 To moderate this panel, we have Paul Roberts, who is a specialist in endings. He is the author of The End of Oil and The End of Food, and a very talented freelance writer. And Paul, where are you? Oh, Paul, take your place. And I will hand this off to Paul, who will now introduce the other people participating in this conversation. Thank you. Can everyone hear me, who wants to? Okay, so thank you for the introduction, and we'll jump right into it. So, for those of you who sort of came in during Bruce's conversation with Steve, you might have thought you were at the wrong conference. Those were sort of the closing remarks for another conference. But so really what this panel is going to be doing is sort of getting at the things that Bruce missed. And before I introduce the panelists, I want to suggest that as we were listening to Bruce talk very persuasively, he sort of reminds me that the reason we can be so optimistic about the oil future is it's going to look exactly like the oil past. And this is a common thing that we do when we're making forecasts. We sort of take what we've learned about the past, the patterns and relationships, the dynamics, and we sort of flip them and say, all right, this is pretty much the future. We'll tweak it a bit for known parameters. And it's called faith-based forecasting because it's based on this faith that the patterns that did operate in the past will operate in the future. And I think that if anything recent past should tell us that that is a somewhat risky model because if we look at things like just two, the financial meltdown and the Arab Spring, two things that couldn't have been predicted under existing paradigms. So I'd like to introduce three panelists who are very good at sort of talking us through a new paradigm and a new way of looking at the future. The first is Alyssa Morgan-Thaler-Jones, and she is the co-founder and CEO of Live Fuels. And they're developing biofuels from algae. She's been a venture capitalist and has a background, very hardcore background in science and engineering. So Alyssa, if you'd come up and join us here. The second panelist is Peter Diamandis. He's a founder and chairman and CEO of X-Prize Foundation. And he's basically reviving the sort of the classic model of a cash prize competition to drive innovation. And he's had a number of incredible successes. So Peter, if you'd come up and join us. And last but not least, Tony Tether, who's the former director of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, or DARPA, and this is the agency responsible for coming up with military technology. So three experts, sort of cutting edge experts, who I think can begin the conversation today. I mean, really, you're going to spend the day listening, you know, hearing about a bunch of technologies and sort of opportunities. And what's going to become clear is that the oil sector, the energy sector in oil in particular, is ripe for a sort of an inflection point. It's ripe for a paradigm change. And so I think I'd like to open the first question with, it's 2030, and we wake up and one morning and we realize that the future that Bruce was talking about didn't happen. We do actually have a suite of alternative energy systems that are not only viable, but they're scaling up rapidly. Lisa, what happened? What was the one thing that Bruce missed? It won't be one. And I don't think Bruce missed it, per se, because he said there will be technology improvements. I think a couple of things will happen, which we discussed last night at dinner. Those of us who have the ability to pay more and have the guilt to impel us to pay more will find other solutions. We will put solar on our homes, which we did 15 years ago. Although I have to admit it was a government subsidy that helped at the time. It was a government lottery. But there's also some other thousand points of light that are evolving. And we are, our company is one of them. Live fuels began as a mini Manhattan project. We paid the Department of Energy five and a half years ago to work with two of the national labs, Sandia and NREL on algae to resuscitate the 20-year program of research that DOE did between 1978 and 1998. They spent $25 million, your tax dollars at work. We have spent 11 million over the last several years. And we have come up with a real paradigm shift, which may or may not work. But at a gross level, the issue came down to the 12 obstacles. We call them the dirty dozen that have kept people from commercializing algae since the Germans tried to do it during World War II when they were running out of petroleum. And they realized, hey, diatoms make a lot of lipids. We all have been running around on oil made by diatoms in the Cretaceous era. That's where most of your petroleum comes from. So technically, this is not a big challenge. People have been doing this for 65 years. We've trained college students to do it. It's easy to grow algae and to make it into oil. It is darn near impossible to do it cheaply. Virtually no one has found a way. But the interesting thing is, as we worked our way through the dirty dozen challenges, the one that leaped out at us was nutrients of all the things we would not have expected to be the big impediment. And I'm very pleased to be here today because you have on your roster today someone from Scientific American and Arizona State University and our dauntless leader, Steve Levine, who has written extensively for Foreign Policy Magazine. All three of these entities have written about the looming phosphorus issue. So a short story here is you cannot grow food without phosphorus. You can't grow anything without phosphorus. Your bodies have about a pound and a half of phosphorus in them. The U.S. has 30 years