It will include cspan video and reflect different points of view. Information to help you get started is on our website studentcam. Org. Of the Tech Industry. Want to show you a clip that is where we are today. This is last year with mark zuckerberg. Car Companies Face a lot of competition, if they make a defective car, they will stop buying the car. Theyll buy another one. Is there an alternative to facebook in the private sector . Mark yes, senator. The average citizen uses eight different apps to stay in touch ranging from senator graham the different . Mark it overlapse. Senator graham you dont think you have a monopoly . Mr. Zuckerberg it certainly doesnt feel like that to me. Would you share us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night . [laughter] mr. Zuckerberg no. If you messaged anybody this week would you share with us the names of the people you messaged . Mr. Zuckerberg no, senator. I would choose not to do that publicly here. I think thats what this is all about, your right to privacy, the limits of your right to privacy and how much you give away in modern america in the name of, quote, connecting people around the world. Host so since that hearing happened, other industry titans have been in front of panels on capitol hill with similar sorts of exchanges. And today, while were 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, that theyve somehow been censored. All this wraps up into one big question whats the relationship between big tech and the government today . Margaret its pretty rocky. Its interesting because here is a contrast, here we are 2019. If you dial back five years ago when i started back on this book, the mood was different. The techno opt up of Silicon Valley was shared by those on both sides of the aisle. These companies that have done extraordinary things, that their products could be beneficial were beneficial, the connection, the communication was going to open things up. Think about how president ial campaigns like barack obama used facebook for example and used the internet to marshal support. You saw this as the future of campaigning. Now the future is different. Of course, it was a turning point. The recognition of how Different Social Media flat forms had functioned as disruptors to the electoral rocess that the potential and the real set that could ontinue 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 and will not be on any of these things, it is really hard to go through your life from dawn to dusk in modern america without it some way having being affected by a product without being 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 . Host what are the characteristics of these companies that got us to this point . Was it hubris . Naivete . Was it in attention to certain details of other business . What do you think are the factors . Professor omara it is helpful to look at the history of Silicon Valley itself. Not just these companies. 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 elative isolation from washington. Even though it was deeply affected by them from the beginning. You have high tech Venture Capitalists. Who are not only funders of Startup Companies but also advisors, mentors, and they are carrying on this distinctive Business Culture from one generation to the next. It is a culture focused on growth, making technology etter, faster. It is 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 , satellitebased Companies Like microsoft. In order to get your you needed to get your products to market quickly, you needed to minate your product quickly, otherwise your competitors would eat you alive. You had to move very fast. That was the cost of doing business. That is part of how we got where we are. Not necessarily of ma nevada lens. Ma left nens. These leaders did not set up to say we are going to be this Disruptive Force in this way. 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. History, really. I want to go into each decade. Because they all have characters. There are themes and you mentioned the government nvolvement and support and encouragement of this. Also, regulation, there is something about that changing. We can talk about that. High tech has been and maybe continues to be the to be comprised of mostly white males. One character in your book is someone by the name of ann hardy. Who is she and what story does her life tell you about the Tech Industry . Hardy is omara ann one of those Hidden Figures of Silicon Valley. In 1956 she walks into ibm headquarters in new york city a few years out of college. He heard there are programming jobs to be had. She knows nothing about computers that she set of front of her told her about this job. They said they are hiring people and it will keep 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 shes managing a team, allmale team and discovers that every single man is making more than she is. She demands a raise. Gets raise. And realizes that some of the men are making more. She left. She ends up in california by the middle part of the 1960s and shes passionate about technology. Thats really interested in programming and using computers. She ends up at a small start up in palo alto thats in this new business called time sharing. The internet by the internet. Its networked computers. This is a time when computers were giant main fourseams or they were Mini Computers but there was nothing about a mini computer. It was refrigerator sized. It was this big device. They were very expensive and they were usually housed in corporate offices, government labs. You couldnt have one in your small office. You couldnt have certainly ouldnt have one in your home. Timesharing was a way for people to remotely connect through telephone cable and connect to a computer power. Of a remote device. Ann hardy built this operating system. For this company to build this timesharing network. When shes hired shes kired of hired accidentally and says, i can do this. Later on, her boss, the c. E. O. Of the company says, you know, i never if i had known how central this operating system was to our business, i never would have hired a woman to do it. The idea that you would be a technical woman and that you would also be a woman who is an executive, someone with authority was so alien. Look, it was the 1960s. It was there were very few women. This is a different time in american in Corporate America generally. But what happens in tech is and particularly in the valley because networked connections, connections between people where people worked with people from one the same people from one company to