Transcript: Principles For Deploying City as a Platform

Unless service providers around the world came to a common understanding of terminology, building blocks, least common denominators on how they can build their business up in order to be a repeatable pattern around the world. If that hadn't happened, they wouldn't have successfully been able to roll out solutions that could be sold repeatedly by suppliers anywhere from Africa to the Americas, to Europe, to Asia, right? Because they would have been so different and then there would be no efficiency gains for the buyers. Same story applies to cities.

Unless we can agree on open standards, industry best practice and open APIs to do things, we are not going to be as efficient that we could have been otherwise. If we can't come to terms with the fact that we need to be able to share things between ourselves much more efficiently than today, then we are going to have a huge problem on a global scale. And I believe that this sharing economy, cities will be the most important venue that we need to figure out how to make this work in practice.

National states can do certain things. Small villages can do certain things, but it's going to be the cities where we're going to see the big impact. Just imagine having the 600 largest cities in the world coming together in strong sharing economy models. It's going to be phenomenally good for everybody. Hello and welcome to The Constructor Podcast, the best way to build it.

Episode number 60. I'm your host, Brittany Campbell-Turner, and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. We talk about fostering trusting relationships, help you to understand at a lower risk, be under budget and on schedule, and most importantly, exceed your end user's desires. So last week, we spoke with Kevin Flanagan, partner at PLP Architecture. Kevin spoke with us about the Oakwood Temperate Tower Feasibility Study and how it demonstrates the viability of building with timber in high-rise constructed with cross-laminated timber, particularly in downtown London.

We cover some of the drivers of design innovation regarding technology from his perspective. And so if you haven't listened to that episode yet, check it out at Constructor.com. Today, we're speaking with Carl Piva, Managing Director at TN Forum for the Smart Cities Initiative, and he's developed the City as a Platform Manifesto. We discussed the 10 common principles for driving smart city success. He says that with these business model principles, cities can become regional or global knowledge hubs and innovation centers.

We also talk about how the built environment drives a better open data economy and how to start impacting cities, creating a simple life for people. And with that, let's get into the interview. Carl, welcome to the Constructor podcast. How are you today? I'm pretty good.

Sitting here in my home office in Shilly, Sweden today. Well, I don't know what translates to Celsius over there, but we are, I think, high of 25 Fahrenheit here in Chicago. Well, the only thing that matters is if you can see snow on the ground or not. And we're just in that time of year when you can start seeing it and it doesn't go away anymore. Yeah, we're right around there as well.

So I want to give the audience a sense of who you are, maybe a little bit of your background. But first of all, you are the managing director of the TM Forum for the Smart Cities Initiative. How did you get to this point in your career? I sort of did a number of different things. I did consultancy for 10 or so years across the world.

And then I started working for software vendors doing that for 10 years. Incidentally, I worked for a lot of American software vendors. So I got into sort of that winners attitude that you have in the United States. And I like it a lot. But after that, I thought, well, it's time for something new.

So I went into an organization called TM Forum, which is a global, non-for-profit industry association that drives common intellectual property, really, between willing participants. So we have 900 member organizations around the world, and they use the forum as a place to develop shared assets, something that they can use to, say, grow a market or establish rules within, say, a technical domain. This particular organization, you know, sort of bringing you into the Smart City thread. It's kind of key achievement has been to pull together the assets that today basically is the reference model on how you run and operate telecommunications business.

So anybody from, you know, a Verizon to an AT&T to a British telecoms to a Vodafone would to a higher or lesser extent use this reference model as their point of reference. And that in turn create this broad ecosystem of suppliers into these type of providers. Looking at telecommunications companies, they all want to find now new revenue sources and new ways to attract new markets. And incidentally, Smart City is one of those more interesting opportunities in the Blue Ocean business strategy space for telecoms companies and ICT companies in general.

I want to understand what are some of the challenges that cities are facing so that we can figure out how this really keys in and addresses the Smart City manifesto? First of all, the interesting thing is when you look at cities today, they are in a very similar position as say telecoms companies were 25 years ago. 25 years ago, if you were a telecoms company, you were serving the national market, you did it and you built your entire system structure using a lot of homegrown systems and local suppliers of various kinds.

