Instigators of Change
Instigators of Change is a Khosla Ventures podcast that explores innovative ideas, the people who come up with them, and those who invest in them. Our guests are the outliers, creators, mavericks — those who imagine differently. They build companies that alter transportation, retail, food, energy, entertainment, space. And when they succeed, we cannot imagine life without them. Tune in to hear about non-obvious ideas from inspiring people.
The podcast is hosted by Kara Miller, former host of the nationally-syndicated public radio show "Innovation Hub."
Instigators of Change
What Smart Companies Know about Working with the Government
Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., aren't always two peas in a pod. The "move fast, break things" approach may not square with a cautious-at-all-costs outlook. So if you're a company that needs to work with government regulators, how do you do it? And achieve your goals? Michael Huerta, who ran the FAA and served as U.S. Secretary of Transportation, joins us to explain why there's often friction between entrepreneurs and the government - and how you can avoid the pitfalls to collaborate productively.
Kara Miller:
Welcome to Instigators of Change, a Khosla Ventures podcast, where we take a look at innovative ideas, the people who come up with them and those who invest in them. I'm Kara Miller. And this week, government regulators and tech companies might need each other, but that doesn't mean they always get along.
Michael Huerta:
The companies need to recognize that the regulators are not just there to make their lives miserable, although it may feel that way. They're actually reflecting the broader society, what society's expectations are for these technologies as they get deployed broadly across the system.
Kara Miller:
Today, former FAA administrator, Michael Huerta, talks about why companies and regulators clash and how you advance technology forward even if you've got your sites set on flying cars. When Michael Huerta was just a kid, a new show premiered on television. The show was about a family who lived not in 1962 which is when the show began, but in 2062, 100 years in the future.
(singing)
Kara Miller:
The Jetsons were a comfortable middle class space age family, and Michael Huerta loved watching them.
Michael Huerta:
They lived in the sky and that you would get to work in flying cars. And George Jetson, the hero, the dad of the family, he went to work every day and he had a job that seemed to involve just pushing a whole lot of buttons.
Kara Miller:
Which felt incredibly futuristic, a job that involved tapping buttons all day long. George Jetson also got his news from a screen in an era the 1960s when newspapers ruled. But looking back Huerta says, Jetson seems like a guy who had the future pretty figured out well mostly.
Michael Huerta:
So you think about, okay, where are we now? Well, many of our jobs involve pushing a lot of buttons on computer keyboards. We also do mouse clicks and swiping on screens. We get our news from screens, but then on the other hand, we are still quite firmly on the ground. We have not transitioned to that place where we have flying cars. And I think that's something that we still aspire to.
Kara Miller:
So why are so many aspects of our lives different from the lives of ordinary folks back in 1962, but we're still noodling around the roads like we did 60 years ago rather than soaring through the air Jetson style? Well, Huerta says that's a story of how the American public views transportation and what we expect from the various conveyance that shuttle us around.
Michael Huerta:
We as a country tolerate that 40,000 people nearly that number every year die on America's highways. And I don't want to say that we're okay about that, but we understand it. If we had that number of people that died in aviation crashes every year, there would be a huge national outcry and there would be calls probably to close down the system. So we just have a very different view of aviation than we do about other forms of transportation.
Kara Miller:
To put some concrete numbers behind this comparison, in 2019, there were just over 400 aviation fatalities in the US according to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. That same year, nearly 100 times as many people died in car accidents in the US just over 36,000 people. But Huerta points out that aviation is a technology most of us don't completely understand. Now, we may not completely understand our cars either, but we do feel, so to speak, like we're in the driver's seat.
Michael Huerta:
If there's a problem that's going to emerge on the road, it's going to be because the other driver did something wrong. Now, I think we all recognize that humans are fallible, but the way we view our sense of control is not necessarily consistent. We have very high expectations for aviation. We don't have those same expectations for travel on the ground. And I think that regulators such as the FAA and governments around the world have a responsibility to reflect what their citizens want.
Kara Miller:
And this is the nature of regulation. When you're a company, whether it's a transportation company or a medical device company, when it's got to work with the government, it's going to encounter approaches to a problem that you might feel are at odds with the data. But it's not just data that regulators grapple with and tech companies, which often come from a culture that says move fast, iterate, it's okay if you fail. Well, they can collide with a government culture that does not prioritize moving fast. Consider, says Huerta, this scenario.
