The Creature from Jekyll Island The battle over a central bank is an issue that goes back to the beginning of America. The Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, wanted the new American government to resemble the British Empire, with their own Bank of England. They were opposed by Jeffersonian Republicans, who understood a central bank to be a dangerous institution of corruption that would benefit a politically connected minority. Both sides saw their share of victories and defeats, leading to the establishment of the first Bank of the United States under Washington, ended by Jeffersonians in 1811. A second bank of the United States was created in 1815 and then ended by Andrew Jackson in 1836. Older than any American central bank, however, was the dollar, which began as a Spanish silver coin widely used in the colonies. During the Revolutionary War, America tried its hand at paper currency, not backed by gold or silver. The result was the Continental Congress acquiring resources and military service from Americans and exchanged from an unstable currency that collapsed in value. The result was, in 1792, the establishment of a national currency based in gold and silver. The new U.S. Mint would mold coins in a patriotic design, but the weight of silver remained the same as the Spanish dollar. With currencies around the world all backed by gold and silver, global trade benefited from what is called the classical gold standard. This international gold standard provided an automatic market mechanism for checking the inflationary potential of government. If a country like Mexico inflated their paper pesos, the inevitable result would be gold leaving the country when foreign banks redeemed their Mexican paper money for the proper amount of gold and silver. While the ability to redeem gold internationally imposed a level of discipline on national governments, interventions in domestic economies still managed to create the booms and busts we see in business cycles. Often, through some sort of government privilege, banks would be legally protected to print money not backed by gold, which would spur investment into projects that otherwise would not be profitable, resulting in a bust. After a particularly bad financial crisis in 1907, the result of bad banking policies first imposed during the Civil War, major Wall Street banks decided to promote the creation of a new central bank that could be depended on to bail them out during a financial crisis. The Wall Street bankers and their allied politicians understood that it would be difficult to get the American public to create such a powerful and dangerous government tool. In planning the creation of this new bank, they met in secret locations like Jekyll Island, Georgia, using fake names. They plotted a national propaganda campaign to sell the public and elected officials on the plan by any means necessary. In 1912, Woodrow Wilson was elected president in a three-way race with less than 42% of the vote. A year later, he would sign into law the creation of the Federal Reserve. Shortly after, the costs of World War I would force governments around the world to begin massively inflating their currencies, which would result as the end of the gold standard. So, if the classical gold standard worked so well, why did it break down? It broke down because governments were entrusted with the task of keeping their monetary promises of seeing to it that pounds, dollars, francs, etc. were always redeemable in gold as they and their controlled banking system had pledged. Governments were incentivized to allow banks to print far more paper money than gold on hand than they could in a free market. It was not gold that failed. It was the folly of trusting the government to keep its promises.


Really, I'm going to focus on communication. Much of what I'll say will apply to communicating anything that's complicated and kind of prismatic. There are many problems that are like the climate and energy challenge. There's nothing quite as like it in terms of its scope. In terms of the interconnections between energy policy and the development policy and climate policy. I've been on this weird long learning journey which you can see illustrated here somewhat in some photos. This is like my 32nd year writing about this stuff. So I'm like one of those people. There's some of us in the audience. I see people with probably some old people who are older than I am. I turned 60 this year and essentially it's all been a learning curve. Journalism ideally is a learning curve. If you get too bought into some idea that you think you understand a problem, you probably should move to a new beat. And again, especially with something as big as humanity's great acceleration and its consequences for the environment. There's no way to get your head completely around that. It's taken 30 years and I'm actually still learning every day. I learned a huge amount here today in meeting with I don't know how many faculty, I learned some really interesting things about the fantasy of carbon capture and sequestration at scale, at climate scale. I've learned more about BEX, which this is this idea that we can not only do that, but you can take biomass, burn it in a power plant, capture that CO2, put it in the ground forever at billions of tons a year scale. And maybe we'll talk about that too. I've learned several other things today that will probably reflect my reporting in the coming year. So even though I've been at this for 30 years, I always feel like I'm kind of beginning. Now, here's the cold shower part of my talk, okay? Let's get real and go into the media environment we're all dealing with. Some of you probably saw this on Twitter. It was pictured by a Hillary's campaign photographer of a wonderful moment when people were gonna share, they're gonna be with Hillary and experience the moment of being with Hillary Clinton. And they're all facing away from Hillary Clinton. This is the world we're in now where your screen view of the world is actually more real or meaningful to you than the real world, the selfie world. So as the environment in which we communicate ideas moves increasingly into online space, there's challenges that come with that. Some of you have probably read the filter bubble. This is what it looks like, Ellie Periser.  Whatever that is, not a political color, it's just like a color. And the world is kind of every color, right? So through the media filters around us now, the world you see is blue. And that's fine, it's fine to be in a bubble as long as you know it's there. I teach communication courses at Pace University now where one of the exercises I do is to sort of force the students to reflect on how information comes to them in the course of a day. Just take some fact you learned today and think back to where it came from. And they have to trace it back, like okay, it was from Facebook, okay? Or Snapchat, more likely. And then they have to say, well, who sent that to me? And then they have to kind of figure out, well, where did that person see it? And I asked them to trace it back to who actually wrote it or created it. And this is what we're losing right now, a lot of this capacity to understand where information came from. If we, from a very young age, we're not thinking about teaching in new ways that involve young people, right from elementary school, if not earlier, developing a new set of skills. We don't need multiplication tables anymore because you can do that on this. But you do need to have a better sense of what's true and what's real. If you want to, and of course, many of us don't want to, which is the other reality. So this is one problem. There's the selfie problem. There's the bubble, and then there's this. Of course, so even if you're interested in finding out what's real, you're buffeted with information. This is a Navy photo of a firefighting exercise on a ship. And I personally have about three of those pointed at me, 24 seven. There's the biodiversity one, the climate one, the rest of life one.  And it's sort of a draining experience. And here's the other issue with that, is that communication environment is in flux, it's changing. It's like, so there's no new normal to adjust. It's not like adjusting to a new normal. It's adjusting to permanent change. My friend, Brad Allenby at Arizona State, who studies complex systems and stuff and he says, change is changing. And that makes all of this that much more challenging. So as you're trying to understand the changing in biogeophysical environment, and you're learning about it through this intermediary of the online communication environment, and that's changing just as much as the physical environment gets. And for those of us who are of the older variety, we had this, we had it so easy back in the day. We had someone, if you haven't heard it, I don't know if I have the, no it's not here, Walter Cronkite, what did he used to say? At the end of his broadcast. That's the way it is, Tuesday. November 2nd, blah, blah, blah. And there's no one telling us all in a common way that's the way it is anymore. And so what you have instead, by the way, for those of us who are of that age, I don't know about you or you, but we used to watch the Vietnam War unfold over dinner. We'd be having our spaghetti, our comfort food, meals. My dad would be home from the furniture store, and we'd be arguing about the next end. But everyone in the country, tens of millions of people were watching three people. And they were all white guys for most of the time, and then it became an African American and a woman and a little bit more very. But it was like, we were all dining on comfort food, it's the same meal. And now it's like, now you're still dining on comfort food, but depending on what you think about climate change, you're finding it at a different place. It's the ultimate buffet, all night, 24 hour buffet with Indian and barbecue and sushi. And so that's depressing. This is the cold shower part. You're gonna get to the, there's hope part. And here's the worst part, all of that, all of that. So if you're, most everyone here is in academia, so you have a thing, right? Your thing is next generation batteries or your thing is the IPCC or your thing is photosynthesis. And whatever your thing is, is out there that you care about a lot. GMOs or health is immersed in this thing, which is, this is newsmap.jp.  