Welcome to The Flux, where we hear stories from people who have asked what if questions to better understand the world and talk about how data can help tell stories that impact decisions and create an intentional impact on the future. This is your host, John Courtier, CEO at Epistemics. In a world where the flux capacitor from Back to the Future does not yet exist, people have to make difficult decisions without always knowing how the future will play out.

Our guests are people who've taken risks, made decisions when uncertainty was high, and who have assisted decision makers. Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC.

John: This next episode of the Flux we have Randy Berg on. Randy, thanks for being willing to participate. 

Randy: Indeed. Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity. 

John: Yeah. So we're here at the Complex Social Systems Society of the Americas Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. [00:01:00] throughout the day, yesterday, today and the first half of the day tomorrow, people will be talking about complex systems, agent based modeling, a number of other topics around, complexity science.

Randy, you're from New Mexico.

Randy: I lived in Santa Fe for almost 20 years. I moved away to Boulder and back home for a bit. Now I'm back in Albuquerque. 

John: Cool. and some point in that 20 year journey, you got engaged in complex system, agent based modeling, complexity science.

Randy: My entry to it all is, through economic development, actually technology based economic development. And, I was associated with the Santa Fe Institute. it's one of those treasures we have in the state that is world class. It's probably the leading, complexity science Institute in the world.

And so we have these, great people moving through here. And part of them, one of them, Chris Lankton,helped develop a swarm development group to create open source software to help do agent based modeling. And, In some ways, it led to a lot of other things. And I've attended the [00:02:00] CSS several times back 20 years ago, probably.

So it's good to be back in, in, in the CSS conversation that stands for complexity, social science. Yeah. Yeah. yes, I'm glad to be back in the fold. 

John: Yeah. Great. so when you were doing some of the New Mexico, economic development side of stuff. How many times around it, any complex models or modeling and policymaking come into play there?

And, have you seen the ability of, we were talking last night, this vision of how do we enable, whether it's Albuquerque or Santa Fe, a combination of both to become a hub for businesses that are interested in complex systems and complexity science connected to the national labs connected to Santa Fe Institute and this building ecosystem.

I know you had some pretty. Cool ideas about how to make that happen. 

Randy: going a little bit deep into the economic development model. one of the things New Mexico lacks, in certain ways is industrial R and D research and development. And, the problem is a lot of the [00:03:00] research and development R and D stuff happens in other states.

other places 'cause it's well established, it's tough to move people here. this opportunity, the agent-based modeling platform and complex science, complexity sciences, offers us an opportunity to build those r and d labs here, and, evolve the agent-based modeling tools. And I've been in conversation with,one of the pioneers in the field of complexity economics, Dwayne Farmer, who actually is from Silver City, New Mexico, is now, the head of this institute at Oxford University in England.

John: We can give, Don and Aynet a shout out, the Institute for New Economic Thinking. 

Randy: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. thank you. and,he's doing some great things there. I think your company's related to the healthcare field, And, his company and his,university there looked at the,COVID response, pre COVID.

as COVID was evolving, they started building models to try to mirror what, or to predict what was going to happen in the, in their economy. it was really economy focused. And so they, focused on the [00:04:00] labor market and which jobs were going to be necessary, and ones that were going to be shut down.

And, Went deep into the, the modeling of the statistics that were there already. And they, and, as it net, the net result was, it was very close to being accurate to what actually happened, right? So they took their original prediction and looked at the end of it. And it was within a few, small percentage, points of being accurate.

I was telling you earlier, I'm a little bit Rip Van Winkle here because I haven't been involved in the CSS environment for a while. But now I'm back and I attended Don's lecture at the Lansing theater and saw that the agent based modeling tools of have ripened to this to the extent that it's ready for primetime.

Now, back when I was involved, it was pretty elementary and experimental, but So you might tell me a little bit more about your application and what you're doing with your related to health care. Is that fair? 

