number one the communist party needs to be a vanguard leading the country and third how do i achieve that? or objective is to create a ability to achieve that is consistent with ours. >> i think everybody agrees even the people the regional vision is one in which they are the suns and everything orbits around them whereas we would like to see a situation which in jupiter is very big but not the center of gravity. i'm increasingly persuaded that that's not only the regional vision of the global vision where they want to displace us as the dominant superpower and therefore persuade them that those of us who want to defend the existing order and those in the ccp who want to disrupt if not to destroy that order that

these two worldviews to use a canon phrase there can be no mode of the venue between the two so we can embrace a competitive high-stakes dynamic and compete aggressively or let me put it even more provocatively. actually wage cold wars with the creativity and alacrity with which we race against assad -- soviet union recognizing there are much worse things than a cold war. there's a hot war and there is surrender so those two things would be and i don't know if that makes sense. >> can i jump in? >> of course. >> mike you and have an olympus partnership. [laughter] let's jeff: that very clear. however we don't want a cold war. we don't want a hot war and we

don't want conflict of any kind and i don't think the american people want this. as you see this in a way that my constituents react on this issue, and we have looked at the polling on this and i'll share this very briefly. recently a poll was taken of all americans all parties and it showed something like better than 50% of americans believe that there is going to be a better than 50/50 chance of war in the next 10 years between the u.s. and china. they view china as one of the top strategic threats, the biggest competitors etc. but then in that same poll 75% of americans, and this is across democrats republicans and independents also to avoid war. he might be wondering who that 25% is 75% is avoid war and i

think what they are saying is look, instead of preparing for conflict to to mitigate conflict and i think the language that we use to describe their relationship and that we use to describe how we should have a conversation is important and in that poll they said help us in our every day lives. reduce fentanyl, do everything you can to reduce economic aggression and economic dumping of business as the operation and then do everything it can to stop the cyberhacking and intellectual property theft. that's what they said. we obviously have to work on during conflicts but i think if we adopt the cold war mentality i'm concerned we are going to trip into something else. >> am ing to resist the urge

but it seems like an opportune moment to do that. >> if you want peace prepare for war if you want were waged a cold war. >> i'd like to go back. we are agreeing we need to dissuade the capitulations of xi jinping or the chinese communist party. let's talk about the tools that we have to do that and what you think of when you look at the tools that you can make recommendations on that you are suggesting to plan. we have sanctions and export patrol and diplomacy. the tool is not a strategy but a strategy is a confluence of different tools. in my mind the thing that might matter the most is affecting the behavior of the chinese communist party. it's their perception of america's strength. when you think about your

recommendations how much are you focused on affecting america towards china or towards our allies in china and how much are we focused on american competitiveness at home? what is your perception of the tools? >> i think the bias i brought into the debate i do think while deterrence is highly overdetermined the most important variable is the specific balance of hard power and capability. the thing that xi jinping is paying the most attention to it i could be wrong, but a lease that was true in the previous three countries were talking about earlier. the things we must absolutely do are things like rebuild their munitions industrial base and make sure there is a robust set of long-range ship missiles and theater and military takeover of

taiwan is so unpalatable that he would try. and he would likely fail in that effort but in doing the committee's work again. much greater respect for economic and technological and ideological aspects. i believe they are much more complex and maybe that's just me because i'm a military guy. the fundamental dilemma is we are in the elon musk phrase we are conjoined twins with china economically. so hard to disentangle that's what makes us different than our competition with the soviet union through big enough to complicate diversification are decoupling because her economy didn't interact where now every lever we poll had four or five boomerang fx on us. and i'll stop here. my only take away frum that is as painful as figuring that out

is and where we need to onshore nearshore french or the sooner we do it the less painful it is. the problem does not age well. there are areas where we will have to spend some money or create a sticks and carrots to reduce the course of leverage that needs to be had for active pharmaceutical ingredients. >> on that front we have to improve our competitiveness at home. i urge everybody to take a look at our economic report. it's painstakingly negotiated and its almost every word in our staff and i see our staff chuckling in the audience right now. it really was but that was the only way we could get 24 members to sign on to this particular report. part of the report that i like to talk about is the third part. it's called the report is called reset, prevent and build.

i like the build part because we talk about fixing our immigration system right now which is driving away the talent that we need to prepare for any competition that was -- with just the ccp. anyone in the world and another issues upgrading the skills of our workforce especially skills-based vocational education for technology the future and no mention of third which is invested in basic science and investing in every thing in between the type of stuff we saw with ginkgo fireworks was able to capitalize on her in a number of tech companies that taking basic government research applying it and commercializing it. >> chris. i'm going to take you to more concrete -- between cold war and

surrender cold war is a better option than i think we can do better than that. the army always has sayings of sort for explaining the inexplicable and one of them they say is the say do gap. the say/do gap is the course we say this. there seems to be a gap about what we do. you all have the committee hammering on taiwan and we would call it an immediate vulnerability. it's a message that is not generally agreed to in most of the rest of the space and in particular if a look at what we do is compare to what we say the fantastic. i think it would require dna transplant. what are we doing to arm taiwan,

i remember what we say but not someone to doubt what we do. let me give a specific example. the vice chair who i think has done the best that the most important thing to be done if you were trying to make taiwan somewhat more defensible against an attack would be to have shore to ship missiles like harpoons. now i do care and i say how were we doing it? we announced a major harpoons deal with taiwan in 2020. we renounce to begin in 2023. most people have forgotten with no delivery date. we press for that delivery date and we said how about 2029?

>> some of the harpoon deals go back to 2016 the backlog is near $20 million. it's been approved but not delivered to taiwan. so if you understand how that's possible part of it is congress' fall. and the executive branch because jurisdiction over foreign militaries is split where the foreign affairs committee has primary designation. it creates a natural lack of accountability and oversight and within the administration the state department has a great deal of authority and that's often disconnected from what the military wants to do. it's a huge failure of policy and we are talking earlier today both for that and for maximizing production of critical munitions harpooned, all these things we know we need in the pacific.

the only thing that's going to make that happen and i hate to admit this is the legislature his view is that article i should be the most powerful branch of government and that's what the framers intended. the executive branch has grown more powerful now. the only thing that's going to make that happen are to convince the pentagon bureaucracy to change the way we do business is for the secretary of defense empowered by the president to wake up every single day going to war with his bureaucracy. senator gaetz has talked to our committee two weeks ago and if you read his memoir and look at the amarah chapter that's a lesson that comes about that. there are areas and i can see the point where we could do things and if we could do it in two years if we had, if we actually believe their rhetoric. if we thought world war iii was on the horizon we would be moving heaven and earth to prevent that. that's the challenge. we are good at crisis response

because we activate thousands of free thinking people we can't move to prevent the crisis in the first place. if you read the quorum where he talks about this being a thin endurance of weakness of a free dictatorship. >> trying to figure out and listening to the conversation about china and climate change which is the same problem when it comes to climate change for that like to turn to our audience. i encourage people to stand up and you can lineup. we have four microphones in different places. >> i see the great david gergen back there. >> he is the great david gergen. david has had incredible role in helping people move into public service particularly helping veterans move into public service overly grateful to david

for that. i think everyone here knows the rules. please introduce yourself and please ask a question. we need to have a relatively short time and i want to get as much as we can into the short period. >> good afternoon. congressman gallagher and congressman krishnamoorthi thank you for the great work you are doing. my name is maximus medici effect like to know the different tools we can use to improve our relationship with china. how do you see a culture change as a way to increase the trust and build opportunities for diplomacy in the region? thank you very much. >> first seriously i think i

want to talk about that but i want to also say one thing that her committee did at the very outset that was important that i would like to see happen more and more with other officials which is we have two avoid xenophobia. we had to avoid anti-asian hate. we had to avoid a tree and of all kinds towards chinese people and unfortunately that's affecting the rhetoric of way too many people not only in washington d.c.. around the country and i want to salute mike and the republicans on this committee for keeping that under the dialogue. that's one way to sync the relationship. i think to improve the relationship more and more on the people-to-people basis we have two avoid that type of talk. secondly we had to build those

people-to-people ties that really helped cement relationships and did so in the past. for instance we talked today about reinstituting the fulbright scholarship with china. donald trumpeted the fulbright scholarship. doesn't make any sense. we need our people to be able to go to china and learn about the country and to be able to bring back what they learn here and in the process form those ties that bind over time. the last thing i would say on that is we need to also foster the people-to-people relationships between our own diaspra here and over there. i would like to see more flights instituted between places -- you know chicago where i represent used to to have at least two daily flights a day to china before the pandemic and now it's once every few days, there's a

daily flight to hong kong from chicago. just little things like that are really important for improving the people-to-people and cultural exchanges and also the business ties as well. all the small businesspeople who are going back and forth. things like that would make a difference. >> and a direct flight from green bay wisconsin to washington d.c.. >> it won't shock you to learn i'm slightly more skeptical to learn that such exchanges will behave the improvement of the regime. i will say this to win this competition will have a coherent strategy at all we need deep regional expertise. we are very bad at cultivating that in the military and even in the intelligence community in part because we should be adopting the military model where people move from climate to climate every two years. hard to hover over a target.

use language and cultural expertise. we did that in the cold war quite well so i'd encourage all of you who are interested in politics to really go deep on the area. i looked at this problem when i was trying to be a modern-day lawrence of arabia and my initial instinct was to be a journalist but i focused on the small part of the region. i think it paid dividends in my career and the think pink community of d.c. there's a dearth of indonesia experts philippine experts and that's the generation of policy officials would need to to cultivate them part of that as travel and living in the region for long periods of time if that makes sense. >> please up in the balcony. >> i'm cal hutchins midcareer

1996 an interesting thing you said about the region but i the last 10 years of my family living in singapore and there was a palpable feeling that the u.s. wasn't there anymore especially as china felt like it was everywhere. all different countries permits is business standpoint in into public policy and diplomacy standpoint. while sitting there during a pandemic i read these two books back-to-back, ship war and the next world war 2034 by the nato commander and they scare me to death. you say we should move our supply chains to places that are friendly. there's no other place to make computer chips in the world besides taiwan. so could you doubleclick on ai and chips and the fact there's nothing we can do about the chip making capabilities of tai wanted how important it is to our society and our economy?

in the gush is going to say i didn't know there were all those people out there. it's like the roman amphitheater. i'm going to plug the chips act. it was a big, big deal. basically it's no bringing a lot of that chip production onshore in different places although taiwan will always remain at the epicenter especially highly advanced chips and chip making but we need to do more to bring that here. interestingly by the way one of the biggest impediments of that happening in the united states is talent. just the other day we have colleagues who represent arizona and one of my colleagues was telling me tsmc is investing $32 billion in arizona to stand up this humongous chip making plant along with an ecosystem that they can't find people. they can't find the talent to

populate these plans. so now they are bringing people from taiwan over here right now to kind of help to stand up these operations and that goes to what is necessary to have that indigenous chip making you are absolutely right. taiwan is going to remain a very important source for the world's advanced chips and legacy chips. we had to do we can onshore a lot of that and maybe mike will touch on this, our export controls have to be enforced with regards to the highest semi-conductor technology falling into the hands of the ccp that's going to be used in ways that could harm our national security work to perpetrate human right abuses. a lot of our technology goes into the ai models. i'm sorry into their computing

that empowers their ai models for surveillance purposes. to target uyghurs tibetans and others but that's why the biden and mr. schneider's done a great job but they need to do more and we are working on that. >> three quick points. even the most optimistic version of the chips act implementation to your point we will still be dependent on chips and chip production. it's the single most important thing we could do is to build a bigger navy and antennae we are on allied rocket forces so taiwan isn't subsumed by china. the other thing that you mention about ai i actually have a huge opportunity to look at the agreement with the obvious and the brits. pillar ii was all about collaboration in critical technological areas ai and hypersonics and the other three

areas. a huge opportunity and that's the beating heart of the free world. they are two closest allies. we have outdated barriers to collaboration in the form of regulation international arms regulation. we should totally modernize that regime and start thinking about hours has an integrated technological industrial base and stand the concentric circle to other countries that have those critical capabilities. this is the third hypothesis that would have in mind. as we seek to selectively decouple or de-risk from china the only way that works is if you simultaneously increase your economic and technological partnerships with other parts of the world and including countries that don't uniquely fit into the free world like vietnam. the communist country that we have interest in getting along very well with when it comes to china. countries like that.

