 I'm David Plotts. I'm the editor of Slate. We are partners along with the New America Foundation and Arizona State University in a great endeavor called Future Tenth, which is a program of articles, live events, papers, discussion, movie screenings around technology and public policy, particularly looking at ways in which technology is going to change our future. It's been an almost two-year, I guess, partnership. And it's been incredibly interesting and fun for all of us. And it gives us a chance to have events like this. So Chris Anderson has an enviable. He has three different enviable careers, at least. One is that he is the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, which I think we can just pose as a certainty. He is one of the great magazines of our time. He is the author of best-selling books. Of course, the Maths of Best Seller, The Long Tale. And then this book we're going to talk about today, which is a future bestseller, Makers, the New Industrial Revolution. And he is an entrepreneur who has, in kind of world's greatest dad, fashion, has created a company, maybe even more than one company. Only one company? Just one. At the moment. At the moment, one company. Taking his sort of, his maker skills and building a company that does all sorts of things that he's going to tell us about relating to drones and other matters. So we're here to talk about the New Industrial Revolution, Makers, the New Industrial Revolution, which is a fantastic book. I strongly advise everyone go out and buy it. And, or better yet, you could manufacture it yourself in your basement, if you were really clever. And since our author doesn't believe that intellectual property can be stolen, you should just steal it and manufacture it yourself. And good luck to you, right? So it seems to me that the one sentence summary of this book is, sorry, atoms are the new bits, not bits of the new atoms, atoms of the new bits. So what does that mean? Tell us what that means. Thank you. Good question. First of all, I want to thank our host at Microsoft on a big day for giving us the space. And I'm incredibly privileged that you would do this to me. I'm a huge fan, constant reader. Anyway, this is a treat. I'm also a DC native, so this is an opportunity to see my mom. Thank you. So anyway, to answer your question, this is what happens when the web generation meets the real world. And the web generation refers to a bunch of things, but it's largely what was founded to Chronicle, which is how technology changes the world, and it's not about the technology. It's enabled by the technology, but it's basically what happens when you give powerful tools to regular people, and then they end up changing the world. And I think we've seen 20 years of the web and seen what can happen when regular people get powerful tools. Those powerful tools now extend to manufacturing tools. The same way that Steve Jobs and Wozniak didn't invent the first computer, but they put the word personal and desktop in front of it, and with a very weak and inadequate computer compared to the main frames of the time, they changed the world. And then when Kim Berners-Lee and others, including Slate and Wired in the early years, took the communication networks and put them in the hands of regular people through web browsers and the internet, changed the world. We now have a moment that's really kind of crept up over the past three or four years where things like 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC machines, cheap and easy CAD, services that will do manufacturing for you, that basically all that hard stuff is now just a click away, like desktop publishing was 20 years ago. So let's dwell on the 3D printer, because I think a lot of us, and I count myself in the crew, you see a 3D printer, it's extruding some plastic doodat. You're like, it's extruding a plastic doodat. Why is the 3D printer? Like tell us, you have a very good riff in the book about why the 3D printer is sort of, and it's just very embryonic stages, and then what's coming is going to dazzle us. So what does that mean? First of all, let us not discount that extruding a plastic doodat is kind of amazing just by itself, and I'll get to my homework assignment later in the conversation, but if you have children, consider what a 3D printer in there in the home might do to their plastic little minds and what they might become as a result of it. But the simple answer is that think of 1985. 1985, Macintosh just came out in 84 and made computing, you had personal computers, but they're hard to use, and it became easy to use, and then there was a laser writer, the Apple laser printer. And you could buy it, and it was about $2,500 or so, and you could do desktop publishing. Now I realize this does not impress anybody anymore at desktop publishing, but at the time it was kind of amazing, we came from the publishing industry, and in those old days to publish, you needed a printing plant, which is by the way a factory, a sort of a block size factory with ink by the barrel and rolls of paper by the rail card, and then it was like desktop publishing. 500 years from Gutenberg on, and now it was like a software, and you press a button and out came the professional quality stuff, and you're like, amazing, but now what? Church newsletters, lost cat flyers, et cetera, we made horrible things. Every cat was found. Every cat was found, all churches suddenly became much more engaged, and we made horrible dogs breakfast of mishmash of fonts, and we had to learn language, words like letting and turning and blow and wrap around, and it didn't really change the world yet, but you planted the seed and then along came the web and then published turned into a button on your web browser. And I mean just every time, for those of you who still have blogs, I realize we're being super curmudgeonly blogs, but when you press publish on your blog, it just basically turned a half millennia worth of industrial knowledge into a single click, and that was awesome, but it started with the laser, printer on your desktop, and then that became an inkjet, printer on your desktop, and today we all have one, and by the way, the killer app turned out not to be church newsletters, but instead digital cameras and printing out high-resolution cameras, and now we get it, public, we democratize publishing and we all have a voice and we can reach the world. The 3D printer is kind of right where that first laser writer is, which is, it is now possible to have a 3D printer on your desktop. Now, just to really quickly walk into what a 3D printer is, you know how a 2D printer, like your inkjet, takes pixels on the screen and turns them into drops of ink on paper, so it turns bits into atoms in a sense, and it just kind of a head moves around, lays it down, and imagine that head just kept going, laying layer upon layer upon layer, and it wasn't ink, it was something else, initially plastic, but other materials, you would then build up an object, layer by layer, until you had it. Today you can buy a printer that costs between $1,300 and $2,300, it'll do just that, starting with plastic, or you can upload it to a service, like Shapeways, and have that same object, which you just, by the way, designed on screen in like 20 minutes, it's not hard anymore, and you can have it made in titanium, stainless steel, bronze, glasses of various sorts, any kind of resins, and that's like in, this is like in the first minute of the day. Going forward, that same technology can lay in electronics, you can do multiple materials, my printer, the one my children grew up with right now, does a one color, in sort of dot matrixy, you know, a very kind of a rough resolution, the next version did better resolution, the next version that's gonna be kind of, they're gonna be getting for Christmas, don't tell them. Is gonna be, is two colors in high resolution, the next