 and welcome to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I'm Evan Feigenbaum. I am the new Vice President for Asia here at Carnegie, and I've just parachuted back into Washington where I spent 10 years after seven years living in the Midwest in Chicago. So I'm delighted to welcome another Midwester to Washington. And I'm gonna tell you a little bit about Rick Snyder in just a moment. But first, we're especially delighted to welcome Rick to Carnegie because we're gonna, as you can tell from the posters, that are on either side, gonna launch a new stream of work in our Carnegie Asia program, which we're calling Asia Local Global. So over the next 12 to 18 months, basically what you're gonna see is a stream of events and product launches that are designed to take a look at some of the trends and dynamics that are happening all around the Asia Pacific region, not just in the United States, not just between the United States and China, but below the national level in states, in cities, in provinces, in perfectures. And that's gonna accumulate over time. And by the way, it meshes very well with some related streams of work here at Carnegie. You may have seen on the table outside some work on the state of Ohio done by my fantastic colleague Salman Ahmed in a project that they're calling a Foreign Policy for the Middle Class, where they're taking a look at some of the dynamics in the American states. Let me give you a little context on this, and then that'll help segue us into the event. I, as I said, I'm a longtime Washington guy. I was in the Bush administration for eight years, but I've been in Chicago for the last seven, eating steaks and admiring architecture and attending Cubs games at Wrigley Field. And I will tell you that when you parachute back into this capital city, after seven years out in other parts of the United States, what you find is that things look different on a variety of issues when you're sitting outside the Beltway than when you're inside of it. And I would argue to you, and this is the premise for this initiative, that that is true not just of this capital city, but of a lot of capital cities, of Beijing, of Tokyo, of New Delhi, of Jakarta, of Bangkok. So it's obvious, since we're sitting in Washington, that what happens between governments, negotiations, PACs, agreements, military dynamics, aggregate national trade figures, and so on, that matters, but that's not the end of the story, not in the United States, not in relationships, and not within the Asia Pacific region. Because at the end of the day, and on an awful lot of public policy issues, it has seemed to me and to us that it is businesses and it is laboratories and it is people that do the work, and they do the work in a lot of areas that don't always resonate or reflect what happens in the national capital. So the premise of all of this, and partly of this event today, is that some of the most crucial dynamics in the Asian region and between the United States and Asia, what makes an economy innovative, how businesses connect to each other, how communities connect to each other, how governments, especially in democracies, bring the public behind them for a national strategy, that happens outside of the capital city. And what's more, a lot of things that happen at the local level then get scaled up and become national policy over time. So the punchline, which is in this initiative title, is that what's local and what's global often are blurred together, and I would argue that that's especially true in the Asian region. That's also true of the US-China relationship, and that's why we invited Rick Snyder to come talk to us today. And I can't think of anyone better, particularly at a time of, I would argue in some ways, maximum tension between the United States and China, where certain patterns may or may not be locked into the relationship over time, but where the technology issues, something that Rick has seen in a variety of lives, business and government, is beginning to be at the hinge of that. Rick's been an executive. He was a longtime executive and then the chairman of Gateway Computers, a hardware manufacturer, a venture capitalist, investing in innovative companies, but above all, he was the governor for eight years of one of America's most storied industrial states, Michigan, and that's a state that was long seen as a one industry state, a motor city in the motor state, but which has been transformed, particularly during the eight years of your governorship, by industrial change, internationalization and connections to the world. So much of that happened on his watch, including 540,000 new private sector jobs in Michigan over the eight years that you were governor. And so what we're gonna do is we're gonna have a conversation and then we're gonna open it up for discussion with all of you, but we wanna try and get at some of those dynamics, change in the United States, change below the national level, how the world matters and how the United States and China are in many ways at the heart of that. So Rick, welcome. Thank you. Glad to have you. I'm not sure how you feel about being back in Washington. It's okay in shorter doses. Okay, so we got you here for a day. So I was hoping before we get to China that we could just talk about Michigan to set a scene and start us off by talking about how Michigan's economy has changed from being basically the story that people tend to associate it with, this national narrative about a rust belt, a motor city, a motor state, to something that's much more multifaceted and diverse than it's been. And particularly the role that technology has in that. We talked a little bit before about things like autonomous and connected vehicles or biomedical. What's happened in Michigan and what's been the story and how has that changed happened? Yeah, no, it's great to be with you. Evan and I appreciate everyone turning out to hear some of this perspective and I look forward to your questions. To give you a little more background, the way I describe Michigan as, what a tremendous case study. If you go back to the first part of the last century during the first 50 years or so, Michigan was the innovation capital of the world. It's incredible. People look at Silicon Valley and talk about that today. Michigan by an order of magnitude was more innovative in terms of impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And everyone knows autos, but it was more than that. I'm from Battle Creek, it was cereal, it was furniture, it was chemicals, it was pharmaceuticals. All these things happened in our state to the point where the modern corporation was actually born in the state of Michigan. The American middle class began in the state of Michigan and talk about a tremendous success story. The interesting part that happened is, is we ended up at the bottom. How did that happen? We ended up in the bottom in the lost decade. When we had the last great recession, we called it the lost decade in Michigan. We had a depression. And it's because we had such a good thing going, we decided we were just gonna write a good thing into the ground. Let's keep on doing the same old stuff we've done for all those years and not recognize the world has changed. And what happened is, is we paid a price for that. We lost more jobs than any other state in the nation. Our manufacturing base declined significantly. We were the only state in the nation that lost population in the census in 2010. Talk about a travesty. And the real question is, what do you do when you have that environment? And that's what drove me to run for governor, Evan. I mean, it was that simple. That never held public office. And there were some good, well-intentioned people, political people running, but they kept on talking about fixing Michigan. Fixing was not gonna be good enough. We had to reinvent our state. We had to get back to the essence of who we were when we had that great era of innovation. And how do you bring that back? Well, the first thing I'll tell you, and I appreciate the mention about all the jobs we created. We are a leader in that. But the role of government doesn't, we don't create the jobs. We create the environment for success. And then let free enterprise work. Let the private sector do what they do well. And that's the environment we sort of created in Michigan. We changed our tax policy, our regulatory policy. Most importantly, we put a focus on talent, on the talented people we have. And in many cases, those people had gone through tough times. Or there were young people that in many cases our young people had left our state. We actually were the leading outbound state in the country probably for a number of years in terms of our young people leaving. Now we're one of the leading states in the country for net inbound. But that also required some tough things. One of the things I told people is we had to bring the city of Detroit back from Michigan to be a great state again. And we have. It's not done, but it's in process. So to a little specifically your point, how do you do that? You find the converging areas of importance. And one of the things that's really worked out well is this whole field of mobility. Autonomous