If you're trying to imagine a new future for your town, or your county, or your region, or your state, or even your company, you need to have perspective. In an ideal world, you'd be talking to a lot of different, smart people; you'd step outside of your situation and see how other people are imagining their future; you'd want to know what assets you have to build on; you'd want to know what context you were working in; and if you were trying to advise people who were trying to plan for the future of a state, it would be hard to be better positioned than this week's guest, Ted Abernathy. He grew up in a small town in North Carolina, and worked on a county level, worked on a regional level, worked on a multistate level. So naturally, when we sat down with him at the UNC-TV studios in Raleigh, we asked him to help us to imagine our state's future.