one's gonna be three colors, and now you're kind of being able to kind of create a multicolor thing, in even high resolution, the version after that, which doesn't exist yet, but is going to be able to do multiple materials, and I had lunch with Craig Venter, the biologist last week in New York, and he's, and what he's working on is a printer for biology or DNA, where in his vision, you know, you just rather than going to the doctor and getting our flu shot for the season, which is a guess at what the pandemic flu is gonna be this season, instead, you know, when they figure out which ever one it is that's hitting right now, they'll just, the doctor will just email you, a little sort of encrypted email, you press the button and out comes the vaccine, custom made on demand, obviously at this point, one has to ask questions like, what could possibly go wrong, et cetera, but once you get 3D and multi-material and multicolor and multi-resolution, it's like the Star Trek replicator. So what is the difference, if any, between the hacker culture of the 80s and 90s and the odds, and the one which is focused on the bits, and the culture that you see developing today, which is focused on the physical objects? Are they the same people? They're the same people. They're the same people with a wider tool palette. You know, what we discovered was, you know, the Humbrew Computing Club, which Jobs and Wozniak were part of and created the Apple, was a subculture of extremely technically advanced geeks. And that created an amazing thing, but it didn't create a movement until it got into the hands of consumers as a product. Along came the web, and the web, you didn't have to be as sophisticated and as technically advanced, and that created a movement of its own. Now we're, now with the maker movement, which is basically the web meets manufacturing, you basically simplified the process of manufacturing such that it's anybody and everybody. And it's everything from Etsy, which is sort of the crafty kind of artisanal side to Kickstarter, which is more of the kind of startups for manufacturing. It's open source hardware. It's tech shops and maker spaces. It's a zillion parents. Well, talk about some of the specific products. I mean, because the book is really the book when you get a chance to read the book or print the book, you will discover it's really about how this is going to change the economy. So what are some of the businesses, what are some of the actual products that are coming up or are about to come towards us? Besides, I mean, Etsy's a great example, but what else? Well, so Etsy and Kickstarter, let me do a quick show of hands. How many people here have backed a Kickstarter project? I don't think I need to say anything more about that. You know, amazing phenomena, crowdfunding. Basically, all those Kickstarter projects you funded are basically maker movements industrialized. That's an example of what manufacturing tools can do when they get in the hands of regular people. How many people have bought something from Etsy? About the same number. So that's a marketplace for artisanal, more crafty stuff. Some of it is maker. By the way, I define maker as, and everyone defines maker differently, but I think it was more a cultural thing. It's the web generation meeting a new generation of technologies, these digital fabrication technologies. A lot of, you don't have to use a 3D printer to be a maker. I think you probably have to use the web in some sense or another to fall into my definition of maker. But those are two great examples. You asked for an example of a product. Let me just actually pull up a slide. This is here to have violated a protocol here by bringing an iPad into Microsoft. I apologize. Let's see if this will work. Okay, so, this may or may not come up. Yeah, so this is like my favorite Kickstarter project. Maybe familiar with the Pebble Watch. What I love about this particular example is that when this was released, and I'm not sure exactly what date it was. It was in early May of this year. On the same week, Sony released their SmartWatch, the Sony SmartWatch. And when I was a kid, the Sony SmartWatch would sort of filled my fantasies for a solid year, as I imagine my Dick Tracy future brought to me by Sony. Sony released their SmartWatch, and four kids in Palo Alto put this thing on Kickstarter. Now how many people here have heard of the Pebble SmartWatch? Good. How many people here have heard of the Sony SmartWatch? Yeah. So that's kind of the answer right there, that the fact is that the combination of Kickstarter, which is the web model, it's crowdfunding, it's community, it is market research. It's all kind of cool web innovation model stuff. Plus the fact that four kids in Palo Alto are likely to be more innovative than any big company, not highlighting Sony in particular. And the fact that they're social, they're inherently social, the maker movement is inherently social and that propagates news and information, does better marketing than any big company can do. That's why you've heard of the Pebble SmartWatch and haven't heard of the Sony Watch. And this is why that's gonna be a better product and they're gonna beat one of the biggest consumer electronic companies in the world. So what do you make of the fact that the Pebble SmartWatch is now behind, they were supposed to have come out and whenever it was August, September, they're behind. Manufacturing's hard and there are a couple months behind. From end to end, they will have gotten out the door and they're gonna get out, they'll be fine. From end to end, they will have gotten out the door and I would estimate a third of the time of Sony. And they're doing it for the first time and Sony's doing it for the umpteenth time. So yeah, they're a little slow because they set a target of $100,000 and they got 10 million plus and they suddenly realized they had to make 100,000 of these things and that's just, that's hard. But they'll get there. So what kind of products do you think are gonna come in the first generation of the maker economy? What sort of things are we gonna see now and what sort of things may we see in the 10 years from now and what sort of things will we never see? What sort of things will never be made by four guys in Palo Alto? My iPhone is not gonna be made by four guys in Palo Alto. Well, it starts with two guys in Palo Alto. But there's a level of complexity that I think you're gonna need mass manufacturing and incredible industrial skills to do. And I'm not suggesting the same with the long tail, which was about sort of the rise of the niche or life beyond the blockbuster. And the same way it wasn't the end of Hollywood, but the end of the Hollywood monopoly. Hollywood exists, but so does YouTube. So does this sort of bottoms up grassroots entrepreneurial democratized manufacturing offer a kind of a long tail stuff? It's an opportunity for small innovative teams to pick off those markets of 10,000 that the mass manufacturing world doesn't wanna get at and that we sort of lost the ability to do with the traditional method here in the US. So what are some particulars? What kind of things do you think we will see? So I, if you look at Kickstarter, it's anything and everything. It is, yes, it's electronics like this. It is vehicles. It is jewelry. It is kitchen appliances. It is toys. It is, I mean, go into Walmart and it's, you know, you pretty much, there's a company called Corky, which does a bit of this kind of stuff and they kind of focus on the bed, bath and beyond market. So like everything in bed, bath and beyond, there's kind of like a Corky, you know, a maker movement version of it. It's, you know, it's hard to, I mean, it's like asking, so what do we make in the United States? And the answer is kind of everything. But it starts with the things that really lend themselves to the web innovation model, which is to say stuff that