and connected vehicles. That's gonna profoundly change our society, our world. It's coming folks. You can argue about the rate of adoption, but it is gonna happen. And if you look at the IT world, which is Silicon Valley, and you look at the automotive world, they're converging. And so what is mobility to me? It's the convergence of IT and automotive coming together and it's probably the most exciting field in the world among that. Because it brings in all those attributes of not just IT, but that whole world of artificial intelligence in terms of a true application. So our goal in many respects was to be the world's leader in mobility and we are in Michigan. We're figuring out how to leverage the industrial strengths we had, but also the smart people we had. Because ultimately, what's the greatest asset any place has? Hopefully it's the talent and possession in your state. We have great research institutions, great universities, great programs, and it's how do we coalesce that and really create that place to say, if you wanna do business and you wanna be effective, here's the place to come. And that partially is how we got into the China mode is because if you look at it, China should wanna do business from Michigan. When I first became governor, they didn't know what a Michigan was. And so the real focus I had was, here's a vision to say, let's get us back on a policy of innovation. Innovation in terms of industry, manufacturing, and also our talent in particular. So that leads naturally to putting the world in the picture a little bit because in the areas that you mentioned, autonomous vehicles, mobility technology, other big economies, particularly in Asia, are both innovators, but also there's a consumption. When I was thinking about this program, one of the things I read was a study by two Michigan economists that showed that Michigan actually, you could say, is the most globalized state in the United States because trade makes a bigger contribution in terms of imports and exports to Michigan's GDP, 38.9% than I think any other state in the country. So most of that is still Canada, Mexico. It's auto parts and auto supply chains, but Asia's bulking increasingly large in that picture. So when we think of California, we think of very international state. People don't always think of Michigan that way, even though it is. Fit the world into that picture of industrial and economic change in Michigan. Yeah, a couple things. I would comment on that and I'm proud of the role we've always played. We're the number one trading partner with Canada. We're number two or three with Mexico, so those are facts. But in many respects, a couple things. One is this whole issue of manufacturing. So if you think about the last decade and going into this, a lot of people ran away from manufacturing saying it's a dead field, so you don't wanna be in it. Well, I hate to tell you folks, we still need to make things. And it's good to make things. So in some ways, the way I view this, I doubled down on putting an emphasis on bringing manufacturing back. And the way I would describe it to you is the biggest cause of the decline in terms of jobs and manufacturing was probably increases in productivity. There was some element of outsourcing, but the biggest thing is we became incredibly more productive, where we didn't need the unskilled and semi-skilled labor the same way because of automation and everything else. So we had to make that transition as a society and it was really hard. We didn't plan for it. We should have thought about it more, but it happened. So the way I view it now when I became governor is, now we're at the low point. So I'll use you a stock market analogy. So you wrote a stock to the bottom and when you're at the bottom, should you sell the stock or do you wanna buy more stock? So the way I view it is let's double down on manufacturing because you can see now it's gonna come back. It has to come back. So we became the leading state in the nation for the creation of manufacturing jobs in my time in office and I'm proud of that. But that wasn't the only thing. How do you create an economy that's more vibrant? I said we're gonna be export friendly. We're gonna emphasize how we can sell goods and services to the rest of the world. We had a declining population. Are you gonna get better off by selling more to that? You have limits. You gotta sell to the rest of the world and the way I define exports, hopefully you'll get appreciation of this, is I was happy to say not only Mexico and Canada and then hopefully China in the long term, but I was happy to sell to Ohio because again, it's exporting anywhere. So I changed our tax system for example, our corporate tax system and again, I'm a proud nerd so hopefully you can put up with me. But traditional state tax is a three factor formula. You tax it based on some combination of assets, people and sales. I said we're only gonna use sales as a factor. We're gonna create an environment where there's no disincentive. It doesn't cost you a dime more if you're doing business in Michigan to put more people in Michigan or to put more assets in Michigan. We deserve to get paid if you're selling stuff in our state and we're gonna tax you on it. But beyond that, we want you to come here, build stuff and ship it to somebody else because that's gonna create jobs in our state. So we created essentially an economic policy to make us an exporter to everybody else and that worked out well. How big a factor was Asia in that because you were looking at these big emerging economies or emerged economies? Yeah, well we'd done a fair amount with Japan was the industrialized market that we'd sell to. But to put it in context, I wasn't joking when I sort of said China didn't know what a Michigan was. When I first started going to China, I'd go there and they might know what Detroit was or they'd heard of the Motor City or Motown Music. But if you said Michigan to them, you'd get a blank expression for most people. And in fact, the prior administration and prior people in Michigan in many respects refused to do business with China because it was part of that narrative of outsourcing. So not only was it something that China didn't know us, we had a very kind of anti-China policy collectively within the state of Michigan. And I thought that was backward because again, you go back to the point, how do you walk away from saying we should be engaging in global commerce, global enterprise and we should be learning and working with the Chinese in a constructive fashion. So I just said, let's go do it. Talk a little bit about some of what you did with China but also and how it fit into your thinking because it always struck me, you always struck me looking at a lot of governors working in and around Asia as I would argue the most China forward governor in the country, not just because, I think you went there eight times in eight years. So not just the number of trips, but some of the ways that you were trying to harness China to strategic plans in your state. And one that sticks out for me is the partnership in Shenzhen, for example. Because Shenzhen, if you don't know Shenzhen, it's kind of a manufacturing hardware wonderland in China where in a sense low cost labor that's yesterday's story in parts of the ecosystem and places like that. But if you want to prototype and build and tweak a hardware product, Shenzhen is an interesting place to do that. And here you're coming from Michigan, a state that's pioneering, that's focused on manufacturing. We're trying to revive manufacturing. Pioneer's a lot of hardware. So there are these interesting synergies. How did China fit into your thinking in Michigan? Also, what did you do? Yeah, so I had a concerted effort to say let's go do business with China. And again, I had to deal with budget deficits first, huge problems in our state. But as we worked through those, it's like how do you have upside or future expansion? So I began by saying we need to engage China in this process and it started with doing trade missions. So I did a trade mission every single year. I'm the only governor that did eight trade missions in eight years in China. And when I say trade missions, these were trips that were two weeks long. Because one of the things I'll tell you, and this is where politicians I don't think understand how to do international work quite often or at least state and local politicians, is the normal model for a governor is to say over the course of eight years they would probably do two or three trade missions to China. They would fly into Beijing, Shanghai, or both places. They would do a lot of handshakes, some receptions and fly back and they'd get a great photo album out of it. That's not a trade mission. So what we would do is we would organize three or four parallel missions when I would go. We would sort of have my delegation representing the state. We would take people that wanted to do business in China. They would have a full schedule of things over the course of 10 days to two weeks. We'd take a couple dozen companies with us. We would have Pure Michigan, our tourism campaign doing things. We actually had a track for our agricultural people to do things. So