hello everyone thank you for joining uh this episode i appreciate you joining and i also appreciate the individual joining us miles taylor is more fluent and adept in technology in that field than anyone i've talked to especially on this podcast dream big daily he is the former lead for advanced technology and security strategy at google and chief of staff at the us department of homeland security at google unbelievable work he's doing to get tech integrated into the federal government itself in that we're lacking behind or as he says behind the curve in certain ways beyond our peers or other nations especially in america but he talks about quantum computing ai drops quotes drops gems drops learnings things to the lay person like me that i would never know if i never had this conversation so i wanted to bring it to you and i'm really grateful for miles joining us to bring such insight and talk about the things he's trying to push forward please enjoy and drop a comment if you got something from this drop a subscription or subscribe and press that button on apple podcast spotify or please youtube if you're watching this on video form thank you miles thank you for listening if you're listening at all video or audio i appreciate you seriously enjoy i have a dream it's one small step for man i am the greatest you want something go get it period i would love to start at so i'm in austin texas right now you're in washington you know the capitol i would love to um have you explain why you're currently there because that can be a nice segue into a lot of what i was gonna ask with google politics like tech and all this other stuff but uh what are you currently doing in washington what brings you there yeah so you know look i've been living in washington dc for almost two decades and have really seen a roller coaster in this town in terms of what the political environment has been like but also what the tech scene has been like on the political side you know americans have lived it i mean we've gone from a country i think that was a little bit more unified focused on policy issues especially unified after the september 11th attacks which were the reason i first came to washington dc uh but we've gone through some hard times i mean we've seen increasing political polarization which has made this town a lot more of a difficult place to get things done but at the same time in parallel we've seen some fascinating things happening on the technology side as washington dc itself our nation's capital is becoming a little bit of a tech hub which is actually really good when it comes to our policy and our politics because it means that lawmakers policymakers people in the white house have easier access to the folks that are developing those bleeding edge technologies that are going to change our society and so there's really interesting synergy there which i never expected in this town and look for me personally and selfishly it's a great opportunity to scratch the itch when it comes to both of my you know true loves which are you know public policy and uh and technology policy more specifically so it's an interesting time to be in our nation's capital uh things have settled down a bit since the craziness at the start of the year and hopefully we're in an environment where we can sort of make politics foreign again and uh and not have it be something that's so disruptive to people's lives but rather as a feature when it comes to their lives and the last thing that i would add to that is you know you know our politicians today can learn a lot from what we've seen happen in recent years of tech growth namely we've seen the tech sector democratize almost everything in our society technology has democratized rideshare it's democratized ordering food on you know any platform getting clothes wherever you want it's really given americans unlimited choice and competition and ironically the one place that we really lack choice and competition is in our own democracy is we've got a system that's really really focused on the two parties which have sort of a stranglehold over the political process across the country so as politicians and party leaders start to realize that technology can't just democratize things in the marketplace it can democratize our political process more effectively i think that's good for americans all around so that's something that's exciting and uh that i'm trying to work on here in dc is promoting civic tech that can really give people more choice and competition in in their country in the democratic process wow yeah i think about um a friend was talking to me the other day and just saying how like politics seems so behind like you always hear that politics seems so behind in terms of like how they do hearings and everything and just like some people's um especially in the senate their understanding of tech itself like when they had the the big four come in like the tech companies and like a lot of the people and hearing didn't even know what zuckerberg or any of them were saying so it's nice to have like a young gun like yourself go in and get people kind of up to speed because you think about in the way you said it too politics it's kind of like the parent that is like looking at their child too much instead of like letting them run free and play which is kind of like the founding fathers set up the government to be more of like you said a feature rather than just like running literally like every little nuance of everything right it's like individual states doing their thing um so i'd love to know what you learned because you were doing the department of homeland security at google you're the chief of staff and what you learned from that to then bring over to the government itself and like the exact stuff you learn with quantum computing and like all the yeah yeah deep tech stuff and that well yeah and it was sort of in reverse order and so i'll start the answer that way um you know i i spent years in working in national security in the government and largely that was because of the 9 11 terrorist attacks