CleanTechies, the Podcast #17 - Dr. Jonathan Reichental - Smart City Evangelist

Hey everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Clean Techies, the podcast. This is season 2, episode 5, or if you're counting from the beginning, episode 17. Um, just as before we get started, if you like the show and this content, be sure to like, uh, if you're watching on YouTube, subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, wherever you're listening. And if you are listening on Apple Podcasts, please do give us a 5-star review if you enjoy this. It always helps with us to spread the word more. And as well, just a quick reminder that this show is sponsored and made possible by Next Wave Partners. Next Wave are experts in the renewable energy infrastructure, ESG, climate tech, and tech recruitment businesses, servicing all major— all major markets across the world with a pretty heavy focus in Asia, the US, as well as emerging markets in Africa and a little bit in South America as well too. But generally speaking, you can reach out to NexWave for any of your recruitment needs. I think NexWave can provide a lot of value to many people given that their consultants are experts in the space. They spend loads of time in the market. They have really good localized knowledge that can help people, help companies break into new markets, or help people who are maybe more senior person looking for a new opportunity, we can work with you there. So definitely reach out to Next Wave to learn more. You can reach out to them at info@next-wavepartners.com. That's info@next-wavepartners.com, or feel free to connect with any of their consultants on LinkedIn. So with that, let's get into today's, today's episode. On today's episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Jonathan Reichental, who Somebody is— he's super excited to have him on the podcast. I've wanted to have him on for a while. I've seen his work. He's been pretty involved in the smart cities movement from kind of day one, effectively, and just been very excited by all of his work. So I was really excited to have him on. Generally speaking, you know, we covered a lot of topics, generally focused on the smart city topic in general. And this is including more than, more than just renewables and sustainability. We talked about medical needs, just data in general, and kind of making cities more efficient. It was very interesting. We also did talk about, which I found quite interesting, we talked about the partnerships, the future of partnerships between governments and the private sector. So public and private sector partnerships, or known as Triple Ps. We also did talk a little bit about talent attraction for local governments, which is something that we've never talked about, and I've never had conversation about before, before this. And I thought that was quite interesting. So again, just a bit about Dr. Jonathan Reichental. He is a smart city evangelist. He was the former CIO at the city of Palo Alto. So basically the CTO, effectively, for a government. And he really helped to kind of innovate the way they did things there. And it was very exciting to hear his story about that. And he's also the author of the book Smart Cities for Dummies. So Very exciting show. I really, really enjoyed having him on, having him on, and definitely going to aim to have him on in the future. But with that, I will— let's, let's get right into the show.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, Jonathan. I'm really, really glad to have you. How are you doing today?

Hey, I'm doing good, Silas. Great to be here with you.

Awesome, very good. We appreciate you taking the time. It's really exciting to have you. So I guess for everybody listening, could you give us a quick background about yourself, maybe a little— a few of your accomplishments? I know you have quite, quite a few, but just give people a little bit of context.

Oh, certainly. Uh, well, I'm a tech guy. I mean, I love technology, and that's been a theme throughout my career. I was programming computers when I was pretty young. I sold my first software program I think at the age of about 11 or 12. And at the time, I sold it for about $150. I thought I was a multi-millionaire. And, uh, well, I was hooked at that point. I was like, wow, you get paid for doing this. Um, not a— not a— I wasn't a huge gamer, surprisingly. I wasn't really into games that much, but I did love, uh, coding and seeing cool stuff on the screen. Uh, and then, you know, I, I went on to, uh, have a number of technology roles, worked with my brother back in Europe for a while. And here in the US, when I immigrated, I worked for a big consulting firm, for what was Coopers Lybrand at the time and then became PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the largest private firms in the world, actually, today. And at one point, towards the end of my time with what became known as PwC, I was the head of technology innovation, and that was like, that was like having a hobby where you got paid well. So yeah, I really did love that job. Then I worked for Tim O'Reilly up at O'Reilly Media, just north of San Francisco. You know, if any of your listeners, listeners are tech folks, they will, they probably have an O'Reilly book, right? His, his team wrote the original Unix in a Nutshell. And then I had an amazing opportunity to work for a city. To actually do some public service. And I was hired by the city of Palo Alto here in Northern California, just about 30 minutes south of San Francisco, often called the birthplace of Silicon Valley. More recently, it's known as the heart of Silicon Valley. And I thought, hey, there's an interesting place to be a city technologist, is in the heart of the action. Look, I did— I didn't fully appreciate what it meant to, to work in government, and, and so I was about to find out, you know. So I spent, uh, 7 years actually, uh, as the Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer for that city, and, and, uh, we, we did some neat stuff. We actually delivered about 270 different technology projects. My team and I, uh, created a smart city in the city, a model for one, which of course we're going to talk about. We did interesting things like a lot of digitalization, so moving those kind of old bureaucratic paper-based services to apps and online. So lots of examples of that. Then in the sort of physical world, We put sensors for detecting open parking spaces, deployed some Wi-Fi. We even were experimenting with what's called dynamic traffic signaling systems. So the light, the signal changes depending on traffic conditions. That work still continues there. And then I left just about almost 3 years ago and started my own company, my little boutique firm called Human Future. And it's focused a lot on education. Education is sort of a theme that you'll— I think you'll pick up as we talk today. Everything from running workshops to helping organizations and individuals understand a variety of technologies, plus the impact of technologies. There's an advisory component there. And then I do some investing. I have a portfolio of startups that are really in the social impact space. Businesses that are helping the world, not just going to work every day to make a profit, but to make a profit and do good. Do well and do good. And I've also been writing quite a lot recently. I've written a few books. One of them is in the Dummy series, Smart Cities for Dummies. And it became a bestseller, global bestseller, which is amazing. It's a 400-page deep dive on this topic. I know we're gonna talk about it today, and recently released a kids' book as well. And I do LinkedIn Learning videos. So some of your audience may know me from the videos I do on the LinkedIn Learning platform, now owned by Microsoft. And I've done things around a lot of stuff on blockchain and cryptocurrency, some stuff on quantum computing, marketing, data governance. So, you know, I like to explore and teach topics that I'm excited about, and I like to take really complicated subjects and help lots of people understand. So that's a quick overview of things.

