What I really like about computer science is that it gives you really easy access to this really powerful tool and you can create anything at any time from anywhere and all you need is a computer. That access really empowers you as a problem solver. Growing up my mom always wanted me to try some programming class especially as I got into high school and I just never got around to it. I never saw it as relevant to anything that I was doing. Finally I came to Michigan. Somehow I found out about this class called Discover CS or EECS 198 which at the time was this one credit course offered just to anyone who wanted to explore the discipline of computer science. That was a really really important experience for me because for the first time I was really being encouraged to do and try and ask questions about programming and that was not an opportunity that I had ever had before. Like that space to be curious and also encouraged regardless of failure just gave me a whole new outlook on the people in computer science and computer science general and that really encouraged me to stick with it and take the higher classes and keep going. Over the summer I got to work on two different research projects with CS kind of at their center and one of them was working with the instructors of Discover CS. The class I took my freshman year and it was analyzing the data that came from that class on students and looking at ways that we can recruit more underrepresented minorities in CS and retain them. One thing that has really encouraged me to stick with the program is the faculty. They really make it clear to you that they care about you as an individual just as much as they care about your success in computer science. It's really important not to compare yourself to other people especially in computer science. Oh I don't want to take EECS 183 because I think everyone's gonna know more than me. I don't think anyone will want to help me and that's so not true. Everybody starts at a different time. It's never too late to get into computing. My name is Sarah Karada. I am a junior in data science but before I came to Michigan I had never written a line of code.


to reinforce to it that it's guilty. And as soon as the mind is able to transcend or to see the, let go of these false beliefs that really are inducing the guilt, then witnesses automatically will be into the world that will show that guilt is... Yeah. But it starts in the mind. Right. I don't have time to think this out here. I'm just saying, if I notice that this out here is not fixed, and I also know this in here is not fixed. Happy, we're over. Happy dreams is what you're talking about. When the mind is so healed and corrected, it will be a happy dream. Okay. Okay, the mind is very expansive, and the mind is very powerful, and the mind is not contained, you know, anything. There's one point where Jesus says, you know, you are in the mind of God, and God is in your mind. So the mind doesn't follow the laws of this world. You know, we kind of think the same in terms of scale. What contains what? You know, is my mind in God's mind, or is God's mind in my mind? Jesus says it's both ways. In one mind. Yeah, it's literally in one mind.  That's the split mind, the small M. But the split mind still is assigned to the body? Cos and effect are simultaneous. In other words, the split mind is an optical illusion that ideas can lead to source, and it seems to see a world that is less to source. When Jesus says within, he's talking about abstractness. In other words, another way of thinking about it would be like, there's a screen out here, and that place, you know how you're saying, well, where is the mind? That place is a concept that's in the mind. The mind can believe in the concept of time and space and place. And so that kind of turns it around in the sense that place is just a concept that's in the mind.  The brain is a thought. It's a projection of a thought. My thoughts or images I have made, the body, the world, and the brain would all be just a projection of a thought. So that kind of takes it out of the context of, once again, all the neurology and the medical model, a lot of times we'll look for different disorders at the brain. There's certain lobes that you can activate and everything, and it's still, once again, in a subtle way looking for the cause of things in the brain. And basically what the Course does is it takes it metaphysically back to the mind where the thoughts are. So that's why it's important, other than that, you could fall into traps about, well, somebody is in a coma or unconscious, it seems like at times that shuts off all communication. And we're just so used to communication being through the senses. And here comes the Course and it's saying communication is at a thought level or a mind level. So we're using our brain, though, to get in touch with the mind. And otherwise, how are we getting in touch with the Holy Spirit or how are we using the body as communication? Well, once again, the brain is just neutral to the Holy Spirit, but a lot of times you hear things in a lot of the New Age literature about right brain and left brain.  What the Course literally does is it takes it right brain, left brain, it lists it out in the context of talking about brains and Jesus talked about right mind and wrong mind. But literally, that's where we really can come to the release because the wrong mind is all backwards. That's what we were talking about earlier, that it believes that the screen is the cause and that the state of mind is the effect. And the right mind sees that everything's just a decision in mind. So in that sense, it's just important to really get clear on the right mind and the wrong mind, and then you can let go of the wrong mind because once you can see it for what it is, you might go there. Remember our beginning of our discussion, we were talking about decision, where decision is. Now remember the discussion about the blue shirt or the green shirt or whatever? No, it seems as if, it certainly does seem as if that we're persons and we're making decisions every day, not between just shirts, but between lots of things. So are you saying that's all in the script? Yeah, and basically you were saying, well what do I really have a choice on? Remember we addressed that as well that ultimately if you really follow the course in and you really train your mind it will come back, beneath all the beliefs comes back to, I'm a mind and I'm making a choice between the Holy Spirit or the ego. I'm making that choice every second but it doesn't seem that way. Sometimes it seems like our emotions all of a sudden gets stirred up and we don't even know what happened. We can't even think of a trigger event in an album collie. There's all these beliefs in the mind that have to be looked at because the decision is being made at a very deep level at the basement and then it's coming filtering out through the, we were using one example of, here it is, make it a choice for the Holy Spirit or the ego it comes up, time, space, bodies, oh I'm the man, I'm the Cincinnati and but I'm over in the Indianapolis now and I'm speaking at a door to me and it kind of comes out on the surface like that but basically the decision is being made at a very deep level. Doesn't the Course also say you can make the decision in a split second or even less and then immediately your mind forgets that it made it and so therefore you see it as not having been happened to you, that you had no power in the decision, it happened to me. I said 136, that's, in sickness this is defense literally you wait, it's like trying waves the wand and then it quickly dissociates and forgets what it did. But my thing is Ken Watnick says this, why would anyone want to be here, so if we're all going to get sick unless some of them progress to a state where we can just leave the world without getting sick, 99.99999% of us get sick and leave this world, right? Well it still assumes that we're in, that we come into it but it's kind of like there's lessons that are really high in the workbook where it says when I'm healed I'm not healed alone or there's still a pervaded belief kind of in the mind that somehow thinks, alright I'm taking the course, there's all these other people that are out there doing the best that they can but I'm working on this path and eventually if I really continue with this and follow it all the way and accept the Atonement then I'll leave the world but there'll still be this world going on back there that's still twisted and everything but I'll be out of it and what the course is saying is the world is the hallucination when you accept the Atonement for yourself then the hallucination will get real bright in the sense that your perception will be healed true perception of the real world and then the world will fade and disappear you see how different that is from a sense of like coming into the world as a soul or a person that is my hallucination hey that makes it simple when I accept the correction and the healing then the hallucination will be over the thing that is so difficult is that the deceiving mind believes that there really is an objective world a real objective world that I came into and now I'm going to go out of and then it's like it's going to continue on but Jesus is saying there is no world apart from your own money see my husband says to me okay so there's no world and it's all a big dream so what does it matter what you do anyway then and it always leaves me stumped and I think things like well it's because you have some lessons to learn and he says no no no he says you say this is a dream I don't have to worry about what I do this is all a big dream and no matter what I do when that body goes I go I'm at home anyway so you know and I never know that real clearly you're going to love God you want to serve him or if you don't you still get back and the thing about doing remember how we talked about the two levels it's so common to say what should I do or what shouldn't I do but you know how we see that still at the behavior level where Jesus says the whole point of course is to think like God to start to think like God which will be the Holy Spirit's thought system where he says think like me use me as your model for learning but it takes it away from why do we do anything from the do question to well all I know is that I'm trying to align my mind with my father's will or I'm trying to think only the thoughts that I think with God there's a lot of metaphysical systems in fact new age systems that we've seen on magazines create your own reality now in the one sense Jesus does talk that we were talking about at the beginning because there's the law in the kingdom is what you extend you are and he says what happens is when it comes through the ego lens and gets twisted in this realm it's what you project you will believe so in other words if you have an attack thought in your mind you can't stand to keep that in your mind it's too intolerable so I'll project it out on the screen now the big difference between the course and a lot of things and this is where you get into level confusion again and this is very subtle I create my own reality if you mean by reality in terms of the script or whatever there is level confusion because the course says that all creation is entirely spirit in other words we talked about the father creates the son creates the creation the danger comes in is when I say I create my own reality then the guilt comes in because that's where the new age thoughts will come in is like I've created my own sickness lesson number two of course I have given everything I see all the meaning that it has there is no objective world kind of out there which