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This podcast, started in 2013, now 11 years running. I wanted to break from the usual conversations to share some thoughts on gratitude and optimism. To share some updates and thank those who have participated in this exceptional run. Designer Resources Pacific Sales Kitchen and Home. Where excellence meets expertise. Monogram - It's the details that define Monogram ThermaSol - Redefining the modern shower experience. Without steam, it's just a bathroom. Design Hardware - A stunning and vast collection of jewelry for the home!  - Where service meets excellence TimberTech - Real wood beauty without the upkeep The production of this episode coincides with Thanksgiving, intentionally. This is the time of year when most design professionals and clients alike tend to shut things down for the year. Kids come home from school for the Winter break, family comes to visit, we buy gifts for loved ones, attend holiday parties and I like to think that I am not alone in looking at the past year reflectively while looking to the new year with renewed optimism. 2024 was a fantastic year with regard to the show. Convo By Design has hit a higher gear this year. Going back to by background in motorsports, that means we have opened up new opportunities and are running faster and harder than ever before. The post-pandemic world is different that it was prior. Some issues have emerged this year that I find disturbing. Natural disasters, climate change, weather patterns have all accelerated. It isn't really about if people believe or remain climate change deniers. Ignore these changes at your peril. I experienced something in 2023 that forever changed the way I feel about climate changes. Father's Day, 2023, there was a straight line wind event in Tulsa. 100 mile per hour winds for 30-minutes. You can imagine the destruction. My family was fine, but others were not as fortunate. As I write this, a series of hurricanes passed through the southeast and the devastation was tremendous. We are also saw a dock workers strike, a fierce election season which will once again separate families and end friendships. And as I say this, I cannot help but feel optimistic for the year to come. Why? I'll tell you, rights after this. Why the optimism? First, I have been incredibly fortunate. I have my family, my health, you… yes you, I am so thankful that you listen, even happier when you send an email to let me know you like the show, disagree with something I said or have a guest suggestion. I also have a roster of incredible partner sponsors. Patrick, Nick, Mitch, Rachael and Jari from ThermaSol. Dan, Jay, Sam from TimberTech. Shaun and Verzine from Pacific Sales as well as the amazing team at Monogram. Michele, Avi, Stassi and Jaime from Design Hardware. Then there are the incredible creatives who share their stories and their work with us, you and me every week on the show. 2024 has brought some new endeavors, exciting changes and portends great things to come. But tread cautiously. I'll get to that in a moment. First, the new developments. I learned early on in my radio career that the only thing you can really count on is change. The Telecom Act of 1996 changed so much, for me…and you. Most of the people I speak with these days don't listen to the radio, and that is unfortunate for radio, but not for all of the incredible audio programming that we have available. If there was no Telecommunications Act of 1996, radio stations would probably still be in the hands of individual owners instead of the 10 groups that almost every American radio station. When I was a teenager, growing up in the Valley. I listened to KLOS, KMET, KNAC and KROQ. Play a song for me and I can tell you about how old I was and what I was doing when it was popular. KMET and KLOS created a love for Guns & Roses, Motley Crue, Giant, Scorpions and Van Halen, KNAC sharpened the rock edge with Metallica, Ozzy, Anthrax and Megadeth. Then KROQ, my beloved KROQ.

Being a life-long blind person I have never served in the military and thus only understand the military way of life vicariously. There is reading about it, of course and there is talking to military people about their lifestyle. Today you get to hear a conversation not only about military life, specifically the army world, as it were, from a 20-year career soldier, Chase Spears who recently retired from the military as a major in the army. Chase grew up always interested in the news and what was going on in the world around him. He attended college, both undergraduate studies and later graduate work at universities in Tennessee. Along the way an army recruiting officer persuaded him to join the army. By that time, he was well married to a woman who, surprising to him, supported his decision to leave college and join the army. Chase's telling of this story is wonderful to hear. As you will see, he is quite the storyteller.   He and I talk a great deal about the world of a soldier, and he puts a lot of things into perspective. For those of you who have served in the military much of what you hear may not be totally new. However, since Chase served in public affairs/relations duties throughout most of his army career, you may find his observations interest. Chase and I had a good free-flowing and informative conversation. I personally came away fascinated and look forward to talking with Chase again in the future. A few months ago, Mr. Spears retired and entered into a doctoral program at Kansas State University where he is conducting research concerning how military life impacts the citizenship of those who serve. You will get to hear a bit about what he is finding.   About the Guest:   U.S. Army Major (Ret.) Chase Spears is first and foremost a Christian, Husband, and Father to five children who help to keep him and his wife young at heart. Having grown up with a passion for news and policy, Chase spent 20 years in the Army as a public affairs officer, trying to be part of a bridge between the military and the public. He merged that work with a passion for writing to become one of the Army's most published public affairs officers, often to resistance from inside the military. Chase continues that journey now as a doctoral candidate at Kansas State University, where his dissertation research explores how military life impacts the citizenship of those who serve. His other writings focus on topics including civil-military dynamics, communication ethics, and the political realities of military operations.   Ways to connect with Chase:   LinkedIn/X/Substack/Youtube: @drchasespears www.chasespears.com   About the Host: Michael Hingson is a New York Times best-selling author, international lecturer, and Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe. Michael, blind since birth, survived the 9/11 attacks with the help of his guide dog Roselle. This story is the subject of his best-selling book, Thunder Dog.   Michael gives over 100 presentations around the world each year speaking to influential groups such as Exxon Mobile, AT&T, Federal Express, Scripps College, Rutgers University, Children's Hospital, and the American Red Cross just to name a few. He is Ambassador for the National Braille Literacy Campaign for the National Federation of the Blind and also serves as Ambassador for the American Humane Association's 2012 Hero Dog Awards.   https://michaelhingson.com https://www.facebook.com/michael.hingson.author.speaker/ https://twitter.com/mhingson https://www.youtube.com/user/mhingson https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelhingson/   accessiBe Links https://accessibe.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/accessiBe https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessibe/mycompany/   https://www.facebook.com/accessibe/       Thanks for listening!   Thanks so much for listening to our podcast! If you enjoyed this episode and think that others could benefit from listening, please share it using the social media buttons on this page. Do you have some feedback or questions about this episode? Leave a comment in the section below!   Subscribe to the podcast   If you would like to get automatic updates of new podcast episodes, you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast app.   Leave us an Apple Podcasts review   Ratings and reviews from our listeners are extremely valuable to us and greatly appreciated. They help our podcast rank higher on Apple Podcasts, which exposes our show to more awesome listeners like you. If you have a minute, please leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts.     Transcription Notes: Michael Hingson ** 00:00 Access Cast and accessiBe Initiative presents Unstoppable Mindset. The podcast where inclusion, diversity and the unexpected meet. Hi, I'm Michael Hingson, Chief Vision Officer for accessiBe and the author of the number one New York Times bestselling book, Thunder dog, the story of a blind man, his guide dog and the triumph of trust. Thanks for joining me on my podcast as we explore our own blinding fears of inclusion unacceptance and our resistance to change. We will discover the idea that no matter the situation, or the people we encounter, our own fears, and prejudices often are our strongest barriers to moving forward. The unstoppable mindset podcast is sponsored by accessiBe, that's a c c e s s i capital B e. Visit www.accessibe.com to learn how you can make your website accessible for persons with disabilities. And to help make the internet fully inclusive by the year 2025. Glad you dropped by we're happy to meet you and to have you here with us.   Michael Hingson ** 01:21 Hi there and welcome once again to unstoppable mindset. And we have a I think really interesting show today are interesting episode we get to chat with major retired Chase Spears. I've been saying ret all morning because he's got Rhett in parentheses. And I didn't even think about it being not a name but retired. But anyway, that's me. Anyway, he has been involved in a lot of writing in and out of the military. He was a major military person for 20 years. He's now in a doctoral candidate program, Kennedy C candidacy program. And my gosh, there's a lot there, but we'll get to it also. Major Rhett major Chase spears. Welcome to unstoppable mindset. We're glad you're here.   Chase Spears ** 02:13 just thrilled to be with you, Michael. Thanks for having me. Now   Michael Hingson ** 02:17 that now that we've abused you with Rhett, but that's okay.   Chase Spears ** 02:20 I think God worse. Well, there   Michael Hingson ** 02:22 you are. And by your friends, I bet. So that's what really makes them more fun. But we're but I really am grateful that you were willing to come on and spend some time with us. Why don't we start I love to, to start this way to give people a chance to get to know you. Why don't you tell us some about the early Chase spheres and growing up and all that stuff?   Chase Spears ** 02:44 Well, it's yeah, it's been quite a journey. I grew up in the southeast us My family was out of Florida. And when I was a teenager, we ended up moving we went out to Texas, which was really just kind of a an entire change of culture for us. If you can imagine going from the kind of urban parts of Florida that are really highly populated a lot of traffic, a lot of tourism, a lot of industry. And we went up to North Central Texas in my teen years. And if you can imagine going from from that, you know, Florida to a town of about 9000 people it was a an oil and agricultural cattle town, and Graham, Texas and it was really kind of a culture shock at first, but turned into some of the best and most formative years of my life where I I really learned the value of hard work working on the fields with my dad really got to kind of connect with nature and just taking some gorgeous sunsets in the evenings out working in the fields enjoying the views of the wildlife Hall. I was out working. But one thing that I did learn from hard manual labor, was it made sure that I kept on track for college. And so I ended up going to Lee University in Cleveland, Tennessee in 1998. Right after I graduated from high school, I was homeschooled and met my Hi my sweetie there, Laurie. We were married by senior year we decided neither one of us we wanted to graduate and leave the other one behind. So we got married start a family pretty young afterwards. Went on to the University of Tennessee at Knoxville afterwards because I thought, hey, I want to work in journalism. And it'd be great to have a master's degree in journalism to prove my commitment to the field make people take me seriously. And it was during that time that I ran into an army recruiter while I was working my part time job at a law firm. I was working at the courthouse one day filing paperwork. And this gentleman and I just struck up a conversation in an elevator he was there in his full dress uniform was very impressive to me as a civilian at the time. And so I started asking him questions about what he did. In what army life was like just trying to be friendly, conversational, I was genuinely curious, though I was not looking for a military career. Well, as a good recruiter does, he managed to coax a phone number out of me. And seven months later there I am raising my right hand, swearing into the army in Knoxville, Tennessee. And so we were in the army for 20 years, we moved to several different parts of the nation, we've landed in northeastern Kansas, just on the outskirts of the Greater Kansas City, Missouri area. And now we're kind of starting a new phase of life after the army enjoying being kind of planted Gayndah. Watch our kids grow in a smaller community. And we're excited about what's next. So   Michael Hingson ** 05:42 what is the postdoc? Where are the doctoral degree in, that you're seeking.   Chase Spears ** 05:47 So I am in a program entitled leadership communication. But I'm kind of a misplaced public policy scholars what I've learned, but the faculty there have been so wonderfully gracious to me, and I've been very supportive of my research agenda. So I'm a career communicator. In the army, I was a public affairs officer. So everything I did was about stuff like this. I didn't community engagement, I did interviews, I was did social media strategy, I was part of the bridge that the military tries to build between it and the public, which is incredibly important in our form of governance. And so I love all things communication. And I also love team leadership, small organizational leadership, I had the chance to, to lead teams, I had the chance to lead a company while I was in the army, so fell in love with that. So when I saw a degree program that merged both of those, you know, they had me at hello, I was a sucker from the get go when I saw the marketing. So I applied and they very kindly accepted me. So I've been studying leadership communication, but my research agenda is actually more in the policy realm. My dissertation work is studying how did we come to this concept that the military isn't a political and air quotes institution, when it is funded by the government when it is commanded by elected leadership? When when we exert our national will, on other nations with it there absolutely political connotations to all of that. And And yet, we kind of say the opposite. So I was curious, I was like, this would be something fun to explore, how did we How did we get to where we believe this in spite of what we do? And so that's what my research Jind agenda is all about. And I'm having a lot of fun writing.   