 Welcome everybody, welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you here today. This is a place where we discuss the future of higher education and I'm really glad to do it all together with everybody here. My name is Brite Alexander. I'm the Forum's creator, I'm your host, I'm your chief catherter and your guide to the next hour of conversation. For the past seven plus years we've been touching on campus community relations in different ways. We've been looking on the economic connections between campuses and their immediate environments. We've been thinking about the environmental aspects in terms of climate change. We've been talking about research, we've been talking about teaching. Now we have a brand new idea. Our friends David Staley and Dominic Endicott have a new idea. They call for decentralized knowledge towns, a new form of academic institutions that are embedded in a given community and really help elevate that community and support that community. It's a fascinating book and by the way if you look in the bottom left of the screen you should see a little button that has knowledge towns there. You can click there to grab a copy of this new book. I'm fascinated by what this might mean. This is a bold vision appropriately from two bold thinkers and now I'd like to invite them each on the stage. So first without any further ado, let me bring up the awesome scholar activist and friend David Staley. I should say podcaster as well. Thank you Brian and let me also point everyone to your book, Universities on Fire. I want to affirm that as well. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that. David, first of all, where are you today? So I'm in my office at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Oh, yes. Yes, we have to say that. I can't just say it. Don't forget the thumb. I know. Do we have to add a trademark at the end? We absolutely do. Yes. The Ohio State University TM. Oh, gosh. And David, every time I meet you, not only do I learn something, but I also become more excited about your work and your thinking. But what are you working on for the rest of the year? What lies ahead for you? What are the big projects and the big ideas? Yeah. Likewise, Brian. So one project I'm working on right now is a new way or at least I think a new way of thinking about the future. So you and I have both written scenarios before and that's a pretty, pretty typical method. I've become interested in biography as a form. And so last summer I hit upon the idea of writing biographies of future people. So in design we use personas, which are sort of bullet pointed lists of characteristics of people. I'm imagining different scenarios of the future and placing a person in the middle of that and sort of writing their story. So I don't know if this genre exists or if I'm copying from others, but I'm doing, I guess, anticipatory or speculative biographies. Speculative biography. I love the sound of this. Oh, this sounds great. And I can't wait to see it. Please ping me. I'd love to be able to help out or at least be a sounding board. Hold on. Excellent. I certainly will. Well, we've got David here from the University TM and now let me add his collaborator and his co-conspirator and co-author Dominic Endicott. And let's see. Dominic, you have some great mood lighting there. Yes. Hello, everybody. Hello. Where have we found you today? I'm in Beverly Farms, which is just a small village or almost a hamlet outside of Beverly, Massachusetts. In fact, it's the foundation for Beverly Hills. So people from Beverly King went to California and decided to call Beverly Hills in remembrance of Beverly Farms. And Beverly itself comes from England, so it's kind of interesting the connection. To have someone with an English connection be there. Yes, guys. Absolutely. Well, Dominic, what are you going to be working on for the rest of the year? What are the big topics that are top of mind for you? So I am very focused on really implementing a lot of the ideas in the book and in particular around the notion of creating venture capital funds that will be investing in local communities and working with universities. So right now I'm working with six universities in the northeast of England and we're in the process of setting up a venture capital fund. And the idea is to execute on that. And many of the people we're talking to would also like to do some of that place-based regeneration that is associated with the book. So I'm very excited to actually turn these ideas into reality and realize where perhaps I was being too optimistic and where we can learn and do it better. Oh, excellent. Excellent. That sounds like terrific work. Great. Well, both of you welcome to the program and we're really looking forward to diving into this. So I've read the book, which is very exciting and I'm trying to wrap my head around what a knowledge town might be. So let me know how I'm doing here. I mean, part of what you're thinking is that a lot of work and a lot of workers are mobile now. That COVID showed us that, that people could go wherever they could find bandwidth. So what you're seeing is that's the idea of physically co-locating around a spot like Boston or New York. No longer has to be the case where we could just really, really move around. A second point is that higher education now is much more, sorry, I'll put it this way. Post-secondary learning is potentially much more nimble. We can access teachers, we can access content of all kinds, pretty much from anywhere in a wide variety of styles and formats. So what it seems like you're kind of, you're describing it, blowing up the university and making it available throughout the world, but then trying to reconcretize it