(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 575: The Urban Truth Collective

This week on the Talking Headways Podcast we’re joined by Tom Flood, Grant Ennis, and Brent Toderian to discuss their new communications project, The Urban Truth Collective. We discuss pushing back on falsehoods and conspiracies through positive messaging around cities.

Listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA. Find all our past episodes here.

Below is a full unedited AI generated transcript of this episode:

That was 10 years ago that we chatted on on podcast. Wow. I can’t believe that

Auckland, New Zealand, and a lot of North American cities too. And I also co-curated, just last year, a really cool exhibit at Paris City Hall on Climate Action in the form of better city building. Partnered with Marin Hidalgo in Paris, and that was pretty fun and all of that. Is actually indicative of a kind of a growing impatience and frustration I’ve been having with, uh, the need for better communication.

I’ve joked, and it’s not a great joke, that I might have stopped learning about better city building years ago, but what I’ve been obsessed about learning is better communication, more persuasive communication that sort of breaks through the noise. And actually changes the minds of decision makers, changes the perspective of the public, et cetera.

And, um, increasingly that’s started to focus on aggressively, unapologetically calling out the lies and disinformation because you can’t just tell the truth, persuasively, you’ve gotta call out the lies. And then. As I have been leaning more and more into that, uh, unapologetically, I observed, you know, the people who were within the profession, but also outside the practice of city planning and city building.

The people who are the good communicators in the sphere of better cities, and saw Tom, who is a unicorn, this former ad exec that used to use his superpowers for evil helping car companies and now is using them for good. I don’t know, Tom, if you like, the way I phrased that. I, to me it’s kind of like, it’s.

Superhero origin story, which I think is really cool. Um, and Tom’s a cool guy by nature and does some really great work and I’m sure you follow him on social media. Most people do ’cause he’s putting it out in a way that normal people understand. And then I run across probably the best book in the conversation about disinformation, which is dark PR that grant wrote.

And we start to grant and he and I started to get to know each other. And I started to think about the Venn diagram of the three of us. I come at communication from practice and they come to the practice of cities from communication and in grant’s case, uh, really, really good research. And, you know, that overlap was super interesting and.

Maybe the origins of something new. So I pitched to the guys this idea of what we eventually called the Urban Truth Collective, to sort of break wide open the serious need for better communication. Not just better ideas, but better communication of ideas and calling out the lies and disinformation. So that became the Urban Truth Collective, and we launched that about two months ago now.

And it’s just hit the ground running. We’re going full steam ahead. We’re building the airplane as we fly it. We’ve grown from the original three white guys that we are to an increasing number of collaborators that add a lot of diversity of perspective and professionalism and lived experience. So as we say, we were designed to grow and we leaned in on that growth and that’s been really exciting.

But so far we’re just, uh, doing really great work and putting out a lot of really interesting content.

And the reason why is because. You know, not all of us come to this place the same way. We don’t all come through planning school. We don’t all come from an engineering program. We don’t all come that way. And the kind of winding way that people get to where they are is interesting and allows people to know that they can do the things that you’re doing, even if they don’t have the formal background generally of a planner.

So I’m curious, Grant and Brent. What was your first kind of thoughts about cities or like were you always interested in them, like when you were a kid, and then what brought you to this space initially?

And yeah, I cycled, walked transit to my job, to gigs, to bars, everything you kind of do in your kind of early twenties. Well, working in, in advertising. And I really didn’t have an interest. I loved being in the city, but I didn’t have any sort of, you know, insight into cities. I don’t come from transportation, from planning, from academia.

Zero background in this space, but for me, what happened was when. The two kids now who are a little bit older, but when I first took them out on their bikes to school, the kind of light bulb went off and I had my real moment of clarity about the imbalance that we have on our streets. And that’s what really woke me up.

And as soon as like a lot of people know this here, is that as soon as you see it, you can’t unsee what’s out there and how we design our cities and plan our cities. So I started just sharing very casually, like everybody does on social media. I was just venting as a parent that was annoyed that it was.

Kind of complicated to get my kids to school walking and biking, and that kind of just snowballed into developing creative and content and just kind of went from there. But yeah, I have zero background in planning or engineering or cities. Probably most of your listeners have a way better insight into how our cities work and transportation networks, you know, work than I do.