John: Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So [00:05:00] We built a platform for doing agent based modeling at scale for prime time.

So One of the challenges in agent based modeling in the past has been how do you build a population of agents that are representative of? actual society or the city of Santa Fe or the city of Albuquerque You And so we just said let's just cut right to it and we built this digital twin of the entire United States that includes every person, every house, every school, every workplace, dynamic interactions of where people travel to and from within a city, how people interact within a household, within a school, within a workplace, and even can bring into effect how people travel to and from different cities on the average day in the United States.

And so we've basically solved for do you have a rich enough synthetic population to begin doing these advanced models that can tie simulation and forecasting together? So one of the things that Jones [00:06:00] Miller really been working on as it comes to complexity economics is, these economic models that people are using today.

Like people are using that to try to predict things and you know how useful could agent based modeling become if we can tie both agent based modeling and the more like predictive type sciences, machine learning, other regression based approaches together. And, our shared belief is that by utilizing these really robust synthetic populations, you can start doing forecasting work by representing the behaviors that lead to these macroeconomic, outcomes.

Rather than just taking,oh, we're sitting back, we're going to wait for all this data to come back to us. And then we're just going to look backwards and say, Oh yeah, like this is what happened. We told you so. One of my, executive CEO coach friends at this point, he says, economists, they put out information two times a year, one at the beginning of the year that says what, is going to happen.

And then one at the end of the year that says why they didn't happen, that they say what did happen and why their earlier prediction didn't happen. [00:07:00] And they just tied together and it's Oh, yeah. So we were right the whole time. Yeah. And at the end of the day, it's like most people have no idea what's going on because you can't capture the emergent effects from the bottom up.

Exactly. 

Randy: Yeah. no, I'm so the real fan winkle moment for me, in a sense, is meeting you and hearing how far it's come. and that excites me from this economic development standpoint, how can we take this, if you will, largely Man, created here in New Mexico, largely large contributions were made from New Mexico.

How can we take this and harvest some of the rewards that come with it, such as industry based research? That, and that really is the triple helix of industry, your company, universities, and laboratories, and government laboratories, and that sort of thing, is working on perfecting the models. And, so So what was once a, a game almost is now, it's able to predict, in deep real world because the data [00:08:00] exists and the computational power exists to actually accomplish it.

I want to share another story, speaking of New Mexico, Abby Ray Smith, is from Clovis, New Mexico, and he started Pixar and, he got, he's the guy that had to fight with, Steve Jobs about, How come Pixar wasn't happening faster? And back then it was the computational power lacked to be able to do it.

So Technology is catching up with itself. I was going to get another shout out to my good buddy. I say good buddy He's a brand author. Dr. Brown author from the Sanofi institute and he wrote a book. The nature of technology what is it and how it evolves? You And,he was one of the senior scholars there early on at the Santa Fe Institute.

And he's, in some ways, the father of complexity economics. he was applying, he's an action economist that was his training and education, but, through the Santa Fe Institute and what they do there, the interdisciplinary,conversations they have there, he integrated the technology concept of evolution and what it is, and he goes to the point that it's combinatorial.

Sure. [00:09:00] And,when I first heard that, it really locked in a lot of things for me of an agent based modeling is about combinatorial science. If you will. It's about evolving, combining things and data and people and habits and so forth. So anyway, I don't know. Do you have any thoughts on the combinatorial aspect?

John: Yeah, I know one of the common things that come out of the Santa Fe Institute and others. It's when looking at what makes something a complex system. It's like when you can't look at any one part of it and see the macro effects. And so the combinatorial nature that agent based modeling enables you to see play out.

You can combine interventions, you can combine scenarios, you can combine changing demographics of a population. How do these things in combination lead to different possible futures? And,folks who listen to this podcast, they know that we talk about counterfactuals quite a bit. So when you're starting to change different variables within a system or you perturb a system with some new [00:10:00] variables or some new scenario that hasn't happened yet, the combinatorial effects enable you to see how might this play out.