i mean after the attacks uh and i'd been in the world trade center one week before the towers were hit that had a big impact on me and it made me want to go into the realm of national security and and to work in defense and intelligence and and try to better protect the country to prevent a day like that from ever happening again but also to better anticipate emerging threats to our country so at the end of my most recent portion of my government career i was i was the chief of staff at the department of homeland security which is the government's third largest department it's 250 000 people and a 60 billion dollar budget all focused on how do we better protect this country and of all the things that i learned in my time there about the threats to the united states the most important was that we're behind the curve when it comes to anticipating technology developments that could affect our nation's future and its security and chief among those developments at the end of my tenure was in artificial intelligence quantum computing and autonomous vehicles and i think what we're seeing in terms of development in that space will have extraordinary unpredictable ramifications for our security for years and years to come in fact some of those technologies like quantum computing are somewhat unknowable in terms of the impact that they will have we are talking about computing power that is so enormous by orders of magnitude above the even the fastest super computers we have today that it's difficult to predict what problems those machines will be able to solve but at the same time what potential public safety and national security threats will arise out of individuals having access to that level of computing power so when i left government that was a key concern to me i wanted to focus on those technology security challenges that we're going to confront in the next 10 20 30 years so after that i left i went to google i became their head of advanced technology and security strategy which really meant looking at the at the bleeding edge technology developments happening inside the company and better understanding the public policy impact how those tools would reshape the world that we live in and what changes if any need to be made to legislation or government policy to make sure that we usher in those new tools and technologies and systems in a way that's safe and effective and beneficial to the american economy and also reduces uh public safety threats and national security risks and one great example would be when it comes to artificial intelligence we spent a lot of time when i was at google talking about ai principles and what principles we would need to put in place to make sure that we deployed that technology in a way that was safe and secure and beneficial to the consumer because we all know there's a lot of movies out there whether it's terminator or the movie named ai that was directed by steven spielberg that talks about some of the scary things that can happen when you give machines the autonomy to think on their own to act on the route and so at google we put in place a policy framework to make sure that anything we did in artificial intelligence was done in such a way that it took consideration of the larger public policy and societal impacts and we spent a lot of time talking to government about that and trying to make sure that the us government was doing the same thing as it developed these technologies so so my experience in the national security realm really influenced my thinking about technology policy and how we you know stay in the lead when it comes to these various emerging tech categories around the world and staying in the lead means both you know making sure that you get the best economic impact from these technologies because you're ahead of everyone else but also that you can anticipate the challenges and the downsides sooner and and to guard against them so that's why i think that's really important and it's why i've been spending a lot of time really trying to develop a a richer technology conversation here in our nation's capital yeah as is needed and i would love to as you said we're behind the curve have you explained why we were behind the curve in the first place because like people say like yeah we are but like nobody know the details as to why yeah i mean look here's the reality right now the united states is competing in an international assistant in an international system where our rival countries are investing heavily in emerging technologies in a way that the united states simply is not at least from the government side so we'll take china for instance the chinese have set targets to spend billions upon billions of dollars investing in new technologies like quantum computing whereas the united states i think has only pledged one billion dollars over five years towards that technology there's a huge discrepancy there now in some of those spaces we're currently ahead right america has the lead but with that level of investment from foreign governments they could be set to overtake us in this decade when it comes to those really crucial emerging technologies now there's some places that we're already far behind i mean i would say when it comes to 5g and the deployment of 5g when it comes to some elements of artificial intelligence there's rival countries that have already exceeded the united states and we've got to play ketchup and at the moment there's a lot of really interesting legislation and ideas moving through washington dc to try to make sure that we stay competitive and that we either catch up in the races where we've fallen behind or we stay in the lead in those few places where we currently have a lead and one of those places i think is quantum computing i think we do have a slight edge right now and it's one of those things where that edge can be preserved if we develop deeper public-private partnerships in other words making sure that the government is working really closely with startups and industry to galvanize this ecosystem and make sure that we've got the