 Well, thank you, Arpita. Yeah, Lynn and I have been here a long time, but you have to understand that we got here when we were about 15 years old. Isn't that right, Lynn? That's a lie. So we'll come back to that. So Lynn was asked to actually talk about his role in building up energy at Stanford as it now exists. He was kind enough to invite me to help him do that. As usual, being too humble to talk about himself and feeling it might be boring to a bunch of new students to hear a recitation of all his incredible achievements. He did also remind me, and through this a few times, that because we went through some of these wars, I would say I was a well-placed observer at times and helped out a little bit along the way. As he put it to one of the leaders of the Office of Science at DOE when she asked me to introduce him, that that was a bad idea because we have so much dirt on each other, we might actually spend the whole time revealing that. But I've been encouraged by Lynn to bring some of that in. So I won't give Lynn's whole bio resume as respect to his role in building up energy at Stanford. And as per pre-agreement, focus on three main things that he helped launch here. Help is an understatement, as I'll describe. And those are the Global Climate and Energy Project around 2002, the Precourt Institute for Energy around 2009, and then not quite Stanford, but related to it and maybe lessons learned here for there, his role as the Undersecretary of Energy for Science and Engineering. This may seem like a bureaucratic acronym, but having been on the applied part of the Science Advisory Board for eight years or something, this chasm between the science, surprisingly maybe to you, the gap between the science side and the applied side, application side of the Department of Energy is pretty wide, and Lynn was brought in to do that. So what we're gonna do is after this brief introduction by me, Lynn's gonna make an introductory statement. Then we're gonna go through GSAP, PI, and the Undersecretary of Energy role and focus on what were the goals of what was being attempted, again, with Lynn being where the buck stopped pretty decidedly, obviously took a lot of people to do it, but he was key. Then the Precourt Institute for Energy and then DOE Undersecretary, and then overall lessons learned and hopefully we'll leave 15 or 20 minutes for questions and answers. So that's kind of the layout of the session. So we're gonna do a little bit of going back and forth so we'd appreciate if you could keep audience questions till the end and I'll ask some penetrating questions. This is a little bit like the talk show where Lynn is the, you know, Stephen Colbert and I'm one of his assistants. He's supposed to warm up the audience and keep things light and tell a lot of jokes. And if I say any more about how we've talked about presenting this to you, I will steal Lynn's thunder because he's really, really good at seeing the student perspective on things. And with that, I think I'll turn it over to him for an introductory statement. Thanks, John, I think. So he's too modest about his contributions as well, but over the last, gosh, almost 20 years now, we've sort of transformed in a big way how energy research is done here at Stanford. And if there's any, I just want to kind of look back at some of that and ask what lessons have we learned there that might be helpful to all of us as we try to think about how to meet the challenges that Arun and Chris and Rob talked about so effectively this morning. I just to state my overall view, I'm like Rob, I'm an optimist. I think we can do what we need to do. Now that's a different question from will we do it. There's plenty of challenges there and we should pause and take some satisfaction in the progress we've made so far. Wind and solar and battery costs and LEDs are down 95% in cost. Just, you know, there had been big elements of progress but of course there are plenty of big challenges that remain. So how do we attack all of that? So in the early 2000s, we, I guess, if you think about it, this is, there's a little bit of a lesson in this. So we were in the competition for a big carbon mitigation effort. We did not win, Princeton University won. And so there's the carbon mitigation initiative, CMI, there. And it's a great group of people and we've worked very closely with them over the years but we were disappointed, of course. But at the time, we, those of us who worked on that effort had been talking about it to one of the advisor groups for the School of Earth Sciences, I was the dean at the time. And one of the companies on that group, the member from Slumberger said, you know, we'd be interested in what you're kind of talking about but we don't want to do it by ourselves. We would like some other sponsors. And so a few of us went to work and in the end, to make a long story short, we were able to put together a $200 million project over a 10-year period to look at reducing greenhouse gas emissions from energy use. And that led then to having some resources that we could put to work to build the energy, clean energy research program here at Stanford. There was lots of stuff going on, distributed all across the campus but it was largely individual research groups doing their own thing. And what came out of that, we can talk a little bit about why and how that, but what came out of that was a group of people that did know each other, that were working together in lots of new ways. And I think maybe the most, if there's any one thing you take away from this, the most important part of this was the relationships amongst students in the various research groups. Now, I'm gonna reveal the secret to a good university. Information transfer particles in a university are graduate students and postdocs. It's not the faculty. The faculty are too busy. They have too many things to do. The classes teach the proposals to write and all the committees to serve on. It's all of you. And what we put together with regard to the Global Climate Energy Project, we did