Transcripts For CSPAN QA Margaret OMara The Code 20240713

At 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan 2. Susan margaret omara, what will readers get in your new book, the code . Professor omara what they will get, is a biography of Silicon Valley itself, and the modern American Technology industry tself. The modern American Technology industry itself. There are many people and i have been studying this region for so long and this industry for so long and people always ask, what is the Silicon Valley secret . How do you build another one . I set out to answer those questions for them. Susan 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. In front of the senate panel. Lets watch. Car Companies Face a lot of competition. If they make a defective car, it can get into the world and people will buy another one. Is there an alternative to facebook in the private sector . Yes, senator. The average american uses eight different apps to connect with each other. 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, would you share the name of the hotel you stayed in last night . Mark uh, no. [laughter] have you messaged anybody this week . Would you share the names of the people you messaged . I would not choose to do that ere. This is about the rights 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 elationship 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. On both sides of the aisle. The idea that these private companies had done this extraordinary things, that there their products could be beneficial. Think about how Barack Obamas ampaign used facebook to arshall support. It was seen as the future of campaigning and also governing. Now the mood is different. 2016 is and was a turning point, in the recognition of how social media platforms have functioned as disruptors to the electoral process. That has the potential of a very real reality, that outside actors had been using social media platforms to mess with the election, that might have had a consequential effect on outcomes. 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, mazon, facebook. If you say, i will not be on any of these things, it is really hard to go through your life rom dawn to dusk in modern america without it some way having being affected by a product made by one of those companies. This is driving the conversation in washington. Hat is the role of these companies in shaping the political and social life of modern america . Susan what are the characteristics of these companies . Was it, hubris . Naivete . Inattention to certain details . 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 grew for a long time in relative isolation from washington. Even though it was deeply affected by them from the beginning. You have high tech Venture Capitalists. They are funders, advisors, mentors. 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 seattlebased Companies Like microsoft. You needed to dominate your market quickly otherwise your competitors would eat you alive. You had to move very fast. If something got broken along the way, 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 referenced the government involvement and support and encouragement of this. Also, light regulation, which may be 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 hardy. What story does her life tell you to about the Tech Industry . 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 ew years out of college. She heard there are programming jobs to be had. She knows nothing about a friend told her about this job. They said they are hiring people and it will keep you on the job. She gets the job as an entrylevel programmer. She becomes a manager. She is managing a team for the better part of a decade. She is combating sexism every running of the ladder. She finds out that every man is making more money than her. She demands a raise and gets a raise. And to relet the sum of the people she is supervising are still making more than she is, so she left. She ends up in california by the 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, in this new business called timesharing. The internet before the internet, it is networked computers. This is a time when computers were either giant mainframes or minicomputers. But there was nothing many about a minicomputer, it was refrigerator sized. They were very expenses and usually housed in corporate offices or government labs. You cannot have one in a small office or in your home. Timesharing was a way for people to remotely connect through telephone cable and connect to a computer power. So ann hardy built this operating system for this company to build this timesharing network. When she was hired, she was hired accidentally. She walks in and says, i can do this. Later her boss, the ceo the company said, 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 and this was a different time in corporate america. What happens in tech and but particularly in the Valley Networks are where People Choose to work with the same people for from one coverage of one company to another. They use their network to hire and choose who they are going to invest in. The very overwhelmingly male network of the 1960s kind of gets trapped in the amber. It gets harder for new voices to break in. The other thing a challenge for, people like ann hardy besides the everyday sexism of corporate etreats work, people would say, you cannot come because if the women come, then we have to invite our wives, then we cant have dalliances on the side at this corporate retreat. Aside from that, the work habits of technology, work hard, play hard continues today. Working in tech is a full immersion activity. Youre supposed to be all in. 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 silken valleys story too. Usan as we go through this we hear the word Silicon Valley and also another word, coding. Where did those words come rom . Professor omara the early days of digital computing. The First Digital computers, the art and the science of computing was considered to rest in hardware, in the machine itself. The origins of the first alldigital computer comes out in world war ii. It is an army funded project. Based at the university of ennsylvania. It is later commercialized as the univac. In the early days of computing, univac was a brand like kleenex or google. There is a great political story involving a univac. The first appearance on television was in the 1952 election eve of the election. Walter cronkite, newly hired anchor, is managing the election ight coverage. They have a univac computer that is supposed affect the outcome. This is eisenhower versus stevenson. Round one. The univac predicts correctly an overwhelming victory for isenhower. It was so decisive in its production that all of the programmers were like i think they got it wrong. Coding, it is a time when the hardware is considered to be so important. The software is like being a telephone operator. To program a computer, youre just plugging in different wires in different places. It was not considered an art or science, just very routine. That coding something was like data entry. So a coder was kind of a drone. Unsurprisingly 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 workaround. 