Michael Huerta:
If we go and buy a new cell phone and we turn it on for the first time, what's the first thing that happens? Well, it'll say hello. It'll ask you to put in your name, but right there at the beginning, the first thing it's going to do is download a bunch of updates and patches. And sometimes that's frustrating for us because we have to wait a while until we can actually get the thing going, but it's something we expect.
Kara Miller:
Huerta argues that we totally accept the fact that we are beta testers. We know things are going to be improved over time, tech is not perfect when it comes out of the gate and that's okay. But would we be fine with that attitude being applied to aviation?
Michael Huerta:
Now, you're back in that aircraft in row 17, and you're looking out the window. And way off in the distance you see another airplane fly by. How would you feel if somebody told you, yeah, that airplane's on a beta test and there are a couple of things that don't work on it, but they're going to get to it and fix it? You'd probably be freaked out, right?
Speaker:
Well, there again folks is the flight deck, we've reached our cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. Clear skies ahead of us on our way to Miami today, but the fasten seatbelt sign is still eliminated. We're going to be doing some testing on our new engines. We've got a few bugs to iron out and we may experience a sudden drop in altitude. Just a reminder in the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen mask will drop down in front of you. Make sure to secure your own mask before assisting others. Enjoy the rest of your flight.
Michael Huerta:
Now, you step back a little bit, that is the culture of the two industries though. The tech industry, as you talked about, it's fail fast, let's break things, let's constantly iterate, let's constantly improve. And that works when you're talking about consumer technology where you're talking about transporting hundreds of people. Aviation has evolved to a very strong safety culture. One of the things that a lot of people don't know is that the aviation industry is obviously like other industries an incredibly competitive industry, but manufacturers and airlines will all tell you they don't compete on safety. They share information about incidents, about accidents, about little glitches that appear quite broadly across the industry, because everyone recognizes that if something goes wrong, it affects the entire industry.
And so that translates to a culture where safety is paramount in everyone's mind. But a safety culture is also an incredibly cautious culture, because we've gotten to a point where in commercial aviation, we have a fatality rate that is virtually zero and no one wants to be the one that messes that up. And when you are talking about a big change, that raises a question in people's minds, that is this going to mess up this incredible safety record that we have? And that's the juxtaposition. In the technology world, you want to change everything, you want to fail fast, you want to try a whole lot of things, you want to break things. In the aviation world, you want to change as little as possible, you want to keep everything operating in a very consistent and predictable fashion.
And that's the challenge that technology companies need to navigate. It's not a question of one of these cultures being right and one being wrong, they're just very, very different. And what you have to figure out is how you can take the really positive elements of an innovation culture and connect them with the benefits of a safety culture and all that we've accomplished to ensure that the traveling public can get around and get around safely and somehow bring those two things together if we're going to see these new technologies in aviation that like advanced air mobility, that Jetsons world that people aspire to.
Kara Miller:
Well, it seems also like the stakes are a lot higher. So if Amazon's testing something out and I can't order the book I wanted to get, whatever. But if you are testing something out, you're so limited in being able to test out things with airlines or cars in the real world, because if something goes wrong, the downsides are very big, they're much beyond like I never get my book or it's three days delayed or whatever.
Michael Huerta:
Yeah, you're talking about people's lives. And that is something that everyone takes really seriously. In aviation and in manufacturing, there are practices that have evolved over the decades of how we certify aircraft, how we ensure safe operation. And they take years. They require a lot of interaction between companies and regulators, a lot of data collection, a lot of test operations that develop that data, a lot of analysis of that data. And as you build that knowledge base, you start to reach conclusions of what is acceptable. And that's the interesting thing about aviation safety, you're never eliminating risk. You can only do that if people don't fly. But what you want to do is take it down to a manageable and acceptable level. And you want to have redundant systems so that if something comes up, that there will be another system that can counteract whatever bad thing is happening.
Now, this is a process that has evolved over many years and it served aviation very well, but it takes a long time, years, three, five, 10 years, depending on the complexity of the product, which for a tech company is a completely foreign concept. You've assured your investors if you're a startup that you can come to the market in a year or two and start generating revenue, but you have this black box of regulatory approval that you need to get through before you're able to do that. And that's the thing that people have got to understand and appreciate when we start talking about aviation.