it sure seems like it in which events cause us to feel certain ways but that it's all our beliefs and our expectations and their meanings that we read into them as soon as you can just start to grasp that principle just in the slightest then you start to see this is my way to empowerment if all my upset comes from a misperception and Jesus can help me get clear and heal this perception and get in touch with these false ideas and beliefs that I have then that's my point of power I can actually reach a place where there's nothing I won't be upset by anything or anything to do with that there's a part of the course where Jesus talks about questions and he says there are these things called double questions that the ego really it's a statement because it asks and answers it's got the answer already built into questions you're always asking one of two questions one of them might be worth it do I want to know God's will for me which is a real open ended question to receive the Spirit's guidance and the other one is which of these illusions will fill my lack and whenever we start striving for things in this world that's where all the outcomes come in that's where the expectations come in really the deeper question in the mind is already the presumption is lack and then on top of that one is which of these illusions which of these idols will fill my lack and whenever we go through a day and we get all in an upset mode it's like that's the question in somewhere in our mind that we're asking if I'm working on a project let's say and I get all the way halfway through it and I don't have the tools that I need so I get upset instead of what is God's will for me in this the question is somewhere in the mind I've already decided that I need to finish my project for a happy day and therefore that's part of the illusions that I'm going to need to be happy to get the project finished and therefore I'm going to perceive not having the right tool as an obstruction to my happiness it all comes back to the question that I'm asking in my mind that it slowly we let go of the cravings and desires for things in this world believing that they will bring us happiness then we're free of expectations therefore you know you can more likely appreciate all things work together for good but if I've got a big investment and things have to go this way why? because I'm driving along and I'm trying to get to a business meeting and a train comes along and the train comes along it just is but if I perceive myself as losing my job because I'll be late for work because of this darn train you can see where the thoughts you can get into it from that misperception to a good upset when I start doing that when I have all these outcomes and goals and self-concept things then I can't see the divine order in that train you know because that train is an obstacle it's perceived as an obstacle to something that I want more than the peace of God that's pretty heavy duty but it's like when you start to do that with everything pretty soon it's kind of like setting things up to be the keep of your peace and then you're also going to blame that thing you see for not having peace and the truth is peace is at hand a lot of times people get into this when they think about wait a minute it's a world's an illusion and I like bird stripping and I like sunsets with all these hasels and colors and everything you know sometimes people have a little bit of a difficulty with you know I want God to be in that sunset and what the course is saying is is you really have to bring it back to a question of purpose because if we literally said that God's in nature and God's in sunsets and God's in quiet rivers and blowing trees or whatever and then we said well maybe he's not quite so apparent in concentration camps and ghettos and in man-made concrete structures like downtown buildings we would be caught again because we would be limiting our peace of mind to those nice scenic so-called scenic areas


Stand by. My fellow Americans, it was just yesterday that I returned from my historic Moscow summit meeting with General Secretary Gorbachev. And it so happens that later this month I'll be visiting Canada for an economic summit with the leaders of the world's industrialized nations. I thought I'd take a few moments to tell you about both. First, my meeting with General Secretary Gorbachev in Moscow. The event that held perhaps the most immediate historic importance took place on Wednesday. It was then that General Secretary Gorbachev and I exchanged the instruments of ratification bringing into effect the INF Treaty. The effect of this treaty will be very simply to eliminate an entire class of U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear missiles. The significance of the INF Treaty can hardly be overstated. For the first time ever, the levels of nuclear arms will actually be reduced rather than having caps placed on their growth. These missiles will not simply have been shuffled around on the map or placed in storage. They will have been destroyed. The exchange of these instruments of ratification alone would have made the Moscow summit a success. But the General Secretary and I made important progress in other areas as well. We moved ahead on start negotiations, negotiations that would lead to a dramatic reduction in both sides' arsenals of strategic nuclear arms. On bilateral issues, I'm especially pleased by our agreement to hold increased exchanges involving high school students. The number of students will at first be in the hundreds, but could grow into the thousands. Imagine it, hundreds and then thousands of young people who have first-hand knowledge of each other's country and, yes, who have made friends. Turning to regional conflicts, Mr. Gorbachev and I discussed ways to reduce tension in areas around the globe, Southeast Asia, Africa, Central America, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, of course, represents an historic step in itself, one that the General Secretary and I agreed could serve as a model for settling other regional conflicts. A key part of my agenda for this Moscow summit, as for my previous meetings with the General Secretary, involved human rights. Recently, the Soviets have begun to show somewhat more respect for human rights. In the past year, for example, they have released some 300 political detainees from detention. It's my hope that what took place in my Moscow visit will lead to still greater individual freedom for the peoples of the Soviet Union. You see, in addition to my meetings with Mr. Gorbachev, I held other meetings with monks at a monastery in Moscow. With nearly 100 dissidents and refuseniks, men and women who have been worked for years for the freedom to speak, to worship, to assemble, and to travel. And at Moscow University with students, indeed with the very students likely to become the Soviet Union's next generation of leaders. To the dissidents and refuseniks, I was able to say the people of the United States and elsewhere support you. To the students, I suggested there is another way to live and govern your country. A way of democracy and economic growth, a way in which creative human energies are released. If anyone had suggested, even as recently as 10 years ago, that an American president would one day be able to meet with Soviet dissidents inside Moscow itself, or be able to speak to Soviet students in their own university about human freedom, well, I think you'll agree that a prediction like that would have been dismissed. But this past week, it happened. Seeds of freedom and greater trust were sown, and I just have to believe that in ways we may not even be able to guess, those seeds will take root and grow. Accompanying these new political freedoms are a series of economic reforms that may begin to inject elements of free enterprise into the Soviet economy. In two weeks, I'll be attending my final economic summit in Toronto, where the Western countries will celebrate the success of free markets. It's my belief that liberty should be as important a concern in Toronto as it was in Moscow. Liberty in the economic sphere means low taxes. It means paring away needless regulations and reducing counterproductive government planning and interference. And it means keeping down barriers to international trade here and around the world. Until next week, thanks for listening, and God bless you. I want to give you something here.


Coming up on DTNS, Google makes its quantum supremacy claim official. Apple Pay hits a milestone in why McDonald's is becoming an AI company. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 23rd, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane and Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were talking about all kinds of fun stuff regarding pets and their attitudes and habits and moving. And if you want to get that expanded conversation by Golly, it's easy. Yeah, just go sign up on the Good Day Internet level at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Facebook CEO, perhaps you've heard of him, Mark Zuckerberg, told the US House Financial Services Committee that the Libra cryptocurrency, quote, will extend America's financial leadership as well as our democratic values and oversight around the world. He also claimed that China is preparing similar ideas. He also said that Libra is not a sovereign currency, won't launch anywhere until US regulators approve it and is in the hands of the Libra Association. Now, not Facebook. Hmm. It also looks like data. That's the thing I wanted to throw out there for Star Trek fans. Notice that today. Anyway, hey, Samsung update. Oh, wrong one. Sorry. Snapchat added 7 million daily active users and quarter three to reach 210 million. That is up 13 percent year over year. Snap revenue rose 50 percent year over year to 446 million losing four cents a share. Both numbers better than expected, by the way. Snapchat also added five million users outside of the North American area. Total time spent watching grew 40 percent year over year in the Discovery tab. More than 100 discover channels or discovery channels. So over 10 million viewers per month in quarter three, you don't use Snapchat, do you? Not any more. It's the Discover tab. There's no why. There's no Discovery tab. No. Oh, I want to see Shark Week on the Discovery tab. I think Discovery does have some shows on the. Samsung updated the software for its Galaxy S10 and Note 10 phones to fix that problem that led to any fingerprint unlocking a phone. If you were using a certain type of screen protector, when you registered your fingerprint in the first place and then left it on the phone, Samsung is pushing notifications for the update to phones that have registered any kind of biometric data. The Bank of China and Alipay both pulled their fingerprint authorized functions from their apps on some Samsung devices because of this. If you're paying attention to how Huawei is doing, given its tumultuous year, the company shipped 200 million smartphones so far in 2019, which beat its previous record. The company's Mate X is now set for release in China on November 15th for a whopping equivalent of $2,400. And Microsoft posted its Q1 2020 earnings fiscal year, hence the 2020 with revenue of 33.1 billion net income of 10.7 billion. That's revenue up 14 percent net income up 21 percent. Office and cloud led the way, provided most of that rise because surface product revenue dipped 4 percent. No new products in this quarter. All the new products they've announced are coming or came off of the Q1 books and gaming revenue dropped 7 percent. Also, because just not a lot of new stuff in that gaming department for Microsoft. Yeah, we're in between things there in the