Peter Thiel and Charles Bolden on The World in 2050: What is the Next Big Idea?

Good afternoon, and welcome to our final session, "The World in 2050: The Next Big Idea." I'm Margit Wennmachers, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a trustee of the World Affairs Council, and I'll be your moderator today. World Affairs 2012 has focused on the many security, economic, and resource challenges facing the world and the US in particular. Last night's keynote address examined America's path in a shifting global landscape and how we can adapt in the ever-changing political and economic systems. This afternoon, we will examine the road ahead and the prospects for innovation and big ideas that have the potential to reinvigorate the American economy and spirit. I'm honored to bring two more voices to this weekend's discussion, Mr. Charles Bolden and Mr. Peter Thiel.

Since 2009, Charles Bolden—or should I call you Charlie?—Charlie Bolden has been the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A retired Marine Corps general, he spent 14 years as a member of NASA's astronaut office, traveling into orbit four times aboard the space shuttle. Here to discuss NASA in a dynamic international environment, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Charlie Bolden.

Thank you. Thanks very much. In the interest of time, especially since my wife is here and she told me, "Don't wing it," then I brought some prepared remarks, so if you'll bear with me, I'll go through these, and I think I can stay on schedule and keep us that way. But I really want to thank you all for inviting me to speak to the Northern California World Affairs Council, or I guess as you call it, the World Affairs Council of Northern California. Absolutely. For those who may wonder, "Do I know anything about the World Affairs Council?" well, I was, I was some kind of long-term member of the Houston World Affairs Council and served on our board of directors for a while. And I've been with one of your sister councils here in California, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, about two years ago.

You know, the last time I was out here, we talked mostly about my beginning impressions of NASA. I had just been in office less than a year, so my impressions were quite different then. But since then, when we were several months away from closing out the shuttle program, lots of things have happened. We have completed the 30-year amazing story of the space shuttle, and we're now off on another era of space exploration. In February, this past February, it was my privilege to share NASA's FY13 budget request, a $17.7 billion budget for NASA and the nation, and to embark on an ambitious plan of space exploration that we hope will take us farther into the solar system than we've ever been before with humans.

Despite a constrained fiscal environment, this budget continues to ambitiously implement the space exploration program agreed to by the President and the Congress. Bipartisan vote of the Congress, if you can believe that, since you don't hear that very often coming out of the Congress lately. But it laid the foundation for remarkable discoveries not just in space, but here on Earth. This gathering has been discussing what may lie ahead in the coming decades, the pivoting space program of these times, and I am confident that there will be definitely a vibrant space program 40 years down the road. We'll look back at some of our actions today as the building blocks on which that future was established.

I'm talking about the development of new technologies, such as in-space propulsion, on-orbit fueling depots, precision landing, and many others on which we have our eyes today. Technologies that will be essential for reaching destinations beyond low Earth orbit, or LEO, as we refer to it. I'm talking about a heavy-lift rocket and crew capsule that right now are undergoing tests and refinement for human missions farther into the solar system. I'm also talking about creation of an entirely new segment of the economy, brought about by commercial access to LEO, not only for government users, but industry, academia, and private citizens. I'm talking about science continuing to rewrite textbooks and taking us even farther in our quest of knowledge about our planet, our universe, and ourselves.

I'm also talking about something that relates to everyone in this room, the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, that includes new types of airplanes and many new technologies to make them, the airspace, and the airports more fuel-efficient and more environmentally friendly. I want to remind everyone that we also have spaceports. These already exist in this country at the Kennedy Space Center, at Wallops Island in Virginia, in Mojave, California, and in New Mexico, just to name a few. The success of our modern exploration effort will be judged in part on how well we continue to make space exploration about global partnership, particularly since it is clear that no one nation can do it alone and the benefits to be gained are for all of humanity.

With NASA's long history of successful international cooperation and more and more nations reliant on space-based capabilities to support their day-to-day lives, I have every reason to believe that we will continue to build strong relationships around the world and create a unified effort for expanding humanity's horizons beyond our planet. Whether that means sending an astronaut to orbit, designing experiments, being the main supplier of a crucial part of one of our new observatories, or being a researcher who analyzes data from our spacecraft, there's going to be a role in exploration for everyone who wants to participate. The period in which we now live represents a once-in-a-generation shift from a flagship program, the Space Shuttle, to a new way of doing things, a new paradigm, and a new set of priorities.

What does this mean for the future? NASA is in the future business, and that means shaping tomorrow and helping us to reach our higher potential as human beings. It's a very exciting time to be involved in space exploration. The retirement of the Space Shuttle last July after 30 incredible years of flight represented a bittersweet time for us. But the next great era of space exploration is quickly taking shape. In fact, our most recent call for astronauts drew more than 6,300 applications, the second highest we've ever had. Some from this group will become the NASA Astronaut Class of 2013. They're going to be the ones who will pioneer new ways of reaching space, and on commercial vehicles, and possibly travel to an asteroid and lead the way for those who will go to Mars in the 2030s.