Michael Hingson ** 07:37 Well, and I guess we could go right to why well, so why do you think the reason is that we are not a political but we say we are? Oh, are you still researching it to the point where you're not ready to answer that yet? Well, I   Chase Spears ** 07:57 have, I have some theories and what I believe are pretty educated guesses. I'm trying to make sure that I don't bore your audience going too deep in the weeds on this. It's really kind of comes out of the Second World War. When you look at the history of the United States. Traditionally, we are a nation, our ancestors were part of a nation that were really cautious about the idea of having large standing military forces during peacetime. Because there had been this historical observance over hundreds of years, particularly in Europe, that large forces during peacetime ended up causing problems for society and the nations that bred large armies inevitably found ways to use them, that might not always be to the benefit of the populace. So we come out of the Second World War, and the nation has decided we're going to become the global military superpower, we didn't want to be caught off guard again, like we were for what Germany had done in the years after the First World War. And we also have a rising Russia, we need to counter that. So we decided as a nation, yeah, we will become a global, permanent, large, highly industrialized, highly institutionalized force. Well, how do you gain public support for that when the public has traditionally for hundreds of years been very, very suspect of that and very much against it? Well, Samuel, in walk Samuel Huntington, a brilliant political scientist who writes the book, the soldier in the state, and in it he proposed a theory of military supervision in which officers would abstained from voting and then over time that grew legs into Okay, well, now we're just not involved in politics and then in time that grew legs into where a political, but if you go around the force and ask most people what that means, if you ask them to define that word, few would actually be able to define it. It's one of those kind of discursive terms that we've come up with kind of like for the public good. Well, what is for the public good? Can you actually define that, and it's largely often in the eyes of the beholder. So that that's where I believe it came from, I'm still doing quite a bit of work and reading in that. But historically, it's very fascinating to see where we've come and just 70 years on that topic. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 10:25 And also, we're in a phase of all of that, where it seems to be at least that it's changing and morphing again, I mean, with what's happened in the last seven years in this country, and the, the lack of desire for discourse, the the desire on some people's parts to really involve the military and a lot of things. It seems like we're possibly changing again, or perhaps even strengthening the military in some way. And I'm not sure what that is.   Chase Spears ** 11:04 We there's really kind of been somewhat of a public backlash, the last, I'd say, five to 10 years, we saw an increasing comfort with military members publicly advocating for political policy for political parties, which is absolutely within their constitutional right to do, George Washington himself said, we did not lay aside the citizen to assume the soldier. But again, that that discourse coming out of the Second World War, really kind of conditions the American public to think that when you're in the military, you do give up your rights to expression that you do give up your rights to citizen agency, and, and, and meaningful involvement in civic processes. And while we do rightly give up some expressive rights, and that is captured and codified in military regulations, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, there's some legitimacy to that argument. But I would say, you know, if you're, if you're holding a ruler in your hand, the regulations kind of restrict us somewhere between the two and three inch mark on the ruler, whereas the perception that's just kind of come out of the repetition of these terms and ideas is more that we're up around the nine or 10 inch mark on the ruler, if that makes any sense for you. So we we've seen in the last few years, more military people being willing to get involved politically, and there has been somewhat of a backlash to it. And therein is the problem. You if you're going to hold to a belief to a doctrine to a discursive claim, then you have to match it. And the military is really kind of at a point right now they have a decision to make, are we going to hold on to this discourse to this idea? Or are we going to acknowledge that? Well, the regulations are much less restrictive than what people have been led to believe? It's it's a tough spot to be there's not a perfect answer, to help the institution requires cracking down on constitutional freedoms. And well, what is the institution there to serve? So it's a very sticky issue?   Michael Hingson ** 13:11 Well, it does seem to me that in no way, because the person becomes a soldier. And even in their oaths, do they give up the right to be a citizen of the country? So I'm with George Washington?   Chase Spears ** 13:26 Oh, absolutely. No, I am with with George Washington himself, you know, the greatest American? And I think we would, it's a, it's a good reminder of the importance of knowing our history and knowing where we came from. It's in my interviews with military members on this topic. In my research, I'm finding that that like me, most of them were just kind of told these things verbally. They were never pointed to the actual rules. They were never actually pointed to the actual laws. I only know the regulations because I have a personal fascination on the topic. And I went and looked them up. But no one ever told me where to find them. That was research on my own team and figure out where do I look for this. So it's, we really need to do better, nationally, to know our history and know where we came from.   Michael Hingson ** 14:14 We do have a really interesting paradox in the world, because we've gotten in the last two government administrations, to different views of not only how to govern, but to a degree how the military needs to be a part of it, and that's gonna not be very helpful to things either.   Chase Spears ** 14:34 Absolutely. The the military at the end of the day is controlled by the Civilian governance. Now. I'll acknowledge that General Mark Milley didn't really seem to think so and there have been other figures in military history who MacArthur being one of them who who seemed to challenge who was actually in charge of the military. But at the end of the day, constitutionally, we We are governed by by civilians. And that that is right, that is proper any anything else would be a coup and you don't want that. So we, it comes down to how does the military try to hold a consistent line? When you have governments that change every two to four to eight years and have drastically different perspectives on policy? How do you as a military hold an even keel and another wise stormy sea. And in previous generations, we had senior general officers who were pretty good at that they were pretty good at saying, regardless of what the ship of state is doing, the ship of military is going to remain on a heading to serve everyone. And there's been somewhat of a lack a breakdown of discipline at the senior ranks in the last probably 10 years, that's really kind of shuttered the ship of the military. And I think the current some of the recently promoted, general officers understand that I think General GA is the new Chief of Staff of the Army, I think he understands that and he's trying to do some things to reintroduce some stability, but it's a hard thing.   Michael Hingson ** 16:16 Yeah. And the other part about it is that the military, in some ways is a part of society. So we've had things like the whole Don't Ask, Don't Tell dealing with LGBTQ types of issues. And, and of course, even women in the military, and there's been a lot of things that haven't necessarily been as visible as they have become, and are issues that we are starting to face and deal with more. But it seems to me that the military, like it or not, is part of society. And we do need to recognize that collectively, as well.   Chase Spears ** 17:02 We were absolutely drawn from society. We serve society, we exist, you know, for the protection of society. But I will say there's one thing that's all always kind of set Western militaries apart a little bit, and the US military hails from that Western tradition of understanding that just because society chooses to take a move in one direction, doesn't necessarily mean that it's in the national security interest of the United States for the military, to follow suit. And then there's kind of a reason that the military has always tried to, in some way, set itself apart, of acknowledging that there's some things that society will do or want to that are affected by the times as Shakespeare himself noted, there's always a tide in the affairs and man, the tide comes in the time tide goes out the the, the winds shift. And but one thing that was said at the military part was this idea of, at the end of the day, if it's a societal change that enables us to better defend the nation, then that's the direction we'll move. If it's a societal change that could potentially be a friction point or cause additional challenges in securing the nation, we might, we might think on that one a little bit harder, we might be a little more a little slower to adopt that. And we've seen that has kind of broken down the military is very much going out of its way to be reflective of society. And in some ways that can be good in some ways that's caused additional unnecessary frictions to the force and is rightly being having questions asked about it.   Michael Hingson ** 18:45 And that's where having good solid leadership in the military at the highest echelons, has to be an important part of it, because that's where ultimately, the direction that the military goes, is at least in part, going to be authored. Yes, there is a civilian government that and civilian commander in chief, but still the military leaders have to really be the ones mostly to figure out where the military should go in terms of policies and how it deals with different issues or not, I would think.   Chase Spears ** 19:27 And the key word that you hit on there, Michael is leadership. Back a few months ago, I wrote a piece that was published by real clear defense called seven new things the new Sergeant Major of the Army could do to restore trust in the force. And the argument that I made his predecessor was one who was very kind of reactive to the, to the whims you might say, of a the younger generation of soldiers. He was very much all over Twitter about telling me your issues. Let me get involved in your issues. And he was, in some ways a very divisive, senior official in the military. And I equated it to you, you want to look at kind of the British constitutionalist position, the British Crown, if you're looking overseas, it has traditionally been something that it's kind of the rock, unmovable, unshakable, the parliament will do what parliament will do that the Tories and Labour will do what they will do, but the crown is unmovable the crown serves all. And that's kind of something that the military reflected, and I call out to the new rising generation military leaders to remember that, to remember that we don't own this, we owe nothing in the institution, we all leave it one day, as I left it a matter of weeks ago. All I have are my memories and and hopes that I was able to leave some things better than I found them and that the people I served that I hope I served them well. But at the end of the day, we hand it off to someone else. And it's so important for to have good leaders who recognize that we we steward the profession, that we we want to do the best we can with it in our time, and recognize the decisions that we make, will impact those who serve long after our time and do our best to hand it off in the best possible condition that we can for them. Because then to the to society, we returned. And then we depend on this who came after us for our national defense. And so it's the steward mindset to me as key.   Michael Hingson ** 21:41 Yeah. Well, and going back a little bit. So you're in graduate school you got recruited in and accepted and went into the military. What did you do? What was it like when you first went and that certainly again, had to be quite a culture shock from things that you would experience before? Ah,   Chase Spears ** 22:02 yeah, I figured absolutely was you'll never forget your first shark attack at basic training for for anyone who's unfamiliar with that, it's when you once you've done your initial and processing there, whatever base you get your basic training at, for me, it was Fort Jackson in South Carolina. And then they eventually buss you off to your your training companies, which is where you will actually conduct your combat training. This is after you've received your uniforms and done all your finances, paperwork, and life insurance and all that. And then the buses stop and the drill sergeants, they're just there waiting for you. And it's a moment you never forget. And of course, you jump off the bus and they're giving you all these commands that they know it's impossible for you to, to execute to any level of satisfaction. And then when you fail, as you inevitably will, you know, the entire group just gets smoked over and over and over again. And I remember that moment just having that realization of I have not in Kansas anymore, like the next next few months of my life are about to be very different than anything I've ever experienced. And it was it absolutely was. I got through that. And I think the first thing that was really kind of shocking to me be on to the training environment was the use of last names. So yeah, I go by chase my friends call me chase people who know me call me chase. I'm I'm not hung up on titles. I'm a simple guy. In the military, you are your rank and last name. I was specialist Spears sergeants First Lieutenant spears or LT Captain spears, major spears. And I remember at my first unit, there were other other people who in my unit there were the same rank as me. And so I thought were peers I'd call them by their first name. And they never gave me problems about it. But our higher ups would you know, people have rank spears, we don't go by first names spears. And I never I never 20 years and I still never really adjusted well to that I learned how to how to keep myself from getting as many talking to us about it over the years is I had in previous times. But that was a culture shock. And, and just the the constant what we call the military, the battle rhythm, you know, civil society would call it your work schedule, while in the military. It never really ends your day start very early. You have physical training that you're doing with your unit at 630. Depending on what unit you're in, you may be off at a reasonable time in the late afternoon, early evening, or you may be there. I've remember staying at work one night till 4am Just because the boss gave us a job to do. Frankly, it was an unreasonable job. But he gave us a job to do and an extraordinarily tight deadline and it took us till 4am to get the job done and And I was at work by 630, the next morning. So you never, ever really do get used to that in some ways, because you kind of come to accept it. But it's been really eye opening to me in the last nearly three months now that I've been now, looking back and having some control over my schedule now for the first time in 20 years, and realizing, wow, that was such a foreign existence I lived. But when you're when you're swimming in a fishbowl, you don't know you're wet. So every time you do adapt to it, but it's been neat being on the other side and realizing, you know, can kind of breathe in and start to have some say over what a schedule looks like, because I'd forgotten what that was, what that'd be like.   Michael Hingson ** 25:44 But as you rose in the ranks, and I assume took on more responsibility, did that give you any more flexibility in terms of how you operate it on a day to day basis.   Chase Spears ** 25:56 It all depended on the position, there were there were some jobs I had, where were, regardless of the rank, I had flexibility. And then there were other jobs, where I absolutely did not even as a major want, there was a job that I had, where the boss was very adamant. This is the time you will be here and you will be sitting at this desk between these hours and you are authorized authorized is a big term in the military culture, you are authorized a 30 minute lunch break period. And you will be here until this time every day. And this was when I had you know, I think I was at my 1718 year mark. And I remember thinking to myself, golly, do I need to ask permission to go to the bathroom to see, it seemed I didn't. So it really kind of depended on your job. There's a perception a lot of times that the higher you go in rank, the more control you have over your life. And I observed that the opposite is actually true. The higher you go, typically, the more the more demands are placed on you. The more people are depending on the things that you're doing. And and the bigger the jobs are. And the longer the days are was my experience, but it had been flooded depending on what position I was in at the given time.   Michael Hingson ** 27:17 Now, when you first enlisted and all that, what was Laurie's reaction to all of that.   