Can you touch a little bit on what you meant by the fact that IP policy isn't abstract?

Yeah, you know, I think a great place to start an appropriate topic, given this year's celebration of the 250th anniversary of our country, is really going back to what the founders were thinking about intellectual property policy and why they decided to put it in the Constitution.

And it's easy to get caught up in the weeds of IP policy and IP lawyers and policymakers and kind of lose the greater plot, which is why were IP rights incorporated into the Constitution? Why did George Washington talk about the importance of intellectual property protection in his first State of the Union? Why was it, you know, very soon after codified in the first Patent Act in April of 1790.

And that's because the founders in creating our country and looking at the model of what was working and not working in England saw that economic protection for scientific discoveries and innovations were critical to grow and support you know, and nurture the economic, you know, success of a new country.

And, you know, maybe reasonable people can disagree on the importance of IP policy.

But going back to the Constitution, I think really is the tiebreaker, right? I mean, the founders had the wisdom to to embed that into the fabric of our founding.

And what happened after that? IP helped democratize innovation.

Coke, do you see a world where bipartisan support for patent reform legislation, let's just start with the Prevail Act, where that could be accomplished? And what do you think that's going to take?

So what was your approach to leading such a large and technically sophisticated organization?

Right.

So USPTO is big.

I mean, we are about 14,000 people and that doesn't include contractors.

And currently about 75 percent of our workforce is fully remote.

And most of that 75 percent are people who do not live in the D.C. metro area.

And then, like I said, as soon as we started, you know, OPM was issuing, everybody knows about Doge, but OPM was issuing all these memos frequently, sometimes multiple times a week.

And from your perspective, what do you feel are the most significant challenges facing the U.S. patent system today?