can be described with a digital file, so like a CAD file, something like that, and they can be traded in exchange and, you know, you can build communities around. It's stuff that can be prototyped on some of the tools we're talking about, 3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters. It's stuff that doesn't require, you know, like semiconductor skills to make. In other words, it uses commodity electronics and you can sort of put together the business pieces. That's how the Apple II was started. They didn't, you know, they just bought commodity electronics from Fry's or whatever the equivalent was at the time and put it together, and, you know, that's, and you know, what we do mostly and what these guys are doing as well is just take advantage of what's going on with the smartphone revolution, that there's this like extraordinary technology advances. Another non-Microsoft product. And guys stop doing this. It's extraordinary technology advances going on within the race between Apple Microsoft and Google. And as a result, all these little chips in here are now available at Radio Shack. Which means that, you know, all the non-smartphone applications for sensors and processors and GPS and cameras and all this kind of stuff is just waiting for the micro-crowd to figure it out. But so, I mean, you want to, you know, you want examples and I think basically, you know, the answer is that, you know, in the garages and workshops of America, people have always been tinkering and laboring and inventing stuff, but they weren't doing it in public. They weren't doing it together and they couldn't scale up into actual manufacturing and now they can. Talk about that together, because one of the really great insights of this book is the way in which these products come out of communities, not necessarily, they don't necessarily come out of traditional businesses, they come out of communal activity. So what, describe a little bit of that? Yeah, so I think if there's one thing that defines the web model, it's this notion of doing things in public. We talk in public, Facebook, we work in public, we instinctively share, when we do something, we post it on YouTube. It's not altruism, it's not showing off, it's some combination of the two, but we just kind of, we work in public and you're instinctively there, I'm instinctively there, we wouldn't be here. What happens when you work in public is that you intentionally and not end up with a new innovation model. You put up your bad idea and someone sort of comments on it, makes it better and you kind of ratchet up. So in the 20th century inventor model, everyone worked by themselves in the garages and then they didn't show it until it was done and it was almost never done. In the web model, you kind of have a half-baked idea, you toss it out there, you shoot a shaky video and put it on YouTube and people see it and they're like, oh, well that's been done, but here's something that I could add to that or go above it and we simply just, recognizing what the baselines are out there, we end up, we stop reinventing the wheel and start kind of working together to build a vehicle. And that's I think is what we're seeing with them. So for example in electronics, which is what I, which is how I got started on this, we have a couple, it's simple things, there's something called Arduino, which is a very simple computing board that you can buy and anybody can use, you don't have to be an expert. We have something that gets really wonky, but there's a, my microphone's pulling out here. There is a free software called Eagle, Eagle PCB design software, which allowed us to share the design files really easily, it was free and it was important. The big part suppliers got good websites and so you could just buy like four or something rather than four million or something from like a big, a major supply house and then there are all these services that would like to make pretty circuit boards for you, you can just upload a file and they just make it for you. And it was just little things like that, but suddenly a guy like me who knows nothing about electronics can create an autopilot. In matter, we build a community around it and share their ignorance and people sort of taught us stuff and they kind of point us to links and three years later we're competing with Lockheed Martin. So one of the premises of Makers is that there's a huge amount of, you've caught, I mean, Cognizor plus or I think you call it dark energy, is that people are inherently dissatisfied or not using their full selves and their day-to-day lives and they're ready to deploy it in another way. I mean, I think there's two things going on. One is that I think we're all Makers in some sense or another. I mean, if you're like to cook, we all understand the sort of the simple pleasures and satisfaction of working with your hands. If you like to cook, you get it. You're making your own meal. If you like to garden, you get it. If you tinker in your workshop, kids playing with blocks, that's making. What happens is we get it sort of knocked out of us in the sense that this could be anything we could do in public, pretty quickly. First of all, it gets hard to use sophisticated tools. Second, even if you could invent something cool, it wasn't clear initially how you would turn into a business or get it out there. Thirdly, it wasn't really a language for sharing designs. We didn't have things like 3D CAD files, et cetera. And fourth of all, it wasn't your job. It was your hobby and we're a little sort of embarrassed about our hobbies. I mean, one of the great things about the web is that it sort of de-stigmatized amateurism. And we don't think about it much, but the web is the first platform in history where the professionals and amateurs are on the same playing field, head to head. You and I compete with amateurs. I mean, we compete with each other, but we compete with amateurs even more so. And they have equal access to the reader. We're all competing for the same eyeballs. And amateurism is not, you know, the fact that someone has a great blog, no one asks you what your business model is. And that, I think, was a liberating factor which allowed those tinkers of the world to both have a, you know, see what other people are doing, inspired of what other people are doing, have a language to describe what they're doing, whether it be a CAD file or a YouTube video, and then a platform where it wasn't embarrassing to show your stuff. And what do big companies, what do the Microsofts or the Milwaukee Martins or the General Electric of the world do about this? Are they inherently not gonna be able to participate in the Maker Movement or is there some way they can, you know, steal it, overpay these people's salaries and keep the energy of the Maker Movement or is it impossible? That's a great question. And I think everyone's wrestling with this. I mean, it's like, what does Hollywood do with YouTube? You know, I suppose that, you know, I mean, it's like, what did Gandhi say? You know, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you've won. You know, I suppose that, you know, Hollywood would initially, you know, it's the big companies initially laughed at this. Then they, you know, tried to co-opt it. And, you know, tried to, you know, open up these, you know, crowd sourcing initiatives and open innovation, et cetera. And that's so much caught, co-opting in a negative sense, but they tried to kind of, you know, co-tail on it. Then they realized that some of these things were becoming competition, the smartwatch being, for example. And I think over time, the best of them are gonna figure out some way to actually use it and it's gonna be scary. GE is a great example. GE is, you know, trying to figure out. I mean, GE's started in, you know, a tinkerer working in his workshop, Thomas Edison. You know, the heart and soul of American