And, a lot of people, they struggled trying to think that way. It might not be natural to say, I'm just going to think in what ifs and make decisions in what ifs.

the thing that comes up and, we've talked about this with Rob Axtell and other people,Joe Farmer as well.

the field of economics is based on like the rational actor, or if all of these agents in these simulations were acting rationally. we know that's not the case. That's not reality. We're not all. Maximizing our own utility functions or else we'd all be maybe a little bit richer. Might live in a different zip code.

All sorts of things like that. yeah, to your question on the commentary effects. One of the things that we try to help people do in the way that they can think about solving, complex challenges differently is thinking about it from the perspective of what are the conditions that lead to the outcome that you're hoping to see.

And so. What are the combinations of interventions [00:11:00] and strategies and where the population is moving to that create better futures for people? And that could be from a health perspective. It could be from a economic development side of things. It could be closing the wealth gap, things that really do impact people.

And that's where, we believe that this combination of our software that we're providing, as well as connecting with the open source and the academic community, who can. Build models, share models in an open way can have trust with Oh yeah, like we're using this software platform. It's producing these results.

We can clearly see how those results are being, like either reproduced or how the program is executing.and that creates really trust and credibility to a policymaker or a decision maker who, for the most part, they're not trying to dive into the models themselves. They just want to know this helps us make a better decision.

We understand the future trajectory of this decision. Things are going to change. That's what we get into. 

Randy: That, that sort of [00:12:00] application really does fit into this industrial research and development, if you will. And industry may be the wrong word to use for this kind of computer science kind of work, but, but it provides, An environment to grow these this talents.

And so part of my idea that we were talking about last night was Looking at Attracting some universities and partner universities and companies Macrocosm your company other companies Macrocosm is a company Dorn has formed in the UK and I've had a conversation with them about trying to nudge him into

To doing something back home here in New Mexico, he's not opposed to it. So we'll see where that goes. But, some of the core parts of that R and D environment and get them put in place here. and you can imagine, that the world could come to us, different parts, different policy makers around the world.

Cool. Could look at what we're doing here as something they can add to their portfolio of solution sets and That's my real [00:13:00] goal is to see that kind of thing happen, but have it happen here Often these ideas are formed here through the brilliant minds we have here There's an often from an economic development standpoint, New Mexico claims or Demonstrates that we have the highest concentration of PhDs and in the country per capita and that's true But we need to build on top of that and this is a way to do that and so but back to the idea was looking at how we can get Some universities to partner with our universities, build that labor force talented people who can you know stay here or take their tools and trades elsewhere You But it's also a net attractor to people from around the world to come here and explore these opportunities.

John: So you mentioned the parts of the ecosystem that create the conditions for a thriving New Mexico. Built around, more of like the technologies that come out of the national labs and Santa Fe Institute and others. 

Randy: not to be critical, but what we do in New Mexico a lot of times is we look at the labs [00:14:00] as the spring of technologies.

And a lot of them are 20, 30 years ahead of their time for actually, and I can cite numbers of examples, 3D printing, for example, I was working with a company in the 90s, that was doing 3D printing at Sandia, and then only in the last 10 or so years has it been hit mainstream. and so what I'm excited about this field is that it's gone through that 20 or 30 year gestation period, and now, You're sitting next to me.

You have a company, you have employees and, and you have a working model and it's ready for primetime. And to me, that's the time when venture capital gets interested in. 

that's when, people, who are pursuing careers outside of academia, perhaps, or science pursuits can join a company and build a great career with good pay.

and,it's the model that works. 

John: Yeah, we were talking last night about a book called The Rainforest that this guy, Greg Horowit, wrote, about how do you create the conditions that lead to an environment like Silicon Valley that leads to companies [00:15:00] getting spun out, wealth creation, educational opportunities for more people are attracted to the location, tax base goes up, all those types of factors that lead to a thriving ecosystem.

