 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. Yeah. Right. Oh, no. Oh, we're back. We're back. We're on. It's two o'clock. Here we are. We're given Wednesday. Exciting. This is a big day Wednesday. This is the day before the storm. Storm, yeah. No storm, right? Storm, no storm. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. This is a very exciting day. This is a very exciting day. I hope so. A very exciting day. In 1993, in a second to habit, actually, William & Mary was charted in 1611, but they must have had a board of regents like we have because it took them 80 years to fund the place. In the meantime, this, you know, little place in Cambridge popped up. The rest is history. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to talk about Iceland, and in Iceland, you know, they started the legislature called the All-Thing. That's right. In the year 930. Yeah, it's the All-Thing. Harlem in the world, still going strong actually, part of the Inter-Polumentary Union. The Secretary General of that was here a couple weeks ago. Iceland is his favorite place. Iceland and Portugal I think on the tourist map right now tend to be much much. They're out of the way somehow. They had been overlooked for a long time. And they don't have the same stresses and threats that other places have. So you've been writing books again. Actually, I've been writing books for a long time. You started writing books when you were at Scheidler, no? No, no, no. I started, you know, I was a former academiciac, or as we say in Hawaii, academia nut. And, you know, to get tenure at places like Wharton and Columbia where I taught, you know, it's published in Paris. So I, you know, I started writing there, I had to. Although that writing was the dry analytical stuff that nobody ever reads, but it does get you tenure. And so that... Once you get tenure, you can relax a little bit. Then you can snooze, right? Yeah. So that, I mean, that got me into it. But then, you know, as I got older and particularly got into business and so forth, I wanted to write stuff that people actually read and was able to do speaking tours off the books. So that's kind of when I wanted to do books like this, of which I've completed ten now. And this is not... Some people, by the way, Jay, have suggested that I've written more books than I've read. It's a very unkind statement. How unkind? Right. Probably right. Still unkind. Right. So this is not the most recent one. That's the interesting part. Yeah. But in some ways, this is the one that's most interesting right now. It's always alive. I mean, this thing, this issue has really never died. Yeah. They probably want to know what book we're talking about. So why don't you hold it up? Yeah. The book is called Flight Capital. It's about 13 years old now. But again, seems to always have a new life. And it was conceived in many respects right here in Hawaii when I started to notice a number of Hawaiians and others, Americans, particularly in the science, technology, medical areas. We're doing citizens. People have been here 10, 23. People who are highly successful, very well educated, gold chip kind of men and women. We're doing a U-turn and we're flying back to their homes of records. Stuff they never did before. The kind of people you're talking about though are people who were born elsewhere. Born elsewhere. They were not natively born here. And when they came here, I mean, the idea was it was a one-way trip. They weren't doing a U-E at all. They were tickled to death to get in the country, land of opportunity, whether they were Albert Einstein or Albert Hitchcock, they made a name for themselves. But increasingly, I started to see more of these middle and senior successful folks, men and women, doing an about face. And so the question was, is this a trend or a trickle? Is something going on here? Why are they doing it? What are the implications for the United States? What should we do about it, if anything? Well, it's a business issue because it's, as you said, human capital, flight capital. And this is the most valuable. Human resources is the most valuable asset we can have. It's a knowledge-oriented economy, which we clearly are very much into. What's interesting to me, and I mentioned it to you before, is that we live in a state where we're worried about the brain drain, about people living here, getting school here, but then leaving. And so what do we generate? We're generating this product that leaves on us. That's not a win-win situation. And so you have somehow taken that and examined it on a national level, and not simply a state level. No, I think that's right. And again, these people, you know, it's one thing if you lose some bright people. It's another thing if, alternatively, you have not been developing your own homegrown talent, particularly in the STEM areas. And lo and behold, we haven't. I mean, kids today, Jeff Immelt of GE has a great line. If the U.S. wants to lead the world in masseuses and sous chefs, we can do it. But China's going to lead the world in India well in artificial intelligence and brain surgery. And true, you know, if you look at kids majoring in stuff today in colleges and universities, they typically shy away