Episode 35 Transcript: Why Swim When You Can Fly

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast for the climate economy. We dive deep into the climate crisis and come up with solutions. I'm Molly Wood.

So this week’s show and last week’s show kind of go together, actually … oh have you not heard it yet!? Go listen first … I’ll wait. Growth hacking.

See they go together because if we’re talking about building entirely new communities of housing … then we start thinking … ok so what’s the … car situation in this new development. How big does it have to be to accommodate driving and parking …

Could we imagine a place that has a different kind of transportation … bikes … walking … scooters … all the things we’ve talked about in the mobility world …

But today let’s go wild … because what if we started building cities with … electrified flying trams. RIGHT? Let’s go …

Gerald Posky:
I'm Gerald Posky, CEO of Swift Cities, which is a company that on the surface is a transportation company. We bring a new form of transportation you've never seen before. You would think of it as a cross between an Uber and a ski lift gondola, meaning it is on a cable, but it's a vehicle you can reserve right in and it takes you directly where you're going to the stop that you're after that doesn't move you like a bus or anything else.

But in reality, we're not a transportation company. We are a real estate company. Because doing something like this changes the way real estate gets built. You're typically constrained by traffic, you're constrained by roads, you're constrained by parking. If you're a large developer developing millions of square feet, this unshackles you from all of those constraints and allows a totally different way of building these large developments. So on the surface, we're a transportation company delivering this fun, dynamic, on-demand autonomous transportation mode, but under the surface, we're a real estate company. And why I love being on your show, Molly, is the common thread between all of that is climate change, sustainability, all of the trends that are shifting us in a direction that people are gonna like. It's not giving up something, it's helping them deliver what developers know people want, but they've always been hamstrung by having to put in this much parking and this much roads and all of these things. So it's just a win-win-win for us, for developers, for riders, for cities. It's a great place to be.

Molly Wood:
Amazing. We're going to take that apart piece by piece and understand each chunk of it, starting with, well, OK, so what was the driving? What's the impetus? What made you think this solution is the one for the future and the cities and the housing developments of the future?

Gerald Posky:
Yeah, the nice thing is we started with one particular client in mind and built something for that client. We were at Google. I was an executive in the transportation part of the real estate division, solving problems for Google's campuses, which were large, and need to be interconnected. But most importantly, they were all tended to be two to three miles from a major train station. And the future was going to be, if you wanted this, this beautiful campuses that had both live, work, play, you know, there's housing, there's residential.

Molly Wood:
Got it.

Gerald Posky:
Sorry there's you know entertainment there's retail open space just everything you need in a large urban area you needed you could only afford to do that if you had less parking fewer roads and there was no other way to make this happen so to hit that vision we knew in the real estate division that something had to happen something new had to come out and so our first assumption was okay self-driving cars were at google

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Gerald Posky:
All sorts of other things, buses, whatever it's gonna be, what is the future? And we ended up going through everything out there, from tunnels to flying vehicles. Nothing out there is designed to solve the one to five mile challenge. Most of the things that are out there are designed to get you the hypothetical 25 mile commute through traffic. That's a single digit percentage of daily trips. That's a small market. 50 to 60% of all trips are this five miles and under trips.

That's the ones we needed to solve. And nobody was focused on, ironically, nobody was focused on 60% of the market. They were sending lots of time and energy on a fraction, tiny fraction of the market. So we said, okay, if there's nothing out there like this, we are at Google, we are able to do new things. Let's try to make something new. And through a series of trial and error and a few different options looked at, this came through and it came through at a price point and with performance levels that we knew far exceeded what Google needed.

and could be done for, could be affordable to many large developers and applicable all over the place. So that's when it spun out of Google two years ago to form a freestanding Swift Cities.

Molly Wood:
And this is probably where we should say what this is, because you sort of alluded to the idea that it's like an Uber meets gondola. It's probably closest to gondola, right?