And so, where's climate, where's sustainability? Is there a sustainability box there? No, and even if we weren't on the verge of this unbelievably important election, it wouldn't be there. In 2009, I was at the Copenhagen Climate Talks and I took this picture, which I've shown, I probably showed here before in a different presentation on climate policy, and we've all ends up feeling like this guy. This was a cameraman in the press room after two weeks of Copenhagen will do that to you. But anyone who's trying to figure out how to be effective in that, let alone how to be effective on climate change or related issues. But in that media environment, you can feel really disparate. Okay, so now, I'm gonna pause, take a breath and take you to the frontiers of communication innovation. This is a completely different arena, whoa, sorry. There ain't no great, can hold my body down. Does anyone, has anyone seen this? No one, not one, hey. There ain't no great. JohnnyCashProject.com. So what you're looking at is a four dimensional creativity. Let out of the ground, ain't no great, can hold my body down. So let me explain a little bit. Aaron Koblin, who was at UCLA, a data visualization guy, they moved to Google. And he and some other wizards of visualization a few years ago created this. And so here's the dimensions of creativity here. Well, someone wrote the song, JohnnyCash played the song, so that's two. Then there's someone shot the video, that's three. The video originally was just pictures, just images, photographic, videotape. So these guys then said, let's set it up online in a way that's interactive, where you can come to the website and a video is basically a bunch of frames, right? It's 26 frames a second or 60 frames a second. So it's a finite number of images and they created a portal. You go there and you can do this and you can choose one frame out of those several thousand and you can draw on it. So you can come as a, so they've created a song, there was a song, song, videotape, you the viewer of this, why does that do that? You can come and become part of the creation of the art. And then there's another, so there's a fifth dimension where you can then come, so you end up with this like thousands of drawings. People have helped create this communal artwork. And then you can come as a viewer and you can curate your own version of the video down at the bottom. When you go to that website, you'll see there's, you go to the actual widget. You can choose frames, all the different frames that different visitors, thousands of people who visited are there sort of stacked below each spot. And you can kind of create your own version of the artwork to play. So that's five dimensions of creativity in one thing. Think about that in the context of conveying information about global change. Or anything, you can kind of engage, it's the engagement part that's novel. And so anytime at the New York Times when I look at our, we've had really cool, Josh Heymer, Heyners, doing these fantastic drone videos of the Marshall Islands and stuff, really innovative new things are happening, data visualizations. But I always remind myself when I think that we've crossed some cool frontier and feel ha ha, aren't we great? I think to this kind of thing and I say, we haven't even begun yet. We haven't even begun at figuring out ways to engage people. And of course, this is global. There's another one, the guy, one of the musicians from the 80s band Depeche Mode.  Where anyone around the world can put on headphones and record, sing a line of harmony to a certain song. And then he takes that stuff and makes this gigantic global chorus out of it. Same kind of thing, think about sharing. Have you seen the photographer George Steinmetz, did this a week in the food life of a family? He went for Time Magazine, I think he went around the world and showed you what one week's food is for Sub-Saharan poor people for suburbanites in Toronto, etc, etc. Fantastic, again, model for how to think about portraying what's going on in the world in new ways. And finding ways to do that with information related to these things is vital. It requires something that my buddy Randy Olson, who some of you probably know, he calls it escaping from the nerd loop. The nerd loop is when people get into a room and talk about how to communicate. That means we're in the nerd loop right now, as opposed to actually doing it. It takes guts. Some of you know Andy Bunn at Western Washington University.  So we're doing this paleo work and we love it if you would come with us and write this great feature for New York Times. But of course, it's thousands of dollars, mosquitoes the size of B-52s. And they were going anyway, and I said, well, no, I'm not going to go.   And so we created at that time what I call the postcard from the Pleistocene because his work was on that time scale. And it wasn't journalism, I'm not in the field with my pad and my pens as I've been many times. It wasn't a press release, I'm curating it. I'm involved in mediating what we were doing. It was a novel experiment. And after that happened, I did more than a few of those. And then the New York Times started, they created this scientists at work blog, which kind of doesn't exist anymore because of shrinking resources. But it was a way to sort of test drive that idea of getting content from scientists in the field and sharing it with people. Richard Alley, great scientist, pretty good guitar player. And he does these goofy songs about geology. Of course, as I say many times, he has tenure and lots of awards. So the young faculty here, I don't necessarily think it's great advice to just jump online and do something goofy. Maybe wait till after tenure. Randy's written this good book, Houston, we have a narrative about storytelling advice and I'll just very, very quickly summarize one thing he says that I think is invaluable, I talked to all my students about. And it's three letters, ABT, and the three letters stand for and, but, therefore, and he learned this from Trey Parker, one of the creators of South Park. Who in a documentary a number of years ago about South Park, said anytime you replace an and with a but, or a therefore. Anytime you do that, you're telling a story. But and, and, and is not a story. I went to Stanford and I gave a talk and I had dinner with some friends and I came back home. Where's the arc there? I went to Stanford and I gave a talk, but someone challenged me really emotionally about something and I was really wrong and I suddenly figured out that something I spent my life on was waste of time. That's storytelling, it's not true, but, but, but so, so, and think about that. What is it, what is it, what is an abstract, what is a paper? What is a research paper? CIS is melting, but we don't have a lot of understanding of the dynamics of how the ocean temperatures relate to that. Therefore, I did blah, blah, and, and I find blank. So, so, storytelling is all around us. Figuring out how to shape that into a meaningful, whether it's a talk or whether it's a actual, the summary of a paper or an article or a blog post is, is a, an opportunity. Twitter matters, how many of you are on Twitter? Not a lot, of those on Twitter, how many of you really like it? Like, it's, it's valuable to you. That's good, that's, so, that's a pretty high percentage. And, and can anyone just shout out a reason why? Like, what is it helpful for? This one. So news, as a fee, anything else? Conversations with people? Conversing, yeah, so this, this is, this was an invention, this thing right here. I mean, it's a pound sign or whatever the other terms are for it. But in 2007, a guy who was living in San Diego, worked at Mozilla, Chris Messina, on Twitter, when it was, 2007 was pretty, that's the early days. He said, hey, let's use this. Why don't we use pound sign to have a conversation in, in this cyberspace we're in? Where, so it's pound sign, I'm sorry, hashtag. The hashtag for groups, as in pound sign bar camp. And bar camp is some programming term, I don't even know what it means. That doesn't really matter, but that, this was the first suggestion, the first use of a hashtag to try to organize conversations in, in Twitter space. And it was just about in November that year, that was when the San Diego fires were happening around San Diego. And that was the first operational hashtag was that in November. Pound sign, San Diego fire. People were trading information in real time about which roads were being closed off, radio would be way behind. You wanted to have real time information and then Arab Spring happens and this happens and that happens. And what it is, it's a way to, there's all that noise, Justin Bieber and Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, and stuff. But a hashtag allows you to have a coherent line of thinking or conversation, it's global, it's either synchronous, you can have a live discussion around hashtag. Or it's asynchronous where you can catch up with a discussion that Google had in your field, I'll talk about some examples in a minute. So through all that noise, it gives you the signal. It's like, environmental education, this is a fun one. I am a scientist because that kind of, there was a woman in California, a young PhD candidate, I think at Caltech, who one day took a selfie with a poster that said I'm a scientist because, and it became kind of a way for scientists to, to, to pause and, and explain why they do what they do and think about that in the, in the context of the ABT thing I told you about. That, you know, is it more interesting for someone to know what you do or why you do it? Which do you think is more interesting? The why, right?  