Yeah, I mean, that's a lot of things, right? I think that I aspire to be like somebody like you who has done many things and knows many things. So I'm curious, you know, obviously we want to kind of keep the focus on the smart city aspect.

Sure.

What was the original kind of impetus for when you really started to realize, okay, I'm super interested in smart cities, and how did you realize that that was important? Could you just walk us through kind of what was the spark that lit the fire for you to learn these things?

Sure, no, that's— I love that question, thank you. Well, the story goes a little bit like this. I was in the private sector for most of my career. Then I get a headhunter who calls me up and says, "Hey, Jonathan, would you be interested in working for Citi?" There was a big part of me that wanted to say no immediately because government was fascinating to me, but as a place to work, I was a little concerned. I definitely am a bit of a person who's not a big fan of bureaucracy and not a big fan of things going slowly. I like to— I'm an action person. I like to do things and get stuff done. And when you're a technology person, you write code, you want to deploy code quickly, you know. So all those things, I thought, wait a minute, maybe it's not for me. But there was another part of me which was like, goodness, I'm so curious. I'm fascinated by government and then by cities. How do cities work? You know, not just the superficial stuff, but I want to really get behind the scenes. So, you know, the city manager and I went backwards and forwards a little bit, and over the course of a few weeks, he thought that I could be the right guy, and I thought this could be interesting. And he took a risk on me, and I took a risk on him. And so I started working at the city. And, you know, the intent always when you, when you work, when you take an opportunity and your career develops, you're there to make a difference, to give what you can and to change, if you like, in a positive way, the organization which you join. What you don't expect often is that the organization changes you. What happened to me over the course of a few years was that the job changed me. I had a completely different perspective on my role as a citizen. I had a different perspective on The economy, you know, now I had sort of a different view of the role of the private sector, the public sector. And I was also in academia too. So now I was able to see almost a 360-degree view of how stuff was functioning in modern society. And what happened was over the course of it changing me, and really it was a positive change, I fell in love with cities. I really fell in love with this human invention, this complicated, incredible human invention, which by the way is the most successful of any human invention. That's, you know, cities. They've brought more people out of extreme poverty than anything else and created opportunity, whether it's economic or health or education. You know, the Industrial Revolution, which brought cities in a big way into the center of the action, improved the lives of billions of people and continues to, to this day. Now, that being said, I know we're going to talk about a lot of the challenges, but this sort of changing me, my love affair with cities, and then realizing the importance of cities, like, wait a minute, the central human experience in the 21st century is an urban environment. And there are so many issues: the environment, of course, sustainability, energy, transportation, education, healthcare, the things I've mentioned. And so we have to work hard at this. We have to work to bring new ideas forward. We have to work to get more people into the conversation. We have to innovate in a way that government and cities have never innovated before. And all of that is encapsulated in what we mean by smarter and more sustainable communities. It's this mindset and these actions that are moving forward our communities, powered by technology, no doubt. Technology is a core component of it that really characterizes how we can make our communities better and ultimately improve the quality of life for people. That's my journey. That's how I got there. Then as I was getting passionate about it and helping Palo Alto succeed and evolve into being a smart city, other cities were interested in what we were doing. I got asked to share our best practices, which of course we did. I was asked to talk at events and conferences and write about it.. And I just got immersed in this new world I had not been exposed to before. And at the same time, the movement itself, the interest in smart cities, was also emerging. So sometimes in your life and in your career, you want a bit of good luck and a bit of good timing. And I think I had both. I was in the right place at the right time. And by the way, I believe that to be the case more so even today. That those of us who do what I do, you know, helping cities succeed using technology, were at the right place at the right time. Uh, you know, so here we have— here we are today. We're, you know, 18 months into a catastrophic pandemic who we didn't see coming or having the impact it did. And cities are more important than ever. And, uh, being smart and more sustainable and more resilient more important than ever. It's sort of like it's accelerated even. So the movement is bigger and more important than ever. And, and that's, that's how I got— that's why I'm doing what I'm doing right now.

Yeah, that's very interesting. I find it super fascinating, the aspect that you had mentioned, that you have kind of perceived or been in the shoes of, of many sides of the table, right? The public sector, the private sector, and academia. To me, that's very interesting because I think, you know, I've never worked in the public sector. I view things typically from, from the private lens, but I've also been curious myself on how does it work, how can we work together. So I think that that's a very interesting position you're in to be able to have that perspective and trying to join it together, which I want to get to later on in the conversation about creating that and making that better. But first off, I'm curious if you could give us a high-level overview, what in the ideal world, in the perfect world, what could a smart city look like? What would be the main aspects? Again, irrespective of what's currently in place, what can be?

Yeah, very popular question. I get this a lot. I was just doing— I did an interview yesterday evening with a newspaper in Chile, in Santiago, Chile, and and they had exactly the same question. So I'm like, I feel a little bit like I'm prepared. I didn't anticipate, I don't know your questions today, of course, but I feel like I'm, it's top of mind, I should say. I've answered this question a few times, but it continues to evolve as new information comes to the surface and more insights happen and we've better research. One of the things you have to think about is, You know, no two cities are the same. Like, think about San Francisco and, uh, Paris, let's say, or London, or New York, Miami. You know, where were you from? What city are you from?

