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If that makes sense. There are many others like that. Not always as gentile. There's something that I wanted to mention to the two of you that is in the Amherst College Archives which will be of interest to both of you probably for the same but also for different reasons and it's the text of a speech that John F.

Kennedy gave here in , when Frost Library was being opened and the speech had been written by Arthur Schlesinger and on the plane up Kennedy did the editing on it and it's a wonderful thing to look at because you realize both what a good editor Kennedy was and what a good writer Kennedy was and so the first Andy, one of the things you'll notice in this document is that he has taken Schlesinger's draft and he has put these big X's and I just wonder, do you use the X approach on your manuscript?

I do a box with a strike through. Which is maybe a little bit nicer than the X but yeah. It's basically an X. And then there's Kennedy's own writing or rewriting. Here's a phrase that was in Schlesinger's draft. When power narrows the area of man's concerns, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. Kennedy crosses that out, and writes in, when power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

It's just remarkable, done on a plane probably over Chicopee and I wonder Ben, do you recall, any edits along those lines? I had no idea that that was yet, but one thing that pops in my head is the remarks that Obama had to give the night that Osama Bin Laden was killed.

I had been asked to prepare a draft for different contingencies. If Obama had to announce that Osama bin Laden was killed, if Osama bin Laden wasn't there at this compound, if things went horribly wrong, but I had written all the negative remarks but I couldn't write the positive ones, because I was afraid of jinxing it.

So what that meant is I had an hour to write this address to the nation that he was going to give. I'd written something along those lines that said, basically said that. It's been a hard decade, but we've stuck at this, and lots of language. I can't remember exactly my draft, and he edited it and he basically took this paragraph that said, what I just kind of alluded to, and he made it, and I'm not gonna get this exactly right, so when you check your, but he basically made it, that this reminds us that America can still do big things.

That was the phrase. America can still do big things, and what I realized was so interesting about that is that a president is telling one or Obama used to do this. I don't know that every president does this but Obama used to like to think that he was telling one story throughout his whole presidency, and that line was essential to that story. America can still do big things, and it's actually a very Kennedy line.

Like we can go to the moon, and I just remember that that was a simple formulation, in a way that anybody could understand and I probably written something more flowery like Schlesinger was trying to do. What a good politician can do is distill a lot of language into something that ordinary people can understand but also what a good politician does is recognize that everything that they're saying is telling one story.

Every speech is a chapter in one story that they're telling to the country as president about what they're trying to do, and that line, America can do big things, appeared in his next State of the Union. It appeared in his reelection campaign and what I always say to people is if you want to know Barack Obama's skill as a politician it's that his convention speech that launched him on to the national scene. His farewell address as president is the exact same message as that first speech.

How many politicians can you say have that kind of through line, and so that one edit to me, is emblematic of this broader skill he had to kind of root everything in a kind of story he was telling about America that could be understood by anybody.

Andy and Ben, and let's start with you Andy, in part because, I'm mindful of the fact that Amherst College is a writing college. I would bet that 40 graduates every year go into the general field that you and I, and Ben more recently, are in, and it's not a field that has a, there's not a conveyor belt into the job. It's entrepreneurial in some way.

You gotta feel your way towards it. There are many different access points, and I wonder, I'd like to hear from you first about this, but also Ben from you, on the same question, because where you ended up is also not, I mean most MFA's don't result in what you did for a living.

When you think back, what are the skills, the influences, that kind of bore you up, as you tried to get into this, the field of magazines, books, and so on? I think I always loved to read. I was a reader. I always thought of myself as a reader and actually grew up, my father was a speech writer like Ben, for a United States Senator for many years, and I grew up seeing him upstairs in his office, in his bathrobe with his cup of coffee, typing, on his IBM's electric in all caps, his speeches for Lloyd Benson was the Senator, and it's a different kind of writing.

He wasn't a novelist. He wasn't a journalist, and there was a lot about his job that I think he didn't love as a speech writer but I grew up seeing that, and I grew up being intrigued by it and being impressed by what my dad could do with language and I came here and I think this fell sort of naturally into the English Department and American Studies Department and continued to pursue my passions. I failed on multiple fronts here though. I don't know why, but I didn't do any. I didn't work for the school paper.

