Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Kevin, what an absolute pleasure to talk to you today.
We're going to just dive straight into it. Okay. Tell us what you do. Like, what is the industry or career or what's your job like? Who are you?
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Yeah, so I'm Kevin Laux. Currently I am the chief impact officer at Charlotte Works. And Charlotte Works is the local workforce development board serving Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. But really at the heart of it, what I am is I'm a strategic innovator. And I think about how do we drive people centric transformation organizations. I've got a background in business, law, economics and technology. And basically, how do we bring all of that together to make meaningful impact in society?
[00:00:42] Speaker A: Okay, so workforce development, economic development, a lot of our audience don't know what that means. So give us a simple definition of what it is that economic development does because it's very amorphous to the people who are hearing about this for the first time.
[00:01:00] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: So economic development is really focused on creating the environments for businesses to want to locate and create jobs in a region. And so those are the people that are thinking about infrastructure, roads, bridges, rail, and saying, how do we make sure that Amazon wants to come to our location when they're, they're looking for the next location to locate their major workforce of.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Okay, let's break this down.
[00:01:26] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: I was in, I didn't get economic development until I was in Bali.
[00:01:33] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Okay. Here's why, right? I was on vacation with a family in Bali. The roads are so narrow that two cars cannot drive side by side.
What that means is that every time somebody comes from the other direction, you have to stop, you have to move to the right and let them pass, or you have this incredibly scary thing, not for the balinese, but for me, this horrifying moment of almost touching. It's amazing that these balinese drivers can do this. You're basically almost touching the other car. And they drive side by side and sometimes not at low speeds.
But that made me think, like, oh, somebody decided what are the widths of the roads? Somebody decided what is the width of the parking at Costco. Somebody decided where Costco should be, where schools should be, where industrial centers should be.
Like all of these things, they happen in the background. We have no idea about them. So before we jump into the Amazons and bring in businesses and kind of the crux of economic development, from your experience and knowledge, and I'm sure you know all these stories about towns that went wrong, what does it look like when the function of economic development doesn't exist. What are the pitfalls?
[00:02:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: So again, one of my previous roles I worked out in Appalachia, Kentucky. And so if you look at a map of the United States and you look at an interstate map, you'll see a giant gap of interstates in eastern Kentucky and in western West Virginia. And that is exactly what you're talking about, the economic development. That's when, when you don't have access to these infrastructures, whether it's road, rail or Internet of, you don't have the same opportunity. So you can't connect in commerce in a meaningful way. You don't, like you said, driving past each other at high speeds in Bali, imagine that's two semi trucks that are transporting goods. They're not going to be able to do that. And so if you're figuring that out, that means that those individuals in that region just don't have the same access to jobs or opportunity as other regions. And so that's fundamentally what that looks like. And so in essence, let's break this down.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: You're trying to create and the whole economic development and city managers, right? All these teams thinking about this, you're trying to create an environment in your community which will enable businesses, citizens, community organizations to be successful.
[00:04:04] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: So the example you gave, like in Bali, right, is if Amazon can't get their trucks, maybe it's a railroad station or their goods, whatever method, if they can't execute their business in your state or city or community, they're not going to come. Yeah, it's as simple as that. And that's jobs, right. It's a whole bunch of things. And we kind of think as just citizens who have no idea about economic development that these things just happen magically. They don't. It's people like yourself who make it happen. So tell us more. What are the kind of projects that you've dealt with and what was the pain? What were the issues that you were preventing?
[00:04:43] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: So one of the biggest projects that I worked on back in Kentucky was focused on the new infrastructure or broadband Internet and saying, you know, we don't, like I said, we don't have the same access to interstates here and we've worked to improve our roads, but that is still necessarily a shortcoming of our region. So with the emergence of e commerce, with this as a new utility, how can we leverage.
[00:05:08] Speaker A: Wait, that's so important. You called Internet a utility. Why? I mean, that is such an important thing. You said, I don't want to just gloss over it. Why is Internet a utility?