So I'm originally from the north woods of Wisconsin. I lived in New York City, and now I'm in Florida, but I have been to Miami, so I can compare Miami and New York.

Okay, super, super. And any, you know, of course small towns and even the largest cities in Nebraska. The one thing that I think we can all observe is that different cities have different needs, you know, and that's because they have different industries, they have different geographies, they have different culture, they have different resources, different talent, you know. There's many, many different dimensions. So, you know, what's important for Miami is going to be different today than what's important for Melbourne in Australia or Auckland in New Zealand. So this question of, you know, what makes a city smart and, you know, what are those core characteristics, it's always a complex question to answer quickly because you've got to set the context. You gotta, you gotta share this insight that you know, a— what a city does is going to reflect their needs. What I have found though is there are some commonalities, you know, even though, you know, I, you know, Miami, for example, the mayor is consumed with worrying about some flooding and some sea level rise, right? Uh, not necessarily the, the worry of folks in Vegas right now, um, but In Miami, traffic is a problem. And in Las Vegas, traffic is a problem. So you can begin to see that there are some core topics that are similar in each city. And, you know, just 4 areas that I typically point to for simplicity terms, because this is a— as you probably know, I think you know in your own research for this, this is a wide and deep topic, right? You know, this is not a one—

Yeah, it's not a one-sentence answer. It's exactly right. And it's not a one-dimensional problem.

Problem. You can't just say it, you can't simplify massively or quickly a big topic like this. But I need to help people get up to speed quickly, and there are 4 areas that all of us, I think, can connect with, and I'll quickly list them. The first is transportation, right? Congestion, the use of the car, pollution from congestion and cars, is a universal international problem. Just moving people around consumes a lot of energy. It's quite inefficient. It causes accidents. You know, there's a lot of stuff related to transportation. Number 2 is energy. Again, not hard to understand that as cities grow and, you know, we use more devices, we plug more stuff in, you know, including our cars now, we need more energy.. And we want to have clean, abundant energy. The third area is digitalization. We ought not to have to go to a government building and fill out forms in triplicate and then fill out another form and take a ticket. I mean, it is the third decade of the 21st century. These things can be done on apps now, on iPad or on a website. So cities are catching up. They're doing quite well, but there's, by the way, trillions of dollars of opportunity to digitalize government. And the final of the 4 kind of common areas is sustainability, right? If you're in a region and 1 city out of 40 cities in that region is doing really well in their carbon gas emissions, perhaps they're completely an electric community powered by clean energy, you know, there's another 39 cities surrounding them that are not doing that. It's not going to work, right? We kind of have to all do it, right? You know, stabilizing average temperature increases around the world has to be an international effort. And again, to make— to stress this point, it's going to happen inside cities. We have to do it inside cities because that's where the action is. That's where the carbon is happening. And, and so those, those are the 4 theories. So I think if a city is focused, uh, on improving some major issues using technology, probably touching on every one of these 4 and more, plus there is a leadership mindset for using technology to solve problems, being innovative, being progressive— those are the kinds of things I look for. The last thing I would look for is the use of data. Use of data. One thing I recognized early when I started working in government is that it is a world of excessive constraints. And what I mean by that is that almost sounds like an oxymoron, right? Excessive constraint.

I—

what I mean by that is there's always, uh, there's, there's always too much to do. There's never enough people, never enough money, never enough time. Never enough talent, right? It's always constrained. But there's an abundance of data because governments and cities in particular, just by the mere act of existing, you know, they create data to get things done. They collect, use, and store data. And unlike the private sector, which has sort of figured out how to take advantage of data for, you know, targeting customers, for building better products,, you know, being more efficient in their use of materials, all those kinds of things. Again, it's no surprise government's been slow. It's been slow to sort of say, hey, we got all this data, let's take advantage of it, let's go after it, let's make it a core resource for us. But that— that we've turned the corner now, that's starting to happen. And I, I can't imagine— there's really no such thing as a smart city without a deliberate, assertive data strategy. And I think that's something I would look for in the, in the sort of suite of things that identify and differentiate cities that are, you know, smart cities or aspire to be smart cities versus those that are not.

Okay, got it. You know, one thing I'm curious about just generally is this is something I've always been interested in. Again, I came from the rural, very rural Wisconsin. And I moved to New York City and I loved not having a vehicle. I'm actually having car troubles right now. So I'm just curious, in a perfect world, do you think that there's situations where the majority of cities can be, or maybe even smaller cities, maybe even rural areas with small metropolitan areas, can be easily accessible to people without vehicles?

Great question. By the way, my apologies, I thought you said Nebraska. You said Wisconsin.

Wisconsin, yeah.

My apologies. I apologize, earlier on in our conversation, I thought you said Nebraska and I referenced Nebraska. My apologies.

Yeah, no worries. I have relatives there.

It's fine. No, just I'd like to make sure I'm correct. And so I didn't mean to put you somewhere where you weren't. I think that, again, back to your question was about, you know, can we live without the automobile? Well, it's a very large question. Yeah, it's lovely. Part of the answer, let's focus on the United States. You know, you have a podcast, I'm on this podcast, probably people who are not in the US are listening, they happen to, and And so I'm going to just focus on the US for a moment. This country largely was designed, at least the latter part of this country's existence has been designed around the car. The grid system, the interstate system, our highways. By the way, it's part of the reason why America has succeeded. We have had through the 20th century a remarkably well-established roadway system. Now, not so much trains. We also— the— our airline, uh, um, uh, you know, um, infrastructure has been very good too. Um, but moving vehicles, trucks, you know, uh, you know, the big container trucks and, and, uh, and cars and, and motorcycles, you know, we really connected the country well. If you look at a map of the United States, the road system is remarkable. But there's another side to that. What we did was we really doubled down on cars at the cost of having a low-cost, low-impact railway system, unlike, let's say, the United Kingdom. Who really went big for railway. Well, they started earlier. That helped. But you can get to any two points in the United Kingdom pretty easily, and the rail network is fantastic. In terms of energy usage and cost, it's better than the car system.