And it's having each of these layers of the ecosystem in place, which, again, go back to these things would create the conditions that would enable more companies to emerge out of that ecosystem. 

Randy: Yeah, I spent the last few weeks sitting in, the New Mexico legislative, interim committees that, But, they hold, outside of the sessions to talk about the issues and opportunities and that sort of thing.

And, there's, so there's people from all over the state represented in those committees, and, I can envision, and of course they're in the policy side of things, and their setting policy and making decisions on who gets, which policies get funded, which ones don't and that sort of thing. But it would be nice to use New Mexico and its communities as a laboratory of sorts, to,

gain from these tools and understand the uses of them. So we have a living laboratory here in New Mexico, [00:16:00] which could extend to other states, obviously, but, that's another opportunity that I see time is right to pull these things together. And,but having the Santa Fe Institute, the labs, the universities.

And this long history of advanced technologies here. I think it's time we harvested some of our own and actually grew it here. and there's a few other opportunities that are happening as well, but related to those other industries. But 

John: sure. one of the things that comes up related to New Mexico, a lot of the states revenue comes from the energy sector, right?

And with the kind of green revolution coming, is there a way to look at workforce development connected to some of these newer technologies? A lot of which were developed in and around the national labs. so what you're, 

Randy: so what you're telling me is you're,your tool is ready to help us with some of these problems.

John: yeah, absolutely. and that's some of where the collaboration between what do farmer's interested in Yeah. Working with us on, they can do a lot of the economic modeling, workforce type modeling. Using these synthetic population that we've been able to create to try [00:17:00] to yeah, it's a good it's a good match Ecosystem 

Randy: the ecosystem comes together.

Let's see on the economic development front there's the industry R& D is one of them the college collaboration and we named a few I don't know if I should name them now, but you know that our you and so I think it's really important for us to have deep investments in this field.

Go ahead. Why don't you mention the ones that you would mention 

John: if, yeah, some of the top groups that we get to collaborate with definitely groups out of Carnegie Mellon groups out of University of Michigan, University of Vermont, MIT, there's some really great groups that, George Mason, of course, got to mention them, where complexity science, agent based modeling is a major focus.

Randy: So creating a place is. A central place where these minds could come together in a real physical sense, as well as a virtual sense, and, help train and help introduce people to New Mexico. that's my hidden goal with this idea, but, raise some of these flags here also working with our existing universities .

[00:18:00] Uh, one of the attendees here, Chris is former city councilor in Santa Fe, but he's also a lecturer at UNM, a professor at 

John: UNM, 

Randy: and talking about complexity science and that sort of thing. So we have those partnerships already established, we just need to build on them. And I think we have a few places we could stand up such a place where these minds can come together.

Santa Fe Institute does it all the time. But the people come and they go back home. We want people actually to come and visit, but we want them to stay, some of them to stay here and create that core that, that takes us to a new level. 

John: And you mentioned at a certain inflection point, venture capital and other investors get interested in that,we're the benefit of some of the early stage venture capital groups in New Mexico, making a bet on epistemics to like one bring this technology to life, but also bring this technology to life in the state.

and so that's another, cool thing made a couple of connections for you to get plugged in across that ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah. 

Randy: Like I said, it's a little bit Rip Van Winkle for me. [00:19:00] I, led a number of organizations in those genres, years ago now, one called Coronado Ventures Forum. I was a chairman of it for a few years and I was able to, get the adventure capital committee involved in it.

I called it the entrepreneur wine club, which was, A lot of whining, 

and one of the wines was we don't have any capital here. Sure. And I and others helped Attract the venture capitals to the board and organization we also got the state investment council on the board, which was a coup the state investment, It grew to actually make investments in venture capital funds that help fund new mexico ideas and it's You Still underway and still a very effective tool.

And I'm sitting next to you as a result of those tools. So it's nice to see. 