another, they use their network to hire nd to invest and to choose who theyre going owork with, the very overwhelmingly male network of the 1960s kind of gets trapped in the afterer. Its harder for in the amber. Its harder for new voices to break in. A challenge for people like ann hardy besides the everyday sexism of corporate retreats people would say, well, the women you cant come. If you come, then we will have to invite our wives and we cant, you know, kind of have dalliances on the side while we were at this corporate retreat, that sort of stuff. Aside from that, the work habits in tech, kind of work hard, play hard, which continues today. You are supposed to be all in. Part of what made Silicon Valley go, quite frankly, was the fact that these male executives, these 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. So those women are a really part of Silicon Valleys story too. Susan so as we go through this we will hear silicon value evened another word, coding. You tell the story how each of those words made their way into our lexicon. Where did coding come from . Professor omara the early days of digital computing. First digital computers, the art and the science of computing was considered to rest in hardware, building the machine. The origins of the first alldigital computer comes out in world war ii. It is an army funded project. It is later commercialized as he univac. Univac was like a brand name like kleenex or going. There is a great political tory involving univac. He first appearance on television was in the 1952 election eve of the election. Walter cronkite, newly hired nchor is managing the election ight coverage. They have a univac that can predict the outcome. What univac predicts correctly is 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 is like being a telephone operator. Youre 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. So a coder was kind of someone like a drone. Surprisingly this was seen as omens work. Secretaries, telephone operators, it is kind of basic, a woman can do it. Turns out 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 over around. 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 50s, 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 subsequently become men. He name coder itself came from usan is it a product, code . Margaret yes. There is software code. Oming out of world war ii code cracking. Here is the brutalization of it. It is something where there is a pattern. Like morse code. It is not a creative process. Coding is, the best coders are people who are always thinking about thinking in rather complex ways. Programming is much more complex. Programming is even tougher when you had less memory and you had to be brutally efficient in getting the commands to be as short as ossible and use memory as much as possible. Now we have incredible 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. 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. It turns out the time, the main customers for the Semiconductor Companies were not people like you and me, they were other companies. They were computer makers. The sales guy for these the Computer Companies would come out and they started colloquially referring to the valley as Silicon Valley. Here is a reporter for a trade paper. This is based in palo alto. This is a guy named don hoffler. Hes writing this big feature story in 1971 about the big silicon semi conducter industry in Silicon Valley. He gets wind that Silicon Valley is the colloquial name and he headlines the story Silicon Valley, u. S. A. , and that name stuck. Although it was something that was bandied about in the valley for a while within the industry. It really is its not until the late 1970s when it starts disseminating out. I found in my Research References in the Washington Post and New York Times and Fortune MagazineStart Talking about the valley, Santa Clara Valley and then occasionally they will say Silicon Valley in quotation marks. The post is referring to Silicon Valley in quotation marks until 1979. Then it becomes a more familiar lexicon. It was seen as so often the side of the main action for so long. Susan well, we will go back in time to tell this story. I want people to know a little bit about you. So how did you get interested in this . Professor omara i got interested in this i was in graduate school and i knew i wanted to write a im really a i worked in politics, washington 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 look at the domestic impact of the cold war and i kind of came at i was a political junky. I was interested in what the Eisenhower White house was doing and what lawmakers in congress were doing in the 1950s. And of course, one of the greatest domestic impacts of the cold war was this what the military Industrial Complex to cede the Electronics Industry and computer industry and i was like, oh, this is the story. This is the story how this new. S. Economy was built. I was always really interested ever since i was working in washington with how business and government work together. They have an interest in the antagonistic relationship but hey were together. 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 ndustrial complex. That becomes the foundation for this entrepreneurial flywheel of incredible creation and innovation and five and wealth reation. 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 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 ill clinton. I graduated from college. I was from arkansas. Like any good history major, i did not have a job. History majors get lots of jobs. I came up to try to figure out what to do next. Also, what i was going to be when i grew up. I figured i would volunteer on the campaign. That position turned into an entrylevel job. One thing led to another and hen your candidate wins, verything changes. I spent the first clinton term and working here. Working for both president clinton and Vice President gore. It was an extraordinary education. 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. There just human beings who are trying to figure it out. Hey are very smart, talented 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 the historian has given me being a historian has being an historian has given me a different view on this. Not looking at this as someone is in politics but someone trying to understand why people do what they do. Ooking at the history of Silicon Valley or American History at large, it is a way of not only better understanding our presence, that is one thing 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. Whos right and whos wrong and draw back and say why did we make these choices who is right and who is wrong and draw back and say why did we make these choices . Then you have a richer understanding. And perhaps some more empathy for why Different Actors are doing what they do. Susan how long did you work on this book . 