So, so it's a way to, and it's a way to start. Go there and see what people have written to kind of make that point. Pace Coral was the hashtag for one of the documentaries my students made at Pace. FarmHack is really interesting. It's young farmers who are trying to find ways to use technology and, and to make traditional farming like small scale or, or, or organic farming more sustainable. Weeding methods and funny little machines that can grind things. So FarmHack is really cool. Bird class was Margaret Rubega who's a, this is for the teachers in the room. Years ago, she was teaching, she teaches at University of Connecticut, of course, in bird, bird biology. And they had a long standing assignment where students had to keep a journal of bird behavior, just as they observed it. And she switched to Twitter. They had to start tweeting about bird behavior, which is kind of implicitly funny. But, but she found that, and she's written about this in, in journal. She found that they're way more engaged with keeping track of bird behavior when it was through this thing that they're already living through. So rather than banishing it, it's part of, it becomes an organic part of how they're learning. And not only how they're learning, they're sharing their learning, because Twitter is an open medium. And so, and it's become now a portal. That hashtag, if you go there, half the time, half the time, the things that have been posted to that tag are someone in Arizona, you know, who saw a bird and wanted to know what it was.  Again, to me, it reminds me of the Harry Potter movies at the port key.  The best way to start, this is like a little four minute Twitter primer, is to follow people. You don't have to tweet, remember? You can test drive it, you can turn it off when you don't want to have it take over your life. And here's some, someone, well, here's a, he's actually very active on Twitter too, but YouTube, Google Hangouts are a way for university scientists to say, hey, this is what I do, it's like an open house. But doesn't, you don't have to put out cookies and, and, and wine. And here's some very, very useful touchstones on climate, climate change science, Gavin Schmidt, Katharine Hayhoe, who just did that thing at the White House with Leonardo DiCaprio and the president. And Richard Betts, he's at the Met Office in UK, he has a government position, but he's actively engaged on Twitter as a way to sort of help people sift what's real or not. So, so to me, it's, it's not the responsibility of every scientist, but it is the responsibility of every institution of science to be engaged in these areas, to be out there, to be helping people sift for what's real, so that we're not all suffused with that noise. And any, any time you can help cut through that, you're doing, you're doing a public service. There are, and you think about journalism shrinking, that's left an opportunity for a lot of institutions of learning and research to fill that space. This is just a few examples, Yale E360, Earth Institute at Columbia, Pace University, our, our blog, separate from what I do at the Times University of Minnesota. They're magazines. They're basically, they're out there. Remember, search engines, don't care if it's in the New York Times or, or something like this. If you do good SEO, good search engine optimization on your website. Then, then that, and, and I've had this happen where, I'll give you an example. The conversation, is anyone here posting on the conversation? Good, good, good, good. It's a really interesting, it's kind of like an op-ed page for everybody, for anybody with some kind of academic expertise or scholarly understanding. It was started by an Australian journalist or two, and now it's a global platform for writing commentary, mostly on current events or if you have a paper coming out. And so one day, let's see, what was this? It was several years ago on Facebook in my flow, there was this unbelievably dramatic photograph of a volcano erupting in Papua New Guinea, and it was so stark. And I write a lot about disaster risk reduction, not just climate. And so I wanted to find out what was going on. So I'm googling around, and I found this guy, he was a, he may be out now. He was a doctoral candidate at University College London, who had written a really great explainer about this volcano and that particular area of New Guinea. And I ended up excerpting it on my blog and, you know, quoting him, because, because he was really insightful and a good writer. And, and I never would have known, who would have known of Robin Wiley? Maybe someone in the room knows him. But, but he, because he, he, he's out there. He put himself out there in a way that was useful. And you think, well, yeah, this is all great, but what about, you know, as journalism shrinks, what about investigative journalism? What about the hard stuff? Which is really a problem right now. And there are non-profit entities that have risen up to fill some of that gap, that part of the communication sphere. One is, inside climate news, they want a public surprise, a public surprise for pipeline reporting. Several years ago in the Midwest, they did all that Exxon new reporting. So there's a model, there are models that are emerging that are not the conventional newspaper model. And that can get a lot of attention, even without that. I'm going to talk about DIY. The do-it-yourself factor is so much, there's so much more you can do now as an individual, if you have some GIS skills, if you have skills that I don't have, like how to turn data into a map, how to map data. But in Pennsylvania, well, I guess it was around 2009 or so, a young guy who worked in the state legislature, he was a low-level guy who knew there were a lot of data out related to fracking, where the wells are, whether there were violations. The data were all there in government websites somewhere. But he spent a couple days, and in a couple days he created a clickable database like this, so you can go there, if you're moving to this community, or you live near here, and there's something weird smell in the air, you now, because of this guy, have way more access to that data than you might have had before. And it was just one person who did that. Just yesterday, was it today or yesterday? I just posted on this cartographer from the University of Wisconsin. His blog is northlandia.com, Carl Sack. He's really upset about the Dakota Access Pipeline, and I agree with him that not enough attention is being paid to the historic treaty issues that underlie the thing that most of the people in the room are more focused on, which is the implications for oil and gas. And so I did a piece, he created a map, and he said, he quoted someone who had influenced him greatly, whose name I'm blanking on right now. But the guy said, the side with the best map wins. And he had noticed that there wasn't really a good map of the situation with that historical context, meaning where the land was, that this is all Sioux land, their reservation is only part of the land that they were granted under a treaty. And to me, that really needs to be hammered. So it's another example I think that's really kind of exciting. Get your skills, you have skills, use them, find partners to build things if you don't know how to do everything. Learning and doing, six years ago when I started at PACE, they had an annual documentary course where students on their spring break would go somewhere and make a film, which is great. A lot of the films were like travel sites in Italy. And they were just films about things, a day in the life of the US ambassador to the Netherlands, and won an award. I mean, it's fine, it's good, good stuff. But I joined, someone said, hey, you should meet Maria Luske to make the professor, communication professor. And we started brainstorming, and I thought, well, you know, God, I've got this backlog of stories I've been wanting to do for so many years. And the first one was, there was an American woman who had moved to Belize in the 80s, and she was dead set on coming up with a more sustainable model of shrimp farming, Linda Thornton. And so I did some reporting, that was the film we made that year, the first year. And then since then, we've been to Cuba, Portugal to look at the forests, the issues with cork forests, and long story there, but interesting one, Sea Turtle Conservation in Baja. And these