And this industry for so long and people always ask what is the Silicon Valley secret. I set out to answer those questions for them. Yours is the story of 75 years of Government Support and encouragement of the tech industry. I want to show you a clip of where we are today. This is from last year on capitol hill with mark zuckerberg. Lets watch. Car Companies Face a lot of competition. If they make a defective car, people will buy another one. Is there an alternative to facebook . The average american uses eight different apps to connect with each other. We provide a number of different services. Is twitter the same as what you do . It overlaps but i dont think it is the same. Do you think that you have a monopoly . It does not feel that way to me. Mr. Zuckerberg, could you share the name of the hotel you stayed in last night . Mark uh, no. Have you message anybody this week . Would you share the names of the people you mentioned messaged . I would not choose to do that here. I think that might be what this is all about, youre right to privacy. The limits of your rights to privacy and how much you give away in modern america in the name of connecting people around the world. Susan since that hearing happened, other industry titans have been in front of panels on capitol hill with similar exchanges. Today, while we are talking, down at the white house, there is a gathering of people who are aggrieved on the right side of the spectrum who feel they are not getting access and are being censored. What is the state of the relationship between big tech and the government today . Professor omara it is pretty rocky. It is really interesting. It is such a contrast. Here we are talking in 2019. Five years ago, when i started work on this book, the mood was so different. There was a lot of tech optimism in Silicon Valley and it was shared by a lot of leaders in washington. The idea that these private companies had done this extraordinary things, that there products could be beneficial. Their products could be beneficial. Think about how Barack Obamas campaign used facebook to marshal support. It is the future of campaigning and also governing. Now the mood is different. 2016, that election was a turning point, the recognition of how social media platforms have functioned as disruptors to the electoral process. It has the potential of a very real reality that outside actors had been using social media platforms to mess with the election and the very real feeling that could continue Going Forward. That combined with the permeation of these technologies and platforms in our lives. Think about the products of the biggest five American Technology companies. Microsoft, apple, google, amazon, facebook. If you say you will not be on any of these things, it is really hard to go through your life from dawn to dusk in modern america without it some way having being affected by a product without being affected by one of those companies. This is driving the conversation in washington. What is the role of these companies in shaping the political and social life of modern america . What are the characteristics of these companies . Was it hubris . Naivete . What do you think are the factors . Professor omara it is helpful to look at the history of Silicon Valley itself. These companies are the product of a business culture, a business ecosystem. I call it a galapagos, a very Distinctive Community that group for a long time in relative isolation from washington. From wall street, from the capitals of finance and politics, even though it was deeply affected by them from the beginning. You have high tech venture capitalists. They are carrying on this distinctive culture from one generation to the next. It is a culture focused on growth, making technology better, faster. It is facebook had posters in their headquarters that said move faster, break things. It was this notion this was not something that was facebook, you can look at intel or sales big based copies like microsoft. You needed to dominate your market quickly otherwise your competitors would eat you alive. You had to move very fast. That was the cost of doing business. That is part of how we got where we are. These leaders did not set up to say we are going to be this Disruptive Force in this way. I liken it to a runaway train, this incredibly Effective Technology was so good at what they set out to do. It had all of these unintended consequences. Susan yours is the story of 75 years of evolution. I want to go into these stories because they all have characters. There are themes and you mentioned the government involvement and support and encouragement of this. Also, regulation, there is something about that changing. We can talk about that. High tech has been and maybe continues to be the to be comprised of mostly white males. One character in your book is someone who works their way up. Her name is ann. Professor omara ann hardy is one of those Hidden Figures of Silicon Valley. In 1956 she walks into ibm headquarters in new york city a few years out of college. She heard there are programming jobs to be had. She knows nothing about computers that she set of front of her told her about this job. They said they are hiring people and they will teach you on the job. She gets the job as an entrylevel programmer. She becomes a manager. She is managing a team for the better part of a decade. She is combating sexism every single run up the letter. Rung of the ladder. She finds out that every man is making more money than her. She demands a raise and gets a raise. She ends up in california by the middle part of the 1960s and she is passionate about the technology. She is really interested in programming and using computers. She ends up at a small start up in palo alto this is networked computers. They either worked giant mainframes