proposal competitions. And in those proposal competitions, we asked for three things. One was good science or engineering science. That kind of goes without saying. The second one was an impact on greenhouse gas emissions, but it didn't have to be overnight and it could be a pathway to impact. It didn't have to be necessarily. So we're interested in fundamentals, but as I say, certainly in the early pre-commercial kind of side of it. And then the third thing we asked for was something that was step out. So what do we mean by that? Well, you'll see research groups across the university that have been working in a particular area for a long time and they've built a logical and incredibly important step-by-step attack on things. And that's very important. It's an absolutely essential way that we do things. But at the same time, here we had a relatively modest amount of money, $20 million a year more or less, that we wanted to put into things that were not necessarily the next incremental step, but were something that was tougher, that we were willing to take some risk, we were willing to take the long view. And the interesting thing about this was that the way research groups went to work to try to satisfy the step out requirement was one of them was to band together with some research group that they hadn't worked on before to do some problem that they'd need a group thought they could pull off on their own, but together they might have a shot. Well, so of course what that did was to get the students to get to know each other amongst these research groups. And we funded some of the work and we were way oversubscribed on requests for all this money, but we provided lots of feedback from the review process and in some cases the research groups took that knowledge of the reviews and came back to us or got it funded somewhere else or whatever, but the key part of it, I think the most important part of it was that they had such a good time brainstorming about all the stuff that they might be able to do that would be hard to support in the standard way of doing things that they kept right on doing it even after they were finished with us or... So what that did was to build a cross-link community of researchers, faculty who knew each other, students who knew each other, research groups looking for problems at their boundaries that they could be worked on. And one of the things that came out of that then was to do something like what we're doing here, which is to look for an opportunity to create those relationships amongst all of you as early as we can just because we know that your paths will cross in interesting ways and that good things will flow from that. So part of the reason you're all here is that we're hoping that you'll get to know each other. And I would say that a lesson I learned too in Washington amongst other things is that, you know, for heaven's sakes, be polite. You never know when your path will cross with somebody else that you met in some situation like this. And my existence proof for that is that the woman who's the head of the National Science Foundation, France Cordova, she and I were undergraduates here about 100 years ago. So here we were. We found ourselves in Washington, you know, in charge of, I don't know, $18 billion a year of federal research, the two of us. And it just was a little help that we already knew each other. So take advantage of those pathways when they arise as well. John. So a couple of comments. Just to put a little bit more of a scale on what was accomplished, I actually think of Lynn as being Herculean in responding to the 10 or 12 labors of Hercules. I think his cousin Eurythias actually put those for it. There's actually a historical debate about whether it was 10 or 12. The one I like, speaking of fake news, even in Greek mythology, is there were originally 10 and Hercules violated the thing. So my image of Lynn is that way. But just to put a kind of frame on the magnitude of the effort, there's also a debate about how big this scale increase that Lynn described from say 2002 to 2010-ish when he was, or 2013 I should say, going through the Global Climate Energy Project and the initiation of the Prequart Institute. I would say the number of faculty and who were spending significant amount of time on energy, energy research, students, postdocs, projects and so on went up by at least a factor of four. My personal estimate is a factor of eight. So this took us from 20, 30, 40, 50 people who were working in various outposts around campus to this gigantic partially and with Prequart, even more integrated group 200 plus as you see and they probably read this when you were thinking of applying here. That's actually true, but it wasn't always that way. And I think Lynn was among many important people, the most important person in making that. So speaking of that kind of language, if you're a Star Trek fan, one piece of dirt is the two of us are two, probably there's a moderate amount of standard faculty who are Star Trek affection autos. So I'm thinking back to the press conference that announced GCEP in 2002. So I was minding my own business and as a Star Trek fan, actually Lynn had run a bunch of faculty get-togethers before it was actually announced what GCEP was and who was involved. And I thought to myself in the kind of quirky way I think about things that would be nice to invent something like dilithium crystals or better. So I'm remembering going out to the posters, student posters that were available after the press conference. And Lynn came up to me and he has almost never said anything potentially confrontational or territorial to me. And he said, hey, are you the guy that's going around talking about Star Trek and dilithium crystals? And I said, yes, sir, captain. And he said, that's my idea. And I then learned not only about that, but that Lynn got to participate in a event at Monterey Bay Aquarium where they actually had the model for the Cleon bird appare that went in under the Golden Gate Bridge as part of that movie