Mack Paul: Co-author of Miracle Road on designing places where innovation happens

23:02Mack Paul:So that was a key part of RTP's success was that there was a push to try to land a center in the South, but a lot of reticence over the way the South was responding to Brown v. Board of Education in 54. And Sanford made a huge point of, we're going to give everyone a place at the table. And he sent his kids to an integrated school in 1960 to demonstrate that commitment. And through his relationship with Kennedy, ultimately, you know, RTP was really struggling the first five years, but he landed the environmental health science facility from the federal government. So you can imagine the competition among states for that federal lab.

23:42Mack Paul:And he got that here. And right after that IBM came. And a big reason Tom Watson Jr. chose RTP because it was a late add to the list of places over Virginia was the fact that Virginia, their governor said, we're going to do massive resistance to integration. And North Carolina did not do that. And that was kind of the decisive factor for him to come here. So there can be policy things put in place. Land can be purchased and developed, but at some point, someone has to have a compelling idea that shows people, we could do something cool here. We are doing something cool here. Is there a point in history where that happened, where there was something really innovative that got people thinking?

24:32Mack Paul:It was definitely 1965 when IBM made the announcement to come here, but you have to think about RTP as a little bit of a different animal from what we might think of innovation center today. So at that time, you know, we're talking about companies coming and building large labs here. IBM was looking for a place to construct or fabricate the System 360, which was a really revolutionary computer system that they created in the early 60s. And one of the lead engineers happened to be from North Carolina, a guy named Fred Brooks. That really showed that RTP gave validity to the whole concept, because up until then, we had attracted one company in the first five years, Chemstrand.

25:17Mack Paul:The governor, Sanford, I mentioned, he was sitting there in his mansion in the summertime. He had three phones, making phone calls to a lot of these old industrialists and textile companies, trying to raise money just to keep the lights on in RTP at the foundation. So that was really the defining moment for RTP. RTP largely existed on these large companies coming here and often doing what some call hard tech in the sense they were making things, Northern Telecom, Cisco Systems. They had a lot of R &D going on. They were testing these products. They were improving these products. But they weren't necessarily just there as an innovation center.

25:58Mack Paul:They were also building things. and usually large company facilities. And it took many years before we started building this sort of ecosystem where you had the innovations you might see often associate with Silicon Valley. Let's talk a little bit about the design originally and how it might be changing and using kind of an urban design and or architectural lens. So the way that these institutions or companies built things was very much sort of this mid-century, low density, dependent on cars, single use. And as some of these campuses are thinking about redesign, what are some of the factors involved there?

26:37And what's the design angle on that?

26:39Mack Paul:You know, as you said, RTP was planned originally in the 50s, total prototype of your suburban office park concept where everyone drives. You know, it's at the center of the region, which is good, but it also has been a hindrance for the regional growth because where you would have most of the growth is this kind of dispersed office park. And so Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill are on the different points of the park. Really starting in the early 2000s, the park was starting to suffer from traffic congestion, sprawl. You started to see this renewed interest of companies moving back into urban centers.

27:18Mack Paul:So Durham started to actually see some life with its American Tobacco Campus that was redeveloped into like an innovation center with a lot of companies. Glaxo had a lot of office space there. Red Hat, you know, was moved to downtown Raleigh instead of RTP. So RTP's vacancy rate really started to increase by the early 2000s into 2010 relative to like the other urban centers in the area. It really knew it needed to change, but it was also fearful because it had been so successful, you know, how to go about doing that. You know, we had a new president of the foundation come in in 2011, Bob Giolis, and he started that conversation and the idea of Park Center, which was really the first mixed use node in RTP, which has been going on for a number of years.

28:06Mack Paul:And then now we have the whole conversation around 3.0, RTP 3.0, that just got its final approval by the owners and tenants last week, which allows owners to opt into a number of different development typologies, including, they call it a mixed-use density node, but that really is like just an urban innovation center. But the real hindrance still is infrastructure. We've struggled with transportation like a lot of emerging tech centers in the South and the West. We don't have that old Northeastern transit-rich system in place. So to get the funding to build a transit system is really challenging.

