On Our "Virtual Route 66" This Week: Looking to the Future

While traveling on our "Virtual Route 66" throughout the week, our team pulled together the folowing on the state of our World courtesy Route50, Bloomberg Green, Fortune & Peter Diamandis which we present for consideration:

In This City, Your Taxi May Not Have a Driver DANIEL C. VOCK  |   California regulators gave Cruise the go-ahead to charge passengers to ride through San Francisco in its autonomous vehicles, but public safety skepticism remains.

States With the Highest and Lowest Rainy Day Funds JEAN DIMEO  |   Wyoming leads the nation in the operating days in its fund, while Washington has a negative balance.

By Bill Donahue At first, it seemed as though nothing could go wrong. Dockless shared electric scooters began showing up on the streets of the world’s cities in 2017, and the vanguard — techies, baristas, twentysomething daredevils — hopped on and rode, confident that they were tilting against two looming threats, urban congestion and climate change. The future of scootering seemed so bright that the valuation of the largest manufacturer, Bird, went from $300 million in March, 2018, to $2 billion three months later, an astronomical leap, even by Silicon Valley standards. But Bird’s earliest scooters were so flimsy that, in one 2018 study, their average life span on the streets of Louisville, Kentucky, was just 28.8 days. (Bird disputes the study’s findings pointing to an investor presentation from 2022 claiming that the “half-life” of its earliest scooters was three to four months.) Reports of scooter battery fires and brake failures across scooter brands began hitting the news. In August 2018, Bird’s CEO, Travis VanderZanden, made a highly unusual move, selling off tens of millions of dollars worth of his company’s stock. Today, the scooter industry encompasses over 200 brands, but it is still shadowed by a bad reputation. Scooter-related injuries are so frequent among riders that several law firms offer websites targeting prospective e-scooter plaintiffs. Scooter operators are frequently banned from cities — in January, for instance, Miami kicked out five of the seven companies operating in the city; Manhattan has banned shared scooters. Paris deputy mayor David Belliard last year joined numerous other city leaders in scooter-hate when he proposed “getting rid of them completely.” Despite all the attention they command, e-scooters are used for only about one one-thousandth of all trips made in the world’s cities, according to McKinsey & Co. The global consulting giant has predicted that by 2030, micromobility — think bikes, mopeds, e-bikes and scooters — will triple in popularity to sustain a $500 billion industry. Can the scooter grow up and meet that economic promise? Superpedestrian scooters weigh in at 60 pounds apiece. Source: Superpedestrian A Boston brand is earnestly trying to make it happen, by focusing on safety. Superpedestrian has put nine years of research into making what’s been called “the Volvo of scooters.” It recently raised $125 million in funding to enhance its technology. And by year’s end, in several U.S. and European cities, including San Diego, Rome and Madrid, thousands of Superpedestrian scooters will come equipped with a Pedestrian Defense AI system. This software can instantly stop the vehicle’s engine if the rider hops up onto a curb, starts slaloming wildly or travels up a one-way street. Additional gadgetry will alert headquarters if a rider parks more than 10 centimeters outside a designated area and will self-check 140 components to ascertain if, say, the battery is at risk of igniting or if the throttle is stuck. No other scooter integrates such a suite of safety features, according to Augustin Friedel, an independent industry analyst and mobility expert based in Germany. Can Superpedestrian profit from its safety push? Click here to read the full article.

Covid’s lingering fallout

What else did Covid cause?  As the pandemic shifts — and as this newsletter begins to focus on other topics — it’s time to start thinking more deeply about all of the non-Covid effects of Covid-19 on health care. Some are obvious. A lockdown in Shanghai led to a shortage of medical dye used to scan American patients for cancer, emergency heart conditions and strokes. Others are tragic. Backed up emergency departments and hospitals have left young psychiatric patients waiting for an inpatient bed for days or even weeks.  The financial, public health and other ripple effects of the pandemic are still being studied, and it may take years to know the real collateral damage of Covid.    A healthcare worker prepares a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 booster shot. Photographer: Hannah Beier/Bloomberg Cancer screenings fell precipitously during the pandemic’s peaks, but it’s still not clear in the data how that affected cancer deaths. Traffic fatalities rose, but not because roads were clogged with people driving instead of taking public transit – there are signs it was because roads were empty, and the few people driving drove faster. Health insurers saw strong profits during the first two years of the pandemic as people delayed medical care, leading to expectations that they would face a tidal wave of claims as the virus waned – but that hasn’t happened. Population growth hit its lowest level in more than 100 years, driven by fewer births and more deaths.   The ongoing shift of the pandemic’s status – whether you choose to call it the end, a hidden surge, a move to endemicity, or just a change – will bring with it the movement of billions of dollars, altered demographics, and revelations of unknown collateral damage.  Some of those pandemic side effects may ultimately be good, some will certainly be bad, many will be confusing or more complex than our assumptions about them were a year or two years ago. The only thing that’s certain is that health companies, patients and caregivers are going to find a far different world as a result. —Drew Armstrong

