 So we're here at the SID display week with Laura Rear. Rear. Rear. It's like Reagan without the gun. All right, so who are you and what do you do? Well, I've spent 36 years as a military technologist for the Air Force Research Laboratory and I was honored to be asked to serve as a panelist on the Women in Technology panel. It was something that has been on my mind a lot lately as I am about to retire. I've had an extraordinary career, helped in large part by a fairly gender-neutral management chain and I think not everybody has had that luxury. When I'm finding out the more women I talk to, not everybody has that environment. So it was a chance to pay it back. What do you think about the session? The session went really well. We got some tough questions. Mostly I was blown away by these amazing women on this panel. Julia, Candice, Heidi, Niaz. These are rock stars in their technical communities, entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, professors and I'm just kind of like a military nerd and I really didn't feel worthy to be there. But we got great questions and there were great people in the audience. No, you had lots of cool things to say even though it was, it's hard to because you're six people, right? And that means average five minutes each. It's hard to, you can't read 10, you can't like, you could have spoken much more, right? Probably, I could have gone on more. The one thing that always gets me is when I started this, people were always asking how do you balance family and career? And the question almost always came from women and how do you balance personal, family, career, professional things? What I'm finding with this generation, the millennials, some of my young protégés, the mentees that I have that are men are starting to ask that same question as they buy houses and have families. So I think if there's one indicator that we've made progress, that's it. We're starting to see that same question, not just come from the women, but also come from the young men. So you've been doing lots of top secret jobs, getting awesome technologies into it, I'm joking. I'm a nerd. I'm just a nerd. Managing high tech stuff, right? It's been great. One of the things about research for the federal government, I work for the Air Force Research Lab, we can do the really fundamental science. We can take risks that other commercial entities can't. The return on investment I need to show might be 20 years out. I can do fundamental science that helps solve a problem that the Air Force cares about, but somebody in a company needs to show a return on investment, get something to a product much sooner. So the joys of working for the Air Force is we can do the really kind of crazy, B-hags, the big, hairy, audacious goals, and we can chase some of the really hard problems with some of the best brains in the country. So it's kind of like the NASA, but more of it? Pardon? NASA. Oh yeah, it's NASA. But NASA has a much smaller budget, right? You have 10 times. NASA has a tiny, tiny budget, but NASA's the reason- You have 30 time bigger budget. People my age, there are a lot of us that are engineers and scientists now because of NASA, the Apollo program. When I was seven years old, I remember my parents dragging me out of bed on July 20th, 1969, and saying, look, on TV, there's a man on the moon. And I decided I was gonna be an astronaut. I didn't make it as an astronaut. Were you nearly there? I got to fly in planes. I got to do aeronautics. Very fast ones. So yeah, not really fast. I flew in a helicopter with the doors open. That was kind of cool. Doing some night vision goggle testing out in the field. So having a chance to be part of military technology development, I consider myself something of a citizen scientist. It's been a good run. You're still working with the military, right? So I can't ask you anything political, but I would like to see, no, it doesn't matter what people think about Trump, but he should just think of himself and just say, let's send humans to Mars in four years. That should be his priority. That would be so cool. What would be really neat, and I thought this, because the Apollo program was such an amazing inspiration to me as a child, there was this amazing goal and it was kind of explorers out there kind of doing Star Trek and all those amazing things. I was wondered if we couldn't have another grand challenge like that and something around clean energy, energy independence. I think that would be like a NASA challenge where we put this goal out here, we're gonna be energy independence and independent in 2025. And to do that, you've got to have people working science and technology. And so I'd love to see whether it's NASA or the Department of Energy or the DOD, some kind of funding, National Science Foundation. Some kind of funding that would really drive that big challenge that brings us together as a nation around something that's exciting and rewarding the way the Apollo program was for me when I was looking. I'm thinking Mars is still a good- Mars would be a good run. Because you could have energy independent kind of technology that would spin out of that because you would have to run, you would have to go two and a half years in space with just solar panels and stuff. Yeah, I'm getting too old to go to Mars though. I wouldn't mind going back. I don't think so. I think that you could sign. I don't know. They're kind of jelly-body parts. You know, Mars says that everybody can buy a ticket to. Yeah, but that kind of that grand challenge that inspires people, whether it's medicine, it could be cures for cancer, it could be clean energy, whatever it is, I think what would be really nice to see, politics independent, is an enthusiastic focus for the nation on technology as solving problems and making the world better, whatever that is. SID for some reason is always in the US and is the best technology for displays and there's so many awesome display prototypes. Coming from elsewhere. How can we get those out there in the world? Making the world flatter, that's a hard problem. I would love to see more of us in the US learn a second language. I think that would help flatten the earth. I'm currently, even though I'm old, I'm learning Spanish. It's because I should learn Spanish. I scuba dive, I dive in the Caribbean a lot. But I think helping flatten the earth and helping transition technology would be much more effective if more US citizens were bilingual. So you were mentioning in your part of what you were talking about, you were saying that you were going to retire. But are you sure you're going to be able to retire? Maybe you're just going to start doing a startup? Do you want to go and launch a startup, something? I have a lot of volunteer jobs. I do a lot of bicycling advocacy. I work with various nonprofits in my little town. I also have, me and my man friend, he's too old to be a boyfriend, my man friend and I between us, we have four kids that live in really interesting places. So just visiting the kids every year and they're spawning grandkids and things. So I have no shortage of things to do. I'm going to hike El Camino, cross Spain. I'm not coming back, I'm not doing startup. I'm done.