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 and so, 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. Because it has become a more high prestige activity. The coders subsequently become men. Susan the name code itself came from is it a product . Professor omara yes, there is software code. The idea that a code it is coming out of world war ii code cracking. There is the routinization of it. It is something where there is a pattern. Susan like morse code. Professor omara it is not a reative process. Susan coding is. It is something where the best coders are people who are always thinking about thinking in rather complex ways. Professor omara particularly now, programming is much more complex. But even then, 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, to use as little memory as possible. Now we have incredibly powerful 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 971. Before that, it was Santa Clara Valley. A Fruit Growing valley in california. It gets its name what is happening in 1971 is the major industry there is silicon semiconductors. At the time, the main customers for the semiconductor companies, were not people like you and me, they were other companies. They were computer makers. The big computer makers like ibm and honeywell were mostly based elsewhere. So, the sales guys for these the Computer Companies would come out and they started colloquially referring to the valley as Silicon Valley. Because that was the main action. There is a reporter for a trade paper. This is based in palo alto. Electronics news. A guy named don hoffler. He writes about the Semiconductor Industry in Silicon Valley. He gets wind that Silicon Valley is the colloquial name and he he thinks that is a good thing to tie it. So he headlines the story, Silicon Valley usa. That name stuck. Although it was something that was bandied about in the valley for a while within the industry. Is not to the late 1970s when it starts becoming starts disseminating out. I found my references in the Washington Post and new york times. And fortune magazine, Start Talking about the Santa Clara Valley and then occasionally they will say Silicon Valley. And quotation marks. The post is referring to Silicon Valley in quotation marks until 1979. Then it becomes a more familiar lexicon. It was an outoftheway place, seen as off to the side of the main action for so long. Susan were going to go back in time to tell the story as you do in your book. Before that i would like people to know a little bit about you. How did you get interested in his . Professor omara i was in graduate school, i knew i wanted to write i worked in politics before i went to graduate school. I came to graduate school to study 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 1950s. And then, of course, one of the greatest domestic impacts of the cold war was what the military industrial comp lex did to seed the Electronics Industry, the computer industry. I realized that this is the then, i 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 interact with one another. They have an antagonistic relationship but they also have a collaborative relationship. The real story in American History is one of publicpart Publicprivate Partnership in many ways, that are sometimes nseen. 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 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 who are in Silicon Valley. Who are the creators of these companies and these echnologies. 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 like a lot of young people who come to washington, i came for a president ial i worked on campaign. 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. [laughter] history majors get lots of obs. But i came home to try to figure out what to do next. 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. I started in the Correspondence Office as many great blue ghost at start. One thing led to another and then, when your candidate wins, everything changes. So i spent the first clinton term and a little extra in washington, d. C. , working in the white house and add dhhs eared working for both president clinton and Vice President gore. It was an extraordinary education. I call it my first graduate chool. 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. Weatherby and government or a business, they are 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 being a historian has given me more empathy. I spent 20 years on the others of the fence, looking at politics and business from the view of someone trying to understand why people do what they do. Ooking at the history of Silicon Valley or American History writ large, it is a way of not only better understanding our present 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 and what were they hoping to do. And what did not work out . Then you have a richer understanding and perhaps more empathy for why Different Actors do what they do. Susan how long did you work on this book . Professor omara i worked on this for the better part of six years from idea to execution. I live in seattle. My family and i moved down to palo alto for two years. I was really fortunate to have sabbatical fellowships. I had a way to be down there. And i interviewed a lot of people. Had to build my own archive. Historians like to go to archives, to the library of congress, to the National Archives and get in the dusty boxes and do our thing. His history, there isnt a library of congress or National Archives in this industry. Although government archives were very important to me. And archives like the cspan archives and the governmental archives were really important to me. But i had to draw in Different Things and talk to people who were there when it happened. And draw in oral histories from people who are longer with us. No corporate records. Sometimes 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 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 fact that was a competition between two different geographic areas boston and palo alto. Who are 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, in a big way, the National Science foundation was created in 1949. There is a decision to go big on Public Investment in peace Time 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. To compete in science and education with the