My name is stephen rodriguez. Im a student at the new mayor w americas foundation. Why liberal arts ruled the world and scott and i have known each other for a little while now. H when he first approached me about this, i immediately thought of my freshman year in college when i was deciding what i should major in. I loved history and Political Science but i quickly thought id want to be sure i get a job coming out of college. So i decided to meet the professional world halfway and major in business. But when i talked to him it made sense. Cott abo my career i can any of yours takes the many pivots and turns. I realized no realize now what w then is that int many ways liberal arts or business as the ability in the Technology World for innovation in general. So, with that i want to turn over to scott. I know scott from our time in new york. Hed like myself spend time in the Venture Capital world and v worked with google, facebook and pretty much as has a dream rese and importantly for this book spend some time as a president ial innovation fellow. So, at the fortune or misfortune so of getting the government learning about driving innovation in large enterprises. Maybe to start tell us about yourself and why you got the idea to spend time writing this book. First, thank you for having me here today and all of you for spending your lunch with us here. My impetus to write the book came out of the observation i grew up in the boom and bust of Silicon Valley but always carry this interest in public policy. The job is to effectively meet,o on a daily basis and tracks where it may be going into work others to place investments in those Companies Using heavy profit. I was sort of at odds with the narrative coming out of the media and the narrative i saw on a daytoday basis but basically Silicon Valley was a monolith of techies creating innovation and i think if you go back to the 1990s, laying the groundwork infrastructure for the web and the technology we have today it may have been more of a true statement that was pioneered by techies but today its been for propagated throughout the media. I would flip out and say its become the application layer is about how we apply the technology meaningfully. Its no longer the case you have to be a techie. In five meetings a day or so i would say at least half were people coming out of all theseep different lives from fashion, media, coming out of differentia academic backgrounds, applying what theyve known from sociology or economics, partnering to put the new toolst against things they understood deeply that i realized in this thesis of the book as they had e become more monetized from the people coming from these other backgrounds and experiences it has the passion and interest to apply to what they know so they come back from the 1960s and 1970s and it was this association in this set of terms it refers to those that gave to study the social sciences and they were more selfexplanatory people that came out of the engineering world of computerpew science and the book also is not about the opposition of the twoo and its not that i am fuzzy and you are techie or one or the other but it is a book within any of these programs of theanye social sciences for example you got a Statistical Software to master these days you are often working with the big data and engaging with independent variables. Then youve got the advent of design and know your customer so you sort of start peeling back these terms and realize its about these two things and that sort of secondary part of thef book refers to the liberal arts and this sort of takes this constant liberal or that has been in some degree throw from e bus in Silicon Valley for example asset of those that work in shoe stores come and ifwo nothing against shoe stores but that isnt true english majors will be more like one of the founders said the liberal arts of no value in the future economy and first of all, i mean if we look at the classic definition of what the liberal arts are, they incorporate mathematics and logic andgic an Natural Sciences so if we look at some of these field for example in the gene sequencing bees come ou out of this only fr their biology without direct vocational application and that is the sort of premise of the liberal arts that i mean when i say these are things that will rule the digital world, so that is i guess the rationale behind why i wrote the book and theeran overarching thesis. If you listen to the podcast or watch any of the Major News Networks would feel we are in a world any time consumed byts nt software, these are big economii messages today talking about the role of automation and taking jobs away or bringing jobs here. So kind of piggybacking on the comments made, how or why should a world consumed in artificialsn intelligence, automated processes even care about liberal arts and things like anthropology, history orto Political Science . When i say Silicon Valley i dont mean the geographical location, i mean atlarge this technological layer interfaces look lexington kentucky and chattanooga and places in between, it is the democratization of a lot of these tools not to mention the application of the technologies means we have more broadening of where technology is so the reason i think it Still Matters if you look at 2014, oxford came out with a study that said 47 of u. S. Jobs were at high risk of machine automation and this was sort of the rise of the robots in the book and thinking about the reality that there were so many jobs at risk. In january of this year, they came out with a followup where they looked at a little more granular level and said wait a minute, lets look at 800 occupations and what comprises these occupations. If we divvy them up and attempts to match them with what machines currently doing with the project them to do down the road we find based on the 5 of jobs which is still a nontrivial number, 5 has massive implications for social reasons and things that