most sophisticated quantum computers in the world yeah i'm so glad you ended on that too because i was just thinking about everyone i've interviewed almost everyone is like a self-starter an entrepreneur and something to the likes of that and like i've interviewed more than you know we're almost at 100 episodes off the record i've interviewed hundreds and like all of them are building such amazing things or doing incredible things and it's beautiful in that sense but it's also to say like all of the public companies we have are all made from like these unbelievable entrepreneurs and like the small businesses that became big businesses they all fuel what america is which is so beautiful um i watched one video of i believe it was trump and then every single uh ceo of every single major tech company and yeah sure yeah and they were just talking about like how to they're just talking and like how to make things better and how to integrate tech um and i think like it's those discussions that matter and just like your continued work to get tech into the most important thing to lay the foundation of what america needs itself but uh one quote i wanted to bring up you were in an interview with yahoo finance and you talked about quantum computing and just for contextualization of how crazy it is you said uh every picture you see online and every text message you read is just a long string of those two numbers quantum computers are different they harness the power of nature to create more possibilities and i was just like that's that's insane um can you explain more of quantum computing itself since you said yeah mean things like that and ai yeah i mean look most people when they're at the dinner table at home with their families are not going to engage in a conversation about quantum physics and and if you can't explain to the layman what quantum physics really is it's very tough to understand the implications of the technology but the best way to boil it down is if you think of classical computers that we have today your iphone your desktop your ipad everything that happens on those machines is operated in terms of perceiving information in terms of zeros and ones every single thing is boiled down to zeros and ones so when you type your name into your computer it's encoding it as a series of zeros and ones the long string of those two numbers what's different about quantum computing is that it harnesses the power of quantum physics all the way down to the atomic level and it's something called qubits so just like a computer a bit is a you know a series of those uh ones and zeros a qubit is very different because in nature a an atom can be both one or zero or one and zero at the same time and here's the way to think of it if you think of a coin a classical computer you flip the coin it's either heads or tails it's one or zero that's it but when it comes to quantum mechanics you can spin that penny and it has got a one side and a zero side but there's also uncertainty it could land as one one or zero so you can measure it in multiple different ways what does that mean it means you're able to do computer processes that are exponentially more complicated because you can introduce uncertainty into your calculations now what does that mean in the real world it means for instance that a quantum computer can solve a problem incredibly faster than even the best supercomputer in the world so i'll give you one example one u.s company two years ago demonstrated what's called quantum supremacy and they showed that there was a math problem that would have taken the world's fastest supercomputer 10 000 years to solve but their quantum computers solved the problem in about 90 seconds so that shows you just how extraordinary uh this computing power is in these quantum machines now i want to be realistic about this we're about a decade away from quantum computers that are actually practical to deploy to solve really tough challenges right now they're in their earliest stages but when you think about the fact that a quantum computer thinks the same way that nature thinks rather than this artificial way of ones and zeros which we've created i mean if you take a microscope and you put a leaf under it and you zoom in and you zoom in and you zoom in at the end of the day you don't see ones and zeros you see atoms you see the atomic structure of that leaf and because a quantum computer can mimic that and use those same processes its ability to do things is infinitely greater than your standard computers and that opens up a whole new world of possibility the most important one being in artificial intelligence because a quantum computer can supercharge ai so that machines will be able to think more authentically like human beings do and they'll also as we project potentially in the 2030s be potentially able to even develop the analog of human emotions in other words a machine that is authentically happy or sad or in a worse case angry those types of things are possible in the fear in the future the not too distant future with quantum computers and it's something that we've got to prepare for now from a public policy perspective and it's one thing that i worry is not happening in washington dc is policy makers are not talking about the era that's not very far away of when machines might be able to have feelings what are we going to do around that how are we going to regulate that how do we want to think about that how do we want to protect people from that but how do we also want to leverage that technology to do extraordinary things because it's not all about the movie terminator right if you've got a machine that can think and feel that doesn't mean the machine is going to destroy humanity it actually means that like us as human beings the machine will have a much more efficient way to process its environment our emotions are an evolutionary benefit to what we do every day you know when you touch a hot stove and it burns your hand and it hurts and it makes you angry that sends a really efficient signal to your brain to not ever touch