Future Forward

Seyi (00:01.901)
Hello, hello, hello, Reza, how are you?

Reza (00:04.289)
Good Seyi, how are you doing?

Seyi (00:05.845)
I am good today, I am good today. It is Future Forward, again, another episode. And this episode is called The Future of Third Places.

Reza (00:18.592)
Yeah, I'm excited about this one. So before we jump in, I'll tell you a little bit about Future Forward and how this episode came about. So Future Forward is a conversation that Seyi and I have been having for years and we're bringing you into it. And we're talking about the future of cities, but we start with giving you some historical context of where each topic that we're bringing up came from.

We talk about what's going on in the present, and then we provide some strategic foresight for the future. And we're really focused on sustainable cities and thriving communities. And as we always say, we're not experts. We're learning with you. We're very curious. And so we always ask our listeners to send in ideas, your thoughts, your corrections, so that we can learn with you. So this episode, Seyi, I'm, you know, so

This episode came from two mailbags. One is from my daughter, Alia. She goes by Oli. She, after listening to the first episode, said, Dad, you need to do an episode on the future of third places. And as a teenager, she's a sophomore in high school, it is something that, you know, she feels keenly because I think more and more, you know, the younger folk don't have these

places that we've always had as we'll learn in this episode. So thank you, Ali, for a great suggestion. And then the second one was Alpesh. We talked about him last week. He sent in a mailbag about places of worship, which is a third place. And so thank you, Alpesh. We have a little segment in here that explores places of worship as a third place.

Seyi (01:52.633)
Thank you.

Reza (02:12.908)
Like we say, please give us your ideas. So thank you, Ali and El -Pesh, and everyone who's listening, please send us other ideas that would be good for us.

Seyi (02:22.691)
That's great. Thanks for sharing and thank you, Oli and Apeche. And again, for those of you who didn't catch that, Oli told us about this from listening to the first episode, which is a testament to just how thoughtful she is, just like you, Reza. It's pretty epic. So where did this idea for third spaces, places,

Reza (02:40.344)
Thank you. Thank you.

Seyi (02:51.085)
Bring from for us, Reza.

Reza (02:51.129)
Yeah. Yeah, this is pretty cool because the seeds of this podcast were sown in a third place. We have met for years. We say this at the start of every episode. We're bringing you into a conversation that Che and I have been having for years. And that conversation has been had almost every week over hot chocolate on Fridays at the Great Hill Starbucks. That's where we started to meet. Obviously, during the pandemic, we just stayed

Seyi (03:00.173)
Yes.

Seyi (03:15.416)
Yes.

Reza (03:20.866)
connected by talking on the phone. And then as soon as it was safe, we just went back to Great Hills Starbucks and restarted the in -person meeting at a third place. So I'm excited about talking about this because this built a connection, like that place built a connection for you and me. And obviously Starbucks is a big third place and we'll explore Starbucks as an example in this episode. But it's a...

Yeah, it's exciting to talk about this.

Seyi (03:52.343)
Yes, the whole idea for the podcast about third places today coming from us at our third place is meta and awesome on so many levels.

Reza (04:08.024)
Yeah, so true.

Seyi (04:09.675)
It is, it is. And I don't think it'll surprise our listeners to learn that we didn't come up with the term third place. And while it feels new again, because of the Starbucks reference, it is not, it is not. The phrase third place came from a book called The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg in 19...

89. He wrote the book in 1989. There have been a few updates to the book, but the first one where he references that phrase was written in 1989. And get this Reza, in 1989, Ray Oldenburg was talking about the decline of a place he had turned the third place in 1989. And he shared a few factors that have

Reza (04:59.552)
That's crazy.

Seyi (05:06.963)
led to the decline because even if we use Starbucks as a reference point here and the struggles that Starbucks as a business is having, it does speak to some of the issues or the decline that we're seeing with third places. And what I'll do now is define third place because Ray Oldenburg spends a lot of chapters talking about this concept.

where he got the idea from and he gave it a really simple definition. At third places are where people go to discuss issues, relax, make friends and build community. That they're hospitable environments that cultivate social connections, essentially what you just mentioned Reza, and that all cultures have had third spaces. It's not unique to the US or to the West.

What I will suggest is that the West is where Third Places became a commercial.

Reza (06:11.851)
Mm -hmm.