Gerald Posky:
Yes, it starts there. It is on a cable. It is overhead. The differences are, that's about where it stops, the differences are the vehicles aren't stuck on a cable that goes mindlessly between two points all day long. The cable's not moving at all. The vehicle drives itself. And what the combination of that does is now the vehicle can make choices. The cables aren't just a single cable. It can interconnect across a number of stations. So

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Gerald Posky:
You know, typically imagine five, 10, 15, 20 stations across an area, across a series of buildings, across a semi-urban area. Now you can go from any point to any point. It's not on a fixed line. It's not operating like a bus or a train. You get in one. Actually, just back up. The stations are at ground level. Generally you walk up, it's right there incorporated with where you want to be. It's like a bus stop. Forget station. Think of it as a bus stop. You walk up, vehicles are generally going to be waiting for you.

you hop in one, you're going to use your app, you're going to use your phone, you're going to do what it takes to tell it this is where I'm going and it takes you straight to your destination. Every station along the way is on a siding so I could get you could go on one and you're going to station seven and I'm going taking when I'm going to station four yours is going to choose to go up take a left turn a right turn and a left turn take you straight to four and then it pulls off to the side drops you off at the ground level and there you go and you're on your way mine will

Gerald Posky:
It's the pleasure, convenience, and enjoyable ride that we're used to with private automobiles, but done in a way that is highly efficient in operating, highly efficient in resources used, both from the vehicles, the infrastructure, as well as the operating.

Molly Wood:
I want to ask you about the efficiency, but first I just sort of want to restate that Google was like, we need this short-term, we need this sort of short distance transportation solution. And then you got, I'm just so delighted by the idea that you were like, and we were at Google. So we were able to imagine this kind of autonomous, gondola-esque situation and make it happen. But I wonder like,

what else was discarded? Because when you're describing that one to five miles, I have to admit that I am thinking e-bikes.

Gerald Posky:
Oh yeah, and for those who don't know, I mean, Google is a champion of biking. Thousands of bikes are around the campus on any given day just to bike yourself around. There's elaborate programs to help get people who've never biked before to bike to work or people who do bike to work to help get them accessories. Google is all in on biking. But the fact is, that's a portion of the population that can enjoy that mode. Scooters, definitely, take scooters when you can.

Molly Wood:
Like what is it?

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Molly Wood:
Totally. Yep.

Gerald Posky:
There's a time of year, there's a time of day, there's weather conditions, there's health reasons. They are useful and they move the needle. But you have to do the kind of change we're talking about, you have to move the needle a lot and it's all additive. If you need to move the needle 30 to 40%, 5% of people on scooters is great, 10% of people on bikes is great, another 5% carpooling is great, that's gotten you to 20%.

You still have 20% more you need to move the needle. And we were not seeing those kinds of return, any kind of return from those programs that could ever get you to where you wanted to be.

Molly Wood:
Everybody in the pool. I just feel obligated to say it because I already know. I can see the email in my inbox already, the what about bikes email. So we had to dispense with bikes. And then, no, they're huge. They're huge. We had to just acknowledge, stipulate, bikes are huge, part of the solution. And also, who doesn't want flying autonomous or floating autonomous? Come on, people. Embrace the gondola future. OK. So.

Gerald Posky:
Sure, thank you. No, but yeah, don't dispense with them. I mean, they're part of the solution. Yeah.

Gerald Posky:
Alright.

Molly Wood:
How are they more efficient? Like what is the underlying technology and how on earth do you create an overhead infrastructure where vehicles can kind of take multiple directions and make a right turn and how does that work?

Gerald Posky:
Yeah, a key on that second question modularity, the keeping everything as standard as possible. You've got a set number of poles there. They're going down city streets. You're covered under the same permitting policies that telephone companies, cable companies have always put in their poles and their cables on public right of way. We're a little bit larger than those poles, but the basic idea that you can put these things in and they're standardized. The polar standard, the

Molly Wood:
Okay.

Gerald Posky:
mountings at the top are standardized, the vehicles are standardized. production from modularity Even our software control system than an autonomous vehicle's cars. train system that you might see at the expansion and modularity.

Gerald Posky:
as opposed to thinking about it from an individual vehicle's perspective or from an entire train system's perspective, it's broken apart in a way that just everything about this is modular. The sustainability, yeah you asked about the efficiency. So small vehicles, very lightweight, they don't have to be made to survive a hit with an SUV because they're up in the air. So you're able to be much lighter weight.

Molly Wood:
Right. And we should reiterate. Oh, yeah. Go ahead.