Right?

Mm-hmm. Look, before people write to me and find the holes in my arguments, I know I'm simplifying stuff, but look, we're only together for a short amount of time here, so let's make just the broad points. So I think, you know, if you— you know, you're from Wisconsin, an incredible state. Even if we were talking about Nebraska, Nebraska is huge, right? And, and, uh, you know, so it's hard to get around without a car, you know. Yes, you know, if you chose two points on the map in the United States and wanted to take a train. It's not going to be simple. It's possible, but not going to be easy. And all the money and efforts being made around the car system. So that's hard. Now, at the town level, look, it's expensive to build a light rail system, for example. I do think there's room for e-bikes. I think e-bikes are going to show up in small town America. This is a bike with a battery that has a little motor on it. It's kind of cool.

Cool.

You go up a hill, you think you're like super strength or something, you know.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, it's a little hard sometimes, even in a, in a small town in Wisconsin, to have a bicycle could be tough because, you know, if the, um, you know, the distances can be, can be onerous, or in some states it's hilly, you know.

And the winters, the winters aren't great either.

Oh, that's— see, I, I'm, I'm here in sunny California. I never even thought of that. Uh, bicycles may not be practical in the snow and in the freezing cold. I can imagine. Yeah, I mean, I was in Chicago one winter and walking was too hard. I couldn't imagine being on a bicycle. People do, I suppose. So yeah, there's no quick fix for that question. There's no quick way to answer, to replace. What we can say is we probably won't drive cars. It's likely, certainly in the big cities, very soon we're going to see a lot of self-driving vehicles. So, you know, and I don't think your question was about us sitting in cars, but having the computer drive the car, but that's coming.

I think it all plays in, right? 'Cause to me, the big thing is like, you know, you look around New York City, for example, I have a lot of experience living there, and I can just imagine if they cut out the roads. I know if they cut out a lot of major roads and tried to encourage people to use, you know, skateboards or bikes, like I skateboarded around New York City a lot, with my electric skateboard, and it was way more efficient than taking the bus across town, right?

Sure.

Maybe arguably a little bit more dangerous potentially, right? But there's a lot of things that I think can be done in general that I'm just curious to see, like, what might the city look like? 'Cause I understand that when city planning, and you probably have some more insight to this, city planning with the roads is helpful for, you know, the airflow of the city to ensure, you know, good health. I'm just curious, do you see that, you know, the reduction, at least in major cities, of major, you know, roads going through them and trying to encourage people to get around by different means once they're in the city?

Well, we are seeing a few different things happening all simultaneously. Number one, we're seeing the movement towards electric cars, right? It's starting to pick up pace. Some countries are much further ahead. A country like Norway, you know, the majority of cars sold today in Norway are electric cars. Still in the US, it's single-digit growth per year. You know, it's not— we're not selling, you know, 25% of cars sold in America in 2021 are not going to be electric yet. But within a few years, we'll start to see more and more. Looks like the, you know, the distance anxiety problem is overcome. You know, you can power your car for 400 or 500 miles now with a charge. So we'll move to electric cars. That will eliminate the, certainly the carbon emissions from a car in a city. It'll be quiet too. That's another, that's a pro, right? If ever, imagine every car was electric, it'd be, highways would be pretty quiet. It's a funny thing, right? But the other things we're seeing is we're seeing bikes, e-bikes, skateboards, razors. I don't even know if they call them those anymore. All the, you know, It's fascinating actually to go to downtown San Francisco or downtown New York in Manhattan and see the variety of things that people are riding on. It's quite remarkable. That changes all the time. Even electric motorcycles are coming in a big way. So we're going to see all that. Now, at the same time, I've always been impressed with the pedestrianization of Times Square. That was supposed to be temporary and now it's permanent. A major artery in the center of Manhattan now is largely pedestrianized. Dynamic completely changed. Accidents dropped by 30 to 40%. People sit out drinking coffee and meeting friends. It's 24 hours a day. It's just a lovely place for social engagement. I wouldn't recommend it necessarily at 3 AM at night.

Exactly.

It's all lit up and everything. There's been a few bad things there the last few months, but hopefully those are rare. Over in Paris, there has been ambition for about a decade now, a project proposed to really change the dynamic between people and cars in the center of Paris. And it just got approved after a lot of effort. These things take time. A major, major facelift is going to happen. Everybody, I think, is aware, at least maybe some people have visited the major thoroughfare down the center of Paris called the Champs-Élysées. And if you go there today, it's packed with cars. You know, it's got several lanes either side, but on the, on the sidewalks, there's cafes and ice cream stores and fancy, you know, retail stores. It's a mix of everything. And because it's so popular, it's crowded, it's noisy, it's dangerous. There's fumes, you know, it's— there's heat islands too, you know, because of just the nature of concrete jungle, you know, that absorbs— doesn't absorb the sunlight, the heat in the summer very well. This has all sorts of impacts as well. The transformation is going to make the Champs-Élysées and other areas of central Paris into an urban garden. So they're going to significantly reduce the roads, or at least narrow them. And instead, there's going to be little— well, it's going to be little vegetable gardens, but there's going to be trees and lots more trees. And a focus on humans, a focus on people, more space to walk, and more cafes, and more roses, and flowers. So the examples of New York City and Paris are very visible, high profile. But this idea of shifting the focus to people away from cars is happening in cities all over the world, from Dublin to Liverpool, you know, to Mexico City and Singapore and other places. So I do think over the next decade and beyond, a lot of our central urban areas are going to look different for sure.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that to me it's exciting. I know, and I know there's a lot of people out there who are not maybe early adopters of of things. I'm one who prefers the new technology. I just am excited by what could be, right? So I think that some people might have to wrap their head around that. But I think ultimately, it's a great thing. You know, I guess there's kind of two parts to this question, I guess, basically. I'm just kind of curious, you know, what are the biggest— I know you've mentioned the four areas that a smart city should have. So what are the biggest kind of inefficiencies, slash, what are the solutions for those? Like, what are the solutions and technologies already available? Obviously, you have a pretty vast library of knowledge on what can be done to improve these. Could you walk us through some of those things?