I just kind of use the lens as a parent. Trying to move my kids to school. And then the idea that that was framed up as some sort of radical thing when we would try to implement some safe systems measures is what really lit a fire under me being kind of framed as a radical for wanting kids to be able to get to school safely

I remember being hit by cars twice

And in both cases, yeah, they just, they clipped me from behind. It could have been very serious. I’ve just thought that’s a city where. John Forrester’s idea dominated and ended up with very little protection for kids or anybody on a cycle. So my childhood urbanism was that the John Forrester childhood.

And then I remember going to a place Rancho Cordova outside of Sacramento, and I remember calling a friend of mine friend on the phone vividly and leaving a voicemail saying, this is the most dystopic place I’ve ever been. It’s just nonstop cutter cookie cutter houses. As far as I could see. I don’t remember seeing a single human being and this urban sprawl that like, uh, Rancho Cucamonga is really the epitome of, and maybe there’s a better example, but growing up in California with a lot of it, this urban sprawl really marked me.

So when I started traveling for work and seeing that cities could be wonderful things where people can walk and thrive, I think that contrast of growing up in California and this. This like dystopian sprawl really shaped a lot of my thinking, I guess you could say.

And both of those things are wrong. My parents were originally struggling country music musicians. And my dad went on the road and was on the road all the time, and I would spend the summers traveling with my dad around cities and towns and um, he would sleep all day because he played all night. And I would go out and explore the city.

And I would find where the used bookstore was, and I would find where the interesting spots were. And I think what I was doing at the time was understanding the DNA of good cities and bad cities, even though I wasn’t necessarily aware of that at the time. Plus my parents were performers. And I often say that it’s probably why it’s in my DNA to be a bit of a performer and to be very comfortable on stage.

’cause I was actually in the band, I was the drummer from five years old to 14. So people are shocked when they hear that because they, I don’t know why they think my parents were lawyers. ’cause I don’t think I. Sound like a lawyer, but they think that, and as for Sim City, I was not a Sim City nerd growing up.

I was a Dungeons and Dragons nerd. But I would create city adventures instead of dungeons. I would create elaborate cities, I would design them, I would create the political structure, the administrative structure, et cetera. And I realized then that I didn’t even know what city planning as a profession was.

And then my 12th grade urban geography teacher in high school. Made us, uh, do an exercise on designing the perfect city. And I was, I got obsessed with it. I wanted to perfect it. It was actually a very rudimentary computer program where you would be graded each time you made changes. And I wanted to get to a hundred percent.

And he explained to me that there was this profession called city planning at the time I wanted to be a lawyer, ironically. Um, and, uh, boy, am I glad I didn’t. Go that path. But I thought, well, the city planning undergraduate degree sounds like a good pre-law program for environmental law. And then I took the undergrad program and fell in love with it and never looked back.

And so very counterintuitive approach to becoming passionate about what I do. But I kind of realized I was always passionate about it just back in my day when I was a kid. City planning was not a profession that was in the newspapers. It just wasn’t, it was invisible as a profession. Even in, when I was in school, it was invisible.

Now it’s very visible. People talk about it all the time, but back then it was, you know, I almost stumbled across it and said, what’s that? But I was passionate about cities and I was realizing early on that I was figuring out what worked and what didn’t work.

He was like, you know, you can do this as a profession. I took a class called the Modern American City from a Professor Shane Davies and really changed my, my brain a little bit. I do wanna ask you all, you know, you, you mentioned obviously the Urban Truth Collective, which you formed. I’m wondering what the truth is in that truth collective, like what’s the North star that you all kind of organize around in order to start thinking about how to push back on the lies and falsehoods?

Some of it’s gonna be the need to get rid of some of the stuff that is shaping the cities we live in right now, like famously minimum parking requirements and these kinds of things. I think it’s, the truth is, is sometimes. Like not very cool. Smart cities, for example, they are not the truth. They’re, they’re like not really a very good idea.

Like techno cities where everything runs with an app is really not great. Sometimes the truth is very much more basic.

15 minute city, for example, sounds, you know, brandy and technical. But it’s really about isn’t it better to have more things nearby than having to drive everywhere? How, how more common sense can you get than that? Right. So we debated whether we should have the truth in our title ’cause frankly, Trump might have ruined it by taking that word and using it in truth, social and such.

But one of the things we’ve specifically decided to do is we’re not surrendering language. We’re taking it back. So we’re taking back truth. We’re taking back common sense. We’re taking back these words that have been weaponized. By the forces of disinformation and misinformation and reapplying them to, you know, what makes a city more successful or not based on experience and expertise and evidence and common sense.

