Mobile machines so this is an agent all new choices will surface for us and we will be able to go a lot of places to have a big effect on our cities and at the same time city governments can manage our movements and with a question about privacy. Is the next stage of the internet revolution. Los angeles 2028. What should we expect . One thing about information revolutions is we have seen it before. My coauthor and i were in paris at the turnofthecentury. And we were predicting that smart phones would change communication. And it turns out they didnt come until 2007. But the changes are still important. So what will we see . Will see a lot more choices and spend billions of dollars on public transportation. There could be cars that are semi autonomous living in parts of los angeles. I dont think by that point we have fully Autonomous Cars going around in that space. But there could be airships like small robotic drones that carry people around los angeles. You spend some time with mayor garcetti for what they are planning to do . Yes there are a lot of big projects to get in gear for 2028 for the olympics per go but the big thing is with los angele angeles, people are fed up more than ever with traffic. They are so fed up they decided to tax themselves raising gas taxes to fund Public Transit. And the hope for many of them is with Public Transit many people will leave the roads. Host with these billions of dollars are they spent on Smart Transportation or more roads or more vehicles . They are not spent on more roads or vehicles but a dramatic expansion of the metro syste system, more buses, more electric buses. And looking at los angeles as a hotbed for new technologies. So there telling people if you set up the new company whether scooters or economy cars or flying ships, you can try it out in los angeles. Host that happened in santa monica . Yes and people were unhappy about it because one day it just appeared on the sidewalk in santa monica and people thought they could use their phones to activate them now they are writing around without helmets, getting in the way of traffic, and making some people very mad. But the guy who set it up previously worked at huber so offer your service get a lot of people who like it and then deal with government what you have the constituency and the fan base and thats what he did. And angered officials of santa monica but i was just there a few days ago and lots of people are zipping around on scooters. Host if governments fail to assert control with taxes and regulations, cheap, ubiquitous mobility could overwhelm the entire region, much the way the automobile did. So somewhat argue that is what we want. It is to a degree but to send a car 20 miles to pick up a special kind of panini that you like. If its too cheap it is overused and overwhelm the infrastructure because you only have a certain number of molecules you can move in a space. So what do you see of the role of government in this age . Government will have to take a much more active role than they have with the internet revolution than what they did in a century ago. Cars coming into our cities and to colonize our cities and to develop a constituency and then the motorist in the car industry force cities to build immense infrastructure and to pave much of the planet. So in this next stage is for the do overs. Those that we visited from los angeles, dubai, shanghai, each has a different approach. But what they have to do is to make things work. Efficiently, cleanly, and also give everybody a chance to move around. Host how was the approach in los angeles to the mobility generation different . Los angeles is a hard place to govern there are scores of different municipalities and there are a lot of reasons thats why the United States and california is unique. Its a hard place to govern whereas dubai has a lot of power. It is organizing things to control movement and with all kinds of new technology and a test bed for flying machines and flying cars but all the data will go to a command center the goal is to move people and there are things around as efficiently as in an amazon warehouse. Its a question of freedom versus efficiency. In dubai and china they will have a lot of efficiency and the question in the United States is how do we achieve that while still respecting peoples data . So the authoritarian government has an easier time of that . Yes. That is true about all kinds of things of the authoritarian government. And they control things until people rise up. Host in dubai you compare it to and not just rich people at golf courses they want the flying airships with little stops all over dubai with flying machines carrying people back and forth. Host what have they developed already . They have opened their doors and have done test flights with the mobile company where drones carry people across the city. And then to have a stretch goal of 2022. And for that time if they dont prove to be safe they cant go with it. Whoever controls the data they will be in a position to manage movement. Who should control that . If you think about and Autonomous Car a huge data machine it has the equivalent of supercomputers in each car to calculate each turn with everything that is happening in that car. And most of that goes up onto networks and at the same time scooters and bikes and all these machines there is a vast amount of data that is recording every movement in the city. Who should have access . Thats one of the battles in the coming decade. Ford wants to offer a big digital services. And then to have voice commands and to interface with music and entertainment. And then give people alexa in the car now all of a sudden amazon has access to this mobility data. And ford has access to less. Thats the decision products have to make. And that is better data. Host you go further in hop skip go to suggest that data that the Tech Companies have should be turned over to the government for efficiency sake . I dont know if it should be turned over but one thing in helsinki and thats one of the cities we focus on, they dont turn the data over to government, what they do is stipulate every conveyance whether a rideshare or car share or bus or metro has to provide mobility data with the same standard so any company that wants to manage Mobility Services has access to this data and can use it to provide services. So that is the case where the government doesnt control the data but puts anonymized data making it available to entrepreneurs and companies. You mentioned earlier Ford Motor Company and you write Software Firms are out to conquer the car and one of the characters is chris thomas. Who is he . He is a young man. Who went to ford and a graduate from yale and lived in detroit and asked for an internship at ford. He got the most boring internship he could imagine. So he sent emails to all the top executives saying can i just have half an hour of your time to talk about what i want out of this internship . He proposed to talk for half an hour with the chairman of ford and tells him how boring the internship is and begs him for an interesting job. Billy ford eventually puts him in this project to scope out the future of transportation in megacities. So chris thomas sees this mobility revolution we are talking