Kara Miller:
And it's interesting because it feels like there's a little bit of a paradox in here because you talked before about how so few people are killed every year in plane crashes, and that's especially true when you're talking commercial plane crashes in the US. I think in a given year, there are often fewer than 10 people killed. So very, very close to zero. On the roads, it's tens of thousands of people a year who die. And one of the things I feel like you hear about when you talk to entrepreneurs on the issue of self-driving cars, and we heard it on this show last week, it's pretty obviously a new technology, it's still being tested, still being figured out, but they think it couldn't lead to substantially fewer collisions, like lots of lives saved. But then it's also, like aviation, this unknown technology to the public. And so there's a lot of weight on the collisions that there are when you're talking about a self-driving car.
And so you're at this moment where you're trying to get self-driving cars to be more like planes, which is to say very, very highly automated, but you're running up against this issue of people believing that the status quo of cars on the road right now is safe, like it's pretty safe to drive your own car when, in fact, it's not that safe.
Michael Huerta:
Well, there's a cultural issue here. If you step back, let's take aviation first and then we'll talk about cars. Aviation is founded on a principle that you're going to have as you adopt new technology, many redundant systems, all to assure that there's safety, but at the end of the day, your last line of defense is the pilot, that the human being will be there when everything goes wrong to deal with the situation, correct it and ensure that it can be handled safely. That's been the culture and philosophy of aviation.
Now, to a technologist, the human being is the weakest link in the chain. They believe that we all know humans are fallible, humans make mistakes, they get distracted, and that there are ways that you can build reliable technologies that will actually be much better than humans in reacting to situations as long as the technology is designed to anticipate and deal with those situations. So there's this philosophical cultural difference between how the technologist and how the aviator will look at the world.
Now, the self-driving car universe sits in the middle. There've been wonderful technologies that have been deployed to provide assistance to the driver, but if you look at accidents and incidents, both on the highways and in the air, data will tell you that the majority of those are due to something that went wrong with the human, driver error, pilot error. And yes, there are instances where the technology didn't do what it's supposed to do, but the human beings are significant contributors there. And so you want to find ways for the technology to provide the level of support, but to have the reliability to ensure that it's always going to do the right thing.
The other thing that happens with the car companies is it doesn't have the same culture as the aviation industry of not competing on safety. Think about it. When you go to buy a car, I personally look at the safety rating of the car. And the car companies do use safety as a marketing feature. They do say that our car is safer because of the way it's designed, the systems that it has on board and all of that stuff. And there you don't have the same culture of broadly sharing information to benefit the whole industry. And so all the manufacturers tend to have a narrower view that based on the data we have about what we manufacture, we know that it meets a certain safety threshold, but they can't speak to the entire industry.
And so there's two dimensions here. One is the interaction between the human beings and the technology, the other is how broadly is data shared across the entire transportation ecosystem. And those are some of the things that I think as we bring more and more technology, as we see self-driving cars, automation in aviation, we've got to figure out how we're going to balance those two things.
Kara Miller:
Yeah. To highlight some of this difference in cultures or cultures coming together, we've seen a lot that's been written recently about regulators attempts to work with Tesla. The Washington Post reported not long ago that after a Tesla that was using the driver assistant system crashed a few years ago, the driver died, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, they got involved. And this is a quote from The Washington Post, "They called Tesla executives to say they were launching an investigation." Musk screamed, this is Elon Musk. "Musk screamed, protested and threatened to sue," said a former safety official. This feels like doesn't it that pointing to that clash of tech culture versus this much more cautious culture.
Michael Huerta:
Yeah. And that's a challenge. I think that regulators, and I used to be one, regulators can be very prescriptive. And one of the things that I think is important for government regulators and private companies to do as they explore these new technologies is to have a really collaborative approach, because the reality is the technologists are always going to be ahead of the regulators. They're going to be innovating and coming up with solutions that the regulators haven't thought about. But at the same time, the companies need to recognize that the regulators are not just there to make their lives miserable although it may feel that way. They're actually reflecting the broader society, what society's expectations are for these technologies as they get deployed broadly across the system.
And so to a large extent, the regulators are critical to... You can think of them as a proxy for customer acceptance. And yes, there will be people that will try things out that aren't completely baked and that might be experimental, but by and large, the regulator's trying to reflect the prevailing view of the majority of people. And so it may be frustrating and yeah, there may be a lot of yelling and screaming, but that really doesn't work really well. What works better is if regulators can sit down with companies and have a very open conversation, we are trying to get to here, and there may not be standards or there may not be approved technologies, how should we break this down and think about it so we can both get what we want? From the company's standpoint, a new deployment that benefits society, from the regulators' standpoint, something that can be done in a responsible way that will ensure public safety.