Hmm. Well, look, the, the thing that is most obvious to every one of us is anytime you interact with government, you're confronted with paperwork. It doesn't matter if you're in Kuala Lumpur or Hanoi in Vietnam, or even Miami City or Fort Lauderdale, you're probably going to have to make a few calls. You're probably going to have to go to somewhere, fill out some paperwork. That's a near-term opportunity. We know the technology exists. We know how to do it. Now it's only a matter of will and it's a matter of money, I suppose. But even this stuff has got really, really low cost. I mean, to spin up a Google Form, you know, it was free, right? Often. And even the premier products that have really clever workflow and decision trees and stuff, it's not the cost it used to be. It's all cloud-based, so there's no infrastructure the city has to build anymore. So I think one of the, you know, One of the, if you like, immediate and big impact things that cities that are aspiring to be smarter are doing is digitalization. I really think that's— you get good results and it's very visible. If it used to be, for example, let's look at the permitting process. This is a very common city activity, right? Not the most sexiest, right? But it's so important. Like, if you, if you are a homeowner and you want to upgrade your kitchen, you know, maybe you have a kitchen from the 1940s and you want to have a modern kitchen, well, you're probably going to have to have an inspection, you know, and then you're probably going to have to have someone come in and make sure that the electrical is done right and the plumbing. And, you know, there's paperwork and there's permits required for that. It's just, that's the nature of the beast. We don't want people burning their homes down or the homes exploding or something, so we have to make sure they're done right and get inspected. So permits are required. Those processes that exist in every city, those are typically difficult, and they're, they're often paper-based, sadly. And even the ones that are somewhat electronic, they're still complicated and bureaucratic. It turns out, by the way, that some permits, uh, you know, where we used to have a lot of people involved because there was checks and balances, and then there was a workflow. Some of them can be just on self-service now. We don't need to have lots of humans interfering in the process. As long as the homeowner is honest and they put in information that's required, these modern, these contemporary permitting systems can do the checks. And make the approvals and issue the certificate or the license, whatever is required. So we can not only digitize these messy, ugly, bureaucratic, expensive processes, but we can digitize them, make them beautiful, make them efficient and lower cost, and just create a much better experience. So I think that's such a near-term opportunity. If you are a provider, if you're somebody who wants to help cities do this, this is worth a trillion, couple of trillion over the next few years. I mean, real money. You might say, "Well, it's locked up with existing vendors." I will say to you right now, and I'm a person who lives and breathes this stuff every day, there's plenty of room for new entrants. There's plenty of room for new companies. If you're passionate about this, you want to make a difference, it's a great place to play. Of course, the— what else? I mean, we could go down a very long list, you know.

Could—

let's see, you know, one of the more contemporary things that are happening right now is the use of sensors for data collection. Now I'm talking about— by the way, I'm not in favor of, and I don't advocate, you know, surveillance society. People sometimes think When I talk about sensors and cameras, they're like, well, look at London, for example. When you walk out your front door, you're basically on camera the whole time. Or in China, people get really concerned about the social credit. You're always being watched. I'm not in favor of any of that. I don't think that's where we should focus our time. There's a role for surveillance for personal security. I mean, that's probably— we'll talk about that maybe on a different podcast. But I'm talking about things like detecting air quality or leaks in major plumbing systems. You know, some cities in the world, when the water flows from a source to a destination, it loses 90% of the water because it leaks, right? And you think about fresh water, drinking water, which is in short supply in many communities. Well, if you don't have a good solid plumbing system, you're going to— you're already at a disadvantage. You're getting 10%, maybe 20% of the water from the source to the destination. So these low-cost sensors cities can deploy in major plumbing arteries can detect very quickly if there's a leak and where the leak is. The cost of sensors and also short-distance wireless has made it more affordable and accessible to more cities than ever before. It used to be expensive and complicated. It's not that way anymore. I think probably the third one, because I want to get back to this kind of core theme, because a lot of people are concerned about this work, the smart city movement work, because they think it's complicated and it's very expensive, uh, and, and, you know, it's out of the range of a lot of communities. But I want to talk about things that are every community can go after. And one of them is, is let's try to use data better. Now, one of the things you can do as a community is you don't have to build everything yourself. This is certainly characteristic of the 21st century. It used to be, you know, you pay your taxes, you expect cities to do everything. That doesn't— that doesn't happen anymore. You got to do it in partnerships, and you got to— you got to have the private sector stepping up to do stuff independently. So one of the things excuse me, one of the things that cities can do is make available the data they have access to, to everyone else in a machine-consumable way. So it's, you know, you have APIs, you basically can, can pull down the, the core raw data. And so many cities have got on this. They, they— we call them open data portals, or because we're opening the data to everybody, we're making it easy to get the data you want. So it's got nice metadata around it that describes it. And so now you can have private providers and homeowner, just hobbyists, if you like, solving problems and analyzing data. You can have entrepreneurs build solutions from this data. I think that, again, is what I would call begin to think about the baseline of of being a smart city. The final— well, I said that was the final, but I have one more, because I would be remiss if I didn't share this. And, you know, COVID has given us the reminder that we probably didn't need, which is internet connectivity, right? Let's go to any community in the world and take a snapshot of where they are with their connectivity. So the first thing is, is everyone connected? Typically the answer is no. And then, okay, what's the spread look like? Who has broadband? You know, who has dial-up still? And you might laugh, but even in Silicon Valley, we have a number of homes, quite a lot, who still have dial-up. Can you believe it? And so, you know, New York City, right? One of the biggest initiatives of the Chief Technology Officer of New York City right now is to bring internet to New Yorkers. I mean, this is, this is baffling in the 21st century, right? A lot of New Yorkers have internet access, but a lot of New Yorkers have really bad internet access, you know, and, and so it's not— that's no longer acceptable. So what we do is we call this now digital infrastructure. Digital. So a smart and sustainable community has a robust broadband infrastructure in place, and anyone who needs to get access to fast internet should be able to get there. It's a journey for most communities, but there's a lot of communities who are already there, fortunately.