Chase Spears ** 27:23 I was shocked. She was so supportive. She actually grew up in an Air Force household. And so she knew military life pretty well. Her dad had been been in, he spent a lot more time in the air force than I did the army. And then even after he retired from the Air Force, he went on and taught at the Naval Academy as a civilian. So she is just always had a level of familiarity with the military as long as she can remember. She joked with me that when she got married to me and then had to give up her dependent military ID card that it was kind of a moment of mourning for she didn't want to give that thing up. So one day, there we are Knoxville, Tennessee, and I approached her. And I'm trying to be very careful, very diplomatic, very suave, and how I bring it up to her and let her know I've been thinking about the army. And I'm kind of curious what she might think about that. Because it'd be such a drastic lifestyle change from everything we've been talking about. And I was bracing for her to look at me and be like, are you insane? And instead, she was like, Oh, you won't get in the military. And I get an ID card again. Yes. She was she was supportive from from Jump Street. And so you talk about a wife who just was there, every minute of it, and loved and supported and gave grace and rolled with the punches. milori Did she was absolutely phenomenal. Though, I will admit when it got to the point that I was starting to think maybe 20. I'll go ahead and wrap this up, because my original plan had been to do 30. But when I started talking with her about that she was she was also ready, she was ready to actually start having me home regularly for us to be able to start making family plans and be able to follow through with them. Because we had the last three years we had not been able to follow through with family plans, because of the different positions that I was in. So she was very, very supportive of me joining and then she was equally very supportive of me going ahead and and calling it calling it a day here or the last just at the end of this year. But what a what a partner could not have done it   Michael Hingson ** 29:41 without her. So where did she live when you were going through basic training and all that.   Chase Spears ** 29:46 So she stayed in Knoxville for nonGSA. Yeah. And then from there, she actually ended up moving up to her dad's and his wife's place up in Maryland because my follow on school after base See training was the Defense Information School. That's where all the Public Affairs courses are taught. And it's so happens that that is located at Fort Meade, Maryland, which is just about a 45 minute drive traffic dependent from where her dad lived. So while I was in basic training, she went ahead and moved up there to Maryland so that while I was in school up there, we could see each other on the weekends. And then from there, we didn't have to go back to Tennessee and pack up a house or stuff was already packed up so we could get on the road together there to wherever our next duty station was. And it turned out funny enough to be Colorado Springs, Fort Carson. And here's why that's funny. When, when I approached Laurie, about joining the army, one of the things that she was really excited about was seeing the world if you're in the military, you get to see the world, right. And my first duty assignment was the town that she had grown up in, because her dad had spent the last few years of his career teaching at the Air Force Academy there on the northern end of Colorado Springs. So so her her dreams of seeing the world with me, turned out that our first tour was going to write back home for her.   Michael Hingson ** 31:14 Oh, that has its pluses and it's minuses.   Chase Spears ** 31:17 Yep. So it was neat for me to get to see where she had grown up and learn the town little bit.   Michael Hingson ** 31:23 I've been to Fort Meade, and actually a few times I used to sell technology to folks there. And then several years ago, I was invited to come in after the World Trade Center and do a speech there. And so it was it was fun spending some time around Fort Meade heard some wonderful stories. My favorite story still is that one day somebody from the city of Baltimore called the fort because they wanted to do traffic studies or get information to be able to do traffic studies to help justify widening roads to better help traffic going into the fort. So they call it the fort. And they said, Can you give us an idea of how many people come through each day? And the person at the other end said, Well, I'm really not sure what you're talking about. We're just a little shack out here in the middle of nowhere. And so they ended up having to hire their own people to count cars for a week, going in and out of the fort was kind of cute.   Chase Spears ** 32:23 Well, there's quite a bit of traffic there. Now that basis when   Michael Hingson ** 32:26 I was then to there wasn't just a little shack, of course, it was a whole big forest.   Chase Spears ** 32:32 Yeah, yeah, it's I was back there. Golly, I want to say it wasn't that long ago. But it was about five years ago now is back there. And I almost didn't recognize the place. There's been so much new built there. But oh, I know, as far as army assignments go, it's a it's a pretty nice place.   Michael Hingson ** 32:50 Yeah, it is. And as I said, I've had the opportunity to speak there and spend some time dealing with folks when we sold products and so on. So got to got to know, people, they're pretty well and enjoyed dealing with people there. They knew what they were doing. Yeah,   Chase Spears ** 33:07 yeah, that's a it's a smart group of people in that base.   Michael Hingson ** 33:10 So you went through basic training and all that and what got you into the whole idea of public relations and what you eventually went into?   Chase Spears ** 33:20 Well, I had studied in college, my undergraduate degree was in television and radio broadcasting. My master's was in journalism, I'd grown up kind of in the cable news age, and the at the age of the emergence of am Talk Radio is a big, big tool of outreach. And I grew up thinking, this is what I want to do. I love communication. I actually thought it'd be really neat to be an investigative reporter on if, if you remember, back in the 90s, it was this big thing of, you know, Channel Nine on your side, yeah, had this investigative reporter who tell you the real deal about the restaurant or the automotive garage. And I always thought that would be amazing, like what a great public service like helping people to avoid being ripped off. And so I wanted to be a news. I'm sure you're familiar with the Telecom Act of 1996. That That caused a tremendous consolidation of media for your audience who might not be familiar with it. It used to be that really, if you had the wherewithal to buy a media station or a television station or radio station, you were unlimited in what you could you there were limits, I should say on what you could buy, so that you couldn't control too much, too much media environment, the Telecom Act of 1996, completely deregulated that and so large media companies were just swallowing up the nation. And that meant there's a tremendous consolidation of jobs and the my junior year in college. I was in the southeast us at the time at Lee University. Atlanta. Nearby was our biggest hiring media market, my June Your year CNN laid off 400 people. So I could tell really quick, this is going to be a chat and even more challenging field to break into than I thought. And that's why I ended up working part time in a law firm was in, in Journalism School. Afterwards, because I was looking great. I was looking for a backup plan. I thought if journalism doesn't work out, I also love the law. It'd be nice to get some experience working in a firm to see if I want to go to law school. So it was a natural fit for me when the army recruiter started talking to me. And he was asking me what I was interested in. And I told him, Well, here's what my degree is in, here's what my career plan had been, here's who I really want to do with my life. And he said, we have public affairs, I said, What's that? It turns out, the military has radio stations, and they have television networks and you PR, I had no idea. I was a civilian. And I was like, Well, that sounds good. And so I thought, yeah, sure, I'll I will enlist for that come in, do one four year contract, I'll build a portfolio and and then I'll be able to take that portfolio out into the civilian realm. And hopefully that will make me more competitive for a job in the news market. And of course, a couple of years into that. I was in Kuwait deployed to camp Arif John. And my brigade commander sat me down to lunch one day, and made it very clear that he expected me to apply for Officer Candidate School, which was nowhere on what I was interested in doing was nowhere on my radar, I applied, I really didn't have a lot of confidence. I thought, I looked at officers and I thought they were people who are way, way more intelligent than me, way more suave than me. And I really didn't know if I'd get in, well, I got in. And after I commissioned officer candidate school is about like basic training all over again. So that was fun. And I ended up being assigned to a combat camera unit. And then afterwards, I was able to put my paperwork in to branch transfer right back into public affairs, it was a perfect mess was everything I wanted to do. I didn't get to work in news directly. I wasn't a reporter. But I got to work with reporters, I got to be an institutional insider and help facilitate them and help to tell the stories of what some great American patriots were doing, and wanting to serve their countries. And so it was, for the most part, more often than not, it was a really, really fun way to earn a living living.   Michael Hingson ** 37:34 I collect as a hobby old radio shows I'm very familiar with but back in the 40s was the Armed Forces Radio Service, then it became Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. And so I'm aware a little bit of, of the whole broadcast structure in the military, not a lot, but but some and know that that it's there. And it does, I'm suspect, a really good job of helping to keep people informed as much as it can as they can with the things that they have to do in the world. It's   Chase Spears ** 38:04 definitely it's a comfort over the years, if you're spending a lot of time overseas to have kind of that that taste of home and our forces network does a really good job of that letting I think we're starting to see some debates inside the military. Now. What do we want to continue of it? Because now information is so ubiquitous, if you will, you can pull it down, you can stream whatever you want, wherever you are in the globe. So I kind of wonder in the next 1020 years, will it still be a thing, but during my early career during my early deployment before he could stream stuff, it was really cool to have an AFN radio station to tune into is really cool to have an AFN television network to tune into to be able to get a taste of home. That was much a comfort,   Michael Hingson ** 38:52 right? Yeah, it is. It is something that helps. So you can't necessarily stream everything. I spent a week in Israel this summer. And there were broadcasts I could get and pick up through the internet and so on. And there were stuff from here in the US that I couldn't get I suspect it has to do with copyright laws and the way things were set up but there was only so much stuff that you could actually do.   Chase Spears ** 39:20 And what a time to be in Israel you will I bet that trip is even more memorable for you now than it would have been otherwise.   Michael Hingson ** 39:27 Fortunately, it wasn't August. So we we didn't have to put up with the things that are going on now. But still Yeah, it was very memorable. I enjoyed doing it. spending a week with excessively over there and got into getting to meet with with all the folks so it was definitely well worth it and something that that I will always cherish having had the opportunity to do get   Chase Spears ** 39:51 for you. If it's on my bucket list. I've always wanted to spend some time over there.   Michael Hingson ** 39:56 Hot and humid in the summer, but that's okay. Let's say but they love breakfast. Oh, really? So yeah, definitely something to think about. Well, so you, you joined you got you got the public relations, jobs and so on. So how did all that work for you over? Well, close to 20 years? What all did you do and what, what stories can you tell us about some of that?   Chase Spears ** 40:25 It was it was fascinating. It was fascinating because everything that I got to touch was, in some way a story. And so my first job was in radio and television production. I did quite a bit of that in Kuwait. And it was actually there that I got my first taste of crisis communication, and I was immediately addicted. Do you remember back in? It was December 2004. Donald Rumsfeld said you go to war with the Army you have not the army want or might wish to have it another time? Yeah. I was there. That that was uttered in camp you're in Kuwait. And that was such an interesting moment. For me in terms of a story to tell. I was with the 14 Public Affairs Detachment we were deployed to camp Arif John to provide public affairs support for for Third Army's Ford headquarters. This was back during the height of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And so there's a lot of military going over there. We were part of that. And I remember hearing this tasking that had come down that the Secretary of Defense is going to come out here is going to do this town hall meeting with the troops. There's going to be no question that you can't ask. You're going to be allowed to say anything you want to say to the Secretary of Defense, nothing's going to be scripted, nothing's going to be put through for review. And by the way, 14 pad you guys are going to make sure that it can be televised live back to the United States. And so here I am thinking what can possibly go wrong. And so we helped we all the event, Secretary Rumsfeld hindered and handled it really, really well. They set up this big, you know, fighting machinery display, they're in a in a big aircraft hangar epic camp bearing which is in northern Kuwait, just not too far south from the Iraqi border. And he gets up he gives the speech. He's well received by the troops. And it goes to the q&a part. And soldiers were asking him all sorts of questions. Most of them are jovial, you know, hey, when when do we get to go to Disney World, stuff like that. They were kind of big jocular with them.   Michael Hingson ** 42:42 Seems a fair question.   Chase Spears ** 42:44 Yeah, you know, I felt them right. And so finally, this one guy, I'll never forget his name, especially as Thomas Wilson from the 2/78 Regimental Combat Team. Tennessee National Guard asks him a question about when are they going to get the body armor that's needed? And in true Rumsfeld style, he's he says, Well, I'm not quite sure I understood the question. Can you ask it again, which is a great technique. He used to buy him some time to think the answer. And then it came back after the second question. And the whole hangar about 1000 of us in there. It was hast. I'll bet you could have heard a plastic cup hit the floor at the back back of the room. I mean, everyone was like, what? Oh, no, what just happened? What's about to happen? And Rumsfeld makes that remark, you go to war with the army have not the one you want or need. Yeah. And and then the questions went on. And there was not be after that. There was no awkward moment for the rest of the time. And I and I thought, wow, that could have gone south. But it didn't cool. It was just it was neat to watch. I was running the television camera that caught the moment. I was in the room. And so we me and my sergeant had to stay up there the rest of the day because there were some other television network interviews with other officials that we were running the satellite transponder for. And it was a long day our commander was kind of being a jerk to us. So by the end of the day, we were tired we'd been up there sleeping on cots for a couple of days, we were kind of just ready to get back to data camp Arif, John to our beds and put the whole mission behind us. And then we drive to three hours through this pouring pouring rainstorm in Kuwait, and a Canvas side Humvee that's leaking. All you know, water just pouring into this thing on us. So we're done. We're done. We're done. We're like, we just want to get a bed. We get back to our base. We're offloading all the equipment, putting everything away. And at this point in time, I forgotten about the moment earlier in the day when that question was asked, and I walk in and there we had this wall of televisions you know, tracking all the different news networks back in the US and on all of them Their Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, you go to war with the army have not the army won or wish to have another time. And at that moment, I was like, it's about to be an interesting few weeks around here. And it turned out, it turned out indeed to be an interesting few weeks, an interesting few months. And I got to be on the front end of what the public affairs response to that looks like. And I can tell you, I've never seen armored vehicles flow into a place as quickly as they did in the following month. So the power of a message transmitted is a real thing. Well,   Michael Hingson ** 45:39 so whatever happened to specialist Wilson?   