And everybody did it their own way, which was very inefficient, very costly. And it really didn't drive a good usage pattern across the world, right? But over the last 20 years, this has shifted. So now you have a set of global suppliers who can accommodate all these different service providers around the world. Cities are in the same place.

They are currently running a scenario where they have a broad local ecosystem providing solutions to the city. Lots of systems within the city that have been developed within the city and developed by local stakeholders. And they're just now in this moment, they're looking out, they're actually looking at how can we embrace the global supply chain in a better way? How can we pull this together and be more efficient? And of course, serve our constituents is better than we are today.

So in a sense, cities are on fairly similar evolutionary path as service providers were 25 years ago, all baked with a kind of a different mission in mind, of course. But from a technological kind of perspective, there are lots of similarities. And I think the smart city movement is just one of those areas where you will see technology meeting urban challenges in new and very exciting ways, and could lead the charge in many of these transformations that we're seeing. So taking you back again, Britain, to the city as a platform manifesto, we launched this manifesto in China.

It's really a set of 10 core principles that guide both cities around the world and global suppliers and local suppliers on what they need to agree on in order to successfully launch data economists in cities that can drive resident services. Well, let's go through each one of them, because I'd like for the audience to understand how everything is laid out within the manifesto and kind of give us a baseline. With data economists, we really mean establishing a platform business model in a city where you have data consumers and data producers, all making a living offering outcomes that are good for the city and good for its inhabitants.

We took a very close look at the platform business models in the private sector, you know, the Airbnb's, Uber's of the world. And we tried to map what we could reasonably expect to work in a city context based on the extreme successes of these models in the private sector, keeping in mind that cities are much more than just making ends meet about solving problems for real people. And the mission is quite different. So these principles that we established, so let's take a look at them one by one.

First of all, we realized that these city platforms that are being put into cities, they must have a purpose. And that purpose should be to improve the quality of life in cities, benefiting the residents, the environment, but also helping to bridge various kinds of digital divides within the city. So the first principle really talks to for whom are we creating these platforms, and what's the expected outcome. The second principle is more focused on who is doing it. And, you know, in the traditional way of looking at the world, you had buyers and sellers of solutions.

What we think is in this new ecosystem, we are looking more at partnerships. It's going to be public and private stakeholders who come together in various kinds of digital ecosystems. That is the focus on our second principle. So these platforms must bring these different stakeholders together in the best way in a digital sense. I love that the foundation here is obviously the focus on the citizens.

And I mean, where else would you want a city to start? Most of us would hope that they would certainly start there instead of some maybe revenue positioning. Yes. And yet, you know, when you think about it, if you work in a city, a lot of challenges that you have to address and sort out are in areas where citizens are pretty far removed. So you actually have to struggle to get back to the point where you can actually put the citizen at the heart and center of every design decision and sort of force yourself to take that stance.

And then it becomes easier with your priorities as well. The third priority here is to embrace the whole notion of the sharing economy. The simple fact that if we just continue living as we live today in this kind of throwaway culture of, you know, everybody has her own car, everybody has our own, you know, this and that. If we can't come to terms with the fact that we need to be able to share things between ourselves much more efficiently than today, then we are going to have a huge problem on a global scale.

And I believe that this sharing economy, cities will be the most important venue that where we need to figure out how to make this work in practice. National states can do certain things. Small villages can do certain things, but it's going to be the cities where we're going to see the big impact. Just imagine having the 600 largest cities in the world coming together in strong sharing economy models. It's going to be phenomenally good for everybody.

The fourth principle, you know, taking us through the whole list here is looking at what kind of opportunities these sit of platforms can enable. And we specifically targeted the fourth one to this local startup community, because we all know that there is a drive in every city to try to help its own. Doesn't matter if you're a city like New York, Chicago or Los Angeles or other cities around the world. Every city wants to have a strong local high tech scene. Every city wants to have this kind of high academic influences and so on and so forth.

So it's very important for everybody to be able to attract talent and be this environment where local startups can thrive and innovate. So why not recognize that also in our principles? We need to design something that can support this factor life. That takes us to the fifth principle, which is focused on some things that people might not just think about or just take for granted. What about privacy?

What about security of confidential data? So these sit of platforms that are established must actually take care of these things in a programmatic way. Right now. I don't think this is something that is being taken care of very well. It's a little bit of an afterthought.

