Newsletter Audiocast Olaf Sakkers

In the first episode of our second season of RedBlue Conversations, co-host Prescott Watson speaks with Nora Eckert to discuss the UAW strike and ongoing labor negotiations of September & October 2023. Nora is a reporter with the Wall Street Journal focused on the major American carmakers and is part of the Journal’s leading automotive team.
Nora has spent much of the last two months embedded in the negotiations, and we are lucky to have her as a conversation partner. We discuss:
* What’s behind UAW’s aggressive opening to this negotiation? Demands for a 40% wage increase and a 32 hour workweek are a response to BOTH a 30-year decline in labor’s power in the American auto industry. But they are also a result of a very specific set of political circumstances in Union leadership with the rise of Shawn Fain.
* Will increased labor costs really derail EVs? Nora and Prescott dive into the arguments from both labor and management. How deeply will increased labor costs in both legacy and new factory roles impact the profitability of EV lines for Ford, GM and Stellantis? Hint: the major losses all three are incurring on their EV product lines may start with labor, but they certainly do not end there.
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In this episode we speak with Horace Dediu, the co-founder of Micromobility Industries and one of the earliest and most influential voices in the world of micromobility. A longtime Apple analyst, his insights into the adoption curve of products like the iPhone informed how he began to look at consumer interest in e-bikes and, later, e-scooters. Looking at the state of micromobility today we touch on flash points, like the near-collapse of one-time leaders like Bird and Lime. “What went wrong,” quickly morphs into “what is still likely to go right,” and Horace takes a generally positive long-term view of the role that micromobility will play in cities around the world. We debate the importance of America as a battleground for micromobility policy: Will progress elsewhere make up for America’s micromobility backwardness or is it critical to change America? This turns out to be a critical and contentious question.
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During episode 6 of the Audiocast series we cover:
🚧 What if EVs can’t scale?🧽  Battery sponges & 💧 Lens of scarcity🏘️ Urban trendsVisit us at red.blue and dig deeper at news.red.blue


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This episode we speak with Lior Steinberg, an urban planner and co-founder of Humankind, an urban planning firm based in Rotterdam. Lior and his team work with local governments on refactoring urban space through projects like dedicated micromobility lanes and increased green space - all through the lens of making cities more “people-centric.” In our discussion he describes his process for measuring the impact infrastructure changes makes in daily life, centered around projects he’s contributed to in Rotterdam. He also gives us a sneak preview of his upcoming children’s book “The Car That Wanted To Be A Bike.”
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In our second episode of the Expert series, RedBlue speaks with Brad Templeton, Chairman Emeritus of the EFF, the leading foundation protecting liberties and privacy in cyberspace. Brad was the founder and software architect of ClariNet Communications Corp., the world's first ever ".com" company. In the nineties, Brad became fascinated by self-driving cars, and went on to write a series of industry-leading essays, publish a robo-car blog, and consults for Google's AV team.
We get asked all the time a set of questions about autonomous vehicles: When will they be here? Will people still drive when we have autonomous ridehailing? Will there be more or less cars in a world of robotaxis? Will autonomous trucking come before autonomous taxis? And of course: what about that trolley problem? Brad is probably the person in the world who has thought most about these questions and answers them very directly and clearly in this episode of the Expert Series podcast. 
Besides answering most of the big questions around autonomous vehicles, Brad explains why roads made of concrete are similar to the structure of the internet and we run through a scorecard of where various autonomous vehicle programs currently stand.
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In our inaugural episode of the Expert series, RedBlue speaks with Alain Bertaud, Senior Fellow at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management. He is the author of  a book about markets and the practice of urban planning titled “Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities” published by MIT Press in December 2018. Bertaud previously held the position of principal urban planner at the World Bank. After retiring from the Bank in 1999, he worked as an independent consultant. Prior to joining the World Bank he worked as a resident urban planner in a number of cities around the world: Bangkok, San Salvador (El Salvador), Port au Prince (Haiti), Sana’a (Yemen), New York, Paris, Tlemcen (Algeria), and Chandigarh (India).
In this conversation, we cover a number of different topics, including how innovation can be leveraged in the process of helping cities to grow, the importance of humility at certain times for open planners, the importance of looking at data and information in order to get city planning right, and also the importance of acting in order to achieve specific outcomes. Alain grounds these lessons in very concrete examples of how different cities operate and different things have played out over the length of his career.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit redbluecapital.substack.com