are students who mostly will go into careers in corporate communications, or maybe at CNBC or that kind of thing. But in part, and they're not environmental study students, most of them, they were communication students. But in this course, they learned that poverty in a poor community in Mexico, if you're not considering those fishermen's livelihoods, they're not going to stop fishing, even if it's going to drown some turtles. They learned these fundamental challenges that we face in sustainability, which are so often about those kinds of trade-offs, and that sticks with them, and I think that's kind of fantastic. So it's been a great thing. We went to Cuba this year. We were there the week that Obama and the Rolling Stones were there. And we went to the Stones Show. It's in the film. Cuba's Crossroads. At Pace University, we did a, actually, Mark Jacobson participated in a Google Hangout with us about energy futures for New York. This is that 100% his template for looking at state energy transitions. And so we were learning and doing it at the same time. There's many ways to do that. And then, of course, that spills into dot-earth, so it's kind of like a multiple thing. Facebook can actually matter. This is one of my favorite Facebook items that a student of mine, who's a Turkish journalist, he pointed to it on his Tumblr account one day. And for those in the back of the room, I'll just explain. It was created by this young student in Nova Scotia, Isaac Freshia, as a school project. And what it is, it looks like a conversation on Facebook. It actually reads like a conversation on Facebook. But you get into it. Tiger totally screwed 3,200 of me left, sad face. And Panda, well, yeah, he likes this. But then, of course, Panda immediately realizes that could be misinterpreted. And he says, I don't mean like, like good. I mean like, I feel you, bro. I'm around 2,500 now. Marine Turtle, Rhino, Mountain Gorilla. So it's a conversation. And it ends with human point taken, guys. And that's fine. That's funny. You've seen a lot of funny things like that. But it was linked to a World Wildlife Fund sort of learn more thing. And who knows whether there was a measurable diversion of business as usual trajectories on conservation as a result. But to me, certainly, I can't imagine that this would have at least gone in a negative direction. The fact that he was creating artwork in Halifax, Nova Scotia, not like at the School of Visual Arts in New York City or someplace. And could have that become a meaningful part of the sustainability conversation related to species conservation is really great. But I think the single most exciting education initiative I've seen in years came, it was in the Bronx. I one day to talk, my wife who's an environmental educator, a couple of decades ago, she had mentioned to me once, she had someone at the Bank Street School where she worked briefly, had mentioned that they used to do a field trip to the boiler room in their school as a learning experience. And so I was at a meeting in San Francisco, actually, the Verge meeting a few years ago. And I kind of blurted out, hey, man, we should all do field trips to the boiler room. You don't have to get permission slips. You don't have to rent a bus, any school. And then someone emailed me from this solar one. It's in New York City, a nonprofit group that does curricula elements related to energy. And they said, we do that. We do that at the school in the Bronx. It's the high school of energy and technology. And I could go into a long, there's a fantastic back story behind how the school got created. It's a public high school designed to fill an employment gap in New York City. New York City had gotten a grant to do a big retrofit of their school buildings. And remember, in New York City in the 90s, as late as like the mid 90s, New York City schools were still coal shoveled furnaces to keep them heated. So there's a lot of retrofitting that has to be done. They had a grant, a federal grant. But then they went to the union, and the union said, we don't have enough people to run those new systems, those cool new smart meters and things. And the woman who ran the city's sustainability part of the school system, she worked out, let's turn this school in the Bronx into a school for energy and technology. And one of the things they do is a boiler room tour. The custodian is their lecturer for the day. Just that alone is an amazing thing to think about. And they learn about their school as a system. How many people in this room are passionate about systems? Systems thinking. How many times do you hear systems thinking, systems thinking? But how many times do you see it taught in a way that's like this, where it's just visceral and simple.  Fantastic. And that can be done in any school. And it's not a matter of anything except sharing information. That's all it takes. So that makes me hopeful that we can build from the ground up a lot of potential. I'm going to speed through some things just as we have time to talk. You all know about visualizations. I can tell you the volume of the atmosphere, how many cubic kilometers there is, or I can show you. Adam Neiman has done this beautifully. Over the years, others have tried this. He's a British science illustrator. That's the volume of all the world's liquid fresh water. And a great homework assignment is, OK, kids, draw the volume of all the world's usable fresh water, meaning accessible. And that's actually all the world's water, all the oceans. So how much is fresh? That's a known volume, so you could draw that sphere. How much is potable? You can't even see it. So there's lots of opportunities there. And I was talking to a couple of people here about the right wavelengths for the right job. This is a beautiful sunny day in Colorado. 2009, I started writing about methane leaks and oil and gas facilities. And this is the same thing with an infrared camera. This has kind of become old now. So it's a beautiful sunny day in Colorado. But if you wanted to convince people that the Obama administration needs to tighten its regulations on oil and gas facilities, which wavelength would you choose? And then if you remember the Aliso Canyon disaster, EDF, Environmental Defense Fund, with another environmental group that has aviation capacity, if they hadn't used infrared cameras to show the effect of that Aliso Canyon eruption, it would have taken a lot longer, I guarantee you, for that issue to be resolved. And this isn't all about tamping down bad behavior. There are opportunities that can arise using these technologies as well. Last year, I was at this meeting in Paris in July. It was a science meeting, climate science and policy meeting, ahead of the big shindig. And a woman from Plymouth University in England presented a paper where they did this really interesting study using infrared camera images of houses and showing you the waste heat that houses or an old house leaks a lot of heat, you're losing energy. Basically, they did a test through a course of a year where they had two or three different versions of the brochure, informational brochure on how to save energy with your house. And one of them was just the information. One of them was the information with a picture of a glowing house. And one of them was an information with a picture of your house. And then they followed up, which got the same information. And of course, the one with your house got way more buy in. And that's to me a very interesting demonstration of how thinking about how people receive or don't receive information is an important thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. I'm sorry if I'm running long. This is an infographic. It's data turned into visuals. It's on the benefits of public transportation. It was originally a bunch of still images from Toronto City government on the values of a trolley system there. And a young guy in Texas a few years ago put it on Tumblr as an animated GIF. And again, it's just information. It's the same number of people in different transportation circumstances. And again, I think about the New York Times or anyone else. And I think this is circling more toward what I was showing you in the beginning with our friends, the Johnny Cash Project. So that'll do for now. I can go on. But I wanted to be sure we had a couple minutes to talk. Thank you very much. Get on Twitter. Try it. Thanks very much, Andy. That was a tour de force and a very broad run through a lot of different things that I think will be extremely important. We're counting on you to figure out exactly in what way they will become important over the next five years. Actually, I meant that seriously. You could think of doing a systems analysis of everything you presented. Maybe somebody here wouldn't be smart enough to do that. Certainly not me. Why don't we take maybe three quick questions and then move to the Energy Social? That's OK with you. OK, we usually start with student questions. Any student questions? Looks like Emma Hutchinson. Hi. Thank you so much for your talk. I just wanted to hear if you had any advice for young people entering the climate communication space, given that there's all these changes to journalism. Yeah, well, I guess what I would recommend is, depending on your issue or you're finding someone like Climate of Gavin or Katherine Hayhoe, study them, watch them, track their output, see how they engage people in Facebook. Katherine's very active on Facebook. Remember, she's a Texan. And