or minicomputers. Like a minicomputer was refrigerator sized. They were very day, they were housed in corporate warehouses. You could not have one in your office or a small home. Timesharing was a way for people to remotely connect through telephone cable and connect to a computer power. Ann hardy built this operating system. She was hired accidentally. She walks in and says, i can do this. Her boss says if i had known how central this operating system was to our business, i never would have hired a woman to do it. The idea you would be a technical woman and an executive, someone with authority was so alien. It was the 1960s. There were very few women. This is a different time in corporate america. What happens in tech and particularly in the Valley Networks are where People Choose to work with the same people for one from one coverage of another. They use their people to eager out who to invest in. It is an overwhelmingly male network. It gets trapped in the amber. It gets harder for new voices to break in. A challenge for people like ann hardy besides the everyday sexism of corporate retreats where people say you cant become you cant come, because then we will have to invite our wives, then we cant have dalliances on the side on this corporate retreat. That sort of stuff. Aside from that, the work habits in text, work hard, play hard continues today. It is a full immersion activity. Part of what makes Silicon Valley go was the fact that these male executives and male engineers could go completely heads down building their semiconductors and computers and working on their software and they had wives at home taking care of the rest of their lives. Those women are really important part of Silicon Valley cost story valleys story too. Silicon valley, coding, where did these words come from . It came from the early days of digital computing. The First Digital computers, the art and the science of computing was considered to rest in hardware, building the machine. The origins of the first alldigital computer comes out in world war ii. It is an army funded project. It is later commercialized as the univac. Computing univac was a brand like kleenex or google. There is a great political story involving univac. The first appearance on television was in the 1952 election eve of the election. Walter cronkite, newly hired anchor is managing the Election Night coverage. They have a univac that can predict the outcome. What univac predicts correctly is an overwhelming victory for eisenhower. It was so decisive in its production that all of the programmers were like i think they got it wrong. It turns out, it was entirely right. Coding, it is a time when the hardware is considered to be so important. The software is like being a telephone operator. Youre just plugging in different wires in different places. It was not considered an art or science, just very routine. That coding something was like data entry. Surprisingly this was seen as womens work. Secretaries, telephone operators, it is kind of basic, a woman can do it. Turns out is that programming is very complicated. If for some reason there is some misfire in the program, there is a bug in the program, you have to do a work around. It is a very creative process. What Computer Specialists and technologists realize is programming the software is really where it is at. As that becomes more professionalized, the discipline of Computer Science is created. By the late 1960s, you have women not only in the United States but other scholars in science and technology who have written about how women are pushed out of programming. It has become a more high prestige activity. The coders subsequently become men. The name coder itself came from is it a product . Yes, there is software code. The idea that a code it is coming out of world war ii code cracking. There is routinization of it. It is something where there is a pattern. Like morse code. It is not a creative process. Coding is, the best coders are people who are always thinking about thinking in rather complex ways. Programming is much more complex. Programming is even tougher when you had less memory and you had to be brutally efficient in getting the commands to be as short as possible and use memory as little as possible. Now we have incredible machines where you have a lot more latitude. Susan how did Silicon Valley get its name . Professor omara great story. It was not called that until 1971. It was Santa Clara Valley. It gets its name what is happening in 1971 is the major industry there is Silicon Semiconductors. The main customers for the Semiconductor Companies were not people like you and me, they were other companies. They were computer makers. The sales guy for these the Computer Companies would come out and they started colloquially referring to the valley as Silicon Valley. There is a reporter for a trade paper. This is based in palo alto. This is a guy named don hoffa. Hoffler. He writes about the Semiconductor Industry in Silicon Valley. He gets wind that Silicon Valley is the colloquial name and he headlines the story Silicon Valley usa. That name stuck. It was something that was bandied about in the valley for a while within the industry. It is not until the late 70s when it starts becoming starts disseminating out. I found my references in the Washington Post and new york times. They Start Talking about the Santa Clara Valley and then occasionally they will say Silicon Valley. The post is referring to Silicon Valley in quotation marks until about 1979. Then it becomes a more familiar lexicon. It was seen as so often the side of the main action for so long. Susan i would like people to know a little bit about you. How did you get interested in this . Professor omara i was in graduate school, i knew i wanted to write i worked in politics before i