are commonly brought to the forefront of the media but its not 47 and what they also found is that for 60 of jobs, 30 of the taxes are things that would change generally over a 20 year timeframe, so i think the reality we are living in is muca less about this coming wave of automation taking over jobs its more about if you flip the letter from Artificial Intelligence to the riaa, that is something to think about. In the automotive world, we look at self driving cars and think over what period of time are the vehicles going to be running around the road by themselves. Weve been undergoing this process for a long time all the. Way back to automatic transmission to antilock brakes. We are starting to see the benefits of being on a freeway in a particular area and we will start seeing this more and more but its not going to happen overnight and i think if you look at that progression is much more serial progression and i think the same is true in the workforce. We are more likely to have a death in the office than robots taking over jobs so that is one of the interesting things in the book if you actually unpack this idea and say where are the tasks in the jobs that can be taken away, generally the best practice that we have could become a machine practice and it is generally something that youve done before, you know the process. It can be scripted and programmed and then obviously there is a machine that can do that. If you look within the job and say what are the best practices those are generally the simple things that are routine and can be moved away from machines that what that does is freeze up the human and the role to focus on the complex tasks. He talks about basically the social skills and soft skills in the employment world of something we cant quantify we know it is important but how do we put our finger on it like dark matter in the universe we know its out there that we cant put our finger around what it is. He talks about in this world where all the simple tasks are scripted and what is left is the complex task. We specialize more so you may be good at one thing and i am good at Something Else. There is a transaction cost associated and which reduces thh friction is actually soft skill, social skill, things you learn through other positions and i think that it is an interesting secondbest to this whole wave of automation to say it thinks things do start for example in the legal space, there is a study in the book where they said lets look at people and figure out the legal professione and it is done on 13 that could be scripted and taken away but that doesnt mean 13 of lawyers disappear. It means within each job there is a small subset of tasks. That sort of thing we can outsource and it gives some of these smaller startups to havee the same scale efficiencies. I think its the same way as mab having the 50 associates. Those are some of the ideas around the reason why this training in liberal arts or ways to train collaboration andts or communication has become really important in this machinelike world. [inaudible] that would be a valuable skill. Its interesting you mentioned the ai automation because i think it is pivoting more towards the field on nationalin security and ive often thought about the unmanned systems, predator, global hawk or these kind of terminator like tanks that are going to go out and fight everyone out. I had a conversation with someone recently and they reminded me that i think for every one or two predators, these unmanned planes in the east missions overseas primarily i think they set up to 80 people are required to keep those in the air. So maybe by having a predator id the air, certain individuals are no longer able to have the jobal that they did but now its a whole new set of job skills to keep these unmanned systems. I t so washington dc and security,. , who in the government today whether individuals or agencies, who gets this in your opinion,nn you spend time as a president ial innovation fellow. Have you run into people here in washington that seem to understand this . He brought this program into fruition and the attempt was to bring technologies from outsideu of washington to bring perspectives and ability and Product Innovation and things to different agencies sort of like the White House Program within a particular agency to make it more efficient and think about the outside tools focused on Data Visualization and digitizing the records at the National Archives for example, so that was an example of importing in some ways and we were chatting about this idea whether it is exporting. I think its more exporting problems from places Like Washington where we have a finger on the pulse or maybe legislation coming and data in the Government Agencies that can be made open and accessible through application programming. Those are ways i think we can start exporting. I think a good example of this is bringing the Defense Industry and for the programs. We always try to bring them into washington and i thought the attempt to bring the defense to Silicon Valley was interesting in the process of creating the Defense Innovation experimental incubator they started creating all sorts of programs. One of the outgrowth of that is the professor that wrote the book so he is a pioneer of this mentality and working with a former Army Colonels key started a program that was mentioned. It goes from the particular agency for teams within the military needing to have better information about the biometric data and it appears it is a mix between Computer Sciences and people from the field and people studying International Relations and they worked together on whatever problem they are assigned to. The innovations have been amazing in these short sprints getting the crowd sourcing and different perspectives on how to fix them and i think this is one idea that gets to the heart ofof the book taking some of the things that we understand here and exporting them as well. Heres another