Kara Miller:
We're going to take a quick break now for a word from Khosla Ventures, but I'll be great back with Michael Huerta. He's the former administrator at the FAA. He now sits on the board of directors at Delta Air Lines and works with the company Kittyhawk, which wants to bring us small remotely piloted air taxis. After the break, we're going to look at how tech companies can work with regulators to turn new ideas into reality.
Speaker:
The job market is filled with endless possibilities today. If you are ready for your next adventure, consider joining a company in the Khosla Ventures portfolio. KV companies aim to fundamentally change health, finance, the future of work, transportation, energy, even space. Check out khoslaventures.com/jobs. That's khoslaventures.com/jobs. And now back to Instigators of Change.
Kara Miller:
I'm Kara Miller. I'm talking with Michael Huerta, former head of the FAA. I know that there are some attempts to bring different kinds of people into boardrooms, into the places where decisions are made. And you have these different kinds of experiences, you've left government, you've worked with businesses. Do you feel like when you think about that divide, there is more cross pollination going on that we're starting to see of government people and tech people treating ideas?
Michael Huerta:
There is, but I think there needs to be more of it. I'll just give an example. When I was a regulator at the FAA, it was early in the days when companies were starting to think about things like package deliveries and how you could get an Amazon package delivered by drone or you could get Google and other companies that were starting to think about providing drone related services. And you remember that there's been a lot of discussion around that. And we saw both. We saw companies that would come in and sit down with us in a very thoughtful, almost researchy way. Hey, we're new to this, we don't really understand what are the wickets we're going to need to go through and the laws we're going to need to comply with, would you be willing to sit down with us and help us figure that out?
And, of course, that was something that we were always delighted to do. But sometimes, the government regulators are not that open to that. Sometimes they're going to say, well, when you get further or longer, when you get it figured out, come back and see us, we're busy. And I think that the government needs to be receptive and it needs to have portals that companies can come through to kick around ideas. We need to be doing more and more of that. On the company side, what you don't want to do is walk in as some companies have sometimes approached regulators with a whole army of lawyers sitting down and telling the regulators, here are all the reasons that your rules don't apply to us and here is what we are going to do because to the regulator, that sounds like a challenge, that sounds like you are challenging their authority to look out for the larger public interest. And what you're not creating is any receptivity to working with you.
And so the collaborative approaches really need to be expanded on both sides. And I think that if we're able to do that, and we are doing that, that it'll get to more rapid deployment of new technologies, which is beneficial to everyone.
Kara Miller:
You were in the Obama administration, but then for a minute or two in the Trump administration, I just wonder what's your sense of how regulatory agencies change as presidential terms change and presidents come and go? Is it very stable? Are companies dealing with radically different ideas and approaches?
Michael Huerta:
Fortunately in transportation, things are pretty stable. And I think that it's because transportation, aviation and all the other modes that make up our transportation ecosystem have generally enjoyed very broad bipartisan support. And that's a good thing. I think that there is a recognition just across the board politically that transportation is an enabling force that is beneficial to the economy, to cities and rural areas, that it is something that people depend on to go about their lives. And so you really don't see a lot of dramatic change in what regulations or policies might be in transportation if you move from a Democrat to a Republican administration.
There may be nuances. Like, for example, Democrats tend to favor public transit, Republicans tend to favor highways. And that reflects the urban rural divide that you see. But I think everyone recognizes that a safe and efficient transportation system is really critical to our country and they want to do more and more. Yes, you're going to have the debates about how best to do that and what have you, but everyone wants to get to the same place.
Kara Miller:
We've talked a lot about people who want to move fast, which is the companies. As you said, they've got people who invested and they want to get that money back to them and this and that, and then the people who are like, let's slow this down, and those are the regulators. We have not talked about nuances, like state to state. I know that sometimes companies will go to another state to test drones because they have very different regulations than from one state to another state. But the other thing that we're seeing too is that China, for example, country to country. So China, for example, has a lot of government support for different kinds of transportation where maybe the US doesn't. So how do companies navigate and see those differentials? And I wonder how you see those differentials in relaxed regulation or fast tracking things and slowing them down.
Michael Huerta:
It's a really good point. The regulatory structure is different for aviation than for surface transportation. In the aviation industry, the vast majority of regulatory authority here in the US is held at the federal government level. For a lot of surface transportation, it's held at the state level. So that's one important difference. And then you talked about differences from one country to the other. I think from a company standpoint, the first thing they need to think about is what's the market that they're really looking to exploit. The market that you want to be in is what's going to drive what your regulatory strategy is.