28:46Mack Paul:There's always been political resistance to transit in certain quarters because there's a fear of density and a fear of transit in this kind of bucolic southern environment. We do have a transit plan that is starting to get traction and is starting to be constructed. It's a bus rapid transit system, but it will be regional wide. We do have a commuter rail that comes through there. It's just not going to be constructed for commuters probably for another decade. The infrastructure is still going to be difficult because to build the type of environment that you're talking about, I mean, you need street grids, you need structured parking, you need transit accessibility, you need a lot of heavy infrastructure.

29:28Mack Paul:So, you know, you see a lot of these innovation hubs going into older urban areas that have declined. You know, they have the infrastructure there. They just need to be repurposed and rebuilt. We're going into like a parking lot in the middle of the woods and trying to build a city. It's a very different proposition. Presumably, there were some failures along the road. I'm curious what those were and what can we learn from those experiences? There's definitely a layer of failure or inability to execute on the transportation system over many decades. The first effort started in the late 1980s. And we also had incredible amount of momentum going on regionalism at that time, where a lot of the leaders, government, business, universities would meet periodically.

30:18Mack Paul:We called them world-class region conferences, and they would identify regional goals and regional needs. The transit system came out of that Triangle Transit Authority. And by the early 2000s, as the federal standards got more difficult for a variety of reasons, after spending a lot of money, the plan was pulled for that. Then we had another plan after that, that failed in like around 2013, 2014. Again, it was more of the decline of the regional cooperation. So Durham and Orange County, Chapel Hill and Durham tried to do their own plan. That failed. And then Wake County came behind it with its plan.

30:58Mack Paul:And its plan actually is becoming a regional plan. We've kind of come full circle. I mean, I think we recognize the importance of regionalism, but after we sort of moved back into our constituent areas in the early 2000s, where I said Durham was getting more traction, Raleigh. So there was a lot of refocus into the smaller communities. Now they're coming back together. And I think it's seeing the need for regional cooperation. You know, we've struggled, I think, since the pandemic, where you see this across the country with tech hubs, like Apple announced back in 2019, they were going to build a major facility in RTP.

31:36Mack Paul:Still hasn't come out of the ground yet. A lot of question, when is that going to happen? Is it going to happen? But certainly the way people work together changed significantly after the pandemic. And then AI has added some questions around workers and who's doing what, how many workers. Fortunately, we have a very significant life science industry here. And so we have a lot of labs, a lot of people who go to the lab, obviously, to do what they need to do. But I think there's been a question or certain challenges that have hit the IT industry that have impacted RTP and some of the companies. Fidelity is a huge company out of Boston.

32:15Mack Paul:They're the largest employer in RTP now. They just announced their workers are back full time. But we're six years into the pandemic now. So just having more people there is positive for RTP. You mentioned earlier that initially there may have been some resistance amongst the sort of academic university community to that synthesis between that you might see somewhere like Stanford, where it embraces it a bit more. And the system at Stanford is actually such that if you develop something as faculty or a grad student, Stanford owns the IP and then licenses it back to you. And so you end up getting basically a third of the equity.

32:54If you're an undergrad, they don't take anything. So if you're going to be a founder, be an undergrad at Stanford. So they don't have to take a cut. But did that change over time for universities in the areas where they embraced the business side of things a bit more? Yes.

33:06Mack Paul:Three very large companies sort of came out of the universities in the 70s and 80s or kind of at the same time. Two of them, we have a really strong statistics department and a biostatistics over at UNC. It's a statistics part at NC State. SAS software, you know, that started in the late 60s and by the 70s was spun out. And they always had like a subscription model. So they never really had to raise money. They basically gave NC State the technology for free, like you can use it, but they didn't have to license it. The guys who started Quintiles, which was kind of a whole new way of looking at clinical research and bringing new products to market quicker, came out of UNC Biostatistics.