example of the coming regulation where the world is changing so much its not just a problem and solution but its the timing and why is it important today because if you are at the wrong time you are wrong so i think one of the things washington can help with is helping people understand the timing of particular things. Er i know there is a mandatory device that becomes 31 millionon trucks in the road suddenly youve got to have logging information that isnt just paper notes in a spiral notebook when youre sleeping and driving and regulations for safety, now theres this mandate for an Electronic Device and theres a company in Silicon Valley called keep trucking thats funded by a pakistani from texas who studied Political Science at the London School of economics and his family knew the Trucking Industry and said im going to leave my christian job case in point he worked and went and started a company thats doing very well. What they do is created and internet of things device that attaches to the engine and it provides that realtime information about when the truck is running, if the truck is loaded or not loaded and they are starting to cultivate all this data around which blames for the realtime shipping information across the u. S. Which are highly optimized and a trucker is driving one way and then driving home unloaded with no shipment and so those are the kind of things where if you have information on changing legislation and regulation. Its interesting because i have a number of friends whoveg gone out to work for a Technology Firm revenge or Venture Capital firm. Whether it is the inhouse lobby person for the firm or places like this and thats always kind of bothered me because to your point i thought theres got to be a lot more value to someone that spends time here in dc not just reading on capitol hill but understanding how the Government Works not just being a congressional advisor orl adviso lobbyist. It has value on the business side that these men and women can bring to these firms and i think you kind of touched on some of these people in this book. Not just the subject matter but its sort of the applicability of the methodology. One example if you look at the people come and attend this is one of the observation, one of the empirical truths that i thought was fair went against the grain of this narrative about it being a sort of monolithic place and if you look at the economics major in history and literature major from Williams College you look at alex who runs the Big Data Company and has a phd in social theory, peter loves to hate on global arts, philosophy degree and law degree. If you go down the route, its a lot more people than you would expect that have these irrelevant degrees. If anyone likes to interest, thc thumbtack Political Science again so theres all these examples. Its more efficient to contend people. Stewart actually was the creator of the photo sharing app back i the day but before that he was a philosopher and did undergrad and grad studies in canada in philosophy. If only i had the foresight to build that years ago. People dont have the foresight to just start doing something and iterate their way towards a truer and truer version so it started as a Gaming Company called tiny speck. In the process of building this Gaming Company, they used an internal Communications Tool to communicate between the engineers in overtime they realized maybe this has more value and they started reiterating towards that. In the process of doing that, he attributes the process to this methodology in the philosophy and the philosophical and very if you think about sitting at a roundtable when you debate ideas and try to not judge people based on their positions but get towards this idea of truth in as close to the proclamation as you can get in many ways that is seen as a Product Development process and how you get closer and closer, whatever that is. Its very similar. There is so many examples of thr methodology that come to play in the Product Development processs at a place like google. It reminds me of a conversation i had one time. I met with a very Senior Executive at a household name Technology Firm that will go nameless for this conversation, and this person and proclaiming the wonders of the company said wtheir companieshad we only hirw how to code. Okay, great. I said i wanted to code in the 90s. Does that count and this person said well, now its got to be cribbed language. I said great to you know how to code . Well, no. Exactly to your point i had to scratch my head and say you are the key driver of value and presumably revenue for this major Technology Firm and you are a fuzzy. Thats interesting as the tools have become more democratized to learn the new tools, if you look back to the 90s and well before that, the syntax you had to master it was highly complex as youve gotten further and further away, more and more away from the its moving towards natural language processing. We are not there yet dot the ultimate level with the english come of those things actually work well. We would be able to command access to the date of the big bottleneck is the ability to ask the question. I think if you go all the way back there was a great quote judge a man or woman by the . Either answer and i think increasingly if we want an answer fiasco machine and if we wanted questioned we ask is for human. Those were some of the things that i think as the tools become more and more democratized going back to your point even when they are building the tools lk theyve got 25 plus Million People learning to code through online dashboards where you follow directions and put coding into the develop and in the process founded a company that is a dropout from columbia and Political Science major and i need to give a couple of shout outs. He was looking at hiring the top people at different programs and people coming out of thesepl programs and he said here are the languages i need to build in