Alec ross, why do you open your in the Book Industries of the future toy with a story about vomit. The first sentence of the book is its 3 00 in the morning and im mopping up whiskey smelling puke after a Country Music concert in West Virginia. Not a typical beginning for the book about the future. Want to be clear that the perspective i give is from somebody who grew up in West Virginia and who worked as a midnight janitor. So most people who write books about the future do so from a position of what id call coastal privilege, and i guess part of what i wanted to convey was that there wasnt any blue blood in this body and i wanted to talk about a whole different issues from the perspective of somebody who grew up in West Virginia and worked as a janitor host you rite that people in West Virginia were doing their best to manage a slow descent. Guest i just turned 25 and my beginning was spent West Virginia and i thought it was normal to an inherently difficult situation. And it wasnt really until i left West Virginia that i understood dish came to understand that wasnt how it was all over the world. A lot of what we have seen is that has continued. That feeling of economic helplessness, has attend apace in continued apace in the 25 years since i left. Host when people say to you i want to create my own Silicon Valley, can they . Guest no. No. Silicon valley is a very special 30mile long, 15mile wide area that is a product of 50, 60 years worth of investment, trillions of dollars float in. Its got multiple world class universities to. Try to create your own Silicon Valley is naive. Really naive. Its something very specific. Do think, though, that places all ron the world can be centers of innovation, wealth creation, and job creation, without having to become sort of silicon vrabel 2. 0. Host how do they do that . Does charleston, West Virginia, become part of the industries of the future . Guest i think there are examples of places like charleston, West Virginia, perspective vicepresident ing. Charleston didnt. We are moving from an industrialbased economy into a technologyrich, knowledgebased economy. Would point to a number of place placed that did this and can provide a road map. In North Carolina and South Carolina when i was growing up, foal was fueling the question of West Virginia, textiles and tobacco were fueling the economy of the carolinas. What they did, which my native West Virginia did not, is really in the 90s and through the 90s and through the present day they made the pivot and recognize that textiles textiled tobacco would not sustain the economy so there were massive investments in things that would help create work places and workers. They were oriented towards highgrowth industries. Thats why North Carolina and South Carolina right now are relatively economically strong, where West Virginia has stagnated. Host who made those investments and what kind of investments. Guest its a very terrific example of how government can do things well, and how the private sector can do things well when working with government. One thing government did, think effectively not just the carolina but throughout much of the United States where have seen positive examples of innovation. Government asks itself, what are are the things we can do to facilitate innovation, make hours the headquarters for highgrowth industries, even if our Industrial Base jobs are moving to mexico or india or somewhere else. So from tax incentives to making pivots in k12 education, to be able to attract talent, other such things, they took all of the assets in a region and they said, reality be very strategic about allocating them so we can decouple ours from yesterdays economy and focus on what is next. Host your book is about future industries and one is robotic snooze i think the robots robots of the cartoons and movies from then 1970s will be the reality of the 2020s. And i think theyre really two things driving this. Number one this is this called mapping belief space. Things that history include are very difficult robotics handcuffses like grasping, grasping might seem really straightforward but its very complex to model out mathematically and therefore program. But development in mapping belief space in the last few years has enabled us to take our robots from. Become twodimensional to increasingsly threedimensional beings. The next thing is cloud robot yings. So anyone stead of a very sophies tick sophisticated robot that can do things thats manual and routine but cognitive and nonroutine, like c3po. That would have taken hundreds of millions of dollarsber robot but because of the cloud they can be relatively dumb, light, wait devices so long as theyre connected to the cloud where the hundreds of million outside dollar odd are Processing Power can live. As much that internet that shaped the last 2010 or 10 or 20 years, the next 20 years that artificial enabled robotic is will be the for y ffor y of it. Guest who is paying for these. Guest there are 196 countries on the planet. Really only five, five that matter in robotics. Its very strength strange. Just United States and germany in west, and then in asia, 10, china, south korea, and japan. South korea produces more industrial robots than the three billion people who live in south america, africa, indiana, and russia combined, and its interesting. A lot of