Chase Spears ** 45:44 I don't I don't know. I know that news coverage. When that news reporters were asking that very question and coverage that I saw said, Oh, his unit, his assured that nothing bad will happen to him. He was a national guardsmen, so he kind of fall under a different, different command structure than us. From time to time, I have wondered that and I've tried to look him up online, and just try to find out what happened to the sky and what was life like for him? I'd love to talk to him and ask alright, what was it like, man, what is your unit do? But I, I have no idea. I can't find him. I presume he's gone about his life and doesn't want to be famous about it. But it also goes back to National Guard culture versus active duty culture. We talked earlier about the citizenship aspect. And the National Guard gets that way more than the active component. At the end of the day, they demobilize. And they go home. Right, you're running into the same people you serve, with the church, at the grocery store, at the grocery store, at the PTA, places like this, some of them might be your neighbors. And so they have an entirely different outlook. This is what they do to serve the country when needed. And then they go on about their lives. I don't think you would have seen an active duty soldier ask that question. I really don't because the culture is so so markedly different. And there's a level of kind of freedom of thought and expression, present that guard that that is much more lacking in the active component.   Michael Hingson ** 47:19 Should there be more freedom, in that sense in the active component? Or do you think that it's really appropriate for there to be the dichotomy that you're describing?   Chase Spears ** 47:32 And the act of force you need discipline? You need a discipline force, who, when they're given a lawful order, will carry it out hastily, because lives could hang in the balance. That's absolutely important, and we can never lose that. But sometimes we can use discipline I say sometimes, often, more is the more appropriate term often we confuse discipline with silence. We confuse discipline with a lack of willingness to ask tough questions. We confuse discipline with just saying Yes, sir. When you know, in the back of your mind, there might be something you need to dig into more. We we need, unfortunately, since the end of the Second World War, going back to my comments earlier about this large, industrialized, institutionalized force we have it breeds careerists. It breeds a mindset that's fearful to ask tough questions, even if you know they need to be asked. Because you want to be promoted. Right? You want to get assignments, right. And it breeds a culture where you really are much more timid. Or you're much more likely to be timid than someone who's maybe a reservist or National Guard member. We need people who will ask tough questions. We don't need indiscipline, we don't rush showmanship, we don't need people who are being performative just to be seen. But there are valid questions to be asked is, you know, is US defense policy? Better set for a 400? Ship navy or a 300? Ship? Navy? That's a valid question. Is it better for us to use this route of attack versus that route of attack? Given the Give Me Everything we know, those are valid questions. We need people in the military who who are willing to be critical thinkers, and there are a lot of extraordinarily brilliant people in today's armed forces, as there always has been. But there is on the active duty side a culture that works against original thought and that's really to our detriment. And I think the manner in which the evacuation of Afghanistan ended is one more blatant indicator of that.   Michael Hingson ** 49:48 It was not handled nearly as well as it could have been as we have seen history tell us and teach us now   Chase Spears ** 49:56 Absolutely. i It broke my heart. I'm A veteran of that conflict I'm not one who cries easily, Michael but I can tell you that morning when I saw the some of the images coming out of cobbles especially there's a video of a C 17 cargo jet taking off and people literally hanging to and falling to their deaths. Just i i fell off, I fell off my on my run into a sobbing human being on this on the ground for a little bit it is there's a lot to process and it has continued to be a lot to process. And there again, there's a great example of why you gotta be willing to ask tough questions. There was no no reason at all. We should have abandoned Bagram and tried to evacuate out of downtown Cabo. But that's a whole nother conversation. Yeah.   Michael Hingson ** 50:52 Well, speaking of you, I understand that you weren't a great fan of jumping out of airplanes, but you got used to doing them? I   Chase Spears ** 51:01 sure did. Oh, yeah. I always thought that would just be something that no, I don't want to say no sane person would do. I mean, I enjoy watching skydivers, I think it's really cool. And obviously, they're saying, I never thought I'd be among them. I thought, Nah, that's just something, I don't think I'm gonna do that. And when I was an officer candidate school, I was roommates with a guy who had been to Airborne School earlier in his career. And he was like, man, don't do it. Don't let him talk you into going to Airborne School, though, you'll be stuck at Fort Bragg, you'll just you'll be broke all the time, you'll be hurting all the time, the army takes the fun out of everything. And he's right. To an extent the army does take the fun out of most things that touches. But I got to my first unit as an officer. So I'd done enlisted time for three years, then I went to Officer Candidate School. And then my first job as an officer was at the 55th combat camera company, which is not a full airborne unit, but it's a partial airborne unit. And they had a hard time keeping enough active duty paratroopers on hand. And so I remember day one, when I was in processing the unit, there are all these different places you go, when you're in process, you gotta go see the training room, and you got to go see the administrative room, and you got to go see the Transportation Office and all these places, and they're just checking your paperwork. And so I see the training room, and there's the sergeant in there. And he's looking through my list. And he's asking me all these questions, you know, when was your last PT test? Where's the last physical, you know, making notes on me for the unit record? And then he says, Do you want to go to Airborne School? And without thinking, I said, Absolutely not. I have no interest in going to Airborne School. And his reply to me was go ahead and get an airborne physical. And I thought, There's no way I'm ever getting an airborne physical because I'm not going to Airborne School. So a few weeks later, I'm in the unit, I'm more comfortable. And I'm across. I'm in a different office across the hall from where this guy worked. And I'm joking around with this other sergeant. And I'm like, sir, and you're just such a cool guy. Like you've got all together, you're, you're like everything I want to be when I grow up. What how do you do it? He said, Well, sir, you got to go to Airborne School. That's step one. The other guy across the hall ever hears that, you know, mouse ears, I don't know how. But he darts out of his office across the hall into this opposite we're in, looks me straight in the face and said, Did you say you want to go to Airborne School? Like no, is not what I said, I absolutely have no interest. I'm not going to Airborne School. And he again replies with schedule your physical. And I thought, I'm not going to disappoint me scheduling a fiscal. So I get back to my office that later that day. And I thought this guy is not going to give up. So I came up with this brilliant plan. It was smart, smartest plan you'll ever hear of, I'm going to pretend I'm going to get my airborne physical and then he'll forget about me, leave me alone. So I called him and said, Hey, Sergeant, what's the phone number I have to call them schedule an airborne physical and it gives me the phone number and the the name of the person to talk to and I said, Great. I'll talk to him. There were two or three other lieutenants set to show up to the unit next in the next month. So I thought he will assume I'm getting a physical which I'm not getting and there's other guys will show up and he will convince them to go and I will fall off his radar. I was incorrect. That was a bad bad miscalculation on my part, you might say a flawed operation   Michael Hingson ** 54:39 with your the and you were the one who was talking about brilliant people in the army Anyway, go ahead.   Chase Spears ** 54:43 I know I know. Right? Yeah, I am a paradox. And so that within an hour I get an email from him with my he's already put me in for school. I already have orders generated to go to jump school. And then he calls me he's like Hey, by the way, your report in like three weeks, I need your physical as soon as you can get it. And I thought this guy, I told him I'm not going to Airborne School. Well, at the same time, our unit commander was a paratrooper, and he loves jumping out of airplanes. And I had two or three paratroopers in my platoon who were underneath me. And I thought, There's no way I can go now. Because if I, if I get the commander to release me, one, I'll lose face with the old man. And I'll lose face with the troops that I lead because the soldiers have to compete for this. They're just giving it to me. And so I went, protesting, kicking, screaming the whole way. I hated ground week. I hated tower week. And then they put took me up to the 250 foot tower and dropped me off the side of it under a parachute. And I loved it. I was like, Oh, this is fun. I actually asked if I can do it again. And they said, they don't get what's right. So the next week, we go into jump week in there I am in the back of an airplane, and it comes to my turn to get up and exit it. And I do, and I get to the ground and I survive. And I literally just sat there and laughed uncontrollably because I couldn't believe I just jumped out of a plane. And it was my first of 40 jobs. So I was I was absolutely hooked from that moment on.   Michael Hingson ** 56:20 And what did Lori think of that?   Chase Spears ** 56:23 She was a little bit surprised. She She again, was supportive. But she was surprised she never thought it's something that I would take to and it ended up being a great thing for us. Because having been on jumped status, it opened the door for me to request the unit and Alaska that we ended up going to for six years, you had to be on airborne status to be able to go to that job. And so had I not going to jump school, I would not have qualified to go into Alaska for that particular job. And so it ended up being a wonderful, wonderful thing. But I would have never guessed it, it just it's another one of those poignant reminders to me that every time that I think I've got a plan, it's God's way of reminding me that he has a sense of humor, because what's going to work out is always going to be very different from what I think.   Michael Hingson ** 57:10 And you help Laurie see the world. So well worked out. Absolutely.   Chase Spears ** 57:15 Yeah, she we never, we never got to spend time together overseas. But Alaska was an amazing adventure. And, gosh, if if no one in your listeners haven't been there yet to go see a Sunday?   Michael Hingson ** 57:29 Yeah, I went there on a cruise I didn't see as much as I would have loved to but still, I got to see some of them. It was great.   Chase Spears ** 57:38 It's nothing like it. No. Now you   Michael Hingson ** 57:42 as you advance in the ranks, and so on you, you started being in public relations, being a communicator, and so on. But clearly, as you advanced, you became more and I'm sure were viewed as more of a leader that was kind of a transition from from not being a leader. And just being a communicator and doing what you were told to be more of a leader, what was that transition like?   Chase Spears ** 58:07 That was another one of those things that I would have never seen coming. After I did my three years as the spokesman for the Airborne Brigade. In Alaska, I ended up becoming the deputy communication director for US Army, Alaska, which was the highest army command there in the state responsible for 11,000 troops and their families in multiple locations. And I remember one day, my boss came to me and saying, hey, the general is going to give a speech to the hockey team at the University of Alaska, about leadership. And so I need you to write it. And I looked at him and I said, boss, all right, whatever he told me to write, but the general has forgotten more about leadership than I know, like, how do where do I start with this? And I don't remember the exact words, I think it was something to the effect of, you're smart, you'll figure it out. And so I put together a speech, it was by no means anything glorious, but it was the best I had to give that moment in time and what leadership was fully convinced that I was not one. And then over time, I there are people who spoken to me at their headquarters who called out leadership that I didn't see they were pointing out influence that I had there pointing out people who I was able to help steer towards decisions that I didn't realize that I didn't know and it made me start looking back in other parts of my career and realizing, Oh, my goodness, I actually led that team. This man actually looks to me for decisions. I actually I am a leader, I had no idea. There's something I always thought if if you were in the military and you're a leader, you were some grand master, you know, like, like Patton or Eisenhower and I didn't think think myself anything like that. And so finally, in 2015, I was offered A chance to take command of a company which in civilian terms, that's kind of like being the executive director, if you will, of an organization of 300 people. And I was so excited for it. Because by that point in time, I finally made the mental transition of saying, I'm not, I'm not merely a communicator, communicating is what I've done. But occasionally it's I've worked on delivering us on passionate about, by came to realize, I love that so much because communicating is a part of leading and, and I, I am a leader, it's just something. Looking back. Of course, my life has always been there, I just never knew it. I never saw it, I never believed in it. And so by the time I was offered the chance to command, I was very excited for it, I was very eager for it, because I realized this is going to be an a wonderful adventure getting to lead a team at this level of this size. And it was the hardest job I ever did in the army, and the most rewarding. I don't know if you've ever watched any of the Lord, Lord of the Rings movie. But there's this moment where Aragon is being chided, is set aside the Ranger Be who you were meant to be to be the king. And that meant that came back to my mind several times I had to challenge myself that just because I only see myself as a communicator all these years doesn't mean that I can't do other things. And so it was a joy to actually walk into that. Believing is not easy. There's there are a lot of hard days or a lot of hard decisions. Especially when I was a commander, I agonized every decision. So I made because I knew this will have an impact on a person, this will have an impact on a family this, this will change the directions and plans that people had. And so it's a heavy weight to bear. And I think it's good that those kind of decisions come with weight. And I would question someone who who can make those kinds of calls without having to wrestle with them.   Michael Hingson ** 1:02:01 When you look at all the things that you've done, and the work that you do, and the work that you did, at the end of every day, or at some time during the day, I know you were pretty busy. But did you ever have the time to just kind of sit back and reflect on how did this go today? How did that go? What could have been better? Did you do any kind of introspection? Or did you feel you had time to do that?   Chase Spears ** 1:02:24 I didn't really feel I had time. And it would be easy for me to blame the unit, it'd be easy for me to blame people. But that responsibility rests with me. It's a discipline that I didn't develop until way too late in my career. And I eventually did develop it, I eventually came to realize the importance of reflection of introspection of taking a mental inventory of what I've accomplished I didn't accomplish and what I can learn from it. But it was sadly something that I didn't do as much as I should have. And I didn't do it as early, I was really, really bad at assuming well, because the unit needs this right now. I can't take care of this thing that I need to take care of that will that will allow me to be the leader that I need to be you know, I get in a car, someone slams on my car, and I need to get them to take care of it. Why don't have time unit Scott has to have me We gotta move on. Well, I've got six screws in my left hand and my left shoulder right now because I was always too busy to listen to the physical therapist and take care of myself, you know, the unit needs me the unit needs me the men need me. And so it, it was a hard, hard learned lesson. The importance of sitting back and reflecting is something I wish I would have learned much sooner. But once I did, it served me well. And it's a discipline that I still practice now.   Michael Hingson ** 1:03:46 Yeah, yeah, it's, I think a very important thing. And a lot of things can can stem from that. What's the best position your favorite position in the army and why?   Chase Spears ** 1:03:59 The best thing I ever got to do is company command. And it's hard to say that because it's really it's really closely tied with being a brigade director of communication. And t

