After I shut the camera off when interviewing Yuri, the senior policy officer of the Russian Government, we started talking about how the world has changed.
I told him that if you had told me in High School that I’d someday have a friendly chat with someone from the Russian government I would have told you that you were smoking something that probably was illegal.
It was the time of the cold war. My dad worked at Lockheed. Building Star Wars satellites designed for nuclear war.
We were still preparing for the day that nuclear war could come with the Russians. In high school we all knew that the “Blue Cube” (a building near Lockheed at the corner of Mathilda and 101 where the government had its hub of communications equipment) was ground zero in Silicon Valley. Our government was spending huge amounts of resources to prepare for war with the Russians.
And yet here we were joking around about our father’s world and how remarkable it is now that we’re able to build Intel processors across our country’s borders (he told me in the interview that the software for Intel’s Centrino processors was developed in Russia).
Yuri punctuated that off-camera conversation with “the world changes.”
I wonder how the world will change in Patrick’s time? I sure hope it keeps going the direction it has. Talking with Yuri about geeky stuff is sure a lot more fun than the alternative.
