We're back with Dr. Jonathan Reichental to talk about everything from "Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids" to his thoughts on the future of cities and the groundbreaking technologies that will shape our future.
Dr. Jonathan Reichental is the founder of human future, which is a global business and technology advisory investment and education firm. Former CIO for the city of Palo Alto in California and is also the bestselling author of Smart Cities for Dummies.
Reichental co-authored an activity book for kids with Brett Hoffstadt, Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids, which can be also purchased here.
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Episode guests: Dr. Jonathan Reichental
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Lindsay: (00:05)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of Govlaunch and your host. I am back with Jonathan Reichental. Dr. Reichental is the founder of human future, which is a global business and technology advisory, investment and education firm. He's also the former CIO for the city of Palo Alto in California. So, Jonathan, thanks for joining me again today.
Jonathan: (00:38)
Well, it's wonderful to be back yet again. I so enjoy our conversations.
Lindsay: (00:43)
Well I wanna just jump right in, I guess I should have mentioned in the intro, you're the author of not one, but two books about smart cities. We talked a little bit in previous episodes about smart cities for dummies, but arguably the more impressive being your activity book for kids. Tell us what inspired you to write a kid's book?
Jonathan: (01:00)
Well, yeah, it was kind of a surprise to me too. As many of these things are. I had a guy call me. He had written in a lot of children's books and somehow he got interested in the smart city space and he thought, Hey, kind of cool to do an activity book for kids about this topic and was looking for the right guy to do it with. He, uh, found me on LinkedIn sent me a message and we got chatting and he said, what do you think? And I said, Hey, you know what, uh, like sounds like a fabulous idea. This was like the perfect platform to reach, uh, a new audience around how do you get kids thinking about the big issues of our times. And it, it follows my dummies book in that it's the past present and future of cities. And I wrote it as sort of a narrative, like, uh, you know, it would start off something like humans used to be Wanderers originally. And then we started having settlements. I had this whole thing laid out, and one day I'm looking at my screen, I've written the whole thing, and I'm looking at the screen and I'm thinking to myself, I wonder if I could rhyme any of this, what, what would happen if I rhymed it? And, and so I, I, I, I work for you at least couple hours on just about four lines.
Jonathan: (02:15)
You know, that our kids and it actually is a little funny and I'm pleased with it, but I'm worried because if it works now I gotta rhyme, you know, an entire book, you know, so I, I, uh, get on the phone with my co-author Brett Hoffstadt and I say said, take a look, what do you think? And he reads it. He says, that's pretty good. I said what do you reckon, should we try and rhyme the whole thing? Or, you know, it's a lot of work. We both, after some discussion said, let's try it, let's go for it. Uh, and you know, you make a commitment like that and then you have to do it. And it was hard work. We, I ended up, you know, with Brett's help course rhyming the entire book. And, and so it's, it's kind of, um, it's lovely now.
Jonathan: (02:56)
It's early, we're still in the marketing phase, still trying to create awareness, uh, like talking to you, for example, on this great podcast. Um, but as, as soon as teachers learn about it and kids get it in their hands, they, they love it. It's been very successful.
Lindsay: (03:12)
I love that. And, and you'll be probably the first to tell us that much of the work in local government is finding this connection with community, ways to break down barriers. And really what better way to do that than to engage with kids in this smart city journey in some way. I mean, they're gonna be the future civic makers. So getting them excited about ways to get involved in the future of cities, I think is fantastic. In the last few episodes, we've covered some foundational work to launching a smart cities plan with advice for all local government practitioners on how they should be approaching innovation. In this episode, I really wanna shift gears a bit and have you blow our minds with some leading edge technology. So some of this technology is really reshaping the future of local government before our eyes, others are so cutting edge, we can only explore really the possibilities for how this technology could be used. Sso what immediately comes to mind? What topics do you wanna hit on today?