she's surrounded by people with all kinds of feelings about climate and energy. But she engages in a very respectful way, a very open way, listening. So find good practitioners and just get used to what they're doing and then maybe do a little test drive. See if you can start to build your own little network. Jacqueline Gill, who's the University of Maine paleo-ecologist, I just started this. Eric Holthouse, a blogging meteorologist, sent a note around a year ago to a bunch of us climate people, communicators, and said, let's we need to get together once a week. Let's do something. Got to just talk, chat. And then someone said, well, we should do a podcast. So Jacqueline is part of this podcast. This Eric, me, and Jacqueline is called Our Warm Regards. And I'm just using it as a way to get used to what's podcasting. It is highly imperfect. But we're learning and it's actually working. People are listening. So just try it. Try it. You'll like it. Do you have student questions? OK, on the back. Any non-student questions? OK, let's do this one and then that one. And then we'll probably break. So the last thing about the value of the total image of your house gets more. So could you see getting involved in creating a knowledge base where we're looking at the picture of the land that somebody was on. They're able to put into the knowledge base. This is what's going on in my land. And then ideally, if there's a problem, you get communities of science. The community is on the ground working together to solve a problem on the basis of their common interest in that ecosystem. Yeah, well, there are people. I just visited Adam Sobell. Someone I was just talking to. We're talking about how to refine picture of agriculture, productivity, from remote sensing. I think that we're just at the beginning of thinking about how to do lots of these things. At IASA in Austria, there's something called GeoWiki, where they have a huge amount of satellite data, of land use change. But apparently satellites are still, sometimes they conflict, like a European, an ESA satellite and a NASA satellite will look at the same pixel and think it was deforestation or it's water or not.  There's many, many, many ways that this can play out, I think. Final question back here on the green shirt. You mentioned the bubble problem. Yeah. They really address, I don't think, any solutions to that. But it seems like all these Twitter things just concentrate ideas. Yeah. And then when there's conflict, it blows up and all that. Yeah. Well, to me, it's about intentionality. And this is the hardest thing. But you have to, the reason I mentioned like elementary school education, that it's a new skill set that's needed in terms of how to think about the web, how to think about what you're seeing. The Pope, actually, in his encyclical had a little section I could show you another slide about where he said, how do we use this stuff usefully? But you have to have an intention. I guarantee you that the bubble will win unless you develop. It's like Dan Kahneman's book about thinking fast and slow. Thinking slow is basically stopping and thinking about how you're thinking. And if we don't develop that skill, and this relates to all the Trumpy, all this intensity is about not stepping back from your own thought processes and letting your feelings dominate, then we're in trouble. Can I see one more question on the left-hand side? Yeah, I was just wondering if you could comment on how you've seen the increasing polarization in the US reflect on reporting in your community and with respect to the environment, et cetera. Well, if I had time to fix my presentation a little more, there was a video shot last year in, I mentioned earlier in the day to some students, in Woodward County, Oklahoma, which, according to a Yale survey, was the most skeptical county in America on global warming. And it's mostly oil and gas families. And it's a three-minute video. It's on dot Earth. You just search for Woodward, Oklahoma, Revkin, CNN. You'll find it. And these people, the first minute and a half, they all are just like you would think. This older lady says, oh, out here, Al Gore's name is a cuss word. So it's like that. And then halfway through, it shifts to discussion about energy. And even the guy who's the ultimate pocket protector, oil and gas guy who thinks God controls the climate, he says that. He says, we've got half of our roof is covered with solar panels. And we're going to do the rest of it because we want to get off the grid entirely.  And he'll fight you forever on global warming. And his reasoning was not about the George Schultz kind of security. We don't have to buy oil. It was about independence. He doesn't want to have to pay a utility when he can do it himself. So you can, if you want to build a broader impetus in divided America around climate progress, then often this thing to do is not talk about climate. And it's not like a cop-out.  But if it's the way to develop a common conversation on a solution that everyone thinks makes sense for some reason or other, and this is the same, the Yale survey shows that high, there's no red and blue states. No red and blue states on increased research and renewable R&D, like renewable energy R&D. Regulating CO2 as a pollutant, it's not red and blue. Because all look kind of yes. Because people have an ethical understanding of pollution is a bad. So that means a lot of environmental groups who are all climate, climate, climate have some work to do. Great. I'll remind you and invite you to the energy social outside for the next 56 and 1 half minutes. And finally, thank Andy one last time. Thank you.


What's up everybody? Jason here for jaspyskatespace.com. 2023 Canadian National Treasures Baseball just sold out. This is a four box case break PYT number 18. So thank you guys. I did see more back there so we actually can post more. And again people love the NT. It's been great this year. 12 team R&B for this one guys. And there's the customer names with the teams that we'll keep an eye out for. Well that's weird. Why isn't my, hold on one second. My chat's not connected to the YouTube stream. Sorry guys if you guys have been talking to me I haven't been able to see my chat. Hold on. Yeah a re-stream is disconnected. I don't know why. Don't worry Steve. I'll make sure at the end too that we add them all in there. I just seen your chat. It's definitely streaming. I don't know why the chat's disconnected though. Alright I'll uh, I'll dual chat it. I already did a mic. It has something to do with re-stream. This isn't a YouTube chat. This is re-stream connecting to YouTube. Yeah I'll add it right now Steve. Don't worry man. I don't forget about anybody. I might forget for a few seconds. For a few minutes or so. Oh my god they got so lucky. Oh my god. He fumbled it too. Actually one sec guys. Let me move this chat up. Okay. Wow what a hustle play. Who's that?  Little added bonus incentive for special teams. Number 45. What a hustle play. Hey man the Packers are for real right now man. I don't care. This isn't a fluke. They're just playing good football at the right time. Yeah that is true too. They are fully healthy at the right time too. That is true. I mean their receivers were always banged up for the most of the year right? Wicks is out. Aaron Jones out. Jaden Reed out. All of those guys are basically banged up on offense. Alright future fame America's past time to 150 and it's a Jordan Lawler. Very nice. Michael with the Diamondbacks. He I think he tore his pectora muscle and he was out for the year I think. He had a season ending injury though or a season long ending injury. Yeah yeah yeah that's what I'm saying yeah. Jack was it was it his shoulder? I don't remember what we actually have in the backyard but I know he had a season ending or a season long injury where he was gonna be out for the year but for Texas going to Tristan. Grace and Rodriguez to 49. Touchdown. Touchdown. What's going on here man? This is a game alright. Orioles going to Matt. And we got Whitey Ford 15 out of 16. Oh they're gonna go for two. I guess they are down by one so might as well. I mean they were down by one so. Yankee is going to Matt. One of one three-color patch of Ellie DeLaCruz. Eric with the Cincinnati Red straight up buddy. Joe left his little button there.  Wow wide open again. Man he almost dropped that too. Here you go. You got a little bit of Joe well. Well we can. All aboard. The Big Hit Express. We got Ricky Titan into 49. Toronto. Toronto. Going to the Blue Jays and Ed.  Oh man. Is it been a good game? Well they're only up by two that means it has been a good game. 18 out of 99. Does my boy SJ have more than 30 points? Like always? Cleveland. Guardians going to Chris. Colson Montgomery to 99. White talks going to Eric. I'll see. SGA 30 points. Exactly. We got Jack Lathur again for Texas. Out of 99. Another one for Tris and the Rangers. Yeah it's automatic Steve you know for the most part. And how about a Bobby Wood Jr. for Eric and the Royals. Nice service. Good box for you here man. First box. Nice box. Nice nice box. Wow Ted Williams legendary materials for Boston. Nice. Boston Red talks going to Kev. Gary Carter for the Mets. 12 team R&B. Wow that's the first hit for the 12 team R&B. 14. Spot four going to Ed. Alright then we got David Ortiz Big Papi to 25. We got Masatake Yoshida two color patch. Another one there for Boston. Moises Alou for Houston to 10. One two three color patch as well. And we got James Wood for Washington. Going to the 12 team R&B. That's two out of 99. So two is Brian Frank. We have a very nice Zach Meen Colossal patch autograph. Three color patch are two out of 25. That is Carl Rotto Rocky's Ed. And we have what's going on here Tris. Just a bunch of Jack Lighters. Just going to have his whole collection of hits in this product by the end of this break. And we have, wow, Jackson Churrio. There we go. That's why we wanted to get him in the R&B, huh? 33 out of 99. Spot three going to Brian Frank. And the last one is a printing plate. Is that Rolderick or Rice? Yeah, one on one for the Yankees. Noice. Oh, he almost intercepted. What are you doing?  