[00:05:19] Speaker B: I mean, Internet is functionally utility, because if you think about the way that we live our daily lives, you think about using water, you think about using electricity, we're not able to have this conversation. You're not able to pay your bills online. You're not able to attend a school in the, in the middle of the pandemic when everyone's at home doing e learning, you're not able to do that. Internet is functionally a utility because of how society has evolved today, that you cannot basically fulfill most of your daily tasks, whether that's paying bills, learning new content, or interacting with others, you know, going on meetings. Internet is just as vital today as electricity and water.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: That is such a beautiful analogy. I mean, Internet now is basically a basic service that we should be entitled to. And yet what a lot of people, I think take for granted is that, oh, yeah, I have high speed Internet, but that isn't necessarily true across the United States, across all neighborhoods or regions. Right. There are hot spots. Right. Where they don't have the access that everybody else has.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Yeah. And there are layers to that as well. There are layers to that access. And when you think about that again, when we talk about economic development, we think about it again in terms of net neutrality. And so if we are.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: Okay, no, you need to explain that. What is net neutrality? Okay, we're touching on really important points today. I just want to make sure that we're bringing our audience with us in this journey.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: So net neutrality fundamentally is just the concept that all Internet traffic is created equal. So a fundamental idea that whether you are going to Netflix or that you are going to Amazon, your traffic is going to be treated the same.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Okay, but how does that go completely wrong? Like what? How would that be abused if we did not have net neutrality? And maybe a lot of people don't know, but this was a huge issue in the news not so long ago where they wanted to cancel net neutrality. We're not going to get political and say who did what, but in absence of net neutrality, who would be the loser and who would be the winner?
[00:07:29] Speaker B: The loser is anyone that isn't willing to pay those providers. So those small businesses, those companies that are just starting out, trying to innovate in a marketplace, they're not going to be able to pay to prioritize their traffic. And so without. Wonderful.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: So I'm a startup. I'm trying to innovate. I'm trying to hire people. I'm trying to bring new business.
The speed of access to my website would be slower in the absence of net neutrality. However, I'm a big company, IBM, Microsoft, I don't want to hit on any, you know, beat up any specific company, but I'm a big company. I have a budget. I can pay the net neutrality, quote, the lack of net neutrality fees that exist due to the fact that there is no net neutrality. And then because I have these fees that I'm paying, and it's not a problem for me to pay these fees, I get the speed, meaning that anybody coming to my website, they access it fast.
So really what this is, what you're describing, is that it's removing a barrier, a friction for new businesses to be successful. Absolutely. Allowing the small business to be successful.
[00:08:35] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: That's amazing.
It's not something that we think about on the day to day.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: No. And again, just a point of clarity. Like you said, they were trying to remove net neutrality, but there's a lot of detail in that. Functionally, if you pull up Internet on your phone and you're using your cell service today, you don't have net neutrality. So there's prioritization of traffic. That scenario that we just described exists. And so when you think about how people access the Internet, we know that individuals that are lower income are more likely to use a device like this. And so that means that their traffic is deprioritized. They're trying to start a small business. They're trying to do something. They don't have the same benefits as someone who's got, you know, cable running to their house, fiber optic Internet. They don't have those same, that same net neutrality protection. Or even if you have the fixed wireless home Internet, that's not, that's not available to you. So those are the types of things that, again, impair economic development and impair that innovation. When we think about, you know, if you're trying to learn, do school on your phone, that prior, that traffic may be deprioritized over watching Netflix.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: Right.
And you probably know this, but one of the biggest elements of a website or application being successful is not having these lags and delays. So, in fact, this idea of net neutrality and allowing fast access to any site, right, if it's a big company or a small company or entrepreneur or a mom and pops, that actually is a huge determinant of if people will interact and buy and purchase and send that revenue to a local mom and pop, it's a huge, huge factor. So we say net neutrality, but actually, what this is, it's supporting small businesses. Yeah, that's what it is. Right.