Jonathan: (04:10)
Well, as you say this is a big one, uh, lots of topics. Uh, I'll tell you something funny though. I was at an event at a university up in Wisconsin just a few weeks ago, and I was doing a talk there and at the end I got this question. Can I talk about what I think to be the most innovative technology right now? And, and so everyone was expecting me to talk about maybe, uh, the internet of things or cryptocurrency, something like that, but some of the hot stuff that's happening in cities. Um, and my answer surprised everyone. I said, you know, what I think is one of the most innovative things right now is how we're embracing bicycles.
Jonathan: (04:45)
I said that this seems to be right now, uh, a global movement in urban transportation, which is people embracing bicycles. We're having to think differently about bicycle lanes and how we protect kids and adults who cycle to work into school. Countries like the Netherlands, they have, you know, multi decade head start, but other countries are really, uh, catching up. Look at a city like Paris, right? I was over there, uh, with a government delegation about seven or eight years ago. And we met with the deputy mayor. And he said, uh, you know, uh, we wanna tell you the story of bikes in Paris. Somebody had the idea, maybe the mayor that, uh, we should these, um, racks around the city where people can just go and get bicycles. And the consensus from the group was, um, this will not work in Paris.
Jonathan: (05:34)
You know, this might work in Amsterdam, you know, this might work in, in other cities, but Parisians will not cycle around streets of Paris. That's a, well, let's try it let's experiment. So they, they rolled out like a hundred of these bikes, right. And immediately they were all taken, the racks were empty. Uh, so they said, okay, well, we'll, we'll deploy our next phase. We'll deploy a thousand. So they deployed a thousand around Paris and immediately were all taken again. As you can probably guess, increasingly they deployed more and more, and all the bikes are taken. Fast forward to today and if you're lucky enough to have visited Paris in the last few months you will see a transformed city, um, bicycles are everywhere per Persians went wild on this thing, very, uh, uncharacteristic. And, you know, they've had to redesign many streets and put bike lanes in and the safety, uh, you know, architecture that often is put in place to support bicycles and, and roads. So that's one, one of the answers, right? Not, not the one that you were looking for, but I, I, I really feel it's important for people to recognize that innovation and urban innovation, isn't just about digital.
Jonathan: (06:43)
A big area though, if we get more to sort of the more traditional technology, I’m really thinking that based on the data and the trends I see around the world, the internet of things is going to be, and, and is already quite significant. So what we're talking about here is connecting things to the internet. There's about seven half billion people on the planet now, and we're going approaching 8 billion. Over the next few decades, it looks like humans will reach about 11 billion. Um, the science says we'll peak around then, and then in fact, after that point, uh, human population might begin to decline quite quickly, which becomes another issue, you know, under population issue.
Jonathan: (07:22)
Um, but if we get up to 11 billion, we can only connect 11 billion people. You can only connect as many humans as there are to the internet. The same can't be said for things, right. If there's a technology, if there's a device, uh, and you can get power to it and it can get the ability to communicate. It can get on the internet. And today we think there's about 35 billion connected devices. And by 2025, about 75 billion. So that by the way, next four years will add 40 billion, new things, 40 billion with a be it's only staggering. Um, that's every year, that's about 10 billion, which comes out at about almost a billion things per month. Um, and these, these, these are connected things, where are they?
Jonathan: (08:03)
Well, they're gonna be in your home, right? Like a music system or something in your house that will be wifi connected, um, factories. We've got smart manufacturing and smart factories that are connecting machines. We're connecting everything in hospitals, in an airports. But the place where we are connecting the most amount of things is our urban landscape is our cities. And, and so 20%, in fact, the numbers 21% of all IoT deployment today is in our cities, right. This is a very big deal, uh, just in terms of scale. And then, you know, let's think about the impact. So what are these things doing, right?