of phosphorus left. We can't grow enough food 30 years from now if we ramp up our production of food because we're going to need more phosphorus. And for sure, we can't do biofuels. Livefuels has been driven by following the chain of clues to the fact that we need to go to the ocean, which is where phosphorus settles into the deep. And while we were on this journey, we found that because the ocean has been fished out an awful lot of the mixing, the vertical mixing in the ocean has been taken away because fish, believe it or not, account for about a third of all mixing in the ocean. Can I just, 30 more seconds? All right. So the paradigm we're going with is if we bring nutrients up to the photog zone where the carbon dioxide is building up, we may be able to turn it into algae, which are eaten by fish, which are pulled out in the form of carbon. Fish being 10% carbon as a result of which you can count the carbon you pull out of the ocean. Half the carbon that you put into the atmosphere goes into the ocean every year. And as a result, we may be running a large chunk of our world on fish oil as we did 100 years ago, 120 years ago on whale oil. Thank you, Lisa. So Peter, if you were thinking about a sort of a disruptive moment and we don't really know the technologies that appeared in 2030, what was that disruptive moment? What happened along the way? So the situation that I think is missing here is the fact is we're living in a world which is using about 16 terawatts of energy today. And the world is under rapid change. What do I mean by that? I mean we have a little under 2 billion people online today. By 2020, that's expected to increase by 2.5 to on the order of 5 billion people having access online. What does that mean? Those people, what I call the rising billion, not the bottom billion, are going to start to become part of the economic sphere of the planet. They're going to start to become consumers. They're going to start to become producers. And they're going to start to demand energy. Not only use energy but demand energy to get a life, education, health care and so forth. So we are living in a planet that doesn't need 16 terawatts of energy. It needs 32 or 64 terawatts. We have a huge requirement for energy growth. You're going to be hard pressed to tell people they can't have it. So I think what we are missing is the sense that we're going to have a heck of a lot of experimentation and research going on outside the United States. I wish we as a nation were putting a lot more money. I mean I was talking to Jeff Chamberlain who had basically battery research here in the United States. We'll hear from him later about, I guess, $100 million spent by the government on battery research technology. Which is paltry, which is ridiculously small. I mean by orders of magnitude. So the idea is that the research base that we've got isn't large enough and that's one thing that needs to happen. Number one, the second thing is I would say that we're going to see the rest of the world because of sheer demand become a heck of a lot more innovative. And I could see battery technology and photovoltaic technology or even Nathan's traveling wave tubes, really all popping up outside the United States and us becoming secondary in energy because we're not leading the race. So Bruce's sort of scenario was really a U.S. or maybe a western-centric sort of forecast where we're saying, well it hasn't happened here so we don't expect much change. And given what's going on with infinite computing resources, AI, robotics, really these rapidly exponentially growing technologies, these things don't know national boundaries and the research can take place and the brains can take place at the parts of the world. So I think we're going to start to see a lot more and if we don't lead we will end up quickly falling behind. So Tony, you've spent a lot of time sort of working on technologies and seeing the pattern that disruptive technologies have to follow. Walk us through this, you know, exactly this pathway even if we don't know the technology per se, what has to happen for a disruptive sort of event to turn into something that's scalable? You know, I wish I knew the answer to that. It really is a lot of serendipity that I've found that basically you have to be able to go after many approaches and what you need to be is flexible enough that when something appears, we'll call it just serendipity, that you're able to pounce on it. So we need to really let a thousand flowers bloom at this point where we are. But we have to be ready for that one flower that seems that is going to make it to jump on it and focus it. What we tend to do is we have a thousand flowers blooming, we get a lot of constituency and it's difficult to go after the one that looks like it may be the one that we really want to put all the money on and leave the rest behind. Do we have, I mean, existing, is there the kind of institutional capacity to sort of allow A, a thousand flowers to bloom and B, to sort of identify the ones that are showing the most viral potential growth? Well, necessity is still the mother of invention. And there's no doubt in my mind that we're looking at our energy requirements today. Peter's right. By 2030, they're going to be double, maybe even triple. But the unfortunate part is that the energy consumers are not going to necessarily be the United States. It'll be China and India. That means we are currently the market maker. We will not be the market maker in 2030, which really is going to put us at a great disadvantage of getting good deals because the market maker is the one who gets the good deal. So I think we have to do this. And I think because there's an opportunity for people to make a