Nokia Bell Labs

We handed them steel.

We've handed them electronics and now handed them solar cells because literally Bell Labs invented it.

Carter put solar panels on the White House.

Reagan ripped it off.

There's also a member of the AAAS, which is the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the largest scientific organization in the world.

And so I asked my management at Bell Labs, can I not only go to the conference, but give a talk with the imprimatur of Bell Labs, because they had done this, not exactly as part of my work, but as I did it at work.

It's close enough.

Yeah.

We didn't know what the details were, but we knew that there was actual program.

So I said that was an offer I couldn't refuse.

So a few years later, there was an opening and I took a leave of absence from Bell Labs.

And that's that experience on what is now called the Stargate program.

This is the link between someone with ASD excelling in a field like mathematics, physics, and computing, and becoming very rich.

In years past, that profile of person might have whiled away their time doing research at Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, or the Ministry of Defense.

Since the late 1970s, though, there has been a path to monetize the ambition by starting a company, or more recently, to working at a hedge fund, trading in crypto, or building AI.

It's wrong, however, to think that people like Delo and Musk get involved in right-of-center politics simply because they are neurodivergent or rich.

In 1964, two young radio astronomers in New Jersey had a problem they could not solve.

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson worked for Bell Labs, and they had been handed something extraordinary, a 20-foot horn antenna originally built for satellite communication, one of the most sensitive instruments of its kind anywhere in the world.

They wanted to use it to map faint radio signals from the Milky Way.

But to do that, they needed the instrument to be perfectly quiet.

I didn't realize it would be used ultimately to control control us.

And in fact, before I even worked on those chips, I worked on some of this first, I helped at Bell Labs with some of the first CMOS imager chips, which is what allowed cameras to be low enough power and small enough and integrated enough to go into your cell phone.

So I worked on some of the first imagers as well.

So now, you know, now the technology has improved a lot since then, but I was in on some of the early work of that.

If you look at other places that are not siloed, MIT's was set up, I think, so there would be interactions.

If you look at other places like that, Bell Labs had buildings where they put people on floors where they'd have to interact with people.

Steve Jobs did that in the first Apple building they built.

You had to sort of cross through a lobby to get to the food stores or the bathrooms.

But it requires a kind of ecosystem.

And again, you have the origin story of venture capital comes from East Coast finance, and in the case of innovation, of course, the big, not only university research laboratories here, but also classically places like IBM, Bell Labs, and other hubs of innovation and certainly places that are associated with the early advances of technology.

But then you have this transplantation to California and you get a kind of very dense ecosystem of capital and innovators.

So in the kind of classic paradigm of how venture capital works really, really well, to quickly seed and propel innovation, what is the kind of best case to be made for the critical nature of venture?

And if you zoom out, you see that group intelligence, how well a team works together, depends more on social harmony than just the average IQ of the members.

Those organizational stars, they studied at places like Bell Labs.

They weren't just technically brilliant.

They excelled at building trust networks, getting consensus, seeing different perspectives, taking initiative, managing themselves well.