in small academic institutions located in small communities. How far off the BMI? Not very far at all, Brian. No, I think you're spot on especially. So the only thing I would sort of elaborate on and I'll let Dominic extend it is we are in the book, I think we are big believers in place and the importance of place and building strong places. What we see as being dissented especially is the nature of work. And as you mentioned, Brian, one of the things that we saw during the pandemic and we think that this is going to be a trend that's going to continue on is that remote workers in a sense, if we had the privilege, we could all be remote workers. That meant that if I could work from anywhere, I could literally work from any place. So why don't I choose a place where I actually want to be, whether for because it has access to the kind of amenities I like, because of cheap housing, because of quality of life, because of connections to families. And we think that this is an opportunity for places, especially small towns, rural areas, secondary cities, that this is a moment to attract those sorts of workers. And the book really is the way in which towns and in particular the academic institutions located there can attract talent to their area. Dominic, what have I left out? Probably a lot. I would build on that. I sort of had a couple of points. The number of people that express a desire to move somewhere else is somewhere in the order of 30% of Americans, so 100 million people. The number of people that actually move is a lot lower. And that's because it's very, very hard to move. There's a lot of friction. And so part of the argument we're making is there are all these towns, there's probably 30,000 locations in the US alone and 4 million around the world that you could conceivably consider moving to. But most people that don't happen to be there, when they're looking at choices, tend to gravitate to like 10 or 15 cities they've heard of, the big cities and so on. And we're saying there's actually a plethora of opportunities. And therefore, as an individual, you should be exploring a lot further and you'll see amazing stuff, the cities you've never even heard of all over the place. But also, from those locations, they're not doing a good enough job effectively attracting people. They need to take it as one of their jobs, the job of attracting people. And the great thing about college towns is that they've already got some element of, they've got a muscle to attract people because every year they attract students. They kind of spend three or four years and then they leave. They're really good at that. They're not particularly good at retaining them, but they know how to attract them and they can kind of build on that. And that's the evolution really from a college town to a knowledge town that is really being self-consciously involved in attracting and retaining talent, turning it into talent magnet, and then using that to build kind of economic growth around that. This is fascinating. So we start from the premise of the college town and all the goodness that comes from that. But then you want to see that forward as the world changes into a knowledge town. This is fascinating. Friends, I want to ask just one more question. I want to give the floor over all of you for your questions and comments. My job here is mostly be a facilitator as well as an instigator. How is what you're describing different from the locations that Richard Florida likes so much in the creative class? He talks about urban centers that are welcome, that welcome high technology, also very diverse communities and that are very progressive politically and culturally. And he's made a career out of showing how cities that already have that can grow and how cities like this bird can turn into that. Is the error for that past or are you describing a different form of the Richard Florida world? Slightly different form, although I think the same sort of motivation. Florida, of course, was talking about, for the most part, was talking about big cities and maybe even large universities are ones. I think that that was a connection. I think most of the examples in our book, not every example, but most of the examples are about how the same or a similar sort of strategy can work even in small towns or secondary cities. There's been a couple of articles that have come out in the last couple of weeks. There was a New York Times article about a month or so ago that was talking about the plight of a number of small towns or college towns that as the colleges in them are shrinking, their numbers are shrinking and are dealing with those sorts of challenges that you've highlighted, Brian, that is having an impact on the town because of the nature of how town and gown have typically worked in these college towns. We're talking about a very different sort of attitude, a very different sort of strategy. Dominic was pointing out, for instance, that seeking talent or the attraction of talent is not just simply undergraduates and faculty. It means knowledge workers. It means others. And part of what that means is that institutions that currently exist are going to have to rethink their missions and their purpose. To be a talent magnet for a region means that the university or the college has to take on a very, very different sort of mission and purpose than they traditionally have. Dominic? One way to add to this is to say, in some ways, Richard Florida has been too successful. The problem now is a lot of the superstar cities that, in a sense, his ideas have helped nurture have become so successful that, in fact, a lot of people can't afford living there. So Boston, LA, New York are not affordable for a lot of