this is an nbc news special report. >> hello, i am joe fryer with a special report. breaking news, former republican senator and presidential candidate, bob dole, died at the age of 98. the elizabeth dole foundation announcing the senator died in his sleep. here's kelly o'donnell with a look back on his life. >> bob dole always possessed humility and dry humor. >> i want to thank all those

that said the kind words about me, they are probably not true but they are nice. >> respect earned through his years of public service, and capped with a medal in 2018. but dole's story brought everybody together, the world war veteran and longevity was among his gifts. in his 90s, dole returned to kansas to visit every county one last time. from his roots in russell, kansas, dole joined the army during world war ii. gravely injured in italy, dole gave credit to the people of kansas for putting their faith in him. >> i was in the 10th division -- >> elected to congress in 1960, and then to the senate in 1968,

rising to republican leader for a dozen years. father to daughter, robin, from his first marriage, when he was married to elizabeth. dole sought the office of president himself three times, and faced incumbent, bill clinton, and described himself as a fighter at age 73. >> tonight i stand before you, tested by adversity, and a fighter by principle, and the most optimistic man in america. >> after politics, his service turned to causes close to his heart, leading fundraising for the national world war ii memorial in washington. his bond with other warriors endured, an emotional dole

managed to stand before the flag-draped casket of fellow world war ii veteran, president george herbert walker bush. ambitious, yet also self afacing in victory and in defeat. >> i leave you all tonight with a full heart and fervent prayer that we will meet again. >> bob dole's commitment to country, tested and lifted by his resilient spirit. kelly o'donnell, nbc news, washington. >> you have been watching an nbc news special report on the death of former senator, bob dole. he was 98. we now return you to your scheduled programming on the nbc

as you say, you add one more, you have the world's largest supercomputer. >> that's the extraordinary thing when you go from '70 to '71, you're talking about a computer so powerful the world has never seen such a thing. does that put into danger things like encryption and banking and things if a computer can try to crack those codes that fast? >> yeah, one of the -- today our encryption uses electrical

curvography or rsa. and it takes a long time to break the key. rsa corporation came out and said it would take 300 trillion years for today's fastest supercomputers to break one email but a quantum computer that would be sufficiently large, might do it in just a few seconds. and it's that difference in computational power we're talking about. the good news is you need a lot of qvids to break encryption. so there would need to be a lot of runs this afternoon. >> this afternoon. although you are ahead of schedule on this. >> yes, and that is a concern because maybe quantum computers come faster than anyone thinks and are we ready for it in our digital lives? as we rely on encryption

protecting our bank accounts to protecting nuclear weapons, presumably. >> would quantum computer making an encryption key be better than a computer making an encryption key? >> yes, there's quantum encryption, which there are algorithms that quantum computers can't hack or certainly make it difficult to do it. that's what -- this is like one of those y2k issues. we need to replace the old code with new code to make sure we're safe in quantum computers. >> you used to work for amazon. it's one of the prime reasons, if you will forgive it, that the product can go from a warehouse to person's doorstep in two days. they're reason. that's amazing. if you're at home, i want you to look at your tv screen. this is a guy who made your life that much possible. but how do you go from that to quantum computing? >> well, one of the problems in

logistics is the traveling salesman problem. you might remember this from high school, which is what is the optimal root for a driver to go? do you go to house a or house b first? and that is actually a really big computational problem. what excited me is quantum is one of those things that might be able to solve that problem as well. a single delivery driver for somebody like u.p.s. or fedex delivers to over 20 addresses every day. you remember your high school math, that number minus one factual. so 191 factorial is the number of possible routes, which is a number that has 200 digits to it. so there's that many combinations with just 120 delivery addresses. if you want to optimize a delivery system for an entire

city, the number of possible routes would be more than the number of atoms in the universe. and this is the kind of problem where quantum computers can suddenly start to help. >> peter chapman, from ionq, thank you so much for joining us. let keep this amazon theme going. up next, "the wall street journal" christopher meant is going to help us trace a product from origin from a factory in asia to your door.

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you recognize this object, it's a usb charger. you probably have several of these in your junk drawer, which is where this one came from. the path from my junk drawer, it went from a factory to a boat to a plane to an amazon warehouse to my front doorstep and probably just took a couple of days to do most of that. when you think about it, it's really a miracle. christopher mims has thought about it. "the wall street journal" reporter and come up in any event has written a book called "arriving today," where he examines the rash of products from china to our doorstep. christopher, you picked the usb as that object. you actually followed one of those things across the global and global economy. why did you pick a usb charger? >> i picked a usb charger, it's

kind of the transistor radio of our day. you think about back in the '60s, it's kind of the simplest technology, if you can produce that, you can produce a whole heck of a lot of other things. where these were made, vietnam, southeast asia, that's the same place most smartphones are made, airpods, most things we rely on these days, all could from there, not china, believe it or not. >> and it really is miraculous. you wrote, explaining how tapping a button on your phone yields pretty much any consumer good could want within 24 hours, explaining how all of the innovation that's came it come together in a planetary-scale clockwork mechanism whose behavior is impossible to understand without building it up from its smallest constituent parts. it's amazing the number of

