Future Forward

Seyi Fabode (00:02.708)
Hi Reza, how are you?

Reza (00:05.118)
Good Seyi how are you doing?

Seyi Fabode (00:07.092)
I am good, I am good. It is episode seven of Future Forward here.

Reza (00:14.11)
Yeah, I'm excited about this one, Seyi Tell us what we're going to talk about today.

Seyi Fabode (00:19.06)
Yes, today's episode is all about the future of water in cities.

Reza (00:25.214)
Wow. So this one's going to be a good one, Seyi, because you know, you've been, you know, your last startup was on water. My first job, as I've mentioned before, was at an energy and water utility. And so it's like front and center in my early development in my career. So I have a lot of questions and I know that you've spent a lot of time thinking about water.

Seyi Fabode (00:39.284)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (00:43.412)
You

Seyi Fabode (00:48.5)
Yes.

Reza (00:53.278)
But before we do that, let's tell folks about Future 4G.

Seyi Fabode (00:57.62)
Yeah, yeah. So for new listeners, welcome to Future Forward. It's a conversation Reza and myself have been having for the last few years. And we recently decided to bring you all into it. It's our exploration of the future of cities, taking a good look at the history of the systems that run our cities, and then providing some strategic foresight about where we believe.

the industry or the system is going.

Reza (01:33.246)
Awesome. So let's jump in, Seyi. Let's take us back. Where did this begin?

Seyi Fabode (01:40.852)
Yes, this one is a fun one. I've presented about the water industry at several points. And I always love starting with this story of Aaron Burr, the infamous Aaron Burr, who apparently was the first person in the US to start a water utility. And the story goes, yeah, it's crazy.

Reza (02:07.678)
Whoa.

Seyi Fabode (02:10.324)
We all know him for his deceptions in the political sphere, but turns out he was already doing this in other industries. And this brings us to a point in the 1780s, 1790s, when in New Amsterdam, which we all now know as New York, 2000 people died from

what doctors believed back then were waterborne diseases. And reading a bunch of books highlights that this was technically the first official water crisis in the US. We'd had the great stink in the UK that really started to move the country and most of Europe, honestly.

Reza (02:57.566)
Where?

Seyi Fabode (03:10.228)
towards sanitation and filtration and sewage systems and water systems. But the first real crisis in the US was in the 1780s, early 90s, when Aaron Burr, who was already in government at this point, and the technology and ideas from Europe were starting to bubble over across the

pond into the US proposed to the new Amsterdam is what I'll call it. The new Amsterdam sort of Senate and government that he could build sewer systems, drinking water filtration systems, treatment plants to help address what had been identified as the waterborne disease.

2000 people dying at that point in New Amsterdam was a big deal. And consequently, he was given Aaron Burr, who was in government claiming he could also build a water system and a utility. He was given $2 million, which is about $44 million in today's terms. But instead of building the water system,

He took that money and put it in a company called the Manhattan Company, which was supposedly the water company he was starting. But it wasn't really a water company. It was what we now know as the first business entity slash location for what we know as JP Morgan Chase.

Reza (05:00.222)
What? That's a pretty crazy story.

Seyi Fabode (05:02.74)
Yes, it's crazy. And so he failed to address the problem. And other industrialists, business people were given more funds and the issue got addressed because again, remember we already had some of this technology from Europe and it was just a case of implementation. And New Amsterdam got water from beyond its

direct sources, which led us to our first like grand builds of water infrastructure systems, getting water from the Delaware River, piping it through up to New York. So that was the first water crisis, 1780s, 1790s. And we can really consider

where we are today as the fourth water crisis in the US, but I'll touch on the second and the third quickly. The second water crisis in the US was right after World War II. And similar to the first one, the government of the United States at this point made financial decisions to pour billions into building infrastructure.

most of which is what we still use today. A lot of the water systems that we use today, that we rely on today, were built right after World War II.

The third water crisis happened in the 1970s and the major flash point then was industrial pollution of the Cuyahoga River. I hope I pronounced that correctly, which led to a river fire and huge protests. Remember we've talked about this protest thing in the 70s across these different systems that we've discussed. Well,

Reza (07:00.862)
Yes. Yes.