And then we’re telling it more persuasively and we’re rethinking a lot of the existing brands or the lack of brands. Grant mentioned Smart Cities. Smart Cities was a very interesting brand because it was a brand created by technological companies to sell stuff. To city halls, that’s what it was for. And they started inviting me to speak at the conferences and I said, A smart city isn’t how much technology you have.

A smart city is whether or not you’re doing smart things. And you know, if you’re doing dumb things with smart technology, you’re not a smart city. And they didn’t like me and they stopped inviting me to speak at their conferences. So, but that’s an example of, you know, branding with a sort of, um, a sinister purpose a bit, if you can take the drama of that phrase.

Whereas we’re thinking about branding, we’re thinking about marketing, this is about communication. We are not another organization that says we know the right things to do. There’s actually a lot of organizations out there. Like that, and a lot of podcasts like yours that talk about that all the time, what we’re emphasizing is the communication, the marketing, the branding piece of it, because frankly, that’s the key.

In my experience, I’ve sat in more decision making rooms than most human beings on the planet for cities. And it’s the communication that wins. And that doesn’t mean we don’t need to know what we’re talking about, but if you know what you’re talking about, but you’re bad at communication, you lose.

I’m curious about that, about the origins of the Urban Truth collective, because I’m curious like how you decide to go forward and what you picked out as some of the problems. Maybe what are some of the things that you decided, well, this is what we need to do. You had mentioned even the decision to even have a certain word in your title.

I’m curious about some of those initial sit downs where you all chatting with each other and saying, we need to do this, or we need to put this together because it’s what we need to do.

What does that raise in people’s brains? And by the way, to answer your question, we’ve never physically all been in the same room together. This is a virtual world we live in now. I’ve been in the room with both of them. I’m not sure, Tom and Grant, if you’ve been in the room together and all three of us have not been in a room together and we’ve done everything virtually, which is the power of our new life after the pandemic.

It’s just so easy to collaborate virtually, uh, as we’re doing right now, looking at each other on the screen. So. I originally thought of this idea, had a slightly different title, pitched it I think to Grant first in a day where we were walking around Paris. ’cause I was there for the opening of our exhibition in Paris.

And we talked about it and he was my test to think, does this have legs, can this work? And I said right off the bat, Tom is the other one I’d wanna talk to it about. And then, so once. Grant liked the idea that gave me confidence to approach Tom, and he liked the idea and neither one of them said the words I was most afraid of.

Great idea, but we’re way too busy. We’re all way too busy. We’re doing this off the side of our very busy desks, but none of us said that we’re too busy. And we found a way to make this work and get this done. Then we debated the title, we debated the focus. We debated who the audience was, you know, what kind of content we wanna get out there.

We do wanna focus on things that we do think meet our own test of the truth. It’s not called the Urban Opinion Collective. So, you know, to a certain extent, we’ve gotta be able to have some confidence in our ability to defend the things we say. Based on our expertise, our experience, et cetera. And yeah, we’ve debated almost every element of the messaging we’ve been getting out there and, and now we’ve been debating our first big campaign that we’re about to launch very soon, which is gonna be really cool to see how it lands.

For me, one of the audiences being kind of a mainstream, general, broader audience who may not have interest in city planning or you know, streets or transportation and framing things up to them that they can connect to and relate to, which is I think is a bit of a gap that’s out there. And sometimes, yeah, a bit of a broken bridge where things get lost in translation with sometimes a bit too data heavy and maybe sometimes too research specific for a regular kind of mainstream audience.

So yeah, my kind of role is to. Take some of this really, really good information and hopefully cultivate messages that can connect to people in a way Yeah. That they can relate to in their lives. Again, similar to how we do with consumer products for forever, essentially, and kind of apply that into this transportation city building space.

And the little bit I’ve done has taken me down some crazy rabbit holes. You have the tea party, you have the John Birch Society, the Koch brothers. You have really big spenders. Putting money into these kinds of conspiracy theory arguments. So I really don’t think that there’s such, uh, easy pickings because the, they almost have to invent lizard people living in these 15 minute cities to make them sound bad.

None of the critiques, about 15 cities that I know of has really been grounded in reality. Open air jails. Again, this is just if you, if you can throw enough money at this kind of nonsense, you can throw it at anything. So I think it’s, it’s much more about the money and who’s spending the money on these disinformation campaigns than it is the 15 minute cities themselves.

