 Imagine being tasked with rebuilding New York City after the tragic September 11 attacks. Well, former NYC Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff had to do just that. And he joins me now. And Dan, you're out with a new book on the rebirth of New York City. It's called Greater Than Ever. It's a fantastic read. What was your biggest accomplishment as Deputy Mayor? You know, I think if you look at it in totality, it was really positioning New York City and its economy for the 21st century. When we came into office, not only had the World Trade Center been tragically destroyed, but you stepped beyond that. The city was really stuck in sort of land use patterns that were more appropriate to the 1950s. You know, the manufacturing base of the city had declined from a million jobs to maybe 150,000 that left bath swaths of the city that were underutilized at a time when the global economy was shifting. And rather than wait for there to be a call for that, we leapt ahead of it and literally rethought the city physically and I think financially. And that's really what the book is about. And in the book you talk about how much you wanted to build a stadium over the Hudson Yards area on Manhattan's west side. It didn't happen, but what did happen and what's happening right now is the construction of what, 20 skyscrapers? Yeah, so what's interesting is, you know, the stadium got a lot of publicity, but it was really part of a much bigger plan that included extending the subway into the area, which has happened, rezoning the entire area, which has happened, building a deck over the rail yards, which has happened. And so all of that really has happened other than the portion that was going to be the stadium. Then after the stadium went down to defeat, we rezoned that piece and eventually that'll get developed too. So it has been sort of a remarkable 20-year journey for me to watch, sort of from an idea that was catalyzed by the Olympic bid that New York had, which I led for 2012, to what related has achieved over on the rail yards. It's sort of a magical thing to behold. Do you worry though that maybe the development is getting a little bit out of hand in New York City? Do we have an affordability crisis when it comes to housing in New York? I do, but I don't think the two things are mutually exclusive. I'm actually really proud of our housing efforts under the Bloomberg administration. At a time when nobody was calling for affordable housing, and a time, by the way, we had no money because it was right after 9-11, we committed to spend three and a half billion dollars to create 75,000 units of housing. Then we doubled down four years later because we believed that it was critical for the city to grow and that we were going to have to accommodate residents of all income levels. And I think we were doing really quite well. After the financial crisis, demand for this city bounced back much faster than the market was actually able to accommodate. So we have a fair amount of catching up to do. But at the end of the day, we did spend about eight billion dollars on affordable housing and created or preserved 165,000 units of housing. There are 500,000 New Yorkers now living in apartments that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford because of those efforts. Could we have done more? Sure. And that's, by the way, why I applaud the de Blasio administration's really ambitious affordable housing efforts as well. So they are carrying that legacy. They absolutely are. They're extending it and using many of the same tools. They're leveraging the rezonings that we did that created lots of land for housing where it hadn't existed before. But that's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to learn from what we can always do better and move forward. And I think if you look at the record when you combine their affordable housing targets and ours together, I think it's going to be a pretty remarkable record. But we have to keep doing more because it's definitely true. The city is popular and when it's popular, there's more demand. And when there's more demand and not enough supply prices go up and that's kind of what's happened here. And we also obviously have a lot of foreign capital coming in to New York City. That's pushing up prices too. Yeah. I think probably less so to be honest. I think there's a lot of attention paid to foreign capital and foreign buyers living in condos on 57th Street. I don't think that's really having an impact at all. Because those skyscrapers, the lights are out every night. No one lives there. But you know what they'll do? Eventually they'll produce lots of taxes. They produced lots of construction jobs. And the more stuff we can get built here, the better off we are for pretty much everybody at the end of the day. So do you support DeBlasio in his reelection in just a few days? I don't discuss my own political views. But as I said, it is, I think he's done a very good job in a number of areas including affordable housing. Fair enough. On a more grim topic, we obviously just had the first deadly terrorist attack since 9-11 just blocks from this office a few days ago. Are we safer now in the city than before 9-11? I think there's no question we're safer than we were before 9-11. The NYPD has done a remarkable job over the course of these last now 16 years. I mean, you think kept us safe. And you think about sort of what the risks are that we do have to live with every day. I know under the Bloomberg administration, we added about 2,000 members to the police force focused on counterterrorism and security, anti-combatting threats. And police departments incredibly sophisticated as offices all over the world. They work incredibly cooperatively with the feds and other agencies. I think there's no doubt we are safer. You know, I think this is a terrible, terrible tragedy. And it was a terrible tragedy just the way 9-11 was is that it was an attack on what we fundamentally are. And that is a diverse, open city. The reason New York is so unique and so special is that we attract people from all over the world who know that they can come here and be respected for whom they are. And the thing that we can never do, and this is why I'm really proud of New York in the wake of this most recent horrible attack, is in effect close off that sense of openness. Well said, and obviously our thoughts and prayers are with the victims of the attack. You know, we also had the fifth year anniversary of Superstorm Sandy just a few days ago. Is New York ready for the next storm? I know a lot of money has been spent, but there's still more work to do. It's better prepared, but the answer is no. And it's unlike who will ever be completely prepared for that. Next, hopefully it will never happen, but there's much, much more we can do. And that's, I assume, is going to be a priority for whoever the next mayor is, assuming it is de Blasio. Well, again, when you're kind of doing things like whether it's building codes or more importantly sort of physical infrastructure that can serve to mitigate the impacts of storms or things take time, and we have to remain really vigilant and continue to invest. You're now the CEO of Sidewalk Labs. It's an alphabet company. Tell us about some of the work you're doing there. So the center of our activity really is try and build a new city, really think of it as a district. And that would be the best integration of great urbanism and cutting-edge technology. And we've been working for two years on a concept for how that could actually work, being building up, gradually building up a team of urbanists and technologists. And just a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we're partnering with Toronto to actually do it there. And so over the course of the next year, we'll be doing with them, with the city, with the province, with the national government, with our actual partners, an entity called Waterfront Toronto, whose three stakeholders are those three levels of government, an intense planning process that will involve members of the community, significant outreach. Really, we view it as a process of co-creation. And we think we're very confident that when you apply the digital technologies that are now available today, and some of the other technologies that are available for infrastructure and other things, that we can fundamentally bend the curve on every quality of life measure. You talked about affordability. What if we really can meaningfully lower cost of living? What a contribution that would be. If we can give time-starved parents an hour or more back in their day, what if we actually can achieve Vision Zero or create the world's first climate positive neighborhood or give people access to greater opportunity? We believe it's possible, and that's what we're setting out to do. So it's not for the faint of heart. This is a big, complicated project, but we're determined that it can be done. And our self-driving cars part of that equation? Yes, they are. In fact, if anyone's really interested in seeing what many of the ideas, a little bit of the vision is that we have, go to our website. It's www.sidewalktoronto.ca, and there you'll find the 200 page response to the RFP that we submitted because we actually had to compete with other companies and consortia in order to be the partner of Toronto. And so we're laying out sort of what some of those ideas are so they can be the beginning of a real conversation. Can self-driving cars work here in New York, and when do you think we might see such a move? It's hard to predict, and I think it'll be a generation, most likely until that's what all we basically have on the road. But you'll see experiments. You'll see lanes that might be dedicated to self-driving cars faster. You will see, I think, much sooner than the generation. You'll see shared taxi-type services, certainly much faster than that. So yeah, I think we'll probably start seeing them on the road sooner than, yep, thank, but it won't be just tomorrow. All right, so fascinating conversation. Dan Doctoroff, thank you very much. Again, the book is greater than ever. Great, thank you very much, Scott.