That's two interceptions Brock Purdy should have right now. I mean, D.B. is a big part for sure.  I mean, right now it just seems like Purdy just hasn't been in rhythm really. Had a lot of overthrown balls today already. So as much as you're missing D.B. I mean, it's not the reason why you would lose this game, right? I mean, also the 49ers offense has been getting so many flags and penalties, right? And can't stop Jordan Love right now. And all those weapons he has. So that's a little bit more than just D.B. Alright, added 25. Future fame, past time. Wow, another Jordan Lawler. This time with a beautiful four-color patch. One, two, three, four. Very nice. That is for Michael and the Diamondbacks. Alright, Andy Rodriguez to 49. Yeah, Maddie, I mean, I'm not going to say that just yet to the game's over potentially, but so far, Brock is not playing well. You know, he's been lucky hasn't thrown two interceptions. Pirates, 12 team R&B, four going ahead. Ryan Rocio to 25 for Cleveland. Chris Panger. And we have a Tress Speaker for Boston, Treasured Stats. I should really love these Treasured Stats cards. They're so awesome. And we have a George Brett for Kansas City. Dalton rushing to 10. 7 out of 10. Los Angeles Dodgers. Dodgers, that's going to Ed. We got Lizardo Montes, 9 out of 10. Nice four-color patch. Seattle Mariners going to Richard. Now what a beautiful signature. Jimmy Rollins, 6 out of 10. So nice. Philly going to Ed. And then we have a Yuli for Philly. Stars and Stripes RPA. And more for Texas. This time it's not Jack Leiter. Tristan. It's Evan Carter. 98 out of 99. Which I believe he was a big post-season rookie per farward. All right. Unomas. Unomas, guys. All right, Hall of Fame Materials, Luke Ablin. I just want to make sure which Chicago sometimes I kind of forget. Hall of Fame Materials, that is actually Chicago White Sox. So White Sox, that's going to Eric. Kevin Pirata, actually behind him. So yeah. Metz. 12 team R&B. Zero. What about Bowman's best number five lucky 17? Zero's going to Brian Frank. And we got a Yuli for Philly. And we got a Randy Johnson San Francisco edition. One of the 12 team R&B. 19 out of 25. Spot nine going to Joel. Then we got a triple, a three-color patch in autograph. Owen Murphy for Atlanta. Atlanta is actually a 12 team R&B, sir. 42. Spot two is Brian Frank. Then we got a Orelvius Martinez for Toronto, which is going to Ed. We have a Nick Gonzalez to 99. Patch autograph. That's for the Pittsburgh Pirates, which is going to go 11. Spot one going to Jason Gonzalez. And we have Barry Larkin, six out of 25 or eight out of 25, I should say. Still going to go straight up to Eric and the Reds. And then last hit is going to be another Evan Carter. 46 out of 99. He said, let's finish drawing another banger. Well, nice hit right here though, right? There you go, Tris. And there you go, guys. That was the break. So nothing super, super crazy minus Jackson Chriro, I feel like, for the R&B, but there was a lot of R&B hits though. And then, like I said, really nice case here regardless. We got that Ellie Dilla Cruz 101 Relic earlier. And some really nice stuff in general, guys. Appreciate it, guys. Thank you. Again, I'll post another one up, jaspyscasebreak.com.


Next question is from Tad Mills. What are your opinions on the multi-grip bars for benching? I don't have a lot of experience with these. Justin, have you used them? Yeah, I've used them. I mean, I like it. It's interesting. It's a different feel. With that sort of a neutral grip, you know, and then coming in for a narrow, I like it a lot for like narrow grip bench pressing, which I've used it for before. But really, it's just a slightly different recruitment pattern.  But, you know, I just look at it as another way to like provide a different type of a stimulus, but that's about it. Yeah, I feel the same way about it. I think it's neat. It's a neat. I mean, there's so many cool bars and stuff that are out now.  The Bison Bar. Yeah, the Bison Bar. Like, and, you know, I don't get a chance to squat with it very often. It was fun to squat with it. Like, do I necessarily think that it's necessary or it's like so much better than the straight bar that it's like, oh, this is the answer. It's like, no, I think it's a cool way to vary. If you're training a lot, right, and you've been training consistently for a long time, I think these are all cool tools. I don't think it's the difference maker of you building this amazing chest because you've got a bar where you can change the position. I think people get really pumped on it when they've had like wrist issues, for instance, and like, you know, maybe this is a way that they could put the wrist in sort of a better position where they feel like it's secure and stable. You know, and that might be some value to that. But, yeah, like, it's just a different stimulus. I could see that with the close grip because one of the challenges with the close grip is the angle on the wrist. Yeah, you got to break your, either got to break your wrist or it just feels really weird the way you're flared. Especially at the bottom. Where if you get to do close grip, you can turn it in a neutral position. It's a lot more comfortable. The reason why I've never messed with these is because I've always done that with dumbbells. So if I wanted my wrist neutral, and here's why changing the wrist help gives you maybe different results than, you know, with other exercises. It's not necessarily the wrist, but rather where the elbows follow. So when I have my wrist in this neutral position, it more naturally makes my elbows bringing a little closer. Exactly, they pull it in. Yeah, I'm going to get more shoulder recruitment. I'm going to get a little bit more tricep recruitment. So I've just done it with dumbbells. So I've done that.  So I'm with Justin, I like it for that reason because you're right. When you do a close grip bench press, which I love to do for triceps, you have a bit of an elbow flare, which you would get more tricep involved if I could be in the neutral position and tuck my elbows in. So that bar allows you to do that.


When the words came out of Dr. Lacanian that I had multiple masses, I had a very large mass on my pancreas. I was in a bit of a denial, so when my biopsy results did come back and it revealed lymphoma, I was a sense of relief. It was a sense of, we can beat this, we've got a chance. But that didn't happen. My cancer may have improved a little bit, but it was finding another way. It was mutating. It was outsmarting the chemotherapy. I was very, very scared. But there was another way, and that was CAR T immunotherapy. So with CAR T therapy, what we do is we collect T cells directly from the patient's own bloodstream. So these are a patient's own immune cells, and we take these cells and we then genetically engineer them. Interestingly, using a viral particle that's very similar to HIV that is able to inoculate the cell and deliver a gene, a novel gene to the T cell. And that novel gene then migrates into the chromosomes, gets integrated into the chromosomes, and starts to produce a new protein called a CAR. A CAR stands for chimeric antigen receptor. It's not something that exists in nature. It's a freak of nature. It's a product of synthetic biology. And what it is on the outside, it's an antibody molecule that's able to recognize a marker on the surface of the cancer cell. And that's connected to a series of signaling domains or molecular switches that work inside the T cell. So once that antibody is engaged on the outside and sends a signal through that stalk of that molecule to the inside of the cell, that turns on the cell to divide and become activated. And so that T cell is essentially reprogrammed and redirected by that genetic modification, by that genetic engineering. But once the CAR T goes in and latches on to the cancer, with each cell that it kills, it starts to multiply.  This is really a living therapy. These cells, we give a small number of these cells and they expand many thousands of fold within the body. And these individual T cells then can go and recognize other cancer cells.  And I got stronger and stronger each day afterwards. Looking forward to seeing the PET scan, wanting to know what was the outcome, did it work, how much of it was gone. And when I did get that PET scan 30 days later, I couldn't believe no cancer, all of it was gone. They couldn't find anything. I could not believe. I could not believe my good fortune. I could not believe it. I've been in this field for 35 years and this is really an advance, an achievement that we couldn't even conceive of back then. It's just truly, it's remarkable. It's miraculous. It is a dream come true for patients, and also for those who've been working in the field for so many years to devise and develop these therapies.


