Billy Riggs (00:38)
Hey Vipul, what's up? How you doing?

Vipul Vyas (00:40)
Good. How you doing, Billy?

Billy Riggs (00:42)
I'm doing well. we've been talking about this this series for a while. And I think it's great that we're we're now doing it. And a couple of the things that we were talking about really relate to this big picture of kind of reframing

automation and innovation in kind of the national, international, urban economic context. And you've been talking about this a lot in kind of this idea of kind of the great decoupling and venting to me. But what does that mean to the kind the future of our cities and our innovation hubs?

What do you think is going on here? And we're academics, we're innovators. We're embarking on this journey and what do we hope to get out of this thing?

Vipul Vyas (01:31)
Well, I don't think complete decoupling is necessary or even necessarily desirable because there's a lot of things that certain countries do better than we. And I've demonstrated a track record of that and a track record of being on a path to improve and advance at a rate that we're not on. And so that's something we have to acknowledge.

Accept is a different question, but we have to at least acknowledge that this is the case and whether we want to be competitive in that regard. That's something we have to ask ourselves and invest in if it is something we want to do. But the bigger question is the world is changing. The world is changing fast. We have to be both competent in terms of understanding what those changes are.

and competent in terms of formulating strategy, and then also competent in executing that strategy. So that's sort of three things, awareness, response, and execution. And right now, I don't think at the local government level that is the case. And at one level, one...

One dimension maybe I should say is that it's not perceived to be the role of local government. That being said, I don't think that's how our peer cities around the world think about it. They look at themselves as cities as being economic or commercial hubs and economic and commercial engines that have strategies that they have to...

Billy Riggs (02:53)
Yeah.

Vipul Vyas (03:02)
enact to compete both domestically in their respective countries and also internationally if they are dominant in their local domestic economies or even regions. And so a lot of, for example, Chinese cities are aspirant around how they can carve out their niche in the global environment, not just in their regional or national environments, or even super regional in terms of like...

say Southeast Asia or South Asia or Southeast Asia. And so they're transcending that. While at the same time.

In the US, most cities are just worried about how to figure out, well, they're worried about how to relearn how to fill potholes.

Billy Riggs (03:43)
Yeah, yeah. What I think that brings up, yeah, I think that brings up kind of like the trajectory of where we want to go with this. mean, we're we so we're kind of embarking at least at least for the what we're envisioning is is the start of this journey kind of in in what we're calling rewiring. And I think what I want to do is start off in kind of this term that I've come up and unpack this word rewiring.

Vipul Vyas (03:45)
And so...

you

Billy Riggs (04:11)
We're kind of embarking on this, at least for this first series, in a 10 to 15 limited series of episodes, going on this journey of really focusing on this idea of global strategy in the age of separation in kind of where...

kind of how urban innovation can be both a national, international, but also a local strategy and how global can be local, how you can be a "glocal" city. And I think that's something that we've talked a lot about and I talked a lot about a couple of weeks ago at my Autonomous Vehicles & the City

conference and we're going to dive deep into some of what I'm doing in mobility and AI. I think we grounded some of this in our early discussions about doing this series in automation and our work in automation, AI and innovation when we started a center on automation innovation at University of San Francisco. for context, think we did a poor job of introducing who we were. Maybe we should

kind of rewind a little bit more in terms of that. And I think that what that lends to is kind of this idea and where we'll go in the next 10 years or 10 to 15 episodes is really looking at kind of what does the future workforce look like? How does that relate to population and labor in a shrinking world? What does that look to kind of how do we look at embedding equity? And what does that look for? How does the Silicon Valley think beyond itself? Go from

from Silicon Valley to middle America to the population center of the world being of all places, not Silicon Valley, not Japan, but of all places, East Africa. waking up to the research talent and growth engines of the future. And then I always like to ground to

innovation for good and moving beyond profit and kind of this idea of the collaboration dividend and this idea of, and I was talking this morning to some international partners and I believe what I want and I want to ground to this idea of the idea, kind of a counterintuitive idea of the idea of rewiring

the American edge as being not an idea of America contracting, but America actually inverting its idea of immigration, that we actually become very pro free trade, that we become very pro.

labor. And I think the future of what we see happening really has to have kind of this aperture for exchange of ideas and exchange of information has to grow. that in the future of the information economy, in my mind, that's the gold currency.