things that have to work right and work well and really have only been developed in the last few years to have something arrive today on my doorstep. >> yeah, what i came to understand was, if you take all of the biggest, most-important innovations over the past 100 years from automobile to ai, it takes every single one of those in order to get you that thing, whatever you ordered, the next day or within two days. and it's because every part of the supply chain has been so transformed in the past ten years, from the way sorts work, shipping and trucking and, of course, amazon. we've all seen hopefully the video from inside amazon warehouses, all of the robots involved. there's a tremendous amount of automation that has come into this whole space that wasn't there 10, 20 years ago. it used to be you only saw industrial robots in factories. now you see them all over the supply chain, and especially in those warehouses. >> take me back to the absolute

origins of the device that you tracked. i can picture the big shipping -- the big ships that come into the oakland harbor or trucks that take it to the amazon warehouse. what i have trouble picturing is the absolute genesis of this. is it a tiny little building? is it a major plant? >> yeah, well, you know, to quote carl sagan if you want to talk about how to make an apple pie from scratch, you have to describe the beginning of the universe. we won't go back quite that far. but let me blow your mind, the absolute ultra origin of that device is in appalacia, which goes around the world to be transformed into a microchip so we're olympicing it up at the mid-point really and that's the point all of those parts of the chips, pcb boards and wires are being transformed into smartphone, airpods, whatever and that happens in a small

factory in vietnam. so many are duplicates from originals in china. people used to worry about a trade war and now they worry, how do we get all of the things out of china because of the shipping blockages because ports get shut down because of covid. that's the absolute origin. then it goes into a cardboard box, puts into a shipping container, gets trucked to a tiny port where it's picked up by a miniature crane and put on a barge believe it or not. that barge takes all of those objects down river on an eight-hour journey to a giant port that faces the ocean and there it's put on a giant containerized ship. these things are literally as big as the empire state building laid on its side. they can carry 10,000 shipping containers a piece. >> i always wonder when i see a kid's meal toy at mcdonald's or some novelty item, the tchotchkes you see around and think if you rewound this all

the way back, somebody in some plant is making this and saying to themselves, i don't even know what this thing is. >> that's absolutely the case. >> someone's making the clattering teeth you winde must what is this and what am i doing? >> yeah. i happen to live in baltimore, it used to be the china of america. they used to make everything from bottle cans to umbrellas here. now all of that gets made in asia. it's the workshop of the world, right? it doesn't matter where you live outside asia or southeast asia, that's where all of that stuff pretty much gets made. >> you mentioned covid, as i mentioned, the miracle of hitting a button on our phone and get something quickly, we did begin to appreciate that with covid. >> yes, because of so many supply chain issues -- by the way, do your christmas shopping early this year. it will only hit us again. right now there are 60 container ships in a queue at the port of

long beach, los angeles. this is totally unprecedented. they're doing record volume through that port every month and yet they have 60 ships in a line. normally there are three queued up. when i went to the port of los angeles there were three, four waiting at anchor to get a berth. everyone needs thousands of items pulled. but there are a ton of things we will not be able to get because there's not enough capacity in our global supply chains now, largely because of covid. >> you write we're all living inside a factory. what did you mean by that? >> in the old days, raw materials went into a factory and the goods got shipped to you or maybe the factory was in the same country you were in. but now, especially with e-commerce and delivery to your door, it's really like we are at the end of the conveyor belt, which starts with raw materials, and then just kind of ping-pongs across the world as different places that specialize in different types of manufacturing, build up the

components of whatever object we're going to buy. if you buy a smartphone, there are 300 different components in that smartphone. every single one of those components has a supply chain that's so complicated, that it feeds the goods that go into it, just crisscrossing the world. then it comes to you and you're at the end, you as a consumer, your demand for that object had been predicted in advance. that's why you can get it the next day. it took two months to come to you from across the ocean. >> but i only asked for it yesterday and it arrives today. >> because predictive algorithms, machine learning, ai, as we call it, predicted you were going to want that object. >> and they were right. miracle indeed. christopher mims, author of "arriving today." thank you for being with us. "press:here" will be right back. . and this is emmanuel, a future recording artist, and one of the millions of students we're connecting throughout the next 10. through projectup, comcast is committing