Jonathan: (08:42)
They are in many communities doing, uh, for example, air quality detection, right? When you know the quality of air, you can do something about it. There are IoT devices that are monitoring water. So, uh, here's an example for you, local example, the city of Palo Alto, where I worked, uh, has a Creek that runs through it. And during our very rare rainy season, right. Doesn't happen too often here, but occasionally it does what happens is, it, uh, doesn't rain for months and months and months, and then it just pours in one day or two days, right.
Jonathan: (09:18)
Just comes, comes down. And the creek, it overflows well when, historically it used to overflow that the water would then flow into, into our streets and into homes. And it was every few years there was, it was a flooding challenge. Well, um, we put sensors in, and now when the water starts to rise we can monitor it. If it is actually filling up very, very quickly and getting high, then, we can take action or, or we can have people evacuated. So those sensors are helping and they’re real time, right? So the data's being fed to a website. You can get them on your smartphone. So if you're a resident, you can know the level of order at any point in time. So that's a practical example. Another one I'll give you is traffic management, right?
Jonathan: (09:57)
One thing I, I would never have thought about if I was outside of a city, if I had never worked in a city, is the, the importance of sort of counting and monitoring traffic, or particularly counting traffic. I never thought that was such a big deal, but apparently it's, it is a big deal. So you, you want you add another lane or, or turn lane or something. Uh, perhaps you're looking at, uh, road markings have to be updated relative to the traffic. So there's a whole lot of reasons. It's also useful to know how fast car hours travel, what direction they are, what type of vehicles. You can use this information for things like, uh, public safety. And, and so now what we can do is rather than having, you know, people log data occasionally, uh, we can have these, uh, monitoring tools, uh, all day long, 24 hours a day, giving us real time data about what's going on with traffic and we can make adjustments accordingly. Um, so this is just a, a quick sample of how these little sensors are, are getting deployed in our communities.
Jonathan: (10:55)
So other kind of future thinking, well, two, two areas that are a little bit ahead, right? Not sort of right now, but probably coming in a big way. The first one is the, uh, is a technology called digital twins, digital twin technology. Um, and what is it? Uh, well, it, it's interesting when I sort of have studied this and the fact I've created even, uh, quite a lot of educational content on, on over the last few years, is it a lot of the, technology's not new, it's the way it's been used and it's the fact that the cost point for the whole thing is, has dropped a lot, that it's more accessible. Now, if you think about how we've, uh, been designing things over the last few years, we use computer aided design to design, uh, some sort of maybe a product let's say, uh, and then we, when we're happy with it, we send the specifications for that object, that, that thing to, to manufacturing.
Jonathan: (11:52)
And then it gets built and that visualization and graphic, the, the graphics and, um, uh, the tool set, the cat tool set really come a long way over the last few years. Um, but so we take that, and then we, we, uh, we have another set of technology, which is, which are sensors, which is, comes from the IoT place, and they're, they've really dropped in price and there's a lot more connectivity. So you can, you can place sensors in more places, and you've got that connectivity. You pull at day data, uh, back to a, a, a source. And, and so what we can do is for example, uh, we can, uh, render an object like a let's, let's use a wind turbine, right? Uh, that for energy, right? It's out, it's out, it's on a hill it's or it's out, out at sea, and it's hard to get to, uh, but we wanna be able to know, uh, its condition at a point in time.
Jonathan: (12:44)
So we stick these sensor all over this, uh, wind turbine. And, uh, back at some sort of headquarters, we have a digital representation or what we call it like a digital replica of this wind turbine. And the data that we're collecting from the centers appears, uh, on the rendering in real time. So, you know, the speed, the orientation, maybe its heat, um, any stresses on its frame, you know, um, any other, uh, you know, dimensions that we need to record. Uh, and, and we may even make some adjustments based on that data. So this, this technology has been developing quite rapidly. We're using it, not only for design, but also for building things. And also for operating, like I just talked about or maintenance, right? So you, you find that these digital replicas are showing up in, in, uh, in, in multiple phases of the product life cycle, uh, management of, of products. Um, but the new sort of world for digital twins is, uh, taking, uh, entire environments and creating digital replicas of them and placing sensors in those environments, such that you can now monitor very large areas.