John: Yeah. you popped in, last night, Steve Guerin, Santa Fe local, said, Hey, come over there. There's a dinner, the site is getting together. I don't know if you want to mention any of the work that you and Steve have done in the past together or anything that Steve's into now that excites you about where.

what you're doing is an integration of, 

Randy: And you can [00:20:00] see the impact of that in the work that you're doing. And that's where this field is going well and I, Steve will have to speak for himself. Uh, on exactly how agent based modeling fits into his world and his tools. But. his company SIM table.

 Has integrated technology into the rather arcane science of managing forest fires and wildfires. and advising fire response teams across the country around the world about how to to, to predict and prepare for, changes they bring in, live data from the weather, winds, terrain information, the types of trees on the, in the forest, the type of grasslands, whatever, they're able to integrate those in real time, and in some ways,I, and again, I don't know exactly how agent based modeling fits into all that, but it's a way to illustrate the power of, that preparedness can have for solving real world fast moving fires and problems.

but Stephen, I go back years. I was, helpful in getting organization. He stood up called the Santa Fe complex was early version of what we're talking about, trying to move forward [00:21:00] again. bring in, these outside resources to bear on our opportunity. And, unfortunately it,it was more, it was a coworking space before coworking.

Coworking wasn't even a term at that point. And, but we were doing that here in Santa Fe around this complexity science field. And, it was,we did it for four or five years and it was very powerful, but then. certainly Covid,came along, a little bit later, but it would've killed it to begin with.

it was, it really took out the coworking spaces in a lot of respects.

There's, so the remote workforce world has changed, you've taken advantage of that. 

John: . Yeah. we have people on our team all across the country.

a couple folks on our team are based out of London. 

Randy: And Yeah, and having an address in New Mexico is essential as far as my game plan goes. It's having a presence, having a flag here of some sort, letting the world know. One of the, speaking of Kornadovich's forum, was created by two MIT grads who were Ph.

D. 's, living in New Mexico, that, I was just telling you about that, PHD pool [00:22:00] and they started it and they based it on the MIT Enterprise Forum. Are you familiar with that? 

John: I am. 

Randy: Yep. Yep. Unfortunately, I just found out it went away. They shut it down, to my great chagrin. Cause I was going to, but anyway, when I was the chair of the Cornell adventurous forum, knowing that it had MIT roots and they were forming it after modeling and after that organization and MIT Enterprise Forum is a network was a network of.

Probably 19 different chapters around the country, and around the world, actually, most of them were probably overseas even, but, basically it was that,core not of interest model of entrepreneurs and investors getting together and talking and learning and growing. And, so I was trying to get them trying to change our name from Cornell to purchase for him to the M.

I. T. And I 

John: had 

Randy: conversations with M. I. T. and it was actually went out of their alumni Association. Interesting enough. I don't know if you knew that, interesting way to keep your grads entertained or engaged. and the story there is, and I've heard this, I haven't verified it lately, at least, that if you [00:23:00] took all the MIT entrepreneurs who've succeeded over the course of many decades, it would be the sixth largest economy in the world.

Thank you. 

John: You heard that, whether it's MIT and Stanford or one or the other. Yeah, 

Randy: it's substantial. Yeah. It's substantial. another book that really influenced me was, regional advantage culture and competition between route one 28 and Silicon Valley. 

John: Okay. I don't know anything about this. It's an older 

Randy: book.

It was in the nineties. again, Rip Van Winkle.but basically, and the woman, excellent. Annalise Saxenian, who's the professor at University of California, Berkeley, that wrote the book. She's from Boston. 

John: She grew 

Randy: up in Boston. She went to school in Boston. She knows Boston and she knows the East Coast and she knows the culture there.

John: Sure. 

Randy: And if you think about it, venture capital started there. In Boston, the merchants and the marine, the shipmaking and all the industry, the shoes, the, all the industrial might that they had their, venture capital actually started there, but they also had a very [00:24:00] strict culture,very striated culture that,you were limited

Yeah, what was that, Matt Damon movie? Um,where he's the janitor? 