the most interesting innovations i see coming are coming out of east asia and coming out as much because of a series of cultural factors as technological or investment factors. One reason is in the west, were taught to fear bringing to life those thing that we shouldnt from icarus and his waxed wings to fracturen stein. And the east in east asia its entirely different. They dont have the cultural hangups we have. In japan, half the population practices shinto and all on objects have soul and they dont have the hangup of robots doing human tasks to degree in the west. Host why have not other countries found the model successful . Cincinnatiing a interest. First of all its very capital sensitive. It takes a lot more sophistication to develop advanced robotics with Artificial Intelligence than, say to build a new app. So its a good oldfashioned things that takes millions, tens of millions, occasionally hundred its of billions of dollars of research and development. What that tends to mean it has to includesser in places where theres intense investment, and so in the United States, it tends to come around universities, the spectacular innovations at m. I. T. , for example, and ones coming out of Johns Hopkins in baltimore, and in asia, a lot of it comes out of big business. So honda and it toyota, because they have so much expertise in mechanics and engineering, but because they also have access to enormous amounts of money that they can apply for research and development, a lot of the really coolest innovation out of asia is flowing from some of these by colorado like honda and toyota. Host alec ross, number on the list of industries of the future, life science. Guest i think the worlds last trillion dollar industry was me a out another code to and the information one is genetic code. Were finally, finally, 15 years after the mapping of the human genome, were finally the point where the computer power, the economics and the science are lining up in a way that we can harvest meaning. We can harvest data. From the 20 to 25,000 genes that exist in all of our bodies in a way where welcome mind, blowing diagnostics and develop mindblowing personalized medicine. One quick example why the answer cancer will become less fatal there is a liquid biopsy, pioneered by a research a Johns Hopkins. It means that taking a little vial of blood, they can sequence the genetic material in the blood and identify cancerous cells at 1 100th the size of what can be detected by an mri. So instead of cancers being detected in stages three and four, after you feel very badly already, and when they more often than not are fatal, cancers can be identified during your annual checkup. When youre presymptomatic, very early statement one when the cancers are upmer more treatable the commercialization of genomics is going add three to five years of Life Expectancy to todays teenagers in america. Host alex ross you talk about craig venter. Guest he is this sort of crazy scientist. One of the People Associated with the mapping of the human genome and he is involved in a couple really crazy toys right now. One Crazy Companies right now. One is human longevity, inning, focused on take our lives which may have live expect tap sis expectancies in the 70s or 80s and second it. What can we do with the Building Blocks of the 25,000 genes in our body. To be able to repair misfiring dna to repair our illnesses the cellar cellular. Level. Theyre seeking to add a decade ore moore of Life Expectancy to all of us. Host holiday dudout get from being an overnight janitor in charleston, West Virginia to this field . Its a long and winding road. It started with a woman named becky the barbarian. My mother. Didnt matter that i was a Public School kid greg up in West VirginiaWest Virginia. My mother made darn certain that i, my brother and sister, would work our tails off in school. That enabled somebody who work as midnight manager and on a beer truck in college to have the drive and also the sense of certainty to have enough confidence to sort of go out there and become an entrepreneur which is michigan i which is something i did to get involved in politics and government, which is something that i did. So it started with her. The road after college started as an Inner City School teacher, and then entrepreneurship and then got involved in politics working on president Barack Obamas first president ial campaign. Host what did you dethe state department. Guest i worked for Hillary Clinton as the the title was senior advise for innovation. Focused the intersection of technology and Foreign Policy. I did not innovate her email. That was somebody else. I was not like the i. T. Guy. My focus was really on addressing really nasty Foreign Policy challenges, and thinking about the role of technology within it. Thinking, for example, how we can restore anonymous Crime Reporting and n narcotics controlled territories in northern mexico using technology. Thinking about how to do things like reduce the number of surgical political assassinations taking place in syria, because the Syrian Intelligence service and syriatel, the atv eye syria, wore working together and identifying targets based on the against on peoples mobile phones. So my work for four years was focused on the intersection of National Security where there was technology involved, and working in the