that hot stove again so rather than having to program that into a computer in a complicated way you could hypothetically with quantum supercharged ai teach that computer to have the same reaction to touching a hot stove as a human being does that mean it can learn more more quickly more efficiently and more organically to perform its functions better but that's a whole new world of public policy that we've got to get into that quantum computers will usher in a new era of is that what you said with holding it back so you don't deploy it into the ecosystem is that what you said earlier on with like it's just simply not ready yet like there's still many things yeah let me test that in in a nutshell um quantum computers right now have a lot of what's called error so it's really really difficult to try to harness the atoms the way that you need to in a quantum environment in fact a lot of cases it requires uh an environment that is so well controlled that you're able to measure these things that are happening at a really small scale so to create that controlled environment you need total precision and at the place that we are in terms of technology development there is a lot of error in that process in other words when you tell the quantum computer to do something you can't totally rely on the result that gets spit out because you're not completely certain that it was performed to perfection it's the same thing that happened with super computers and just regular computers in the 1950s and the 1960s they were called there was fault there was error built into those machines we it wasn't until the 1970s that we reached what's called fault-tolerant computing and it meant that we had computers that if they spit out an answer to one plus one equals two we could be confident that the machine did it correctly that's the same place that we're in right now with quantum computers is that era where we're trying to make sure that what the computer tells us at the end of the day is true and that the error has been corrected for so that error corrected quantum machine is about 10 years away but that doesn't mean we can't do anything within the interim because in the 1950s and 60s we still did things with computers recognizing that there would be some error so we're in this really exciting moment where we have quantum machines that kind of work that can solve hybrid problems uh in the real world today for instance you know there are competitions around the world right now to try to find companies whose quantum computers will help more efficiently deploy drones uh and drone delivery vehicles around cities so we're only a few years off from a lot of major u.s cities having amazon drones that come deliver packages at your doorstep well when you've got one or two drones that have to fly a flight pattern over a city that's an easy calculation but when you have 500 of them you need really really impressive computing power to make sure those drones deconflict the path they're on find the most efficient routes and get to where they're going safely and that's where things like quantum computers can step in and help a traditional computer optimize those interactions in the air so we're going to see some of that happening in this decade before we get to the terminator stuff in in the 2030s yeah i i think of one thing with like usps or ups fedex like some of the most insane logistical companies which need to compute a lot of data to figure out like where everyone's going how to get everything everywhere i went to mail a letter the other day and i had one little item in it and it was just a envelope for just the letter so i put it in the box and in my you know where the postman picks it up and he takes it and then a couple days later i find in my mailbox back again the letter but the thing the item's not there anymore there's a hole in it and there's a stamp that says parcel rate required yeah i say all that because like it wasn't the exact weight or like i guess dimension it should have been so they sent it back and said it's not good so with you know a company like that with like obviously humans who do the check off on their on their screens with their tablets and such to say like oh this literally can't be used because it's too big even a 0.1 of an ounce more it could screw up the plane when it's taking it to the east coast where my letter was going from uh central america and austin so like i think about with computers doing that how much more efficient things can be but also like how exact things have to be like to the point zero zero zero like you said the ones and the zeros it's insane but yeah if you want to say something yeah no i was just gonna say i mean look there's a whole array of different fields that we expect quantum computing to completely disrupt and you know in addition to making artificial intelligence smarter robotics smarter there's a lot of practical areas where we're going to be able to deploy quantum computers to solve big societal challenges and i'll give you one that you know sounds kind of boring but people will care about and that is when it comes to batteries it's really really difficult from a chemical and physics perspective to develop efficient batteries that can hold a lot of charge and can go long range and where that's going to matter is in our vehicles so right now look i drive a tesla and my tesla gets probably 250 miles an hour range well that company is really focused on making sure that their vehicles go more than 250 miles before a charge they want to go 300 400 500 1000 miles on a single charge but it really comes down to the weight of a lithium-ion battery and how it's constructed it turns out that's an extremely com you know difficult computational question the great thing about quantum computers because they can think in the same way nature thinks is you can use them to try to make those batteries and fuel cells vastly more efficient to get that longer range in a way that today's classical computers simply cannot do so quantum is going to unlock these kind of everyday developments that really