Space exploration strengthens us all, not only with the new discoveries we make, but with the numerous technologies that are developed with applications toward improving life on Earth. Besides that, it brings us together as one world. In addition to all the science and research on human health that has been and continues to be conducted on the International Space Station, or ISS, one of the station's historic achievements is how it has demonstrated that many nations can work together on a project of enormous scope, complete it, and then keep it going. Fifteen nations contributed to the development and assembly of the International Space Station, and even more are or will soon become involved in the program through their utilization of this amazing research facility on orbit.

The ISS represents our toehold to the rest of the solar system. What we learn there is going to make it possible for us to venture farther. It will help us become a truly spacefaring people. Already, we've had people in orbit 24/7 for more than 11 years. Just the thought of this would have been science fiction when I was a child growing up in South Carolina. Not only is the ISS the largest, most complex international scientific and engineering program in history, it's a test bed for future technologies and systems and is a tangible symbol of unprecedented international cooperation. Just take a look outside on a clear evening and you might see a very bright shining star moving overhead. Important that it's moving.

That is the International Space Station, the temporary home for the international crews living and working in space. The station is a world-class laboratory that conducts full-time research. Now that its construction is complete, we expect many more partnerships in the future with academia, industry, other U.S. agencies, and as I mentioned earlier, other countries to help bring it to its full potential and fully utilize this incredible investment. Within the next month or two, we expect the private company SpaceX of Hawthorne, California will launch and berth an uncrewed cargo vehicle to the station, demonstrating a new capability, the first time a commercial entity has done this. Later this year, Orbital Sciences Corporation, another commercial entity, is planning to conduct its first demonstration mission of a similar cargo resupply capability.

By 2017, we at NASA are planning to rely on American companies for crew transportation and rescue services to low-Earth orbit. NASA is currently working with the private sector to incentivize companies to build and operate safe, reliable, and cost-effective commercial human space transportation systems. Initially, NASA plans to be a partner with U.S. industry, providing technical and financial assistance during the development phase. In the long term, NASA plans to be a customer for these services, procuring transportation services for U.S. and U.S.-designated astronauts to the space station. These are just a few of the many milestones on our path to opening that new sector of the economy that we think will be a job-creating engine for generations to come.

This reliance on American industry will change our relationship with space and make it much more a part of everyone's daily life. The economic benefits of exploration are one of the reasons that it will be a key component of our future. As I've said before, every dollar we spend on space exploration is spent right here on Earth. It represents good jobs and innovation and pushes the envelope of our capabilities. Our new Space Technology Program currently involves more than a thousand projects. It's generating the ideas and innovations that will take us farther. Ideas such as solar electric propulsion and lightweight cryogenic propellant tanks are things to which we have recently directed resources, just to name a few.

We're targeting a launch of a cryogenic propellant storage demo in 2016. Our new 2013 budget provides for this type of work and projects like the three Technology Demonstration Mission proposals we selected this past year to transform space laser communications, deep space navigation using atomic clocks, and in-space propulsion capabilities, including solar sails. In aeronautics, our investments are driving technology breakthroughs for cleaner, safer, quieter and more efficient aircraft. In fact, NASA funded three industry-academia teams to explore new vehicle concepts that could achieve these goals and enter into commercial service in 2025, two generations after the current state-of-the-art aircraft.

The teams created technology development roadmaps and identified critical technology demonstrations necessary to make these aircraft a reality. The results of these studies, released this past January, are helping NASA and industry to prioritize research investments to make that future a reality. Science is an area that has always been characterized by a great deal of international cooperation and where we are continuing to expand our partnerships, both as the leader and as a contributor to partner-led initiatives. Who could have guessed that by 2012 we would have documented hundreds of extrasolar planets, learned about some of their characteristics, and started to identify some that might be Earth-like?

With the James Webb Space Telescope, we'll be looking at light from near the beginning of time. It doesn't get much bigger than that when you contemplate the larger implications of our work. We're going to try to keep trying to answer questions that continue to fascinate humanity. Is there life on Mars or elsewhere in our universe for that matter? The Curiosity Rover landing on the Red Planet this coming August may shed some light on whether or not Mars may once have been hospitable to life, or maybe even so today. What's it like in interstellar space? The Voyager spacecraft, which have been en route for more than 30 years, could break out of our solar system within our lifetimes. In education, we're focusing on programs with measurable returns.

This will help us feed that pipeline we so urgently need of new scientists and engineers to share their energies, passions, and great intellect with us. Last year, we also provided 80 space technology research fellowships to graduate students to complete their studies and join us in tomorrow's missions. You know, you can develop all the technology you want, but in the final analysis, it's about the people. It's about making life better here on Earth, about improving the human condition, expanding our knowledge and expanding our partnerships across Earth in pursuit of a larger goal that none of us could accomplish on our own. We have numerous demonstrations on this right now, from the International Space Station to the SERVIR program, where scientists from around the world use space data and their own ground-based observations to help us better understand and predict our planet's changes.

Everywhere I go, I see the fire in the eyes of students who are just learning how important science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are to understanding our world and how they can make a real difference by pursuing these career paths. So, to me, the future looks bright. We look forward to continuing our leadership in space exploration in the global community. Building on the strong relationships we have now in talking to non-traditional partners. These are the countries with whom we haven't worked a lot in the past, or maybe not even at all. In some cases, they may not even have their own space programs. At the end of the day, it's people from around the world sitting across the table from one another who must decide if together we can bring a complex mission of exploration of our universe to successful completion.