people, young people in particular, people that maybe have not had as much success in life and now they're sort of in their later years and they can't afford to live there anymore. And we're saying, well, let's just take those ideas and decentralize and diversify them and bring them to the rest of the country. You can sort of think David often talks about how the industrial revolution started in a small number of places and then eventually it spread to the whole planet. We're basically saying the knowledge revolution, that sort of creative class, everything that happened in large cities, is now ready to break out and go everywhere. And that democratizes, that brings affordability, brings a lot of options. And frankly, it relieves the pressure on these large cities, which are under pressure. I'm not going to deliver enough housing and therefore kind of reduces the stress on that. Well, it sounds like a very beneficial move all around. Thank you both for answering my very particular question. Friends, this is the spot where we'd love to hear your questions and your comments. So please just reach down the bottom of the screen along that white strip and just click either the raise hand button to join us on stage. And as you can see here from my image, you don't have to have a lot of books in the background in order to be admitted to today. Or click the Q&A button and give us your Q or A. Keele mentions a point that connects with something you were just saying, David. How does the shrinkage of American higher education figure into this? I mean, that is total enrollment for higher ed peaked in 2012. It's gone down every year since. There's been no COVID rebound. So if the overall footprint of higher education keeps shrinking, how does that change your picture? I think the way that we address that in the book is, again, to go back to this idea of reimagining what a college or university exists for or what its business is. And so we talk a lot about what we try to align or we do align the mission of a university with a talent magnet. And so what that means is that in addition to teaching traditional undergraduates, the purpose of the college is expanded. So for instance, it involves developing innovation centers, innovation districts. It means being involved in rewilding, redesigning a town to be a 15-minute city. I can let Dominic talk more about these. So in other words, the purpose of the university is not just to educate traditional undergraduates and to have sororities and fraternities and to have a football program. It's to be an economic incubator. It's to be the venture capital fund for the region. It's to incubate entrepreneurship. It's to have all these additional functions. And therefore, in the book, what we say, in fact, what we identify is that the college or university that follows this strategy is what we identify as a knowledge enterprise. And we steal that term from Michael Crowe and William DeBars, but we sort of need to find what it means as a way to distinguish the sort of institution that we're talking about from a traditional or an incumbent college or university. Dominic, yes. Does that sound about right? So to sort of add some numbers to this. Somewhere in the region of 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., roughly, there is a rate of decline, like many are going out of business every year. And typically, when the colleges go out of business, they just go poof. They're done and then maybe somebody buys the land or maybe another college acquires it, but it's over, right? One of the things we're saying is, for example, if you're a college or university under pressure, it's a good idea to sort of step back and say, what do I have? Let me take a sort of inventory of my assets and my liabilities. And you often end up saying, well, I'm a major landowner. I've got a bunch of buildings. I'm good at attracting people. I've got some professors. I've got some patents. I've got a bunch of stuff. The way I've organized it today doesn't seem to be working anymore because of the demographic cliff and a bunch of other things. But perhaps there's another way of reorganizing these assets in a way that will actually be more sustainable. And if you think about what entrepreneurial is, or startups is, it's really entrepreneurs coming together and making something out of nothing. The typical founder in venture capital starts with an idea, doesn't have any money, doesn't have any assets, doesn't have any buildings. And yet they are able to sort of cobble together an economic model. It doesn't always work. In fact, it mostly doesn't work. But when it does, it can be amazing. When you think about Airbnb, they don't own any homes, but they're the largest provider of hotels in the world, hotel rooms in the world. And so it's sort of applying a little bit of that bootstrappy mentality and saying, going on as normal is not going to work. How can we think differently and then take sort of advantage of these assets? So let me just put a coded of that to say, and I don't know if I stated as boldly as this in the book, but our conviction is that for a lot of institutions, for all the challenges that have been identified here, an enrollment management strategy is insufficient. We'll just grow enrollment. And as we sort of said, that's going to become a real challenge. I think what we do in our book is present an alternative strategy for a lot of these sorts of institutions. And central to it is the idea that university and city, town and gown, thrive together. And that is a thread that we weave throughout the book. There's a synergy. There's a virtuous cycle. There's all sorts of terminology for it. But town and gown together thrive together. This reminds