Whereas think about what we do as city builders. We’re mind-numbingly boring and bad at this most of the time. I’ve actually had planners, city planners, urbanists tell me that. Branding your ideas crass. It’s, uh, lazy. It’s, it’s, it’s beneath us. And instead, we have to use incredibly boring jargon and three letter acronyms and terminology that no one understands, but A, at least we’re pure about it.

It’s actually somewhat infuriating, and I can say that because I’m in the profession, so I’m criticizing my own profession. I’m criticizing engineers and other professions that relate to city building overall. So. You gotta give them credit, the forces of evil. They’re doing simple messages. They’re beating us by throwing every simple message they can at the wall and seeing what sticks as, as Grant often points out.

And then we’re scrambling around trying to debunk. Whereas Grant’s research tells us that debunking doesn’t work. You have to reframe. So. These are all good examples of why we created what we create because frankly, we need help. The Urbanist community, the Urbanist Program project, needs help with the communication side because we’re not good at it and we’re getting beat.

We’re getting beat. I see it in practice every day. Some have said that, well, the attacks on the 15 minute city have kind of died down, haven’t they? That’s kind of gone away, and I’ve said, no, it’s still happening every week in city halls that I’ve seen, and if it has died down, it’s because it’s largely succeeded.

I know a lot of city halls that actually have stopped using that language because the politicians say, I don’t want the tinfoil hat. Outside our city hall, so I don’t want you using that phrase. I also, by the way, let’s also avoid the phrases that existed before it, like complete communities and walkable neighborhoods.

Because someone might say That’s 15 Minutes City, or Agenda 21, or something like that. Right. So it’s actually been working far more than we’re willing to give. Credit. And so not only do we have to do a good job of taking new ground in terms of the conversation about better cities, we need to actually take back some of the ground we’ve lost by taking back these words, taking back these ideas and getting them back into City Hall when they’ve actually been pushed out of City Hall.

Talking about kind of walkable neighborhoods, and I think it’s so important to, when you look at the benefits of a walkable neighborhood for your kind of average person, it’s so clearly beneficial to, you know, regular folks to move through their city easily, right? All the things that we’ve been told that are bad for us, this kind of conspiracy side is completely ridiculous.

As a regular kind of parent to speak for myself here. If there’s nothing better than kicking my kids outta the house at 8:00 AM and they can go walk to school by themselves, I get more time for myself. I can sit at home, send them to the store to get me something. I can sit back, listen to a record, read a book.

These are all selfish things, and I think we should start playing in that space and sell some of these benefits targeting people’s, you know, selfish interests, right? Like what’s in it for me? Why I don’t care about a bike lane, but. I might care that my kid can get to school by themselves and I can have some time to myself.

And as a busy parent, getting through life is chaos. So the more time that my kid can do things on their own independently, which of course is good for them, but selfishly I get time to listen to music and, and play some guitar at home.

Of course. I wanna make this point. I have had arguments with urbanists about social media, about the fact that I repost the same post more than once. The mindset of some urbanists, and it’s always the urbanists who say this professionals who say, you know, oh, you post the same post once a month? Yes, I do.

Imagine the car company only running their car commercial once a month. They run it three times per commercial break during football games. Right? Because they understand that repetition works. Grant, what’s the quote that you use in the reframing that, that the best determiner of an idea resonating is how many times they’ve heard it.

Is

And so that’s, that’s super frustrating.

Earlier this year I was listening to David Roberts, who has a podcast called Volts, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with David’s work. Yep. Uh, I brought this up also chatting with Danny Pearlstein of Transportation Alternatives, and we were talking about congestion pricing earlier this year as well.

But David had Samuel bag on the show and they discussed something very interesting about misinformation, which is the idea that. We need more fact checking or white papers to convince people of an idea, which what they’re saying is like, you don’t need that. In fact, we need actually more social proof and the idea that people actually, you know, are identifying with their team more than say, like the fact checking and those types of things, because a flat earth isn’t gonna necessarily change their mind, right?

Like you, you can go to somebody and say, Hey. I have all this stuff about 15 minute cities, or Carlos Moreno said this, or this data tells me this, but they’re not gonna believe them because the people on their team are telling them that that’s not true. And so one of the ways we can do this is by organizing and thinking about it that way.

We have folks like Brent on social media repeating things over and over again. We have, uh, YouTubers like city Nerd who are telling people things, podcasters like Sarah and Doug. They’re doing all these things and some folks don’t like the idea of war on cars or whatever, but they’re actually bringing people along.