Yeah, I mean, this is interesting. I think to me there's a theme that's going through most of this, and, and this is not just even this podcast, some of the previous shows I've, I've been able to, to record. This idea of transparency, right? The data is there in the cities. Unfortunately, it's not being collected often. But I think that there's so many issues that can be solved with just transparency. And this is— it kind of is interesting to me that my whole mentality in my career has always been honesty and transparency. And I think it's gotten me a lot of places. But I think that cities can do this well too, because if you have this data, and if you're transparent with it, like you said, entrepreneurs, maybe people who are trying to just make the city a better place, can actually go out and make solutions. They don't have to be the one doing everything. And I think that this mentality that you mentioned about shifting, and this is something I have tons of perspective on because I grew up not in a city, I grew up in the middle of nowhere. This mentality of government does it for us, but now we have to do some of it for ourselves because we care about the environment, we care about making the place a better place and we can't wait around, but there's so many things we can do on our own. So to me, this is interesting. I also think, and I know you mentioned it a little bit, it's not necessarily the focus of this podcast, but it's come up quite a few times, is the social impact aspect, right? When we have the data, we can see how people are being underserved or mistreated because of that transparency. And to me, that's something that's very exciting. I'm really glad you brought all this up because I'm excited to see how that changes because I think that that will be I mean, honestly, it'd be great if we put people first. I think ultimately we'll all live happier lives, right?

Well, there's an element to that, just to add to the great points you're making, which is transparency helps with trust. And there is a trust gap between community and government, right, here in the U.S., right? I think, I think the trust of federal government in the U.S. is in the single digits. You know, and it's less than 10%. The trust of state is a bit better, and the trust of local government is actually reasonable. It's not great, but it— you know, most people trust their local mayor and the mayor's team much more so than their governor or, you know, and their federal agencies. So that's, you know, kind of an okay story. We need to improve trust all around. But one of the ways we do that is through the very point you're making, which is transparency. You know, I'll tell you something, a quick story. When I was working as a CIO for Citi, we are obligated to make, for example, employee salaries open to anyone who wants it. There's all sorts of laws in the United States and many countries where government data has to be available. Sometimes it requires a request. Other times the government is a little bit more enlightened, then it makes it available, right? And that's what open data, you know, really strives to do. So we would get people asking for salaries. There's a curiosity part to it, and then the media would publish it. So once a year, around about the budgeting time, all the local newspapers would literally have a 2 or 3 page spread of all salaries, including mine, by the way. And You know, you know that when you take the job, you know that you're going to lose a lot of your privacy. That just unfortunately is part of the package, if you like. I mean, look, like, like you, if you've nothing to hide, who cares? I had nothing to hide, so I didn't care. And so we would do this prior to me getting there. It would be, you know, sometimes it would just be PDF documents that would be sent to media, or it would be a you know, just a comma-delimited file that had to be, you know, massaged by the— it wasn't always pleasant. So anyway, when I got— I went— when I got there, I, um, I said, look, we're gonna, we're gonna do this open data strategy, and we're gonna put lots and lots of data online for anyone, by the way, 24/7. So you don't, you don't have to wait to get it once a year. You could get it anytime you wanted. Um, so, um, I, you know, One of the reporters from a local newspaper, uh, was— became aware of this and, you know, wanted to ask me questions. And I said, yeah, this— what we're going to do is we're going to have an online platform. Everyone's salary is going to be there. So if you want any, just— you can search for a person's name, you can see how much they get in benefits, uh, you can download everything in Excel and CSV and XML, whatever version you like. And, you know, I could tell that he was sort of a little bit reserved in his belief that what I was saying was going to be true. He was skeptical, he was skeptical. And then sort of was like, you know, it was one of those projects where it was a, you know, we would go live overnight. And so I think Monday was the— everything was getting ready and Tuesday morning it would be live. And so on Tuesday morning goes live Of course, we send an email to all the media outlets saying it's ready for you. A few days later, I meet this journalist again and I said, "Well, what do you think?" He said, "Well, you know, Jonathan, it was a little surprising." I thought, "Oh, God, thank goodness. What happened? Did I disappoint?" He said, "It was much more open and accessible than even what you described." I was like, it was that moment, it was like I wanted to just throw my fist into the air in celebration, like, yes, did it. It was a lovely moment. So doing something like that is a game changer. By the way, the media outlets who reported on salaries and different things, the issue kind of, all the tension that was surrounding all that went away. It never came up again. They didn't even have to make a phone call because everything they needed was just a web page away.