June 7, 2022

Good morning. The word “woke” doesn’t attach well to Doug McMillon. The Walmart CEO was born in Memphis, grew up in Arkansas, and started his career at the giant retail company while in high school, loading trucks. “They tend to give the rookies the heavier stuff to lift,” he recalls. “That’s one of the things I learned.” So the fact that McMillon, who was our guest on this week’s episode of Leadership Next, has emerged as one of the leading advocates of a stakeholder approach to business is worthy of note. In 2020, he committed Walmart to becoming “a regenerative company.” Just in case anyone thinks that’s a meaningless phrase, he moves quickly to actions. On the environment: “We’ve got project gigaton underway right now with about 4,500 suppliers, where we’ve already had them report they’ve saved over 500 million metric tons of greenhouse gases. But it’s not enough… Becoming regenerative means that you take nature, and you take humanity, and you put it even more into the center of your decision making.” McMillon doesn’t have the luxury of playing on one side of the partisan divide. As head of the largest company in the world, with the most employees and the most customers, he is a smiling amalgam of contradictions: red state and blue state, tech and brick-and-mortar, blue collar and new collar. When I ask him about the recent pushback against stakeholder capitalism, he doesn’t flinch: “I think it all boils down to timeframe. Yes, we are here to provide a return for shareholders. The best way to provide a return for shareholders over time, is if you have strong communities, associates that are well compensated and happy with their jobs and excited about their futures. A planet that works.” A few other excerpts. On how long inflation will last: “It’s going to last a while.” On how long it will take the global supply chain to get sorted out: “I’m not even going to venture a guess. But it’s definitely going to be longer than this year.” On rising wages: “Wages have gone up, and we’re pleased about that. Actually, we like to raise wages.” On Walmart’s move into new businesses like advertising and health care: “One of the interesting things that I’ve learned over the last few years is when you make the switch from being purely analog to being more of a digital company, it unlocks opportunities to grow a lot of other businesses… When I was going to business school, we were taught about silos and conglomerates. In a digital world, it all feels a lot more connected. It doesn’t feel like they’re silos. It just feels like you are designing for a family or a customer or for members. And these other things kind of naturally come together and result in one experience for them. And that’s what we are trying to build.” You can listen to the full interview on Apple or Spotify.  Other news below. Alan Murray @alansmurray alan.murray@fortune.com Any reasons for optimism? War, pandemic, inflation, and crypto crashing… A glance at the headlines is enough to set anybody on edge. And with an endless media stream, it’s hard to escape those headlines. Worse, evolution shaped our brains to be acutely aware of any potential dangers—so our news media and politicians focus on the grim to capture your mindshare. This dire combination has a profound impact on our mindset: it literally shuts off our ability to take in good news. So, what’s the solution to this challenge? It takes actively developing what I call an Abundance Mindset—it means shifting your mindset from cynicism to hope, from pessimism to optimism. Making this mindset shift is especially important for entrepreneurs, who need to see opportunities where others see problems. In today’s blog, I’ll summarize science writer Matt Ridley’s important work on why many of us feel what he calls a “moaning pessimism.” I’ll also include the story of how Ridley himself developed a more optimistic and abundance-focused perspective. Let’s dive in! NOTE: Helping you master an Abundance Mindset, especially during uncertain times, is a key focus of my year-round Mastermind and Executive Program Abundance360. If you like this blog, share it! | Twitter | LinkedIn | Share via Email FROM PESSIMISM TO OPTIMISM Matt Ridley is a tall Englishman and the award-winning author of one of my favorite books, The Rational Optimist. He’s an Oxford-trained zoologist but has spent most of his career as a science writer, specializing in the origins and evolution of behavior. And lately, the behavior that has most caught his attention is humanity’s predilection for bad news. As Ridley puts it: “It’s incredible, this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.” In trying to make sense of this pessimism, Ridley, like the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, sees a combination of cognitive biases and evolutionary psychology as the core of the problem. He identifies the cognitive bias “loss aversion”—a tendency for people to regret a loss more than a similar gain—as the bias with the most impact on abundance. Loss aversion is often what keeps