sale. tis the season to shop at sebastopol hardware. make your list and check it twice. there's gifts for the not so naughty and nice. keep your cocoa hot in cool yeti tumblers. stay in style all season long with top clothing brands, and enjoy home cooked meals in high quality cookware. sebastopol hardware santas favorite hardware store. select sebastopol hardware is your store at acehardware.com. stay connected with nbc bay area news. this week, lots of batteries, all stored in the same place, can lead to disaster. the future of the warehouse near your home. plus, crypto mania author andrew chow on trump's push to win the bitcoin vote. and former google exec frederick fert on preparing yourself for the future. that's this week on press here. good

morning everyone. i'm scott mcgrew. as someone who covers technology for a living, i deal with the future pretty much every day. the next iphone developments in ai and what it means for jobs and education. green energy that may someday save the planet for our grandchildren. so i am constantly looking at new ideas, future ready, i would think. but i kind of suspect there will come a day when i am old enough that i will say, okay, that's enough, because that's what we dos humans. we reach some point in our old age and we quit learning things and adapting and adopting, and it it all seems too much and i don't want to do that, which is why i want to hear from frederick fert, who teaches people how to be future ready. his new book is what's next is now. frederick is the former chief innovation evangelist at google. frederick joins us from what appears to be his habitat on mars. frederick,

is this your house? it is beautiful. yes. thanks for having me. it's a little geodesic dome in our forest in the santa cruz mountains, so i'm happy to join you. oh, jealous, jealous, jealous. okay, well, you call yourself a future optimist. why is that? yes. so, you know, as a future optimist, i really focus on the opportunities that the future holds rather than just predicting trends. and i think you make a great point that we love to just predict. right. and our mind really craves that certainty that predictions actually bring. and if we don't find that certainty, right, we feel anxiety. so we spend a lot of time worrying about the future because our minds again crave this certainty. and our brains are wired to make this feel uncomfortable. but for me, this discomfort is also a call to action to engage more proactively with the future. so i like that people turn away from that question what will the future bring towards the

question, what future do i want to create? well, right. because i mean, oftentimes when we talk about the future, it's sort of jetsons y, right? we talk about, oh, we're going to have flying cars or we'll have teleportation or it's all technology based when most of us try to predict the future, but when we want to be ready for the future that's inside your own mind. absolutely, yes. and that's what i call a future ready mind state. so for me, being ready for the future really transcends technology, right? i think it's about your mind state. so it's not about the tools we use but how we use them. i always like to say it's people that innovate, not technology. and so again, being future ready is less about the technology we use and it's more about our mind state. and it's how we approach the world and challenges we face. and so with a future ready mindset, really, we embrace

change with openness, with what i call radical optimism. we're trying to experiment. we use empathy, and we are curious about what the future not just holds, but what future we can actually create. and so, you know, for me, it's not just seeing the future as something distant, like, you know, ten or 15 or 20 years out. and you mentioned the jetsons, right? i think in this in the 60s, they did a pretty good job in, in predicting the future and looking at the future. but i want to bring the future close, close to you. and for me, the equation is pretty simple, which is the choices you make today equal your future. well, absolutely it does. i always think to myself, my future self is going to thank me for what it is that i've chosen to do tonight. maybe it's that extra glass of wine or something. now, you know, you touched on it earlier that that, you know,

this future can make us uncomfortable because humans look for patterns. our brains are uncomfortable with the idea of something out of pattern, or at least we notice it. and i think that tends to grow stronger as as we grow older, there is a resistance to change. future is change. it is yes, and change is constant, right? the law of impermanence basically tells us that everything is changing all the time. so there is no way of fighting that right there is, you know, a way to embrace it. and i think if you embrace change, right, you can see more opportunities and then make make the most out of it. i think it's a function of age though, too, because, you know, i mean, whenou imagine, you know, something in the, let's say, the civil rights movement or something, those were, you know, young people, students marching in the streets and, and the old people were on the sidelines and, and at the time thought, let's keep it the way it is. it's never the opposite. i mean, it's never old people marching through the streets and

kids saying, no, no, we mustn't change. yes. so i'm a big fan of our next generation. i have to say, i have full faith that you know the future they want to create and they will create is going to be a tremendously good one, and it's going to be a better one. you mentioned an interesting point, which is the future self, right? i think there is some interesting research from some from some of my colleagues at stanford who asked 20 year old students, right, if they could imagine themselves ten years in the future. and the students were like, yeah, yeah, we can totally see ourselves, right? we probably have a little bit more money and a better car and so forth. then they asked them to imagine themselves in 20 years in the future, and they said, definitely, yeah, we'll have a family and a good job and maybe also a house. but when they asked them to imagine themselves 30 or even 40 years out, right, the picture really got fuzzy. so they couldn't describe anything about where they might be or what they might be doing. so they didn't have an image at