from this stuff. It's hard. It's hard. It's considered sort of geeky, antisocial. And who needs it? I remember my own consciousness on this was when Bill Gates, he was then CEO. Yeah. I was making a trip around the country visiting college campuses and trying to get kids, you know, mostly American kids, not imported from other countries, but American, to study technology. And they wouldn't do it. And he couldn't find the talent he wanted to hire from Microsoft. Well, one day about six months after this, like, dawned on me from that article about him, we had a show here about Microsoft. Right. And we had a whole bunch of them. We were the best and the brightest in Microsoft. Sure. One was from somewhere in the Middle East. Right. One was from Africa and one was from Asia. And none of them were born in the country. Yeah. So, you know, what you had is, yeah, Bill Gates figured it out all right. You go offshore and you get them. And then you give them a life here. Yeah. And then you may recall, Jay, he built a monumental facility in Vancouver. Again, he couldn't capture them here. So, he went across the border. And as you know, Canada has been very welcoming to exactly these kind of people. And he was able to fill it up. He also created in Beijing, there's a guy named Kaifu Li, who's a legend in this sort of area. Born in Pittsburgh, went to Carnegie Mellon, got all of his degrees there, joined Microsoft, went up like a rocket. And Gates sent him to Beijing to start Microsoft's Asia Pacific Laboratory, which later MIT's technology review ranked as the best R&D center in the world, three years in a row, to the point where Gates twice a year went over there to essentially kiss the ring and keep this guy going. But their major talent resource was in Beijing. And it was, again, with a lot of these same folks who had been plucked away from the U.S. When I talked to Li, by the way, I said, what was the biggest obstacle you had getting Chinese-born Americans or immigrants back to China? And he said, I mean, it sounds crazy, but the biggest problem we had was with the mothers. You know, the mothers on the mainland, you know, were so proud of their sons at MIT and Caltech and Intel and so forth. When we try to bring them back, you know, they're telling us, you know, I want to lose my bragging rights in the neighborhood. You know, what am I going to tell Milley across the street or what have you? They said it took seven or eight years to get over that. But they, of course, did get over it in a big way. So you have found that the lessons you learned when you wrote the book 13 years ago are still appropriate and still true, maybe even more true now than then? Yeah, well, we're losing, on my average, 200 to 250,000 of these people a year, a year. Now, that excludes the people who ordinarily would have come here or would have considered the U.S. on a short list along with Australia, Canada, some other places who, you know, given the events of the times politically and so forth, have seen a chill in the air and have been looking elsewhere. That's a huge number compared to the number who came in the first place. It's a turnstile. So a lot of people, a lot of people, high percentage of people who came from other places are leaving. Going back, yeah. And which begs the question, why are they doing it? Where are they going? And the interesting thing I found in doing it, as you may recall, I went to eight countries to take a look at this. India, Ireland, Iceland, Israel, Taiwan, China, Mexico, and China. Where this phenomenon was going on at different levels. You know, Mexico was like one-and-a-half on a ten-point scale. Ireland was like a nine. Israel was right up there. India, China, sort of six, seven, and moving in that direction. And they were going back for the same reasons people emigrate in the first, and that's a better life as they define it. And it's typically a better life economically, politically, culturally for them. And if not them, their kids were their grandkids as they defined success in a better life. And they can get jobs in those countries now where they could not get jobs, you know, a generation ago. Yeah, I mean those countries, let's face it, they were either basket cases or near-basket cases. And they had all sorts of political upheaval and could have been very oppressive religiously or whatever for these people to kind of make progress. The U.S. was a wonderful escape valve, but these companies, countries, India and China, a classic example, have come a long, long way. And also, particularly the Asians have felt that even in Silicon Valley, you know, where they've had so much success, they still get stereotyped, they're sort of geeky, and they can run the research lab in the staff areas. But in terms of getting into the C-suite in the corner office, they still see some hostility or lack of opportunity. If they go back to Bangalore or Beijing, that's not a problem. Singapore and become crazy rich. That may change the whole model now. Yeah, and Singapore was one of the countries I visited and they have, you know, this goes back to Lee Kuan Yew. Of course, Singapore has always, in his days, relied on expatriate, imported workers. 