Go. Mr. Baker, you write that this book is about the coming age of mobility. What do you mean by that . Stephen well, there are its an information revolution. And weve been watching it for the last half century. Its spread into computers and overwhelmed media and advertising. And then it spread into telephones. And we were carrying around the internet wherever we went. And now in this next stage, the internet and the mobile machines will be carrying us around. So i think its its going to be an age in which all kinds of new choices are going to surface for us. And were going to be able to well, were going to be able to go a lot of places and its going to have a big effect on our cities. And at the same time, companies and city governments are going to be able to manage our movements and that will raise all kinds of questions about privacy. So its just the next stage of the internet revolution. Imagine a scenario, something you write about in your book, los angeles, 2028. What should we expect . Stephen well, one thing about revolution about information revolutions is you cant bet on dates. Weve seen it before with cell phones. We were john my coauthor and i were in paris at the turn of the century and around the year 2000 and we were predicting that smart phones were going to change communication by 2003. It turned out we were we were way early. They didnt come until 2007. But the changes are still important. So los angeles in 2028, what are we going to see . Were going to see a lot more choices. Theyre going to have spent billions of dollars on public transportation. Theres going to be cars that are semi autonomous running in certain parts of los angeles. I dont think were going to have i dont think by that point were going to have fully Autonomous Cars going around that vast space. But well have some of that. And there could be air ships Like Networks of small robotic drones that carry people hither and yon across los angeles. And you spent some time with mayor garcetti out there and talked about the oaks and what theyre planning to do for that time. Stephen yeah. Well, they have they have a lot of big projects that they hope to get in gear by 2028 for the olympics. But i think the big thing is and the big thing about los angeles is people are really fed up more than ever with traffic in los angeles. And theyre so fed up that they decided to tax themselves, raising gas taxes to fund Public Transit. And i think the hope for many of them is if we fund Public Transit, many of the people will leave the roads and it will move things will move faster. With these billions of dollars that are being spent in los angeles, are they being spent on Smart Transportation or just more roads, more more vehicles . Stephen theyre not being spent on more roads and more vehicles. Theyre being spent on a dramatic expansion of the metro system, more buses, more electric buses. And theyre looking at theyre looking at los angeles as this test bed for all kinds of new technology so theyre opening it up and theyre telling people if you set up your new company whether its scooters or Autonomous Cars or flying ships, you can try it out in los angeles. And that happened actually in santa monica, didnt it . With the bird scooter . Stephen yeah. And a lot of people were unhappy about it because one day one day the bird scooters just appeared on the sidewalks in santa monica and people looked at them and they saw how they could use their phones to activate them. And the next thing you know theyre riding around without helmets, getting in the way of some traffic and making some people very mad. And the funny thing about it was the guy who set up bird had previously worked at uber. And the way that uber traditionally has worked is barge in, offer your service, get a lot of people who like it, and then deal with government once youve got a constituency and a fan base. And thats what bird did. And it angered officials in santa monica. But i was just there a few days ago. And lots of people are zipping around on all kinds of scooters. Now, in hop skip go you write this. If governments fail to assert their control with taxes and regulation, cheap ubiquitous Mobility Services could overwhelm the entire region much the way the automobile did. But mr. Baker, some would argue that cheap Ubiquitous Service is what we want. Stephen well, it is to a degree. But if its so cheap and ubiquitous, you might send a car 20 miles to pick up a special type of panini you like. So if people are if its too cheap, it will get overused and overwhelm the infrastructure because it it involves moving molecules. And you only have a certain number of molecules you can move in a certain physical space. So what do you see as the role of government in this coming mobility age . Stephen well, government is going to have to take a much more active role than they did than they have in the internet revolution. And much more active than they did a century ago when cars came in. If you think about cars coming in to our cities over the last century, they basically colonized our cities. And much like as i was describing with bird, they developed their constituency. All motorists around the world. And then the motorists and the car industry forced cities to build immense infrastructure. All these roads and basically to pave much of the planet. And so in this next stage, its a chance for a doover. Cities that we visited in writing this book from los angeles, dubai, shanghai, each one has a different approach to it. But what they have to do is figure out how to make things work efficiently, cleanly, and also giving everybody a chance to move around and not just the rich. So there are questions of equity as well. So how is the approach in los angeles to the mobility generation