people stuck in ruts. It’s an unwillingness to change bad habits for fear that the change will leave them in a worse place than before. But this bias is not acting alone. “I also think there could be an evolutionary psychology component,” Ridley contends. “We might be gloomy because gloomy people managed to avoid getting eaten by lions in the Pleistocene.” Either way, Ridley has come to believe that our divorce from reality is doing more harm than good and has lately started to fight back. “It’s become a habit now for me to challenge such remarks. Whenever somebody says something grumpy about the world, I just try to think of the other side of the argument and—after examining the facts—again and again I find they have it the wrong way round.” This conversion to positive thinking did not happen overnight. As a cub science reporter, Ridley encountered hundreds of environmentalists fervently prophesying a much glummer future.  So, what caused the shift? HOW DATA DRIVES OPTIMISM About 25 years ago, Ridley started noticing that the doom predicted by these experts was still nowhere in evidence. Acid rain was the first sign that the facts were not matching the fanfare. Once considered our planet’s most dire environmental threat, acid rain develops because burning fossil fuels releases sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, causing an acidic shift in the pH balance of precipitation—hence the name. First noticed by English scientist Robert Angus Smith in 1852, acid rain took another century to blossom from scientific curiosity to presumed catastrophe. But by the late 1970s, the writing was on the wall. In 1982 Canada’s minister of the environment, John Roberts, summed up what many were thinking, telling Time magazine: “Acid rain is one of the most devastating forms of pollution imaginable, an insidious malaria of the biosphere.” Back then, Ridley agreed with this opinion. But a few decades passed, and he realized that nothing of the sort was happening: “It wasn’t just that the trees weren’t dying, it was that they never had been dying—not in any unusual numbers and not because of acid rain. Forests that were supposed to have vanished altogether were healthier than ever.” To be sure, human innovation played a huge role in averting this disaster. In America, that handwringing produced everything from amendments to the Clean Air Act to the adoption of catalytic converters for automobiles. The results were a reduction in sulfur dioxide emission from 31 million tons in 1970 to just 1.8 million tons in 2021—a 94% reduction. Nitrogen oxide emissions declined from over 27 million tons to 7.6 million tons during the same period. This absence got Ridley curious. He began looking into other dark prophecies and found a similar pattern: “Predictions about population and famine were seriously wrong… Age-adjusted cancer rates, for example, are falling, not rising. Furthermore, I noticed that people who pointed these facts out were heavily criticized but not refuted.” All of this led Ridley to another question: If the really negative predictions weren’t coming true, what about the veracity of more common assumptions, such as the idea that the world is getting worse? To figure this out, Ridley began examining global trends: economic and technological; longevity and health-care related; and a host of environmental issues. The result of this inquiry became the backbone of his book The Rationale Optimist, which makes the case that optimism rather than pessimism is the sounder philosophical position for accessing our species’ chances at a brighter tomorrow. FINAL THOUGHTS The last few years have felt chaotic, unpredictable, and downright scary at times. But when we pause, zoom out, and take a broader perspective, it’s clear that we are living in the most exciting period of human history. The incredible news today, as compared to even a few decades ago, is that exponential technologies are giving each of us unparalleled access to knowledge, experts, and global communications at little-to-no cost. One the best ways to see this is to look at how the internet revolution has continued to rapidly spread across the planet. In 2010, we had just under 2 billion people connected to the internet. We’re now at 5 billion. By 2030, that number will rise to at least 7.5 billion—or 90% of the planet. Coupled with 100 billion sensors, the incredible advancement of AI, robots, and much more, we’re rapidly creating an intelligent brain for the entire planet. This intelligence layer enables us to solve global problems by mobilizing resources around the globe.  