Welcome everybody to our Future Tense event on imagining transportation futures with Secretary Pete Buttigieg and some of our talented Future Tense fiction writers. I'm Paul Butler I'm the President and Chief Transformation Officer here at New America. I'll just give you a little bit of background and Future Tense is a project of New America, Arizona State University and Slate magazine. We explore the impact of technology on society and how we live. We're so excited today for the conversation. Future Tense publishes ideas journalism on this theme and host conversations like this one, all under the tagline as citizens guide to the future. A few years ago in alliance with our partners at ASU Science Center for Science and Imagination we decided to add speculative fiction to our citizens guide to the future toolkit on publishing a monthly fiction story and response essay on slate. In our Future Tense fiction editors wrote in the preface to their first published anthology of fiction, and I quote, we hope that Future Tense fiction stories help us imaginatively rehearse possible future scenarios and help us get better at recognizing where things could be different. Even when they're hard to glimpse scientific and technological elites and leaders often present the future as a fade out complete. A good story, though, can help us find a different point of view to scout out the decision points so that we can muster our resources and act at the right moment. I would like a lofty goal on the part of my Future Tense colleagues, and then the real world of Washington policymaking annual appropriations bills and the like we asked the question, is there a role to be played by future scenarios derived from our imagination and from our art. Secretary Buttigieg, we're so honored to have you. Thanks for making the time to join us. Thanks very much for really, really pleased to be here and really a fan of the work that's going on here so thanks to New American Future Tense for having. Thank you. I want to jump right in because we have a great panel that will follow our exchange and conversation. And I would love to start with a question and maybe a thought around. What happens as ideas get exchanged what we may describe as in the horizontal, sometimes the most innovative ideas and design and in process are inspired. They're borrowed from other industries. So things like food and beauty or music and architecture or automotive and fashion. We often see that kind of exchange across sectors. And I'm wondering as you do your work about thinking and imagination of transportation. Are there industries that you borrow from other sectors that inspire you. It's a great place to begin. First of all, let me offer a reflection which is it's striking how much of our imagination about the future is centered on transportation, at least in terms of the imagery of it right you look at how the establishing shot of a sci fi show or film for example tells you you're in the future and usually what establishes it is there's different ways people are getting around there's there's levitating cars or there's starships or something like that and so we've always rightly or wrongly had a disproportionate sense that what tells us we're in the future and not the present or what marks the present is different from the past is is how we get around. But of course the reality is a lot of the most profound technologies that affect our lives, including, ironically, the most profound technologies that affect transportation itself aren't necessarily vehicles or what's on board vehicles. So, you want to talk about a horizontal translation one thing to consider is that in the last decade. I would argue the most important piece of transportation technology was not a vehicle it was the smartphone and certainly the thing that changed transportation for most of us most tangibly was probably the rise of rideshare companies like Uber and lift. And they were using the same kind of cars that the taxis use that we use to get ourselves around. But the way in which we would summon them changed and through that a different labor model emerged a different means of getting around to merge with good things and bad things that came out of it. But it's a reminder the value of that that lateral thinking. And it will continue to be the case that communications technology will mean as much to transportation as propulsion technology well. I think increasingly you're seeing automotive companies turning into software companies. I think it's never a bad idea to look at fields that aren't even exactly industries as such, like film and literature to recenter our imagination on why transportation matters in terms of its human impact. And that's what we try to focus on here at the department to we deal a lot with with technology but try not to get absorbed in tech for tech sake we try to think of it in terms of how will be deployment of this technology. Make everyday life different, make it better or worse from the perspective of safety or equity or economic empowerment. Those are the kinds of questions that should be keeping us busy as policymakers. And that can be touched by any field but certainly I think the humanities is one that arouses our imagination about what it's like to be somebody different than who we are. And I think we, we won't get into the policy portion of that discussion today which is maybe I think an interesting place for us to stay and I'd love to go back to something you said, which really also provokes me to think about some of those works of fiction. As you said, they open a lot with these great images that that stick with us. I want to go back there and just as I think about things like the Flintstones, as I think about the Jetsons the matrix back to the future. You're absolutely right that that these images and stories that involve transportation really do create an impression about the future and the present. I'm wondering if you if you think about, you know, your favorite works of fiction that have transportation elements. What sticks with you one. Tell us what is one of those favorite works that that made an impression on you, particularly in the role that you have now. Look, I came up on Star Trek. And so, which is obviously very much about transportation right from from the shuttles to the to the the starships to the that that vision of the transporter that's the first time we see long distance transportation that doesn't involve a vehicle at all. But if you look at where Star Trek was predictive. Revealingly it actually wasn't on the transportation side right it was more things like the communication side the little especially from the original series in the, in the 60s they're the little devices that they use now resemble cell phones, sensing technology. If you think about a medical tricorder and how that relates to some of the most impressive things happening in life sciences. And if you look at the tricorder on the nose than than most of what we saw there from a transportation perspective. I do think it's interesting to think about the Jetsons and the Flintstones right both of them, unlike Star Trek with their transporters have the presumption of the the conveyance that moves you from from point A to point B there's the family car and the Jetsons it's the flying car right in the Flintstones it's the foot propelled vehicle. We've moved actually in both directions we've come to realize active transportation isn't a primitive thing it's a very advanced thing and we're doing more with bicycles and self propelled transportation in that regard. Haven't quite gotten to flying cars yet. But, but we have seen that that what what seems to change more than the, than the, you know, fact of the vehicle is its propulsion. And as we're moving into an electric vehicle future that's something to think about, but what even the Simpsons didn't, sorry, the Jetsons didn't we get a whole other conversation on the Simpsons. What even the Jetsons didn't picture is that, you know, by the time anybody's got a flying car, George Jetson probably doesn't have to drive it. And, and again it's revealing that sometimes what matters most is something we weren't really thinking about which is how we relate to these pieces of transportation technology versus you know what their physical capabilities like their speed for example actually are. Interesting and you're elevating something about these works of fiction and stories and time and the compression of time and the elasticity of time, which is really fascinating and brings me to another, maybe another area of exploration and just reflection. So much of the work around transportation has kind of a very present, very real, very now, kind of needs, need state, we have to get from point A to point B and solve issues that are with us in the moment. And then on the other hand, the work itself the output of the work, in many cases bridges tunnels that you know if we think very fundamentally about it has such permanence and such long duration. And then if you think about flying cars and we're forecasting way into the future. So we have to solve at these very, you know, kind of binary points or wide points if you will, the very present the very now, and the very far in the future. How do you think about that how do you resolve that in your day to day. Yeah, you've nailed a big question that we think about a lot, because a lot of the things we're building, especially with the new law and the funding that we have in the bipartisan infrastructure package. These are the means to build cathedrals of infrastructure and the nature of a cathedral is that it's takes a long time to complete and then it's in service for a very long time. We rely on the cathedrals of infrastructure from past generations right, we're figuring out what to not just iconic things like the Golden Gate Bridge but we're figuring out what to do about the Baltimore and Potomac tunnels they're 149 years old, and a lot of people depend on them right now for our passenger rail travel just give you one example. And so we have to make decisions that are a bit of a bet on the future, and at the same time we don't want to bet the farm on the future turning out one way or the other. So what I spent a lot of time thinking about is, how can we deploy our capital in an agile or nimble way. So that some of these decisions will make sense, even if we don't quite know how commuting patterns are going to work in seven years, let alone 50. But certain things are going to be true we know they're going to need bridges to get from one side of a physical barrier to another. We know that we're going to need resources and hubs where people can come together to access modes of transportation, even if those modes of all things like train stations or town squares or transit hubs or airports and ports. So what we've got to do is invest in the things we know we're going to need no matter what, and then create room for other things to happen that might be very difficult to picture. And the best way to do that is to not think about the asset first, but to think about the people that it'll affect first and, and to think really big about the effect that your investments are going to have give you an example around high speed rail, or any really service. You mentioned getting from point A to point B and part of the appeal. Is it if I'm going from somewhere if I, if I live in Washington I'm going to Newport Rhode Island, I might have the option one day of being able to do it on a faster sleeker train than I do today. That's true. But what's really interesting about a new rail service is that it might actually change. It might actually