25% of the population today came to Singapore, the lion city from someplace else. And Lee Kuan Yew has his dream of making Singapore the Boston of Asia Pacific. He was brilliant. He was a brilliant guy. And one of the guys I spent some time with over there, Edison Liu, an interesting guy. Born in Hong Kong, his parents were both doctors. They immigrated to the states in the Bay Area, both practice medicine. He did all of his degree work at Stanford, then went on, taught at Duke, taught at Yale. And he was the director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute at the Festa, Maryland. What a talent! Incredible guy. I mean, and a great guy, really a fun, you'd enjoy this guy. But Singapore went after him and brought him there. They created a city called Biopolis. A major science city with seven specialties, including genomics and bioscience. That reminds me of Dwayne Goebbler. I don't know if you knew him. He was a national quality, National Institute of Health, a tropical infectious disease guy that Ed Cadman brought out here. And Cadman in the medical school just started to build a big, fancy laboratory. But in the meantime, he wasn't really getting the kind of incentives that he hoped for. And when Duke contacted him out of Singapore, he gave him a whole building. No, that's what this... And he went there, like that. When I saw Liu, they were just basically sweeping the floor on this one of seven buildings. I mean, magnificent buildings in Biopolis. And he had recruited 177 bioscientists, including 80% of the genetic gene tracing team from Paris. And, you know, it was just going crazy. And he said, you know, I asked him, he said, are you really going to make Hayway here? And he said, you know, in 10 years, we will have at least 10 major league bioscience companies coming out of Singapore. Yeah, I mean, when you mentioned before about the sous chefs and all that. Yeah, right. I think the audience will understand we're talking about brilliant people. Right. Top of the line. Yeah. Total type A achievers who are going to... who are presently changing the world. Yeah. And wherever they go, that place benefits by their presence. Yeah. And these people, you know, there's a gene pool they're in, you know, it's called brain circulation, where there's a limited number of these people, and they are totally mobile to go any place, any time. And every country, if you're in biotech, nanotech, and a number of artificial intelligence, if you're a pilot with multi-engine experience, if you're a lawyer who has taken companies public today on the major exchanges, these guys are on the hit list of... they are. Ireland has... Enterprise Ireland has eight major centers in the United States. To recruit. To recruit. Exactly these guys. So what the factor is then, is one is you can get a job overseas. Right. Two is you have family, probably. Yeah. And it's a familiar thing, and you're happy that your country, the place you came from, is doing better now than it was before. Right. So it's a quality of life. It's not a bad life. Right. And then finally you get, and this is really what I want to dwell on for a minute, is the incentives. Governments are throwing out incentives that are sometimes very valuable, very focused, in order to bring people home. Yeah. Yeah, no question. China has a $2 billion at last count budget to attract a group that are called sea turtles in Chinese. They're homing, the Irish call them homing pigeons. The Icelanders call them homing puffins. Sure. But they're all returning type folks. So there are big budgets out there. Now, China, some countries are using the public sector, places like India, when you talk to Infosys and Wipro and all of the major companies, they basically say it's all being done by the private sector. They basically said, we don't want the Indian government anywhere near this recruiting effort. But in China. Yeah. China. The Chinese government has got a program going. Yeah, definitely. I remember it. It was one researcher biochemistry research in New Jersey. He was really making a tremendous career. And one day they called him up and said, you should return now. And we're going to give you a laboratory that we'll make your head spin. And he went right back and he's a happy guy. Yeah. So I think you're right. The recruiting is some country's business, some country's government. But I think a focused approach is to offer him incentives that he will come back. The start is for the government and or in partnership with business to look at a strategic plan of what kind of Singapore do we want to create in today's world. Once you've sorted that out, then it's, how do we do it? Do we grow our own? Do we pluck some from or some combination of the two? And clearly a lot. I mean, a major plus, you know, we talk about how things have changed are the educational systems and the science, the research facility systems in the industrial parks in these places has really jacked up. So there's, I mean, there's something major to come back to. What does a scientist love more than anything else? This is rhetorical. More than anything else. He loves talking science with his colleagues. There's only Robert Olson and the New Fitzsimmons, which is like a tripler