me of Kathleen Fitzpatrick's vision and generous thinking. And some of what I've seen in decolonial university studies of trying to tear down some of the boundaries between town and gown. General, we have all kinds of questions. People are pushing the idea around. I want to make sure everyone gets a chance to ask these. Some of these are very practical. Some of these are big conceptual. And here's one. Let's see. This is from Eva Bradshaw. Hello, Eva. Ohio State has Intel opening soon. How does that fit with Knowledge Town and change its mission? And you might want to explain what the Intel opening means in this case. I will, yes. So Intel are building or about to build, I think it's the world's largest. It will certainly be the country's largest Gigafactory chip fabrication plant. It will be east of Columbus in Licking County, east of Columbus. And so all of us here in Columbus are sort of thinking through the implications, the impact that it's going to represent. And I think to respond to Eva's question, I think it does. I think if there's anything that distinguishes our approach is, I think we begin with the attraction of individual knowledge workers, as opposed to let's attract a company. In fact, if anything, the idea is that you bring knowledge workers who again are working remotely. The idea is they're working remotely. You bring the company along. But it starts with the attraction of talent of individuals rather than companies. Do you buy that Dominic? Absolutely. And the other thing I would add is the typical way companies come into places, they get this huge piece of land, they build a big factory. And then you're like, okay, well, where are people going to come from? Well, then they build highways and parks, parking lots. And effectively they're perpetuating the sort of sprawl model that is really part of our problem. And so what we would advocate is in such a situation to think a little differently and say, well, you know, maybe what we can do is go back to the old company town models where often they were built closer and there was an idea of walking to work, kind of building dense neighborhoods that would be walkable or where you could commute to work biking or thinking about transit and actually trying to use a new build as an opportunity to sort of move away from the sprawl model. And you see the same thing when we build schools, when we build libraries, new universities, many of the tech parks. So we are often perpetuating the kinds of things that give us bad health, that are bad for society, bad for the environment, right? So it's an opportunity to think differently. That sounds very appealing except for one thing, Dominic, that company towns are horrible. How do we extract that walkability and local setting without reproducing the true awfulness of script and so on? Right. And so I think you want a more diversified version of that. So ideally what you want to do is identify a existing town. And there are many existing towns that have fallen on hard times, right? And then you bring a new business into that. You don't want to become too dominant. So one of the things, an enlightened strategy as opposed to the old fashioned company town is to build additional suppliers, convince them to move nearby. So now there's other sources of jobs. Encourage other knowledge workers to move into that city and kind of work in creating kind of a diversity of economic opportunity so that if the Intel plant ever went down and it moved somewhere else, it wouldn't devastate the town, right? So I think you're right that the old model doesn't work. You have to do a refined version of that. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. Sorry if I came across as a little rough on that. Bring it on. Bring it on. All right. This is a good community for that. We had what you've seen here on the screen are a couple of the Q&A box questions. Now what I'd like to do is show you how a video question works. And this is from my neighbor here, Ryan Johnson at Georgetown. He's ahead of University Research Services. And let's see what his question is. Hello, Ryan. Hello, David. It's been many years since you and I worked together. Good to see you, Ryan. I'm interested in one of my great concerns is the increasing dysfunction between the infrastructure between the creation and distribution of knowledge and research. And I'm curious how within your concept of Knowledge Towns, and I apologize, I haven't read the book yet, how would this impact this or perhaps increase the democratization of the information milieu or environment in which we live? Because access is becoming increasingly difficult and both access to publishing as well as to the published record. And this is a real problem I've seen in many parts of the world, including many in the US. So it's good to see you, Ryan. And I'm not certain that we address specifically open access, but we do talk about sort of the status of knowledge. And I think that one of the things we emphasize in the book is that the knowledge enterprise, part of the redesign of its mission, is that the knowledge, the simple slogan version of it is knowledge in place. We believe it's really critical that the research that knowledge that's created is addressing or is drawn from local concerns. So just to take a quick example, and I'm not going to name the specific institution, but there's a place here in Ohio where agricultural runoff is moving into the rivers that feed into Lake Erie. And it turns out that this place is at the confluence. I mean, it's a critical point where this is happening. Our knowledge town model is that that becomes a research agenda for the institution, solving that problem, not just simply for the benefits for the