Now, you also need to recognize there are some things that are still a gray area and have yet to be worked out. You mentioned different drone regulations from state to state. Well, that's correct when it comes to things like land use questions, where drones might land. And that's very much an evolving landscape. Traditionally, aviation has been exclusively in the federal domain. And there have been state and local regulatory equities there, but they've been dealt with essentially by contract. The best example of that is where do you locate an airport? Well, the federal government recognizes a city air state's authority to locate its airport wherever it chooses to. And the local or state government recognizes the FAA's authority to regulate the safety, the design and the operation of that airport. And that has served us very, very well. But now when you're talking about things like drone deliveries, and if you want to get a package delivered to your driveway, that effectively means that everyone's driveway becomes an airport.
Kara Miller:
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.
Michael Huerta:
And that construct no longer works, because you're not going to work out driveway by driveway what the rules are. And I had a mayor who put the question to me this way. He said, "Look, if I have a constituent that years from now is running a home business and they're receiving drone package deliveries of all hours of the day or night, and it becomes an annoyance to the neighborhood, the neighbors are not going to call the FAA, they're going to call the mayor. What I need to know is what are the authorities that I have to do that and to do anything about that." And I think that's a really good question. What we have today is the universe where it's completely unquestioned, that cities have exclusive rights to regulate land use. It's also not contested that the FAA has exclusive control of things once they leave the ground. And then there's also a third doctrine that a property owner has exclusive right to the quiet enjoyment of the airspace over their property. So on its face, there's a conflict there.
Kara Miller:
Sure.
Michael Huerta:
And what we all need to figure out is with these new technologies, how are we going to reconcile those different authorities in a way that's workable. Many of the companies that are looking at drone delivery have expressed the view that they want to see federal preemption, that the federal government will have the exclusive authority, because what they don't want to see is a patchwork of different regulations from one state.
Kara Miller:
Right. What a nightmare if one town in Virginia has one thing, you go to the next town, it's another thing, you go to the next town, it's... Right. But you could be on one end of the street and they have a set of rules and the other end of the street's in another town, different set of rules.
Michael Huerta:
Yeah. And that's for a delivery company an absolute nightmare. But I do think that eventually you have to land and you do need to respect the equities that exist at the city level. And I think there is a universe of things that cities should have control over. For example, hours of operation. Or for low flying technologies that might generate noise, perhaps the ability to root them away from certain critical facilities like schools or churches, or to perhaps work with the federal government prescribed particular corridors that traffic might operate within. But this is all very much an evolving area and something that's going to need to be worked out. And there needs to be a recognition that there are different interests here that we're going to have to satisfy. It's a complicated problem, but it's not without a solution.
Kara Miller:
A couple questions for you about the future. I'm sure you did at the FAA too, but I know you think a lot now about what technologies are next, how is transportation going to change. So in what ways do you think that if we looked at five or 10 years, what things in transportation are on the brink of change? And what big changes, exciting changes, interesting changes are coming?
Michael Huerta:
Well, the whole self driving or automated flight area and they are related, I think is very, very exciting. I don't necessarily agree that we're going to see it as soon as 2023, 2024 on a large scale, which is what some companies talk about. Yeah, there is a lot of great work that's taking place, but, for example, what we might see in 2023 and 2024 is the beginning of that, like for eVTOL service between defined points, a major airport and downtown, but not necessarily widespread use of eVTOL across an entire city.
Kara Miller:
And what is eVTOL?
Michael Huerta:
Electric vertical take-off and landing. And that's what a lot of companies are planning. They're the small aircraft that carry maybe three or four people that can take off vertically, fly 100 miles or so at a fast speed and then land on a very small footprint.
Kara Miller:
Okay. This is like a taxi in the sky type of situation. You don't go to London on it, but yeah.
Michael Huerta:
Yeah, that Jetsons example. And so you have some companies out there that saying they're going to launch service in 2023 or '24. And they may have an aircraft that would do that, they may have secured a couple of approvals for landing sites, but I don't think that we will have the whole ecosystem of what are the guidelines in cities and what are the characteristics of landing zones and how do we deal with concerns about noise or impact or traffic. All of that stuff is also part of that larger ecosystem. So I think you'll see the beginnings of it, but I think we're probably talking many, many years down the future before we see widespread deployment of that stuff.