script. Sorry for those of you who don't follow Star Trek. So I'd like to turn that into a question. As is well known to your good friends, since you've already won from the Starfleet Command, which represents the intergalactic federation of planets, several awards of valor, a medal of honor, silver palm with cluster and a Starfleet citation for get this conspicuous gallon tree. I told you I was a Lynn fan. Was one of your initial goals in starting GSAP to literally invent either a substitute for or a synthetic way to make dilithium crystals given the politics intergalactically of that in the Star Trek theme, sir? Well, I have to say that we didn't have any thing quite as clear a goal as that, but I will tell you a story about dilithium crystals. And actually the truth is that my wife gets the credit for this. We put all this effort into trying to put together this project, basically a year of traveling the world and negotiations and so on, but we did this. And so my Christmas present from that year was a beautiful set of crystals. And in case, now to the uneducated eye, these might have looked like fluorite, but obviously they weren't because it came on a little wooden stand that had a nice little brass plaque that said dilithium crystals. So this was great. The dilithium crystals, I will say, went with me to the Department of Energy and were on my coffee table. I had an office that was bigger than anybody should ever have, but there was a couch and a coffee table and a place for it there. And it was kind of a test. I think if you're my age or John's age, we all remember the Star Trek movies and the TV show. And sometimes the younger folks at DOE would come in and they'd go, dilithium, never heard of this stuff. What is it? So anyhow, for those of you who don't know, it's the material that you use to contain the antimatter for the warp drive and that makes the star ships go faster than the speed of light. So it's pretty important stuff. And I had to hardly been at DOE when there was this controversy that arose an email debate because some DOE employees had been off at Comic-Con and they did, on their own time, this wonderful sort of energy educational thing that it was just so clever, I just loved it. And in any case, somebody somewhere in the bureaucracy raised the question of, was this an appropriate use of federal funds? Well, first of all, there wasn't any use of federal funds, so it was entirely appropriate. But I was brand new at DOE, you know? So there's always stuff flying around. And I finally jumped in and I said, come on, folks, lighten up. You know, this was done on their time. It was great fun, it reached an audience that might, you know, some education could do with it. I think we should be applauding this. And then I said, but of course I might be biased because I'm the guy with dilithium crystals in my office. Well, so in fact, that shut down the whole argument. So dilithium turned out to be useful there. So in terms of the goals that we had to, in thinking about this, I don't think we ever set out to invite any one device, invent any one device. In fact, if there was something that seemed pretty clear to us at the very beginning, it was that this, we needed a portfolio that there were, or if you look at all the ways we transform energy resources into some energy service, their resources might be fossil, they might be solar, they might be wind, they might be nuclear, there's a whole series of resources there. And we use a variety of technologies to get those into the services like electricity and transportation and heating and cooling and lighting and so on. So we wanted to look across that spectrum to ask where were there opportunities for university-based research to do some things that would be hard that weren't necessarily being worked on in industry now. So we did a whole series of workshops where we asked ourselves really the research agenda question. If we were gonna work in the solar area, what kinds of things would we do? If we were gonna tackle the nuclear area? In the end, we chose not to do a lot on the nuclear side because we didn't think we had enough money to make an impact there. So we did a whole series of those and it calls for proposals and really tried to use the opportunity we had to generate new ideas in the research community. And that was both fun and interesting and then we made a lot of hard work for ourselves because we got all these cool proposals and we had to try to figure out which of those were the strongest and made the most sense for university-based work. And something like about half that work was done at Stanford and about, well, maybe 40% was done at other universities around the world. So we did a bunch of traveling the world to try to drum up business. John participated in a few of these. I can remember Richard Sassoon's laughing in the back because the three, the bunch of us, we, well, there was that trip into India where our luggage got lost on the way and every day we were going to a new city in India and the luggage chased us all the way around India. We finally got it the last day as we went back to sort of, there was a lot of washing our underwear and using the hair dryer to get it done. And so anyhow, we had lots of good times in trying to figure out how to do this but it's not like we had it all figured out at the beginning. We really did make it up as we went along and in the process, what I described of sort of building all the cross-linking here at the campus, that was in a way a by-product. I don't think we had completely figured that out at the beginning and I think what that means for all of you is that it's not a prescribed way to do it. We're looking for opportunities and the really good thing about bringing a bunch of really smart people together and empowering them to try to figure out how to invent the future is that there's so much that we can do, the opportunity space has never been bigger than it is now for inventing a clean energy future. So if I had any one emotion in meeting all of you, it would be envy. It's such a great time, it's such an opportunity to change the world and by the way, we do need to change the world so it's something that's really important. We just need all the players we can get on the field. Actually as much as I'd like to do a lot of anecdotes about Lynn and Richard and Chris Edwards, Mr. Exergy who you'll probably meet and myself going to China and India and China and India again in Japan, I'd like to pick up on that thing explicitly because another arc I think that you were instrumental in back to the student perspective is the evolution of the IP agreements and the role of the students working in the labs in early GCEP in revamping that. Yeah, so the way all that worked for the Global Climate and Energy Project was that everything that we did there was to be published if it was good enough to be published. No, you might already know that we're not allowed to do anything at Stanford with graduate students that's not to be published. That's we don't do any proprietary work for anybody. And the companies that sponsored the GCEP, I think mostly what they didn't want to have happen was for somebody to come along and patent some idea that we'd worked on that then they would have to pay to use the patents that they'd supported the research for. So we worked out a sort of a non-exclusive license arrangement that any work that made sense to patent would get patented but would be available broadly after that. I think mostly in most cases, it was not a big impediment because the work was so early stage that by the time it gets to commercial use there would be a whole lot more follow on work that went that way. But we did make sure that all of that was publicly available. And I'll just use that as an opportunity to say that the fundamentals, the material science, the all the ideas for new devices or systems, those are all really important. But if we're gonna change the world, we have to get to scale. So the business of going beyond what we do in the university and making sure that that translates to a world where you can get the market, that's an important part of it. And in a way, John, that leads to the idea that the Global Climate and Energy Project was a specific research project. It was interdisciplinary. So it wasn't owned by any one of the schools or departments. But it was really focused on the technical side. But as Arun pointed out nicely in the opening presentation, no matter how good we all are on the technical side, you still have to think about markets, you still have to think about financing, you still have to, the regulatory system works as well. So that led to the eventual formation of the Precourt Institute for Energy, which is a deliberate attempt to provide a home for all the interdisciplinary work that goes on across the campus. So that, and that broadened to include the economists and people really working across the spectrum of how you get to transformations in a big, complicated, existing energy system for the world. Not surprisingly, just to sync this up, I was going that direction anyway. So I think everybody who got this book that I helped edit, so we kind of talked about the long arc energy technology innovation from deep laboratory to applied research to VCs to startups and so on. And I do think for me the other observation regarding the IP is some of the students say, well, this is big, you know, kind of heavy metal 50 year out targets. But we've learned enough in your lab, Professor Blank, fill in the blank, you'll see most of the people here subsequently. But we think we can get halfway there right now with the startup. Two questions about that. One, how many startups came Richard may know this exact number out of the original GSAP plan? I actually know and have advised several of them. And that includes not just tech people, but often systems and marketing people from the Stanford community who met when they were graduate students. And second, just to lay out another observation, I do think this jump from GSAP, which is mostly tactical stuff to the broader frame needed now more than ever with the audience here being among the most critical people to do it was a little bit like the labor of cleaning out the OGM stables because there were a bunch of existing organizations, including at Slack and around campus that you had to kind of move together and get moving in the right direction. So before we go to open questions, I'd like you to address that a little bit if you're willing to do so. Sure, I can try. So if you think back to just the broader question of we'd really face this with what led to the Woods Institute for the environment that we had environmental researchers all the way across the campus. And we certainly had energy researchers. And there was a long series of gosh, for years discussions about whether we should try to create a single entity and move all faculty to that entity to work on the environment. And the answer was that that was too hard. That instead we've used the interdisciplinary institutes as a way to get the benefits of that cross-linking without disrupting all the department admissions and the curricula and the educational programs. So we already had that model in place. And then as we began to think about creating an energy institute, the question is, should we try to pull all those things or just in sort of hard organizational terms or should we just do it informally? And what we ended up with was something that was partly in the middle. So there was the Global Climate and Energy Project. There was the Pre-Court Energy Efficiency Center, which was working very hard on all the energy efficiency aspects. And we pulled those pieces and then we built an executive committee of populated with a whole bunch of people that didn't actually report to me. They were the heads of other research groups around the university. And we just kind of charged ahead and didn't worry too much about the specific organizational, the way you drew the boxes on the page. And I guess since I've made a whole career of ignoring institutional boundaries and have appeared to get away with it, I think that's a good thing to do. And I hope that one of the things that will come out of all your week here is that you just won't pay any attention to those. That the having students from the biz school and the medical school and humanities and sciences and engineering and earth sciences and education and who they leave out law. That just gives us a way to build some further relationships that can lead to some good stuff. And on the company side, I don't know, Richard, do you have a number for how many startups came out of GSAP? A lot of startups, they evolved from GSAP work. And so they'll hear later during the week from the Tomcat Center and they'll hear about all those startups. But there's an evolution that goes into a technology startup. And so I would say a couple of dozen probably have their origins in GSAP, whether they might not necessarily be directly emanating from a specific technology that came out of GSAP, but it may be the students that then went on to develop something after that time. Yeah, I agree with that. A couple of dozen seems reasonable. I don't know, one of my students started a company that clearly came out of the stuff that we did with the GSAP support. So that for those of you that have an entrepreneurial bent, that there is that possibility as well. I would say having worked, helping Jim Sweeney with the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center, this phenomenon Lynn mentioned, and I see Diane and Kida Bhai, who was one of our post talks, that kind of gave us an opportunity in our own group. We were both in management science and engineering, but Jim was able to get kind of pure behaviorless, like cognitive psychologists together with tech people who did sensors controls and so on in search of what's been called in the VC community digital demand technologies, which were even in clean tech 1.0 became some of the successful ones. So these were essentially IT apps and energy. I'm not clear without this environment that Lynn had created here. We could have done that. So we're working hand in hand. I remember a key workshop, Kerry Armel put together, where there was a day with the behaviorless, no technology mentioned, a day with the technologists, no human interventions mentioned, and then she had strong contacts with the IDO folks who are kind of genesis of the D school, and they can work with us in the usual IDO manner with tables and jelly beans to get everybody hiked up on sugar, which actually works by the way, to make this kind of progress. That's just one example, but I think what Lynn described went on all across campus. So you had materials guys and gals and working across ME and material science and bioengineering and so on. And you still see that continuing. And I do think this evolution towards shorter run focus and shorter term has led to shorter term research, which has got these very disparate communities trying to work together to move the needle apropos of the last question that was asked to Rob Jackson to get moving further faster. So I see we have our 10 minute warning, so I feel we ought to open it up to audience questions at this point. Everybody's still awake, nobody's left for a load shed, so good job. Well, I would say that in terms of, you mentioned jelly beans that just as graduate students and postdocs are the information transfer of particles. You need, for the energetics of that, you need fuel. And the fuels are caffeine, pizza, sugar, pretty much all the major food groups. And then maybe a beer or a glass of wine. So I told you, Lynn was smart and he really plays to the graduate school audience. Great transition. So questions? Okay, over here. Hi, I have a question for Lynn. What, how different is the current administration from the previous administration when it comes to energy policy? You mean the federal administration? Yeah, Donald Trump and Obama. Let's see, if you, so you can think about inverse functions, you know, that's, yeah, certainly the attitude is different. I have to say it was great fun working at DOE, that the secretary of energy was Ernie Moniz who he had had the job at MIT that I had here that is running the interdisciplinary research, energy research program. And I, and of course I was brought in specifically to try to figure out ways to build links amongst the fundamental science and the applied energy programs. And there was a big commitment to work on climate change, to work on clean energy and that sort of thing. And that's what we did. The Paris Agreement was done on our watch and we, you know, as soon as I came back from Paris, we put together a team and did a five year energy R&D plan for doubling of energy research in the United States at least. So the attitude is, as you've seen, quite different and there's a pretty strong anti-regulatory stance in the current administration and they've been busy trying to undo a bunch of the things that we worked on. That's the thing to remember here of course is that the White House does not control the entire universe, the Congress matters too. They, for example, have the administration budgets have been for sharp reductions in the applied energy research but the Congress has not gone along and those budgets have actually stayed okay. So yeah, there's certainly a big strong contrast and emphasis amongst those two administrations. Actually let me put in an unsolicited plug for the energy seminar which pre-court has me coordinating our very first speaker. Two weeks from today, 430 and video auditorium is Kevin De Leon who was the master, master of what's called SB 100, the latest California regulatory approach which is I think 100% renewable gen in California by 2045 if I'm not mistaken. So. So let me say one more thing about this and that is that energy R&D is pretty important but the whole most of the energy regulation in this country is done at the state level. So the feds have a few things that are important, energy efficiency standards, cafe standards.