local area, but now that institution, that area becomes the expert in agricultural runoff, the other sorts of challenges and problems. This is part of what we mean by knowledge in place that we think is a central part of any knowledge town, of any knowledge enterprise. I think another element of this is if you look at, say, which institutions are able to capture the knowledge of their academics and turn it into value, and which ones don't, there's a high level of variation, right? So you've got the classical, you know, beasts of this, Stamford, MIT, Harvard, in the UK now, Oxford, Cambridge are doing a really good job. But many other institutions are not good at this, and therefore not able to extract the economic value for the university, but also for the professors, but also for the region. And so part of it is to democratize the process of technology transfer. And so there are some new mechanisms emerging. Some of the work I'm doing in the UK is, for example, the creation of accelerators, which are pre-venture capital stages to be able to help ideas come from the lab into kind of a pre-venture company, and then eventually the ones that get it right can raise venture capital, enabling students to start companies. So there's lots of ways to sort of create a more entrepreneurial ecosystem, and the more it can be captured by that region, the more it actually starts to create economic wealth. The other stages, many places that do have these accelerators don't have enough venture capital, and by the time companies need venture capital, then they leave the college town, they go somewhere else. So by having a venture capital fund in region that's committed to that region, you have a much higher probability that things will stick around. And I think with AI now and chat GPT, that means a whole layer of intelligence is available to a lot of people. I think the key thing is a lot of that data is not available to everybody, right? So opening that data and letting people play in the sandbox as many people as possible and see what ideas they have is something that's really missing. Well, and let me head off any questions that might be brewing. We talk a lot about that. We talk about what I think elsewhere called innovation hubs, but I don't think we limit ourselves to that. So one of the things we talk about in the book is knowledge towns as creativity clusters. So there's the economic dimension that Dominic has just laid out, but we think that the incubation of novel ideas, even those that aren't necessarily commercializable, that are for nonprofits, let's say, or for the creation of public goods, we play around with the scenario, what if Black Mountain College had been organized as a knowledge town? And that's the sort of thing that we're imagining. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. It was pretty remote. Very remote, yes. What if they had been thinking about developing a town as well? And again, we explore, we play with that scenario. You do indeed. Ryan, can I ventriloquize a question based on yours? Sure. Again, forgive me if I'm getting this wrong. This idea is so interesting in so many ways, orthogonal, that I feel like I'm trying to struggle to wrap my head around it. Are these short-term communities? Short-term? Yeah. You mentioned the unnamed location in Ohio, where you'd want to have a knowledge community there to help solve the problem of runoff and river issues. But it sounds like you would eventually solve their problem. Yes. And then move on. Are these, as opposed to say a college in Ohio from 1840 or so, which is still operating today, do you think these might be temporary knowledge towns or temporary locations or configurations? No, it's a really good question, Brian. And I don't think that that's our sense. And I don't want to mischaracterize what we're saying in the book. It's not that we sort of solve that problem and then we're done. And in fact, like the company town, or like the worst aspects of company town, a knowledge town can't be centered around one industry, one problem. It has to be an ecosystem. There has to be sort of a portfolio. So how does solving this problem lead to knowledge over here and knowledge over here and knowledge over here? Yeah. I mean, just to build on that, I think for something to happen, it's probably going to be 10 or 20 years, right? So I think anybody that wants to start a knowledge town, really part of it is to commit for a considerable amount of time, because it's not going to happen overnight. I mean, you can have some very quick changes, but you have to sort of have this mentality to sort of really stick around and make it happen. The other thing is that as with many things, as you solve one problem, you'll uncover other problems to solve, right? So if you're able to solve this sort of runoff problem, suddenly what you'll do is you'll be really good at solving this runoff problem. It's probably like another 20,000 locations in the US that have the same runoff problem. People are going to start coming to you and saying, hey, I noticed that you solved the runoff problem. Can you help us? And that's going to generate demand for you to help other places. And that's a good thing, right? I mean, a nice analogy is how the Dutch, because Holland's underwater, they've gotten really good at flood management. They had to. And so now they're exporting all that knowledge around the world, right? So if you get really good at runoff management or whatever it is, that's going to become part of the future. If you're so successful that tons of people come to a knowledge town, that's going to create another problem, which is you have too many people, then you start to hit the sort of housing, issues of