the academies and none of them have the requisite coding language skills. They have theoretical grounding in things that taught them the Building Blocks that they saw to go to the General Assembly and upscale on some of the latest languages they have to g had toa workshop at night so i think because of that, we can graduate with any slip of paper whether it is a Political Science slip of paper and have that be the sort of Carte Blanche to relevance in this economy. I think those days are numbered and its much more about keeping our education and data and educational work in progress. That is Something Else in the book that is in the narrative today that you still have this Carte Blanche and this is a changing target so its about the ability to be a smarte questioner. That reminds me of an old anecdote that i heard. It teaches you how to learn and then getting a postgraduate degree teaches you what to learn and its this idea like you said othat education and data orid continually learning and i think its interesting getting your thoughts on this, do we have these new oddly enough printer only Technology Related trade classes or trade schools like General Assembly even inor c different degree designed to quickly and relatively easily help people that want to learn and help them learn how to learn and use specific subject matters without having to go and spend 50, 100, 200,000 for a masters class. Thats become of personal interest to me. A lot of times my fear is people dont ask the hard questions because the answers are going to be ugly. I reverted to my true form to get my masters and one of the first things they taught us is policymaking is about using the least bad option and a lot oft times to even get to those options you have to ask hard questions that you know they wont know how to deal with or have a great response to that but i think answering these questions you may go back to thb method. N the narrative and the media has been there for good reasonas if you look at sort of triple threat of the 2008 financial crisis, rising unemployment, rising cost of student and the importance of that and then this coming wave of automation and the fear of the technological transformation and job loss has been a sort of triple threat against the questions of education. Its about vocational relevance. The book is not against technical literacy but its thie idea that they are mutually exclusive but he studied philosophy and you know nothing about coding. Charles was no dave what was called the read lecture at Cambridge University in the uk because he talked about this sort of opposition to the two cultures in the sciences and humanities and basically said if we have people learning the laws of thermodynamics they should also be reading shakespeare and vice versa so its not a new idea to sort of blend the two. But in the big data and aia and all these buzzwords we see on a daily basis, theres been this notion that they are magic new secresecret sauces that are goio change the world and somehow they must be that the answers were going to appear in our jobs will disappear. S disa and in reality, going back to plato and Francis Bacon and information not being the same thing as knowledge and the transition between information and knowledge requires human input. Pu to go back to defense, theres a couple examples in the book where you think in the world of big data if you go to Newport Rhode island to the naval war college, why do we still havewh gaming if they have all the data and all the signals and intelligence why do we do for gaming of course theres a human component and youve got to have the force on force adversarial games to see what happens and what doesnt and why and think about all these different ideas and from an experiential component to that is the reason why even in this big data world we still in the south china seas youve got all these signals of intelligence on ships that you hear about where an oil rig is moved to different waters and theres a bunch of ships surrounding it and theres a moment of crisis where you have to think is it an exercise or attack, is it something bigger, and its the context in addition to the code its the human perspectives like you said to keep the drone in the air takes 80 engineers are so. If it is the sor that is the soy behind the curtain of these buzzwords. So those are some of the examples. Question last question and then please, cue up your own questions for the remaining time we have. Its interesting to see the wargaming i started that primarily for the Intelligence Community and the one game i missed because i was at another was the infamous millennium challenge game of 2003 where they had a marine general named paul and they had a scenario in the persian gulf and she was the commander of the red team of the opposing forces that were going against the various blue teams commanded by these areas and they had their own staff basically saying what if we did these operations what would the enemy do and to your point, i think the big Data Scenario would have picked this up but if you hav had just done a monte co simulation to crush the opposing force nine times out of ten, the general said why dont i get a bunch of small little boats and swarm them and it ended up seeking the entire fleet. The only reason we know about it is because the u. S. Navy said we cant have that outcome. He said this is ridiculous and then the scenario got leaked to the. Of the final question and i will turn it over to you in the audience. I would imagine when i sit down to write an article or paper, the question that you presumably ask when you are looking to write this book how did that change the initial question you asked yourself and is the different than what ended up in the final product . Tha that is a good question. Of course. Ality its sort of my reality coming from Silicon Valley and the world talking about a tiny speck reiterating itself over and the same is true with all productions