introduce a point C to your picture. In other words, it might become possible for you as somebody who works in a given community to live in a different community than you would have otherwise just because that train was there. In fact, over over the sweep of decades communities may come into existence, just because a certain commuting option materialized whether we're talking about a highway interchange, or a high speed rail stop or something else. And so what we really got to think about is not just how we create a newer maybe better faster cleaner safer way to get from point A to point B, but how the points a b c d and e change. So we make good choices about how infrastructure ought to work. That's the level of thinking we got to invite ourselves to do is not always easy, given the, as you mentioned the world of annual appropriations and immediate state of good repair concerns that are preoccupying a lot of the people who work on infrastructure for a living today. That's a beautiful point that that introduction of point C and kind of the emergence of that, that third point. It really also about the people changing even who move between points a B and C and, and a lot of the conversation we've had internally is around, not just transportation but mobility. Not just physical mobility but social mobility. And I can imagine as you're talking and sharing that reflection that in a lot of ways that point C could also be a reflection of how the people are evolving as well in terms of social mobility. And we think about equity as you mentioned earlier, earlier, accessibility and affordability. I looked at there's always been a deep connection between social and economic mobility and physical mobility as part of why access to mobility is so important and it's often so politically contested right it's not an accident in my view that one of the single moments of the civil rights movement was the bus boycott and these struggles over who got equitable access to transportation not just the dignified and equal use of transportation assets but often even whether people were served at all.  Most dramatically when it is denied. When you see the living in a community that is a, that can be a transit desert, for example in the same way that we have food deserts impacts the life choices and the economic opportunities of the people who are there. Transportation is empowering and access to transportation empowers people to reach educational opportunity, economic opportunity. And also the ability to cohesion the ability to gather with loved ones or participate in civic life. These things are deeply, deeply connected and it's one of the reasons why I think it's always a good idea to think about transportation as a form of freedom. And there's so many so many works of literature and art filmmaking that I think bring some of those images to life and really signal and communicate what you're referring to. And this idea and this connection between transportation mobility freedom at the other end. I'd love to try something in as we move into kind of the last few moments, maybe a couple questions and do a little bit of a rapid fire round if you're up for it. All right, let's try it. So in, in, in futures planning. We often do this, this kind of, we're moving from to as a way of just framing very quickly, what a evolution looks like and what a future scenarios look like to do the radical reimagining. So, if I give you a from as a as an example of today. The rapid fire would for you to just give us a forecast or a quick reaction to, what would it look like in the future. So one day in the future this may be possible it's not to say that we're actually working on it or that you're actually working on it, but just a way of projecting a possibility. Sound good. All right, we'll give it a shot. All right, let's see. So, from Mars. To the stars, I guess I mean if the Mars is our current destination, where we're mobilizing to try to go. It's exciting to think about what the next leap might be and that's, you know, not just getting around our solar system but well beyond. Yeah. So I'll try another one. Thinking about cars and automotive. So from a monthly car payment. A monthly mobility dividend. What I mean by that is, if we're looking way out into the future, where we have things like, let's imagine distributed energy generation, where you have resources at your house, whether it's a dramatically more efficient. We have solar panels and wind resources and we have there something we can't even imagine that just on your, you know, from your home, you can put more into the transportation system and you get out of it through things like energy. So that you would participate in creating so much value. They'd actually get a net dividend on it, instead of paying into it on a net basis. And that's pretty far out. A more intermediate goal might be from a monthly car payment to a monthly transportation payment that's quite a bit less than a car payment that covers everything. And we're actually seeing certain glimmers of this now. So some of the rideshare companies, for example, are starting to look at mobility as a service where you have some kind of interface.  So that's our vision, I think that's well within our lifetimes if not within our grasp. Could that could that get us to the stars for that monthly dividend get us to the star. Eventually, I don't see why not. Let's see why not either. Alright let's try one more. I think you actually you mentioned it earlier, we were talking about some works of fiction. So from flying cars to flying. Well look flying packages are around the corner so we might start with those and let's be careful with those you don't want all the packages flying every which way. But those might well be on our horizon. Great. Thanks for George thanks for doing that one. We'll think of some more. I just want to maybe wrap up with maybe one final question.  So in New America, we think a lot about building the field. And we're committed to building the fields that we work in the next generation of voices the next generation of thinkers. And we have many programs that do that work. So we'll reflect 50 years from now on the secretary of transportation. So who'll be sitting in your seat. Could you tell us who you imagine might be there what set of skills, would they need to have what experiences would they have had by that point. Well that's that's a fun one to think about so if I envision 2072. And I'll still be puttering around watching what the secretary of transportation is up to. And the truth is this is a relatively young department, I should mention that it hasn't been around for 50 years. So we will not yet have reached the centennial. Or I guess it's right around 50 years, I should say but it was cobbled together. After the FAA and the federal highway administration already existed. I think some of the qualities will be the same. I think, you know, she or he will need to be thinking about the effect of transportation on has on people's ability to live lives that they're choosing. And that will be so, but I hope that to do list will be very different. By 2070s of course, we will have either succeeded or or failed on the climate challenge and it'll be very there'll be no escaping that we either pull it off or we didn't. And I try to veer away from the dystopian so let's suppose that we did let's suppose that we here in the 2020s got it right with things like the widespread adoption of electric vehicles, and the search for alternative sources of propulsion for the harder to sectors like maritime and aviation. That means that one of the big items on my to do list, which is climate will have more or less been dealt with by the time someone's doing that job in 50 years. Likewise, you know right now we're trying to deal with profound inequities in American transportation. It will be attractive to imagine the 50 years from now that's that's been done that the generations now in charge will have seen to that so that there's very little question of whether you can equitably access mobility to get to where you need to be. The things that are on the to do list now will stay that way. The first safety, who knows what things will be regulating for safety right now but probably more automated vehicles probably more drone type delivery of goods. Maybe jet packs and flying cars and all that, all that fun stuff we'll see. The idea of losing 40,000 people on our roadways as we do right now every year will be a grotesque and antiquated thought. Just as is, you know the idea today that that people would routinely be lost to dysentery or something like that that's another item that we ought to take care of so that my successor in 50 years doesn't have to. But safety will still be top of mind, I think, making sure that whatever technologies are around the corner then serve to benefit people will still be top of mind and I hope that a secretary who will have grown up, perhaps in the generation of my less than one year old will see as an environment of policy success. In other words they will have seen the experience of our society deciding to collect revenue and then use it to deliver good results on everything from healthcare to transportation infrastructure. We use that to build confidence in the power of collective action to do good things and balance the freedoms that are created by government getting out of the way with the freedoms that are created by government doing a good job and be able to do that approach to whatever infrastructure needs there are in the future. But I'm doing my best to make this funding, which we may not get again for 50 years or so, and build things that are in good enough shape that she or he won't won't have to worry quite as much as we do about them falling apart. That's a good, that's a good forecast and a good foreshadowing of I think what we are hoping for, and I think gives us a good springboard into the rest of how we'll spend the hour, some of the writers that have joined us. Mr. Secretary, we're going to let you go. I know your time is precious. We so appreciate you joining us for this and really to give us some things to think about in the future and I love the point of 2072. And it's maybe a way for us just to think about and do the work of imagining going forward. We so appreciate your time. We're going to pass off to our colleagues at Future Tense. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for matching with us. Great talking with you. Thank you. Take care. Today I'm going to now turn us towards the second part of our event today. Let me hand this off to Ed Finn he is the founding director of the Center for Science and the imagination at Arizona State University and the academic academic director of Future Tense Ed over to you. Thanks so much Paul. Thank you for that fabulous conversation and thank you to Secretary Booty judge as well. Really, really interesting and a beautiful setup I think for this conversation we're about to have. So the Center for Science and the imagination has a mission of inspiring collective imagination for better futures and Future Tense has been a collaboration of ours from the very beginning. I feel so lucky to be representing ASU in this partnership with New America and with Slate. And it Future Tense fiction is has always been dear to my heart because I think it speaks to the heart of what we do and the conversation that we just heard the way in which stories about the future can inspire real change in the present and can invite people to imagine in detail these different possibilities that might feel very abstract when you're talking about blueprints or you're talking about financial projections or you're talking about other kinds of complex visions or estimates of the future that are not really accessible, and even the experts who work on those different kinds of thought vehicles you might call them for the future, often don't feel like they have access to the bigger picture. And so a good story can invite engineers and policymakers and and members of the general public to all have a conversation together about what we're working towards, and whether that those are things we really want. And maybe most importantly of all, stories like the ones we publish in Future Tense fiction allow us to feel what it might be like to live in this future to recognize it not just on the plane of ideas or new technologies, or policies, but actual people living their lives and what is it going to feel like to wake up and and get out there in the morning and live in this world and is that a world that we want to, to give to our children is that a world that we want to try to work towards today. So let me briefly introduce our three fabulous speakers today, and then I'm going to set them up with an opening question. The author of The New York Times is a science fiction author, a contributor to the New York Times and New Scientist, and the co host of the award winning podcast our opinions are correct. One of the great podcast titles. Their most recent book is for lost cities a secret history of the urban age. John Yabuchi is an author of fiction and nonfiction and a former civil rights lawyer. His most recent book is the novel Goliath, and his novel riot baby when the ignite award World Fantasy Award and New England Book Award. And Linda Nagata is an author of science fiction and fantasy based in Maui Hawaii with a background in zoology perfection has won the locus and nebula awards and her most recent novel is the science fiction techno thriller Pacific storm. So very excited to have you all joining us. Hopefully you'll, they'll be on turn on turn on your camera soon. But I want to just start with that comment that Secretary Buddha judge made about the opening shots of science fiction stories which I thought was really astute. I hadn't really thought about the fact that it's he's he's absolutely right it always involves something moving around that's how we know that we're somewhere we're somewhere new we're not in Kansas anymore or that Kansas has dramatically changed. And I wanted to ask, as people who have done a lot of opening scenes for your stories and different science fictional worlds that you've imagined. Now, you think about that is what why do you think that transportation is so essential to our feeling of, you know, things have changed and and is this something that you found yourself doing in a story that you've written. I'm going to let's see what why don't we we start with you touchy. It's, I mean it's interesting it's funny it's a it's a point that I hadn't really thought of, which is particularly egregious given my filmic background. But oftentimes I think of these opening shots in the context of the genre that I'm sort of playing around in, in addition to science fiction and fantasy so glide for instance, particularly the beginning is a lot of commentary on the western. And, you know, the western is somebody comes to town or somebody leaves town. And so we have that beginning of Jonathan coming from the space colonies into an irradiated New Haven. And it's about his journey and the things that he's sort of thinking of, and that's, you know, guy comes to town and alternatively how to pay reparations the documentary the story that I wrote for future tense. And it doesn't play around in the heist genre, a little bit, you know, you have this sort of motley crew of people coming together to pull off this.  It's in a sort of Robin Hood fashion. But yeah, you have you have these people sitting down talking about yeah so we you know we had this we had this plan to like pay reparations. Launch this reparations plan in our town and so it's interesting like that's, that's oftentimes, you know, what I'm trying to do with opening scenes is sort of set. You know, get the reader an apostrophe of intrigue, so to speak. And it's really interesting that you, you also tie it to genre, and that there are sort of there's there's a transportation genre link as well which I hadn't really thought about. Emily how about you. Yeah, I mean, it is interesting that we center vehicles so much in our fiction. I also found that to be a really interesting point. I find that it is embarrassing because I'm thinking about my novels and all of them do start with transit. I am personally obsessed with transit so that is not too surprising, but I find that it's a good way to take readers through the world. And when when I was first working on my nonfiction book about cities for lost cities I talked to an architect who done a lot of urban planning and one of the things that he said to me was, when you go to a new city. What you should do is get on the transit downtown whatever transit and just take it to the end of the line and that will tell you everything you need to know about this city. And I did that actually the next city I went to after that was Istanbul, and I had an insane adventure on the train, which I found really valuable. And so, and it showed me sort of social relations it showed me different neighborhoods it showed me how well the transit was maintained which at that time was not super well. And so when I started my novel autonomous, which is set about 150 years in the future. My character is a pirate, a pharmaceutical pirate, and she has a submarine that she is smuggling drugs in across the Arctic sea. And so that was easy right because it allowed me to introduce the fact that the Arctic sea is ice free. It allowed me to introduce the kind of corporate entities in the world who are struggling over who gets to manufacture drugs and who gets to have those drugs.  And all of them kind of congeal around this vehicle which has like a driver who has a particular goal and who kind of fits into these larger pictures. And in the piece I wrote for Future Tense, when Robot and Crow saved East St. Louis, we start with a drone, who's in St. Louis proper in a wealthy neighborhood, and then goes across the river to East St. Louis. And again, we immediately see the different kinds of social relationships in those areas. And I think that's what's really great about thinking about transit through science fiction is that it lets you evoke all these different kinds of social institutions and how they affect infrastructure and transit like economic stuff, social stuff. A lot of the things that Secretary Buddha judge was talking about, about when we think about transit we have to think about communities and how they change over time. So I think it's, it's a sneaky device that I didn't realize I was using. So, so that's quite quite interesting to be thinking about going forward. Oh yes, a pirate sheet. This seems like a great transition Linda to your story which of the three is probably the most explicitly about transportation. So how do you think about these questions in your work and if you found yourself doing some of these same moves. I'm saying that the, the technology in the story, it tends to evolve. When I'm trying to create a story I always, I'm always keeping in mind that the future is not one thing quote unquote. And so we need different elements to try to build that some sense of, of possible reality. The whole transit system that I was writing about in the story was actually evolved in my novel Pacific Storm. And that was again it was, I don't want to call it window dressing but it's kind of one of those cues that the story is not now. Recently I had a project that I was working on where we were dealing with artificial intelligence. There was a lot of information about what the status of the field is now. And what I found was that what the status of the field is now is not quite where we are with science fiction in other words, writing about it now felt like old science fiction. So you have to be able to push the, the idea ahead in time to make it feel like you actually are in the future. So, with that transit system. I just came up with them. It's an automated taxi system. It's an AI and AI and it's, it's trying to trying to optimize for efficiency. So the trick behind it is that it will assign the AI will assign you to cars that you would ride share with other people who are bound in the same direction as you. And you don't necessarily know who they are. It does also offer kind of a, I don't want to say a class system but a behavior system. So if you have a good social rating, you get to ride with people with good social ratings. If not, you get downgraded. And that's so you're kind of limited to who you meet unless something very strange starts to happen. Yeah, I love your point about how it's easy to write science fiction about that sort of outmoded compared to what's really happening in terms of infrastructure and transportation. I always think about the fact that the Jetson still looks like the future to us. It still feels like a tomorrow land sort of future and we're still talking about where are my flying cars where are my jet packs you know we never. We still haven't gotten them. And you make this wonderful point and I think your story does a great job of exploring the strangeness of how these real world transportation systems in the near future could be dramatically the tropes that we've been working over in our stories for decades now. And I want to connect this back to another comment that we had in the earlier conversation with Secretary Buttigieg about the interesting, the long range planning. You know you think about transportation and infrastructure is one of the few areas where governments really make these big long term bets on the future. And because it's the only way to do it right you have to make those decisions and those decisions have huge consequences, many of them surprising and unexpected, and you've all touched a little bit already on how you you've thought about that in there and in writing that you've done stories that you've created, but maybe you could talk a little bit more about what inspired infrastructure transit systems that you imagined, or what research did you do. I love, Emily your idea of getting on the train and writing it all the way out I want to hear about your assemble adventure sometime but a different time probably, and what's maybe what surprised you about how these, how these things rolled out or how they influenced your story in thinking about that notion of the, the intersection of infrastructure and different kinds of social relationships. I don't know if anyone would like to go first for this one. I just wanted to say that I, I feel like we've had this kind of consensus future in science fiction. So like back in the days of the Justin's it was the whole flying cars thing. And then it just evolves as time goes by. So much of science fiction is a conversation between writers but also between the evolving reality. Right now it's all autonomous cars and AI driven mechanisms of transportation. So, I mean that of course was a huge influence on a lot of the work that I've done recently. I think trying to extrapolate the implications what are the things how would it really work and what are the things that could go wrong and what are some of the unexpected fallouts of these new systems. What are the kind of questions that you know I'm thinking about when I try to write these stories. Yeah, it's with regards to social relations I, I distinctly remember it must have been maybe four years back or so. There