I sent out to answer those questions for them. Yours is the story of 75 years of Government Support and encouragement of the tech industry. I want to show you a clip of where we are today. This is from last year on capitol hill with mark zuckerberg. Lets watch. Car Companies Face a lot of competition. If they make a defective car, people will buy another one. Is there an alternative to facebook . The average american uses eight different apps to communicate with each other. We provide a number of Different Things. Is twitter the same as what you do . It overlaps but i dont think it is the same. Do you think that you have a monopoly . It does not feel that way to me. Mr. Zuckerberg, could you share the hotel you stayed in last night . Mark uh, no. If you messaged anybody this week, we do share the names of the people you messaged . This is about the rights to privacy, the limits of your rights to privacy and how much you give away in modern america in the name of connecting people around the world. Susan since that hearing happened, other industry titans have been in front of panels on capitol hill with similar exchanges. Today, while we are talking, down at the white house, there is a gathering of people who are aggrieved on the right side of the spectrum who feel they are not getting access and are being censored. What is the state of the relationship between big tech and the government today . Professor omara it is pretty rocky. It is really interesting. It is such a contrast. Here we are talking in 2019. Five years ago, when i started work on this book, the mood was so different. The optimism of Silicon Valley was shared by a lot of leaders in washington. The idea that these private companies had done these extraordinary things, that their products could be beneficial. Think about how Barack Obamas campaign used facebook to marshal support. That was seen as the future of campaigning and also governing. Now the mood is different. 2016, the election was a turning point, the recognition of how social media platforms have functioned as disruptors to the electoral process. It has the potential of a very real reality that outside actors had been using social media platforms to mess with the election and the very real feeling that could continue Going Forward. That combined with the permeation of these technologies and platforms in our lives. Think about the products of the biggest five American Technology companies. Microsoft, apple, google, amazon, facebook. If you say i am not going to be on any of these things, it is really hard to go through your life from dawn to dusk in modern america without in some way having been affected by one of those companies. This is driving the conversation in washington. What is the role of these companies in shaping the political and social life of modern america . What are the characteristics of these companies . Was it hubris . Naivete . Was it inattention to certain details . What do you think are the factors . Professor omara it is helpful to look at the history of Silicon Valley itself. These companies are the product of a business culture, a business ecosystem. I call it a galapagos, a very Distinctive Community that group for a long time in relative isolation from washington. Even though it was deeply affected by them from the beginning. You have high tech venture capitalists. They are not only funders of startup companies, but also advisors and mentors. They are carrying on this distinctive culture from one generation to the next. It is a culture focused on growth, making technology better, faster. Facebook had posters in their headquarters that said move faster, break things. It was this notion this was not something that was facebook, you can look at intel sales based Companies Like microsoft. You needed to dominate your market quickly otherwise your competitors would eat you alive. You had to move very fast. If something got broken along the way, that was the cost of doing business. That is part of how we got where we are. Not necessarily of malevolence these leaders did not set up to say wed not set out to are going to be this disruptive force. I liken it to a runaway train, this incredibly Effective Technology was so good at what they set out to do. It had all of these unintended consequences. Susan yours is the story of 75 years of evolution. I want to go into these stories because they all have characters. There are themes that come across. You referenced one of them, which is the government involvement and support and encouragement of this. , which ist regulation something that is changing. We can talk about that. High tech has been and maybe mostly whitebe males. One character in your book is someone who works their way up. Her name is ann hardy. Ann hardy is one of those Hidden Figures of Silicon Valley. Her story tells us so much. In 1956, she walks into ibm headquarters in new york city a few years out of college. She heard there are programming jobs to be had. She knows nothing about computers. A friend of hers told her about this job. They said they are hiring people , and they will teach you on the job. She gets the job as an entrylevel programmer. She becomes a manager. She is managing a team for the better part of a decade. She is combating sexism every single rung of the ladder. At one point, she is managing a team and discovers at one point that every man is making more than she is. She