Jonathan: (13:56)
Uh, so we're starting to see digital twins of cities. Now, the one that, uh, is particularly impressive, uh, that was completed not so long ago is the digital twin of Singapore. And they, they, they actually dropped 65 million, uh, on this, uh, digital twin of the city. So city leaders and others, other stakeholders can look at…
Lindsay: (14:18)
This should not deter our small cities. You can still do a digital twin. You do not need 65 million, maybe you're saying before you do, but don't stop listening if you're a population of 5,000
Jonathan: (14:29)
Right. No, that's such a fantastic point, Lindsay, that the cost of doing this has dropped so much that it is now accessible to smaller communities, uh, very small communities. That's one of the themes that's exciting about gov tech right now is that tech that was unreachable for smaller communities is now increasingly, uh, reachable. So you have these city leaders of Singapore who can see so many different aspects of their entire city. They can zoom in and zoom out. Uh, they can look at things like energy use, uh, weather management, traffic management, all sorts of aspects, of the community. Now, look, I know what people are thinking about as I'm saying this. They're thinking about privacy. They're thinking about, oh my goodness, surveillance, state, you know, end of privacy.
Jonathan: (15:14)
Uh, look, if anyone knows me, they, they should know that, uh, I'm a, uh, an advocate and champion of privacy. Um, I, I don't think these tools that that's their purpose, um, or when we do things like use them for public safety, we have to respect and honor and make sure that we are respecting people's rights. That's a component to this and it shouldn't be forgotten. It should be a priority. Um, and so you’re seeing digital twins being used now in, in all sorts of communities, giving city leaders and stakeholders, all sorts of incredible insight into the operations of their community in a way we haven't been able to do before.
Jonathan: (15:52)
Now, the final one, I suppose, for now, at least that I wanted to share is the sort of the emergence of cryptocurrencies in a city context. Now for you and I to have a, a meaningful conversation on crypto, we probably need a couple more podcasts, but I'll try to keep it all in a very summary, uh, fashion. The idea of, uh, digital money or this, this, uh, this currency now that, you know, runs over the internet, um, is not centralized, right. Has a distributed nature, uh, no barriers for anyone to participate, uh, eliminates banks and other intermediaries. Um, it's, it's got some legs. You know, it all started in 2008, uh, with the paper, uh, that proposed Bitcoin 2009, we had the first usable Bitcoin. So we're, we're only about 11, 12 years into this. It's early, but all of the evidence suggests this is a real deal. There's lots of reasons to be skeptical and I'm one of those people, by the way, who's not afraid to, uh, to challenge something if I don't believe it has, you know, substance, uh, but there's, there's growing evidence that we, we are seeing an alternative, uh, ecosystem for value transactions running natively on the internet. You're starting to see it being applied well, first of all, for just plain old everyday to transactions buying and selling things, right. But how does it manifest in cities? Well, first of all, there's a whole question of, well, taxation.
Jonathan: (17:17)
If you are having people work in trade using cryptocurrency, it's quite visible relative to the traditional markets. Uh, so, you know, cities have to be interested in the taxation part of it. There's questions of whether does a city take, uh, crypto as a payment, maybe to pay a tax or to, to get a form or something, right. So there's all, there's just the everyday questions of that functionality, but what has emerged is something very intriguing is this idea of a city issuing its own cryptocurrency, its own coin and using that coin to actually be a source of revenue. The one here in late 2021, that's getting a lot of attention. There's two, but the one that has, uh, be in very much leading this is, uh, city of Miami and Miami has, uh, bought into this. There's a product called, uh, city coins.co, and they've spun up this thing called Miami coin. You can buy into it. And so the city gets to use that revenue to spend on Miami infrastructure.