I didn't edit for a literary magazine. I should have, but I didn't, and when I graduated however, I really didn't know. I didn't have any skills obviously but I thought I just wanted to get into the world of books, and I'll do this quickly, but I took a job at a book publisher in New York and lasted two years there before leaving it.

I hated it. I really did not think that books were gonna be for me because the place that I landed, was not particularly friendly to junior editors and it was not a place where you were ever gonna advance and I just felt like I wanted to be doing. I was ambitious and probably annoying, probably wanted to do things, that were not gonna be available to me for quite some time in the book world so I ended up in magazines.

Took a freelance job at Esquire Magazine and ended up almost the next 15 years as a magazine editor, and really learning how to edit, and how to generate ideas, and how to care about every sentence, in a way that I think, I may not have learned as well in the world of books, where the scale of a book is so different and sometimes I think editors in the book world are just not able or trained to focus as intensely on the language on the page. After almost 15 years of magazines, the problem for me with magazines was that I worked at Esquire Magazine and then GQ Magazine, which were the magazines where you could do these long stories and work with great writers, and had the resources to do things that I really cared about.

What I didn't care about was the mission of the magazine. I didn't care about men's magazines. I didn't care about the conversation, the larger conversation that these magazines were engaged in, so I kind of reached an end point on that and realized that what I really wanted to do was go back to the world of books, and I did 10 years ago. I came back into the world of books at Random House, and it was, I had sort of built up editorial skills that I had acquired in magazines, but yet again, didn't really know what the world of books was about.

I had to learn it, and learn it at a more advanced age, and it's been like, I have not regretted that decision since I made it, and it's in some ways, I consider myself a generalist as an editor. I'm interested in a lot of things. I'm not an expert in any of them, but what this job has allowed me to do is just pursue again, ideas that are interesting to me.

Writers that I've always wanted to work with, and it's, for me it's been the dream job. Kennedy I have volume one of a two volume biography by Fred Logevall who is a professor at Harvard whose last book about the Vietnam War won a Pulitzer Prize. I have a book by a psychiatrist slash neuroscientist at Stanford about the origin of human feelings. I have a novel by Imbolo Mbue. It's her second novel. Her first novel was a huge success and an Oprah book pick, and this novel is actually something that she started 17 years ago way before her first book came out and was a big complicated personal story.

She's from Cameroon. It takes place in an unnamed African country but is essentially Cameroon and it's a much more complex enterprise narratively and it took her 17 years to do it and it's coming out in June and that's on my desk right now.

It's essentially, it starts with, and goes Sidney Poitier as sort of act two and then it's gonna end with Kanye. So I have a followup. A second book by reporter named Michael Moss who did a book called Salt, Sugar, Fat, about seven or eight years ago, about the processed food industry.

This book is about addiction and food. It's a crazy range of things, and that's what makes the job so fun every day. If you're interested in a broad array of subjects, it's really a great job. I think sometimes people think, you go to graduate school, and you get this Master's degree and then you do this internship and that path would have not led me where I went. I knew I wanted to be engaged and then what I applied for jobs. I knew my skill was writing, so I applied for jobs in journalism, and I had an editor of the magazine say to me, you don't want to come to work here.

You'll just fact check, and maybe we'll throw you a side bar every now and then. If you want to learn about foreign policy in the world and you want to write, you should be speech writer for somebody, and I got a job as a speech writer for a guy named Lee Hamilton and what I'd say is that I always did a job that involved me working for somebody that I admired, and could learn from and doing something that I loved to do, whether it was writing, or some aspect of foreign policy, and the reason that was so important for me is that you're much much better at your job if you like it.

This seems like an obvious point to make, but if you're forcing yourself to do something, because it's a credential, that you don't really like to do, you're not gonna be as good at it, as if you're doing something that you're passionate about, or if you go to work on a campaign for somebody let's say there's a billionaire running for president, because that person is going to pay you a lot of money.

You're not gonna be that good of a campaign staffer, if it's just for that check. If you're passionate about the person you're working for, and you're doing the thing you like to do, you're gonna be good at what you're doing.