we did multi-track things. And the other thing I did is I got out of math. I mean, this is not rocket science. I am a nerd, but this one's hard to figure out is get out of Beijing and Shanghai also. So the classic illustration is we went to Hangzhou, we went to Chongqing, our sister province at the time and still is, it's a great place, is Sichuan. So we'd go to Chengdu, but I also identified Guangdong province. Because it was like the wealthiest, most prosperous province in China and hardly any Americans would go there from a political point of view. That's nuts. So I got on a plane and we flew down there on a regular basis and I built relationships with the provincial government and the city governments and it made a big difference because you showed you care and developing old friendships with people. The other thing we did is we created the Michigan China Innovation Center and that Evan, I appreciate your help in getting that stuff the right way. So I put in a five-year funding pattern to go beyond my term as governor to say, let's establish a place, the Michigan China Innovation Center to say, how can we do more interactions? And we focus in on Shenzhen as part of that. And so that's going on and they're actually sponsoring something. We're gonna do it again, they're doing it again this year, even after my term. I'm looking forward to it though, is Michigan China week. We're actually within the state of Michigan, we celebrate a relationship with China and invite delegations from the provinces and places we have friendships with to come talk about doing business, to bring cultural affairs, to bring interactions to show how we can learn from one another. I mean, this is about building relationships. I'll go back to how I started about those couple trip kind of things. You don't do good business, you don't do good government, you don't do good politics if you try to do transactions with people. Transactions are where you do a one-off thing or a two-off and there's a winner and a loser. The only way you're successful long-term is to find win-wins, where basically you're doing it over an extended period of time and building a relationship where people see mutual value that everyone's benefiting in some constructive way. That's in the context of saying we do have real problems that we do need to address with China. So I'm not being ignorant of that. I'm actually proactive trying to work on that. But at the same time, you have to show how you can build trust and relationships with people and that was my goal. So that's the way I viewed my China strategy. Yeah, so can I get at that competitive dynamic a little bit because I'm assuming first in Michigan you had voices saying, what are you doing here? You're enabling a competitor, essentially. But I think that view, it's not just a view of the moment here in Washington. The United States has had a lot of problems structurally with China for a while, economic but otherwise. And we hung this event, if you look at the title of this event, we hung it on the tech dynamic because I think it's not inconceivable that sometime in the next 12 to 16 weeks there'll be a trade agreement of some sort between the United States and China. But there's a view, not just here but widely held that some of the competitive dynamics are structural. And so we'll call it the trade war or the tariff war, won't remove some of those more structural things, particularly around technology, standard setting who dominates industries of the future emerging in foundational technologies. So if the trade war gives way to a tech war, people here in DC but beyond would argue that there's a relative gains basis to that. So the argument runs something like this. If you collaborate with China on these kinds of technologies, because American firms and laboratories are more advanced, in essence, you're raising China's boat while degrading American vantage in the process. And you'll hear critiques of that. Some people say, oh, that doesn't understand the nature of technology or the way technology and innovation happen. But there are those voices, I'm sure you heard them in Michigan, and they're grounded in structural challenges between the two economies. So I'm curious how you see that as you argued for collaboration in some of these areas. But also what you confronted from Michigan companies or from other companies and people who had expansion into China as part of their growth strategy, but nonetheless saw competition from China as a big part of the challenge. Yeah, really simple question. So let me go to a bigger context though, and I'll bring it back to China to illustrate at least philosophically the way I view it. So one of the things being in Michigan is I viewed as we had to be the world's leader in mobility, autonomous and connected vehicles, because that's critical to the long-term strategic survival of our state and a great growth opportunity. We are the world's leader in mobility. That's a fact. People talk about the valley and I'm not competing with the valley for say, I wanna collaborate with them, but we have that leadership in Michigan. At the same time we were doing that, I am a techie. So I recognize we had to be thoughtful. So another thing I can tell you, Michigan is the leading state in the nation end in terms of state initiatives is cybersecurity. Because if you're gonna go do mobility, you're raising a set of issues or IT, you have to be equally responsible in my view about the downside threats, the challenges and everything else. So I'm proud of our track record there that we are truly a leader in cybersecurity and that's something I'm still passionate about. Now overlay that in the China context, that's one of the greatest concern areas I have about our relationship with China is the whole issue of cybersecurity, intellectual property. I have done license and agreements in prior life with some of the biggest tech companies in the world where I had to negotiate them. So I understand that world. You have to be smart about how you work with people. And in many cases we do need to be aware not just of China but other places in the world that we can be taken advantage of and we have it. So we do need to be cognizant. Those do need to be topics on the agenda that do need to be worked through. At the same time I would always recommend to people be careful about simply not trying to blame the other party for all the problems. Are we doing what we need to do in this country in terms of our policies and practices to be responsible about saying how do we do advanced research and development? How do we do intellectual property protection? How do we do it in terms of a strategic fashion versus what's non-strategic? And I don't think we're doing as good a job in this country as we are. I think in many cases I'll use the cyber case. The federal government in my view has done a lot of resources to do protection of the federal government. But they have not engaged the rest of the country while in that discussion where in Michigan my philosophy was it's only as effective as we engage the private sector and be partners with us on cyber issues. So I'm sort of going off on a tangent a little bit here but it's to say there is this tension of how do you do great business? How do you do win-wins? And at the same time recognize on issues like IP, cybersecurity, ownership requirements. I think these are real issues but I wouldn't characterize them as quote unquote a war environment. These are tough issues that war connotes a breakdown and a fundamental dislike and a battle versus saying we should be finding ways how we can build trust and understanding in areas and then leverage that into saying we need to deal with these hard issues and how do we get to a mutually satisfactory solution on those before you get to the point of saying we should be a battle or a war in some fashion. I mean, isn't that how you'd work with your neighbor let alone another country? But can you pick out a couple of areas of technology that you've worked on or that are central to Michigan companies or Michigan's future where China's investing heavily? I mean, electric vehicles for example. Why is that not an intrinsically competitive dynamic in a way that disadvantages Michigan companies as China was up the value chain? Yeah, well one of the things is people assume it's like there's America and there's China. The supply chain in most fields is already dramatically interwoven. We were a leading state. We ended up number three in the nation for jobs created by Chinese investment in the US after being at the bottom. And a large part of that is is we had the supply base where again, I created favorable policies and we welcome people and we work to bring them in there. But at the same time, automotive companies were saying we do business with you in China. We're already selling a lot of products in China. We wanna have a global supply base so we want you to come do business in North America. So they're coming in North America anyway. So how do you create that environment? In that context though, you have to decide what's important and what's not when you get to government policy. And this is an illustration I'll give you. We do need