I think I'd like to grow that aperture of as we kind of see the arc of our discussion over at least the next 10 to 15 episodes that occur. But know, Vipul, maybe we should do a better job of telling at least whomever tunes in who you are and who I am, because unless they've been my student or happened to have attended a lecture or

conference that I've been to or have worked for you or have sat in your class, maybe they don't know who we are.

Vipul Vyas (07:54)
Sure, do you want to introduce yourself? Feel free. ⁓ I'm Vipul you know, as we've introduced ourselves already, but I've worked in Silicon Valley for the past 25 years, been associated with a variety of different startups, and primarily have actually focused on voice recognition or speech recognition, machine learning, natural language processing, more recently generative AI, and...

Billy Riggs (07:55)
I've been talking for a lot right now. think it's your turn.

Vipul Vyas (08:18)
been in the AI space in probably the past seven years-ish, and so have seen the whole arc of development of these technologies that are now at the forefront. So that's a little bit about me, and then I've also been in the healthcare space as well, from a venture perspective, from a startup perspective, and have been teaching at the University of San Francisco for about the last five years, mostly in the...

the School of Management and management related courses specifically. So that's a little bit about me.

Billy Riggs (08:46)
Great. He's modest, folks. He's modest. And we met on a playground with our lovely now 14-year-old boys. We won't share too many personal anecdotes, but they are lovely. Mangy at this point. ⁓ But, you know, so I'm Billy Riggs.

Vipul Vyas (08:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, at that age, yeah.

Billy Riggs (09:05)
Over the arc of my career, have focused on many things. I would say most recently, spending a lot of times really focusing on one of these sexy fields that is automated driving and autonomous vehicles. And so a lot of people know my work on automation these days. But if I was to rewind.

10 years ago, I was doing more streetscape engineering. I was doing more engineering of roadways for bicycling and pedestrian design. And I was doing more planning of cities for housing. And I was the chair of a planning commission for the Planning and Transportation Commission, not only for the city of Palo Alto,

but for the city of San Luis Obispo and I've been on so I've been a professor for Going on 15 years now before that. I was a city planner and an engineer in the public sector in the private sector And I started my career designing piers for the Coast Guard and It was an interesting story. I just got back from a vacation in Hawaii

And it was great experience for me because some of my first piers that I designed for the Coast Guard in Hawaii in the Malalea Harbor. So that was fun experience for me because I saw some of the projects that I designed. And at the time, yeah, was just, it was great to see some of the work that I did 20 years ago that's still there. that kind of a fun experience. And it's fun to see that

some of the work you do isn't a very, doesn't become an expensive paperweight. So, you know, it's real tacit stuff, right? It's not just pie in the sky ideas. And maybe that's a good place to kind of start about how we have big pragmatic ideas and

how we get stuff done. So let's go back to this term kind of like rewiring. And I challenged us, I came up with this term in the middle of the night. In the middle of the night just kind of came to me. And we've been talking about this term We are talking about this topic, know, automation and innovation to kind of encapsulate these fields for a while to kind of

We wanted to have this big envelope for a lot of stuff that was happening in the industry, but also talk about policy and governance and entrepreneurship and innovation, but also what's happening in our cities. But how do we fix them? And in my mind, part of how I define rewiring was not only changing how we think about them in our brains.

rewiring how we brains, but also thinking about like mechanically and technically how we think about changing our economies, thinking about how we change our systems, thinking about how we change even our ways of doing business or ways of maybe even our ways of building stuff. And that's why I chose this kind of this idea of kind of of using the physical act of wiring.

to represent both the technological side but the kind of the engineering mindset or the systems thinking mindset. Vipal, I don't know if you liked that term. It came to me kind of like as I was in this quasi sleep state. I don't know. Was it a good idea? Was it a bad idea?

Vipul Vyas (12:21)
I think it actually is right for a few reasons. The main reason in my mind is that we have to rewire our brains first before we do anything else. So that's the commonly used term rewiring. The biggest issue we have is one of, and there's a great discussion by a guy named Sanjeev.

butcher his name though, I should know better, Sanyal. And he was a prominent government official in India a while back and still is influential. But any case, he uses this term called poverty of aspirations. And effectively what he describes I think is pretty accurate, which is for,

a city or any collection of people, if you focus on thing X, you will build an entire culture, community, and ultimately economy around that said thing X. Whatever that might be, for good or bad. And I think in the case of certain American cities, we focused on homelessness, rightfully.