Granted, I had some luck. I went to work for Barack Obama when I was 29 years old and we were all just a bunch of kids but even that we believed, we convinced ourselves because he told us that we had agency to change the world, and so for me, I didn't even think about and nor did any of the other people. I went to work in a tiny office with so many, John Favro and a couple other guys. We weren't thinking about what jobs we were gonna have.

We just wanted to elect this guy president and that made us much better at what we were doing, and so those are my core lessons, was I didn't stick to a plan. I didn't force myself into a plan. I gave myself the luxury and with the full acknowledgement sitting here by the way, that I had the privilege to do that. I was a privileged person.

I have the privilege of getting a good education. I had the privilege of not having to worry so much about money because I didn't have parents to take. I think we all have to have some humility here that I could only be in the position I'm describing because of that privilege, but if you're at Amherst, you probably have a dose of that too and the point is that, being passionate and putting that into a skill that you care about and a person you care about or a cause you care about is going to make you go places faster than if you feel like you're painting by numbers to get to a job.

The last thing I'd say to get Andy, Andy's an understated guy. I mean literally, someone who can both edit educated and genres.

This is a unicorn editor. I know what I don't know. I didn't know how to write a book. You need some humility, no matter what field you're going into, and so when I leave the White House and want to write, I knew I had to write a book. I had to allow myself to be guided by someone who knew more than me. Someone who knew how to do what I wanted to do better than I did. So then that's the other thing because if I had just gone to a publisher, give me some money and said, come back in a year with a book with some good anecdotes that can sell in the first week the book wouldn't have been good which means I wouldn't have had a chance to maybe write a second book and so you also have to allow yourself to be mentored and guided by people who know something more than you do because there's always somebody that knows something more than you do in life.

I loved hearing what you were saying about what it's like to suddenly come into the orbit of an editor, who was able to become a partner in many ways in what you're doing, and I'd like to hear that from your perspective too Andy.

Both of us are editors. It's a surprisingly intimate occupation sometimes, and yet at the same time very rewarding and it changes from writer to writer, but can you tell us something? Just a little bit about what appeals to you about the nature of that social interaction between what you're doing and you're a writer? I think it's really important for editors to always understand that they're just editors.

We're not, the writer is the writer, and we're the editor, and our job is to help that writer make the best book they possibly can without making ourselves the story and I just like that. I like that part of the job. Maybe it's because I don't want my own ass on the line with a book out there in the world with my name on it. I just find. And that means that when you do something to a car, as it passes you on this moving production line is a worker, like us a, you know, a high end screwdriver, essentially, to to put the airbag in, for example, you you actually have to set up that tool to do the right thing for the car in front of you.

Because if you use the wrong talk or use the wrong number of turns or something like that, then it can basically damage the the frame and or maybe, you know, like the airbag doesn't go in, right.

And essentially, you know, you have a real problem there. So what those customers now do is that they track all of the tools on the assembly line using tracking technology. And they track all the cars on the assembly lines, it moves down the line. And they use software to essentially look at the location streams coming in. And when a particular tool is being used on a particular car, instantly, the control software recognizes that and sets up the tool to do the right thing for that particular car at that particular point on the assembly line.

So from the point of view of the worker, they pick up the tool, they use it on a car, and magically, it's set up in exactly the right way without them having to do anything. And so, essentially, that's how a modern high end car production facility works. And so to do to do that, you might have, you know, the biggest factories, we've got, you know, maybe four or meters square, so, you know, sort of no third of a mile on the side, and, you know, may use sensors to do that.

So it's, you know, they're quite big systems, and they have to keep working all the time. So you can be working one moment on the hood of one car, and then turn around and you know, a fraction of a second later, milliseconds later, you can be working on the tailgate of the next car on the assembly line.

And in that time, the system has to have track the tool recognized, it's moved from one car to another, reprogrammed it so it's now doing the right thing. And, you know, done that with with, you know, an error rate, which is kind of probably less than one part per million is what's permissible these days. So well, you know, it's a very high end kind of tracking system. And for that, you know, we typically use ultra wideband location because of the high tracking reliability that's necessary.