Seyi (06:13.411)
concept and the difference between I'd say the third places of today like Starbucks and the third places of old was that those spaces had purpose even as the people in them were there for no real obvious reason. And we know there was.

Reza (06:36.279)
Mm.

Seyi (06:38.019)
there was a reason for going because people were looking for belonging in spaces. And consequently, it was considered frivolous to go to this third place, even as essential as they were. Any comments about that?

Reza (06:56.184)
Yeah, I'm just sort of taken by, I was so taken when you told me that it was 1989 that I asked you before the episode started, we like, when was this book published? And you said 89, I was floored that so it's an, I agree, it's, it's not a new concept as you will talk about in the history section. I think it's, I think it's a, I think it's a need, it's a human need to form connection and community. And as the world has modernized that

Seyi (07:08.654)
Yeah.

Seyi (07:22.979)
Yeah.

Reza (07:25.624)
place to form that connection and community has evolved with our cities as we've gone from rural areas where third places were just sitting outside with others in your tribe and conversing and doing the things there together. As cities have become more prominent in our lives, third places have evolved with them.

Seyi (07:31.405)
Yeah.

Seyi (07:53.015)
Yeah.

Reza (07:53.884)
I think it's, yeah, I'm excited to explore starting from the history.

Seyi (07:59.317)
Yeah, no, so it's such a good point. A further definition that I'll share as I dive into the history is that what Ray Oldenburg was alluding to was that we, through time, had a place that is maybe the first place, which is home, where we are with our family, our unit or extended

Reza (08:22.775)
Yeah.

Seyi (08:28.899)
there was a home, which was the first place where we felt belonging with no real currency of exchange beyond love, honestly. And then the second place became work. And even in rural times, work was maybe on a farm, but outside of the home and in modern times, work where we go to a different place to do.

quote unquote productive output through our skills and labor was the second place. And that the third place was this generally, I'll use the word frivolous, not as a derogatory word, more as just the home had its purpose, work had its purpose, but the third space didn't really. But the general idea that Oldenburg pulled out from a lot of research, he referenced,

Jane Jacobs, he referenced some of the writers who had done work before. did, including a gentleman called Philip Aries, who had a really pessimistic view of just the decline of third spaces, but mainly the decline and the problems with the family unit was the point of Philip Aries's

essay which was written in I believe 1979 and he talked about

pre -industrialization 18th century that we had the first place home.

Seyi (10:16.341)
second place work but it was only men who worked at that point and so the women only had this one main place that they which was home but then that women also went to wash houses to do work but for their homes and that the men who needed to relax in what we now consider a very male chauvinistic world honestly

Reza (10:35.699)
Mm -hmm.

Seyi (10:44.067)
they had their third place, which was the cabaret, for example. And as we started to industrialize and more women started to have a role to play outside of the home, we needed to create, societally, third places for them. And which is when we now get into this need for not just the man of the house to relax as an adult.

there was also a need for the woman of the house who had started to contribute to the family, even if it was just trading small things, to also find a place to relax with people who were in the community with her. And so I'll pause here because this point, post -industrialization, when we got cars,

is when we started to really see the split between what was a third place for men, or sorry, for the wealthy versus third places for the masses. The wealthy would go to cafes and pubs and in some cases, cigar rooms, houses of ill repute in some cases. The wealthy, but the masses really flocked to.

Reza (12:05.311)
Mm

Seyi (12:12.355)
places of religion for their third place. And yeah, it's really fascinating to see it called out in some of the work of Oldenburg, but also Philip Aries there.

Reza (12:14.336)
Hmm. Interesting.

Reza (12:29.312)
That's interesting. I want to sort of pull on two things. I want to say like our first episode was the future of the office where we talked about the second place and explored that. And in that we also touched on like, you know, what's going on with third places, you know, offices, you know, if they become less important, whereas, you know, you lose one place of connection with other loss of third places. The second thing that I want to pull out, which I think will be a theme throughout this episode, and I want to

Seyi (12:37.784)
Yes?

Seyi (12:50.04)
Yep.

Reza (12:57.794)
call it out, which you so correctly did, was about belonging. You go to third places to feel belonging. And so we'll come back to that, but I want to sort of put a pin in it and have our audience sort of pay attention to this theme of belonging.