but in a way that basically entrenches that issue and also makes the entire economy serve that issue. So we've created all the infrastructure, all the mechanisms, all the levers of government, all the levers of power, all of the funding, all of the tools to address that issue almost to the exclusion of any other issue.

while not solving it, because there's really no interest in solving it, ultimately, in my opinion, because that would undermine the entire infrastructure that you've created. And so I think rewiring is quite relevant, because ultimately, you're figuring out where you want to point your ship. What is the horizon you're looking for? And if your aspiration is a, and I think in a lot of cities, the thought is that

We have so much wealth. We have all these millionaires, all these billionaires, and really it's about income being inequitably or unequally distributed, maybe both inequitably and unequally distributed. And therefore, really the problem to solve is an internal one. It's a matter of being much more...

a lot fairer when it comes to this redistribution of what's perceived to be overly concentrated wealth. And so that becomes the focus. The focus is not how do we create more wealth, how do we lift versus the sense of injustice that must be rectified. And so the focus is on

the injustice economy versus any kind of opportunity economy. And they're not mutually exclusive. You can pursue both agendas. But what I find is people can only keep a couple of things in their head at one time. And what has happened is there's this perception of we have an unjust system. And so we have to write that. And the injustice resolution economy

is what dominates. Now the funny thing is it creates a lot of its own injustices that are conveniently ignored, but it becomes the sole focus, the sole orientation, and so you get entire cultures that are developed around that, entire economies, entire government apparatus or apparatus that are created around that, and so everything is built to serve that aspiration.

Billy Riggs (15:33)
Hmm.

Vipul Vyas (15:57)
Now you look at other cities in the US that have different aspirations and you can see that all the tools of government, all the cultural vibe, if you will, is pointed in different direction. And so you wonder, how did fires in LA happen in such a catastrophic way? There's probably no way those were preventable and just given the circumstances, but were they mitigatable probably? But why did that happen? It's because that's just not where the...

the focus was. And so the first step I think is rewiring is what is your, what's your intention and where's your attention?

Billy Riggs (16:28)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. So, you you said that, you know, and so there are other cities, said, the US, you know, I think part of our goal too is to, you know, we, we, we in the US, we're the...

I'm gonna say it, we are the best at thinking we're the best. it is the one thing that when I travel, it's pretty glaring to me that we are pretty clear that Manifest Destiny is ours.

It's a bit, I have to, every time I come home, I'm a bit humbled to come home and realize that our problems aren't so dang exceptional. And that we try to exceptionalize many times how horrible some of our problems are. And other cities around the world have similar problems and they deal with them too, they just don't whine as much.

But they have innovative solutions too. So I will maybe just flip the question then. Do you have examples of cities you would talk about where you think there are cool ideas or cool concepts or cool solutions?

Vipul Vyas (17:54)
Well, there's obviously a lot of people like to point to things in the Netherlands as an example of where they have solved common problems that affect urban areas in the West more generally. And they have tackled homelessness in innovative ways, so have lot of the Scandinavian countries. But I'd say the US.

Along with that intention is sort of a corollary or additional element of intention is really trying, really aspiring to solve the problem because we take a lot of half-hearted measures and I think that's because ultimately there's not a sense, there's a sense of despondence versus accountability. And so,

So let me just back up and say, yes, lots of cities have problems similar to the ones that are faced by American cities. It's not unique to the US. And so our sense that these are American, or uniquely American problems is probably not a fair appraisal. But what is seemingly unique, uniquely American is, I shouldn't even say that, but what seems to be dominant in America today is our inability to execute.

our way out of these problems, which has not historically been the case. So we can't seem to solve for a lot. We do a lot of problem admiration versus problem mitigation or even problem resolution. And I think that's a function of some degree of learned helplessness. And beyond that,

Billy Riggs (19:05)
Hmm.

Vipul Vyas (19:23)
The few people who have a vested interest in the problem staying a problem have an outsized voice and an outsized level of power. But as examples, let me just be more specific. If you look at the notion of social housing, which is very popular on the West Coast in the US, there's no problem with the concept of social housing. fact, Singapore has done a...

Billy Riggs (19:34)
Yeah.

Vipul Vyas (19:47)
That's one variation of it. ⁓

Billy Riggs (19:49)
Yeah, I mean, there's

basically no private housing in Singapore. They're in tune. 99-year lease, yeah.