You know, it's an A high tracking accuracy that's required in in what's quite a challenging environment with a lot of metal and reflections. But obviously, that's, that's the right technology, the right sensor for that particular job.

And it might be complete overkill for a different kind of location tracking challenge, or is not enough. I mean, there are other technologies, which are even more accurate than ultra wideband.

So you always have to choose the right thing for the right job. Yeah, it's a toolkit. And there's always pros, cons cost, and infrastructure and battery life and robustness and all these other things.

So, how accurate Do you need to be to know the difference between the end of the back end of one car and the front end of the one that's coming quickly? That's a good question.

I mean, they're, they're separated by about half a meter or so. So you know, at some level, you have to be kind of, you know, accurate to that kind of level, that the biggest challenge actually is not so much the, you know, instantaneous accuracy in a nice, clean environment, it's actually dealing with the fact that, you know, as you're doing this, the tools are sometimes used in the wheel wells, or, you know, under the car or in environments that are, you know, not not ideal at all for propagation.

You know, I think I think people have their mobile phones given them a false sense of security about how radio signals propagate around the environment, you know, that, you know, they don't ever really see the fact that you know, radio signals are blocked by all sorts of things, people I mean, I you know, people are fantastic radio absorbers.

So, in those environments, you know, it, actually you very rarely get really good propagation from beacons on tools or on cars into infrastructure that you place around the, around the production line, you know, you're always being challenged by reflections, and obstructions, and so on.

So even if even if your technology works at 50 centimeters in a nice, clean environment, the question is more, what's the level of reliability and robustness? You get when you're you're dumped into a hellish environment? And is it good enough to do it there with the levels of reliability that then people need? And, you know, it's a it's a challenging problem. Or, or someone's body, is it? No, no,. And I think that the, you know, the, the important, the important thing there is that actually, you have to put up enough infrastructure that at some point, you have a, you know, a few near lines of sight, right.

So, you know, if you go from line of sight and near line of sight, your accuracy of your system degrades, I mean, just just going to right, if you go from near line of sight to no line of sight, or blocked, you know, then, you know, things get a lot worse a lot, a lot more quickly.

So, you know, a lot of these car production lines have to have enough sensors that you're getting the the basic number of line of sight or near line of sight paths, even in those, you know, really challenging kind of situations. And then it's down to, to how much information do you squeeze out of every line of sight or near line of sight path that you're getting? So if you're, you know, and this comes back down to location system architecture, really, right, so if you, if your location system is a pure tdoa location system, you'll need four.

So we've got a pure time difference of arrival system like GPS is, or like, you know, there are many radio time difference arrival systems, then essentially, you need four of those pretty clean or nearly clean paths to get your 3d location with any accuracy.

If you if you do two way ranging, so that's normally called tra, or time of arrival, where you're sending a signal out from a tag to an anchor, and it comes back again, and you measure that the two way trip, you might need three, right. So that's kind of a bit better and a bit more robust in those really challenging circumstances. If you use a away, actually, you only need to, you know, that's an even more robust technology.

And we actually use a combination of eo a plus tdoa. So that actually gives us a lot of information from any path that happens to kind of make it through the the maze of the maze of obstructions that you're placed around. Now, that's interesting. So you're, and I always call this if it's on an asset that's moving around, I tend to call it a tag and I try to call beacons of things that don't move.

But but the complicated thing is that tags tend to use beaconing radio protocols, which is really confuses everyone. But anyway, let's get back to the point that this mixing of AI and time of arrival so you so you're using both and ultra wideband with ultra wideband is that the the the time of arrival, that your time difference?

We make the ultra wideband does both so you can measure an ao a on a ultra wideband signal in the same way that you do on say, a bl okay, right.

So right that might have it's very, very similar. It's a bit easier because of the shorter signals to measure that tdoa on a ultra wideband signal than a ble signal. So, you know, we have the opportunity with ultra wideband to do both of those techniques at the same time.