soviets. Not only a matter of prestige but developing the nuclear ealities of the nuclear age, which the United States had entered into this. Boston was the 800 pound gorilla. What was in boston question what was 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 gave them an advantage, was that they were the center of governmentsponsored Business Research during the war. The leaders were from harvard and m. I. T. , including one of the people i talk about in the book, vannevar bush, who is the original entrepreneur professor. He has this extraordinary career, crossing over academia, government and industry. He is the founder of raytheon. While he is an electoral engineering professor and m. I. T. He goes on in world war ii to lead the warTime Research and about meant office under franklin roosevelt. He is known as roosevelts general of physics. He has a very high public profile then. He is the person who kind of conceives of this Postwar Research network that is based in a lot of universities. And so, that explains boston. Boston is, a lot of money is finally in after world war ii. And theres, 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 its biggest export is prunes at the time being the prune capital. It was on the Pacific Coast where a lot of wartime military activity had gone on and continues to go on. So military installations in the bay area. And, it had stanford. Stanford university was a respectable institution but was better known for its Football Team that being a harvard of the west. It wanted to be a harvard of the west. But it has a great asset in this guy named fred turman who had gone to m. I. T. For graduate school and was a student of vannevar bush. During world war ii, he had gone to boston to work under bush in this research effort. He is sitting in cambridge and looking at what is going on and he knows after the war, bush and others are building this infrastructure to continue forward. And researching diversity like harvard and m. I. T. Are get a going to 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 could state like dartmouth. Good but not having a real effect on the national conversation. Now, i do not know what dartmouth administrators then or now what they can that assessment. It is a little bit uncharitable. Dartmouth has its own Important Role in the history of computing. Nonetheless, he goes back to palo alto and talks to the incoming president of the university. A guy named wallace sterling, historian, who 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. And engineering, and laboratories that really meet exactly what the cold war military wants us to do. And no other university in the world did that. The Architecture Department evaporated. They did away with other things to build up science and engineering. And they formed these close alliances with industry and encouraged students like David Packard and bill hewlett to Start Companies nearby. They encouraged technologists from elsewhere, a guy named el shockley, coinventor of the transistor, to come to palo alto and set up shop. And other companies and defense contractors followed. So stanford with this hub of, not the only factor, but wasnt was incredible critical. Susan one of the things people outside Silicon Valley associate with telik and ballys Stock Options that may so wealthy. You write that that began in 1957 with hewlettpackard. Professor omara hp was founded in 1939 a goes public in 1957. From its founding, its two founders, hewlett and packard set out to form a different sort of company. One that was think about the big businesses of the 1940s and 1950s. The big corporations, the trite automakers. They wanted something very different. They wanted a nonhierarchical company. No corner offices, no managerial suits and ties. No unions because that signals something is wrong with management Employee Relations if you have to be union, they are not getting along. Instead, they wanted to create something that was kind of like a scientific laboratory. That was much more egalitarian, where people felt free to did not feel hemmed in by their job description. That there is not as much of a ladder. Where people work shortsleeved and wandered, what hewlett and packer called it was management by walking around. Rather than call people in and see what they were doing, they would be on the shop floor and see what was going on. So this meritocratic idea, and then everyone got Stock Options. Not everyone. Not some of the people on the Manufacturing Assembly lines. But the whitecollar employees did. Everyone had stake in the companys financial success. This becomes the model that company after company after company in the valley follows. Susan we talked about the importance of the space race, sputnik launched in 1967. All the money flowing in. I want to fastforward to the 1960s and talk about one government policy that changed in a big way. Lbj signing an immigration law. We are having a big immigration debate right now. How does this 1965 immigration bill figure into the history of Silicon Valley . Professor omara it is incredibly important. I think the 1965 Immigration Reform act is possibly 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. In fact, as Lyndon Johnson is signing it on Liberty Island in october, 1965, he said in his remarks that this is not a revolutionary bill. It was seen as crossing the ts and dotting the eyes on the Civil Rights Act in some ways. Dotting the is on the Civil Rights Act in some ways. It had been a racially discriminatory quota system for immigrants the 1920s at a time established of fierce antiimmigrant sentiment. That was very much driven by prejudice against southern and eastern europeans, catholics and jews. People who were seen as other at the time. That was holding fast until the mid1960s. So johnson and liberal democrats pushed through this Immigration Reform. That was really just about 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 doors 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 you have 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. He came to the United States as a teenager from hungary after world war ii. 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 at technology than everyone else, the american system has allowed the Free Movement of people and capital. And it has drawn people from around the world like a magnet from all over the world as students and entrepreneurs. To the valley and to american tech centers. That has been really fundamental to what we have today american dominance in the tech space. Susan the 1970s are pivotal decade, reading about. 