John: Goodwill hunting? Yeah. 

Randy: Goodwill hunting. his dad was a janitor or a plumber or whatever. So he was going to be that he couldn't be anymore. But yet he was solving this guy's equations 

John: right 

Randy: at night. And so that was an illustrative, illustrative of that culture is that you knew your place and you didn't try to bust any barriers.

And so a lot of people didn't. out in Silicon Valley, out in,the Bay Area, there were farms, there were peach orchards and, and they had to create their own energy. And so it was very collaborative early in the early days, still is probably, but, there's a place called the Wagon Wheel Bar and Grill, that in the early days where all the techies, like this software group we've got upstairs here, 

they Getting together talking turkey like what's what and how do we make this work and so forth?

And but they're all they were competing competitors, but they're also collaborators 

John: Okay, 

Randy: and that shift in [00:25:00] culture made that happen and it just blew past What boston was? dollar wise Talent wise attracting people from all over the world You know this notion about immigration Many of our best companies were formed by elon musk being an example South African, that, attracting this talent from around the world.

I'm getting a little off subject of my, how am I doing? 

John: You're doing great. Yeah. I think the one thing that we're getting to is like the emerging culture and like how that enables, yeah. And innovation to happen, companies to get built. So 

Randy: my investment in myself in time and economic development has been trying to pull these pieces together and create a nucleus, catalyze this, This equation, if you want, and,and this is a start.

I see, I really,I'm pretty sold on it, so we'll see what happens. But,yeah,but this, regional advantage really took me home. And I learned about that book from, I think I told you last night, I had a chance to visit with the VP of real estate for sun microsystems when they were looking for a 3000 person campus somewhere in the U S.

And. He was the front page or front cover of the Rolling [00:26:00] Stone and the site selection business called site selection And he was he talked about his project and it didn't talk about New Mexico and it talked about some other places But didn't talk about New Mexico. So I got a hold of him. I said, hey Why or why not New Mexico?

I know you're not gonna I'm not here to sell you But I just want to know why not New Mexico sure and he said I can't it's the culture and so part of our challenge is building this culture of From the inside out, and we've got all the components. We got the venture capital. We got the laboratories and to some degree the technologies.

But this agent based modeling is emerged out of this local culture here. It's something that's ripe and ready for picking in a sense. And you're an example of that. 

John: Yeah, we hope to see the field of agent based modeling grow, from here elsewhere. and that would enable New Mexico to benefit if we're building more people on the team here for, getting more people moving here, investing here and the one key thing about looking at an [00:27:00] ecosystem like Silicon Valley or Austin, which is, a,they blew up, even a couple decades ago, but what are these sort of repeat type stories within the culture.

The first person to go and build up a company. That's a huge ask for somebody to do. But within that team, there's probably two or three people. They got to learn through that experience when there's an exit event, that money can get reinvested in the same community and they have a path or at least somewhat of a blueprint.

Hopefully they can learn from the stakes of the first go around. They build another set of companies and then you end up having large companies, medium sized companies, small companies, all with this sort of culture of innovation. But you have to have investment come in for all different size of those companies.

You have to have a talent pool that can support multiple size companies. and so that's a critical thing is you're thinking about building more of an ecosystem, of startups, larger companies, other industries [00:28:00] staying here in New Mexico. 

Randy: I have a good case in point and it ties into the, industry R and D I was talking about.

back in the mid seventies, there was an earthquake in the Silicon Valley and Intel was just getting going. They'd been a three or four year old company making chips. And, and they, and it's a very sensitive process, ever more so sensitive process. The stability in a plant has to be absolute.