Jonathan: (18:19)
Things like improving the roads and bridges and all the projects they have. So it becomes now a new source plus, you know, if, if, if it actually accrues value, uh, those that invest in it, uh, can see potentially a, a return on, on that money invested. Bit of a big, you know, obviously it's a high risk, uh, big bed, uh, but so far it's, it's working well. New York city, so NYC coin now is spun up, uh, is, is looking pretty, pretty good it's early days. Um, but I'll kind of conclude my thoughts on this and say if you're a city leader or urban innovator you like this space, you're listening to this podcast, you ignore this at your peril, I just say, you know, learn about it, learn about, uh, cryptocurrency and, and city coins because it looks like they could have a major role in the years ahead.
Lindsay: (19:07)
I wanna walk that one back a little bit, because cryptocurrency is obviously this like flashy new technology, but it is an offshoot of a core technology that is blockchain. Yes. We've talked to a number of government teams about blockchain and the general consensus we've heard is that blockchain has great potential in local government, but it's really not there yet. So can we talk a little bit more about that foundational piece, blockchain? What is blockchain and what are some other areas of potential you see for local government use outside of cryptocurrency for instance.
Jonathan: (19:41)
Yes. Well, thank you. Thank you for doing that. I appreciate that taking you us in that to direction. When you talk about, uh, you know, the, a paper proposal that was, uh, made in 2008 for a cryptocurrency, the paper talks about how it's done, right? How are you gonna build this thing? You know, one of the problems the way, uh, with digital currency prior to 2008, uh, was, was something called a double spend problem. You know, if, if you have on your computer, a, a photo or a music file, and you sort of copy and paste that, or copy that and send it to somebody there's no incremental cost to sending it. You can copy it indefinitely. Imagine if you could do that with money, you know, if, if you have digital money and you're able to just copy you, you get, you gimme $5, and then you copy that $5 to give it to somebody else you could infinitely pay people.
Jonathan: (20:34)
Well, look, if you know anything about economics that doesn't work. So you have to solve that double spend problem. If you have five digital coins and you give them to me, you should have zero, right. Logically, right. How do you fix that? Well, uh, the way that the paper in 2008 proposes to fix this is through this idea of a distributed ledger. Now, ledgers have been around for thousands of years. We figured out it was useful as a way of recording transactions. And they're one of the foundational, um, technologies of, of the modern world, right? Without ledgers, you can't run the world. I mean, that's how we do stuff, right. You don't think it, you don't, we don't wake up in the morning. Think I, I hope the ledgers work today are, yeah. All my life is is working because there are ledgers in place. We, we don't, we don't think about it. It's all on the back office. The writers of the paper that proposed Bitcoin suggested the solution to the double spend problem was this idea of having a digital distributed ledger.
Jonathan: (21:35)
This mechanism by which you're able to record these transactions and, uh, eliminate the possibility of spending, um, has become known or in a category called a blockchain, a block. So it's blocks of data that are, uh, cryptographically linked or just block of data that are linked together, uh, in a chain. So we get blockchain. So this is the fundamental technology. I have read as well, uh, quite a lot of skepticism. In fact, there was a recent article that, uh, interviewed quite a number of senior CIOs in government agencies who were very skeptical. I have to say candidly, that's a little misinformed.
Jonathan: (22:15)
There is a lot of production uses of blockchain in the world in cities and governments, um, being used very successfully. So I, I think it's just a matter of education in fact. Get out there and, and explore what what's actually happening. So I'll give you a, a few examples that may help. The real estate title registry in the country of Georgia in Eastern Europe. When they emerged from the Soviet union, they had a chance to sort of start fresh as did a lot of the former Soviet republics. And, uh, one of the areas that needed real attention was how, uh, real estate titles were managed now in the world there's, there's millions and millions of properties, uh, that there there's no title. And, and this sadly, uh, results in, in people who live there not being able to prove that they own what they own and, and some governments just take property.
