only figured out what the computer was for. the digital revolution. the maker revolution is really a combination of the two, digital meet industrial.

it is the digitization of the manufacturing technology but not just introducing digital technology into factories because we had that decades, since the 1970s. what it is is personal computers to democratization, the introduction of digital manufacturing tools to anybody and everybody. that is when we see the web innovation mall, when we see the creativity, the energy of everybody start to come to bear on the biggest industries in the world. this is the maker movement. there are many definitions of the maker movement. i think the credit for the term goes to dale dougherty who works for o'reilly of o'reilly publishing company. around 2005-2016 recognized there was something going on, he saw web generation starting to use their hands more and work

together in communities and share ideas a little more. digital tools -- he created a magazine for the movement. baker affairs which are hugely successful, 100,000 people come over the weekend, there was one in new york a couple weekends ago. the maker of movement was something they identified first, leading edge tech publishers, so not incidental that they spotted this was technologically driven ball so -- i hope tim o'reilly will forgive me the roots are in the 60s kind of social change, power of the people. they have their roots in the country and recognize justice steve jobs it a cultural revolution under this as well. it was a combination of digital technology and new tools allowing people to do

extraordinary things and the recognition that people want to use their hands. we are all makers on something. if you r cook your maker. if you our gardener you are a maker. kids are born makers. there is the dignity in holding something made in your hand but we didn't have the skills to do this stuff. most of us didn't have the skills and what they recognize is a digital technologies, good with screens, what they realize is still shut -- digital technology will allow us to capture ideas and make some real without having to get to a machine. that is the maker movement. the web degeneration meets the real world, a new generation of technology allows us, not just the compelling -- personal-computer and the web, to start to compete with the biggest companies in the world and create a new manufacturing industry that is grassroots, democratized, bottom-up and just like the web can compete with the biggest industrial giants in

the world with a new kind of innovation mall. let me talk a little bit about what it means for our country and the economy. the industrial revolution -- let me stop and turn to the competition. thank you. [applause] >> i appreciate you doing this and i think it is very interesting that you have drawn these parallels between what is happening in the physical industrial revolution and the previous antecedence, semiconductor revolution, digital revolution as you talk about, one thing i remember from watching the growth of the web, reflected already in the questions coming right up, people are a little bit skeptical that what is happening

in hobbyists's garages is relevant to the mass manufacturing and move the needle. i will share one question from the audience. i completely understand the applicability of 3d printing a think you have way overstated what is or will ever be possible with 3d printing. i understand your logic but those who have not read the printed will be disappointed. please comment. >> 3d printers are just one of a whole generation of tools, there are laser cutters and emt machines and embroidery, you buy sewing machine, basically the digital application tool as well. three printers that we gravitate toward for a couple reasons, made him very accessible. second of all, one of the

things, replicate ears, star trek, would be awesome, let me explain a little bit more, and also 3d printing is not a mass production technology. it is a rapid prototype technology. a great way to make one of something which is good to make a prototype you can make many of or you want something just for you. you don't want mass producing. today industrial 3d printers and my robot company, fantastic, at home we have makerbought and it is pretty crude mica dot matrix printer, the ones you buy at home take a filament in plastic, the same stuff you use for lego and melt it and squeeze it out and there are other ways, liquid

resin, powder, etc.. you can go to a site where they have 3d printers and you cannot -- upload the same design, stainless steel, the quality is astounding. 3d prints, turbine blades for jet engines. there are limits to what you can do with a 3d printer but not many. the question is simply how long will it take? 15 years to get from dot matrix to photo quality ink jet on your desktop. we are not matrix phase right now, how long will it take? i don't think it will be 15 years. in part because it shares the same mechanical technology as an ink jet. the 3d printer is x why is the. interesting stuff gets into materials.