Analysts Don Kellogg and Roger Entner discuss the landmark Chevron deference Supreme Court case and what it means for the future of telecom.00:23 Chevron deference overview 03:33 Politicization of the process04:18 Power shifts away from agencies 05:00 Relevance of the Telecom Act 06:19 Settled law is no longer settled 06:55 Predictions for the industryTags: telecom, telecommunications, wireless, prepaid, postpaid, cellular phone, Don Kellogg, Roger Entner, Supreme Court, Chevron deference, regulation, FCC, net neutrality, telecommunications Act of 1996, Title II

Margaret O'Mara, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington, leads the conversation on big tech and global order.   CASA: Welcome to today's session of the Winter/Spring 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I'm Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today's discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/Academic, if you would like to share it with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have Margaret O'Mara with us to discuss big tech and global order. Dr. O'Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair of American history and professor at the University of Washington. She writes and teaches about the growth of the high-tech economy, the history of American politics, and the connections between the two. Dr. O'Mara is an Organization of American Historians distinguished lecturer and has received the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award for Innovation with Technology. Previously, she served as a fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. O'Mara served in the Clinton administration as an economic and social policy aide in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. She is the author of several books and an editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press. Welcome, Margaret. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. O'MARA: Thank you so much, Maria, and thank you all for being here today. I'm setting my supercomputer on my wrist timer so I—to time my talk to you, and which is very apropos and it's really—it's great to be here. I have a few slides I wanted to share as I talk through, and I thought that since we had some really interesting meaty present tense readings from Foreign Affairs as background for this conversation as well as the recent review essay that I wrote last year, I thought I would set the scene a little more with a little more history and how we got to now and thinking in broad terms about how the technology industry relates to geopolitics and the global order as this very distinctive set of very powerful companies now. So I will share accordingly, and, Maria, I hope that this is showing up on your screen as it should. So I knew I—today I needed to, of course, talk—open with something in the news, this—the current—the ongoing questions around what has—what was in the sky and what is being shot down in addition to a Chinese spy balloon, which is really kind of getting to a question that's at the center of all of my work. I write at the intersection of economic history and political history and I do that because I'm interested in questions of power. Who has power? What do they value? This is the kind of the question of the U.S.-China—the operative question of the U.S.-China rivalry and the—and concern about China, what are the values, what are the—and Chinese technology and Chinese technology companies, particularly consumer-facing ones. And this is also an operative question about the extraordinary concentration of wealth and power in a few large platform companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States—(laughs)—a couple in my town of Seattle where I am right now talking to you, and others in Silicon Valley. It's very interesting when one does a Google image search to find a publicly available image and puts in Silicon Valley the images that come up are either the title cards of the HBO television comedy, which I was tempted to add, but the—really, the iconic shot of the valley as place is the Apple headquarters—the Spaceship, as it's called in Cupertino—that opened a few years ago in the middle of suburbia. And this is—you know, the questions of concentrated power in the Q&A among the background readings, you know, this was noted by several of the experts consulted about what is the threat of big tech geopolitically and concentrated power, whether that's good, bad, if that's an advantage geopolitically or not. It was something that many of those folks brought up as did the other readings as well. And this question of power—who has power and taking power—has been an animating question of the modern technology industry and there's an irony in this that if you think about the ideological granddaddy of Apple itself is the Whole Earth Catalog, which I—and this is—I quote from this in the opening to my review essay that was part of the background readings and I just thought I would pop this up in full for us to think about. This is Stewart Brand. This is the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. The full issue is digitized at the Internet Archive as are so many other wonderful artifacts and primary source materials about this world, and this is right here on the—you know, you turn—open the cover and here is the purpose: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory as via government, big business, formal education, and church has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the Whole Earth Catalog.” The audience of the Whole Earth Catalog was not a bunch of techies, per se. It was back to the landers, people who were going and founding communes and the catalog was—you know, which was more a piece of art than it was an actual shopping guide, had all sorts of things from books by Buckminster Fuller to camp stoves and to the occasional Hewlett Packard scientific calculator, making this kind of statement that these tools could actually be used for empowerment of the individual because, of course, the world of 1968 is one in which computers and AI are in the hands of the establishment. We see this playing out in multiple scales including Hollywood films like Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, which, of course, follows, what, four years earlier Dr. Strangelove, which was also a satiric commentary on concentrated power of the military industrial complex, and computers were, indeed, things that were used by large government agencies, by the Pentagon, by Fortune 50 companies. And so the countercultural computer or personal computer movement is very much about individual power and taking this away from the global order, so to speak. This is the taking—using these tools as a way to connect people at the individual level, put a computer on every desk, connect everyone via computer networks to one another, and that is how the future will be changed. That is how the inequities of the world would be remedied. The notion of ultimate connectivity as a positive good was not something that originated with Facebook but, indeed, has much, much deeper origins and that's worth thinking about as we consider where we are in 2023 and where things are going from there. It's also worth thinking about the way in which global—the global order and particularly national security and government spending has played a role—an instrumental role—in the growth of the technology industry as it is. Take, for example, the original venture-backed startup, Fairchild Semiconductor, which is legendary as really starting the silicon semiconductor industry in the valley. It is the—it puts the silicon in the valley, and the eight co-founders known as the Traitorous Eight because they all quit en masse their previous job at Shockley Semiconductor working for William Shockley, the co-inventor of the transistor, and they went off and did something that one does not—did not do in 1957 very often, which was start your own company. This was something that you did if you were weird and you couldn't work for people. That's what one old timer told me, reflecting back on this moment. But they, indeed, started their own company, found outside financing and in this group contains Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the two co-founders of Intel, as well as Gene Kleiner, co-founder of Kleiner Perkins, the venture capital firm. This is really the—you know, the original—where it all began, and yes, this is a story of free-market entrepreneurialism but it also is a story of the national security state. This is a—Fairchild is founded at a moment when most of the business in the Santa Clara Valley of California, later known as Silicon Valley, was defense related. This is where the jobs were. This is the business they were doing, by and large. There was not a significant commercial market for their products. A month after they're incorporated—in September '57 is when Fairchild incorporates itself. October 1957 Sputnik goes into orbit. The consequent wave of space spending is really what is the literal rocket ship that gets Silicon Valley's chip business going. The integrated circuits made by Fairchild and other chip makers in the valley go into the Apollo guidance system. NASA is buying these chips at a time that there is not a commercial market for them and that enables these companies to scale up production to create a commodity that can be delivered to the enterprise. And so by the time you get to the 1970s you are not talking about defense contractors in any way. These are companies that are putting their chips in cars and in other—all sorts of one time mechanical equipment is becoming transistorized. And Intel is Intel, still one of the most important and consequential—globally consequential tech companies around at the center of the action in the CHIPS Act of last year, not to mention others. But this longer history and this intertwining with the military industrial complex and with broader geopolitics—because, of course, the space program and the Apollo program was a Cold War effort. It was about beating the Soviets to the moon, not just doing it because we could. But that really kind of dissipates and fades from collective memory in the Valley and beyond with the rise of these entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, young, new-time CEOs that are presenting a very, very different face of business and really being consciously apolitical, presenting themselves as something so far apart from Washington, D.C. And this notion of tech, big or little, being something separate from government and governance is perpetuated by leaders of both parties, not just Ronald Reagan but also by Democrats of a younger generation that in the early 1980s there was a brief moment in which lawmakers like Tim Wirth and Gary Hart were referred to as Atari Democrats because they were so bullish on high-tech industries as the United States' economic future. And the way in which politicians and lawmakers from the 1980s forward talked about tech was very much in the same key as that of people like Steve Jobs, which is that this is a revolutionary—the tools have been taken from the establishment, and this is something that is apart from politics, that transcends the old global order and is a new one. And, in fact, in the speech in May 1988 in Moscow at the end of his presidency Ronald Reagan delivers a—you know, really frames the post-Cold War future as one in which the microchip is the revolutionary instrument of freedom: “Standing here before a mural of your revolution”—and a very large bust of Lenin—“I talk about a very different revolution that is taking place right now. Its effects are peaceful but they will fundamentally alter our world, and it is—the tiny silicon chip is the agent of that, no bigger than a fingerprint.” This is really remarkable, if we sit back and take a deep breath and think about it, and particularly thinking about what happens after that. What happens after that are decades in which, again, leaders of both parties in the United States and world leaders elsewhere are framing the internet and understanding the internet as this tool for freedom and liberation, a tool that will advance democracy. Bill Clinton, towards the end of his presidency, famously kind of said, effectively, that I'm not worried about China because the internet is going to bring—you know, internet is going to make it very hard to have anything but democracy. And this notion of a post-Cold War and beyond the end of history and tech and big tech being central to that that, in fact, aided the rise of big tech. That was a rationale for a light regulatory hand in the United States, allowing these companies to grow and flourish and so big, indeed, they have become. But I want to end on a note just thinking about the—you know, why this history is important, why this connective tissue between past and present actually does matter. It isn't just that, oh, this is nice to know. This is useful. Lawrence Preston Gise was the second—sorry, the first deputy administrator of DARPA in 1958, created in the wake of the Sputnik—post-Sputnik panic, originally called ARPA, now DARPA. He later ran the entire Western Division of the Atomic Energy Commission—Los Alamos, Livermore, et cetera. Longtime government public servant. In his retirement he retired to his farm in west Texas and his young grandson came and lived with him every summer. And his grandson throughout his life has talked about how—what a profound influence his grandfather was on him, showing him how to be a self-sufficient rancher, how to wrangle cattle and to build a barbed wire fence. But the grandson—you know, what the grandson didn't mention that much because it wasn't really relevant to his personal experience was who his grandfather was and what he had done. But when that grandson, Jeff Bezos—a few years ago when there was—when Google employees were writing their open letter to CEO Sundar Pichai saying, we are not in the defense business. We are—we don't like the fact that you are doing work with the Pentagon, and pressuring Google successfully and other companies to get out of doing work with the Pentagon, Bezos reflected, no, I think we're—I think this is our patriotic duty to do work—do this kind of work. And as I listened to him say that on a stage in an interview I