And they complement each other quite well. But essentially, what you're trying to do is, is you know, you've got a direct path, squeeze as much information out of it as you possibly can, because you may not get many more of them, right. So, so from a robustness point of view. It's a very robust technology, but it's probably you know, it is it is a bit more expensive than ble. So, you know, if you look at the kind of applications that you have in car plants, then ble Might be a great application for logistic store areas or something like that, where, you know, you either you don't need quite the accuracy or you know, all the quite the robustness at the same time, it might be a great application for those, whereas somewhere on the production line, you know, it's a very nasty radio environment, and one needs to, to squeeze out as much information as possible with the highest bandwidth signal.

So, you know, in my view, when we put together location systems, it's always horses for courses use the the best technology for the particular problem that you're looking at. And, you know, I although we make ultra wideband sensors, you know, there are applications where ultra wideband just isn't good enough. So, you know, we work with car manufacturers who want to do what's called bolt level accuracy, where you, you know, if you if, let's say, you've got a good example is a helicopter is that is the rotor blade assembly for a helicopter, you have lots and lots of bolts, and they have to be bolted down in precisely the right sequence.

Now, kind of imagine changing the wheel on your car, the tire on your car, you know, you're supposed to kind of tighten the bolts on the on the wheel, in a kind of, you know, if you've, if you tighten the one here first, then you go across the wheel to the next one, the next one. So there's a particular way in which it's, you know, we're doing it well, for a helicopter, plate assembly, it's like that, but there's 50 bolts, and you know, the consequences of getting it wrong are really bad.

And all of those bolts look alike. So there, you need to basically be able to tell, within a couple of centimeters, where the tool head is, as you're assembling this thing to make sure that the assembly process has happened exactly right. And that's beyond ble, or ultra wideband, in fact, probably the only way of doing it is optical. So you know, for those kinds of applications, you know, we we suggest optical techniques, because it's the only way of really being sure about about what you're doing.

So there's a continuum of, of location technologies, each of which is applied clickable to different industrial kind of applications,. Where you're, what what? Yeah, that's a good question, we work with a company called AR t out of Germany and AR t have built a tool mounted camera.

So it's kind of like a little camera that looks directly at where the tool is, is being used on the assembly, and it looks at the area around the bolt to, to figure out, you know, what, what, which bolt you're looking at. So they actually originally did it for things like engine assembly in, in car production lines, right, because, you know, if you imagine kind of trying to work on a, an engine deepened an engine that's in the kind of engine bay of a car, and as a, you know, metal hood above you, you know, it's a really awful scenario for anything that's kind of outside the car, trying to detect signals that are coming from a beacon or something like that in No, you can't look into the car, you can't get any signals out, the best you can do is actually look at what's happening inside the bonnet, or inside inside the hood of the car, you know, with the with a tool that's got a little camera on it, and the camera can see the area around the bolt, and it can see exactly where you are with respect to other bolts and so on.

And actually with a bit of machine learning and, you know, Ai, they can tell exactly which bolt it is that you're looking at. And so you can then know that with some quite interesting combinations of technologies because this AR t vision based technology is quite capable of telling you within an engine block, you know, which which individual bolt it's looking at.

But one thing it doesn't know is which car you're looking at. So every car, the engine block looks identical to the system. But you can combine that with the tracking from ultra wideband or with you know, ble or something like that, you know, on a production line, we we combined it with ultra wideband because the ultra wideband knows exactly which car that is working on right now.

And the AR t vision system knows exactly which bolt on some car it's it's working on right now. And if you combine those two things, you can essentially work out exactly which bolt you're working on on any car in the factory down to the individual bolt. And so you can do quality control processes and understand exactly what's happening at a much much deeper level and you wherever possible, ever able to do before.

But that's only possible because using a combination of different technologies, each of which have some strengths and some weaknesses but if you can bind them in the right way, you can get a combination that's strong in both both regard. And I guess the machine vision product is not gonna have the kind of the serialization, you have a, like a Bluetooth tag on a on an asset, then that can be indexing into some unique ID.

And that's kind of Another limitation. Because I think, you know, for those people in the competitive mindset, the question is, well, what's the best technology? And of course, the answer is, well, is a hammer better than a saw? Now, it's like different things for different jobs.