33:52Mack Paul:It wasn't like a proprietary technology. It was more of a system that they created, hugely successful. And then Cree, which ended up, it started out like as a silicon carbide type semiconductor technology out of NC State. But they really made their money in diodes with computers and lights and LED lighting in the 90s. Those were great examples for the universities to see faculty do extremely well. But then the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 created, I think, a lot more activity in the universities and their offices of translation or commercialization. Just to see the levels of sophistication over many decades, Duke has an angel fund in their office.

34:37Mack Paul:I mean, they're spinning out new companies all the time. IonQ recently went public. It's like a quantum computing technology or approach. You could just go down the list, but it has evolved radically over a number of years. Today, like the idea of RTI was definitely a creature of its time where there was this sort of resistance in academia to industry. And today, if someone was trying to start a research park, I don't think you would hear that sort of demand coming from the universities. You co-authored this book with your dad, I think. Is that right? Correct. Yeah. And the two of you conducted about 160 interviews with various people.

35:17Curious, through the course of those interviews, what surprised the two of you the most?

35:21Mack Paul:Well, first, I want to say, give all credit to my dad. He passed away on May 25th, so very recently. And fortunately, we were able to finish the book, and we had the chance to work together on this book, because I'd never worked with him on a book before. That's amazing that the two of you got to share that before you lost him. Yeah, no, thank you. It's a great experience. And, you know, he he loved writing. He was a journalist. He's written several books. I'm an attorney, you know, never written a book. So coming at things very differently. And he did the bulk of those interviews. And every time he did an interview and I talked to his like, this is the best damn interview I've ever done.

35:55Mack Paul:This person, you know, he's so enthusiastic about the people he talked to. And a lot of that comes through. And in some ways, the book is almost an oral history of this region and the people who really made this region. And I tried to provide some framework around that, some connective tissue between those stories and putting it into a narrative. But a couple of examples, he interviewed Marydell Chilton, who just also died recently in June, right after my father died. And I got a note from her caregiver just saying how much she loved my dad, meeting my dad. And he interviewed her several times, but she was the foremost scientist in transgenic plants, you know, transmitting DNA from one plant species to another.

36:37Mack Paul:and came here to lead this research office of Syngenta back in the 70s. And her story, personal story, and how she navigated academia as a woman and found success and then ultimately came here is fascinating. I had an opportunity to interview a guy named Dudley Flood, who, I mean, I was so fortunate to meet this person who is in his 90s, still very lucid. and he was hired back in the late 60s to help lead the push to desegregate North Carolina schools. He was the African-American partner. There's another gentleman. The two of them went across the state, met with Ku Klux Klan, community, you name it, to try to help communities come together around the idea of desegregating their schools.

37:30Mack Paul:And so listening to him, and he's kind of an iconic figure now, but I'd never really talked to him in depth. But his stories and the techniques he used to try to enlist the support of community leaders and reframe ideas and concerns around busing and other issues happening at that time in a way that, you know, helped people get beyond the fears that they had and to see a new way that life could be. And the way even their sports teams coming together, they had different styles of playing high school sports, cheerleading squads, You know, you had different styles, the way they cheerleaded. And he would come up with ways to incorporate the school's different colors and the new teams and the different styles.

38:10Mack Paul:I mean, it's just fascinating moment to describe the way a state dealt with a very difficult issue in a very human way. So for me, that was certainly the interview that had a huge impact on me. Sorry to hear about your father's passing. My dad actually just passed away last month too, so I'm going to go through that as well. But I'm curious, you know, there's a public facing element to this, a legacy that I'm sure is very important to you. But maybe you talk a little bit just about the personal side of doing this with your dad. Maybe some highlights there would be great. Well, as I said, he and I have very different approaches to a project like this.

38:48Mack Paul:But we've argued very little about the outline or about what should go in the book, what shouldn't go in the book. So he would be doing a lot of the interviews and he started working on it probably five or six years ago. So for me, the first couple of years is more a sounding board and listening to him describe, you know, the people he was meeting and working on the outline. But about two to three years ago, finally, we had a book deal. You know, we had pressure. We've got to actually write this book. We've got to get it done. We can't just continue to interview people forever. So we got really focused on, OK, how are we going to get a product completed?