So they had an earthquake and they said, looked at each other and said, we got to do something different here. Or we're going to be out of business if we have an earthquake in our and we build up all of our resources here We're out of business. We got to move these plants somewhere else. It's less Earthquake prone and so the first plant that they moved or the first decision they put a plant in Hillsborough, Oregon outside of portland And that was in 76, I believeto get out and Basically, I talked to the site selection consultant that worked on that project.

He said they drew a circle around the Bay Area. I'd said it's 600 miles. And so Portland fell into that and then they built it. It was rocking and they also moved their R and D there though. 

John: [00:29:00] Okay. 

Randy: They put their brain, their R and D brain. So we were thinking about the next, next of where things are going and they're getting ready for that and guiding the company through that channel of R and D.

Right. That's what we're missing in New Mexico. Is that kind of And so that started in 1980. So my point here is that both of those plants were started about the same time. And so they moved their R and D to Portland and, and then the business took off and they had to have another plant.

And the third plant was in Rio Rancho, New Mexico of all places. It was within 1200 miles. 

John: Okay. 

Randy: And so that started in 1980. So my point here is that both of those plants were started about the same time. Roughly the same amount of multi billion dollars of investments in both places over the decades and, And I came across this study where a woman at Portland State had done this research on spin out companies from local Portland, Oregon companies attract them like how much what spun out of who and when and how and so her data on Intel, which is very personal to me because our Intel plan here [00:30:00] 70 companies during the period of her study.

I think it's 10 or 15 years. 70 companies had spun out of Intel in Portland. Yeah, because they had an idea and they took it to the market and a lot of times Intel will invest in those extra ventures. They have Intel ventures. They'll do that. 

John: Yep. 

Randy: looking at New Mexico, at Intel, Rio Rancho, big zero, none.

And so that's that missing R& D piece, because the people at Rio Rancho aren't paid to be thinking about what's the next chip. They're there to pay attention to that platform of a 10 million plate of chips, right? And it's a different culture. And so we have to move beyond and.

Encourage that other industrial R. D. culture, and I see that opportunity in this field dramatic because of what we actually have here. 

John: Cool, so all right. So rainy last question. if you had to provide any advice to a company that's looking to move to either Santa Fe or Albuquerque,how do they most successfully integrate into [00:31:00] the existing culture as we're trying?

that's your vision to try to build up.more of an entrepreneurial right? 

Randy: I have to. I spent 10 years at the state economic development department for state of New Mexico. 

John: And 

Randy: so a lot of times companies would call our office looking for a place in New Mexico. They're looking at Texas, looking at Colorado, Arizona, whatever they're looking nationally, which doesn't.

So they'll oftentimes reach out to the state organization and the state works closely with the communities and,So for a company to come in that's a good starting point is to engage the state and I think In your particular case you were able to engage some job training or job creation Benefits and you mind talking a little bit about what those were 

John: Yeah, being able to create jobs in New Mexico and a you know, the state has a pool of funding to support Part of the salary for employees.

Yeah, 

Randy: and they're the higher paying jobs which ripples throughout the economy so that so that people of all echelons benefit,and so The [00:32:00] point there is that there's resources there like that the state knows, most community communities know but You get out in the rural communities and it's a little bit of a challenge sometimes to keep those folks informed And that's something the state is actually working on is how do we integrate the entire state so But it's the education of our team our economic development team that really matters and one of the things that I'm Largely proud of actually back in the day Speaking of that opposite side.

How do we welcome business? I went around the state with companies and Early on learned like there's a lot of people out here don't know the game at all And it's not their fault. They've never thought about it, but they have a perception of what it should be. 

John: And 

Randy: that's counter to what if you're trying to attract a business into your community, what that actually process actually is.

A lot of them turned out to be a little bit unwelcoming. Interesting enough, challenging. Like, why do you want to come here? Sure. I think. And it's Whoa, wait a minute. So based on that, I, helped establish the, New Mexico economic development leadership Institute. It's it at,Western New Mexico University down in Silver City 

John: that's 

Randy: been going for [00:33:00] 35 years.