right now in my printer we can do one, in plastic, pretty low resolution. the next one, two colors and the next will do three, is and mix them and you start to be able to print images as well as shapes. the one after that we use more than plastic but maybe i will put the electrical wiring in a long plastic and now use other substances like a start based substance that is by degradable. i had a privilege to talk to craig venter, this biologist in new york who is developing a printer -- we know how to sequence genes supereasily, gene sequences are not hard, you can find the mont ebay but dna

synthesis, we know how to read the dna and print the dna, that is dna synthesis, a big industrial tool, desktop size, every year we all get our flu shots, guess what the flu is going to be this year? we never know. it propagates from asia. rather than guessing at the beginning of the season, the doctor sends you an e-mail saying turns out the fluid is this, here is a rococo, print out your own vaccine and get a little liquid and drink it, that is a 3d printer as well, printing dna which is a physical material. obviously at this point you have to have questions of what could

go wrong, ideas like -- a little too littoral. this you won't print and iphone soon, if and electronics at various stores and semiconductors. it is pretty bullish on this. i think will happen fast and the only thing -- the only caveat i would make it is not mass production technology. the prototype technology, want to make that million of something a bit goes and injection mold. >> i want to talk about disaster scenarios, drones, synthetic biology, starting to get nervous but before we get into that we want to talk about what are the

impact on the economy, macro economic impacts, people talking about job creators and bringing manufacturing back for. what you are talking about is the difference between mass production and this prototype technology, the last two ways to make a duck. we could start there. >> when you jenna 3d printer it is incredibly exciting, you holding your hand and post it on youtube or tweet about it and you think this is great. i would like one too. then you realize you could spend your whole life watching the printer work. you have to learn a new set of technologies. the good news is i actually went back in 1977 to the apple ii but

even more perfect to go to 1984 with the macintosh and the first laser printer. we forget how mind blowing that was. the desktop publishing, it doesn't sound exciting that that was amazing. publishing used to be something -- if rules paper on railway cards, publishing was hard and now you do it on your desktop with software you deck and collect and high-quality special stuff and that was superexciting. those printers spoke a language which was the same language spoken by the biggest printers in the world so you could prototype your desktop and upload it to a printer and you could publish and that was exciting and we did the same

thing with the web. then along came the web and you can put it out to the world and broadcast and distribute. that was superexciting and now we are doing the same with physical goods. at fresen post script, but we now have is a new language, we have languages called chico and others. the same language that drives the product on your desk will drive the biggest factories in the world. upload your file and rather than 3d printing they will do the inverse. it is an additive technology that builds up something. you can cut away the object. when you cut away the object you have a whole, and an injection mold where you and make millions for a penny. to go from one to many as a

matter of using the same filing and outgoing in a different technology, in a different flakes. you can just -- you don't have to be anybody, just upload your files, they will take the credit card and mass-produced for you. robots' in china will work for you for. it is pretty exciting. >> in the software world when we got to this continuous passage of scale where you could arrayed on a prototype quickly and get feedback and take the same product from your dorm room at harvard all the way to a public company, the same basic technology, same underlying language, and. a whole new wave of entrepreneurship, very excited but we have a lot of skeptics. a big concern is the question, how will this affect the future of american manufacturing. about people worried that because in a democratized world,

does this mean it will result in fewer firms, less choice for people and products they have and if this is going to destroy -- some people as optimistic they will destroy traditional manufacturing what are people going to do? >> i wrote a book about what would happen when the entry into publishing fell to zero which the web did and the answer is it creates an explosion of choice. a lot of people became producers who couldn't have been producers before but the biggest misunderstanding is it was going to be the end of the blockbuster and it wasn't. it was the end of a monopoly of the blockbuster. hollywood still exist even though we have youtube and recognizing when you involve more people in creation they tend to grow the pie. they tend to find new ways to

create stuff and their creativity tends to expand our potential as a culture and economy. mainstream media still exists even though the web provides competition. the same thing will tend to happen with manufacturing. i went from playing with lego with my kids in five years to two factories, one in tijuana and one in san diego. we have 40 employees. we run sophisticated machines, and electronics manufacturing, you could say we compete with aerospace but we don't because we are addressing entirely different market. we are looking at personal friends and they're looking at military drones. >> put a few questions people can't understand what business you have running a drone company. >> my wife is among them. a drone is just a flying robot.