like a book. So i think the original thesis was if i think back to one of my earliest drafts from a few years back at this point it was that you dont have to be technical to succeed in Silicon Valley. That was the original. The title was always the same because i loved the framing, so i kind of knew the title from the moment i thought about it but the second was originallycan why you can be nontechnical in the technical world but stillcc. Succeed. Then as we got into that we thought was in bodies that, thats more like the liberal arts. As other great books have come out with weapons of mass destruction, and it is fantastic if you havent read it, but its about being a realist about thet big data and saying if you look at big data as one thing that how we collect it is another thing and where it comes from so if you think about predictive policing and can we deploy in more optimized ways, probably technology can help but if you kind of look at what is thet source of the data that informs where we send them is there a bias in the reporting of that data if it is based on the crime data that is reported, is it all in there, no because it is reported. So is there a bias in how certain types of crimes are reported and some are underreported chronically so if you start running bees that extrapolate in propagating back, you can get to the binary outcomes, so its about asking the questions behind the big data and realizing all these tools so if you call it an algorithm tha it doesnt becomey more inherently objective thann sitting in a room in siliconwhev valley and so i think taking a step back and recognizing those truths behind the buzzwords. Im not sure if we have a a microphone. If you have a question, please raise your hand and introduce yourself and please limit yourf question to the form of a question. Right up here first please. You d you talked about education and jobs. Of the leader keeps talking about bringing jobs back and mostly Economic Growth as we head into a financial crisis beyond imagination if we dont get the economy moving. You talked about education maybe i missed some of it but are we educating in such a way as the next generation needs more and better second part abou of thatw does that apply to the rest of the world where jobs are difficult to find, egypt, iran, china and france. Can you speak to that a little bit . Thank you for the question. So, the status quo we have to recognize the changing world around us where it is hugely. Important. These are not mutually exclusive things. You ask how can we teach this in a way that engages new technology that doesnt lose thg older framing and context in all these things. We take ma one way is if we take the subject and apply them in the lens of the technology so in the case of ethics or philosophy, we can read this but then we can apply it to this modern contactr us to so we have a car pulling into an intersection and various moments where there are questions about ethics and building the machine to go left or right and trolley problems people talk about if you have to choose the left or th or right t answers and deaths on both how do you make that choice, those were sort of unanswerable questions that could be paired with the reading of different ethical paradigms and thinking through some of the classical texts but in a modern way. Similarly, using this method to teach things we are looking at k12 and i think one of the interesting studies i try to bring into the book is grappling with messy problems being in the era of google where we can google anything and find the answer in moment. Whats the point of learning if you can just google anything . So if you have these questions which one example of that was a school i cant recall where i think it was in kentucky the teacher asked if we had square ears and this was a question she posed to the fifthgraders. They had to use all these tools, ive had this, watching youtube videos and all these Different Things but there was no right answer so they had to learn about acoustics and learn about biology and actually inquire the resources and say i trust that source but not this other one. E. This video looks a littlenges sketchy so it was kind of depending on what our friends share. I think to the extent we have to engage these things meaningfully so how can we teach through th that. I have a 2 20 month old and a three week old at home and i think with both of them you see their personalities come out early on and the one thing i would hope for them is that they would always keep asking those questions just not that it oclock when i am trying to put them down for bed. I am interested in an area that i study there is a zone right in the middle and im wondering if you can talk about majors that are designed to be disciplinary majoring in sociology or High Technology and society and things like that do you see those playing an Important Role in how all of this plays out in the workplace . Definitely. The i love these interdisciplinary majors and i feel like i see more for different programs like georgetown and applied intelligence and using data science applied in it particular field. There is one i talked about because there hav had been some incredible graduates at thate rh program. You look within a lot of these companies and a lot of them with the nature comprises this logic, philosophy, math, Computer Science and psychology. I look at the majors and i quickly ran away from it. Its an incredible crosssection because you were asked to grapple with Computer Science and math and logic in this intersection of things that have been behind the scenes in a lot of these companies, so theres probably a lot of these pointss where theyve always existed if we look at architecture fork example, architecture is aesthetics and mathematics inrcr some ways so thereve always been these things that sat at the crossroads. I was listening to a podcast on the train about basically being able to identify music based