Any other limitations of that machine vision that you see that preclude it from being used for everything? Well, I mean, I think it's, it is, it is down to the the identification, right? It's, it's not great identification, um, you can always arrange for it to be good, I've, you know, been a big barcode on something, and maybe that's a good thing. You know, but the, you know, it's, it really, genuinely is a line of sight technology, right.

So, that's not always ideal. And, you know, any radio technology that you will get some diffraction round things, and, you know, you'll get some penetration through certain materials. So it's, in my, in my experience, optical technologies are a bit harder, you know, both in terms of difficulty, and also in terms of, you know, being black or white, right, it's like, either it works, or it doesn't, right.

Whereas rating technologies are softer, they, they degrade, and they may degree a quick, but it's not a complete, kind of instantaneous cut off. So that, you know, I think machine vision is going to be an interesting technology, and people are going to do some, you know, I've seen fantastic performance from things like slam and so on, where people are now tracking forklifts, where essentially, you put cameras on the forklifts, and you drive the forklift around, and it's sensing, you know, everything as it goes past.

And you can see exactly where you are. And you can map it out at the same time. So some technologies that people are already using things like the Oculus, headsets, and so on, you know, in a bigger scale, are being used all over industry, and I'm pretty sure that there's going to be a lot of consumer, drone devices, and that kind of stuff, where that that that stuff is really going to be very mainstream in the next next few years, robot vacuum cleaners, that kind.

So the idea is that if you've got cameras on a device that are looking out, then, you know, you can use that combined with inertial technologies to essentially do what we do as people, you know, we, we know where we are in buildings.

And the way we do that is by looking at where we are, and combining that with the information that's coming from our ears. And, you know, we build up a map of exactly where we are and what's around us and how we're moving through the space. And that's what slam does in a, in a computing way. And I think that's something that that has really taken off in the last, you know, years, I'd say, you know, the technologies to do that have become widely available.

You know, one of the things actually, that is a bit of an aside this but one of the when I was doing my PhD in location tracking technologies, there was one paper that was just completely on another plane that that I came across, and it was from a guy called Gary Bishop at the University of North Carolina, who is you know, I met him once bonafide genius, I'm sure. But he built he wrote a paper in about , I think it was about a thing called a self tracker, which was a cube of cameras, you know, each looking in different directions, and it had some accelerometers.

And this guy was basically 30 years ahead of his time, right? So you probably couldn't have built it in Or maybe the military didn't, never told anybody but you know, now is reality and that's an interesting technology for the future.

Well, I love your metaphor or tie back to human beings and what we do but of course, human beings, augment our visual senses with location technology on phones so we can see where we are we roughly recognize were in the middle of the Yorkshire Dales, but we don't know exactly where else we are. So we use GPS and all that stuff on our phones. So I want to just, you know, this is fascinating comparing the different technologies that are in the toolbox, just going back to the AAPC because we kind of build this as mainly Comparing Bluetooth and ultra wideband but it's so much more do those anchors that you have over your shoulder that?

Yes, it's like a paperback. It's sort of like the old Michelin Guide, because they're a bit thicker than your average spy thriller that you might buy at wh Smiths bookstore in England. So do those have Ayoade, those have multiple antennas, or is that something else that you need in order to do a no so that.

And that's what allows us to get a two axis elevation and Asmath. And that gives us the tdoa, or the timing from A to A to so you know that Yeah, they're kind of about the size of a book. I mean, you know, obviously, our our focus is in industrial applications.

And, you know, these are by no means that the the ugliest thing in the factory. So, you know, I think sizes, the size is perfectly acceptable for that kind of thing is that it's the tanks that have to be small, you know, you have to, you have to make small tags that are, you know, have long battery lifetimes. And, you know, particularly for industrial applications, it's got to be pretty hands off, because you don't get the opportunity to recharge everything in the same way that you do with, you know, many consumer applications.

So, you know, every, every night, we're all programmed now to plug our phone in to get recharged, right. What is unique about your corner of the industry? Any interactions with indie booksellers lately? More Profiles. Featured Interviews. The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews Award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones reflects on her experiences working on the Project and discusses her plans to adapt the project into an expansive new book.

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