Guest it is an information revolution and weve been watching it for the past halfcentury. Computers overwhelmed Media Advertising and it spread into telephones and we were carrying around the internet wherever we went and in the next stage the internet and mobile machines will be carrying us around so it is going to be an age in which all kinds of new choices are going to surface for us and we are going to be able to go a lot of places and it has 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 result kind of questions about privacy. It is just the next stage of the internet revolution. Host imagine a scenario, los angeles, 2028. What should we expect . One thing about information resolutions is we cant bet on dates. Weve seen it before with cell phones, Michael Arthur and i were in paris at the turn of the century in 2000 and we were predicting smart phones were going to change communication by 2003. It turned out we were away early. They didnt come until 2007 but the changes are still important. Los angeles in 2028 what are we going to see . We will see a lot more choices, they are going to spend billions of dollars in public transportation, there is going to be cars that are semiautonomous running in certain parts of los angeles. I dont think by that point we will have fully Autonomous Cars going around that vast space but we have some of that and there could be ships, networks of small, robotic drones that carry people who there and jan across los angeles. You spent some time with mayor garcetti when you talked about the olympics and what they are planning to do for that time. They have a lot of big project they hope to getting year by 2028 for the olympics but the big thing is people are really fed up more than ever with traffic in los angeles and so set up that they decided to tax themselves, raising gas taxes to Fund Public Transit and the hope for many of them is many people will leave the roads and it will move faster. Host with these billions of dollars being spent in los angeles are they being spent on Smart Transportation or just more roads, more vehicles. They are not being spent on more roads and more vehicles, they are being spent on a dramatic expansion of the metro system, more buses, more electric buses and they are looking at los angeles as this testbed for all kinds of new technologies so they are opening it up and telling people if you set up your new company whether it is scooters or Autonomous Cars or flying ships you can try it out in los angeles. That happened in santa monica, didnt it with the bird scooter. Guest yes and a lot of people were unhappy about it because one day the bird scooters appeared on the sidewalks in santa monica and people looked at them and saw how they could use their phones to activate them, and the funny thing is the guy who worked at uber and the way it works is barge in, offer your service, get a lot of people who like it and then deal with the government, and angered officials in santa monica but i was there a few days ago and lots of people are zipping around doing all kinds of scooters. Host in hop, skip, go you write this. Of governments failed to assert their control with taxes and regulation, ubiquitous Mobility Services could overwhelm the entire region much the way the automobile did. Somewhat argue Ubiquitous Service is what we want. It is to a degree but if it is so cheap and ubiquitous you might send a car 20 miles to pick up a special type of panini that you like and so if it is too cheap it will get overused and overwhelm the infrastructure because 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 . Guest government is going to have to take a much more active role than they have in the internet revolution, much more active than they did a century ago when cars came in. If you think about cars coming into our cities over the last century they colonized our cities. Much as i was describing with birds be developed a constituency of motorists around the world and the motorist in the car industry forced cities to build immense infrastructure, all these roads, to pay for much of the planet and so in this next stage it is a chance for a do over, cities we visited, 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 giving everybody a chance to move around and not just the rich, questions of equity as well. Guest house the approach to los angeles to the mobility generation different from that in dubai. Los angeles is a hard place to govern, there are scores of different municipalities within Los Angeles County and there is a lot of freedom. That makes the United States and especially california unique. It is a hard place to govern whereas dubai is essential authority that has a lot of power. Dubai is organizing things so that they can control movement. They are investing in all kinds of new technology and light los angeles they are looking to become a testbed for flying machines, robotic cars and all the rest but all of the data in dubai is going to go to the command center and that command center, the goal of that command center is to move people and their things around as efficiently as the amazon warehouse. And so it is a question of freedom versus efficiency. In dubai and china they have a lot of efficiency. The question in the United States, how do we achieve that efficiency while still respecting peoples data and giving them the freedom of where you stood. In the sense of authoritarian governments like that in dubai, has an easier time of it . Guest yes. I think thats true of all kinds of things and authoritarian governments, they have an easier time controlling things until people rise up. Host you compare it to being on the jetsons. It is not there