Future Forward

Seyi Fabode (00:01.644)
Hello, hello Reza, how are you?

Reza (00:04.294)
Good Seyi, how are you doing? doing?

Seyi Fabode (00:05.9)
I am good, I am good. We are about to dive into future forward again. How do you feel?

Reza (00:13.766)
Man, another one. It's exciting.

Seyi Fabode (00:15.692)
Great, great. Yes. This episode is all about the autonomous city. We don't want to call it smart city because we know what, how problematic that phrase is, but we're calling it the autonomous city. And it is a most recent episode in our exploration of the future of cities.

Reza (00:42.662)
Yeah. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this one, Seyi You know, as we always start our episodes, if you're a new listener, this is a conversation that Seyi and I have been having for years. Welcome to our show. It's really about the future of cities, strategic foresight on technology, community, where cities are going. And this one's an interesting episode because implied in its...

topic is the future. And in it are a host of problems that we will explore. So, Seyi, how about we start with some history on, you know, these visions of smart or futuristic cities.

Seyi Fabode (01:13.548)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (01:18.604)
Yes. Yes.

Seyi Fabode (01:31.422)
Absolutely. Yeah. So the, as we mentioned on, I think our third or fourth episode, this whole idea of smart cities and the framing is problematic, but it's not new. we started having conversations about the smart city in the 1930s. And it was, these ideas of modernist buildings, sleek technology.

in these environments that were sort of future forward as far in the future as they could think in 1930. So back then we had some grand ambitions from specific individuals and I'll touch on a few here. Frank Lloyd Wright, the famous architect, he had this idea for Broadacre City, which he

exhibited April 15th, 1935 in New York and was well received because everything Frank Lloyd Wright did was well received. But even in its visionary status, it lacked everything beyond the, this should serve everyone, not just the homes. These buildings were beautiful, but that was it.

really wasn't a practical city in that sense. But then we swing to the far end of what was a practical vision for a smart or futuristic city in the form of, I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly, Le Corbusier's radiant city. We all know him for his utilitarian.

almost at the expense of the humans in the city. The city was supposed to do what it needed to do. And in his mind, it was to house and move people from home to work. There was no warmth about his cities. And then we had the wild, wacky, Buckminster Fuller glass structure, Utopia, where we would all live in bubbles.

Seyi Fabode (03:53.804)
ice bubble, glass bubbles, which impractical, but when has that been a consideration for Buckminster Fuller, you know, so.

Reza (04:03.046)
Hahaha.

Yeah. So.

Seyi Fabode (04:06.796)
And what that highlights, yeah, and what that highlights for us though is that the ideals and the philosophy of the people who were proposing the cities was what was getting played out in the cities. If I could put a wrap on these three entities that I mentioned. And I know you have some thoughts about that too.

Reza (04:29.606)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe give us a, you know, give a couple examples of more recent ones because I think there's some contrast there. Yeah. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (04:38.188)
that you want to pull out. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, and so the two most recent examples that, one failed, well, two failed and one is failing before our very eyes. we had sidewalk labs, the Google funded, city focused sort of incubator slash idea lab, got into an agreement with.

Reza (04:51.685)
Yeah

Seyi Fabode (05:08.108)
the city of Toronto to make the Quayside area of Toronto a city I love. We've been to Toronto and it's just such a, despite all that is happening in terms of just property speculation, Quayside was this part of the city that had been neglected.

but had so much potential because it was facing the water in the city. And Sidewalk Labs came and the proposition honestly, my summary of the proposition was, Toronto, give us your land. We'll build this digital utopia. We'll sell ads to corporate partners. So you won't have to pay us much for us building what we want.

We will sell ads to fund the city and by the way, the ads will be based on people's data. That was the proposition. And unsurprisingly, the people of Toronto were like, what is this nonsense? And this was one of those beautiful exhibitions of the Jane Jacobs approach to making sure the city serves its people. No coincidence, she moved from New York to Toronto.