lot of money and gather a lot of wealth, people will be doing this anyways because there's great opportunity. Opportunity is what creates necessity. If there's an opportunity, you have now to come up with an idea that is better than anybody else, and inventions will occur. What we need to do is to allow that to happen by being able to provide funds, to have people that can listen to ideas and fund them in a very directive way. I used to call the milestones go-nogos because there were like many challenges actually. But laying out, okay, these are the things you have to do. And I think it'll happen. Now I personally believe that we do need to fund domestic oil. It's only a recent phenomena that we actually import more than we use internally. I think about 1993 or something like that. The line crossed where we actually were using less domestic oil than foreign oil. So clearly, no matter what technology we settle on, it's a long roll out. 20 or 30 years, during which time you need a lot of oil, you have to replace depleting fields. So oil's not going anywhere. But we are in this country, again this Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom, it's almost a policy not to fund oil R&D. And I think that's wrong. I think quite frankly our domestic oil, which peaked a long time ago, was because everybody wanted to get the easy oil. And I think some research into them, we have lots of reserves. I mean we have lots of, I don't know if you would call them reserves, it's hard to get them out. But technology development will allow us to get to those reserves. And that will continue having oil while we wait for the technology. So we have two tracks where we can't take our eye off the oil ball, so to speak, while we're developing these other things. But we also can't let the sort of oil optimism take our eye off the possibilities elsewhere. So listen, there's been a lot of talk lately, a great article in National Review a couple weeks ago, about sort of the demise of low-hanging fruit in technology. I mean we are anticipating, when you look at any charts, there's sort of this gray area to be announced and this is what we're going to get from innovation. But there's a concern that we've gotten the easy innovation. And there's a lot of talk about so that we picked the low-hanging fruit already and what we're going to be getting is diminishing returns. And that you can already see the end of Moore's Law as an example. What's, and that's becoming sort of a common theme, what's missing in that argument? Again, human innovation. So it is true that we have picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit. I'm indebted to Dr. Tether, for example, because one of my venture partners was the venture money behind Apple before it went public and another venture partner was the venture money behind Siri, the S in the iPhone 4S. It was $200 million of DARPA funding over several years, starting in about 2003, that funded the basic technology that Siri was and then another 40-plus million in venture capital to commercialize it, which Apple then bought and it is now the basis of the future where you will talk to your cell phone. So yes, we have picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit, but the good news is we used the money and the productivity that we got from picking it to increase our ability to pick higher fruit. And it's that investment for the future that I think is going to help us pick fruit a little higher on the tree. Let me take off on that point. I mean, right now you point to sort of the amazing Siri and sort of Apple as well. And you know, there's concern that a lot of the technology today, the innovation is going into not so much progress, but just change for the sake of change. I mean, that's a lot of what drives the consumer market. And yet in terms of energy, we need those big steps forward that actually drive progress. What's the, I mean, what's to ensure that we continue to drive that kind of technological innovation and not simply let our resources go into these technologies that drive short returns, but don't necessarily move us to where we need to be sort of in these big picture items. So, I mean, I'm happy to take that. That's what I do for a living wearing my X-Prize hat, right? Is set bold objective goals. So there's a basic expectation that we have at the X-Prize Foundation when we put up a very bold and dramatic goal, whether it's, you know, flying privately into space, which is one boat return or building, you know, 100 mile per gallon equivalent car, which Oliver Kutner, his team at SN21, which you'll hear from him later, it's the notion that a lot of breakthroughs really come from non-traditional solutions. They are people who are outside the field because experts are, with excuse to experts, we all are in our own field, experts are folks who can tell you exactly how something can't be done, right? So we're so locked in the way we think about things, we don't know how to think otherwise. We also have, psychologically as humans, a need to maintain the thing we're known for and that we're experts in, and you don't want something coming along and disrupting it and destroying it. So we have a tendency to support the base that we've created, but really true breakthroughs. The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. It comes from an orthogonal point of view. You would have never thought about it as an expert. You completely discarded it, but yet it's the thing computing on silicon instead of the vacuum tube or whatever it might be, whatever example you want to use, that is fundamentally disruptive. And, I mean, if we have any historical memory at all, we know that everything we hold sacred is disrupted. Whether it's the