to have limits and restrictions on truly strategic and critical things. But I'll go back to the days when I was at Gateway. A classic case is at Gateway, a lot of our supply chain was from Asia back then in PCs. A lot of those products came from Taiwan in those days. It wasn't from mainland China. I'm an old enough guy where that was the supply base for Singapore someplace. But the classic is I remember one day I was going through customs and the guys came up, they were wonderful people that they were telling me though about export controls and were we complying with all the rules? And they said, I said, so one of the things you have on your list is you have hard drives on your list of prohibited materials. So you're sort of saying, I can't export a hard drive of this size to Asia. Because it could help cause nuclear weapons to happen somewhere in Asia. And I said the interesting part is I'm buying hard drives, the same hard drives from Asia and bringing them to the US and you're telling me I couldn't sell that same hard drive back outside. I said this is nuts folks. So it's again, this is something that we need to do a better job of defining what's critical and what's not critical. In terms of markets that are taking off though, specifically Evan the one I think you're talking about is in electric vehicles. So in mobility autonomous and connected we're leading China by a fairly significant margin. And I believe that's probably gonna be maintained or should be maintained. When it comes to electric vehicles, batteries, all those kind of power systems, China is as good as we are or Europe in many respects because they put an emphasis on introducing electric vehicles far more than we have. So the investments gone in, I've actually seen them waste hundreds of millions of dollars on things that didn't work in China. So it's not like they just win. They're just making huge investments in batteries and electric vehicles. We're doing good work here but in that case I would say it's not clear that the U.S. has any great advantage over China, right? Or other parts of Asia. Do you think, even it's been your mention of supply chains, do you think supply chains are too integrated to price apart? Because there's a debate here about decoupling, essentially a divorce but it's a divorce by policy design that you can price apart supply chains either for, I mean national security is a no brainer but for competitiveness reasons. And there's a view that in certain technologies or in certain areas where regulatory regimes, standards are in play, that's essentially the trajectory we have to be on. So first, what do you make of that decoupling debate? But second, having been in the supply chain business, what is it for government to mandate supply chain change and how does business adjust to that? That would be a terrible endeavor to undertake. And the way I'd describe it to you is when we think of the auto industry, we always go to sort of the OEMs, Ford, GM, Toyota, Hyundai, all the big manufacturers anywhere in the world but you forget that there's a huge supply base involving hundreds of companies underneath. Tier ones, tier twos, all these companies. And I can tell you in almost any product category, almost any category, there are multiple international suppliers to any single component. I'm not talking just Chinese but in particular, the Chinese are part of somehow probably one of the top five of probably three, four, 500, 600 different components in a vehicle. And that's not standardized in any one way. And this one part in some one particular mechanical part, they could be number two. They could be number five in something else. They could be number one in something. And so how are you gonna all of a sudden draw that apart to separate that all out about causing massive chaos? And in terms of job costs, the other part, all the money you gotta think about is there's a, why did they go there? Because whoever's buying from them think they're getting a better product for a better price. So what's your car gonna cost? And I'm not just talking about your car, what else is it gonna cost you to decouple something in this society because we've been a beneficiary as consumers of the outcome of that supply chain integration globally. So are you willing to pay 10% more, 20% more for a significant part of the goods and services you buy every day? That's a tough call, folks. It's easy to talk about, it's tough to do. Well, but our people, I mean, you were a politician. I mean, you did retail politics in a Midwestern state. You ran for governor twice. So as you talk to, I mean, as you talk to people about trade or about supply chains or about business opportunities, what's the mood on, I mean, are people willing to pay that price or unwilling to pay that price? And how does that, it's a cheeky way of asking about the trade war, I guess. Yeah, how does it, how does it play in Peoria? I mean, how's it, I know that's not Michigan. But yeah, no, the same points I've given you, I've done in town halls, I've done in Michigan, in multiple cases. And there would be a few people that would scream at me. I mean, you'd read comments to any article. You can find a few people wound up about something. But the vast majority of people in my state, the way I viewed it, were supportive of what we were doing. We create a lot of jobs in our state from international companies coming to our state, China and other places. They're hiring Michiganders. That was one that I mentioned to you, the ironic part about some of the tariffs they put on products. I said, I know a couple programs where they were gonna be opening plants in Michigan and those plants are now delayed because they weren't smart about what they put tariffs on. They actually put tariffs on some Chinese equipment that was needed to come start the plant. So we actually put tariffs on stuff to say, now it's too expensive to bring the product to the US. So now we have to delay opening the plant in Michigan to move the jobs from China to Michigan. That's not real bright. But the average Michigander, again, I can't speak for them, but I wasn't having people yell at me. I mean, they're happy to see the jobs. They're going, go governor, get more jobs. Is there a disconnect in this debate at the federal level and at the state level where people interact with politicians differently at the federal level than I did? So you're cheering, you know, governors, it's jobs growth. Give me more of that. Come on, go get them governor, bringing more investment to the state. But then people go in the ballot box and they pull the lever for national level trade policies that have the potential to produce a different outcome but they don't play out that way in the political debate. Yeah, that's always been part of it. I think it's gotten much worse because one of the things besides China, I get on my soapbox quite often is about the lack of civility in America. And if people are actually trying to channel anger in the issues that people can be angry about because they think it's gonna promote some political interest. And that's a bad thing, folks. We're the greatest country in the world but our greatest threat is us. And it's this lack of civility. If we can't get along with ourselves, how do you maintain status as a great country? And so I always spoke out about how do we work with one another and that's in this context of how do we work with the rest of the world? I mean, the world's gonna keep on becoming more and more global and you wanna be a good citizen and a steward in it and a leader in it in some fashion. You don't do it by yelling at people, generally. I mean, there are cases when things break down that you do have real conflict but short of that, how do you have a constructive dialogue to show how you can find mutual benefit and you build trust? That's how I, you know, I did a lot of bipartisan things in Michigan. And the way I did it is, is I said, we don't agree on everything but what do we agree on, let's go do. Because if you do stuff that you agree on, the next time you come back to the stuff you don't agree on, they're easier to deal with because you've shown success and you're that much closer to it. So that's always been my philosophy is people talk about compromise being a bad thing. It's actually how you get stuff done in terms of you don't compromise your values. You show progress on how people mutually win is the way it should be defined. Did you, can I go back to the China thing for a sec? Did you find when you came to Washington when you sat with other governors that there was a lot of skepticism about what you were doing with China that people say, oh, you're too forward with China or they had a different, particularly at the federal level but I'm wondering even with other states. Yeah, absolutely. Some people still think I'm nuts. And they're entitled to their opinion but I think the results have shown. The parts I would give you as is one, we've had a lot of great economic success but secondly, I believe you, I can, the Chinese relationships I've made both in the public and private part is now I have people that I can sit down with that I have credibility, they have some confidence and trust in