autopilots and gps and cameras and things like that. something you may be able to relate to. out in the bay there are wind surfers. we all want school videos of doing extreme sports. when your wind surfing it is hard to get good video of that. you want the camera 30 feet behind you and 30 feet up focus on you the whole time and you can hire a helicopter to do this but it is pretty expensive. better get on that board or you might just have a robot camera telling you around and that is where a personal drone is. just have a box in your pocket all they follow me box and you push a button, a maligned laid helicopter sitting on the short takes off,s over and positioned itself 30 feet behind and 30 feet above you and follows you around as you do your cool stuff and when the batter gets low it

goes back to the shore. star wars personal growed, there are people in the bay doing it now--not right now. this is possible, very scary, it becomes self aware etc. but remember the internet was a military technology. computers were military technology and now we thing we understand personal applications. we are right there with drones as well. >> people wanted to know -- going back to the kind of consequences of this you also wrote about how this will require a whole new financing method for developing these companies and funding them not in the traditional way of top down and the lot of questions about our pcs going to understand this, our private equities? probably not, certainly not at this stage and we have seen the emergence -- new ways, almost

accidental ways to bring financing in to the maker economy. >> i knew about this application and the web innovation model. i could see the maker movement under way but didn't have unanswered, kind of like bootstrap, that is how we did it but it is not always the best answer and along came kick starter. how many people have started a factory kickstart project? at least half of the room. that is fantastic and it is telling as well. you were the venture capitalists of the maker movement and you probably knew that. kicks starter is the crowd fundings site, basically a way to pre order products that sort of test whether these products deserve it in the first place.

does three wonderful things. the first -- when you think about traditional product development it is all wrong. what you need to do is all your costs at the front end, you have to do your r&d, tool up, get component inventories, manufacturing, all this money sunk into this warehouse, only after you have done all that can use their buying it and the money comes back to you and that is why you have to raise money from venture capitalists, you need money now and don't get paid until later. pre order it and we will get the money now when we needed and we don't have to go mortgage house, losing money for ritter in time to bring in needed. it does market research. there's the famous pebble smart watch of $100,000.

it was never going to be made. if you fail your targets it tells you it will not be successful. use save yourself a lot of time and money so market research is wonderful and some of you talk about the ability to lower the risk. the minimum viable unit, passing that threshold confirms minimum viable unit. the third ding it does is build communities. all those people who pre order product are part of a movement, they are part of your team, there evangelizing, start tweeting this and word of mouth and comments, they feel that they have a right to tell you what they think of your product and you have an obligation to listen. the kick starter smart watch is a perfect example. i love it and which was more

waterproof. bluetooth fairy, bluetooth 4 will be cooler. unlike more color. and the team wasn't and responded and now all those people who participated in the project, pre order a product that because of the way it is structured they are part of it and when it comes out, this is the kind of marketing money can't buy. that is the answer, that is one answer to the funding model. there are still venture-capital lists, a good option, friends and family, credit-card is, getting cheaper and cheaper, not a bad way to bootstrap operation but the great thing is this is a business model for maker movement companies, it is not hard, sell things for more than they cost, period. sell things for more than they cost. this is the seventeenth century

english applecart would know this, we are laboring in the internet business where the product, the intended cost of manufacturing but labor and how we will come up with business models. with physical stuff is supereasy. add to your production cost, people get it wrong and don't understand where the pressure is that basically it is not like calculus. the great thing about it is if you set it up right you get paid on day one. >> what is your favorite project? >> i love the pebble smart watch. on a quantified self junkie -- bones measuring as we speak, i made little old school. it is -- i love not only because

it is the kind of watch i use but it measures my activity but i love the fact that the same week they announced the smart what sony announced their smart watch. you may not have heard of it, you heard of the pebble smart watch, kids in palo alto out compete biggest consumer electronics company in the world, there's a sense of what the movement can do. a great experiment to watch. this is going to be -- when we talk about the internet, it will come out of the maker movement. that level of innovation, that pace of engagement in the community. >> other consequences, a lot of questions about whether the organizational forms the companies will take? will they have to borrow the bureaucracy and coordination techniques of big companies to compete on a head to head bases? will be a new kind of company? >> i wish i could tell you it is