demands a raise and gets a raise. She discovers people she was supervising her still making more than her, so she left. She ends up in california by the part of the 1960s and she is passionate about the technology. She is really interested in programming and using computers. She ends up at a small start up in palo alto. It is in and it is in this new business called timesharing. This is networked computers. They either worked giant mainframes or minicomputers. A minicomputer was refrigerator sized. They were very expensive. They were housed in corporate offices. You could not have one in your small office or your home. Timesharing was a way for people to remotely connect through telephone cable and connect to a computer power. Ann hardy built this operating system. She was hired accidentally. She walks in and says, i can do this. Company, the ceo of the howe says if i had known central this operating system was to our business, i never would have hired a woman to do it. The idea you would be a technical woman and an executive, someone with authority was so alien. It was the 1960s. There were very few women. This is a different time in Corporate America. What happens in tech and particularly in the valley networked connections connections between people or peoplewould work with from one company to another. Male networkingly of the 1960s gets trapped in the amber. It gets harder for new voices to break in. The other thing that works a challenge for people like ann hardy in addition to the everyday sexism of corporate retreats where people would say, if the women come, that we will have to invite our wives. Then we cannot have dalliances on the side on this corporate retreat. Aside from that, the work habits hard,h of work hard, play which continues today it is a full immersion activity. Part of what makes Silicon Valley go was the fact that these male executives and male engineers could go completely heads down building their semiconductors and computers and working on their software and they had wives at home taking care of the rest of life. Those women arent important part of the Silicon Valley story. Howou tell the story of Silicon Valley encoding made their way into our lexicon. Tell us where that came from. It came from the early days of digital computing. The First Digital computers, the art and the science of computing was considered to rest in hardware, building the machine. The origins of the first all digital computer comes out of world war ii. It is an army funded project. It is later commercialized as the univac. Computing univac was a brand like kleenex or google. There is a great political story involving univac. The first appearance on television was in the 1952 election eve of the election. Walter cronkite, newly hired anchor at cbs, is managing the Election Night coverage. They have a univac that can predict the outcome. The univac predicts correctly is correctly predicts an overwhelming victory for eisenhower. It was so decisive in its production that all of the programmers were like, i think they got it wrong. Coding, it is a time when the hardware is considered to be so important. The software was like being a telephone operator. To program a computer, you were just plugging in different wires in different places. It was not considered an art or science, just very routine. That coding something was like data entry. A coder with someone who was kind of like a drone. Surprisingly, this was seen as womens work. Secretaries, telephone operators, it is kind of basic, a woman can do it. What turns out of course is that programming is very complicated. If for some reason there is some misfire in the program, there is a bug in the program, you have to do a workaround. It is a very creative process. What Computer Specialists and technologists realize is programming the software is really where it is at. As that becomes more professionalized, the discipline of Computer Science is created. By the late 1960s, you have women not only in the United States but other scholars in science and technology who have written about how women are pushed out of programming. It has become a more high prestige activity. The coders increasingly become men. The name code itself came from is it a product . Yes, there is software code. Code it isa coming out of world war ii. It is a time of code cracking. It is not seen as there is something where there is a pattern. Like morse code. Like morse code. Coding it is not seen as a creative process. Coding is. The best coders are people who are always thinking about thinking in rather complex ways. Particularly now. Programming is much more complex. Even then, programming was even tougher when you had less memory and you had to be brutally efficient in getting the commands to be as short as possible and use as little memory as possible. We have incredibly powerful machines where you have a lot more latitude. Susan how did Silicon Valley get its name . Professor omara great story. It was not called that until 1971. Before that it was santa clara , valley. It gets its name what is happening in 1971 is the major industry there is Silicon Semiconductors. Microchips. Made of silicon. The main customers for the Semiconductor Companies were not people like you and me, they were other companies. They were computer makers. The big computer makers like ibm and honeywell. The sales guy for these the for these Computer