went to graduate school. I studied political history and i was interested in looking at the eisenhower years and the domestic impact of the cold war. Funnily enough, i was becoming a political junkie. I was interested in what the Eisenhower White house was doing and what lawmakers in congress were doing in the 50s. Of course, the greatest one of the greatest domestic impacts of the cold war was this. What the military Industrial Complex did to see the electronics and the computer industry. I realized that this is the story. This is the story of how this whole new economy was built. I was always really interested ever since i was working in washington with how business and government work together. They have an interest in the antagonistic relationship but they also have a collaborative relationship. Sometimesat are unseen. I think this story is a really great way to get into that. To understand how government can support business and vice versa. The funny thing about the cold war, if you have the biggest of Big Government programs, the space race, you have what eisenhower labels the military Industrial Complex. That becomes the foundation for this entrepreneurial flywheel of incredible creation and innovation and five and wealth private wealth creation. It is an industry that considers itself an industry that built itself on its own. Government has become almost invisible to many of the people in Silicon Valley. The creators think there is not a role but there is. That is part of the magic. It is a government out of sight. Susan what did you do in washington . Professor omara i worked on the 1992 president ial run of the clinton. I graduated from college in arkansas. Like any good history major, i did not have a job. History majors get lots of jobs. I came up to try to figure out what to do next. Also, what i was going to be when i grew up. I figured i would volunteer on the campaign. That position turned into an entrylevel job. One thing led to another and when your candidate wins, everything changes. I spent the first clinton term and working here. Working for both president clinton and Vice President gore. It was an extraordinary education. I call it my first graduate school. Aside from just witnessing things as one does when you are a young staffer on the perimeter of the room or in the room where it happens, not making the decisions but watching very powerful People Struggle with the decisions they have to make, it gave me this appreciation for the humanity of politics. Particularly, even the people at the highest levels of power. There just human beings who are trying to figure it out. They are very smart, talented but they are doing their best and trying to implement the vision they see. It gave me an understanding of how power works and empathy for where different people are coming from. I think the historian has given me being a historian has being an historian has given me a different view on this. Not looking at this as someone is in politics but someone trying to understand why people do what they do. Looking at the history of Silicon Valley or American History writ large, it is a way of not only better understanding our presence, that is one thing that i hope this book will help readers do, understand how we get to this big tech now and where do we go . You need the back story. It helps you get back from all of the noise and the fighting of right now. Of who is right and who is wrong and draw back and say why did we make these choices who is right and who is wrong and draw back and say why did we make these choices . Then you have more empathy for why certain actors did what they did. Susan how long did you work on this book . Professor omara about six years. From idea to execution. I live in seattle. My family and i moved down to palo alto from seattle for two years. I was really fortunate to have sabbatical fellowships. I had a way to be down there. I interviewed a lot of people. I had to build my own archive. Get in the dusty boxes and do our thing. There isnt a library of congress or National Archives in this industry. Although archives like the cspan archives and the governmental archives were really important to me. But i had to draw in Different Things when it happened. I had to draw conclusions from people want a longer with us. People would give me file folders that they kept in their attics for the last 30 years. One of the real challenges and one of the really important things Going Forward is how can we make sure this history that is in the making will be in the making be preserved . It really matters. Not only the Technology Understanding the technology but what were the Business Decisions surrounding those technologies . Who were the people . This is going to be extremely important to historians Going Forward. Susan right after the war, you write about stuff that was a competition between two different geographic areas in boston and palo alto. Who were the patrons . Why was it boston and palo alto . Why did Silicon Valley triumph in this . Professor omara coming out of world war ii, boston was as the u. S. Government decided to get into the science business, the National Science foundation was created in 1949. There was an unprecedented decision to go big on Public Investment in research and development. It was peacetime only in technicality. It was the cold war. It was very much an investment made from the cold war struggle. This is not only a matter of prestige but developing the nuclear realities of the nuclear age. The United States had entered into this. Boston was the 800 pound gorilla. What was in boston question harvard and in boston . Harvard and m. I. T. Yes there is the university of pennsylvania and its school of engineering that were also important but the leaders what came off in this they were the center of