It also gives people space to think about other things, right? Because I think that there's— it's not everybody, but there's a number of people, especially in maybe smaller towns, it's more so prominent that there's like, what else are you going to do? You have to have issues, right? So let's focus on maybe some more important issues rather than how much are my local representatives being paid. But I mean, also this point about data too and the transparency too, I think is you mentioned earlier the costs of implementing the, you know, the softwares and the sensors and everything. From, I'm assuming, based off of my previous conversations on the show, the cost to install these things probably generally is very much offset by the savings created in the long run, correct?

Well, it's not as simple as a yes or no because Yeah, you know, cities don't operate to make a profit or anything, right? So the way you measure some of this stuff is a little bit different. You know, if you, if you have reduced cost in one area, you're probably spending the money on something else. So there is no cost reduction, right? On the other hand, the fact that you're spending it on something else means you're getting value from a different area. So indirectly, your question is— the answer is yes. But if the experience and the value is increased, sometimes spending a bit more money or not reducing the cost can be okay too. So we don't— I don't know that we can think necessarily in the government of being driven by reducing cost. Let me be clear that this is not about borrowing and driving up deficits. No, not at all. It's like you should be able to balance your budget every year by moving money appropriately to the priorities, doing other things more efficiently. I just wanted to make the bigger point. I'm not disagreeing with you. I just didn't want to simplify the answer by just saying yes. Right.

Yeah, I mean, I think generally speaking to me that the aspect that matters to me is that if there's resources being wasted, how can we not waste those resources and how can we allocate them in a way that helping us advance to our goals? Because anybody who's involved in the climate change space and kind of helping to fix this knows that we don't have a lot of time. Unfortunately, it's a very urgent matter that we need to work on. I know we're running out of time here, but I want to maybe just a couple last things. I find it interesting. We mentioned the public sector and private sector partnering. How do you think that people in the private sector can— because I'm guessing that there's a little bit of shyness occasionally to try to partner with the public sector, given the difficulty and the potential lack of a reward at the end, right, if there's no partnership to secured, how can they work together better? Or how can, you know, people listening who are in the public sector, how can they try to improve the speed in order to make it better partnerships and just more advancement in general, whether that be in a large, large city or a small town? What are some of those improvements that can be made from, from your experience?

Mm-hmm.

Well, there has to be a willingness, you know, there, there has to be a decision made that the way we're going to get stuff done in government is through partnerships. There has to be just a— beyond just a recognition, there's got to be active steps done. And that means creating more opportunities for engagement. My quick story on this is, so I was the equivalent of a chief technology officer at the city. Lots of tech companies wanted to talk to me. Tech companies want to talk to lots of CIOs and CTOs. Particularly in government, they would make a call and they would never get a phone call back. They'd send an email, they'd never get an email back. Anyone who called me, whether they called me or sent me an email, always got a response, and I'm pretty fast. They were shocked. I would get startups that would come to me and They email, maybe phone me or email me on a Monday, and they'd be in my office on Wednesday morning doing a demo. They'd be like, "Jonathan, we called 40 government CTOs, and we never heard from any of them. We called you, and we're here 48 hours later." I said, "That's on purpose. I've made that a priority. I realize that we're not going to get stuff done if we don't have lots of different ideas." we're not meeting with a lot, and we're not meeting with lots of different people and startups and tech companies and etc. So that's just an example of how you actually have to do— you have to behave differently. You have to bring in these partners. So you're going to be open to it. When a problem comes up in a meeting, you know, the city manager says, I'm getting a lot of people in the community complaining to me about this thing. The go-to might be, well, let's have Public Works fix the problem, you know, or let's have, you know, utilities go after the problem. The right answer might be, let's bring together the appropriate group of stakeholders. Let's do an outreach and figure out who can we work with to get this problem solved in the long term at a price, by the way, that makes sense. You know, if we do it alone, we may never get— yeah, it'll be expensive, it'll take much longer, and we may never get it done. So I think, I think the mindset has to and is evolving, by the way. This notion of public-private partnerships or PPPs is more greatly being embraced today than ever before. So you can tell sort of one of the themes in our conversation today is we have the ways to do these things, we have the processes, we have the technologies. What we need is the people and the mindset and the vision to execute on it, to actually go after it, to make it possible. That, after all, at the end of the day, is a human component. One last answer to this question is, if there are a whole range of issues that it's looking like the city's barely ever going to solve, publish those issues, you know, put them on the, on the city's website and tell people what the problems are that need solving, you know. And, and, uh, you'd be—

I—

one is always surprised by the, the energy and ideas that can emerge from a community, uh, once you, uh, invite them into the conversation, once you invite them to fix it. Um, and, and so, uh, that again lends itself towards this idea of partnerships and community engagement. I think that's one of the ways to answer this question.

Yeah, I think that's very helpful. I think, I mean, I was relatively involved at the— when I lived back in Wisconsin, I was involved with the— it was technically a city that I lived in. It was about 30,000, 40,000 people. And towards the end of my living there, when I left, there was a new mayor that came in and she did a very— she's done a very good job so far being super super transparent with those things. And I think it's been great for people to see, right? So I know that the involvement, when you can just text your mayor and be like, hey, can we have a coffee? Um, that flexibility to be able to get close to people and to understand like what's going on, that's, that's interesting. I think, you know, maybe one thing, do you, do you have any tips or thoughts on the idea? Because, you know, obviously my day job is, is working as a headhunter. So I'm curious how can people— because it sounded like you had this kind of a little bit of an apprehension to going into the public sector initially. So what can be done, maybe whether it's in the candidate perspective or the, you know, the city, the government's perspective, to try to help attract those, those more, uh, quick-minded, you know, tech-minded, whatever, whatever you want to call it, there's people who are more innovative that are not going to be so like entrenched in the way that's already existing. How can we attract those people and how can people maybe change their own mindset to consider those opportunities?