on the beats per minute and it was a challenge to identify. Er i dont think there is one right answer. Over there in the corner. My question is two elements. What was your findings with respect to the families and siblings and was there any competitive nature among the siblings going into technology or liberal arts and the second thing, was there any influence on studying abroad towards these paths . I dont really cover studying abroad per se. We live in an increasingly globalized world where the question of education is as well this notion of learning the skills. If you are highly creative and a place like Systems Engineering with the building infrastructu infrastructure, those jobs will always i think exist but this notion that you code websites and that is going to be your bread and butter for life, there are places like the company between new york and play goes and what they are doing is training people coming out of great universities in nigeria and giving them the skills for some development and bringing together whole teams that then outsource projects from ibm and google and microsoft say youlo look at them and are they becoming the new bluecollar jobs those are the same things we had in the business process in the 90s and 2000 is. I think we will see some of that in the same way we are already seeing it. My website for the book coded for about a thousand dollars in ukraine in under a week so there are examples of this all over the place understanding the world in the global context of broad is hugely important andhe then the other question about sibling rivalry, we had a funny interaction as we were chatting before this about not knowing too much and sort of staying humble so in the process of writing this book, i knew nothing about writing books and i just sort of integrated my way down the path and at the same time, my sister went to the iowa writers workshop and in the process of writing the book she helped launch a startup in los angeles so kind of not knowing too much on this sibling rivalry it was that answers your question at all. That gets to how many studies have been done that show people can have very severe opinions about certain things which then decline precipitously when exposed to the subject of their opinion whatever that might be. I dont know if that applies to sibling rivalry that pretty much every other case im pretty suri that it does. Fascinating conversation. Er i wondered if he reached any conclusions in the book about the comparative advantage of the firms that combine butter in a society that increasingly places monetary value above other values that there is innwhet healthcare or information or whether you found some inherent advantage that needed to be pushed back against Technical Skills. One example is a Company Called stitch fix and i dont know if anyone here is familiar but its effectively they take an item of clothing and classify a fast piece of fabric to characteristics based on you connect to your pinch this board and then they try to predict what you might like fashion wise and then they send you those items, you keep some and send some back and it gets better and better. Theyve raised about 50 million on this hybrid model. They are not and only Machine Learning shop. Its their algorithm and the interesting thing is they have about 70 scientists and about 4,000 scientists to make the stylists and so they take and they have a subset of maybe ten items that they think you will like that then they know a little bit about that demography and you from conversations if you say you are fashion forward your in lexington kentucky is that different than if you are in midtown manhattan. So theyve done the incredible job of bridging the and a techie in the sense that the founder oa the company came out as an economics and business and social background and partnered with a guy that ran netflix algorithms programs and he built the backbone of netflix and to me it is a great example of both the styling engine and the magic of bringing the two together. And hes a huge proponent of the algorithms. The second question was more about the pushback. Is whether or not you think it is a natural thing that will happen that liberal arts and Technical Skills will melt because the market favors that were whether the market favorsrs at the moment because of the structure of the market and the valuation of the profit over other values whether the technical gains an advantage over the less monetized skills. That is the myth i seek to bust through in the book that these are monoliths because they are not. You look at this map chat. What was the reason they won the sort of gen x demographic and why didnt those people got into grammar facebook, one could argue the major epiphany and what they had was for people that grew up with digital abundance, people that had every photo theyve ever taken stored in dropbox on their google phone and cloud, they didnt know digital scarcity so its a sc sociological insight of understanding what could create the demand in scarcity on the platform and its make things disappear. There is a guy named nathan based in brooklyn who is a phd sociologist that wrote all abou what he called digital dualism in this idea things that were online can be real and things that are offline can be fake and we had this idea about our real world is real and the online world is somehow not tangible. He said when you look at this stage dressing against the grand posts that is sort of creating an artifice in the real world and if you have this moment of a sophie on snap chat that can be very authentic and real so i think if you look at snap chat and was made at them super effective highgrowth and designate with this demographic is this fuzzy inside and similarly i think with google and spectacle theres this idea of indoor glasses and transparency or outdoor glasses and inherent part of assumption of non transparency and to have a recording device on the sunglass makes more