game side. All right, let's talk a little more about the quantum of supremacy. The new born James Bond mashup movie. I can't wait for it. I'll be there day one. Actually, Google published a paper in the journal Nature claiming the company's 54 cubit sycamore quantum computer has achieved quantum supremacy. A term I am still not totally coming to terms with. Anyway, it can perform a calculation in this case, a technique for determining random numbers in 200 seconds. That would take the world's most powerful classic computer and like normal computers, 10,000 years to perform. This is the paper inadvertently published on NASA's website a month ago. However, IBM researchers have proposed a method in which a classical computer could achieve that that calculation in a practical amount of time. A few days of using the hard drive space in addition to RAM and other optimizations perform that in 2.5 days to be exact, rather than much more lengthy 10,000 years. Oh, yeah, that seems more reasonable. Just a couple of days. Yeah, I mean, 10,000 years. Tom made a really good point on the morning show today. It came on and talked about this a bit on the segment, but you made a real good, a really good argument for that still kind of practical if it's only three days. That's not that bad. It's something you could do. You could do it. So the idea of supremacy, the reason they use the term supremacy is not about quantum computers being better than classical computers. It's that quantum computers right now are clunky and they can't do anything better than a regular computer. So the supremacy is when do we get to the point where there's one thing that quantum computers can do that classical computers can't and can't is defined as generally impractical. Taking 10,000 years to solve an equation may be great for the Stuart Brand folks who build 10,000 year clocks, but for most of us, that's too long to wait. So that was a fair comparison to say, OK, quantum computers can do this one thing, that one thing ain't totally useful. Maybe there's lots of ways to generate random numbers. But for demonstration purposes, we found a thing that quantum computers can do better. But as we told you yesterday, IBM says we think we can do this in two and a half days. Now, IBM hasn't done it. They've just proposed a method to do it that makes sense. So now somebody's going to have to like carry that out on a classical computer and show that it works the way IBM says it would work. And then that would undermine Google's claim to quantum supremacy. And we'd be back to waiting for that milestone to be reached. That milestone to be reached is just kind of a marker that says quantum computers have advanced to X point. It doesn't really mean that they're useful or practical or going to start breaking all your passwords or anything like that. Moving on to mobile payments. E-marketer reports that Apple Pay has passed Starbucks mobile payment as the most popular mobile payment app in the United States. The first time a generic mobile payment app has led this category. E-marketer estimates that 30.3 million Apple Pay users in 2019 are exist now compared to Starbucks's 25.2 million, followed by Google Pay with 12.1 million. And then Samsung Pay with 10.8 million. Apple Pay is expected to be available in 70 percent of U.S. retailers by the end of 2019. U.S. users are estimated to spend one thousand five hundred forty five per year per person using proximity mobile payments this year, which is up 24 percent over last year. That is quite a jump. Yeah, this is another one of those milestones, right, where we're looking at something and going, oh, we wondered if people were really going to use this, if Apple Pay was going to be the thing people would use, and it turns out, yes, they were going to use it and they're using Apple Pay more than other stuff. Can I buy coffee at Starbucks with Apple Pay now? That's a great question. That is a good question. I think you can. I think you can. Because I think they have the NFC card readers for other things. That would make sense, right? Like, that's how I feel this is going to go. So all of these big, these big numbers of Apple's more than double to the next guy, but well, not more than double. I guess 25.2 is closer to that. But anyway, all these other ones, Google Play, Samsung Pay, it'd be cool if every place just if one became prominent enough, let's say 10 million or more people using it, it'd just be cool to be able to just support it. They're just readers. Like, yeah, I don't have a problem with that. And that's the thing, right? CBS had it where it would work and then they stopped at work because they wanted to do their own thing. And then that thing never caught on. So they went back to letting Apple Pay work. And when Apple Pay works, generally Google Pay and Samsung Pay also work because they work all the same way. Although I have, I have complained about this on the show before. The natural food store that is near me, which is wonderful. And I frequent it often every so often. I kind of, you know, it's early in the morning. Maybe I'm walking the dog. I don't have my wallet on me. They only accept Samsung Pay. They don't accept Apple Pay. And it has gotten me into trouble more than once. They're not using the NFC system. Samsung Pay can use magnetic stripe to because it emulates the magnetic stripe. That's why that.  But for the most part, yeah, Apple Pay has improved my life because, you know, I've got an iPhone with me at all times. Well, China, we know you're laughing at this because you use WeChat for everything. That's fine. Let's check in with Russia. Russia's Yandex, most well known for its search engine, announced Wednesday. It'll begin testing driverless cars in the US next summer. Yandex cars will offer driverless taxi service during the North American International Auto Show in Detroit from June 6th to the 21st. And then they'll keep those cars over in the United States for further testing. Yandex is creating its cars in collaboration with Hyundai. There's a couple of areas in Russia, Skolkovo and Inopolis that have working test zones right now where people can use Yandex driverless taxis. Yandex also has a license to test driverless cars in Israel and is considering an IPO for Yandex taxi, its joint venture with Uber that would also use driverless cars and maybe some of Uber's technology there. So just just kind of thought this was interesting because it points out that while you probably see Waymo and Uber in the headlines for driverless cars, especially in the United States, there are a lot of companies testing this in a lot of parts of the world. I'm super curious about I know this is not not even that important because we're talking about driverless is sort of the key feature here. I want to know what these look like. Like I want to see a Russian driverless car up close. And I want it looks like a Monday. Yeah, I was going to say, have you seen a Hyundai? Yeah, I guess it's like you kind of know what it looks like. I guess, you know, when I was in high school, it's not like a Soviet driverless car. Well, I think that's where your head is. Where my head is, you're not wrong. I'll admit it. I have Soviet ideas in my head. I drove a Ugo for a while, which is a Ugo Slavia car.  The steering wheel came off during a date. It was the worst thing ever. I'm not saying these are going to be bad like that. I just have it in my head that they're boxy and mean looking. No, they look like a Hyundai. In fact, you do a search for a Yandex driverless car in Google Images and you'll see tons of cars that they say index taxi and Cyrillic on them. That's the only weird thing. What I think is interesting about this is it's Yandex is I mean, it's you might not use it, you know, it depends on where you are in the world. But that is a very big search engine used by millions and millions of people. And the fact that the company is like, OK, well, we're going to expand into driverless tech, the way that a lot of other companies from other parts of the world have done the same just goes to show you how much people want to be at the forefront of this new thing. We're talking about driverless technology, driverless technology. You know, they're very small tests that are going on in the US, for example. But they're small and and we're all still kind of scratching our heads, being like, OK, how's this going to work? Is it safe? Is it going to be OK? And a company like Yandex, a huge company, which you don't necessarily associate with any car technology. Well, you know, there they are with everybody else trying to get in here. You guys are right. They look like Hyundai Elantra hatchbacks. The Chrome 78 browser launched for Mac, Windows, Linux, Android and iOS offering an image gallery, themes and options for suggested shortcuts, curated shortcuts, or if you're like me, no shortcuts at all. That's not true. I like shortcuts. A forced dark mode setting will enable dark mode on all websites using color and version theory to keep them readable. Google's password checkup extension will soon be integrated, although it's not in there now, prompting you to change a password if necessary. Click to call, let you click on a phone number on your desktop and sends it to an Android phone. Chrome 78 is testing DNS over HTTPS as well. And last one is what got him in trouble with advertisers in the UK and elsewhere. Yeah. Yeah. It's I think I'm running it now. And I think it's a little pepier or maybe I just feel like it is. Yeah, I thought this was interesting, given our conversation yesterday about Firefox 70, where all of the new features that we focus on with Firefox 70 are security and privacy. Firefox is out there like we're making this more secure. We're making this more private. We're letting you see these kind of trackers. Not surprisingly, that's not the big feature of Chrome. Although there are a couple, like you said, the Google password word checkup extension coming in. It's not like Google doesn't want to make things more private and secure. But if privacy and security are top of mind, Firefox definitely compares better between these two versions coming out within a couple of days of each other. I got to say it is so interesting to me. And this is coming from somebody who was like, I don't like the dark mode thing. I don't want that.  