Yes.

Molly Wood:
How small? Like how small and how many people would fit in?

Gerald Posky:
Oh, more than a golf cart, but they need to hold a wheelchair and attendance, so therefore they end up holding five to six people. But your typical weight and it's going to be, you know, 200 pounds is the average passenger load of one point four passengers per vehicle. It's how we're typically moving. You know, it's counterintuitive. I think everybody wants to say, wouldn't it be better if you had if you group people together? And there's room for that. And if you've read an airport, if you're at the rush hour, that certainly may happen.

Molly Wood:
Okay.

Gerald Posky:
But the reality is most of us don't take transit because our schedules never quite align with other people. And I should mention that in this five to six mile range, it's not just the commute. You're serving for that midday trip, that lunch run, that trip to the pharmacy, that other trip that you're trying to do. If you're trying to live in these compact, sustainable neighborhoods, you still have these trips. And so we're not there just for the peak, just for the rush hour.

to serve all those trips and just typically people aren't all going the same way at the same time. So sharing is hard. Big vehicles, this is what works with the rest of the transit world, big vehicles that are very efficient during rush hour are very inefficient the rest of the day. So we bias it the other way. We want to be efficient all day. There's definitely a rush hour where you want to have maybe some combining and some other things happening, but that the

actually outweighs in the inefficiency we lose during rush hour. It's counterintuitive to a lot of people, but I think it's a really important point that until you do the numbers, you probably don't believe it. And just we've done the numbers and happy to, you know, dig into that. At some point, we all have time.

Molly Wood:
And then

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, that's fascinating. That's a whole other hour-long conversation. And then is it electrified? Is it the whole infrastructure overall, I assume, is sort of electric and powered by renewable energy in these developments?

Gerald Posky:
Oh yes.

Gerald Posky:
Right, yes, your electric power is going to come as clean as you can possibly get it, you know, fingers crossed. But yes, you're off the grid, you're using the grid, and then each vehicle is battery powered from there.

Molly Wood:
Gotcha. Okay, and then let's talk about the real estate part. So, because the idea is, I mean, it sounds like if you're designing something modular, in theory, it could be popped up in an existing city, but it sounds like, talk to me about this, the real estate part and the kind of developments of the future that will have Swift City's vehicles as part of their design.

Gerald Posky:
Yes, I wish I could just say here's the one place it fits and it works, but it turns out it's working all sorts of places that we didn't even imagine. But to take a few examples that have been on my radar already this week, the university with the split campus, that's a very common situation. And they run buses that they have to run 18 hours or so a day and it's not great service. The buses are polluting. They're now

that will change somewhat in the future, but they're still like it's a slow service. Students were driving, students were unhappy, students were, you know, like I said, moving their cars between campuses. They didn't need to do that. You need something that can be above traffic that can get you from a set of stations on one campus to a set of stations on the other when not everybody's going. It's not just point A and point B. They're still spread out areas. So that's one example. Another one that's sort of small, but we weren't expecting.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Gerald Posky:
ski towns. They're used to gondolas going up mountains so they're comfortable with them at the ground level. Everything they were wanting to do was just putting more and more development along a long narrow windy mountain road and that's not good for anybody. How do we get something new? But to your original point I think that yes a brand new real estate development is by far easiest but a lot of them are being retrofitted. A lot of campuses, you know, corporate campuses,

Molly Wood:
Right?

Gerald Posky:
and those are becoming 50 years old. And so now people are saying, and this was, if you know Google's campus in Mountain View, a bunch of two-story buildings surrounded by parking lots. And the push has been, how do we bring that up to modern standards of workplaces and living? And the answer is, get rid of the parking lots, make them three, four, six-story buildings. Let's make it a better place to be. But if you're going to add that density while removing parking, you better find another way to get people there.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:
Right.

Gerald Posky:
And so it's possible to retrofit, capture a lot of the value. We do say sometimes you're printing land. When you can put more real estate on a given property, you're in effect printing land and printing land is worth a lot.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Time for a quick break. When we come back, we’ll dig more into what we really mean when we talk about housing density … and the climate impact of accommodating so many cars and so much parking … everywhere we build.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Gerald Posky … the CEO of Swift Cities … next up … if we were building our ideal cities … they’d look like Paris. Yeah, you already knew that … anyway, here’s Gerald again.