totally virtual land open and transparent. it may start that way but the moment you get into real production manufacturing suddenly you have huge respect for enterprise resource planning and roles and responsibilities and lines of credit, basically you get huge respect for traditional manufacturing very quick or you don't get there. our drone community is open source, we are all out there and transparent but as we got bigger and everything got more complicated we found out we were starting to look like you have roles and responsibilities, team leaders, flyers, supply chain management, accountants, lawyers and we have 4 good reasons. when you deal with this kind of scale, you have to -- there is a reason manufacturing, america is

the leading manufacturer in the world. we are pretty good at using technology in industries like manufacturing, we find ourselves not coming up with a radical new kind of manufacturing but more getting to where they already were faster and not having to be a big company to do it. >> the change in what is required to get started, keep coming back to that. we don't have huge costs and huge infrastructure, relief fundamental. >> the office is moving to the cloud, the one difference is the maker companies though they end up using traditional manufacturing technologies, the one thing that differentiates them is community at the core of what they do. the recognition that your customers are part of your innovation model if you structure it right, bring them

into the process early on, that is very well like, lessens the major community has applied. >> you are listening to the commonwealth club of california radio program. our guest, wired editor and author chris anderson is discussing a new vision for entrepreneurship that brings manufacturing to the desktop. i thought we would switchgears. one thing i like about your book is it is not just a business phenomenon but a personal aspect to it, you share your story of making things with your daughter's, maybe you could share a little about that. >> after i got into this, i am going to need -- i have a tiny desk and started to pile really high and my wife was getting annoyed, a workshop. it is time. so we built one and it is like oh wait, this is coming back to me. i remember when i was a kid i

spent my summers and los angeles with my grandfather and this is 30 years earlier and i hadn't -- i had forgotten about it. it all flashed back to me and i realized it had been in my blood all along, my grandfather was a swiss immigrant and los angeles in the 1920s working in hollywood in the mechanical business. was all gears but at home he was an inventor. he did exactly what a swiss engineer who is a watchmaker would invent in los angeles in the 1920s and 30s which is to say los angeles was booing, there were greening the desert, they had sprinkler systems, automated heads the etc. but you had to turn off naturally.

realized we need to put a watch on top of the sprinkler system, a timer so it will be on automatic so he invented the automatic sprinkler system. did he have one? no. my grandfather passed bought ago but that is what he invented. he would teach me about mechanical drawing and as i got older, jeans jacket and a workshop, spent summers in his workshop learning how to use metal aids, and one summer we got a box, we're going to make gas powered engines this summer. i ordered the kit and i built model airplanes, and we opened the box and it was four blocks of metal. where is the engine? blueprints, and we literally did

it. and master machinist, take a block of metal and out comes the solyndra, piston and crankshaft and it was stunning. but then i forgot about it for 30 years, the reason being i didn't have his skills. i wasn't a machinist. he could take an idea and build from drafting board to prototype because he had the skills and i didn't. what i needed was all that complexity to be turned into a black box and that black box was my printer. but taking the craftsman skills out of the process and learning from ideas to the push of a button, that is what brought me back into it and i realized it was in my blood all along waiting for the technology to be ready. my children as they grow up it will be different, i have three daughters, and we were a little strict about video game time.

two hours a weekend per day. the girls are into the sims, a doll house game, a virtual doll house, really cool home furnishings and put people in and went it is time, screen is off, got to play in the real world. you have real balls, why don't you play with that? is not as cool. i am pretty good at doing research for these things, and first of all, he is very expensive. second of all, very little choice and it is all the wrong size. there's no standardization of dollhouse furniture scale. it is a slightly different scale and the rest of the house. you actually need to to sit properly on the couch, kept getting it wrong. i am not buying any more doll furniture. it is not working out.

