YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Crow

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73

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2024-03-07

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2024-03-07

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1

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1. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have an area of giving back a little bit to public service. I didn't serve in the military and I was the first male in many, many, many, many generations not to do that. So I didn't necessarily feel good about that.”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “Hundreds and hundreds of investments. And then these technologies have been sped into national defense. And then the proceeds of our investments allowed us to generate revenue back to NQTEL, low billions of dollars. And those low billions of dollars then become a perpetual machine. So I've been on that board for.”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “So in 1999, February 1999, in late fall of 1998, there was the Indians detonated a nuclear device without anyone at the American government knowing what was going on. And it was a deep shock that somehow we didn't have the technologies that we needed from the civilian technology stream that ought to be in the government, that there was a barrier. So the intelligence community and the defense community said, well, we need to devise some way where we can find these technologies and speed them into the protection and defense of the United States. So a new thing was set up, a not-for-profit entity called NQTEL. And what it does is it invests in technologies from all over the country, now all over the world that are sped into use. So for instance, in Qtel was in the top five initial investors of a company called Keyhole. Keyhole was the precursor company to Google Earth. You might have heard of a company called Palantir. So NQTEL was one of the early investors there. So NQTEL has made hundreds of”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “I also was involved in designing and launching a thing called the Earth Institute at Columbia, which was an attempt to draw together a number of disparate disciplines so that public health people didn't work with the Earth scientists, didn't work with the engineers, the earth scientists didn't work with the biologists, didn't work with the ecologists. And so a fantastic, I spent 10 years building this Earth Institute, and it was unbelievable fun, unbelievably instructive in terms of what was needed. Even this building that we're in here, the Center for Planetary Health, the Global Futures Laboratory, these are all things that couldn't be done at Columbia because there were just limits to what the faculty innovation rate was at that institution. And in spite of their great achievements, their ability to move in new directions wasn't something that was as high on their agenda.”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “Yeah, so I had three jobs there. So, one job was to drive technologies into creation. So we took about 400 technologies public and we did about 4,000 licenses of advanced technologies. And we did this in a lot of areas to build better drug, build better solution, build better materials, better devices. And then I was also a faculty member.”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Yes, Senator Harkin called me up one day and said, it looks like you've gone off and gotten yourself some education. And so you need to come back and help us advance some new projects.”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Yeah, they had a project. This is right at the energy crisis in Iowa. They decided that the way out of the Middle Eastern energy crisis was to dig up all the coal in Iowa and burn it. Well, the problem was that the Iowa land is so valuable and so productive. And the problem with the Iowa coal is that it was so filled with sulfur. And so the project was designed to solve those two problems. And I worked in the field on those projects, solving those problems. But then they said that nobody in the legislature understands what we're doing. And so the old time scientists, all of whom were like born in the 19s, the people that I worked for were all born between 1917 and 1920. They said, you seem to be able to understand this stuff. Go down there and explain it to them. So I started driving down to the state legislature in Des Moines twice a week explaining them what we were doing.”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “Yes, yes, I know that. I like that song. And so, what I thought was even then, even as a high school senior and a college freshman was that, well, who built all these chemicals that kill everyone? I literally, who built all these chemicals? And you come to find out that the chemists built all those chemicals. And it's not like they were evil or didn't have forethought. That's what they built. And so could you design something to build something in a different way? So I started concluding that we were limiting ourselves. And I had a fabulous undergraduate advisor named Don Hedwiger, who was this Oklahoma wild guy sort of out of the depression era. And he says, he says, well, Michael, I don't really care what you want to take. You're going to get on the right track when you need some help. You come back and see me. And here's all the forms that take whatever courses you want to take. And so it didn't help my grade point to take all these courses without the prerequisites. I mean, you really take a pounding when you do that. But what I could tell was that we had something missing in the design of how knowledge is advanced, something was missing. I didn't know what it was.”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “The relationship was kind of funny when I was in high school and doing all this reading and then ultimately when I looked at things I had concluded that if we had all these problems, so I remember the rivers in Ohio were on fire and the reason I was interested in environmental science, there were all these kinds of issues. And so what I knew was that”