Molly Wood:
Yeah. Let's talk about, for people who are not familiar, just the overall kind of climate impact of density. Why this is a solution that certainly can take cars off of campuses, but also enable the type of density that itself is a positive climate outcome. Just talk to me about the kind of climate goals writ large.

Gerald Posky:
Yes, so I think people pretty easily get the fact that suburban sprawling development bad for sustainability. People get that. And so you wanted to, we always wanted to believe, including me, that the opposite end of the spectrum was the good end of the spectrum. High rises, skyscrapers. Turns out, I think there's a time we were also more concerned about operating carbon before really thinking about embodied carbon and what it takes to build something that you're going to use later.

that building piece, even if it's gonna last 50 years, is still so large that it can outweigh the rest of the operating side. So that's what more recent research has shown that skyscrapers are also bad on the other end, that the amount of embodied carbon to create them is a negative. And you say, ah, where's the place we wanna be? We wanna be in this four to four, six, eight, 12 story buildings. Those don't exist a lot in the US. People would think of Paris.

Paris is that way. Actually even downtown Palo Alto has just enough density as sidewalk cafes. You kind of get this feeling like, boy, this place wouldn't exist if all of these buildings had to have big parking lots around them. The problem is, that level of building is a little bit more expensive to build and there's some zoning constraints that limit it somewhat. But fundamentally, you get this weird mishmash where those are too dense to be served.

if everybody drove cars. But if it's just a tiny pocket of your city, you're not gonna build a mass transit line just for that little pocket. So when it's all of Paris built to that level, fine, that works. And you've been working on that hundreds of years. But you get this little pocket of two to four million square feet of real estate development, that's not enough for a mass transit line. So you have this area where there's this big gap between

cities that can be served by mass transit, subways and that sort of thing, and the rest of the city that's basically taken over by cars, and the sweet spot in the middle can't be done by either of them. So you have to come up with something new, and this is where purely in hindsight did we realize that was where Google's development was, and that's why we developed something new, was we were taking it above the level of density where cars could serve it, but it's nowhere near the kind of density that's

Molly Wood:
Hmm.

Gerald Posky:
urban and loud and skyscrapers and you can't see the sun. It was a mixture of open space and light and airy, but the buildings were still more than a car than the car network could serve. So there is this sweet spot that we have to build in, whether it's our solution or not, we have to be building our buildings in our cities in this four to six to eight story density level.

Molly Wood:
Right.

Gerald Posky:
and there's just not a good way to bring transportation to that density level. So something has to change. I don't care if it's our solution or not. If we're going to transform cities, I don't know if you've seen the numbers, the two and a half billion people are moving to cities over the next 25 years, by 2050. That's a hundred million people a year moving to cities and it's close to a hundred billion square feet of real estate that has to get built just to support that migration.

Molly Wood:
So.

Molly Wood:
Wow.

Gerald Posky:
So you other times see statistics that China is building a new New York City every month, and they're almost incomprehensible. And you just have to say, that's true, though. There is so much building and every building that we build poorly today lasts for 50 years. So we've got to get ahead of this curve as fast as possible. And the good news is we're not asking people to do things they don't want to d. This is the type of development that developers want more density. People love this type of

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Molly Wood:
Right.

Gerald Posky:
lifestyle, they love Paris, they love downtown Palo Alto, whichever your paradigm is, they like this environment. It's just hard to build and hard to serve transportation-wise. So we're looking to solve all of these problems in a way that makes everybody happy with the solution.

Molly Wood:
Right? So I want to put a finer point on what you just said about this type of building. It is already happening. You're not trying to incentivize a market that doesn't yet exist by serving it a transportation solution that it will eventually need. You're saying this building is already happening, this development is already happening around the world, even if you maybe don't see it in your city in the United States. And so is your what who are your customers?

And how do you say to them, hey, don't build without Swift Cities.

Gerald Posky:
Yeah, a good point about exactly who is our customer because it does vary a lot. In some cases, it is the private developer themselves who can say, you know what, I was going to be spending $200 million on parking structures and now I will spend less on that. I know, the numbers get big in a hurry when you're in this. I could have used even bigger numbers but it throws people off. Yeah, I have.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, you can't see me dear audience, but I just made a what face like what?