I saw potential of this cooperation firsthand when I commanded NASA's first mission to planet Earth, ATLAS I, with Belgium's first-ever astronaut, Dirk Frimout, and a complement of 13 international experiments to study our Sun and Earth's middle atmosphere in ways never before accomplished. It was displayed again two years later when I was privileged to command the first joint Russian-American Space Shuttle mission with a Russian cosmonaut, Sergei Konstantinovich Krikalev, as one of our mission specialist crew members. The relationships we developed on those missions and others served as precursors to our extremely successful cooperation on the Russian space station Mir and ultimately on the International Space Station.

Since NASA was founded 52 years ago, international cooperation has been one of our cornerstones. We have entered into about 4,000 agreements in that time with more than 120 nations, touching almost every aspect of NASA's activities. Right now, NASA has 535 active international agreements, conducting some form of ground-based research on every continent and working with nations around the world to develop and implement the next generation of space exploration missions. This cooperation is the definition of win-win, bringing multiple benefits to everyone involved. I'm truly proud that NASA's work stretches far beyond America's borders and has a positive impact on people's lives in places far from our shores.

I believe that space exploration is good for the world, and I see America continuing to lead global exploration efforts. Government-to-government relations that might otherwise be difficult continue to improve using science and technology as a basis for common understanding and agreement. Whatever the situation looks like in 2050, it will be people sitting across the table from each other as I was with my fellow heads of several space agencies last month in Quebec City, Canada, talking about our progress and our challenges and what we want to do together in the coming decades. There are a lot of frontiers within the broad scope of space exploration, and as such, there's likely something exciting going on right now in some part of the world that may someday help us to further humanity's understanding of those frontiers. Because we all inherently share a need to explore, I firmly believe that individuals and nations will continue to be drawn together by the promise of space exploration.

Thank you so much for allowing me to join you today to participate in this conference on navigating in a shifting global landscape. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas about how the frontiers of our ever-changing world may develop in coming years. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Charlie. We will now hear from Peter, but let me first introduce him. Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. His achievements include co-founding PayPal, Clarum Capital, and the Founders Fund. His work, regardless of sector, is always at the forefront of change, and he always challenges current perceptions. Here to discuss developing the developed world, ladies and gentlemen, join me in welcoming Peter Thiel.

Thank you very much. Let's see. I basically thought that I normally don't like doing slides or presentations, but I thought I would do just one slide to give people a little bit of a graphical visual on, on how I think the picture of the world looks going forward to 2050 and try to put it in a single slide. I think we have in our world two big trends. There's a trend towards globalization and there's a trend towards technology. And so we have progress on globalization, progress on technology. The words globalization and technology are often used interchangeably and often sort of blended together. And I believe that little could be further from the truth and that these are best thought of as extremely different kinds of things.

And I would define globalization as basically moving along the horizontal axis. And you can sort of think of it as horizontal progress, extensive progress, and that basically globalization is about going from one to n. It is about copying things that work. And technology is vertical progress. It is doing new things. It is going from zero to one. You could define globalization as doing more with more. And so globalization is simply copying things that work and doing more of it. And then technology, in some sense, is doing more with less. And the question I want to pose, and I'll sort of give some perspectives on how I think people pose the question, I'll give a perspective on how people think about it, and then I'll sort of throw in a few thoughts of my own.

The question I think that's worth posing as we think ahead towards the year 2050 is how much, uh, how much should we weight the horizontal dimension and how much should we weight the vertical dimension? And that's the—that's a big, the very open-ended question, uh, I'd like to throw out to you. And I think, uh, if you think of it as a resource allocation question, there are different kinds of things to allocate resources to. As an investor, do I invest in globalization, so do I invest in, you know, building on, building highways in China or setting up McDonald's franchises in India or things like that? Or do I invest in technology, in trying to do fundamentally new things? As a philanthropist, do I allocate money towards helping people in emerging market countries do better?

Or do I allocate money towards basic research and taking the best things in the world and making them better? And there are all sorts of ways in which you can frame it as a nonprofit, as a for-profit question. And of course, there's a political version of this, too: where do we spend our resources on sort of getting the whole world up to the U.S. level, or do we spend our resources on improving the U.S. and making it a better country? I think that's sort of a very basic political version. Now, the glib answer, of course, is we're going to do all of these things. But I do think you can ask the question very much, what percent of your time, resources should go into them? Should it be 50% globalization and 50% technology, 95 and 5?

What are the different ratios? Now, it strikes me that the answer people have in our world today is that they are massively long globalization and massively short technology, just as a structural matter. The simplest anecdotal way I can describe this is, whenever people ask me for money in a nonprofit context, the easiest way I've found to decline requests for money is to explain this chart, to explain the difference between horizontal and vertical progress, between extensive and intensive growth, between copying things that work and doing new things. Explain to people, 'I've decided I'm just doing new things. Now tell me what your nonprofit does.' And invariably, they're always on the horizontal side.