Good. All right, well, thank you for having us here. As was mentioned, my name is Carl Dietrich. I'm the co-founder and chief technical officer at Terrafugia. Terrafugia, our mission is to make personal flight more practical for everyone, to truly turn the dream of a flying car into a practical reality. We were founded in 2006 by five graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We're now within two years of delivering our first product, the transition, a prototype of which is out here on the floor, the exhibition floor. We currently employ about 100 people around the world, with offices in the Boston area, Hongzhou, China. And we're opening an R&D center here in the San Francisco Bay Area. And we are here because we're hiring. It's a very exciting time for us. My background, I received my PhD from MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. And I've been a pilot since high school. So this has been a personal passion of mine for a long time. And as was mentioned, the big news this week is that Terrafugia is now part of the same family of companies as Volvo and Lotus. We were just acquired by the Zijang Geely Holding Group, which has a tremendous financial depth and access to global markets. So it's a very exciting time for Terrafugia as a company to have access to not only the financial backing of this global automotive company, but to also have the access to the global markets that we've been seeking for a long time to truly disrupt personal mobility. Why are we interested in this? Why is a company like Geely acquiring a small startup like Terrafugia? Well, somewhere between 2% to 4% of the global GDP is lost due to things like traffic congestion. Currently, about half of the world's 7 billion people live in urban areas. And that number is growing by about 60 million people a year. So the growth number is about seven times the population of New York City. It's incredible, and it's not changing. It's just going to continue going in this direction. So you look at traffic congestion. I took this picture actually out of the front window of a taxi cab in Beijing. And this is typical. It's actually worse now in China than it is here. And you look up, and there's a whole lot of room up there. So this is an old story. We've all heard this for more than 100 years, and we've kind of written it off. People have been flying for 100 years, but why don't we fly more today? Little airplanes have been around for a long time, but it really is a niche industry. There are only about 160,000 general aviation airplanes out in the field right now, and only about 600,000 private pilots. Almost everybody has a driver's license, but less than a fraction of a percent of the population in the United States know how to fly. There's lots of training required, certainly a major barrier. Typically, getting a private pilot's license would take about 60 to 70 hours. The minimum requirement was 40 hours. And you have to learn a lot. You have to learn a lot of rules. You have to develop physical skills to land an aircraft. And then once you do become a pilot, there are some major barriers that keep pilots from flying small airplanes today. Little airplanes are fundamentally more weather sensitive than large commercial airliners. So weather is one of the biggest reasons that pilots don't fly more often. There's a high recurring cost of ownership to keep an aircraft. And they don't achieve the true time savings that is possible by flying at 150 miles an hour. On average, a pilot spends about half an hour stopped at an airport, just switching between driving and flying overhead. And then finally, most of the 5,000 public use airports around the United States have no rental car counters. The industry just isn't big enough to justify Hertz or Avis setting up a little counter at most of these little airports. That said, these little airports are our nation's largest underutilized transportation resource. They exist out there and very, very few people use them. These are not the SFOs. These are the small regional airports. This is what we are trying to do at Tarifoodia, is take advantage of the infrastructure that exists, bring some new technology into the equation, and see if we can change the way, start to change the way we get around. Our first product is called the transition. I'll show a brief video of that now. So the transition is really targeted at this existing market today, the general aviation pilot population. It allows them to keep their aircraft at home in their garage, saving hangar expense. You drive it on normal roads, just like driving a normal car.  It's all about convenience, making it more practical, bringing it home. You drive to one of these little airports, go in the gate, unfold the wings in about 40 seconds, do your pre-flight inspection, and take off, flying to your destination over whatever traffic exists at a speed of about 100 miles an hour direct. And then when you land at the airport, you fold up the wings in another 40 seconds, and you drive right to the door of where you want to be. So the transition was designed to fit inside a new category of aircraft called light sport aircraft. That has a 20-hour training minimum instead of a 40- hour training minimum. Most people get their sport pilot certificate in about 35 hours. So by bringing the product into that category, we really are lowering that initial training barrier. We make it very, very simple to fly. Because you can drive in bad weather, the vehicle is less sensitive to the weather variability. The high recurring costs of ownership are reduced by allowing the operator to keep their aircraft at home. And because the aircraft runs on normal automotive gasoline instead of aviation fuel, which is both better for the environment, and about half the price, it's actually quite a bit more economical on an ongoing hourly basis. Because the pilot spends less time stopped on the ground at the airport, they can actually beat much higher performance aircraft on a given door-to-door trip because they spend less time stopped. It's very simple. There's no magic here. And then, of course, because you don't have to worry about renting a car, the fact that most of these little airports don't have any sort of rental car counter or many of them don't have Uber's nearby even, it's not an issue. So this is our first step. And because this is a technical conference, I'm going to go a little bit more into the detail of some of the really cool technologies that we're integrating into this first product. And some of that insight will sort of give you a vision as to where we are headed in the future. First, we'll start with some of the more traditional aviation technologies. The transition has a fairly extraordinary custom wing design, and if you come to our booth, you can see this in person. We developed a custom airfoil for the vehicle due to a number of very interesting constraints. We have a wing that folds up against itself, so we wanted something with a flat bottom to minimize the aerodynamic impact of having a hinge on the bottom of the vehicle. It is not what's called a natural laminar flow airfoil. This is a little bit more draggy, but that gives it ability to resist changes due to the buildup of road debris. So if you're driving around on the road and you get dirt splashed up on the leading edge of your wing, it's not going to dramatically change the performance of this vehicle. It achieves one of the highest maximum lift coefficients of any 2D airfoil section without a flap. And it has a very low moment coefficient, which means that we can keep the tail volume, the tail much shorter, allowing the vehicle to fit inside a garage. Are there any aero engineers anywhere in this building? OK, all right, one of them. All right, so for you. This is some data on that. At a higher level, what is this? One of the things that we're very proud of at TerraFugia is that by bringing the transition to market, we expect to statistically improve the level of safety of personal aviation. And that comes from a variety of things. The visibility out the front of the vehicle is actually quite extraordinary. Most aircraft you're sitting either on top of a wing or right underneath a wing.  You can see out to the side, front or down. You don't have to worry about making clearing turns. Any pilots in the room? Maybe one. All right. OK, we have an angle of attack indicator. One of the leading causes of fatal accidents in small general aviation aircraft is simply loss of control. The aircraft on a turn from base leg to final will exceed the maximum angle of attack. And the aircraft will stall and auger into the ground by having knowledge of where you sit relative to your stall angle of attack. You can avoid that sort of situation. In addition, once you do stall the aircraft, the vehicle has very, very benign stall characteristics. This picture actually is a picture of the vehicle in a fully-stalled flight. You'll notice the little black tufts are making all sorts of crazy shapes near the fuselage of the vehicle. Basically, what that means is the flow is very unsteady there. The airflow is separated near the root of the wing. But you'll also notice that if you look out near the edge of the wing over the aileron, out on the outboard section, the airflow is very nice. What this means is that even when the aircraft is fully stalled, the pilot actually still has control over the role of the aircraft. It's still flyable, even in stalled configuration. So that's what we mean by very benign stall characteristics. It's very hard to get into a situation where you would be out of control. We have yet to achieve it in this vehicle. This vehicle has a much lower pilot workload than any normal general aviation aircraft. These things probably don't mean anything to you folks in the room, but let me just put it this way. It makes it much more like driving a car than flying an aircraft.  