hospital in Denver. Used to be an army hospital and they converted it to a scientific community there. An incubator sort of there. And they wanted to bring, you know, big pharma in there. So what did they do? They, he, Robert Simmons, Robert Olson was running it. He organized breakfasts. And all the scientists would come to breakfast and there'd be this unspoken understanding that you're not going to knock me off on my research. You're not going to steal my work. But I will talk to you and I will tell you what I'm doing and you will learn and we will all learn together. We will all have that scientific experience, the psychic benefit of talking to our colleagues. And I think that's probably part of it. If you work so hard and such a big A achiever, it really, you need to discuss it with other people. You do. The French created a city. It's near Riviera called Sophia Antipolis, near Nicevalbon. And they have about 400 companies. IBM's European, to some extent, global R&D facility is there. And that's been going on for some time. But it's, they're near University, Grenoble University and so forth. And it's, it's all, you know, has that character of a lot of interchange between these. So now the big question is the United States as one of those countries. How are we doing? What have we done to allow the other guys to take our best and brightest away? It's hubris. I think, you know, this is the country that everybody came to, a nation of immigrants. You know, let's face it, we got more out of Ellis Island than we did off the Mayflower. And so, you know, these people, without lifting a finger, these people just fell into our collective lapse. Again, the iron pays and you name it, of the world, all over the place. Because of something we offered them, a notion, freedom, democracy. A better life. A better life, tolerance, hopefully. I mean, although it doesn't always work. It's those ethical things that we offered them that made them want to come here. And not to overstate this issue, we still have some major advantages. I mean, one of the guys that I've got a quote in here from, who is the dean of the Tel Aviv School of Law, and who had taught at Yale, Michigan, and some other places, just said, you know, I was going through, they said, Dave, don't boo-hoo the U.S. He said, there is no other country that is so open to outsiders that I've traveled all over the place. I know what's going on in Israel. I know we're doing it. But there's nothing like the U.S. in terms of providing a pallet canvas upon which to create. So that, and our universities, particularly at the graduate level, our first class, we outspend every other country in R&D. There are a lot, a lot of pluses to the U.S. However. However, it's, as Tom Friedman noted, it's a flat planet that we're on, and people are competitive, and no nation can rest on its laurels, and other countries can, in order of a mind today, to pluck off that kind of talent. So if you turn your back, if you're the market leader in Pepsi or whatever, and you forget about your strengths and so forth, you can get creamed. And if you look at our educational system, how that collectively has eroded horrifically. Right up from the early grades. Yeah, to the, you know, we're now, I think, behind Estonia in mathematics, that powerhouse. And these, again, for these kind of people, educational systems, public education, it's incredibly important. The last thing they want to take a risk on is their kid's education. Well, let's assume that these things that are in place now, these factors that you describe, continue. Let's assume that they take a natural course in the same direction. And also there's more competition, more incentives by other countries or corporations overseas. Let's assume that we're not paying attention to the schools, that we're not incentivizing those kids, those hundreds of thousands of Chinese to stay here. What will happen in 10 or 20 years? Yeah, the good news, if there is any good news, is that to have a more level global playing field, is to have other people playing the game under the tent of globalization. As we saw with India and China, I mean, hundreds of millions of people have seen their lives improved. That's a good thing. And in terms of supposedly world peace and understanding, there ought to be a plus to that. Nonetheless, no nation can sit on its laurels, because eventually it comes back to bite you in the butt. Yesterday's colleagues become tomorrow's competitors. And unless you're fulfilling the pipeline of your homegrown talent and you're losing it with these folks, it catches up with you. And how it catches up with you, Jay, is in deficits. If you look at foreign trade deficits, particularly, it used to be in the old days, sugar and pine. Who gave a damn? Those were sunset industries. You kissed them off and said, I understand that. We can't compete any longer in those. But the hope was that in knowledge-oriented segments, we were at the top of the scale. And we were. And we were. But now we're losing. We're running deficits in a number of those advanced technology categories. And that's going to bite you in the ass, sooner or later. You cannot get away. And again, the rankings of our public schools, you