This is at the core of what it means to have an Abundance Mindset: the idea that next year will bring more opportunities than this year. Your job as an entrepreneur is to consistently turn scarcity into abundance. The question is: What challenges are you going to solve? What will you create? Daily Convergence Update  Good Afternoon. I’m Virtual Peter. Let’s explore how converging exponential technologies are transforming industries and our lives! Selected By Virtual Peter Abra Launches Crypto Credit card, NFT Service with American Express A digital asset financial services company, Abra has announced the launch of Abra Crypto Card and a new NFT service. Abra crypto card is a crypto rewards credit card that will function on the American Express network. Selected By Virtual Peter United Nations proposal could open up Tesla’s Full Self-Driving to Australia While the amendment has yet to be approved by the UNECE World Forum for the Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations, it’s expected this will happen later this month when the lawmakers meet, and will be adopted by the more than 50 countries which have signed onto the rules. Selected By Virtual Peter A $263,000, Solar-Powered Car Will Go Into Production This Year With a top speed of just 100 miles per hour, this two hundred thousand dollar auto will have you eating the dust of other luxury vehicles. A similarly priced Ferrari F-8, for example, can go more than twice that fast. Technology Real Life-Jedi? Chinese Scientists Invent ‘Real Telekinesis’ Using Programmable Metamaterials and Bluetooth Chinese scientists are making strides in moving objects with our minds by experimenting with real-time, remote, and wireless mind control of metamaterials. Telekinesis, or using your mind to move items at a distance, conjures up images of pure fantasy. However, behind the curtain of fiction, scientists are actually working on it already. But one way to make Telekinesis possible is to combine brain signal collection technologies with developing programmable metasurfaces (PM), the functionalities or operating modes of which may be switched or changed by on-site programming or pre-defined softwar... This is the first room-temperature quantum computer An Australian facility recently became the first in the world to combine a “quantum accelerator” with a supercomputer based on traditional architecture. Unlike classical computers, which process data as binary bits (0 or 1), those in quantum machines (known as qubits) can exist in a simultaneous superposition of these two states. This results in an exponential increase in their processing power. Transportation China’s Geely launches satellites for future Volvo, Lotus, Polestar autonomous cars Not content with challenging Elon Musk in the electric car sales race, Chinese car giant Geely – which owns Volvo, Lotus and Polestar – has gone to space, too. Chinese car giant Geely – which owns Volvo, Polestar and Lotus – has launched a batch of satellites designed to connect the next generation of fully-autonomous cars. Odisha-based Startup’s Aircraft to be displayed in Paris Odisha-based startup BON V Technology’s newly developed aircraft is to be displayed in the VivaTech, which is to be held in Paris from 15th to 18th June 2022. The developed aircraft is India’s first artificial intelligence-powered electric aircraft. BON V’s aircraft named RM001 is intended to be utilized as a dependable, safe, clean, and sustainable mode of cargo transportation in inaccessible places. Space A Dyson Sphere Could Provide Us With Unlimited Energy and Help Humankind Live Forever. We Found Out How to Build One. For the best reading experience, open this story on a device with Apple News. It may also be available on the publisher’s website. The World's Largest Liquid-Mirror Telescope Comes Online Take, for example, the research into liquid mirrors and advanced interferometers, which would rely on entirely new types of telescopes and light-gathering to advance the science of astronomy. A pioneering example is the newly-commissioned International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) telescope that just came online at Devasthal Peak, a 2,450 m (8,040 ft) tall mountain located in the central Himalayan range. Unlike conventional telescopes, the ILMT relies on a rapidly-rotating 4-meter (13 ft) mirror coated with a layer of mercury to capture cosmic light. Health New study could help fight bacterial infections without antibiotics Researchers at Mohali's Institute of Nanoscience and Technology have found a novel way to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections -- by inducing self-destruction in the bacteria Although many potent antibiotics are available in the market, our indiscriminate use has rendered them useless in treating several common bacterial infections. The bacteria have mutated and developed smart techniques to beat the effect of the drugs. Scientists are now actively researching alternative methods to combat drug-resistant bacterial strains, one among them being the nanotechnology-based approach. Laser Guided: Artificial Human Tissue On A Chip Could Replace Animal Testing Animal testing could slowly be replaced with experiments using artificial tissue thanks to groundbreaking work using lasers done by the Vienna Technical University (TU Wien). The idea behind the research was the creation of artificial organs in a procedure known as delivering an “organ on a chip” or “human on a chip.”

We leave all w/this: