thank you for coming, all of you. [ applause ] >> i don't think i have to do this introduction. a very, very warm welcome. >> thank you. >> you're already getting a sense of how much we appreciate your coming here. it is such an honor, such a joy to welcome you -- it's not on? >> turn it on. >> give it to me. >> they told me it would be on. >> hello. experience makes perfect. >> this is power. can you hear me now?

>> let's switch that out. >> how about this? >> better. >> thank you. thank you. i was saying, a warm welcome. we are full of joy and appreciation that you have said yes to come to rutgers university to help us celebrate some important anniversaries, the 250th anniversary of the university and the 60th of the eagleton institute of politics. what a pleasure. [ applause ] president barchi has mentioned the background of today's event. speaking personally, i will underscore that this is what you dream about when you write a fan letter. that -- or more than you dream about. that fan letter from me was on

behalf of the remarkable student body. we are privileged to teach at rutgers educating students about civic engagement and the importance of political participation, about taking responsibility for our representative democracy is at the heart of the eagleton institute of politics mission and at the core of today's special event. the response to this event has been tremendous, to say the least, and therefore, our move to this rather large venue, somewhat larger than eagleton normally invites guests to visit with us. that has made a casual question-and-answer session impossible. instead, students from the three rutgers campuses in new brunswick, camden and newark have submitted questions in advance and some of them have been invited to join us on the court. but before we hear from the students, i have the privilege

of asking several questions. and i'm going to begin with the fan letter that was written about the book that i read a couple of years ago and, which had such a tremendous impact on me and so inspiring. and i would like you to talk a little bit about the title for that book. it is called, "my beloved world." would you tell us how you came to that title and what it means? >> as those of you who have read my book know, it comes from a poem by a puerto rican author, one who had been displaced from puerto rico for a period of time. and he was talking about the memories that he had of his puerto rico. and my editor called me up because we had been going back and forth on potential titles for about three years, the process of writing my book.

and he said, sonia, have you ever read jose? i said, in college. did you read this poem? i said, sure. he said, go back to it. it's a much longer poem than the excerpt i have in the book, but i finished the poem and i said, the title is "my beloved world." and he said, that's what i thought, too. and when i thought about it, i actually had some people who didn't like the title. they wanted something like "mommy dearest," you know, "the life and struggles of." and i realized that when i wrote the book, i had in me the objectivity and impartiality that is a part of my profession. it's a craft in my profession.

you're taught to look at things as objectively as you humanly can. and so as i wrote about my book, i hope you're all aware, that i was painfully objective in terms of talking about both the challenges of my life and the good times of my life. because for many of us, don't those go hand in hand? they're really the flip of the same coin. and what i wanted to do was to let people understand that i knew that both the positive and negative experiences of my life had crafted me. they made me. and they made all of the good that's in me. and my mother would say all of the bad, too. but who i am is an amalgam of

those experiences and for me each one was necessary to creating who i am. so when i finished the book, i realized that i loved my life. when you're in the kind of position i've been thrown into, people always ask you what you would redo. and i tell people, not a thing. first of all, it would be disingenuous. how many people get to the supreme court, okay? but even though i wouldn't necessarily want to change that, there are parts of it that i wish i could have done without. but i really do appreciate that with it, it made me a better person. and so hence the title l, "my beloved world." >> this will relate a little bit to what you're saying. you've written, as everyone knows who's read the book and followed your career from very

humm humble beginnings to one of the nation's most prestigious and visible positions. what have you held on to from your earliest days? >> my gosh, read my book. everything. just about everything. you know, i tell people that i'm the proudest american that you could ever imagine. when i'm asked what i am and who i am, i tell them i'm an american from new york city. but when i talk to people, i also tell them, i have a puerto rican heart because my culture is deeply ingrained in me. who i am is all of the experiences i have had but also the values that i was taught and it's unfair to attribute it just to being puerto rican. i think every culture instills common values. all of us have love of family, love of community, love of country.

but there is something in the music that i heard, in the poetry that i read, in the food i ate, in the dances that my family had that stays in the very core of you. and that core is so vibrant and so important to me that i don't think it will extinguish the day i do. how's that? and i bring it with me to just about everything i do. >> when -- [ applause ] >> by the way, i don't think you know -- i'll tell a story. i think it might interest the audience. the day the president called me to tell me that he had selected me to be his nominee to the court, he asked me to make two promises, and one of the two was to stay tied to my community.

and my response to him was, to him was, mr. president, i don't know how to do anything else but. and i think that that response not only was genuine, it was who i am. and i don't know that he understood, however, that my community was just not my family or even my puerto rican culture. it is much wider than that. it's a world that i care very deeply about. it's a country that i'm very devoted to. it's issues that are critically important to me, education being at the foremost. so all of that is my sense of community. >> going back a bit to the family but how that -- how the relationship has evolved from the book, it's apparent and from what you're saying, of course,

that family is such a key theme and priority in your life. being a supreme court justice is so high profile and being in the presence of a justice can be intimidating, although you make it easy, i must say. >> thank you. >> has being on the court affected how people close to you, including those people in the family, treat you? does the fame especially in such a politically charged climate as we're all living in, does that affect your family and your relationships with your family? >> well, the day i got a call from my brother telling me he was in a gym in california and guess what, the president walked in and he went up to a secret service agent and said, you know i'm justice sotomayor's brother. and he got through secret service to shake the president's hand. he called me and said, okay, this is worth something, okay?

you know, you have good and bad things. like the person who bears my last name whose wallet was stolen and cotold the police sh was my cousin. i had no idea who this person was. and there are moments it affects family and very dear friends. i earlier told stories of moments with friends where we've really had to talk through the relationship and the situation, more the situation. you know, people torture my family and friends to get to me so i'll say yes to doing something. and at the beginning it was very hard on many of my friends because they felt some loyalty to whoever was asking them to do the thing and at the same time they understood that my life had gotten very complicated. but i found just as i describe in the book that really talking

it out makes a huge, huge difference. and each of us has and them have found a protocol for dealing with it that takes the pressure away from them and from me. and so, yes, that does affect you. i earlier told the students who were at lunch that the first christmas that i went to our family christmas party -- we do it around new year's because everybody has nuclear families elsewhere. my own is with my brother in syracuse. so i come back down to the city for new year's. and we have an outing at my cousin miriam's home. you'll know who miriam is. she's mimi in the book. okay? and i walked in and i sat down at the couch and there was silence. deafening silence in a puerto

rican party. nobody shuts up. and all you hear is people talking above each other and screams from the other room and laughter and lots of it. and i looked around and i said, what's wrong with you guys? i'm still sonia. and then the room burst out in laughter. and everybody started talking oef over each other and asking me questions and we started going through and catching up. but sure, it changes the relationships. it has to but so there are events i miss because i can't leave the court, events that the family knows i would have been at, including my 90-year-old aunt's birthday. that's something i would have never missed except they decided to have it on a day i was away. my point is that, sure, it changes it, but we work hard at keeping it the same as much as we can.

but it's a work in progress. none of this happens on its own. and it's them working with me and so if the event is really critical to them, they've learned to call early so we can get it on my schedule, and they've even accommodated funerals so i can come in from washington. and put it off a day so i could travel. so it's a sort of gif and take that we're doing to maintain the relationship and close to the same as possible. >> as close as possible. >> as close as possible. >> in the memoir, you touch on the role of politics in the judicial appointment process and the need to make yourself and your skills, one self and one skill, known to those in power in order to be considered for a judgeship. what was the experience of making your skills known,

blowing your own horn, like for you? and particularly for some of our students here, what advice would you give to young people about how and when to be your own cheerleader? >> hmm. i really believe in letting your actions speak for you. and the one thing that you i know i did was to ensure at every stage of my career that i was doing the very best job i humanly could. so i studied and studied and studied both in high school and at princeton and at yale. and i never, never cut corners with my education. my book talks to all of you about how i relearned how to write in college because i thought that my writing was inadequate. >> sound please.

[ inaudible ] >> hello? okay. so i went back and reread grammar books, found a professor who helped me with every paper, to reteach myself and to relearn english grammar and how to apply it to actual writing. but i've done that in my professional pursuits. my first year at every job i have really not been distracted by anything else. i've put my head down and i studied as hard as i could. and once i felt i was in control of the process i was in, then i would go out and do other things and try to become a leader in those things that interested me. one of the hardest things that do today, i look at the resume of students, and you're often involved in so many different

things, i worry that you're missing the point. you should get involved in a couple of things that are really important to you and then excel at them. become a leader. do something noteworthy, something that people will talk about in their letters of recommendation about you. it can't just be, you know, she's a member of "x," "y," "z" and "a," "b," "c" and "d" or she does this and that. it's really important for a letter to talk about what your passions are. and to show how good you've been. and that's how i dealt with my professional career. it was putting my head down and being the best i could, the best lawyer i could be in the d.a.'s office. getting a reputation for being

tough but fair. that was important to me. but most important to me was being passionate about the work i did. don't do any work that you're not passionate about. first of all, you won't be good at it. if the work doesn't interest you, if it doesn't satisfy something in you, then you're not going to be the best at it. but if you go into any work situation recognizing that you can learn things from any situation that you're in and work to milk that learning experience to its utmost, then you'll grow passionate about that work. because except for illegal activity, all other work has value. you know, i tell law students especially those who are so passionate about public interests, it's not a sin to make money. all right? it's not. and commensurate with that, it's

not a sin to work for a corporation or to work for a big law firm or to make money. it is a sin if you do those things without giving back to your community. if you do those things without volunteering, without using some of those resources, both the company you work for and your own, in helping public interest activities. then there's something wrong. but all work has some inherent value. all work can be intellectually stimulating. in all work you do, you can help people. you know, on april 15th, all of you are very happy with your tax accountants, okay? and you think, as i do sometimes

to myself, don't they get bored with those numbers? but they don't because this is fascinating to them. and for the really good accountants who are working closely with you and really trying to help you, not just save money but to be honest and to be upstanding in how you report your income, you know that you value that. so you can value the taxicab driver who takes you to where you need to go. you can value the bus driver who takes you to work every day. you can value the person who cleans your room in a hotel, just as you can value anybody that provides a service for you. and so don't be afraid of thinking of public interest more broadly. think of it as an opportunity to figure out what job satisfies your intellectual interests, makes use of your natural talents, and where you can use

those things to benefit sometimes yourself but to benefit others. and i think if you do that you end up with a passionate life. and that is actually the most important thing that i think you should be thinking about as you study law. don't eliminate choices simply because others think, oh, my god, you're going to be one of those horrible corporate lawyers. there's nothing horrible about it. anything you do with honor can be put to good use, okay? [ applause ] all right. we're having -- [ inaudible ] >> hello? i got it now. i'll give it back.

now that you're on the supreme court, do you view your role as a judge differently from when you served on the lower courts? and in what ways? how does that vary? >> i don't know how we're going to do this, but they'll figure it out. all right, you see a lot of dressed up people around the room, men and women in suits. they've got these little things in their ear. most of them aren't u.s. marshals and campus police and some of the local police and their job is to protect me, not from you, but from me, okay? i like doing something that they don't like a whole lot because they think it puts me in danger. i don't, so i do it. but i do it because you're going to make me a promise, which is you won't get up when i walk around among you. okay? i don't like sitting still.

if you read my book, you'll know that i was called a hot pepper by my mother when i was a child because i never sat still. i was always up and down. and i haven't stopped that way since. i also think if i move closer to you that you'll feel like we're having a real conversation. so just don't get up because if you do, they jump into action. and it gets a little messy. so i'm going to try to make it somewhat up there. [ applause ] but i'm not that young anymore, so we'll try, okay? all right. is there a difference? it's harder, much, much harder, to be a supreme court justice.

when i was on the lower courts, the district and the trial courts, i always thought to myself when i got to the supreme court, how much different could it be? a lot. and it starts with that i had not realized or appreciated when i was on the district and circuit courts how much comfort i took in making decisions from the fact that there was a court above me that could fix my worst mistakes. that really gives you an out, okay? you struggle with a question. you do the best job you can. it's much easier to let go when you know you're not the final word. well, now i'm part of the final word. and although congress can fix some of the things that the supreme court does wrong, it can't fix others.

on constitutional questions, we're the last word. on statutory questions, it's not easy for congress to act and change laws or change things that many of them, many congresspeople, may think is wrong. and so making a decision is much, much harder. and in many ways, i feel it more a burden because i remember one thing, in every single case that comes before the supreme court, we're announcing a winner. we're telling one side they were right. i'm getting past the nuances. sometimes we say they're right on one thing and wrong on another. but generally, one side is going to come away feeling vindicated by our decision. and the flip of that is someone

lost. and someone feels like something important has been taken away from them. either a right they thought they had or a recognition of a loss that was deeply felt by them. and that makes this job that much harder. and so that part of the judging is very different. the critical difference, however, is, so the layperson can understand it, we're the court of last resort. and what do we take cases? we take cases when the lower courts have disagreed about the answer to a legal question. it's what we typically call a circuit split.

there are 13 circuits in the united states that cover the 50 states plus territories. the circuits are not of equal size. some of them are bigger in number of states. some are smaller in number of states but bigger in terms of the number of people. but if you start from the proposition that we have to have either a circuit split or a split among the circuits and a state court, the highest state court, or a split among courts generally before we take a case, what does that tell you? we take only the hard cases. and we take the cases where reasonable people have disagreed. because you have to start from the assumption that if courts below that are always made up of judges who are trying their best and they can't find the answer,

then the answer for us is not easy. you know, there's a lot, a lot of complaint at times i hear because we don't agree more and i look at people and say, why do you expect a unanimity of opinion when the reason the case came to us is because other people couldn't agree? and so that is a fundamental difference from the other job. the other courts. in the other courts, you get a certain number of cases that are right on that margin, but the number is much smaller than the everyday work. as one of my colleagues once said about the case, the minute it comes to the supreme court, it's a supreme court case.

as soon as we say, yes, we're going to hear a case, everybody revs up to tell us every side of the case. so it's harder because every case is on the margin. ruth? >> hi. is this working? great. i'm going to ask one last question, and then we're going to turn to some of the students. new jersey is a very -- do not let her go too high up. >> why? >> not to nosebleed territory. new jersey is a very racially -- >> oh, no. telling me no is the worst thing in the world, you know? go ahead. go ahead of. start again, ruth. >> as i was saying, new jersey is a very racially and ethnically diverse state, one of the top three most diverse states in the united states with

respect to racial, ethnic and immigrant populations. we know that makes a difference here in new jersey. it certainly defines and shapes the culture in so many ways. does diversity on the court make a difference? how and why? this is my last question. >> that's your last question. okay. then i get students. we represent the country. we make decisions that affect every single person in the country. and sometimes in some of our decisions, the world. we also supervise, generally, the practice of law in the country, and we're influencing the work of lawyers in every single profession there is in the country.

and so to be able to represent all of those people, it's helpful when the justices have present among themselves as much and as varied an experience base as the country has. and it's not because the sitting justices can't learn about how other people are feeling or what they're experiencing because we do. but there is a personal ability to explain an argument that you know if your colleagues haven't had it, that your voice can let them see it in a different way. i give a very simple, simple example, okay? number of years ago in a case called stafford, there was a

13-year-old girl who was in a no drug school. and it was reported through three layers of hearsay to her principal that she had taken an aspirin. that she was called in to either the principal's office or the vice principal or whomever was in charge and strip searched to see if she had aspirins. she then came to court and sued because it was a state school for an unreasonable search and seizure. the court was hearing the argument and i wasn't there when this happened so i'm talking about something i read about, okay? some of my colleagues, male colleagues, were then asking her -- asking the lawyers, her lawyers, questions, the tenor of which basically was, what's the difference between this and strip searching to go to the gym and work out?

justice ginsburg was reported to have said after the argument that she feared that some of her male colleagues did not unction how it felt to be a 13-year-old girl and how important the sense of body privacy and sensitive that is at that time. [ applause ] now, did it make a difference in the decision-making? i'm probably going to say no, not any. my colleagues are lawyers and they're judges and they based it on their view of what the constitution required and didn't. but i know one thing. there wasn't a majority dissenting or concurring opinion that insulted a little girl by telling her that this was no different than changing in a

locker room. that, itself, is worthwhile. that you have people on the court who can tell each other what you're saying, how you're saying it is going to be hurtful. how or what you believe about others may not have a foundation. those conversations exist. will they influence the outcome? not likely. but they do influence the manner in which we approach the issue. and that has, to me, importance. so that's why i think diversity of all kind -- i'm not talking about ethnic and religious, alone, but diversity in professional backgrounds, how people grow up, what they've done with their lives is critically important and valuable to the experience of judgment. [ applause ]

>> okay. it's nice to see you. >> you see. you still can. hello. hello, you guys. >> some of our students are now more than ready for their turn to ask some questions. we're going to begin with angelo villanueva who has a question for you. angelo is a sophomore in the school of arts and sciences, majoring in math. >> if my nose starts to bleed, i'll tell you you were right. >> angelo is here. [ applause ] >> all right. you plan and you plan.

>> angelo, go ahead. >> angelo is down here. >> i misheard it. go ahead. >> that's fine. >> go ahead. [ speaking spanish ] we've heard the phrase that words cannot describe certain feelings but i hope you don't mind me asking, in what words can you describe your feelings during the moment of being sworn in as a supreme court justice? and how did you feel when you became one of the most powerful and influential latinas here in this country? [ applause ] >> it remains for me an absolutely surreal experience. people often ask me, what does it feel like to be a part of history? and i look at them quizzically because it's not just that words can't explain it. it's that it doesn't feel real. and i fear that if i thought i

lived that way every day that i would stop doing the things that i thought were right to do. so there is a piece of me that sort of pushes it out of my mind because it's not important to me everyday living. other than i don't walk around in shorts anymore because i'm afraid of the pictures people will take. when i'm in a restaurant and i see people's cell phone popping up from under the table to take a picture as i have food going in my mouth, i stop. you know, that sort of thing does affect you, but by and large, you can't live thinking about that. you have to live doing what you think is the right thing to do at the time. and so i don't think about it too often. what was it like when i first

went to be sworn in? first of all, you have to understand that i was sitting in john marshall's chair. it is behind a protected glass enclosure at the supreme court. they only bring it out for swearing ins. a few days before, i had signed the john harlan -- first john harlan -- bible. every justice since has signed it. and when they gave me the book and i was reading the names, it really was like an out-of-body experience. how do you describe feeling that way? and so here i am, and across from me in what would be either the justice's box for guests, which in a regular courtroom

might be the jury box, okay. in that box was sitting the president of the united states. and as i got sworn in, all i could think about was, my god, thank you for this gift. because that's all -- [ applause ] and when i turned around to look at my family and friends and there were tears in everyone's eyes, i knew that a moment had passed that i never imagined. i never dreamed of because from a kid from the south bronx who had no lawyers in her family, i didn't know a supreme court existed. so you can't dream about what you don't know about. and so -- [ applause ]

i had lived and reached something far, far beyond any dreams i ever had. and so that sense of being blessed was very real to me that day. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> thank you. our next questions come from -- >> hello. wow. it is -- you guys are really dedicated. thank you. you are really dedicated. thank you. thank you. thank you. all right. i'm sorry. i'm in trouble. >> are you ready? >> go ahead. >> our next questions come from two students who have complimentary questions and i would ask them to come forward.

one is a sophomore in the -- crystal is a major, a junior major in psychology at the camden college of arts and sciences. domeyola. >> thank you for being here today. my question is, as the first latina on the supreme court, do you feel pressured to set a standard? >> and crystal, if you ask yours as well. >> greetings, justice sotomayor. my question is, what advice can you give to young latinas interested in pursuing leadership? >> all right. i don't think that i've ever lived my life feeling pressure from others. pressure is always inside of me. in that way, anything i've ever wanted to achieve or do i've

done because it was a sight i set for myself. you know, you can't live your life for your parents. my mother wanted me to be a journalist. because she always wanted to write and travel the world. and so if i had lived her expectations, i can tell all the journalists down there, i would have disappointed her. [ laughter ] no. what i do is i set a standard for myself. i do what i think is important to do and that which i think makes a contribution. i said something earlier today that ruth told me she really liked, so i'll repeat it here. okay? every night before i go to sleep, i ask myself two questions. the first one is, what did i

learn new today? and the second is, how did i help or extend an act of kindness to someone? and if i can't answer each question and i don't fall asleep, i go on the internet. [ laughter ] i read an article or i think about a friend who i've been out of touch with or a friend who's in need and just get in contact with them by e-mail so they know i'm thinking about them. with respect to the second part of that question, it's in keeping with the first, which is to be a leader, you have to lead a life by example. you have to show people the way to be better people.

and that means not just being kind to the people in your life, even when they're not kind to you, but it means by doing things that help others. you define the agenda. you look at what needs to be done in the world and what you think your talents can help you bring to the world. and that will create the leader. because i have found that if you do good things, people will come and help you do them. good luck to the two of you, by the way. >> thank you. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> boy, it's hot up here. i'm really sorry. i see all of the fans and i understand why it's really hot. >> i have another -- >> sorry about that, guys. i'm going to go that way, okay?

now, i'm going to drive my security really crazy. go ahead, sarah, take the lead. all right. this is much easier to do. >> this is my first experience with the goddess. >> now, just -- >> i hear you but i don't see you. >> hello, guys. thank you. thank you. hello. okay. who's next? >> our next pair of students with complementary questions, sahar, and connie capone. would you come to the microphone? sahar is a sophomore and political science major in the school of arts and sciences and

connie is a junior in the school of arts and sciences. her major is political science and journalism and media studies and she is minoring in french language. sahar, would you begin? >> good afternoon. somy question is, is how does one balance their own personal opinions on a case but at the same time tries to remain objective with the law and legal precedence? is there a balance between the two or are they distinguishably different? >> well, let me start with a realization that you have to have as a judge. what are laws? laws are the society's definition of how it will balance the competing interest of people. so the first example that i give everyone is a law that affects every single person in this room

when they go outside. you go to the corner, you stop at the red light. why? there's a law that tells you if you don't, you're going to get a ticket. all right? so why do we have that law and what is it doing? it's taking a bit of every person's time, putting it into a pool and saying, you can't get to where you want to go as fast as you would like. you can't push penal out of the way. you can't injury them to reach your goal. everybody stops at the red light, gives us time, so that

society and most of its people can reach their goals safely. so if you think of most laws, that's what laws are doing. they're trying to balance the competing needs of people in the society. if i make a different choice and impose it as a judge, i'm rebalancing something that's much, much more complicated than my individual understanding. and i'm doing a greater injustice to the society that depends on the rule of law to help us believe rightly that it's a fair society. that it's a society not governed by the whim of one individual judge, but by a system of

justice that asks its judges to respect that their view of what might be fair could be very unfair. and if your belief in the process of law the way i do, and that i believe that over time if laws are not good laws, people will change them. i know laws have changed in response to court opinions. look at what happened to desegregation. a court segregated the society and a court unsegregated the society. took too long. took way too long. but we can and bad laws can be changed. they can be changed by you. and so for me, the tension is not the one that you set for.

i don't feel it in a tension the same way. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> connie. connie. >> good afternoon, justice. my question is, how does your decision-making progress work. do you rely on your own ethics or consider the views of american public or is it something in between? >> well you are going to be disappointed. i don't do any of that. [ laughter ] >> i read the briefs the parties give me, i read the prior supreme court cases that inform the issue, i read the decisions that the lower courts have issued addressing the question, and so i already told you they are generally split. so i'm getting two sides of the story there. we have briefs from friends of the court. i read those. and after i've read all of it, i

look at the issue and i de-construct it. i try to break down its elements as a legal question and i put it together in the framework that i see the law as having created. and so it is a very -- in some way s -- an academic process, because i'm not relying on my ethics or my own personal views, i'm trying to decipher from the body of law that informs the question i'm addressing. what are the fundamental principles that that body of law is dictating? what are the values that it is setting forth? what are the approaching to the rights and remedies that people are seeking that the law has created? and so that is how i arrive at my answer.

>> thank you. >> i know that sounds boring, doesn't it. [ applause ] >> thank you. the next question, and i'm afraid it is the last one, apologize to the students we couldn't get to. michael guggenheim is a senior in the school of arts and sciences. he is an eagleton undergraduate majoring with in political science with a minor in modern hebrew. >> hello. how are you. >> that wasn't my question by the way. >> i doubt that. i doubt ruth would let you off. >> she wouldn't have. obviously there is a lot of political intrigue in the supreme court and a lot of powerful people are interested in the decisions that you come to and the effects that they have on public policy and commerce. so my question is, what, if any, effect does that political interest have on the court's

decision-making process and what steps do you take to maybe isolate yourself from that political interest or is it just something that you and the other justices get used to over time? >> you know, you don't get on the court unless you're a concerned citizen. every single justice has had a career in which they've devoted their lives in some form or another to the public good. even when they've been in private practice, they have been involved in activities that do public service. we are, by nature, citizen lawyers. you don't work as hard as we work, reach where we've reached, unless we've shown that to the powers that be. we get selected because we're the very best at some aspect of the work that we've done. and that work often includes public service.

so it means that there isn't one of us who is unaware of political life. we're aware of it. we read the newspapers. we listen to the news. some of us are political junkies, others are not. but being an informed citizen doesn't get translated into -- now i'm going to vote the way the public wants me to. the gift the founding fathers gave us is they gave us a lifetime job. so that we wouldn't feel pressure to do a decision based on public opinion from fear that somehow we would be driven from our work. and so we're not thinking about public opinion in terms of reaching the answer that we believe the law compels. every year, if you read our most

sensitive decisions, you will see us recognizing the impact those decisions might have on people. in every sensitive opinion the court is very aware when one of its decisions is going to be particularly difficult for some people in the society. it is recognized in our writing. but we do take pride on the fact that we are voting according to what we think the constitution or the laws require. that means that we can be aware of what is -- the effect will be. we can even acknowledge it. but that is a different thing from letting it determine the outcome of a decision. [ applause ] >> now, would the students please not leave. i'm coming down now.

i would like to take a picture with the students who are here because they took the time to come up with a creative question. and they deserve a picture. [ applause ] >> and maybe as i'm walking down, the next student could ask me the question so i get through more of those than not. and my security detail will talk to me later about being late. [ laughter ] >> i know that all of you will join me in a rousing thanks of appreciation. [ applause ] >> and in -- [ applause ]

>> come on around me. come on, guys. >> as you can imagine, and i'm sure some of you are feeling, we have a few more students, a few more colleagues and friends who have questions. so we're just going to have to get her back. and we have -- we hope that you'll do that. and in the meantime, many years of strength and health as you serve all of us from that incredibly important position. we're very grateful to have you there. [ applause ] >> thank you. >> all right. i came back. after i broke my ankle during the confirmation hearings, i am

very cautious about moving. that is why you see them helping me. i'm trying to avoid a second accident, okay. >> now we're done. >> okay. bye-bye, everybody. thank you. [ applause ] [ hearing concluded ] the libertarian party is holding the national convention this weekend in orlando, florida. c-span will have live coverage when presidential candidates hold a debate saturday night at

8:00 eastern. then on sunday morning, the party chooses its presidential and vice presidential nominees. that starts at 9:45 a.m. eastern. so far, the libertarian party is the only third party that is on the national ballot in all 50 states. our campaign 2016 bus continues to travel throughout the country to recognize winners from this year's student camp competition and recently the bus stopped in massachusetts to visit several winning students from that state. they went to the sage school in foxborough where all of the students and first through eighth grade attended a school ceremony to honor 7th graders for their honorable mention video titled "gunning for safety." and the bus made a stop in ludlow to recognize honorable mentions in a video called veteran services and james elliott won for lgbt rights,

stop the discrimination. the two were honored in front of classmates and family and local eofficials, receiving $250 for their winning video. our special thanks to comcast and charter communication for helping to coordinate the visits in the community. and view all of the winning documentaries at student cam.org. congratulations to the class of 2016. today is your day of celebration and you've earned it. >> the voices crying for peace and light, because your choices will make all the difference to you and to all of us. >> don't be afraid to take on cases or new jobs or a new issue that really stretches your boundaries. >> you spent your summer abroad on real ships rather than internships and the specter of living in your parents basement

after this graduation day is not likely to be your greatest concern. >> throughout this month watch commencement speeches to the class of 2016 in their entirety from colleges and universities around the country by business leaders and politicians and white house officials on c-span. science, business and technology pioneers gathered at the "washington post" transformers summit this month to discuss break throughs in artificial intelligence and innovation and a look at restoring light to the blind and how pigs could become future organ donors for humans. this is nearly two hours. good morning, everyone. thank you to the "washington

post" and we're delighted to welcome you here this morning. thank you for joining us. [ applause ] we're sitting in the center of what we call "washington post" live. it is a new initiative that extends the reach of our journalism through live events streaming and pairs our journalists with leaders and decision-makers to dissect and explore the most important and compelling issues of our time. the idea of today's conference on transformers began with a conversation we had here about the transformation that is underway at the "washington post." we've gone from what was once a locally focused newspaper to a multi-platform digital first news organization serving a broad national and global audience. and although we've made amazing progress and in many ways leading the industry we will always view ourselves in the process of transforming and never fully transformed. because like so many industries, the media space is changing so rapidly that the process of transforming can never really be

complete. with advances in technology, the speed and the scope of change is only increasing -- it is only accelerating. so achieving or maintaining the status quo will never be sufficient. so for all of us in journalism today, whether you just started or early in your career or in my stage, the reality is that our entire profession will be a time of continuous and increasing change and that is the culture that we are embracing here at the "washington post." well for any business, transformation is a delicate balance. what do you utilize and preserve from the past and what do you set aside to create room for the future. well, for us the pillar of journalistic excellence has always been and will always be fundamental to our mission. but the rest is determined by constant innovation and experimentation. as part of our transformation we've imbedded 80 engineers within the newsroom to quickly bring stories to life in new

innovative ways. our technology team now creates our own extensive and flexible site architecture and we're licensing that to others. we're constantly testing and experimenting and never standing still. we have bold ambitions to continue to grow across the country and around the world and to be a model for a rapidly-changing industry. so for purposes of today's conversation, how do we translate the broad disruption that we're witnessing around the world in all sectors into a thought-provoking event. i think we've accomplished that today with a unique lineup of voices who are pushing the boundaries on really every aspect of our lives. the transformers program is anchored by visionaries and innovators in space exploration and artificial intelligence and impact philanthropy, national security and much more. we'll be discussing breath-taking changes that are

forever altering the way we live, connect and learn, from the social platforms we use to communicate, to the cars we drive or more accurately, i should say that drive us. today we'll explore efforts to define mortality and what that means for our future. and we even have the father of the internet here to explain it all to us. and despite what we may have heard a few campaign seasons ago, this is actually the father of the internet. to start us off, i would like to thank our presenting sponsors, lockheed martin and samsung electronics. please join me in conveying our appreciation. [ applause ] and i would also draw your attention to the program where the rest offous supportering -- of our supporting sponsors are listed. on the way in you may have seen students building robots. they are part of what we call the ro-porter conversation we're having here today. the way we gather news has

changed dramatically in many ways in the past few years. virtual reality, 360 video and drone robots are helping journalists to tell stories in new and engaging ways so we've challenged a team of top hgss to build a functioning robot to help collect information from places otherwise unreachable for journalists. that competition is underway right now and we will be announcing the winners to you later today. but now please, to start our program, please join me in welcoming shand raw, the head of samsung catalyst fund to say a few words. [ applause ] >> good morning. thank you, fred and thank you "washington post." i'm honored to be here today representing samsung electronics. it is a privilege to join you all today to listen to you and engage in it a conversation about technology and how

technology is going to impact us as individuals, as society as well as our country. perhaps to just to kick it off here today, you are going to listen to some amazing speakers. these are the speakers that represent innovators who really are bringing in the next technology revolution. and you, as the audience, get the opportunity to engage with them, really help shape the conversation of how technology is going to in turn influence us as people and as society. at samsung, we are very privileged to work in the technology industry. we do this every day. as we look out there into the future, we see some very significant challenges we face as a society. climate change is one. shifting demographics. chronic illnesses and the rising cost of managing chronic illnesses, security, privacy,

these are all very significant issues. we think technology has a role to play there. in just the last few years there has been significant technology break-throughs. for example, deep learning, deep networks has been an amazing development. the human brain has been an inspiration for how these new technologies have come together and deep learning is giving compu computers an ability to see and have a dialogue with us and that is going to be transforming. quite similarly some of the new big data analytics techniques are influencing how quickly we could analyze dna sequencing and how inexpensive that will become. this biology to technology and back to biology is creating a virtuous cycle and we think we as partners could engage with that and make a transformation in society. we at samsung believe we can't do this alone. we would like to engage with you

in a conversation. we would like to figure out how we work in an open collaborate way and make a fundamental difference in harnessing this technology. let me perhaps at this point give you a little bit of sense of what we have outside this room. at some point today if you would like to get a vision of what samsung is doing, we have some demonstrations of our gear vr. you can -- if you have some time, please stop by and take a look. finally, i would like to thank "washington post" for having us here, for giving us the opportunity and thanks to all of the speakers and the audience. thank you. [ applause ] discover a way to hear what others saw. since before you could buy books

on the internet, he was obsessed with it. transformers are dreamers, makers, doers. they are the famous, and the unknown. they are people who can see, build, or leverage an idea that by design could better everyday life. how we age, how we move from here to there. the way we relate to each other. transformers push the boundaries of what we know. >> good morning and welcome to transformers. my name is nealy tucker and on behalf of the "washington post" i would like to introduce you to our first guest who is a stunner. it is impossible to imagine the modern world without our first guest. one of her college thesis or college thesis became one of the first satellite television companies. she was also the president of the first company to

commercially offer gps devices in cars. after that, she created sirius xm and one of the founders of the idea of satellite radio. it is not a bad start to your career. she loves sirius -- left sirius more than 20 years ago to found a company to assist her youngest daughter who was at the time dying of a then incurable lung disease. the resulting company is managed therapeutics, now a 6:00 million dollars biotech and based in silver spring. it has expended, if not saved the lives of tens of thousands of people, including they are daughter genesis who is now in her 30s. ladies and gentlemen, martin roth blat is also the recipient of this year's billy jean king leadership initiative award devoted to lgbt issues and puts her in an interesting issue because she has a company based in north carolina which as you know right now she might get arrested for going to the

bathroom if the governor had anything to do with it. ladies and gentlemen, martin roth blat. [ applause ] >> martin, one of the basic concepts that you are interested in, it is not just improving life but it is immortality. they are all going to live forever. and martin, i might mention, has founded a religion, based on transhumanism. and you have the idea that we're not just going to live a long time but we're all going to live forever. tell us your concept of immortality and how that would work. >> thanks, nealy. it is a great pleasure to be here. the idea is one that has been percolating up from lots of people in the information technology industry for a while. perhaps ray cursewhile who is a prolific inventor is best known

for the idea that as our abilities in the information processing industry computer software and storage of more and more of our thoughts and our ideas outside of our body becomes easier, more automatic, less expensive, that ultimately we're going to have sort of digital dollp gangers of ourselves that are stored in the cloud and are able to present themselves to any manner of devices. and that as thousands and thousands of software coders and hackers and people in the maker movement work to make the software that runs these digital doppelgangers ever more life-like, and ever more human-like, there will come a tipping point when people begin to claim that the digital doppelgangers have achieved what we call consciousness, an

ability to have a sense of themselves, hopes and fears and feelings and at that point i think the activity will move to the legal arena as to whether or not the digital doppelgangers are conscious, really do have an in dependent legal identity and kind of the trend of progressive thinking is once there is a scientific consensus, in this case it would be the science of ikology, that being the -- the psychology, the science of the mind, that these digital bople gangers are conscious and then they gain the rights and protections that we assign to even our pets, laboratory animals, and to quite a high extent to primates lime chimpanzees and so in this way ourselves will kind of morph into a sort of a digital consciousness that is recognized by the law as being alive.

>> and you have a kitty hall type of project naped for your spouse which i have talked to and many others and it is sort of a head on a table at this point. but it talks to you. and you've described this as not the finished product, but 48 is the kitty hawk basis of how this -- you call them doppelgangers, can you say robots? >> yeah. robots are just as good. >> and if you put in -- i have the idea, like the matrix, where they were plugging stuff into the back of people's head and i have the idea that you upload everybody's personality or consciousness or to what amounts as a thumb drive and upload it to the cloud so you are always there and just plug it into a robot and there you are. >> right. but it is becoming even -- that is 48 on the screen and that is a recent episode of morgan freeman's series on the national

geographic channel about the nature of god and religion and what not. so we did this project to really inspire young people. and i would say young girls in particular to become coders. and when they have an opportunity to speak with 48 and see today in our primitive 20 teens we're able to write software that could respond ideosyncraticly. she doesn't give the same answer any two times and there is no pre-scripted questions and you could ask her anything. i would say she is way better than siri. >> cuter. >> i would say amazon's alexa is just about catching up to her and i'm sure because there are thousands of people working on alexa, she'll soar right past 48. but this type of software inspired young people to become koe coders and why i'm so confident that cyber consciousness will emerge because it is not just

our foundation or big kcompanie, there are tens of thousands of people around the world that could make cyber consciousness and they don't need a factory or investment, all they need is a digital device to talk to the cloud. >> i want to ask how close we are on this. because the question is sort of if i go outside and i get hit by a bus and my arm and leg is amputated, i'm still me. and if i need a lung transplant from the united therapies, i'm still me. how much of my brain can i change? what would be your answer? how much can you change and still be you? >> nealy, it is a great question and somewhat in the realm of philosophy and psychology and with most things in life ultimately it will be decided by lawyers. [ laughter ] >> the scientists have long known that people forget vast majority of what they experience and it is called ebbing house

curve. that over a period of a week we forget over 90% of what we experience. but things that are really important to us, that have emotional content, they stick with us forever. and that is what most of us refer to as our soul. that part of us that doesn't change. so in terms of you, whether your soul can be transferred into a cyber-conscious form, it is going to be something that happens gradually. and even today there is a lot of debate on whether or not dogs and cats, for example, have a soul or are conscious. i think -- i feel they do. and i think that most people in society are moving in that direction. the day when you could grat tew tuesd -- gratuitously, it is a crime

to do that in most states. so i think we'll get to a point where there are friends of cyber conscious people and especially if it is a cyber conscious nealy, that person will have a lot of friends and fans probably, too. and i think very quickly we'll get to a point where we say that cyber conscious individual has a soul, it is nealy's soul and even if, god forbid, nealy's body ends in a car accident or some other death and disability, nealy did not end, nealy's identity continues in this cyber conscious form. >> let me ask you one more about the frightening aspects of this because there would be some people that none of us want to live forever. hitler, for example. nobody wants this guy to be able to upload. so where do you get into where -- eugenics was a thing in this country 80 years ago, we're

going to clone people to make the whole tribe better. what -- you're a nice person to run this project. but how do we avoid digital eugenics and cyber robot and cyber people. where does that come in and who gets to participate in the program? >> yeah, nealy, i'm kind of -- i have a point of view that this is not something a realistic thing to really fear because all of this cyber consciousness and all of these robots that are being developed are being v developed in an environment, which, even though it is a hu human-made environment, it is still an environment like the natural environment and the humans are the selection factors. and the law of darwinism still apply and the so-called bad robot problem or the hitler robot problem, there is going to be nobody that wants to buy a hitler robot.

if a hitler robot emerges and begins to do bad things, the same thing will happen to the hitler robot that happened to the real hitler, which is the rest of society will rise up and quash it down. so there is no market really for an evil robot, evil software. does that mean that evil robots and software will never exist? no, i don't think it means that because there is always mutations and environment and there will be bad people and bad robots that emerge. but the vast majority of billions of people that comprise the decision-making in society, through the economic powers and their political powers will quash down the bad people and the bad robots and so i think it is a self-correcting problem because humans overwhelmingly good humans comprise the darwin environment in which all of this cyber consciousness will emerge. >> let me ask you while we're still on future questions, this is my favorite project that you do, you have a herd of pigs in

west virginia that i like to call genetic mutant pigs. >> they are. >> they are genetically altered but the purpose relates to the united therapeutics and you are raising them for possible future lung transplants which would vastly reshape lung transplants in the united states if not across the country. tell us how that works. >> sure, nealy, thanks. so ever since my grandmother received a pig heart valve because her heart valve had gone bad, i have been aware of the fact that pigs hearts and for that matter lungs and other organs are very close to the same size, shape and function of human major organs. so i -- as our youngest daughter developed this fatal heart-lung disease called pulmonary art eerial hypertension and i learned the only cure for it was a transplant. but the problem with transplants are that there are way too few

organs to go around for everybody that needs them and secondly organ transplants a trading one disease for another disease. you are trading the end stage organ disease that you are dying from for a chronic organ rejection kind of disease that ultimately takes the life of many, if not most people, who received transplants. so i set about to solve this problem, inspired by making sure that our daughter would be able to live a normal life. and i went and -- back to school and got a ph.d in genome transplantation so organs can be not only be the same size to use for humans, not only because they are the same size and shape but because by genetically modifying the pig genome they won't give rise to the chronic rejection which has flawed animal to human organ

transplants in the past and ultimately if the genome could be modified really, really nicely, the individual can receive those organs and not have to take a life-long immunosuppressant. so within my company united therapeutics we purchased the early leaders in this area, a company called rivo core offer the campus of uva in -- i'm sorry in virginia tech in blacksburg, virginia. and we now are definitely the leaders in genetically modifying pigs genomes so that not only the lungs but also hearts and kidneys can be used in human transplants. all of the recent records that have been announced by the nih program in zeno heart transplant come from the united therapeutics of pigs and our records in lungs and kidneys.

and our goal, which i feel really confident we'll achieve and i'm much more confident we'll achieve this goal than some of the earlier satellite communications projects that you mentioned, is that we'll be able to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs through the modification of the pig genome so there is an unlimited supply of hearts and livers and kidneys an lungs that could be tolerated by humans without the need for life-long immunosuppression. >> timetable? >> so we have on schedule to have our first clinical procedures, which means using these organs in people, by the end of this decade. and by the -- we hope for regulatory approval less than ten years from now. and i'm pretty confident that by the end of the 2020s there will be literally tens of thousands of people ayear receiving organ

transplant as a result of the transplantation. >> and to give us some idea of how quickly you've made progress on the disease that effected genesis and others, how many people were alive at any one time when you started united therapeutics and how many are alive now. >> it is one of the things that is -- the way you say it, it comes out kind of odd and then you think about it and it is really good. when genesis was diagnosed, there were only 3000 people with pulmonary art eerial hypertension. she was diagnosed across the city here at children's national medical center. and so we were told that she would die because everybody with this condition died. i knew i did not have time to get this whole organ transplantation thing going, so i left my satellite communications activities and focused on finding pharmaceuticals that would be a bridge to a bridge. the pharmaceuticals could bridge people to the organ transplants. and fortunately our

pharmaceuticals have proven to be successful, approved by the fda. they are now in the united states, 40,000 people living with pulmonary hypertension and so it comes on a little bit strange to say, when i started there were 3000 people with it and now there are 40,000 people. it is like i've been doing something bad but it is actually really, really good because that is a whole football of stadium of people that are alive that would not have otherwise been alive. >> they would have died already. >> the mortality is one to three years. >> and how is genesis now. >> genesis is doing great. she's working in our company at the united therapeutics and she is in charge of keeping everybody in the company working together through using digital media to make sure that all of our clinical trials and development activities and information is available to everybody in the company. >> and briefly, the project that you started a couple of weeks ago is almost tedious by your standards but you are going to reshape how all transplants take

place across the country. you've placed an order for up to a thousand, i think it is, piloted drones that will replace the helicopters on top of the hospital when people go running and all of that. it is going to be a drone? >> so it is -- it's actually a big proj erect. i would say that is a more challenging project than the genetically modified organs themselves but i had to think about that aspect of the project because when we make a pharmaceutical to get it approved by the fda we have to prove to the fda that our drugs have a shelf life of a year. and that is why every drug company, if you look at your medicines it says refill it within a year. the problem is, so we could make the medicines and ship them to the cvs and walgreens and they could sit on the shelf and that is dandy. but when you make a genetically modified organ, as far as the fda is concerned it is a drug called a bio logic.

but unlike medicines for other diseases, this drug has like a 24-hour half life. we all know that you can't just put an organ on a shelf and keep it waiting there for a year. we can't ship it to walgreens. so when we manufacture the organs, which mean we ex plant them from the genetically modified pig, we have to deliver them within hours to the patient at a hospital to be transplanted. there is no shelf life. so i had to think of a whole new model for how are we going to transport all of these organs in realtime from the point of manufacture to the hospitals and the patients. and i think very much inspired by the post owner jeff bezos who i think provided an important foundation of credibility to the whole concept of commercial use of drones. i began to think about, well

maybe it would be plausible to have a special type of drone, obviously this is not one that you will drop the organ on the front yard or something like that. >> it zooms up. >> so it has to be -- it has to be a special type of drone. but i know from technology, if you have a drone that could drop a pile of books on your front yard today, you will be able to have within ten years a drone able to land softly on the hospital heliport and have a person roll the oregon out of the drone and -- the organ out of the drone to the surgeons table and they take it and plant it. so we place the order for a thousand what we call manufactured organ transport helicopters or moths and these will be delivered within the next ten to 15 years. >> and bringing back to close on the very, very prosayic, you are this year's recipient of the

billy jean king leadership award devoted to lgbt issues and you have a multi-million dollar facility employed a couple of hundred people in virginia and you were just down there -- >> yesterday. >> and you have no plans to move your facility from down there. tell us your thoughts on this issue and why -- do you stay and fight? do you pull out? what are your thoughts on how to lead on that issue? >> so, right. i think that unfortunately i got automatically enlisted to lead on this fight because i'm the most visible transgender ceo in north carolina, which maybe i'm the only one. um, but, i was actually -- it was brought to my attention by lots of people in my company who don't identify as being lgbt at all. and they just said, martin, this is going to hurt our recruitment. we're always hiring people at

the united therapeutics especially scientists and technology gists. we hire people from all over the country and overseas. they said to me, martin, can our company put out a public statement that says we oppose this so when we are recruiting people we could say to them, well this law was passed but our company is on record as being opposed to this. so i said, absolutely. and to be frank, i was a little bit nervous about -- i didn't want it to seem like it was my agenda because i'm transgendered and it wasn't -- it bubbled up from the -- especially the r&d staff at united therapeutics. so we adopted this statement. and then the next thing that happened is the newspaper for that area, they asked me to do an editorial interview when i did and i was really gratified that just this weekend on monday the editorial board of the major

newspaper in north carolina all came out in support of our position, which is that this law called hb-2 is not well thought out and counter-productive for north carolina and should be repealed. and the thinking there is that there was no problem -- there had been no documented problem caused by any transgendered person using the bathroom that matched their gender identity. so why adopt a whole law that specifically requires a -- say a transgendered man who could have a full beard and everything and often with at least have a nice kind of nealy tucker beard there, why force that individual to go into the women's bathroom. it is insane. so i -- i mentioned this in my

interview and the editorial board agreed and i think the people of north carolina realized this law was not well thought-out. big companies like paypal and a couple of others have decided not to go to north carolina. but i was clear from the beginning that north carolina is not perfect. but we love it any way. and i never really agreed with the sentiment of love it or leave it. i was -- or like, cut and run. i'm just a stand and fight type of gal. so just because north carolina has one thing bad, it has a lot of good things that are good. and i would rather stand there and change north carolina than run away from it. so we've got hundreds of employees there. they have families. their kids are in schools and churches and everything. and they have all lives there. it would be crazy to think about pulling up and leaving. so we never thought about leaving. we said we would stand there and fight. and later this week, i'll be

speaking at the move festival, which is a big electronic music festival in north carolina. and that all move-fest festival has been turned into a giant protest against hb-2. >> and i think you were quoted i saw as saying you don't think the law will last that long any way, and the u.s. justice department has a view. >> crim crowe laws, they tend to wear out over time. >> well, they do. and been married interracially, you know this when you have been married for 30-plus years and nobody blinks on that issue these days. >> yeah. but when i was born, it was illegal in more than half of the states in the country, so i -- i just love the fact that i'm alive at a point in time when progress is not only continuing to advance but the rate of progress is increasing exponentially and it makes me

feel that we're all alive at the best of all times. >> martin, thank you very much. [ applause ] >> i'm going to turn it over to lois. [ applause ] ♪ ♪

good morning, everyone. i'm lois romano, i'm the editor of "washington post" live. thank you for being here. we have speakered on stage that are deeply involved in how we might augment our reality and even create new senses. i'm going to leave a little time at the end for questions so think about if you have any. first here we have neal harbisson, the first person in the world to have a permanent antenna implanted in his skull. and for being officially recognized as a cyborg. and yes, he sleeps and eats with the antenna. and this woman explored how the brain codes visual information and awarded a grant for her work. she has cracked the neurocode for blindness and is currently working on an artificial retina that could restore vision. at end we have john warner, well-known in tech circles and currently a vp for partnerships

at meta which is a rising star in the augmented reality area. he had been previously at m.i.t. media labs. so welcome our guests and we'll get going. neal, i'm going to start with you. you are a certified cyborg. >> it allows me to extend my it picks up light and gives me vibrations depending on the color. the advantages is that it allows me to send infrared and ultra violent so it goes beyond visual spectrum so there is internet spectrum so people can send colors to my head and share colors with me directly to my head and i could connect to satellite so that i could send colors from space. in fact i'm using the internet as a new sense and not as a tool and i'm using technology not as a tool either but as a body part, as a sensory extension so i don't feel i'm using or wearing technology, i feel i am technology.

that is why i identify myself as a cyborg. >> so you are an artist also. >> i see it as an art. it is the art of designing your own perception of reality and designing our own senses or nining your designing your sensory organs. >> so you were born color blind and become an artist through hearing colors? >> i think i was an artist before that, yes. to me, creating your own senses is an art or creating your own body part is an art. it is designing your own perception of reality. >> okay. got it. all right. sheila, let me go to you. what do we know about the neurocode and how -- how does the brain take in this simulus and use it? how does it work? >> well, just in a normal person, for a normal person, images come in and they land in your photo receptors and -- >> we're going to show you the

slides. >> they have the basic idea. all right. i don't know what happens to the slides. but i can explain. i worked out the neurocode of the retina. like images come in to your eye and it lands on your retino and on your photo receptors and then actually if you go to the next one it highlights just the photo receptors. okay. i'll skip that. okay. and then it is passed through the retinal circuitry and what the circuits do is perform operations on it, so it extracts information and converts it into a code and it is in the form of patterns of electrical pulses that get sent to the brain. and so the key thing is that an image gets converted into a code and it is a code that the brain understands. so like this pattern of pulses that you are looking at here represents this baby's face. so when a person's brain gets this pattern of pulses it knows that what is out there is this baby's face. and of course it is a million

cells that are doing this simultaneously, about 10,000 in your central retina. so if it got a different pattern, it would know it is a car or a dog. so, that is how the communication goes from image into your brain. and so what i've been working on is trying -- when a person gets a retinal disease like macure all degeneration the photo sense -- receptors die -- i'll just explain it and no information could get in. but the output cells, the cells at the end, they still work. and so the idea then is if we could make a device that could interact with these output cells and send the code in, then we could restore sight to the blind. it sounds dramatic. and so i worked out to a large extent the code so i could make a device that could mimic that and then send signals to the

output cells and then send them to your brain. so if we send it like a pattern of pulses that -- that represented stripes, the patient would see stripes. if we send a pattern of pulses that show a talking face because it is movies, the person would see this. we've done it in animals but not in humans yet but i went to the fda three weeks ago and once i send the fda application in, hopefully they will approve it and we could start a clinical trial in 2017. >> and you had good results of the animals. >> have a picture of that to give you a feel for why the code is so important. if you could show the picture of the baby's face, if anybody is -- >> i don't know if they could bring that back. but we'll work on that. let me go to john. john, this idea of tailoring our individual realities as related to what you and your colleagues are doing at meta, how does augmented reality work and how do you trick the brain to see this extra information. >> sure. augmented reality is taking the

digital information connected to the physical world. we've created a headset that you put on and you could look through a visor and see the world and see digital information connected with the world. you could have infinite number of screens where you interact, very similar to the movie minority report and have 3-d images from cad and manipulate it. here is an architect working on a 3-d building and pulling out pieces and you could have somebody else collaborate with it and have remote assistance if you need to fix your washing machine or a jet engine or do surgery, you could have someone looking at what you are doing and help you walk you through that. it is hands free. when i think of the typewriter pd and the keys that the "washington post" folks use a lot and it is based on movable type and the mechanical typewriters didn't get stuck it is like punch cards connecting with technology. i think the future of using eye sight and using gestures is a

big leap forward. there is some reports that say there is $120 billion market opportunity to change the way we interface with computers. so we created a headset where you could look at the world and interact with it and you've seen it rendered in movies like iron man and minority report and mission impossible. we are bringing it to the workplace and creating a tool -- not a toy. it is not based on gaming or entertainment, it is based on productivity. >> you said headset. so a lot of things -- we hear people saying this isn't practical, who will run out and get a headset and wear it around. walk us there when we can -- >> so at m.i.t. i taught the first class on making apps for google glass for the professor and it is a heads-up display and it doesn't track your hands, there is not a microsoft connect device that could see your hands and the heads up display with

2010 technology in 2013. i think it was great that google glass gave the hardware away but it was a public relations nightmare in terms of a.r. and oculus rift was bought by facebook and everybody is excited by virtual reality in which you are submersed in digital information. i think augment reality is three times bigger and society hasn't gotten the memo on it. and the device we created it has a 90 degree field of view. it is a equivalent of a four-case screen. instead of 90 feet away, a movie theater, nine feet away, a television three feet away, a smartphone, we want to eliminate screens and create an office place where you don't have monitors and you are not hunched overlooking at these metaphors on a smartphone. as a society, we are more disconnected even though were are hyper connected and having glasses like ray bans to look out and see digital information on the world is a game-changer. does that answer your question. >> yes, it does. >> because i'm very excited about this and could you

preorder the device and it is shipping in quarter three. >> and it is reasonably priced. >> and it is a third less than the microsoft thing. and the other thing about this is companies are sitting on tons of digital information. and this is a tool to interact with it. and i think it could change health, design, manufacturing. >> thank you. >> and journalism. >> you are training your brain to be connected to the internet 24/7. what sort of information are you getting in there and is it -- is it sensory overload, what is that doing to your brain or our brains? what will happen? >> so the fact of having internet in my head allows me to receive colors from other parts of the world. there is five people that have permission to send colors so they could send colors any time of the day or night. in the beginning it was confusing. >> who are these people. >> five friends. one in each continent. so it is an eye in each continent. so if there is a beautiful sunset in australia and he could

send it to my head and i will be experiencing the sunset while i'm here. if they send colors at night it asks my dreams. so if someone sends violet while i'm asleep and i wake up and i realize i dreamt of a violet house but i know it was violet because of my friends. so my friends could intervene in my dreams an we could share dreams and senses and colors in this case. but my aim is to use the internet exclusively to receive colors from space. so we could use the innoceterne send it to space so instead of going to space, we could feel we are there without the struggle of physically going there. and when there are 3-d pictures that could print our dna we could see ourselves in other planets and have a second body there and connect via the internet. so the use of the internet as a sensory extension to explore space is my main goal and in 2019 i'll have the permanent connection to satellite. so we'll be sensory and explore

space by sending our mind to space instead of physically going there and that is the beginning for myself. i'm just connecting to nasa international space station like two hours a day because i'm training my brain to get used to this disconnection between body and senses. >> you are connecting to the space station two hours a day and the space station is working with you on that? >> it is live stream. anyone can do that. >> i see. >> there is live stream from nasa international space station and i connect there and i try to connect longer and longer each day. but it will take at least two or three years to have 24 hours connection because i need training because it is overwhelming -- the colors from space are much wider in the spectrum than here. so it is overwhelming when i connect. >> and you are hearing that? let me ask you a follow up to that. what are the implications of the human brain interacting with so much information in an immersive constant way? >> well, um, one has to control

it in some way because it could be information over load. but he does it in a good way. not that you need my approval. but that you have the vibrations as you were mentioning so it is an extra sense without interfering with your normal hearing and so a big part of what your nervous system does, evolution made your nervous system do is actually compress the information so that you could use it efficiently. so there is a lot of discussion about the power of big data. but i actually think there is downsides on big data. it is overwhelming. it is like going to your college classes simultaneously and having four professors talking to you, at some point you can't fence. sow want -- so your retina for example, you have 100 million photo receptors so you are taking in essentially every pixel on your computer monitor and then the circuitry gets -- compresses it and gets rid of the stuff you don't need and holds on to what you do need so

you could maneuver. so i could get up on this stage before and never been here before and seen you before and get up and walk through and not crash into people and that is because of the simple way in a sense. >> so our braiif simplifying in a sense. >> it has to learn how to simplify it, which is what neil was saying he has to do in stages. >> that's right. >> each person will have its own time of adapting to a new sense or a new organ. your body needs to either accept or reject the body part, like the material, and your brain might reject the new sense. there's two cases of possible rejections. >> that's what attention mechanisms do for you also. it allows you to pay attention to one thing rather than another thing, so evolution built a way for you to control what you're taking in. >> john, let me swing back to

augmented r augment augmented reality. there are still people who think of it as entertainment. you can just walk us through a little bit about how this can help us in our every day lives, function better, produce better, health care. any examples that you have that it is not just about a game. >> sure. so it's great to be on the panel with these pioneers. neil, you're a visionary artist finding ways to use new senses. cutting-edge research. we have created a tool. the founder and ceo is listed as a real thought leader for wanting to create an operating system that's much more connected with how the brain works. we have been in some ways held hostage to operating systems that are based on rectangles and the technology that we've used. and we want to create a device

that we can manipulate 3-d hologra holograms. if someone is going to do a c e coccoc cochlear implant for your child -- imaging to create a tool that can be an extension of the body. neil is an artist. we want to tap artists and other thought leaders to help us use this device. what would have thought solitaire helped get windows going. i'm excited to help facilitate partnerships with the design community, the manufacturing community, the journalism community to figure out how to

use this technology that's coming. i love the media lab. i've worked there for a number of years, but i have decided i'm going to help create this tool that can really impact society. and i think the internet was big in 2000. mobile phones was big in 2010. apple just had their first negative growth year of their smartphone. there's indications that we've reached a saturation point. i think the 2020s is going to be augmented reality. a lot of fortune 100s are going to have to figure out strategies, like in the 1990s what's our chinese strategy. >> i'm going to ask neil one more question. then i'd like to come to the audience. neil, why was it important for you to be recognized as a cyborg? >> it wasn't. i had an issue with the u.k. passport office. they didn't allow me to renew my passport. they said electronic equipment is not allowed on passport

photos. they thought i was something electronic. i said this is a body part and i feel like i'm a cyborg. i explained to them that i felt cyborg. in the end, they said yes. they allowed me to appear in the passport with the antenna. this allows me to travel because airports don't really like technology. if you are technology -- >> is it on your passport? does it say you can have the antenna? does it say you're a cyborg? >> the picture on the passport has the antenna. they have to accept it is an image that is part of me. >> it is you. >> i wasn't seeking for this. i was just renewing my passport. >> there you go. that tells us how to deal with passport offices. >> i'm now applying for swedish citizenship because the material in my head is swedish.

if you have a sensory organ that's from that country and you've had it for several years why can't you be from that country? because part of my body is swedish. i'm in conversations with the swedi swedi swedish government now. >> i love it. >> are there other cyborg people? are there others that are out there? is there a community? we had a discussion or presentation from the lgbt community. this is not a community that we've heard much about. i'm sure there must be some discrimination. can you talk a little bit about that side of it? >> yes, so we are a minority group. people who voluntarily have decided to add technology into their body to extend their senses. there's two types of cyborgs. there are cyborgs for medical reasons, regenerating preexisting body parts. my case is creating a new body part and a new sense. this is a minority now, but there's a woman who has a

seismic sense. whenever there is an earthquake in the world, she feels it in her body. she's used to feeling the earthquakes in the world on the richter scale. there's one sense. there's the north sense. you can be implanted. you feel the magnetic north. it's senses that other species have, but humans don't have. we have a stage in history where you can design what species we want to be. i consider myself to be a trans species. you can add many more senses that other species have and organs that other species have. we'll start seeing these in the 20s. it is growing. it is happening underground. there are many surgeons willing to do the surgery anonymously in the same way in the 50s and 60s transgender surgeries were being done underground. cyborg surgeries should be

allowed for everyone who wants to extend their perception of reality. >> it is great to be at "the washington post." i don't know if people realize, but journalism is trying to find a business model that works. these are interesting times. i think we need editorial of the times more than ever. i think figuring out how new technology can help us interact with information is really important and what the future of the knowledge worker is. i think this community has heard a lot about internet of things, but i think it is internet of thinking things or internet of the brain. if we fast-forward 100 years, maybe people will be able to connect through esp. what are the tools that are going to help us be a collective community? i think often when people have technology added to their biology, it doesn't fit. i know a lot of people who have lost limbs have prosthetics that they don't wear because they're not comfortable.

i think figuring out how to create technology that can work with us -- i think that's why neuroscience is so important. these are really exciting times to figure out what to do with some of the technology that's coming. >> thank you. do we have another question? yes, right here in the front row. >> i'd like to know [ inaudible ] on the pigs and how you tested what they saw once you implanted what you did, if i understood it correctly. >> what we've done is recreating -- causing the neurons to fire just like they normally do. you can have a completely blind retina. we jump over and driver the output cells to fire, just like i was showing you in that picture. the problem is it is hard to check this in an animal. we've done this in mice. we can have them be blind mice like the song and they can track

images. it is hard to do this in primates because there aren't blind monkeys and i cannot bear to blind a monkey just to test it. so we're just going to go -- if we get permission, we'll just go into humans. the beauty of working with patients is they are very motivated. if you meet a smart blind patient, you can work together. you can send the signals in, as long as it is safe, then we can get the feedback from them as to how well it is working. if we're sending very close to the same signals they would normally get, they should be able to see this. mice can track images. and we showed what it was like to reconstruct an image from the firing patterns of a totally blind retina and compared that to what happens with the use of standard prosthetic right now, what's available. it is much better. i have a ted talk on this if you want to see the actual pictures.

i think bloomberg news just did a story. it shows what it really looks like. >> we have time for one more. is there -- there we go. >> hello. two questions, please. one would be why do you assume sensory is a bad thing? because normally people use very little of their brain capacity. i understand that's because -- what if for some reason somebody was born to filter massive amounts of data, not understanding everything, but being able to connect the dots and put that information to useful ends? again, why do you assume that's not possible? the other question would be do we really want to take evolution into our own hands? it's been working pretty well so far as it is.

thanks. >> who would like to take that? the reason i say that is because if somebody could filter it, that would be amazing. right now being able to function quickly -- as you're asking me a question, i'm listening to you. everybody in this room is going into my retina, but i've ignored it so i can focus on what you're saying because it is very, very hard. when you're multitasking, think about when you're driving and you text. it is just dangerous. we have to figure out ways, like he does, to be able to make use of the information and filtering is essentially what i mean. filter the information, so you take what you need and you can solve the problems that are in front of you. it would be the same with the augmented realities. finding a way to utilize it, not getting into a slaclash with yo own brain. we're not totally built for it

yet. >> i can take in 10/8th bandwidths per second. we need to do it in a way that we can be productive and cl collaborati collaborative. at the end of the day, human beings are a collaborative species. >> unfortunately, that's all we have time for for, so thank you all very much. this was enlightening. [ applause ] if you google any one of these three people, there is a wealth of information on them. now i will welcome my colleague jeremy gilbreath up.