thought, ah, that's his grandfather talking because this little boy, of course, was Jeff Bezos, the grandfather of Lawrence Preston Gise, and those—that connective tissue—familial connective tissue as well as corporate and political connective tissue, I think, is very relevant to what we have before us today. So I'll leave it there. Thanks. CASA: Thank you, Margaret, for that very interesting introduction. Let's open up to questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) While our participants are gathering their thoughts would you start us off by providing a few examples of emerging technologies that are affecting higher education? O'MARA: Yeah. Well, we've had a very interesting last three years in which the debate over online learning versus in-person learning very quickly was not necessarily resolved. We did this mass real-time experiment, and I think it made—put into sharp relief the way in which different technologies are shaping the way that higher education institutions are working and this question of who's controlling the—who controls the platforms and how we mediate what learning we do. Even though I now teach in person again almost everything that I do in terms of assignments and communication is through electronic learning management systems. The one we use at UW is Canvas. But, of course, there are these broader questions—ethical questions and substantive questions—about how our AI-enabled technologies including, notably, the star of the moment, ChatGPT, going to change the way in which—it's mostly been around how are students going to cheat more effectively. But I think it also has these bigger questions about how you learn and where knowledge, where the human—where the human is necessary. My take on it is, aside from the kind of feeling pretty confident in my having such arcane prompts for my midterm essay questions and research projects that ChatGPT, I think, would have a very hard time doing a good job with it but although I'm looking forward to many a form letter being filled by that technology in the future, I think that there is a—you know, this has a history, too. The concern about the robot overlords is a very deep one. It extends from—you know, predates the digital age, and the anxiety about whether computers are becoming too powerful. Of course, this question of artificial intelligence or augmented intelligence kind of is the computer augmenting what a human can do rather than replacing what a human can do or pretending to have the nuance and the complexity that a human might be able to convey. I think there's, you know, these bigger questions and I'm sure—I imagine there are going to be some other questions about AI. Really, you know, this is a—I think this is a very good learning moment, quite frankly, to think more—you know, one of the things I teach about a lot is kind of the information that is on the internet and who's created it and how it is architected and how it is findable and how those platforms have been developed over time. And what ChatGPT and other AIs like them are doing is they're scraping this extraordinary bounteous ocean of information and it is as good as the—it's as good as its source, right. So whatever you're able to do with it you have—your source materials are going to determine it. So if there is bias in the sources, if there is inaccuracy in the sources, there is—that will be replicated. It cannot be—you know, I think what it is is it's a really good rough draft, first draft, for then someone with tacit knowledge and understanding to come into, and I like to think of digital tools as ones that reveal where things that only people can do that cannot be replicated, that this—where human knowledge cannot be, where a machine still—even though a machine is informed by things that humans do and now does it at remarkable speed and scale it still is—there is—we are able to identify where humanity makes a difference. And then my one last caution is I do—you know, the one thing you can't do with these new—any of these new technologies is do them well really fast, and the rush to it is a little anxiety inducing. CASA: Thank you. Our first question is from Michael Leong from the—he's a graduate student at the University of Arizona. Michael, would you like to unmute and ask your question? Q: Yeah. Hi, Dr. O'Mara. Hi, Ms. Casa. Sorry for any background noise. I just had a, like, general question about your thoughts on the role big tech plays in geopolitics. Specifically, we've seen with SpaceX and Starlink especially with what's going on in Ukraine and how much support that has been provided to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and potentially holding that over—(inaudible)—forces. So, basically, do we expect to see private companies having more leverage over geopolitical events? And how can we go forward with that? O'MARA: Yeah. That's a really—that's a really great question. And you know, I think that there's—it's interesting because the way—there's always been public-private partnerships in American state building and American geopolitics, and that's something—it's worth kind of just noting that. Like, from the very beginning the United States has used private entities as instruments of policy, as parastatal entities, whether it be through, you know, land grants and transcontinental railroad building in the nineteenth century all the way through to Starlink and Ukraine because, of course, the Pentagon is involved, too—you know, that SpaceX is in a very—is a significant government contractor as ones before it. I think that where there's a really interesting departure from the norm is that what we've seen, particularly in the last, you know, the last forty years but in this sort of post-Cold War moment has been and particularly in the last ten to fifteen years a real push by the Pentagon to go to commercial enterprises for technology and kind of a different model of contracting and, I should say, more broadly, national security agencies. And this is something, you know, a real—including the push under—when Ash Carter was in charge of DOD to really go to Silicon Valley and say, you guys have the best technology and a lot of it is commercial, and we need to update our systems and our software and do this. But I think that the SpaceX partnership is one piece of that. But there has been a real—you know, as the government has, perhaps, not gotten smaller but done less than it used to do and there's been more privatization, there have been—there's been a vacuum left that private companies have stepped into and I think Ian Bremmer's piece was really—made some really important points in this regard that there are things that these platform companies are doing that the state used to do or states used to do and that does give them an inordinate amount of power. You know, and these companies are structurally—often a lot of the control over these companies is in the hands of very, very few, including an inordinate unusual amount of founder power, and Silicon Valley, although there's plenty of political opinionating coming out of there now, which is really a departure from the norm, this kind of partisan statements of such—you know, declarations of the—of recent years are something that really didn't—you didn't see very much before. These are not folks who are—you know, their expertise lies in other domains. So that's where my concern—some concern lies where you have these parastatal actors that are becoming, effectively, states and head of states then and they are not, indeed, speaking for—you know, they're not sovereign powers in the same way and they are speaking for themselves and speaking from their own knowledge base rather than a broader sense of—you know, they're not speaking for the public. That's not their job. CASA: Our next question is from Michael Raisinghani from Texas Woman's University. Michael, if you could unmute. Q: Thank you, Ms. Casa and Dr. O'Mara. A very insightful discussion. Thank you for that. I just thought maybe if you could maybe offer some clarity around the generative AI, whether it's ChatGPT or Wordtune or any of this in terms of the future. If you look, let's say, five, ten years ahead, if that's not too long, what would your thoughts be in this OpenAI playground? O'MARA: Mmm hmm. Well, with the first—with the caveat that the first rule of history is that you can't predict the future—(laughs)—and (it's true ?); we are historians, we like to look backwards rather than forwards—I will then wade into the waters of prediction, or at least what I think the implications are. I mean, one thing about ChatGPT as a product, for example, which has been really—I mean, what a—kudos for a sort of fabulous rollout and marketing and all of a sudden kind of jumping into our public consciousness and being able to release what they did in part because it wasn't a research arm of a very large company where things are more being kept closer because they might be used for that company's purposes. Google, for example, kind of, you know, has very in short order followed on with the reveal of what they have but they kind of were beaten to the punch by OpenAI because OpenAI wasn't—you know, it was a different sort of company, a different sort of enterprise. You know, a lot of it are things that are already out there in the world. If we've, you know, made an airline reservation and had a back and forth with a chatbot, like, that's—that's an example of some of that that's already out in the world. If you're working on a Google doc and doing what absolutely drives me bonkers, which is that Google's kind of completing my sentences for me, but that predictive text, those—you know, many things that we are—that consumers are already interacting with and that enterprises are using are components of this and this is just kind of bringing it together. I think that we should be very cautious about the potential of and the accuracy of and the revolutionary nature of ChatGPT or any of these whether it be Bard or Ernie or, you know, name your perspective chatbot. It is what it is. Again, it's coming from the—it's got the source material it has, it's working with, which is not—you know, this is not human intelligence. This is kind of compilation and doing it very rapidly and remarkably and in a way that presents with, you know, literacy. So I'm not—you know, does very cool stuff. But where the future goes, I mean, clearly, look, these company—the big platform companies have a lot of money and they have a great deal of motivation and need to be there for the next big thing and, you know, if we dial back eighteen months ago there were many in tech who were saying crypto and Web3 was the next big thing and that did not—has not played out as some might have hoped. But there is a real desire for, you know, not being left behind. Again, this is where my worry is for the next five years. If this is driven by market pressures to kind of be the—have the best search, have the best—embed this technology in your products at scale that is going to come with a lot of hazards. It is going to replicate the algorithmic bias, the problems with—extant problems with the internet. I worry when I see Google saying publicly, we are going to move quickly on this and it may not be perfect but we're going to move quickly when Google itself has been grappling with and called out on its kind of looking the other way with some of the real ethical dilemmas and the exclusions and biases that are inherent in some of the incredibly powerful LLMs—the models that they are creating. So that's my concern. This is a genie that is—you know, letting this genie out of the bottle and letting it become a mass consumer product, and if—you know, OpenAI, to its credit, if you go to ChatGPT's website it has a lot of disclaimers first about this is not the full story, effectively, and in the Microsoft rollout of their embedding the technology in Bing last week Microsoft leaders, as well as Sam Altman of OpenAI, were kind of—their talking points were very careful to say this is not everything. But it does present—it's very alluring and I think we're going to see it in a lot more places. Is it going to change everything? I think everyone's waiting for, like, another internet to change everything and I don't know if—I don't know. The jury's out. I don't know. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Denis Fred Simon, clinical professor of global business and technology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He asked, technology developments have brought to the surface the evolving tension between the drive for security with the desire for privacy. The U.S. represents one model while China represents another model. How do societies resolve this tension and is there some preferred equilibrium point? O'MARA: That is a—that's the billion-dollar question and it's—I think it's a relevant one that goes way back. (Laughs.) I mean, there are many moments in the kind of evolution of all of these technologies where the question of who should know what and what's allowable. If we go back to 1994 and the controversy over the Clipper chip, which was NSA wanting to build a backdoor into commercially available software, and that was something that the industry squashed because it would, among other things, have made it very difficult for a company like Microsoft to sell their products in China or other places if you had a—knew that the U.S. national security agencies were going to have a window into it. And, of course, that all comes roaring back in 2013 with Snowden's revelations that, indeed, the NSA was using social media platforms and other commercial platforms—consumer-facing platforms—to gather data on individuals. You know, what is the perfect balance? I mean, this is—I wish I had this nice answer. (Laughs.) I would probably have a really nice second career consulting and advising. But I think there is a—what is clear is that part of what has enabled the American technology industry to do what it has done and to generate companies that have produced, whether you think the transformations on balance are good or bad, transformative products, right. So everything we're using to facilitate this conversation that all of us are having right now is coming from that font. And democratic capitalism was really critical to that and having a free—mostly free flow of information and not having large-scale censorship. I mean, the postscript to the Clipper chip—you know, Clipper chip controversy is two years later the Telecom Act of 1996, which was, on the one hand, designed to ensure the economic growth of what were then very small industries in the internet sector and not—and prevent the telecoms from ruling it all but also were—you know, this was a kind of making a call about, OK, in terms when it comes to the speech on the internet we are going to let the companies regulate that and not be penalized for private—when private companies decide that they want to take someone down, which is really what Section 230 is. It's not about free speech in a constitutional sense. It's about the right of a company to censor or to moderate content. It's often the opposite of the way that it's kind of understood or interpreted or spun in some ways. But it is clear that the institutions of—that encourage free movement of people and capital have been—are pretty critical in fueling innovation writ large or the development and the deployment and scaling of new technologies, particularly digital technologies. But I think you can see that playing out in other things, too. So that has been, I think, a real tension and a real—there's a market dimension to this, not just in terms of an ethical dimension or political dimension that there does need to be some kind of unfettered ability of people to build companies and to grow them in certain ways. But it's a fine balance. I mean, this sort of, like, when does regulation—when does it—when do you need to have the state come in and in what dimension and which state. And this goes back to that core question of like, OK, the powerful entities, what are their values? What are they fighting for? Who are they fighting for? I don't know. I'm not giving you a terribly good answer because I think it's a really central question to which many have grappled for that answer for a very long time. CASA: Thank you. Our next question comes from Ahmuan Williams, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. Ahmuan? Q: Thank you. Hi. I'm wondering about ChatGPT, about the regulation side of that. It seems like it's Microsoft that has kind of invested itself into ChatGPT. Microsoft had before gotten the Pentagon contract just a few years back. So it's kind of a