My name is stephen rodriguez. Im a student at the new mayor w americas foundation. Why liberal arts ruled the world and scott and i have known each other for a little while now. H when he first approached me about this, i immediately thought of my freshman year in college when i was deciding what i should major in. I loved history and Political Science but i quickly thought id want to be sure i get a job coming out of college. So i decided to meet the professional world halfway and major in business. But when i talked to him it made sense. Cott abo my career i can any of yours takes the many pivots and turns. I realized no realize now what w then is that int many ways liberal arts or business as the ability in the Technology World for innovation in general. So, with that i want to turn over to scott. I know scott from our time in new york. Hed like myself spend time in the Venture Capital world and v worked with google, facebook and pretty much as has a dream rese and importantly for this book spend some time as a president ial innovation fellow. So, at the fortune or misfortune so of getting the government learning about driving innovation in large enterprises. Maybe to start tell us about yourself and why you got the idea to spend time writing this book. First, thank you for having me here today and all of you for spending your lunch with us here. My impetus to write the book came out of the observation i grew up in the boom and bust of Silicon Valley but always carry this interest in public policy. The job is to effectively meet,o on a daily basis and tracks where it may be going into work others to place investments in those Companies Using heavy profit. I was sort of at odds with the narrative coming out of the media and the narrative i saw on a daytoday basis but basically Silicon Valley was a monolith of techies creating innovation and i think if you go back to the 1990s, laying the groundwork infrastructure for the web and the technology we have today it may have been more of a true statement that was pioneered by techies but today its been for propagated throughout the media. I would flip out and say its become the application layer is about how we apply the technology meaningfully. Its no longer the case you have to be a techie. In five meetings a day or so i would say at least half were people coming out of all theseep different lives from fashion, media, coming out of differentia academic backgrounds, applying what theyve known from sociology or economics, partnering to put the new toolst against things they understood deeply that i realized in this thesis of the book as they had e become more monetized from the people coming from these other backgrounds and experiences it has the passion and interest to apply to what they know so they come back from the 1960s and 1970s and it was this association in this set of terms it refers to those that gave to study the social sciences and they were more selfexplanatory people that came out of the engineering world of computerpew science and the book also is not about the opposition of the twoo and its not that i am fuzzy and you are techie or one or the other but it is a book within any of these programs of theanye social sciences for example you got a Statistical Software to master these days you are often working with the big data and engaging with independent variables. Then youve got the advent of design and know your customer so you sort of start peeling back these terms and realize its about these two things and that sort of secondary part of thef book refers to the liberal arts and this sort of takes this constant liberal or that has been in some degree throw from e bus in Silicon Valley for example asset of those that work in shoe stores come and ifwo nothing against shoe stores but that isnt true english majors will be more like one of the founders said the liberal arts of no value in the future economy and first of all, i mean if we look at the classic definition of what the liberal arts are, they incorporate mathematics and logic andgic an Natural Sciences so if we look at some of these field for example in the gene sequencing bees come ou out of this only fr their biology without direct vocational application and that is the sort of premise of the liberal arts that i mean when i say these are things that will rule the digital world, so that is i guess the rationale behind why i wrote the book and theeran overarching thesis. If you listen to the podcast or watch any of the Major News Networks would feel we are in a world any time consumed byts nt software, these are big economii messages today talking about the role of automation and taking jobs away or bringing jobs here. So kind of piggybacking on the comments made, how or why should a world consumed in artificialsn intelligence, automated processes even care about liberal arts and things like anthropology, history orto Political Science . When i say Silicon Valley i dont mean the geographical location, i mean atlarge this technological layer interfaces look lexington kentucky and chattanooga and places in between, it is the democratization of a lot of these tools not to mention the application of the technologies means we have more broadening of where technology is so the reason i think it Still Matters if you look at 2014, oxford came out with a study that said 47 of u. S. Jobs were at high risk of machine automation and this was sort of the rise of the robots in the book and thinking about the reality that there were so many jobs at risk. In january of this year, they came out with a followup where they looked at a little more granular level and said wait a minute, lets look at 800 occupations and what comprises these