socalled white or gray world. So not doing anything covert but doing work that was overt. That i can talk to you about here today. Host another one of those industries of the future you talk about is Foreign Policy problem, which is Cyber Security. Guest oh, yeah, i think the weaponization of code is the most Significant Development in conflict. Since the weaponization of fissile material. The difference creating the nuclear bomb requires access to scienckists and creating malware has a lower bare youre entry. Think doing itization is an overwhelming good this, think rise of the internet and these communications networks, which give us access to abundant information, entertainment, and knowledge, it can also be weaponized, and we have seep that all around the world. We have seen it in recent weeks in saudi arabia where the air Traffic Controller system has apparently come under cyber attack by the iranian and see saw it in our last president ial election where i think for the first time, another nation state figured out how to weaponnize the internet in a fairly consequential way. Host what is big data. Guest big data. It is basically the mashup of computer power and being able to use that computer power to harvest meaning out of all of the zeros and ones that are being created by the 16 billion Network Devices in the world. 90 of the world resident dat world residents data has been created in least two years and if you take the sum of all information created by human kind from literally the earliest recordings, paintings on cave walls. From paintings on careful walls to the year 2013 2003, which is not that long ago. We now produce that much information every two days. So big data is our ability to look at this specific ocean worth of information that we are creating and harvest intelligence from it. Host what do you moon by intelligence . Guest things thattening help you make a more informed decision. Dont take a utopian view of big data. I dont believe that noiseless algorithms should nudge us in every decision we make during the day. But if youre an advertiser, and you want to advertise to people who are more likely to buy your product, well, part of the reason why advertising in newspapers has gotten wiped out in recent years is because using smart data analytics, using big data, you of much more likely to reach people who are going to buy your product through other means, like through the internet, for example. And going back to the prior topic of discussion, genomics. If were going to add years of Life Expectancy because of our ability to analyze the terabytes of data within our body, that, too, is big data. That basically is taking the Life Sciences and combining it with the Computer Sciences, and enabling the Computer Sciences to draw out intelligence, information, that can then be used to do things like develop a drug, or tell us if we have area stage cancer. Host alec ross, the last two industries of the future that we talk about, Cyber Security and big data, dont they have a lot of privacy concerns attached to them . Guest absolutely. And i think the one of the consequences of our turning so much of the world into computer code is going to be the near inevitable loss of privacy. A lot of peek theyre worried about surveillance. I actually think we should worry more about surveillance is being watched from the nsa or su veilancing being watched from below by everybody with a video enabled cell phone or such things. As we sit here, we live in a world of about 16 bill devices in the world that 16 billion device nets world that are networked, sending or receiving a signal. In four years, not that long from now, that number will have gone from 16 billion to 40 billion and lot of that growth are going to been sensors lining walls and our product and ingesting information about who we are, about where we are, about all of these sorts of things, and i think that one of the near inevitable consequences is going to be a substantial loss of privacy. Host so, youre talking but the internet of things in a sense. Guest the internet of things is really the heart of this. If a robber is able to tap into the my homed in thework and able to determine because my house is now been networked, including the Home Security system, the garage and everything else, and know exactly when i am coming home and exactly when im leaving, thats a lot better information than was the case when i was growing up and burglars would look to see if newspapers had stacked up in front of your front door, and a, oh, must not be home. Theres stack of newspapers on their front door. Ill rob them. Now that can be down behind a computer if you can tap into Security Systems and get near omniscient about the come examination goings of people. Host why do you cite colombia and chile as examples of country doing it right a0 posed to ecuador and brazil. Guest i think that a number of countries there, including chile and crow colombia have figure out how to make their countries a comfortable them to the industries of the future. So, it really comes down to government. When i think about government officials in chile and colombia, the government officials there and in most other countries where innovation is flourishing, the government says, what can we do to help make these innovators successful . We work for the entrepreneur. In countries