>> fantastic. to the other balcony please. >> my name is michael farmer and i'm a student. thank you for both congressmen all the work you've done. my question is knowing what you guys know about the chinese communist party and the chinese economy giving it struggles that you think it's more likely the cpc will back off on the international stage or lash out further? >> i joked earlier my impression 10 years ago was to become professor but the politics was too intense and i couldn't take it. it's somewhat irresponsible for the president or members of the administration to say oh because china has economic problems the optics could just as well be true. the opposite could be just as well true but we have a tendency

to grasp our own western sensibilities with regimes that look nothing like us. something that's from her perspective or calculating the economic utility is a move makes perfect sense because your primary goal is regime survival ♪♪ by the wave the last time we did fight on the battlefield the regimes are far less sensitive to casualties than we are. even scholars who are far less -- to give xi zhang peng the choice of you can have taiwan but it will cost your entire maybe they would take that choice. we have constituents that we have the answer to. we have sons and daughters. >> here's what i think. i think there are massive economic problems internally. the consumer confidence is low.

we are experiencing deflation as we speak. we know the major economy has seen this in a long time and the other thing that jumps out at me every time i hear it as a youth unemployment rate which is 22 or 23% they stopped publishing it it was so high. if you think about a country where there's a one-child policy of parents and for grandparents have invested all their hopes dreams and aspirations and resources into one child and that child graduates from college and doesn't have a job, are you kidding me? how many people are mad at this point at that the regime. i think xi jinping is focused right now on how do i try to fix this situation as i think it is in my mind one of those little seedlings of potential regime problems. so that's why he's going to san

francisco and sending this minister in that minister and all these different people who need us to calm investors needs both inside and outside of china. i think he's also trying to prevent the number one export to china last year were high network individuals. they are fleeing the country and taking off for places like singapore. all that being said i still think we have to hedge our bets against the scenario that mike is talking about but he could lash out and he could say it i don't nod to fix this thing. we are going to go for it. we are going to play the nationalism card and i'm going to get over my insecurities about my own pla which he claims has the peacetime disease. he repeatedly says that the pla has peacetime disease but they haven't fought since 1979 against him so they don't know how they will perform in a combat scenario.

so we have to hedge against that but i still think we have to give them a chance and encourage him to say you really don't want to go to war. you really don't want to move on taiwan because that will hurt you internally more than help you. >> we only have just a couple of minutes and i know it's important to remain on time particularly tonight. i think we are all deeply appreciative of the public service that both of you are engaged in and are doing and i can't help but and with my own question to chairman gallagher. we come over the weekend, a flurry of text in e-mails among one another noting but had announced he wouldn't be running for re-election come this fall. i thought you reference it several times today so i feel like you are inviting the questions. it has not been told across the

table. is there anything you'd like to share with us or any reflection you'd like to make about your time in congress? i know you will continue to serve in many ways but you were in the marines and in congress so i would imagine your next chapter will have some element of service and is there anything you'd like to close with before we initially" x.. >> it's no longer relevant. >> you have got a lot of work to do before you go. >> that's right, that's right. i actually do think that's the reason, the reality is the closer i got to it the harder it became harder to actually get to the line because you do start to feel like oh man i have this position and what will life be like and this reference is totally outdated but in the super mind movie he gives up his powers and gets beaten up in the

bar but i sincerely believe in the model of citizen legislator and i think that's what the framers had in mind that i've always had in mind 12 years and going back to something different. quite honestly when i came and i was single and i got married and have two little kids but it's a family that is to reflect on the last eight years beyond the legislative accomplishments what i'm going to take away are the friendships that i built. i mentioned david and those people that have helped me. when you first one and you don't know policy and people come to help you it's an amazing thing and i've developed all these genuine relationships with raja and that's fantastic that the only thing, i've come away from eight years, i think it's because i have written a lot. ..

it is a very hard into this day i do the exact same thing. that's the only way i'm able to think through issues is by challenging lower myself to put on the page. quickly it will pay dividends no matter what regional focus you have or, if you want to be a technical expert. it's an increasingly rare skill on the twitter age that can communicate their thoughts and written and spoken form. maybe that's not exactly where you're going with that question i think that made a big difference for me and my ability to impact. i try to write electric but that is fantastic. it's very consistent with what we tell our students what we try to work with them on. i'm real proud of them to for. >> i think the reason we get

along as we both have a sense of humor. if you take yourself too seriously are going to fail. take the mission but not yourself too seriously. i've had mentors that were great at that. john mccain was a hilarious guy leave on an optimistic note given we are talking about world war iii and allison wrote a book about war are destined for war. i will just remind you the late john mccain said when as a fresh member of congress he said don't worry, mike, it's always darkest before gets pitch black. fantastic britt on that note what will it take if you become a packers fan i will run for reelection. >> nonnegotiable. [laughter] >> i am reminded of an article

in the headlines i lived in my office representative gallagher. maybe accommodations could be one thing. let me just conclude by saying represented christian murphy and representative gallagher for this time with us. but more importantly for what you do and also how you do it. a great model for all of us we are really proud to host you here today. and looking forward to the good works you are doing. i also like to thank of course my dear friends allison were always knowing how to stoke the flames. and thank you all. have a good snow day. [laughter] friday night watches c-span 2024 camping trip weekly round up of c-span campaign coverage providing a one-stop shop to discover where the candidates are traveling across the country at what they are saying to

voters. this along with first-hand accounts from political reporters updated poll numbers, fundraising data and campaign ads. watches c-span 2024 campaign trail friday nights at seven eastern on c-span online@c-span.org or download as a podcast c-span now a freak mobile app or wherever you get your podcast. c-span your unfiltered view of politics. since 1979 in partnership with the cable industry c-span has provided complete coverage of the halls of congress from the house and senate floors to congressional hearings, party briefings, and committee meetings. c-span gives you a front row seat to how issues are debated and decided with no commentary. no interruptions and completely unfiltered. c-span your unfiltered view of government.

♪ >> coming up cheap economist for moody's analytics provides an outlook on the u.s. economy, the national economist club here in washington d.c. as the host of this event. [inaudible conversations] hello everyone. hello, hello. thank you for coming today. we really appreciate you being here. my name is michael redman i am

the vp of programming for the national commerce club. it is our first event of 2024. we are very excited to welcome you to this venue for this. keep an eye out for e-mails that will be reminding about our next events in person here again in a couple of weeks it will be a very interesting events on fiscal policy in the u.s. and what it all means in the very contentious year for debates. i would also like to thank robin for finding our speaker here today. we are really pleased to welcome mark to present to us. his ideas for 30 minutes or so we will follow it up with q&a where you will have your chance to ask a question for just remember every question ends with a? please stick to that. [laughter] he is the chief economist at moody's analytics. is a provider of economic research and analysis. he is the author of books on the

financial crisis and the great recession regular consults with policymakers he testifies before congress prays also the host of insight economics the podcast that talks on might spot a fight list for the year is the most listened to artists. my wife's is taylor swift so you have competition for the household yours is a bachelors in his phd from the university of pennsylvania as well. we are really grateful for him to be here with us. please join me in welcoming him. [applause] >> thank you can you hear me okay? it is good to be here. want to thank robin for the invitation and for the introduction.

from board for sake of disclosure of the board of directors. in the lead director of policy map which is a data visualization company. it's in my hometown. maybe what i will do is speak for 25 or 30 minutes and then turn it back to the group to see where you want to take the conversation, does that sound like a plan? okay. is this better? yes. taylor swift would have no problem doing this. [laughter] is an economist i'm not well versed and microphone etiquette. good to be here. who's taylor swift? [laughter] by the how many times have i spoken? is is my third time? does anyone remember i knew it

remember what he said last time? i got it right, i got it right. i have a track record. i will speak for 30 minutes on the economic outlook let me begin with the bottom line. i think the economy is a performing well the prospects are good when i stay tuned near term summit remainder of the year. what say to this time next year. gdp growth is strong. interestingly not only have we not had a recession in 2023 but it was a very good year the economy had a very strong growth of gdp growth. we will explain some growth similar to that in 2024 somewhere between two and three half percent. the economy is creating lots of jobs i think will throttle back

a bit. that is probably a good thing the economy's trading cordova billion jobs per month unemployment will remain low we have been there for two years. and i think the key to all of this inflation will continue to moderate today's numbers notwithstanding. the economic data zigs and zags is zagged today did you look at the data? you probably looked the stock market. in my mind that does not change the trajectory here. i think the economy has another good year in store for it. let me give you few reasons for that optimism. and then i will buy it back a little bit. i think the risks of my optimism i think there is downside risk

but there's also upside here as well. the risks are relatively symmetric but i will focus on the downside that's where most people are focused. then i will leave you with a couple different indicators to gauge which direction we are going and how they will play out. the reason for optimism i already alluded to it inflation is coming in. it's reasonably gracefully. if you look at consumer price inflation we got this report for january today if you look at cpi inflation excluding shelter and i know shelter is a big component we will refer to the index and i'll talk about that in just a second period but take that out cpi inflation is already back to the federal reserve target. i did this very quickly. i was down in florida i took a plane up here. have a few things going on in

the next couple of days. they gave me a room so i had a chance look at the data. year-over-year growth was 1.6% obviously the target is over two. rub gap between where we are on inflation and overall inflation where we want to be is the cost of shelter. that is where we have the surprise today. i don't if you noticed but that's where the mist was in terms of the number it came and hot. particular on so-called owners with the cost of home ownership. and all the data it would suggest that should moderate. i forecast many think somethings something's a very competent and some not so much.

i am very confident the process housing services is going to come in here. ultimately that is tied to market rents and rents of the plethora of data lot of multifamily supply because the supply chain issue during the pandemic. now that it is the in the rearview mirror the supply chain is normalize the market to back up and running all the supplies coming in. hometown of philly or chicago and that will flow through and we will see housing costs come in inflation back to target.

i would be surprised if we are e not back to the federal reserve target by the second half of this year. i think all the trim lines look good despite today's numbers on the market reaction to that we will see how it ends up. but i think we're in pretty good shape there. >> reason number one for optimism and by the way it is inflation that really messed up many economists forecast of 2023 why they thought recession. i think the issue was there was a mixed diagnosis into what caused the inflation. there's lots of reasons demand and supply. at the tippy top of the reasons is supply. it is the pandemic. i mention that in the context of supply chain and labor market. in the war in ukraine we underestimate oil, natural gas,

agricultural prices to jump. those two supply shocks conflated because inflation to increase and that's why they were on high alert, devcon one. i would expect a wage, price dynamics to spiral and jacked up interest rates. the two supply shocks that conspired and because the causee inflation to take off. the good news is as those shocks fade into the history books, and that rearview mirror that allows inflation to come in without having to push the economy in recession. but that jack's upper rates for the economy so no recession. this whole idea of macular inflation i find it irritating and annoying. it was just a missed diagnosis of what was going on.

it was primarily supply. reason number two for optimism, with inflation coming in and the economy moderating particularly in the labor market and we see more of that as we go forward here interest rates are going to come in and my mind a question of when that will recur. i may not be at the mate meaning. on the what after that and the one after that. at the end of the day if my outlook for inflation is roughly right and given the economy started full employment with sub or% unemployment rate by reserving satisfied dual mandate. the goal of achieving full employment low and stable inflation has been achieved. what you are there i flick were hittint fast.

why should interest rates remain as high as they are? particularly if you think a long run you target is something like expectation the so-called is consistent with monetary policy for supporting growth is two and half% that's a pretty good gap of three percentage points. that does not make a whole lot of sense in the context of you achieved your goals. you are at full employment and you've hit target. i would argue for interest rate cuts going forward. i will say, this is a sidebar the tuna% is probably too low probably higher than that at 3% or three and a half for lots of reasons but the economy is mortal great insensitive than it has been in the passport households and businesses have done a very good job of locking

in the previously low interest rates extending the maturity's other debt you look up household debt service burden that devoting to servicing their debts. it's very low by historical standards. it is rocksolid because people moved into long-term fixed rate mortgages. the interest payments by corporate businesses you look at relative to their cash flow that is as low as it has ever been in the data that we have in its data going back and again businesses have done a good job as well. i do think you could argue it's rate insensitive than times a if passage of the reasons for that. and therefore maybe two and half maybe it's three, three and half. that's a lot lower than five and a half.

i think low rates will help. particularly are under stress because the higher rates. lower income low income households they have borrowed aggressively with consumer finance loans. because when inflation was raging they turned to the turn s of debt to supplement their income come to maintain the purchasing power in the debt loads are higher and if the fed cuts rates over flood through lower rates buy now pay later that sort of thing that should be very helpful. reason number two i would not count on long-term interest rates coming down 10 year treasury yields around four and a quarter anything around 4% roughly where they should be in the long run. that will still be quite

helpful. so reason number two for optimism here lower interest rates. how are you feeling? that it's a humming to reasons is going to give you? i will give you two more. and then we will move on. i want to maintain some time here. third reason for optimism the american consumer. the consumer is hanging tough to keep the economy moving forward. no to something of inflationary pressures with consumer spending growth all in. maybe a little over christmas was really good to me feel stronger than that. that's exactly where you want to be. the power to maintain their spending, they are going

forward. real incomes are rising. excess savings savings built up during the pandemic is a high income household to a lesser degree middle income. low income households blew their excess savings. high income, middle income plenty of savings. i can see the deposit account sitting in the banking system. they are well above what you expected to see savings of cash. households will turn to that they need to to maintain their spending. i mentioned that service and of know the stock market is down 2% today it's up how much since he pandemic? housing values have picked up. that's pretty tough if your first-time home buyer. but if you are a homeowner two thirds of the americans it on

their own home you are pretty wealthy according to our measure of house prices house prices nationwide are 50% higher than they were four years ago before the pandemic. 50% higher there's a lot more wealth out there. lots of good reasons to think were going to hang tough. consumer sentiment is a bit on the soft side. as a go to for many folks. the way the questions are asked in the way the survey is conducted. much better to look at the conference board's survey but regardless pick your survey people are starting to feel better now that real wages are rising and a consistent way. the sting of higher inflation is starting to fade people are still upset about having to pay a lot more. it's funny when i have

conversation with folks my national inclination is to ask potentially how is your economy? how are things going for you? but of course the last couple three years it's been not so good. the economy is not been performing well. we go to what's bugging you the answer basically is some food item that price is a lot higher today than it was three years ago so it's talking to students about what's bugging you and it's ramen noodles. [laughter] my nieces 23 years old. i ask her what's bugging her? it took a while to get it out of her but came down to some tea come boxer t. [laughter] was on a conference call last with a bunch of bankers, a banking group. one banker it was really upset he's paying a lot more for a pound of sugar, who buys a pound

of sugar? what you do with the pound of sugar? are you making it apple tart or something? i don't know but everyone has their food item that's messing with their mind. in time if food prices remain where they are i think that will start to fade people will feel better. to support the consumer and a lot of the economy. one more quick reason and that i am going to run. fiscal policy is been very supportive of the growth. particularly in 2023 because of the infrastructure legislation the chips act and the inflation reduction act. most pieces of legislation of havereally juiced up activity i. you go back pre-infrastructure

law kind of pre-biden annual manufacturing construction put in place 75 billion it's pretty rocksolid. most recent data over $200 billion. the infrastructure is also affecting construction and manufacturing think about that for a second, manufacturing and construction are the most rate sensitive sectors of the economy and and again going back to my point the economy is rate sensitive. those sensors what kind of flat. you spend on construction spending or aggregate spending you go through production. basically it has gone flat. it is not on down. what you typically see in a world but they are jacking up interest rates very aggressively you expect those sectors to take it on the chin and lead those up into a recession that did not go

around in a significant part because the fiscal legislation. the sources of support will continue in 2024. not the same degree in 2025. there's other sources of growth. >> are you feeling now? that's the pinnacle right there. let's talk about the risks to the outlook i do think the risks are symmetric i do think there's reasons to be optimistic things could turn out better than i am anticipating. go to the supply side feels like it has a lot more not be temperate that would be very helpful on the supply side. let's focus on the downside risk and may be symmetric i will give you four reasons. or nervous system. reason number one and by the way

my goal here at the end of this you are going to feel worse but i want you to be overall feeling better about this. to calibrate that is like the fed trying to jack up the interest rate. just enough to slow things down but not push us into a recession parade that is the idea here. let's see how good i am at this. these risks feel kind of chronological to me. what could do it most quickly and what may take a little longer may become a problem. number one oil prices. as i mentioned earlier i forecast many think some i feel confident in some not so much. oil prices are not so much. and might baseline optimism about the economy i expect places to migrate a little higher i don't know if you've noticed they have been very low. the big surprise here is how significant the pickup and oil

production. they are producing 13 million barrels a day that's as substantive pickup from a year or two ago. that is more than offset off oil production by the saudi's and the russian oil exports because of the sanctions which was quite modest today. that kept the oil prices down. and i do expect oil prices to migrate higher here a little bit. i expect the economy should be fine. a good chinese economy should improve and continue to improve in 2024. if push comes to shove they will have more for production. tougher for u.s. producers to keep ramping it up because of the way they ramped it up it's not a sustainable run they're not investing to the same degree for obvious reasons. i do think prices will move higher from somewhere in the mid 70s to the mid- 80s. which means the cost of a gallon

of regular unleaded is going to go from a low almost $2 which is where we were a few weeks ago. i will pay $2. that's wyoming i think. cheyenne of the permian basin what do you guys pay here in washington? so roughly a national average. that is how i remember at the national oil price the price is posted that price is exactly the national average measured by energy information. i don't even know what sites i can seat with the national price. we are expecting to peek out here. but again as i said a lot of

risk around that. nothing does more damage the u.s. economy and higher oil prices. it undermines real income if they have to put more dollars and their gas tank then they spend on everything else. this undermines people's views about the economy in their own financial situation it jacks up inflation both by workers it gets into the wage structure but also bizarrely look at exploitation. that's also influenced by oil prices and a reason for the fed not to cut interest rates.