There are very few overarching design principles that have teeth that really, really looks into areas such as privacy. Looking forward when we can see even more Internet of Things technology or social networks, telecommunications, data, financial data or whatever else kind of data that we can pull together from a city from all its various sensors, third parties and businesses. When you start pulling all these data sets and data sources together, you are very soon going to get to the place where you can start see some very interesting patterns.

And sooner or later, it might be possible to take this down to an individual level. And when that happens, we sort of lost the plot when it comes to privacy and security. I think this one is probably for me, just looking at it from the outside, I feel as if this is so key to so many different elements of what a smart city can be. It speaks to the core of what individuals really need. I mean, security, life safety.

Everyone needs that. Absolutely. I mean, outside of food and shelter, right? But it's just one of those things where, especially with the integration of technology, there's just so much value that you can get from that level of data, like you're mentioning. This gets close to the double-edged sword, if you like, of smart city.

On one hand, you can see all the benefits it can provide to us as living in cities by being able to better integrate data and better act on data and adding in artificial intelligence and this and that and so on. But the really dark side of this is that all this data can be misused either by global business or by national states. And all this is also happening around the world. So we need to really, really be careful what we wish for when it comes to these type of opportunities as they are, I think.

The sixth bullet, though, is kind of related, but in a positive sense to the previous one. The sixth principle we identified is that these are the platforms they must inform political decision-making and offer mechanisms for us as residents to make our voices heard in the city. Just think about it. There is a way to be very direct and very democratic if you get people to provide their inputs. Two questions that they reasonably understand.

Having that said, though, you know, let's not forget, we choose our politicians, in most cases, because we want them to represent us and spend time on decisions and make decisions for us that we simply don't have time or interest in. You know, who wants to know everything about waste disposal? Who wants to know everything about your local tax system? If you do, you're part of a very special interest. But most people would just like to know that it's being taken care of.

But at the same time, there are things that you want to be able to impact as a resident that are not complicated questions that are impossible to sort of understand within a reasonable time frame. What are your thoughts about disrupting technologies like blockchain utilization to help with this decision making? I mean, you have the data, you have the immutable ledger, and it's something that you can ultimately keep your politicians accountable to making decisions based upon real data. I'm curious as to what your thoughts are about that.

When I look at what's going on in the world, I've sort of noticed two things. I noticed that we have more data than we've ever had before. And I noticed that people are disregarding data more than we ever have before. Just look at what's going on in the political arena. No names, but we all know what I'm talking about, right?

And what does that mean? I think it means that we have too much data that we can't make sense of. And it just becomes this information overflow scenario where people don't care anymore. And we would prefer to just listen to somebody who has a nice face on Facebook instead. That is dangerous.

It's really, really, really dangerous. So I think when it comes to anything to counter that, to make it easier for people who kind of advocate the voice of reason, as it were, to provide something that's based on data, rather than based on private wish or a special interest. If we can provide that through data platforms, it must be a good thing. I don't believe in just providing data as such, because data seem to have the ability to be misused for whichever purpose. Driving political decisions, if you can provide them, you also need to provide that political climate where it's valued to use real data for decision making.

Not just the city that can provide this data that people can act on. It is a political system that needs to embrace the fact that they can actually make better decisions if they get good data as well. I totally see that. If they're planning on utilizing the data in such a way where it shows that they're benefiting their own selfish needs, then that's not good. Hopefully that's not being the case.

But in some ways, there are lots of people who think that's all politicians do, and they don't necessarily make decisions that are community minded. That in itself is also a double edged sword. Having that said, I think it is easier to accomplish this on a city scale, because we are simply closer to the problem. It's more pragmatic. We know kind of our neighborhoods, we can't do the same thing as one can do on a more national or regional scale, I think.

So when it comes to cities, it is a safer place to play the data game than national states. The seventh principle, it's focused on the role of local governments in governing these city platforms. And the principle here really says that, yes, local governments should be part of governing and curating the ecosystems around these platforms. They should not necessarily have to operate and run these platforms. They could perhaps be outsourced to a more merited third party to do that, but they need to have a stake in the governance of them.

This is also something where, you know, sort of the lines are a bit fuzzy. Sometimes you would kind of expect our cities to be able to do things where they might not have the skill sets or the know how or the kind of security mechanisms in place to be successfully doing it. While we sometimes also expect them to take a governing role while not really expressed like that. And suddenly we sort of lose sight of the goal a bit. Let's take an example.

