 and I'll turn it over to another industry participant, Ed Walters. Thank you very much, Mike, and thank you, Carl, and John Podesta and the team of Center for American Progress for having us here today. It's so exciting for me to be in this room because it's so many friends and heroes and new acquaintances kind of all in one place. And I'm deeply nerdy about this stuff, but it's cool to be in a room where other people are too. And I really love to see the innovations of like a gub pulse or a fed thread or organlaws.org or even public resource. There's a lot of people who are innovating at the end result. But it's also really cool to see the government innovating too. You see Ray or Mike or Beth Novak, people who are really concerned about getting it right from the government's perspective. And that's a really exciting development for my perspective. What I feel like is happening right now is they're kind of converging on each other, but they're not quite connecting. And I thought maybe from that perspective, it might be a good idea to take just one step back and think about what law.gov might do to connect innovators on both sides of the spectrum. I was very pleased to be a part of the first law.gov workshop at Stanford where somebody asked the difficult question, is law.gov trying to put Westlaw and Lexis out of business? This was right in the middle of the health care debate, and it had a little bit of the flavor of, is this socialism? Will there be law.gov death panels? And I suggested at the time that, no, this is not something that's striving to put Westlaw or Lexis or Fastcase or Justia out of business. It's public infrastructure. It's like the interstate highway system. And after that meeting, I actually read a little bit about the interstate highway system. And as the law.gov workshops progressed over the last few months, it's really fascinating to me the way in which those two stories kind of converged. The interstate highway system in the US has its origins in World War I. It was the first war where moving stuff by cars over roads was a big part of the war effort. And after World War I, when the troops came back, the secretary of the army said, hey, you know what? We might need to move troops in the US. It's important for our common defense to make sure that our roads are ready for it. So much like our inventory of legal materials, the army said in 1919, we're going to take an inventory of our public infrastructure. We're going to find out what it takes to move a convoy of military trucks from a spot not far from here at the ellipse across the country over public roads to San Francisco. Chronically, this was a young Lieutenant Colonel named Dwight Eisenhower. The trip covered an unprecedented 3,251 miles. It took 62 days. The average speed of the convoy was 6 miles an hour. It lost 9 out of 54 vehicles. Most of these vehicles were being lost in washouts. They were getting lost in quicksand or falling into mud. It wasn't anything like the kind of modern system of roads. And it wasn't that long ago. There were 230 separate traffic accidents. And mostly it was because the roads, well, couldn't support the infrastructure. So this was the first real survey of the readiness of our infrastructure, of our roads. And it reminds me quite a bit of Erica Wayne's effort to take an inventory of legal materials. What does the infrastructure of our public laws look like today? In World War II, Eisenhower drew the short straw. And he had bad road duty again. Two things he had to do. One, he had to build a supply chain across North Africa from Casablanca to Tunis. Obviously, there were no roads. It was deserts. It was mountains. Some parts of his supply chain were supplied by goats. So this is a guy who feels the imperative of good infrastructure. Then after D-Day, he was a part of the race to Berlin. And he had to go from basically the beaches in Normandy through these terrible hedgerows with trucks, tanks, equipment, water, food, gasoline. And so he trudged slowly in this terrible race for time across France until he got to the German Autobahn, which at the time was this beautiful six-lane highway. It was the most gorgeous example of public infrastructure that he'd seen. Obviously terrible, but in the same way he realized the military significance of it. And once they hit the Autobahn, they were straight into Berlin. When he saw that, he said, I've got to have one of these. So when Eisenhower became president, one of the most important things he did was to spend $25 billion in 1956 in the Federal Aid Highway Act, which would establish the first interstate highway system. There had been attempts before, 1938, 1944. But without any funding, they were really just blueprints. They were a good idea. With a dedicated funding source, we were on our way to our first real infrastructure. I think it's important to realize also that in 1956, we had a very good railroad system. If you were a business and you needed to move 18 tons of grain from Chicago to St. Louis, you'd have a really good system to do that. Unfortunately, for the railroads, which are the Microsofts or the Apple computers of that age, they were really only affordable to the biggest of American businesses. If you needed to move 18 bushels of apples from Seattle to Salt Lake City, you probably couldn't use a railroad to do it. And if you needed to move trucks and materials from Washington to San Francisco, the railroad just wasn't going to be your way. Did Eisenhower want to eradicate the railroads? No way. He just said, roads are going to be important for our infrastructure. And this interstate highway system is going to do all sorts of things, to create commerce, to move cargo, to help us move materials. It wasn't nationalizing the railroads. It was building new public infrastructure. And what did this do? First of all, it built new markets for the railroads. I mean, suddenly things that you move by rail had all kinds of retail outlets that they never had before. So it was kind of market creating and market enhancing for railroads. Second of all, for shipping companies, it created the opportunity for the first time to have a shipping company of national scale. And third of all, it allowed all kinds of entrepreneurs to create new businesses around the interstate highway system. So Eisenhower think of my company, Fast Case, as like the UPS of 1956. UPS started in 1907. It was a little shipping company, it chipped stuff by truck up and down the West Coast. It was the establishment of the interstate highway system that said, now UPS could be a truly national industry, creating markets where they want ones before, not to try to get rid of the railroads, not to try to drive anybody else out of business, but to create new commerce where it didn't exist before. So what lessons do we learn from the creation of the interstate highway system? Well, today we have very efficient private railroads for moving legal information. They're expensive and they're often worth every penny. They're fantastic. We also have a system of state roads for information. They're maintained by state government organizations. They don't exist with very good standards. They don't interoperate very well, but they're there. Some of the infrastructure is already built. And believe me, we spend a fortune every year kind of navigating these state roads. So I can tell you what Erica tells you, they're in some pretty bad disrepair and they have a big need for infrastructure. There are very few new challenges in law.gov. We see these throughout our history, the interstate highway system, the creation of the internet, putting the SEC data online in the past. So a lot of these problems we've seen before, recognizing there's a problem to be solved, patchwork state and federal systems that don't interoperate, the difficulty of establishing meaningful standards between the government, states, individuals. And then finally, the challenges of funding, which you see up and down organizations like this, both for nonprofits, for the government itself and for entrepreneurs. Second, the thing we've learned is that creation of a new public infrastructure doesn't necessarily have to compete with private industry. It can create new markets for incumbents and create great opportunities for entrepreneurs. Third, vision is really important, but nothing important happens until a sustainable, dedicated source of funding is identified. These 1938 and 1944 bills had beautiful ambitions for what public roads would look like. But until Eisenhower in 1956 put $25 billion behind it, you really couldn't build the roads. And then finally, I think we tend in hindsight to view these kind of events as inevitable. I mean, of course there was gonna be an interstate highway system, but I can assure you there was nothing inevitable about it. It wasn't until a group of very smart, very dedicated people, I would postulate much like the group of people assembled in this room today, decided that they were gonna make it happen and really put their shoulder behind it, that it actually occurred. Eisenhower, I think, put out a pretty good mission statement for law.gov when he signed the bill in 1956. He said, our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods. The ceaseless flow of information throughout the Republic is matched by individual and commercial movement over a vast system of interconnected highways, crisscrossing the country. Together, the uniting forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear, United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts. Thank you.