all. and so what they did is they actually put vr headsets on the students. and after a couple of minutes where they showed them the older versions of themselves, they noticed that they are actually changing their behavior right now. what that means is that the majority of the students said that they intend to pay more attention to their health, so they want to have a healthier lifestyle, and they want to save more for their retirement, actually double the amount. so what that means is if you can connect with your future self and really trying to wh i call empathize with your future self and build a clearer picture of who you want to be in the future, then you actually change your behavior. today you were early at google. did you imagine the google that it is today? i left google about two years ago, you know, on my own terms, and i left with a smile because i had a tremendous time at google.

kind of like being in a in an environment that is, you know, creative and you work with incredibly talented people at the same time, you know, doing a job like a chief innovation evangelist where you help people to come up, you know, with these radical ideas. so the one of the last projects i was working on was actually called project reimagine, where we try to reimagine how we want to work in the future. this was right when the pandemic actually started, and it was incredible to see the ideas that, you know, the leadership came up with and the future visions as well. so i'm a i'm incredibly grateful for the time i could spend at google. and at the same time, i felt, you know, my learning curve is kind of like flattening, right? and i feel comfortable. and whenever i feel comfortable, you know, i get also, you know, a little bit antsy and say like,

okay, what can what can happen next? and, you know, i want to be in control of what happens next. well, i highly recommend the book. it's a great read. what's next is now, frederick, thank you for being with us this morning. frederick fair is that author of what's next is now how to live future ready press here. we'll be back in the very near future. what do you do? i'm a thief. promise me i won't lose her. love all this, don't you? job satisfaction isn't a crime. for the rest of it is. what's your name again? jessica. after an accident involving uber, lyft or

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u may know that when electric car catches fire, it burns and it burns and it burns. battery. fires are very difficult to stop. a single car can burn and flare back up for hours. now imagine a warehouse full of batteries. it's a problem you haven't thought about, i'm guessing, but the folks at alum rock have. they've built a special warehouse outside sacramento to house lithium ion batteries waiting to be shipped to factories. brandon moraga is cut the ribbon on the warehouse. he is the chief operating officer at alum rock, a global supply chain company. brandon, i mentioned cars, but there are generator batteries. there are golf cart batteries. all of a sudden there are a lot of batteries in the world. yeah. that's right. and thanks for having me today. obviously, to talk about this important issue. you know, lithium ion batteries have been in our lives for a long time now, right in our laptops and on our phones. but they're getting more and more in our lives, as you said, with with cars powering our homes, powering our camp units,

powering anything you can think of. and it's our opinion these days that almost every warehouse in the country has some density of lithium ion batteries. so the more we're aware of that situation and the more we're taking it seriously, the safer we're all going to be. and you could retrofit future or current warehouses. you describe it as a warehouse within a warehouse. so a warehouse that you know, where they're warehousing things, they could have batteries and these batteries are getting bigger. i mean, some of the things you're talking about are the ones that power entire houses. we're not talking watch batteries here. yeah. that's right. and the bigger and the bigger they are, usually the denser they are too, which can make them even more energetic and more dangerous when it comes to storing them and then moving them around in the country, obviously. so it's an important alarm that we serve this industry because we need these things in our lives. we want to keep them safe, and we don't want to have these fires that you keep hearing about in the news. well, i was going to ask you, there was a fire down in san diego, not your warehouse, but it was a big

fire. battery fire. tell me about the challenges that firefighters faced. yeah. so the biggest thing with the with these things is they are stored energy, right? they they just like a gallon of gasoline is stored energy. so is a lithium ionattery when it's charged. but even more so they bring their own oxygen to the party. so they these things can sometimes even burn underwater. you can't rob them of their oxygen when they go into what's called thermal runaway, where the heat from the fire and the off gassing is actually supplying extra heat for the batteries around it so that they can go into thermal runaway. so that one that you were talking about in san diego, they just let the fire burn out after days and days. so firefighters are always getting new training, but not every firefighter in every community is going to know everything there is to know about fighting these fires. so, you know, being able to prevent them or put them out before they start is going to save firefighter lives. yeah. that's right. and the firefighters are upskilling. so for sure or for sure. right. and so the biggest thing that one of the biggest things that we did and that you