Yeah, this is so— it's such low-hanging fruit. There's so many easy ways we can make a difference in this area. It's a great question. Um, look, when I, when I joined the city back in 2011, uh, when an IT opening, um, came up and we posted it, um, honestly, we probably got 5, 6, 7 responses. Within a— yeah, within about 3 or 4 years of me being there, we were getting 100, 150 responses. So the question was, well, what happened between the day I arrived and, you know, 2 to 3 years later? A few things. First of all, you know, the way we advertise government jobs, it's like the— it's like the 1950s. I mean, have you seen a job description for a government official, uh, you know, or, you know, job in government, we're still— and I'm a little bit tongue-in-cheek here— I'm still seeing references to, you know, data processing people. You know, years ago in the early days of IT, you were a data processor. I don't think that's a job anymore, right? Data processing is not a responsibility anymore, and yet we see that because they're using the same job descriptions from, you know, 1983. We can update the job descriptions. Number 2 is smart, ambitious, technical people want a leader to look up to, and they want a vision to go after. The notion of you're going to get some sort of desk job and be in the back office, and you're going to just be quiet, and if you stay around long enough, you get a pension, that is attractive to a smaller amount of people. There's still people who go after government jobs because of that. But the folks that are ambitious and who will— would probably choose Google or something to work, um, you know, but would like to work in a city, want to be excited by it. They want to know that the person in charge has a vision, that they're bold or innovative, they're doing cool stuff, they're making a difference. So that all has to be communicated outwardly. And by the way, the cities that do that, you know, and I know many of them, um, they're getting good candidates. And the cities that are not, you don't get the candidates. So we can really change the game on the job descriptions, on how the vision and how the actual group that the person is going to be part of, how it performs and what its vision is. I think we also need to tweak who we're hiring. You know, I can say it now because it's been several years since I was working in a city. IT people don't want to have management analyst as their title, you know, or senior management analyst. These job titles need to change. Cities need data scientists and project managers and and vendor relationship managers. They need cloud architects. You know, we got to upgrade all that stuff in government. You know, part of the reason why we don't, by the way, because it's hard work. It's like, it's a pain, you know, to change titles and job descriptions. It's very bureaucratic. It's more— the overhead is much greater than you might think. You know, unlike the private sector, we just, you know, spin up a role and put it out, you know, just advertise it. No, in government you got to go through a very extensive bureaucratic approval process to get new jobs designed. But I think that it's worth it. I think the payoff is worth it.

Yeah, I mean, to me that makes a lot of sense because this is something I really had no true understanding of until I ended up into the recruitment field, is if you don't have good people, you don't have good, good results, right? So, and it might take a while I feel like with the transition process to more agile types of government organizations, it might take a while to attract people. But in the case of— I think you're a great example, right? Palo Alto, obviously very exciting what they're doing in general. And in the course of 3 years, you're able to start to attract people. So awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time. I know we're over time here. I guess just finally, could you let people know where they can follow you and where they can get your books?

Oh, sure, sure. And by the way, fantastic interview. I have loved every minute of it with you. Great questions. I love where you're coming from. I know where your passion is and what your objective here is. Yeah, I'm pretty easy to find. My last name is Reichental, R-E-I-C-H-E-N-T-A-L. You can find me on Twitter @Reichental. You can find me on LinkedIn. Please do reach out to me through those channels. I have a website, reichental.com. You know, pretty simple, right? Right now I'm, I'm pretty excited about my new kids book about the future cities. It's called Exploring Smart Cities Activity Book for Kids, and it's easy to find. You can just go on Amazon and search for it, or www.smartcitybook.com/kids. If you just go, by the way, to www.smartcitybook.com it will take you to my Smart Cities for Dummies book, my bestseller. But do the forward slash kids and get yourself, uh, get your kids, the kid in your life, uh, one of my great books.

Awesome, very good. Well, I appreciate taking the time, and we'll see you next time on the podcast.

Thanks, Silas.

Thank you guys so much for joining on today's episode. I hope you found a lot of value out of, out of the discussion that we had with, um, regarding, regarding this the different topics we covered. I found it super interesting. I'm always so excited and so, so pumped up after I have these conversations just to constantly learn more. So I hope you are as well. That's the goal of what we're trying to accomplish here. If you want, we really appreciate your thoughts and feedback on the show, maybe future guests you'd like to hear, maybe questions you had about some of the topics we covered today. You can feel free to comment if you're, you know, wherever you saw this, feel free to comment there and share your thoughts. You can also join our Cleantechies Slack, the Slack channel, the Slack community, if you want to have more discussion with anybody. There's a number of people there who would typically like to have brief discussions about some of the topics in the climate tech space. As well, if you're interested, you can, you can subscribe to the Cleantechies newsletter, which comes out every month on the 27th, and we generally cover one topic in, in good depth but not too much. So just, just a good, interesting newsletter to help educate people a little bit more on what's happening in the climate tech space from a, from a little bit different perspective than the podcast that again comes out the 27th of every month. And then feel free to, you know, reach out to me if you have any questions regarding, regarding the show. If you're, if you're somebody who has a clean tech startup or a climate tech startup and is interested in being on, always glad to hear inquiries, inquiries. And to have people on the show. And yeah, I guess that's, that's kind of the big things. And we really, really appreciate your support. Please do, as always, share this with somebody who might find it interesting. Do subscribe to the content so we can help get the word out there. And, and if you are interested, we also have a support link to, to support the show in the, in the link notes, in the show link notes. So feel free to do that as well. And yeah, we'll see you next time on the podcast.