Seyi (13:01.207)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Seyi (13:10.891)
idea of belonging. No, it's, let's pull that thread, because I really think it's a very good one. So I'll plug my wife's book here. It's called Cultura, and in it, she talks about belonging in work environments and sort of contrasts work environments, the second place, which is a, almost a contrived space where you have to

find your tribe and sort of navigate your way to belong in the workspace contrasted with belonging in the home, which is social settings with no currency being exchanged. And the third place gave us somewhere else, gave people somewhere else to belong without a real currency. And I think that is

Reza (14:04.661)
Mm

Seyi (14:07.523)
the difference between the belonging in a workplace setting versus what we consider as frivolous, just random places where we go. And that, the loss of that, and we'll come to that, but the loss of that sense of belonging in, or the desire for belonging in a place different from the home.

was thriving in the early 1900s. It was huge and your big jazz fan, that was the point. People went to bars, to music houses, and they could just be.

Reza (14:55.66)
Yes, yes. Yeah. I want to sort of take that and extend it a little further. It's almost like third places are a place where you can explore an identity that's not work and that's not family. You have multiple identities and this is, you know, an identity that might have greater resonance with, you know, some passion, some interest, some connection that you wouldn't have otherwise. And so,

Seyi (15:12.514)
Yes, absolutely.

Seyi (15:24.962)
Yeah.

Reza (15:25.832)
you know, I will use the example and I think I've brought up this example before of the Q2 stadium where Austin FC plays as a, as a third place that has done an incredible job of making you feel like you belong the moment you walk in. And the moment you walk in, you feel like I am an Austinite and I love this team and this loves me. no matter how I look and no matter where I am from, no matter my

Seyi (15:34.051)
Yep.

Seyi (15:43.095)
Yep.

Seyi (15:48.93)
Yes.

Reza (15:55.606)
status in this city, everyone is wearing green and black and is equal there. So I think that's like an example of a third place with a great sense of belonging where you can explore this identity of being an austenite.

Seyi (16:00.536)
Yeah.

Seyi (16:09.353)
Absolutely. And I think you've nailed it. The third place is once you feel that belonging, it sort of strips everything else away. Yes, you might still have some of the day -to -day issues that you, but once you walk through the doors of your third place, it is the sense of almost because you're

going to be engaging with a community of people that you feel are of the same, quote unquote, say what you will about some groups in third places, they belong. And that, as a thread, is what we want and hope people pull from as we think about the future of third places. But before we get there, we started losing third places.

well before this current issue that Starbucks is having. And Oldenburg and Mary sort of suggest that post -industrialization was when we really started to lose third places. And I'll dive into this a little bit.

I'm simplifying this, but this is from aggregating a bunch of research and data. The idea here is that once we got cars that took us further away and transportation systems that took us further away from home and allowed us to spend more time at work than at home and then came back home after work with less energy or desire.

to then find a third place, we started to struggle societally. We started to struggle. And I will agree because we now live in an age where that tendency where work versus home is even more of a problem, for lack of a better word to use.

Reza (18:00.054)
Right.

Reza (18:06.562)
Thanks

Seyi (18:25.437)
is we're feeling like we belong less in, and the fracture, the friction we're seeing in our societies is because we don't have, we know we belong in our homes in some cases. We know we belong in our work spaces because they're paying us to be there, but who else are we when we don't have a third place to go? And I think there was,

Reza (18:48.044)
Yeah.

Seyi (18:55.573)
a lot of sort of in the times the pre pre -industrialization there was a lot of just lounging people ate in restaurants people ate in cafes something i found out at cafes in europe when the telephones first came cafes in europe were where you could go hang out and then call friends or relatives in other cafes

Reza (19:04.984)
Mm

Reza (19:21.015)
Ha

Seyi (19:24.297)
in other parts of the country or the continent. And once we stepped away from going to those cafes and we stopped gathering as much, we lost that retreat. So we lost the time in the cafes and in the third places to cars and television is how Oldenburg frames it. And we retreated into our homes.

and loneliness really started to set in.

Reza (19:56.684)
Fascinating. Fascinating. actually, cars that gave us freedom also had its downside. Every technology, every infrastructure has its unintended consequences, and that is the consequences, which is like a theme in our podcast.

Seyi (20:11.384)
Yep.

Absolutely.