help you so i don't have to charge my car once every two hours when i'm on a road trip it's maybe once every three four five six hours those are the types of things that will happen in the background that americans don't see but also more significant things quantum computers will hopefully allow us to model a lot of things that we're seeing when it comes to weather and climate change when you talk about the interactions in the atmosphere between different types of forces and on the ground it gets exceedingly complicated exceedingly fast and you need something like an advanced quantum machine to better understand the mechanics behind climate change and also some of the key drivers so we think that's going to be another area where this is important and then also in healthcare when we're studying really dangerous viral pathogens like covet 19 and others that can spread throughout the world quantum machines can dissect those pathogens a lot more quickly and potentially could help us reach you know cures and and treatments a lot more faster than we can today when it comes to dangerous diseases so there's a lot of exciting things that can happen as this technology gets rolled out and again it will supercharge artificial intelligence in in ways that right now we can't even fully anticipate yeah i was going to ask on what fields will be hurt helped or more so both helped but uh that definitely touches on it and i'm a big fan of teslas too national security is another area where you know i think that we're gonna have to look at what quantum computing is doing and the impact that it has and i say it because of this whichever nation has the most powerful quantum computer in some ways has a decisive edge over their adversaries and i'll give you a specific example if i launch a uh let's say a weaponized drone swarm so a whole bunch of mini drones that have you know ordinance on them that can blow up let's say i throw a 100 of them in the air on the battlefield against an adversary and i say to the drones attack the adversary and their goal is to swarm in and let's say destroy a tank well if that adversary has a smarter quantum computer and a drone defense system that smarter quantum computer is going to be able to out think my drone swarm and destroy it before it gets in and the the really really shocking thing about quantum machines is for every qubit you add just like a bit on a computer every qubit you add to a quantum computer it becomes smarter by a double exponential what do i mean by that i mean to the second power so it becomes incredibly smarter than the next one just by adding one additional qubit so you could see us in the not too distant future in a a cubit bicubit race with other countries to see who's got the most uh extreme processing power and that processing power translates into real impact on the battlefield so there's genuine national security implications from this technology beyond just the ability of quantum computers to break encryption the encryption that protects our emails our health records our financial records that's something that will happen but also the beauty of quantum computers is that they can help create unbreakable encryption at the same time so it's sort of a double-edged sword yeah you hear about breachings all the time especially like the food sector had some uh research but i would love to know whether it be in the public sector when you were at like the likes of google or if you were in the private and you were like working with federal stuff even and with the government like you're you're duplicating nature and when you play around with um nature itself and try to speed up the process of like maybe evolution in certain ways um or what has taken so many so many years like how how can that have a downside because i know people always think about the downsides to change it's like an innate human fault in a way but also can help us from um not getting hurt but depends on how we use it using our self-awareness but like have you thought about that when in public or private sectors with like dealing with these tough questions like we are literally duplicating nature we don't want to hurt anything we want to help everything but we got to be super cognizant of like how we do it like our approach yeah when when we start to enter the quantum age as as a nation as a civilization as a society we would be really wise to heed some of the philosophers and scientists that have come many years before us one of them in particular francis bacon who was uh you know a philosopher and a scientific prodigy who said that nature to be commanded must be obeyed in other words if you want to have control over nature you've got to obey the laws of nature i think that's really relevant when it comes to technologies like quantum computing things we're seeing in biotechnology if we disregard science and the natural processes themselves we will experience unintended secondary and tertiary consequences it is important to understand how nature operates in order to manipulate it in positive ways in ways that are beneficial towards us and that requires really a an understanding of a vast array of disciplines so you know for instance if you want to use quantum computing power to manipulate the way that uh you know traffic moves and traffic patterns evolve then you better understand some key principles of evolution and and also potentially you know the downside and detrimental effects of empowering uh a machine that's only designed to accomplish one objective and and the ripple effect that that relentless attempt to accomplish that objective might create and the downstream effects that we can't see um you know all throughout the history of technology and in a range of fields one of the biggest failures of leaders in those fields has been the failure to see the secondary consequences of their actions and that's really you know the unintended consequences are the bane of of you know most uh of most geniuses who create some of the extraordinary things that have benefited our society so it's another thing we're