Most cities around the world have data platforms today. Very few cities around the world have an approach to create an ecosystem using the data that these platforms provide and offer. Unless you can create an ecosystem where you have a multitude of different data providers and data consumers that actually form and shape this ecosystem with the way that they act within it. If you can't build that ecosystem, there will be nobody really using the data that you can offer. And the whole thing becomes useless.

It's just a technology platform. Right. Which goes back to your last point about utilizing the data properly. So if you can't combine the data in a proper ecosystem and understand how everything interrelates, then it again, it makes the data less useful. It's just because it hasn't been parsed in through.

Exactly. And the really, really interesting thing with cities is you're going to have so many different ecosystems within this ecosystem. You will have one ecosystem for health, another one for waste management, the third elderly care, and so on and so forth. And they might find it decent within their own closed off structure. But what happens when you want to start connecting ecosystems and these ecosystems start colliding with one another?

That's where we're going to see a lot of value coming over the next couple of years, when we can start breaking down barriers between ecosystems and start seeing data as being this liberated free resource in the right way, with the right security and right privacy and so on. The eighth principle, and thank God for your listeners that we only have 10 principles here, not more. So the eighth principle is focused on something that Team Forum is heavily involved with, which is open standards and open APIs and industry best practices.

So our notion is, I'm taking you back to where we started the discussion earlier. Unless service providers around the world came to a common understanding of terminology, building blocks, least common denominators on how they can build their business up in order to be a repeatable pattern around the world. If that hadn't happened, they wouldn't have successfully been able to roll out solutions that could be sold repeatedly by suppliers anywhere from Africa to the Americas, to Europe, to Asia, right? Because they would have been so different.

And then there would be no efficiency gains for the buyers. Same story applies to cities. Unless we can agree on open standards, industry best practice and open APIs to do things, we are not going to be as efficient that we could have been otherwise. It's laying out that system of best practices, if you will, or some level of standardization so that people are providing quality with a consistent approach. Right?

Yes, they are. And also agree on a very small set of common elements that you can agree on in between cities. Let's take this example again. Let's assume that you have a group of cities of say 50 cities on one hand, and then you have another group of 50 cities on the other hand. The first group might not work together at all.

They try to optimize their own cities as best they can. This other group of cities, they try to come to a common agreement on open standards and open APIs and best practice and so on and so forth, and start collaborating between themselves on those topics. If you look at those two groups and you say you started these two groups up today, but if you were to fast forward 10 years, which group would be the most successful one 10 years from now? One obviously who has the open standards because of sharing more information.

That by far pushes a group forward. Yeah, because in that group, you can take maybe a solution developed by one of the cities and simply deploy it in these other 49 cities without it being a big issue. And you can do things like that successfully. And suddenly you have a completely different speed of innovation than you otherwise would have had. This bullet is incidentally linked to the next principle as well, because we believe that once you have set the platforms that support this common approach, it will also support something we refer to as service and data federation, meaning that you could actually link set the platforms to one another.

So just imagine take Chicago, right? We had an office in Lyle and one of my previous companies, small little sort of suburb Chicago as kind of the leading entity here had its, it's set the platform. You know, they have more power behind more investment going into it, but Lyle has their own, you know, much smaller, much more down to earth. What if they were building these platforms with these common elements in mind so that you can do data federation and service federation between Chicago and Lyle?

Would that be valuable for somebody, say developing an app or a piece of software in one of these smaller cities? Yes, absolutely. Yes, it would, because suddenly you can access consumers for your service. Especially if it's locally minded and you're dependent upon the local community to support whatever the goal is. Yeah, precisely.

So think about it as like a digital marketplace of locally consumed data sources, where the local data has some value to play in the larger scheme of things. And we believe that this type of thinking, if you can do data and service federation between set the platforms, it will help to drive regional approaches. So you would suddenly see that, well, maybe in five years, we won't talk about Chicago, we'll talk about like the larger Chicago area where that includes maybe 30 other municipalities around Chicago. And they would have teamed up in a larger economic unit, benefiting the people who are part of that digital ecosystem.