can't have a dung hole. I mean, we've been survived by, again, the graduate level success of 20 or so universities. Well, you're suggesting we could take affirmative steps to reverse the process of flight capital. No question. What do we do? And if you don't mind, can you compare it with what they did in Iceland? Yeah. I mean, what you can do is, I don't want to get back into Reaganomics and Thatcheromics. But, I mean, the Irish were the first in the Celtic Tiger, where they took the public education system, which had stopped at the seventh grade up through college. They were going into the EU, so the foreign language training became very, very important. They overhauled the infrastructure. They cut taxes, cut tariffs, created industrial parks, were able to talk Intel, Microsoft, and other people to come over there, and they were off and running. Iceland and others, Singapore, took a page out of that book. So that, I mean, that's part of it. But you do have to, there are two things. One is you somehow have to get more of your homegrown talent interested in these areas. And people like, I mean, Gates is, you know, Andy Grove at Craig Barrett at Intel, Sally Ride before she went. I mean, getting women interested in science were evangelists and you need more of that. We definitely have to do that. And then you've got to, you know, you've got to be smart about your immigration policies. And I suggest in the book then, as people have today, that our immigration policy, which has been so skewed, almost 70% to family reunification, and only 20% to skills acquisition, should be flipped. I'm not saying it ought to be 80, 20, but probably half of it ought to be devoted towards these kind of bright people. This is a practical matter. This is a competitive global marketplace. We need that talent. We need to fly to capital. Without the flight capital, we lose the competition. Again, that's not a problem if you're growing people are coming out as colleges up the yin-yang in nuclear medicine and so forth. But that's not the case. Yeah, no. It's very competitive. I remember reading, this has got to be 10 years ago, that somewhere in the area of Beijing, probably in Tianjin, they had a particle accelerator. Oh my God. A particle accelerator. I thought we had to lock on those things, but we don't. We'll look at India and China. I mean, they both have space programs. They're both very much committed to try to put a man on the moon. China in artificial intelligence, people will tell you, are way ahead of the United States. Well, after a while, that bites you. And I'm wondering what the government could do in terms of incentives to students here, everybody's students, all students, to make them study science, to make it cheap for them, to support scientific research in a big way, to just take off and be the world leader. I actually think if government policy were focused on this, we could recover. We could change this phenomenon, get off the slope right away and come back. I mean, a lot of this is in the last chapter of the book. I mean, there's such an opportunity out there, we could cream basically almost anybody else. I mean, people would, when you look at where you want to go, generally, this place, the U.S., is highly attractive. The people that I ran into, a number that went back, I mean, what bothers them is sort of the discourse, the coarseness, the vulgarity, bare mid refs, tattoos. I mean, there are all sorts of things. One scientist from New Jersey, he and his wife, went back to India and said, the day I discovered my kid's middle school was spending more on medical detectors and on mathematics, I told my wife we're out of here. So that stuff really grabs a lot of these, it's a major, major turn off. I remember a story in the paper maybe a year ago about an Indian law professor in a place like Missouri. And his wife was a doctor, they were achievers and all that. But some Indian fellow had been murdered on the street in the street crime. And they didn't feel that justice was being done, they felt afraid. And the two of them, and they made public statements in fact, left the country. They couldn't tolerate the quality of life, it's not what they were working for. And they had credentials they could sell elsewhere. So we run the risk of creating an environment which turns people out. I think this is everybody's business, everybody has to pull together. If you want to tell the average Joe Schmo on the street, if you want to talk to America David, what would you say to them about this? I would say get on an airplane for a start. If you don't have a passport, which I think is the situation about half of the people in Congress, get a passport, get on an airplane and get stuck into China and India. Just go through there and see what the hell is going on. This ain't rickshaw territory anymore. See what's happening in other pockets around the world and realize that's a swimming pool. Your kids, your grandkids are going to be competing in. And we either get on that wagon or you get run over. That's simple. And that will make America great again. There you go. Not tariffs, but that. There you go. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Great to talk to you.