>> is inverted still inverted, even in my expectation of the records, i don't think the curve slope with a long way above the short rates and well into 2025, therefore, thanks another non-bank's are short-term the money and land long and higher interest rates, kind of the most traditional way of making money in the with more difficult to do what is inverted and low growth is slowing coming in the wake of last year's banking crisis cylinders have tightened up with their underwriting and so we see much lower loan growth. growth is been pushing to the non-bank system you can see that in so-called private credit and lending and we can talk about that if you're interested. but the credit scores has slowed

an aggregate and for small businesses that are kimbrough and credit quality is reloading this weakening of the credit quality, pretty good by some standards with the point is, that is moving the wrong direction vertically for commercial real estate and i won't go into that was when dig into it more deeply but well i don't think that it will get into undermine the economy my baseline, there's a reason to nervous that there will be more defaults going forward which one when capitol make life more difficult for the banks and on banks and cre particular small banks is when i worry the most of us have the small with the big guys no, if you look at their commercial real estate exposure although was very modest by the temperatures, mortgage loans commercial mortgage securities the loans to real estate companies, five or

10 percent no big deal of course they capitalize, to large declines in the prices when they take this why don't know if you guys are in the banking but this stress test this year to be released in should be today if it does that, the keep me guessing is when they will recent while waiting for this carpet luster see card, they asked the banks of the big banks to capitalize 40 percent decline and cre prices knows all across assets and property sites has just not going to happen. in a meteor would have to lend washington dc for that happen is not happening. well yes the rego. >> take out some of the property they can do it with yes we don't go there. [laughter] but the small guys, they have larger exposure. they can blow hundred billion in assets, their exposure 25 - 30 percent of their asset base are much more exposed was we will see more of a failure more

small bank failure. my baseline optimism, my view is that through not systemic it is not going to create a problem but you know we did see what happened in the last year or even it was noted systemically important bank and we was truly don't thank you so $200 billion making you saw depositors run for the doors going to money markets and equity investors sell stock and a vicious cycle and so, i think we can dismiss that because risk number two risk number three the election, they elections were to be close and anybody see my election model know, did not see my election model will oh gosh, was really cool. [laughter] going to describe we should google it, the election mountable sandy and it will go into the all of the gory detail i won't tell you who will win, you have to look with the point of the research what we do have

the electoral college level the state level so we predict sure the mode the goes to the recumbent party and five states the voters it with it one percentage point of the state is going to turn election, my home state of pennsylvania and effect of the entire election involves around my wife. [laughter] yes will she. [laughter] is we live in chester county pennsylvania outside of philly, that is around zero, that's where the battle will rage is not about well i know who she's about for i know that but what really matters is that she does it with enthusiasm and knocking on doors going to the polls raising money and adding fundraisers and that kind of stuff all eyes are on her. [laughter] telling you but read the paper read the paper is all about pennsylvania and southeast pennsylvania in fact we sing the president to knock on my door.

it will be contested in close and if it's contested, probability is going to be political angst and - the markets and who knows how that plays out so you know by the way, the only country in the planet that has elections that are going to be contested, roughly half of the worlds population are replaceable we have to contested elections we will be i think the year of a lot of angst political and finally, reason number four purposes, now long run, physical situation, that's a problem in the commercial budget office will budget and released this past week, but under current policy, we have a problem heard and that loan will go from 100 percent publicly traded gp

to 100 and whether 60 percent in 180 years from known 30 or smell the forecast i think that's where the end is what you view on forecast of that point and it's nonsustainable than hide that, hot averages will on the company, for every increase in the debt load of 1 percent point the gdp is now at went - two-point printed in your field so do arithmetic, hundred percent gp to 180, times say one, is 80 basis points and tenure yelled the goes from 4 percent up to 5 percent, that's a pretty significant weight of the economy some point breaks we have got to make big changes some point. okay, i meandered with one getting bob at have hour maybe two indicators to watch the gauge, and right and we should be optimistic or wrong going down the alternative path within the economy the strongly at

first, every mentioning the survey consumer confidence that i it the end of the day a recession is loss of faith of consumers losing faith in: do the job the pullback spending. and loss of faith business people that are going to be able to sell whatever it is that they produce and become back on jobs and in this cycle survey is a very good measure of faith in the good news, less reading, that index 114 average so the beginning of time they been doing this for longtime decade closer to 100 and so we are fine we are good and if you see that measure starting to false in a significant way, and if it falls 20 points, for three months time, we're toast consumers are packing it in the would run for longer going to go into a recession and finally, and i am a by market and is why live and breathe and i had to call out

the spread between the yield on high-yield corporate junk debt and ten year treasury this a measure of the compensation that investors are demanding for the credit are taking and investing in and businesses feel like they economy is struggling the businesses and are to feel the payback on the net and have a way to high-yield interest rate relative to risk-free treasury yield in the spread widens. the signals of a recession on average than the jump high-yield market was on the planet, the average brightest 500 basis points, percentage points, and today it is 3.5 percentage points means investors are okay no problem we are in good shape but i would watch it very carefully. okay come i am. right there and thank you. [applause] [applause]

>> it looks like we have a few minutes for question please keep them short. and he could restate the question in terms that would be great. >> okay sure. >> okay mark free and think you very much for being here. my question is why or why is 2 percent inflation target desirable why would it a 0 percent inflation target over time be preferable up to the 2 percent. >> so bert asked, will the phillies win the world series. [laughter] [laughter] and the answer is no. good question and interestingly, very consistent with your kind of iconoclastic perspective on the world because most people would say, why do percent inflation rate right 3 percent but over says them up when a zero percentage inflation rate.

[laughter] [laughter] well i think the answer for mother many as of the answer the resignation most with me is that if it is zero, that means half of the economy is experiencing deflation in the businesses in half of the academy having price claims now avoid to speak to you as a business person that is very difficult to happen. you gotta go back to your workers and you say going to get your wages category defectors expenses and how to manage with the goods and services of falling prices i can try, but in telling you is very very difficult to do and why do that. 2 percent i think is chosen in part because if you're at two, most businesses are going to experience positive price increases is something about zero will be some experiencing deflation with generally, the role of rising is goes back to the thinking that wages are

sticky so the businesses that cut prices, they cannot cut wages, like is very difficult because they start to get the workers in the economy and i would argue just the opposite and i would say, why sacrifice the economy to the 2 percent inflation, particularly the world of slow growth. without a world of you know phenomenal 4 percent and so that suggests that if you get into kind of a recession, the fundraisers almost invariably going to go to zero, and the feds are the position of having to well do i do this at the point or long-term interlaced i think based on the conversation argue that visually the distortionary so if you're three, then they are much less likely in a variety of the

recession it will give you more room to navigate. now getting from the current 2 percent inflation 3 percent inflation rate why don't know how you pull that off, gracefully but is very difficult, this would undermine inflation expectations and certainly do not want to do that until you're back out to when to get back into, think okay, anything of the framework the central bank is operating of the maybe we can raise it but i think zero would be a mistake i would argue 40 change the inflation, i would races to something closer than three more consistent with the wind growth rate and with the economy. >> i am wondering to what extent rising consumer debt in the default rate of the consumer credit cards and so forth, how does that factor into your assessment of the optimism in the consumer realm. >> sure, you tweet. >> no. >> all you should tweet.

are you should go twitter and follow me. [laughter] [laughter] just tweeted this very issue. and, you can follow me mark zandi. holly springs in a second. and yes the consumer debt is an issue predict a letter for that are in the bottom one third of the income distribution entity think of you back your to go, when the inflation was raging, many households many lower income households have blown through their excess savings and inserted credit cards consumer financing, to supplement their income. and, the other thing that happened in 2021 and 2022, when the inflation was racing, the lenders lowered the underwriting standards. in the credit score inflation

because if you back to the pieces of the legislation during the pandemic, beginning the cares act on the way through the american rescue plan, and the legislation is said that lender should not report to the credit bureau the problems the borrowers having because the thinking was that this was no problems of no fault of their own but we don't want there chris course be impaired by this insult they caused the credit scores to improve as of the lenders consumer finance, this in tech companies came into this and extended the credit at that point in the interest rates were very low so she tomorrow avenue point of 2022 then you saw a lot of credit growth that ultimately resulted in much higher delinquencies. all of the way up until late last year and the good news, good news is that helping inflation is back in, the wage

growth is stronger than inflation borrowing has cooled off and the lenders have tightened down the wake of the pandemic. making prices, and of course interest rates are higher so make too much more costly so we've seen very significant sent down in credit growth. over the past year. infected is still growing this point in aggregate predict an outcome of delinquency rates have picked and appeared to have peaked in my sense is when they cut the rates which i anticipate will see the default rates coming in the second half of this year going into 2024 and also 2025 is i think will pass the worst of it but it doesn't turn into my thinking. at the end of the day, here's a muscle scary factoid, the top one third of the income distribution, accounts for two thirds of the spending in the sense of where the spending comes from.

yes. >> what about the sovereign debt and particularly you know what we see going through the pipe bomb of just the amount of credit is being put out legally among the sovereign that. i can kind of limit that to the higher income countries because understand the low income countries, the higher incomes, there's a lot of paper going out there, not just the short fault. >> the issue that is ended on, and the risk that is here in the office, significant increase in our debt load and you know if you go back for the financial crisis in the ratio was 4050 percent this kind of work is been the wake of world war ii all the way until financial crisis and i were at 100 percent and the trendline know we change policy suggests will racing to

be alive or not the only country in the world is doing this. everyone is the exception will be germany and by the way so the reason why's german is struggling to stay out of recession at the moment because being very cautious in their use of the balance sheet. compared to other countries this probably pays off in the long run maybe because a part of your but it's a gamble and you know that's the only country not doing it. i don't suggest there's going to be a lot of sovereign debt being issued going forward and a do think is going to put higher on interest rates and they will slowly move up and up and that ultimately becomes unsustainable right because you put that into your interest expense is already rising pretty quickly and you know at some point, you pay so much in interest as you know you get into the well you run out of

space and you have a crisis and then something about it possibly has never done before see default of this lacey rating agency panfried. from aaa monies list and aaa rating on negative as a result. this is part of the process unfolding so we need to make changes and you know this may be helpful or wishful but my sense is that when push comes to shove, we will make changes necessary to ensure the sustainability in the next test of that will be on the other side of the election 2025, because that's when we have to raise the debt limit again and that is when the trump tax cuts need to be addressed to the buyer i think some of the obama tax credits for obama care has come to listen pretty - time

propitious is that a good word. we don't use anymore but propitious. is the time to address that in some of these issues is interesting and if we make changes, has long-term consequences i don't know if you notice, you go to the cdo of budget was actually better than it was also because the fra right and so solid you have to think we do it if he said the time. editing the lawmakers cannot make the changes the need to make until the elector say make it. they have to connect the dots lawmakers have to connect the dots in the minds of the electorate and white we need to make the changes is almost like you need to hire or some kind of hesitates a crisis was some type of an event to sale my gosh, maybe it is something like mom

spending more and is that make sense to anybody, by the way who is buying those bots right think about who's buying bonds and so were getting or selling a more on interest for foreign investors than in our own defense does anybody think that makes sense does anybody know so is a point where i think that we you know we make some hard choices like that adage, and void which are think will be the point, americans try everything into the do the right thing. and there it is you know it so just make myself feel better, every night and recite that. yes read. >> thank you barred from having heard of su to comment about the short-term because normally deficit of five - 7 percent of l employment him is like a red

light as less likely usually should try not to do that read as a benign thing is that risk and what is your take on that situation. >> will i think that the reasoning behind the situation that we are in, is set and several fold and one is until recently the interest rates were very low. the rates were below the gpd gives you a lot of latitude and so, the kind of has a green light to do something that we need to do and long term investments that we would be able to do otherwise infrastructure. and for the folks that like i do, the climate is issue. and these are big investments in the costly we cannot find the political carbon tax which is probably will probably what we

should do. therefore criminal hold down the root and secondly, the pandemic later bear some pretty significant national security risk you know in my view the chips act as national security and we were in that very clearly that we are very dependent on taiwan and of course given the relationship with china and taiwan lives a very good choice we had to do something about that and quickly. so that was costly you know there were some things that we needed an infrastructure, you can argue that is an investment not an expenditure we needed to do that so i think there's a real logic to what was done here we are interest rates are now higher this way it works all of a sudden that there higher. but without going on and liberal