Seyi Fabode (07:07.092)
The protests as a result of some of the pollution, industrial pollution that led to the fire is what a lot of industry experts consider as the birth movement for the Environmental Protection Agency in the US now. And $60 billion of funds were appropriated for what we now know as the Clean Water Act in 1972.

I'm mentioning the Clean Water Act because that was in 1972, which is over 50 years ago now. It is still the dominant and prevailing law under which we manage water systems, ignoring the fact that we have discovered millions of new formulations of materials and chemicals and chemistry, which were not

testing for properly or cleaning in our drinking water systems and which is how we've landed in our current state of what I've said far and wide is the fourth water crisis in the US.

Reza (08:25.086)
So I'm just gonna, I have two comments. One, Aaron Burr from Hamilton fame. Okay, okay, but just trying to like pinpoint that. And so that was first crisis, then we had the one after World War II that sort of drove out the infrastructure. And then we had this crisis in the 70s, which we've seen with other systems, but that drove a set of regulation that

Seyi Fabode (08:31.828)
Yes, yes, save her.

Reza (08:53.854)
seems to have stifled innovation, if I want to put it that way, with what we're, maybe I don't know the right words, innovation, but we've stifled some of the things that we're trying to do with water as a system, and we haven't evolved our thinking as the science has evolved. Am I catching up on that right?

Seyi Fabode (09:13.812)
Yeah, you are catching up on it. And I will say it's both slowed down the evolution of the system.

Reza (09:25.662)
Mm -hmm.

Seyi Fabode (09:27.124)
more than it has prevented innovation. I'd say that is more the case because water is life. We know that. And consequently, the entities that are charged with providing us water take that responsibility seriously.

Reza (09:35.422)
Mmm, okay.

Reza (09:42.366)
Yes. Yes.

Reza (09:52.606)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (09:54.196)
But the incentive is not to change anything, honestly, even as everything is changing around it, because the framing is it currently works. And we're talking about drinking water here. What we've been doing for so far works, for so long works, is sort of how we frame it. About 92 % of US

Reza (09:59.934)
Hmm. Okay.

Reza (10:14.174)
Yes. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (10:22.26)
water systems, utilities, both private and public, still use chlorine as the disinfection mechanism in water. This is a technology that was invented in the early 1900s and the approach was invented in the early 1900s. And it is still the dominant method for filtering water in the US today.

That kind of shouldn't be the case.

Reza (10:54.174)
Yeah, that's kind of crazy. We see parts of our world sort of evolve so rapidly and this one just seems to have, you know, just stultified, stagnant, like stagnant water, stagnation. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So Seyi, bring us into the present fourth water crisis and tell us where we are now.

Seyi Fabode (10:56.084)
It is. It is.

Seyi Fabode (11:07.124)
been stuck in the past. Stagnant. Yeah, unfortunately, unfortunately.

Seyi Fabode (11:19.252)
Yeah, so we're recording this in late June. And the first week of June in Atlanta, Georgia, in the US, they had a water crisis. And the nature of water crises from time past that we've just explained, the nature is that the infrastructure to do

one of the two things we need to do to water. We either need to clean it if we have it in a place so that it's drinkable, or we need infrastructure to move it from one place to another place to then clean it to make it drinkable. And then we move it to the people who need to drink it. So

The crisis with water always revolves around one or both of these two systems failing, the system for moving the water or the system for cleaning the water. And in Atlanta, Georgia, as has been the case in Jackson, Mississippi, New Jersey, Houston, Austin, Texas, and tens of thousands of other cities in the US.

One or two of these systems have broken or both. And in Atlanta, both of those systems failed in the first week of June, the last day of May 2024 into the first week of June 2024. Assets failed, pipes broke. And remember, these pipes were built after the Second World War and consequently,

They are well past their sell by date, unfortunately. And the approach in the US has been, and honestly, in many parts of the world, having studied this industry, is not to do the hard work of fundamentally rebuilding the water systems. It is to patch

Seyi Fabode (13:44.98)
and ignore till the next crisis happens. So Atlanta had the problem. The city with the most, the busiest airports in the world couldn't provide water to its residents. And I was having a conversation with a friend who reached out when this happened. And people ignore that.