But I do think that automation is going to be a significant change in the entire transportation system. We are seeing the self-driving car deployments, and it's been slower than I think a lot of people would like to see. But I think that people are getting more comfortable with the idea of seeing them on the street. And so that may happen a little more quickly, largely because I think there is a higher level of customer acceptance around transit on the ground. And we do have automated transit systems that exist, trains. Think of the underground transit as an airport that takes you from one terminal to the other. That's largely an automated system and we get on that. We get on an elevator. And we are comfortable with that. And so I think if people feel grounded, they're a little more accepting of technology because there is a belief that the worst thing that can happen is we just stop. And maybe then I'll have to figure out how to get moving again.
Kara Miller:
Final question about the future, which is, and we may have gotten to it, but you talked about how you see things moving in terms of maybe more automation, more these shorter flights, what do you think is going to be the biggest challenge for regulators in the biggest conflict area between regulators and companies in the next five or 10 years?
Michael Huerta:
It's going to be this question of autonomy. And it may require significant policy and or legislative change in doing that. If we stick with aviation for a minute, aviation is founded on a principle of a three legged stool, that to ensure public safety, you want to have an aircraft which is certified and meets a certain standard, you want to have an operation, the company that is also certified and has well documented processes, maintenance programs, training programs and the like, and you want a certified pilot that is appropriately trained and able to operate that aircraft.
So when you go to autonomy, you have to come up with the regulatory proxy for that pilot. That is, what is the system and how do you certify it and ensure that it's safe. There are some out there that argue that actually requires a change of law. I'll leave that to the lawyers to figure out. But we were talking about this earlier, this philosophy of the pilot being the last line of defense is something that people are going to need to address. And so that's going to be, I think probably the most significant challenge. I think we will make a lot of interim progress through first, perhaps remote pilots while the pilot is you still have a pilot in command, that pilot is not necessarily sitting on board of the aircraft. And the only regulatory question is where the pilot sits.
And then we'll go from there to perhaps a pilot controlling multiple aircraft. And then the question is ensuring that the workload is appropriate and the pilot is able to monitor a set of automated systems. But to jump to full autonomy, I think that, that's going to be the question that the regulators and the companies are going to have the most difficult time dealing with, because from the regulator standpoint, they're going to want to demonstrate to the public that they have analyzed and assessed it and they can represent that it is as safe or safer than what people are used to. And from the company's standpoint, they're going to need to think about it as a customer acceptance issue, because their business is only going to be successful if people want to use it. And how do they tell that story to the larger public.
And I think many companies recognize that they need to get that right, because not only is there the larger question of how you get the customers to accept it in the first place, but how do you respond to if an accident happens, if people die, does that set them back? And so that's why they want to be really careful and thoughtful about how they approach that.
Kara Miller:
A final question, which is, if you were giving advice to an entrepreneur who is working with the government, who needed to, because that was the nature of the thing that they were doing, what do you feel like from all your time on the government side, but also on the private industry side, what's the nugget that you would say to them that you've learned through hard experience and they could keep in mind?
Michael Huerta:
Communicate early, communicate often. A lot of companies make the mistake that they are not ready to talk to the regulators because they don't have it all figured out in their mind. And they have a tendency to want to have the answer before they sit down and talk to regulators. And I think they just need to recognize that the regulators are human beings as well. They're going to be quite excited about the technology and they don't have it all figured out either. But the more smart people you bring to address a problem, I think the higher likelihood that you have of getting to a place where everyone can get comfortable with how this technology is going to be deployed. So collaboration is key. And what underpins all collaboration is very open and transparent communication.
Kara Miller:
Michael Huerta was the administrator of the US Federal Aviation Administration from 2013 to 2018. Michael, thank you so much.
Michael Huerta:
Thank you.
Kara Miller:
And thank you for joining us. Next week on Instigators of Change...
Jay Whitacre:
There's a constant question I ask myself when I do technical diligence for venture firms is how many miracles need to occur between now and when this product is on the floor somewhere is doing its thing. And the answer is sometimes there's multiple miracles. It's not even one, there's a couple.
Kara Miller:
In the meantime, subscribe to the show on iTunes, leave us a review. We would love to hear from you. And if you're looking for a recent show you might like, check out our conversation with Harvard Business School, Karim R. Lakhani, about the difference between companies that get artificial intelligence and those that don't. I'm Kara Miller. Our show is produced by Matt Purdy. I'll talk to you next time.