This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
REID:
I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens, if in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
Typically, we ask our guests for their outlook on the best possible future. But now, every other week, I get to ask Reid for his take.
REID:
This is Possible.
ARIA:
Reid, you are an investor in California Forever, which we touched on in both of our last few guests on Possible, Jan Sramek and Devon Zuegel. So what has either resurfaced or crystallized for you after those conversations about the future of cities?
REID:
Well, you know, it’s funny, it’s partially that so few people—we take cities for granted—and so few people think about what are first principles, what is the evolution, what is the design of them? And one of the things that was amazing and astonishing about both Jan and Devon was, you know, thinking about like, “How do we make this a lot better for people?” As opposed to just saying, “Well, the number of cities in the world is the number of cities, and they kind of increment the way they increment and that’s it.” And you know, it’s like, no, no, if we are really rethinking this, what are the things that we do? And obviously there’s a bunch of things that generally matter—what most people encounter—affordable housing. So how is it that we get more housing stock, more quality housing stock—what are the methods for doing that?
REID:
You know, the number of people that encounter that. But they don’t think about, you know, things that—for example, Devon surprised me with, which is narrower streets. It’s like, that is a very counterintuitive statement, but might very well be correct. Or similarly, one of the things that we naturally tend to be doing implicitly in a lot of our social planning is separating out age groups. And actually in fact, blending the age groups is positive for all age groups. It’s kind of like thinking about it in bold, new, fresh ways is what’s excellent about both of them and in kind of different directions. And part of the thing that people think about like—and so it’s like, well, would you rather be living in a city, you know, built in the 1800s or would you rather be living in a city built in 2020?
REID:
And it’s the same kind of thing of technological stack learnings and a bunch of other things. Like, this shouldn’t be the odd artifact of a couple of entrepreneurs, you know, going into what is almost the wilderness and saying, “We’re going to create a new city here,” but should be kind of part of all of our thinking and all of our discourse. And I think that universality for everybody encountering it and everyone giving some thought—because for various reasons that both Devon and Jan went into—like cities are what create the majority of the population of people’s lives. And they shape it and they amplify it and they create great options and opportunities and they’re also the thing that creates challenges and environments and other things. So encountering that and making that a lot better is, I think, really important. And of course, building some new ones—just like anything else in life—is a super important part of that.
ARIA:
And I think a lot of people, of course, have nostalgia for the past in all different ways, and that also comes up in sort of architecture and, you know, you don’t want new buildings. But I think, you know, Devon brought up Paris and that’s one of those cities that has actually been rebuilt, rebuilt, rebuilt. You see a façade from the 1700s and then you walk in and behind it is this beautiful, new, technologically-advanced space. So, I think we can have both. We can have sort of the old and like, take the best of both. And so, you know, Devon talked about electric leaf blowers and solar power, and we talked about remote work—sort of all of these technological advances that are letting us sort of build the cities of the future. Are there specific technologies or data that we should be using to build the future of cities? Or are there any AI applications that you think about when we talk about designing cities? Like, what more technology should we be bringing into these discussions?
REID:
Well, I think the short answer is tons. But you know, it goes from the visible and the obvious, like for example, “How do you have green building construction? How do you have much more eco-cooling and heating functions which are high-energy things?” To somewhat less obvious and potentially more controversial, which is like you could imagine with kind of modern micro-reactor designs, you could actually have little teeny nuclear reactors and like space for that, that can power things—that by the way, if they go wrong, all you basically do is shut the door and come back in 20 years [laugh], right? You know, it’s like that’s it, that that’s as bad as it can go [laugh], right? And you know, like there’s that and then there’s data questions. Like you could say, okay, well, as opposed to doing Waymo and Waze with the smartphone, say for example, you’re reprogramming all the traffic and you never get gridlock because it’s all automatically managed.
REID:
And you know, you’ve got like, part of your emergency response is you’ve got cameras everywhere, but the cameras—you know, the streets and so forth—but the cameras go, “Someone’s fallen down, go help them! Wait, there’s a crime happening on Fifth Street. Turn on the alarm and shine a light.” You know, you could just imagine this whole range of things that when you really begin to think about the cities of the future—which go from everything from super important kind of green things (you can imagine walkable cities and all the rest) to, “How does the world of of AI and data and bits, you know, make everything better?” One of the more common knee-jerk responses is, “Isn’t AI using more electricity? And isn’t that a problem?” It’s like, well, but AI is going to also use more electricity to make us much smarter on everything, including how we use electricity. So [laugh], you know, that’s part of what progress is. Anyway, that whole range, I mean, we could literally spend hours talking about, let’s look at every single piece of technology in a city both visible and present and physically there, to underneath it and then that may not even be there yet and say, “How do you upgrade it?”
ARIA:
I’m probably dating myself, but the movie Enemy of the State, I feel like is a really great example of when they were using computer programmers to stop people in traffic and to like, keep giving people the red light. But to your point, why couldn’t we do the opposite? Why couldn’t—when ambulances are coming down a road—automatically lights change so that they can go through and it doesn’t cause a traffic jam? Like, there is so much we could do with the data of how people move around that would make everyone’s life better. So I’m waiting for the Enemy of the State too.
REID:
Yeah. And by the way, part of like what matters is, in fact when you envision the cities of the state, you would actually have cybersecurity on someone’s changing the lights. Why is that? Who is doing that? Right? [Laugh], right. Let’s set off an alarm there. [Laugh].
ARIA:
Totally. I love it. Well, so speaking of science fiction—science fiction authors have always entertained what these future cities will look like. And you know, just over a hundred years ago we were just starting to take flight and now we may be on the horizon of self-flying cars. And you are in fact an investor in Joby. And so what can we expect, you know, future cities to look like? And I know we don’t try to predict too far in the future but why is it so captivating to predict this future where we have Joby e-helicopters flying around everywhere?
REID:
Well, I think, you know, making the city transport and network 3D—you know, we already have obviously cities with great subway systems and other kinds of things as ways of doing that. And you’ve got stuff that’s on the ground and going to the air is just that 3D, you know, high quality. And you can imagine anything from one of the weird things you have because of the configurations of space. Like, the most common one people experience is between the city and the airport. And the city and the airport, you know—whether it’s JFK in New York or other things—just get to be a nightmare. And if you just kind of go, “Hey, look, I can fly there.” [Laugh], right? It eases a whole bunch of congestion, is green in that regard, both in environmental impact and also of course quality-of-life impact, and then makes that whole thing work better.
REID:
Not only will you have Joby doing this, but you know, you’ll see, see things from Zipline, right? Which is like delivery of stuff. Like if you kind of go, “Oh God, I need an EpiPen,” [laugh] right? You might actually be able to hit a button. And, the drone takes off and is coming to you at high speed to get the EpiPen there in the right time. That could save a life [laugh], you know? And so the people thing is part of it and like, you know, airport commutes and other kinds of geo configurations of things, but also logistics and delivery stuff. And so, thinking through the 3D—and you don’t need to go to Jetson anti-gravity. We still have no idea how anti-gravity might even be possible. Like, but the notion of quiet, effective—making quality of life for the majority, like the city dwellers much better—that’s line of sight within the horizon.
ARIA:
Yeah, I mean, it’s so interesting. Like there’s so much we can do just with, again, the noise pollution that, you know, these—whether it’s an e-bike, you know, electric vehicle, whatever it might be—they will just take cities in the right direction if we can apply this technology across the board. So I’m excited for that futuristic city that we’ll see. Like you said, not too far in the distance. Thank you so much, Reid.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Adrien Behn, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, Parth Patil, and Little Monster Company.