governmentsponsored Business Research during the war. They were from harvard and m. I. T. Including the people that i talk about in the books. The original entrepreneurial professor who has this extraordinary career crossing over academia, he is the founder of raytheon. He goes on to become the leader of the research and development effort. He is known as roosevelts general of physics. He is the person who kind of conceives of this Postwar Research network that is based in a lot of universities. That explains boston. Everybody is funneling and after world war ii. The Electronics Industry is based on the east coast. There is a lot of existing industry. What explains Silicon Valley . Santa clara valley was known for being the prune capital of america. It had two assets. It was on the Pacific Coast where a lot of wartime military activity had gone on and continues to go on. Military installations in the bay area. It also had stanford. There are known as the harvard of the west, they want to debate the harvard of the west. They had this great asset in mr. Hermann. During world war ii, he had gone to boston to work under bush in this research effort. He is sitting in cambridge and he knows after the war, bush and others are bringing this to move forward. Harvard and m. I. T. Will get a big piece of this action. He writes to a colleague in the middle of the war that there is an opportunity that is about to blossom. Stanford has a possibility of becoming a nationally influential institution like harvard or it could still like dartmouth. Good but not having a real effect on the national conversation. I dont know what dartmouth administrators would think of that assessment. Nonetheless, he goes back to palo alto and talks to the incoming president of the university. He was a historian. He joined him in saying that we will turn stanford into the premier cold war university. We will reorganize the curriculum and build up the physics department, we will build up specialized programs. Engineering programs and laboratories that new exactly what the cold war military wants us to do. No other university did that. They did away with other things to build up science and engineering. They built a very close alliance with this industry. They encouraged students like dave packard and bill hewitt to make companies nearby. The original Silicon Semiconductor company was set up by bill shockley. And other Electronic Companies and defense contractors followed. Stanford was this hub, it was not the only factor but incredibly critical. Susan one thing they always associate with Silicon Valleys stock options. That is what makes people so wealthy. If the company succeeds. What is the story . Professor omara hp was founded in 1939. It went public in 1967. Its too founders set out to make a different kind of company. Think of the big corporations of the 50s, the detroit automakers. They wanted something very different. They wanted a nonhierarchical company. No corner offices, no managerial suits and ties. No union. That signals something is wrong with management employee relations. Instead, they wanted to create something that was kind of like a scientific laboratory. It was much more it gala terrien. Litarian. People felt free to come. People do not feel hemmed in by their job description. There was management by walking around. They would rather just be on the shop floor. They would not call people in to their office. This meritocratic idea, everyone got stock options. Not everyone. Not some of the people on the manufacturing and Assembly Lines but the whitecollar employees did. Everyone had stake in the companys financial success. This becomes the model that company after company after company in the valley follows. Sputnik launched in 1967. I want to fastforward to the 1960s. Talk about what in government policy changed in a big way. In 1965, lbj signing an immigration law. We are having a big immigration debate right now. How does this figure into the history of Silicon Valley . Professor omara it is tremendously important. The Immigration Reform act is one of the most consequential economic policies of the latter half of the 20th century. The funny thing is it was not intended to be that at all. As Lyndon Johnson is signing it in 1965 he said in his remarks that this is not a revolutionary bill. It was seen as crossing the ts and dotting the is on the Civil Rights Act in some ways. It had been established in that the 1920s at a time of fierce antiimmigrant sentiment. It was driven by prejudice against southern and eastern europeans, catholics and jews. Peoples that were seen as other at the time. That was holding fast until the mid60s. Johnson and liberal democrats pushed through this Immigration Reform. It was really just supposed to set things right. The assurance that johnson gave some of his fellow democrats including southern democrats who were a little worried about what this liberalization of immigration might bring he said this is not going to change anything. It turns out it did. It opened up americas door to immigrants from around the world. Including huge chains of immigration from south and east asia. Many of these immigrants from taiwan, hong kong, india and china ended up in santa clara and Silicon Valley. They became the engineering backbone of the valley. They go on to found companies in disproportionate numbers. By the 1980s, one third of the companies in the valley are founded by people who were born from either india or china. On top of that, there are people from other places. You have refugee programs, refugees from the former soviet union. They and their children go on to found companies. Google is cofounded by the child of a soviet refugee. You have other refugees that come earlier in americas history. Andy grove, the legendary leader of intel, he was