Okay. So now that we've kind of brought everybody with us, keep going. You had this issue of net neutrality. Tell us a little bit more about the community, what the problem was and how you worked through this.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And so again, when we're looking at Appalachian Kentucky after the downturn of the coal industry, again, this has been widely populicized. This has been talked about in a lot of national news outlets about what happens to this region that was entirely economically dependent on a single industry where a lot of the good jobs in this region were in the coal mines. And so when that goes away, what do you do? And without the infrastructure that we may take for granted in a lot of our major cities, you don't have those interstates, you don't have all those ancillary businesses supporting it. We were focused on leveraging the Internet as again, a new utility to drive this type of economic growth. And so our focus there was really just saying we've got a major statewide project creating a middle mile, which is basically again, very technical. That's just to say we're getting this Internet to your area, but it's not getting it to your home. And so what we're trying to figure out is say how do we leverage that to create these technology hubs in our region so that we can have companies that want to locate? And we did have tech companies that were created or that were located in the region as a result of that infrastructure, as a result of being able to connect at high speeds across the globe.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Incredibly important what you just said. I'm, you know, I'm Amazon or Whole Foods or whatever.
[00:12:03] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: In order to run my business, I need fast Internet. But it's not just for my home. I need fast Internet for, you know, my 500 employees. If I figure out that in Appalachia there's no fast Internet, I'm not bringing my business there, end of story.
[00:12:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:19] Speaker A: So this is an enabler to create jobs, right?
[00:12:22] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And in Appalachia too. I mean it's also, if you think about it, if you got a mom and pop store like you got a little specialty shop and you're trying to sell, you got a town of 6000 people, that's your customer base. That's, that's who can buy your product. But if you're, you're making artisan goods, you're making something special. You know, that's something that can sell on etsy. But like you said, if you don't have the high speed Internet access, creating that marketplace, creating that Internet presence, is going to be a lot more difficult. And so it's again about expanding the economic opportunity. And then as that business owner then brings an influx of cash to the region again, they can hire more people. They can grow the economy locally by having that expanded reach and expanded customer base.
[00:13:05] Speaker A: I love that. Look, I'm going to argue that the edo economic development offices, government, city managers, I'm going to argue that this whole community are unsung heroes. And here's the problem. The problem is if you have a fire, right? And you're a firefighter and you go put out that fire, it's very clear that you're the hero, right? Absolutely. Like, who doesn't love the firefighter that saved their. Their house, right?
[00:13:33] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:34] Speaker A: Amazing. Right.
However, if you are the person who prevented an issue before it happened, nobody knows there would have been a problem.
Right. So nobody is grateful that problem was averted because there was no problem.
[00:13:50] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:51] Speaker A: So Edo's are in this incredibly, I think, unappreciated environment where they're preventing issues before they happen.
And that's such an important point. So I have goosebumps. And I have a huge appreciation for all the Edo teams working to make communities amazing and successful and really create this fertile ground for success.
Internet is important. What other projects did you work on? When we think about the factors that create economic success.
[00:14:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:27] Speaker B: And so, I mean, one of the other projects we worked on again is creating the environment to leverage the Internet. So we talked about economic development. And that's the company piece of companies creating, you know, coming into a region, creating those jobs. Well, the. The other side of that is having people in the region, the workforce development, that are ready to step in and fill those jobs. And so that was another piece of the puzzle, is basically making sure that when, you know, if companies do come, let's make sure that they have the talent they need and so working.
[00:14:59] Speaker A: So this is amazing. Right? You have supply, you have demand, right?
[00:15:02] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:15:03] Speaker A: The supply is the people, the workers, so to speak. You have demand, is the company. So you're thinking about both sides. You're thinking about the companies that need to offer the jobs, but. Okay, so the company comes. There's no Internet. I'm not coming. Okay, so you fix that. Yeah, but the company comes and is like, well, I need software engineers. Do you have those in your region? No, I'm not coming. Right.
[00:15:24] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the problem. Yes.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Okay. So what did you do? How do you even. How do you approach a problem like this?