And so it's a great way to decline requests for money. But I think this sort of perspective is embedded in a lot of different things. When we think about how we—we used to talk about the world in the 1960s, we talked about the world as being divided between the First World and the Third World. The First World was a part of the world that was seeing accelerating technological progress. And the view was it was just going to keep going. There was a bestseller written in 1967 by Servan-Schreiber called The American Challenge. And it basically said that if Europe didn't get its act together, it would fall further and further behind the U.S. The difference between Europe and the U.S. would grow from a difference of degree into a difference of kind.

And that by the year 2000, according to Servan-Schreiber, the accelerating rate of technological progress in the U.S. would leave the rest of the world in the dust. People in the U.S. would no longer have to compete with other people in the rest of the world. They would be so far ahead of everybody. And this would be reflected in the average workweek in the U.S. People would work seven hours a day, four days a week, and have 13 weeks a year paid vacation, all by the year 2000, as a result of exponential, accelerating technological progress. Now, we're always tempted to dismiss it: 'Well, he was French,' and sort of have some sort of facile way to dismiss the sort of incredible optimism that existed around technology in the '50s and '60s, where things were going to continue to accelerate at a breathtaking pace.

The way we speak about the world today is not about a First World and a Third World. We typically speak about the world today in terms of the developed and the developing worlds. And the developing world is the world that will copy the developed world and that will catch up. And it basically—the sort of dichotomy in the way we speak about the world involves a convergence theory of globalization—that the whole world will converge on something like the level of the U.S. And so this dichotomy, unlike the earlier First World/Third World dichotomy, is much more pro-globalization. It's a very bullish globalization dichotomy. But I want to also point out that the way we talk about it is implicitly an anti-technological dichotomy.

And it's most hostile to technology when you talk about the developed world as being developed. Because implicit in—if you take that literally—you're saying that the developed world is the part of the world where nothing new is going to happen. It is done. And it is a place where nothing new is going to happen. And I think we have to be aware that if you want to sort of geographically situate this, probably the country in the world that most embodies the convergence theory of globalization would be China. And it is the country in which people are relentlessly bullish. It's grown at 8% a year for the last 30 or so years. If it keeps doing that, it will be bigger than the U.S. by 2023. It'll be bigger than the rest of the world put together by 2040 or so.

But that's the one people are incredibly bullish on. The part of the world that perhaps symbolizes technology more than anything else, if it was an independent country, would be the state of California. And this, again, is a place people are structurally incredibly bearish on. There's always some things happening in Silicon Valley, but it doesn't seem to actually be enough to move the dial. And if you said California is this place where all this technology is happening, people don't really believe that. It's not like, say, the 1930s when you had a serious recession, Great Depression, and people moved to California. *The Grapes of Wrath*—they moved from Oklahoma to California. Today, people would be moving from California to Oklahoma.

It's probably not because technology is being developed in Oklahoma. And so there is sort of a sense in which I think the perceptions are that we are extremely bullish on globalization and bearish on technology. And my sort of, you know, bias I would have is: Is it really possible for there to be this sort of unbalanced growth in the 21st century? Can we have globalization without technology? That's sort of a basic, one question I think is worth posing. And then, moreover, why has this shifted? So let's start with the question: Why did it shift in the way it did? How did things change so radically from 40 years ago to today, where people no longer believe in technology, but believe in globalization as the great driver?

And I think the—the pessimistic answer I have is that there's been much less technological progress in the last 40 years than is often advertised. With the important exception of computers, there has been general stagnation everywhere else. We have seen little progress on the energy front. In fact, energy prices, commodity prices are higher than they were at the peak in the '70s. The great Green Revolution of the '50s and '60s and '70s has started to fade. There's no longer improvements in agricultural innovation. And we're sort of living in an increasingly Malthusian world in which there's a struggle for resources because technology has not kept pace with global population growth. Biomedical progress has...

has markedly slowed in the last 20 years. There are only about a third as many drugs currently in FDA trial as there were 15 years ago. The big pharma companies are starting to liquidate their employees en masse. And even when you come to something as basic as transportation, we're no longer moving faster. And it peaked with the Concorde in '76. That was decommissioned in 2003. And basically today, transportation speeds are probably back to 1960 levels if you include very low-tech airport security systems and the way in which travel has become an increasingly nightmarish process. So I think with the one exception of the computer revolution, there's been tremendous deceleration. I have been involved with the computer revolution for the last 15 years.

I think it has many reasons to believe that it will continue. There is an open question whether it is enough economically to move the dial. I don't think it's been enough the last 40 years. And you can look simply at median wages in the U.S., which have been stagnant since 1973. You can look at mean wages, which have gone up a little bit, so there's been some increase in inequality, but the basic reality has been stagnation. And I think the economic facts really call into question the sort of very optimistic technological story that often gets told in Silicon Valley. How can you have had 40 years of breathtaking technological progress when it's not translated into higher living standards in our society at all?