penniless. Nothing would have signaled to immigration officials that he was destined to be one of Silicon Valleys most influential leaders. He was. That immigration system has been really critical and continues to be. The fact that why is Silicon Valley so great . It is not because americans are better than technology than everyone else, the american system has allowed the Free Movement of people and capital. It has drawn people from around the world like a magnet from all over the world as students and entrepreneurs. It is to the valley and to american tech centers. That has been really fundamental to american dominance in the tech space. Susan so much happened, what are the most critical things that people need to know about the 1970s. Professor omara that was this moment when a new generation the baby boom generation comes of age in the valley. They have been they are products of this space race cold war age push toward science and technology when technology. When they are Elementary School students, they want to become astronauts. They learned how to Program Computers and interface with computers for the first time. They worked on timesharing and terminals. Timesharing terminals. Government was seen as using its power for destruction, corruption. You have people coming up who are much more interested in turning away the government and big business and using competing computing. Computing had mostly been who had computers. It was Big Government agencies and big corporations. They were so big and expensive. They were not things that ordinary people could access. It is like how can we take these and use them as a tool for personal empowerment . How can we make it personal . How can we change the interface . How can we change it so that people can use it or not versed in computer languages. How can we create a computer medications network . There was the space that is born out of this political moment that cant be separated from the other things going on. These computers will save us. All of the things you see around the world, war, equity, racism and sexism, if we have control of these computers and we are communicating with them and connecting and understanding one another, then this is going to fix it. Susan what happened out of the Homebrew Computer Club . Steve jobs and steve wozniak. They show up at the first meetings of this rangy group of computer hobbyists. People who are playing around with computers. They are building their own motherboards. Building their own devices. These are the guys that grew up with radio sets in their basements. They graduated to building these machines. They showed up as two young guys and they came in hauling this device that was the act has designed. This computer, this motherboard that is more elegant and simple and sophisticated than anything anyone else is doing. It is the apple one. It is so funny, you can easily google an image of the original apple one. They housed it in this wooden case. It looks like someone belted in a High School Shop class. A like someone built it in High School Shop class. It was very rudimentary but the Homebrew Computer Club was this way for technologists to trade on ideas. It was very collaborative. It is a way to figure out this technical hack and share it with you. It was not about making money or commercializing. Out of that group of people that grew steadily, they had this monthly meeting, it gets bigger and bigger. Out of this comes an industry, a whole host of personal Computer Companies. Apple is one of them. They create a transformative new bit of microcommunicating. We know that as desktop communicating. They are extremely important and also left out. I wanted to show this Silicon Valley galapagos that are critical to understanding why a group and why it has been so successful. It grew and has been so successful. You have specialized venturecapital firms. This is hightech central capital. Many of the people in central that were venture capitalists were in Technology Companies themselves. Many came out of the Semiconductor Industry. The next generation must to start venturecapital firms and become investors. You see this again and again in the valley. People who are in a company, do well and have a good ipo, they get fired and then they become investors themselves. Then they are the ones mentoring and picking the winners for the next generation. Venture capitalists are really critical. You have all of these Computer Companies starting out out of this hobbyist community. What sets apple apart is they get the venture capitalists to back them really early. They get venturecapital funding from established venture capitalists. They also get executive leadership from this guy from intel. He made a healthy amount of money, he was semiretired in his mid30s and it decides to put a chunk of money into apple personally. And then come in as kind of adult supervision. The two steves were not capable of running they did not have managerial experience at all. They were pretty unconventional guys. They create an organizational structure that is more like a business, somewhat traditional. Apple positions itself as a countercultural company, a think different company, it has more in common with ordinary corporate america. More than you might expect. Susan we will run out of time for all the history but i wanted to get to Ronald Reagan. We have a clip of Ronald Reagan talking about a very important project to him. Lets watch that and then talk about this california governor. He comes to washington, and how he impacts your story. There has been a desire to discuss sti. As if its funding could be determined by purely domestic considerations, unconnected to what the soviets are doing. Sdi is a vital insurance policy. A necessary part of any National Security strategy that includes deep reductions in strategic