And she led a lot of movements in Toronto. So that spirit was still there and the people immediately shut it down. the next one, a few years ago, Cisco, Google, and, a few of these tech companies were trying to make Kansas city a smart city. That one failed as well was a lot of money spent that one field as well. But the biggest and most.

elaborate idea here is Neom, which is in Saudi Arabia. And my goodness, is it a smart city that is doomed, that was doomed to fail from the beginning or what? I'll give you some, some stats. This line, it's supposed to be almost like one through line going through. Yeah. And.

Seyi Fabode (07:33.068)
It is costing 1 .5 trillion dollars to build this.

Reza (07:33.318)
long building.

Reza (07:44.87)
That's crazy. That's just crazy.

Seyi Fabode (07:46.476)
$1 .5 trillion. And the project is supposedly moving full steam ahead. It probably won't be successful. It is supposed to stretch for 105 miles across the desert with a length. So stretching 105 miles, but a length of just 1 .5 meters, sorry, 1 .5 miles. And as you can imagine, the problems with that

You won't have to drive is what they claim. It's a smart city, but it is failing before eyes. Yeah.

Reza (08:24.422)
That's crazy. So one comment, Sidewalk Labs. I remember all the promise with it. I love the name, just the name sort of like, Sidewalk Labs, Sidewalk, that's like so human. I was so excited about it. Never heard about the Kansas City one, probably discounted at the moment I read about it. So it's erased from my memory. NEOM just seems incredibly ambitious, but just miss.

Seyi Fabode (08:34.732)
Yes. Yes.

Seyi Fabode (08:42.924)
Ha!

Reza (08:51.366)
misguided in its vision of just splurging money to overbuild something in a place that just doesn't seem sustainable. But the interesting thing, Seyi, that I see in these, you gave these examples of Frank Lloyd Wright, my dad's favorite architect, Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller, and then these current...

Seyi Fabode (08:53.196)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (09:02.508)
Yes, yes.

Reza (09:18.982)
you know, these current like sidewalk labs and neon. And the distinction that I see is, you know, back then in the thirties, the vision was driven by an individual that had this idea of, you know, using architecture and building to create, you know, with the technology of the day, these, you know, smart cities, so to speak. And what we have today is we have either tech companies or government,

Seyi Fabode (09:38.764)
Yes.

Yes.

Reza (09:48.166)
you know, trying to drive it. There's just, I see, you know, I see a lack of vision in those. Like what those architects did, they had a vision. It was coherent. It was probably wrong, but there was some coherence to what they were trying to do. And these ones are just like trying to jam technology into, you know, into a city in a way that isn't coherent. And then for the both of them, the statement, the common thing is,

Seyi Fabode (09:54.252)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (10:02.508)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (10:13.164)
Yes.

Reza (10:17.382)
Neither of them actually think about the humans living in the city, you know You you have kind of pointed that out as you've talked about it, but I think that's like the fundamental thing is neither of them Addressed the core problem is that cities are for people for humans to live in I Think we were exchanging a text this week about it Yeah

Seyi Fabode (10:35.244)
Yes. Yo.

We were, we were, and I love that you constantly pull out these distinctions. So one slightly successful smart city in South Korea, I believe it's called Songdo. I say slightly successful because it was a combination of two things you're talking about here. There was sort of a clear vision. The government was involved, but they worked with visionaries to try to

Reza (11:07.59)
interesting.

Seyi Fabode (11:08.748)
address the needs of communities. The problem with that, though, is what you get when a government is involved in visions like this. It becomes how does it serve the government's needs? And it became a mess because there was so much surveillance of the residents. You really, it was, what is that Sylvester Stallone movie?

Reza (11:11.942)
Interesting.

Reza (11:31.878)
Really?

Seyi Fabode (11:38.092)
that was where you ended up with just one fast food restaurant and it was Taco Bell. Any of our listeners who remember the movie, something man, any of our listeners who remember the movie, please reach out and let us know. But it was that, it was a smart city, started off with good intentions, but then became super problematic because the government's intention.

straight away from community or probably wasn't even embedded with community in the first place. In that movie, you got fined for kissing him, for just a kiss in public. I'm forgetting the name of the movie, but yeah.

Reza (12:09.062)
Yeah.

Reza (12:16.062)
That's just nuts. I don't remember either. But yeah, I see misaligned incentives, government doing it for their own needs, and then you end up with almost a dystopian state as opposed to something that's beneficial for the people there.