different than that in dubai . Stephen well, los angeles is a really hard place to govern. There are scores of different municipalities within los angeles county. And there are theres a lot of freedom. And thats part of what makes the United States and especially california unique. And so its a hard place to govern. Whereas dubai, theres a Central Authority that has a lot of power. And so dubai is organizing things so that they can control movement. Theyre investing in all kinds of new technology. And like los angeles, theyre looking to become a test bed for flying machines, for robotic cars and all the rest. But all of the data in dubai is going to go to a command center. And that command center the goal in that command center is to move people and their things around as efficiently as the items at an amazon warehouse. You say in your book stephen and so its a question of freedom. Its a question of freedom versus efficiency. You say dubai and in china they have theyre going to have a lot of efficiency. And the question in the United States is going to be how do we achieve that efficiency while still respecting peoples data and giving them the freedom that were used to . So in a sense an authoritarian government like that in dubai has an easier time of it . Stephen yes. I mean, i think thats true about all kinds of things with authoritarian governments. They have an easier time controlling things until people rise up. So in dubai you compare it to being on the jetsons. Its not there yet but thats the vision. The vision is to have flying airships early in this coming decade and not just a few of them carrying around rich people to golf courses and luxury hotels. They want to have these flying airships carrying all kinds of people. And they want to have a flying network. Like a metro system with little stops all over dubai with little with flying machines carrying people back and forth. What have they developed already . Stephen well, they havent really developed anything. What theyve done is theyve opened their doors and theyve got theyve done test flights with the German Company called volocopter where drones carry people across the city. But they they are not at a point where its happening yet. And they have a goal, a stretch goal of 2022 for these flying machines. But as i was saying earlier, you cant count on dates for technology revolutions. If those machines dont prove to be dont prove to be safe, they cant go with it. They cant go with it yet. From your book, whoever controls the data will be in a position to manage movement. What data are we talking about and who should control it . Stephen well, if you think about think about an autonomous car. Its a huge data machine. It has it will have the equivalent of supercomputers in each car calculating each turn and recording everything thats happening in that car. And much of that information goes up onto networks. At the same time, even scooters, bikes, all these machines are network machines with sensors. So theres a vast amount of data thats going to be recording every movement that humanity makes in a city. So who should have access to it . Thats going to be one of the big battles in this coming decade. Ill give you an example. If you have ford wants to offer stall kinds of great services, Digital Services in their cars. They want to have they want to have voice commands and interface with music and entertainment and maps and all the rest. So they could develop that technology themselves, or they could team up with amazon and give people alexa in the car. So they give people alexa in the car all of a sudden amazon has access to all this mobility data. And ford has access to less of it. But so thats the decision that car makers are going to have to make is how much of the data do i want the Tech Companies to control . Because the Tech Companies are better at data. And they have they have services that people want. But you go further in hop skip go and suggest that perhaps that data that the Tech Companies have should be turned over to governments. For efficiencys sake. Stephen well, i dont know if it should be turned over to government. I mean, one thing in helsinki what they do and helsinki with is one of the cities that we focus on, they dont turn the data over to government. What they do is stipulate that every conveyance whether its a bike share or a car share or a bus or a metro has to provide has to provide mobility data with the same standard so that any company that wants to manage mobility and offer Mobility Services has access to this anonymized data and can use it to provide services. And so thats a case where the government doesnt control the data. But the government puts anonymized data and makes it available to entrepreneurs and companies. Mr. Baker you mentioned earlier ford motor company. In your book, you write that piece by piece, Software Firms are out to conquer the car. And one of the characters in your book is chris thomas. Who is he . Stephen well, chris thomas is a young man hes still a young man who went to ford he was at yale he was a graduate student at yale. And hes from detroit. And he asked for an internship at ford. And he went to ford and got the most boring internship you could imagine. And so he sent emails to all the top executives at ford saying could i just have a halfhour of your time to talk about what i want out of this internship . He gets to talk for half an hour with the chairman of ford, billy ford, and tells him how boring his internship is and just begs him for an interesting job. And billy ford eventually puts him in this project which is a skunk works which is to scope out the future of transportation in megacities. And so chris thomas sees this mobility revolution that we are talking