United States Department of Energy National Laboratories

A lot of Jews came to the United States and were very smart, and they came from Germany.

And so we had this great opportunity to, what are we going to do? And that led to the creation of the National Science Foundation, the growth of places like NIH, the DOE, which ran the National Labs, all came out of that.

We're now at an inflection point, and we could do a whole other podcast on that.

What's the next

Right.

So what's happening now is you're seeing, you know, companies partner with other groups, not just universities.

It could be national labs, contract research groups, standalone research organizations.

You know, you got a great one there in Wisconsin, for example, like the Mogridge Foundation.

And so I was very fortunate to be able to be part of two separate teams.

One was led by Rocky Mountain Institute and the other was led by Syracuse University, whom both, and there were many other team members, Tatum, Cycle Architecture, Stangle Engineering, Lawrence Berkeley, National Labs.

I'm sure I'm missing a few, but it was, they were two, I guess what I would refer to as powerhouse teams with little tiny TKF and its concept also on these awards.

So, Yeah, it was great to have the, I guess, trust and faith in those institutions to be able to say, yeah, let's do this.

One is academia, just go the pure PhD academic route.

The second path is work in the national security environments, like at the national labs.

And both of those were not as appealing.

I had done some research at academic labs and didn't really jive well with the pace of progress there and the culture.

And the national labs, they had some amazing plans back from, you know, that are decades old on roadmaps and designs.

And when you look around, China is essentially building those plans, and people in the national labs are saying it's hard to get funding, it's hard to move fast.

And we'll get into that later, probably in the conversation.

But that led me to the third path, which I believe is also an American competitive edge, which is to start a company.

Well, somewhat simplified story, but nonetheless.

So for example, the US National Labs, previously overseen by the Atomic Energy Commission, was suddenly put into the Department of Energy, which was a huge bureaucratic colossus in Washington DC that wanted to steer all this.

So you're onto something in your description there that at some point, probably during the 1970s, we passed from a state where politics and bureaucracy supported innovation to when it became like rather like put a lid on it by controlling away the natural tendencies, so to speak, of creativity that is inside in science, putting things in boxes, ticking boxes, you know, formulaic research programs where you had to prove that you had a sustainability perspective, not that there's anything wrong with that, or a gender perspective, not that there's anything wrong with that either, but you have to tick these boxes rather than be free in the creative process.

And that's where bureaucracy becomes then coercive instead.

So it was really timely of showing that many of the things that have been progress during the 20th century became instead fears among people.

And that in turn then creates a need to control things.

A need to make sure that all the, for example, all the atomic research or the particle physics done in the national labs or whatever, fulfills all the safety requirements that we have.

And that of course adds to the bureaucracy.