riverboat, going to the railroads, going to the airplane or whatever it might be, so is there any reason to believe we're not going to be disrupted by energy structures and infrastructures? Oh, we're going to have smart grids, biofuels we're going to have, maybe not fusion, but maybe micro nukes or ubiquitous solar and better batteries and all of that. I don't know what it's going to be, but something is going to happen. So how do we capture it? How do we incentivize it? How are we open to the breakthrough idea when it first comes in and not ignore it? My last point I'll make is that corporations are the worst, traditionally, at accepting breakthrough ideas. I used this example last night and I love the NIH and Francis Collins there and so forth, but the NIH as an example is funding more researchers over the age of 70 than they are in their 20s, which is completely backwards to really breakthrough thinking. So on that point, then, when we're looking at innovation and trying to imagine where it's going to come from, what is the catalyst? Is it going to be something kind of crisis-driven? Because we can come up with any number of crises that will sort of disrupt the existing energy order and sort of force change, or is it going to be someone comes up with a innovation-driven or someone just happens to come across that technology that does a better job and it takes over? I'm going to jump in for one moment. The cell phone didn't show up because people were saying, the cell phone, it showed up because it was something that took the place of something we didn't realize we needed. So is that what we're looking at or is it something that's going to be in response to a crisis? Cell phone was invented by a scientist at Motorola, so clearly innovation can come from big companies, but there is no doubt, and I speak as the head of a small company, that the momentum is against small companies and yet Peter is dead, right? Most of our biggest innovations is people working together. You know yourselves. You are most efficient when you're with another small group of people. When you're sitting in large meetings, not a lot gets done. Tony, on that, where does the innovation come from? Well, we found that the innovation does come from small companies or people that get together and have an idea, and what DARPA did was it was a place that people could come to with their idea to have it evaluated in a non-peer review sense. Not that peer review is bad, but peer review kind of... The radical ideas don't usually get through peer reviews because the peers are saying, God, I mean, if I say this is good, then how come I didn't think of it? So they kill you with a thousand cuts, but in a place like DARPA funds things, a good idea, the consequence or the capability that we're going to get is something we want, and we fund it. We don't fund it all. We give them the money to start proving out the 1-0 case. It cannot be done. And this is really all that DARPA really does is prove that something can be done because that's usually what brings in other people. I mean, the old story of Bannister, many of the people here probably don't remember Bannister. There are a few people that look old enough. There wasn't that long ago when doctors wrote papers that the human couldn't take in enough oxygen to run less than a four-minute mile. Bannister did it. You know what, three months later, three other people did it. Why? Because they now do it because they now knew it couldn't be done. And so that's kind of what you need is some place that funds things so that people now know it can be done and then the money comes in from elsewhere. I believe... I mean, I have my own... I don't really know the answer and we funded at DARPA solar cells, algae, cellulosic... I mean, everything that you could think of. We had, of course, a more military mission in mind. But the problem is I think Bruce just put it right. The energy density is what counts. And if I were to look at the future, I would say that really what we're going to have to have, we will gravitate towards in the future or later, is towards small nuclear reactors. Using materials that aren't uranium. And we're going to be spending a little time talking about that. Let me push this a little bit further and ask. Right now, one of the advantages that oil has isn't simply the energy density of the fuel itself, but it's the infrastructure that's in place. I mean, there are trillions and trillions of dollars invested in this asset so that that tilts the playing field toward either oil continuing or a liquid fuel that's very much like oil, or a nuclear system. Well, I'm just saying that that is some inertia in the system. But there's also infrastructure in the nuclear area too. I mean, that's not as healthy as it was, but that infrastructure still is there. We have not in this country spent money on that nuclear infrastructure because there's been a stigma to it. But if you look into the future for the stationary requirements, not the transportation requirements, we have to go to many newts all connected together by an exquisite power distribution system. It's an internet that we are going to create. Then instead of server farms we're going to have little nuclear farms that are distributing the energy to wherever it's needed. On top of that, now that we have this distributed nuclear network, we can now make distributed hydrogen. So decentralized and outside of the existing sort of framework? Absolutely. I think that the only thing that ultimately works is a bottoms up. It's never a top down. I think top down is going to continue to fail over and over again. And bottoms up requires the ability for basically ubiquitous distributed ownership and installation. So