about, and he convinces billy ford and others to set up a venture fund that will invest in all of these new technologies. And so thats what he did. And when i when we wrote the book, he was still doing that. But later, he quit the venture fund called fontinalis and is setting up an education a new university to develop the brainpower for new mobility in detroit. The idea being that they need to have the talent for these new technologies, robotics and other other new technologies to keep the auto business in detroit. Has he made any profit from what hes been doing since he left ford . Stephen well, i think i imagine he did very well with fontinalis. Its a venture fund and had a good return on a lot of its investments in robotics and other mobility technologies. So i think hes done just fine. I dont think hes making a ton of money with his education education venture. The education i dont think is a huge profit maker. I think hes doing it to try to to try to help detroit. A lot of Mobility Technology that is being developed now has not seen a return. Is that correct . Stephen right. Whats happening is were in the boom phase of a nascent industry. So money is pouring in to all kinds of startups and ventures. And Silicon Valley is just is just full of all kinds of mobility startups. And at some point, this boom phase will end. And the investors will start asking difficult questions about whether the companies are making money. And that will lead as we have seen in previous iterations of the internet to some kind of a bubble bursting. And many of the companies, including im sure some of the companies that we profile in this book, are likely to fail because thats what happens when booms end. And then others, the victors, the survivors, will pick up the brainpower, the code, the patents, and grow with it. Mr. Baker, whats going on in china right now when it comes to the Mobility Technology . Stephen china is all over this all over this technology. Theyve got massive government funded investments in artificial intelligence, which is at the heart of many of these of these mobility technologies. They want to become leaders in robotic cars, and autonomous vehicles. They are really big on airships. They want they want it all. And they want china to be the leader in the technology and also they want it to they want it to improve life in chinese cities. Because chinese cities are like shanghai and beijing are covered in smog and the traffic is miserable. And so if they can if they can organize this right, they can make their cities much more attractive and vibrant and at the same time become a leader in perhaps the most Important Technology in the next 10 or 20 years. You write that china has by far the biggest and richest data sets on earth. Stephen right. And they dont have any they dont have any citizen action groups that are that are decrying this or asking for anonymized data. The chinese have access to the data and they can do with what they want and that gives them a big step up. Its quite a bit like dubai. And that makes a lot of americans suspicious, doesnt it . Stephen yeah. No, its going to be a huge issue in this country, how do we get how do we reap the benefits of this revolution while maintaining our freedom and our privacy . Stephen baker in hop skip go you list three different items that you think Data Collection and this Technology Needs to be judged on. Open standards, algorithm audits and Net Neutrality. Could you walk us through those, please. Stephen sure. If you want if you want a really vibrant Mobility System in a city where where you can go where you want to go and everything works well, you need to have standards so that everybody is everybody has the same type of data. Its what i was describing earlier about helsinki. If you remember the cell phones back in the 1990s and early 2000s, we had different standards and some cell phones couldnt talk to each other. And europe moved way ahead of us because they had a common standard. And you could go from finland to portugal and make calls anywhere you wanted in europe. And we need that kind of open standard in mobility so that everybody can build together and not have a fractured ecosystem. As far as audits go, you theres all kinds of ways that companies and governments can misuse this data. And they could conceivably make things happen so that poor people cant move as fast as richer people, for example. And so what or they discriminate against certain types of people because theyre not as economic they dont provide the economic return. So what you want is an audit to make sure that the so that the algorithms are fair. And what was the third thing . I forgot. Net neutrality. Stephen yeah. Well, Net Neutrality is its related to the audits. But the idea is that everybody should have equal access to the mobility, to move around in the cities. Have you found already inequality when it comes to mobility . Stephen well, i think i think our world is full of inequality. We have cities that have transit deserts where people cant get cant get Public Transit to go to a Job Interview or go to a school. And the idea is that we could perhaps use this next generation mobility to provide more opportunities for those kinds of people. And this could also change real estate in cities. Because mobility deserts, people move from mobility deserts in part because the rent is low and the rent is low because its such a pain to get anywhere. So there are areas in cities that would be fine and full of potential if they werent mobility deserts. And so if you had a system in which people could move around whether its with car share, bike share, metro, whatever it is, and had access to more areas of the city, then it would it would you know, have a big effect on the real