yet but that is the vision. The vision is to have flying airships early in this coming decade and not just a few of them carrying around which people to golf courses and luxury hotels, they want to have these flying ships carrying all kinds of people and have a flying network, like a metro system with little stops all over dubai with flying machines carrying people back and forth. Host what have they developed already . They havent developed anything but they have opened their doors and have done test flights with the German Company where drones carry people across the city that they are not at a point where it is happening yet. They have 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 approve to be safe, they cant go with it yet. Imac 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 . Guest think about an autonomous car, it is a huge data machine. It will have the equivalent of supercomputers and each car calculating each turn and recording everything that is happening in that car and much of that information goes on to networks. At the same time even scooters, bikes, all these machines are network machines with sensors so that is a vast amount of data that will be recording every movement that humanity makes in a city so who should have access . That is going to be one of the big battles in the coming decade. I will give you an example. Ford wants to offer all kinds of great services, Digital Services in their cars, 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. If they give them alexa in the car amazon has access to all this mobility data and ford has access to less of it but that is the decision carmakers have to make is how much of the data do i want Tech Companies to control because Tech Companies are better at data and they have services that people want. Host you go further in hop, skip, go and suggest that data that the Tech Companies have should be turned over to government for efficiency sake. Guest i dont know if it should be turned over to government. One thing is in helsinki what they do, helsinki is one of the cities we focus on, will they dont turn the data over to government, what they do is stipulate every conveyance whether it is a bike share or car share or bus or metro has to provide mobility data with the same standards that any companies that wants to manage mobility and offer mobility has access to this anonymous data and can use it for services so that is the case where the government doesnt control the data, but puts anonymous data and makes it available to entrepreneurs and companies. Host you mentioned earlier ford motor company, 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 . Guest chris thomas is a young man, he is still young man, who went to ford, he was a graduate student at yale and he is from detroit and he asked for an internship at ford and he went to ford and got the most boring internship you can imagine so he sent emails to all the top executives, can i have half an hour 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 in bags and for an interesting job. Billy ford eventually puts him in this project which is going work switches scope out the future of transportation and megacities. Chris thomas sees this mobility revolution we are talking about and convinces billy ford and others to set up a venture fund that will invest in all of these new technologies so that is what he did and when i when we wrote the book he was still doing that but later he quit the venture fund and is now setting up a new university to develop the brainpower for new mobility in detroit the idea being they need to have the talent for these new technologies, robotics and other technologies to keep the auto business in detroit. Host has he made any profit from what he has been doing . Guest i imagine he did well, a venture fund with good return on a lot of its investments in robotics and other Mobility Technology so i think he has done just fine. Making a ton of money with his education venture, education i dont think is a huge problem, hes doing it to try to help detroit. Host a lot of the Mobility Technology that is being developed now has not seen a return. Is that correct . Right. We are in the boom phase of a nascent industry so money is pouring into all kinds of startups and ventures and Silicon Valley is just full of all kinds of mobility startups and at some point this boom phase will end and 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 we profile in this book are likely to fail because that is what happens when booms end and others, the victors, the survivors will pick up the brainpower, the code, the patents, and grow with it. Host what is going on in china when it comes to the Mobility Technology . China is all over this technology. They have got massive governmentfunded investments in Artificial Intelligence which is at the heart of many of the mobility technologies. They want to become leaders in robotic cars and autonomous vehicles, they are really big on airships. They want it all and they want china to be the leader in the technology and also they want it to improve life in chinese cities because chinese cities like shanghai and beijing are covered in smart and the traffic is miserable and so 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, 20 years. Host you write china has by far the biggest and richest data sets on earth. Right and they dont have citizen action groups that are decrying this arresting for anonymous data. The chinese have access to the data and they can do with it what they want and that gives them a big step up. It is quite a bit like dubai. That makes a lot of americans suspicious, doesnt it . Guest yes. It will be a huge issue in this country. How do we reap the benefits of this revolution while maintaining our freedom and our privacy. Host in hop, skip, go you list three different items 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 . Guest sure. If you want a really vibrant Mobility System in a city where you can go where you want to go and everything works well you need to have standard so that everybody has the same type of data. It is what i was describing earlier about helsinki. If you remember the cell phones in the 90s and early 2000s we had different standards, some cell phones couldnt talk to each other, europe moved way ahead because they had a common standard and you could go from finland to portugal and make calls anywhere you wanted in europe. 