I am a fellow at the. While liberal arts rule of the divisional world. They had known each other for a little while now. I immediately thought of my freshman year in college. I decided on what i should major in. I love history and Political Science. No one cares to read about. I decided to meet the professional world halfway and major in business. When i read this book and i talked to scott about it made sense because my career like many of yours as well was taken different pivots into turns and i realized that now what i didnt know then which was in many ways the liberal arts in business has applicability to the Technology World even innovation in general. With that i want to turn it over to scott before scott tells you more about his book i know scott from our time in new york. He like myself has spent time in the Venture Capital world also worked for google and facebook. And has the dream resume. He has spent some time as a president ial information fellow. Have the fortune or misfortune of getting some good experiments in the government and driving innovation. Maybe just tells a little bit about yourself and where you have the idea that writing the book. Thank you to the new america for having me here today. For all of you guys for spending your lunch with us here. My emphasis for writing the book really came out of observation i spent my time and i grew up in the bay area in the boom and bust of Silicon Valley. It just carried this interest in Public Policy and the fuzzier side of things. I found my way into google and facebook where i was working at a Venture Capital firm. In the process your job is to meet with entrepreneurs on a daytoday basis and track where you may be going and work with other partners in the firm. It was at odds with the norm that was coming out of the media and what i saw on a daytoday basis. Silicon valley was this group of techies creating innovation and there is no other contributor to that world. If you go back to the 1990s for the love and technology that we have today. You may have been more of a true statement. They had been propagated to the media. I hope to flip that and say they are feeding the world. It has become the application. It is no longer the case that you have to be a techie in order to participate doing five minutes a day with different entrepreneurs. At least half of those they were coming out of all these different likes. They were coming out of academic backgrounds. And they were partnering with it to kind of put the new tools. With the thesis of the book. As it has been more commoditized the comparative advantage and to how we apply also comes from the people that are coming from these other backgrounds and experiences and has the passion into the interest to apply the technology to what they know. The term actually come back on the stanford campus and it was a lighthearted association and monitor of our you more of a techie. And really, in the set of terms. They referred to people that studied the arts. They were more selfexplanatory. The book also is not about the opposition of these two and its not that im a fuzzy and you are a techie or one or the other. If you look within any of these programs you look within social sciences you have Statistical Software they have to match. In working with big data sets. You are engaging with independent and dependent variables and if you are doing those things. They are not the funny subjects are not uniformly fuzzy. You have the Design Thinking which is basically user psychology there has been a lot about user experiences and the interviews which are kind of sociological and how they work. You kind of compare these terms and you realize we are all a bit of both. The secondary part of the book which refers to how the liberal arts were there. They had been to some degree thrown under the bus. They have said those are the soft skills. I have nothing against shoe stores. I dont think that they will be baristas in the founder has said. Basically the liberal arts has no value in the future economy. And first of all if we look at this. They incorporate mathematics. If you look at some of the most emergent fields and gene sequencing. In the things that come out of that. Its a study of biology without direct application. And when they are tugging on their mind. Those are the premises of the liberal arts that i mean when i say these are the things that will rule the digital world. That is sort of the rationale behind why i wrote the book in the over arching thesis. If you listen to podcasts or check websites or watch any of the Major Networks you would feel like were in a world it is consumed by ai and automation. Where people including administration are talking about talk about the role of automation and taking jobs away. They are piggybacking off of the comments you just made. How or why should a world that is consumed in Artificial Intelligence should even care about liberal arts and things related to anthropology or history. Looking across that. When i see Silicon Valley and i mean the geographic location i mean atlarge the technological layer. As we are seeing in places like lexington kentucky. In chattanooga and a number of those places. They had access to information with a lot of these tools. In the rate of the technology has meant that we have a much more bargaining Aware Technology exists. The reason i think it Still Matters if you look in 2014. They came out with a study that said 47 percent of u. S. Jobs were at high risk of machine operation. This was the rise of the robots. And thinking about the reality that there was some e jobs that were at risk. In january of this year they came out with a followon study where they looked a little bit more granule level. Wait a minute. Lets look at a hundred occupations. Lets look at what comprises of the occupations. If we divvy up occupations by task and then we attempt to match that with what they