So I think the reason for this shift has involved the fact that we've had 40 years of general failure in technology. And the question we have to ask as we go forward is, can this be extrapolated and can this be continued? And I guess just to sort of say a few words on my thoughts on it, are that it's going to be quite hard to reverse the tech deceleration. It's something that's important to try. It's important to push the computer revolution further. It's important to try to reinvigorate all sorts of other areas. I think there are a lot of interesting questions why this deceleration has happened, but it's an important question for us to try. The one thing that I am, however, very convinced of is that the consensus view, long globalization, short technology, is simply wrong.

That globalization without incredible technological progress is not going to work. And it is not going to work for simple reasons that we have. If you're on the more liberal side, we have environmental constraints. On the more conservative side, we have probably fundamental resource constraints. There are not enough resources or environmental resources to sustain 7 billion people on this world at an American standard of living. And so if you have convergence in globalization without any technological improvement, you are basically just setting yourself up for relentless conflicts over resources of one form or another. And that's why I think the cleantech failure in Silicon Valley in the last decade

is something we need to think about really hard. I think there was a lot that went wrong with these companies, but there's something about the cleantech failure as being more important than the Web 2.0 success. Web 2.0 success did create value. But the cleantech failure and the failure to develop alternate energies is what really calls into question the sort of globalization type of narrative. And when you see a world that's globalizing but not progressing on the vertical side, on the technology side, you start to have a sort of very different perspective on what's happening in many parts of the world. So just to give one, one perspective on the Arab Spring, sort of all these questions: is this a good thing, is this a bad thing?

And people often frame it in ideological terms around democracy spreading to the Middle East, or it's this fundamentalist Islamic backlash. So you can sort of have a positive or negative ideological take on it. But I think there's sort of a positive and a negative technological take. And the positive technological take is that it is the information age that is sort of helping disseminate information and that it's sort of a success of the computer age that's coming to the Middle East and transforming these countries. The pessimistic technological case for the Arab Spring is that it was basically driven by runaway food price increases in 2011. Food prices had gone up something like 30 to 70 percent in the previous year.

And that the so-called Green Revolution is best understood as a result of the failure of the true Green Revolution of the '50s and '60s, which increased agricultural outputs, and that we should not simply embellish it as this great transformational event. And we should not ignore the fact that it is sort of the direct result of desperate people who became more hungry than scared. And that is the kind of thing that you're going to be seeing more and more of in our world in the decades ahead. China is probably—China cannot develop without massive technological progress. If China had the same standard of living like you have in the U.S., I don't even want to think what happens geopolitically. Who gets the oil?

Who gets the resources? How does this possibly work? The 2008 to 2012 period saw us—oil prices were at $140 in the summer of 2008. What basically happened in the last four years is that a large part of the developed world got knocked out. You had massive economic collapse in the U.S. and Western Europe. China kept growing. Oil prices are now back to close to $140 four years later. And we're once again running into the same resource constraint we faced four years ago. And the question is, who gets shut out next in this sort of game of musical chairs? Is it a second Arab Spring? Southern Europe that needs to get shut out? Is it austerity in the U.S.? Is it a bubble breaking in China? Do people in India have to starve?

These are the kinds of questions you're going to have to answer if you believe in globalization and you're not focused on technology. And so while I am in many ways somewhat pessimistic about things, my pessimism does not stop me from believing that it is incredibly urgent to push the vertical axis really hard, because I believe that that is the only way we can navigate towards a more prosperous and successful 21st century. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Peter. That was brilliant. We will start taking questions, so please write down your questions and pass them to the staff. I'll say this: optimist, pessimist, or at least tough critic, that was two interesting points of view. The deceleration that you're talking about, it almost feels like you're saying the developed world, or at least this country, is just psychologically incapable because it's not signed up for larger goals.

It's, you know, I'm always nervous to go straight into the question of why. Because you say we had the slowdown, and the question is, why has it happened? I certainly think that there is a way in which—in a way in which—our country does not believe in larger goals around science and technology. And it's very hard to set those goals. And so I think it would be very hard to motivate if you imagine sort of a political leader going on TV and saying, 'This is what we're going to do.'

Like a Kennedy did.

I think it would be hard to get an Apollo program approved today. It would be hard to—you know, Nixon declared war on cancer. They said they were going to defeat it in six years by the bicentennial, by 1976. You know, I think that was a worthwhile effort. Probably a lot went wrong with the process. We need to figure out what went wrong and try to do better. But, you know, today, something like 40% of the people at age 85 suffer from dementia or incipient Alzheimer's. So if you're 85 years old, you have a 40% chance of having Alzheimer's. And so it would seem to me that... that we should declare a war on Alzheimer's. But these kinds of things cannot be done. I think one can speculate a lot on why.

One sort of philosophical cut I have on it is that people no longer believe in the future as something you can calculate. They believe that the future is fundamentally statistical. And there's been a shift in thinking about the world in terms of calculus to statistics. And maybe it's that our society is too financialized, so it's just sort of the random walk down Wall Street. And nobody knows what technology will happen. We do not believe in prophets. We believe that all prophets are false prophets. Anybody who says they know what the future looks like is automatically dismissed as a con artist of one sort or another. If you had someone like Einstein writing a letter to the White House, it would be treated as a joke.