I've actually I've really come around. It's more readable. And the fact that it's sort of like we now have a forced dark mode for websites. Even if the websites don't actually want you to have dark mode, we'll do it for you. It is that is that is a feature that like I would have chuckled about not that long ago, but now I'm like, I really like it and had tipped to sky. You're the one to text to me the other day about seeing the story saying that the OLED screens were, you know, maybe saving some battery life because of dark mode. Yeah, they seem seems to actually be accurate. I know I'm getting longer battery life in my 10 that I used to. But I thought it was just me having, again, some sort of observation bias or something seemed better. And I've also come to like dark mode on desktop, on tablet, on phone. And I was so not into this when it was first happening. And I don't know what Kool-Aid I drank, but I'm totally into dark mode. And I'm glad who's doing this. So yeah, if you're watching the video, I'm going to go dark mode now. There you go. There it is. Nice. You've filled our video. Yeah, looking good. Well, Sarah, what's up with Google Stadia? Oh, well, Tom, glad you asked. Google announced that it cannot fulfill all pre-orders for its Google Stadia streaming service in time for its November 19th launch date. Stadia's Founders Edition customers are the only customers that are being promised delivery. A Google representative told ours, Technica, that Founders Edition shipping starts the 19th and will be fulfilled in order received with Premier Edition shipments shipping in order after founders. Google told the Verge that it expects all founders and Premier Edition pre-orders to be shipped within the first two weeks of launch. But ours, Technica says, if you try to order premium right now, it gives you a shipping date sometime in December. So they're not rolling all these out of what, Scott? No, I'm not super annoying because I'm not into the first round of this. I kind of need to see it settle in on other platforms, PC in particular, browsers, all that stuff needs to happen before I get really on board. But it is a little weird. You're talking about a controller and a dongle that's basically a Chromecast, and that's it. And I'm not saying that everything's easy to make all the time, but it seems like Google should have the wherewithal to get that done. And I don't think it's because too many people bought them. I think part of it is they're charging like the same price for both editions, and that's weird. Although you get the founders edition first, if so, they should have realized that more people would want the founders edition because it ships first, right? That makes sense to me. There are a few reasons why this could happen. One is they just underestimated the interest. They made a certain amount of controllers and more people were interested in signing up than they thought. That that can happen to any company, right? Because you make a guess. That one's hard to swallow, though. Like, well, because because like the press release based on Google Stadia was a very big deal when you build hardware, though, you want to have a precise amount of hardware order. You don't want to overorder. It's very important. And there's no like, you know, accepted way of saying like, well, we made a big press release and it's going to be this many people, right? That could be a lot of people and still even more people. It doesn't take that many more people. I suppose I guess I guess I just, you know, when I see that it's Google, you think, well, if you're going to be bullish, be bullish. Well, if you're Google, you can't make mistakes. This is almost what you're saying, right? You're so big. Why would you make a mistake? Actually, there's there's value in saying that because I think that they need to be this needs to be as smooth as possible for them to compete in the way that they're planning on and to take on Microsoft and XCloud and to take on PlayStation and any other gaming platform that sees Stadia as the hot new next thing. I just think they have to be careful about this stuff. So I'm a little bugged on that end. But in terms of like supply and demand, I totally get it. Normally, the way this works is they know how many they're going to make exactly and then when they sell out, they sell out and you stop selling them. And you say they'll be back when they're back. In this case, it doesn't sound like they did that. It sounds like they're doing a lot of estimating and I don't know why that is, but that probably has something to do with it. I didn't even get to the other reasons, right? It's it's and I think this is this is emblematic of the situation. Like Google can't do anything right, except be perfect. Because it could be that they they didn't get the order right. It could be that there was an unforeseen problem in the supply chain that slowed down the orders. And so maybe they had some padding, but but they didn't get the yield out of the factories that they thought they could get, which Google not being great, you know, not being a big producer of hardware and not previously producing controllers could be part of it. And it could be that they want to have fewer people in here because they want to limit what can go wrong when a lot of people start using Stadia at once. And the more you can control the influx of people, the better chance you have of making sure those servers work well and those servers have to work well. I mean, just look at how we're we're talking about Google with the shipments part of it. This thing cannot go down. It can't have latency problems or people are going to rip it apart. Yeah, I'm nervous about that. We'll see. You think you're nervous. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day at about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to Daily Tech headlines dot com article in New York Times today called Would You Like Fries With That? McDonald's already knows the answer.  Because McDonald's has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring artificial intelligence companies. We've talked about Dynamic Yield, which does AI for drive through orders. We've talked about a print a voice activated platform for taking orders. So it recognizes your voice. You don't have to talk to a person that can handle more orders that way by doing voice recognition. McDonald's has a tech hub in Silicon Valley called McD Tech Labs. That's not unusual. Domino's has their own R&D innovation center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Engineers in data science all working on lots of things like voice recognition solutions. One of the things they're talking about in this article are smart drive through boards that take into account things like the time of day, the weather, popularity of certain menu items, the length of the weight and change the menu based on that. So for instance, it's simple, very simple version of this on a hot day. I might show you a soda on a cold day. I might show you coffee. Transactions now also have recommendations suggesting what else to order? Kind of like Amazon, like, oh, I see you ordered a Big Mac. Would you also like Fries With That? Right. That kind of thing. But on a grand AI scale, there's even the idea of recognizing license plate numbers with your opt-in saying, is it OK if we keep using your license plate numbers so that when you pull up to the menu, the things you like to order are up there and you can see what options are available. Personally, I would love that. It is where it's being tested, leading to larger orders. So it's working. McDonald's is selling more stuff to people. I kind of want to go test it. Does anyone else want to just go over there and just go, you think I want fries, but I'm going to say I don't want any fries. You know what I mean? Listen, McDonald's is I don't go through the McDonald's drive through all that often, but it does happen. And I'm with Tom.  So those sorts of things actually I find helpful when it comes to what I'm going to see on the board, what, you know, things like time of day, temperature, what might be offered to me as a beverage, you know, is it hot? Is it cold? You know, we're going to try to help you. That's that doesn't really bother me. The whole kind of license plate number identifying customers, which is opt in again, doesn't mean it doesn't mean, you know, anybody has to freak out. You have to say, you know, I'm interested in this. That is even if you are interested in it and even if that does actually make your ordering process better going forward. That does give me pause. But then again, why wouldn't McDonald's want to do this? Yeah, all companies do this. Totally, totally. And I think it's important to New York Times has a really snotty tone to this article like people that eat McDonald's. Am I right? And just kind of take it potshots at the healthiness of it. But I think that's more interesting to think about this story from the idea of a restaurant that is selling you food, whether you like the food, hate the food, whatever, it doesn't matter. This is interesting because a lot of restaurants when you drive up, the menus are organized to try to get you to order certain things.  So it never makes sense for me to get their combo and then I have to hunt around to find the other stuff. If they could recognize my license plate and go, OK, this guy, I don't even don't even show him the combos. It's fine. He just orders all the card. I would love that. But you're right. This is going to cause people to start thinking about restaurants as tech companies, as privacy violators, because they're collecting data on you. And in this story, Daniel Henry, the chain's chief information officer says, you just grow to expect that in other parts of your life. Why should it be different when you're ordering a McDonald's? We don't think food should be any different than what you buy on Amazon. Oh, Mr. Henry, which is he has a point. He does. He actually does have a point. At the same time, I think that that is a very convenient way for McDonald's to be like, well, Amazon does it. We can do it. Also, read the room, Daniel Henry. What's happening right now is people are getting upset at companies for doing the things you're saying we expect in other parts of our life. Granted, it's totally hypocritical in the part of the human race to be like, I'm not going to read the terms of service. I want things for free and just suddenly wake up one day and go, you did what with my information? But that's what's happening. And so if you want to be a tech company in that sense, I think that's smart. I think it's a great way to make sure that your restaurant survives. But I wouldn't go around saying, and we're not going to do anything different. I think you need to actually say, and we're going to respect your privacy as they are with the opt-in, right, on the driver's license. We're going to let you handle your data, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That that would be truly forward thinking. Yeah, that's some super, super sketchy language that he's using there. And I don't like it at all. But I'm kind of a Tom. I sort of want this like I kind of want smarter destinations for lots of things, not just yeah, yeah. And food makes the most sense. Like this seems like the good next step for the sort of thing. I think that tech is interesting. But they have got to get out ahead. Like you said, read the room and get out ahead of this stuff. Not just in language and PR, but like showing us what their plans are. Very explicitly regarding security or else you're just you're just asking for it. They're going to get just killed on this if they don't do that. So well, and one of the things of the New York Times article that we didn't really touch on was that apparently the fast food industry is is is lagging. You know, it's it's it's not growing, it's shrinking. So of course, a company like McDonald's, you know, arguably at the forefront of fast food in general would be like, OK, well, we're going to get somebody through the drive through already. How do we get them to, you know, like buy a couple more things, you know, based on what they know it's it's the exact same thing as as, you know, ad tracking, it really is. And I think it's very smart on the on on on the company's sake. I just, you know, I don't I don't know. I don't know how many people will be outraged about this. Will care about this or will love it? Well, it depends on how they do it, right? And the answer is it could be both. Domino's is trying to say we're a tech company that also sells food in restaurants. We're an online company. That's the mentality that a lot of these companies are starting to have. And we're just talking about drive through and ordering here. There's also understanding what things are being ordered, what kinds of flavors are emerging and knowing before the audience or before your customers do what kinds of food they're going to want to have. What should we add to the menu? When should the McRib come back? All of that stuff is a way to get people to come into the restaurant more