can currently do and what we reject them to do down the road. We actually find that based on the 5 of jobs which is still a nontrivial number they have massive implications for all sources. And the question of basic income. And they are commonly there. Its not 47 percent. What they also said that for 60 of jobs 30 of the tasks were things that would change. Generally over an eight to 20 year timeframe. The reality that we are living in is much less about this wave of full automation and im taking them taking over jobs. Its much more if you lip the letters from Artificial Intelligence to the argumentation. That something to really think about. We look at self driving cars and we think over what time will they just be humming around the roads by themselves. Weve been undergoing this process for a long time. All the way back to the intellect breaks. We are starting to see the benefits of lean guidance. And being on the freeway with no potholes in good visibility. Will start seeing a ton of vehicles more and more. Its sort of all or none. When they have them one of the interesting things in the book is if you actually unpack this on idea and say where are the tasks within our jobs that can be taken away. The best practice that we have could be a machine practice. If you have a best practice you can generally see that we have done that before. It can be scripted. If they can be programmed obviously there is a machine that can do that. With you look within your job. What are the best practices those are generally the simple things. They are highly routine and they can be moved away from machines. If you focus on that. There up at the harvard graduate school. Basically the social skills and soft skills as being the dark matter in the educational world and something that we cant really quantify. We know its important. But how do we put our finger on it. We know that its out there. We cant quite put our finger on what it is. When he talks about is in this world where all of that simple tasks are scripted and eroded by machines we actually specialize. We actually encounter friction. In the transaction. What reduces the transaction cost. Its actually soft skills and social skills. And things you like through that. And i think it is a really interesting second deck to this whole wave of automation is to say if these things do start in the legal space they were in a study that i talked about. In the Legal Profession where this could be a task and working take it away. With the legal tasks. It doesnt mean that 13 of lawyers disappear there is sort of a small subset of tax. We can obviously outsource that to machines. I think it gives some of the new skill advantages. They have empowered smaller startups. I think the same way with automation. They may be able to compete with the big law firm. Those are some of the ideas around the way to change the soft skills. In the machine like world. I can definitely tell you i would personally pay a lot of money for whatever dr. Dark matter helped with that. That would be a valuable skill. Its interesting you mentioned the automation because i think it could be more towards the International Security. Ive often thought about the man for instance. With the terminated like tanks. They will go out and wipe everyone out. I have a conversation with someone recently these unmanned planes in the noncombat missions that we see. Up to 80 people are required to keep the things in the air. Maybe by having a predator in the air certain individuals are no longer able to have the job that they did. There is an whole new set of job skills. And they were massively undermanned. To keep the systems and may be over ran. I think really the International Security in washington dc. Whether the individuals or agencies get this paradigm. With the president ial innovation. Have you run into people here in washington that seem to understand this. We were talking before and i think its an interesting concept so what he was working with president obama it was a second cto he brought this program to for mission. In the attempt was to Bring Technology from outside of washington into the beltway. In the innovation and things to different agencies and really come in and kind of like the white house and the tact along with cto within a particular agency and to make that agency a little bit more efficient. Focus on Data Visualization and making these physical records in the different archives that was an example i think of importing techies in some ways and we were chatting about it earlier this idea of whether it was exporting i think its more exporting problems and understanding the depth of understanding of problems from places Like Washington where we have a finger on the pulse for maybe coming with legislation and the data that is walled up in Government Agencies they can be made open and accessible through application programming interfaces. Where they can then pipe that data into new tools those are ways that i think we can start exporting the fuzzy and import the techie. I think a really great example of this was the prior secretary of defense bringing that Defense Industry out to Silicon Valley. Weve always try to Bring Technology into washington but i thought his attempt to bring that out to Silicon Valley was interesting and through the process of that its the Defense Innovation experimental incubator that is out they have started to create all sorts of programs and really exporting problem sets. They have those things. And one of the outgrowths of that is that partnership between the entrepreneurship. The lean startup. That professor who wrote the book lean startup. It is the pioneer of this build measure mentality and working with the two former army colonels. They were now have the hacking for diplomacy. Its around 13 different colleges and you mentioned texas a and m jm you here in virginia. They have this program as well. But