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 they are Elementary School students, they want to become astronauts. When theyre in college, they go to the College Computer lab and learn about punchcards and understand how to Program Computers and how to interface with computers for the first time. They worked on timesharing and terminals. There were also comingofage in the vietnam era, the watergate era, an era when government is increasingly seen as, government is using its power for destruction, for corruption. You have people coming up who are much more interested in turning away the government and turning away from Big Government and big business and thinking about using computers. Who had computers before this . It was Big Companies and Big Government agencies. They were so big and expensive. This new generation was, how can we take this compete or power, this incredibly power machine incredibly powerful machine 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 an interface so ordinary people can access and use this incredible vise. How can we create a Communications Network for computers . There was a techno optimism. This incredible state born out of this political moment that cant be separated from the other things going on in the United States at the time. And in the bay area at the time. That is, these computers will save us. All these things you see wrong with the world, war, inequity, 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 are some of the names we know today that came out of the Homebrew Computer Club . Professor omara the two most famous names that come out of it are steve jobs and steve wozniak. They show up at one of the first meetings of this rangy group of computer hobbyists. People who are playing around with personal computing and soldering their own motherboards. And 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 wozniak 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 built it in High School Shop class. It was very rudimentary. But inside was a sophisticated device. 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. Yet. 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 generation of microcommunicating. Which becomes what we know as desktop computing or personal computing. Susan and lawyers . Professor omara i wanted to show the other part of this Silicon Valley galapagos that are critical to understanding why a it grew and why it has been so successful. What you have in Silicon Valley which you dont have anywhere else you have specialized venturecapital firms. This is high tech Venture Capital. Many the people who are Venture Capitalists were first engineers or entail Technology Copies themselves. Many came out of the Semiconductor Industry. And their generation, the next venture was to start Venture Capital firms. You see this again and again in the valley. People are in one company and do well and have a good ipo, they they get acquired 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. One thing, 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. A guy named mike markel who came in and he had 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, adult supervision as they call it in the valley. The two steves were not capable of running they did not have managerial experience at all. They were pretty unconventional guys. So markula creates 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. 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. The strategic defense initiative, sti lets watch that and then talk about this california governor. He comes to washington and how impacts your story. There has been a desire to discuss sdi. As of its funding to be determined by domestic considerations on connected 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 and beyond. The 1990s and beyond. We will research and develop it and when it is ready we will it. Susan lots of money coming into this. How did it affect Silicon Valley . Professor omara sti was really a supercomputing project. In order to work it would require immense amounts of competing power. So it becomes this incredible resource for Computer Science and other related disciplines. A lot of the computer scientists the funny thing is, in Silicon Valley were very much against sdi. They were, a number of them were against it technically. They were like, this is not going to work. There is a possibility for error and error would be catastrophic. It would require so much. We are not there yet, technologically. It reminds me about some of the conversations about Autonomous Vehicles and driverless cars. People are not quite there yet. But also philosophically. This is the people who are 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. Theyre the ones who see, you know, they want to make peace, not war. They are politically and philosophically opposed to what the Reagan Administration is doing. And so, but this is one of the wonderful things and it is understanding this relationship and how it evolved. You have some of the people who because are the biggest beneficiaries of some of this money. The money keeps on flowing. Because its coming through darpa and police agencies. And it is a lot of it is going, toward computing. Even some of the people who are the biggest beneficiaries are simultaneously protesting and picketing. And having meetings and writing open letters. This ability to dissent while still being part of the system i think its really important. When 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. The immigration act being an example of that. Theres been example after example after example. That is this interplay that i find so interesting. Really important in understanding if were talking about what is going to happen next and what is the role of washington. We need to understand his history and these interesting complexities. And the distinctive, only in america aspect of so much of it. The next clip susan the Clinton Administration for whom you worked, and al gore. This is before they took office and the summit the pulled together to encourage entrepreneurs. A lot of the investment we have made is an infrastructure that makes it easier for us to move around resources that used to be more important. They are still important. But if the Key Resources knowledge, today, shouldnt we be giving a lot more emphasis to the kind of National Infrastructure that we need to share information and create and share knowledge like the information superhighways referred to earlier, the digital libraries and software and programs that make it possible for children to come home after school and plug into the library of congress. Susan during the clinton ministration with gore this was 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 loved that clip. The other person, the closeup shot was john scully, then ceo of apple. There, during 1992 and 1993, he appears sitting next to hillary clinton. At the first state of the union 