 I am a stranger in a strange land. I want to introduce this video a little bit. For the last two days, I have been in a very strange place. Well, strange for me. I got invited a few weeks ago to give a talk, actually to re-give a talk that I gave in 2013. About an article that I wrote called The United States of Starbucks. Oh, and before I go any further, this is my Columbia Astronomy mug in celebration of my friends Alex Ticci and David Kipping who have just today announced the possible discovery of an exo-moon. Head over to the Cool Worlds channel and check that out. Really exciting, congrats you guys. So I got invited a few weeks ago to give an updated version of this talk. And not just any kind of talk, this is a talk called an Ignite Talk. There are five minutes, twenty slides, but the slides auto-change every fifteen seconds. This makes it actually a really stressful talk to give, but the payoff I think is really huge. After going to big conferences like AAAS, I'm desperate for things to seem more interactive, more entertaining and more authentic while at the same time conveying information. Buddy dog, what are you doing man? Somebody from the Geekwire Summit community reached out a couple weeks ago to see if a few of the Seattle Ignite alumni would be willing to come and give a talk. In exchange they gave us free passes to the summit and also I got to go to the VIP lunch today, which was actually really cool and the mayor of Seattle was there. But a technology conference is not my forte. This was a conference as much about the tech business, business of the tech industry as it was about technology. In fact, I would say it actually leaned more towards the business of technology. So it was even further outside of my comfort zone or my wheelhouse than I expected. That's a powerful thing, pushing me professionally to go and talk and relate to people who have no idea what I'm about. Here's the other honest truth. When I gave the original version of the United States of Starbucks talk, I was at sort of an impasse in my career. I wasn't sure that I was loving what I was doing, I wasn't sure I was staying in it for the right reasons. And I didn't feel a huge sense of ownership in what I was working on. This is the reason that I started IfWeAssume.com. This is my blog. I haven't talked about it much on this channel and I really have been meaning to. If We Assume and talks like the United States of Starbucks, the publicity that I got from that early on opened up a lot of doors for me. I got to speak at some events. I got an internship at Microsoft Research. These doors sort of opened because I hustled, I took ownership of what I was doing and then I created a platform. I created this website. You know, it's not the most sophisticated thing, but I created this thing and I put a lot of passion into it. So this is all a long way of saying that that talk, that five-minute ignite talk that I gave, that talk in my mind became this turning point where I wasn't sure if I was going to stay in astronomy. I dipped my toe into the tech industry waters. So to get to go back and re-give that talk to a new audience was a special opportunity. Anyhow, that's a little background. And so with that in mind, here's footage most of day one of the 2018 Geekwire Summit. That linear at the end game of disease is just like in smallpox. The last handfuls of cases are the most expensive for obvious reasons. And what I realized was two things. One is I enjoyed him getting fired up because he was mad at the problem of polio. He wanted to get rid of polio. But I didn't really test what it was like for him to be mad at me. That fierceness directed against polio all day. Like I can do that all day. There was a term back in the Industrial Revolution that's called euthenics. And it was, believe it or not, just human-centered design which has been thrown around as this recent novel idea. Nope, it's been around for a long time. You couldn't smoke your own dough. You could be a facilitator of transactions. You could go to the website for those transactions but to actually believe that you are smarter than everyone else as a principal of those transactions. I hate the below-the-gorge, bullshit-filled corporate world. And my whole goal is to try to build a business. A fun topic today, it's a challenging topic to cut through the crypto and cut through the craziness of crypto since we're right in the middle of it. That is awesome. We're starting to see that conversation happening. But I think that you're right to say what are the lessons we can take? What are the issues we're talking about in the election context? This increases the sense of immersion and makes the virtual world feel more magical when overlaid on our world. Releasing information about that has actually happened on your first day. Yeah, it was quite... I had a heck of a first day. My first day, most people are like getting another colleague or people pull together. I was on the phone with state agencies from around the country saying, you know, oh, I'm Tony West, but here's my first day. I've got to disclose a date of reach to you. All right, a few takeaways so far. One, the food at a tech conference, pretty good. Better than the food at an astronomy conference, it's generally. Two, business casual in this world is much, much fancier than business casual in astronomy. I don't think it's worth going into too many details about that, but it's definitely different dress code here. Talks by various CEOs from companies like Redfin and the Bill and Linda Gates Foundation have been really, really interesting. And the whole style of fireside chats have been actually really cool. I feel like I'm not getting as much out of the panel discussions because they're a little more technical, a little less accessible to somebody who's not just straight in tech. I've actually found a few interesting overlaps. People whose cards I've taken who I definitely want to reach out to. So far, networking actually pretty good. Here at the end, they did this competition for elevator pitches, which I loved, because one thing that we really push on students is being able to explain your project in an elevator pitch. There's a great way to network at meetings, a great way to find new collaborators, and a great way to just understand what you're working on. So it was really cool to see that here, a whole competition based on literally elevator pitches.