often. Because it's not like people aren't eating food. It's just that they aren't necessarily eating your kind of food. And you you want to use this technology as a way to make sure you're super serving the audience that can mean better restaurant experiences. It can also mean privacy violations or, you know, leading to unhealthy behavior, trying to encourage unhealthy behaviors, et cetera. But those are all the kinds of controversies you can expect to see erupt around this stuff, especially if you read this New York Times article. You can tell they're just salivating at the idea of having stories to write about where they can expose the privacy violations of future restaurants. Well, privacy violation stories are very welcome in our subreddit as our other stories that you care about. You can submit your, in fact, they are. You can submit stories and vote on others at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Thanks to everybody who submits. You help us make our shows every day. We're also on Facebook. Join our group, facebook.com, slash groups, slash Daily Tech News Show. You want your voice on our show, email us. And then we might read your email in the mailbag. Indeed. This one comes from Paul, although Johannes and a few others wrote in about our conversation the other day about why not, why don't Google and Amazon review voice apps that are updated for security reasons? You know, why don't they act more like an app store, the way that we know app stores to go? Paul says, well, it would be really hard to do that. Voice apps work more like a web app than a native phone app. That is to say, most of the code in a voice app lives on a server. And then the voice hardware acts like a web browser, just relaying voice commands to that server so you could get an app approved and then change your server code to respond differently without ever having to go through the approval process. There are some changes that would require getting re-approved, but most changes can be done without this. So to implement what you suggest, Google and Amazon would have to sample requests that look for bad behaviors, sort of like how an antivirus works. It's probable, but it would be really expensive. On another note, as for reasons not to switch to Firefox. This is Paul just, he had lots of ideas. The developer tools aren't as good. They've gotten much better recently, but Chrome still kills it there. I'd be willing to hear arguments against this, though. Commits me to use Firefox, please. Just keep using it. The more you use it, the easier it gets. And, you know, I mean, if you have to develop on Chrome, then you can use it for your development, but just surf on Firefox. On to the other stuff. Johann and a few others wrote in pointing out, and I knew this, I just forgot it because our own Daily Tech headline skill sits on our server.  And Amazon doesn't know. So it would have to be a different situation. It's not like Amazon can't afford to have the space to copy this over and host it and scan it, but maybe they just don't want to go through the expense that that takes to monitor. So that's a very good point. Thank you, everybody who pointed that that out to us. And thank you, Paul, for writing in. Absolutely. Shout out to our patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Tony Glass, Ruchan Brantley and Adam Carr. And thank you, Scott Johnson. Yay. You know what that means on Wednesday? It means everything went fine. If I get thanked, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me as always. If people are like, man, what's the other weird stuff does that guy do? I have a great place to go. It's called frogpants.com. You'll find all the shows, all the art, all the projects, everything I got going on right there at frogpants.com. And if you're just trying to yapp at me online, you can find me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. 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Thank you, Mike, for that very generous introduction. It's about the nicest I've received since the person who was supposed to introduce me got sick and they let me introduce myself. I was asked to come and we were talking about what I should do, and since I'm one of the early speakers, they said, you know, why don't you do sort of a scene setter, kind of a lightning round of issues relating to strategy. And so we agreed on that. And from my days as a student here, you know, way back in the Dark Ages when we only had one big problem, I said, well, you know, back in the day it was traditional for the speaker to tell a joke. And they said, yeah, yeah, you should probably tell a joke. And I said, I don't tell jokes very well. And they said, yes, but we've heard you speak and you should probably tell a joke. And so I said, well, you know, why don't I just try and set people's expectations before I start. And they said, okay, that was after I told them that the only jokes I knew were jokes about physics. And I was up in Lincoln Labs and I told my physics jokes to the physicists and they didn't laugh.  They said because I didn't understand what they were talking about. But anyway, I was out in Nebraska a couple of years ago, a friend of mine who was a provost at the University of Nebraska at Carney. It's out in the Panhandle. They were having a speaker series and there's about eight speakers. And so I was one of them and I went out and there was a nice dais.  It's kind of an evening thing, you know, people have eaten their dinner. And so I got up and my friend was on my right and somebody was on my left. And got up and gave my talk and finished two polite applause, which I always think is a good thing when you hear a speaker, you know, polite applause at the end. And I sat down and I was feeling pretty good. And I turned to the fellow on my left and said, what do you think? And in Washington, you expect somebody to give you the polite answer. In Nebraska, you get an honest answer. And this fellow said to me, let's see, it's an eight speaker series. You're the sixth speaker. I have to say you're about the worst. So my jaw just about hit the table and I kind of turned back to my friend who invited me out there. And he was talking to somebody else. He turned back toward me and he saw the look on my face. And he saw the other guy was kind of smiling and he turned away. And my friend said to me, hey, Andy, hey, don't mind that guy. Don't listen to him. Don't pay attention to what he says. He doesn't even have a mind of his own. He's just repeating what everybody else is saying. So I'm setting your expectations now. What I'd like to do as quick as I can is to talk a little bit about security challenges, the resources we have to deal with them, and a little bit about strategy. And hopefully give you some food for thought and the discussion that follows in the seminar sessions. To start out, I guess one of the fundamental things we think about in terms of strategy is, we've had sort of an enduring way of preserving our interest over time as a global power and assuming that we want to remain a global power. In order to preserve our security and our well-being, we try to fight our wars as far away from our homeland as possible, which gives us enormous strategic depth if we use it right. And that's an advantage that most other countries don't have. And one of the core principles of strategy, and I'm going to repeat it as I go through, is strategy is a lot about identifying, developing, and exploiting areas of advantage and having great strategic depth as an advantage. Second, by going, say, to fight our wars away, we go to key areas of the world and we engage and have the good fortune of having powerful allies, which is another source of advantage that we have relative to, say, our competitors or our rivals. And third, it enables us to maintain access to key areas around the world as part of a global economy where we need access to resources and trade to help sustain our economy as the most vibrant and powerful economy in the world, at least up to this point. So these are important advantages that we have. And as Admiral Howard said, sustaining and maintaining those advantages really relies on our ability to have access, access to those regions because if we don't, our allies and partners begin to wonder if we really are going to be able to assure them to provide the kind of capability that we say that we will, that we're committed to. It also runs the risk that key parts of the world with great industrial power could fall under the control of adversaries and thus reducing our strategic depth and not only imperiling our economic well-being but our physical well-being, our security. So, again, there are several regions of the world. One obviously is Europe. Another has become the Middle East in the recent decades and then the Far East where we have important security interests, important economic interests. And of course, we have to maintain access to the global commons which have been expanded from the maritime domain, as Admiral Howard said, to the cyber domain and also the space in order to be able to move goods and services but also move military force if we need to to support, again, our interest in those parts of the world. Now, what I'd like to do now is just talk about some of the challenges that we're confronting. And if I could give you the bottom line up front, challenges are going up, resources are going down, which means you really need to think hard about strategy. The best way to use limited resources is the most effective way to use them in order to preserve your interests. And the way I look at it, I don't think we've seen this kind of environment in terms of the strategic challenges that we are confronted with. Since the late 1940s and early 1950s. You know, we fought the Cold War. It was a radical shift in terms of our thinking in the late 40s and early 50s at NSC 68-162-2, the Solarium effort. A lot of smart people working the problem. At the end of the Cold War, there didn't seem to be anybody out there. And so, arguably, we became a little bit strategically lazy. Well, now it's time to put our thinking caps back on. In terms of the challenges to our security, relative to the last 20, 25 years, they're growing in scale and shifting in form. Certainly, when we did our planning in the 90s and the early 2000s, when we did the MRCs, MTWs, MCOs, major regional conflicts against relatively small adversaries, the Libyans, the Iraqs, the North Korea planning, those sorts of things. That's small potatoes compared to the rise of major revisionist powers. Russia in Europe, China in the Far East, and of course, Iran for quite some time now in the Middle East. Now, these are countries that don't like the existing international order and it's not clear that they're willing to respect international norms of behavior in their efforts to shift that order in ways that are more favorable to them. And of course, we see the Russians acting upon this, looking for territorial gains in Eastern Europe, the Chinese, expanding their claims of what actually belongs to China and their recent moves in the South China Sea, the Air Defense Identification Zone in areas that cover Korean and Japanese zones, and Iran, which has been active almost since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, certainly now in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Bahrain. So we have a problem whose scale is much greater than the kinds of adversaries, the kinds of concerns we had in the, say, the two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But even just as worrisome is that the form of the challenges is shifting. And as Admiral Howard said, and the theme of this conference indeed is adversaries are looking