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. Go to the library of congress, national archives. Get in the dusty boxes. There isnt a library of congress. Or national archives. Although archives are important to me and archives like the cspan archives are important to me. Governmental archives were really important to me. But i had to draw in Different Things when it happened. Draw in oral history that others conducted of people who are no longer with us. Corporate records. Sometimes people would just give me file folders that 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 in the making be preserved . It really matters. Were building the future. Why do we care about dusty old papers . But it really matters. Not only understanding how the technologies themselves were developed but also, what were the Business Decisions surrounding those technologies, who were the people, whats the really rich tapestry of the place . This is going to be extremely important, not just for historians now like me but historians Going Forward. Susan right after the war you write about the fact there was a competition between two very different geographic areas like boston and palo alto. You mentioned pennsylvania. Palo s it boston and alto and who were the big patrons . Why did Silicon Valley triumph in this . Professor omara coming out of world war ii, boston was as the u. S. Government decided to get into the science business in a big way, the National Science foundation was created in 1949. U. S. Government decision to get into the science business, the National Science foundation was created in 1949. They wanted to go big on Public Investment in research and development. It was peacetime only in technicality. It was the cold war. It was very much an investment made from the cold war truggle. This is not only a matter of prestige but developing the nuclear realities of the realities of the nuclear age in which the United States now had entered into it. And so boston was the 800pound gorilla, because what was in boston . Harvard and m. I. T. These were the premiere Research Institutions of the age. Yes, the university of pennsylvania and the school of engineering that were also important but the leaders what gave boston this advantaged, the fact that they had been the center of governmentsponsored Business Research during the war. The researchers were from harvard and m. I. T. And including one of the people i talked about, never bush. The original entrepreneurial professor of who has had this extraordinary career thats crossing over academia, he is the founder of raytheon. While is he an Electrical Engineering professor at m. I. T. And then he leads the leads the research and development effort, the wartime research and Development Office under franklin roosevelt. Hes known as roosevelts general of physics and has a high public profile then. Hes really the person who among the many other things he cooks up, he is someone who kind of conceives that this Postwar Research network thats based in a lot of the universities. That explains boston. A lot of money is kind of funneling in after world war ii. There is the Electronics Industry is based on the east coast. There is a lot of existing industry. What explains silicon alley . Santa clara valley was known for being the prune capital of america. It had two assets. T was on the Pacific Coast where a lot of wartime military activity had gone on and continues to go on. And it had stanford. It also had stanford. There are known as the harvard f the west, they want to be the harvard of the west. They had this great asset in mr. Hermann. During world war ii, he had gone to boston to work under bush in this research effort. He is sitting in cambridge and he knows after the war, bush and others are bringing this to move forward. Harvard and m. I. T. Will get a ig 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 or it could still like dartmouth. Good but not having a real effect on the national conversation. I dont know what dartmouth administrators would think of that assessment. Its not charitable. Dartmouth had a history in computing. But he goes back to palo alto, talks to the incoming president of the university. Guy named sterling, a historian. And said, we will turn stanford into the premiere cold war university. We will reorganize the curriculum and build up the physics department, we will build up specialized programs. That is what the cold war military wants us to do. No other university in the world did that. They kind of the Architecture Department evaporated. They did away with other things to build up science and engineering. They built a very close alliance with this industry. They encouraged students like dave packard and bill hewitt to make companies nearby. The original Silicon Semiconductor company was set up by bill shockley. Coinventor of the transister. The original semiconducter was set up by bill shockley. And other defense contractors followed. So stanford was this hub of not the only factor but was incredibly critical. Susan so one of the things that people outside of Silicon Valley always associate with the run of it is the stock options. Excuse me make people so wealthy if their company succeeds. You write that began all the way back in 1957 with h. P. Whats the story. Professor omara so h. P. Was founded in 1939. Goes public in 1957. From its founder the two ounders really set out to make a different kind of company. Think of the big corporations of the 1950 earks the detroit automakers. They wanted something very different. They wanted a nonhierarchical company. No corner offices, no managerial system ties. Suits and ties. No unions because that signals that somethings wrong with managementemployee relations if you have to have a union, they are not depetting along. Instead, they wanted to create something that was kind of like a scientific laboratory. It was much more utilitarian. People felt free to come. People do not feel hemmed in by their job description. There wasnt much of a ladder. People wore shortsleeved. What hughlett and packard called manage hewlitt and packard called management by wandering around. They wouldnt call people in and say, what are you doing . They would be on the shop floor to see whats going on. 