Scott Santens

And when it comes to technology, basically all type one, all level one research is actually government funded.

So all these tax dollars are going into these technologies, including self-driving cars.

I mean, this was originally a DARPA project that was funded by the military really to start up.

and there's a lot of these technologies that we create using our text dollars and then the companies just take the ones that seem like they could build into profitable businesses and profitable technologies and just use it and then what do we get in return we're just told that in return we get to be able to purchase those products

And it doesn't really make sense if you think about it in terms of, say, investing in Apple.

If you buy stock in Apple, then when Apple makes a new product, you aren't just told that, congratulations, now you get to buy a new product.

You actually have this dividend that you can get from Apple, and you have an increasing value of that stock in Apple that can benefit you.

So I think it's important that we see our economy as essentially a giant corporation where as citizens we are stockholders and we should get a return on our investment that we're investing in these technologies.

And also the technologies are actually especially increasingly trained by our data when it comes to artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms and these kinds of things.

So we should understand that it is our data that is helping make this possible.

Yeah, and there's nothing that says that they shouldn't earn the money.

This is about percentages.

So instead of, say, Google keeping 100% of their revenue, then perhaps it should be 90% or 95%.

There's some percentage that we're saying that we are the ones that put up the original research.

We're the ones who did the original investment.

We should be seen as the original investors.

Yeah, again, all research, because there's no profit in that research, it comes down to government or to pick that up.

It used to be the case like back in the day, like say Bell Labs was a company that did a lot of its own R&D and that just doesn't exist anymore.

If it's not profitable, people aren't going to do it.

So all this exploration into new technologies and new knowledge, that's really just government funded.