however we do have a 3d printer so we went on line to a web site which is a repository of open designs people put out there and we found there are the most beautiful designs created by a designer -- by day she designed sets for broadway, she is a set designer in new york and by night she designs beautiful doll house furniture's that gives away the designs for free and so we download the man scaled them and all you have to do is pull aside the scale and print the mouth can the girls paint them, they can make any dollhouse furniture they want, anything they can imagine we can create, they painted them to make it personal and a treasure this stuff away they would not treasure anything mass-produced and bought in walmart. they put them on the shelves. my boys do war hammer x conlan

as you might imagine, probably violating intellectual property somewhere but they too can make it exactly the way they want and treasury in a way they wouldn't otherwise. my grandfather to my children, we found a thread that runs through all of this. we are all makers just waiting for the right tools. >> there's a real back to the roots nostalgia woven through this. thinking about the whole earth catalog and the original managers ran machine shops and a lot of questions about wood shop and other classes remove from curriculum, this old making strain in american life and research but from robots. what do you make of that robot accommodation? >> i used the word robot for a fact as well but the reality is it is machines, computers.

we have an opportunity to attack the instinct in all of us, not only allow us to do more cool stuff but share this and inspire others. i have two homework assignments for the audience. if you have children, consider this might be the holiday season you get that 3d printer. remember when we were kids and our parents got a home computer? probably cause $2,000, pretty significant. it wasn't clear what it was for. the sense was it was the 20 first century still and it would bring it into the home and kids would figure out how to use this. we are right about there with the 3d printer. they cost $2,000. you would have a home 3d printer. it seems clear the 20 first centuries ago, we are not clear, we probably didn't know when we

got a first home computers will eventually emerge but we do know it will inspire the kids to imagine what they can be but the time is right. this holiday season is the one that you should consider that. the second homework assignment is if you have a relationship with your local school especially if you have kids, we have an opportunity right now to right the wrong, wrong was a perfectly reasonable choice but shop class, home economics, industrial arts, that was something in high school when we were kids when manufacturing jobs were considerable viable route to the middle class and a new were not anymore and about replaced by computer classes or liability insurance were quite dangerous. they got wiped out. we have an opportunity to bring it back and not by reinstating traditional shop class but simply adding a couple 3d printers to the computer lab we have already got.

and now you have a design lab. to insert the word design into our educational curriculum and normally design but digital design is an opportunity to really teach a twenty-first century skill and when you think a kid, right now our computer labs are teaching our point. if they could teach them to use even mine craft which they think is a game and design stuff and prints it and take it home, that is going to change the kids's life, that is going to blow their mind and make a realize the navy designed something they can do. it is not a capital design, it doesn't require an advanced degree but the point is we will create a generation of makers, that is when twenty-first century skills turn into the curriculum and we create an industrial revolution to bring manufacturing back to the u.s.. >> it is really exciting. my parents had a home computer

like you described and after the purchase changed my life and if you look at the story of a lot of successful internet entrepreneurs, since he was a kid, he was in his parents' basement, that is true for a lot of entrepreneurs, so to create that opportunity for the next generation to do not just in the internet but industrial settings -- >> if i write 20 years from now someone sitting in this chair having just taken a company public will say what changed my life is my parents brought home a printer. >> before anybody goes out and buys a printer for their kids you have to deal with the armageddon question which has been pouring in. my first question is are you at all nervous about this? we have been talking about a positive affect and i'm very excited about it but i just wrote a book called killed

decision about killer drones that keep to manufacture and condemn any where by hobbyists and start destroying -- won't ruin it for anybody but pretty nasty stuff and they have the ability to make their own killed decision. flying blowtorches that can disassemble boats. nothing to see here. no worry. >> a fantastic book and the third book with damon which is brilliant. >> daniel and i have been in touch, this is modeled after our community. informed by knowledge of our community. our latest book -- i was on a plane reading on my kindle, they served the meal so i closed my laptop and was reading a book, irresponsible engineers would create these autonomous swarms of killer drones and they run amok and i closed my kindle and