Jonathan: (23:12)
In Georgia, uh, they wanted to be able to have a more robust system to be able to register all, uh, titles, all properties,and they built a computer system for that. Uh, and it, it showed benefit. They started to mature it more and move more and more assets into it. Uh, and recently, just a few years ago, uh, with the emergence of blockchain, uh, they felt that that could, uh, increase the level of integrity through the adoption of blockchain. Today, largely the system runs on blockchain, uh, and, uh, it has significantly improved the integrity of their registry and reduced significantly corruption, and made it very transparent and available to the population of, of Georgia. Uh, so a, a, a real, you know, success story.
Jonathan: (24:04)
The final, uh, sort of example I would give here, and, and this more talks to the potential is the idea of identity management. This is very difficult to solve online, right? In, in person, I can show you my driver's license, or you can see me and I'm say, Hey, I'm Jonathan, right? We have all sorts of authentication methods, um, they're somewhat successful, but given the high degree of challenges that exist online with identity, it's not working entirely, uh, as we would like it. Um, so anything that can improve, uh, your ability to, uh, ensure that it is you, uh, who, who online and, uh, also that your privacy can be protected and whilst it's at the same time, proving who you are, that is something that would be welcomed. Uh, one of the growth areas in blockchain technologies coming is something called, um, self sovereign identity or SSI, self sovereign identity. And this is, uh, just a set of technologies that all run on blockchain that allow us to prove who we are with, with significant reliability and not have to share any personal data with any other organization.
Jonathan: (25:19)
It's kind of groundbreaking. Right. And so we're gonna see that a lot in the private sector, governments are going to embrace this when it, when it, uh, at the point in which it's, uh, you know, they get knowledge of it, understand it, and it matures, uh, because you think about any online interaction you have with government, it needs to know who you are. So I would suggest that's one of the hottest areas, uh, of blockchain potential in, in cities, in the near term.
Lindsay: (25:47)
Yeah. All great points. And I appreciate you going into a little bit more depth on blockchain. We obviously could talk about a ton of other stuff, so you're right. We're probably gonna have to do a bunch more podcasts. So we get to AI, autonomous vehicles, decarbonization. I mean, the list goes on but I wanna wrap up today by talking about the metaverse. Yeah. Can you give us a, a quick rundown of that before we have to have to say goodbye today?
Jonathan: (26:12)
Yes. Thank you very much. And I'll be delighted to come back, uh, in a few months and maybe talk about some other topics. Uh, let's see. So, you know, September, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announces that the future of Facebook is the metaverse. And most people are hearing about this for the very first time. They're like, what, what is that word? Did he make it up? Uh, I, I have to, I have to take this opportunity to share this with, with you. Um, let's go back 14 years to 2007. 14 years ago. And it's me, in PricewaterhouseCoopers is a big consulting firm. I'm running an innovation group and one of our topics drum roll please.
Lindsay: (26:56)
You invented the metaverse.
Jonathan: (26:58)
No, I didn't. Boy I'd like that. All right. Drum roll. I'll give you your drum roll . Thanks. Um, no one of our research topics and some of the work we are doing is in the future of the metaverse. And 2007, I just wanna be real clear. And I have the receipts to prove it. I wrote many articles that you can find online on this topic. I, I wrote a, a high profile article in, in, uh, for the Harvard, uh, interactive media review magazine. Um, I was on the cover, uh, at least my topic was on the cover of, uh, variety of tech magazines at the time. Um, so metaverse is not September, 2020, it's been around for a few decades. This idea of an immersive, you know, virtual reality is, is, uh, has been around for a while. And I was a researcher and I was talking about it. I even built, um, a office in second life , which still exists by the way, you can use it, uh, back back in 2007.
