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Title: Sam Araki Interview II
Narrator: Sam Araki
Interviewer: Tom Ikeda
Location: San Jose, California
Date: January 20, 2016
Densho ID: denshovh-asam-02-0005

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TI: So I guess the question I have now is why? I mean, you're now eighty-four years old and you're still creating new things. Do you ever think about just retiring?

SA: Well, I've concluded that the worst thing to do is retire, because if you let your brain atrophy, that's the dying process. So if you keep your mind and your brain active and in a competitive mode, you feel better, you're healthier, and you can enjoy life better.

TI: Have you thought -- now, I'm not sure how your company is structured or anything, but you and Ko and others, through your life experiences, have gained so much. And even in the way you've thought through this new venture... so it's not so much just the idea that you have, it's the way you think about things. How are you transferring that to the next generation? How is this, thinking about innovation, all the things that you've talked about, how is that being transferred?

SA: Well, I've talked a lot to a lot of startups in the Silicon Valley, and they have basically embraced the same approach to this whole breakout organizational concept. What I'm doing now is when a organization matures is when innovation disappears. The two are not co-compatible. So I'm really concerned now about the national security programs that we developed over fifty years now, and with the world the way it is today, we have some real serious threats in the making. And it's gonna take another set of innovation to really treat and build a defense for the threats, today's threats. I call them asymmetric threats because -- and the asymmetric threat in a way was created with the internet. And so now we created what we thought was a peaceful internet, but in return we also got some major threats, and it's a global threat, it's not one nation. It could be one individual, it could be a group, it could be multiple nations, it could be small nations or big nations, doesn't matter. So we have to now innovate, re-innovate in national security to come up with a preventative defense system that can counter asymmetric threats. So that's the kind of thing that I'm helping with the government.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2008 Densho. All Rights Reserved.