Companies would come out. They started colloquially referring to the valley as Silicon Valley. There is a reporter for a trade paper. This is based in palo alto. A guy named don hoffler. Featureiting this big story in january 1971 about the silicon Semi Conductor industry in the silicon in the sarah the santavalley in clara valley. He writes about the Semiconductor Industry in Silicon Valley. He gets wind that Silicon Valley is the colloquial name and he headlines the story Silicon Valley, usa. That name stuck. It was something that was bandied about in the valley for a while within the industry. It is not until the late 1970s when it starts disseminating out. I found in my references in the Washington Post and new york times. They Start Talking about the Santa Clara Valley and then occasionally, they will start saying Silicon Valley in quotation marks. The post is referring to silicon until in quotation marks about 1979. Then it becomes a more familiar lexicon. It was seen as so often the side of the main action for so long. Susan i would like people to know a little bit about you. How did you get interested in this . Professor omara i was in graduate school, i knew i wanted to write i worked in politics before i went to graduate school. I came to graduate school to study political history. I was interested in looking at the eisenhower years and the domestic impact of the cold war. Finally and enough, funnily enough, i was becoming a political junkie. I was interested in what the Eisenhower White house was doing and what lawmakers in congress were doing in the 1950s. Of course, the greatest one of the greatest domestic impacts of the cold war was what the militaryindustrial complex did to the computer industry. I realized that this is the story. This is the story of how this whole new economy was built. I have always been really interested ever since i was working in washington with how business and government interact with one another. They have antagonistic relationship, but they also have a collaborative relationship. I think this story is a really great way to get into that. To understand how government can support business and vice versa. The funny thing about the cold war, if you have the biggest of Big Government programs, the space race, you have what eisenhower labels the military industrial complex. That becomes the foundation for this entrepreneurial flywheel of incredible creation and innovation and private wealth creation. It is an industry that considers itself an industry that built itself on its own. Government has become almost invisible to many of the people in Silicon Valley. The creators think there is not a role, but actually, there is. That is part of the magic. It is a government out of sight. Susan what did you do in washington . Professor omara i worked on the 1992 president ial run of the of bill clinton. I graduated from college in arkansas. Like any good history major, i did not have a job. History majors get lots of jobs. I came home to try to figure out what to do next. What i was going to be when i grew up. Like, i will volunteer on the campaign. That position turned into an entrylevel job. I started in the correspondence office. One thing led to another. When your candidate wins, everything changes. I spent the first clinton turn and a little extra here in washington, d. C. Working at the both house, working for president clinton and for Vice President gore. It was an extraordinary education. I call it my first graduate school. Aside from just witnessing things as one does when you are a young staffer on the perimeter of the room or in the room where it happens, not making the decisions but watching very powerful People Struggle with the decisions they have to make, it gave me this appreciation for the humanity of politics. Particularly, even the people at the highest levels of power. Whether it be in government or business, just human beings who were trying to figure it out. Talentedvery smart and , but they are doing their best and trying to implement the vision they see. It gave me an understanding of how power works and empathy for where different people are coming from. I think being a historian has given me more empathy. I have spent 20 years on the others of the fence. Looking at this not as someone who is in politics, but looking at it as someone trying to understand why people do what they do. Looking at the history of Silicon Valley or American History at large, it is a way of not only better understanding that is one that i hope this book will help readers do understand how we get to this big tech now and where do we go . You need the back story. It helps you get back from all of the noise and the fighting of right now. Of who is right and who is wrong and draw back and say, why did people make these choices . What were people hoping to do . Then, you have a richer understanding and perhaps more empathy for why Different Actors are doing what they do. Susan how long did you work on this book . Professor omar are for the better part of six years. Professor omara about six years. My family and i moved down to palo alto from seattle for two years. I was really fortunate to have sabbatical fellowships. I had a way to be down there. I interviewed a lot of people. I had to build my own archive. Historians like to go to archives. Get in the dusty boxes into our things. There is not a library of congress or