Molly Wood:
Woo!

Gerald Posky:
manage the planning for billions of dollars worth of parking structures and every time it breaks my heart a little, but you could build less parking, use this instead, and they can see how it's financed in their construction plans and it works no different than a parking structure. Definitely talking to some private clients who operate that way. In other cases, you're serving an area where there may be multiple businesses, multiple owners, and it's complicated, and so then the city steps in, but they basically, the private sector can be the ones who charge themselves in certain ways. Or the other extreme is, okay, there's the city or the government or the federal, wherever you are in the world, whichever regional government body, whatever it is, to say, okay, we're building out this area and we're gonna invest in the infrastructure to make this area work. And again, whether it's a brand new construction and you can pass that cost along to the new developers, or is it backfilling an existing area, all depends on where you are. But in short, The answer can be private sector customers who just have a problem they need solve or a bigger government effort. And what we see, speaking of us as a small company, our go-to-market strategy is really focused on those smaller places that can operate and can make decisions quickly. The more that it's on private land, the simpler the regulations and the approval get. The big market is the city scale stuff, obviously.

That's where we're going to have the biggest impact. That's where the biggest revenue is. So we're just have a go-to-market strategy that starts small, builds it up as quickly as we can, but we don't bite off more than we can chew.

Molly Wood:
Right. Well, it feels like, and we should stipulate, you're still quite early. Is there an operational system anywhere in the world now?

Gerald Posky:
We have our prototype is down with the hardware side of this business is down with a company called Home Solutions in New Zealand. And so you're welcome to visit New Zealand and ride the prototype. But if and actually that's where the first pilot is being planned is in Queenstown, New Zealand. It's a beautiful, beautiful site. You couldn't ask for anything better. But it's a city that squeeze between mountains and water. Absolutely beautiful, but they can't grow and they can't expand the roads. There's nowhere to go.

Molly Wood:
Great, on the way.

Gerald Posky:
and things are therefore getting incredibly expensive for the people who live there because people are moving there, but there's no way to expand the city. And so they're looking for transportation solutions.

Molly Wood:
I mean, I am picturing cities all across just the Bay Area already. So it feels like that starting with those private developers, it seems wise for many reasons, not least of which is that you can sort of prove the efficacy and the safety. I would imagine there is some mental hurdle for people to overcome. Like even riding in a gondola can be a little scary for fun. Yep.

Gerald Posky:
Yes, yeah, definitely.

Molly Wood:
And how does that, you know, what is that? How does that conversation generally go? Like, do you, are you ever having conversations with the developers who are like, it's going to freak people out.

Gerald Posky:
It has come up that not everybody wants to be in the air and so thinking through the vehicles and how much can you control your experience do you feel some people want to look down and see how high in the air they are other people you know don't want to be near that and so it definitely affects vehicle design choices of how much you can see out or can you control what you're seeing. I think most people have been accepting of the idea that

if 1% of the people can't use it. This isn't trying to replace everything else in the world. There's still other ways to get around, but this is a great bonus on top of that. I think actually the surprise for us had been when we were within Google, everything was numerical. What is the value here? What can you put a dollar figure on? Reduce parking or other efficiencies. We didn't put any value on the experience. And what we're seeing in the private sector market and even among government people, I want to give people this incredible experience.

I want them to remember their visit here at my resort, at my ski area, at my business park, whatever it is or in my city. And so that number that we didn't quantify it all internally is turning out to be one of the biggest factors is most people want to have that incredible experience.

Molly Wood:
Yeah, I mean, this with all due respect, but that is a very Google way to have come to that conclusion. But it's true. I mean, if you ever go somewhere like I'm thinking of Pittsburgh or even in L.A., they there's funiculars that are both or in downtown in San Francisco, there's the cable cars, right? They're they're functional, but they're also a reason to go there. I feel.

Gerald Posky:
Ignore that. Yeah, ignore the aesthetics.