estate markets in these cities. Stephen baker in hop skip go you have a futuristic vision where highways maybe the 405 in l. A. Would be a bike path or walking path or return to nature. Stephen right. I think its going to be a while before the 405 becomes a bike path. The idea is and helsinki is doing this. The idea is that if you have more people using not using cars, using other options to move around, then you can you wont need as many parking lots. The city the county of los angeles has an immense amount of parking. I think its five times the area of paris in parking lots in san francisco, i mean, in los angeles. Thats an enormous opportunity for parks, schools, swimming pools, malls, whatever whatever you want that doesnt have to be like that. In helsinki they have this venture thats called mobility as a service. And the idea is that you open yourself you open an app on a cell phone. It tells you how to get someplace and it has all of the connections. And theyve got a lot of transit in helsinki. And its all paid for with a monthly subscription. The idea is that if if you can use information this way and package it, people wont need their cars as much. And if people dont need their cars as much, then you can start turning highways into bike paths and greenways. How is it that helsinki became part of the cutting edge of the mobility revolution . Stephen the finns are very advanced in technology. And theyre willing to try things first. When i was working for businessweek in europe in the late 1990s, i was going up to helsinki all the time because they were on the cutting edge of mobile phones with nokia and a bunch of other mobile phone providers. So this is just like the next step. The finns are into the next stage of the internet which happens to be mobility. And the question is whether they can nokia was huge for a while. And then it got eclipsed by basically by apple. The question whether the finns can become World Leaders in these apps that move us around or if theyll get swallowed up by somebody like google. Another city featured in hop skip go is jakarta. Whats going on there . Stephen well, jakarta has some of the worst traffic in the world. And so theres theres a company there that has turned these motor bikes that they have into a taxi service and also a delivery service. And they can go much, much faster through jakarta than the cads or the limousines. Once you have mobility on an app, this company is finding, then you can start providing all kinds of other services on that app. You can start delivering food. You can start delivering banking services. And it shows how the if you think about if you think about the previous revolution, the smart phone, back when we were imagining it in the early 2000s, you wouldnt imagine that smart phone would become a music player, a video player, and social networks and all the other things that it became. And the same thing is going to happen with mobility. If you have services that deliver things, and theyre on apps, then those apps can move into other things like entertainment, food, banking and thats what were seeing in jakarta. And you began this conversation, mr. Baker, by talking about privacy. Where is this going to head when it comes to privacy . Stephen i dont know. And it really it varies from one place to the other. The one thing thats interesting about if you think about the automobile revolution, we had incredible amounts of privacy because we could go anywhere we wanted. We could get lost and nobody knew where we were. Our parents didnt know where we were. The cities barely knew where we were and they used to have to put hoses that counted cars across roads just to count the traffic. That was it was so primitive. They treated us like herds so we an immense amount of freedom and privacy and also incredible waste. Now, this this next revolution has much less waste. And it can be much greener. But we are going to be counted, surveilled and controlled much more. And i think its a tradeoff. And i think a lot of people are not going to be happy with it. But, you know, a lot of people werent if you tell people about how intrusive the cell phone is, and how much it tells google or the phone company or the government about our lives a lot of people are horrified but we still carry cell phones around because they provide a service that we cant do without. And i think the same thing is going to be true of mobility. Were going to sacrifice more of our privacy, a bit more of our freedom perhaps, our freedom to get lost, our freedom to escape. But if it works the way it could, we could move much more efficiently and we could have a lot of fun, too. Peter hop, skip, go. That is the name of the book. Communicators are available as podcasts. The house will be in order. Cspan hasears provided america unfiltered coverage of congress, the white house, the Supreme Court and Public Policy events from washington dc end around the country, so you can make up your own mind. 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There is still time for you studentr the cspan video competition. You have until january 20 to create a five to six minute documentary that explores an issue you would like to see president ial candidates addressing campaign 2020. We are giving away cash prizes and a grand total of and a grand prize of 5,000. Go to cspan studentcam. Org. Jesse it is day seven of our series on washington journal where we feature authors from all sides of the spectrum on key Public Policy issues of the day. Joining us today to talk about her book, our broken america is author and columnist Jackie Gingrich cushman. Jackie good morning. Thank you for having me on. Jesse our broken america. What prompted you to write this book . Jackie i started writing our