changes and you have to adapt to that and that's where we are to that we have to adapt to that new reality and 4 percent is noted 2 percent and i think while yes there's another question here. >> something that i am wondering, coverage of the cre risk and the makes in geography and properties because i know essential real estate is like 8l estate and is nonperforming is poorly is like - for example. >> while yes, the real problem is the office in downtown urban centers in the northeast chicago on the west coast. the retail runners downtown areas goes to the remote fundamentally to the remote work and if you look at occupancy in office buildings in major cities, like dc, it depends on the city but your back to 50 or 60 or 70 percent of the pre-

pandemic occupancies and if that is the world you are now in, the economics change dramatically in the interest rates roses that were in a very low rate environment hour and a high rate environment fundamentals have changed significantly so you have to adjust event events what is happening the prices up to come down as a comedown, embraces rent potential risk and lays the foundation for the adjustments you need to make some point, you know conversion of office into multifamily makes sense right and there's a big project on the circle with trying to make that work in the economic has not quite gotten there but maybe at some point it probably will. and one thing that i've learned because these folks my clients, never underestimate the creativity of commercial real estate developer. [laughter] [laughter] they are pretty darned creative, and they will figure something out i keep thinking they're

going to turn some of these office hours and forage areas into canvas. [laughter] [laughter] >> i've heard a lot about why joe green farming. and i don't know if that will be enough to make it opens a lot but they will figure it out. and if you look in out of silver areas, there's really no problem. in terms of mouse properties. so big deal. you're right, is not universal you cannot pay with a broad brush and you have to be circumspect about how you think about the things like in most issues right. talk to bert about the class a year ago and i say will i was very upset that he didn't see it because i'm an economist and look at the world at 30000-foot

level and people driving down to 20 and i sometimes will go 210 and if you get come i run out of oxygen. so i'm looking at averages and medians and i'm not looking at the distributions that is a massive error especially when you're in the banking system the financial system, and if you really want to understand the problem, you have to look at the average and median and the distribution. the distribution, he was the that sitting out there like you know like what heck is going on over there. and so the same with commercial properties. >> i have a question here. >> the trust fund balances, you know going to zero, will that trigger something. >> yes of the question is, given the social security medicare medicaid are headed towards will the whole solvency and it will not be the catalyst for change could make could be changed well

i think that everybody is thinking the lawmakers will ultimately pay up figure out how to pay social security to the recipients of the current benefits but you know, they might have a political dynamic with that might not be obvious and is not obvious, i don't think it will stand politically there will be changes so that is a possibility trigger point. and i think have one question back here. >> i was curious what your take was on ghost jobs, ghost jobs. for those that will jobs are posted today and employees are not necessarily filling them or maybe looking for the perfect candidate to fill the urgency to fill them. and i was wondering what your take on that was be back while yes that's where he question

about unfilled can seize. still elevated and if you look at the job opening they deliver turnover the number of vacant jobs of comedown substantially from where they were saying year or year and have ago with her so high relative to the pandemic and so if you look at that is negative face value this very tight and i think it overstates the case by orders of magnitude those jobs is a good description of it ultimately, low cost to maintain open positions and you just slow watch trying to fill them. we do that well is a business person, we do that as well right because well here's the thing, once you taken the position any hundred shut down your hr function, very difficult to revit backup and you know you want to keep to take resumes you want to keep talking to people even though you not going to pull the trigger, the bar is

very high to hire somebody you do not want to shut down the process because you know to get that going to get is going to be incredibly costly and difficult to do so we keep the machinery going so my thought is that until the position is overstating the case it was probably more consistent with that historical moment in the market is otherwise softening and if you look at while the only place you go see this is job vacancy and maybe in these jobs numbers, maybe there 250k but if you look at hours of work, has fallen sharply this back to kind of a recession level if you look at hiring rates, that is falling sharply and post recession if you look at the normalized it back to pre- pandemic so is cooled off quite substantially i think that we shall be focused on that and by the way in the place for the conference got it wrong because the focus on that statistic is a look, how are you going to solve this problem we have to push the

economy into a recession. because many of our business people, they didn't see or understand that statistic was probably well line and talk about the jolts, and the response rates recently they are to the floor. same with the employment survey and so all data is becoming a little bit more difficult to interpret certainly month to month ... the answer is yes. which is a large insurance ground zero. they do scores for claimant risk of chronic risk we've taken

those and brought them into our modeling particular on housing values and cred. here is one fascinating thing though. i have worked very hard specifically to tease out the impact on climate on house prices, because i have a home in florida. [laughter] but it is very difficult to tease out so far. now it may be the housing market is so wacko so supply constraint and people are moving from northeast down into florida and texas so it's very difficult to disentangle i would expect this will have an impact on price. and on the commercial side it's built into our forecast, yes. so far it's very difficult to tease out. [inaudible] looks large swaths of america? works states are stepping in or

people are self-insuring big commercials are saying is going to cost me $500,000 for some purpose complex. for five and the thousand dollars i can replace the entire roof so i'm just not going to do it. were seeing a lot more self-insurance. which, by the way it may mean more onus on government to step in. if you look at natural disasters in the last 50 years and you look at property damage and compare it to insurance plus government support it's almost one-for-one. so those place have less insurance get more government support. that took a lot of time, you were very attentive and i strive to be 51% right anyway thank you very much, thank you. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> wednesday congressional budget office director testifies on the u.s. and budgetary and economic outok before the house budget committee. live coverage starts at 10:00 a. eastern on she's been to, to spend our free mobile video apps or online at c-span.org. thursday, irs commissioner will give an update on the tax filing season recent changes of the irs protested by the house ways and means committee oversight hearing and you can watch it live starting at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span2, she spent

now are free mobile video app or online at c-span.org. if you ever missed any of c-span's coverage you can find it any time online@c-span.org. videos of key hearings, debates and other events feature of markert for guide you to newsworthy highlights these points of interest markers appear on the right-hand side of your screen when you hit play on selected videos this timeline told makes it easy to quickly get an idea of what was debated and decided in washington. scroll through and spend a few minutes on c-span's points of interest. ♪ see spans a "washington journal" part of our live form involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy. from washington and across the country. coming up wednesday morning texas republican congressman eight member of the foreign affairs committee talks about

border security in u.s. aid to israel and ukraine. resident for the committee for a responsible federal budget talks about the national debt recent congressional budget office prediction the debt will top at $54 billion over the next 10 years. see spans "washington journal" join the conversation live at 7:00 a.m. eastern wednesday one on c-span, c-span now or online at c-span.org. ♪ in the weeks that lie ahead first television series unfolds famous influential men and women who occupy those seats are have a lot to say about freedman's view of the society in which we live today and his solutions for the ills of our times were good 37:00 p.m. eastern american history tv will air the 10 part series free to choose between nobel prize-winning economist milton freedman, mr. freedman coproduced a series with his wife below economist rosa

freedman first aired on public television in 1980 in the freedman's ulcerative vessel and companion book with the same name. programs of the series take us to locations important to the u.s. and world economy. the freedman's advocate free-market principles of limited government intervention in the economy and in social policy other topics include welfare, education, equality, consumer and worker protection and inflation. watch free to choose saturdays at 7:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on cspan2. what's next, transportation secretary pete go to judge the former mayor of south bend, indiana talks about were cities in his agency can work together to improve transportation policy. ♪ >> it is good to see you. thank you. thank you mayor for the warm welcome.

thank you, all of you for welcoming me back. it does feel good to be among american mayors especially at a time like this. and especially appreciate for those of you who are from around here in southwest i appreciate you braving the elements to be here. if you are from the midwest a parachute suppressing your midwest instinct to tell everybody in washington d.c. how this is not real snow. [laughter] it is allgh relative it turns o. i really do feel at home more than anywhere else when i am among them eight american mayors. the occasion on the street some of the site mayor pete they'll stop and correct themselves like they said something wrong.on i always say i wear that as a compliment. i was thinking back to when i first got elected not even elected after got the nomination of my party for mayor in my ci city. i got an e-mail from a 10-year-old boy saying congratulations.

now that you are mayor i need to let you know there's an intersection close to where i live sometimes a way through to get a ride is very dangerous the cars speed byy their. i wrote him back unsure how he got my e-mail address and said thanks so much for getting in touch i'm not actually the mayor yet i still have to win the general election. but i look forward to doing everything i can to make our streets safer. sure enough i won the election. the very next day ine get an e-mail i think he's 11 now. congratulations on getting elected. now, i'd like to get back to the matter of the stop sign. [laughter] and once i took office and understood how the department of public works, it worked i asked our city engineer to have a process for this? and of course there is. we did some math and it turned out it's just a by the next thing i knew one of the first days in office we found the kid and the two of us together installed a stop sign in south

bend indiana. we know as mayors what it is like. it's intelligible to even as you deal some of the most confounding issues in public policy and american politics. i always tried to member the spirit of those early days navigating what our city government could do. i work now in washington with my administration colleagues under president biden's leadership to try to make your job a little bit easier. especially at a time like t thi. the more i see division at the national and global levels the more convinced i am salvationin comes. i believe in many ways the most

meaningful measure of our success is how communities do this at a local level. our weather to put it another way. and i hope you will agree that we are. he faced so many challenges to become more fierce and more ferocious. were sitting at the table with the mayors lanyard in this room. would've been nice back then the president of the united states lunch 1.2 trillion dollars infrastructure coming to our city and every other in the ctunited states. [applause] we are here in your work to make sure you succeed. enter tried to shape the culture of this place in washington d.c. to better reflect about the community. in effort i first made public

from this very stage. i often said would be well served in washington if it worked a little bit more like america's best run cities rather than the other way around. i believe that even more strongly now. so, what i wanted to do with our time together to share a few examples of how we have followed the lead of america's. and what that could mean. it's a special board to highlight the partisan consideration as mayors just as likely without pretending to bea any more politically anymore politically conservative then i was. and likely to be challenged by democrats as republicans. through this body the u.s.

conference of mayors i came to know and work with and trust fellow mayors without considering or in some cases without even knowing their party affiliation i'm addressing one of the only rooms left in americaa what hundreds of senior elected officials from both partieser around the country's gathered wishard purpose and like each other. that's a powerful thing. [applause] i would be'v lying if i said ben anywhere close to that culture on a routine basis here in washington. could i have been struck at how much work we are doing is not just bipartisan but often nonpartisan. takes the very fact the bipartisan infrastructure law which we passed with your help and support the number of republicans who areli willing to cross party lines and work with democrats and president biden to get it. done. even though the idea of a

bipartisan anything was greeted with mockery when president biden first took office. the obituary of that legislation we now cannot imagine not having. that obituary was written thousands of times by people saying the president was on a fool's errand trying to get bipartisan cooperation only for to happy ways that now delivers results in every part of the country red, blue, and purple. sometimes it means eliminating dangerous railroad crossings in rural counties that haven't have votedwith my party in deca. we were in georgia it recently trainees could be more than 2 miles long past every day and cut off an entire half of the town from another half is out to celebrate a grant to fix that crossing make it easier and safer to get around town.cr we are doing that kind of work appeared at the same time we are funding transit achieved and int and west coast in new york for last fall c i sign the final funding agreement to extend the second avenue subway up to one or 25th street in east harlem

they've been waiting literally 50 years to get done. [applause] every state, every region of this country red, blue, purple have seen historic total investments in roads and bridges, ports, airports, trains and transit often the largest community investment they see in a lifetime. i also need to mention by the way we got a reprieve today. in the form of a continuing resolutionso we are really going to need some sense of the bipartisan to prevail in order to get thet budget we need to t this worked out. and here to wish the spirit of america's mailed layers would prevent you do not have the option if you have a disagreement with your counsel your government shutting you need water to live you cannot shut down. the federal government ought to have the same mentality as well. [applause]

a second thing that i appreciated sometimes miss about local government is people unmistakable focus on reality, facts, on data that cannot be ignored. local leadership is more rooted in reality largely because your held accountable everywhere from local media to grocery stores. do not get me wrong i know rumor and disinformation can happen at every level. but in my experience the truth is never that far away. when you are mayor if there is a hole in the road and you don't fill it in when someone calls you on it you can't say that's fake news people know that road is there. we have our work at the national level that's what we seek to do. looking for the evidence that will tell us whether we are leaving each former transportation better than we ea it. b we follow the facts we are following the facts to see whetheree the results are happening. on supply chains for example specific shipping rates have

fallen by more than half during the pandemic. following the events in the red sea carrier and dod to monitor supply chain disruption. thanks the ocean shipping reform act american company somewhat a leverage an international shipping cartels but something to lower shipping costs which ii turn we know is attributed to lower inflation for the american people. we also know because of strong investment in transportation and infrastructure and construction and manufacturing that goes with that we have anav extraordinaryy many measures on president. of economic growth. we're also holding ourselves accountable to make sure that continues to reach every american. an air travel just a few years after observers were asking which of the death of commercial aviation as we knew it during the pandemic we're announcing some of the busiest travel seasons on record. we ended 2023 with the lowest

cancellation rate in the past 10 years. which translates to a million millions more people getting for the need to be we did that with a lot of work a lot of pressure on airlines which responded to the pressure by improving their operations. when it comes to roadway safety very closely from the inescapable and troubling numbers that we see around the country we are living there crisissa. something i've been partnering with the americans mayors we just had a great conversation some of our grantees around the country taking steps deploying federal dollars from u.s. dot. but also your own political to help guide the people who trust you with their lives as your constituents would save roadways. if not always an easy conversation would have we here to support everything from data