There is manual control of the mixture. They have carburetors. They have all sorts of manual control things that, frankly, the automotive industry solved 50 years ago. So we are really bringing general aviation into the 21st century and making it as simple and easy and reliable to fly as possible. Since we don't have any pilots in the room, I won't get into any of these other issues on the bottom, but the real key here is we designed the vehicle from a pilot's perspective to be psychologically help pilots make good choices. Pilots still are key to the equation. And there is a lot of interest right now. We're very interested also in bringing the technology to market that will allow machine learning and AI to make it even more safe in the long run. There are some major, major barriers to achieving the level of reliability of a human being. Statistically speaking, a human being, a human pilot, makes a fatal mistake once every about 10 to the fifth hours, once every 100,000 hours. Given the variable circumstances that the pilot has to deal with, that's actually rather extraordinary. And while, in theory, we can contemplate AI and machine learning algorithms that might someday get to that level, it's extremely difficult to compensate for all the failures, all the sensor failures, and maintain the perspective of your situation that a human being can do intuitively. And we're not there right now. So in the meantime, we're making it easier for the pilot with the idea that if we make it easier for the pilot, that will actually make it easier for the machine learning algorithms in the long run. One other very cool technology that we bring in the transition is a full vehicle parachute. So if all else were to fail, you can pull a handle and bring the entire aircraft down under a parachute. The vehicle incorporates automotive crash safety features. So we have a safety cage, crumple zones, integral fuel cell. These are things you don't see in general aviation today. We really are setting the highest bar for safety in the GA industry. We've done extensive simulated crash testing of the vehicle, all sorts of different scenarios. And you really do push the state of the art of simulation as you do this type of analysis. Any composite material experts in the room? Not so much, maybe. Yeah, over there. OK. So you know that the failure of composite materials is extremely difficult to predict. How much energy will that failure incur? You can predict about when it will fail, but not necessarily how it will fail and how much energy will be absorbed in the process of failing. So we use isotropic materials, aluminum, to absorb energy in a collision. And we rely on carbon fiber and composite materials for our rigid structures that we want to keep intact to protect the occupants. So we take these simulated crash pulses and we feed them into simulated crash test dummies. So we can actually do a full range of crash testing and have expectations for what sensors in an actual physical crash test dummy would output before we actually do any sort of physical crash testing. And that helps us reduce the cost of our development program. Some of the other very cool technologies. So right now there's a lot of buzz in the aviation industry about electric and hybrid electric propulsion systems. And there's good reason for that. The specific power of electric motors is on the order of five kilowatts per kilogram. The specific power of a certified gas turbine engine, a jet engine that would be on an aircraft today, is about half of that. So we're almost doubling the specific power. So what's the big problem with electric propulsion for aircraft? It's the energy. It's the battery. The battery technology to do pure electric flight is just on the edge of being viable today with mandatory legal reserve minimums. The FAA requires for a flight in what's called visual flight rules, you have to have at least a half hour reserve. So whatever amount of energy you need to get to your destination, you need to be able to fly for at least a half hour more. That's very difficult to achieve with today's battery technologies unless you go to vehicles that are more like sail planes that are extremely efficient and less practical for what we would call normal flying missions. That said, electric can have a big impact on aviation, particularly if we go to hybrid configurations where we're still relying on fuel for the storage of energy. And we use the electric motor to provide additional power in certain situations, like in takeoff, high rates of climb situations. So this is an example of one of the system architecture that we have in the transition, where you have a traditional certified aircraft engine driving power back through to a propeller, and you have a motor generator on that prop shaft that powers a bus. And that allows us to, gives us the flexibility of using electric ground drive when we're driving on the road. But it also gives us a very cool capability, which no other aircraft has out there right now, which is the ability to have effectively an electric power boost or what we would call an electric afterburn, which is going to be a very nice feature if you're a pilot of these things. Imagine you're in a situation where you're at a high density altitude and you need to climb out a little bit faster. You can kick in an extra 20% power. You notice that. That all goes into climb rate. So it's a fantastic safety feature that you're giving the pilot. You can't do that for more than a couple minutes, because of the limit on the battery capacity. But just being able to do it for 30 seconds can change, can save somebody's life. And that's really what you're talking about. When it comes down to it, aviation is all about safety, right? Making these things work reliably, consistently. And not only will this be a fantastic safety feature, it's actually going to be a whole lot of fun for a pilot. Some of the other new technology that we're integrating into the transition is a data network that's fully deployed now, satellite and ground-based data stations, part of this ADS-B network, where all aircraft in key parts of the national airspace will be required to broadcast GPS position and heading to this data network, and it's freely available. So effectively, when we deploy a transition, you'll have an image of all the other air traffic around you that is something that today you would not have in a normal general aviation aircraft unless you had radar on board. This way, we get the effect of long-distance radar capability allowing you to steer clear of other traffic. I alluded a little bit earlier to machine learning and AI. One of the big problems with incorporating machine learning and AI into aircraft is that the FAA, the way they certify products, is they need to know if your system gets this input, what's the output going to be? And how can you prove to me that it's going to be that output with this level of reliability? That's what certification is all about. By its very nature, machine learning and artificial intelligence, you can't do that by the definition of machine learning. This is a huge problem for the certification of the future of flying cars. We would like to implement nondeterministic algorithms that give us new capabilities that we don't have today. I mean, the pilot at its heart is a nondeterministic algorithm. The FAA is comfortable with giving a person a pilot's license, but they're not yet comfortable with giving an algorithm a pilot's license. So how are we going to get around that? This is the current proposal, and it's evolving into an industry standard right now. We're very heavily involved in the committees that are creating these standards. Basically, you have a monitor system, a safety monitor system that is certified. So while normally you may be operating with this complex or nondeterministic algorithm, you have a safety monitor system that can switch it off and implement a certified recovery maneuver. So this type of concept is not very sophisticated, but it already has been employed and fielded. And this is just a very cool video that I want to share of one of these systems. This is what's called automatic ground collision avoidance. So if the system has a model of the performance of the vehicle, and it has a terrain model of the land around you, and if the safety monitor on board predicts that you're getting too close to the terrain, it will execute an automatic recovery maneuver. This system has been fielded on F16s and is already credited with saving four lives. This is not our work. This is actually work that's been pioneered by a team at NASA Armstrong. But it's an example of the type of technology that we're hoping to bring to market. So what you see here is a cockpit view on F16. This pilot is pulling a 9G turn. And they black out in the middle of a 9G turn with full afterburner on. And they wind up rolling into the ground. So you can see the altitude display on the right. So he's up at 17,000 feet right now. And now he's basically nosed over because he's blacked out, heading towards the ground. Two, recover. Two, recover. Two, recover. That's the automatic system kicking in and recovering. The pilot had blacked out. He would be dead without that system on board, without that safety monitoring system. And he recovers consciousness and can fly away. So that's the kind of thing that we're talking about implementing with that sort of algorithm. So let's create a vision now for what we could do if we had machine learning capability on board. We could do things like planning smart routes. If you had a deterministic route planner today, and you looked at the weather, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, oftentimes in the morning, you have fog come in. But oftentimes it burns off by a little bit later in the afternoon. Pilots know that. So a pilot could plan a route that takes into account some of that experience, some of that knowledge that they've gained through the years. And they could achieve more missions, which in the end could achieve those missions safely. Whereas if you had a hard-coded algorithm that if the visibility wasn't good when you wanted to depart, you wouldn't be able to go. At the same time, pilots may know that, hey, you know, about three o'clock in the afternoon, the winds pick up at this particular airport. And therefore, I'm actually not going to fly into that airport because that's going to be crosswinds, and I'm probably going to be uncomfortable. I'll be outside my personal limits. So I'll fly to this other airport where I'll have better winds. Again, those sorts of things, those are decisions that pilots make today that are very, very difficult for a computer to code in because they have to do not only with the performance of the system, but weather and things like that that are very, very hard to predict. But if you have some experience with the local environment, you can make better decisions, safer decisions, and decisions that allow you to also be more productive. So that's why we want, in the long run, to enable things like machine learning in personal aviation. So the long-term vision for flying cars. Many of you will see lots of media about flying cars, not only from TeraFugia this week, but there are a number of different companies all around, particularly in the Bay Area. Airbus is doing the A-Cube Vahana program here. Boeing just acquired Aurora Flight Sciences. They're doing an urban electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicle. TeraFugia is also entering the vertical takeoff and landing space with electric vertical takeoff and landing capability. Our plans are not public yet, but they're very exciting. And I'm very excited about the future that we've got in front of us. So if you are interested in this space, I hope you'll come by our booth. We are right now hiring controls engineers, aero engineers, systems engineers, electrical engineers, embedded software folks. And I'd like to talk to some machine learning folks who want to be in on the next generation of transportation. That's it. Thank you very much.