It would get lost in the mail room. I think there is no definite view of what the future is. If you had a conversation about what do we think the U.S. will look like in 20 years, people will give indefinite bromides about it will be better. But any specifics, that's completely taboo. And that's very different from the way people talked about the future in the '50s or '60s. Science fiction as a literary genre has collapsed, which was again one of the fictional ways in which people envisioned a better future.

Yet here you are, and you're going to take us to Mars by what?

2030.

2030. There you go. So he's going to do it, and you're going to reinvigorate it.

Peter works with or supports a guy who thinks we can do it quicker, actually. If you talk to Elon Musk, he and I disagree on some things. I think we both agree that we'll get there. The way we're going to get there, we sort of disagree on, but I think we'll get there.

So I'll ask you both, since we need to get out of this thinking, is there a role for government to help? Is that a place where, like Kennedy did, where the government can step back in and say, let's think higher, let's set goals?

I think government is absolutely essential. One of the speakers earlier today—and, boy, it's all clouding my mind here, but in one of the earlier sessions we actually talked about, you know, people want less government. They want government out of the way. I have to agree with whoever the speaker was at the time that said you get chaos. We just can't operate without government. Government's job is to facilitate the success of private enterprises. Elon and others wouldn't be able to do what they're doing today were it not for government investment in what they're trying to do with private space.

Yeah, I'm on the more libertarian side politically, so I'm somewhat more skeptical of government. I would say that with respect to science and technology, there is an argument that certainly some types of basic science research has the nature of a public good and that it is the kind of thing that, in theory at least—and there are many examples—in theory, at least, could be backed by the government. The part that I'm skeptical of is I think our government is less able to do that than it was 40 or 50 years ago. And we have to think really hard about how it can actually lead the way given the degree of technological and scientific illiteracy you have among people in government. Our government is dominated by lawyers, not by scientists and engineers.

Of the 535 senators and congressmen, at a generous count, maybe 35 have some background in science or engineering. And, you know, the rest of them do not know that solar panels don't work at night and windmills don't work when the wind is not blowing. And so I tend to think if you're going to have an engineering-centric government that's going to build major projects, you have to have very different people in it.

So you think there'll be parallel governance systems that will emerge that operate alongside or in place of?

I don't necessarily think there are automatic solutions. Very often, a lot of problems do not get solved and things simply fall apart. And so I do think that's a very real possibility. But I think there is theoretically a role for government and for nonprofits. Practically, with some significant exceptions like my fellow speaker here, most people in government would not give a speech like the one that he just gave. That's an unusual speech. And that was the thing I was really struck by, listening to your speech, was how rare that sort of a speech is in our society. And why is it that it's so hard for people who are not just running a given program but who are broader leaders to give a speech like that?

And why is it so hard for them to do it in a way that's convincing and doesn't sound like they're lost in space or something?

I promise I won't dwell on this, but if I could say one thing, and I think Peter makes a great point, but I would implore people to listen to the President now and then. He talks about the need for technology every single day. He talks about the critical need of education every single day. He is the person. I didn't make up going to Mars by 2030. That was a challenge that the President gave to NASA, a challenge of putting humans in the vicinity of an asteroid in 2025. He is frequently ridiculed by some who question it for whatever reason. I think you have a—no, he's not a scientist, and he is a lawyer, but he's an incredibly intelligent, articulate person who does have a vision, and it's the vision that we try to carry out in NASA.

I'm privileged to lead 17,000 absolutely incredible civil servants, people who dedicate their lives to the service of this nation in the best way they can. Almost all of them are scientists and engineers who just want me to leave them alone, give them some meager funds so they can go and do the technology development about which Peter speaks. I agree with him. We have to become, uh, less risk-averse, and we have to be willing to lose now and then, to fail now and then, uh, and we had that—the biggest thing in my business is I have to try to convince my leaders, my middle managers, to turn young people loose. When I say young, I don't mean in age, but inexperienced people, loose to do high-risk, low-cost projects, uh, otherwise they'll never learn. You know, we're going to lose some people

in the things that we do. And we're going to lose some things, and the people that we're going to lose. Commercial space is difficult, but government space was very difficult. So people have just got to have faith in American industry and the fact that I think they can achieve the goals that have been laid out by the President.

You've both talked about the importance of science and technology and in some cases the lack of appreciation for that. Underneath all of this is education. Each of you talk a little bit about what you think of the current educational system and if by 2050 we're going to improve it, what would you like to see happen?

I'm a product of public education. I believe in public education. I don't think that you can do anything other than improve, make your public education system as robust as possible, or then we are doomed. You can't have a nation like America be the nation that we are today without viable, robust public education. And so we have to find out what's wrong and fix it. And it doesn't always require money. It sometimes requires people making very difficult decisions about it and being able to tell people, "Okay, you either put up or get out." Those are things we have to do.

Well, I've spoken on this education topic a great deal over the last few years. And I do think there are some things that have I've sort of been interested in the question of what's stopping people from innovating more. And one of the things I think has gone wrong in a strange way is these incredibly large debts people are burdened when they come out of college with, which forces people to go into these sort of much lower risk, higher paying careers that they need to get out of debt with. You know, total student debt sort of exceeded past the one trillion mark at the end of last year. The cost of higher education has since 1980 gone up by about 300% after inflation. It's gone up faster than anything else in our society, faster than healthcare, faster than energy costs, faster than housing through the 05 bubble.