industry. Very much driven by innovation and asking themselves, what do we do about the maker movement? And they're starting with things like sponsoring maker spaces. They get throughout all the maker fairs, teaching people about the tools. They've done some open innovation competitions where people's ideas get turned into products by GE or invested in by GE. And now they're asking questions like, does GE have technologies that they could share? And algorithms that could make products better, manufacturing easier. I mean, Thomas Edison's an interesting example because Thomas Edison, of course, spent much of his life using patent law, using the law to destroy competitors and defeat competitors. And that's obviously something which has become a terrible weight on the American economy generally and on this particular part of the American economy. Are the makers, what's gonna happen when the makers run up against people's patents? We're gonna get sued. We know that. We know that. I'm gonna get sued. I mean, I can tell you with certainty I'm gonna be sued. I'm gonna be sued sooner or later. I'm hopefully later. We are hobbyists turned entrepreneurs, turned megalomaniacs. I mean, this is what the web does is you sort of incentivize to try things out to iterate, to throw it out there, see what happens. I'm part of the open hardware movement. You're right. I don't protect intellectual property in my night jobs, in my day job I'm required to protect copyright. We have a lot of forums where we talk about law and IP and the simple answer is no one knows what the rules are. Take patent law, for example. There's two ways to approach this. You can either do a patent search and find out whether you're gonna violate a patent. You probably won't get a good answer. And then if you then do a violated patent the fact that you did a search first actually increases your liability. Or you can do what we do, which is just do it, wait for the letter. When the letter comes try to innovate around it. If the trolls come after us one of us is gonna have to be brave enough to fight back. And the courts will ultimately decide. But yeah, there's an iceberg ahead and we know that, which is that as the amateurs start to compete with professionals professionals get scared. And as each of us crosses the $10 million revenue level they're gonna start coming after us. Have there been any suits yet? And the 3D printer space, yeah. As a matter of fact some of the 3D printer companies in the open source realm have started patenting which just makes their skin crawl. I mean we're so opposed to patents. They've been patenting simply defensively. So when the letter comes they'll have something else to throw back. It's a sad thing. So let's go back to the cognitive surplus in the human capital and the, many of much of your book begins with I was tinkering in my basement. I don't know if it was in your basement your garage someplace with your children and blah blah blah and then you spin off of that. Usually your children appear to give up after about 12 hours. But what is it at the level of policy? Because this is Washington at the policy town. What is it at the level of policy that government should be doing to build these skills and encourage the maker instinct? Absolutely. Well you know that because I come from Silicon Valley I'm sort of contractually required to say get out of the way. Putting that aside I actually think there's a lot the government can't do. Can I just show one thing I do with my, I'm not, I'm not, I've got a word with my good. It doesn't always happen that way. I am, I use my children all the time as props and I'm just saying that in advance because, well exactly. So I don't, That was in the basement too, strangely. Oh my, okay. See the tools you've got. I'm going to have to clear my mind of that. So I've got five kids and I really want them to get interested in science and technology and just fail and fail and fail again. We actually started a whole site which is now a line of books called Geek Dad. And it's all about finding projects that will inspire the kids into science and technology. And I just, just not having any success until we got a MakerBot which is a 3D printer. And so I've got three girls and they are, they were kind of strict about video game time. They're only allowed two hours of video game time each weekend day, so four hours in total. And the girls during their time play the Sims. This is Sims 3, does anyone know that Sims 3? It's kind of a, it's a great video game. It's kind of a dollhouse game. You build a house, you put it in cool furniture, you populate it with people. Very clever by the way, it was originally an architecture sim and then the people were just inserted because the designer will write needed a way to score the architecture and it turns out the best way to score architecture is with the happiness of the people in the building. So we invented the people to be the happiness metric of the building. Anyway, so the girls build really cool houses in the Sims and then the time's up. And we're like, it's time to turn off the computer and play in the real world. And by the way, you have a real dollhouse. And they're like, oh, but it's got the wrong furniture. It's not nearly as cool as like, you know, we go to Amazon and buy me some new furniture. And you know, I'm, you know, I'm a little sucker, but I do, I do know that this ultimately can get to know, but I have to explain why it's gonna be known. So we search on Amazon for dollhouse furniture. I'm gonna go on a little dollhouse furniture rant here. This is probably not what you expected, but. Number one is crazy expensive. Number two, there's almost no choice. And number three, you can never get the right size. There's no standardization of dollhouse furniture. And even if you go to the right size for the house, it's not the right size for the people because they don't bend properly, they don't sit in the couches. Anyway, the answer ultimately was no, you can't have dollhouse furniture. However, we do have a maker bot, so I said let's go to Thingiverse, which is this repository of online CAD designs, and let's see if we can find any dollhouse furniture there. And we found a whole series that was just right. They were kind of doing this, I know what you would call this, maybe kind of a French Renaissance design. That's not French Renaissance? No, I don't know. Whatever it is. And it turns out that there's this woman who goes by the screen name of pretty small things who is, by day, she's a set designer on Broadway. She does theatrical sets. And by night, she designed beautiful dollhouse furniture and gives away for free at Thingiverse. And because we have a 3D printer, we just print it out, and then the girls paint it, and then it goes in the dollhouse, and they actually love it so much that they put it on the shelves of their bedroom. And if you're a toy company, they should just fill you with tear. Because this is not as high quality as the stuff you get made in China. But my girls designed this. I mean, they didn't really design it. They just actually just dragged a slider that made it the right scale. But they felt there was a little bit of themselves in it. They made the contribution to it. They then painted it. By the way, the boys do a Warhammer, 40K mechs as you would expect. But they made it themselves. They put a little maker spirit, a little painting, a little customization. It's exactly what they wanted. And it was easy. And this is, you know, this is not gonna replace all the toys in their lives, but it's gonna replace a lot of them. And so what are they doing here? To answer your question, they're doing digital design. They're starting with CAD files, which is what that original one was. They're then modifying those CAD files in the CAD program. They're then outputting it on a rapid prototyping machine. And then they're painting it with