about and convinces billy ford and others to set up a venture fund in all of these new technologies. And when we wrote the book he was still doing that. But is now setting up the new university for new mobility to have the talent for the new technologies of robotic and other technologies to keep the auto business in detroit. Has there been any profit from what he is doing . I imagine the venture fund has had return in robotics and other mobility technologies. At all think hes making that money from the education venture. I dont think thats a huge profit maker. I think hes doing it to try to help detroit. Host a lot of the Mobility Technology developed now has not seen a return. Is that correct . Right. We are in the boom phase so money pours into all kinds of startups and ventures and Silicon Valley is full of all kinds of mobility startups. And at some point investors will start asking difficult questions if companies are making money and as we have seen previous iterations to some kind of a bubble bursting. And many of the companies that we profile in this book are likely to fail because thats what happens when booms and. Because then the survivors will pick up the brainpower, the code the patents and go with it. Whats going on in china right now with the Mobility Technology . China is all over the technology. Massive governmentfunded investments which is at the heart of these mobility technologies. And want to become leaders of robotic cars. They are big on airships. They wanted all to be the leader of the technology and also to improve life in chinese cities that is like shanghai and beijing and the traffic is miserable. So if we can organize this right and at the same time become a leader of the most important technology. China has by far the biggest and richest data set. Right. They have no citizen action groups that decry this or ask they have access to the data and can do with it what they want and that gives them a big step up and that is like to buy. That makes a lot of american suspicious . Yes. It will be a huge issue in this country how do we reap the benefits while maintaining freedom and 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 and algorithms and Net Neutrality can you walk us through those . Sure. If you want a vibrant Mobility System to go where you want to go and everything works well you have to have standards so nobody has the same type of data. If you remember the cell phones in the name nineties and early 2000 some could not talk to each other. And europe moved way ahead of us because of a common standard to go through finland to portugal and make calls anywhere you wanted in europe. We need that kind of open standard in mobility so everybody can build together and not have a fractured ecosystem. And there are all kinds of ways that governments can misuse the data. And we could conceivably make things happen and that cant move as fast as richer people for example. And then to discriminate against certain types of people because they dont provide the economic return. So what you want is an audit so that the algorithms are fair. With Net Neutrality it is related to the audits but the idea is everybody should have equal access to the mobility to move around. Have you found already and equality with mobility . I think it is full but to have transit deserts where you cant get Public Transit to go to a Job Interview or a school and that we could use this next generation to provide more opportunities because mobility deserts because the rent is low because it such a pain to get anywhere. There are places that would be fine so if you have a system whether car share or bike share or metro to have access and more areas of the city it would have a big effect on the real estate market. Host in hop skip go you have a futuristic vision where the freeways like the 405 would be a bike path or a walking path as a return to nature. Right. It will be a while before the 405 becomes a bike path. [laughter] but the idea is if you have more people not using cars but other options, then you dont need as many parking lots. The city county of los angeles has an immense amount of parking its five times the area of paris that is an enormous opportunity for park parks, schools, Swimming Pool pools, whatever you want. And helsinki has a venture called mobility is a service. The idea is you open an app on the cell phone, it tells you how to get someplace and has all the connections. And it is all paid for with a monthly subscription. The idea is if you use information in this way and package it people will not use the cars this much and if they dont use their cars as much and you can turn highways into bike paths. How is it part of the cutting edge of the mobility revolution . The fins are very in advanced in technology willing to try things first. When i was working for businessweek in europe in the late nineties i was going to helsinki all the time because they were on the cutting edge of mobile phones with no kia and a bunch of other mobile phone providers. So this is the next step. The fins are into the next stage of the internet. And then no kia was huge for a while and then it was eclipsed and then to be swallowed up from somebody like google. Host what is going on in jakarta . It has some of the worst traffic in the world. So there is a company there that has turned these motorbikes into a taxi service and a delivery service. And they can go much faster through jakarta. So once you have mobility on an app you can start to provide other services. You can deliver food, banking services, if you think of the previous revolution of the smart phone, back when we imagine that the early 2000s, you wouldnt imagine it would become a music player or a video player and social networks and the same thing will happen with mobility. Services that deliver things than those can move into other things like entertainment and seeing in jakarta. Host you begin this conversation by talking about privacy. Where will this head . I dont know. The one thing that is interesting if you think of the automobile revolution. To have incredible amounts of privacy. But nobody knew where we were the cities barely knew where we were. The hoses that counted cars across the road counting traffic it was so primitive they treated us with the herd so freedom and privacy and also incredible waste now this has much less waste and can be much greener but we will be counted and surveilled and controlled much more. And it is a tradeoff and a lot of people will not be happy. But if you tell people how intrusive the cell phone is and how much it tells google and the phone companies and the government about our lives , a lot of people are horrified but we still carry them around because they provide a service we cannot do without. So this is true of mobility to sacrifice privacy with freedom to get lost and escape. But if it works the way it could we could move much more efficiently and have a lot of fun. Host hop skip go is the name of the book all communicators are available as a podcast. Given the heights and cool and facebook and others recently. You normally have a pretty broad stroke to your coverage. Why this book and right now . Thank you for having me, by the by. I started this book in 2017 i had just taken a job