was a rail extension from New Haven to Hartford, the CT rail extension so you know if you were, you know we had Metro North to get you between New Haven and and Grand Central. And this extension basically made it a lot easier and a lot cheaper to get from New Haven to all the way to Springfield with various stops in between. And you know my family lives in the Hartford area. And before then, even though I lived in New Haven. You know if I was without a car, I had to depend on very sporadic and track times to go home. The CT rail operated like almost depending on the day every single hour. And so the ease with which I was able to go home and see my mom increased greatly, and I found that my, my life and my quality of life improved drastically as a result of increased access to home cook meals. But you know I think that's, you know, when we talk about, you know, particularly the effects on social relations with regards to technological innovations or technological improvement, particularly in the realm of transportation that's something that always comes to mind. I have greater access to my family, because of this rail extension. And another thing that the previous conversation made me think of was that when we think of transportation it's not just about people as transport of goods. And you know in the beginning I was wondering how does my reparation story tie into this issue of transportation right. But there's a whole dispersal element of it it's not just the calculation of an amount that you would send to individual citizens residing in your metropole. How do you get that money to these people. And one of the side effects of the whole plan to pay reparations is that, you know, because it's sort of zoned, you know, with this complicated algorithm involving zip codes and whatnot. A lot of it is based on where people live. And all of a sudden when people are able to afford to live somewhere else that changes and they go live somewhere else where they have access to a different school system or what have you. And that has all sorts of domino effects because then you have to bring into account the changing social landscape of your city. And if you've calculated this. It's sort of attempt at equity based on where people live in a very sort of static way that like it, all these different things are sort of implicated and so I was very, you know, it's, it's very interesting to think about future impacts, with regards to these sorts of things I think the point about introducing a point C, you know, as a consequence of your work in improving transit between point A and point B is very well taken in that regard. And I think this is such an interesting question because so I am going to talk about a novel that I have that's coming out in a few months. So I'm afraid that you can't actually read it to verify what I'm saying is true. It's called the terraformers and it's about some terraformers. And the main action of the book is that they're trying to create transit for this planet that they're building.  And so I knew that I had to create transit one of my biggest questions was exactly what Tochi was bringing up about how do you create infrastructure that doesn't kind of decay socially so that you don't assume you're always going to have the same configuration of settlements and, and the same kinds of commutes. So I actually luckily was able to talk to Jeffrey Tumlin, who is our director of transit at the San Francisco municipal transit authority. And he is a huge science fiction fan so he was willing to spend a long time talking to me about the questions that I had which were things like who typically owns transit if you're building transit across a planet. Okay, we're not just talking about between cities, and he was bringing up all this stuff that I didn't even know like, for example, oftentimes you do have one group that owns the train up to the edge of a city and then another group that owns it in the city. And how do they match up. I was also really interested in how you figure out where to put stations. I play the game mini Metro so if you've ever wanted to build, drive yourself crazy building train stations it's just a casual game on your phone and you kind of put stations in and people get angry if the stations aren't in the right place and stuff like that. So, one of the things that Jeffrey said to me was, because I wanted to have flying transit and he was like well people hate it when things fly over the city so if you're not flying transit it has to go under the city. You know as you as as you come in. But I ended up after talking to him for a while and thinking about it I came up with flying trains. Because then you don't you're not tied to a track infrastructure. It's also less environmentally impactful my characters go around and do things like take environmental samples. There's a whole section of the book where all they're doing is surveying people in the city about where they want to go, because that's the kind of exciting science fiction I write. And you're just surveying people in the town about commuting to downtown areas. The flying trains are also artificially intelligent and they form their own government, eventually, and so it becomes this interesting question about how does transit as a social force interact with the communities on the planet. And it's, it really became, you know, an exercise and thinking about, I want to say, nation building although they're not really building nations it's far in the future. And so I won't give spoilers but basically yeah the way that I came up with a form of transit that would be sustainable and and sort of able to shift to meet new future configurations of human settlement was create sentient flying trains. And then, you know, let the train fall in love with someone because I guess that's what happens in the future. So, I love the idea of a Congress of trains for a collective of trains. That's really beautiful. And your comments about the flying vehicles you've given me another little epiphany that I'm sure would be really obvious to someone in the transportation world which is that one of the reasons we must. We like the idea of flying cars or flying trains is that we're trying to have our cake and eat it to we're trying to have this beautiful, you know, rapid transit system without all of the stuff and the built infrastructure and filling up our streets and our skies with, you know, I don't know, platforms and tracks and stuff. So the future is a place where you can, you have all that perfect mobility but you don't have to deal with the logistics and the sunk costs of making that stuff possible. So that which brings me to another thing I want to bring up and you got me thinking about this toji talking about the transformation of your of your own time through through this new rail line that opened, and some advice that when my wife graduated from law school was the centerpiece the first big piece of advice that the graduation speaker had which was consider the commute. Consider the commute for the rest of your life and that could be a really important factor in your overall happiness and how everything else plays out, and it's really good advice, you know that we, we, we spend so much time getting around, and often we don't. We don't recognize how much of an investment, not just in times in terms of time but emotional labor and stress and all the other things physical work sometimes involved in commuting. So this got me thinking that the, the role of transportation is really just as much about time as it is about space and giving people these different opportunities. So, okay, now my pivot, speaking of time, I want to talk about the, the future and this, this idea of science fiction storytelling future visions in relation to actual public policy. How do you think science fictional visions of the future can be helpful in thinking through potential policy interventions. And then on the other hand, what are some of the hazards in trying to tie fiction and reality together like this. I think it's, you know, it's helpful because it's thought experiments. It's, it's a cheap way to make mistakes. You can explore different ideas, different implications. Like, you know, my taxi story was an example because I was very surprised that several people seem to think this idea of being assigned to a taxi with some kind of terrible imposition. I did not expect that. So, you know, there's ways of finding it's a way of just kind of far off experimenting and seeing how people react to new ideas. The dangers of tying it to maybe the dangers that we think things will be easy. It's fairly fairly easy to write a story very hard to build a new train system. So, I think it's just a good way to kind of confront these ideas. I'll just, I'll jump into just to piggyback off of some of what Linda was saying. I mean, I think, I think what's, I think what's interesting is that sometimes the downside is that science fiction can be looked at as some sort of predictive evil, right, or, oh, this is what it's going to be like in the future, or what have you, or this is, you know, there'll be an evil company in a science fiction novel.  And then some, you know, Lex, some real life Lex Lusor minus the charm will have read that novel and been like, Oh, that was a really cool company. I'm going to name my company after the evil company. I'm like, come on guy, like, come on, really. But I do think there was a very interesting phrase that I heard at the very beginning of this event when Mr Butler was talking about the preface to the future tense anthology and that was dress rehearsal. And that's very much the spirit in which I thought of my reparation store. I was like, Okay, this is a super fantastical idea. There's no way that this would happen in real life, but what if, right, like, what if, what if a city, you know, what if a portion of city leadership decided to take seriously the issue of reparations. What might that look like how might we go about that. What are the, you know, both the political implications but how do you try to get how do you anticipate and try to get around, you know, what you might, you know what you might conceive of as some of the political obstacles to that. How would you think about disbursement. How would you think about where the money would go, you know, verse, you know, individuals versus institutions like would you send it to schools would you send it to, you know, the heads of school would you send it to individuals living in those school districts like it's, it was really, it was really interesting to think through those questions with regards to something that could conceivably happen tomorrow. There could be somebody in state in a state legislature somewhere who is at work right now on like, not a bill but even just in conversation with others about okay this is something that maybe we should think about like I think it was maybe a little after the story came out, there was in the news. Oh, I wish I could I'm blanking on the details I feel like it was somewhere in the Midwest but there was a town that was like okay we're going to seriously contemplate a reparation scheme. And I was like wait a second. It was supposed to be a bit farther out like you know this thing actually happening but I don't know I think dress rehearsal is an interesting, a very interesting way to think about the ways in which science fiction can, you know, adjust or inform our thinking on these issues. I think California has a state reparations task force that is getting going there, having conversations, we'll see if anybody gets any money, but that would be nice. I think one of the dangers of using science fiction to think about the future is that sometimes when a story is really great, like say a story of a flying car. We get kind of like calcified around that story, and it almost holds us back. I think Linda was saying that you know flying cars were kind of a previous vision of the future and now we're thinking about autonomous cars. But I think I still hear people say to me, where's my flying car.  