a paintbrush. But these are skills that used to have to go to college. You know, and get an industrial design degree to do. And they just realized that basically, you know, what have you learned on the web? You learn the web that all information, everything in the world is on the web. You can get it for free, and you can modify it if you want. And that's kind of what they're learning now for physical goods as well. Anything they can imagine, they can just sort of find something that together, you know, kind of a starting point, modify it, output it, and it's theirs. And that is a, you know, that lesson, that design is something that everybody can do, taking the capital D out of design, and the same way we took the capital J out of journalism, the capital P out of publishing, and that's an incredibly empowering lesson for kids to learn. And I think that if there's one thing government can do, it's to integrate, is to put design into the national curriculum, digital design in particular. I think it's as simple as matter, as simple matter as take the computer labs you already have, and right next to those two laser printers at the end of the row, put two 3D printers, and the rest is done. You know, you have to obviously figure out who's gonna teach, what's the curriculum gonna be, you know, who's gonna replace the plastic when it's run out, but those are small problems. We've already got the labs. So really, you just think it's a matter of just this, this equipment plus the innate curiosity of children and will do enough. You have kids, yeah. Yes, yeah. Do you have a 3D printer yet? I don't have a 3D printer. How old are your kids? 11, nine, and four. Do you have plans for presents this holiday season? It's a really interesting idea. No, it's a very, it's very tempting. It is very tempting. I mean, I run into the extruded plastic doodad problem. We already have enough extruded plastic doodads that I would manufacture them in my home in slightly alarming. Well, I can't fight the whole plastic problem, but you know, things your kids made and value and pressure as opposed to things that they got from McDonald's. I think I know which ones can stick around longer there. No, no, I mean, I've been making with my middle son. We've made, you know, Evil Mad Science. Yeah. Making, you know, a little digital alarm clock and soldering the hell out of stuff. But I'm wondering, it just happens that you and I are amazing dads. Right? But what about those people who are not so fortunate? Well, I mean, I think this is, like you are writing from perspective of someone who really has done this with your children is this is your thing and then you have a society where kids are just like, you know, they're taking really boring math tests all the time and how do you, I want this stuff to be transferred broadly. Sure, I mean, I think my, this is on? I guess it is on. When you and I were in high school, I'm sort of guessing that we're more or less the same age, we had shop class, industrial arts and you know, there was home economic and they were like sewing machines and ovens and dam saws and we made, as I recall, bongs and ninja throwing stars. But that was the tail end of an era of the last great making era of America where we were manufacturing. By the way, we are still, America's still in the number one manufacturing economy in the world. It's just not creating manufacturing jobs the way it once was. And you know, in the mid 20th century, a factory job was the root to the middle class. This was, you know, we were learning industrial skills because you could get a job, a good job, Matt. And then by the time we were in college, that was no longer true. The jobs were already moving. And then budget cuts and lack of professional relevance and liability issues and those shop classes all got taken out and computer classes came in and then we learned PowerPoint. Not there's anything wrong with that. And typing skills and all this kind of stuff. You know, I think this is an opportunity to reinstate shop class, but not with big expensive rooms full of bandsaws and liability concerns, but simply the addition designed into the computer curriculum that we already have. And you know, I see no reason why this couldn't be in the public school curriculum. I don't think it's exclusive to privilege. I mean, these three different interest don't cost any more than the laser print. Right. Right, it's really weird though. And I mean, I hope there are some great Washington policy people here tonight because it does seem to me this is incredibly simple, obvious, really useful sort of policy fix for the government to be involved in. You know, it's a chance for government to do something where it appears they can do something pretty easily and quickly and have a genuinely good effect. But I don't, I mean, Tom Khalil, I did an event with Tom Khalil and so that this Obama White House at least is thinking about this, but are we gonna get somewhere? I have a little bit of good news. That shouldn't be news I think probably people may notice, but DARPA in particular has a project with O'Reilly which created the coined the term make and maker movements and has make magazine and all that. I think they're putting digital design classes in something on the order of 1200 schools over the next three years. So there is an effort to do this. Let me show you another slide. I just wanted to kind of make, I just want to make, show you just how easy this is. So let me just, yeah. So you know how Apple, when they came out with the iPad, they had their marketing slogan was rip mix burn which was kind of mind blowing at the time. You could rip music from a CD into your computer. You could then change it and create new playlists and all this kind of stuff, modify it and then you could burn it onto a CD which is for manufacturing in those days. And you know, it was awesome, it was cool. It destroyed the music industry and you know, but rich in rich society and empowered us all. So the maker equivalent of it is rip mod make. What does that mean? What does it mean to rip reality? And the simple answer is that your phone right now can, it can be a 3D scanner just using the camera. You just walk around an object. Actually, I could have done it right there with that iPad. You walk around an object, click, click, click, click, click, send the objects images into the cloud. It then assembles them and creates a 3D mesh which looks like that which you then, which you can then clean up and modify again using free apps on your, on your tablet to fix it. And then you print it out as a pest dispenser as one does. So, so this is free. These are free apps. I mean, this is kind of, you know, someday my, you know our generation will laugh at us for being impressed. But this, you know, 3D scanning, reality capture, you know, modifying sophisticated 3D meshes of polygons with your fingers on a tablet, outputting them on your desktop. This is, I mean, this is like, this was like, you know really industrial stuff, like just a few years ago and now it's all free stuff on, you know, on your tablet. And the, oops, sorry, that's not what I wanted to do. The, I just want to show you what the, what the, the, the, the, the software. This is another one by Autodesk. It's so easy. You know how on your, on your, in Microsoft Word, you go to the file menu and there's this, there's this many items that says print. I know this, you've seen it. This is not seem so impressive, but it's kind of amazing that print, you know, the, you know, getting machines to work for you is simply an item. Well, now these CAD programs have these items called make. And you go to the file menu and you pick make and just walks you through this, this sort of wizard that helps you figure out whether you want to output in 2D or 3D, whether you want to do it on your desktop machine or whether you want to upload it to a service to create