like brazil and ecuador, i feel like the governments there say, oh, well, we are the regulators. The entrepreneur below news the hierarchy and we control the. The government focused on enabling rather than regulating tend to be those that are competing and succeeding the best. And really competitive environments like south america, where theres a jigsaw puzzle of countries competing with one another but also then competing globally itch think the role of government and how it shoo chooses to engage with entrepreneurs, proofs to be deterministic about whether its going to be a home. Industry or the future or not. Host some else you profile is shill tile. Guest a wonder kind. A young man. Graduated from stanford at age 19 with dual degrees in public sol and i and biology. Focus on him and another guy named jarred cohen in my book because the last chapter is called the most important job youll ever have and that is parenting. His parents did a brilliant job preparing them for tomorrows world and the heart of this is interdisciplinary learning, shell tile is the cohead of the seed fund the nea, the Worlds LargestVenture Capital fund. Hes 25 years old. A law degree from harvard on the side. And why i think he is so spectacularly successful at age 25 is because he grew up where his parents made sure that he had a Good Foundation and n science and technology, but also the humanities. With jarred co ten, jarred just turned 25 and is part of a Company Called jigsaw, a part of google. Hundred he drew he was studying member and science and also art and became fluent in swahili, and traveled the world and in a world growing more dominated by zeros and ones, in many respects the best thing to do for our kids is getting more good oldfashioned ink stamps on the passport. So theyre examples of if you make the right inputs into people when theyre in their very young and in their teens you can get wildly successful 25 to 35yearolds. Host the Stem Education we have focused on, has it been successful . Guest i think i dont think we have put it in place with sufficient scale. Think that having a base line injuring of science, engineering and mathematic us is important to have a middle class job. Think of the computer coved its the alphabet that future information is written. In theres actually too little Stem Education and too few women and girls who are taking stem classes after middle school, through high school, and into college. So we need more of it. You do have to go beyond stem. You do have to go beyond science, technology, engineering and mathematics. I think they great leaders of tomorrow will be those people who cop combine an understanding of things science and technological and also have domain expertise in a humanity. Think about facebook, for example. Most people think of facebook as a terrific innovation by a brilliant Computer Scientist named mark zuckerberg. When i think about facebook and when i think about mark surgerierberg i think about somebody who has as much expertise in behavioral psychology as Computer Science. And it was that combination of behavioral psychology and Computer Science that produced facebook. Host so, alec ross, what does donald trump mean to Silicon Valley in your view . Guest i think that Silicon Valley is worried. Donald trump doesnt seem to have much in way of intuition about Silicon Valley. You think about the industries where he focus kid his career, building buildings, think about his activity prior to inauguration, focuses on things like boeing and carrier, the sort of industrial factory jobs. I dont think he really gets Silicon Valley. I think when he thinks of Silicon Valley he thinks of like twitter and google ump dont think he much understands it beyond that and i also think there are set of values inside Silicon Valley if i were to sort of stereotype that community, that really cut across the grain of a lot of Donald Trumps values, so i do think that its going to be an almost schizophrenic relationship. I think that theyre going to be things that Silicon Valley likes and i think there are going to be times where theyre pulling their hair out and i think that at 1600 pennsylvania Avenue Northwest theyre going to be frustrated more often than not when they try to engage with Americas Technology sector. Year. Host you talk about the industries of the future. What about the Regulatory Framework of the future . Does it need to be update snead no. Guest no question. One reason why re struggle and Middle America struggles is we need to rewrite our social contract. We had a social contract for the agriculture stage and then a social contract for the Industrial Age that included things like the 40hour work week, free public education, pensions, employerbased health insurance. As we move from an industry age into an information age, i think a lot of the shortcomings we have in regulations in public policy, come because were trying to graft elements of our Industrial Age social contract into the information age, and so i do think that these new industries, feels like Artificial Intelligence genome makes you was just regulate them in the way that the feels from the 1980s. You need some brand new thinking about it. And it doesnt necessarily fall across a traditional rightleft, democratrepublican, binary. Host the best is the industries of the future alec ross is the author