   2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “So she said, I'm assigning you to distributed studies with all of the other dummies. So I ended up majoring in two subjects and minoring in three subjects, all five are the ones that I listed that day.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “I walked up to the table at Iowa State, where I was going to be a javelin thrower, where I was a javelin thrower. And I walk up to this table and the lady goes, I said, she says, what do you want to major in? I said, I got five things. I rattle them all off. She says, well, I only need one. I want to major in five. She says, you can't. I said, well, where does it say that?”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Then you got your MS, and that's more of the same. And now you got your PhD, which is an acronym for piled higher and deeper. So the level of respect coming from the leadership of my family, my pursuit of my PhD was de minimis. And so I was really focused on going to college and seeing if I could do something other than just work to make machines work or work to make money for other people. But could I work on something that could help this problem of why we weren't making it towards. So there's Sir Thomas Moore, I don't know if you remember like his view of the utopian is that we're all farmers. Everybody has the same status. Everybody has the same rank and there's no technology and everybody lives happily ever after. I'm like, no. It seemed like we had no other pathway to move forward. So I was really interested in going to college to figure out how to do that.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “And no one had ever been to college in my family. My great grandmother, who was still alive, she was born in the 1880s. She was a really old salt person racist, you know, everything you could possibly imagine. And when I finished my PhD, just to give you some sense of my family, she said, well, Michael, you know, you got your BS and we know what that is.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Was an epiphany. I happen to have read that same year as an eighth grader, Sir Thomas Moore's 16th century idea of a utopian place. And I remember reading Anne thinking it was stupid. That was the mind of an eighth grader. And then I also read, I was reading a lot of Cicero at the library and I was attracted to Cicero because he was always focused on what you could construct. So there was this phrase attributed to him that I criticized by what I create. And so, and I was also an unbelievable even then in 1968 Star Trek fan of the first original show. Yeah. And so there was this utopian notion that somehow got in my mind that science and technology was a way to work on some of these issues or work on some of these problems. So that became something that I focused on.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “Yes, the equivalent. Yeah. And so I saw this incongruence. And knew that something was unbelievably wrong. How could you do that? Orbit the Moon? And at the same time, these people lived in a tar paper shack and had little boys collecting food for them. And so I just knew there was something wrong.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “And so we're going down a pave road, then a dirt road, and then a two lane track through a field. We get back to this house. Now, we live in government housing, nothing fancy, living off government commissary and government food supplements on a low salary, you know, one pair, two pairs of blue jeans a year, you know, that kind of thing. These people had a tar paper shack, tar paper on the outside, knock on the door, open the door, the floor is dirt. There's a pot-belly stove. There's four children, two adults. Some of you might have been alive then. And I remember this switch went off in my head, and it wasn't like WTF because I didn't think that way.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “So, the year is 1968. So, my dad was in the Navy. We were living in different military bases in Norfolk, Virginia, and a place called Patuxet River, Maryland with a Patux River Naval Air Station in St. Mary's County, Maryland. And so I was working on my Eagle project in the summer of 1968 through the fall of 1968. So Dr. King has killed in April of 68. Senator Kennedy is killed in June of 1968. So my mind is really fixed on these things. And the Chicago Convention of the Democratic Party is in the summer. and then the TED offensive where a number of our family friends were killed. And so it's 1968 was this like really, really focused time in my own thinking. And so this other kid, Randy and I, decided to collect enough food for one family for one year. Turns out that's a lot of food. You fill up a 24-foot U-Haul truck and another smaller truck. We get a name from the county welfare department of a family. And we go to the family on Christmas Eve to deliver the food.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “Well, I mean, there were five children, but it was not a lot. We went to working class schools. Some of the schools were majority minority schools. There was a lot of, I can't tell you how many times I've been mugged. If you look at my hands, there's little marks on my hands. Those are little boys' teeth. And they're not all victories, some are losses. But not alone. I mean, ensconced in trying to learn.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “It was the way that they treated me. So they would say, Oh, really? Too bad for you, kid, you know, because. We learned commas last year, and you haven't learned them yet. And so too bad for you. So I was constantly being, well, why don't you go play with these rats? Or why don't you go read on your own? And so I started reading when I was 11 or 12 years old just basically becoming a consumer of everything a library had to offer, imaginable.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “Everything in our family was this working class family, you know, in 1965, I looked up on a chart that my dad's pay from the Navy was below the poverty line, which is why we got peanut butter from the government, cheese from the government, powdered milk from the government, lived in public housing, lived in trailer parks, you know, all these kinds of things. And so the drive was not a function of what we didn't have or whatever. It was just that in our family, and I think probably in tradition of our family, it was, you know, you work. And so it was about work, you know, gaining some value from work. So I think the drive came from that partly.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Yeah, we'd go in Chicago when he was stationed there for a while. We'd go down to Ohio Street or different streets and sort of areas where there were a lot of what he referred to as Winos. And he'd pay them money to tell us their life story, how they got there. And I don't know what his motivation was. You know, he took us to Cook County, Morgan. He paid some guy to pull out some dead kid and show us what happens when you make bad decisions. So I think it affected my siblings more than me. But I just thought, what is this about? Nonetheless, I do remember these things.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “My mother had gotten cancer and died in those days. You didn't see your parents if they went into the hospital. You were kept away from them. My father was serving the Navy. He was actually off the coast of Asia at the time. Had to come back. We got split up. So it was like this traumatic thing. And I think that my expectation was that somehow my dad was going to be, you know, have a plan. And my dad was so shocked, I sense, in a sense, by his high school girlfriend dying, our mother, that he just said, I don't really know what to do. You've got to figure it out. I was the oldest, and he said, You got to figure it out. And I just remember saying, well, I'm not really sure what that means, but how to do that, but I know what the message is. And that is that I've got to somehow figure out where to go, what to do.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “Yeah, we lived in public housing. We moved everywhere. I was born, all five children in my father's family were all born in naval hospitals.”

    2024-03-07 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 571 – Michael Crow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source