Seyi (20:18.357)
It is, it is, it is. And so it's such a good point. To counter that, to counter that, we then started to, when I say we, I mean the West mainly, because I don't think the idea or the concept of the places has eroded as much in other more still slightly traditional places as it has in the West. And in the West,

when we started to lose that third place that was just for quote unquote frivolous activities, we really doubled down on religion. And religion, churches, synagogues, they acted as a bunch of things for us. Critical was the opportunity to gather and belong.

Reza (21:14.722)
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Seyi (21:16.577)
Yes, we were there to worship, but strip that away. People hung around after church to eat and talk and commune.

Reza (21:28.758)
Yeah.

Seyi (21:30.871)
Those places, we've seen this in a few other episodes Reza, churches, synagogues, mosques became the staging area during emergencies or crises within the community. You knew there was a safe space for you in there. And then according to Jane Jacobs, whose book I also have here, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she said third places allowed

public characters, those people who seem like the glue that keep our communities together. It allowed them to have a central point within the communities where you could say, you know what, and this is super evident, I'll reference a fiction book, Deacon King Kong, really played into this public character.

Reza (22:06.049)
Huh?

Reza (22:26.968)
Yeah.

Seyi (22:30.681)
staging area and gathering spot, which religious centers became as evidenced by all the research some of these great researchers and social scientists have done.

Reza (22:42.7)
Yeah, I think that's super interesting. I'll sort of bring it to an even finer point. We often conflate places of worship as a place of religion, as opposed to a place of community and belonging. so, you know, there, yes, the religion part is part of it, but part of imparting values, morals, connection and community, those places of worships are

Seyi (22:58.146)
Absolutely.

Reza (23:12.164)
places of worship are places where we do that. I think it's so true about that sort of that central character. I know, you know, when I was growing up in Mumbai and, know, I was part of a small Iranian community and we have sort of religious gatherings and I knew the one or two connectors. They were always loud and out and about, you know, knowing everything about everyone whose birthday it was, who got married. Did you go to that

Seyi (23:32.28)
Yeah.

Seyi (23:41.048)
Yes.

Reza (23:41.936)
Did you go to that wedding or not? And the same in Austin, in the meditation group that I belong to, there is the one person that's the historian, the connector that reaches out, I haven't come in a long time, what's going on? Is something wrong? Or said this person passed away or this person just had a baby. That is, they play a central role in keeping that community together and there's something so critical about that. So, for sharing that.

Seyi (23:51.544)
Yeah.

Seyi (23:55.042)
Yeah.

Seyi (24:06.743)
Yeah, no, it's such a, I'm pretty certain most of our listeners also remember someone who are a few people who are those public characters. And as we've lost third places, we've lost proximity to those public characters as well. I'll dive into churches.

Reza (24:26.41)
Hmm.

Seyi (24:33.633)
specifically a little bit more because one of the points Alpesh made in his mill back to us was that why are churches, mosques the of the highest points within most cities? And we have some, we did some research, surprisingly, which pointed out some things for us. I'll quickly touch on these three things.

churches, mosques, synagogues, the tallest points in towns and cities. There was the religious symbolism, of course, for them being the highest points. And the height of the church spire and towers sort of pointed to heaven and connected or symbolized the connection between Earth, us, the people, and the divine.

The height of these churches and the towers and spires also came because architects and engineers of the time used church construction to showcase advanced architectural and engineering techniques of the time. I actually think about the architectural wonders in Barcelona.

Reza (25:55.565)
Mm -hmm.

Seyi (25:55.651)
some of that are still being worked on till today, those were just the cutting edge of architecture and they were religious infrastructure as well. And then again, no surprises as we've talked about third places and churches being third places, they became the community focal point. And consequently, if you could see it, you could go to it.

Reza (26:08.364)
What?

Reza (26:22.284)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Seyi (26:23.937)
And it had to be the highest point in the city or the town to allow you to navigate your way. was almost this symbolic navigation, just as much as it was for you to physically see. We go to these places, third places, churches, mosques, synagogues, because we're looking for something. And to be able to see it and go there, I think there was such a...

Reza (26:27.586)
Thanks.

Reza (26:48.012)
Yeah.

Seyi (26:53.399)
a deeper meaning to them being the highest points in cities as well.

Reza (26:58.38)
Fascinating. So it's almost like the geography of community, right? It had a particular purpose in drawing you towards it. I mean, also sort of what it made me think of is that the power at the time was much more concentrated in the church or in mosque or that kind of, and I remember when I went to Iran and I went to Shiraz and Isfahan and went and

Seyi (27:01.699)
Yeah.