>> good morning. i'm jeremy gilbert, "the washington post" director of strategic initiatives. i'm very pleased to welcome to the stage the director of the defense advanced research projects agency, better known as darpa. they are credited with the invention of the internet, driverless cars, and much, much more. he founded the technology office and spent more than a decade as a leading silicon valley venture capitalist. i'm also grateful to have gary king, who is a harvard university professor. gary is an elected fellow in

eight honorary societies, has more than 150 journal articles, and 8 books. and what we're here to talk about this morning is numbers tell the truth. new tools that help make meaning from big data. i want to start by asking our guests what it is they really think that means. >> i think both of us think big data is not actually about the data. the revolution is not that there's more data available. the revolution is we know what to do with it now. that's really the amazing thing. if you take social media, today there were 650 million social media posts that were written by somebody and available to researchers to see what people think. some people say it is the largest increase in the expressive capacity of the human race in the world. one person can write a post and potentially billions of other people read it, but how is any one person going to understand what billions of what other people say? the only way to understand for

one day is to have automated methods that can understand this text, so the revolution is not about the data. it's about the analytics that we can come up with and that we now have to be able to understand what these data say. >> gary is talking about, i think, one of the most interesting dimensions of the data explosion, which is the data that humans are generating as we express ourselves. the human race is my favorite species, so i like that kind of data for future, but i think data has become plentiful in many, many other areas as well. if i think about the work we're doing in cybersecurity where the data is the ones and zeros and the code and the work we're doing to understand the radio spectrum where the signal at each frequency and the wave form, that's the data, and i think about the work that we're doing even to understand the signaling of the brain, that's a

different kind of data. we are in an era in which we're data rich. the opportunity space to start building the techniques that give us insights from that data is vast. we see it commercially and in the research horizons. i think it is important to say as well as powerful as this data revolution is it also has some important limitations, at least today. i just want to make sure that we don't get into a world of buzz and hype and sort of overlook what those limitations are, so we should probably talk about both of those. >> why don't we start there, then? where are the limitations? what are the challenges associated with that? where is that space? >> there are lots of them. dive in. >> i think that's actually the space. that's actually data science, which is what we would probably rather call it, although i love

the media invented the term big data because my folks think they understand what i do. it is a valuable thing. it resonated with people. people get a sense that it is important. the data is important, but the analytics is where the revolution is. the point of it is to try to make sense of information that is complicated and error prone and doesn't speak to the questions you have. so what is it that we do? we do inference. inference is taking facts you have to learn about facts you don't have. that's the whole thing. it might be that the facts you don't have have everything to do with the facts you do have. it's never a sure thing, but we test and we test and we make ourselves vulnerable to being proven wrong. the idea this is a separate topic that may be data is

sometimes error prone isn't really right because every datum has problems with it. >> maybe an interesting example of some of the limitations today -- really, i think there's so much that is going to be possible here, but let's talk about where it runs out of steam. one of the areas where there is enormous progress with data is in machine learning. a really simple place that we all experience that is -- i don't know if you go on facebook or social media and an image pops up that you didn't know someone had taken of you and an algorithm has identified that's you in the picture, that's based on image understanding technology that's based on machine learning. these are essentially systems that learn by looking at hundreds of thousands of millions of images that are labeled, and from that, they learn this is what a person looks like. this is what this particular person looks like. over time, these machines have become very, very, very good at

identifying the what's happening in a picture, who the people are, what the action is that's going on. they're now at the point where they're starting to get on a statistical level as good and sometimes even better than humans looking at pictures, so that is pretty impressive. they are statistically better. they're not better. humans aren't perfect at that either. the machines aren't perfect either. i think the really important thing to recognize is that in this case, in machine learning for image understanding, when the machine is wrong, it's wrong in ways that no human would ever be wrong. it's just going to be a different kind of mistake. everything that we do is structured around the way humans make mistakes. so think about a self-driving car or in my world we just launched -- we just christened a self-driving ship. you can sense what's going on around you and learn and adapt and be able to operate without collisions, whether it is

collisions on the road or collisions on the open ocean in our case. in both of those cases, i think you have to recognize that as powerful as these machine learning systems are there will be mistakes that happen. they won't be the kind of mistakes that we currently indemnify for. when you start to try to ask why did the machine make a mistake that is different from a mistake i would make, today it is pretty much a black art how these machine learning systems work. they don't have a way of explaining how they've adapted themselves to be able to recognize pictures. and until we have deeper understanding of those systems, i think we just need to recognize that there will be places that we do want to use that technology and other places where we're not going to yet be ready to use it. >> are you implying that we have almost too much faith and too much trust in artificial intelligence and in the machine generated learning algorithms

that we have now? do you think the public presumes they are more trustable than they actually should be? >> i think sometimes. i think sometimes our narrative about these technologies is just extrapolating from the enormous gains we've made in the last few years to a place that's not realistic, but in fact i think there are, you know, in my world to go from a new technology capable to a system that the defense department and our military will use and rely on, we have a very rigorous process to make sure that these systems work and that we can trust them before we turn decisions over to them. i'll give you an example. i think there are places where we're not going to be ready to have the machine just decide and go do what it needs to do. examples might be a self-driving ship in a very congested environment. we're still going to want to have a human in that decision loop. there are other places where i think we are ready to have machines make decisions for us. an example might be in

cybersecurity. if you're trying to defend your network and attacks are coming in, we are at a point now where we think the power of machines looking at the patterns and the ones and zeros and the net flow data, that those machines are going to be able to see the patterns of attack and discern what's happening and alert you so that you can do something about it in a way that humans can't. statistically if they guess wrong, the world doesn't end. it's going to be very, very valuable in starting to get a handle on cybersecurity. >> if you think of the kinds of methods that are developed to analyze data this in field, they range from fully human, which doesn't really work -- it works fine at the microlevel, but no human can process the amounts of d that that are coming in today. then you can go to a fully automated system that are extremely efficient and

incredibly dumb. imagine a driverless car where you don't tell the human where to go. the best technology in most areas is human empowered and computer assisted. the computer doesn't tell us what an interesting idea is. although more and more it can help us get a sense of the potential interesting ideas, but it's only the human that is going to choose those. i give an example of social media a minute ago. one of the things we did is download all the social media posts in china, and we learned that we were able to download all the posts before the chinese government could censor them. we had all chinese language social media posts that were censors and that were uncensored. they're censoring it for a purpose. what's the purpose? you censor it anytime you're

critical of the government. we used that lens to analyze this data and it didn't make any much sense because there was just as many censored posts that were critical of the government that were supportive of the government. the ideas are the human part. we tried a lot of ideas. data, big data, and data a analytics don't make the process of coming up with ideas automated. nothing clarified until at one point my graduate students and i said, wait a second. we thought they were censoring criticism. maybe they're actually censoring protest and not censoring criticism. we all thought they were the same thing. once we separated the two and looked through those lenses, it became incredibly clear. they don't censor criticism.

they censor protest. you can say to the leaders of china -- you can see in social media posts the leaders of this town are all stealing money, this is the bank accounts they're in, and they all have mistresses and that is not censored. but if you see, by the way, and we're going to have a protest, censored. they don't care what you think of them. they're a bunch of dictators. they only care what you can do. if you have the power to move crowds, they're worried about you. they're not worried about foreign governments invading. they have nuclear weapons. they're worried about their own people. now those ideas didn't emerge from our terrific data analyt s analytics. i love our analytics. that's our contribution, but it only assists us in coming up with the ideas.

then we can try out things and make ourselves vulnerable to being proven wrong. we can test the hypothesis. >> i think that's a great example of the human and the machine together because you would have never done it without the data either, right? >> that's right. you need the data, but the data by itself isn't very good. the great thing it is empowering us. we were like astronomers they were like standing on our toes and stretching out our neck and squinting. now we have the photons and the equivalent of great telescopes. but that isn't enough if you don't have an idea of what you're seeing and the analytics. >> you were using tools to interpret a huge amount of information that would not have be been processable.

>> absolutely. how did people study censorship before in china? well, there was one person that would write one post and notice that that one post was censored. humans are incredibly good at seeing at patterns. look at the clouds when you walk outside today. you'll see animals and elephants and things like that. we're lame at seeing non-patterns. the way we studied censorship is one person would see one post. it was censored. they would generalize that the entire chinese bureaucracy. we had the first aerial view of this whole thing. it is the same example. we had the first aerial view where we could see millions and millions of posts. around 1300 were censored every day in different topic areas. once you see this, it reveals all kinds of different things. it reveals the intentions not

only of individuals. it reveals the intentions of organizations. so think of this giant organization designed to suppress information in china. it's so large that it conveys a lot about itself if you look at it at scale. it's like a big elephant tiptoeing around. it leaves big footprints. and when we look at scale, we can see the footprints. >> it is so interesting because if many ways we believe or know that the government is using similar artificial intelligence and analytic systems to try to understand what the public is saying. i think to bring out some of these sentiments. i guess it suggests that the tools can be used for very healthy and less healthy outcomes. how do you balance as you build these systems -- how do you ensure that they're used in ways that we feel ethically comfortable with? >> i think it is true of every

powerful technology. human history says the technologies -- i'm a techno-optimist. i believe technology has advanced humanity over many centuries, but how humans have used technology is for both good and ill. i think this is a question that has to be integral to all the work we do like at darpa. we have tried to address that question by first and foremost just getting those ethical issues on the table. it's been an interesting thing that i've observed. in the defense department, i have the privilege of working with a lot of senior military people in leadership positions. it is so woven into the training of what it means to be a war fighter, the ethics of that business, a very serious business, is something that is taught and learned and trained and discussed very, very openly and very, very seriously. it is sort of surprising as an

engineer by training. i don't think we really talk about that in science and engineering. very little today and not to the degree we need to. we scientists and engineers certainly don't own the answer, but i think we own the responsibility of getting these issues out on the table. the one you touched on is the first obvious one that happens when it is human being's data and that is about privacy. one of the things we're trying to do at darpa is come up with some of the technology tools that might allow us to essentially give people and organizations greater agency of their data. we believe, for example, as an individual i can share my health care data for medical research knowing who would see it and who wouldn't, knowing it would be available for only a certain amount of time, knowing it wouldn't be published to the world. i would be much more inclined to be open with my data if i had

that kind of assurance and agency over it. i think that kind of answer is going to include technology components that can help. if we can somehow break a very painful trade between privacy and security today, i think that would be a huge advance. i think it's also important to be clear there's never going to be a technology that's a magic wand and let's just sort of wave these problems away. they're deeply human societal issues that we'll all be grappling with for a long time. >> inside a university, we're under very strict rules. you don't have to worry about us. before we do anything, we have to get approval. but in the public, there is a debate that you're raising about there's more data, there's much better analytics, we can understand what people are doing, aren't they going to be privacy violations? absolutely. that's something to worry about. but don't forget the good. would you all be willing to give up some of your privacy to live

ten years longer than your life expectancy? ask yourself that question because it is not an unrealistic question. it is not just live longer than expected. it is live happier lives, safer lives. i'm saying there's two sides. and both sides effect every one of us. and we just shouldn't give away the good. we're on the research end of things, and so we see the good coming down the pike very vividly. and we don't want any of us to miss that. at the same time, we have to protect everybody's privacy because we're not going to be able to get access to the data to find out these wonderful things about the future of humanity. >> i want to pose one more question to our panelists and then i'll open it up to the room. given darpa's history and some of the things you have talked about, the use of robotic systems, artificial intelligence, was social science this kind of quantifiable -- is

that a natural fit? does that telegraph darpa's intentions? >> it is one of many things that we're looking into. i see a huge opportunity with people like gary and other leaders in this field. social science is being reinvented because of the availability of massive of data coupled with these very thoughtful techniques and the me methodologies that are developing. i think that is going to allow us to ask questions that have been dead ends in social science for a very long time. we have a new program called next generation social science that is specifically about building the tools and the methods that would allow for a new generation of social science research, research that could be done on a different scale than, you know, graduate students that are getting paid 20 bucks to do an experiment, research that

could be reproduced and scaled, research that could be investigated and seen from the outside in a very different way. we've chosen that example. it's a very basic research program, but we wanted to have a particular sample problem to work on. in that case, we chose the question -- the question we're posing are, what the key factors in collective identity formation. as you can imagine, this is something that is essential in our world if you think about the stability operations that happened in iraq and afghanistan that we're still in many ways engaged with. these are some of the more core questions about any social group is when do a group of individuals believe that they are a collective whole and what causes that to break apart. i don't think we have very good answers to that. certainly we don't have practical answers to help anyone who is trying to do something on the ground today. our hope is through developing these techniques we get new insights in that area, but also

develop methodologies that scale across many more areas. for our mission at darpa, which is breakthrough technologies for national security, i think it's actually very hard to imagine an area that's more important to national security than understanding societal behavior. the fact that we have vast new opportunities told that i think is something we definitely want to tap into. >> fabulous. are there questions? all right. i think we probably have time for at least one, maybe two. >> with the incredible job that darpa is doing, do we need diux? >> it is an initiative in the defense department to try to connect the dod better to the commercial tech community, the first part of that activity is in the silicon valley area. i actually think this is a really important opportunity for the department. darpa is designed to be deeply engaged with the technical community.

my 100 technical program managers are out in the world. they can't get their jobs done without talking to people in universities and defense companies, small companies and large. much of the rest of the operations of the department are jobs that keep them in their offices and talking to each other. secretary carter has underscored how important it is. i actually think it is a very important initiative and one we hope to see making great progress. [ inaudible ]. well, darpa has had a 60-year history. i think it is really important for many other parts of the department, more of the operational parts of the

department in particular, to start tapping where commercial technology can make a big difference. >> these are special cases of a general phenomenon that's happening. it used to be pretty much all the day in the world was inside universities because we created it. now most of the day in the world is out there. it's in companies. it's in governments. the only way we can do our job, the only way you can do your job, the only way companies can do their job is to talk to each other, is to have way more connections than they had before. to have a treaty where companies can share their data without feeling privacy is violated is a really important topic for the politicians or for someone here to solve. >> well, i'm really sorry about this, but we are out of time. i would like you to join me in thanks our guests for coming. >> thank you.

[ applause ] please welcome to the stage katie couric for the next segment. >> hi, everyone. good morning. nice to see you all. i'm katie couric.

thanks for being hire. i'm looking forward to our conversation about philanthropy. joining me david rubenstein, who is the cofounder of carlisle group and a self-described patriotic philanthropist. he has taken an interest in preserving and owning some of the nation's most prized historical landmarks, wendy schmidt, a founder of its 11 hour foundation focused on wise use of natural resources among other endeavors. she is also the founder and vice president of the schmidt ocean institute. and peter cobbler, the immediate past chair of pancan, the pancreatic cancer action network and the chairman of the board of the cobbler foundation. welcome to all of you. great to see you.

i apologize in advance. i have a terrible cold. let's start by asking a little bit about -- talking a little bit about the way you were raised. i know, david, you grew up as an old child in a jewish neighborhood in baltimore. your dad was a postal worker. your mom a stay at home mom. how were your ideas of philanthropy formed when you were a young man? >> while i wouldn't say my parents were against fill l philanthro philanthropy, they gave what they could to charitable things. i didn't get into this until later in life. don't make the mistake that i have. even if you don't have a lot of money -- philanthropy is an ancient greek word that means

loving humanity. when i got money later in life, i decided to race through the latter part of my life in giving away the money. i'm now committed to giving it all away, but i wish i had been more involved in philanthropy as a young person. >> i knew you grew up in shore hills, new jersey. born in orange. your parents owned an interior design shop. you are the second of five children and athe only girl. was philanthropy something your family emphasized? what kind of values did your parents instill in you that might have helped kind of promote the notion of philanthropy later in life? >> i was raised to work hard. my grandparents were philanthropists of some note in their day. but our family was not really focused that way. i maybe different from other people in my family.

i've had a different kind of life and certainly different opportunities. philanthropy came to me kind of a necessity after google went public. we had a responsibility to think about what do you do with this. how do you not just make contributions to things, but how do you help to help transform the world? that's the motivation. >> peter, i know that your grandfather and parents started the cobbler foundation in 1967. tell us the genesis of that foundation. >> my grandfather and father did very well in business. the jim beam bourbon was the name of the company. >> can i just say thank you to them? >> you and i together. they did pretty well. and they were very fortunate. the money from that was the origin of the cobbler foundation.

fill l it was mainly in jewish interests. to me, two very strange things happened. what a strange thing to be born into a family where there was these assets and these foundations and where -- but the second strange thing that happened to me, which was very improbable, was death from pancreatic cancer in my family when i was a teenager. suddenly my father dmother diedn my grandfather died. then i was in the middle of two very unusual circumstances being linked to a foundation and being linked to a very terrible disease, which later in life i've tried to take on. >> you obviously got involved for extremely personal reasons in this cause. >> like in your family -- i know it's well known the suffering in your family and how you have tried to turn that suffering

into something -- into productive channels. i personally and our foundation has also tried to make a difference in that way. >> david, i know that you have been incredibly generous. universities, hospitals, cultural organizations, but the majority has gone to something called patriotic giving. tell us what the definition of patriotic giving is. >> it gets more attention than the other things i do because not as many people are doing it. most of my money goes to medical research and education, but it gets a lot of attention because a lot of people aren't doing it. i'm trying to get more people to learn more about our history and our heritage so they can be better citizens. if they know more about our history, they can be more informed citizens. we can have a better democracy. that's a theory. i've bought history documents like the magna carter, the emancipation proclamation, where

people can see them. by seeing them in real life, i think they may be inspired to read more about history and to learn more about it. it is designed to make these places more attractive and make sure people more go to them and learn more about the history. >> what inspired you to do that, to get into that area? >> like most things in life, it's by serendipity. i happened to be at a place where the magna carter was being auctioned off. i decided to buy it and give it to the country. then it led to buying other documents. when the washington monument had earthquake damage, i said i didn't want to wait for congress to fix it up. that led to other things. more and more people thought it was a good thing. and i tried to encourage other people to do it. the national parks service has $11 billion of unfunded needs, and i don't have that kind of money to do that. i'm trying to get other people to be involved in the parks

service which controls the washington monument and the lincoln memorial. it is just something that i think is a good way to give back to our society. i came from very modest means. with my last name, i'm not sure in other countries i would have risen up to what i am today. >> and you have something called the mother standard. >> yes. when i was building my company, i'm sure my mother was happy, but she didn't call me every day and say you're great. you're going to make more money. this is great. when i started giving away the money, she started saying that's a good thing. you're finally doing something useful with your money. if you can make your mother happy, particularly if it is a jewish mother, it is a very good thing. >> meanwhile, wendy, much of your work has focused on awareness and research and programs, which i know are important to you, around preserving natural resources, environmental causes, overall

sustainability. what was it about that arena that made you think this is where i want to invest? this is where i think i can make a big difference. >> we had to make a decision when we were making our family foundation what we were going to focus on. eric is very focused on technology and about how the world is changing. we met in the 1970s. since that time, everything we do is different because of the microprocessor revelation and becau the way we communicate and network. that model is so important. i looked outside and thought we need to use those tools. we need to look at a system that we inherited after world war ii that has transformed the world in very good ways, but has left environmental degradation

behind. particularly when we look at the oceans. the oceans are so big, so vast. when my mother was born in 1931, there were 2 billion people on the planet. now we're almost 8. the pressure of humanity, the human footprint on the resources of the planet, is something we need to address today and understand how to live within the living systems that we can see. i don't know if you saw the tree of life article a couple weeks ago about where the human branch fits in. this is something darwin introduced. scientists have been looking at this other time. some berkley scientists came out with the newest tree of life based on the coding of dna. plants, animals, people are over here. the bacterial branch is quite large. the single-celled organism brarg branch is very, very large. when you look at the systems we live in, we're very, very small.

what do we need? what do we need to preserve? what can we use? what do we need to regenerate in a more circular economy rather than a wasteful one? >> take me to a micrmicro level how deciding where the money is going to go and the criteria about making decisions about who is going to get what. >> i've had the opportunity to chair two organizations. one is the pancreatic action network. it has just surpassed breast cancer as the third leading cause of cancer death in america. sadly, there's not very much funding either from government or from the private sector. but it's juried.

they don't make decisions arbitrarily. they respect one another's dedication and excellence. it's not specific to a particular university because, s as we know, universities have a preference for their own people. it's a way to work out that preference problem. the other organization, which i'm proud to chair, has been the bloom cobbler family foundation. that has also dedicated excellence. a little more risk taking because you can be more of a risk taker in a private foundation than you can be in a public corporation or than you can be in a public charity. we'll do cultural things, sort of like patriotic. we'll do health things. you get to take a little more risk in a private foundation,

but excellence is still -- it's the mother factor, but it's also known as excellence. >> i know you helped fund stand up to cancer, an organization i started. the emperor of all maladies, which was ken burn's series on pbs. >> what stand up to cancer did for emperor of all maladies was to put cancer on people's -- to get it front and center. ken burns, brilliant filmmaker. couldn't be more proud than to have the cobbler foundation to help underwrite stand up to cancer and that brilliant documentary. >> wendy, what about you and david? when you're thinking about what you're going to place your donations and your work and your effort and your oversight, what are the things you're looking for in terms of the

organizations that you want to support? >> well, you ask are they moving the dial. if we look at energy and climate centers and agriculture and human rights, we look for organizations that are going to be transformative. and we take the risks. risk is a huge thing. i think philanthropy can afford to take risks that government certainly won't take, particularly in the sciences. we've seen a drop of 40% or more in government funding for scientists since 2010. there's a huge role for us to play to step into doing that. you mentioned films. these are projects where we're very interested in involving the general public in some of these more abstract understanding about what's going on in the planet and to bring what is far away, or was when i grew up,

something happening in the democratic republic of congo, into your consciousness. >> how do you measure success? >> first, i don't have a foundation. i do it all myself. i don't have a staff. >> can i interrupt you for two seconds? >> sure. >> it is interesting these two individuals do and you don't. i'm curious why not. >> i know what i want to do with the money. i write a check and that's it. >> saves you some on overhead. >> i'm afraid if i had a staff they would convince me to do what they want to do, so i just do it myself. i'm not critical of people who have different situations. probably at some point i should do something more professional. my standards are will my money make something happen that wouldn't otherwise happen, would my money complete something that otherwise wouldn't get completed, and do i have enough

money and time to get something don't that wouldn't get done? i'm looking for things that i can actually see get done. i would like to see some progress while i'm alive. i'm 66 years old. i would rather see it while i'm alive. my goal is to kind of get things done while i'm alive, do things that have an impact, and that are measurable. do i see people getting some better use of the resource aye given? is life somewhat better for people? i don't have a profit and loss kind of metric. no one really does. all of us here could give away all of our money today if we took all the requests that we had because there's an infinite amount of good causes in the world. we could fill up our checkbooks. i get $50 million of requests a week. like most people in life, i like

my ideas better than somebody else's ideas. 95% of the money i give away is something that i came up with. they might not be perfect, but i like my ideas better than somebody else's. generally, i like what i'm working on. i focus on it. i call people up and ask them if they will take the money as opposed to waiting for them to come to me. >> there's been a little bit of blowback about private individuals and philanthropy. in a 2014 piece in the new york times, for better or worse, the practice of science in the 21st century is becoming shapeless by national priorities or by peer review groups and more by the particular preferences of individuals with huge amounts of money. so i guess i think critics have a problem with this for a number of reasons. they say the money goes to elite universities at the expense of poor ones, that -- and that is

not spreading the wealth literally, geographically, economically, racially among the nation's scientists. they say the social contract is at stake and it ignores basic science for, quote, a jumble of popular feel good fields like environmental studies and space exploration. i'm just curious what you think about some of these critics and scientists who are saying this isn't really great because it disincentivizes government and it makes for an unfair playing field. >> i'm jump in on that. like david, i once served in the executive branch of the united states government. i think the author has made some very good points. the numbers are much smaller than what the u.s. government can do. the u.s. treasury overwhelming in significance what an

individual can do. also there's an element of fairness frankly. so i think the author is right. something that's juried or reflects the point of view of the american citizenry has enormous advantages. and philanthropy is wonderful, but it doesn't have that level of integrity. >> the atlantic wrote an article entitled, is philanthropy bad for democracy? thoughts on that, david? >> it sounds like that is written by somebody who doesn't have the money to give away. look, if you do anything in life, anything, you will be criticized. there's always a critic. there are 7.5 billion people on the face of the earth. trying to please all of them is impossible. if you're going to be frozen because you're afraid somebody will criticize you, you'll never

get anything done. in the end, you have to make your own judgment. we have a small amount compared to what the government has. the government can do whatever it wants. getting decisions from the government is not that easy. fiphilanthropists can get something started and the government can catch up later. elite universities are elite because they're very good. they make enormous changes to our country. i think one of the greatest assets our country has is or highest education system, particularly the good public and private schools. they are the envy of the world. if we say to them don't give them money because they already have money, we'll be starving them a bit and they won't be the envy of the world. in the end, i'm not as concerned about these kind of criticisms. i'm more concerned about my mother than i am these people. >> i can also say i think the opportunity we have as philanthropists is to create new models. that's not going to come from

government. we have a research organization that we have opened up to scientists around the world to share. we have research labs. we have a super computer. we have ship to shore communication and sicientists express their interest to be on these cruises. this is transforming the practice of marine science and maybe government will follow. the point is we need good reference points to develop good policies. >> are you pretty optimistic that the good data and the results of philanthropy will in fact change public policy, because all the fill l-- philanthropy can be destroyed by bad policy? >> wealthy people who have made

money are not all that smart and they'll have a worse policy for the government by people who are not financially successful. if wealthy people have given away money, it's they do have s intelligence, they do have some ideas that might make the country a slightly better place. on the subsidy issue let's suppose we eliminated the subsidy for charitable deduction which is motivating a lot of people to give away money, we give away more money in this country than any other country per capita, but i think actually most of the philanthropists in this country would give away largely the same amount of money they're giving away now because what can you do with the money? you can't be buried with it like the pharaohs were buried with it. >> you said you don't want to be the richest guy in the cemetery. >> i don't. so if the charitable deduction were eliminated i don't think it would appreciably change the wealthiest people's giving away money. they have to give it away. what are they going to do with it? it may change other people's -- and i suspect that deduction won't be eliminated. but clearly i think it does motivate some people to give away money but i think for the

largest philanthropists in the united states they're not motivated by the tax deduction. >> without disagreeing with wendy and david let me say something on behalf of government funding particularly for science. it was franklin roosevelt who stashted the national cancer institute. richard nixon and subsequent presidents over the last two generations that have accelerated funding for cancer, i believe vice president joe biden is now the leader of a major project called moonshot project which we hope will make it through congress. if the united states government gets behind something in the sciences, and today you're having somebody from nasa, it is spectacular what the results can be. so we can admire philanthropy, and i'm so honored to be part of that world and to be here with wendy and david, but the federal gets there, boy, it's historic. >> well, to that end, peter, are you worried that somehow the government will be let off the hook or disincentivized to do more if in fact we see an increase in private philanthropy

going to various issues and causes? >> it depends. that's not the favored answer. but it depends on the engagement of citizenry. if citizens get involved and ask their elected legislators or the next president to do this, they will do it. our group as one example in 2012 pancreatic cancer action network there were 10,000 bills introduced. only 200 passed. one of them was ours to instruct the national cancer institute to start a program, a framework to take on pancreatic cancer. it can be done, but people can't sit back and watch tv and tweet. they've got to really get involved. >> how important is your philanthropic efforts and the things that you've done in terms of your legacy? obviously we know how your mom felt. but for you personally, what does it mean? >> well, obviously, when you think you're doing something to make the world a slightly better place, you feel good about

yourself. we're only on this earth for a very short period of time and all of us want to feel we're doing something to make the world a better place and it's not clear that just by making more money you're making the world a better place so i think i feel better what i've done the last couple years thaun i did in the previous 20, 30 years just making the money but everyone has to make their own judgment of what makes them happen and i what makes them feel self-satisfied. but i think i'm very happy with it. my biggest regret is i'm 66 years old and i'm not going to have another 66 years to do what i now enjoy doing. >> what has given you the most satisfaction of all your efforts? >> well, i guess it's probably the feeling that i get very often wherever i am i get people in this country coming up to me saying thank you for what you're doing to help our country in many ways and while what i'm doing is very modest people feel giving back to the country is a good thing to do. i guess it's a pleasure out of hearing from people i don't really know so well about their pleasure at what they see i'm doing and hopefully they're going to be motivated to do the same. >> what about you, wendy? what's the difference between recognition and legacy and --

>> i would answer that by saying i believe we are living through a revolution right now. we may not recognize it but we are. and we are going to end up making things differently. we're going to use resources differently. we're going to see enormous opportunity in front of us if we can seize this moment. i'm very focused on the transformation of the systems we live in that can create a much healthier world. products that are healthy for people. practices that are healthier for people. and for the environment around us. we need to move away from the systems of the last century and invent new ones. i'm very focused on innovation, and i'm sure that will continue into the future. >> and do you think that will be your legacy, helping this transition? >> i would love that to be my legacy. yes. >> and peter, obviously, you come from a family from really instilled these values. i'm curious how you're doing that for your children and how all of us, regardless of our means, can sort of instill those

values of philanthropy to our children. >> i hope i've instilled them. there's no one more proud of their sons tn i am. i have a lawyer son who's a public defender and does philanthropy as classically defined, not as a foundation director. and i have another son who's a surgical resident and i'm hoping that he will one day be using his -- at johns hopkins and i'm hoping thael one day be using his skills to do medical philanthropy. one other point not covered today, much less glamorous, much more about nuts and bolts, patriotic environment, cancer, all important but one aspect of philanthropy we really need in the country now is more nuts and bolts, direct services. a lot of people in the country are really suffering. inner city, rural, opioid addiction, lots of things. the more money that can be given to direct services so clinics can take care of people medically, food for people really hungry in the country. that's a subject for another day. >> now, we were talking about

that, my colleague and i on the way down from new york, and we were saying some of these less glamorous causes. glamorous in quotations. sometimes don't get the intention and the funding. so maybe we can -- maybe you all can make them glamorous. david. >> i don't know about that, but the question you addressed earlier. what do you do with your children? if you're fortunate enough to have a fair amount of money and you don't give it all away or you die before you give it all away, your children have a fair amount of money, what are they supposed to do with it? and trying to instill in children a philanthropy and a philanthropic gene is important. at the give and pledge meetings much of the conversation we have amongst people who sign the giving pledge is whether or not you should give your children their own foundation. how do you get them involved in philanthropy? how do you make sure you don't spoil them but also teach them about the importance of philanthropy. it's a very complicated subject and very few people have figured it out. i don't say that i figured it out perfectly either. and i still struggle with how

much money do you give your children, when do you give it to them and how much freedom do you give them to give it away and do you guide them? these are complicated subjects. fortunately we're in the position to be able to deal with it but it's a subject that hasn't been satisfactorily resolved by anybody. >> what about you, wendy? you have two girls. tell me about their role in philanthropy. we're almost out of time. in fact, we've been out of time. sorry, you guys. we're almost done. but what kind of lessons have you tried to show them or do you kind of want them to follow your example and what you do? >> i think that's up to them. this is relatively new in their lives. i've only been working at this for a decade. so they are growing into adulthood and they are watching what we do. and they're involved as observers. and hopefully practitioners at some point. but david raises all the same issues that we'll all face with the legacy. >> that may be for our next panel another day. thank you all for being here so much. david and wendy ledder, thank

you so much. we're going to take a break and be back in 15 minutes. >> thank you very much. >> thanks. the libertarian party is holding its national convention this weekend in orlando, florida. c-span will have live coverage when presidential candidates hold a debate saturday night at 8:00 eastern. then on sunday morning the party chooses its presidential and vice presidential nominees. that starts at 9:45 a.m. eastern. so far the libertarian party is the only third party that's on the national ballot in all 50 states. >> madam secretary, we proudly give 72 of our delegate votes to the next president of the united

states -- ♪ we now return to the "washington post" transformers summit. for a look at commercial space travel and the impact of online communities. in this portion nasa administrator charles bolden and other space leaders share their thoughts on what commercial space travel will look like. the ceos of twitch and reddit discuss how their sites have changed how people communicate online. this is an hour and 15 minutes.

>> achieving a goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. >> four, three, two, one. zero. we have a lift-off. lift-off on apollo 11. >> the space race inspired a generation of scientists and innovators. it's contributed to immeasurable technological advance that's have improved our health and well-being from satellite navigation to water purification, from aerospace manufacturing to medical imaging. this exploration will once again inspire wonder in a new generation, sparting passions and launching careers. >> my name is chris not davenport. i'm a reporter at the

"washington post." our next panel is about space and particularly commercial space. it's a really interesting time right now where too many people i think when the shuttle retired in 2011 they think there's not that much going on but in fact there's so much going on at nasa and in the commercial sector, enough probably to fill a book for one of our panelists here. let me introduce everyone here. next to me is charles bolden, who's the nasa administrator. we have julie van creek, the vice president of aerospace and launch at rocketdyne. andy weir of "the the martian," and george whiteside, ceo of virgin galactic and the spaceship company. all of these people are involved in space in various ways but something extraordinary is going to happen in a year or two, administrator bolden, and i want you to talk to us about it. we're going to have a launch from a government site at kennedy space center or cape

canaveral. we're going to launch nasa astronauts to the international space station. but they are going to be launched on a commercial vehicle. >> absolutely. >> this is a very big deal. how did this come about? >> it's a huge deal. and it actually started back in 2003 after we lost "columbia." and long story short, the decision was made -- recommendation was made to the president at the time to phase out of the space shuttle for a number of reasons. one, we wanted to explore. and the shuttle was a low earth orbiting vehicle. but we felt that nasa had worked with our industry partners long enough and that they were fully capable of providing transportation for cargo and crew t low earth orbit. so we struck out. we didn't invest in commercial crew initially. we were kind of lukewarm to it. president obama provided 9 impetus. he said we're going to do it when he spi came into office. we started in earnest and now we're a year, year and a half away from launching american

astronauts from u.s. soil. and that's going to be incredible. >> but can you take us back to that early point? because to have even cargo and to rely on the commercial sector in that way, that was a really sort of bold and daring bet. did people tell you you were crazy? >> yeah. but that's okay. i get told i'm crazy all the time. we talk about -- andy may not know this. we talked about mars when i first came in, and that was not very popular in 2009. that was sort of a verboten topic here in washington, d.c. for reasons beyond my belief, but it was not until the president actually said okay, this is what we are going to do. and he did it in what i consider to be a major space policy address to the nation, to the world at the kennedy space center in april of 2010. and nobody paid any attention to it. but that was when he gave us two challenges. one was to put humans on an asteroid by 2025. that's still a strong challenge. and put humans on mars in the

2030s. so we're well on the way to doing both of those things now. >> i want to yum top george for a minute at virgin galactic, which is sort of different than a pure commercial entrepreneurial venture. backed by of course richard branson and part of this what's called new space where you've got elion musk and jeff bezos and sir richard as well. what he wants to do is create the world's first commercial space line. i just like saying that. >> so do i. >> it's amazing. talk to us a little about what the vision is and what you're going to be doing. >> what we want to do at virgin galactic is to open space up to the rest of us. and i think that's an inspiring thing. an interesting thing is do people know how many people have ever been to space? just guess. >> about 600. >> you can't answer, andy.

>> administrator bolden might be able to -- >> nobody on stage can answer. anyway. the answer is about 550. and i'm sure you were about to say that. which seems like a remarkably small number given that we've been going to space for 50 years. what we want to do is break that open and provide the opportunity to travel into space to people but also to give rides to this new category of satellites called small sflooits satellites because that's a really interesting area. and we think by opening up that experience to more people and to more satellites the benefits of space can accrue down to earth and that's what we're hoping to do. >> can you talk for a minute as a leader in the entrepreneurial space that we're seeing, you know, i wonder if we're going to look back at this time in 10, 20 years from now and say this was really an extraordinary time when all of the space flight that nasa and the government's done bleeds over into the private sector. >> you know, i think it is an extraordinary time. and i think it's due -- i think

a lot of credit goes to administrator bolden and the president but also the congress and others for taking smart moves to open up innovation in the american launch industry. and the reason why it's important is because we're getting started on a cycle of innovation that should feed on itself over time. that is to say, hopefully we can get the price lower to space access that then leads to more activity in space, which then drives lower cost, and he with start getting on this wheel of innovation. and that's what's so exciting about this with the reusable launches of spacex and what we're hoping to do and julie's hoping to do. all these things i think will have hopefully a cycle to them that drives innovation so that we actually end up in a place, you know, ten times cheaper, 100 times cheaper in the future than where we are now. >> i should note, too, there's a side goal of this panel, and that's to provide andy with material for his next book. >> actually, i did -- i did an

analysis once. i presented it at a convention in the bay area. but basically, i said what if the commercial space industry had the same overheads as the modern commercial airline industry? so the commercial space industry is in its infancy, and it's just getting started. and it's -- you know, it's an extremely expensive venture. it costs a lot of money to work out these technologies. but i thought, okay, what if it ended up like having the same efficiency as the modern commercial airline industry, which has had like, you know, decades and decades of competition and like refinement and stuff like that. and it worked out. i said i needed some numbers to work with. so i said like, well, let's say they have the same fuel overhead ratio. in other words, what percentage of all the money that a commercial airline makes, how much of that do they spend on fuel and how much do they spend on everything else? and it works out to be pretty

much across the board every commercial airline company spends between 16% and 17% of all the money they make on fuel. so you map that forward and you say like okay, let's say that were the same for the commercial space industry. then you start to get down to freight costs in the range of like between $30 and $50 a kilogram to low earth orbit which is unthinkable to us today. >> tell everybody what it is today. >> oh, it's thousands. thousands of dollars per kilogram. >> like $20,000 to $50,000. >> yeah, well, the falcon 9 is -- i think it's less than 10,000 per kilogram. but if the falcon heavy is successful, then it will be -- that will be the most efficient non-subsidized price l.e.o. at about $1,600 per kilogram. >> falcon heavy at spacex is a big rocket they're building. i've heard you say before, andy, that i think you started writing "the martian" before the sort of

new space movement really kind of took off and that if you were going to write the book again you might include some of that. is that true? >> that's definitely true. and also -- well, i'm not 100% sure on that because when i wrote "the martian" the way i -- that's my guy. the way i wrote it was like -- my job is to entertain. like that's my only focus, my only goal when i'm writing a book. it doesn't have to be 100% realistic or anything like that. when i was writing "the martian" i shamelessly took advantage of people's nostalgic feelings for the apollo era. sought aries program in the book is very similar in feel and style to the apollo era program. in real life i'm sure our first manned mission to mars will have -- probably everything will be put into low earth orbit by commercial space industries via government contracts. i think it will be a large multinational effort.

it won't look anything like it looked in the movie. >> so julie, aerojet rocket dyne makes so many of the systems and components that go on these vehicles. you guys are really pushing the edge in terms of the innovation and technology, which is what sort of today is all about. things like solar electric propulsion, another thing i like saying. so blow our hair back. give us a sense of what you guys are working on that's really cool and how it fits into all this. >> well, we're working on -- like you said, we support government, we support commercial, and we do primarily propulsion, which is engines, big engines, motors, those type of things as well as power. neat things we're work on today, we're doing ion propulsion, which is a form of electron propulsion and it reduces the mass. you talk about bringing the cost down. everything we throw off the planet now has to go on a rocket that costs quite a bit of money. sought smaller you can make it's cheaper it gets. we have solar electric

propulsion that will be putting on these next missions, working the technology on nasa contracts and internal. and it will half or 1/10 the size depending on how we do that. it looks like you see the blue glow from the old star trek, it looks just like that and it is like that. so we're working on -- we're printing rockets now. we're doing 3-d printing of whole rockets. and a number of people are doing it p and the hard thing -- >> does that mean i can illegally download a rocket? >> you know, you -- well, we probably shouldn't talk about this. rocket technology's still protected. >> but it gets to that. you get a model and you can do that. the really big ones you can't do yet. but you can certainly dot smaller ones. we talk about the small sats. we can print a whole cube sat propulsion system in one pass. and those are things that bring down not just the cost of the product. they're more efficient. they bring down time. and all of this just continues

to fuel the cycle as george was saying it. it's really a transformative time. we're building off the things we put in place for the last few decades, but now we can actually take them that next step. >> andy talked about what he thought the martian would be like. you know, with commercial space available. and he's absolutely right. and if you look at what nasa's doing today, a big part of my life is spent growing international partners, looking out for what we call non-traditional partners, countries that want to be spart of the sfas program but either don't have the financial resources or don't have the technical knowledge but they have other things they can contribute. working in partnership with commercial space, commercial entities has been incredible. nasa has never built a big rocket. and that's a misconception. julie's been building rockets for nasa since she was a kid. but that's just the way it was done. but they were built under contract where we own the rocket. we don't own the rocket anymore. we buy a service. and that's what george is

talking about. so if i want to send my astronauts to space i say look, i want to send four astronauts, a crew of four, and i talk to spacex and boeing today and they say okay, we've got a vehicle for you. each of them. the big thing is we have two. because competition is absolutely critical. if we go down to one there's absolutely no competition. what george and his community is doing is giving us competition that gets the price down. it's giving us resilience, which allows us to do what we did two years ago when we lost three vehicles boom, boom, boom. we lost a spacex vehicle, we lost an orbital cargo vehicle and a russian vehicle. under ordinary circumstances that would have put us dead in the water. we didn't lose a beat. the japanese had a vehicle, the europeans had a vehicle and in the time they were flying ow american partners and the russians were getting themselves back on their feet, so we're back to normal now. >> so when you stood up those programs are now flying leo, low

earth orbit, just to the international station about 250 miles or so above the earth. but these entrepreneurs, they think big. elon mus k and richard branson. elon's talking about going to mars. >> he is. >> i wonder does that put him in competition with nasa? >> no. >> explain to me. >> it is not a competition at all. and i think most people in the audience are quite aware that we recently -- or spacex recently announced that they were entering into a partnership with us for what they call the red dragon. what he's looking at that we want. we look at them coming back and landing on a barge or coming back to the cape and landing on a mat somewhere. that's what we call hypersonic or recei or supersonic retropropulsion. we're not investing in that but we don't need to if our commercial partners are doing it. we talk about reducing the cost to the taxpayer. if spacex can land a vehicle on mars, that's one of the most critical challenges to us, is what we call entry descent and

landing. how do you get big masses on the surface of mars? that is all good information that we need. and it means we don't have to do one, two, maybe three tests we off to do if nasa were doing it all along. >> the trucking analogy, it keeps coming up over and over again and makes sense. it's like hostess makes twinkies but every grocery store in america, they need to deliver twinkies to every grocery store in america. clearly hostess to schget to work inventing a truck. no. you let other people invent the trucks. you make them a truck, then they'll buy the truck. >> i think the complexity of going to mars, when you look at all the things you have to do to keep humans alive and have them there, you're going to need a lot of trucks. there's a lot of stuff to take and there's room for -- no single entity is likely to do it. it's going to be a collaboration of a number of both foreign as well as commercial. nasa i think is going to take

all of that to really achieve that. >> or you can send people you don't really like. >> one-way mission? yeah. don't bring anybody with them. >> i'll tell everybody who has watched the movie "the martian," it is fantastic. but you need to go back and read the book because when you find is mark watney and his crew didn't land on mars and have all this stuff land with them. they had been building that up over a period of decades. and that's exactly what nasa's doing today. we've been flying what we call precursors. so they're lead things that we need to do on orbit satellites for navigation, communications, re relay. landers that can go out and survey. we've been on mars 20, 30 years. >> wasn't it just this year maybe where they selected about 50 potential human landing

sites? >> i'm not sure the number but we hay big where we came up with potential landing sites. looking at where's the water. still follow the water. you can't do that. you can't make that determination if you don't have orbiting imageers. and that's what we've had with the europeans and ours. now even the indians. so when you talk about non-traditional partners, they were incredible. first time ever that somebody had attempted to go to mars and gotten there on the first attempt. we work with them. we feel that we contributed to their success. and that's really, really, really important. >> mongdeleon -- i can't pronounce it. >> you can call it mom. mars orbiter mission. >> mongleon. administrator bolden, you've been -- >> it's charlie. >> charlie. nasa's been doing this for a long time. and you've got now these new entrants, new innovation, new

money, disrupting the industry. i wonder, george, if you could talk a little bit about, because you work for charlie as his chief of staff. a little bit about the cultural differences between the sort of ethos at a place like virgin or blue oirnlg or spacex versus nasa. how are they different? how are they similar? >> charlie is the captain of an aircraft carrier. >> we turn slow. >> and it's an amazing organization that has a lot of different capabilities. what the new companies are dpog are trying to do one or two things well. i think it's the most exciting time to be a young aerospace engineer than in decades. and the reason i say that is because there are so many different opportunities, whether it's inside nasa or at virgin galactic or in some of these other companies, julie's, where

young and older and middle-aged, all kinds of engineers, can climb on board and get involved in a real way with real hardware that gets built quickly. we've got some of these new machines as well. what they can do is just spectacular. whereas before maybe you go work inside some company and work on a bolt for five years or something now you can build whole subsystems and do that really quickly. by the way, we're hiring if anybody -- >> so are we. >> it's something i'm required to say in every appearance. >> we're saving money for the taxpayer. >> i think the key thing is that sense of innovation and that no matter whereou are you have to move quickly and i think that's a great thing to have embedded in our community now. i think charlie said it really well. competition and innovation is

what america's great at. and to have that inside of our aerospace community, it's not easy to design the entry conditions for that from a policy perspective. but i think we're doing pretty good right now and hopefully we can maintain that spirit as we go forward because we're going to innovate more if we do. >> andy, i'm wondering, from your standpoint because you're somewhat of an outsider but you're very familiar with it, with nasa and the commercial space. if you had charlie's job, what would you do differently? i'm promoting you. >> first off i'd probably drive nasa into the ground. i think charlie's job takes a certain amount of skills i don't have. if i -- well, if i were king of nasa, i guess, if i had even charlie has to work with a whole bunch of people, but if i could just make edicts and have things go the way i wanted, i would concentrate on the commercial

space side, get as much of my money, nasa, me, my money, me, into the commercial side as possible because they will very quickly drive down the price to l.e.o. and then that makes the extra -- the sis lunar and mars-related missions affordable and brings the price point down such that it fits in nasa's budget rather than having to go to the hill and ask for more money. in terms of the first mars mission i would go a little non-traditional. i would -- the biggest benefit to having an afrns on the surface in terms of science is that an astronaut has a brain and that an astronaut doesn't have a five to 20-minute layncy in communicating what he or she wants to do on the surface of mars. i think the very first humans to mars area of mission i suspect will be a whole bunch of rovers

on the surface of mars and humans in orbit controlling them. >> what do you think? >> he's absolutely right. when you talk about visioning -- and we don't talk about a lot of stuff because you get in trouble, to be quite honest, if you go too far ahead because people say, well, as nasa is a government agency you're just not organized. well, we are. you've got to be thinking 30, 40, 50 years out. and andy is right. i tell people all the time the very first things on the surface of mars are going to be robots. think about what we do for american forces today around the world. we don't send soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines often into a very hot area first. we try to get in and make the environment safe for them using robots or whatever. >> we send missiles in first. >> but i imagine there's going to be a fleet of robots, maybe humanoid. they don't have to look like humans. they're going to establish the habitat. they're going to go in because with 3-d printing we can put a fleet of robots on the surface

of mars. we may find based on what we know about the radiation environment that we want to go underground rather than have huts on the surface and get blown away in the wind that doesn't exist. but that was a critical part. i tell my wife, it's a movie. okay? very, very important part. but it may be that robots dig under -- you know, go subterranean and establish the habitat. anybody ever do, you know -- build houses for charitable reasons, you don't go there, there are no 2 by 4s on the lot. there are prefab structures sow get eaves and walls. and that's what we're going to do on mars. but we're going to print, it i think. >> also i was just saying in addition to that in terms of the pure science and analysis is humans in orbit controlling robots on the surface gives you a zero latency communication with those robots and it's basically like driving a remote

control car instead of what they're doing right now, what are we going to tell the robot to do today? if the roeblt issues a decision point it has to stop. now it's just going to be like -- >> you don't have to tell it the night before. you want to be able to have a human in orbit or on phobos or demos. >> some people don't even think we have people in space right now. but we're on the way to mars now. we're building the systems that can lift things off right now, the capsules. again, there's a lot of different ways to do it but the country's putting in fl ing iti that infrastructure right now and it's a lot closer than you think and we will launch in a couple years. again, the plan will be just like you said, put stuff around it and go control from up -- circling mars first before you go down, but it's within our reach. it's not that far away. >> there are a lot of technologies. the one that stands out to me, charlie, it's what's on the international space station right now. the beam. this is a habitat thaex pands

out. it's going to be tested while on the station. and they have plans for bigger ones. do you see the day when the international space station is replaced or there are other stations -- >> i don't see the day. it's inevitable. it's it is a human-made structure that has a lifetime. and today we think it's maybe 2028. so we are working feverishly to help george and others build this low earth orbit infrastructure that is commercial so that nasa doesn't have to invest taxpayers' money in maintaining -- building and maintaining this low earth orbit infrastructure. that's the depot from which we're going to go to deep space. but that should not be nasa. should not be government. commercial entities have the full capability to do that today and that's what we're looking at with a lot of our -- we go out and ask for bids and ideas. we're going therefrom there. >> the inflatable habitat, that's absolutely critical

because for the first time now we'll be able to escape the tyranny of the launch vehicle diameter. that's basically what it comes down to. right now everything that's in space has to fit inside of the launch vehicle. but if you have some big inflatable thing you get an awful lot of volume for your surface area. >> when you think about space, we talk about launch and space tour and habitats. but one of the biggest things that's happening now is this small sat, cube sat revolution. you think of satellites you think they're just massive. but now they're developing satellites the size of a shoebox. and i know aerojet is doing a lot of this. talk to us about that and what you guys are working on. >> we're actually printing entire subsystems like that. we're using typically satellites have always used toxic propellants too but we're using green propellants. we developed in collaboration with nasa a new kind of propellant that can be around all the time unlike a lost

propellants we have to fly today. it is revolutionary -- revolutionizing things because the smaller the mass the smaller the launch vehicle. and as you do that you drive down costs. not just the product is cheaper because it's printed but the launch vehicle's cheaper. you get into that cycle which is going to be necessary to have true commercialization. so it's an interesting time. i've been in this industry a while. and there is -- like charlie said, the industry does build a lot of the stuff for nasa. but it's been under a different kind of model. now many of these things are mature enough now that they can be purchased as services. so it's cool to be part of something that's transforming like this. nasa can still do and sponsor the really hard stuff and the new technologies, but then you're starting to migrate over. nasa pioneered the technology back in the '90s. mr. bigelow picked it up. and it's amazing what he's doing

there. >> that's the great way this can work. you have -- >> when you talk about small sats or cube sats, when you talk about a revolution, i don't know whether there's anybody out there who has a son or a daughter who goes to st. thomas moore elementary school in northern virginia, first elementary school to send a spacecraft into space this week. >> elementary school? >> elementary school. it was launched off the international space station. it was among a lot of cube sats that was sent to station on a probably orbital or a spacex vehicle because we have room to do that. so there's an elementary school in northern virginia that can now brag about my spacecraft is up there doing stuff. and once you get that into kids -- i did science fairs. my seventh grade science teacher turned me on to science fairs, and i never looked back. i can guarantee you these kids at st. thomas moore, they are never going to be told we can't do that because they're going to say when i was in elementary school i made a satellite.

what do you mean you can't do that? >> can't top that. >> elroy jetson. >> this is an area where nasa doesn't get enough credit because the iss and to a certain extent ames and other centers have really pushed the ball forward on the small sat front. and through iss has been sort of seeding the small sat market. but you can't launch into all the different orbits frichlt ss. what we'll able to do with our vehicle launcher 1 is to put the satellites into other orbits. but what i think is interesting is the u.s. is now leading a new area which is the small satellite sector and you know, we're going to see tremendous growth. the geostationary -- the number of geostationary satellites getting launched into orbit isn't really growing right now. but you're going to see this huge growth in small satellite constellations over the coming years that will establish

essentially a new information skin for planet earth. that helps us with navigation and communication and weather and remote sensing. i think it will be eventually a permanent new skin around the planet. a lot of that is being catalyzed by the work that was done inside nasa labs and now inside the national lab at iss. >> and you're talking about hundreds if not thousands of small satellites in orbit swarming around -- >> yeah. we have as a customer a company called one web which has some offices here in d.c., and they aspire to build the initial deployment is about 800 satellites, which will bring basically broadband connectivity to everywhere in the world. >> just a note on cube sats. we keep usiing different terms. i say cube sats. they're basically an idea whose time has come. and i think the main reason is

because as always the space industry takes advantage of the knock-on effects of unrelated industries. the reason cube sats are possible is because of your cell phones. the minute churization of computer technology because of the market demand for people to have these, these can absolutely be the brains of a cube sat. and before -- just even go back in time like 15 years, before mobile phones had to be like stand-alone computers, before smartphones. even the smallest, most compact computers were these clunky laptops. so that's -- this is why it's great to take advantage and leverage existing technology rather than reinvent the wheel in every single way, which was -- i heard people from nasa say the apollo program was the best and worst thing to ever happen to the space industry. >> i want to ask george, going back to space tourism for a minute because i think there's a lot of focus on that.

the idea of democratizing space, making it accessible to the masses. you've got something like 700 people who bought tickets. more people who have actually been to space as you said earlier. where do you see the demand? do you see there's really a demand and a market for that, that this is going it grow? >> i'll answer the question two ways. one is i think the demand far outstrips the supply, at least for the foreseeable future because it's going to be hard to fly these vehicles, you know, at the start and we want to do it really carefully and safely. and so i think it's going to be one of these markets where for a long time to come there are more people who are going to want to do it than we have seats available. and so i think that's a good thing. that means we can take our time, fly everybody safely and we'll have a very profitable business with the people that we fly. and i should say our customers are really amazing people. they're successful people who really believe that they're

helping to catalyze something to bring about something new because they know that if they don't put their money down this thing isn't going to happen. but where does it go? i mean, i think that's an interesting question. and it's one of the things that we think about at galactic. i think it's frustrating to all of us, or it's frustrating to me at least, that you know, we're still going mach point 8 in our commercial air travel and we've been basically going that speed since the dawn of the jet age. in fact, the average speed has maybe even gone down slightly. i think it's conceivable for us to start thinking about things that would enable us to go transpacific in an hour or two. go across the continents in a short amount of time. is that going to happen in a year or two? no. it's a really hard technical problem. but what i like to say is the technologies that we're working on with spaceship 2 will feed into that. so how do you fly people safely in these high-speed journeys? how do you build highly reusable space vehicles? how do you create highly

reusable propulsion systems, thermal protection systems, guidance systems. how do those things integrate into air spaces? those are the nuts and bolts. how do you insure them? how do they fit into regulatory in those are all the questions that we'll essentially be dealing with with suborbital travel and then we'll be in a much closer place to be able to reach things that we've been dreaming about for a long time, which is getting to asia in an hour. >> and i want to ask you about that. i also want to note that we can take a few questions from the audience. we have a couple minutes left. so if you start thinking about that, there are people coming around with mikes. >> i just want to add one thing on the commercial side. in terms of demand. the true space boom will happen when the price point to going into space is within the reach of middle-class americans. so it's like you in the audience, raise your hand if you could go into space and spend a week in a space hotel for 10,000 bucks. >> there are some hands. lots of hands. >> so there's your market.