Gerald Posky:
Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood:
I'm in a bit of a bubble, I admit, because it's people who are looking for climate solutions. But I do feel like there is increased willingness to accept and talk about different mobility modalities. I mean, you're in the same bubble, but wouldn't you say that's true? Like people are willing to consider alternative options to allow dangerous cars and all of the things that we're just used to now that don't work.

Gerald Posky:
Yes, and if you really think about departments of transportation at the local or state or whatever level, I mean, 20 years ago, there was no openness to identify, you know, to embrace anything other than bus train. This is the paradigm bus train. They didn't care about bikes. All of that has just changed so much. And I think a lot of it came from Uber just rocking people's world and realizing, oh, external forces could affect us. It's been it had been the same for 100 years in transportation.

cars buses trains and All of a sudden it took a little while and now everyone in the transportation world almost everyone is saying, okay I have to be alert. I had to be paying attention I have to be looking for new things that whether I want them or not, you know Some people are resistant to change but they certainly have to be aware of what's coming out there and that wasn't true 10 15 years ago

Molly Wood:
Yeah.

Molly Wood:
Right. And wouldn't you rather have maybe a relatively controlled ecosystem of vehicles like this and infrastructure like this, as opposed to like, Evie Tulls popping up off of every roof? Ha ha ha.

Gerald Posky:
Yeah, maybe that's it does. We get a better reception from cities than I was expecting. And I think part of it, maybe, yes, we're, we're the friendly kind. We understand cities. We have people in our staff who've worked from inside or outside of cities before. And so, yeah, we're not the, you know, break things type of startup. We, we understand the game. We work with cities to make this happen.

Molly Wood:
So generally, how would something like Swift Cities be treated, like from a regulatory perspective? It's not, they're not flying.

Gerald Posky:
Right. It falls under the same rules that the airport trains, which are autonomous, fully autonomous driverless trains, it's just that our train, our tracks is a single cable. And we have this small vehicle switching paradigm as opposed to one train that kind of goes in a circle or back and forth. And luckily those regulations were updated in 2021 to accommodate something like this. So we fit very comfortably in regulations. We're very happy.

Molly Wood:
Mm-hmm.

Gerald Posky:
It's a nice world to be in where you can just say, yes, I am going to follow those rules to the T and we're happy. They exist. Yeah.

Molly Wood:
and they already exist and I don't have to like rewrite them or have a huge fight with every single city. Are those federal regulations?

Gerald Posky:
It's the Feds delegate to the states and the states have delegated it or adopt what's called the American Society of Civil Engineers Automated people mover standards. So most states have adopted the same set of standards and in fact and globally there's similar called Cinelex standards That are similar enough that going global even isn't a challenge

Molly Wood:
or standard.

Molly Wood:
fascinating. Describe it for us. I feel like the first time I heard about Swift Cities, I mean, it was really, it was describing living somewhere that has this, you know, all the things you don't realize you're encountering every single day, like cars almost running you down in the crosswalk, or exhaust, or the sound, or, you know, just sort of describe the perfect vision of the Swift Cities enabled environment.

Gerald Posky:
Yeah, I think number one is to say the city you're in, the place you're in is walkable. It's vibrant. There are the sidewalk cafes, there are parks. A little bit of a Goldie Glock zone. Not too dense, not too sparse. It's just right. And it means there's just not a lot of cars clogging up all the streets. So to get around, you leave the cafe, you walk over to the bus stop size stop, find an empty vehicle.

you know, hop in to use your phone or use the touch screen to say that you need to go to your destination. Your destination should have a mix of everything. And it's not just the five destinations that would pay the most, but it's got to stop at the park. It's got to stop at the museum. It's got to stop at other things that may not be purely the busiest spots, not just the office buildings or the train station. But it's truly serving all of your everyday needs.

you're going to the park, you choose the park station. You lift up off the ground, connect up with the overhead gables. A lot of people might just picture them like telephone lines, a little bit higher than that. And you're gonna glide through a series of left and right decisions. So you get to the park and then it pulls off to the side, descends down to the ground and you get off. Doors close behind you and that vehicle may hop off to somewhere else in the network where somebody needs it. And you're there, there's no emissions.

no noise, nothing that's going to be like the world you're used to today.

Molly Wood:
Well, on that note, tell me quickly about the team and yourself. How did you come to the... I mean, I got a little bit of how you came to the... how you got the assignment, so to speak. But were you passionate about sustainability before? Like, what's your story?