for their own forms of advantage in order to deny us access, in order to make access to the commons and access to key regions around the world where we have security commitments, very problematic. A simple way of putting this is the cost of projecting power is going up, and it seems to be going up rather dramatically. And either we face the fact that we're going to be crowded out of some areas or the cost of doing business is going to be too high, or we find a way around that. We find a way to restore our freedom of maneuver in these areas. So that's the strategic challenge. And this A-to-AD problem, at least in one domain, is the result of our loss of a key source of competitive advantage at the end of the Cold War, the First Gulf War. What we found out was we had the ability to wage precision warfare and we had nascent battle networks. And over the course of the next 10 years or so, we developed that. We relied more and more on precision weaponry. We developed our battle networks to be far more capable than they were at the end of the Cold War. And this gave us a great advantage. However, this source of competitive advantage has become what people in the late 40s and early 50s, once the Russians tested their nuclear weapon, they called our nuclear monopoly a wasting asset. It was an advantage we had, but it was going away. It was being dissipated. Others were entering the competition. And it's the same now with precision warfare. And of course, the pace setter right now is China. They have the most advanced capabilities when it comes to precision and the rise of battle networks. And like good strategists, what they're doing is they are trying to align the strengths that they're building with our weaknesses. And they see our weaknesses as many eggs in a few baskets, the few major bases we have in the Western Pacific and the many eggs we have in our aircraft carriers. And also going after the battle networks with anti-space capabilities, cyber capabilities, and so on. So I confronted with a much more challenging environment, moving from permissive to non-permissive, uncontested to contested environments. And the Russians are doing it in a more modest way. The Iranians are doing it in their own way. In fact, nobody's trying to mimic us exactly. They are all doing it with their own specific characteristics in mind. So that's one area. Second is we're losing an advantage that we've long had in the developing world, which is nuclear weapons over the last 15, 20 years are now proliferated to the developing world. And when you think about nuclear planning, it's not these Armageddon exchanges between us and the Soviet Union anymore. It's thinking about the Russian doctrine now which is escalate to de-escalate. If you find yourself at a disadvantage in a conventional conflict, escalate to nuclear weapons is a way of de-escalating the conflict. I'm not quite sure how that would work in practice, but this is what the Russians talk about and this is what they're exercising and their military exercises both focused on NATO in Europe and China in the Far East. They're more about NATO than China, but still that's one of the issues. Another is Pakistan, which Pakistani generals will tell you they've learned a lot from our experience in the 1950s, which is if you're outgunned by a conventional adversary, use nuclear weapons. They're building nuclear weapons faster than any other country and their doctrine says if we're invaded by India, then we use nuclear weapons on our own territory to stop them. Of course the Indians will understand that they shouldn't use nuclear weapons against us. Indian doctrine says we've got a cold start doctrine, which is we're going to grab Pakistani territory very quickly, call for a ceasefire and negotiate from a position of strength. So you have two very different views of what a conflict might look like and it's not a trivial possibility that if such a conflict would occur that nuclear weapons would not be involved. And of course the issue of the day, which is Iran, Iran stands to become perhaps a threshold nuclear power. If Iran does acquire a nuclear capability, there are some interesting observations you could make. One is that the missile flight time between Israel and Iran is about five minutes. That is not enough time for even the most advanced early warning and command and control system to detect an attack, to inform the national command authority, to make an informed decision about whether it's a real attack or whether the system is faulty, and to engineer a corresponding response. So in a crisis situation, and one could imagine any number of ways where a crisis could emerge between Iran and Israel, how would that play out? And what would our role be in trying to stabilize the crisis situation? The Saudis have said in many different ways that if the Iranians, if there's a Persian Shia bomb and if there's an Israeli Jewish bomb, then by Ghali there's going to be a Sunni Arab bomb. And given the funds that they provided to Pakistan, one could imagine Pakistan providing extended deterrence to Saudi Arabia, just as we provide extended deterrence to Turkey by placing nuclear weapons in Turkey, they could do the same. Pakistanis could do the same for Saudi Arabia. Only in this case you'd wonder, well, who's actually controlling those nuclear weapons? And so you see that there's a rich set of scenarios and contingencies one could think about that are certainly not beyond the pale. And given the prospective consequences of nuclear weapons use, they're worth thinking about, it seems to me. I'll just put one or two lines in about the biosciences. If you look at some of the enormous advances that are being made in the field of genetics, the field of fighting cancer, many of them very encouraging. Unfortunately, science can be put to good use. There's talk about specifically designed pathogens to go after specific population sets and subsets. And the fact that as the late Defense Secretary James Schlesinger once said, and I don't know why he said this, but anyway, he said, if you have the technology to know how to develop and run a microbrewery, then you have the basic technology that enables you to create biological weapons. So I prefer to get into the microbrewery business. But anyway, so there's also this issue of the global commons. And if you look at space, cyberspace, and the undersea, you find that they're increasingly contested. It's not clear that countries even know what they're doing in this domain. So in space, we see in 2007, China conducts an ASAT test and creates an enormous amount of space junk, which doesn't help them any more than it helps us. So what are these guys thinking about? What was on their mind before they started doing this stuff? The cyber domain, Admiral Howard covered that, I think, very well. Not much I can add to that. I would talk about the undersea. When I was growing up, I used to watch Victory at Sea. And we were fighting our way across the Pacific and everything. I noticed that after a while, whether it was Guadalcanal or the Battle of the Philippines Sea or Lady Gulf, we were always shooting up the same Japanese transport ship. They just kept running it over and over. I guess we didn't have a lot of film on that. So I thought, well, you know, you have to worry about commerce rating, commerce defense and so on. In 1947, two years after the war, we started sinking the first oil rigs off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. And now we have this enormous undersea infrastructure. A lot of it's energy-based, but also, obviously, a lot of communications cables running undersea. And if you look back, you see that one of the first things the Brits did in 1914 was cut Germany's overseas cables when World War I started. You also note that there's, potentially, we had the BP spill, enormous environmental damage. That could be caused depending upon how these kinds of economic assets, not at sea but under the sea, the kind of cost we could incur if this becomes a battleground in another war. And if you look at space, cyberspace in the undersea, what strikes me is we often rely on a posture of deterrence to deter aggression against us. Well, arguably in each of these domains, attribution is difficult and given an equal amount of resources, the advantage goes to the offense. So, if you're thinking about deterring through retaliation, deterring through the threat of punishment, if attribution is difficult, and again, Admiral Howard made a great point, who actually was conducting these cyber attacks on Estonia? Who actually conducts these denial of service attacks, identity theft attacks? Our defense industry is attacked on a regular basis. Who's conducting the attacks? We think we might know, but do you really have a smoking gun? So many countries getting into space. Your satellite that's blinded by a laser from some part of the world, well, who actually is conducting that attack? Your well heads are blowing up in the Gulf of Mexico. Do we know exactly who's doing it? One of the interesting things we're looking at at CSBA right now is the eastern med where the gas finds, natural gas finds under the ocean, are claimed by the Egyptians, the Israelis, the Lebanese, the Turks, the Greeks, and probably Hezbollah in there somewhere. Can you imagine what it's going to be like sorting that out? The potential for conflict there, and again, the difficulty of identifying who might be the source of an attack. And if you're talking about deterrence through defense or denial, we'll just deny you the ability to conduct an effective attack. In each of those domains right now, the betting line is that it favors the offense, which means that whatever defenses you could put in place, your adversary can offset them far more cheaply than you can continue to improve them. So what does that say about how stable that kind of a situation might be? So those are some of the challenges. Again, increasing in scale, but also shifting in form. And if they're also shifting in form, what that means is that a lot of the capital stock, the military capability that we have built that's focused on a particular set of contingencies may depreciate somewhat, perhaps precipitously, if we're faced with using that in a different set of contingencies. So the stuff we've had, the stuff we're building, are we building it in anticipation of these kinds of contingencies, or are we kind of living off what we consider to be arguably the more comfortable, familiar kinds of conflicts? And I would also mention that just one theme is the democratization of destruction. If you're looking at cyber, if you're looking at precision weapons, if you're looking at the ability to use the internet to proselytize and recruit people to your cause, we're facing a situation where, increasingly, it seems to me that even small groups and individuals can cause enormous, have the potential to cause enormous destruction. And with that, I would say, we may also be looking at the return of proxy warfare. We've said one of the things we want to do as a country is sort of get out of the business of large-scale stability operations. But Trotsky once said, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. And the Russians are waging proxy warfare in Eastern Europe. The Iranians were waging proxy warfare for the last 30-odd years against us. Not clear where the Chinese are headed. But again, if you can basically empower a small group with high destructive potential, then that may make that group more attractive as a proxy. And proxy is a great way of imposing costs on your adversaries, as we've seen in a number of instances over the years. So what kind of resources do we have to deal with this particular problem? I