two-part question. So, first of all, how does that—what does that say about government's interest in artificial intelligence and what can be done? I know the Council of Foreign Relations also reported that the Council of Europe is actually planning an AI convention to figure out how, you know, a framework of some type of AI convention in terms of treaties will work out. But what should we be worried about when it comes to government and the use of AI in political advertisements and campaigns, about, basically, them flooding opinions with, you know, one candidate's ideas and, therefore, them being able to win because they're manipulating our opinions? So what would you say would be kind of a regulation scheme that might come out of these type—new flourishing AI devices? O'MARA: Mmm hmm. Mmm hmm. That's a good question. I think there's sort of different layers to it. I mean, I see that, you know, the Pentagon contract—the JEDI contract—being awarded to Microsoft, much to Amazon's distress—(laughs)—and litigious distress, is a kind of a separate stream from its decision to invest 10 billion (dollars) in OpenAI. I think that's a commercial decision. I think that's a recognition that Microsoft research was not producing the—you know, Microsoft didn't have something in house that was comparable. Microsoft saw an opportunity to at last do a—you know, knock Google off of its dominant pedestal in search and make Bing the kind of long—kind of a punch line—no longer a punch line but actually something that was a product that people would actively seek out and not just use because it was preinstalled on their Microsoft devices. That is—so I see that as a market decision kind of separate from. The bigger AI question, the question of AI frameworks, yes, and this, again, has a longer history and, you know, I kind of liken AI to the Pacific Ocean. It's an enormous category that contains multitudes. Like, it's—you know, we can—oftentimes when we talk about AI or the AI that we see and we experience, it's machine learning. And part of why we have such extraordinary advances in machine learning in the last decade has—because of the harvesting of individual data on these platforms that we as individuals use, whether it be Google or Meta or others, that that has just put so much out there that now these companies can create something that—you know, that the state of the art has accelerated vastly. Government often is playing catch up, not just in tech but just in business regulation, generally. The other—you know, another example of this in the United States cases with the—in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, with what were then new high-tech tech-driven industries of railroads and oil and steel that grew to enormous size and then government regulators played catch up and created the institutions that to this day are the regulators like the FTC created in 1913. Like, you know, that's—of that vintage. So, I think that it depends on—when it comes to—the question about electoral politics, which I think is less about government entities—this is about entities, people and organizations that want to be in charge of government or governments—that is, you know, AI—new technologies of all kinds that incorporate ever more sophisticated kind of, essentially, disinformation, that—information that presents as real and it is not. The increased volume of that and the scale of that and the sophistication of that and the undetectability of it does create a real challenge to free and fair elections and also to preventing, in the American context, international and foreign intervention in and manipulation of elections but true in every context. That is, you know, getting good information before voters and allowing bad actors to exploit existing prejudices or misassumptions. That is an existing problem that probably will be accelerated by it. I think there's—there's a strong case to be made, at least in the U.S. context, for much stronger regulation of campaign advertising that extends to the internet in a much more stricter form. In that domain there's—I think we have pretty good evidence that that has not been—you know, having that back end has made the existing restrictions on other types of campaign speech and other media kind of made them moot because you can just go on a social platform and do other things. So there's—you know, this is—I think the other thing that compromises this is the rapidly changing nature of the technology and the digital—and the global reach of these digital technologies that extends any other product made—you know, any other kind of product. It just is borderless that—in a kind of overwhelming way. That doesn't mean government should give up. But I think there's a sort of supranational level of frameworks, and then there are all sorts of subnational kind of domain-specific frameworks that could occur to do something as a countervailing force or at least slow the role of developers and companies in moving forward in these products. CASA: Thank you. Our next question is a written one. It comes from Prashant Hosur, assistant professor of humanities and social sciences at Clarkson University. He asks, how do you—or she. I'm sorry. I'm not sure. How do you think big tech is likely to affect conventional wisdom around issues of great power rivalry and power transitions? O'MARA: Hmm. I don't—well, I think there are a—these are always—these definitions are always being redefined and who the great powers are and what gives them power is always being reshuffled and—but, of course, markets and economic resources and wealth and—are implicated in this for millennia. I think that tech companies do have this—American tech companies and the tech platforms, which I should preface this by saying, you know, none of the companies we're talking about now are going to rule forever. Maybe that just goes without—it's worth just note, you know, this is—we will have the rise and fall. Every firm will be a dinosaur. Detroit was the most innovative city in the world a hundred and ten years ago. There's still a lot of innovation and great stuff coming out of Detroit, but if you—if I queried anyone here and said, what's the capital of innovation I don't know if you would say Detroit. But back in the heyday of the American auto industry it was, and I think it's a good reminder. We aren't always going to be talking about this place in northern California and north Seattle in this way. But what we have right now are these companies that their products, unlike the products of Henry Ford or General Motors, are ones that are—go across borders with—you know, the same product goes across borders seamlessly and effortlessly, unlike an automobile where a—to sell in a certain country you have to meet that country's fuel standards and, you know, safety standards, et cetera, et cetera. You have a different model for a different market. Instead, here, you know, a Facebook goes where it goes, Google goes where it goes, YouTube goes where it goes, and that has been kind of extraordinary in terms of internationalizing politics, political trends. I think what we've seen globally is very—you know, the role of the internet in that has been extraordinary, both for good and for ill, in the last fifteen years. And then the kind of—the immense—the great deal of power that they have in the many different domains and, again, Ian Bremmer also observed this kind of the—all the different things they do and that is something that is different from twenty-five years ago where you now have companies that are based on the West Coast of the United States with products designed by a small group of people from a kind of narrow, homogenous band of experience who are doing things like transforming taxis and hotels and, I mean, you name it, kind of going everywhere in a way that in the day of the—you know, the first Macintosh, which was like this cool thing on your desk, that was—yes, it was a transformative product. It was a big deal and Silicon Valley was—became a household word and a phrase in the 1980s and the dot.com era, too. That was—you know, everyone's getting online with their AOL discs they got in the mail. But what's happened in the twenty-first century is at a scale and—a global scale and an influence across many different domains, and politics, this very deliberate kind of we are a platform for politics that has really reshaped the global order in ways that are quite profound. This is not to say that everything has to do with big tech is at the root of everything. But let's put it in context and let's, you know—and also recognize that these are not companies that were designed to do this stuff. They've been wildly successful what they set out to do and they have a high-growth tech-driven model that is designed to move fast and, yes, indeed, it breaks things and that has—you know, that has been—they are driven by quarterly earnings. They are driven by other things, as they should be. They are for-profit companies, many of them publicly traded. But the—but because, I think, in part they have been presenting themselves as, you know, we're change the world, we're not evil, we're something different, we're a kinder, gentler capitalism, there has been so much hope hung on them as the answer for a lot of things, and that is not—kind of giving states and state power something of the past to get its act together that instead states need to step up. CASA: Our next question is from Alex Grigor. He's a PhD candidate from University of Cambridge. Alex? Q: Hello. Yes. Thank you. Can you hear me? O'MARA: Yes. CASA: Yes. Q: Yeah. Hi. Thank you, Ms. O'Mara. Very insightful and, in fact, a lot of these questions are very good as well. So they've touched upon a lot of what I was going to ask and so I'll narrow it down slightly. My research is looking at cyber warfare and sort of international conflict particularly between the U.S. and China but beyond, and I was wondering—you started with the sort of military industrial complex and industry sort of breaking away from that. Do you see attempts, perhaps, because of China and the—that the technology industry and the military are so closely entwined that there's an attempt by the U.S. and, indeed, other countries. You see increase in defense spending in Japan and Germany. But it seems to be specifically focused, according to my research, on the technologies that are coming out of that, looking to reengage that sort of relationship. They might get that a little bit by regulation. Perhaps the current downsizing of technology companies is an opportunity for governments to finally be able to recruit some good computer scientists that they haven't been able to—(laughs)—(inaudible). Perhaps it's ASML and semiconductor sort of things. Do you see that as part of the tension a conscious attempt at moving towards reintegrating a lot of these technologies back into government? O'MARA: Yeah. I think we're at a really interesting moment. I mean, one thing that's—you know, that's important to note about the U.S. defense industry is it never went away from the tech sector. It just kind of went underground. Lockheed, the major defense contractor, now Lockheed Martin, was the biggest numerical employer in the valley through the end of the Cold War through the end of the 1980s. So well into the commercial PC era and—but very—you know, kind of most of what was going on there was top secret stuff. So no one was on the cover of Forbes magazine trumpeting what they've done. And there has been—but there has been a real renewed push, particularly with the kind of—to get made in Silicon Valley or, you know, made in the commercial sector software being deployed for military use and national security use and, of course, this is very—completely bound up in the questions of cyber warfare and these existing commercial networks, and commercial platforms and products are ones that are being used and deployed by state actors and nonstate actors as tools for cyber terrorism and cyber warfare. So, yes, I think it's just going to get tighter and closer and the great—you know, the stark reality of American politics, particularly in the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, is the one place that the U.S. is willing to spend lots of money in the discretionary budget is on defense and the one place where kind of it creates a rationale for this unfettered—largely, unfettered spending or spending with kind of a willingness to spend a lot of money on things that don't have an immediately measurable or commercializable outcome is in national security writ large. That's why the U.S. spent so much money on the space program and created this incredible opportunity for these young companies making chips that only—making this device that only—only they were making the things that the space program needed, and this willingness to fail and the willingness to waste money, quite frankly. And so now we're entering into this sort of fresh—this interesting—you know, the geopolitical competition with China between the U.S. has this two dimensions in a way and the very—my kind of blunt way of thinking about it it's kind of like the Soviet Union and Japan all wrapped up in one, Japan meaning the competition in the 1980s with Japan, which stimulated a great deal of energy among—led by Silicon Valley chip makers for the U.S. to do something to help them compete and one of those outcomes was SEMATECH, the consortium to develop advanced semiconductor technology, whose funding—it was important but its funding was a fraction of the wave of money that just was authorized through last year's legislation, the CHIPS Act as well as Inflation Reduction Act and others. So I'm seeing, you know, this kind of turn to hardware and military hardware and that a lot of the commercial—the government subsidized or incentivized commercial development of green technology and advanced semiconductor, particularly in military but other semiconductor technology and bringing semiconductor manufacturing home to the United States, that is—even those dimensions that are nonmilitary, that are civilian, it's kind of like the Apollo program. That was a civilian program but it was done for these broader geopolitical goals to advance the economic strength and, hence, the broader geopolitical strength of the United States against a competitor that was seen as quite dangerous. So that's my way of saying you're right, that this is where this is all going and so I think that's why this sort of having a healthy sense of this long-term relationship is healthy. It's healthy for the private sector to recognize the government's always been there. So it isn't though you had some innovative secret that the government is going to take away by being involved. And to also think about what are the broader goals that—you know, who is benefiting from them and what is the purpose and recognize often that, you know, many of the advanced technologies we have in the United States are thanks to U.S. military funding for R&D back in the day. CASA: Our next question is written. It's from Damian Odunze, who is an assistant professor at Delta State University. Regarding cybersecurity, do you think tech companies should take greater responsibility since they develop the hardware and software packages? Can the government mandate them, for instance, to have inbuilt security systems? O'MARA: Hmm. Yeah. I think—look, with great power comes great responsibility is a useful reminder for the people at the top of these companies that for—that are so remarkably powerful at the moment and because their platforms are so ubiquitous. There are—you see, for example, Microsoft has really—is a—I think what they've done in terms of partnering with the White House and its occupants and being—kind of acting as a NSA first alert system of sorts and kind of being open about that I think that's been good for them from a public relations perspective, and also—but I think it also reflects this acknowledgement of that responsibility and that it also is bad for their business if these systems are exploited. Yeah, I think that, again, regulation is something that—you know, it's like saying Voldemort in Silicon Valley. Like, some people are, like, oh, regulation, you know. But there's really—there can be a really generative and important role that regulation can play, and the current industry has grown up in such a lightly-regulated fashion you just kind of get used to having all that freedom, and when it comes to cybersecurity and to these issues of national security importance and sort of global importance and importance to the users of the products and the companies that make them there's, I think, a mutual