what material, what the kind of cost implications are, some material properties, strength issues. I mean, these are like, you know, armies of PhDs and generations of industrial experience turned into a little software wizard that's free on your desktop. So when I, when, you know, the notion of putting industrial design into a high school curriculum would have been crazy 10 years ago. And now this is just like, just a menu item in free software and kids completely get this stuff. If you can play Minecraft, you can do, you know, CAD software. So one last question, then we'll go to your questions, which is, can we put that, the chart up there, that doable, or is it Chris's? So then, so you have a great graph about where it makes sense to make things or where it makes sense to make stuff in China and where it makes sense to make stuff here. And I found it just very intellectually satisfying to look at it. And I wondered if you would just explain that. Absolutely, this is based on my experience. While that's coming up, I should just say that my little sort of parenting gone wrong thing. So I was playing with my kids, we were playing with Lego, Mindstorms, we, you know, planes. I kind of realized that this whole smartphone technology was useful. And I just really, I mean, it started literally with putting Lego in a plane, which kind of almost worked to fly the plane. And then kids lost interest and I went down the rabbit hole. And in five years later, we have a multimillion dollar robotics company that puts more drones in the air every year than the whole U.S. military fleet. Our drones are small and cheap. How many people have you killed? And safe. And safe. And our drones are for imaging and video and fun and what our drones do, if you're a wind surfer, this is a very California example, I realize, but if you're a wind surfer, it's the GoPro generation. You totally want cool video of your extreme sports. But the problem is it's really hard to video your wind surfing because people are too far away. What you really need is a robot helicopter to come behind your position itself, 30 feet behind, 30 feet above, and just follow you around, which we now do. So that's a $600, that's what a drone's for in outside of the military context. And that's what ours, that's what ours do, among others. Oh, didn't come up. Not possible, all right. Not possible. That's okay. I could draw it if we had a... All right, we don't have a whiteboard. No. Well, just explain the basic idea of it. So I call this a new industrial revolution. I think this is the future of American manufacturing and I need to defend this. So today, my drone company runs two factories, one San Diego, one in Tijuana. And the Tijuana connection is kind of interesting. Because it starts on the web and uses the web innovation model, one of the great things about the web is that no one asks you for your title before they start talking to you. It's basically what can you do? Show the YouTube video, show your demo, and we don't really care what credentials you have. And so as we started this community to kind of figure out how cell phone technology could be used to feed the future of aerospace, people started bringing in ideas and there was this one guy who was like flying this helicopter with a Wii controller and he's using Arduino, it's really cool. So when it came, once we started coming up with good designs, people started saying, can you just make it for us? And I realized we were gonna have to start a company and this guy who was flying the helicopter with a Wii seemed like the best guy. And so I said, let's start a company. He said, okay, his name was Jordy Munoz. And when it came time to sign the incorporation documents I said, I should probably find out something about you. Jordy, can you tell me something about yourself? He was, turns out when I met him he was a 19 year old living in Tijuana, just graduated from high school. He'd moved to Los Angeles and so hadn't gone to college and today he's the CEO of a multi-million dollar area or a robotics company. And I thought that he was the smartest guy in the world at like robotics and stuff. And it turns out he was super smart and super curious but he had access to the internet and learned everything that way. But what I really, what he really ended up teaching me was about manufacturing. And I thought the fact that he was a teenager living in Tijuana was a liability. I mean, what would be odd when the editor of Wired decides to start a drone company he ends up co-founding it with a teenager in Tijuana. But here's what a teenager in Tijuana knows that you- That go in bad directions. That we, well exactly, when you hear Tijuana you probably think cheap tequila, drug cartels that probably goes downhill from there. Tijuana's the Shenzhen of North America. Every screen you own, every flat screen you own was made in Tijuana. They have massive Samsung, Sony, Sharp, et cetera, these massive electronics factories. Tijuana's population's three times that of San Diego. It is, this is NAFTA, it's the Macadoras, it's the, this is how we bring manufacturing back from North America is by using the effect that we do have an industrial base, a really good industrial base with awesome, Mexico graduates more engineers in the United States. I mean, Mexico, all those ISO 9000 comply, all those really manufacturing experts, great manufacturing experts who left the heartland of America. They didn't leave Tijuana, that's where they still are. And that's what my, that's what Jordy knew, excuse me, he knew that the way we were gonna bring manufacturing back from China was to use this sort of San Diego for the engineering, Tijuana for the manufacturing nexus. By the way, it's 20 minutes between the two. You don't show a passport on the way. You just, you drive, it's like driving between France and Germany, you totally show a passport on the way back though. But there's, you know, but it's 20 minutes down, like 40 minutes back, it's no big deal. So what we learned is that where you make something is now an open question, and it starts like this. You start with making one of something in your prototype. That's your basement, get it. Then you make 10 of something, and you've got a little sort of, you just repeated it, and that's, you know, those are beta tests. Now you, now people are like, that's pretty good, I'd like one. At this point you're talking about 300 or something, 400. You do not wanna be sitting around your kitchen table soldering those. So you go to a service, and that might be, might be in China, we'll put the boards together, et cetera. Okay, that's pretty good. You go from like, you know, 300, 500, maybe 1,000 of those. And now you realize, now you've learned something, like those Kickstarter guys are learning, you've learned something about manufacturing. Number one, you've learned that when you send, when you send things out to China, first of all, for economies of scale, they really encourage you to buy 5,000 or 10,000. Needed by big numbers. And you're like, okay, well, that just means you wrote a big check. Like all your capital is now caught up in inventory. Okay, maybe you can handle that, maybe you got lots of money. So now, now you're making 5,000 or something, it comes back, it's like, oh my God, what if it's wrong? What if I made a mistake? That could be a huge expense. Okay, let's say you've got it right. Fine, you've got, you've made 5,000 of these things. You now start selling, you put it on the distribution channel and they start selling. And you realize that you can no longer innovate. You can't change your design, you're stuck. You've got to sell them all before you're allowed to make a new version. And it's a huge drag on innovation. So batch processing and long supply chains are basically a terrible thing from a cash perspective and a terrible thing from an innovation perspective. So at that point, you're