[00:15:32] Speaker B: And so again, how we try to approach that is trying to bring together business interests, just like with economic development and saying, hey, we understand there's not an incentive for you to come. You're a for profit entity. Without this here, you're not going to be here. So how do we make it advantageous for you? So working with those companies and individuals that are willing to do the training and say, I just need x, y and z in order to make that happen. And so partnering with those entities to say, all right, let's talk about what training would look like. Are you willing to commit to hiring? What does that, what does that mean for our region? And then again, economic development, a lot of times there is that financial string that's attached. There's that Kara, that you're dangling to say, hey, if we can get this to our region, there'll be an economic benefit. So we want to make sure that we kind of get the ball rolling here. We're going to create that incentive to get it started and hope that it kind of snowballs from here. And again, in all transparency, I think that the danger there a lot of times and where economic development can go wrong is getting that balance wrong is looking at it and going, are we really actually, is the investment here for the public good? Is it a public utility? Is it a net positive for our community? Or are we investing money here that we're just putting in a private company's pocket and they're the ones that are profiting here and, you know, in some cases they would have done it with or without our investment. But now our I location subsidizing it.
[00:17:03] Speaker A: Right?
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Yeah, our local area is worse off because we've just given money away to something that isn't having a return for us. And, you know, that's, that's one of those things that, you know, I learned as a young economic developer is looking at and working at some of those projects where you go, you know, we're working on this project in this area to say there's a lot of poverty here and there are a lot of people that need jobs and we want to create jobs for them. But are we, are we creating jobs for the people that live here or are we driving gentrification? Are we creating jobs in a zip code for people that currently live somewhere else and getting them to move here? Or are we actually solving the problem we say we are? And so that's, that tension and that balance of being really intelligible about this.
[00:17:49] Speaker A: Is almost an impossible problem. So not only I would argue as before that you're the unsung heroes. But also you have the risk of making catastrophic mistakes. I mean, I don't know if I want your job. Right. Nobody appreciates you and there's a huge risk of making mistakes.
So how do you approach that? How do you think about, so you're basically designing incentives or putting in infrastructure to support these companies to generate jobs. Yes. How do you think through those decisions? How do you evaluate, is this going to be a net positive or is this a bad decision?
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, again, that is that kind of, that calculus, that art form of economic development is saying, how much did this cost? You know, how much are we paying per job here? And is this going to snowball? Is this going to create broader economic activity and allow other businesses to come into play? But again, the challenge there, and I'll tell you, one of the mistakes we've made is not reading fine print. Again, there's a lot of legal analysis that goes into this. Corporations are very smart and structure things in a way that gives them a lot of leeway. And so if there's a fine, you know, we're committed to hiring, you know, but for all of these certain conditions and caveats, well then did you make that investment with all those caveats are there? I, when the jobs don't come to fruition, when people aren't hired. So those are the kind of the pitfalls and dangers that, again, it's very easy to say, well, we look at the jobs that are being created, we look at the investment. This is a great deal. But then if you don't read the fine print, if you don't make sure everything is aligned like we talked about, the economic development piece, make sure that infrastructure is there, well, if you don't have the workforce, it's still not going to happen. And then even if you bring those two things together, if you didn't make sure that everything was in the contract was right or that everything was how it needed to be, it could still fall apart. So there's a lot of different layers to it that have to be all thought through and all worked together. And so it really just requires a lot of people to come together to do different pieces of the puzzle because again, no one person can do that on their own or they're going to be kind of setting themselves up to miss something or for failure.
[00:20:07] Speaker A: Right. I mean, that's so interesting. Right? You're saying that. Hold on. We're basically, we have a contract with this company. We're saying we will give you some benefits for you to come here and generate jobs, then there's the risk of them getting those benefits and not generate those jobs. Right. Which is. Which is like, well, hold on. Are you. I delivered my part. Are you delivering yours?
[00:20:30] Speaker B: Correct.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: And that starts with the contract. Then it follows up with negotiations and touches and discussions. It's not a simple art, is it?
[00:20:39] Speaker B: No. And Ari, I'll tell you, in our experience, it was, we're going to invest in training individuals, and we're going to make sure that they're ready to be employable. And after that, the company is going to commit to interviewing these candidates. And we're like, okay, that's great. Surely that'll lead to something you don't have details around. What are the interviewing metrics? How do we make sure that if they're not a fit, that they are hirable? What does graduation look like? And so the company fulfills. We interviewed the candidates and we decided not to hire them. That doesn't lead to that employment. And then we don't necessarily have another job for these individuals.