$1.7 billion reach over 1000 communities. the lifesaving potential of addressing these crisis we are finally seeing the numbers starting to come down think early indications level commence or of gun violence. the implication is if we have a 1% reduction we are saving 400 lives right there. loaded 7:30 seven aircraft. this is the power of the decisions being made about local level that's reaching from the federal level. another thing i think every mayor understands the importance ofnd connection. symbolically and literally. unifying and connecting in the physical, social or even literal sense. mayors live and breathe out

work. and often your specific missions for development maximizing enhancing a parks trailerer reimagining a streetscapesc embodied we at the federal level would do well. helping too connected in a literal physicalut sense. put another way mayors understand physical mobility is escapable he connected. a couple years ago is in the south side chicago neighborhood discussing an effort to extend the redline further south for people in the community can access the opportunity downtown. could not help but do mental math courses south of margaret. if you have according to downtown chicago more quickly then if you were in the roseland neighborhood in chicago and

don't have ao car. we are changing that. changing that to make sure that kind of mobility is not a barrier to people getting the kind of good paying jobs that are going to help them build up their families. we were in buffalo plaster half a century ago federal funding wasle part of the problem the kensington expressway cut off but had been a thriving neighborhood from the rest of the city for a story i know you have seen played out in just about every community in the u.s. were looking to exchange that. who's organization called to restore our community coalition ought to restore the neighborhood for the better part of her life before she sadly passed away a few days ago. she sought thel commitment of federal and state funding she had been seeking her entire life to deck over that highway, create connections where there had been division. along with that very few mayors are able to access, new land use for community benefits with help

from this administration. transportation infrastructure of the realms of a public policy you understand how much depends on deliveringun the basics those unsexy things mayors spend a lot of time thinking about and working on not just transportation water, wastewater, contrast, snow removal police and fire to permit the very foundation of the human hierarchy off need. starting with safety. safety by the way is why our department exists. that's why we are making sure we elevate roadway safety which i described a little bit earlier. and on that i want to lift up the partnership that we have with mayors who now represent over 70% of our nation's population participating and safe streets for all program we have a new round opening up in february so please talk to your planning to parents about that but lester had led by the cities that have alreadyal seen a yearr more with zero traffic test.

hoboken, new jersey, evanston, illinois, and now there are many more cities using safe streets for all funds to pursue their vision zero plan including minneapolis, fayetteville, arkansas, spokane, salinas, california, thank you. salina's. hundreds and hundreds of committees benefiting from this if you're not part of it i hope you will consider it. while we are at it i would shoot you know were working to make sure our safety mission benefits people in every mode of transportation. i have to remark as we near the one year anniversary of the norfolk southern derailment and eased a policy and i'm proud of the work the dot team has done to use the full range of our authority to improve nation rail safety nationwide. including holding where was accountable supporting first responders, protecting rail workers. there is a bipartisan railway safety act sitting in congress waiting its turn right now.

let's not allow america to get to the one-year mark and not have that railway safety act become law. i think your voices need to be heard in this period because it mayors and your emergency services department should not be in the dark about what is coming to your communities. where during our part with the authorities that we have. congress ought to be helping and we are calling on congress not to get suckedan into any of the other things it seemed to be commanding attention over there that do not add value will this continues to sit waiting its turn. i don't traffic rights and bike lanes and potholes and some the other things mayors work on are not always considered sexy but they are profoundly important. not just because potholes are the bane of every mayor's existence at least that is my recollection. those basics are the foundation for everything else. that's why i think we need to keep a level of fidelity.

the intimate relationship the most important most workaday people don't absorb data to be a good parent to your kids you cannot fully be present for that if you are not home in time because the road is not in good shape. if the meaning of life for you has toai do with your faith you are not in position to concentrate on that if you're distracted about insurgency weather and drinkingou water is placing her children for the meaning of life because he was entrepreneurship. you won't be able to fully live a life of your choosing at the public works that you count on are not available and you have to worry about working around them. something even bigger is at stakee right now which is the fate of our democracy. president biden often says the

ability of democratic nations to deliver is being put to t the tt right now. when the basic economic, political, social conditions deteriorate including our infrastructure, public trust deteriorates withra it. the vicious cycle cost the legitimacy of democracy itself. on the other hand what we deliver on the basics including infrastructure people feel the benefits of their democracy through a better quality of life. it is why filling holes in the road are feeling holes in the charging networker filling holes in the supply chain are all investments. not just in u.s. transportation but in the durability of our democracy. as a former mayor of mine andy burkert once put a good city government tears down the obstacles that stand between people and a life of their choosing by making sure people have the basics taken careve of. you are helping to preserve their very freedom.

there is always a lot at stake for america's mayors and just like there always is here in washington. but that is exceptionally true and our time is our nation struggles to deliver on its promise it. as americans sometimes question whether democracy can deliver for them. so much depends on your work and but we are now here to support that work with the resources they have not existed in my lifetime to help cities get their jobs.nt yes, we are with the federal government in here to help. time we are backing it up with the funding as well as a technical support as well as anything else you need. i just want you to know how energized i am by the excellent extraordinary work and how confident i am this a challenging, troubling, even dark as the last five or 10 years have been in many ways. we are going to remember the

2020s. america's infrastructure decade thanks to president biden's leadership. and america's democracy decade if we get right to the assignment before us at every level for the federal to the local. we will look back with great pride on this moment and what we are able to do together. and i am here with you every step of the waiver thank you for the great work and the chance to join you. [applause]u. >> coming up a series of discussions in the technology industry council policy summits. focusing on artificial intelligence emergent technologies the future of the tech workforce u.s. trade representative on the global economy and current u.s. trade strategies. and later air force assistant secretary discusses technology acquisition process and working with the private sector.

♪ c-span's "washington journal" our live before him involving you to discuss the latest issues and governments, politics, and public policy. from washington and across the country but coming up wednesday morning texas a replicant congressman eight member of the foreign affairs committee talks about border security usa to israel and ukraine were then present for the committee for a responsible federal budget talks about the national debt in the recent congressional budget office prediction the debt will top $54 billion of the next 10 years. ♪ see spans "washington journal." join in the conversation live at 7:00 a.m. eastern wednesday morning on c-span. precedes bednow or online at c-. >>ednesday congressional budget office director testifi on the u.s. a budgetary and

economicutlook to be for the house budget committee. live coverage starts at 10:00 a.m. eastern on c-span2. e spent now are free mobile video app or online at c-span.org. >> he spent as your unfiltered view of government we are funded by these television companies and more including comcast. >> are you thinking this is just a community center? it is way more than that. comcast is part of 1000 committee centers to create wi-fi enabled so students with low income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. >> comcast support c-span has a public service along with these television providers giving it a front row seat to democracy. >> cyber officials from the biden administration join members of congress and industry stakeholders to discuss ongoing priorities. this is part of a tech policy summit hosted by the information

technology industry council in washington d.c. [background noises] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ lisa welcome to the stage board member vice president of global government relations. >> bright light spread hi everyone, that was not very good applause are you all asleep after lunch? come on. [applause]

welcome everyone. it is great to have you here. my honor to welcome you here to the policy summit my name is kristen i run global government relations. i am very proud as well to serve on the board of directors. this is a great crowd we have here today i don't think everyone is all in from lunch everyone is chitchatting a little bit which is okay. we also have a lot of people online. over 1000 people registered to participate in this. which is awesome, very exciting that is testament and tech policy today. it's not a surprise or such interest concerning the level of speakers we have today. it's never a dull moment. there is no exception to that right now. this year is been a landmark year for innovation. the generative ai exploding onto the scene and grabbing

everyone's attention much to some of our dismay here 10 congressional bills each year for the next 10 years. it's an important inflection point men of the issues we are working on may truly determine the course of our future. it's a fitting we've taken advantage of the opportunity presented by state conference to bring together smart minds from all different backgrounds, professions and opinions to tackle these topics head on. so today we are going to be taking stock of some that majorr tech policy milestones that have transpired over the past year. we will the ai order known to some of us is the gift who never stops giving. the very people setting the vision for ai in the u.s. federal government. we will also get an update on how the chips in science act is

impacting main streets across america. cybersecurity ai in particular stand at the forefront of today's digital landscape. around the world the current state of cybersecurity reflects an ever-growing need for robust measures to safeguard our digital infrastructure. with cyber threats and increasingly sophisticated attacks continuing to pull over for a rate including the use of ai the imperative for collaboration viewed the public and private sector has never been more apparent. which is why it, someone has been the cybersecurity world for many years i will not admit how many infants very large audience. i am thrilled we will hear today from not just one, but two of the world's most for most security leaders this afternoon. i have the pleasure to meet one of them backstage a few moments ago the national cyber directorate harry coker will be taking the stage momentarily.

i have been lucky to have had the opportunity to a tent and host many forms as have you and work with trade associations over the years and i can tell you this event in this organization really do stand apart. iti is truly comprehensive on tech policy covering the full tech waterfront of policy issues. and truly global. with the tremendous benefit the other 979 member companies these member companies many of whom are with us here today and the room. great to see all of you here, welcome it. our veritable who's who of top tech talent from across the rope so welcome we are glad to have you all here. i want to give a special welcome europe, asia, australia, south america, or anywhere else we're really glad you're here with us

today as well. of course this event would not have been possible without the generous support of our sponsors and member companies. let me give special thanks cognizant ericsson, mastercard, meta, organization nielsen sage, salesforce. for their sponsorship of today's program. i will now ask you to silence earphones, turn off your ringers but do not put them away. we'll invite you to share the experience with your audiences. tweet, post, gauge on social media however you would like. as we move through today's program. you will find us on twitter iti underscore tech tweet. # intersect 2024 so go ahead and post away all day long please. will also be doing digital poles

throughout the program you will need your phone to participate in those. you will see instruction showing up on the screen as we go. you will be able to scan the qr code or go to the pigeonholed web address and enter your code to join your submission will be anonymous we appreciate your participation. set let's get the ball rolling it's my great pleasure to welcome jason to the stage is president ceo of iti. hope enters the keynote speaker. >> getting us kicked off hi everybody it's so great to see you i can't see any of you that the light were not shining and my face it's great to see it we appreciate you taking time to be with us today it's exciting days kristen noted we haven't asked amazing lineup we've had some terrific speakers we have even more on behalf of the whole iti

team thank you so much a ring with us today. smite great honor to welcome our opening keynote speaker is going to start the intersect off for us. national cyber director harry. harry is a graduate of the u.s. naval academy of postgraduate school in georgetown law center. director has received numerous accolades from across his many years of service to our nation. such as a national intelligence distinguished service medal for exceptional service he has served as executive director of the nsa. he played a strategic role across the intelligence community including extensive experience as well marked by a leadership and digital innovation. and science and technology and n public affairs. showcases his commitment to excellence and our nation is very lucky he has decided to return to service the cell is

6 feet in washington. i ask you all to please join me national cyber director harry coker. >> good afternoon. i am delighted to be here and thank you, jason for that gracious introduction. he wondered who we were talking about but i will take it. i am excited to join well this afternoon to kick off this event

i had a procedure i had my old left knee replaced two weeks ago so i may not build a kick this off in the fashion i would like too. i still cannot get into my dress shoes i hope you will forgive me for wearing air jordans. i heard i need to kick this thing off so i will take the power of any athlete especially the go to get it done. but, and all seriousness i'm honored to stand before you as a nation the second national cyber director. i'm particularly pleased to be here at the summit you all have been great collaborators were grateful to an organization like iti for helping to create opportunities for engagement that drives meaningful change. at the office of the national cyber director we like to say engage early and often i will be here early in my tenure.

i've been in the job for a little over seven weeks and i have to tell you i was humbled but also quite excited to be called back to serve. i do not know any position could have brought me out of my second retirement due to the potential to make a lasting impact for our nation was an easy decision for me. after 43 years in the navy and the intelligence community it truly is a privilege to help new and tribute to the safety and the prosperity of the american people. but one thing you should know about me i love to solve harder problems that was a driving factor in my decision to return to government service and to quote the goat michael jordan obstacles don't have to stop you. if you run into a wall don't turn around and give up figure out how to climate and go

through it or work around it. our problems do energize me i grew up as a cold or sailor in the navy when our nations face the hard problem with the soviet union. part of the intelligence community i was extremely proud to take on what we now refer to as the great power competition. part of my contribution to those efforts included incorporating the open source enterprise into the agencies and into the centers. all of those challenges were hard with cybersecurity is a different kind of a hard problem. that stems from the threat which is very real and persistent. one example amongst many is the threat from the people's republic of china. last week i had the honor of

testifying in front of the house select committee to focus on the chinese communist party with my colleagues from across the federal government in particular. assistant director easterly fbi director wray my friend and former boss recently retired commander of u.s. cyber command and director. it was an important moment for us to appear together to articulate the full measure of the threat posed by china. and to demonstrate coherence and collaboration across our federal enterprise. cyber actors from the people's republic of china are actively working to gain access into our nation's critical infrastructure systems with the purpose of disruption or worse, destruction. in the early stages of armed conflict they want to disrupt our military's ability to

mobilize and to impact the systems that allow us to thrive in our increasingly digital world. their intention is to drive home a point so many of us have known for years. in cyberspace and the private sector as well as the american people themselves are on the front lines. and as we all know the vast majority of critical infrastructure in our nation is owned and operated by the private sector. folks, protecting and defending america from a growing number of cyber threats is a hard problem. ensuring the short and long-term protections of a defense and resilience of the systems that underpin our increasingly digital way of life is a hard problem. in ensuring internet remains open, free, global and operable and importantly secure anchored in universal values that respect human rights and fundamental

freedoms is a hard problem. harder still is what we do about it. after all belligerent states have postured their military forces aggressively for millennia. america said plenty of success last-minute domain of cyberspace but as we said last week the risk we face within the cyberspace today is unacceptable. there are plenty of actions that we have, can, and will take to address counters normative behavior and the necessity to partner with so many of you in this room is absolute essential. how do we collectively how do we take the talent your organizations and channel our collective energy toward countering the growing number of malicious actors. how do we collectively the technology to create and make

sure they are source how do we truly help local governments one of the more than 50000 public water systems spread across our great nation. thankfully the present has started sat on the right foot. from the very beginning of this administration present by the mid- cybersecurity priority. he brought in some outstanding people and some of them will be with you here today. my dear friend national security advisor at the national security council who will join you all later this afternoon has made incredible progress. 14028 pushing for the creation