National Archives in this industry. Although archives like the cspan archives more important to me. But i had to draw in Different Things when it happened. In oral histories that were conducted with people who are no longer with us. Sometimes people would give me file folders they kept in their attics for the last 30 years. One of the real challenges and one of the really important things Going Forward is how can we make sure this history that is in the making will be preserved . It really matters. Not only the Technology Understanding the technology but what were the Business Decisions surrounding those technologies . Who were the people . What is the rich tapestry of the place . This is going to be extremely important not for historians like me, but for historians Going Forward. War, yought after the write about that there was a competition between two different geographic areas in boston and palo alto. Who were the patrons . Why was it boston and palo alto . Why did Silicon Valley triumph in this . Professor omara coming out of bostonii, you had was as the u. S. Government decided to get into the science business, the National Science foundation was created in 1949. There is a decision to go big on Public Investment in peacetime research and development. It was peacetime only in technicality. It was the cold war. It was very much an investment made with the cold war struggle in mind to compete in science and education with the soviets. It was not only a matter of prestige but developing the nuclear realities of the nuclear age. Boston was the 800 pound gorilla. What was in boston . Harvard and m. I. T. These were the premier research and the tuitions of the age yes, there is the university of pennsylvania and its school of engineering were also important. Will gave boston the advantage aside from the fact that it had been a center of governmentsponsored research during the war was that the leaders of the Government Research effort were from harvard and m. I. T. Including one of the people i talk about in the book. The ultimate and original whoepreneurial professor has this extraordinary career crossing over academia, government, and industry. He is the founder of raytheon. He goes on to become the leader of the research and development effort. Under franklin roosevelt, he is known as roosevelts general of physics. He has a high public profile. He is the person who kind of conceives of this Postwar Research network that is based in a lot of universities. That explains boston. A lot of money is already funneling in after world war ii. The Electronics Industry is based on the east coast. There is a lot of existing industry. What explains Silicon Valley . Santa clara valley was known for being the prune capital of america. It had two assets. It was on the Pacific Coast where a lot of wartime military activity had gone on and continued to go on. Military installations in the bay area. And, it had stanford. Stanford university was a respectful institution. It was better known for its football team. They wanted to be a harvard of the west. It had a great asset in this guy name fred terman. During world war ii, he had gone to boston to work under bush in this research effort. He is sitting in cambridge and looking at what is going on. He knows after the war, bush and others are bringing this to move forward. Harvard and m. I. T. Will get a big piece of this action. He writes to a colleague in the middle of the war that there is an opportunity that is about to blossom. Stanford has a possibility of becoming a nationally influential institution like harvard. Kind of stay like dartmouth. Not having a real effect on the national conversation. I dont know what dartmouth administrators then or now would think of that assessment. It was a little uncharitable. Dartmouth has its own Important Role in the history of computing. Nonetheless, terman goes back to palo alto, talks to the incoming president of the university, a guy named wallace sterling, who was a historian, who joined terman in saying, ok, we are going to turn stanford into the premier cold war university. We are going to reorganize the curriculum. Were going to build up the physics department. Were going to build up specialized engineering programs and laboratories that really meet exactly what the cold war military wants us to do. No other university in the world did that. The Architecture Department evaporated. They did away with other things to build up science and engineering. They formed these close alliances with industry, encouraged students to Start Companies nearby. They encouraged technologists to come to palo alto and set up shop. The original Silicon Semiconductor company was set up by bill shockley. Other Electronic Companies and defense contractors followed. Hub, not thethis only factor but incredibly , critical. The things people outside of Silicon Valley associate with it are Stock Options that make people so wealthy if the company succeeds. Hp whate in 1957 with is the story . Professor omara hp was founded in 1939. It went public in 1967. It is two founders who set out to make a different kind of company. Thek of the big business of 1950s, the big corporations the , detroit automakers. They wanted something very different. They wanted a nonhierarchical company. No corner offices, no managerial system ties. No unions because that signals something is wrong with management employee