Re jump starting different ecosystems. So it helps the company, but it also helps the entire ecosystem outside of it, which raises the tide.

So the academics should give them a tax credit for that, right? They should give them more tax credit for that kind of research than for in house research. So that's a policy that could be actually done pretty easily. Get what I call STEM professionals into K through 12 classrooms more. And there are some programs that to do that and some companies, you know, sponsor their scientists to go into the local schools or whatever, just figure out ways to do more of that because we want students to see, like, I don't know, there's some crazy statistic about how many people can't name a single scientist who's alive today because they never meet them, they never actually interact with them.

They know the Kardashians, right?

The community more and especially into schools.

There's going to be an interview on the Age of Infinite with Ron Levine. Levine, he is the director of the Ramon foundation in Israel. And what was amazing about him when I met him is what their. The organization was founded after one of the shuttle accidents where Elon Ramon died and then her son ended up dying too in another accident. She About $3 million a year go to this Organization and they put, they bring 250 individuals, teachers, experts, academia, they do hackathons to try to figure out what's best to teach. And every year they go in and they teach a little bit of space. That's what I called it. They don't call it that. They teach space to every school in Israel. So every one of the kids each year, I don't know what year they start, but let's assume it's at grade school. They get a teacher to come in to teach them something about this thing called space. What type of implications are when an entire country learns about bleeding edge, cutting edge technology in their school when they're young children?

Yeah, and kids are naturally interested and inquisitive and they're sort of, you know, they think like a scientist, frankly, until it's beaten out of them. So anyhow, I think getting that kind of cross fertilization and role modeling and things like that. Next I would say that government could co fund industry sponsored or at least industry driven tech challenges to the sort of, you know, the SpaceX type thing that's a huge scale government could help pay for some of those and change the what I call not invented here mindset that a lot of companies have. So kind of getting again, defining challenges that would benefit a lot of parts of the ecosystem somehow or different sectors, you know, optimization. If we could solve the algorithms for this problem, it would be useful for all these different kinds of problems and businesses and organizations and societal issues. So the government working with industry, again, cross fertilizing to address and to stimulate research and ideation. And then finally, and this is sort of just a little closer to home, but attracting experience, experienced industry experts to government. People are in, you know, retiring early and they have a huge wealth of knowledge and they can afford in a sense to give back to government. And government is full of, I don't know if you've ever gone to visit your congressman or it's full of young people, very eager, some of them incredibly smart, with you know, no experience, no life experience. And they're coming in and they're doing policy and having more people with a lot of experience that they bring to those kinds of roles I just think would be really valuable in this time when we're trying. Congress needs to have technical capability that.

It doesn't, I would add on top of it, when they go to government, government's got to get their act together because often the individuals that I know who go to help come back so frustrated with government slowness, government policy, government Demands that they say, I can't deal.

With this, I give up. Well, and you know, there, it's a different world. And that's why these worlds tend to sort of stay separate because they are organized and operate differently. And frankly, you want government to be slow most of the time.

You don't want them to be able to make choices anytime that they want, which other countries do. By the way, if you're authoritarian, you.

Can back to my original. There's pros and cons to everything. And so anyhow, that's my list of how to enhance connections. Industry to university, industry to industry, government to industry. There's probably more, but I am a connector and I believe passionately in a way about bringing, bridging the gaps between these different stakeholder groups or sectors. And then things will happen. So I'm not necessarily worried about again investing in a particular project. I'm investing in getting people together so that they can work together and solve problems together. So those are, those are sort of my thoughts on technology advances, how technology advances and how to accelerate technology advances.

It's interesting because I, as anybody who's listening to this later, does not. Most people don't know. They've heard me say it a few times. I don't know what you're going to talk about. You and I create a title and Creating Tailwinds for Growing Cutting Edge Technology Ecosystems. I never would have thought you would have gone in this direction, which I appreciate. That's the value of being able to sit down with someone like yourself who sees it from a different perspective than I would have. And you've expanded my thinking in a few different areas that I have to rethink how they can be done. And I also have to rethink some of them because I'm not an American thinker. I try to think globally how this would translate, how these could be leveraged across multiple countries, multiple disciplines to get a larger ecosystem, larger tailwind. If you'd say for the challenges that we're facing on Earth, I do want to just an add on what is the state today of quantum computing.