of cyber trust. and i would be remiss if i did not mention my white house colleague kobe, south carolina but currently the director public engagement. you'll see him this afternoon for his outreach on behalf of the administration's key to strengthening our partnerships and delivering outcomes. at oh ncd we have been lucky to have had chris english setter organization on the right course. we were champions of this office and our mission. i am proud and lucky to build upon the foundation those two leaders said for us. we are also standing on the shoulders and the wisdom of the office of cyber director in 2021 following a recommendation by

the cyberspace solarium commission. i was pleased to meet with many of those commissioners last week. i did tell you their insight continues to be a great value to me and frankly to all of us. leaders note you cannot tackle hard problems. good old fashion grip. and i am hopeful this group has heard quite a bit about the national cybersecurity strategy. the two bold shifts. number one, shifting the responsibility away from individuals and small businesses and onto the larger institutions capable of bearing more responsibility in cyberspace. a number to a real lighting incentives to favor long-term investments in cybersecurity. that has been said before and i agree with that but allow me too

share my take on this important strategy. it's bold because the underlying vision and the tenacity. the work of the off it sets out explicitly the hard problems wee had to solve and takes them head on. the strategy says we have to take problems the fact the insured was built on insecure foundations. we are finally implementing improvements through the border gateway protocol. accountable when that russian rh insecure code to market. we are working with the academic community and legal expert to explore different liability regimes. will soon be engaging with you for the private sector perspective. that's smart regulations minimize compliance burden on companies. we are one of partners across

inter- agencies to harmonize requirements using the feedback many of you have already provided us in response to our request for information. the strategy says we need and diverse and robust cyber workforce to meet the challenge of this decisive decade. we are working aggressively to foster ecosystems across the nation to fill the more than half a million cyber jobs that are available today. too that end i have already been to a job fair and career event and thrilled to have heard from an incredible array of students, faculty and employers. it's great to see it we've made progress. some employers that had not visited that institution before and came away impressed rowing to follow up on that. we'll be doing events across the country exposing people to

opportunities. but every one of the problems i have mentioned his heart in its own right. each of the ones i mentioned has been studied for decades. each remained pernicious but unresolved. what makes national cybersecurity strategy bold is its clarity. one seem to complicate our precisely what we need to tackle to seize the initiative my predecessors made a clear commitment to transparency and accountability by publishing the national cybersecurity implementation plan. act as a former program manager i found it impressive as i come to watch the team put the shoulder to the real every day

across inter- agency. trust is openness. we commit to you when we report on our progress not just where we succeeded but where we came up short. with the intent of getting better. in the coming months you will see the reports on the efforts to date in the next phase of the strategies of limitation. and i will say one additional thing for the implement strategy and plan. policy solutions are not self-executing. it is true developing solutions to the hard problems in cyberspace is a fundamental responsibility of our office but so is carrying them to fruition. thankfully i am not alone there are 80 incredible patriots that i get to work with every day. experts who hail from the industry, civil society, federal agencies in capitol hill.

their work includes putting the good ideas and powerful solutions to thoughtful strategy into practice to improve the digital foundation of this nation and to make our nation safer. i am excited about the work the talented staff is leading on the open research problem of software measurability that makes it difficult to understand the quality of code we use. 2016 newspaper we are continuing to make progress on. are also pushing government and private sector coders to ensure secure by design incorporates memory safe programming languages. some of the most dangerous vulnerabilities that criminals look to exploit our memory safety bugs and memory safe coding languages to prevent those errors from ever making into production and yes

developers have been slow to adopt them even though many have existed for years. in the coming weeks you will see us put out a paper that addresses memory safety and software measurability. additionally we are developing guidance to help agencies eliminate un- necessary degree requirements for contacting cybersecurity positions. while this has been mandated for years it's another tough challenge that has yet to be fully implemented. in many cases it turns out implementing the solution is the hardest part of all. that will take partnership the first shift in the strategy is about rebalancing responsibility in cyberspace to the most capable actors. that means the government, yes, it also means all the organizations represented in the rooms today and all of you. make sure the cloud improves cybersecurity takes meaningful

partnership to stop adversaries from using our own systems. as home or office routers to launch their attacks. to bring coherence to the federal mission coordination to unwind the sea of licenses agencies deal with on a daily basis. it will take innovative partnership in your technological know-how to scale solutions that protect pipelines delivering gas to homes in minneapolis or to a hospital with lifesaving care in my hometown. it will not be easy and that is why the national cybersecurity strategy is our northstar. i appreciate its traces its lineage back 25 years. that tells me that was and

remains a bipartisan issue. that tells me the public-private partnership was and remains core to our success. still dealing with some of the same tough problems. the office we have the team, we have the vision, we have the responsibility for not scratching our heads the same problem in 2050. so i say again please continue to collaborate with us in a true partnership fell and knows the truth even you think we don't want to hear. let us know what's working feedback and ideas. solving the hard problems for the our nation security and prosperity. thank you.

[applause] ♪ joining us now jason, president and ceo of iti with david senior vice president of global public policy and general counsel at amazon. corrects high david. welcome to the intersect hour thanks your first speech inside washington incite his appointment this important role. this holds what we need to be thinking about but it's equally if perhaps not more important for us to have conversation with industry leaders about how we should be crafting our story

here in washington and around the world. i am so thrilled to have david here with us today to help us think through the important policies of the debris as a thank you for being here for lex thank you for having me. it's a privilege and an honor and it is great to be able to engage on these important issues. >> we've been around since 1916. we are 108 years old if i'm doing the math. amazon is not quite that old. but you have been with amazon for a number of years almost since the beginning, 24 years if i have the number right. tell us about how your role has evolved. and what you're responsible for today. >> i wasn't in the beginning for sure but i joined in the fall of 99. i was only litigation regulatory attorney with amazon back then. there were about 15 people in the company's revenues were just

over a billion dollars. we did that for a dozen years and years later my boss retired and asked me too take her job. and so the council 2012 the company was about $61 billion in revenue. and it was about 200, 2050 people. lester had the opportunity to step into leadership of the global public policy organization. which is an additional -- as this room knows more than most relate top-notch people. we are over five your billion in revenue. the more than 2000 people. it has been an amazing journey.

i feel very lucky, very privileged to have the most interesting job as one could possibly have. when to be hard to convince me that's not true for iraq as a recovering lawyer myself i can agree these kind of jobs are more interesting than a lot of other things you can do. that is quite a journey. i remember as it tech policy discussion has a lot to share and a lot to offer. were going to talk a lot about ai in particular in a minute. but as you discussed your own journey within the company i can imagine the company itself is change a lot over the 24 years you have been there as well. >> it is interesting. some ways it changed immensely. it is so much larger. i don't even come close to knowing which is disconcerting.

i could not have imagined in 2012 alexa, 177 suite fly around network. satellites, movie studios. even since 2012 we have had to grow and adapt and build those businesses. that includes lawyers and the issues in the spaces. it has been a constant exercise in building. i stopped somewhere around 2008 i stopped trying to predict the future at all. see the same faces when i walk in the door. a lot of my senior leadership were there. one of the guys on my team was on the energy move we still talk

about the company we think about the company lot the same way. and as you probably know one of our big priorities can stay focused on trying to remain which means staying nimble, staying clean making decisions quickly. making sure we are not too big to cause a slowdown. and we worry a lot about that. and many ways we change it in many ways it hasn't. went to particularly focus on ai. that's a lot of the focus it's happening on amazon, run generative ai. and obviously of as we have heard today the member of congress from california's 23rd is literally the only

person with an ai degree. industry has an incredibly important role to play in a form of policymakers here in the u.s. and around the world about the benefits of aip we hear about the scary stuff. we talk about how ai is going to end the world. we in industry not focus on that or focus on telling the positive story telling the good that can come from it. can you share with us in the first instance what amazon is and would generative ai and with the ai roadmap looks like? and talk about how we can tell that story to policymakers? >> sure. for a long time i resisted the term ai at all. i would not allow in my office. it really is another application of machine learning techniques. investing in machine learning in every aspect of our business for a long time. it's behind the recognition

that's part of alexa. we are very familiar with machine learning. a very large language models is a new application of that. that obviously is incredibly exciting with a lot of possibilities. we are fully investing in that as well. amazon has a three-tiered approach to ai. we are at the base of foundation level we have been working with chips that are optimized for training algorithms and doing machine learning the special

design trips that make it much more cost-effective. there is a middle layer that we built into amazon web services that are most easily access through a place like bedrock which gives our customers the ability to access the whole choice, a whole variety of large language models. she the shopping assistance on

amazon. i think ai but it won't happen overnight. going to experiments with third level customer facing apps that uses technology. some will be mine and blindly great. they're not going to build themselves. i think we have some time to figure out what this is and isn't. the weight amazon his providing and democratizing it if you will but also investing in our own models. >> given that brett of policy issues that has arise from the breath of business uses of ai. i wanted to ask you how you are

approaching the regulatory environment. it is one thing for me too rely on aim i amazon. treatment course to follow based on people with similar circumstances and the ai use case and medical. so obviously a risk-based approach is important. for amazon this is enormously complicated you have so many use cases for ai. and as you and your team and travel the world and talk to different jurisdictions some are further ahead than others, some are moving forward on the ai acts. here in the u.s. we are still talk about what might happen at the federal level. are there some guardrails? are there some we support.

supporting risk-based regulatory. we support the white house. we were at the safety summit. we supported those. that's an encouraging aspect of the fact this is all so new and everything is doing everything all at once we have the opportunity to build consensus about what are the risks what are the use cases we should be concerned about? and how can we work backwards which we all agree are bad. build the right regulatory

guardrails. that will prevent the harms. i need what is -- what's a bad thing or trying to stop? one thing about being so broad it's like both of the examples you use as one you should be concerned about and may be one you shouldn't be so concerned about. obviously anytime for using this type of technology to make decisions or civil rights or things that could profoundly change someone's life. you have to move very carefully and make sure you are using with the utmost responsibility, safety, security. the problem is as i alluded to before us we don't know what those things are going to be.

it is a particulate fraud exercise to start regulating something you don't really understand and it doesn't really exist yet. the very favorable that could save lives. or make people's lives much better. it is a balance. the good news is there's a thera burgeoning set of consensus in the uk and the u.s. and some other countries. where we can work together and i think the key is and this is where you guys are an incredible ally is to educate and collaborate with lawmakers and policymakers so we can help them understand the technology and we can talk together about the risks and use cases are. >> of those to use cases i've mentioned when medical is like primary i would don't make it

up. it is fantastic. you mentioned the importance of making that connection for policymakers with what businesses are trying to you and the impact of the public policy decisions i want to ask you as a business leader with a seat at the table of the business decisions made at amazon how do you estimate this will be a helpful practice tip for all of us how do you make that case ann your send out members of congress or parliament how to make that connection to help them understand here are the things there amazon is trying to use the benefit of our customers here is what the decision you're contemplating making is going to do to our ability to deploy that service. how do you make that connection? as you mentioned no one likes abstractions and some are hypothetical abstractions. you are trying to tell policymakers the decisions they

make are going to impact their constituents accesses great technologies had he make that case? >> you have to make it real. like i said i'm not good abstraction anyway pretty hectic come up with. i'll give you an example they didn't expect to talk about but it's a pretty powerful one. when ukraine was first invaded we worked with the ukraine government to quickly copy their government records, the real estate country get them out of the country. and upload them to the clouds. give them ongoing access to their records weeks before the record. and so under certain versions of what they call the you cloud there are versions of that that would have prohibited aren't a

certain percentage owned by new entities from even carrying government workloads because of what we would say are more protection reasons. what i was able to tell many policymakers as this version of that law gets past we can't help ukraine we are just not allowed to. that is what you break. when you look at legislation like this and you consider a solution and that goes over one weight in the france. it goes over another way in finland with russia. so you need to find a real world examples and talk it through. >> the provision of her talk about is deafly on our priority

list. the idea of the security of a cloud service should be determined by the geographic location of the corporate headquarters of the provider is not one that makes much sense. >> we are all nato allies. we already share the most sensitive geopolitical and military data that you can have. that's a little crazy to have legislators in one country and the other. who rail about the insecurity data and headquarter companies. >> not a good measure. not a good proposal. looking ahead we are now five weeks, six weeks into 2024. how is the rest of that you're looking for you? what's on the roadmap? any moon shots? >> were not going to the moon. >> what is on the roadmap we should be thinking about for 2024? >> we are encouraged by how we made it through 2023 and 2022 is

very challenging headwinds for our business and every business for a couple of years. we sort of address our cost structure the direction of our business. regionalized our logistics will deliver to customers with products that are closer to them. and get to them faster, cheaper and more sustainable. and so that work is still underway and that is very exciting. he asked that question about what opportunity is left at amazon? post a pandemic even. the percentage of online shopping versus retail is less than 20%.

it's going to rise over time and the percentage only five or so% is in the cloud. so just on those businesses there is a ton of potential to continue growing. tell me more customers we can serve. we translate that into our favorite groceries are pharmacies that are just starting their journey. and then when you get out of those two more established places you look at our project to launch 3200 plus low earth orbit satellites so we can provide a worldwide broadband service focused on rural communities. we are very excited about that.

the prototype test. and they worked better than expected to work. with the first order was placed losing those satellites. it's very exciting. we are going to go into production on those satellites in 2024. we'll be doing a lot of launches. we have this company which i am incredibly optimistic about. we bought it a few years ago. led by some visionary people who are pioneering electric vehicles that will be at thomas. and so there are moon shots. we've only scratched the surface

with one medical with innovations working with one medical. so as usual at amazon there's a lot of investments. i have never been more optimistic about it. >> great last question in 30 seconds we have left together. what do you need from iti? what does the industry need from iti as we address these policy challenges? and let every innovation bloomberg. >> first of all have to thank ici. it is another voice working closely with policymakers and communities so we don't get to always touch. to explain and help the educational process about what technology does. how we think about it but how we can regulate it without inhibiting information. that is a hugely important part of the policy and you guys are hugely important part to and

want to thank you for that i. >> think i wound up appreciate your partnership thank you for being with us on the stage today please join me in thanking david. >> thank you. [applause] >> now a discussion on artificial intelligence emerging technology california democratic congresswoman and tennessee republican senator marsha blackburn. in the technology industry council policy summit this is about 50 minutes. ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ please welcome courtney lange

vice president of policy at iti. with congresswoman zoe lofgren. ♪ >> think you congresswoman for joining us today and thank you to everyonee for being here. for those who do not know congresswoman lofgren is the 18th district of california. is that ranking member on the housed science space and technology committee is also a senior member of the house judiciary committee. so, really glad to have you here today i have say i'm happy to be sitting in this seat since they recently testified in front of the house energy and commerce committee have to say it's nice to be giving the questions as opposed to receiving them. so with that let's get right into it. i want to start an area i know you have been focusing on quite a lot lately.