What is that path forward? That's the type of mistake that's easy to make. It's easy to overlook and to say, well, surely if we train them and an interview happens, that's going to lead to employment. But again, if there's not enough meat or detail around, what does success look like, your objective criteria? It just. It leaves a lot of wiggle room where maybe it doesn't happen.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: Okay, now let's assume for a moment, and this is not always correct, but let's assume for this discussion, that that company was not just trying to get the benefits and not, you know, deliver its value. Yeah, let's assume there was a real problem, and the real problem was, let's say, a lack of skill or education or knowledge in that territory, that's part of your job. Right. You identify gaps in labor skill, which is the economic term for it, but basically it's the stuff people need to know in order to be successful with a certain company. That's a whole part of what Edo does tell us about how you empower your labor force to be successful with these future jobs or existing jobs. What are the activities that happened?
[00:22:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:24] Speaker B: So a lot of that is around data analysis and analyzing what skills are in demand from employers and making sure that everyone is aware of that. And so, again, one of the top issues today that I'm focused on right now is around artificial intelligence. And if we look at the history of technology, if we go back and we think about the rise of the Internet, you know, when that first came out, everyone was not sure, what's the commercial application here? We don't know. We're not focused on it. And then you see that come into play. Companies like Barnes and Noble and Blockbuster go out of business, and companies like Amazon and Netflix are successful. And so, like we talked about, the Internet is utility. Today. It's ubiquitous in our day jobs. Same thing with, with smartphones. Again, when these first came out, it was like, it's just, it, it's just a fun toy. It's another phone now it's ubiquitous in our daily world. The reality is that people that don't have the skills to use technology don't have the same opportunity as individuals that, you know, can sit here and talk on a podcast. And so what we're trying to do is one of those major focuses is let's not make that same mistake with artificial intelligence. We know this, this is going to be ubiquitous in our daily life going forward.
We're going to have to have, and we're going to have to be able to use this tool going forward. So let's prepare the workforce to be successful. Companies are still working through what that looks like. A lot of them are.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: How does Edo get ahead of that? So, I mean, this happens all the time, right? You know, the Internet came, you know, websites came, applications, mobile came. Like, there's something new moving all the time.
[00:24:10] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:24:11] Speaker A: And what you're saying is we want to keep our community with the time so they don't fall behind and even prevent these catastrophes where we're maybe bringing the wrong companies that are going to have this huge, terrible effect by an incoming technology. Or maybe it's not even technology, maybe it's interest rates, maybe it's an economic, different economic element that's going to happen. We want to make sure we have a community, a job environment that will be robust because we don't want massive layoffs, right?
[00:24:48] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: So how do you, how do you invest in your community to make sure that they are, you know, keeping with the times, whether it's AI or anything else?
[00:24:59] Speaker B: When I was growing up, I remember in the nineties, you think about it, you're not always going to have access to an encyclopedia. Like, you have to memorize these things, you have to know these things. And then the Internet comes about, you got a tool like Wikipedia, you have access to this encyclopedic knowledge. You have Google to validate, to have all this information at your fingertips. And so you hear these stories about this is, you know, it's not that you don't need to learn those things, but you hear this prescriptive story about, this is how it's going to be in the future, or, you know, you're not always gonna have a calculator in your pocket. You gotta learn how to do this math. And I go, it's still important that you learn that. But again, that prescriptive approach, I think, is kind of the challenge of saying, this is the way it's going to be forever, and therefore, you got to do it the way I did it when I was growing up. And I go, it doesn't mean that those skills aren't important. Learning more and having more knowledge and skills is always better. But I think the challenge in getting ahead and preparing people is helping people to understand that it's not going to look like it did yesterday, and being okay and saying, I don't know necessarily what it's going to look like for my children or their children, but making sure that we are putting them in a position to help us lead them, because they will know what that looks like. They will have a clearer picture of the technology and tools that they're using, the types of things that will create market value in the future. And if we're sitting here and we're telling them, you've got to do it the way I did it, you got to focus on print, newspaper, and that's going to be the key to marketing and success. You're not setting them up for success. And so it's, again, it's listening to them, hearing from them, and then bringing your stories and your experience to say, here's how I might be able to inform you. Here's some historical context that I can share, and it's going to be different. But again, these historical stories will always ring true as long as you're not too focused on the details and saying, you know, there's this conflict, we might not fight it with horses and bayonets, it might be tanks. But the core concept behind that conflict is still going to be something that you can learn from and apply going forward.