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 so we talked about the importance of the space race. For all the money flowing in this. I want to fast forward to the 1960s and talk about one government policy that changed in an unexpected way and that is 1965, l. B. J. Signing an immigration law. We are having a big immigration debate now. How does this 1965 immigration bill figure in the history of Silicon Valley . Professor omara it is incredibly important. The Immigration Reform act is perhaps the most consequential economic policies of the latter half of the 20th century. He funny thing is it was not intended to be that at all. As Lyndon Johnson is signing it in 1965 he said in his remarks that this is not a revolutionary bill. It was seen as crossing the ts and dotting the is on the Civil Rights Act in some ways. What preceded it was an immigration system that had quotas based on national originalin. It was a racially discriminated quota system for immigrants. It was established in the 1920s at a time of fierce antiimmigrant sentiment that was driven by prejudice against southern and eastern europeans, catholics, jews, people who ere seen as other at the time. That was holding fast until the mid 1960s. Johnson and liberal democrats pushed through this Immigration Reform. It was supposed to set things right. And 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 door to immigrants from around the world. Including huge chains of immigration from south and east asia. Many of these immigrants from taiwan, hong kong, india, china, end up in the Santa Clara Valley and Silicon Valley. They became the engineering backbone of the valley. They found companies in disproportionate numbers. By the 1980s, one third of the companies founded in the valley are founded by people who are foreign born from either india or china. Those two. And then on top of that, there are other people from other places. You also have refugee programs. You have refugees from the former soviet union. They and their children go on to found companies. Google is founded by the child of a soviet refugee. You have other refugees that come earlier in americas history. Andy grove, the legendary leader of intel, he was came to the United States as a teenager after world war ii from hungary. He was 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. So that immigration system has been really critical and continues to be really critical. The fact that, why is Silicon Valley so great . Its not because americans are better at technology than everyone else. Its because silicon the american system has allowed the Free Movement of people and capital and 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 weve what we have today and that the american dominance in the tech space. Susan 1970s are a pivotal decade, from reading your book. So much happened. What do people 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 want to become astronauts. When they go to college they learn about punch cards and learn how to Program Computers and interface with computers for the first time. Work on timesharing terminals. They are coming of age in the vietnam era, watergate era, where government is increasingly seen as government is using its power to for destruction, for corruption. You have people coming up who re much more interested in turning away from Big Government and big business and thinking about how computers, which up to that time had mostly been, you know, where the computers who had computers . It was Big Government agencies. It was big corporations because they were so darn expensive and so big, right . They werent something that ordinary people could access. And so this new generation is like, how can we take these computer powers, incredibly powerful machine and how can we use it as a tool for personal empowerment . How can we make it personal . How can we change the interface so that individual people who arent computer programmers, who have been immersed and know the you know, different computer languages, how can we create an interface where ordinary people can access this incredible device . How can we create a Communications Network for computers . And there was this technooptimism, this faith thats born out of this political moment that cant be separated from the other things that are going on in the United States at the time, and the bay area at the time. That is, you know, these computers will save us. Like all the things you see wrong with the world, war, inequity, racism, sexism, if we just have computers and we have control of these computers and we are communicating through them and we are keakting and understanding one another, then communicating and understanding one another, then we can fix them. Susan who do we know came out of the homegrown Computer Club . Professor omara well, steve jobs and steve wozniak, the two founders of apple who showed up at one of the first meetings of this kind of rangey group of computer hobyists, people who are playing around with hobbyists, who are people playing with personal soldering heyre their new mother boards. They built these machines. They show up, kind of two young guys and come in hauling this device that wozniak has designed and its this computer, this mother board. That is morelle gant and simple and sophisticated than pretty much anyone is doing. Its the apple 1. Its so funny, you can easily google the image of the original apple 1. They housed it in this wooden case. It looked like someone built it in High School Shop class. It was very rudimentary but the homebrew Computer Club was this way for technologists to trade n ideas. It was very collaborative. It is a way to figure out this technical hack and share it with you. It was not about making money or commercializing. Yet. But out of that group of people which grows steadily, they have these monthly meetings, gets bigger and bigger. All of this comes an industry, a whole host of little personal Computer Companies. Apple being one of them. They create a transformative new generation of computing, microcomputing. We know that as desktop communicating. Susan Venture Capitalists and lawyers. Professor omara i wanted to show this Silicon Valley galapagos that are critical to understanding why a group and why it has been so successful. It grew and has been so successful. Generation after generation. What you have in Silicon Valley which you dont have anywhere else are specialized Venture Capital firms. This was high tech Venture Capital. Many of the people who were Venture Capitalists were first engineers or were in Technology Companies themselves. Many