Vipul Vyas (19:53)
⁓ Yeah,

there's basically what feels like ownership, really kind of isn't. There's, I think, the Viennese model. There's a variety of models in Europe. But in the US, that takes on the role of spending lots and lots of money to buy old hotels or buildings and a few units at a time, convert them into something that everyone can pat themselves on the back for.

versus passing some kind of legislation that says, here's the tax incentives, the economic incentives, and the structural change, the building code change, the zoning code changes, that would facilitate this thing. Whether you believe in social housing or not, or the concept, right?

That's a fair debate to begin with, but even if, let's just assume that you do the mechanisms to make it happen, they're not serious. There aren't serious leaders with serious proposals. Why? Because that's hard.

So instead you get tokenism. You get a token effort, you get a token gesture, you get token policies that really don't move the needle and everyone just sort of again continues to admire the problem versus really solve it.

Billy Riggs (21:05)
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think one of the other examples that you could put out there and it's very pertinent now. know, city of London has had and Singapore, but let's go with London because it's just an easy example. Everybody feels like they can, know, most Americans, I think, feel like they can relate to Britain or London. Yeah. So not not to obtuse. They speak English. You know, it's not, you know, they drink weird.

weird brown, know, Ted Lasso doesn't like what they drink, that weird brown stuff called tea, but horrible, horrible brown liquid, But they, for 21 years, they've had something, this crazy thing, crazy thing. What is it, what is it, Bibble? It's crazy thing, crazy, crazy. Tell me, 21 years, 2003, 2003

Vipul Vyas (21:41)
Hehehe.

I don't know, you tell me.

I know.

Billy Riggs (21:58)
It's round. It's round. It goes around central London.

Vipul Vyas (22:03)
The Eye of London?

Billy Riggs (22:04)
No, it's called the congestion pricing zone. Yeah, it's called congestion zone. And you know what? For the, you know, for the life of me, we can't get one passed in New York city. Okay. Well, let's, let's, we'll, we'll, we'll hate on that later, but no, no, no. They, the Trump administration, we're not going to go politics. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Well, so they just, passed it.

Vipul Vyas (22:19)
Well, didn't they pass one in New York City and everyone loves it now?

What?

Billy Riggs (22:29)
And it's having the past in New York and it's having great impacts on reducing congestions and raising revenue for public transit. And that is actually what congestion pricing zones are supposed to do. They are supposed to reduce, reduce driving and, and incentivize other modes, reduce congestion and potentially push, provide both the push and a pull a push and a pull provide multiple level levers.

and be both an economic lever and a and a pull factor for public transportation. The launching condition congestion pricing policy was a great example of an economic lever, a radical kind of rewiring of how a city kind of rethought its transportation system.

And it was really a story of this kind of the city kind of said, hey, we want to really rethink the way we finance our bus system, particularly because they couldn't figure out how they paid for a new bus fleet. And they said, we're to put a ring around around central London. And everybody was freaked out because they said nobody is going to come to work and all the business people are it's going to it's going to drive.

business out of central London. You know what? It didn't. didn't. East London still had a big, still had a huge economic growth throughout then. All the Docklands area still had tons of people moving in and there were policies in place that mitigated people who had to come in, for people to had to come in to do service industry work. you know, there were all kinds of policies that were thought through.

to make that really sophisticated policy. And it really worked to mitigate traffic impacts and raised, I think I've heard like 150 million pounds a year for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and basically helped the red lorry survive. I've always heard it's the story of like the revitalization of

the British bus. So, you know, I think this idea of kind of rewiring of society really can is a story of reinvention. And it kind of starts with kind of can this radical rethinking maybe of economic norms, but also kind of the way we rethink some of these these systems.

Yeah.

Vipul Vyas (24:50)
I mean, I think

that probably happened because someone had a vision of what that future would look like and was committed to realizing the vision as opposed to just talking about it. So, I that's a big part of it.

Billy Riggs (25:06)
So but one of the things we, I I think that you touched on and I think that is different now is that we see, and I think what we're starting to see that it is a tension. And I think that we will have to take on is that we see different versions of different permutations of, or different dialogues around the idea of competition.

And kind of, so how does competition play into this idea of automation and climate and competition? And how can this idea of innovation and automation play nice in a capitalistic society? mean, do we all just kind of compare?

ourselves into oblivion?

Vipul Vyas (26:02)
I mean, I think to some degree the act of living is competition. mean, whether anyone wants to admit that or not, animals compete to survive. I don't think we aspire to that type of life, and we've pulled ourselves away from that, fortunately. But at the same time...