But we're still kind of stuck in that what what people often call a retro future. And so I think that's why it's really important that we continue to read science fiction that's contemporary and that we keep focusing on, you know, kind of new writing and new storytelling, including video games and things like that. I think the good thing about using science fiction to think about the future is, you know, when we do kind of public policy planning. I think one of the big hurdles is taking like the, like looking at sort of second order effects. Often that's just out of scope of your project you know you're not looking at like well how might a community be affected in 50 years. And I think like for folks who watched the new Dune movie or who read Dune or who are familiar with the Duneiverse. That's a really interesting story about transit because it looks not just at like the super beautiful spaceships, especially in the new film, but also at propulsion systems and the the energy the fuel that we use to do all of our fancy space travel, the kinds of groups that are formed the kinds of government organizations that are formed around transit there's a whole guild of spacers who've like physically altered their bodies to be able to to propel spaceships. And that's the kind of second order effect that I think is really interesting that science fiction gives us is like, look, you get a whole economy around this new form of transit, and a whole new form of colonialism a whole new form of oppression and reparations that will be needed. And you could even argue that in some sense, Dune is a little bit about environmental reparations you know it's about demanding that, that, you know, I don't know her conans off Dune or whatever her conans get off of Arrakis. Everybody off of Arrakis is which that's the planet where the energy comes from. Anyway, so yeah I think I think that's incredibly valuable as long as you don't get stuck with one vision of the future. You know, all of the Dune equity and justice conversations and that is a beautiful setup to how does this play out in other narratives around the future, how can science fiction help us address accessibility. How can this help how can stories about these possible futures address the needs of people today with disabilities or who might be in other ways excluded or disadvantaged by current systems. I might jump in with a kind of a mushy gushy answer. Last year, I, I and another fantastic writer Madeline Ashby, we had the opportunity to collaborate with the Smithsonian through, you know, ASU is incredible and very sort of dynamic CSI on their on their futures exhibit and so this was an opportunity to, you know, on this occasion of the anniversary of the Smithsonian, imagine what, you know, what various aspects of life might be like, you know, set far far far into the future, and we would write our stories. Brian Miller was the design artist who crafted the posters that were part of the exhibit, and that coincided with each of our stories. And prior to all of that, we would all participate in different workshops with various research institutes affiliated with the Smithsonian or that were part of the Smithsonian. Everything from, you know, you know, issues of accessibility to African American history in the United States to bio conservation to, you know, the history of women in the sciences, all sorts of things. And one of the, one of perhaps the greatest effects that I had with regards to those workshops was that all the stories that I ended up writing. Had an optimistic bent to them. And anybody familiar with my work knows that optimism you don't come to my work for a sense of, you know, for a sense of optimism. It's, you know, if there, if there is, you know, any sense of hope that you might leave my work with it's a very sort of charred and eviscerated like the type of hope that's that's born of like bare survival, or barely surviving and experienced. But the stories that I ended up writing for for the futures exhibit were incredibly optimistic. And I think a lot of that was just osmosis with regards to the workshops and the people in these research institutes doing all sorts of incredible and fantastic work. And it never seemed to them, at least from the tenor of our discussions, like they ever felt that they were Sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill. They delighted in their work and they, and they saw they could see success or at least what success look like. And it was something for them to advance towards and for so many of these issues would be very easy to take a very sort of dystopian cast to them. Environmental preservation for one. But it was just so inspiring being around these people and it couldn't help but infect my fiction. So I think that's, that's one of the helpful things that, you know, science fiction, particularly with regards to our imaginings of the future can do for us is that they can inspire optimism. I think, you know, looking at the current state of affairs it can be very difficult to be optimistic about things. Looking back at the historical record it can be incredibly difficult to be optimistic about things. But the future isn't written yet. And I think if we can look at visions of the future and have that inspire a sense of optimism about our present that can be incredibly helpful. So sorry that's like not a very sort of tactile answer but it's something that's been on my mind a lot lately. Thank you because I'm at an age where I'm really over the dystopia. And to still to try to imagine that we do have a shot at a decent future. I think as far as the disabilities question. I just wanted to point out how Tochi your story and Annalise's story and in mine also all seem to depend on the government or some kind of corporation or something knowing the people that they're dealing with and that knowing very well who they are what they do and what they need. And it just, it seems to me that that kind of a system, while it can be scary to think about. But we are also all of us are now already participating in that sort of a system. But that could in a sense, address the needs of people who have different needs who have disabilities who who might need a different form of transportation than other people would. And that it would also allow a lot of variety in the system. So maybe we do have some things to look forward to. Yeah, I think that I totally agree with what both Tochi and Linda are saying and I think in my story that I did for future tense, which is about the drone that is, it's a healthcare drone. And it's designed to do health surveillance so it goes to different places in the Greater St. Louis area, just taking people's temperatures and having them like cough into a Kleenex. And the CDC is defunded. It's a CDC drone. And it's just now it's kind of a drift. But luckily, the woman who programmed this drone, programmed the drone to kind of go off the beaten track and visit neighborhoods that it's not supposed to it's really only go to the wealthy neighborhoods. And, but she's from, we never know this in the story but in my head, this character has familiarity with, shall we say non elite areas. And so the drone when it no longer has orders from the CDC keeps going around in parts of East St. Louis where it's, they're basically, you know, unhoused people who were squatting in buildings. And, and it discovers an outbreak and is able to work with kind of a nonprofit to get vaccine out. The drone also works with a local gang of crows because the drone figures out how to communicate with the crows by like, gradually building up a big enough data set of crow words this is very unrealistic by the way. When the story came out in slate, a an AI expert wrote an essay alongside it, talking about how, well, this is fairy tale machine learning but maybe in the future this would happen and my idea was that, as I was writing it, it was kind of a fairy tale in my mind, but it was about trying to imagine how underserved communities marginalized groups that desperately need health care, like what would it take to get that to them like to bring the health care to them. The drone has to first of all have been programmed by someone who's sympathetic to those communities. It also has to make an unusual alliance, obviously in an alliance with crows is extremely unusual. But it's kind of symbolic of the of what we were talking about at the top with with Secretary Buddha judge about how you have to have these horizontal relationships between groups and often groups that you just wouldn't expect. And so I think that that in science fiction it allows us to rethink who our allies are and what it really looks like to bring access and how a big part of access is just knowing communities and knowing what they need and physically where they are, what kinds of languages they speak and what kind of social acts they speak. That's another big fantasy in the story is that the drone can speak like every social act in East St. Louis. So people are willing to talk to the drone, because it's very cute and speaks kind of their language and so. Anyway, yeah, I think optimism comes out of all of this and it is very important because if we don't have optimism especially right now. We're doomed. We have to, we have to like, think about how we're going to rebuild instead of how we're going to, you know, hang out in the smoking ruins. We don't want you to write a book called more velocities. I completely agree and I love thank you tochi for those lovely comments about the Smithsonian project and and Lee what you were saying. And Linda about the practice of hope, the way in which we, we have I think a kind of moral obligation to think about what how we can make the world better how we can make the future better. I know sometimes it can be really hard and hope is also it's the most powerful and sometimes the most dangerous thing that humans can do right because hope is one of the is it's one of the, the children of imagination it's the way that we do impossible things and not all the things we do are always good, but, but it's very powerful, and I think we need to practice you know we need to get better and getting back to that idea of the dress rehearsal, I think it's really important to build our collective and that capacity for imagination or collective capacity for hope. And one of the best ways to do that is is to think about history, you know and all of your stories reflect on and build on history getting back to touch these comments as well. And I was really struck by the Secretary's comments about thinking about infrastructure history and all these American, you know in the grand scheme of things is not that old as a country, at least in its modern incarnation. And some of the oldest stuff we have is this infrastructure, you know that I didn't know those tunnels were 149 years old that's really old. And so what lessons can we take from the history of infrastructure transit the belt environment and think of that in the context of this, this, this, the notion of ideals thing ideals to work towards or things to avoid. Just another really easy question for you. So when I remember transportation infrastructure is mentioned. First, I live in Hawaii. I've lived here for almost all my