When you have a water problem in your city and they declare a boil water issue, which means don't drink the water, you need to boil it because there might be contaminants in it. It is not just the average individual that struggles. It is the knock on effect is astonishing. And I'll give you the scenario I played out on my conversation with him.

Atlanta will be one of the cities hosting the World Cup in.

a few years, 2026, the soccer world cup in 2026. If the same incident that happened in Atlanta at the beginning of June 2024 happens during the world cup, the athletes who come will not be able to drink water from the hotels they're staying in. The restaurants will not be able to serve them. The stadia will not be able to

host the games because as we saw with the Atlanta situation when I believe it was Megan Thee Stallion's concert got canceled, you will have to cancel everything.

Seyi Fabode (15:36.436)
and we will.

I hope we won't. Let me reframe that. I hope we won't experience that because this Atlanta incident happened less than three weeks ago. It is no longer in the news, Reza, and it has not been fixed.

Reza (15:44.286)
Yeah. Yeah.

Reza (15:59.326)
That's fascinating. I mean, Seyi, I try to keep up with the news. I might have glanced that something happened, but it passed by, just passed by, you know, it was was whatever the other news was, was much more prominent. So it, and it, and it, and and I'm curious, like Che, and Seyi, you'll start touching on this as we start talking about the future, but it seems that

Seyi Fabode (16:11.572)
Yes. Yes.

Reza (16:27.87)
Water is such a fundamental part of our lives and us being able to form communities and cities. Like, initially in historical times, people would form communities where there was a source of water, because we just needed it to live. And now we've built cities that have systems that allow us to build in places that don't necessarily have just a river running by or a lake or what have you.

Seyi Fabode (16:45.108)
Yes. Yes.

Reza (16:57.694)
And I'm curious about why we allow these situations to occur. And the thought that comes to my mind is this is something that I, you know, when I worked at that utility, like it was always conversation about like, well, water is never priced at the market rate.

Seyi Fabode (17:18.132)
Yes.

Reza (17:19.614)
And I understand why, because you can't price water at the level that you need to pay for it, because it would be expensive. It costs a lot to purify water. And so that would create inequity in a way that would... You're basically taking away a fundamental right or a way of living to have water, access to good water.

Seyi Fabode (17:31.412)
Yes.

Yes.

Seyi Fabode (17:43.06)
Yes.

Reza (17:47.326)
So yeah, so that's the one thought that comes to my mind, Shae.

Seyi Fabode (17:52.212)
It's a, it is at the core, the problem with water systems in the U S and you've nailed it Reza. It is at the core. There's this mismatch between what work is done to get water to the end user and how much it genuinely costs. So a bottle of water, quote unquote,

bottled purified water for what the marketing department suggests these companies should. The same quantity of water is about 220 times what you pay for that water when it comes out of your tap in your home.

Reza (18:42.142)
That's crazy.

Seyi Fabode (18:43.156)
And at some point we need to...

balance that difference so that the water systems that do the utilities that do the work can provide.

updates or update their infrastructure and the assets so they can continue to provide the water to the residents, but not at a price that makes it impossible for, that worsens inequalities in our cities. You made a second point that I think is again, quite critical in this conversation. We, every, the big major

global cities, the cities that we all talk about as the places we want to visit and enjoy, economically and ecologically tied to the water.

Tokyo, London, New York, Amsterdam is even known for the canals and the walkways. Any city that you are attracted to visit that has a rich culture, rich history and is global in its populace is close to water.

Reza (20:08.446)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (20:18.836)
match those two things you just shared, the inability to price water correctly and the centrality of water to those cities, and you have the problems we're experiencing right there in the front of our faces. Yeah.

Reza (20:33.182)
Yeah. Well, I'll show you, I have another follow -up question, which is, and this comes from our experience growing up in a developing country like India or Nigeria, water was always a problem. There was times when we didn't get water. A tanker would come and fill up the tank and you filled up buckets during the day so you can take a bucket bath at night. It was just like we lived with...

Seyi Fabode (20:49.14)
Yes. Yes.

Yes.

Seyi Fabode (20:58.74)
Yes.

Reza (21:01.15)
you know, water scarcity at times. and when I, you know, coming to the U S I was, I was, I was shocked that the water that came out of the tap was water that I could drink because it was never true in India. But what shocked me even further was that, was that same water was used to water yards. I just blew me away. It just utter waste in my, in my, you know, it just, I

Seyi Fabode (21:04.212)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (21:16.852)
Yes.

Reza (21:30.846)
You know, it's like all that electricity and especially in a state like Texas, and here's a stat that, you know, made my mind explode is that, you know, what percentage of water in a home in Texas is used to water the yard?

Seyi Fabode (21:35.668)
Yes.

Reza (21:51.262)
It's 70%. So 70 % of that water that has been purified for drinking goes into watering yards. And so anyway, all of that to say, like it just, that drives me nuts when I learned that I don't water my yard. I call it God's garden. You know, like anything that lives in there, it's because, you know, God meant it to be. So there's a phrase in Farsi, in a jungle Mola, which is like,

Seyi Fabode (21:53.46)
That is insane.

Seyi Fabode (22:02.484)
That is insane.

Seyi Fabode (22:10.484)
Ha ha!

Ha ha!

Seyi Fabode (22:19.06)
Yeah.

Reza (22:19.454)
you know, God's garden. So, you know, that if it lives, it was meant to live or else not. But the question that I have, Seyi, is it doesn't seem that we have figured out in the system of water, of like recycling water well, maybe it exists in other countries. Like I've heard of desalination, you know, in Middle Eastern countries takes up a lot of electricity, but they have a lot of energy to do so.

Seyi Fabode (22:24.5)
That is great.

Reza (22:48.734)
But I'm curious about water recycling and is it because we don't have the market rate for water to invest in those types of things or is there some fundamental problem with water recycling? I just don't know enough about it.

Seyi Fabode (23:01.396)
Yes, so this actually starts to touch on sort of the future that we always want to make sure we thread through from the past. A big part of what you're highlighting here, Reza, is that we need to fundamentally redesign our water systems. So the waste that you've

rightly called out the waste of both clean water to water your gardens and the energy used to power the systems that clean and purify the water.

Reza (23:46.302)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (23:48.884)
leave us in a situation where we will always be playing catch up because that system is just wasteful period. So we need to redesign our systems. And now we're having a lot more conversations about pipes in homes with gray water and blue water is maybe the best way to frame it to separate what gets used. So

Reza (23:58.334)
Yeah, yeah.

Seyi Fabode (24:19.06)
Do we not fully purify the water that comes from our water sources at a certain point in the filtration experience? We pipe it out into the gray pipes so that it goes into the homes for flushing toilets, watering your grass, and those non -portable

Reza (24:37.63)
All right.

Very good.

Seyi Fabode (24:47.956)
needs. So portability is the ability to drink the water. And then you perform the rest of the steps to filter and clean the water for the drinking part of what comes into the home. So you are correct. That is part of what the future of the water, drinking water and wastewater needs to be. Do we recycle?

Reza (24:48.414)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Seyi Fabode (25:15.668)
water. Yes, we do a lot more than people realize, actually. And that is a good, a good thing about the water systems. I'd say here in the US, there are multiple steps in even the traditional wastewater to drinking water process that make it a thing.

Reza (25:19.774)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (25:45.012)
And the part of the problem with the industry, which goes to the second thing I think needs to change about the industry in the future. So the first one was we're designing the systems fundamentally. The second one is to start to like show the work that goes into getting clean water into our homes, because then we will provide information to you and I such that

When we price water correctly, the end user, you and I, understand that it's because there's a lot of work that happens on the back end. So I'll use an example. LA, I believe it was LA Water Department, they ran this project where they have gone to desalination, the example you used. And desalination is.

not new technology, it's just energy inefficient, which is why it hasn't been used as much. But the city of LA and the water department there ran this campaign where the...

took wastewater, sewage, and converted it to drinking water and essentially branded it to make it acceptable. And there are parts of LA right now that the water they're drinking was used to flush the toilet just a few weeks before that. So we're getting there.

Reza (27:15.23)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (27:31.636)
The inefficiencies of desalination, of energy use, of desalination, we're starting to address those with dual siting. So a desalination, a water desalination plant now has its own renewable energy power plant, for example, and it uses solar and battery storage so it's sustainable and you get the clean water on the back end from

Reza (27:50.142)
Yeah. Yeah.

Reza (27:56.862)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (28:01.62)
what was sewage or wastewater just a few cycles before it gets consumed.

Reza (28:07.934)
Hmm. Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. So it seems like you said that, you know, these systems have to be fundamentally redesigned, but I could imagine that there are some constraints on doing that. Cause my impression about water utilities are they're very fragmented much more so than electric utilities. Like electric utilities tend to sort of be larger, you know, serving larger areas and water utilities are like smaller.

more fragmented, you know, even have like these municipal utility districts and small towns with all these, you know, public water systems. So given that how, I mean, you, you face that with, you know, your, you know, your startup Varuna, you know, where it was a struggle, you know, the go -to -market was a struggle because of this fragmentation. so, so maybe I I'm curious, is it a little bit more about

Seyi Fabode (28:50.132)
with the business yet.

Seyi Fabode (28:56.596)
Absolutely. Yes.

Reza (29:03.71)
what you mean by fundamentally changing these systems and if that fragmentation is a constraint.

Seyi Fabode (29:11.06)
It is, it is your again, hitting the core element or the core constraint is the better word. So there are about 50 ,000 water and wastewater systems in the U .S. It is highly fragmented. And part of the issue here is that where all in some cases, I'll use an example, you have three or four small municipal water systems.

trying to run their own water system and they face the constraint of both the examples, the framing I provided before of do we have the water? And in the case of the West of the country, we're now seeing situations where water systems or water utilities that are further down

south of the head of the Colorado River are now struggling with having the water to clean. So there's not enough water in the first place. And you have a municipal utility just a few miles up the road, also trying to do the same work. So the fragmentation leads to massive inefficiencies.

Reza (30:17.95)
Yeah.

Reza (30:29.502)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (30:36.916)
And these inefficiencies worsen when we start facing the problem we're experiencing with climate change now where there is not enough water in the system. And then you get to the second problem of this fragmentation, the purification of the water or the cleaning of the water. And these utilities, these municipalities not having enough resources because they're not

Reza (30:47.166)
Hmm, interesting.

Seyi Fabode (31:06.484)
pricing the water adequately, struggling to pay for the infrastructure and the upgrades to get clean water to their residents. So I say we have to fundamentally redesign the water systems. There was a bit of a lifeline with the federal government providing in total over a trillion dollars

Reza (31:08.318)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Reza (31:16.606)
Yeah. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (31:36.02)
of spend across different systems in cities across the country. But the water sector is getting hundreds of billions of dollars, which the Society of Engineers have come out to say will not be enough to fully rebuild. But I actually think that's a that is not as much of an issue as the one I'm seeing.

Reza (31:54.398)
So.

Seyi Fabode (32:05.076)
which is even as we're replacing pipes, one of the ideas I have here is that we should restructure the utilities and move away from, we'll go back to this centralized versus distributed. So you have huge water plants in the north end of the city treating the water for the whole city.

Reza (32:25.502)
No. No.

Seyi Fabode (32:34.356)
and then piping it down. My take is we should move to smaller, sort of micro infrastructure that addresses the water needs of a constrained geographic region that is smaller than what we've currently done. One, and then two, we shouldn't just lay the same pipes we're laying. The work that's currently going on with

Reza (32:34.366)
Mm.

Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (33:02.644)
changing out the lead pipes that is leading to a lot of contamination across the country. These lead pipe replacement projects, they're literally laying pipes right beside the old pipes. And they're not laying gray or blue pipes or whatever it is we choose to call it. It's just the same. It's just the same. And we're not embedding the new pipes with

Reza (33:23.486)
It's just the same. Yeah. Ugh. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (33:32.5)
internet of things infrastructure so that we can better track and manage both the quantity and the quality. So we don't have enough and we're not using what we have wisely is my realistic assessment. Even though I'm naturally an optimist is my realistic assessment of where we are with the water crisis and my cause for

Reza (33:38.686)
Right. Yeah.

Reza (33:53.214)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (34:01.908)
fundamentally redesigning the water system seem to be falling on deaf ears now, unfortunately.

Reza (34:09.278)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well Seyi, I was about to say, you don't sound your optimistic self when it comes to water. And we're hopeful, both of us are. And I'm looking forward to an episode in a year or two where some of this money that's going into these new systems, maybe some of that identifies new...

Seyi Fabode (34:22.708)
Yes.

Reza (34:37.854)
ways for us to rebuild these systems. So I'd like us to sort of close on a hopeful note. Yeah, a positive and hopeful note.

Seyi Fabode (34:47.252)
On a positive note, yeah, yeah, it is. It is. It is. I can, and I can share a ray of hope here. Some countries and some regions and some cities have figured this out. They figured it out. They saw the problem and they chose to address it. The amount of innovation coming out of Israel for drinking water, wastewater.

Reza (34:56.638)
Mm -hmm.

Reza (35:00.638)
Yeah. Yeah.

Reza (35:11.102)
Mmm.

Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (35:15.156)
and flood management, because we've talked about drinking water mainly on this episode. But we also have the flood water considerations that we have to think about and the source water considerations we have to think about. Israel is a beacon of light in terms of facing the problem head on and implementing innovation at the

Reza (35:19.742)
Yeah, yeah.

Reza (35:33.374)
while.

Reza (35:36.958)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (35:42.356)
making available new sources of water by cleaning water that we thought we couldn't clean before at energy efficiencies that are phenomenal. There's the redesign of homes and water usage in homes to impact consumer behavior, to address the problems of both contamination and waste in homes.

And we have just a lot of what I believe innovation. What we need is the willpower and the will to say we will face it head on instead of what we've done so far, kicking it down the clean out road. But I 100 % believe it will be addressed. Otherwise, I'd probably have found another country to move to.

Reza (36:27.518)
Yeah.

Seyi Fabode (36:41.812)
I strongly believe we'll address it here.

Reza (36:42.686)
Ha!

Yeah, that's great. Thanks for bringing that up. I think that's a, yeah, like you said, a ray of light. Some hope over there in seeing maybe some of that coming back to the US and being applied. Yeah, that's good.

Seyi Fabode (37:00.404)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Reza (37:04.958)
Yeah, so Seyi, I think that's a good place to bring this to a close. As we always end our episode, we have our mailbag and I have one for us this time. One of our listeners, Yusuf, reached out to me and said, hey, you guys do a really good job of editing every episode and making it a really

Seyi Fabode (37:11.092)
Wrap it up.

Seyi Fabode (37:23.7)
Yes.

Reza (37:34.686)
good production, like who is doing this for you thinking that you're some professional and so I sent you a text and you know, I think it was pretty funny what you said in response.

Seyi Fabode (37:41.556)
You did.

Seyi Fabode (37:45.716)
Yes, yes. I confess that this is aided editing. So I do the editing, but it's aided with the A and the I at the beginning of the aided, being the critical part here. AI does a lot of the good work for us, both in image generation to suit the conversation. And for those of you who listen on podcast tools,

Reza (37:58.302)
Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

you

Seyi Fabode (38:16.148)
You're not seeing those images which we post on YouTube, and you can check those out any time. And then the editing of the whole episode is aided by AI. I'm just the guy who gets to say yes or no to the edits that AI recommends.

Reza (38:37.053)
That's pretty cool. I think that's pretty cool. I mean, here's a good example of, you know, AI and well, technology in general, just becoming a tool that, you know, allows us as humans to, you know, create and connect and, you know, help us figure out how we can thrive better. So

Seyi Fabode (38:56.436)
Yes.

Seyi Fabode (39:05.268)
Absolutely.

Reza (39:06.814)
I love how AI is, you know, I'm a little biased, but I love how AI is helping us do this.

Seyi Fabode (39:12.052)
Yes, yes. Considering AI is part of your daily work, I know you're positive about it. And I am as well. And it touches on some of just how we see the need for technology to aid how we build the future of our cities always.

Reza (39:19.582)
Yes.

Reza (39:31.358)
Yes.

Reza (39:35.422)
Yeah, yeah. Well, great. So Seyi, like we always say at our close of our episodes, please keep the mailbags coming. Send your comments, your questions, your corrections, your input. Of course, like and subscribe, rate and review. That helps feed the algorithm and encourages others to listen to us.

But most important, as we always say, share it with a friend, make that connection, and hopefully we grow this community of talking and thinking about the future of cities.

Seyi Fabode (40:16.98)
Thanks so much Reza and to all our listeners, we'll see you next time.

Reza (40:22.302)
Thank you. Bye.