can do if you're running your own people, is to work with your local fire department to come up with a response plan to make sure that they've got the kind of time that they need to get out there and implement the type of procedures that they've been developing over the years to fight these things. and so there's lots of different measures that we put into place, as you said, a warehouse inside of a warehouse. so that's two hour fire rated walls around the storage area to our fire rated doors, its own exhaust system, potentially. and then, of course, segregation. so that's so that's keeping them in a certain type of density between even each other, let alone the rest of the warehouse, which of course segregated by the two hour firewall. and then there's detection. so this is extra detection that you would normally not do potentially for other types of materials. so this is very specific air sampling. lookingng for the typs of off gassing that these things start doing before they go into thermal runaway. and also infrared detection. so looking for hotspots inside of the middle of pallets or or in pallets that are coming in off

of the off of a load to make sure that they look safe as they're coming in. so detecting that as early as we possibly can and then extra suppression. so normally in a warehouse, if you think about having these racks that go, you know, five high or something like that 35ft into the air, you have a really good or really good sprinklers coming down kind of all over that. but with these types of things we did in rack sprinklers. so that's a sprinkler head for every single rack position inside of that area, so that if you have a fire, you can try to possibly can with the water to give those those firefighters the time to get out there and hopefully get that material either out of the building or suppress it all the way. and your first warehouse is in sacramento. wh sacramento? oh, so you know, sacramento. we really like that area as far as as being a central hub in california. it's a really good it's pretty close to our to our ports out in out in the bay area. and it's got a really good

labor pool. and lots of people live up in sacramento and they're looking for work. so we wanted to we wanted to be in that area for those reasons. seems like a growing business is more and more batteries come in more and more products. yeah. that's right. we do see a really good market opportunity there as everybody's trying to catch up. you know these codes coming from the, the, the nfpa, national fire protection agency and the ioc, the international fire code, these are just started coming out in 2020, 2021. and they're and they continue to evolve. so we worked with with some experts in that field to make sure that we're staying way ahead of those of those fire codes that are coming out even in the next five years and keeping people safe. well, i appreciate your time. and you joining us this morning, brandon maragos. see, you c. c o correction. yeah. at elam, thank you for being with us this morning brandon press here. we'll be back in just a moment.

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welcome back to press here. the good news for those who believe in cryptocurrency, at least one of the two politicians running for president supports it. the bad news is that politician doesn't seem to know very much about it. we will keep each and every bitcoin job in the united states of america. that's what we're going to be doing. that's donald trump speaking at a bitcoin conference in july. just a year earlier, he had called bitcoin a scam. andrew chu is a

reporter for time magazine who writes about cryptocurrency. his latest book is crypto mania hype hope in the fall of ftx's billion dollar empire. good morning to you. you know, bitcoin has been around since, what, 2009. but this is the kind of the first time i think andrew i've remembered candidates talking about. yes, i would say that this is sort of the first bitcoin election. and obviously bitcoin folks are really trying to push that narrative, saying that they're bitcoin voters who are single issue voters that are going to vote with their wallets. obviously, donald trump that thinks that there's some crypto voters and he's going after them. hey, you take everything you can get. now, let me just factually check. donald trump says he's going to keep all the bitcoin jobs in america. and there are jobs at robinhood and coinbase and whatnot. and those are generally based in america. but bitcoin is supposed to be kind of border free, right? that is one of the great

promises of bitcoin that it's supposed to be dentrtralized o of the hands of every government. it was created in the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, when people thought that maybe the us government and the banks had too much control. so i think for a presidential candidate to say, to use it and put a sort of nationalist spin on it kind of goes against its core principles. right. okay. well, so you mentioned a financial crisis. the pandemic stimulus really had a big effect on bitcoin. this was in your book. you you mentioned a cnbc study. 11% of young people used at least part of their stimulus check to buy bitcoin. and they profited. they did really well. some of them did, yes. so my book traces this pandemic era rise and fall of crypto. there were a bunch of macroeconomic reasons why crypto made sense to people. interest interest rates were zero, so it was cheap for people to get in. they had a little bit of stimulus money.