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welcome back to "press:here." last week florida announced 40% of its new cars will be electric by 2020. to get there, it's going to invest billions of dollars and hire more than 11,000 people. whether that's because ford wants to be green or is taken aback by the fact that investors value tesla, a much, much smaller company, at 13 times ford's value, only the board at ford knows. venture capitalist todd klein has been thinking a lot about green lately, the money and the

environment. todd is a partner at revolution growth, been involved in financing more than 150 companies. writing recently in an op-ed in "tech crunch," quote, even without regulation as a stick, consumer demand is now serving as a carrot to increase sustainability and impact company's agendas." and you're talking about more than just a green company, right, todd? you're talking there are companies like tesla, impossible foods we would define as green companies. but you mean all companies going green? >> that's right. it's an agenda that pretty much every company is adopting, and it extend well beyond those that originally have a mission or a product that is necessarily sustainable, but it's far broader than that. >> there are companies like stripe, for instance, that process credit cards. how does stripe grow green other than recyclable coffee cups or whatnot in the office? >> well, yes. they can do things inside their

own operations, which are environmentally responsible. but a lot of the decision making that occurs around sustainability in organizations is cultural and it has to do with, for example, the partners that you work with. you have choices now in the energy you buy. does it come from sustainable sources? and culturally speaking to those things, attracting employees that support them and choosing your partners carefully is an element of it. >> in fact, you wrote that in your supply chain, quote, if a diagram of your partnerships and supplier relationships with printed on the front page of "the new york times," would you be comfortable with what it showed the world? you know, you wouldn't have thought, well, maybe a few years ago we would have thought suppliers as far as the way they treated workers. but now employees and customers actually really care how the supply chain works for a major company and whether all of those partners are green. >> that's true.

and i don't know if you had experience or not but a lot of us who have been homebound during the pandemic ordered many things to our houses that otherwise we might have gone to the store to purchase. that includes food and medicine and other things. for the first time, people are starting to notice the packaging their food comes in. and they are aware when they see those boxes stacking up, that there's a consequence for these decisions. and so it's influencing the way consumers are thinking about their product. they're thinking about products holistically. noes just the organic food delivered to my home or medicine but what form does it arrive in and what are the consequences for the form it's arriving in? >> and a lot of companies get feedback from customers. some green policies start their way at the consumer level and work their way up to the company. >> that's right. when we think about investing, part of the decision process we go through is how talented is the perspective company at listening to their consumers.

do they have the tools in place to survey them, to identify their preferences? to do ab testing over the type of relationships they want to develop with their consumers and does it influence the way those consumers by? we think a lot about that with investors and sorry, how in tune they were to their customer base and their needs. >> and transparent. companies like apple issue not only diversity report but sustainability report. and sometimes it's not complementary. there are parts in which an apple sustainability report admits we're still depending on this mineral or this way of mining and we're trying our best. >> yeah, i think companies that recognize what the challenges are and have set goals that they are working towards and communicating their progress under those goals, they have a lot of credit for that.

the expectations, of course, are high but companies like apple with scale and wealth, expectations are higher than perhaps they might be on a start-up. but nevertheless, in all cases being transparent about it, showing your progress and also, frankly, talking about what the challenges are, and how you're trying to innovate your way towards these goals is crucial. >> now, it's best to start out early because you wrote once in "the harvard business review," and this was a few years ago so i understand if you can't totally recall, start-up founders tend to be bad at changing their own company. this is something you can't -- you can't pivot to sustainability. >> i think it is much harder. we talked about partners a moment ago. let's say for example you have a start-up, a key supplier and it turns out that supplier is supplying you with a material that they harvest through very unsustainable or environmentally unfriendly practices, yet you

built that into your business model and cost structure. changing that on the fly once in fact you realize it's not consistent with your values, employees' values or customers' values, that gets much harder once embedded in that relationship. >> now if you're faced with two investment opportunities, one bigger growth and the other dedicated to green, otherwise identical and i realize this is a fictional idea, would you really pick the one that was less profitable? >> i think what we would spend a lot of time determining is if we could innovate our way forward in the one that had greater priority towards green. in other words, these are not static things. earlier in my career, i worked for farm that focused in the environmental area, and i commissioned a survey, a national survey that asked one question. the question was, all other things being equal, how much more would you be willing to pay

if your power came from renewable sources? back then the answer was around 4%. i think the number is higher now. probably closer to 8% or 10%, but scott this notion that people will self-tax to a certain degree to pay more for something that, in fact, is more environmentally friendly has its limits. so our answer to that question ultimately, scott, is not to try to invest in the company that's more environmentally friendly and then change a customer into using it, our job as investors and entrepreneurs is innovate a way to make that better. >> makes sense to me. todd klein, partner at revolution growth. thank you for being with us this morning. one of todd's expertise is also media. todd and i talked about the future of media on our podcast "sand hill road." you can find that episode and dozens of interviews with venture anywhere you find your podcasts. "press:here," we will be right back.

that's our show for this week. my thanks to our guests and thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.

nbc sports, home of the olympic games, notre dame football, the premiere league, the pga tour, "monday night football" and super bowl, only on nbc as the game of golf continues to grow, technology plays an ever increasing role in its evolution. nowhere is it more prevalent than at the professional level >> technology in golf has changed the game >> we have come a long way to see the technology advances as fast as it has th