opened my laptop and started my swarming drone algorithm, that is how it happens so i closed the laptop and i am like no, because if i don't do it, i couldn't help myself. it needs to be done, needs to be created. our storm will be a peaceful storm. we will promote civil responsibility. but i don't know how to stop the march of technology and all technology can be used for coal. computers can be used by hackers or hit them on the head with a hammer and here's what we do. that is how -- i should have shut the laptop but here is what we do. we give technology away on the internet to anybody. we are not the only ones doing it. there are a lot of people doing that and we feel we have an opportunity to promote safe and responsible use and we are really hard core about not with

telling people what is save and responsible which is don't weapon eyes, that is a good start, but also 400 feet, digital landscape and things like that. the others we have reached out to all regulators, the pentagon, flown to washington, quarterly briefings, you guys need to be in this community. we will open up everything and you don't even know what is possible because it is not my job to regulate, it is not my job to enforce. it is my job to help the regulators do their job better so we feel our responsibility is to bring those entities that we trust protecting our safety, bring them into the process, allow them to see what is possible, stop the bad guys early. we have a deal that if you say something in the community, like here is my drone idea, and go a real long distance, might be a

little dangerous, we are like that sounds totally sketchy and we will call off our friend the fbi just like that and we told everybody we would do it and we feel that is our responsibility to let the pros to their job. >> is it time -- [talking over each other] >> robotics, rules would stop robots. it makes everyone bring this up, turns out for a robot to be smart enough to apply the three loss, already taken over the world. that is artificial intelligence, cognition and this stuff. just shooting guns is easy. robots are good at bad stuff which is really reassuring to people. that is not the way it is going to happen. we can't, and you our robots with intelligence to make ethical choices. we need to change society and culture to watch what is going

on. you all are regulatory and surveillance -- we can spot it early. >> back to synthetic biology. questions about are we going to worry about hobbyists doing a killer virus, we need to worry about the dr. e-mailing you dna for your vaccine, we don't know how easy e-mail is doing just to your kids. >> i talked about this. right now dna synthesis is done by big companies and you can design games on the internet, students do it, you can design your own sequence and send it to censuses labs. get back a little vial of dna. however, they are pretty good at

spotting bad stuff, good at starting -- spotting small plots for example. we trust them to protect us. that is what a few companies are doing all the work. what if those things are on every desktop? what we are going to do is to insure that there is something that does a little look up. you look up on the internet and it needs to pass the test of not being dangerous and only then will the fringe. right now photocopies, i have a photocopier that has the intelligence to look for -- i don't know if it is true, never tried to photocopy a dollar bill but supposed to be -- text currency, or a big water mark so it will work. you have some precedent to suggest you can put technology in the machine that will check.

if it -- could it be hacked by somebody? probably. but that is the best answer to that question. [talking over each other] >> i am an optimist. i think we can never enters made these things ahead of time. when i was a kid, growing up, there were test-tube babies out there. remember test-tube babies? when i was a kid, in the 70s, it was like i actually thought they were going to grow the babies in test tubes. i was a little confused about this. today, our babysitters are test-tube babies. at the time it was superscary, playing god and then we did it and it was not so scary. we are comfortable with it but now a cologne -- that would be

wrong. clone is where test-tube baby was 25 years ago. so basically as with any radical technology we have to try it out and see how we feel if and did our toes into and probed a little bit and adapt how we feel about social norms for and risks. >> very cool that the three laws of robotic actually have to apply to the community. nothing to do with the robot that all but that is the challenge for us. >> exactly. we can't predict where technology is going. we can't -- all we can do is learn, try it on for size, see where it goes and adapt as a society and as governments to real threats rather than imagined ones. >> i'm feeling optimistic again. i remember when i was learning about the history of the internet, early internet doctor,

grew up with computers and the dot.com bubble and feeling i had missed the boat on the technology revolution, all the great companies had been founded and there was nothing else to build or work on and i was a complete idiot and didn't see the possibility of the social web, everything that has happened, billions of dollars that were created, i missed the boat. we must have some people listening to this, the book has already been written, the movement is under way. that person thinking they missed the boat, how did they catch up and started? >> i hope no one is thinking that. the biggest industries in the world have really not been -- they have been touched by technology but not a social models of the web. what we have here, what the web promises is the missing markets we knew how to reach markets of ten million, how to reach

markets of 10, that was communities, we didn't know how to reach 10,000 and a long comes the web and some of those marks will become marks of ten million. we found a fleece for minority tastes. >> 10,000 in the fiscal world. we see it already has, if you live in brooklyn, they know all about 10,005. as people get more discriminating in their tastes and more informed about their choices they move out of mass-market smurfs things that are just right for them. that is handcrafted. imagine all the appeal of technology of the industrial and distribution malls of the kick starters of world and you have taken as market to 10,000 and they don't have to be -- you can

have global treated markets. how many nichees in the fiscal world are there that don't make sense for mass manufacturing, don't make sense for your little workshop but are now reaching the industrialization of the maker movement? >> i wanted to read something you growth toward the end of the book. the maker movement tips the balance for the cultures with the best innovation model, not the cheapest labor. societies that embraced co creation of a community-based development win. they harness the best talent and more motivated people than any domain. look for those countries with the most vibrant web communities and the most innovative web companies grow. the set of values that predict success in the twenty-first century market. a lot of the questions we got were about silicon valley in san francisco became the center of the digital revolution. where should we be looking for the center of the maker revolution? i am sure a lot of people -- of 5 want my city to be the silicon valley of the maker movement what are the steps we should be

taking to foster that kind of innovation and growth? >> the great thing about it is it doesn't have to be a center. it is happening everywhere. the second thing is really cool surprises of the last five years that brooklyn, new york has turned out to be as much a part of the maker movement is any place. how is it possible that we are bringing manufacturing to brooklyn? surely is not about low-cost labor and the answer is as the tools get smaller and smarter and cheaper it is less and less about big manufacturing and more and more about design, ideas, the creativity, the human component, and new york is the design center of america, more design schools than anywhere else the new york's design skills compensate for its labor costs inefficiencies and that is fantastic to move manufacturing

to where the most creative smartest people are. you don't have to move manufacturing to the lowest cost of labor or brown sites in the middle of industrial waste land. you can move manufacturing to where people live and where they have ideas and needs. is a shorter supply chain, more sustainable manufacturing, just-in-time manufacturing, contact between the way things are made and consumed, a fundamentally healthy model. >> we have time for one last question. i know whenever you open questions up, the power of the internet and distributed anything, you get one really wacky question. i thought we would end on that. i would love to see this scenario. software tools honors used by people design cool stuff and 3d printers on the moon which produce that using local materials. how realistic is this and what's the food you see produce up there? >> that is the star trek replicated. that is where what you have in

that model, there is a box. the box has so many feedstocks. whether their atoms or molecules, imagine piles of goo that you would say you want something, it would just download the recipe, it would mix them in the right proportions and fabricate them in the right layers, a symbol stuff and you have got it. molecular assembly, atomic construction, doesn't violate the laws of physics. i don't know how you'd do it but it could be done. >> how far away is that? >> pretty far off. maybe it wouldn't be that hard. in that small, talking about atomic assembly, we do molecular

assembly all the time. it is called your body. every selling your body knows how to do this already. we have a hard time creating synthetic machines to do it but biology is a fantastic factory. it knows how to take instructions which is called dna, assembled commodity proteins and molecules floating through your body and create the most extraordinary machinery. so we know how to do it and the answer is going to be less about machinery and more about harnessing the lessons of biology and creating biological factories that can assemble molecule's for us. >> biology is a design challenge. with that we give our thanks to chris anderson, editor in chief of wired and author of the new book "makers: the new industrial revolution". we thank our audience on radio, television and the internet. copies of chris anderson's new book "makers: the new industrial revolution" are on sale in the lobby.

he will be pleased to sign them immediately following the program. we appreciate your allowing him to make his way to the signing table as quickly as possible. this meeting of the commonwealth club of california, a place where you are in the know, is adjourned. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction author or booked you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or tweak as at twitter.com/booktv. >> on your screen is a professor of history at the u.s. naval academy, author of several books including his most recent, two families, generations and the story of america's influence in the middle east. who was daniel was?