[00:27:11] Speaker A: Right. I think that's amazing. And what's interesting is that edo's are bam, smack in the middle, right? You're listening to the companies and learning what are the needs and skills that the workforce needs. But you're also working within government, or parallel to government, to basically put together universities, to put together educational centers, to put professional training, non academic trainings together. But then you're also holding the corporation's feet to the fire. Oh. Can you do on the job training? Right. Can this be as part of the hire process? So you're really in this, in this, in the middle to make sure everything works together really nicely? Yeah.
Kevin, this has been so much fun. Let me ask you one final question.
As a citizen in a community, this topic of economic development is so far away from me, I take it for granted. I don't understand how much these organizations are really trying to benefit the community in a long term. 510 years. It's not about tomorrow.
What can citizens do to support their communities from an economic development standpoint?
[00:28:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, you know, if you're just living your life every day, showing up in a community, and you're not sure how this all comes together, I think the most important thing for everyday people is to bring their perspective and share that, because there's an old Sufi parable about the blind men and the elephant. And, you know, one of the men is. Is touching the trunk and says, this is long. The elephant is long and narrow. One is touching the tail and says, you know, there's a short. There's a fluffy ball at the end, or one of them's touching the poop and says, it's soft and mushy. And they all have different parts of the same story, but the elephant is not that part. And so, in economic development, it is easy for us to just know what we know. We're touching a part of the world or workforce development, but we don't have that whole picture. And so, as an everyday person, I don't want people to think that their voice doesn't matter or their perspective doesn't matter, because if you're someone who says, I would love to go get a new job, but there's a Harvard study that says, there are 27 million Americans that want to work more, but can't tell me why you can't. What are your challenges? Is it transportation? Is it the application system? That perspective is extremely valuable. And you may think, everyone knows this. We're all guilty of this. In my world, I may see something ten times over and go, well, surely everyone knows this, but not everyone knows it, because they're not in that same sphere. They're not touching that same part of the elephant. And so sharing that experience, sharing what this looks like for you, with the people that are in your community, in business, in workforce, in economic development, is important, because without that perspective, we can't come up with the right solution. We can't say, how do we. How do we solve for, you know, helping this elephant get better if we don't understand that, you know, there's an inspection in.
[00:30:18] Speaker A: This is so important. This is so important.
We, I think that when we have pain, then we expect somebody to solve our problem tomorrow, next week, next month, and we can get angry. Like, I shared this feedback with you. Why didn't you fix it? But I think what we don't always appreciate that there is value in educating.
[00:30:39] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:30:39] Speaker A: And the responsibility of educating is on each and every one of us. And we do this through sharing our stories. So each and every one of us can send an email and can share their story, their pain, their experience.
If you want to take it to the next level and become a community organizer and go and collect stories and sign a petition, explain the need. Show that there's 1000 people who are thinking about this, these kind of community leaders and individual community participants who just want to share their story. It might not solve the problem tomorrow, but it might solve the problem next year. And you may have touched the heart of somebody who has the ability to influence. You might have saved 1000 people from losing their job. You might have created something that has prevented a thousand people from losing their job. Such an important aspect. But again, like economic development, it's underrated because you don't know the problems that you've prevented. You don't get appreciated always as the person who. You know what? I don't even remember who that person was. But their story touched my heart and because of that, I made sure that this issue didn't happen.
Kevin, I have goosebumps. I mean, everything you've said today is so important, is so interesting and so complicated. And I think that you've helped us all take another step towards the importance of building community and putting together the infrastructure that is required for successful communities.
I'm going to say thank you so much and we really appreciate you. And I honestly have 20 more or 200 more questions. So I have the feeling you're going to be back here pretty soon.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: All right, well, thank you, Ari. I really appreciate you taking the time.