And so even though it does seem that we need people who have some of these sort of basic scientific and engineering skills to move forward, we also have to realize that something's gone very wrong and that somehow these priorities have been set in ways that need to be rethought pretty thoroughly. So I can speak a lot more on that, but I think the—it's quite possible that we have something of an education bubble where people are, they think of education as an abstraction, as a credential. I was certainly guilty of this when I was an undergraduate at Stanford in the '80s where, you know, what do you do after high school? You go to college. What do you do after college? You go to grad school. And it's become, in some ways,

a substitute for thinking concretely about the future, about, you know, what can I do to really make the world a better place? And so even though there sort of are aspects of education that are very important and good, I think there also are some ways in which it's become a strange distraction from us actually solving these problems.

Now, I have a contrary— "Go for it." —sort of an odd view of what do you do. Peter said, you know, "When we grew up, what do you do after high school? You go to college." I would say if you really want to change things, you want to shake things up, what do you do after high school? You go serve for two years. Whether it's Conservation Corps, you know, anything, military, I don't care. You go do something where you have to work. And then you go to college, if that's for you. If it's not, you go to vocational school, or you go somewhere. But I can tell you, most people who have served, who have worked, and then come back to college understand the value of the dollar, that they're going to pay for their college education.

And they use it, and they get much more out of it. So that would be my radical change. I wouldn't let a kid go to college out of high school.

I think that's a good idea, except I wouldn't make it mandatory. "I agree. One size does not fit all."

But more encouragement might be a good thing. Someone would like to follow up on your comments on the cleantech revolution. The question is, it took Apple about 25 years to go from Lisa to the iPad. Why write off the cleantech revolution in such a short amount of time and not continue to invest in the sector?

Well, I think people should continue to invest. Apple Computer was started, I believe, in 1977. It went public, I believe, in '81 or '82. The investors had a phenomenal return on their investment in Apple Computer within three, four years. It was an incredibly successful company in the early '80s. It sort of lost its way after Jobs departed in '85. Sculley was transitioned out, subsequent to the recall, but I think the, you know, and I do think, I do think the cleantech issue's gone on for eight, nine years. Investors are investing less than they were two, three years ago at this point, and has not worked as well as, as people thought it was going to work seven, eight years ago, and so...

Precisely because we need to develop alternatives, I think we need to have an honest accounting of what went wrong, how people were thinking about it that was incorrect. The basic thing that I think was wrong about it was that people—in the computer area, you have to do more with less. You have to be able to do things more cheaply than the old economy alternatives. If Amazon had set out in '95, '96 to sell books on the internet and said it needed to get government subsidies, it cost twice as much as in a bookstore, but this was the way the future was going to be with books on the internet, they would have never developed the technology to make it better. And so I think the acid test for cleantech is, is it actually cheaper

than conventional energy. And until it is cheaper, I think it will not work.

And you don't think it should be helped along for a certain number of years by government funding to get there?

Or if it does get helped along, I'd want the government to have a very precise view of what it is funding. So there may be a role for government coordination. So I'm in favor of nuclear power. And I think you can't have nuclear power without the government overriding local zoning rules, setting aside a waste site in Nevada. And so there's a need for government to push nuclear. But you can only do that if you have a definite view of what should be done. And if you don't have a definite view, that is a problem. I think the whole Solyndra bankruptcy this last year was a very interesting debate because the debate was all focused on process. We had a process for allocating money to lots of different companies.

And then the Republican critics, there were ethical violations. And it was all about process. And I would have much rather had a debate about substance, what technology actually works, and, you know, substantively what works, rather than that we have some sort of portfolio, financial portfolio allocation approach. And so I think there's a role for government if people are substantively thinking about the specific technologies. And my guess is it'll be one or two that really work, and we should, you know, if the government's going to make a coordinated effort for those one or two, that's good. If it's 100 different ones, I think you'll get 100 bad investments, and they will all fail.

So the government should not be in the venture capital business?

Well, if it is in the venture capital business, it should be like a venture capitalist, where you have a definite view, this is a technology that's definitely going to work.

So there's a question about venture capital. Where does it have a competitive edge? What are the sectors? And where is venture capital lacking? Or where should it be applied to get that axis moving again?

Well, I think there are all these questions about what can be done. I don't think the problem simply gets solved by venture capitalists. It's all these entrepreneurs. I think there is a potential role for government and nonprofits and big companies. There's a role for many different kinds of people. The bias I have is that people can't think very far ahead. And so anything that takes more than two years doesn't get funded. And so my bias is to try to look at projects that take a little bit more than two years.

That makes a lot of sense. So, looking at a couple of other things about entrepreneurship, which will hopefully help us keep innovating, in the next 10, 15, 20, 25 years, do you see it changing? Do you have a picture of how entrepreneurship will change and what the new crop of entrepreneurs will look like? Because the old crop—the current new crop—is very different from some of the folks in the '60s and '70s.