life I live on Maui, which is not Honolulu let's say it's it's a work tends to be a rural island. I think we finally got a bus service of 10 or 15 years ago. So, when I go to the mainland, the thing that strikes me because we drive a lot is the interstate system. I mean to me that is one of the wonders of the world, the idea that you can get on this road and just go almost anywhere in the entire country. That's kind of the scale of transportation infrastructure that I just find fascinating. On the other end of the spectrum. I'm not going to pretend to know a lot about this because this is a Honolulu problem. But Honolulu has been trying to build a rail system for probably the last 15 to 20 years if not longer. And it still is not running. And it's way over the initial budget. And it's made a lot of people really unhappy over the years. The infrastructure thinking is just so important to where we're going. And, but there's also the thing that, you know, a lot of people live in cities and they have problems and they have the potential for a lot of solutions because it's shared among a lot of people. But like people like me I live half an hour outside of town. My transportation options are going to be limited. We do have a bus service, like I said, but from where I live I still have to travel about five miles to get to the first available bus stop. So it's interesting about, you know, what is possible where and when. And then if you start thinking about global warming and what we what kind of transportation system we would need so that we're no longer pumping carbon into the air, you know, things begin to change again. Airships are very popular in science fiction. Slow going zeppelins or whatever. And everybody loves the idea and it is it's a beautiful idea to have this quiet ship solar powered crossing the ocean. And at the same time, who's got time to spend the weeks and travel it would be like going back to the Victorian era where only the wealthy who could take off for a see the whole summer might be able to use a system like this. Or you can you can consider it's not just one thing that changes right maybe the whole society would have to evolve. We have a completely different kind of work life balance that would make this sort of system work. But it's questions like that that I find really interesting. I'll jump in. Yeah, I, I love your point about the airship and how people would never be able to take the summer off to like float across the world, because as as you were describing I was like, yes, of course it sounds lovely. I think what would realistically happen is, you know, you would just have zoom meetings on the zeppelin all day or something like that while you're working which doesn't sound very nice or carbon neutral. One of the transit histories that haunts me because I grew up in Southern California and my family, my immediate family was from Los Angeles is that in the early days of Los Angeles. They had this incredible cable car system just like San Francisco used to have. And if you watch like old silent movies like the famous movie with Harold Lloyd from like 19, early 1920s it's called safety last it has that picture that everyone sees from the silent era of Harold Lloyd like hanging off of a clock going like and he's wearing the little round glasses kind of like mine. That movie is set kind of in the streets of LA and it's full of these cable cars and they're like part of the site gags and he's kind of running around on the cable cars. And when you watch that film you can see how completely cable cars dominated the Los Angeles transit infrastructure now if you go to Los Angeles today, which is like it's just this dystopia of cars. Everything is gridlock. If you're trying to get across the city, you know, it would take 10 minutes if you had a flying train, or even an underground train, and it would it takes you like an hour in a car so it's just horrifying. And that infrastructure that was in place in 1923 when Harold Lloyd made that film completely transformed in a matter of like 20 years. So, to me what that says is that it is incredibly easy if you have the money. The corporate interests in this case to change the infrastructure like infrastructure can radically change in like a generation or even half of a generation depending on how you count generations. So that is hopeful. But I think it is also as we look to the future something that is a huge glaring warning sign, because it is so easy for someone who has a lot of money to come in and just essentially wreck the future for many generations. So we live in an era right now of kind of transit robber barons who, you know, kind of want to own, you know, the vehicle space and the communication space and like kind of create. I don't know if there's synergy there or something, whatever the, the ugly word for synergy is. You know, it's, I think it's just a reminder that as we think about future transit, we have to think about who owns it and think about who runs it and manages it and whose interests are reflected. And so I, I always, as I'm imagining future transit I'm always trying to imagine these future transit groups like future department of transit, in order to protect, you know, our settlement spaces where people live to protect people's access to protect people's or to protect the environment as well, you know, because a lot of these corporate interests are not necessarily the same as, you know, what say environmental scientists might recommend. So, so yeah, I always just say to myself remember the cable cars that are no longer here. And let's try to not let that happen again. Speaking of dystopia of cars. I part of the research of Goliath entailed looking a lot into Robert Moses. Basically, if there's a single person who is most responsible for the dystopia that is getting around in New York, New York City, New York State, Long Island. It is that man. What was fascinating about that was that like that really ram tomes point that it is possible for a single person to completely reshape a metropole. And not simply by Oh being insulated from politics, but by literally co opting the entire political apparatus. And he started out as a park sky. And that like he's known for the highways and basically like, you know, demolishing entire neighborhoods for the sake of making it so a car could get from one place to another more easily. I mean, his, his mandate in the very beginning was, okay, I want this part of the city to look pretty. And I want this other part of the city to look pretty. And I don't really care about, you know, part C over there so they don't get a park. And it was just, it was wild watching, watching his, I don't even want to say evolution because I don't think he changed, I think he just accrued more and more power and figured out, like how to make it happen there was one point he was like, 10 different titles, he was commissioner of this, head of that. And that made me think a lot about about Annalise poi, particularly during the course of their research, thinking about who, what transit authority was responsible for and like it's, and you know you think about Metro North and because it crosses state lines are like, okay, is it like a New York thing, is it a Connecticut thing. Is it both is, do they get like territorial about it like what's what's the deal going on there. And I mean it's, it's, it's fascinating to look at the counterfactual with regards to New York. The fraction of the money that went into creating the traffic jams the traffic apocalypse that is New York, you know, went into public transit went into buses went into the subway system, because there were moments of opportunity where that could have been where you know there could have been a more robust public transit system, but no it just got it just got shunted because this guy was like cars are the cars are my favorite mode of transportation, and that's all that matters to me. And so I'm going to make it so that that's the supreme mode of getting around in this city. And it was like all him. It's wild because you're like, no there had to have been, it had to have been a group or he had to have answered to somebody or no he he was, he was the answered to guy like he just him, it was just him. And, you know, I'm, I, I'm going back to, to Annalise point about the sort of, you know, the flip side of it all in being that the, you know, the swiftness with which a place can be remade can be heartening in and of itself because that means that the problems that we have now can be fixed. And we don't have to wait two generations for that to happen. The other side of it is that oftentimes the, the people, the institutions that do accrue the power to make those decisions and to make them with the type of speed that is often required for generational change. And we have the best interests of other, other people at heart, or often there is a financial impellant that is the supreme motivation governing their decisions, and I don't know it was just like it was just really was interesting doing that research and interesting is maybe the most like sanitize where that I could have applied to my learning about the, the dude who was Robert Moses. I want to bring in at least one or two questions from our audience here so let's try to maybe give brief answers or maybe even just have one person, one one brave volunteer answer, answer these but this is a great question from can what will be the biggest unintended consequence good or bad of our future transportation world. He gives an example of Bitcoin miners resuscitating coal coal factories coal mines. That's a pretty big one. Anyone want to take a shot and Lee. Sure. So, I mean it's going to depend on the kind of transit right so I think there's a couple unintended consequences that we have to think about one is if you have a form of transit that is not changeable like if it's on a track system or it's on a, you know, some kind of or something like that. How does that change the neighborhoods around it we've sort of been discussing that already but there's a tendency for neighborhoods to become much more expensive around train stations so that can always be an unintended consequence is creating new marginal and neglected communities at the same time that you're creating these nice transit hubs. The other thing is like we never whenever we think about like transporters on Star Trek just to get very futuristic.  