>> we're working on it. >> i want to take advantage of one opening george gave me because i know this is about space. but in the president's budget proposal for the coming year a critical part of it in aeronautics is what we call new aviation horizons. nasa is not going to build the supersonic airplanes in which people like george are going to fly, but we're working on the regulatory end because today it's illegal to fly supersonic over the ground in the u.s. and in many other countries. we believe that we have now worked with industry in a design of a vehicle that will break the speed of sound, fly supersonically but instead of getting a big sonic boom you get a rum, sort of a rumble. it's because you change the shape. you have to remember we're talking about energy. sound is nothing but energy. and it just comes off in a big spike and it's like a boom. we think because we demonstrated it that you can really smooth it out. and so you that just get a

rumble. and that's a part of the new aviation horizons. the first vehicle, the first x plane that's going to be built in this program we awarded a contract to lockheed. but you've got companies like boeing, gulfstream who have plans on the drawing board. they just need the regulation to change. and they're all in. and that's what nasa's job is, to give the data to the faa so that they can say okay, game's on. you can now fly supersonic over the ground. nasa has done its job. >> do we have any questions from the audience? we have a mike? yes, go ahead. >> quick question. as the world's already -- space and communications, they're already dependent on the world, who's going to manage all the satellites, all the countries, all the microsatellites going up? who's going to be managing all that so we don't have a catastrophic failure of some tien kind? >> this year congress passed

several very important commercial space pieces of legislation, and one of them has mandated that nasa and other agencies will come together and decide how we put into place the instruments tore what we call orbital traffic management. just like the faa manages air traffic today and nasa provides them with tools to do that, we're going to work with d.o.d., noaa, commercial entities to come up with orbital traffic management. it won't happen this year, but by the time we have people who are ready to do it we'll have a system in place for managing the traffic and controlling it on orbit. >> and that affects all of those hundreds if not thousands of satellites. >> everything. >> once again, where there's a profit motive there's a way. >> exactly. >> because international air travel, the planes manage mostly not to crash into each other. this is a problem that's been encountered before. you have a bunch of independent countries flying their own

planes over international waters but they still collaborate, cooperate so as not to have anything bad happen. >> one of the challenges of these hundreds and thousands of small sats, or cube sats, is they're free flyers. they don't have propulsion systems today. julie and other propulsion companies are working on microjets. microrockets. in a cube sat that has the brains from andy's telephone and a camera that came out of his telephone, it's going to have a little microjet -- >> i'd really rather you got your own phone. >> they're going to be able to maneuver around but most importantly they're going to be able to comply with a law that says when you put a vehicle in space it's got to be able to be controlled for a controlled re-entry where it will not harm anybody on the ground. we're going to be able to do that. >> time for one more quick one. >> nasa has been the driver for education. i'm a teacher from the apollo 11 program. will that continue and will these companies also contribute? because we need a lot of help in

some areas. >> i'm going to let them talk about how they contribute, but they do immensely. i tell people nasa today has a $19.3 billion budget and that's a $19.3 billion budget that's focused on stem education. there is not a single thing that we, do whether it's aeronautics, science, human space flight, space technology, that we don't get into classrooms somehow so that teachers like you can use that material to excite kids. cube sats. that's getting kids interested in science, math, aerodynamics, you name it. and is that an education program? technically, no. but does it promote education? you bet it does. so i tell people all the time, i don't care what the line says in the budget. i've got a line for education, it's skimpy. but we improvise. so we spend 19.3 billion on stem education. >> you think it's a collaborative thing too? our company is involved in education since i actually

joined many years ago. and it's both grassroots, we get our rocket guys out and they go talk to schools, local schools in the area, and that is great. we have the kids' day where we let them come on plant carefully. we don't let them out in the test area but we do let them come on plant. and then we have a number of formal programs too. some of this is self-serving. we sponsor a number of scholarships and programs at colleges and high schools because we want those employees, you know, as they grow up we're always looking for those smart young people to come in and be that next generation of rocket engineers. and most of my industry counterparts are very similar. it's a key thing. and as you look at going to mars it's not hard to sell that one. you go out and talk about it. and you get a pretty good following. >> the martian classroom edition now available. it's the same as the normal edition but with all the swear words replaced with -- no,

seriously. it's a thing. it's for sale. get it for your classrooms. you should get several copies per student i think. >> it can relate -- i have three kids. two of them are more sciency. and one of them, my oldest daughter's a psychology major. and she never liked science with me. and then i was reading she saw "the martian," the book in my living room and i said, hey, honey, you might like this. and she goes, what, snom so -- and then she said okay, i'll read it. and she comes home and says i read that in two days. she goes, that was so cool. that's the kind of thing that's so neat about now, is exciting people to do space again. that's what all the entrepreneurs -- this is the best time that's ever been in the space industry. a lot more excitement than there's been the previous few decades. >> while we have him here i want to press andy because you're writing a new book. >> yeah. >> i'm sorry, george, did you want to get in -- >> talk about education. yeah. we're big into education. we just did a thing where we got

all the sixth-graders in las cruise es, new mexico to do a thing with our engineers. it's fun to do. and it's the right thing to do as well. we do scholarships. we have an organization called galactic unite, which is really focused on that. we're going to go buy all andy's books now. >> i want to hear about the next book. what can you tell us? >> the next book takes place in the 2080s, 2090s time frame. it's another scientifically accurate hopefully story. takes place in a city on the moon. and i came up with an economic reason why there's a city on the moon. and i think it's pretty solid. the main character is a woman who was sort of a low-level criminal there. so i'm going for the lovable rogue archetype. and it is told in the first person smart-ass narrative style that i do. >> when's it published? >> probably comes out middle of

next year. >> looks like that's all the time we have for today. i want to thank our panelists for -- [ applause ] they're really great. really appreciate it. up next we're going to go from space to dna. and we have eric schulte coming. he's up next. thanks very much. really appreciate it.

>> so a beloved astronomer was faced with a task that would seem daunting to just about anyone. okay? if we humans were to announce our existence in this universe, how would you do it? and more importantly, what would you say? now, i say say very lightly here because language is a very human construct. a concept we've applied to many living and non-living things to help us understand communication. but if we're being frank, what is communication? is it the words? the syntax? the grammar? in the narrowest sense, maybe. to understand what communication is, let's just imagine it's 100 years hence and we've all uploaded our consciousnesses into some reddit hive mind cloud computer managed by watson and our minds have been reconstructed with complete fidelity 100% identical to the moments of your biological life. and let's say that my mind wants to learn something.

in this case how to bake an apple pie. what to do? well, i go find my favorite baker in this computer and i ask his or her consciousness how to do it. or do i? you see, in a post-singularity world where our minds co-nestle with other minds, communication may be unnecessary. forget asking. i just transfer the information from baker to me. no loss in information. complete understanding. and as fast as light can allow. you see, communication at its heart is a measure of information transfer efficiency. increase the efficiency and decrease the chance of misunderstanding. and much like that bootleg copy of beyonce's "lem flaid" that i really want, communication in real life is wrought with inaccuracies leaving glitches in my hot sauce. akin to how we can never achieve 100% light speed travel in real life, communication in real life too never achieves 100% efficiency. and we try to achieve that more and more.

but technology and empiricism move this farther. how to preserve communications for eons of time to organisms that probably do not understand our languages or don't speak at all. at the time the answer chosen was to employ the universal language, quote unquote, mathematics. if we encode the basics of language using mathematical concepts like the fundamental characteristics of atoms and elements, we can imply a common tongue. but how to send math. in the past we've tried two methods. we send a thing or a thing-like thing. specifically we send a thing with masks or we send a mass thing like light. currently the biggest bang for our buck is to send light. it's the speed limit of causality in the universe and it makes a lot of sense. our planet has been leaking our human electric o'magnetism for

many years with information about us. blast as much as you can and you get the message out all over the place. but this comes at a cost. not far from earth and still within our stellar block our sent light fades with time and distance becoming harder and harder to hear. let's send the thing. we send our satellites, our probes, and our rovers to great success. and now we want to send ourselves. okay. but water's heavy and it's expensive to send weight in space. so if majority is identity, we're just soupy water. even if we send ourselves, we have to hope we're sending it the right way. the stuff we send is just too little. and that famous astronomer i mentioned, dr. carl sagan. he tried to send both. a thing and a signal.

radio waves and a golden record. so what to do? well, the problem is with the premise. math is the universal concept, not language. it's like light. a thing-like thing. mathematics is our cosmic information storage, like the hidden storage unit of the universe. what we need is better transfer efficiency and a language that is tangible. so we take the best parts of our two strategies thus far in sending stuff and we create a thing and we send it all over. something stable, inert, with high information density that can be sent all over like light. and that thing is dna. it's the closest thing we have to a tangible cosmic language. dna ace tool. an encyclopedia. a scribe and a megaphone. the internet's data can currently fit in a data farm the size of the state of delaware. a dna-based delaware would fit in a standard moving box with room to spare. instead of sending ourselves on cosmic fishing expeditions we

insteaddynamite, increasing our chances of discovery. we send our basic operating system to both ends of the equation, increasing transfer efficiency and by transferring our universal instructions the transfer loss could theoretically be minimized. how? well, dna in our many organic molecules are very stable, and space is very empty. sending a pebble the size of a fist doped with various dna could potentially hold not only all representative life on this planet but also past life, potential future life, and encoded in the strands themselves the math and instruction on how to use it. dna sent in all cosmic directions could theoretically make the interstellar journeys unscathed. and at least form the organic basis to start self-replication again and at most be deciphered with ease. heck, synthetic venter dna could be encoded with our entire planetary history and be no larger than a shoebox. so as a genetic engineer i must

be honest. dna is a wonderful tool in our toolbox but dna's not a great predictor of what constitutes a person, a plant, or a bacteria. >> like the soup cans tied together with strings we set ourselves with our dna and we send a condensed message of this planet. this silent tangible language of our world. math may be the universal cosmic concept but dna is the univer sal language. now if you excuse me, i have an apple pie to bake. thank you. >> this is your future. one of your boxes would go right here. >> how are we going to save the platform? >> if we want to build the platform all we need to do is

build the platform. >> is there anything we should be doing. >> why are you asking me? i'm not the ceo. jack's empty chair is a better choice than i am. >> say what you will about the chair but at least it never told me to build a box. >> hello, everyone. currently oversea two of the largest and most vibrant communities. i'm speaking of steve that's the co-founder and chief executive of reddit and we have the founder and chief executive at twitch. so first thing is first we have a couple of people in the audience that aren't intimate

familiar with it. explain what you do. you're not social networks. you're not media companies. you have 250 million monthly users between you. what's up. >> so switch was started originally as a platform for gamers to share their game strings and it was user generated. anyone can share their game streaming over twitch as a video platform and we quickly realized accidentally we built a way for you to create a gaming community and the video was an anchor that would bring people in but the chat room was the community that they would then come and join and that turned out to be really impactful in how we grew because we not only became a video platform but a place where people would actually connect

with other gamers and form all of these little microcommunities around each broadcaster. >> reddit has a similar story. we started off different from where we are today. originally we were one community and we used to describe ourselves as social news or top 40 for internet links. a place where you can find what's popular online and over the years we have grown into now a collection of many thousands of communities so what we focus on now is a place where people can be themselves online. we have sports, video games, fashion, relationships, everything in between so there's the notion of thousands of communities where people can express themselves and also the kind of larger community itself which is representative of what's going on in the world and on the internet at any moment and time.

>> you mentioned these communities have changed overtime as a result of user behavior. it wasn't something that you planned or directed or controlled by users. >> i don't know if that's the right way to express it but there's moments where we have thought that. where as the communities evolved -- as the community has done things we could not predict. both good and bad where we sit back and we're like what's our next move. but i always -- i have always been uncomfortable when i meet fans of reddit for taking credit for reddit. the always way i have described my role is we tried to not screw it up. we tried to steer it in a direction where we would like it to go and it's taken quite a path over the years but there's

an evolution and we're trying to build the platform where these communities can grow and thrive. >> planning communities works about as well as trying to have planned economies or planned citi cities. i think your role of a kmun based product is more like a gardener. you're trying to make sure that you have enough balance of sunlight and water that the community can thrive and goal. if you think you can make it higher by pulling it up you're going to have a bad time because you can't force people to want to engage with each other and want to connect and communicate. you can only provide favorable conditions and hope it happens in a good way. i like the garden metaphor. any garden you end up with issues like weeds and that can

become very problematic. you put attention into what are the things that will make that likely and how do we deal with the fact that like any environment you're going to get a fertile environment for things you don't want. >> if you're going to use pesticides to kill the weeds you might kill your plants too. >> you start laying on the round up and it turns out the rest of your garden was not round up ready and the whole thing dies and that happens to a lot of communities where they get a little overzealous trying to stamp out -- trying to put too many hurdles in the way and do too much of stamping out bad behavior. you wind up eliminating interesting good behavior as well. >> as much as i love the garden metaphor i'd like to talk about how that works practically because you both had like any community some pretty high profile incidents with abuse and harassment safety, hate speech on reddit.

i was wondering if you could tell us about your philosophy toward moderating that type of speech and how it's changed since you founded your platforms. >> sure. in the early days when we were a small team and had one community or a couple of kmuns we didn't think too hard about it. it seemed simpler. so hate speech we had zero tolerance for it. that was largely accepted by the community. over the years, reddit has grown to be much, much larger and encompass much more viewpoints that aren't representative of my own or the companies but now we have moderators that exist that didn't exist in the early days so each of our kmcommunities ar created by the users and they can run the communities anyway they want or at least that's the approach we have taken.

there's nothing illegal or harassment or bullying. these policies are only as good as our ability to enforce them. how do we make sure that we enforce the rules we have? you have good people doing good things. really amazing things. how do you make sure that you can provide an environment for them to grow and thrive and feel safe and have a good time.

>> we always had kind of a, from day one, a -- we are justified in removing anyone from the community that we don't think represents our values and that's just how it's going to be and if you start with that as a basic policy all of your communities tend to accept that's just how it is. the thing that we found really problematic overtime is we have two values twitch is a platform for the creator. we see ourselves as being creator first. when there's a tension between the viewer and the broadcaster we go for the broadcaster because we believe there needs to be a home online for a broadcaster for creator to have control and their process and run their own editorial policy.

and a lot of it was really positive and usually through negligent they don't control the community well enough and you get a lot of really bad action as a result of that. it's hard for us. the last thing we want to do is know better than you how to run your community and that makes the problem much harder than just jumping into it straight away. >> i like that you bring that up.

you have a model of moderation that is old school internet. letting them control themselves obviously platforms like facebook and twitter have taken an opposite approach. do you feel the need to take those internally? >> i would say it's something we think about but we would never do that because what you get on it is a place where you can really be yourself. people come out on reddit all the time. we think that is very important for providing a place where they can express themselves. that's what makes it special. there's a trade off and attention there but if we can -- where we focus our time is can

we build the tools where people can both thrive in that environment and not negatively effect others. and i have seen it. and it's very very different viewpoints colliding and so our role is to allow these communities to grow and thrive if they're abiding by our rules and their ability to do so

obviously. >> we have a big presence too but the problem is when you have, i don't remember exactly offhand but something on the order of -- employing staff to moderate that. this isn't like facebook posts. you have to be on it 30 seconds after they posted it because that's the entire window of impact is the 30 seconds after they send the message. we're not going to have enough staff. we would have to employ one in three people to moderate the site. it's not practical. we really wound up going to the distributed moderation route because we had no other choice

than pushing that down in some kind of way. we view our role in that with not just go higher but rather go build excellence tools that amply identify the effect internally. so identify the people that are good at reporting bad actors. identify the people that are being a force for moderation and positivity on twitch and empower them with tools that amply identify what their actions do. whether that is by assigning reputation scores or giving them more powerful tools to see more chat rooms. >> we spent a lot of time, i'm assuming you do as well. our focus is on looking for systemic issues.

groups of users harassing other users. spam with them they start to pull other people into their negative behaviors so where we are pretty heavy handed it's behind the scenes identifying those people and trying to get them out of the system. so hopefully everybody else can flourish because we believe that people in the real world are usually good. but they have a fundamental desire to share. that's what we're trying to protect and foster. >> steve i'm curious. i don't know how many people are aware but you took over as ceo ten months ago. there was a headline at the time that said you were trying to save reddit from itself. i'm curious if you think you've done that and if you can speak to the systemic issues that you have addressed or solved during

that time. reddit was in disarray. but i was not certain that it would survive so it's been a big push toward the future and that meant reminding folks. reddit was extreme libertarian free speech route. anything was allowed.

>> we had a larger kmcommunity d open revolt. we had communities that were very toxic that were stirring a lot of the stuff up. making this worse. so that was one of the first things i did was try to squash that group of users stirring this up and internally as a company it's been a lot of culture rebuilding and reminding everybody what our purpose is. to provide a place for people to express themselves. to answer your question, are we done? no. have we made great strides, yes. i'm very, very proud of that. also it's hard to see from the outside when you look at a community site especially like

that there's almost no one that you can bring in that's allowed to change it's direction other than a founder because it's only the founder when you bring them back in that has this moral authority to say this is not what the website is about. we are about this and everyone is forced to listen to you about that. he was allowed to change directions in a radical way. it's not as a ceo but a founder that needs to make course corrections because it's very hard. >> it's something unique to the area of the internet that you're in where your product is essentially a community, right? but it's quite possible for the

community to develop a myth about itself as reddit did as far as, you know, absolute free speech is concerned. to diverge in a direction that's not planned or profitable or viable. how do you deal with those sorts of issues? >> well it's funny. so we -- reddit was the first thing out of college. to summarize it it's been an incredible learning experience. we started in the same room basically we started the notion that the community wanted to

exist and for example a big mistake i made when i returned just nine months ago was i was thinking what reddit needs is a very clear contact policy. like this is what is allowed and this is what's not. and i learned this important lesson which is that it is impossible to draw a line. where ever you draw that line there's somebody with their nose right up over it just looking for the loopholes. and i met some very smart people in this process that did this for twitter and facebook and others and who are basically like you need to be specifically

vague. that's an example of the lessons that could have been taught. which i am forever thankful for. >> the things that i noticed on twitch is we have to deal with the porn issue and that's just how it is. we went through exactly that mistake which is trying to define it and i know when i see it and there's a reason you wind uplanding there which is you just try writing down a formal definition for what is and is not allowed you you're either banning things you don want to be that are perfectly good that are self-expression or valuable for the community or pornography

on your website. so what is creative expression? but that is a huge part of my job it turns out. >> well, i could talk about moderation all day. this is fascinating but i want to make sure that you guys have a chance to talk about your future plans a little bit. both of your sites are rapidly expanding. twitch has expanded outside of that. >> we wanted to broadcast doing creative work and that was in line with our commission which was empowering the gaming creators so we opened up the platform as well. the launch partner for that was

bob ross. we got them to let us do a marathon of all of the bob ross channels. had 5.6 viewers. we did a food channel and it's actually -- mostly generated a lot of people chairing themselves painting or blacksmithing or making costu s costumes. it's how do we allow them to share their passions and make a living doing so and the thing i'm most proud about is the hundreds of people that managed to quit their jobs. carpet cleaning and doing telemarketing support as lawyers and now gets to broadcast themselves streaming video games or art as a living. i don't think it's -- i don't think you can do a cooler thing

than enable someone to do that. that's something i'm proud of. i'm excited to do a lot more of it in the future. >> every boy's dream right? steve what is your plan for internet domination? >> our plan for internet domination. so we're in this interesting position where we have two classes of users. love reddit. loyal to an end. logo tattoos on people. i'm certain there's more reddit tattoos on people than facebooks and twitters and whatnot. supremely loyal users and then we have many, many, like hundreds of millions of users who don't have that loyalty yet. who don't know what reddit is and if you go to the front page, after hearing this talk you're going to be like is he talking about the same thing? because it's not representative of what reddit is.

so the big challenge we have right now and the thing that i'm spending a lot of time thinking about is how do we make the fact that reddit is incredibly broad and incredibly deep, obvious to our users. we have a ton of users who think that reddit is the center of the universe for nfl. which it is. but they don't know that this is a place where you can look at the world's greatest collection of cat's this is the place where you can find a kidney match if you're in need of one of those. that is the message that i want to -- the average view on reddit to understand as fast as possible. so we have a lot of work to do there but that's the most fun work we can do.