relations. Instead, they wanted to create something that was kind of like a scientific laboratory. It was much more a gala terrien. Egalitarian. En people felt free to come. People do not feel hemmed in by their job description. What hewlett and packard called it was management by walking around. They would rather just be on the shop floor. This meritocratic idea, everyone got Stock Options. Not everyone. Not some of the people on the manufacturing and Assembly Lines , but the whitecollar employees did. Everyone had stake in the companys financial success. This becomes the model that company after company after company in the valley follows. Susan you talked about the importance of the space race. Sputnik launched in 1967. I want to fastforward to the and talk about what in 1960s government policy changed in a big way. In 1965, lbj signing an immigration law. We are having a big immigration debate right now. How does this figure into the history of Silicon Valley . Professor omara it is tremendously important. The Immigration Reform act is perhaps one of the most consequential economic policies of the latter half of the 20th century. The funny thing is it was not intended to be that at all. As Lyndon Johnson is signing it in october, 1965 come he said in his remarks this is not a revolutionary bill. It was seen as crossing the ts on the civilhe is rights act in some ways. What have proceeded it was based on national origin. It was a racially discriminatory quota system for immigrants. It had been established in the 1920s at a time of fierce antiimmigrant sentiment. It was driven by prejudice against southern and eastern europeans, catholics and jews. Peoples that were seen as other at the time. That was basically holding fast until the mid 60s. Johnson and liberal democrats pushed through this Immigration Reform that was supposed to set things right. The assurance that johnson gave some of his fellow democrats including southern democrats who , were a little worried about what this liberalization of immigration might bring, he said this is not going to change anything. It turns out it did. It opened up americas doors to immigrants from around the world, including huge chains of immigration from south and east asia. Many of these immigrants from india and china ended up in santa clara and Silicon Valley. They became the engineering backbone of the valley. They go on to found companies in disproportionate numbers. By the 1980s, you have one third of the companies founded in the valley founded by people who are born from either india or china. On top of that, there are people from other places. You have refugee programs, refugees from the former soviet union. They and their children go on to found companies. Google is cofounded by the child of a soviet refugee. You have other refugees that come earlier in American History. Andy grove, the legendary leader of intel, came to the united wases as a teenager , penniless. Nothing would have signaled to immigration officials that he was destined to be one of Silicon Valleys most influential Business Leaders and yet he was. That immigration system has been really critical and continues to be really critical. The fact that why is Silicon Valley so great . It is not because americans are at technology than everyone else. It is because the american system has allowed the Free Movement of people and capital. It has drawn people from around the world like a magnet from all over the world as students and entrepreneurs. To the valley and to american tech centers. That has been really fundamental to what we have today and the american dominance in the tech space. Pivotalhe 1970s are a decade. So much happened. What are the most critical things people need to know about the 1970s . Professor omara that was this moment when a new generation the baby boom generation comes of age in the valley. They have been they are products of this space race cold war age push toward science and technology. When they are Elementary School students, they get exposed to science and want to become astronauts. When they are in college, they go to the College Computer lab and learn about punchcards and learn how to Program Computers and interface with computers for the first time. Timesharing terminals. Work on work on timesharing terminals. They are also comingofage when government was seen as using its power for destruction, for corruption. You have people coming up who are much more interested in turning away from Big Government and big business and using computing, thinking about how computers, which had mostly been who had computers it was Big Government agencies and big corporations. They were so big and expensive. They were not something that ordinary people could access. This new generation is like, how can we take this powerful forine and use it as a tool personal empowerment . How can we make it personal . How can we change the interface so that people who are not computer programmers and immersed in computer languages how can we create an interface that ordinary people can access . How can we create a Communications Network for computers . There was optimism, this faith born out of this political moment that cant be separated from the other things going on. That is these computers will save us. All of the things you see around war,ong with the world in equity, sexism if we have control of these computers and we are