if you think about the fact that we really do have a global cellular phone industry, if you had tried as a government to create a global cellular phone industry it would have never worked. It's the fact that the incremental cost for the local operator and the local purchaser, the consumer was low enough that they could do that. And for me I am a huge fan of the micro nukes and I think that is a critical part. I also think that we're going to head towards what Bob Metcalf calls the internet. Basically a smart internet with distributed storage and so forth. But I do believe ultimately it really is cracking the code on storage and solar and allowing the individual consumer, wherever they are on the planet to be able to add their own capability to cover their own needs. We've been spending a lot of time talking about scale and the need to get to scale but maybe we also need to be looking at sort of the inverse of that size model that allows consumers and users, small regional producers a larger say here. I mean how does that work in the sort of model that we have right now? As Bruce said, price is the most effective signal and Americans are very good at responding to it. All people are but America is quite accustomed to it. But there's another thing which we experienced in California when all of the electrical utilities were used for target practice which is we were reduced to a banana republic. We had rotating outages. If that starts happening and a lot of us who have the means and the brains and the determination will get ourselves off the grid so we will be sort of the small clouds the small internets of our own able to completely support ourselves if we must and we won't even care about whether we're sending power back to the grid. Right, so the capability will be there but again that's a fairly select group of individuals of it. In terms of driving sort of a mass available energy model should we be thinking about small scale? I mean should that be where the end user has more control over what's happening so that maybe price isn't the only determinant but it's some sense of security for example. I think you'll find people moving in that direction on their own. I mean people turn off their lights now. We didn't do that 30 plus years ago. Oh we did. I was always told they turn off the light when you leave the room. What do you think, we work for their electric power plant? That was such a waste. But I mean so much of this assumption is I mean Peter made a good point we're sort of, our mindset is that it's going to be top down that the solution will be presented to us. Maybe some innovation, some garage start-up will come up with it but it will be scaled up by an institution and some sort of an organization sort of presented to us in a mass scale and I'm wondering if maybe the revolution is put the tools in the hands of the consumer. So if I could make the point again which I really want this group to get which is we have such a US centric and developed world point of view but there's really the majority of the world is the biggest buyers of energy in the future and yes, there may be poor and maybe they've only got two or three dollars a day to spend but when you add that up in terms of total consumption we're talking about literally trillions of dollars of buying power and they're in kerosene right now but if buying battery and solar systems gives them independence that's a big consuming public and if the innovation occurs there for the four billion people I would bet that we're going to start to see the pressure of cheap ubiquitous robust local systems that pops out out of the developing world that starts to spread just like the demand that drove Nokia to make the $50 handset you can get today. I think I'd agree the distributed model is the right model why? Because a lot of the techniques that we're talking about the cost is not linear with capacity that I've seen I mean it's not if you double the capacity of an algae farm you only double the cost it becomes more volumetric and that the cost actually is above that linear line so that kind of drives you down to you know a lower size you mean past a certain point you don't get economies of scale? you don't get economies of scale and it's just because of the way it's made it's not like an oil well where your area is pretty small and you're getting a lot of energy out the only thing I and so I do believe that we'll find that we are going to go towards smaller things that the overall cost is going to be less by taking smaller things connecting them together than trying to have one great big central nuclear power plant of a terawatt so sort of scaling down at the same time we're scaling up some of the ideas? we're scaling down and then we're getting the full capacity by having everything be able to interact with each other this intranet or intranet so any of these ideas whether we're scaling up, scaling down whatever technology we're looking at sort of long term projects and long term commitment these things are things you can't do in a couple of years or at least we sort of expect this may be old paradigm speaking but typically in the oil business is a classic example of this where you need to make long term commitments and know that your assets will be in place but there's also this sort of counter tendency today which some people call short termism and you can see it in the financial markets and just as a quick example the average holding time for an asset back in the 1950s was about 8 years and now it's under 4 months some of that is being driven by technology lower transaction cost but a lot of it is being driven by investor expectations and if they're not happy with how their capital is being treated if it's