Seyi Fabode (12:39.884)
Exactly. And I just found it. It was demolition man. It was demolition man. Yeah, demolition man. That was the whole point. But I love your point that this is, it should be about what needs to the people in these cities or in the communities, what needs do they have that we're trying to solve? And yes, the ideals or the philosophies of the visionaries.

Reza (12:43.11)
okay. Demolition, man. Okay.

Reza (13:01.958)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (13:08.204)
will come to play in whatever we end up building in autonomous or smart cities or intelligent cities as they're trying to rebrand them as now. But it really fundamentally has to come back to what problems have been solved for the people who live in the cities. Yeah.

Reza (13:28.55)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you mean, as you, as you say that, you know, what problems are to be solved, you know, you have taken some time to sort of think about what are the elements that, that make up an autonomous city and what problems can it solve? So we ready to sort of dive into that now that we've kind of surveyed the surveyed the past and the present.

Seyi Fabode (13:50.444)
Let's dive. The past. Yeah, let's dive into that. And it won't surprise our regular listeners that these buckets of need fall under some of the topics we've already covered in previous episodes. Please go listen to those. But it falls into a few buckets. And we start from what does a city do for the residents of the city? The city is a place people come to.

Reza (14:03.406)
Yeah.

Reza (14:15.942)
Mm -hmm.

Seyi Fabode (14:20.556)
to come for, I'd say, sort of self -fulfillment, build a family, find a job, move from one place to the other to achieve those things you're trying to achieve. And you hope that your government provides you with the amenities that allow you to live a fulfilled life in community with other people. And so the buckets.

as a result of sort of that definition of what a city does for people. They fall under things like shelter, obviously, transportation, water, energy, waste. So I'll just term those as utilities. And public safety is a big one because we want to know we're safe and secure with our families in cities. And then health care is a big part. But.

wrapping all of those sort of this community engagement thing. So we'll dive into each one. And what I'll share is I'll start with transportation. And Reza, I'd love you to, when I share and share some ideas of how the future of transportation in cities look like, I'd love your, your always deep comments. So anybody who talks about transportation in future cities, they immediately go to

things like autonomous vehicles. The idea being there will be no more traffic jams, no more road rage, we're reading in cars or sleeping as we go to work. And it almost ignores the need for transportation by supplanting it with the benefits of some futuristic technology. But I'd love your thoughts on.

Reza (15:49.542)
Hahaha.

Reza (16:06.726)
Okay.

Seyi Fabode (16:13.708)
on that and we talked about it a little bit. Yeah.

Reza (16:14.086)
Yeah. Yeah, I, this one is like, I, I, I'm most excited about transportation and what the potential could be. I think, like one of the challenges that I see with sort of autonomous vehicles, like a complex problem to solve. I think the transition between autonomous and non -autonomous is going to be really difficult. Like if humans are still driving in, in, and in the mix, there are autonomous cars that just seems like a

Seyi Fabode (16:20.428)
Yeah.

Reza (16:43.494)
difficult transition to make, so I'm curious to know how that transition will occur. I would love to be in a vehicle that is autonomous and is taking me where I need to go. You see some of these sort of futuristic cars with sort of large back seats where you can sort of just relax and read as the car is taking you places. Obviously, all of this sort of is just another...

Seyi Fabode (17:02.251)
Ha ha ha ha ha!

Yep.

Reza (17:11.238)
variation of public transportation. It's private transportation, if you want to call it that, right? A private autonomous transportation as opposed to public transportation where you're not doing anything. So, and I know that we talked about public transportation and how public transportation could be part of solving the future of transportation. And in this week's episode, I want to kind of push back a little bit on that. I don't know. And I think about, you know, I think about cities like Austin.

Seyi Fabode (17:15.02)
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yes.

Reza (17:38.694)
and how difficult it is for us to push forward things that we want to do with public transportation and the costs of doing it. Any city that doesn't have public transportation infrastructure that's trying to build it now, super hard. So I am very curious to see if that money that goes into public transportation can go into solving, you know, through the private market in partnership with the government, some of this

Seyi Fabode (17:45.42)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (17:56.076)
Yes.

Reza (18:08.55)
sort of, I don't know, private autonomous transportation, some of the solutions that we haven't considered.

Seyi Fabode (18:13.324)
Yeah, it -

Seyi Fabode (18:18.188)
Yeah, no, it will have to be. And I love when you push back because it makes us stretch some of what we might have maybe in my mind anyway concluded on, but there's still room for some debate there. And I think the middle ground is maybe a solution in the short term here. And what do I mean by a middle ground? It is.

government defined areas, sort of this geographic region that a city is, the malleable bounds of a city. And we break it down into smaller areas within that city where we can have a combination of public and private transportation that recognizes the needs of the communities that live there. I'll use an example. There are some...

parts of Austin where you cannot get a bus. But the people who live in those parts of Austin probably were never going to get on a bus anyway, you know? It's that idea. So how do we enable in some parts of Austin where there's a higher concentration and larger density of people?

And we build, in some cases, maybe private, in some cases, maybe government built transportation, multimodal transportation systems that cater to those small pockets within the city. And then the overarching transport system is built by the city to connect those small micro areas. So you almost want to have buses in those micro areas, but trains that go across.

in almost the same way we have these three major thoroughfares in the city, you put rail lines beside them and then sort of this nodal structure that I always go back to where there's no one failure point, but a network of options. Yeah.

Reza (20:29.446)
Yes.

Reza (20:32.87)
I like that. I like that. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (20:34.252)
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great. So the next one we've also talked, talked, talked on this and it is the energy system, the future of energy in cities, the autonomous future of energy. It always comes back to clean energy, smart grids. And what do I mean by smart grids? These are just information technology.

laid on top of assets that generate, distribute and help us track the usage of energy. So it's this autonomous grid that matches demand with supply and it ensures every home has the electricity it needs to do what it needs to do. And we can even

tap into individual homes or community solar platforms, for example, to address the needs of the people in the city. And every time I've heard that definition of what the autonomous or smart grid for energy is, I have no reason to disagree with it personally. Yeah.

Reza (21:47.11)
Yeah, yeah, me either. I think this one's also, you know, maybe it's taken longer for it to realize itself, but we are now beginning to see the realization of what the potential of, you know, the smart grid or an intelligent grid could be that could increase resilience, you know, for cities.

Seyi Fabode (21:56.684)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (22:05.356)
Yes. Yes. Yeah, it's a it's a sort of straightforward one. And I actually hadn't thought about the fact that it's been delayed. This has been promised for a while. So yeah, that is a good point. The next one I touch on is waste management. And I know you had some comments about about this one. But

Reza (22:19.654)
Yeah, yeah

Seyi Fabode (22:32.78)
The future of waste management is this.

The garbage trucks show up autonomously driven on a route that they've always optimized because they know how we all generate trash in our homes. And you almost have composting and separation on the same truck, for example. We're so far away from that. It's kind of wild because the most we've seen or I've seen in terms of some automation.

of the garbage trucks are these electric hands that grab your trash can, dump it in the back. Hopefully it all gets in and he puts it back. But that's the most in terms of autonomy I've seen for the waste disposal systems. But we do need a better future for that. Yeah.

Reza (23:19.686)
I'm going to go to bed.

Reza (23:31.942)
Yeah, I have two comments on this. One, you and I growing up in developed countries like India and Nigeria, we generated so little waste. Waste was always on our mind. Don't waste things, don't throw things away, reuse things. It was like we were recycling and reusing before there was a need to, just because of the constraints of the lifestyle that we had.

Seyi Fabode (23:43.468)
Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Seyi Fabode (23:52.556)
Yes.

Reza (24:00.646)
I think this is a very underserved area. And I don't know if it's because it's waste that it's underserved, but I could imagine that computer vision and robotics could do a lot for recycling. Recycling has such a great desire for recycling to be more than it actually is. But there's so much contamination that goes into our recycling process. Even though we...

Seyi Fabode (24:13.676)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (24:22.412)
Yes.

Reza (24:30.278)
put plastic in our recycling bins, it never gets recycled. That's just the shocking thing is like plastic is rarely recycled. So there's so much potential here. And I think it's just staggering how much waste we create, Shady. And I'm curious, like this was the question that I had for you is like, could you kind of give us an idea of like in a country like ours in the US, like how much waste do we generate?

Seyi Fabode (24:35.116)
does it.

Seyi Fabode (24:50.284)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (24:58.508)
do we generate? It blew my mind. I pulled this up and the idea here being, let's go with a city of 1 million people, a US city that has 1 million people. There are a few cities in the US that are above that. And what it translates to in just normal terms is that we generate about 1 million bags of trash.

every day for the 1 million people. 1 million bags of trash. It's nuts. And over the course of a year, we fill up 15 ,000 to about 20 ,000 Olympic sized swimming pools with garbage every year.

Reza (25:29.286)
Whoa. That's nuts.

Reza (25:46.598)
just... that just blows my mind. It's sad how much you wasted.

Seyi Fabode (25:49.772)
And it's so sad, it's so sad. And the last point here is that each American and the average American generates about 800 pounds of trash a year, which is about the size of a small car. It's so sad. It's so horribly sad.

Reza (26:13.382)
Yeah, this needs better solutions and I think it's the fact that it's waste, you know, you're just like throwing it away. You know, maybe that's the reason. Yeah, yeah. Okay, we got to move on from that one. That one is like...

Seyi Fabode (26:21.548)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (26:26.54)
It's, it, we have to move on from that one. It's, it's, it's the one that we, the future hasn't quite, lived up to, to there's nothing sadly. And if you're listening and you're on this, listening to this podcast and you're working on a solution, absolutely reach out because Reza and myself, we want to hear from you for sure. the next one I touch on here is public safety.

Reza (26:35.302)
No, nothing. There's nothing there. Yeah.

Reza (26:47.302)
Yeah, we want to hear it.

Seyi Fabode (26:54.796)
And this is a fraught one because every vision of a safe city, Songdo had this problem. Sidewalk Labs was going to have this problem. It was autonomous cameras capturing images of everybody as we did our thing in the cities, drones patrolling the skies, capturing every activity. And as Demolition Man showed us,

anything that was considered a public spectacle worthy of a fine, you would get caught and fined by a robot immediately.

And I don't know if public safety is the word that comes to mind when I think of drones and autonomous cameras. Reza, please help me out here.

Reza (27:46.63)
No, I don't either. You know, it's just two words, public, that's us, the community, safety, feeling safe. I don't know how safe I feel when there's drones and robots around. It's a very dystopian vision, you know, demolition man squared. Yeah, I think the core problem that I have with it is that public safety is built on trust. So we have to...

Seyi Fabode (27:53.26)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (28:05.356)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (28:13.292)
Yes.

Reza (28:16.39)
venture into this area with a lot of care and trepidation. There can be so many unintended consequences of facial recognition and drones and all these other technologies that are being used. It all has to come down to, does it help public safety officials build trust with the communities that they are serving? And I feel that things like drones and

robots and cameras create separation to where they become even more distant from the community. And the community is like, there's this faceless thing that's trying to keep us safe, but I feel unsafe even more because of it. So that's my impression when I hear your description of what the future could be.

Seyi Fabode (28:53.804)
Mm.

Seyi Fabode (29:01.804)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (29:09.516)
Yes, the trust element is the biggest part of this. And it actually ties to one of the other elements here that I want us to touch on, even though it wasn't supposed to be the next one. But it's this community and community engagement element. Because when you know your neighbors, when you know your neighbors' kids, and I grew up in a place where from the outside looking in, everyone would say,

It's Lagos, it's crazy, it's chaotic, but we had so much communal trust that if anyone, any kid, any young adult or anyone was starting to stray and start to put everybody else in this, was losing the trust of the community, the community would speak up and

Reza (30:03.91)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (30:07.532)
things would start getting addressed even before we got like the police involved. And I think that is what you're speaking to here. The shame of breaking communal trust was what kept all of us safe within those communities.

Reza (30:12.422)
Yes.

Yes, I am.

Reza (30:20.614)
Yes.

Reza (30:25.542)
That's brilliant the shame the shame like you you you want to keep that community spirit You don't want to be like, I just screwed something up. Everyone looks at me like hey, man Why'd you do that? Like we all know one another Yeah, I think Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think

Seyi Fabode (30:28.204)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (30:32.332)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (30:37.868)
Exactly. Exactly. And yes, you had people who did break the trust, but.

Reza (30:48.518)
I think we touched on this as we were going back and forth on community engagement. I brought up the example of Nextdoor. Nextdoor is supposed to be this platform for community engagement because it's supposed to bring the community together. And I disagree. I don't think that brings a community together until you first make eye contact with that person. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (31:02.092)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (31:14.412)
Absolutely.

Reza (31:15.974)
It might be helpful to get an alert about something that happened in the community. All those things are helpful, but if I haven't laid eyes and shook hands and had a conversation with someone in the community, then I'm not going to be more engaged with my neighbor through a digital platform.

Seyi Fabode (31:34.188)
Absolutely. And this, in our conversation, we realized this was tying into this whole idea of sort of micro sociology. These behaviors that we exhibit in person, which cannot be replicated on digital platforms, and you're absolutely correct. We try to mimic.

Reza (31:46.502)
you're here.

Seyi Fabode (32:02.412)
engagement online in our neighborhoods. And I don't think any digital platform can allow us to do that because this whole idea of micro sociology means that you, you behave a certain way because you know, you're interacting with a fellow human and you will tamp down your extreme tendencies face to face.

Reza (32:23.398)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (32:31.82)
to not break trust, even though you might not know the person very well, but you start to behave a certain way. And I have ring alarms and cameras, but the community side of the ring app is one of the worst inventions, similar to Nextdoor. The only things they share are the problems in the neighborhood.

Reza (32:52.774)
Ha ha!

Reza (32:58.726)
Ugh, yeah. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (33:00.172)
And so we really, we really, and let's touch on the last sort of last one here, and then we'll dive to what I think you and I are coming to as a theme here. And this one, it's termed healthcare, but I think it's more around wellbeing, Reza. Wellbeing in your home, and if you go back to the future of buildings, as we discussed before, it is this idea of,

Reza (33:21.478)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Seyi Fabode (33:30.188)
you are healthy and well, and there's some technology like telemedicine can help ensure any issues can be addressed almost in real time or near real time because of doctors on the phone that you can engage with. And hospitals are just more...

I'm able to deal with people who show up because fewer people show up having engaged with their doctors for some of the issues that we might not need to go to hospitals for, but we end up doing. And then we all have these devices on ourselves now that track how we're feeling and say what you will. I actually listen to my wearables like I didn't sleep well and I see the hours. Okay. I'm going to bed.

at pick a time that is earlier than the last few nights just to get back on track. So the future of healthcare in cities and wellbeing in cities, I think is one we're already experiencing to a certain extent. What's your take?

Reza (34:40.166)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah, I think there's, so there's some disconnection I see in this. I liked how you term this well -being and not just healthcare. So if I put this into buckets, there's an aspect of public health that cities need to do a better job at. And that's, you know, made complex by healthcare systems in countries like the U .S. where you're not, you know, in, where in other countries is a better.

public health care infrastructure in the US, I don't think it's very good and it makes it difficult for cities to really care for their residents in a way that, you know, avoids the worst consequences because you never want to go to the hospital. That's the last thing that you want. I believe telemedicine could diminish some of the inequities of access to health care. I don't have enough data to say whether it has done that yet. I also think that

Seyi Fabode (35:11.756)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (35:22.54)
Yes.

Reza (35:36.582)
wearables are still an inequitable solution. I don't think that's accessible to every individual in a city to wear. And I don't see like, I have a wearable and it's for me as an individual, it's not really connected with my doctor or my broader health. But there's potential there. Like it is moving in a particular direction. I'm curious to see if it will erase some of the access or inequities of health.

Seyi Fabode (35:45.772)
should do.

Seyi Fabode (35:54.572)
That is true.

Reza (36:04.262)
The last thing that I would say, and I would love to explore this as an episode, is if you think about well -being and if you think about health, one aspect of it is creating public spaces and parks for people to commune because that is part of health. And I'm going to bring up something in Mailbag related to this that one of our listeners sent us, but I think there's something there. How do you prevent people needing to...

Seyi Fabode (36:19.852)
Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Reza (36:33.318)
have healthcare by putting them in social contact and forming that human connection to where they have that wellbeing. So I love that term, Shady wellbeing. I'm glad that you brought it up that way, but yeah, those are my takes.

Seyi Fabode (36:39.436)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (36:47.532)
Yeah, no, I love it. I love it. And I've read a word that ties in by Emil Durkheim. And it's that in cities, the social contact and the experience of being with a community, a collective of people, is this collective effervescence that we build up that keep us well. And

I was reading that and I thought that absolutely captures what we miss when technology mediates the experiences we're having in our cities. Yeah.

Reza (37:26.086)
Yes. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (37:30.188)
Yeah. Yeah. So that was the last bucket. And the through line here, and I love your comments on this as well, Reza, the through line here is that while the idea of cities improving in the future has always been the case, what tends to be missing is that we let the ideals of whoever is

or the philosophy of whoever is maybe in charge or the visionary remove the humanity and the community that cities are naturally built, organically built up to help foster. And so even as more future smart, autonomous, intelligent, call it what you will, cities are envisioned or executed on what needs to be maintained.

is that what does this do for the residents of our city beyond the tools for expressing that? What does it do for the collective community?

Reza (38:41.798)
Yeah, I love that. I love how you put it that way. I absolutely agree that that process is very messy and involving the community is a critical and messy part of evolving a city to become more intelligent. Because if you don't involve the...

Seyi Fabode (38:51.5)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (39:03.34)
Yes.

Reza (39:07.142)
you know, the people, the humans that are served by it, you're going to miss out. Like you're going to have, you know, either visionaries that sort of aren't considering it or government or tech entities that are have different motives or motivations for what they want to do. so yeah, I couldn't put it better way.

Seyi Fabode (39:24.044)
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Cities are messy and the compressed culture you experience in a city is organic and messy. So you better include that in how you build the future of cities. That's awesome. And so that was it for this episode. But you mentioned the mailbag from one of our listeners. Please share, Reza.

Reza (39:35.366)
Yes.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

Reza (39:50.982)
Yeah, so, you know, someone I know that I met a few years ago, Alpeche, he sent me, he listened to one of the episodes where we mentioned Third Spaces. And so he sent me a YouTube of Simon Sinek. I think some people know him. He's, you know, he's pretty well known and, you know, talking about, you know, what's your why and things like that. But he sent me this little segment where Simon Sinek was talking about

you know, as a human, what are three parts of your body that you should try to keep healthy and why? And he said, you know, your brain, your heart, those are obvious. I got to keep my brain healthy so that I can continue to operate my heart healthy so it keeps my body working. But the third one, which was so interesting was your thighs.

Seyi Fabode (40:46.156)
Wow. How?

Reza (40:47.146)
Yeah, yeah. So I was like, wow, why should my thighs remain strong or healthy? And it's because your thighs are the part of your body that helps you walk. And if you can walk, you can go and meet people and you can connect with them. And that keeps you healthy. So your head, your heart and your thighs. And so that was his take on, you know,

Seyi Fabode (40:53.676)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (41:05.964)
Wow. Yeah. That is so cool.

Reza (41:16.454)
Isn't it cool? I mean, it just sort of ties in so well. So thank you, Al Pace, for sending that because it ties in so well with we want people to humanly connect. I think that is the thesis of this episode was just that. You want to get out, connect with people, form relationships, and that's what makes a city what it is. Not some 105 mile building through the desert.

Seyi Fabode (41:29.74)
Yes. Yes.

Seyi Fabode (41:44.524)
my goodness, that was thank you for sharing that. And thanks for reaching out. That was pretty, I will think about that for a while because it is true. It is true. And on that note, anybody else listening today, please share your thoughts, share your ideas. We want really genius concepts like what Reza just shared coming to us. And thanks as always for listening. We are.

Reza (41:53.254)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (42:12.044)
It's very appreciative of you spending time with us.

Reza (42:15.718)
Yeah, thank you everyone. Take a minute to obviously like and subscribe, rate and review, but more important, take a minute to share this directly with a friend, make that connection, and keep the good vibes going.

Seyi Fabode (42:29.74)
Thank you. Till next time. Bye.

Reza (42:32.774)
Alright, bye everyone.