what I say that I can have a dialogue with them to talk about real issues or real problems where if you were in that sort of war mode, that fighting mode, if you didn't know this person, think about an case. If you just got an argument with people and stuff like that and you sit down and now you wanna have a serious discussion, how often are they gonna be versus saying you have a foundation to build on? Again, this is common sense and unfortunately in our political world today and I hate to say it, I think it's even more true in Washington, I think political sense has gotten pushed too far away because I tell people it's like how did I bring people together in Michigan? I said we're one big family. Even though we don't agree on everything, we still need to get along and let's show progress and I view that and how I wanna deal with China and so I promoted it, I promoted two or three things and I'm proud of that. So I'm gonna give the audience a crack at you but I did wanna ask you one last thing which is since you were governor, what is the federal level not yet about being a governor? Is there something unique about being a governor that you wish Washington understood? Because we hear it in a very cliche way. People say, oh, governors have a different view. If only people were more like governors but what is it that you wish people understood from DC about the state level or vice versa? What are the federal realities that people at the state level don't really understand? Do you think the international are gonna have that much other way? Yeah, one of a couple of things I would observe. One is just the point of, the difference between governing and being against something. It's much harder to govern than to simply be against something and if you look at our dynamic of one side or the other, it's easy to be mad at somebody else to be against something, to say why something is bad. It's actually more work to say I may not agree with you, but how can we show common value and a benefit to our citizens? In an illustration, the context I'll use here is I'm proud in the eight years I was governor, I had President Obama for part of that, I had President Trump for part of that. I never criticized either one of those individuals and people wondered why. I viewed it as common sense. I mean, the people of Michigan didn't hire me to be governor to call people at the federal level names when I'm supposed to be partnering with them and both of us at both levels of government were hired to deliver better results to our citizens. Isn't that what government should be about? So my goal was to say, I'm not gonna talk about what we disagree on or why I may not like you, I'm here to say what do we agree on and how can we better our people? That's something that's missing here too much. The classic illustration and then this is a somewhat different topic was sequester. I'll never ever forget that being a governor. I was here for an NGA conference, the National Governors Association Conference when sequester kicked in and had been promoted as the scorched earth thing that the federal government was gonna end, life would be over and stuff like that so it was gonna force the budget to be more responsible. So sequester happened today, I was at a hotel here waiting for a conference and I watched everyone walking around the day it kicked in and everyone acted like it was a normal day. There was no difference in behavior of anyone that I saw. That's ridiculous, how we need to get over that. The other illustration of how people can work together as I can tell you, governors as peers is I enjoy being in NGA and organizations like that because I could do work with other governors that were Democrats, I was a Republican and it didn't matter because we were all in the same boat. We were all chief executives of something and our people didn't care about whether we got a good idea from a Democrat or Republican and they just want us to do good stuff for them. So governors tend to get along real well among ourselves without the politics and that's a good role model. All right, well I teased the Q and A and all these hands went up so let's, we're gonna start over here, there's a mic that's gonna come around and if you could just say who you are just identify yourself and your organization. Thank you, I'm Zhao Yunfeng, reporter at the BBC. So two years ago Alibaba had major events in Michigan and promised to create a million jobs in the U.S. Do you have any updates on the job creation and other collaborations between your state and Alibaba? And do you consider it as a failed promise just like some call the Foxconn factory in Wisconsin? Never realized. Well I would separate those two cases because one's much more tangible. Actually Michigan was in the hunt for Foxconn but I have limits about I won't buy people into our state. I'll do good business with people and I thought the price was too high for our state in the Foxconn case. With Alibaba I view that as the million jobs wasn't about Michigan but they actually did some good things in Michigan in terms of trying things. And so it didn't work out the way I think they intended it but I'm not gonna overly criticize them for that because they were trying to innovate. And again I want Michigan to be a place of innovation. So one of the things I can tell you is coming up with that new ideas and trying them and not having them work is how you do great innovation and entrepreneurship. And that's one of the things I did with our team becoming governor. Because again we were a broken state. We were 50 out of 50. How do you get the top 10 in eight years? You gotta innovate. So I told our team and I said we're never gonna potentially do something that didn't work but if we didn't do pilots, if we didn't try things and if we didn't have a situation where everything we worked on, if everything we worked on worked it meant we weren't doing our job because we weren't pushing the envelope hard enough to innovate and it's interesting that if you think risk adverse in the private sector, public sector is a lot more risk adverse because it's like politicians don't like to be criticized. So I view that as, that was a good shot and I would be happy if they wanted to come, try to come up with another new idea or variation and do it again. Okay, we got one in the front. Bring you on, Mike. Thank you Governor. You're very thoughtful and you're candid and those are great traits. So let me move to something we haven't talked about. I really value what you have to say. China's human rights record is not good. Right now, Uyghurs are in reeducation camps and we can use a lot of other words to describe what's happening. How do you see the leverage that you prize by getting to know people being in a cordial manner affecting the role that you and your peers could play in asking the Chinese what are you doing? This is not befitting a great power with a great tradition. I think you have some things to teach us here. Yeah, I wish I had a great answer to that because that's a really tough question but it is an important question. And we do need to be proactive about bringing those up. That's that question of how do you balance sovereign rights versus trying to be constructive? So the kind of things that would come to mind and I'm just sort of thinking aloud with you to be open with you in that context are there ways that we could find ways to put people to work in that province in businesses that would give them some hope and opportunity? Again, that doesn't directly address all the civil rights or the human rights issues but if you can show some success, again, I can't speak for them but much of their concern is about problems coming back to the central government and such. If you can show that you can improve their lives so they wanna contribute, they can be constructive, then hopefully you can get them to be less paranoid about the need to control people. I'm not sure that would work but isn't it worth talking about and trying to do it in a constructive way that way in addition to, cause we should talk about those things. I mean, again, I raise them carefully because again, you wanna do it with respect because again, it's their country but at the same time, it's more in the context of in our value system, this would not work. The broader question, the other part of what you ask Israel concern to me too is what they're doing with monitoring people. The whole privacy issue, again, all those kind of issues are truly scary things in terms of those technologies existing around the world and becoming more prevalent. So one of the things I would come back to our country on that I think we're doing a terrible job on is our lack of public discussion and dialogue and the need for thoughtful policies on privacy. Europe's doing a much better job than we are and I'm disappointed. I'd love to be a part of that dialogue on better privacy in our country in respect to rights too. Thank you. Let's do this side a little bit. There's one in the back there and we'll work our way around. Hi, I'm from the Naval Academy. Can you talk about the difference in the thinking behind the innovation model in Michigan versus what you've observed in China and you think the relative strengths and weaknesses of those are? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think one of the things that I think we still have an advantage of is on the creativity side and the innovation side. I think we need to do more to foster that. I think we need better industrial policy from our federal government to encourage some of that. Historically, we had some things that worked great. Some of the old DARPA programs and some of those kind of things were really cool. I think we have underutilized assets like the national labs with the changing evolution of the role of nuclear weapons and everything else. I think we have a lot of capacity that is not doing broader things that could be more helpful. I'm excited to see some of the cool things going on with NASA now to show the reemergence of how we're investing in farther out R&D. I think that's something that America really does have a competitive advantage of is this idea of really changing science, changing technology at the forefront of things. I think where China is really good is the fast follower model. And I think that's something that we need to understand better and we should be trying to do better in our country. And that goes to Evan, your comment about Shenzhen. If you have an idea, if you do have this advanced idea and you wanna turn it into a product that could be produced at mass scale, going to Shenzhen is probably one of the fastest, best places in the world because you've got one stop shopping and you can go to one place that can do it. One of the opportunities we have, and I've actually had this discussion with some people in Silicon Valley, I said that's where Silicon Valley in Michigan should be getting married closer because Silicon Valley is doing a lot of innovation and then software, they're great. But when it comes to converting that to a real product, it's like, if you want something machine or if you want something built and made really well, Michigan, I'll take anybody on in the world. So I wish we'd find ways that we could marry aspects of Silicon Valley and Michigan more closely together to say, now we have more integrated one stop shopping. And again, physically we don't need to do that. It's how we work better together in a virtual fashion to make those things happen. There's one right here. I was gonna come down to the front, now come back to you, yeah. I'll follow up on that question that we just had. Phyllis Yoshida, Sasekawa USA, formerly US Department of Energy. It's great to manufacture and you have to manufacture, but to get back to the innovation part, what are you doing in Michigan or what do you think Michigan is doing with the invention part? I've been lucky enough to work with Michigan State who are training their younger faculty on how to really work globally in the right way in a good way that helps Michigan. What else do you see going on? Yeah, the good part is that, well you mentioned one of our greatest assets, Michigan State University's Fabulous. University of Michigan is, these are truly world-class places that are doing research and development in a wonderful fashion. The other one though is, people underestimate what's going on in the companies. Michigan ranks probably second or third in industrial R&D. People forget all these companies actually have big R&D shops and they're good at what they do. Again, I would encourage you to look at an autonomous vehicle. Look at the technology in one of these things. It's absolutely incredible. So a lot of that's going on. What I would say is better coordination. The part that's happening now though is we're starting to see more outside the university and more outside the big companies with startups. And again, I think we do need to encourage that, but it gets back to that culture. That's why I appreciate that question about trying something that didn't work. One of the problems we had in Michigan, one of the reasons we ended up at the bottom is we'd created a culture where failure was viewed as failure as opposed to a learning experience. And so we killed our entrepreneurial spirit off in many respects because it was like if you just didn't succeed or if you had something that worked, where again in the valley or these other places, it's not great to have it not work, but it's not a stigma to say you just don't know what you're doing. It's like, okay, do it again and hopefully it's gonna work. Let's come on this side of the room. I'm trying to jump around the room, so I'll get that come to you. Edward Lasansky, it's American University in Moscow. We have now two bad actors which always come in use in the federal level, China and Russia. So since you're doing so many good things in China, are you now involved in the same capacity in Russia when you're a government or you're suggesting new government is the same? Yeah, we really haven't had the opportunity to do much in Russia in terms of that regard. China was the biggest opportunity and you can understand for market size and opportunity and supply chain integration. We've not had that in the Russian, with the Russian economy over many components or many products. So China was the natural. The places I spent most of my time be open with you in terms of focus were Canada first, Mexico because Big Train Partners China. Israel was a major place and the reason Israel was a hotbed was after Silicon Valley, I think it's probably the most innovative place in the world and they need a market to sell their products. So I viewed Michigan as a natural gateway for Israel to go back and forth. So that's where I spent most of the time but I've always encouraged people to do business across the globe. The two things I tell people when I was governor, I said there are two fundamental assumptions I make that I base my decisions on. One is globalization is only gonna continue and largely be a good thing. The more we become global, the more we can raise standards of living across the world, hopefully it becomes a safer, better world for all of us. The second one is, and this is the tough one that we're struggling with in my view, is the velocity of change is only going faster. So I don't think traditional planning works as well. I don't think how government needs to think about doing their plans works as well. I think that's why you're finding so many angry people is the velocity of change is going so fast now. A lot of good, hardworking people in our country don't know how to deal with all that change coming at them this fast and they're struggling. They're starting to feel despair and hopelessness and that anger is showing up and being channeled into issues that really aren't helping things versus fundamentally helping people improve the quality of their life. So to go full circle would be great if we found ways to do more business with Russia and other places. Again, that's how you make a safer, better world. Understanding that there are strategic issues you can't ignore that you have to be proactive about addressing those. And sanctions we can't ignore. Yes. Let's go back here. Thank you, Governor. My name is Dong Hui Yu with China the real news agency of Hong Kong. Today in annual reports released by the US-China Business Council indicates that the trade conflict has caused drop in states' exports to China including Michigan. Are you concerned about let this trend line will continue even though the US and China reach a trade deal in the next couple of weeks but the high-tech competition and decoupling continues? Thank you. I'm concerned more globally. I mean we have issues with Mexico and Canada. We're still trying to work through trade relations there. That's had a price to it. So all these things have a price to them and what I would say is I hope that when resolutions come and I hope there will be a resolution relatively soon between China and the US at least in moving us back to a more proactive environment is that they deal with some of the fundamental underlying issues as opposed to simply talking about trade deficits or trade balances. I think there are real issues that we do need to address with respect to intellectual property ownership requirements several of these things that I hope we can make some progress on because again let's get these issues solved so we can do more together and I doubt they'll solve all the issues but let's show positive progress so we can come back in another cycle and hopefully constructively move towards solving those parts of the issue. Can I ask you, sorry, I had to interrupt but. So you've run for office in Michigan. Michigan was the state the president won. If the president makes a trade deal presumably he's made the political calculation that he can sell the deal at the retail level to constituencies and stakeholders around the country including states like Michigan that gave him the presidency. How does one make a retail case for trade these days generically but with China in particular given some of the challenges that you just mentioned. How do you expect the president to do that? Well I can't speak for the president. I mean if you step back and look at the big picture the fundamental thing that drive ultimately drive most voter behavior and again there'll be