communicating with them and connecting and understanding one another, then this is going to fix it. Susan who are some of the names we know today that came out of the Homebrew Computer Club . Professor omara the two most famous names are steve jobs and steve wozniak. They show up at the first meetings of this rangy group of computer hobbyists. People who are playing around with personal computing. They are building their own motherboards and devices. These are the guys that grew up playing with radio sets in their basements. They graduated to building these machines. They showed up as two young guys and they came in hauling this device that wozniak had designed. It is this computer, this motherboard that is more elegant and simple and sophisticated than anything anyone else is doing. It is the apple one. It is so funny, you can easily google an image of the original apple one. They housed it in this wooden case. It looks like someone built it in a High School Shop class. It was very rudimentary but the inside was a sophisticated device. The Homebrew Computer Club was this way for technologists to trade ideas. It was very collaborative. It was about i have figured out this technical hack and im bored to share it with you. It was not about making money or commercializing. Out of that group of people that grew steadily, they had this monthly meeting, it gets bigger and bigger. Out of this comes an industry, a whole host of personal Computer Companies. Apple is one of them. They create a transformative new generation of computing, micro computing, which becomes what we know as desktop or personal computing. Important in that story are venture capitalists and lawyers. They are often left out. I wanted to show this Silicon Valley galapagos that are critical to understanding why a it grew and has been so successful. Valleyu have and silicon which you do not have anywhere else are specialized venturecapital firms. This is hightech venture capital. Many of the people who were venture capitalists were in Technology Companies themselves. Many came out of the Semiconductor Industry. Their next generation was to start venturecapital firms and become investors. You see this again and again in the valley. People who are in a company, do exit, a goodgood exit, a good ipo and then they become , investors themselves. Then they are the ones mentoring and picking the winners for the next generation. Venture capitalists are really critical. You have all of these Computer Companies starting out out of this hobbyist community. What sets apple apart is they get the venture capitalists to back them really early. They get venturecapital funding from established venture capitalists. They also get executive leadership from someone who was a veteran in intel. He made a healthy amount of money, he was semiretired in his mid30s, and he decides to put a chunk of money into apple personally. The two steves were not capable of running they did not have managerial experience at all. They were pretty unconventional guys. They create an organizational structure that is more like a business, more traditional. Even though apple positions itself effectively as a Counter Culture company a think , different company, it has more in common with ordinary Corporate America than you might expect. Susan we will run out of time for all the history but i wanted to get to Ronald Reagan. We have a clip i want to show of Ronald Reagan talking about a very important project to him. Lets watch that and then talk about this california governor. Who comes to washington and how he impacts your story. There has been a tendency by some in congress to discuss sti as if its funding to be unconnected to what the soviets are doing. Sdi is a vital insurance policy. A necessary part of any National Security strategy that includes deep reductions in strategic weapons. It is a cornerstone of our Security Strategy for the 1970s 1990s and beyond. We will research it. We will develop it. When it is ready, we will deploy it. Susan lots of money coming into this. How did it affect Silicon Valley . It was reallyra a supercomputing project that was going to require immense amounts of computing power. It becomes this incredible resource for Computer Science and other related disciplines. The funny thing is a lot of the computer scientists in Silicon Valley were very much against sdi. A number of them were against it technically. They were like this is not going to work. There is a possibility for error and error would be catastrophic. It would require so much. We are not there yet, technologically. It reminds me about some of the conversations about Autonomous Vehicles and driverless cars. People are not quite there yet. Philosophically, a lot of these the people who are building computers, programming computers, who are on the faculty of stanford or working at Research Institutes like sri in the valley, they are the antiwar generation. One they want to make peace, not war. They are politically and wayne philosophically opposed to they are politically and philosophically opposed to what the Reagan Administration is doing. This is one of the wonderful things and it is understanding this relationship and how it evolved. You have some of the people who are the biggest beneficiaries of some of this money. The money keeps on flowing. It is coming through darpa, through all these agencies. It is going towards a lot of it , is