We learned that in in the documentary Star Trek the next generation. And we also never know who has access to transporters is it only the Federation, do you have to be a Federation officer. I'm curious, I'd like to know I think those are the unintended consequences we always have to think about is what gets calcified around the transit and who has access. That's a great response. One more quick question here from Felix. Do you believe there will be a future where physical mobility will be reduced to a minimum due to the advancement of technology other technologies like 3D 40 printers the metaverse. That I mean part of that depends on, you know bosses, not being so insistent on us coming back to the office. You know, I guess it's on them. Right and again another example of how all of these things are really tied together. And we keep we keep discovering new ways of doing the old stuff, you know, like, like the whole gig economy ride share thing is as the secretary was saying just this software layer on top of infrastructure and the idea of the network of people that's been around for for many decades. I, there's so many more questions I'm sorry we couldn't get to them. Thank you to our audience. I'm going to turn things over in a minute to Paul Butler again and I just want to say, thank you so much. Thank you, Tochi. Wonderful to see you again. Really appreciate your time today. Back over to you, Paul. Thanks, Ed. This was an amazing conversation. I have the, I have the job of trying to close us out and maybe see what emerged in terms of the conversation and patterns, but I think there were some there, there are three that really stuck with me as I as I listened to all of you in the conversation. First is the importance of getting into the world of possibilities. Linda you said the future is not just one thing, which really is something that I'm going to hold on to Secretary Buttigieg talked about, as we've said here. Not just point A and point B but the possibilities of point C for new communities and mobility the importance of equity and connections to that. And even your reflections about Maui just raising more expansive questions and possibilities about the where and the when. And you also said in your description about the AI taxi system, just not building a consensus future and really pushing us to think beyond the now. Maybe your, your point you made early on getting into a posture of intrigue. So I think those are some really important kind of reflections I think and something to maybe all for all of us to stay with a second big territory that really lingers with the human which I'll take away is transit as a social force. And Lee, you have to tell us about your new book. And please share it when, when it's ready for us but we talked here about the real effect of transportation on relationships and human connectivity and touch your, your, your story about the new rail and Hartford really gave that I think an But Emily, you also, you really, you really cautioned us to think about decay and making sure that transportation doesn't replicate the decay. So I think that's, that's an important takeaway for us to sit with. And you put it all together with your question about how to connect science fiction and public policy and making sure that connection is real. This is a chief way to test. That's what we said in this conversation to ask the question about what if tochi nodding to your work on reparations the hard questions can be tackled through this art form, and the ability to make mistakes Linda something that you said with this art form. Emily, you, you, you stress the importance of allies that this work can really uncover a new view about allies, but also a critical lens about ownership and deepening our understanding about access. And those I think are important takeaways. And the importance of stories, but the power of images. I think it was something that really stuck with me because images and stories can be so powerful. And Ali you cautioned us not to get stuck in a calcified retro future. And I think that's an important caution as we think about this connection between science fiction and public policy. And I love the spirit of optimism that we all had here, and the importance of using this art form in this discipline really, I listened to all of you talk about the specifics of your work. This really is a discipline, but a space for as you said, a practice of hope. I think that idea of continuing to stay in this space of hope and continuously generating new, maybe the best place for us to end. So I just want to thank everybody for joining. Thanks Secretary Buttigieg again and the teams of future tense ASU slate new America. Tochi and a lead Linda. Thank you again and thanks to everybody who joined us for this conversation hopefully you all took something from it, and we look forward to seeing you all soon. Thank you.


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Virtual Nazgul on Twitch. How are you doing Chichoy? Did you hear about the Russian artist that will destroy 45 million worth of art if a Zanj dies in person? No, I haven't heard about this. I haven't heard about this. I hope he doesn't. Maybe it would be better if he auctions off that art, takes that money and gives it to any person, individual journalist and Organizations that have a support of Julien Assange, not the general generic ones that haven't been supporting Julien Assange. Like a lot of the centralized institutions that are supposed to protect journalists and you know do good in society on earth, haven't said beep regarding Julien Assange. Screw them, right? Give it to like consortium news right? They've covered Julien Assange a lot, right? Give it to well, John Pilger unfortunately passed away recently, but there are a lot of journalists give a ton of it to Estella and let her distribute the funds and to the people that are going to protect humanity and do right by Julien Assange. But kudos to him for protesting, all right? It's not my place to say Jonas. Thank you very much for the Twitch Prime sub. Appreciate it. Jonas, go on. But it's not my place to tell people how they can or cannot protest, right? As Aaron Bushnell's protests showed, it's not something I would do, but it's something that he felt like he needed to do. So as long as you're standing on the right side of history, you got my support. That's my thing.


brought to the city of London in June. Tens of thousands of them are expected there to protest against the World Trade Organization, which is meeting in the city. In a worldwide coordinated campaign, activists in Britain are also planning to protest. The British police were unprepared last time because the demonstrators had a new protest tool, the internet. David Lomax reports. In the Cow Park catacombs underneath a railway station in the middle of London, a thousand people have paid £12 each for a weekend event where they can listen to their kind of music or do nothing in particular. The participants also include activists, anarchists and supporters of a variety of different environmental groups. This part-time art college lecture for instance is from a movement called Reclaim the Streets. It took part in the demonstration against global capitalism in the city of London on June the 18th and is trying to gain support now for another demonstration against capitalism in London tomorrow. It's 24 hours a day and it's capital that's doing it. 24 hours every day, not just one year on June 18th, every single day. This machine is destroying our lives and everyone's eyes on the planet and we are resisting. When Reclaim the Streets ran the last big demonstration against capitalism, its organisation was sophisticated, its planning caught the authorities unaware. Most demonstrators in the city on June the 18th were peaceful but at several places there was violence both from a minority of protesters and by the police. After this incident a woman was taken to hospital with a broken leg. In another a policeman had spinal injuries. There were 84 arrests and millions of pounds worth of damage. Capital is violent 24 hours a day, people are killed, the environments are destroyed, for growth, for competition, for profit. For us that's violent. A few broken windows in the financial centre of the capital. Let's get realistic. When groups like Reclaim the Streets were planning their June the 18th demonstrations against the images of global capitalism, they found that they had a new weapon, the internet. In the last two years or so emails and web pages have suddenly become a vital part of a new phenomenon in political protest and you don't have to look very far to see how fast it's growing all the time. Paul Mobs does most of his activist work by computer. He says the environmental movement is being revolutionised by the internet. These people often never meet, they're in different countries, they probably will never ever talk to each other in real life. They communicate via internet and send messages and exchange ideas. And what is the significance? The significance of that is you can not only develop a campaign in your hometown for example as you would do traditionally. People have a similar problem across an area, across a country or across the whole world can get together and work in a way they were never able to before. He's now organising a virtual sit-in. It's not against the law. He's trying to jam the WTO's server in Seattle with repeated requests.  It's coming up the system with more requests than it can handle. Now it's actually going to take quite a few thousand people to make it work. It's not one of... This can't be achieved by one or two people. It needs a consensus of opinion actually around the world to get enough people to do this. But hopefully we'll get that. The city of London police told us today that they too have been monitoring the net. It's not apparent from all of the information we've gathered to date that what will happen if anything happens on November the 30th will be in any way like the scale that it was on June the 18th. I feel that it will be a much smaller event. But I have to say that our joint operation with the Metropolitan Police, we feel that we are prepared for anything, that we have sufficient resources in place and we're confident about being able to deal with anything that might happen on Tuesday. What do you think yourself of some of these anarchist web pages? Well I think the internet is almost running away with itself. It's a very personal view of course. But it's the way forward. It's the way of the future. It's not going to go away. What do you think of the specific? What do you think of the N30 web page? Well the actual content, I don't think it's my position to comment on. I don't really want to get involved in making comments. Have you seen it yourself? I haven't seen it myself, no. Have you seen the electro hippies page? I haven't seen the electro hippies page, no. You haven't seen the N30 page? I haven't seen the N30 page but others have and do pass the intelligence to me about what's on that page. It doesn't take long to have a look at it. I know it doesn't. I haven't actually personally seen it but others are viewing it for me. Some direct activists like Nick Dukes and Kala Subbaswamy will still be using traditional techniques tomorrow.  It's part of their campaign against Shell's role in Nigeria. You've done it yourself? Okay. But they're also hoping to transmit digital pictures from the protest live onto the internet. They've done it before. I was involved in media work supporting a team of direct activists who occupied the director of Shell UK, his office. A number of people got into the Shell Mechs building on the strand and actually barricaded themselves into the outgoing and the incoming directors of Shell UK. From within his office itself, people actually got images of the occupation up on the web. Using a digital camera, a laptop and a mobile phone, the images were put up live from within his office onto the internet and this was in direct support of the mobilisation of people within Nigeria. Nick Dukes admits that at the moment his protest group is small but says the movement's potential is growing. From the anti-rose movement to all the genetic actions now, I think more and more people are getting empowered in terms of taking direct action, realising that the so-called democracy at Westminster just doesn't serve their needs and so people are looking more at actually taking control of what they do and taking action themselves and making their own demands on government, on corporations and actually building an alternative. But so far, few in the movement seem able to agree about what that alternative should be. Even if police predictions are fulfilled tomorrow and demonstrators don't turn out in force, the movement and the technology it's increasingly using are not going to go away. David Lomax reporting there.