occupations. If we divvy them up and attempts to match them with what machines currently doing with the project them to do down the road we find based on the 5 of jobs which is still a nontrivial number, 5 has massive implications for social reasons and things that are commonly brought to the forefront of the media but its not 47 and what they also found is that for 60 of jobs, 30 of the taxes are things that would change generally over a 20 year timeframe, so i think the reality we are living in is muca less about this coming wave of automation taking over jobs its more about if you flip the letter from Artificial Intelligence to the riaa, that is something to think about. In the automotive world, we look at self driving cars and think over what period of time are the vehicles going to be running around the road by themselves. Weve been undergoing this process for a long time all the. Way back to automatic transmission to antilock brakes. We are starting to see the benefits of being on a freeway in a particular area and we will start seeing this more and more but its not going to happen overnight and i think if you look at that progression is much more serial progression and i think the same is true in the workforce. We are more likely to have a death in the office than robots taking over jobs so that is one of the interesting things in the book if you actually unpack this idea and say where are the tasks in the jobs that can be taken away, generally the best practice that we have could become a machine practice and it is generally something that youve done before, you know the process. It can be scripted and programmed and then obviously there is a machine that can do that. If you look within the job and say what are the best practices those are generally the simple things that are routine and can be moved away from machines that what that does is freeze up the human and the role to focus on the complex tasks. He talks about basically the social skills and soft skills in the employment world of something we cant quantify we know it is important but how do we put our finger on it like dark matter in the universe we know its out there that we cant put our finger around what it is. He talks about in this world where all the simple tasks are scripted and what is left is the complex task. We specialize more so you may be good at one thing and i am good at Something Else. There is a transaction cost associated and which reduces thh friction is actually soft skill, social skill, things you learn through other positions and i think that it is an interesting secondbest to this whole wave of automation to say it thinks things do start for example in the legal space, there is a study in the book where they said lets look at people and figure out the legal professione and it is done on 13 that could be scripted and taken away but that doesnt mean 13 of lawyers disappear. It means within each job there is a small subset of tasks. That sort of thing we can outsource and it gives some of these smaller startups to havee the same scale efficiencies. I think its the same way as mab having the 50 associates. Those are some of the ideas around the reason why this training in liberal arts or ways to train collaboration andts or communication has become really important in this machinelike world. [inaudible] that would be a valuable skill. Its interesting you mentioned the ai automation because i think it is pivoting more towards the field on nationalin security and ive often thought about the unmanned systems, predator, global hawk or these kind of terminator like tanks that are going to go out and fight everyone out. I had a conversation with someone recently and they reminded me that i think for every one or two predators, these unmanned planes in the east missions overseas primarily i think they set up to 80 people are required to keep those in the air. So maybe by having a predator id the air, certain individuals are no longer able to have the jobal that they did but now its a whole new set of job skills to keep these unmanned systems. I t so washington dc and security,. , who in the government today whether individuals or agencies, who gets this in your opinion,nn you spend time as a president ial innovation fellow. Have you run into people here in washington that seem to understand this . He brought this program into fruition and the attempt was to bring technologies from outsideu of washington to bring perspectives and ability and Product Innovation and things to different agencies sort of like the White House Program within a particular agency to make it more efficient and think about the outside tools focused on Data Visualization and digitizing the records at the National Archives for example, so that was an example of importing in some ways and we were chatting about this idea whether it is exporting. I think its more exporting problems from places Like Washington where we have a finger on the pulse or maybe legislation coming and data in the Government Agencies that can be made open and accessible through application programming. Those are ways i think we can start exporting. I think a good example of this is bringing the Defense Industry and for the programs. We always try to bring them into washington and i thought the attempt to bring the defense to Silicon Valley was interesting in the process of creating the Defense Innovation experimental incubator they started creating all sorts of programs. One of the outgrowth of that is the professor that wrote the book so he is a pioneer of this mentality and working with a former Army Colonels key started a program that was mentioned. It goes from the particular agency for teams within the