Jonathan: (27:56)
So it's funny when, when it comes up now this year and, and Mark Zuckerberg says, Hey, we're gonna take the, uh, company in that direction. It, it was, it was a surprise to me and little gratifying because obviously I predicted the future of the metaverse. Uh, but also it was like, whoa, didn't, didn't quite see that didn't know that he would use the term. Um, and, and let's see where this goes. So, you know, sometimes you need someone with his profile and, and the money and an organization like Facebook to, to be, to be a game changer. Cause you know, metaverse and things like second life and, uh, all the other sort of, uh, immersive worlds, they they've existed.
Jonathan: (28:37)
They continue to exist, but they very much are a niche. And on the periphery of the, of the, of, of the mainstream and, and what I think what Mark Zuckerberg has done and will do is bring this to the mainstream. Uh, if, if anyone else had come along and said, Hey, I'm gonna create the metaverse. We might not have given it a second thought. Um, but you, you know, Facebook is a phenomena and, and is, you know, used by billions of people every single day. Uh, you can't ignore it, right? It's, it's a big deal. Um, and immediately you see Microsoft announcing what they're going to do, and you're starting to see Apple speak about it. So already within just a few months, the momentum, the inertia towards, uh, this, uh, new kind of immersive reality, um, if you've used something like HoloLens or any type of, you know, or Oculus, um, you know, for even just to put it on and just see what all the, you know, what's all the buzz about, uh, it, it it's, I would just say pretty spectacular. Now. I can't imagine sitting at my office desk for the whole day wearing a headset and we'll see what the glasses are like and, and how that all works. Um, but just the computing performance and the graphics, and some of the, uh, feedback mechanisms that, that exists, the gaming and stuff that, that exists right now is very impressive. It's very impressive.
Jonathan: (29:59)
Um, so we, we, we cannot ignore this. What does it mean to cities now? That's the real question here? Well, uh, cur just coincidentally, well, I mean, based relative to our conversation here, the, of in South Korea has announced, uh, the soul metaverse and, you know, part of it is a little bit of cashing in, on the, on the marketing, right? The, the, just the, this is hot topic, everyone's talking about it. So they announced that they're gonna build soul in a metaverse now, what is it? Well, they're going to effectively put things like government services, uh, in this world. So you can put on that headset and go to an office and request your birth certificate or a permit, uh, the things you would do in real life, in soul. Now we'll see, we'll see if people embrace that and where that goes. Cause if it works and they get it right, I think it will be a model for others. I do think in the short term, there is a role for city planning and design, you know, already we were using, you know, uh, sort of these virtual, um, reality for, uh, maybe looking what a, what a property would look like before it was finished.
Jonathan: (31:15)
I think what really needs the really right answer, uh, is we can speculate a lot. And of course, uh, I've missed a ton here, but we got limited time, um, is what, what usually happens is, um, the use in a particular context often surprises us. So, you know, a year and a half from now, in the summer of 2023, I might come back on your show and we'll talk about metaverse. And I will say to you, I never saw that coming, or that's such a great idea. We didn't, I didn't in 2021, uh, that's probably more of what we'll see with the metaverse in, in an urban context.
Lindsay: (31:52)
And you could probably say that about a lot of these new technologies. I think that the takeaway from today is that anybody who ever said local government is boring doesn't doesn't know what they're talking about. Cause these technologies have, have a lot of real world applications that, that are really gonna fundamentally change the future of cities. So Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me these past few episodes. We've really covered the breadth of local government innovation and there's been a lot of great takeaways. So I appreciate you giving us so much time and for sharing some of your, some of your thoughts.
Jonathan: (32:24)
Well, it's been a, a real pleasure, Lindsay. Your long form podcast is, is enjoyable because we do get to talk about these things in more depth, uh, than some of the, the quicker, you know, the 20 minute talks. And you're absolutely right. The future cities, it's gotta be one of the most exciting topics and, and I hope more people will jump in. They'll apply for jobs and they'll get engaged because it's, it is one of the hardest, most awesome topics.
Lindsay: (32:48)
Yeah. Perfectly said. Thanks again. Thank you. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcast. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki@govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.