They’re the social proof, they’re creating social identities for people who are listening to their shows. And so I’m wondering what your thoughts are on changing people’s minds or at least providing this social proof for the social identity for people who, uh, might be on our side, but need kind of a little bit more cajoling maybe to create this movement where we can move the needle and then win these kind of endless battles.

How many times they’ve heard a message. You talk about space lasers, enough times, people are gonna think there’s, you know, maybe there’s two sides to this issue. Maybe we really should look at these space lasers. So that comes down to money that for the most part, that comes down to money. And we need to really look at the laws that are subsidizing this kind of marketing.

You know, you get tax breaks for all of the marketing activities. Those are, those are operating expenses. Why are we giving propaganda tax breaks? That’s nuts. That absolutely has to change. We cannot continue to underwrite the cost of the propaganda that is manipulating us. But two, back to your main point on, on the need to organize and social proof.

If people are ever gonna come together and actually change these kinds of policies, they need to be organized. They need people, as you said, like Sarah, Doug, and all the podcasters you mentioned too. You need the people that are sources of information. You need the Urban Truth collective in there. You need all these different kinds of organizations.

We need you, Jeff, doing the work you’re doing. That’s the only way we’re ever gonna really see change is if we all come together and we’re really focused and we demand the policy change we need to see.

And can relate to. I think that’s what’s really, really important with some of these messages that are, obviously they have a lot of complex in the background, but as if we can connect with people in a way that they understand and relates to their lives, I think that’s a real good opportunity to convert people, to be allies of this kind of overall mission and.

We have to figure out ways to make the evidence more sexy. What I say is that my distinct approach to communication, which is different than every city planner I’ve ever met, is, you know, I lean in on great data and great storytelling. I take the data back from the engineers who say that, you know, we need that angle of daylight relative.

To an intersection and can’t have trees in it and can’t have anything, or else people will die. And I say, well, where’s your data? And I now can cite data better than most traffic engineers in the world because I figured out the data that’s most persuasive. People say that data’s boring. I say, no, we are just making it boring.

Our task is to make data, use data in a sexy way. I do it every day and it works, but. Evidence and facts don’t hit the emotional side. And the other side is the storytelling side where you can relate it to their lives. That’s where Tom is a genius at. And I, I use stories and anecdotes all the time because, and I find that those are what people remember.

They remember the stories better than they remember the data. And if you can put the data in a story, they remember both. That’s what I’ve been doing in my practice for at least 10 or 15 years. So translate that to our work. Now, I’m not convinced. And Grant has the evidence to back this up, but my own instinct is it’s not about fact checking even.

Well, we are gonna fact check, but we recognize the limitations of fact checking. We are gonna share evidence, but we recognize the limitations of evidence. The key is that everything we say has to be interesting. Or else, why would people pay attention to it? I used the word sexy, and that’s a crass word, but frankly, that’s what the other side understands.

They know how to make a a, a scary idea, sexy. I didn’t think space lasers and lizard people were sexy, but evidently with some audiences, they are. So we’ve gotta be at least as good as them at making these ideas. Interesting. And that’s why I love people like the podcasters, like you Jeff, like Tom and his work.

Because as a practitioner I was looking at my practice and thinking, why are we so mind-numbingly boring? And then I was finding these people out there, the writers, the podcasters, the the ad people who every once in a while they’re getting stuff wrong, but I generally am still applauding them because they are showing us how to communicate better.

And our profession has responded by saying, oh, yeah, well I think I’ll use a little less jargon and I’ll, you know, I’ll make my slides, uh, 50% less wordy. And that is not good enough. You know, we are still mind-numbingly boring, so we need to learn a lot more. The practice needs to learn a lot more from the good communicators out there.

That’s a tough question. Jeff, can you elaborate a bit?

But often when you’re doing this, when you’re in the trenches, when you’re working on it, you see things. That other people might not see. And so I’m always interested to see or to hear what folks find interesting themselves or what folks find themselves that hasn’t come up in the questions that people ask them.

And we made a decision early on that sort of, you know, as potentially paralyzing as this sounds, we all have a veto. At least the three of us are the coordinators. We’re we’re the ones who are. Overseeing the content and you can blame us if you don’t like our content. The collaborators that are part of the growing collective, they don’t get the blame on such, on the stuff we’re putting out.