not being treated efficiently they'll move it to something else that seems directly opposed to this idea of short term commitment so Lisa how do we begin to sort of use the power of the market even though that market is sort of directed towards short term results to get us sort of what we need to be in the long term price and reliability it works with cars it works with any appliance you buy it works with the house that you choose to live in and people are now because it is a little bit expensive to buy a solar system for your house not as expensive as it was if we go for our house there is now solar city which will allow you to rent I mean you fundamentally have it put on your roof and then you pay solar city on a monthly basis you have no upfront capital expenditure it's going to be that thousand points of light except it'll be millions because in this country as we make it more expensive and I personally think we ought to tell everyone you get about 5 kilowatts a day for your house that is minimum charge and you start using above that and we're going to hit you harder and harder and if you're one of the big homes out where Dave and I live in a town in Silicon Valley with nine billionaires we're going to hit you for a dollar per kilowatt hour try that on for size but in addition to that the problem that we saw in the last ten years with a lot of the alternative industries a lot of investors took their money out of those companies out of those ventures because they weren't giving the results that they needed what's to keep that kind of short termism about sort of maintaining the existing system that works, we know it works and investors are quite happy with that as X on the share price of tests where they're not happy or where they're uncertain is with these emerging technologies how do we coax these emerging technologies into some sort of viability when the market wants short term short term returns it wants quick returns I think it comes back to individual determination our company has survived when most algae companies have survived and frankly virtually all algae companies will die they're just not realistic about their business models I don't know what's true for some of the other technologies but I'll tell you that categorically for algae and you're going to see another algae speaker today and he's facing the same problems we all do so Peter how do we deal with the short termism so I don't have an answer for you there I do know that we're clear about what we need to do I mean there's no question that we need higher energy density batteries, cheaper batteries we need lower cost solar we need all kinds of different components I mean for me I can tell you what I'm doing is really trying to partner with companies and philanthropists to identify and then fund very clear objective incentive competitions that will try and crowdsource from the planets and the smartest innovators to demonstrate and solve these specific problems because what happens is just like a four minute mile once we show and demonstrate something as possible it changes people's perspective of what can be done so we need you know it's just a matter of pushing the human ability and saying this problem is solvable I don't know who's going to solve it but whoever does you win and then it's moving it it's forward it's not allowing it haphazardly it's setting out the challenges it's you know it's and incentivizing them incentivizing them and not restricting where we expect the break if we come from it may not come out of the large corporations or the labs it may come out of some garage tinkerer okay but do we need on top of that a culture I mean a culture change that sort of not only embraces innovation and expects it but at the same time has some sort of moral issue with the existing I think it's all about price and convenience bluntly I don't think I don't think this problem is going to be solved by an ethics or morals or whatever I think it's we need stuff that is more convenient and better price that's why cell phone you know took off and it's got to be it just has to be a better solution for me and there are parts of the world which have no energy where they have lots of sunlight and in those places I guarantee you so it's going to be a better solution if the marketplace is big enough it's going to drop the price down far enough and at that point it's going to be you know we're going to someone's going to say hey let's market that in the United States but how does okay so we talk about this like the cell phone curve which is impressive and everyone uses as a model for how things could go we talk about how rapidly growth can go from 1% to 2% etc is that an appropriate model when we're talking about energy technologies which even if we're thinking about smaller scale are still you know it's a commodity you know and is that a fair you think a reasonable comparison an instructive comparison we're talking about energy in general yes but the time frame is going to take longer because when you're moving electrons it's not very heavy when you're moving protons which is fundamentally what energy is that's really heavy Don Paul is smiling at me he's on our scientific advisory board the magnitudes the sheer size of the stuff you have to move with energy is phenomenal and Silicon Valley has no grasp of this okay so we've got a the timescale you just said how do we accelerate that I mean I think that's really what we're sort of curious about we want things to be driven by price but and and we're and convenience I mean we're not willing to sort of adopt a moral sort of crusade around this because we don't think that works in the past we've seen that but what is the what is the the mechanism that accelerates