going toward computing. Even some of the people who are the biggest beneficiaries are simultaneously protesting and picketing and having meetings and writing open letters. This ability to dissent whilst still being part of the system i think is a really important when we think right now about competition with Trident Technology the difference in , this political system, recognizing how much the american political system has made Silicon Valley possible not always intentionally. Sometimes it has been unintended consequences. The immigration act is an example of that. Theres been example after example after example. That is this interplay that i find so interesting. It is really important in understanding if were talking about what is going to happen next and what is the role of washington we need to , understand this history and these interesting complexities. There is an only in america aspect of some of it. Susan i want to fastforward to the Clinton Administration. This is al gore before they took office. The summit they put together encouraging entrepreneurial spirit. Lets watch. A lot of the Infrastructure Investment has been an infrastructure that has made it easier for us to move around the resources that used to be given even more important. They are still important. If the key resource is knowledge today, shouldnt we be giving a lot more emphasis to the kind of National Infrastructure that we need to share information and create and share knowledge like ,he information superhighways digital libraries, software and programs that make it possible for children to come home after school and plug into the library of congress . During the clinton and gore administration, the 1990s were the boom and Silicon Valley and a lot of people made a lot of money. How responsible was administration and Government Policies for that boom . Professor omara the government played a big role. I love that clip. The other person that the john scullys had been ceo of apple. He appears sitting next to hillary clinton. The government what al gore talks about in this clip, the information superhighway and also this notion of infrastructure. You did have to have that foundational infrastructure for the internet boom to happen. The internet existed since 1969. It was a network for researchers, military people, different parts of the Defense Research establishment and academic researchers to communicate with each other. In the it gradually starts 1980s, moving up. Until 1990 one, it was called the Walled Garden of the internet. You could not do any sort of commercial transactions whatsoever. Companies could have a. Com domain. They could not buy and sell on it. It was very limited. The earlyned in 1990s, the late years of the George H W Bush administration and the early years of the Clinton Administration is this laying down of infrastructure. A lot of this is happening below the political radar screen by and large, including Young Political aides like me. I was not working on tech at the time. I was like this information superhighway stuff, no one understood it. We were working on Health Care Reform and other things that seemed more central. There were a few lawmakers, al gore being one of them newt , gingrich was another. They are keeping their eye on the ball and recognizing that you have to lay down the basic infrastructure and allow this internet backbone to become not regulated in terms of what sort of commercial activities could happen on top of it, but creating a network that the government is encouraging entrepreneurial action to happen. There is an Important Role of the government that the government plays. Susan you report in the book that al gore was on the board of apple and became a millionaire hundred in the process. How important is that for people who work regulators who leave office and made a lot of money in this field . Professor omara al gore is an exceptional figure. He is exceptional in the central of the plays in terms 1980s, caring about computers when other lawmakers did not quite get it. Also, in the central role that he played being the techie in chief for the Clinton Administration. Also the immense wealth and success he had afterwards. In the last 25 years, Silicon Valley has gotten larger and wealthier. Traffics been much more back and forth between d. C. And the valley in terms of people who work in one and moved to another and vice versa. There are a lot of people the valley now who are veterans of the clinton and obama administrations who are now working in these companies. There are a number of valley companies, they are very important forces in washington d. C. Politics. They have grown their lobbying operations significantly. In the 1990s, they did not have lobbyists. One guy working out of the sales office in bethesda. He carried stuff around the back of his jeep. Susan now how large is their lobbying group . Professor omara a lot bigger. They are some of the largest, biggest lobbying operations in washington today. Susan presumably the antitrust suit for microsoft had a lot to do with the recognition that washington was important in their development. Professor omara it was a wakeup call for that company. Bill gates joked with the ftc was starting to bring enforcement action against microsoft in the early 1990s, the worst thing that can happen to me in washington is i could fall down the steps of the ftc and break my neck. It turns