We get the blame, and so if we put something out, it’s because all of us either agree with it or can live with it. But yeah, we, we, maybe we’ll do a, a special podcast specifically on the stuff we disagreed on. As an example. You know, I often get into debates with Grant because, uh, I’ll use something and he’ll say, uh, you know, research suggests that that doesn’t work.

And I say, well, yeah, but a lot of the stuff I do research would suggest doesn’t work. But I find if I do it in a different and better way, it does work. So is that. A message that you shouldn’t do it at all, or is it a message that we’re doing it really badly? And if we can’t find a better way to do it, we should stop doing it.

But if we can find a better way to do it, like some of these things that he says doesn’t work according to the research, and I’m not disagreeing with ’em. I’ve been doing to great success because I’m doing it in a different way. And so, you know, we can get into that back and forth. And I think that’s valuable and that’s constructive, right?

Because we’re, we’re testing each other’s blind spots and we’re probing for weaknesses and searching for strengths in our message and our techniques and our approaches.

Which is a nice proviso. Asterisk, right? Because that doesn’t mean you’re a good communicator. It just means you’re a good communicator compared to a pretty low bar, frankly, of my profession. So I’ll send something that I think is really clever. I’ve used it in my posts. It gets reposted. I’ve used it on the radio.

People say, that’s cool, but Tom will look at it and he’ll, first of all, he’ll make it shorter. Second of all, he’ll make it simpler and he’ll put it down to ground level. For the people that are just listening, trying to relate it to their ordinary lives, which is what he does so well. So I give Tom a lot of credit for that.

That’s a skillset that, again, more professionals need to learn.

And I mean, eventually the seeing the actual policy change that we want to see. I think, uh, an example, not our example, but I think it was transportation alternatives that really led the way for this was the crash not accident campaign. That’s enormously successful in the global, you know, injury prevention community in changing the way people talk, uh, about crashes.

That’s fantastic. We don’t really have the numbers of data on it, but I, I would hope that would’ve led to more policy change. Perhaps It did. I mean, after that we finally saw the MUTCD revised the United States, so that’s the kind of success I, I’d like to see from the stuff that we’re doing.

But the best answer to the one thing is you need to change the conversation. ’cause the prevailing conversation out there about change in cities. Is a barrier to better ideas, and that’s just not disinformation and lies. That’s just biases and preconceptions about change and all of these kinds of things.

And so invariably, I find that the cities that are having the better conversation are having the better outcomes. So part of my job with cities is often to create that different and better conversation. But I realized at a certain point that if I keep doing that one city at a time, you know, the, the conversation has to change ahead of my arrival or else it’s just gonna take too long and we’re all doomed ’cause we’re running outta time.

There’s urgency to the crises that we face, climate, housing, equity, public health, infrastructure costs, et cetera. There is real crisis urgency here. So we need to change the conversation at a much bigger scale. And that’s what I think all of us do with our podcasts and social media accounts. That’s what I certainly do it for.

I want, I need to change the conversation and I would say that the definition of success for me, of this initiative, this organization, it has to make a serious dent in changing the conversation or else why did we bother?

It’s the where are the bathrooms kind of moment in the meeting. Uh, so check out our website. That’s the best way to get to know us. You’ll actually see our ad posters that we’ve been putting out. I think we’re up to 16 or 17 of them. We’ve been putting out content in the form of individual ad posters.

And, uh, you’ll see about us who our collaborators are. That’s www.urbantruthcollective.com. It’s not that big a site. You can explore it, follow us on social media. Uh, we’re most active on Blue Sky. We’re also on Instagram and LinkedIn, and you can follow us there. We’re not on the other social media platforms yet, but we’re still talking about whether we should be there.

We’d certainly like your advice on if there’s other places we should be, and how you get involved is we’re certainly growing in terms of formal collaborators, and you can see on our website who our current formal collaborators are, but you can get involved really easy. Send us your ideas. DMS or post article links to good persuasive information, good research papers, good branding articles, et cetera.

If there’s a cool idea for a poster like the ones we’ve done, send it our way and we’ll give you credit for it. Really, there’s the collective, but then there’s the whole universe that we’re working with, and we’d like to take ideas from everyone. We’re also sharing other people’s ideas. It doesn’t have to be our brand.

It doesn’t have to be our idea. You know, you’re not, you’re stuck in traffic. You’re, you’re, you are traffic that age old poster that we all love, that’s a good brand. We’ll put that out there and we say, boy, we wish we had thought of this one, right? So we’re gonna, we’re gonna put out as much of this kind of branding content as we can, and if you share it with us, we’ll give you credit.