Seyi (27:17.004)
Absolutely.

Reza (27:28.418)
saw some of that, you the great Islamic architecture there and just how much effort and care had gone into building these places and how it symbolized how important those places were. And so today you contrast that with, you know, where is the best architecture? Where are the highest points? It's corporations. we live in the, we talked about this with Kelly last week. We live in this age of sort of

Seyi (27:38.851)
Mm.

Seyi (27:50.147)
Yeah.

Reza (27:56.148)
corporate power centers and they're the ones that want to say, we're the biggest, you know, we're in San Francisco. That's the highest point. know, everyone orients them towards that. It's such a strange, you know, thing to think about how, you know, our perception of what is important in life has shifted as cities have become bigger and more commercial and maybe less community oriented.

Seyi (27:57.998)
Yeah.

Seyi (28:01.357)
Yeah.

Seyi (28:25.643)
It's so true. That's a fantastic point. You think about, as I was mentioning, La Sagrada Familia and just in its ongoing construction, it was this revered building through the ages. And now we point to the Salesforce tower. You know, it's kind of what is going on. It's such a fantastic point you make. And it ties to the

ongoing decline of third places, which was accelerated by the pandemic. We saw that. Even churches have not fully recovered. And I can speak to churches because I attend church. They have not fully recovered from what the pandemic did, which was like it did to you and I.

Reza (29:02.263)
Yeah.

Seyi (29:22.841)
could not gather weekly to commune and feel like we belonged. And once that was ruptured over an extended period of time, the point of the third place, which we'd already started questioning as capitalism kicked in and we talked about technology cars and television, that rupture, that maybe...

crack became a rupture and these third places have still not recovered. The, especially where the bonds or the things that tied us together in those spaces were not as strong. The third places of today are commercial places for the most part. And

Religion is a fraught thing, so I will not, but we, a lot of churches and the perception of churches was that they were becoming commercial spaces. And consequently, once the pandemic happened and we didn't have to go or participate, we didn't go. Places like Starbucks, we had to go orders that you could pick up.

Reza (30:48.684)
Mm -hmm.

Seyi (30:50.413)
but I'm not leaving my home to go get a hot chocolate because the hot chocolate is amazing. It's because I'm going to meet with you. So it's this very commercial conversion of third places. So Starbucks took the idea, brilliantly took the idea and replicated it in a commercial space.

But the commercial nature of the space is what has made it easy for a lot of people, as evidenced by the problem Starbucks is having now, to disengage from it.

Reza (31:33.142)
Yeah, there's no reason to stay connected with it. know, yeah, I that's think that's fascinating. You know, I know that I remember what the pandemic, like even though we stayed connected on the phone, we couldn't wait to meet in person. Even now, you know, there are weeks where we're not able to meet and we talk on the phone because our schedules are busy. But when we actually meet, it's like

Seyi (31:36.717)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seyi (31:52.929)
Yeah, yeah.

Reza (32:02.794)
a whole different, yeah, know, you hug, we, can, you know, absorb all the body language that's going on. Just be there together, totally focused on, you know, connecting. So, I'm, Seyi, I think the next thing that we want to touch on now that we've gone through that is the, to bring up the laws that we have.

Seyi (32:04.565)
Experience, energy. Yeah, yeah.

Seyi (32:12.034)
Yes.

Seyi (32:15.927)
Yes.

Seyi (32:31.778)
Absolutely.

Reza (32:32.792)
have two of the 21 laws that apply to this episode. We're going to talk about those and then we're going to talk about the future. The two laws, one is public spaces foster social cohesion. I think we've been talking about this the whole last episode. Accessible, well -designed public spaces are essential for fostering community interaction, civic engagement, and social cohesion in cities. This is research by White from 1980 demonstrating the importance of a public space.

space design in his study, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. And then the second one is social infrastructure is as crucial as physical infrastructure. And this is a theme that we're going to explore. We almost explore in every episode, but by talking about and it goes investment in social infrastructure, including schools, libraries, community centers, healthcare facilities, is as important as physical infrastructure.

Seyi (33:19.167)
Every episode.

Reza (33:31.042)
for sustainable urban development. here's, so Seyi you have a little story about like the research of this was based on a book by Kleinberg, but tell us more about, okay, so how does this work for the people?