That's really the ninth principle. And finally, our tenth one is just to, again, not lose sight on why we're doing these things. We're simply quoting the UN Sustainability Development Goal 11, which is making cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. As being our tenth principle, because ultimately that's what we're aiming for. So if you want to sign up to this manifesto, you can Google it simply as a platform manifesto.

You will find it on the team forum website. You can also sign the manifesto online if you wish. I believe we have roughly 100 signatories to date. So leading cities like Dubai, Barcelona, Chicago, incidentally, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and so on and so forth to cities maybe a bit remote to us like Wellington, in New Zealand, also signed up to this manifesto to global players like Accenture and many others who are supporting this from a vendor perspective. Yeah, thanks for sharing that.

Yeah, we'll definitely put that in the show notes and then we'll make it available for people to look at and review and ultimately sign. Letting in on a little secret. What's that? So for us, having started this manifesto within the forum, it gives us also the market permission to go out and drive some of these de facto standards that the ecosystem needs. So having this in place now with the broad support we have received, we actually have the permission to go and start effecting change as well, which is maybe the trickiest part when it comes to how you can impact the evolution of cities around the world, because, you know, right now, many of them are set on their own path, but they need to align on a certain number of shared topics.

And we believe this is one of them. And this kind of support will actually make it easier for cities to say, well, hey, there is something called the Sitter Platform concept that can help us creating local data economists that in turn can drive resident services. Let's join the movement. Let's benefit from the shared architecture work being performed by the industry as a whole. And let's benefit from it.

I feel as if I have some follow-up questions here. And I guess my curiosity is, yes, there's so much support and it's taking off, but are you hearing about any particular resistance? What are the obstacles or can you demystify some of the concerns that people have? Right. So smart city in general, it's typically defined as being some sort of technology that comes in that meets some sort of an urban challenge that the city has.

But yet it is an urban challenge being sold by the use of technology one way or the other. So the first thing that mystifies people would probably be the fact that sometimes, you know, you get the sense that it was, oh, right. Here we have a smart pole, you know, like a smart, smart lighting, for instance. Oh, and it has all these gadgets attached to them. How can you use it in the city?

So it sort of starts with technology promise. You start by looking at the technology and say, well, I have it. Now what can I do with it? And that kind of makes people invent use cases for technology, which is to me, not necessarily the right way to go about things. So that's one of the, the mystifications of this is that it becomes kind of hard for people who might not be in love with technology to see the value of these initiatives.

So I'd rather say that, well, look at something that you care about. Look at something like assisted living for elderly. Look at something like healthcare. Look at something like waste management. There are lots of people who actually care about our environment out there.

And then ask yourself the question, how could smart city initiatives and underlying technology help make this either more efficient, less expensive or more environmentally friendly and so on? That is the way to demystify smart city initiatives by actually taking that kind of stance. It's not about pushing technology into people's lives and expect them to like it. It's about simplifying life for people by doing the right things with technology. It's humanizing first and then saying there are challenges here that we're all facing.

How can we actually take the steps to improve our lives? And I know I briefly mentioned about funding before, but I think that's, you know, for a lot of cities, I think that's something that, you know, they're concerned about, whether it be a city that's in debt or a city that's wanting to invest in a number of things back into the city that they know they need to focus. I mean, how would you address that issue? I've been part of a number of funding initiatives as well.

I was part of a White House grants committee earlier in the year. I think I went through 35 or so US cities and their grants applications. And I've been doing similar things around the world. What strikes me to be common is that some people think it needs to be a gigantic investment that they will never see the return of. While there are, in fact, many things you can do that will carve out money for you to invest in other things.

We run an annual conference every year in China where we bring together people from around the world. It's a tier three city in China. It's one of the smartest cities in China called Inchuan. It's right south of Ulaanbaatar. It used to be the capital of the Xiqsia Empire back in the in the glory days before Genghis Khan.

But these guys have done something interesting, I think, when it comes to launching a funding approach that actually works. They have created a joint venture between the city and private business, and they co-invest into this joint venture with the objective of launching it on a local stock exchange within a preset timeline. There's going to be savings or efficiencies on that back end. That way, they're taking a calculated risk. They are investing into something that streamlines local government operations.