So it's early stage. There have been some demonstrations that show the potential for quantum computing to be more capable, to have advantages over classical computing. But they're in very specific examples that don't have broad utility. So good first step. Some people make the comparison to the Wright brothers first flight didn't go anywhere, but it showed what was possible. And so we're really kind of at that stage here. And the other thing that's Important is that classical technology, the sort of bits, digital version of technology is moving forward all the time as well. And so the goalpost is kind of moving and what quantum has to do in order to demonstrate an advantage is always also going up. And. But nevertheless there is every reason. I mean the progress is relatively rapid now in a sense, but there's also some very hard challenges and it's more than just engineering at this point, although some people focus on that and there are some very hard engineering problems. There are today handful of different approaches. So when you say quantum computing that can be implemented using a number of different technologies. So we haven't even agreed upon the type of transistor we're going to use yet.

So that's going back to the question that we. The statement we had earlier where there's no universal 500, 600 people showing up at a conference talking about mobile 5G.

Well, right. And in the early days of the idea of a transistor, silicon and germanium both were candidates and had their own advantages. In the end it was easier to manufacture using silicon for various reasons. And that was the technology that went forward and was used by everyone. Although there still are germanium based transistors for certain special purposes. But the big mass market was in silicon based transistors and quantum computing could end up the same. We could end up with more than one kind of quantum computer. Some are based on these superconducting devices and they have to be kept very cold. That's kind of a disadvantage. Some are based on these sort of cells that have certain capabilities and don't require being kept at super low temperature, but they have other disadvantages. So we're still at such an early stage of figuring out what is going to be the one that scales and is going to prove out to be most practical. So it's still very early days.

You just outlined the difference between AstraZeneca, Pfizer Moderna, the Chinese version, you just define them. Each one having their own positives and negatives, each one having their own possibilities. One has to be cold, the other one doesn't have to be as cold. So you kind of outlined it in just looking at today's challenges with the coronavirus. So then last question on this because I don't want to go too deep in it. We covered the topic is how does this relate to or how do you see this applying with this? The construct of being too early could be a disadvantage in the creation of quantum. And my example to kind of illustrate it, maybe to give that answer Some meat. The question some meat is the United States created with the infrastructure for electricity came out at 110. Europe did not have the advantage of being 110. They were a little bit later they went with 220. It is believed, I think pretty much across the board that 220 is a stronger, more robust, better system to have had. But the infrastructure was so much in place in the United States during this time frame that it was too costly to do a changeover. How does that relate to something like Quantum?

I don't know. I mean, it's always a risk when you finally settle. And there are some concerns with putting out benchmarks and metrics now that might cause that kind of decision to be taken too early. And so there are some who are sort of pretty pushing back on even doing a lot of benchmarking and comparisons because if you're focusing on sort of the wrong area of performance or you're focused on measuring, you know, the cost of doing it this way and you just aren't even taking into consideration some other factors, you could end up making exactly that kind of wrong decision. And so I think there's, you know, there's so many different perspectives around the table right now. Nothing's going to happen super fast and a lot of, I think, you know, there's balance in that sense, but that's a risk that there could be some rush made. Again, I think performance ultimately, ultimately will drive the next choices in which system or which approach is likely to succeed. But there's just a lot of hard work that needs to be done before we're kind of at that point of decision making.

This was great. You went definitely in a different direction than I would have thought, which I always, always appreciate. That's the value in letting someone like yourself, as brilliant as you are, put together what you believe is the way to create tailwinds so that we can discover. I can discover different ways that I might be lacking or have overlooked or have not leveraged to be able to make, to help grow cutting edge technology or to improve the future. So I appreciate, Celia, your effort and putting into creating this. I really do appreciate it.

Well, I hope everybody who takes time to listen all the way to the end remembers that really any individual can have. It sounds like a massive, bureaucratic, uncontrollable system. And it is as a lot of moving parts. But there's a place where really I think, think anyone has the opportunity to make a difference and get involved.

Yes. So with that said, I want to thank everybody for taking the time out of your day to listen in. And I do hope that you learned something today that will make a difference in your life and the lives of others. Celia, what's the number one best way for people to connect with you?

I would encourage using my SRI address because that's part of my job. And that's celia.mertzbacheri.com so that's spelled E L I A dot M E R Z B as in boy A C H E R at s Samuel Robert I.com Stanford Research Institute.

Not a lot of flying or military. Sierra Sierra Romeo Indigo. Right.

There you go. Yep.

Let's see. And always remember, you can't fix yesterday. You can only create tomorrow. So spend the time on fixing and creating a better tomorrow. I would also love to connect with anybody who's interested. You can reach me@DavidGoldsmith.com you can connect with me on Twitter oldsmith, on LinkedIn, on Facebook, Instagram. Mr. DavidGoldsmith, there are many ways to get a hold of me. And that said, I'm David Goldsmith and thank you for listening.