Seyi (33:44.267)
Yeah, with Palaces for the People, yeah, we've done the research. has, obviously it has some essays and research. And I went to get some books with my kids a few weeks ago. And you know what, how it goes. I'm standing in the store, they're picking what they need to pick. And I walk past the social sciences section and I see this book and I'm thinking, this, not even sure.

I know I should buy this book. So I did, along with a few other books. And then as I'm doing the research for this episode and I pull up the laws, I'm like, that's the book. What is this? So it's such a, it all seems to connect. And this is what I love about this idea of cities and our podcast, honestly, these topics, seemingly unrelated, but all part of this interconnected system that we call cities.

Reza (34:39.446)
Yeah. So, Seyi, now take us into the future. What does the future of Third Places bring us?

Seyi (34:47.139)
hold for us. Yeah, so I think this is another one of those topics. And I think we've had a few of those, a couple of those where the solutions have zero to do with technology. If we want to do it right.

Reza (35:06.988)
Yeah, I completely agree. I think there's this mistaken notion that social media and connecting over the internet is a form of a third place. And while I believe that there are certain online communities that are valuable, especially for some of the marginalized people that just can't gather easily, there are just not as many of them or can't gather easily, whether they're persecuted or whatever.

Third places are physical, we're human, we want to connect people in the most human way possible, which is in person. And I think it goes to some research that's also been done. I can't remember the author's name right now, but she wrote about the Twitter revolution during the Arab Spring. She's a columnist for New York Times, whatever reason, it's not coming to my mind, but she wrote about like how, you know, we feel like

Seyi (35:40.28)
Yeah.

Reza (36:04.908)
you know, when Twitter and social media came about that it could lead to social revolution and social change. But it didn't play out that way because you can't have, you know, likes and thumbs ups and, you know, mashing your keyboard to drive change. actually takes concerted work building relationships with people and, you know, working on the ground to make change happen.

She's a Turkish woman, goodness, I can't remember, but maybe you're looking it up.

Seyi (36:39.083)
I do know who you're talking about and for the life of me, I also cannot remember now, but she's a systems thinker. Zeynep Tufekci, yeah, thank you. Zeynep Tufekci, yeah, yeah.

Reza (36:48.63)
See ya.

Yeah, yes. she wrote incredibly well, even during the pandemic about the whole pandemic situation. So yeah, I will say one more thing before you go to the next point about the future of Third Spaces is we have this thing coming up in the future called the metaverse. And I think we're going to have an episode just debunking it.

Seyi (36:59.245)
She did.

Seyi (37:13.305)
We owe it to the world to debunk that idea, honestly. Yeah.

Reza (37:21.624)
I believe that are purposes for it and I'm sure our episode will pique our curiosity about what it could be useful for, but I just don't think it's a third place.

Seyi (37:26.361)
We'll talk then. Yeah.

Seyi (37:30.969)
I agree. I 100 % agree with you. I think Mark Zuckerberg is also, despite him spending billions of dollars on all this, he's come into the realization that he cannot replicate the third places, honestly. So the next one here, I think one of the threads that we've touched on a few times as we've talked about, talked on Future Forward is that

crises tend to bring communities together. And because of the importance of the original third places as gathering spots and sort of the axis of recovery in communities, I believe as we see more crises and hopefully we have heard some, the next generation will start to go back to

what the third spaces did for us before. We already see that in groups that are recovering from say addiction, for example. There's a lot of meeting in the room in the basement of a church with people who understand what you're going through and they become your community. And yes, it is a crisis situation, but

Reza (38:49.676)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seyi (38:59.627)
I do think the epidemic of loneliness we're seeing in the West, we can start to address when we think of it as an opportunity to gather in communities in these third places and places.

Reza (39:13.656)
Yeah, yeah. Shout out to episode 11, the future of Thedas and Crisis. That's where we...

Seyi (39:17.933)
Yes. Yes, absolutely. The third one here is, again, knowing how fraught the topic is, but I do believe we need religion again. And not religion in the sense of this divisive topic it is, but more just this shared, just...

gathering opportunity in spaces that as Ray Oldenburg called it, they are malleable spaces. It is a church or a mosque or a synagogue, but it's also a food bank. It's also a shelter for families that are struggling that need a place to stay. And the malleability of third spaces and third places is only found in third places that are not commercial.