this funny anecdote we had just raised nine and nine plus million for our company and my team sat down because the Moore Foundation chief science advisor has been the head of our scientific advisory board they were thinking with Peter's organization the X prize about how do you make the right prize for energy so my guys my scientists we're sitting in our conference room we gave them an hour or two to think about this about what could we do if we had ten million dollar prize and I'm thinking guys we just raised nine million can we go focus on what we're doing here the power of incentive and clarifying the objective and the power of small groups of people working together I think we'll triumph I guess I think that it is foolish to think of a business funding this kind of activity the now back in the turn of the century businesses did have labs and capability like that because they had to they really don't need to have it now I mean with the with the internet and your computer you can probably keep track of what's going on worldwide without having to have a big infrastructure yourself somebody needs that infrastructure but the companies themselves believe that they can go tap into what's going on but the government the government is has to be the body that provides the money to fund those ideas that are half baked they come the rest of the way and I think what happens is that as those ideas as these people should prove their the existence now it's not just technical see what we used to force was it's not just that you technically can do it but you have to also be able to show me why this will be good for somebody to buy it because people we we never created anything that somebody was really wanting oh they wanted it they just didn't know they wanted it but what we had to do was to kind of show them why they wanted it and that's that's I think it really gets down to the government I don't know who else is going to do that I don't expect these companies to do it the companies are short-term oriented they always will be short-term oriented they were short-term oriented even when they had their labs except that they needed that input in order to make it where now they don't need that organic input to do to do their job okay right so there's this assumption that there's a sort of a public public good out there a square right the commons with that technological information is flowing into it's great pool and you can access it with your internet and so you no longer need to sort of encumber your own company with that capital inefficiency you have to have a and the good companies do they have somebody watching you know it doesn't cost much you know what are they watching they're watching they're watching looking for that idea to pop out because these companies have a large amount of capital that they can pounce on it and the Surrey one is an example that yeah DARPA we spent a couple hundred million dollars and the idea here we were doing it because we wanted to reduce command centers now from 10,000 people to one and if you looked at what these 10,000 people were doing in the command center they were taking care of computers and doing all kinds of things and we said my god if we could only have the computers take care of themselves and we could do this so we spent a lot of money SRI was the prime contractor they created a company they got a little venture money now why did jobs go buy it because he saw an opportunity and he wanted Microsoft to have it and he had the capital and he had the capital to take it off the market and I'll tell you the follow on to that when Steve Jobs saw Siri he called the CEO of that company every day for 30 days until they got that deal done and he said here's the price I'm paying if you shop at anybody else we're done that was a year and a half ago when he was very ill and he knew it I would say to you and that deal that company only took three and a half years from start to finish because DARPA had done so much of the work and then SRI had incubated it further but the average length of time for venture folks to get out of a deal is 7 to 8 years if you take out the internet time typically it's 7 to 8 years the life sciences guys the biotech guys where I come from my husband Dave Jones comes from it can be 15 years so speaking for the venture community you invest in a deal you're married to it and divorce is not an option okay so we do have some examples of long-termism so essentially the model is corporations with a lot of cash waiting being very good at sort of spotting ideas could even be a company like Exxon willing to pounce so I want to add one thing that if I may which is on the short-termism what makes me optimistic again is we're living in a very different age now than we were 10 years, 20, 30 years ago for sure which is that the power resident in the hands of small groups to do extraordinary research no longer requires a government or a large lab you can have a small team of people who are working in the lab on synthetic biology or using extraordinary computational systems to do model model micro nukes or whatever it might be so the number of teams able to experiment around the world has increased by orders of magnitude and we can expect that curve and that will continue and therefore there's no longer 100 groups doing fundamental research there's potentially thousands or tens of thousands of groups that could be doing very powerful research and that gives me great hope we've picked the low-hanging fruit alright but we use that fruit to build ladders of innovation so we now can reach the middle levels of fruit so on that optimistic metaphor I'll leave it here Alyssa, Tony and Peter thank you very much thanks for your kind attention