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, theres all kinds of Ways Companies and governments can miss use this data and they could conceivably make things happen so poor people cant move as fast as richer people for example. Or they discriminate against certain types of people, they dont provide the economic return. So what you want is an audit to make sure the algorithms are fair. What was the third thing . Guest net neutrality. Guest it is related to the audit. The idea is everybody should have equal access to the mobility, to move around the cities. Host have you found already inequality when it comes to mobility . Guest i think our world is full of inequality. We have cities that have transit deserts where people cant get Public Transit to go to a Job Interview or go to school. The idea is we could perhaps use this next generation mobility to provide more opportunities to those kinds of people in this could change real estate in cities because people move through mobility deserts in part because the rent is low and the rent is low because it is such a pain to get anywhere. There are areas in cities that are full of potential if they werent mobility deserts. If you had a system in which people could move around whether it was car share, bike share, retro or whatever it is and you had access to more areas of the city, it would have a big effect on the real estate. Host in hop, skip, go, you have a futuristic vision where some of the highways, even the 405 in la would be a bike path or a walk in path or a return to nature. Guest it will be a while before the 405 becomes a bike past but the idea, helsinki is doing this, the idea is if you have more people not using cars, using other options then you wont need as many parking lots. The county of los angeles has an immense amount of parking, five times the area of paris in parking lots, that is an enormous opportunity for schools, swimming pools, malls, whatever you want, in helsinki, they have this venture called mobility is a service and the idea is you open and apps on a cell phone and it tells you how to get someplace and has all the connections and they have a lot of transit in helsinki and it is all paid for with a monthly subscription. The idea is that 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 you can start turning highways into bike path and greenways. Host how did helsinki become part of the cutting edge of the mobility revolution . Guest things are very advanced in technology and theyre willing to try things first. When i was in europe in the late 1990s 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 mobile phone providers. This is like the next step. The fins are into the next stage of the internet which happens to be mobility. The question is whether no kia was huge for a while and it got eclipsed by apple. If they will get somebody like google. Host another thing in hop, skip, go is jakarta. What is going on that. The worst traffic in the world. It turned the motorbikes into a taxi service and the delivery service. They can go much much faster through jakarta and the limousines. Once you have an apps on the companys finding you can start providing all kinds of other services on that apps, you can start delivering food, banking services, the previous, the smart phone and in the early 20 the early 2000s you never imagined the smart phone would become a music player, and thoses can prevent other things like entertainment, food, banking and that is what we are seeing in jakarta. Host you begin this conversation by talking about privacy. Where will this head when it comes to privacy . Guest i dont know. It varies from one place to another. The one thing that is interesting about the automobile revolution, we have incredible amounts privacy. Our parents didnt know where we were, cities barely knew where we were and hoses the counted cars across roads to count the traffic, so primitive they treated us like herds and we had immense amount of freedom and privacy and also incredible waste. There is much less waste. We are going to be counted, surveilled. They are not going to be happy with it. A lot of people, if you tell people how intrusive the cell phone is and how much it tells google or the phone companies about our lives, a lot of people are horrified but we still carry cell phones around because they provide a service we cant do without in the same will be true of mobility. We will sacrifice more privacy, our freedom to get lost, our freedom to escape, and we could move much more efficiency and have a lot of fun. Hop, skip, go, how the mobility revolution is transforming our lives. All communicators are open is podcast. Former u. S. Surgeon general will discuss the impact of loneliness on our health. And Tara Westover will detail her life growing up with survivalist parents. Find more information and a full weekend schedule online at booktv. Org or on your program guide. Now heres David Marwell on the life of