mentioned the fact that, for me at least, this kind of strategic environment is as rich as anything we've seen since the late 40s and early 50s. Typically though, when threats are increasing, the resources we have to deal with the threats increase as well. We haven't seen a major, from my point of view anyway, arguably, major increase in the security challenges and a corresponding decline in economic resources since the 1930s. Now, I'm not saying here comes, you know, World War III. I'm just saying that that makes for a particularly challenging environment. So, if you have this mismatch between declining resources and growing threats or challenges, what are some ways you might address that? And let's see. One is to increase defense spending. And interestingly, both the administration and the Congress say, yes, we need to increase defense spending. We need to get away from sequestration. The problem is that they're both holding that hostage. And when both parties in the dispute are holding you hostage, as the hostage you can't feel particularly good about that situation. The President wants increased revenues and he wants corresponding increases in domestic programs. The Congressional leadership wants basically other programs to be cut in order to fund increases in defense. And there they stand and, you know, we don't know if we're going to see another Ryan Murray situation or not, but it makes it very difficult to plan. Now, the current glide path we're on will have defense spending by around 2020 at less than 3% of our gross domestic product. We're up around the mid-4s until the drawdown, okay? During the Cold War, we sustained over 6% GDP on average for a 40-year period. And again, to some extent, it's a matter of how much risk you want to take, how much investment you want to put in defense. And this is just, gives you an idea of how easy or difficult it's going to be for us to increase defense spending. Now, these are CBO estimates and they're about as reliable as you can get, but if things remain unchanged, and of course, we can always change things. The debt mountain there, there's a guy with his two kids saying, someday all this will be yours. So it's kind of planning for their future. You're going to have to hand off at some point. But if you look 2014, 2020, 2025, you see that defense spending, as we go out to 2025, increases about 19% over 2014. That's slower growth in the U.S. economy. So as a percentage of our overall wealth, that's going to decline. Mandatory spending, these are primarily entitlements and a few other things. The boomers are retiring. We have Obamacare. We have the Bush administration expanded coverage for drugs and so on. 84% here. And that interest payments, the projection is that we'll be paying more on interest on the debt than we will on defense in another 10 years. So you've got to, by definition, you have to pay an entitlement. You're entitled to that benefit. Only countries with very poor economic outlooks default on their debt. So if you've got those two parts of the overall budget pie squeezing, you've got less and less available for discretionary spending. And it's going to be interesting to see if we can even sustain under those conditions the kind of defense spending that may be necessary to deal with the rising challenges that we face. So if increasing spending may be problematic, there are some other ways. Second is you become more efficient. So you free up resources in order to buy the things you really need. And we've had efficient... I'm going back all the way to the time I was here. I think it was the Packard Commission in 85 or 86. And they were going to improve the efficiencies in the Defense Department. We've had other ones that were going along. And I was in a meeting with then Secretary of Defense Panetta. And there's about 200-odd billion in efficiency savings baked into the current long-term program. And Panetta, who was in OMB and in the Budget Committee in Congress sitting there, and this issue is raised, and this is Panetta's quote, not mine, okay?  So the bottom line here is we often plan for efficiencies. We usually get nickels on the dollar. And actually the result can be pernicious because if I bank those savings, how many Air Force Saucers do we have here? One. Guys, what's wrong? Anyway, so I've got this F-35A program and I've got all these savings that I'm going to get. All these efficiency savings. And I've got this big wedge in my budget. I'm going to have this money. And so I go to Lockheed Martin and I say, you know what? I'm building, you know, 7235s a year by 2019. And you get to 2019 and the money isn't there. And you say, well, remember those 72? I said, do you want to build this year? We're going to have to build 48. And Lockheed will say, yes, sir, we'll build the 48. But you know we built the plant for 72. We bought the equipment for 72. We hired the workforce for 72. You're going to have to cover that. So you can actually generate inefficiencies as you move on your way to generate efficiency. You also defer a lot of hard choices, which isn't a good thing. So efficiencies, yeah, we could try it maybe in a more responsible, careful way. Third is to outsource, to get our allies to do more. And here's a percentage GDP to defense in the late 90s and here's where we are today. Some of our key European allies across Japan is always around 1%. Another major power. But you can see that if there's a disarmament race, our allies are winning it, okay? And so the issue here becomes, can we convince our allies that they need to do more? I was talking to a former British Shadow Defense Minister recently. He said, we've got a choice between the carriers and the nuclear deterrent. That's a fundamental choice, right? The new government now controlled entirely by the Tories. The Conservatives is planning a 500 million pound cut in defense expenditures. And these are the folks who are friendly toward defense. So again, it doesn't look as though our allies are going to be bailing us out anytime soon. A fourth area is to increase risk. Well, we're just going to increase the risk that we're going to be able to meet our commitments. The question is at what point does increasing that risk become a strategy of bluff where you're not deterring your adversaries and you're not reassuring your allies? I was spending about a week in Japan a couple of weeks ago talking to a number of their senior military and security officials.  We don't quite know how you're planning on. You were still waiting for the meat on the bones of the pivot and the rebounds. So there's a concern there. Then another area would be cost and position. A lot of times we look at a threat and we say, how do we respond to the threat? There's other the other side. How do we pose problems to the adversary? And we got into this in a big way in the 1980s. There's some effort to begin to reinvigorate that kind of thinking. When I was on the 2010 QDR Red Team, we actually did a fair amount of work on that. So as the money gets scarcer, looking for ways to impose cost on the other guy can become attractive. And then finally there's just, can you use the resources not only more efficiently that you have, but more effectively? And a great example of this occurred after the Battle of Midway when the Navy General Board recommended to Admiral King that we continue producing the Iowa class and begin planning for the Montana class of battleships. And King said, we're not going to do that. We can get a lot more value out of X tons of steel by building carriers and amphibs and other ships than we will by building more battleships. So are there ways that we can reallocate resources to improve the effectiveness of our military? And so that kind of leads us to strategy. And let's see, I've got my, here we go. As I mentioned earlier, and this Barry Watts, they now use his definition of strategy at the National War College. Richard Rumelt, strategic advisor to Guy named Steve Jobs. Rupert Smith, very thoughtful British general. But it's very interesting to me, you have three individuals and they say a key element of strategy is identifying, developing, and exploiting areas of advantage. And it's also in a dynamic environment where your competitors are trying to do the same thing. And as they try to do the same thing, you need to identify where your wasting assets are. Assets that look valuable now, like that nuclear monopoly in the early 1950s or that dominant precision warfare in the late 90s and early aughts that is unlikely to last over the long term. And so how do you begin to shift away from that? And Eisenhower said, this kind of work, the principles, the definition of strategy are relatively easy. But figuring out the kernel, what new areas of advantage do we need to develop, how can we exploit them, that's the hardest kind of work. Finally, for those of you who love the QDR, and I've been involved in just about every one of them, plans are useless. Planning is indispensable. And what Eisenhower meant by that was that even if you come up with the perfect plan on June the 16th, 2015, the world is such a dynamic place. Your adversaries are always trying and looking for new advantages, new ways to undermine your advantages that planning, the constant rethinking, reviewing, re-evaluating where you stand and your strategy, that's the key. That's the key, not the plan itself, it's the process. It's the constant thinking. So, we have something in the Defense Department called the the third offset strategy. And Bob Work and I used the Deputy Defense Secretary Secretary Carter signed up to this. Bob and I are old colleagues so we talk from time to time and I don't want to, this is my view, not his. But supposedly the first offset was in the 50s, the second in the 70s, and now we're looking for the third. The first offset had to do with the fact that the Russians had tested a nuclear weapon and our nuclear monopoly was becoming a wasting asset. Eisenhower essentially decided to ride that wasting asset. To extend that wasting asset, that nuclear monopoly as long as he could. And his rationale was the key, the core asset he wanted to develop over time was a sound economic foundation to enable us to pursue a long-term competition with the Soviet Union. He knew the Europeans were trying to recover from World War II and so putting the kind of stress on them of building up a major conventional military to match the Soviets was going to cripple that recovery. He was very concerned about maintaining economic probity here at home. And so that was the effort to generate and sustain that kind of long-term economic and industrial advantage. In the 70s the Soviets had caught up with the Soviet nuclear weapons. The arms control treaties kind of verified that, if you will. And so we were faced with an inferior conventional force. At least that's what we believed. And so then we had the long-range research and development plan. Efforts were made. Harold Brow was Defense Secretary. Bill Perry was the head of Defense Research and Engineering. And what we decided to do was we identified a new source during competitive advantage. It was our ability to explore information technology in the broadest sense. For those of you who were around back then nobody was buying Tandy computers from the Soviets. Nobody was playing Pong on Soviet arcade game consoles. Nobody was buying Soviet color television sets. These guys were stuck in the industrial age and the world was moving to the information age. And so it was stealth. It was precision weaponry. It was battle networks, initially in the form of SDI. It was sensors. It was quieting. It was all the things that we could leverage information technology to do for us.  