military needing to have better information about the biometric data and it appears it is a mix between Computer Sciences and people from the field and people studying International Relations and they worked together on whatever problem they are assigned to. The innovations have been amazing in these short sprints getting the crowd sourcing and different perspectives on how to fix them and i think this is one idea that gets to the heart ofof the book taking some of the things that we understand here and exporting them as well. Heres another example of the coming regulation where the world is changing so much its not just a problem and solution but its the timing and why is it important today because if you are at the wrong time you are wrong so i think one of the things washington can help with is helping people understand the timing of particular things. Er i know there is a mandatory device that becomes 31 millionon trucks in the road suddenly youve got to have logging information that isnt just paper notes in a spiral notebook when youre sleeping and driving and regulations for safety, now theres this mandate for an Electronic Device and theres a company in Silicon Valley called keep trucking thats funded by a pakistani from texas who studied Political Science at the London School of economics and his family knew the Trucking Industry and said im going to leave my christian job case in point he worked and went and started a company thats doing very well. What they do is created and internet of things device that attaches to the engine and it provides that realtime information about when the truck is running, if the truck is loaded or not loaded and they are starting to cultivate all this data around which blames for the realtime shipping information across the u. S. Which are highly optimized and a trucker is driving one way and then driving home unloaded with no shipment and so those are the kind of things where if you have information on changing legislation and regulation. Its interesting because i have a number of friends whoveg gone out to work for a Technology Firm revenge or Venture Capital firm. Whether it is the inhouse lobby person for the firm or places like this and thats always kind of bothered me because to your point i thought theres got to be a lot more value to someone that spends time here in dc not just reading on capitol hill but understanding how the Government Works not just being a congressional advisor orl adviso lobbyist. It has value on the business side that these men and women can bring to these firms and i think you kind of touched on some of these people in this book. Not just the subject matter but its sort of the applicability of the methodology. One example if you look at the people come and attend this is one of the observation, one of the empirical truths that i thought was fair went against the grain of this narrative about it being a sort of monolithic place and if you look at the economics major in history and literature major from Williams College you look at alex who runs the Big Data Company and has a phd in social theory, peter loves to hate on global arts, philosophy degree and law degree. If you go down the route, its a lot more people than you would expect that have these irrelevant degrees. If anyone likes to interest, thc thumbtack Political Science again so theres all these examples. Its more efficient to contend people. Stewart actually was the creator of the photo sharing app back i the day but before that he was a philosopher and did undergrad and grad studies in canada in philosophy. If only i had the foresight to build that years ago. People dont have the foresight to just start doing something and iterate their way towards a truer and truer version so it started as a Gaming Company called tiny speck. In the process of building this Gaming Company, they used an internal Communications Tool to communicate between the engineers in overtime they realized maybe this has more value and they started reiterating towards that. In the process of doing that, he attributes the process to this methodology in the philosophy and the philosophical and very if you think about sitting at a roundtable when you debate ideas and try to not judge people based on their positions but get towards this idea of truth in as close to the proclamation as you can get in many ways that is seen as a Product Development process and how you get closer and closer, whatever that is. Its very similar. There is so many examples of thr methodology that come to play in the Product Development processs at a place like google. It reminds me of a conversation i had one time. I met with a very Senior Executive at a household name Technology Firm that will go nameless for this conversation, and this person and proclaiming the wonders of the company said wtheir companieshad we only hirw how to code. Okay, great. I said i wanted to code in the 90s. Does that count and this person said well, now its got to be cribbed language. I said great to you know how to code . Well, no. Exactly to your point i had to scratch my head and say you are the key driver of value and presumably revenue for this major Technology Firm and you are a fuzzy. Thats interesting as the tools have become more democratized to learn the new tools, if you look back to the 90s and well before that, the syntax you had to master it was highly complex as youve gotten further and further away, more and more away from the its moving towards natural language processing. We are not there yet dot the ultimate level with the english come of those things actually work well. We would be able to command access to the date of the big bottleneck is the ability to ask the que