weapons. It is a cornerstone of our Security Strategy for the 1970s 1990s and beyond. We will research and develop it and when it is ready we will deploy it. Susan lots of money coming into this. How did it affect Silicon Valley . Professor omara this was a supercomputing project that was going to require immense amounts of computing power. It becomes this incredible resource for Computer Science and other related disciplines. The funny thing is, a lot of the computer scientists in Silicon Valley were very much against sdi. A lot were against it technically. They were like this is not going to work. There is a possibility for error and error would be catastrophic. It would require so much. We are not there yet, technologically. It reminds me about some of the conversations about Autonomous Vehicles and driverless cars. We are not quite there yet. The people were building computers, programming computers, who are on the faculty of stanford or working at Research Institutes like sri in the valley, they are the antiwar generation. They want to make peace, not war. They are politically and philosophically opposed to what the Reagan Administration is doing. This is one of the wonderful things and it is understanding this relationship and how it evolved. You have some of the people who are the biggest beneficiaries of some of this money. The money keeps on flowing. A lot of it is going toward computing. Even some of the people who are the biggest beneficiaries are simultaneously protesting and picketing. They are having meetings and writing open letters. This ability to dissent whilst still being part of the system , it is really important. We think about competition with china in technology. The difference in this political system, recognizing how much the american political system has made Silicon Valley possible not always intentionally, sometimes it has been unintended consequences. Theres been example after example after example. That is this interplay that i find so interesting. It is really important in understanding if were talking about what is going to happen next with the role of washington. We need to understand this history and these interesting complexities. The next clip, i want to fastforward to the Clinton Administration, for whom he worked. This is al gore before they took office. They were encouraging entrepreneurial spirit. Lets watch. A lot of the Infrastructure Investment has been an infrastructure that has made it easier for us to move around the resources that used to be given more important. Even more important. They are still important. If the key resort is knowledge today, shouldnt we be giving a lot more emphasis to the kind of National Infrastructure that we need to share information and create and share knowledge like the information superhighway, as referred to earlier. The digital libraries, making it possible for children to plug into the library of congress after school . Susan the 1990s were the boom in Silicon Valley and a lot of people made a lot of money. How responsible was administration and Government Policies for that boom . Professor omara the government played a big role. I love that clip. Person in the closeup shot was john scully. He had been ceo of apple. He appears sitting next to Hillary Clinton at the first state of the union of bill clinton in 1993. What al gore talks about in this clip, the information superhighway and also this notion of infrastructure. You did have to have that foundational infrastructure for the internet boom to happen. The internet has existed since 1969. This was a network for researchers, military people, different parts of the defense researchers and academic researchers to communicate with each other. In the 1980s, it gradually starts moving up. Called the walled garden. You could not do any sort of commercial transactions whatsoever. Companies could have a. Com domain. But they could not buy and sell on it. It was very limited. What happened in the early years of the Clinton Administration is this laying down of infrastructure. A lot of stuff is happening below the political radar screen. This included Young Political and like me. I was not working on tech at the time. I was like this information superhighway stuff, no one understood it. Few people were paying attention. We were working on Health Care Reform and other things that seemed more central. There were a few lawmakers, al gore being one of them. Newt gingrich was another. They are keeping their eye on the ball of recognizing that you have to lay down the basic infrastructure and allow this internet backbone to become not regulated in terms of what commercial activities could happen on top of it but creating a network. One that the government is encouraging in which the government is encouraging entrepreneurial activity to happen. Susan al gore was on the board of apple and became a millionaire in the process. Hundred what do you think about regulators who leave office and made a lot of money in this field . Professor omara al gore is an exceptional figure. In terms of the 1980s, karen caring about computers when other lawmakers did not quite get it. Also, in the central role that he played being the techie in chief for the Clinton Administration. Also the immense wealth and success he had afterwards. In the last 25 years, Silicon Valley is has gotten larger and wealthier. There has been a lot of traffic back and forth in terms of people who work in one and move back and vice versa. There are a lot of people in the clinton and obama administrations that are now working in these happenings. In these companies. In the 1990s, they did not have lobbyists. Microsoft had one guy working up in bethesda. He would carry stuff around in the back of his jeep. Now they are some of the largest, biggest lobbying operations in washington