And it's a place where local politicians, local business people, chambers of commerce and so forth can go learn what the process is for, the policy makers, whoever can learn the process from local experts and international experts coming in. And so that was another thing that I helped get started.

Because they saw the need for it and it's still going on. and I was just in one of those legislative sessions and the legislators didn't know about that resource. Because they're asking questions, how do we train our small communities to do that? And it's like,we've got a, we've got a place for you to go to start.

And but understanding the business, what you're trying to do,is essential. You need a workforce that's. It's available in talented or can be trained into these certain positions and a lot of people look at as a job, but they don't, They don't appreciate the finer elements of that job.

It's it takes special skills. Intel was another case in point. I don't mind me keeping rolling. this is important. Yeah,so Intel, later on. So this, you heard earlier Intel. now Intel's big global [00:34:00] And they have a big plant in Chandler now, which usually gets a lot more of the, equal action to rear ranch.

I'll call it that. I don't know what the balance is, but they're making big investments in Chandler, Arizona.and we were up against,we were up against, I think it was a 3 or 4 billion investment they were going to make. And, we have certain advantages here that, that helps industrial revenue bonds and things like that help.

Companies and that's why Intel was one of the big reasons why they came here, but This time it was like the fourth or fifth fab Expansion, maybe six or seven and so they were they tapped out the Albuquerque labor market But we had a hundred thousand people. I don't know what it was 50, 000 people on the unemployed list So you think oh my god, there's got to be people But there were special skill sets that you need to be You And so they had already tapped out and they were thinking.

So I was here in the halls. It was like, Hey, we're going to lose Intel to Chandler because we can't get the workers. But you talk to the local policy makers and folks, they don't understand that those companies know they dig deep and understand their human resources and figures out how many of those available [00:35:00] workers can actually work in my plant.

John: Right. 

Randy: And so,and so what happened was,I call it, we have 20 community colleges around the state. And they're all over the place. They're in rural communities. And so I called up, my friend Jim Henderson, president of San Juan College up in Farmington, New Mexico, up in the far west, northwest part of the state.

I said, Hey, Jim, get down here and talk to Intel. And you and your team of college presidents put together a plan. Intel will give you the equipment. 

John: And you 

Randy: set up this statewide training program on from community colleges and soThey did Seven centers were training These kids from rural, new mexico to get a sixty thousand dollar a year job with a two year This is when sixty thousand dollars is not sixty thousand a day.

It was sixty thousand dollars twenty years ago 15 years ago, whatever it was That was probably 20 actually maybe even more but A 60, 000 with a two year degree and they could stay

They didn't tell Rio Rancho or they could go anywhere in the world. And so it was a pathway and that's the kind of thinking, I guess from bringing up these stories [00:36:00] is that's the kind of thinking we need to have when we look at this opportunity here, what kind of, we need to understand the labor market that you're looking for.

We need to understand it intimately. We need to be able to identify, maybe use an agent based modeling to do that somehow, possibly. And figure out What are our universities teaching now, what are our high schools teaching now, what are the pathways to train people? into these new, agent based modeling professions and we have some of the national experts upstairs here the practitioners, you know Doing this, now and so it's adding to that mix Does that answer the question?

I went long winded on it, 

John: right? It answers the question and more I think having you want It's been great. And I think it's really special that,you are part of this ecosystem in New Mexico, in the book that,the rain forest that Greg wrote. there are some species that have to be able to connect others, in any sort of ecosystem to enable it to thrive.

And the way that you've been able to talk about all these different parts of the education side coming in, the [00:37:00] larger industry coming in,it's really fortunate that you've been that ecosystem connector, or connector within the ecosystem, I should say, across the state. So I'm glad we got to meet.

Yeah, likewise. Absolutely. Hopefully there, there's more flourishing for the ecosystem. 

So and when this goes live, we'll make sure people have a good way of getting in touch with you to Take further some of these ideas put them into action.