sense than a recording device where you expect to have informal conversation indoors so these are very small nuances but i think those are the reasons products succeed or fail so behind the scenes the decisions that make things work. Way afte thats one of the interesting points from the International Security perspective a lot of these questions whether you have the technology or idea oras strategy its not as much to have the capability to do something but its how you could choose to use the capability and i think you get to a lot of those questions even from the enterprise level and corporate n level using these concepts together you get that byy bringi bringing in. But if they were to look at my outfit right now they would characterize it as wonky and approachable. [laughter] any other questions . We will make this one the last one. Im im going to a talk actually and after our happy hour to recruit. Im trying to tell them aboutat what youre talking about. The succes success of ipad is ts telling the story about wire cutter which is a magazine like the Consumer Reports of the sold to the New York Times and about the founder who took wordpress and made basically a model of his company and it worked and she loved it and let him not do as much management. You can imagine how Something Like this can be used for example your police example. You could imagine how this would happen, how you would have a model of a city and police and whos doing what and who knows what and all this and it woulde be cheap because you are using wordpress. He had a master word press person on board. So heres my question and like i said its really slow going with them. The reasons i think or you can figure out why it is this is so foreign to these people t who think of themselves as leaders in dc and civic tech. My question is how command again let me add one more thing this is something where the we are talking lots of people. With so next time i go and have a beer with these guys what should i say . If they understand tha this domain and they are looking at applying wordpress they make things like consumer tax software. How can you use the software to reduce the complexity and keep track of all this data. With this kind of software you keep building it and this other software we are talking about here which is a nextgeneration type of software its a different type of software, different type of problem and again what you are trying to capture in this case is all of these complex human interactions and also creating symbolic worlds that represent these human circumstances so you are a junior comp you can know whats going on in the seven blocks you are assigned to. To them, this is an enormously and it is a big leap, butig again i think it is a very much nextgeneration application and it is doable. Dot company that is in this space actually i featured a little bit in the book called openquotes debate co. Open, they worked for the general hr and it was fascinating by transparency so to the point of knowing what is that happen on a block to block basis, he was flying in the dusty parts of afghanistan looking at transparency issues and had the realization in a shipping container rather than a garage like Silicon Valley that we need to focus on transparency here in the states. They built this platform but has above 1400 cities across the u. S. And all of the municipal data for expenditures and revenues and figuring out on a block by block basis theres more parking tickets given out or what is the timing of the Police ManagementServices Going through the city so they try to visualize if they partnered with 1400 cities to take the data and they built a platform rather than using the processors, they tried to develop theel infrastructure and pipes for the people that understand the problems and the idea that they can basically partner and get the display of the data and provide a transparency. I dont know if that answers the question but its a greater example of how somebody who was passionate about the transparency and about this problem was able to become theth comparative advantage in creating this company raising tens of billions of dollars and employs hundreds of billions and now has 1400 cities with better transparency than theyve ever had before because it isnt in the boxes of printouts, its actually and dashboards like five Google Analytics where you can see in realtime where the city is functioning and where it can improve. You see why this book was a finalist for the prize and it also woalsowon the financial tif the month for april. I almost wish we had done this discussion over a bottle of something other than water. Ghtfl a more philosophical discussion that ive had in a long time. Please join me in thanking scott for coming here today. [inaudible conversations] someone can come and sell this product and forever be associated with it when that is just a shade of the story. He was hands on and had a lot to do with it, but the truth is insofar as it was developed it never would have happened without scores of people working around the clock. Part of the story is that it was born as a software interaction paradigm behind his back. They started basically experimenting with this freewheeling research, it was wild stuff they had this crazy project. They were using for different products to create what would become the iphone. Im not asking anybody to compromise their values or beliefs but to open their eyes to other people so you can figure out your place. I set up at the beginning of the book our biological wiring and i wanted to show we had evolved a culture that was designed to validate us and not to challenge us or contradict us. It gave the illusion that our realities were watertight when they were riddled with weak spots and places that would crunch in. And you are watching the tv on cspan2, television for serious readers we are in new york city at the publishers annual trade show and what we like to do during the summer is