39:23Mack Paul:Who's doing what? And so taking the stories he was producing and trying to put that around a chronological structure was really challenging because he started out writing a lot of the stories about institutions or things from start to finish. So it could be from like RTI, for instance, a chapter on RTI from 1959 to 2026. And so I would take that story and start breaking it down into the component that really fit within the narrative of how RTP started. Then during a period of growth and what was happening at RTI, some of the innovations, the first labs to go into RTI, and then its evolution with World Health Organization.

40:08Mack Paul:So it was an iterative process. He, you know, basically the last year or so was at home and he would spend his whole day pretty much in his office and I would always stop by the house and we would meet or we'd meet on the weekends and just kind of talk through. And then I started writing sections and filling in some gaps and reformatting it. So I feel great about it. I mean, I feel like one person could have written this book and it reflects these two different facets and hopefully it doesn't come across as disjointed. I think it holds up pretty well together. But the two approaches, I think both have a lot of validity to it.

40:45Mack Paul:I mean, it's been hard. The hardest thing for me is like after his passing, like driving out of my parking deck downtown and just always like picking up the phone and calling him, you know, and not having that. I'm sure you've been through that. There's moments where you just are used to having your dad there. And it was a great experience. And he's an incredible collaborator. I mean, he told me the first day, you know, we started working on this. He's like, this is going to be a collaborative process. He built like a community around this book. The Biotech Center put together an oversight team of a lot of iconic figures who opened the doors to these really great scientists.

41:20Mack Paul:And that group of people have really continued, you know, with The Lost My Father. I mean, there's just such a community around this book. and getting the book out there, getting the story out there and see it carry on is really gratifying. When you walk away from this experience, profound that you had this opportunity to write with your dad and also profound to be able to find a project like this that's so deep where you can go into history and really understand more about your local environment, more about this piece of history and probably have some takeaways for what could be used for the future.

41:58Thinking about designers, developers, people who are listening to this, and people who might be involved in their community and want to see something like this unfold where they are, what advice do you have for them?

42:12Mack Paul:I would say design is critically important. I mean, you need to have the right environment to be conducive to whatever you're ultimately trying to achieve. So in this case, innovation, support for new ideas, companies, success. And so they need to be in an environment where people want to live and work and interact with one another. And that changes over time. There's a lot that goes into creating that environment. So you can design an environment. But as I said, if you don't have the underlying infrastructure to support the environment, can't get executed. With these innovation hubs, this is one example.

42:48Mack Paul:It has a very different infrastructure need than the traditional suburban office park. So I think recognizing you're going to need to figure out that piece of it with government support. Then all those other kind of collaborations, the soft piece of it, institutions that bring people together are critically important. Whatever it might be, NC Biotech Center, we have something called the BTEC, the Biotechnology Training and Education Center at NC State. that trains a lot of workers in biomanufacturing. We have the Council for Entrepreneurial Development. The business community came together and like we really need to have a place where entrepreneurs can get together.

43:27Mack Paul:They had a meeting. They thought like 20 people would show up. An entrepreneur came to speak here and they had like 150 people in the room. They asked who's starting your own business. Everybody raised their hand and they had never known that they were there working in a garage or working on the side from their corporate job. instead of building a home for people to come together and interact and find out about what services exist and compare notes. You know, all of those pieces coming together. The lesson from RTP was they had to build a place and that place had to be designed really well. We were very fortunate.

44:02Mack Paul:There's a guy named Pearson Stewart, who was the first planner, young guy out of MIT, who laid out RTP, a firm in New York designed the first plan and he threw it in the trash because they had never been to North Carolina. It didn't really fit the environment here. So he found a way to respect the topography, the landscape, where to build an RTP, and to build a place to bring people together. All those are needed. Good design, relationships, collaborations. We'll be releasing this close to the publishing date. We're at the end of July right now, and your book's coming out in October, I believe.

44:36Once it's out, where can people go to find it?

44:38Mack Paul:Yeah, Amazon Porchlight is kind of our main conduit for selling. And then we have a local independent bookstore here that we're kind of pushing out. Well, Mac, thanks so much for being on Design Better. Thanks so much.

44:55This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter, with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel, designbetterpodcast.com. It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time.