of them came out of the Semiconductor Industry and their next generation was to start Venture Capital firms and become investors. You see this again and again in the valley. You have people who are in a company, they do well, they have a good exit, a good i. P. O. , they get acquired and they become investors themselves. And they are the ones who are mentoring and theyre picking the winners for the next generation. So Venture Capitalists are really critical. You have these companies starting up 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 thats a veteran from intel. Mark. He came in and made a healthy amount of money. Semiretired in his mid 30s and decided to put a chunk of money into apple personally and came in as adult supervision, as they call it in the valley you have the two steves were not capable of running a you know, really didnt have managerial experience at all. It were pretty unconventional guys. So he creates an organizational structure thats more like a business and more traditional. Even though apple positions itself very effectively as a countercultural 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 of Ronald Reagan talking about a very important project to him. Strategic defense initiative, s. D. I. Lets watch this and talk about this california governor who comes to washington and how he impacts your story. [video clip] president reagan some talk bout s. D. I. This is unconnected to it 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 1990s and beyond. We will research it. We will develop it. And when its ready, we will deploy it. [applause] susan lots of money coming into this. How did it affect Silicon Valley . Professor omara it was really 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. Some things people want to see happen we 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 t Research Institutes like sri in the valley, they are the antiwar generation. They want to make peace, not war. They see reagan 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 china in technology, the difference is the political system, recognizing how much the american political system has made Silicon Valley possible not always intentionally, sometimes its 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 he 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 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 the 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 . Susan during the clinton and gore administration, the 1990s were the boom in 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 closeup shot is john scully had been ceo of apple. He was a very close during 1992 and 1993 he appears sitting next to Hillary Clinton at clintons state of the union in 1993. The government what al gore talks about in this clip, the information superhighway and also this notion of infrastructure. This was the basic 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 1980s, it gradually starts opening up. But up until 1991, 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. What happened in the early 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. Few people were paying attention. 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. Whom 1980s and early 19 the 0s are keeping their eye on the ball and recognizing you have to lay down the basic infrastructure and allow this internet backbone to be regulated to become not regulated in terms of limiting what sort of commercial activity can happen on top of it, but creating some creating a network that the government is encouraging entrepreneurial ctivity 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 hundred millionaire in the process. How how prevalent is that in your telling of the story for people who were regulators or lawmakers to then leave Public Office and make a lot of money in this field . Professor omara al gore is an exceptional figure. He is exceptional in the central role he plays in terms of the 1980s, caring about computers when other lawmakers did not uite get it. Also, in the central role that he played being the techie in chief for the clinton dministration. Also the immense wealth and success he had afterwards. In the last 25 years, Silicon Valley has gotten larger and wealthier. There has been much more traffic 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 in the valley now who are veterans of the clinton, bush 2, and the Obama Administration 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. Microsoft had one guy working out of the sales office in ethesda. He carried stuff around in 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. Are the figure five tech companies. 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 famously joked when 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 it 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 not have google had microsoft not been hemmed down. We do not know. Counterfactual history is impossible. This new generation was growing. This happens again and again, this new generation, regeneration of tech, that companies that are big now are not going to be figure forever. It will be interesting to see who we are talking about 25 years from now own what relationship theyll have to the companies 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 ere. 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 latform. As we tell the story we are now coming full circle. 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 echnologies. 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 ho use the products. It is a big and sprawling history full of interesting characters. The book is called the code. Thank you for spending an hour. We just skimmed the surface. 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. Next sunday on q a, malcolm gradwell talks about his new book talking to strangers about how we make judgments often inaccurately about people we dont know. Thats q a next sunday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern and pacific time on span. The house will be in order. For 40 years, cspan has been providing america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the supreme court, and Public Policy events from washington, d. C. , and around the country. So you can make up your own mind, created by cable in 1979. Cspan is brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. Cspan, your unfiltered view of government. On capitol hill, Congress Returns today from their summer state and district work periods. The house gavels in at 2 00 eastern. 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