So, for instance, taking out manual routines wherever possible, replacing it with online approvals permit processes, for instance. In their example, they go from maybe 600 people doing manual type processes around that to roughly 40, 50 people who manage an online much, much more effective process, actually simplifying people's lives and making permits appear in hours rather than months. So by liberating resources and assets through means like that, you're going to become more efficient. It's part of the game when it comes to changing the way you do business.

It's part of your digital transformation as well. And yes, it will hurt in some parts of the city when it happens, but the overall result will be good for the city. And there is going to be savings, efficiencies, and so on. Or for that matter, better service to residents. And the very interesting aspect, I think, of this in-shuan example is when they launch this company, once it's met its key KPIs, this will be a valuable company that will have a revenue stream over years to come from their local government.

And they will have a pretty good return on their investment, both the city itself and the businesses who invested into it. It turns out to be a sound business investment that both the city and the local enterprise did. So I would propose to cities around the world to take a hard look at what they can do, not just a piecemeal approach, try to start a small initiative in a corner of the city, because it could be really hard to get your money back if you are not prepared to break down some barriers or do a proper digital transformation of part of the business that you're in.

You sort of have to be brave enough to approach use cases that are simply either error-prone or inefficient, extremely manual. And when you do that, you will see returns if you are smart about it. And there are many people who are smart in the world. So the problems, I think, sometimes with the way we run local governments in our Western countries, I think, is we tend to not be able to come to consensus on making sweeping changes like this. That might actually be easier in some places, say in Asia, where you can easier drive something from the top down and it will work.

If you tried it somewhere else, it might be harder for political and other reasons to get it through. How would you recommend for a city to start? What would they start doing today? Day one, what would they start doing? What's your recommendation?

I would look for some signatory achievements. I would be looking for something that affects residents in a very clear and obvious way, something that makes it possible for me as say a mayor or something like that to have a chat with my citizens and actually see that they understand what I did. I would not start with something that's too complex. I would start with something that's easy to understand and obvious. And then that would be the thing that makes it possible for me to take the next step with something that might be a little bit more complex and a little bit more time consuming.

Start with something that affects the residents lives. I saw some pretty good examples from Boston, for instance, where you pull together some good resident services that actually improves people's lives, makes them appreciate that, oh, can this be achieved? Then you become more positive towards the whole idea of creating a smart city because you get stuff that actually benefits you. So rather than trying to approach something that's too hidden away, I would go with something that affects people immediately, something that actually touches people. So probably that means, I think, will be to start with a citizen design process, you know, designing around the citizen and just pick the lowest hanging fruit that you could find depending on your current situation.

So start with a simple ecosystem of sorts. My last question would be, is there anything else that you would want to share with the audience here? When it comes to city platforms, I think we covered it fairly extensively. When it comes to the opportunity for people to get involved, I think we probably didn't talk enough about that, but there are ways for citizens and residents to play a role in the cities that are in the cities of the future. Most cities have various programs in play where you can get engaged and where you can impact some of those decisions that are being taken on your behalf by others.

So it's like everything in life. If you don't care about what happens, you're not going to be a part of the decision-making process. If you care about your future and what is going on, well, you have to get involved and put a little bit of skin in the game, I think. Be engaged in the local communities and step up to make their voices heard, perhaps, and be part of this very exciting evolution to smarter cities. Lovely.

And with that, I must thank you, Carl. This was a really fun conversation and I know this will be useful to the audience. It's been lovely, Brittany. Thanks for listening to this delightful interview with Carl Piva. If you've learned something valuable in this episode, share this episode with your friends and colleagues.

You can also let me know if you enjoyed it by discussing with me on Twitter at Brittany underscore CT or find me on LinkedIn, or you can just email me too at Brittany at Constructor.com. That's B-R-I-T-T-A-N-I-E at ConstructRR.com. So next week, I'll be speaking with Michael Lake, president and CEO of Leading Cities. We cover some of the major challenges we face in cities. We discuss the solutions to the problems in the form of ecosystems as well, including sociological, economical and environmental ecosystems.

We cover how introducing blockchain can help the smart city initiatives and some easy steps to work with startups to introduce relevant ideas that can be taken on with the government's to move smart cities agendas forward. If you haven't already subscribed to the podcast, you can do so at iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio. You can also find replays on Periscope if you find me on Twitter. So please leave a review to show your support and let me know you're enjoying the podcast. I look forward to talking with you guys next week.