Reza (39:59.255)
Yeah.

Reza (40:13.463)
Mm.

Seyi (40:14.111)
And religion tends to be that. And so when I say we need religion again, it's to go back to these malleable spaces that give us a sense of belonging and cater to our most serious needs in times of just living life, honestly. Yeah. The next one is that, and this is another Ray Oldenburg point, that we need to make spaces that the elderly and children

Reza (40:18.892)
Yeah.

Reza (40:34.848)
Yeah, well, that's great.

Seyi (40:44.377)
can be in and not feel either constrained or needing to do something in. And the idea here being, and we've heard this a lot of times, if you can figure out benefits and city infrastructure or social infrastructure that benefits the oldest and the youngest amongst us.

Reza (40:54.967)
Yes.

Seyi (41:12.321)
you really address the need for everyone. And I strongly believe that that will be a big part of how we regain the spaces in the future.

Reza (41:22.368)
Yeah, I think it's so critical that one, it's made accessible by making it accessible to children and the elderly. And two, so critical to have that generational connection. We're losing that generational connection. We are not getting the wisdom of our elders. We're not getting the joy of our children. It seemed to be just isolating ourselves into separate places of the elderly, the young, and then everyone in the middle. doing, yeah, so really good.

Seyi (41:26.733)
Yes.

Seyi (41:32.983)
Yes. Yes.

Seyi (41:39.512)
Yes.

Seyi (41:48.097)
Yes, it's so true. It's so true. And then I'll touch on the last one here, which is that we need to think of quote unquote frivolous time as valuable time, because the frivolous nature of being in third places in times past is where we got the opportunity to build community and belong to people without the constraints or the criteria of

Reza (42:02.327)
Mm.

Seyi (42:18.041)
home or work. And so time is really when we said there's no technology, time is what we need to help us address the third space, third place deficit we're experiencing in our societies right now.

Reza (42:35.864)
That's great. These are great. And I love how you bring it right to the end by bringing up all these key points, especially the one about time, especially in this time of technology just sucking our attention to where we forget that we need to be physical humans and getting out of this portal into the internet, which is our phones. So compelling.

Seyi (42:56.823)
Yes.

Seyi (43:02.658)
Yes.

Reza (43:05.472)
I mean, I often sort of have to pull myself away from it, remember sort of making that connection. And so I have a call to action at the end of our episode here to share two things. The first one is think of the third places in your life. Why do you go there and how does it make you feel? So just take a few minutes to observe what it means for you. And then the second call to action is make the time to find another third place

Seyi (43:09.069)
Absolutely.

Reza (43:35.178)
and make an effort to form a new connection there. So explore some other part of your identity in some other third place that you would not normally go to, but find a way of finding one, making a new connection over there and help sort of grow the connections in our community.

Seyi (43:50.925)
These are fantastic cultural actions and I thoroughly appreciate that you're making it actionable for people because it gets us all involved in rebuilding and just strengthening our cities. Thank you.

Reza (44:07.084)
Yeah, yeah, you're welcome, Seyi So Seyi, we come to the end of our episode. Do we have any mailbag this week?

Seyi (44:15.173)
yes, I have a couple quick shout outs. I had two short conversations, one longer than the other, but two conversations last week where both, Aaron and Lincoln, they commented on enjoying the podcast. Aaron is on, the laws of cities episode and he was just super optimistic about the

the path the podcast is taking, but also positive about how much he's learning from it. So I truly appreciate that. And Lincoln was super complimentary of what it feels like a ton of research that goes into the work that we do. And I reminded him, and as we've said, this is about curiosity for us. We're trying to learn. And I believe the people who are listening.

are also here to learn and so it's fun for all of us involved. So thank you, Aaron and Lincoln.

Reza (45:18.082)
Yeah, thank you, Aaron and Lincoln. I just look forward to this time of the week on Sunday where we're going to record because I know I'm going to come out of this just so energized and so excited with what we've talked about. Yeah, we're having a lot of fun doing this and please rate and review, share, like and subscribe. That's the way that the algorithm helps us grow.

more importantly, take a minute to think of someone in your life, maybe one that you know in a third place that you visit, and share this episode with them. So thank you everyone for listening and we'll see you next time.

Seyi (46:02.713)
We'll see you next time. Thank you. Bye Reza.

Reza (46:05.122)
Bye, see ya.