maybe that is an area the ai era we are living and has not been talked about as much but it really wanted to start tearing your perspective. as we are looking other emerging technology areas one of things we are looking at why it's so important the u.s. is prioritizing quantum computing and what you've been thinking about looking at in that space. >> the science committee is taken the lead on this issue. took the lead in 2018 informing the initiative. it yielded the results we had hoped for in terms of research and supporting efforts in the scientific world. one of the great things about serving on the science committee is that we are very bipartisan. the chair is a conservative republican. i am not. that does not keep us from

working together because he was to get something done and so do i. and so we are working on the reauthorization. we are about to begin a fourth-quarter discussion with the senate because we want to make sure we are touching all of the bases democrats and republicans house and senate. in that endeavor. obviously quantum computing is not quite there yet. although we are making tremendoushy strides. but it's not just computing its other usesor of the technology d i do think it's important that we maintain our competitive edge there. when we think about all of the things happening i think we are just on the doorstep witha. ai, quantum fusion. effusion. you put the three together if we don't make serious missteps our

future is very bright. we continued the steps forward that we are trying to promote. >> yes, thank you. you mentioned your national quantum reauthorization act certainly proud to support and i am wondering if you can share a little bit more about what that would do for the quantum capabilities and how that would help and maintain the competitive edge. >> we areit trying to move beyod the purely scientific and to lisome of the applied. we are expanding. nasa is a player but they were always excluded from this so we are including them. we also want to make sure that u.s. scientists have the resources necessary for it which is a big problem. i love the private sector. at love our private sector companies but it is important the scientists and academic

researchers also have access so they can make progress. that's itpr issued not just in quantum but in ai. we had a hearing just yesterday on that subject. >> wonderful, thank you brenda wanted to ask you a little bit more about this in the context of ai in particular and certainly the science foundation we heard earlier discuss their efforts on the pilot program for the national resource which is certainly going to be an important mechanism to advance some of these research and development activities as well as give access more broadly. you have been very supportive of the mission and the legislative efforts. and so i am wondering if you can share your thoughts on how we can make sure there are federal resources available for something to really succeed

moving forward? >> as i say we had an excellent hearing and the committee. got a bill with me on ai had a great interest in this. it's a workforce issue and the two are related. as i have said the barrier for entry is very high in terms of computing. talking to one of the leaders inopen ai he expressed skepticim we would ever be able to provide the resourcesce necessary to cah up. i hope that is not the case because as much as i love the private sector, ai should not be owned by the three companies in the united states it should also be accessible to the academic community and to researchers and to scientists.

so i think this is an inflection point on whether we are going to provide the resources and also the outreach for ai in the same would go for quantum. one of the questions i had for our witness from oak ridge her testimony was how useful ai was going to be an understanding plasma infusion. i think that's a very important question. and yet two weeks ago i was up in seattle visiting some very forward thinking fusion companies and clearly they had no idea this resource was available to them. even had they had known the resources are so constrained they would not necessarily been able to take advantage. that is a real big problem. and i hope on the bipartisan basis we could not only authorize that and i think we will they get the appropriations necessary to make it meaningful.

right now the limitations that we are seeing, the appropriations process which is completely dysfunctional at this point alarming about how much of progress we are really going to make an ai not to mention the fusion program. >> we certainly hope to see that moving forward. as you mention is going to be really integral into innovation and know that it makes sure multiple players in thelt ecosystem are able to harness the resource. so we hope those efforts are successful moving forward. i guess sticking on the topic of ai which i'm sure it will surprise nobody it's a big topic of conversation right now it's important to remember the science committee has been working on ai for over a decade now something you all have been looking f into for quite some time. but certainly it's a conversation for progressives and as we moved to a place

there's different thoughts about how to best regulate and oversee the technology, i'm curious if you could share initial perspectives about how you and your colleagues are thinking about oversight and regulation some areas you arezi prioritizig as you are thinking through the right way of approaching governance with the way technology is. >> we have missed a number of years ago with laying out first during the collaborative process and then laying on eight non- regulatory from it for ai predicted a pretty good job of that. honestly in the end i believe we are going to need some regulations i think they have laid a foundation for how we might proceed. we there arere agreements on approaches. for example should this be wrists baked six sector by sector one giant agency defined the whole thing? i think the latter approach is

bound to fail because it will be impossible for one agency to be an expert in every single thing. but we have not reached a conclusion on that. i think it is important that we know what we are doing before we do it. w and so we have had a number of hearings in the science community was gotten bipartisan informal briefings. so that we are better educated before we go lumbering off. one of the issues in this is a judiciary committee issue is the role of intellectual property and ai. there are a lot of questions about that both in terms of the ingestion of data and also the product of ai. and its connection with the intellectual property. the registrar of copyrights is actually engaging in some investigation on that right now. i don't think in the end she will be the definitive voice and

think the courts are likely to beat us to it. but i think what she is doing is helpful. and one of the things she establish and i think is correct is she -- make a creative product has beenat created by a human you cannot copyright something that does not have a human touch. there's going to be a line, where is that line? she is going to work on that. i think the issue of ingestion is before the court right now. people are discussing whether to 30 applies to this but i don't think 2:30 has any application to aink whatsoever. the whole theory of 2:30 was to protect free speech and it's not an issue for ai. the real issue is what is owed to humankind for the data that has been ingested in what kind of transparency is there going to be on data ingestion? one of the things we aren't looking at in our ai discussion

is a greater transparency and better access to high-quality data so that ai can be improved not just generative ai but other aspects. aspects, where we have f opportunities. people are afraid of misinformation. that is valid. there was recently a deepfake with taylor swift and president biden's voice was used as a fake. all of that is worthy of concern. on the other hand, the use of ai , let's just think about what google did. you would have a phd student unfolding single protein in the human body to write a thesis on that. google unfolded all of them into weeks, posted them for everyone to have. it is going the development of medicine and

other medical advances tremendously with opportunities we need to keep in mind because a number of people whose hair is on fire and the sky is falling and that's the wrong approach. >> we are recognizing how transformative it can be a while recognizing there's also risks associated with it and transparency is something we've been doing a lot of thinking about and we welcome your focus on god as well as the other challenging issues with a couple of conversations today. i would guess congress is expressing the chances are in the near term other than what the science committee will produce which is in the scene

everyone is talking about but it's the private sector efforts in the near term that's going to be addressing these issues adobe is coming up with a system that is promising so i think we may see some real advances but i think the private sector is going to carry us a little bitus further and a bad actors will tell us more what we need to be worried about while congress continues. >> that makes sense sand with regards to the work there's quite a lot going on already that folks are thinking about including the effort you referenced. one other area that i wanted to ask about with pushing to this framework that's been a foundational framework forgh

organizations to think through how they manage this throughout their lifecycle but given i was curious if you could speak more to the role of the conversation on the risk management and how that ties into the work that folks are viewing either an actual implementing executive order or otherwise. >> i think the standard-setting is very important. in that regard we are not where we needre to be. but if you can't measure it doesn't exist and we also need to work with international standards. we will be successful with some of our developed countries. china tends to go off on its own

and i am concerned the eu may be going off in the direction that may not be that positive but i think if the united states can take the lead in standard-setting even if it is voluntary that will help put some order into the science committee may play a role in that. we have had excellent scientists and technicians in the private sector. we are nearing the end of the time so really appreciate you joining us tonight and we will look forward to working with you.

you. >> we look forward to the committee. [applause] office of critical and emerging technology at the department and brian reed officer that the fbi. thank you for joining us today.

we just heard from congresswoman lofgren and throughout the day a lot to talk about the importance speaking about the risk management framework and we are at an inflection point. if we are out and an inflection point it's because of the real work that agencies are going to have to do because of the aia executive order end of the guidance right now from the white house to agencies that spells out over 200 different things agencies will be responsible for thinking about risk and how the agencies will manage risk and not just for themselves but for the energy sectors that covers workforce and how to build capacity it covers howg are they going to govern and manage products and systems themselves and within the ecosystems that exist.

that's a lot so one of the first questions we have is how our government agencies going to go about doing that. i'd like to start with you thinking from your perspective how are you prioritizing that when you look at we just saw the agencies submitting their inventories into the department submitted hundreds of small projects and how are you thinking about balancing all that? >> that's a great question we have a huge responsibility to deliver both in terms of promoting innovation that's one all now we are going to train the workforce and develop tools, foundation tools and models for energy and security. we also have a big responsibility working with other members in the agency on security so this is providing ai, model valuations and we were

pleased last week to have been able to submit our assessment on the sector of risk management agency of the potential risks ai poses to deal with electricity grids. >> that's a great point. you have entities you are responsible for. with the financial service sector. we post cloud and how that impacts the financial sector and we started to talk to a bunch of different firms both financial

firms, ai providers and other folks within the financial sector. from the museum and also some other y small firms starting to think about it. it fits into that model we d already have and it's another risk the biggest challenge was going to be to identify understanding the ecosystem. as we are looking at this and we

continue the conversation tong understand what are the challenges into should we be working to develop tools and techniques that may help them harvest the energy better to prevent things from happening to go off the rails that's why we are excited to be here. when you have comments and thoughts as we are trying to do ryour job to address the challenges. >> before that, of course it's not only in the sector of risk management agencies but the

national security implication here as well and a lot of what is in the guidance at the white house is managing the risks to individuals t and so on so hopefully you can give some of that. >> i would like to highlight two activities for the executive order that have shown value. the first activity is the founding risk to the mitigation and the aia risk management

framework on the ethics and implementation framework for the risks and found the internal processes and control for a concrete example of the process that weve identified as a common one and that the fbi does ensure they are properly trained to assume the overall consequences and any decision that is made within algorithmic tool. and so with that initial mapping is prerequisite it is patterned after a review board and medical

experimentations and we took great pains to ensure the expertise reflects widely in the americann. population. the council is complementary to the profile that we've identified in every case is merits and tohe dive deeper into the nuances of ai to get into conversations about undesirable risk and areas where traditional technology

does not. the two activities in concert with the fbi response and governance models have been hugely successful is implemented by fbi employees and subject matter experts but i contribute a lot of thought to the conversations that we've been having with our fellow government here in academia and the industry more broadly. i think a lot of what you said ties back to your point about the importance of governance having an ethics counsel and risk profiles. one of the questions i've got is how do you balance that with the desire and you have mission responsibility to move forward as fast as possible to not want toto wait to help us catch a bad guyy or soul of a crime or fix

the claimant sustainability challenge tomorrow and we can't wait for the governance process so how are you balancing those tensions? >> this is pretty exciting. the deputy chief officer for about a week may be a little longer the amount and if you saw "the new york times" this weekend the hottest job all across which means that is going to be a lot of people showing up in this space who haven't been trained because there's no training yet i think that's going to be interesting to figure out how to be able to understand the technology working onlo understanding the mission we are looking for and tied together with the issues and their challenges that we have is the organization tries to deliver on its mission to not slow it down but still the right

efforts going b forward into ths also goes into the whole education hiring effort. i sold today there's 15 people who are looking for ai i'm not sure how many of the treasury we are going to be hiring but there's not a lot of folks out there. how do you make sure you have the right folks with the right skills to address that and how do we not allow this to get out of control in a way that is unhelpful? and other things can always go in a direction that we do not intend it to. also how do we make sure it is a big organization and the different components are aligned to achieve the same efforts so i think we have like 13 different to bureaus about developing their own ai model and we are doing 13 times without the

benefits so understanding how to coordinatean this is going to be huge to understand how they are looking at it and then working with other folks to understand how we take the best practices and incorporate those into what we are doing to make sure we are doing this in the right way. governance is hard. trying to make sure we are setting get up the right way.