>> well, that's all the time we have today unfortunately but thank you for joining me and before we leave i'd like to invite louis back on stage. >> we are finally freeing you for lunch. i hope you enjoyed the morning. be back in an hour and we'll try to catch up on a little bit of time and please take everything that you brought into the room with you out of the room. thank you and we'll see you back here in an hour. >> the libertarian party is holding it's convention in orlando florida. cspan will have live coverage saturday night at 8:00 eastern. then the party chooses it's presidential and vice presidential nominees. that starts at 9:45 a.m. eastern. so far, the libertarian party is

the only third party on the national ballot in all 50 states. >> the bus stopped in massachusetts to visit several winning students from that state. they went to the same students where all the students attended a school ceremony to honor 7th graders for their honorable mention video titled gunning for safety. the bus also made a stop to recognize her winning video called veteran services and james elliott won for his video called lgbt rights stop the discrimination. they were honored in front of their family members and local elected officials. receiving $250 for their winning video. a special thanks to our cable

partners. comcast and charter for helping to coordinate these visits in the community. >> congratulations to the class of 2016. today is your day of celebration and you earned it. >> voices crying for peace and light because your choices will make all the difference to you and to all of us. >> don't be afraid to take on a new job or a new issue that stresses your boundaries. >> spent your summer abroad on real ships rather than internships and living in your parents basement after this graduation day is not likely to be your greatest concern. >> watch commencement speeches to the class of 2016 from their entirety from colleges and

universities around the country from business leaders politicians and white house officials on cspan. >> science, business, and technology pioneers gathered at the washington post transformers summit this month to discuss breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, health care and philantrophy. a look at progress in restoring site to the blind and how pigs could become future organ donors for humans. this is nearly two hours. good morning, everyone. thank you to the "washington post" and we're delighted to welcome you here this morning. thank you for joining us. [ applause ] we're sitting in the center of what we call "washington post" live. it is a new initiative

>> it's a new initiative that extends the reach of journalism through live events, streaming and journalists with leaders and decision makers to explore the most important and compelling issues of our time. the idea of today's conference on transformers began with a conversation we had here about the transformation that's underway at the washington post. we have gone from what was once a locally focused newspaper to a multiplatform digital first news organization serving a broad national and global audience and although we made amazing progress and in many ways are leaving the industry we will always view ourselves as being in the process of transforming and never fully transformed. because like so many industries the media space is changing so rapidly that the process of transforming can never really be complete. with advances in technology, the speed and the scope of change is only increasing -- only accelerating. so achieving or maintaining the status quo will never be

sufficient. so for all of us in journalism today whether you have just started and you're early in your career or you're at my stage the reality is that our entire profession will be a time of continuous and ib creasing change and that's the culture that we're embracing here at the washington post. >> transformation is a delicate balance and what doucet aside to create for the future. for us a pillar of journalistic excellence has always been and will always be be fundamental to our mission but the rest will be determined by constant innovation and experimentation. we have imbedded more than 80 engineers within the newsroom to quickly bring stories to life in new and innovative ways. our technology team now creates our own extensive and flexible site architecture and we're now licensing that to others.

we have bold ambitions continuing to grow and to be a model for a rapidly changing industry. so for purposes of today's conversation how do we translate the broad disruption that we're witnessing around the world in all sectors into a thought provoking event we accomplish that with those pushing the boundaries on every aspect of our life. the program is anchored by visionaries and innovators in space exploration and intelligence and impact philantropy and much more. it is forever altering the way we live. connect and learn from the social platforms we use to communicate to the cars we drive or more accurately that would drive us. today we would explore efforts

to define mortality and what that means for our future and we even have the father of the internet here to explain it all to us and despite what we may have heard a few campaign seasons ago this is the father of the internet. to start us off. i'd like to thank our presenting spontaneous source. please join me in conveying our appreciation. and i would draw your attention to the program where the rest of our supporting sponsors are listed. >> virtual reality, 360 video and drone robots are helping

tell stories in many ways. we build a functioning ro bot that can help collect information from places that would otherwise be unreachable for journalists. that competition is underway right now and we will be announcing the winners to you later today. but now please to start our program, please join me in welcoming the head of samsung catalyst fund to say a few words. >> good morning. thank you. thank you washington post. i'm honored to be here today representing samsung electronics. it's a privilege to join you all today to listen to you and engage in a conversation about technology and how technology is going to impact us as individuals. a society as well as our country. perhaps to just kick it off here today, you're going to listen to

amazing speakers. these are the speakers that represent innovators that really are ringing in the next technology revolution and you as audience get an opportunity to engage with them and really help shape the conversation of how technology will influence us as people and a society. we see very significant challenges we face as a society. climate change is one. shifting demographics. chronic illnesses and the cost of managing chronic illnesses. security, privacy. these are all very significant issues. we think technology has a role to play there. in the last few years there's been significant technology

bre breakthroughs. for example, it's been amazing. the human brain has been an inspiration for how these new technologies have come together and deep learning is giving computers an ability to see as well as have a dialogue with us and that's going to be transformative. quite similarly some of the new big data analytics techniques are deeply influencing how quickly we can analyze dna sequencing and also how inexpensive that's going to become. this biology and technology back to biology is creating an amazing cycle and we think that we as partners can engage with that and make a transformation in society. we believe we can't do this alone we would like to figure out how we work in an open collaborative way and make a fundamental difference in

harnessing this technology. >> let me give you a sense of what we have outside of this room. at some point today if you'd like to get a vision of what samsung is doing we have demonstrations please stop by and take a look. i'd like to thank washington post for having us here and giving us the opportunity and thanks for all the speakers in the audience. thank you. >> i discovered a way to hear what others saw. since before you could buy books on the internet, he was obsessed with space. transformers are dreamers, makers, doers. they're the famous and the unknown.

they're people that can see, build or leverage an idea that by design could better every day life. how we age and how we move from here to there. transformers push the boundaries of what we know. >> also the first company to offer gps devices in cars. after that she created sirius xm and was one of the founders of

satellite radio. after she left more than 20 years ago found a company to assist her younger daughter who was at the time dying of a then incurable lung disease. the resulting company is united therapeutics. it's now a $6 billion bio tech based in silver spring and it has extended if not saved the lives of tens of thousands of people including her daughter genesis that's now in her 30s. ladies and gentlemen, she is also the recipient of this year's billy jean king leadership initiative award which is devoted to lgbt issues and puts her at an interesting issue because she has a company or part of the company is based in north carolina which as you know right now she might get arrested for going to the bathroom if the governor had anything to do about it. ladies and gentlemen. [ applause ]

>> one of the basic concepts you're interesting in is actually immortality that we're all going to live forever. she has founded a religion as one does. you have the idea that we're all going to live forever. tell us your concept of immortality and how it would work. >> thanks. the idea has been percolating up from lots of people in the information technology industry for awhile. perhaps ray who is a prolific inventor and is best known for the idea that as our abilities in the information processing industry, computer software, storage of more and more of our

thoughts and our ideas outside of our body becomes easier and more automatic, less expensive, that ultimately we're going to have sort of digital d doppelgangers of ourselves that are stored in the clouds and able to present themselves with devices. thousands of software coders and hackers and people in the movement work to make the software that runs these digital dopel gangers ever more lifelike and ever more human like. there will be a tipping point where people begin to claim these digital dopel gangers achieved what we call consciousness. an ability to have a sense of themselves. hopes, fears and feelings and at that point i think that the activity will move to the legal arena as to whether or not these

digital d digital dopplegangers are conscious and do have an independent legal identity and the trend of progressive thinking is once there's a scientific consensus and in this case it would be the science of psychology. that being the science of the mind that these digital dop doppelgangers are conscious they will get the rights that we apply to pets and laboratory animals and primates like chimps. so in this way ourselves will morph into a digital consciousness that is recognized by the law as being alive. >> and you have a type of product on this. named by your lovely spouse that i have talked to. it's a head on the table at this point but it talks to you.

and you have described it -- this isn't the finished product of where we want to be. but it's the kitty hawk basis of how this, you call them doppelgangers. can you say robots? >> that's just as good. >> have the idea like the ma tricks where they were lugging stuff into the back of people's heads. have the idea that you upload everybody's consciousness on to what amounts to a thumb drive and then upload it to the cloud so we're always there and you can just plug it into a robot and there you are. >> right but it's becoming even -- that's on the screen and that was from a recent episode of morgan freeman's series on the national geographic channel about the nature of god and are religion and whatnot. so we did this project to really inspire young people and i'd say young girls in particular to become coders.

and when they have the ability to speak with her and see that we're able to write software that can respond. she doesn't give the same answer any two times and there's no prescripted questions. you can ask her anything. i'd say she's way better than siri. >> cuter. >> i'd say amazon's alexa is just about catching up to her and i'm sure because there's thousands of people working on alexa she will soar past her. but this software inspires young people to become coders and that's why i'm confidence that cyber consciousness will emerge because it's not just our foundation or a couple of big companies working on this. tense of thousands of people throughout the world can make cyber consciousness. they don't need a factory to make it. they don't need a lot of investment to make it. all they need is a digital

device to talk to the cloud. >> i want to ask how close we are on this because the question is sort of if i go outside and i get hit by a bus and my arm and leggetts amputated. i'm still me and if i need a lung transplant. i'm still me. how much of my brain can i change? what would be your answer? how much can you change and still be you? >> it's a great question and it's some what in the realm of philosophy and some what in the realm of psychology and as with most things in life ultimately it will be decided by lawyers. the scientists have long known that people forget a vast majority of what they experience. over the period of even a week we forget over 90% of what we experience. but things important to us that have emotional content they stick with us forever and that's what most of us refer to as our

soul. that part of us that doesn't change. so in terms of you, whether your soul can be transferred into a cyber conscious form, it's going to be something that happens gradually an even today there is a lot of debate on whether or not dogs and cats, for example, have a soul or are conscious. i think that, i feel they do. and i think that most people in society are moving in that direction. the day where you could kill a dog in a horrible way, that was -- nobody would stop you from doing that in the 19th century. even for most of the 20th century and now it's a crime in most states to do something like that. so i think that we're going to get to a point where there are friends of cyberconscious people. especially if it's a cyber

conscious nealy. that person is going to have a lot of friends and fans too probably and very quickly we'll get to a point where we say that that cyber conscious individual has a soul. and even if god forgive her body ends in a car accident or death or disability nealy did not end. her identity continues in this cyber conscious form. >> let me ask you about the frightening aspects of this because some people none of us want to live forever. hitler for example. nobody wants this guy to be able to upload, right? so where do you get into sort of -- it was a real thing in this country, 20 or 80 years ago. we're going make the tribe better. you're a nice person to run this project but how do we avoid sort of digital cyber robot cyber

people? where does that come in? who gets to participate in the program? >> yeah. i'm kind of -- i have a point of view that this is not something a realistic thing to really fear because all of this cyber consciousness and all of these robots that are being developed are in an environment which even though it's a human made environment our socioeconomic system, it's still an environment much like the natural environment. it's just us humans are the selection factors. and so the laws of darwinism still apply and the so-called bad robot problem or the hitler robot problem, there's going to be nobody that wants to buy a hitler robot. if a hitler robot emerges and begins to do bad things the same thing is going to happen to the hitler robot that happened to the real hitler is that the rest of society is going to squash it

down. there's no market for an evil robot or evil software. does that mean they'll never exist? no. i don't think it means that. there's always mutations in an environment and there will be bad people and bad robots that emerge but the vast majority of billions of people that comprise all the decision making in society through their economic powers and their mitt cal powers will quash down the bad people and the bad robots so i think it's a self-correcting problem because humans overwhelmingly good humans comprise the environment in which all of this will emerge. >> let me ask you while we're still on future questions, you have -- this is my favorite project you do. you have a herd of pigs in west virginia that i like to call genetic mutant pigs. >> they are. >> they're genetically altered. but you're raising these pigs for possible future lung

transplants which would vastly reshape them in the united states if not across the country. >> ever since my grandmother received a pig heart valve because her heart valve had gone bad i had been aware of the fact that pigs hearts and for that matter lungs and other organs are very close to the same size, shape, and function of human major organs. so i, as our youngest daughter developed this fatal heart-lung disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension i learned that the only cure for it was a transplant but the problem with transplants is that there's way too few organs to go around for everybody that needs them and secondly organ transplants are trading one disease for another disease. you're trading the in stage organ disease that you're dying from for a chronic organ

rejection disease that takes the life of many or most people that receive transplants. so i set about to solve this problem inspired by making sure our daughter would be able to live a normal life and i went back to school an got a ph.d. in zenotransplantation which is the science of genetically modifying the pig genome so the organs can be not only the same size used for humans not only because they're the same size and shape but because by modifying the pig genome they won't give rise to the chronic rejection that's flawed it in the past and ultimately if it can be modified really nicely the individual can receive those organs and not have to take a lifelong immuno

surveillan suppre suppressants. we purchased the leaders in this area off the campus of uva in -- i'm sorry, virginia tech in blacksburg, virginia and we now are definitely the leaders in genetically modifying pigs genomes so that not only their lungs but their hearts and their kidneys can be used in human transplants. all of the recent records that have been announced by the nih program in zeno heart transplants come from the united the therapeutics there as well as our own records in lungs and kidneys and our goal which i feel really confident we'll achieve. i'm much more confident we'll achieve this goal than some of the earlier satellite communication projects is that

we'll be able to create an unlimited supply of transplantable organs through the modification of the pig genome so there will be an unlimited supply of hearts, livers, kidneys and lungs that can be tolerated by humans without the need for lifelong immuno suppression. >> timetable? >> we're on schedule to have our first clinical procedures which means using these organs in people by the end of this decade. and it's less than ten years from now. and i'm pretty confident by the end of the 2020 there will be receive transplants from transplantation. >> give me some idea of how quickly you have made progress on the disease that effected genesis and others.

how many people were alive at any one time when you started united therapeutics and how many are alive now? >> it's one of the things, the way you say it it comes out odd and then you think about it and it's good. when genesis was diagnosed, there were only 3,000 people with pulmonary arterial hypertension. he was diagnosed across the city here at children's national medical center so we were told that she would die because everybody with this condition died. i knew i did not have time to get this organ transplantation thing going so i left my satellite communications activities and focused on finding pharmaceuticals that would be sort of like a bridge to a bridge. the pharmaceuticals would bridge people to the organ transplants and fortunately our pharmaceuticals have proven to be successful but approved by the fda. there's now 40,000 people living with pulmonary hypertension.

so it's strange to say there's 3,000 and now there's 40,000 people. it's like i'm doing something bad but it's really good because that's a whole football stadium of people that are alive that would not otherwise have been alive. >> they would have died already. >> the mortality is like 1 to 3 years. >> how is genesis now? >> doing great. working in our company at united the therapeutics and she is in charge of keeping everybody in the company working together through using digital media to make sure that our clinical trials and information is available to everybody in the company. >> briefly the project that you started a couple of weeks ago is almost tedious by your standards but you're going to reshape how all transplants take place across the country. you placed an order for up to 1,000 piloted drones that will replace the helicopters and it's going to be a drone.

>> so it's -- it's actually a big project. i would say that that's a more challenging project than the genetically modified organs themselves but i had to think about that aspect of the project because when we make a pharmaceutical we have to prove to the fda that our drugs have a shelf life of a year and that's why every drug company, if you look at any of your medicines you'll see it says refill it within a career. the problem is and so we can make our medicines and ship them to the cvs and walgreens and sit on the shelf but when you make a genetically modified organ it's like a drug as far as the fda is concerned it's a drug and it's a particular type of drug called a biologic. but unlike medicines this drug has like a life. you can't just put an organ on a shelf and keep it waiting there for a year. we can't ship it to walgreens.

so when we manufacture these organs which means that we explant them from the genetically modified pig we have to deliver them within hours to the patient at a hospital to be transplanted. there's no shelf life. so i had to think of a whole new model for how are we going to transport all of these organs in essentially real time from the point of manufacture to the hospitals and the patients. and i think, you know, very much inspired by the owner jeff besos who i think provided an important foundation of credibility to the whole concept of commercial use of drones. i began to think about well maybe it would be plausible to have a special type of drone. obviously it not one where you're going to drop the organ on the front yard.

and it's able to happen for ten years. a drone that would be able to land very softly and have a person roll the organ out of the drone and to the surgeon's table where they'll take it and plant it. so we place this order for 1,000, what we call, manufactured organ transport helicopters, and these will be delivered in the next 10 to 15 years. >> bringing back to close, you are the recipient of the billy jean king leadership initiative award devoted to lgbt issues. you have a multimillion dollar facility employing a couple of hundred people in north carolina. you were just down there. >> today. >> lead us on this issue.

you have no plans to move your facility from down there. tell us your thoughts on this issue and do you stay and fight? do you pull out? what are your thoughts on how to lead on that issue? >> so i think that unfortunately i got automatically enabled to lead on this fight. i'm the most visibly transgender ceo in north carolina. maybe i'm the only one. but i was actually -- it was brought to my attention by lots of people in my company that don't identify as being lgbt at all. they said this is going to hurt our recruitment. we're always hiring people at united therapeutics. especially scientists and technologies. we hire people from all over the country and overseas. they said to me, can you, you know, can our company put out a

public statement that says we oppose this so when we're recruiting people we can say this law has passed but our company is on record as being opposed to this. so i said absolutely and to be frank i was a little bit nervous about -- i didn't want it to seem like it was my agenda because i'm transgendered and it wasn't. it bubbled up from, especially the r and d staff at united therapeutics. so we adopted this statement and then the next thing that happened is the newspaper for that area, they asked me to do an editorial interview which i did. and i was really gratified that just this weekend on monday the editorial board of the major newspaper in north carolina all came out in support of our position which is that this law called hb2 is not well thought

out and counter productive for north carolina and should be repealed and the thinking there is that there was no problem. there had been no documented problem caused by any transgendered person using the bathroom that matched their gender identity. so why adopt a whole law that specifically requires a, say a transgendered man who could have a full beard and everything and often at least nice nealy tucker beard there. why force that individual to go into the women's bathroom? it's insane. so i mentioned this in my interview and editorial board agreed and i think the people in north carolina realize this law was not well thought of. some big companies like paypal and a couple of others had

decided not to go to north carolina. but i was clear from the beginning that north carolina is not perfect. but we love it anyway. and i never really agreed with the sentiment of love it or leave it. or like cut and run. i'm just a stand and fight type of gal. so just because north carolina has one thing bad has a lot of good things and i would rather stand there and change north carolina than run away from it. so we have got hundred of employees there. they have families. their kids are in schools and churches and everything and have all lives there. it would be crazy to think about pulling up and leaving so we never thought about leaving. we said we would stand there and fight and later this week i'll be speaking at the music festival and it's been turned

into a giant protest festival. >> you are saying you don't think the law is going to last that long anyway. jim crow laws wear out over time. >> well they do. you guys have been married for 30 plus years and nobody blinks on that issue these days. >> yeah but when i was born it was illegal in more than half the states in the country. so i just love the fact that i'm alive at a point in time when progress is not only continued to advance but the rate of progress is increasing exponentially and it makes me feel that we're all alive at the best of all times. >> thank you very much. [ applause ]

♪ good morning, everyone. i'm the editor of washington post live. thank you very much for being here. now we have speakers on stage who are deeply involved in how

we might augment our reality and even create new senses. i'm going to leave a little time at the end for questions and think about if you have any. first we have neal hash is on. he's the first-person in the world for having a permanent antenna implanted in his skull. and yes he sleeps and showers with it. sheila is a neuroscientist and explores how the brain encodes visual information and was awarded a grant for her work. a rising star in the augmented reality area. he had been previously at mit media labs. so welcome our guests and we will get going. i'm going to start with you. you are a certified cyborg.

what is the device in your head and how does it work? >> it's not a device. it's a new sensory organ. it's part of my skeleton and allows me to extend my perception of color beyond the visual spectrum. it picks up light frequencies and gives me vibration. it allows me to sense infrareds and ultraviolets and there's internet connections so people can share colors with me directly to my head and i can connect to satellite so then i can sense colors from space. i'm using the internet as a new sense and not as a tool and technology not as a tool either but as a body part as a sensory extension so i don't feel i'm using or wearing technology. i feel that i am technology. that's why i identify myself as a cyborg. >> so you're an artist also? >> i see becoming a cyborg as an

art. it's designing your own perception of reality. design your own sensory and sensory organs. >> so you were born totally color blind but yet you have become an artist through hearing colors? >> i was an artist before that. to me creating your own senses is an art. creating your own body part is an art. it's the art of designing your own perception of reality. >> okay. got it. okay. let me go to you. what do we know about the neurocode and how does the brain take in this stimulus and use it? how does it work? >> well for a normal person images come in and they land on your photo receptors. i have some slides to show you the basic idea. i can explain it. so what i worked out was the neurocode of the retina. so images come in like this image of this baby's face and it

goes into your eye and lands on your retina and photo receptors and then actually if you go to the next one it highlights just the photo receptors. okay. i'll skip that and then it's passed through the circuitry and it extracts information and converts it into a code and the code is in these patterns of electrical pulses that get sent to the brain. a image gets converted into a code and it's a code that the brain understands. so this pattern of pulses that you're looking at here represents this baby's face. and it knows that what was out there was this baby's face and of course it's actually a million cells that are doing this simultaneously. about 10,000 in your central retina. so a different pattern of pulses would know it was a car or another pattern of pulses it would be a dog.

so that's how the communication goes from image into your brain. so what i have been working on is that when a person gets a degenerative disease the photo receptors die and so no information can get in. and but the output cells, the cells at the end, they still work. and so the idea then is that if we can make a device that can interact with the output cells and send the code in then we could restore sight to the blind. it sounds dramatic. but i worked out to a large extent the code so i can make a device that can mimic that and send signals to the output cells and send them to a brain. so if we send it like a pattern of pulses that represented stripes the patient would see stripes.

pattern of pulses that represents a face or talking face then a person would see that. we have done it in animals but not in humans yet. but i went to the fda three weeks ago and once i send the application in hopefully they will approve it and we can start a clinical trial in the beginning of 2017. >> you had good results with the animals? and you had good resul the animals. >> have a picture of that to give you a feel for why the code is so important. if you could show the picture of the baby's face, if anybody is -- >> i don't know if they could bring that back. but we'll work on that. let me go to john. john, this idea of tailoring our individual realities as related to what you and your colleagues are doing at meta, how does augmented reality work and how do you trick the brain to see this extra information. >> sure. augmented reality is taking the digital information connected to the physical world. we've created a headset that you put on and you could look through a visor and see the world and see digital information connected with the world. yo