out that microsoft did not have to break up but it came out with guard rails on what you could do. It came out much more cautious and constrained. Perhaps less willing to dive into new markets and the aggressive fashion it had before. Part of it was a new tech generation was growing. It is not like you would have had not have google had microsoft not been hemmed down. Know. Not counterfactual history is impossible. This new generation was growing. This i went again, this regeneration of tech, the companies that are big now will it will be interesting to see not be big forever. Who we are talking about 25 years from now and what relationship they will have to the companies of right now. Susan very quickly before we run out of time. It seems like it was a long time ago. It was just 2011 and the first tweet from the white house was barack obama. Im going to make history here as the first president to livetweet. We have a computer over here. All right. Here is the question. In order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and what investments would you keep . The reason i thought this was an important question is because as all of you know, we are going through a spirited debate here in washington but it is important to get the whole country involved. Susan that was only 2011. Now we have the tweeting president. The 2000 and the 2010 story is the rise of social media and how important that became to this platform. What guarantee is there that Silicon Valley and his permutations will continue in the United States have the dominance it has . We are hearing the huawei story. China has certain intentions. Russia has been a major player in using disruptive technologies. There are other nonstate actors that are using social media. How did Silicon Valley preserve the Important Role it has played . Professor omara looking back to its history and recognizing the foundational nature of Public Policy in creating an entrepreneurial sandbox for lack of a better analogy, what the u. S. Government did is it put a whole lot of money in techs direction and got out of the way. Part of the dilemma of social media right now is it is an unregulated space. Funnily enough, that is what allowed it to grow come allowed companies to blossom. In the 1990s, when those rules of the road were being laid down there was a choice that was , made, an agreement that the Internet Companies would self regulate. That was made in order to encourage free speech and conversation on the internet because in that time, the big worry was the big businesses were media, was comcast, time warner. Now you have these companies that are perhaps more powerful than all other media combined in some ways, in some places. Will it continue to dominate . These other countries, including china, are making foundational investments in research and development and advanced Technology Like ai, Autonomous Vehicles and on and on. In Higher Education . The u. S. Has drawn back. The u. S. Is drawing back from the open doors of allowing the best and brightest from around the world to easily come here and be encouraged to come here and create. It is impossible to predict the future, but there are ways in which we can create this foundation. Not just to replicate what is going on right now but think about how can new voices come into the conversation . How do you have more ann hardys . Where are the kids out there that are not being, would not easily come into this world . How do you bring them in . How do you also get different voices in the room who are figuring out what the technological questions and solutions are . Ones that are made with the world in mind . American Technology Companies have global markets. Things that are born and bred in california dont often translate easily to myanmar or name your geography. These are the real challenges that not just the valley and washington have but all of us who use the products. It is a big and sprawling history full of interesting characters. Code. K is called the thank you for spending an hour. Professor omara thank you, it has been a delight. All q a programs are available on our website or as a podcast at cspan. Org. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] next sunday on q a, Malcolm Gladwell talks about his new book, talking to strangers come about how he makes judgments often inaccurately about people we do not know. At 8 00q a next sunday p. M. Eastern and pacific time on cspan. Here is a look at our live Coverage Today on the cspan networks. On cspan at 10 00 a. M. , former forland security secretary a Homeland Security field hearing in new york city or the hearing takes place at the national 9 11 memorial and museum ahead of the 18th anniversary of the terrorist attacks. And the u. S. House returns from the august recess, gaveling in at 2 00 p. M. Eastern for legislative business. On cspan two, a discussion of the release of a survey looking views on Foreign Policy and international relations. At 2 00 p. M. , state attorneys general announced an investigation into the Business Practices of Large Technology firms. The Senate Returns from the august recess at 3 00 p. M. To work on the president s executive nominations, including allowing the u. S. A master to the United Nations to represent the u. S. At the upcoming general assembly. Cspan3, policy experts analyze the u. S. Population and shifting demographic numbers and what they me f