they wanted to make money with their money. and also they were at home and bored, so they wanted stuff to do online. there was this new asset class called nfts. you could join communities, look at pictures. the idea of the metaverse also took hold.emember when mark zuckerberg changed facebook's name to meta around that year? so a lot of people bought in for reasons that, you know, they it seemed like this bubble was only going to expand. and then the next year it popped. well, and then, of course, we have sang bong sam bankman-fried. i think if the average american could name one human being in the crypto space, it would be a guy who is now in prison, which is i mean, that's a pr problem for, you know, and i'm going to use cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin sort of interchangeably here and nfts, because the average person at home, it's all that stuff they're talking about on tv. oh, the sam bankman-fried guy. yes. and part of this is because of sam's wild ambition. he wanted

to affect the world in as big a way as possible, and that meant putting his company's name, ftx, on arenas. it meant getting super bowl ads with larry david. it meant, you know, shooting videos with tom brady, paying each of these celebrities millions and millions of dollars. and crypto for a while embraced him because he was doing the yeoman's work of bringing crypto into the mainstream, presenting himself as the safe and reliable face of crypto. who is working with the regulators? he was also in washington, in and out of washington, basically every other week in backroom deals with politicians on both sides of the aisle, trying to convince them why crypto was good for america. the whole time he was taking his customers money and using it to make incredibly risky investments. and they found out. and when they asked for the money back, it wasn't. they're more similar to the banks than i think we realized. you were mentioning nfts, i mentioned nfts, that's non-fungible token. can we get a third grade explanation to what

that is? an nft is sort of like a digital asset that lies on. it's something called the blockchain. if you think about any sort of if you have a spotify song, you're not really owning that. but the idea is that when you own an nft, that could be a song, you actually own it. there's like a authenticity or a certificate that you do own it. on this decentralized database, a lot of people bought nfts in 2021 and 2022, believing that they would increase in value, and they did for a while. and then they most of them crashed. yeah, the bored apes was one. and then, of course, we can go back to trump because he discovered nfts and he's got these digital trading cards. i mean, he was quick to jump in on it. you know, you can you canalk about it cynically, as many people would, that he saw a money making opportunity of trading digital trading cards

online for enthusiasts or people who just hoped that they could make a quick buck. there are a lot of speculators in the space who think that, you know, if they buy an asset, there will be a quote unquote greater fool to come and take it off their hands. and i think that's a lot of what drives the market. you know, i kind of my last question, andrew, i want to talk about this idea that things get more valuable and in many cases in the in the case of cryptocurrency, they did supporters of bitcoin, ethereum, all those things say, you know, that, hey, that's going to continue to rise to the moon they say, which if they're right, that makes it a good investment because you buy low you sell high. everybody knows that a lot of those same supporters. and here's where the conundrum for me, a lot of those same supporters say that bitcoin should also become a currency, that it should be used to buy and sell everyday things. but both those things can't be true, right? i mean, nobody in their right mind would buy something with a bitcoin that they think is going to be worth twice as

much money next year because they just lose money on the deal. you're absolutely right. it's sort of a cognitive dissonance that's sort of at the core of bitcoin, which was created as a, you know, international currency that could transcend borders. i think if you talk to a lot of bitcoin folks now, as i do, most of them have totally abandoned the idea that bitcoin will be useful as a currency to send money from, you know, buenos aires to, to turkey or whatever. they're really honing in on this idea of bitcoin as digital gold. so this sort of store of value that is sort of like just there's a there's a finite amount of bitcoin. and the more people get interested, the more it rises in value. i find the value of bitcoin to be sort of very self-reciprocal the idea that like because more people buy in, then it becomes more valuable, which causes more people to buy in. and a lot of people are sort of surfing on this cyclical nature and this idea of momentum that they hope will take them to

the moon. and then finally, andrew, with your book, what's the thing that you learned that you didn't know that surprised you? the thesis of the book is that basically this is, you know, a technology with a lot of potential. it's like some could argue it's well designed and addresses many flaws in our mainstream systems. but the way that was rolled out, especially in the last four years, created systems that were even worse than the ones that hoped to dislodge and create this enormous global sort of gambling ring. so that's not to say that that's what crypto will always be, but that's what it is right now. and so it's incredibly volatile. if you like a bit of risk, then, you know, maybe it's fun, but for most people, tread lightly. fair enough. andrew chow, i appreciate you being with us this morning. andrew chow, author of the new book crypto mania, will be back in just a minute. 911 what's your emergency? after years of misrouted calls and outages,

california is now suspending the rollout of its new statewide 911 system. it is the result of our exclusive investigation. an nbc bay area investigation leads to change. the board didn't even know anything about this until you aired your story, pushing the state to rethink the rollout right now. before they move forward, they want to make sure it's safe. nbc bay area moving to the bay area forward. i had health insurance before. so expensive. i mean, i'm helping my mom out. i don't have that kind of cash. i know, but you can get financial help now through covered california. it's totally affordable. you'd be surprised. they've got this calculator thing that shows how much you'll pay. for real? yeah. what are you doing? not having health insurance, man. hey, i know here, let me show you. we all have questions covered. california has answers and can find a health plan that's right for you. covered california. this way to health insurance. looking to end the year. strong joint planet fitness now through december 30th for $1. down $15 a

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