periods where you can find anger channeled into kind of issues that are polarizing but ultimately and they'll get people for one election or so but to keep people for a sustained basis it comes back to their own lives. People bring it back home ultimately to say are they better or worse off? Do they believe they have a career opportunity or a future or do their kids? I mean in Michigan our issue was our kids were all leaving the state and that's what brought my wife. I didn't know I was gonna be running for governor so I went out to date night in 2009. I was having a nice glass of wine and we started talking about our kids may leave the state. My wife looks at me and says we should talk about you running for governor. And I'm proud to report I'm three for four. That's pretty good but a lot of it was is how do you impact people's lives? So one of the things that concern me and I am on my soapbox here is a lot of the discussion when you talk about both the Trump supporters and the new progressives they're channeling a lot of anger and energy into issues that they're significant issues but they're not the issues that are gonna profoundly affect the average person's life as much as are they gonna have a better shot at a job, a better shot at a career, are they gonna have a better or worse quality of life and are they gonna be able to continue living where they are? And I think when it comes to the trade thing is how does it get characterized to be constructive or positive in helping that equation? Let's come right here. Senator? I'm a startup founder from Michigan and I have a pretty easy question I think. What are, do you foresee our current governor? Do you foresee her going to China and continuing these trade relationships and whatnot? I encourage her to do so, I sure hope so. To be open with that, I doubt she'll do it the same level I did but if she does it in a way that's significantly more than the average governor I think that can have a huge positive impact and to be open with that, I volunteered to be helpful in that process. So that's one reason I was excited to come here today. I mean, I hope to continue a dialogue with some of the relations I built in China. Not trying to compete, old governors can go out in pastures. So I'm not trying to be a governor but at the same time, if it can be constructive to say personal relationships and people relationships on the public and private side, I'm happy to do that. Hi, Jeff Vialos, I'm a lawyer in Washington. That's a terrible thing to say, right? And used to be in the defense department a while back. You mentioned autonomy as an important technology for Michigan's future in January and of course that relates to artificial intelligence. The QVLive effective US policies and laws developing essentially kind of curb materially US high tech engagement with China in that technology. Even for civil projects because of the feeling and concern that the Chinese can move those things over to the military side, even if there's no evidence. How do you feel about that policy? And if you don't like it, what's the alternative? Yeah, I think it's interesting. The whole thing of artificial intelligence is something that merits a lot more public discussion and thoughtful discussion. I'll give you an editorial comment and I'll get more into specifics because I joke to people, most people don't know what they're talking about when they talk about AI. I view it as if you go to a cocktail party or an event or a reception today and you wanna impress them when you go up and say, yeah, I was working on this AI thing and you're a star. And that's how most people view AI. What it is is really about smart learning, large groups of data, analyzing trends. And I think the Chinese are doing that and in many respects, I don't think they have to rely on us as much as they're doing more than we are in terms of how it's being applied. I think it's important that we also do important work and understand it's sort of like that hard drive illustration. There are things that are common things that are common sense things. They're gonna be global no matter what. To say we have something proprietary that we're gonna change the world or protect the world by doing it, that's ridiculous. There are gonna be some features and some important things that we're gonna need to understand that we would not apply like the Chinese will. But I would really encourage us to do the research, to understand how those could be used and how to understand the negative consequences and what could be done to mitigate or stop those things if required. So I don't want us to put our head in the sand to sort of say, well, we're not gonna do them and just walk away from it and ignore it. We need to have, again, higher standards of ethics and safeguards to make sure they are not misused. And I think we confuse that discussion in this country by sort of saying, if we sort of ignore it and stick our head in the sand, we're doing the same thing as setting higher standards and safeguards. We're not. And so I'm concerned that we need to be more proactive on privacy and cybersecurity by far than we are today in a thoughtful fashion recognizing let's not stop the development, let's just not try to control everything, let's figure out what needs to be controlled, what we need to manage, what needs to be developed, and then put in the safeguards and protections to do it right because it may be an important thing to defend ourselves, not necessarily from the Chinese, but from something else in the world at some point, whether it be a third party actor or someone else as opposed to just sort of ignoring the topic. You do worry about the dual use applications of some of those technologies. I absolutely worry about it. I mean, I'm a techie, I'm a proud nerd, and I've seen stuff that scares me. And that's why I view it as just as I'm proactive on promoting stuff, I also believe you have a responsibility to be equally proactive on things you view as a threat or a challenge. And to be open with you, I don't think we're doing a very, a great job on either one because we're spending too much time arguing about a bunch of other stuff. There's one over here. My name is Bobby Pestronk. I'm a small businessman now, but I spent about 35 years in Michigan, mostly as a governmental public health person. Very familiar with the slide and with the upswing that's happened there. Part of the story in Michigan that we now understand is the legacy of some of that great success, both socially and environmentally in Michigan. And I wonder, given the promotion of AI and automotive technology and the new technologies that you're promoting, whether you can share what you would envision as the downsides socially and environmentally that we might wanna protect against, be aware of now so that we can protect against them affecting the state of Michigan and other places as we now know that the state has been affected. Yeah, in terms of the whole mobility thing, a couple of comments I'd give you. One is there are things we do need to worry about. The AI piece and stuff, it's the thoughtful introduction in a way that doesn't jeopardize safety. Because again, I think there are companies out there that are over promoting it in some fashion and hyping it in some ways that I think could do damage to the whole introduction of these technologies if it's not done more carefully. One of the great things with mobility in terms of great concerns is what it's gonna do to employment in terms of the classes of physicians that job destruction will take place along with job creation. And historically, our country does a terrible job of dealing with something until it becomes a crisis. And the illustration I would give you is at some point, not for a number of years, but if you're a truck driver, you have all these Uber and Lyft people, you can see it on the walls that those positions could go away as autonomous vehicles get introduced. You're talking hundreds of thousands of jobs, millions of jobs. It's not gonna happen overnight, but we should be proactively finding ways to retrain people, to help counsel them, work with them, to understand where future positions are and how to do that. And that should be happening now. That discussion should start now. So there are a lot of important things like that that we need to be going through in that process. So, again, it's about being responsible as we walk down this path. Environmentally, again, I think environmentally you don't, I don't see as many downsides necessarily. Again, that depends on what goes on. This is where, if you include electrification and the other power systems, in addition to autonomous and connected vehicles, you have to ask the question, it's not just about putting more vehicles or vehicles that drive themselves, it's about smart, intelligent transportation systems. Because, again, we could cause more congestion, we could cause environmental issues or other challenges or the need for unnecessary infrastructure. I actually hope by doing smart cities and intelligent infrastructure, we could better utilize the infrastructure we need so we don't have to pave more, we don't have to have more communities that are these greenfield places versus redeveloping urban areas. I think there's a lot of good, but you have to be smart, there can be some downsides. We have time for a few more. There's one here. Thank you. KT Wang with NTDTV. My question is, how concerned are you about the Chinese economic espionage? Because nowadays we have seen more and more cases disclosed that Chinese scientists are experts working in American companies and they steal the know-how or the intellectual properties. So from your experience doing business with China and do you concern about this, how can you protect that? Yeah, I think that was my point about being understanding that these are real issues, you can't ignore them. And how do you build in appropriate safeguards and look at those kind of issues? A lot of it depends on how we do our practices here. In terms of, and the challenge here is, we have the private sector and we have the public sector. And there are some very good companies on the private sector. There are some companies that don't do good practices. Same thing in the government side. So this is where I think we need a more thoughtful dialogue collectively and about publishing standards. One of the things I was proud of, I mentioned the National Governance Association earlier. I actually helped share their cyber initiatives for a number of years. And I think we did some very good work products to share with other states, other governments and other places about here are good standards that we should be adopting to put preventions in place. Because part of this is China clearly is a risk for that. There's no doubt about that. There are instances that have been documented. But this is also a global problem that if it's not China, there's gonna be other places in the world, whether they be national actors or third parties. This is something that's not gonna go away. When I talk about cybersecurity, I don't view cybersecurity as an acute condition. I view it as a chronic condition. So what do I mean by that? It's not like a one-off case where one person has done something bad. I view it as we adopt these technologies as we become more online and integrated. We're subjecting ourselves to a greater and greater risk of sort of having a chronic condition that you can never say it's gonna go away. It's never not gonna be a problem. It's really how do you manage it effectively to minimize the negative impact and the damage that can do? And we do need to be more proactive about that. So I actually had exercises at the state, those famous tabletop kind of exercises you hear about where I'd push our people to essentially try to crash our state, not just the state government, our utilities grid, everything else, and how would we respond to that and how would you deal with that in a cyber sense? More, we have one here. I'm Ma Wingsheng with Xinhua News Agency. Thank you, Governor. I have a question regarding, you just talked about some of the dual-use technology, some of the advanced technologies. So there is the measures to control the export list, export control list, and the case of Huawei, and there are some other citing national security issue as a reason to restrict trade. So are you concerned about some of the measures that could potentially impede technology advances globally? Do you, what suggestions do you have for the United States and China to address the issue of national concern, but at the same time, enhance cooperation just to advance technology? Yeah. Yeah, one that starts with an open dialogue about understanding that is a real issue. Secondly, I wouldn't restrict it just to China, China being a great illustration, but we need to be thoughtful about that across the globe. But then it comes down to saying, do we have the right expertise, first of all, to understand what is truly a national interest that should be protected? And what I would tell you is historically, I'm not sure that work has been done as well as it should, where I know of cases of many things that really weren't a national interest that needed to be protected, but they ended up on the list, and that causes a lot of chaos and doesn't help matters at all, versus finding that truly short list to say, these are things that are that important. But the other part that goes with it, and I think the 5G situation sort of illustrates that, is okay, we sort of say we want controls on it, but if we don't actually do it in our country at all, we can't do it. So there are some cases where US policy, I think we've gotten caught up in that, and I don't think we can ignore that, but we also need to be more thoughtful to say if we view it that strategic, are we making appropriate investments somehow in our country to make sure we're actually doing that work, and that's an issue on us. So I think we need to do a better job of that too. I'll give you one illustration, let me broaden it out in some ways to show you, it's about how to work with people, co-opetition where you're sort of competing, but you're working together, and mobility is a great case that I'm proud of. I mentioned several times about how we want to be the world's leader in mobility in Michigan. So you have two ways to do that. One approach would have been to say, we're just better than everyone else, we're not gonna share with everyone else, we're gonna push them away, and we're gonna do our own thing. What do you think the likelihood of Michigan being successful if that would be? One, not real high, because the velocity of change and the development of all the stuff around the world is there's gonna be other great stuff happening in other parts of the world. So given that's not a possibility, what's the right thing to do? What I think I did is I said, I want us to be the best partner in the world. We're in the lead right now, and if we're the best partner in the world signing agreements with everyone else on collaborating, and we do that the best way, we're gonna stay in front because we're the best collaborator and best partners. So actually I did agreements on mobility, collaborative agreements to do with the countries of China, the UK, the Netherlands, Australia. Think about this, they actually did agreements with the state of Michigan. That's not a normal thing for them. I was pretty proud of that to say we were able to establish the presence that we had and that they wanted to partner with us. So we did run some risk of them trying to come take things from us, but at the same time, I had confidence we were in the lead that if we were actually collaborating and the coordinating mechanism to do that, that would establish us in long-term leadership. I thought that was a much more common sense answer than to say, okay, everyone's got their own little silo and proprietary, and if we're really lucky, we're gonna come out on head. I didn't view that as a high percentage win strategy. Okay, before we wrap, we could do one more if there is one. Oh, one more, okay, you'll be the last one. Thank you, Governor. I just wanted to get your thoughts on the current federal government strategy with regard to Huawei and ZTE and how there's been a lot of reporting and discussion about the US trying to dissuade its allies from integrating Huawei into their 5G networks, as well as the federal government trying to block out Huawei, ZTE, China Mobile, and others from federal government markets. I was just wanting to get your opinion on whether you think this is the right approach or if there are other approaches that might make more sense. I think we're already in a problem situation that we should be using this as a case study for the future, and that sort of goes back to how I was answering a couple of the prior questions, is to say, instead of saying how do we simply draw lines, we need to be looking at ourselves to say what's appropriate strategic interest in the development of technology within our own country, because part of the reason we get to this is we don't have alternatives that we've done ourselves. And what do you do in that context? I mentioned to Evan, I was reading a report recently by one of these consulting analyst firms, and they were doing the top 20 companies in 5G. So I went through the executive summary of the report of the 20 companies. I can't tell you the exact number, but eight to 10 were Chinese. Eight to 10. There were probably two or three American companies on the list. The others were Europeans. So again, I think we've already created a problem situation here that we should be using as a case study for learning to say, let's look at where the future is going. It isn't that hard to figure out there's five, 10, 15, 20 different areas that may be out there to say, are we doing enough true research and development? Are we figuring out how to commercialize things? Are we doing appropriate safeguards? And it shouldn't be just about drawing the line when it's later. We should be doing things in the earlier stages and setting the foundation of both what we do within our country, but also how we protect that and manage that in a thoughtful fashion. We appreciate you coming to Carnegie for your small dose of Washington this week and please join me in thanking you. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.