We erected sufficient barriers so that, for the most part, it was very difficult for them to steal that technology and even when they stole it, it was difficult for them to know what to do with it. Now, what's the third offset? We're in a world now where we're losing our asymmetric advantage in precision warfare and where a lot of these new technologies, whether it's artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, directed energy, they're widely available to most advanced economic powers, including at least two of our major revisionist arrivals. What it reminds me of is more similar to what we found in the 1920s and 30s when most of the great powers had mechanization. They had an automotive industry. They had an aviation industry. They had radio. They were working on radar or some form of it. And the key discriminator between who emerged on top in the military competition and who didn't were two things. Who could figure out how to leverage these technologies within the context of new operational concepts better than anyone else? And so you see that even though everyone has access to these technologies, only the Germans really come up with Blitzkrieg. Only the Americans and the British really develop strategic aerial bombardment. Only the Americans and the Japanese really develop what we call the fast carrier task force. The technologies were there. These countries weren't poor. They made their decision. Some stuck with what they had and some saw the potential for developing a new sources competitive advantage. The second factor was who could do it faster than anyone else. Because once you figure out, once you break the code you've got to be able to actually create this capability. And the first one, the operational concept, that's part of the department's mission initiative. But until it gets down to the services and until we do it at a joint level I think that's going to be a hard challenge for us to meet. The command that was supposed to be responsible for that was abolished and it was abolished in my estimation for a good reason. But that mission is now an orphan. And the second, doing it faster than anyone else, well look at our acquisition system. And we have we are not at all effective at time-based competition. And until we get good at that, particularly in the world where so much is related to artificial intelligence, big data and so on, cyber, that world moves at super speed. And again, until we sort that out for ourselves, the good news is there are two areas where we have a lot of potential to develop capability and advantage. Another encouraging thing is you've got Secretary Carter who ran AT&L. You've got Mack Thornberry up on the Hill, who is colleague Adam Smith, and working with the Senate side, really focusing now. So you've got kind of a critical mass on acquisition reform. So there is some hope there. And it's not what do we need to do in acquisition reform. That's been known for a long time. It's the political obstacles that we face. So to a certain extent, that's the case. We're kind of in the late 1930s. And the interesting thing for me is even though we lacked a lot of resources then and the threats were growing, we had places like the Naval War College where we had strategic thinkers and we had innovative operators. We had people like Admiral Sims, the president who could testify before Congress in 1925 when all we had was the converted carrier Langley and say that the carrier is the capital of the future. People falling off chairs and you know you had people like Tower and Yarnel and Reeves who war game didn't took it out to the fleet. You had innovators like Wagner and Thatch who revolutionized the way we thought about how to conduct air operations. That all happened here then. It needs to happen here now. And I certainly think the war college is up to it and I think this conference quite quickly is a great contribution to that effort. Thank you. Or jokes, physics jokes. Simon Goldman from the State Department. Thank you for your comments sir. We read your book when we're studying Vietnam and the book talks about how lower levels of war overwhelm strategic thinking. Can you talk about if that's a concern that you have today and the fights that we're in or the fights that we may be in in the near future. I don't know if that overwhelms strategic thinking. It certainly challenges it because I think the lower you go the more dimensions of strategy come into play. There's a great article by Michael Howard in 79 foreign affairs called The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy one of which is the social dimension. It's always important but he really highlights how it becomes important in low level conflict. I think we're not comfortable or practiced it particularly well. I think unfortunately we're likely to see more of it because I think proxy warfare is going to be increasingly attractive for major powers. The Pakistanis are waging it against India. We see it occurring in Eastern Europe as I mentioned. Chinese are using the Coast Guard, not their military for certain activities. It's kind of proxy effort. I think we'd like to stay away from but for the very reason we'd like to stay away from it I think our adversaries would continue to push and probe us in that way. Good morning, sir. Mo Morales from Standing Joint Force headquarters for elimination of WMD. So far we've discussed China as an adversary and certainly that's legitimate. What do you think are the best opportunities to try to steer them away from their hegemonic tendencies and towards more of a cooperative relationship with the United States and do you see a role for in the end perhaps some of the smaller other non-traditional partners of the U.S. in trying to achieve that strategy. Thank you. I think the key is to make aggression or coercion unattractive to the Chinese and I don't think they're looking for war any more than we are. To borrow a phrase from the Cold War I think what they're looking for is the eventual finalization of East Asia. Shifting the military balance slowly over time to the point where it becomes evident to countries in the region that they're the dominant power and they need to bandwagon with the Chinese. So two things on that. One, when I was in Japan I was talking to one of Abe's advisers and he said look we're in this. He said you know we're we're not going to bandwagon with the Chinese we don't care if you, well we do care if you abandon us but if you do we're not going to basically fall in line with China. So you start to think about things like nuclear weapons and so on. Their military is doing some very interesting thing. Five new bases along the Senkakus that are supposed to be completed by 2020. They're forming their 8th division which is being developed into a rapid deployment force. They're developing a brigade which basically is going to be mirrored on our MEPH formations. But they're concerned about the ASEAN states and they're looking for us to basically make some kind of statement so that they don't feel compelled to bandwagon with the Chinese. So I think clearly you've got to show them that the ASEAN version is not a desirable or even a possible outcome for them. And what you really need it seems to me and what we're really not perhaps doing aggressively enough our think tank developed something called Air Sea Battle back in 2010 which looked at air and naval operations designed with the objective of defending the first island chain. So we haven't, I don't think we've decided what our mission is out there yet. Is it to defend the first island chain? Is our posture that? Is it a tripwire? Is it blockade? Is it mobilization? Is it escalation? All those are potentials but I don't see anything that really informs how we think we're going to fight. And more recently I published a piece in foreign affairs called Archipelagic Defense that looks at the role of ground forces. And I can tell you the reason I was invited to Japan to talk to General Bancho who commands the Western Army is because he wants to talk about Archipelagic Defense and this is what he's doing. And his question is what are you Americans doing? And how are you planning? And you talk to Abe's advisor and he says we'll cover the northern sector of the first chain. He actually said you need to cover the southern sector because the Philippines were your colony not ours. We have so we didn't want to go there but anyway are you guys serious or aren't you? And it's kind of a big hat, no cattle but if you're going to convince somebody that aggression and coercion doesn't work then you've got to say okay what are these guys trying to do and how are we going to prevent them from doing it so that they see that achieving their goals lie through other avenues other than military aggression or coercion. And I talk a lot about that but that's essentially what we need to do. Thank you.


I think that's the most difficult challenge and right now a lot of my assessment is based on qualitative assessment. Qualitative could be student feedback, student feedback could be, for example, their feedback in a student evaluation at the end of the course saying, Bob, thanks for teaching me how to write better. A student feedback could be just somebody's verbal communication, contact me in the hall and saying, for example, that's happened many times. Bob, I want to thank you for teaching me how to write better. Thanks for the attention to detail. I struggle with it, but I feel I can write better. Some of that feedback is from alumni that have graduated and have left. They've gone to the workplace and they've sent me emails thanking me for my attention to detail and helping them write because they didn't realize how important writing was in their job and how concise that writing had to be in their job. So that is another element of feedback. So I have a fellowship where I'm working with an undergraduate who took the course from me last fall where we're trying to assess the quantify, somehow quantify the learning of the students. Whether that learning is going to be, has writing improved science content or science understanding or has their writing improved. For the students that are taking it seriously that you know they're trying to further the writing skills, they're asking questions, considering your feedback. We're using their four reports as a means to see if there's been improvement from report to report. Are they, are they, the feedback that I provided in the first report, are they folding that into the reports down the line. So that's another assessment technique. And this past quarter I actually asked three questions. About two thirds of the way through the course I asked three questions. One, name a writing tip of the day that has been helpful and I told them that if you can't think of a writing tip, that's feedback to me because you're not assimilating writing tips. It doesn't matter to you what the writing tips are. And I was happy that everybody could at least, at least wrote down one or two writing tips. So that was positive for me. Another question that I asked was, has the feedback been helpful? And most, everybody said the feedback was the most helpful. I also asked if the template has been helpful. And they all answered that the template has been very helpful because they said that a lot of instructors don't give a template so they don't exactly know what they're supposed to be writing to. What is their audience? What exactly should a table look like? What is active voice versus passive voice? What's in an introduction? What's in a results and discussion, et cetera? So they found the template to be a very good guide and I use that template as assessment means too because I can refer my feedback using the template.