Things go up and down. Societies, cultures, cities, they all have different periods of ascension and decline. And so it's a matter of where do you want to be? Even if you have a period of decline relative to others, it doesn't have to be absolute decline. You can at least manage that in a way that's acceptable and livable.

But I think the notion that we're not in a competitive environment is probably, it's a bit of the problem. That, you know, like I said before, I think there's a sense in some cities that kind of we are where we are, we're done, this is where we're supposed to be, and that's fine. Now it's a matter of reshuffling the wealth. And that's all that we really need to do versus not realizing that there are, you know.

There's a quote from a TV show I won't name, but it's like, if you have something worth having, somebody will want to take it from you. And I think you have to not be naive in that that's happening. And so the Bay Area has had Silicon Valley, and it's been a crown jewel. And it's been nurtured for a long time, and it was cultivated both primarily probably by the federal government more than anything. But.

I don't think it's fully appreciated. And look, a lot of people, you know, criticize the tech bros and just the oligarchic nature of some of these companies based on the amount of wealth that they've amassed and that's all fair. But at the same time, I don't think this is new. People were throwing bags of feces at commuting tech workers that were causing displacement.

Billy Riggs (27:39)
Yeah.

Vipul Vyas (28:00)
and gentrification in the city of San Francisco for 20 years, for 25 years. It's been happening for a really long time. And so at some point, that golden goose will just find another home. And it already happened. It's already happening. It's already happening. And so I think that's the point of where your attention and intention is. If your attention and intention is to make sure these people pay.

Billy Riggs (28:13)
Yeah.

Vipul Vyas (28:24)
or and pay their fair share is one thing, but just feel the pain, feel unwelcome, feel like they don't belong, feel like this is not their city, feel like this is not where they're supposed to be, then at some point they'll get the message. Or they'll fight back.

and say, no, we have every right to be here as much as anyone else. And that's going to be the dynamic. And that in itself is competition. There's a competition for what the vision of the city is.

Billy Riggs (28:51)
Yeah,

I think we're going to continue to interrogate this too. I mean, I think there's a strong dialogue on how much growth is appropriate and how and where to grow, what sectors to grow. And I think this is an opportunity for academics. I think we can say this is an area where we're happy to, for those listening, we're happy to.

You have questions, we're happy to talk with you about this, you know, kind of ideas we have on kind of where economic strengths are in different markets and things like that. there are, I think there are potential opportunities in certain sectors versus not. spend a lot of time, thinking about, for example, in the automation industry,

certain types of businesses that I think are just like, I would not wanna be in, in the next 10 to 20 years and certain types of businesses that I think are really fertile. But this kind of all gets into kind of what do we think the future of labor is, what the future of work is. So then, I think what I wanna do, Vip to wrap us up.

for this segment today is to talk us about what do you think the key takeaway that folks should have in terms of thinking about aligning innovation and labor for governance

as we go far with this series and we think about kind of what's the kind of policies that they should be thinking about as we embark on this journey.

Vipul Vyas (30:31)
Actually, I think the rewiring step is the first one. I don't think policies will emerge that make any sense until you decide where it is you want to focus and what direction you want to point things at. If the goal is, for example, to make X city, whatever that city is, unnamed city, the financial hub of the region or the world, whatever it is, then you have clarity as to what you have to do to get there.

But, or you can have a set of those things, right? It doesn't mean you just have to have one. It probably makes it easier if you have just one, but everything falls out of that aspiration. If you have clarity and direction.

you'll have a strategy that emerges from that. If you don't, you'll probably just have confusion and resentment.

And so I think policy-wise, that's going to be an outgrowth of what that initial focus is determined to be.

Billy Riggs (31:21)
Yeah.

And I think that is a really good lesson as we go into some specifics over the coming episodes is that we start and we ground in management 101 folks have a grounding strategy and it really starts, you know, set clear and specific goals. You know, it really is making those goals actionable, making them specific.

Vipul Vyas (31:36)
Yeah.

Billy Riggs (31:56)
make them really tacit and achievable.

Vipul Vyas (31:59)
Makes sense. Yep. All right. Cool. Now I think it's like it starts simple. Problems are often inscrutable. They're hard. There's no, I'm not denying that, but you have to decide where it is you want to be to start knowing how to get there. Well, that's it.

Billy Riggs (31:59)
All right, final word, Bip.

Alright.

Well, thanks for joining us. Let us know if you have any questions. Share any thoughts you might have. join the conversation. And we'll catch you next time.