like, okay, I'm not gonna do that. What's the alternative? Shorter supply chains, make it at home. And you're like, how would I make electronics? And then you Google around a little bit and they're like, turns out you need something called pick and place machine. It's like a robot machine that puts chips on boards. And you're like, pick and place machine, how could I get one? You go on eBay, they're like $3,000 used on eBay. Which is how, and that's what Jordy found out. He went on eBay, he got a pick and place machine. He went on, he went on Google and found the manual to the pick and place machine. We got, we turned a, he went to Walmart, got a toaster oven, put an Arduino on it. Now he had a reflow oven, which is another essential part of it. And then he kept iterating. He got a better pick and place machine. He got a better toaster oven. And today we have multiple $100,000 pick and place machines, massive reflow ovens. We have kind of world-class manufacturing, but it happened step by step. And we did it because making something locally is maybe 10% less efficient from a labor perspective, about 100% more efficient from a flexibility perspective. We do just-in-time manufacturing. We do small batches. And as a result, we do 64 boards at a time. And as a result, we're highly incentivized to continue innovating. Our cash is all sort of conserved. And we don't have these political, environmental, quality risks of the long supply chain in China. And then, but then the final stage, if you were gotten big enough, it does make sense to go back there, right? Right. So that's in this sort of, we sell tens of thousands of things. Now, once we get to hundreds of thousands and millions of things, at this point those 10% labor costs start to add up. And then, and the design becomes more stable and we're not sort of iterating as quickly. And then you're like, okay, fine, we know what we're doing. We have high confidence in what we want. We have competitors, so the prices need to be low. And then you go back to Foxconn and you say, now I'm ready for China again, but I've de-risked it, the business is sustainable. And I'm going to China for the right reason, which is doing what they do especially well, rather than because it's the only way to manufacture. All right, I've talked enough. Let's go to your questions, which I'm sure you have many. We'll start right here and we'll sort of move around. And I think just, is there Mike? Is there Mike Eliza? Okay. When do you say who you are? Hi, my name's Christine Pryfontein. So it's working, yeah. It's more of a comment than a question, which is I think you're missing one big place, which is the public library. Absolutely, yeah. Especially for people who school didn't work out for them or still have lots of ideas. And we're over with the public library being the model of the repository, the technology of the book. It's already placed. People go to access tech. Absolutely. And they're starting to be makerspaces there. So how do we get that to scale up and go global? Great question. So you're absolutely right. And a makerspace, by the way, just to show you a picture, I may or may not be able to get us back up. A makerspace is just kind of like a gym for manufacturing. Thank you. This is what a makerspace looks like. And, come up in a second. This is a tech shop, which is kind of a professional makerspace. And it uses the gym model where, you know, like with a gym for like $100 a month, you have access to machinery you wouldn't otherwise afford and couldn't otherwise afford or wouldn't want in your house and trainers and other people who inspire you. This is the same thing for manufacturing. You have access to 3D printers and laser cutters and all that. This is a pretty big one, but you have much smaller ones. And this is just a map right here of the makerspaces. As you can see, there's hundreds of them, possibly more than hundreds. There's a few, I know two that are from libraries. So you're absolutely right. Libraries are looking for their mission. And the mission used to be just books that became books in internet access, that it was books, internet access and community centers. And maybe it's books, internet access, community centers and makerspaces. The only problem is that the machines to date have been a little complicated and hard to maintain. And you need certain special skills basically. Now some libraries have people with those skills, but not all do. So I think it's, I think we're, remember at the long answer to this, remember that, you know, when we were going to college that libraries are the place you got photocopies done. They were your Kinko's, right? And so the big thing they had was they had a photocopier. The only place before there was Kinko's everywhere, the only place you could get a photocopier. I think, you know, whatever that time was, I don't know how much your photocopier technology was when it was okay to put in a library and there was like a coin, you could put quarters and et cetera, but that's kind of where we need to be on makerspace stuff. I think we're probably about three to five years away from the technology being so easy and simple and like, you know, photocopier-like that you could put it in any library. Right now you can put it in certain libraries where you have people who are really kind of focused on it, but I'd like to see it, I agree. I'd like to see it in every library. Yeah, I mean, I'm slightly worried about liability. Southerners and sewing machines both sound like they're gonna be ouchy if you do it wrong. But I hear you, yeah. So right here, and then we'll go to you back there. We'll be next. Thank you so much. I'm French, but I moved to the United States to learn. So thank you, I learned a lot today. My responsibility, I'm also a member for UNESCO Task Force. My responsibility is to collect trends, to organize a curriculum for education in Europe. I just came back from China in 300, how to identify the skills and to organize the education for the job which exists tomorrow. So it was the First World Congress in Dalian, China. Have you thought how we could get your ideas? Organize them maybe in advance, inform in advance. Not necessarily always the government. Local communities, I learned a lot much more from a rural area in Norway than from Oslo. We had three months' demonstration, a museum, more than that. In Oslo, the latest technologies, rural area reacted more quickly, set up more quick company to develop their own cultural heritage content. So the point I want to make to disseminate it as broadly as possible. Great question. Super glad you're asking that. Super glad you're doing it. Let me give you one answer, which is that one of the countries that actually might be the first to really do this is England. We lost our shop classes in industrial arts in the 70s and 80s, but in the United Kingdom you still have design technology, it's called DT. Those shop classes are still in most schools. And James Dyson of the vacuum cleaner Dyson has a Dyson foundation and he's working with these DT classes to add digital to the curriculum, laser cutters and 3D printers. I just visited one. It's just starting to take off. And so I would suggest you contact the Dyson Foundation and ask for their help in doing it globally. We'll go right here and then next over there. Hi. So, wonderful talk. I was curious about if you could highlight some of the more unsavory aspects of this sort of makers culture. I mean, you know, from the virtue of my, you know, my research and my, you know, analyst position, you know, I was looking at this and saying, wow, this is a wonderful way to disseminate knowledge, but at the same time, you know, if somebody had, you know, wrong intentions or less than positive intentions, they could certainly use 3D printing and, you know, some of this to do, you know, basic surveillance, to do surveillance on the cheap and