gonna have to think about when it comes to technology in the quantum computing space but it's wise for us to go back to that lesson from francis bacon that nature to be commanded must be obeyed we've got to obey the laws of nature respect them respect the science and make sure that we do these things thoughtfully before we deploy those technologies into the world yeah that's really well said that really made me think i'm like i'm kind of stunned on that anyway but i really want to reflect on that exact quote from francis bacon because to command you have to first obey i really do love that yeah yeah well he was a pretty incisive dude yeah he was i uh i was gonna ask you though we've talked a lot about the macro with like you know what's going on at large and like the the bigger picture with quantum computing and ai it's like a huge focus in your life it's important now um as tech gets integrated into the government because the government does influence a lot how did you get into all this and like for someone who's trying to get into a field such as this and it's going to keep expanding like how do you learn such a thing like you you know so much about physics it seems like did you always have that or or what was your entry point in a way yeah i mean for me really getting involved in technology policy uh started off with just a personal passion uh you know i was i was i was a tech geek as a kid i always wanted the you know the calculator watch or or the coolest you know gadget you could get as cameras became miniaturized i wanted those things but um but really as i started to work in in politics in washington dc in public policy i recognized that technology had an outsized impact on a lot of the public policy dilemmas we face today so my very first job was uh in washington was working in the house of representatives in in the office of the speaker of the house at the time and that was around the period uh just after 9 11 where we were in war and afghanistan and donand to war in iraq and there were a lot of debates on the floor of the house of representatives about the technology that we were deploying overseas to protect our troops and namely how it was inadequate and how the tools we had developed to fight the last war were insufficient to fight in urban warfare and men and women who were defending this country were dying because of that that was a really powerful moment for me to be on the floor of the house of representatives to see members of congress get emotional talking about their constituents back home who'd been killed in battle because we'd sent them off to war with the wrong tools to protect themselves these debates are not inconsequential and to me that really said uh that's not a powerful signal and that was to to do the right thing in this realm this realm being politics and public policy you really need to be a student of other disciplines because if you're going to pass a law or a regulation or issue a policy prescription in some space you darn well better understand that space and so i spent a lot of time trying to dive into and better understand technology policy and especially the emerging tech that could affect our country's safety and security uh in the future and and that became really relevant when i was working at the department of homeland security because some of the biggest dangers we saw in the united states were in those bleeding tech categories were from things like sophisticated cyber attacks and cryptocurrencies that transnational criminal organizations were using to put hits on people's heads or move drugs across borders or things like drones which were being weaponized to conduct attacks and potentially assassinate individuals i mean i was watching in real time some of these new toys and tools around the world being used for nefarious purposes and it said to me i needed to better understand the technology development side in order for us to be able to develop the right defenses against it yeah at the base of everything it is it is physics and chemistry and obviously all that stuff and now like that text getting into it it's such it's so amazing to see i was listening to i was listening to don norman he's i believe that's his full name don norman he was the guy who originated the term ux design sure yeah and he talked in this one video about how designers should not be just learning how to just design as though people connotated with art and drawing and all that they should learn systems thinking second order principles second order you know third order thinking like thinking ahead like operational type stuff and then he was like he got into physics and even elon musk elon musk was like anyone who wants to do what i'm doing should study physics like i'm all about seeing themes and like having these amazing people both talk about how important physics are and then you emphasizing like that's the basis of everything um yeah search the point you gotta learn that stuff yeah you know i i'd say this the realization i came to that our next generation of leaders in this country need to understand both civics and public policy but also technology policy led me to launch a charter school here in washington d.c so a few years ago i developed a four-year high school here in washington that's 400-plus students that's focused on both public policy education and technology education because our leaders in the future are going to need to understand the tech that is driving the world uh as they're trying to lead the country and and develop solutions for the american people so i thought it was really important that we have sort of a public service academy here in washington dc in our nation's capital that does exactly that and the school is called the washington leadership academy it's a great high school the students are outstanding but they really graduate not just learning how to uh how a bill becomes law but learning how to code learning how to fly a drone learning the the technologies that are going to be on the forefront of their agendas when they're in future positions of power so