basically it takes problem sets from the particular agencies or teams within the military they need to have better information about biometric data. It appears that problem with a team that is mixed between computer scientists and people from techie fields with international relations. These Work Together for a ten week quarter on whatever problem they are assigned to. And that innovations had been really amazing. In this short sprints by exporting the problem in getting crowdsourcing if you will a different perspective on how we can fix them. I think that is one idea that really kind of gets to the heart of the book not just about bringing the techies into washington but taking some of the things that we really understand here and exporting them as well. There is another example of joining with regulation and if you think about as an innovator and someone sitting and trying to build a company. If you have information about where the world is changing. So much of that is not just the problem and the solution that you have but the timing. Its by now. Why is important today. If you are youre right at the wrong time you are wrong. I think one of the big things that washington could help with is helping people understand the timing of particular things. I know later this year there is a mandatory electronic locking advice device that becomes mandated. Suddenly you have to have that information thats not just paper notes when youre sleeping and when youre driving. Its regulation for safety and when you can drive and how many hours a day. Now there is a mandate. The logging device. It is a pakistani american from texas. His family knew of the Trucking Industry and he said eminently use my cushy job there. Case in point here is a liberal arts guy. Then he went and started the company thats doing very well. He found it keep trucking. They have created an coyote device and it provides that realtime information about when the truck is running and went the rpms are. Theyre starting to cultivate all of this data around which lanes for realtime shipping information across the u. S. Which of them are highly optimized. With noahs shipment. Those are the kind of things if you have information on changing legislation and regulation they can be big drivers of innovation. Its interesting because ive have a number of friends here in dc to have gone out to work for a Technology Firm or a Venture Capital firm and inevitably the gun into government relation positions. The inhouse lobby into person for that firm. With places like this. Its kind of bothered me only because to your point i thought there has to be a lot more value that someone who has spent time here in dc not just the tea leaves on capitol hill but really understanding how it works. There has to be real Business Value not just being a congressional advisor. There has to be real value on the business side that these men and women can bring. Not just the subject matter. If you look at the people. One of the truths that i had thought was there. Was against the grain of the theater. If you look at those are history and literature major. You look at alex kart who runs the data company. You kind of go down the run. There is a lot more people that i would expect. Ben silverman was a Political Science major at yale. Stewart butterfield is the founder. Is a new corporate medications platform that is trying to become the alternative to email. More efficient or you can take peoples names, like twitter. It was a photo sharing app back in the day. Before that he was a philosopher and he did his undergrad and grad studies in canada. In the process of creating that. We look at these companies and we say if i only had that five years ago. The startup methodology. They dont have the foresight. It have to start doing something and entering their way towards what becomes a chore and tour version of what works. It started as a gaming company. In the process of building this. They used the communication tool. They started integrating towards that. And as what came what came they attribute that process to the methodology in philosophy. If you think about it. You sit at a roundtable and you to be ideas. They get towards the idea of truth. How do you get closer and closer to what Product Market is. There is so many messages. Google and all these companies. It reminds me of a conversation i had one time and i met with a very Senior Executive household name Technology Firm. They are proclaiming the wonders of their company they sent we only hire people who know how to code. I said i wanted to code in the 90s. Does that count. It has the current language. You know how to code. I have to scratch my had saying youre a key driver of value. For the major Technology Firm in your fuzzy. Whats interesting the tools have become more democratized. If you look back. To the 90s and well before that the syntax that you have to master it to be a techie was really as close to the metal. It was highly complex. Have you gotten for there and further and further away. More objections away is moving towards natural language processing. I think it is the ultimate level. The things actually worked well. They were able to command access they are the ability to ask the question. Not the ability to have the data. I think they will go all the way back in with that. If we want an answer we will ask a machine. If we want to question well had to ask a smart human. Those are some of the things that i think as a become more democratized even when they are building these tools. They have 25 million plus people learning to code through these online dashboards. You actually follow directions and you put code into this. It is a company. The Political Science major with a couple of shout outs. If theyre looking at hiring the top people. And people come out of the programs. Here it is a language i need to build. And none of them have the requisite. They have a