today. The big sized tech companies. Susan presumably the antitrust suit from microsoft. Professor omara it was a wakeup call for that company. Bill gates famously joked when the ftc was starting to bring enforcement action against microsoft in the early 1990s, the worst thing that can happen to me in washington is i could fall down the steps of the ftc and break my neck. It turns out that microsoft did not have to break up but it came out with guard rails on what you could do. It came out much more cautious and constrained. Perhaps more willing to dive into the markets in more aggressive fashion that it had before. Part of it was a new tech generation was growing. You would not have had google had microsoft not been hemmed down. Counterfactual history is impossible. Generation regeneration of tech, the companies that are big now will not be forever. It will be interesting to see who we are talking about 25 years from now and what relationship they will have to the companies of right now. Susan very quickly before we run out of time. It seems like a long time ago, 2011 and the first tweet from the white house with barack obama here. Im going to make history here as the first president to livetweet. We have a computer over here. All right. Here is the question. In order to reduce the deficit, what costs would you cut and which investments would you keep . The reason i thought this was an important question is because as all of you know, we are going through a spirited debate here in washington but it is important to get the whole country involved. Susan that was only 2011. Now we have a tweeting president. Of the rise of social media and how important it became to this platform. What guarantee is there that Silicon Valley will continue to have the dominance it has . Right now we are hearing the , huawei story. China has certain intentions. Russia has been a major player in using disruptive technology. There are other nonstate actors that are using social media. How did Silicon Valley preserve the Important Role it has played . Professor omara looking back to its history and recognizing the foundational nature of Public Policy and creating an entrepreneurial sandbox for lack of a better analogy. What the u. S. Government did is put a whole lot of money in techs direction and got out of the way. Part of the dilemma of social media right now is it is an unregulated space. Funnily enough, that is what allowed these companies to blossom. There was a choice that was made, an agreement that the Internet Companies would self regulate. That was made in order to encourage free speech and conversation on the internet because in that time, the big worry the big businesses media was comcast, time warner. Now you have these companies that are perhaps more powerful than all of our media combined in some ways, in some places. Will it continue to dominate . These other countries are making investments in research and development and advanced Technology Like ai, Autonomous Vehicles and on and on. Higher education . The u. S. Has drawn back. The u. S. Is drawing back from the open doors of allowing the best and brightest from around the world to easily come here and be encouraged to come here and create. It is impossible to predict the future but there are ways in which we can create this foundation. Not just to replicate what is going on right now, but think about how can new voices come into the conversation . How do you have more ann hardys . Where are the kids that were not easily come into this world . How do you bring them in . How do you get different different voices in the room who are figuring out what the technological questions and solutions are . American Technology Companies have global market. Things that are born and bred in california dont often translate easily to myanmar or name your geography. These are the real challenges that not just the valley and washington have but all of us who use the products. This is what we need to wrestle with Going Forward. Susan it is a big and sprawling history of interesting characters. The book is called the code. Thank you for spending an hour. Professor omara thank you, it has been a delight. All q a programs are available on our website or as a podcast at cspan. Org. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] next sunday on q a, Malcolm Gladwell talks about his new book, talking to strangers about how he made judgments, often inaccurately about people we dont know. That is q a at 8 00 p. M. Eastern time on cspan. Cspans washington journal, live every day with news and policy issues that impact you. Coming up monday morning, mike willis of the hill will discuss the return of congress from the august break. Then matt schulz will be onto talk about credit card use and consumer debt. Watch live at 7 00 eastern monday morning. Be sure to connect with us during the program. Thecspan at 10 00 a. M. , hearing takes place at the national 9 11 morrill museum ahead of the anniversary of the terrorist attacks. And the house returns, gaveling in at 2 00 p. M. For legislative business. And a discussion about the survey looking at views on Foreign Policy and international relations. At 2 00, an investigation into the Business Practices of Large Technology firms. And the Senate Returns from recess at 3 00 p. M. To work on the president s executive nomination, including allowing the u. S. Ambassador to the United Nations to represent the u. S. At the upcoming general assembly. , experts analyze the u. S. Population and shifting demographic numbers and what they mean for americas future. That is hosted by the American Enterprise institute. A rally inrump holds fayetteville, North Carolina on the eve of the special election or the ninth congressional district. Monday at 7 00 on cspan2, cspan. Org, or on the tree cspan radio