Alexander Rose connection to Greg Leyh began through the early Survival Research Laboratories shows; Rose saw SRL's destructive robot theater at Fort Mason, which changed his perspective, and later connected with others who worked with SRL including Chris Rand who worked on the clock project, and attended the power tool drag races where Leyh first appeared.

Alexander Rose, the executive director of Long Now, expressed hope that someone in San Francisco or listening online with real money would fund Leyh's research, noting that people with real money have safeguards against too much fun.

Alexander Rose mentioned a conversation with Saul Griffith where he reverse-engineered that the Google research budget is now larger than DARPA, and this suggests Google is looking for different kinds of wins than DARPA would be in pure research.

Alexander Rose notes that Greg's work with Survival Research Laboratories in the past, combined with his current solo development of large-scale electrical experiments, represents a continuation of 'pirate science' tradition and positions Greg as creating his own 'savage engineering pirate ship for science' dedicated to studying lightning.

Greg notes that at the Long Now Clock site in Nevada, a large crane tower must stop work whenever lightning is detected within five miles, demonstrating that lightning's destructive potential is a real operational constraint for engineers and that controlling or suppressing lightning over populated areas would be valuable.

Alexander Rose expresses concern that despite the profound importance and inherent interest of Greg's lightning research and the relatively modest funding requirements compared to other scientific projects, nobody with substantial wealth in San Francisco seems interested in supporting it.