I never liked the word "entrepreneurialism" or "entrepreneurship." One of the people who worked for me, I was asking him, "So, what do you want to do in five, 10 years?" And the answer was, "Well, it's really clear. I want to become an entrepreneur." And saying that, it's sort of like a writer saying, "I want to become famous," or a businessman saying, "I want to become rich." And the way I prefer to think about it is that there are very important problems to be solved, that there are people who are passionate about solving problems. Some of these problems can be solved in nonprofits, government, big business. But there are reasons to think that starting new companies is a way to solve a number of these problems, and people become entrepreneurs in order to solve problems.

They don't become entrepreneurs for its own sake.

And for the things we're doing, we need the typical classic entrepreneur. And I'll give you an example. There are near-Earth objects; there are asteroids and things that will threaten Earth. We don't know all of them. Government cannot afford to do it alone. We don't have people who are forward-looking enough who will fund government doing it. So, what we're doing now is we're partnering with—I don't know what they want to be called, but I call them entrepreneurs—people who have the money to independently go out and partner with us. They help. We provide our engineering skill, our know-how. They provide most of the money, and we're trying to develop spacecraft that can help us identify near-Earth objects that one day may threaten Earth, trying to characterize what they are.

It's very important. The nation should have been doing that a long time ago, but if we can't, then we need people—we need entrepreneurs, people who are interested in commercial spaceflight. If we had to depend on people who only invested if they thought for sure it was going to work, we wouldn't have a commercial—I would not be involved in commercial in trying to facilitate the success of commercial entities now.

I'm going to switch gears. There's a student, Ryan Lim—if you're here, you can stand up. He's a student ambassador for the World Affairs Council. And his question is, as outrageous as it sounds, many people have been talking about using outer space as a dumping ground for us to put our trash.

I mean, I don't know that I have thought about that, but with satellites, for example, when we have satellites that have spent their life, there are two things you can do. You can bring them down in a controlled manner and have them burn up during reentry. Satellites built up to a certain time—and I forget whether it's 2008 or 2009 or whatever, there was no requirement to do that—and so they come in uncontrolled, as you've heard twice this year already. Satellites that have been built subsequently have to have enough propellant that we can either do a controlled deorbit to a relatively small area where they will burn up during reentry. Or, as an alternative, you can take them to a higher orbit where they'll stay for hundreds of years.

So that is sort of like a satellite dumping ground, burial ground, if you will. But I don't know that that's a place I want to send trash and nuclear material and the like. I don't take, I don't put anything out of question, to be quite honest. We haven't thought about it, and I'm not sure that he doesn't have a good idea.

Yeah, he might be an entrepreneur. He's not calling himself an entrepreneur. There is this notion, some people complain that technology, or particularly the computer sector, has not produced enough jobs. You have companies that are incredibly successful that end up employing 2,500 people and whatnot. What's your take on technology and jobs? And should we think about that or just ignore it? We'll make that our last question, I guess.

Well, I think that when technology works, it enables small numbers of people to do more than people were doing before. And the way it theoretically should work in the economy is that it increases the prosperity of the economy, and it frees people up to do other things. Um, as long as they're educated, as long as they're educated, as long as, you know, the other structural things are fine. Um, I, I tend to think that, uh, it's a mistake, though, to blame the sort of, um, anemic, a jobless recovery and things like that on, on technology, because I think we've just, you know, in the, in, in the past, we had technological innovation, and people who work in the horse buggy factory lost their jobs, and they went to work in the car factory.

I think the issue in my mind is really much more that there isn't as much happening on the technology side as is advertised. And if we had rapid technological progress, I think you would have a lot of jobs. If you would get the clean tech piece to work, that probably would create millions of jobs if you got it to work in an economically viable way. I think there are ways in which the computer revolution has created a lot of ancillary jobs of one sort or another. I think Silicon Valley, San Francisco are actually doing reasonably well economically, even though most people don't work directly in those sectors. It's just not been enough to help the whole state of California, much less the whole developed world.

One of the paradoxes of our nation is that there are many jobs available. We don't have kids who are, uh, academically, uh, trained and ready to take those jobs. I come from South Carolina. Uh, many years ago, uh, automobile industries, heavy industry came to South Carolina because, for obvious reasons, no unions. They thought they could come down and build cars. No one who could, uh, you know, we had the mathematics or science background to be able to, to run a production line. But the state of South Carolina said, okay, we're not going to make that mistake again. They put together a series of technical schools around the state, and now they are able to do that. And now there are automobile manufacturing companies who have come in place there.

Lots of robotics, so not this massive number of people, but still a lot of jobs. But they're high-tech jobs, and they're jobs that require an education. And, again, that's why my focus, our focus at NASA, is K-12, because if you don't, if we don't give our kids the basic background, the basic fundamentals that allows them to go to a Stanford or the Naval Academy, as I did, or drop out successfully, then we're just not going to be able to go anywhere. But K-12 education is critical, and I think it's done in the public schools, but we make them as good as we can.

And I think we should teach them computer languages. We talked about that. On that note, we are out of time. Let me thank both Charlie and Peter for their awesome remarks and brilliance.