to do production of weapons on the cheap. So I was wondering, you know, if you could sort of highlight or discuss if, you know, if this is something that people are dealing with or, you know, or is this something that's more on the back burner? No, it's a great question. We think about it all the time. The answer is, is that, you know, all technologies can be used for good as well as evil, you know, the computer, you know, can be used for evil hammer, can you hit someone over the head? So our general perspective on this is, so my community does open source drones. I mean, you know, part of me says fantastic, democratizing, you know, robotics, part of me says open source drones. What are you kidding? I mean, like anybody? And the answer is yes, anybody. How can I do that responsibly? And the simple answer is that I don't feel it's my place to limit technology. I think it's my place to inform the regulators and those who are charged with protecting us on what's happening and let them do their job. So what we did is, rather than limit who could use the technology, we reached out, we came to Washington many times, reached out to the FBI, the Pentagon, OSTP, every agency we could think of, we briefed them all on what was going on, constantly briefed them, invited them into our community, told our community we were inviting them, inviting, you know, the FBI and others in, made a deal with the FBI that not only would we, you know, it would encourage them to participate, but if we saw anything, we saw unsavory, we would report it to the FBI, told our community we were going to do that. And basically, we think our job is to help the regulators and law enforcement do their job better by surfacing this stuff that would have been happening in the underground anyway, but by doing it in public on the web, in a sense, we're making it more visible, not less. And again, I'm slightly self-justifying, but we think we make it easier for the law enforcement to do their job rather than harder. And you know, let's face it, this stuff was out there already. It just wasn't, it wasn't being promoted by people who were focused on doing things under the bright shining light of an open network the way we are. Right, here, check your shirt. Hi, my name is Jason Arpino. My question for you is actually with regard to this whole maker movement and why it's taken so long to, for this movement to start. When I was, I started high school when I was in 1990, in 1997, my high school was part of a program called Project Lead the Way. I was using AutoCAD and Mechanical Desktop then. We had CNC mills, we had CNC drills. Wow. And that's the first time that we, I used an injection mold or things like that. That was part of a process that started in the 90s to transform, you know, as you were saying, these shop classes into, you know, like, you know, design technology kind of classes. And yet, still, 15 years later, we're seeing more and more of these shop classes that have, you know, go by the wayside. Yeah. Yet these things, you know, are now even cheaper. Why hasn't those, why haven't those things, why haven't those programs picked up? Why has it taken so long? Why, why have my experiences in high school back in the 90s outpaced those for most kids that are going to school today? I'll give you an analogy. When Bill Gates was going to high school in, what, the 70s, he went to a very privileged in Seattle where they had access to a time-sharing system, they had access to a computer. And this created Microsoft and all that. You know, I didn't. When I went to college, we had access to a mainframe, but we had to, you know, type out our, I'm really dating myself here, we had to type out our program on cards, punch cards and submit it through a window. And, you know, they would later come back with a big stack of bug reports, they would have air messages. You know, the fact that you have access to industrial technology doesn't mean that it's easy or that everybody has access. The technologies you just described, that AutoCAD, I think the license fee on that is $5,000 a year. You know, those tools, those CNC mills you have, they probably cost $100,000. I mean, you're super lucky. But my school couldn't afford that. Most schools couldn't afford that. The difference now is that that same technology is free. The CAD software is free. It costs $700. It uses a Dremel tool that we finally got in it so it's cheap, easy and ubiquitous. And now it makes sense to put in the schools because it's not a huge hardship on the schools and it's something you can continue to use in your after school without having to kind of get a degree in mechanical engineering. I'm going to do one last question right here. Oh, if you talk loudly. Hi, Mary Alice Ball from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. So I work a lot on broadband deployment, digital inclusion. You're talking about Tijuana and San Diego. What do you see as the possibilities, you know, the potential of these technologies and makerspaces, how they might transform rural America? Yeah. Well, the good news is that, you know, like everything else that the Internet touches, it kind of, it's easily distributed. You know, the first Industrial Revolution took the cottage industries at the time and sort of, you know, took everyone out of the rural world and brought them into the cities. It's a wonderful thing. I mean, actually, I, you know, do I have time to show you one quick slide? It's kind of magical what the Industrial Revolution did. You know, we think it's about, you know, dark satanic mills and all that, but, you know, by, you know, basically concentrating industrial power, it hugely improved quality of life. And this is what it did to life expectancy and this is what it did to the population in the United Kingdom. And it, you know, we think of, you know, the cottages and the rural England as being idyllic and, you know, and peaceful, but in fact, they had no access to running water. They had, you know, poor sanitation, no sewers, no education, you know, poor access to education. The walls were damp, et cetera. And so those dark satanic mills actually were surrounded by cities that had sewage and water. And so concentrating industrial might around the cities was very good to develop us. But what we lost in that process was all the variety and character and, you know, let's say individual qualities of the cottage industry. But that was necessary because it was all about the machines and the machines were massive steam powered, you know, that stuff I was showing before. What we're now introducing with digital manufacturing is possibly return to the cottage industry. You know, now it doesn't, you don't have to, in fact, you don't have to be big, you know, block-long Goliaths. You can have small prototyping machines on your desktop and then upload it to the cloud. And so you can start to imagine a world. If you look at the Kickstarter, Distribution and Kickstarter projects, or VETC projects, they look like America. They're fully distributed. And what you realize is that where broadband reaches, where people have desktops, where FedEx can go, there can be manufacturing. And we can come back to the cottage industry without having, you know, lost the ability to be global, to be innovative, and to manufacture at scale. So I think this could be, I think this could be great. You say rural, I'm not sure what I would go as far as rural, but it would be great for sort of, you know, move manufacturing out of industrial centers. You know, less about Detroit and more about suburbs and all that, and let people live where they want to live and let culture go where it wants to go without having to move to the machines. Chris, thank you so much. I understand you're going to stay and sign books and answer questions as people have them a little bit. Absolutely. Well, thank you everybody for staying. Thank you all very much.