that's really important to me and that civic education and technology education in my mind are intrinsically intertwined congrats on on all that when was it officially launched the school let's see our first year uh fully in operation was 2016. so we just had our first four-year class uh our first seniors graduate and go to college last year wow how did that how did that feel to have you know the school you built have people go through it officially i mean it was great i mean it was extraordinary yeah i mean it it felt really good you know i was sad because the past few years because of my service in government i had to step away from the school but it's been uh you know it's been just hugely exciting to watch those students thrive and go out into the world and to prove that that concept was a worthy one of a student's time and and of their high school experience yeah absolutely i uh education's everything i've been having conversations the past couple episodes and discussions i've had education is just it's like you know a hammer and a nail just every time i hear about it and someone who's adept in the field just hammer keeps hitting the nail i go deeper and deeper into the wood and i just understand things more and more it essentially all starts with that because if we want to learn more we gotta learn more about quantum computing and ai like we have to educate the people to do such a thing like you said with coding but talking about old keyboards if people are watching on video i wanted to take a uh redirection and talk about what's happening because i see you have a really cool setup is that an old typewriter it is it is it's an old remington uh model five typewriter and uh i'm not gonna lie it's it's it's not terribly efficient for cranking out information but boy does it produce some some beautiful letters and uh you know when you want to take a spin on it and write out some pros it's a kind of a relaxing cathartic tool to use as you're writing so yeah good good eye there that you spotted the remington down there in the corner yeah well i i mean i it's a coincidence too because like to think about that and then like where we are now i mean for sure yeah you have it there for as you said the reasons i just you just gave but it must be cool if you think about like what you're working on now and then like how that was built what just like a century ago you know yeah exactly i mean we've come leaps and bounds and this is what i think will blow people's minds about where we're going in technology development what we've seen happen in the past 50 years in computing power will be eclipsed in just a few years in the quantum computing domain i mean really our growth here is is truly exponential and it's going to open all sorts of extraordinary doors in uh not just in technology but but socially and i think that's what we've got to be excited about yeah there's some scary things from you know some of these technological developments but the future is a bright one the future is one that's going to be driven by people who understand how to harness those technologies do so in a responsible way and uh and make sure that there's inclusiveness in terms of access to that technology around the world so yeah it's an exciting time and i apologize my friend i have to jump about uh in about a minute to prepare for my uh 7 p.m but um but uh what note should we close on is there
a final question that we should dive into yes i was gonna ask well i have you uh something just to give you the stage i like doing that for all my guests and all my yeah you can hear my friends just anything top of mind anything you really want to list off anything you want to speak on for others um yeah yeah you can be well this is the last thing that i'd say is we have in this country in the past few years been deeply divided in a lot of cases by technology itself so i think most americans would agree that tools like social media while they've been beneficial while they've in some cases increased productivity and information sharing have also increased divisiveness in our country and the reasons are obvious because when you build a digital brick wall and you throw a grenade over it you don't see the other person on the other side that's hit by that grenade it's impersonal and the impersonal nature of our technology today has actually caused damage in our politics it's made people much more inclined to separate from each other to attack each other and say things online that they would never say in the streets but i also think that the same problems that have been created in our politics and the same divisiveness that have been created by certain technologies in the social media realm will also be fixed by advances in technology and here's why if the impersonal nature of today's tech and social media has caused us to separate from each other the increasing personal and intimate nature of the technology of the future will bring us together what do i mean by that i want you to think of technologies like virtual reality and augmented reality if instead of tweeting at you i hate you you're a piece of garbage i get on twitter and your face pops up your likeness you in real time as a human i'm gonna be less inclined to say that nasty thing maybe i'll disagree with you but likely i'm gonna disagree with you in a more civil way so i'm an optimist i actually you know my friends call me mr brightside and and i see a future that's not too far away where technology will become more personal again and more intimate again and i think we'll have a pacifying effect on our politics will help take out the discord in our discourse and we'll hopefully genuinely bring people back together so uh i hope that's what happens i hope that's what we see and and that's kind of the future that i'm trying to work towards every day i like that mr brightside i love that nickname i appreciate it uh everything you said wise words but uh until we talk again all right thanks anthony you're the man i appreciate it i look forward to chatting with you brother likewise thank you
2021-07-13