>> the founder of the university of beirut. >> how did he go about doing that? >> he went to a lot of american entrepreneurial spirit and the financial backing -- >> dodge cars? >> a copper conglomerate which was built in the nineteenth century. >> what was reverend louis's goal in founding the american university? >> it was different from his life's work. he determined to convert muslims to christianity, very quickly realized that wasn't going to happen and the way to make a connection was not to convert them but to educate them and improve their lives in tangible, concrete ways because that is what they responded to positively and once he had that in sight, he ran with it and

developed what later became and remains the greatest university in the middle east, a harvard of the middle east, and it is an american institution. >> is it still open? >> is indeed. it has weathered many tough years in the lebanese civil war from 1975-1991, but it remains open first -- even for the tough times of the civil war. >> who owns it? who runs it? >> it is run by a very impressive faculty of professors and administrators who are middle eastern and american. the current president is a direct descendant of daniel bliss, and egypt, just by training and shared one of the important department at the university of chicago before he took up this job a couple years ago. >> is it coincidental he is a direct descendant of reverent bliss or is that on purpose? >> it is the happy coincidence.

he is an extremely well credentialed and capable scholar, administrator but he has a personal passion for the school because of his family connection. >> who owns the american university or who runs it? >> the faculty of middle eastern. the vast majority of students -- >> is associated with a religion or another school? >> it is deliberately secular and nonsectarian. >> what does it cost to go there for your? >> i have no idea. >> what did it cost in reverend bliss at today's? >> i don't know the answer to that question either but i do know that over time it began to open its doors not just the offspring of the elite but people of all ethnicities, classes and religions and its appeal has its merits. >> how is it viewed in a lease currently and how was it viewed when reverend bliss opened it? >> those are two separate question.

i will start with chronologically earlier first. there was a lot of suspicion on the part of the middle easterners when the school opened in the 1860s. it was run by christian missionaries, americans who didn't have deep roots in the region but rather quickly it became apparent to middle easterners who were not just orthodox christians but muslims and jews that this was the best place to get the best possible education and within a generation by 1900 it had become what it remains to this day which is the harvard of the middle east and what is magnificent about that is it is an all-inclusive institution founded by americans that exist to serve the interests of the people of the middle east regardless of background and it is an example of the united states giving to our region and not taking from it. >> speaking of which, do you see

the a b as being a part of american diplomacy? >> only indirectly? the leadership of that school has traditionally attempted to maintain its independence from the united states government which i think it's appropriate and practical but it serves american interests in the sense that it gives middle easterners of whatever background and awareness that the united states has a humanitarian presence in the middle east. it has not always been about access to will, close relationship with israel or deployment of military purpose -- forces for purposes of national security. americans have been there for 150 years getting to the region, and much more practical and beneficial way for the people of the region and not just for us. that is why i wrote the book. i wanted them to know and the american people to know that story. >> who is malcolm karen and what happened to him? >> he was a professor of

political science at ucla who the before i arrived for my ph.d. had grown up in beirut, his parents had been on the faculty and though he had made a very distinguished career for himself in the united states as a scholar he went home in the early 80s to lead the school during a period of particularly difficult times when they route had fractured due to the civil war and the israeli incursion of 1962. the city was a mess, the school was under assault, there was a lot of danger but he believed going back and running the school and providing good leadership in a time of crisis was the best thing to do for an institution that he loved and he gave his life for the school. he was assassinated in january of 1984. >> by who and how? >> most likely by the fanatical

wing of hezbollah. group known as islamic jihad that comprised lebanese shia and historically underprivilege, excluded from the politics and economics of the country and ideological affinity for the regime in iran brought to power in 1979 and radicalized by the israeli incursion into south lebanon in nearly 1980s. it was a very toxic makes that led them to take radical steps that climaxed in the assassination of malcolm. was an american and not only american but very visible presence of the university and the middle east. there was no more higher profile example of america's involvement in that region than the presidency of a and