So in terms of that front-facing user experience, what were some of the, I guess, requirements or the things that you really wanted to progress or to be able to offer to customers? How will their experience change with the new digital banking system, with the new lending system?

So look, we have three strategic pillars.

We have simplicity, digital enablement, and doing good.

So for us...

One of the observations when we looked, if I take digital banking, for example, the previous two apps, the former People's Choice and the former Heritage, were not what you would call simple, intuitive, easy to use.

Interestingly, they had a reasonable amount of features, but the experience was just not for us fit for purpose and aligned to those strategic pillars.

We believe in elegant simplicity.

So I understand this is based on Backbase as the operating system for the digital banking platform.

We have a Granville Entertainment District transformational plan, so we hope that this will be a real catalyst to speeding up the work to transform Granville Street into that anchoring street once again for Vancouver.

I was really impressed by what Vancouver did with Granville Street, and I think, you know, we talk about the short-term and the long-term benefits.

The other side of this is, as a city, we, we developed and flexed some new muscles that we haven't, we hadn't fully developed and flexed before.

So the way we use public spaces, uh, you know, the way the streets embrace the marches, the, the fan zones that, some of which, uh, were very planned, others that kind of erupted a bit, um, spontaneously.

But there's a lot to learn from how we use these public spaces, because people look for gathering points.

And, you know, one of the things that we've been, uh, really drawing attention to through the work we've done outside of FIFA but on the destination master plan is a greater focus on pedestrian hubs within the city.

We're seeing some this year with the Church Street pilot and others.

Do you think combination of hotel and the games were sold out, do those two things financially balance each other out, the cost of the games versus the money brought into the cities?

Yeah.

That is my least favorite genre.

That's, like, the assumption that the default state of humanity is chaos and subjugation and stuff like that, and that's just not what our history has shown.

I mean, humans strive for stability.

We always try to find a way to make today be a lot like yesterday.

This idea that humanity's default state is chaos and victimization and we have to work hard to have a civilization, I disagree with that fundamental assumption.

[laughs] Definitely reserves.

I generally don't like to talk about politics, so I won't, but I do feel like our efforts in environmentalism would be better spent on amelioration than in a kind of a pipe dream of reversal.

that you contributed to this year.

I'm happy to talk about that, but let me go back to this 50th anniversary for a minute because somehow in the city, there was a bit of a tourism baby boom about 50 years ago.

We had the CN Tower.

The Blue Jays are 50 years old.

Last year, the Toronto Zoo turned 50 years old.

TIFF, our film festival, turned 50 years old.

There was something in the water in the mid-70s in Toronto.

There's so much going on in Toronto.

Yes, but to me, the details are where the originality lives, right? I remember when I was reading Project Hail Mary, I, I don't even know how one would begin to think about what it means to be a species that functions this way.

See, that's the part of writing that I love, the research and conceptualizing and glorious spreadsheets, spreadsheets, spreadsheets everywhere.

Like, I'll have two or three spreadsheets open and then four Google searches for different things.

I, I just love the ideating.

I wish I had, like, um, some secret silent partner who would do the writing for me, and I'd just do the research.

Like, I love it.

It's so fun.

[laughs]

The acoustic waveforms, yeah

...

the acoustic waveforms that Rocky's making.

And it would say a word, and then i- i- then he'd put that in his program and say, "This, and, and this is the word, like, 'Hello.'" And then when the computer heard something close enough to that, it would then have a synthesizer voice say "Hello" to be Rocky's voice.

So, and Rocky is not speaking ful- you know, poetic, very high-end.

... as a storyteller?

... because it gave me an excuse to...

If you calculate, if you assume Newtonian physics, which they did, um, they calculated how much fuel they would need to get from their home star 40 Eridani to Talceti and, and, and for a trip back.

[laughs]

... a single-celled organism, and it lives on the surface of stars, kind of like algae lives on the surface of the ocean.

It collects energy from the stars and then uses that energy.

Uh, it stores it up tremendously well, and then it uses that energy to propel itself out randomly.

Its spores, kind of like mold, just goes out in random directions hoping that, like, some tiny percentage of it will end up finding somewhere else to seed.And, uh, that's what astrophage does, it spreads from star to star like that.

It's basically a stellar mold, and it gets into our star in the story, which presents a problem because there's...

it, it reproduces by...

Uh, would you describe her and what your thinking was? She's sort of the person who is commanding this global enterprise and is just a boss.

Andy, what was your inspiration around that form of alien life?

Astrophage? Um, yeah.

This all started off with I wanted to come up with a story where humanity had access to a mass conversion-based fuel.

'Cause if we had that right now, we'd be able to colonize the solar system, like, now.

It'd be easy.

'Cause we have the energy.

The problem is storing the energy in a small enough volume and, and mass that we can use it for a spacecraft.

Aw, I'm so disappointed

I would love to know about your process there.

Well, I started off with the real exoplanet, 40 Eridani a b, which is about eight times Earth's mass.

It orbits the star about every 46 days.

It's closer to its star than Mercury is to ours.

And so I said, like, "Okay, if that's gonna be the planet, then what do I have to do to make this a place where life could exist?" And within the context of the story, there was a panspermia event, so it has to be, like, water-based life.

And so I'm like, well, to have liquid water that's really, really hot, you have to have a really high atmospheric pressure because the higher the pressure, the higher the boiling point of water.

So okay, they're gonna have a big, thick atmosphere, but if you're gonna have a big, thick atmosphere and you're right next to a star, the star is basically gonna sandblast your atmosphere away.

I mean, the movie overall is really about empathy and collaboration through science, and why was empathy so important to your development of Rocky's character?

Mm.

I, I don't know.

Uh, part of it was because we moved around a lot, so I would always be kind of plonking down into the middle of preexisting social groups.

So yeah, a- a- as a kid, I b- uh, often would just have nothing to do.

I'd be bored a lot, watch a lot of TV.

Like my life, uh, my childhood and my upbringing, my life was, was not really that happy a story.

I wasn't abused, I wasn't, you know, assaulted in any way or nothing like, nothing horrific like that, but I just had a very, a pretty unhappy childhood.

Mm-hmm

... and then meeting the physical puppet, what's that like for, uh, the act of creation to be tangible for you?

Well, it's interesting because I, I, I don't have a very visual imagination.

I'm on, I'm, I, I, I'm more toward the gray blob scale on the, uh, on the aphan- aphantasia scale.

Like, like, I, I, I don't...

I, I'm not completely aphantasic, but I, I don't see things very clearly or crisply in my imagination.

When I finished the book, I couldn't have told you what color Ryland's hair was.

Wow.

And then that...