In this section, I will explain the concept of beta and risk premiums when we are dealing with the individual security. So we were talking about capital asset pricing model and when we are dealing with the capital asset pricing model, we do take into account the risk premium and the beta values. So it is important to understand what is meant by the beta in CAPM. So basically what we are, it is simple to accept this reality that if suppose we are having two securities and the risk of security A is larger than the risk of security B. It means that by investing money in security B, the return you are getting, the risk is less as compared to risk in the security A. So if you are taking more risk by investing in security A, you will expect a higher return from security A. So this is a basic concept. So the higher risk involved with security A, you expect that it will give me a bigger return as compared to other securities whose risk is less as compared to the return you expected return that is lower as compared to this one. So that is the basic foundation. Now if we look at the overall decision that we have to invest in this situation in portfolio concierge, then we discussed that we have to take this CML, capital market line, point of tangency, with an efficient frontier and what will happen there on that particular point, your expected return is getting maximum at a given level of risk. So that is why we call that particular allocation point as the optimal point. Now if we look at it in terms of the beta, now beta is equal to the ratio of sigma jm. I have written in the formula that sigma jm is divided by the sigma square of m. So basically what you are trying to do is you have to take out the covariance of a certain individual security return and the market return with the covariance. That means what is their degree of association. So with a certain individual security return and market return, you will account for covariance and what variation is going on in the market return overall. So if you account for a certain individual security return and market return with covariance divided by the volatility in the market. So if you calculate the ratio, you will get the value of the total risk involved in which you are going to take by investing in a certain specific individual security. We are calling it j in this formula, hypothetically. So beta will give you the mayor of risk. So if we try to understand it in the formula wise, this is beta from security j. We have assumed that it is j. So beta from j, that means the risk from j will be equal to the covariance between the return on the security j and the return on the market portfolio. And divided by the volatility of the market, you will get the mayor of risk of that particular security. And we represent that from beta. So suppose you have a security A or any name you have assumed, B or C or any company name that can be given by simply the ratio of these two values. And this will give you the the mayor of the securities risk. So security risk we have to account for and we have to account for the risk premium. And these two things together tell you how the equilibrium can be established. So in equilibrium, the expected return from an individual security j minus the risk-free return. We will call it excess return on security j. So this can be termed as excess return on security j is equal to the risk of security j multiplied by excess market return. What should we do here? Look carefully. Here we are taking j or we are taking the return of the market portfolio. Right? So we have made a benchmark. The portfolio of the market, we will use that particular reference. The expected return minus the risk-free return. We will multiply that by the value of our risk and we will know what our excess return on security j will be. And this is how you can find out the value of equilibrium. If we are applying the concept of capital asset pricing model or CAPM, then we can calculate the equilibrium value of excess return on a certain security or asset of, which we call j here. We can calculate the equilibrium value of excess return on any of your security j.


Recently, Kaylee did a review on the Nosellicast talking about how aggravated she is that she has to throw away her perfectly functioning AirPods because the batteries don't work anymore. So I hunted down a company called Akua that is working on headphones with replaceable batteries but this isn't a headphone that's like the size of a small piece of bread. Exactly. So I'm with Amy Jackson right now. Yeah. So we're more the size of a P. So we can solve that battery problem. We have something called a hot swap battery. So what it happens is when you are wearing your earbud device and after about four or five hours when the battery is going dead and you're just into a phone call all you have to do is quickly pop out the battery in your charging case right here. You have additional batteries which I'm sorry wasn't ready for this that you would just take out.  It takes about 15 seconds when you get good at it and you're back on. You are off for no more than 15 seconds and you have enough battery life for about. Turn your head this way so you know the other side. Sorry. So the these earpods are very small. They're almost flush with her ear and they're not much bigger than the ear canal there. No you're absolutely right and the reason is is because most earbuds the retention comes from the outside of the ear canal. That's why they're so big and bulky but ours given our patented comfort seals we have probably the deepest penetration into the retention that you can get and then we have these wonderful comfort seals that when you take them off she's pouring it off right now it's three sort of it's three sort of flanges that are that are holding on to her ear there. When you look at this tritear seal I don't know if you can see it from here but they are vented so you'll never feel occluded. Oh I like that yeah and then it has a built-in wax guard which is also wonderful so wax will not get in the receiver and then you just put you know chain jump for sanitary reasons when you need to and then you just pop it back in your ear. So the reason we can be so small is because our retention comes from within the ear canal not the outside part. And then the one other thing we have that's really awesome is we have a built-in bone conduction mic. Oh okay. So when you're on a call say in a room like this we are 100% noise cancelled you will not hear anything in the background. The microphone is only the bone conduction. Only the bone conduction hearing through jaw so we have some pretty unique stuff and for the traveler we have a voice translation which is real time. Oh come on. Yep. Nope. Real deal. And we're also really going for a market of about 20 through 5560 and we want to address people who have mild hearing loss so this same device there is an amp where they can do an in situ hearing test with this in their ear it will burn their thresholds to the device and they will get that volume and nobody will know if they're wearing an amplifier or wearable. Oh that is really really cool. I do want to forward thinking here. I do want to say for the audio listeners that the case that she was describing where she's got the earbuds in the case but then she flipped the bottom of it open to get to the spare batteries. And the spare batteries will be kept in here. Are they charging when they're in the case? So they are charging. So it's charging on one side and on the other side of the same. Wow. Yeah so the earbuds. The case is not that much bigger than an AirPods case. Not at all. No. The case is advised. The other side. Batteries. Charging. And Apple says it can't be done. Can't be done. We did it. So the name of the company is Akuva. What's the name of the product? It's the the product's name is also Akuva. It's actually the Akuva Xtreme with the hot swap battery and the Akuva Amp is for the amplifier. Oh that is really cool. So we are in Eureka Park do you have an idea of when this is going to come to market? Yeah we're hoping for Q2, Q3. Oh really? This year? Yeah we're almost done. It's almost done. Fantastic. I really wish you guys a lot of luck. This is a cool product. Oh yeah. Do you have a price point yet? The Akuva Amp is going for $500 on sale here for $350 for pre-orders and the Akuva Xtreme how much is that? She's asking for $250. So the Amp is actually another physical device. No it's the same device. It's just with the you are actually just getting the app with it to increase the threshold student. I got you, I got you. I thought you had to buy both and that was starting to get real expensive. Okay. Not at all. So if you need the hearing amplification you get the the Akuva Amp, you get the Akuva Xtreme if you don't. Exactly. All right I caught up. Thank you very much Amy this is really really cool. Thank you. Thank you.