but there's lots of questions about intellectual property and ownership and that is an active area i know everybody here is interested so if i can follow up on that the question i think how do we provide continuous feedback because the field is moving so quickly how do we ensure there is good connectivity. part of the effort from the last 22 years has been the public-privateic partnership for the sectoris but we are highly

dependent and you can't run a bank without power so how do we make sure we are engaged. we love to question back to understand the right way what this office is going to be new in most places hopefully some of you already have ai officers out there. what are your best practices and what do i do to make my job easier to get paid faster this dialogue is going to be critical to make sure we are learning and understanding the best way. over sharing is good in this way and hopefully it's not created by ai but the lessons you've learned overall to get to a better spot it's going to be a

team. effort. we have to get the economies of scale. just so everybody knows, totally unsolicited but we appreciate that and look forward to picking you up on that. one of the questions and i will go to the other and then the thoughts on this there's a huge workforce implication to this endn of the prioritization and question here the executive order ande the memo talk a lot about the plans to build capacity in its early days so how are you thinking about expanding the workforce and bringing more people, what are you actually doing in the agency to try to address some of those

challenges? >> we have a number of programs to increase the digital data acumen. a particular recipient where i am able to go to school and part-time these opportunities need toti be explored in a comprehensive manner and initiatives being ticked off. the 2021 commission on the ai and the need for a federal response. i am hopeful we are going to find the capacity in the near

future. >> we were talking outside. while they will hear that and realize that some are in order for helping to address these but utwhat are you doing today that isn't an unattainable solution long-term obviously. >> i'm fortunate to work with a whole slew of technical experts across the programs and the over 50,000 to scientists and engineers and technologists at the national labs are not all ai experts but i don't think they need to be. we need to the scientific approach to many of the problems. we have a task to train 500 new researchers by 2025 and we are looking at building programs and expanding programs with the

communities and academic institutions and their areas to see how we can ramp that up more. because energy is in our name people often associate us with clean energy specifically and claimant that's a huge part of the mission but i think the thing i would really like to share his we have so much enabling infrastructure to solve the problems both from the computing that we have that's also second most energy efficient because it's something that we try to couple closely through our partnerships, so that with the abilities we have across the countries that generate troops into troops of high-quality scientific data and this is a resource we should be able to use. i'm going to follow up on that point how do the industries find out about that, there's lots of

those things out there. the representative was talking about visiting companies in seattle so what do we do collectively to close the gap? >> personally i feel like it's my personal responsibility for the greater community i heard her talk about those three with deep interests in all of these areas and the energy efficiency to underpin a lot of the work so in terms of how people find out about it, we are also tasked to develop partnerships with industry and academia to build some of these tools to leverage the facilities to be able to push the field further. i'm sure people here would have a lot of interest in helping to

do that. people from oak ridge use to have to come sell to individual agencies we've got a cool supercomputer here do you have any uses for it that doesn't seem like the right solution and i'm sure there's got to be better ways. i'm sure you are doing this research right now and making a report but what can the industry do to make sure what's going on in treasury and engaging with it in a more proactive way. what we also do is encourage if there's an issue out there let us know. call us directly to let us know what those are and what you are

finding as beneficial. we have the best information from folks to understand the challenges and also providers and the like but what we have to keep doing is listening more. solutions are going to come out if we talk to enough people. how do we make that environment feel comfortable having that discussion that's part of the goal here is to make sure people are comfortable coming in. we challenges to tackle. one thing generally we ask for best papers out there and things you find that are helpful to

make sure you understand this so we get a smarter on it and some of the scientific papers but whatever those are the more conversations we can have identifying those things to help us get smarter across the border. i don't have time necessarily buthr i know a lot of people hee in the crowd say this is better to be able to say here's something we found that's helpful so we start that conversation. to say this is what we learned is this the right stuff and ther challenges to be able to have the conversation hopefully it's more than once a year here's how

the industry is developing. that feedback is going to be critical because we can't do it all ourselves. there's not much out there if you think about it compared to other risks we face how do we use the opportunities to get better. if that is where hopefully we will be in the right spot. >> we've only got a few seconds left. one of the questions it's great to hear that and i've got to disclose your more than welcome to come back about one of the challenges for us the approach how do you think the industry should be thinking about alinteracting across all those agencies as well? i think all the doors are open.

if there are things you want to be talking about and we should be considering. you heard it there. feel free to contact her. thank you all very much. we are out of time. [applause] ♪♪

i'm honored to be joined here on the stage with marsha blackburn who represents the state of tennessee. a power house a set of committees in the senate including the finance committee the commerce committee, the judiciary committee and veteran affairs committee. i had the opportunity to testify before the commerce committee on consumer protection led by senator blackburn and senator hicken looper. we talked about how to increase transparency. senator blackburn has been a leader for all technology and artificial intelligence for quantum computing. there's been vigorous activities and a series of ai. they've done a lot of due

diligence in theen area of artificial intelligence. based on the discussions that you've had at this point what do you think it is congress can do to promote a pro- innovation artificial intelligence agenda for thehe united states to continue to lead the world? >> that's what we should be doing is realizing that congress will create the assignment for job growth and innovation to take place and we need to be certain that we do not legislate to a technology but focus more on the utilization and use of that technology so that's the mindset that we should go into this with. and i've been so pleased that we've beened able to have some hearings, judiciary committee has been very active and has commerce committee. we even have a veterans affairs

hearing and what it could do and of course as you know representing tennessee i like to say we have a relationship when it comes to ai. our healthcare, our logistics, our manufacturing all utilizing and to do great things and then you look at entertainment and that's where we have issues around the image and likeness, so my hope is we focus on the environment and put the guardrails in place and we realize if we are not allowing innovation, china is so it's important for us to have that take place. >> we talk about having this tech neutral framework across the technologies of the future i know you've touched on these

industries and they were a leader in transportation and healthcare for many years and increasingly in telecommunications and of course the wonderful artists performing and songwriting will be able to use artificial intelligence. i want to bring you to another technology we just touched on briefly buthe that is quantum information sciences. i know oak ridge national wound up you've you've taken a very keen interest in this code you describe a little bit of what's brought you to the interest to the quantum field and what you can see that promise being? >> oak ridge has the world's fastest computer. we like to take a little victory lap and what we have seen is one of our cities, chattanooga

tennessee that is in close proximity to oak ridge has focused on quantum and on the broadband acceleration broadband toer the promise and enabling innovators to be there and they have a city quantum initiative and i get a quantum roundtable this summer and it was absolutely fascinating because of that. we've got a couple of bills that we are pushing and as you all know the quantum initiative needs to be reauthorized in order to move forward. ndsenator lujan and i have a quantum sandbox bill that would allow the innovation that needs

to take place and be able to move from that to look at these near term utilizations and how we move this into commercialization and build a quantum system so that there can be a more widespread commercial use. there's a second bill we are working on the deals with testbeds and making sure we have the testbeds thatt are going to be in a classified setting into some inci a commercial setting. we want to be certain there again that we do our part on creating that wraparound and environment so we can keep that innovation here and people

working in this space to know there's going to be the support system they can jump into when they are ready to elevate. how are we using the best use of the taxpayer dollars in these public-private partnership frameworks for innovation to make sure the technologies transferred in a smart way but the private sector generally leading a lot of those initiatives down the road? >> we want to make certain when we look how we are going to in the military space we look at them carefully we need to look at how we do security clearances

as you talk about next generation warfarere and degenerative ai into some of the technologies that can be there and be utilized, it's important to think forward on that. >> i just want to ask one more question if i could and that's on tax policy and investment in technology is driven by tax policy and tech companies to get where they need to go to scale up to invest more from their base revenue than any other sectors of the policy impacts them even more than the other sectors, so the u.s. continues to lead and go to policies. the house passed a bill that includes immediate oriented be d and other tax fixes, how would you prognosticate the future here on the ability to pass

something in the area of tax relief? >> we anticipate the piece of legislation from the house to the senate will come to us at the finance committee and we will be able to go through an amendment process on this. everyone agrees that making certain we keep those credits into the bonus depreciation that expends it is vitally important to do. one of things i remind my colleagues if you have a short window in a lifecycle for these technology applications, so you need to be generous in allowing them these credits and expensing

because they will be on to the next iteration and we need to keep that it doesn't matter if it's quantum or ai it needs to be there. the protections for that name image and likeness and voice whenoi it ai to be certain we protect the creative community there so you have the right to

benefit from work you do. you do please know all of the member companies are going to be more engaged as the bills come about. as i mentioned at the time is at an end thank you for being such a leader for innovation and championing american innovation and joiningel us today. >> it is my pleasure.

[applause]

vice president of the americas vice president at cisco. [applause] >> i was wondering if you would applaud so thank you for that. good afternoon. our purpose is to power and inclusive future for all. a technology based solutions drive the ability to address critical challenges and communities, power hybrid work, transform infrastructure and cities you to secure the networks that run it all to ensure they can be deployed it takes forward thinking policies that foster innovation and emerging digital technologies. no matter how remote with the networks that bind to the the se

channels of communications openness and competition or a world where ai propels us forward and does so responsibly they emerge as foundational pillars shaping our society, economy and governance. to fulfill the potential of this moment right to size investments in government policy and research innovation security and procurement should lead the way. at the heart of this critical discourse is the federal communications commission and its pivotal role shaping with innovation inclusion and investment are also ensuring the transparency and accountability where the challenges are significant as the opportunity as the fcc has a lot on its plate and knows that this new

chapter requires more foresight, collaboration and most of all a balanced approach. to have access to affordable service as we work to propel the program forward to help the schools and libraries get affordable servicing secure telecommunications and internet access and as we work to cement the global competitiveness by freeing up spectrum of fostering spectrum sharing and accelerating research development the fcc has been and will continue to be a critical partner that's why it is my honor to introduce to the intersect stage the commissioner anna gomez a trailblazer in the telecommunications policy world

playing pivotal roles in key public sectors and commissioner gomez brings a deeply personal commitment to bridging the digital divide in advocating for high-speed broadband accessibility for every person in every community regardless of geography or income. the leadership of the federal level ranges from issues as diverse as public safety communications to international spectrum negotiations. the technology challenges facing the united states will you all please join me in providing a warm welcome to the intersect stage commissioner anna gomez? [applause]

let's pretend this is your first time in front of an audience of technology professionals. i'm sure it's not but we love having you here and appreciate. your arrival was eagerly anticipated might be an understatement. you filled out the commission and are joining a majority of. i want to start because everybody here whether they know it or not has issues before the fcc. why you assumed this role the role of the fcc and the role that you would play as a commissioner and what your priorities are, tell us what it's meant to you coming into this office? >> thank you again for having me

and i want to point out that i've known you for almost 30 years that i've been and i'm just delighted to see how well you are doing. i would like to talk about my regulatory philosophy which i'm still finessing so i have a bit to go but overarching lay, i want to ensure competition drives vibrant innovation for the good of consumers. what that means is ensuring the users in the united states are connected to high-speed broadband and that it's affordable and means having beans havingspectrum for new ane services. ensuring public safety has the resources it needs to meet its mission and also that consumers

have access to services that make them safe as well. on the media cited means protecting localism and making sure that we have diversity and competition in the media marketplace. i particularly want to make sure that we take all of our actions of keeping in mind how it affects historically underrepresented communities and so that's basically in a package where i come from. let me ask about a couple of issues that you've mentioned in that framework one is spectrum and another is affordable access to broadband, both very much in the news largely through no fault of the commission but through some action or inaction is better to describe and issues

ranging from disputes on how much broadband connectivity we should have as we take off from the runway and a lot of issues in between that and at a high level, what are some of the things you would like them to pay attention to in the spectrum debates and what's coming up at the fcc or what should we be urging congress to do to make sure the spectrum is unlocked for the best uses. >> there's been this amazing thirst for spectrum for new and innovative services and it's not slowing down. if there is a constant search for finding ways to repurpose the spectrum.

there's a lot of different services that rely on the spectrum from the normal mobile broadband now to satellites, science issues. i just got back from dubai. i was there for the first week of the confidence where all of the issues were front and center and one of the items because the fact that we are looking at a framework for allocating spectrum and how will be allocated for these particular uses so spectrum is a big deal and i'm glad you raised to the

authority. the pioneered options as a way to efficiently assign spectrum licenses and it is a much faster process in the traditional during a beauty contest between the different license applicants and because the authorization expired and congress hasn't reauthorized it there's a lot of work the commission cannot do in order to prepare for additional spectrum and every day that goes by that we don't have that authority it's going to put us further and further behind in terms of new licenses for new services. >> you mentioned the importance of those two license use of spectrum mobile broadband that we all rely on from different

providers so i want to ask about that balance and how you are looking at the need to make sure that innovation we all benefit from ranging from garage door openers and baby monitors and everything in between how do you view the role in terms of allocating the license and unlicensed to make sure there's innovation in both areas? we need to find the appropriate balance and they did to take action when it allocated the van which was unprecedented to have that much spectrum allocated and larger bandwidth unlicensed. that was one of the items we did very well at the communication conference that remained for the wi-fi services which is important not just because they

are bringing in the next generation of wi-fi that needs to keep up with of the high-bandwidth broadband but also because it's so important to maintain for equipment making it lower cost and more deployed so very pleased with the outcome of the good work the delegation did at the wrc. >> which is something since the president plucked you from one role where you were heavily involved to another where you are still heavily involved i'm sure that was particularly pleasing to see that work continue. you also mentioned broadband as part of your portfolio on board at the commission. the news of this week is the potential end of a very important program that made

affordable broadband available to address that digital divide and i think the commissioner has announced that tomorrow is an unfortunate milestone should congress not act between now and tomorrow which is probably unlikely what should we be thinking about the importance of that program and other programs that congress may or may not move forward and what should we be asking congress to do to continue to address the digital divide? >> so glad you raised this question and i do hope that congress passes the current a bipartisan bill that has been dropped to provide funding to extend the programs. it provides support to close to 23 million households nationwide all over the country, rural, tribal, everywhere. of these are folks that qualify

under the program and we believe we will run out of funding sometime at which point there will be no more support for these households. i'm very concerned about it for some reasons we want to make sure every user is connected. it's so important for participation and society and our economy. it's important for finding a job, applying to college, doing homework, doing remote school, telehealth, seniors. it is central to our lives now that of those who cannot to be connected are going to fall further and further behind. for me though i also want to make it clear there is broad thd effects on the economy because you don't know what kind of

innovation you're going to bring from that one student who would not have that connection but somehow is able to create some type of online product that becomes the next, i don't know, google. also telehealth reduces the cost to medicare and medicaid by 23%. the majority of subscribers are seniors in high costs to serve. for that reason they tend to be higher priced despite the universal service goals and we need to make sure that the companies that are providing the services are able to continue to provide the services in addition

to spending tens of billions of dollars throughout every corner of america we need to make sure that those are sustainable without subscribers they won't necessarily be sustainable so we are looking at you downstream affect losing the support for 23 million households that could have a significant effect on the economy. >> it would be good to see congress take some action there and a lot of communities i think close to half of the program participants are military as well so definitely important for the nation. want to ask about two other areas important to the tech industry that they've recently stepped back to and one is cybersecurity and the trustmark. i was pleased to participate and we will hear later who convened the group at the white house the fcc and power to to move that

forward so tell me about this later security efforts and how important you think those are. >> i'm very excited about the trustmark. if they put out another proposed rulemaking that would create much like the energy star logo that means that it makes standards for cyber hygiene and it also had a qr code to find out more about the manufacturing of the product itself and how secure it is. i think it could become a real competitive edge if it is adopted widely innovative consumers actually accept it as something that is trustworthy. i'm excited about the industry is excited about the trustmark

and i think that it could be a good public-private partnership between the fcc and manufacturers to lead to better cyber outcomes. it's a voluntary program so what you want is to be market driven and to make sure that it succeeds through wide deployment. >> we look forward to helping support that program and it is as you said a competitive differentiator for companies to use to inform consumers about the care they take with the manufacturing of the deployment of products. the last technology question, not surprisingly given what we've been talking about all day, ai. we've seen fcc engagement with aia in the headlines this week helping track down a robo call callerwho enabled ei to be usedo spoof the president in a political primary.