Gerald Posky:
Yeah, this has been this type of autonomous guided transportation has been in my blood since undergrad. I remember the day I fell in love with it. I won't go into the whole story, but I remember the day that I said this is my future. After being at a startup previously.

Molly Wood:
Oh, I kind of want to hear the whole story. What did you see? Was it a flying car?

Gerald Posky:
just the usual, I know, I mean, sort of undergraduate, went to the library, at the like once a month I'd flip through the new magazines, the popular science, popular mechanics, scientific Americans, there's a little article, like a less than a page on autonomous monorails in small vehicle style. And it's like, well, that's interesting. It doesn't even seem possible, or it seems, normally these things are kind of pie in the sky. I looked, went to the library.

there was a whole book on the subject. There had been some government research and I started digging in and all of a sudden it seems reasonable. That was really before the internet was truly bonding people, but I was able to find a little set of people out there who were actively in the space. Most of them were academics and engineering schools connected with that world and said, oh, this is my future. But I had, I went to business school specifically to move to this space. I went into a startup. Google was actually my startup life, after three years of startup life.

going back to reality and like, I was gonna have a normal job for a while. And then you get to Google and realize it's not normal. And we can do some crazy transportation stuff here as well. So that took.

Molly Wood:
Wow. And then Google's like, please build that thing you've been obsessed with since college. Amazing. Well played, Gerald. Well played. Ha ha ha.

Gerald Posky:
Yes. They may not realize it was so planned, but anyway, it was a long-term effort. But being on the customer side of the table is what really changed things and understanding. It's not the idea that sells people, it's the team. It's what you were asking about is how are you going to get these projects delivered? And my two co-founders who were the first ones in Urban Planner who

Molly Wood:
Ha ha ha!

Gerald Posky:
call her the city whisperer. She understands how to get things through the city process. Clay Griggs on our team is the project manager. It's just a prodigy of discipline and management to make projects, the orchestration of projects, making them go smoothly. And then since then we've added on, there's a guy Steve who I've worked with for 20 years in this space. Just so much background from some of the other companies who've built airport people movers who are successful.

Craig comes from Lockheed Martin and autonomous space travel. You think you've got it hard doing, you know, autonomy here. If you haven't sent it into space, you don't know challenges and difficulty. Even if you think, well, there's nothing to run into out there. It sounds simpler, but all sorts of things about execution and perfection that you don't get to fix it after it's left. So you've got to understand it, but you have to get it off the ground. You can't spend forever trying to make it perfect. So understanding these balances between process and progress.

Molly Wood:
Wow.

Gerald Posky:
You get that mindset and it's like, ah, lucky Martin, MIT background. We've got marketing and most of the except for except for Craig, who has been with us for a couple of years now. I think then everybody I go back with more than six years at the minimum, sometimes closer to 20 to say we're a team that knows each other. We know the space well, we've worked together well and just get that dream team. And I, like I said, I was at a startup before I know what it's like to not have it.

So that's why it feels so special when you get that together.

Molly Wood:
That's amazing. Gerald, thank you so much. I cannot wait to live in this future.

Gerald Posky:
We'll make sure you are there for one of the first rides when it comes somewhere near us. Maybe it's not, maybe you don't wanna go to New Zealand, but we'll get one to you.

Molly Wood:
Awesome.

Molly Wood:
Oh, oh no, I do. Yep, yep. All right, amazing. Thank you so much for the time. I appreciate it.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:
Now I should acknowledge here that as a lifelong reader of science fiction …

It’s not that hard for me to imagine a city or a world that looks completely different … from the one we live in today … so thanks for coming with me on these flights of possible fancy …

But it’s a good reminder that the way things are is NOT the way things have always been … or have to be. We have the freedom to imagine something totally different … and it’s … kind of wonderful.

Oh by the way … you heard me mention funiculars … which are also sometimes called incline railways … as one example of how people solved transportation problems in small hilly areas. I found a cool list of the best ones in the world … which you can find in the newsletter … subscribe at everybody in the pool dot com. LA has one!

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

Email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com …

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Thank you to those of you who already have. See you next week.