interest in having some sort of rules of the road and that—and I think any company that's operating at a certain scale is—understands that it's in their market interest to be—you know, not to be a renegade, that they are working with. But I think having—you know, there can be a willingness to work with but they're—having a knowledge and an understanding and a respect for your government partners, your state partners, whether they be U.S. or non-U.S. or supranational is really critically important and sometimes tech folks are a little too, like, oh, politics, they don't know what they're doing, you know. We know better. And I think there needs to be a little more mutual exchange of information and some more—yes, some more technical people being able to be successfully recruited into government would probably be a help, too, so there's—on both sides of the table you have technically savvy people who really understand the inner workings of how this stuff is made and don't have simplistic answers of like, oh, we'll just take all the China-made technology out of it. You're, like, well, there's—like, it's kind of deep in the system. You know, so having technologists in the conversation at all points is important. CASA: Thank you. I think we have time for one more question. We'll take that from Louis Esparza, assistant professor at California State University in Los Angeles. Q: Hi. Thank you for your very interesting talk. So I'm coming at this from the social movements literature and I'm coming into this conversation because I'm interested in the censorship and influence of big tech that you seem to be, you know, more literate in. So my question is do you think that this—the recent trends with big tech and collaboration with federal agencies is a rupture with the origin story of the 1960s that you talked about in your talk or do you think it's a continuity of it? O'MARA: Yeah. That's a great way to put it. The answer is, is it both? Well, it's something of a rupture. I mean, look, this—you know, you have this—you have an industry that grows up as intensely—you know, that those that are writing and reading the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 the military industrial complex is all around them. It is paying for their education sort of effectively or paying for the facilities where they're going to college at Berkeley or Stanford or name your research university—University of Washington. It is the available jobs to them. It is paying for the computers that they learn to code on and that they're doing their work on. It is everywhere and it is—and when you are kind of rebelling against that establishment, when you see that establishment is waging war in Vietnam as being a power—not a power for good but a power for evil or for a malevolent—a government you don't trust whose power, whose motivations you don't trust, then you—you know, you want to really push back against that and that is very much what the personal computer movement that then becomes an industry is. That's why all those people who were sitting around in the 1970s in Xerox Palo Alto Research Center—Xerox Park—just spitballing ideas, they just did not want to have anything to do with military technology. So that's still there, and then that—and that ethos also suffused other actors in, you know, American government and culture in the 1980s forward, the sort of anti-government sentiment, and the concerns about concentrated power continue to animate all of this. And the great irony is that has enabled the growth of these private companies to the power of states. (Laughs.) So it's kind of both of those things are happening and I think, in some ways, wanting to completely revolutionize the whole system was something that was not quite possible to do, although many—it is extraordinary how much it has done. CASA: Margaret, thank you very much for this fascinating discussion and to all of you for your questions and comments. I hope you will follow Margaret on Twitter at @margaretomara. Our next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 1, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Chris Li, director of research of the Asia Pacific Initiative and fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, will lead a conversation on U.S. strategy in East Asia. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR's paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/Careers. Follow at @CFR_Academic on Twitter and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you again for joining us today. We look forward to you tuning in for our webinar on March 1. Bye. (END)  

On February 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed into law the landmark Telecommunications Act of 1996, the most significant revision of the Communications Act since its enactment in 1934. In the 1996 Act’s preamble, Congress declared the statute’s purpose “to promote competition and reduce regulation.” And the conference report accompanying the law stated it was intended “to provide for a pro-competitive, deregulatory national policy framework.” At the signing ceremony, President Clinton’s rhetoric was soaring: “With the stroke of a pen, our laws will catch up with our future.”Now, a quarter century after the Telecom Act’s passage, we can celebrate the 25th anniversary and acknowledge the achievement, while – with the benefit of hindsight – also taking a critical look at what the 1996 Act actually accomplished and whether it needs updating. This program will address these fundamental questions: (1) what did the 1996 Act get right; (2) what did it get wrong; and (3) should it now be updated or substantially rewritten, and if so, in what way?The Federalist Society's Telecommunications & Electronic Media Practice Group is pleased to host a distinguished panel to address these questions.Free State Foundation President Randolph May, a former FCC Associate General Counsel with over four decades of experience in the communications law and policy field, will moderate a discussion among experts: Harold Furthgott-Roth, a former FCC commissioner who served as a principal House Commerce Committee staff member working on the 1996 Act; Michelle Connolly, Professor of the Practice in the Economics Department at Duke University who twice served as Chief Economist at the FCC; and Chris Lewis, President and CEO of Public Knowledge who has served as Deputy Director of the FCC’s Office of Legislative Affairs.Featuring:-- Michelle Connolly, Professor of the Practice, Duke University; former Chief Economist, Federal Communications Commission-- Chris Lewis, President & CEO, Public Knowledge; former Deputy Director, FCC Office of Legislative Affairs-- Hon. Harold Furchtgott-Roth, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for the Economics of the Internet, Hudson Institute; former FCC Commissioner-- Moderator: Randolph May, President, Free State Foundation; Executive Committee Member, Federalist Society's Telecommunications & Electronic Media Practice Group

This week on the SyrupCast, MobileSyrup staff reporter, Shruti Shekar is joined by the Editor of The Wire Report, Anja Karadeglija, to do a deep dive into the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review. For the past few years, the Canadian government has promised to review the Broadcasting Act and the Telecom Act -- both of which date back to the early 1990s. Finally, last year, the government appointed a panel of seven experts to lead a review of this legislation. The panel has been accepting written submissions from various companies and organizations within the media and telecom industries to inform their interim report, which is due to release sometime this month. Ahead of this anticipated report, Shruti and Anja breakdown the written submissions of a handful of key players. With the exception of Shaw, one thing all of the major companies involved seem to agree on is a Netflix tax. It's important to note though that the term 'Netflix tax,' could mean multiple things and ranges from whether Netflix should be imposed a sales tax or whether it should contribute part of its revenue into Canadian content. Shruti and Anja also ask the question, why should we care about a legislative review of the Broadcast and Telecom Acts? Tune in to hear the SyrupCast team's thoughts. Total runtime: 30:23

Over 21 years ago, at the dawn of the commercial Internet, Congress passed a seemingly minor  amendment to the massive Telecom Act of 1996 — Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (HR 1555). HR 1555 was designed to limit liability of Internet providers for content posted by their users and also to give them […]

In the first 1/2 hour I will be talking to Phil Kerpen. Phil Kerpen 2Phil Kerpen is president of American Commitment, a nationally syndicated columnist, chairman of the Internet Freedom Coalition, and author of Democracy Denied. Prior to joining American Commitment, Kerpen served as vice president for policy at Americans for Prosperity. He has also worked as an analyst and researcher for the Free Enterprise Fund, the Club for Growth, and the Cato Institute. A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., Kerpen resides in Washington, D.C., with his wife Joanna and their three children. Phil and I will be chatting about “Net Neutrality” and why it should be ended. Phil Kerpen argues that Obama's Washington's takeover of the Internet—a disaster for free speech, commerce, and the future of the Internet as a sphere of innovation—should be reversed. For over a decade, professional liberal organizers and agitators—backed by a tidal wave of big liberal foundations and Silicon Valley corporate money—have told a bizarre scare story that without heavy-handed government regulation, Internet service providers (ISPs) will start blocking what websites you can go to and impeding free speech on the Internet. No such thing happened in the approximately two decades that ISPs were unregulated “information services” under the 1996 Telecom Act. Indeed the opposite occurred as robust competition between phone and cable companies—and later wireless companies—drove speeds dramatically higher and consumers benefited from an Internet that innovated beyond our wildest dreams. Listen in as Phil and I discuss the internet and free speech in the era of President Trump, and his article, "The Net Neutrality Noise Machine." ******************************* In the second 1/2 hour I will be joined by Kellie Fiedorek. Kellie Fiedorek serves as legal counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, where she is a member of the Alliance Advancement Team. Since joining ADF in 2012, Fiedorek has defended religious liberty, marriage, and the family against legal attacks. She has authored federal and state legislation, and advised members of Congress, governors, state attorneys general, state legislators, and policy organizations on how to preserve First Amendment freedoms. Fiedorek has testified before state legislatures across the country on the importance of safeguarding religious liberty, free speech, the sanctity of life, and the right to privacy. She has also litigated cases defending the constitutionally protected freedom of citizens to live and work according to their conscience. Her appellate advocacy practice has included authoring and coordinating amicus briefs for pivotal U.S. Supreme Court, federal court, and state court appellate cases. Fiedorek earned her Juris Doctor from Ave Maria School of Law in 2009. Before graduating from law school, she completed the Alliance Defending Freedom leadership development program to become a Blackstone Fellow in 2008. She is a member of the state bar of Florida, the District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court, and multiple federal appellate courts. Kellie and I will have a conversation about: Most Americans, including nearly 25% of those identifying as Democrat, favor common sense restrictions on Abortions. DNC Chairman Tom Perez's comments on Friday are out of step with most American's views on the sanctity of life. The evidence is indisputable that a pre-born child is a human being. To those who pretend there's still doubt: why do you err on the side of death? Every innocent life deserves to be protected. Pro-Choice is anti-woman. Abortion is not a one-time event; women have testified and research shows that it is an ongoing, painful struggle. Close ties between the DNC and the abortion industry should concern women. If you think the tobacco industry has glamorized dangerous behavior that leads to disease and death and is only concerned with profit, take a look at the abortion industry. Just as Americans don't want taxpayer money going to Big Tobacco, every American should be outraged that Big Abortion has received billions in public funds from politicians aligned with the DNC and its chairman. Follow Phil Kerpen on Twitter at @kerpen, Kellie Fiedorek at @ADFKellie, and me at @tamij AND tweet your questions/comments during the show using hashtag #tjrs. *Sponsored by Rentacomputer, your premier source for Sound System rentals , by ROBAR® Guns, a True Custom firearms and firearms finishing shop located in Phoenix, AZ, and found online at RobarGuns.com, and by Dispatches, your site for the BEST conservative resources to fight and win the information war.

We dig into the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision on new royalty payments for internet radio, looking for clues about the future of small and medium-sized webcasters. In our final review of the 20th anniversary of the Telecom Act of 1996, Matthew Lasar explains how the Act and the political environment of the time affected community […] The post Podcast #35 – Digging for Clues About Internet Radio’s Future appeared first on Radio Survivor.

We dig into the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision on new royalty payments for internet radio, looking for clues about the future of small and medium-sized webcasters. In our final review of the 20th anniversary of the Telecom Act of 1996, Matthew Lasar explains how the Act and the political environment of the time affected community […] The post Podcast #35 – Digging for Clues About Internet Radio’s Future appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This is our second episode examining the history and legacy of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in recognition of the law’s 20th anniversary. This time around Prof. John Anderson from Brooklyn College explains how Reagan-era deregulation, culminating in the Telecom Act, triggered civil disobedience on the airwaves along with citizen action that continues to push […] The post Podcast #34 – How the Telecom Act of ’96 Triggered Popular Resistance appeared first on Radio Survivor.

This is our second episode examining the history and legacy of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 in recognition of the law’s 20th anniversary. This time around Prof. John Anderson from Brooklyn College explains how Reagan-era deregulation, culminating in the Telecom Act, triggered civil disobedience on the airwaves along with citizen action that continues to push […] The post Podcast #34 – How the Telecom Act of ’96 Triggered Popular Resistance appeared first on Radio Survivor.

The 1996 Telecom Act turned twenty today — and was obsolete even before the ink was dry. Congress has tried and failed to update it, leaving the FCC to struggle with outdated technological silos and try to “modernize” the Act on its own. Big questions surrounding FCC censorship, broadband competition, and Internet regulation remain unanswered. Berin and Evan discuss what the Act got right, what it got wrong, and what a #CommActUpdate should look like.

There’s a feminist civil war brewing over Caitlyn Jenner. The Principal Got Beat up in Ca - Listen to what we have to say about these Morons This study tells the story of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and its aftermath. In many ways,the Telecom Act failed to serve the public and did not deliver on its promise of more competition,more diversity, lower prices, more jobs and a booming economy. Instead, the public got more media concentration, less diversity, and higher prices. Richie and Marla Renegade Talk radio http://www.renegadetalkradio.com Sky Pilot Radio http://www.skypilotradio.com

The Telecom Act of 1996 is long overdue for a rewrite and this is the year. Think back to 1996 if you can when the telephone companies sold voice and the cable companies sold video. Things are not the same for the Verizons and the Comcasts of this world as they compete head to head for your business while disruptive companies like Google are nipping at their heels.