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 this was the basic, foundational infrastructure for the internet boom to happen. The internet that existed since 1969 as a network for researchers, military people, different parts of the Defense Research establishment and also academic researchers to communicate with each other. In the 1980s, it gradually starts opening up. But up until 1991 it was the Walled Garden of the internet. You could not do any sort of commercial transactions whatsoever. You could have, companies could com domain but they could not buy or sell on it. It was very limited. What happens in the early 1990s, in the late years of the george h a ministration and the early years of the Clinton Administration is this laying down of infrastructure. This included Young Political and like me. I was working on other things, i was not working on technology at the time. Like what is this information superhighway stuff, no one understood it. We were working on Health Care Reform and other things that seemed more central. There were a few lawmakers, but al gore being one of them. Newt gingrich was another. Who in the early 1980s and 1990s 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. That the government is encouraging entrepreneurial action to happen. So there is a really Important Role the government played. Susan you also report in the book that al gore was on the board of apple and became a hundred millionaire in the process. How important is that in telling the story for people who leave office and made a lot of money in this field . Professor omara al gore is an exceptional figure. He is exceptional in the central role he plays in the 1980s 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 has gotten larger and wealthier. There has been much more traffic back and forth between washington, d. C. And the valley in terms of people who work in one and move to another or vice versa. There are a lot of people in the valley now who of the clinton, bush to an obama administrations who are now working in these companies. A lot of them, their number of peoplethese Valley Companies are very important forces in washington, d. C. Politics. They have grown their lobbing operation significantly. In the 1990s, they did not have lobbyists. Microsoft had one guy working up in bethesda. Out of he would carry stuff in the back of his jeep. Susan now how large is their lobbing group . Professor omara some of the biggest lobbing operations in washington today are the big five tech companies. Susan presumably the microsoft antitrust soon had lot to do with the recognition that that we important in their devout meant. Professor omara it was a big wakeup call. Gates famously joked when the ftc was starting to bring enforcement action against microsoft in the early 1990s, gaetz scoffed, the worst thing that can happen to me in washington is i could fall down the steps of the ftc and break my neck. [laughter] it turns out that microsoft did not have to break up. But it came out with guard rails on what it could do. It came out much more cautious and constrained. Perhaps less willing to dive in to new markets and the aggressive fop fashion it had before. Part of it was a new tech generation was growing. It is not like you would not have google had microsoft not been hemmed down. Of course, we do not know. Counterfactual history is impossible. This new generation was growing. This happens again and again. This 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 a very quick clip before we run out of time. It seems a long time ago. It was just 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. A tweeting president who has used this platform. But the to thousands and the 2010s are the story of the rise of social media and how important it became as a platform. As we tell the story we are now coming full circle. What guarantee is there that Silicon Valley will continue to have the dominance it has . In the United States, we are hearing the huawei story. China has certain intentions. Russia has been a major player in using disruptive technologies. There are other nonstate actors that are using social media. How does Silicon Valley preserve the Important Role it has played . Professor omara yes. 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 technologies direction and then got out of the way. The internetpart of the dilemma of social meet at right now, is it is then unregulated space. Funnily enough, that is what allowed these companies to blossom. In the 1990s when the rules of the road were being laid down, the infrastructure, there was a choice made, an agreement that the Internet Companies would self regulate. That was made in order to encourage free speech and conversation on the internet because in that time, the big worry was the big businesses, media was cable, 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. So, 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. In higher education, the u. S. Has drawn back. The u. S. Is drawing back from the open doors of allowing the best and brightest from around the world to easily come here and be encouraged to come here and create. It is impossible to predict the future but there are ways in which we can create this foundation. Not just to replicate what is going on now but think about how can new voices come into the conversation . How do you have more ann hardys . Where are the kids that would not easily come into this world . How do you bring them in . How do you also get different voices in the room who are figuring out what the technological questions and solutions are . Ones that are made with the world in mind. Because American Technology companies have global markets. Things that are born and bred in california dont often translate easily to myanmar or name your geography. These are the real challenges so, that not just the valley and not just washington, but both. And all of us who use the products 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. Next week on q a, daniel weiss, president and ceo of the metropolitan museum of art, talks about the life of poet an, president and ceo of the metropolitan museum of art talks about the life of Michael Odonnell who went missing in action during the vietnam war after the helicopter he was piloting was shot down over cambodia. That is next sunday night at 8 00 eastern and pacific on cspans q and a. Coming up on washington journal, National Review Senior Editor richard burr kaiser talks about his talks about his book give liberty. Thert wiseman looks at procedures percent impeachment trial. Impeachment trial. We will take your calls and tweets come alive on washington journal. Done to prevent them. Heres how to take part in the conversation. Republicans, 202 7488001, democrats, 202 7488000