affordability. And so we encourage people to be thinking long-term and saying, let's plan for success. Let's build out this part of town or this area, but let's kind of get ahead of the curve and maybe we need to buy some land now so that in the future, we need to expand. We sort of already planned that. We've got zoning. We're ready for that future expansion, right? So we really encourage long-term thinking. And I approve of that very much. Ryan, thank you for the question. Thank you. And yeah, Ryan's appearance did remind you that it helps to have a beard to be on the form. And again, if you're new to the form, that's an example of a video question. So please, if your camera is on and your mic is on, you have a question, hit the raised hand. We'll be glad to welcome you. Bearded, be booked or not? We have a question from our good friend Tom Ames who asked another kind of comparative question here. Let me bring this up. Are you familiar with Doug Engelbart's networked improving communities? As a member of several of those, how do you overcome the local distant competition for attention? I'm not familiar with it. Dominic? No. I'm looking for sure. Tell us more. He's an amazing figure. Of course, Engelbart is the inventor of the mouse, among other things. Yes, well, I know that name, yes. Tom, let me know if you want to be videoed up on stage. I'd like to do that. A question came in from Daimudra Denighe who said this quote, I do wonder about the impact of knowledge workers on the cost of living for other folks. Think of the short housing supply in Humboldt and the proposal to create barges of student housing. I haven't heard that idea of barges of student housing, but I can see it now clearly. So what happens when an area becomes good at grabbing knowledge workers, Dominic, your Beverly Hills East, how do you deal with that inflationary pressure? I'll let Dominic answer this because it's a big part of our book talking about affordable housing. Please, Dominic. It's a sort of central issue, and I think you could say that the lack of affordable housing in the U.S. today, which probably impacts easy 100 million people or more in this country, is one of our most central issues and a really tricky one. And one that we do not have a good strategy to solve. And so one thing is to, as I said earlier, you got to think ahead and you got to assume some level of success and plan for success and you got to create mechanisms around that. So for example, one idea we suggest is the creation of a development company that is only oriented around the good of that location. So it's not trying to sort of make a quick buck, but it's actually plowing back all of its capital into developing the area and with a mind to always ensuring there's a balance of supply and demand. That's one element. The second element is to use talent in a very, I guess, intelligent way. You need a different kind of, different mixes of talent. Some people are apex talent generators. So if you think about at the top, for example, Jeff Bezos, the fact that he moved to Seattle probably is responsible for 250,000 jobs in Seattle. And so some people have a massive multiplier effect and you need some of those. But then other people are multipliers in community formation, in art, in creating vibrancy, in creating nature. And so you need to sort of design to some extent a community, just like say colleges design a community and they want to have a mixture of people and not have everybody of one kind. You need to do this, generationally, certainly racially, I think bringing talent from abroad, talent of different kinds. A lot of builders, physical builders, a lot of this is going to be about building stuff. And so the knowledge talent is not just for the knowledge worker. It's actually for everybody. The other aspect is that most jobs have a lot of knowledge. So if you're really good at, say, construction, there's a huge amount of embedded knowledge. There's also a lot of new knowledge coming along the way that you can tap into. And so respecting all the domains of knowledge and not making it sort of a narrow version of it. That's very interesting. That's much richer. Yes, we obviously talked a lot about knowledge workers, but Dominic's right. I think we take a very expansive definition of talent in the book. Well, thank you. That was a very, very good question. The question here is coming in. And now I've got Tom Hames on the podium. We'll bring him up on stage so that he can flesh out his point about Doug Engelbart's other idea. Hello, Tom. Hi. Microphone would be useful. So the question I had was later in his career, Doug Engelbart was very much into human systems thinking. And that motivated him all along. But he came to a realization once he had solved a lot of the technical hurdles to humanize technology by 1968 that the real problems and hangups were how human beings organized themselves and thought. And so he developed this idea of networked improvement communities, which leveraged the connective technologies that were emerging in the 90s when he wrote this stuff. And I put a link in the he has stuff on it in the thing. The question I have those specifically is that having, you know, I've constantly struggling to participate in, create, facilitate exactly these kinds of communities. Brian and I, Ruben and others as well have been parts of these communities at various times and structures. And there's always this push and pull between the local people and the local systems and the distributed systems. And I'm wondering, you know, how do you, because I think some of that is also human nature. You know, if you have a choice between being in a, in a shindig like this and the four of us sitting around having coffee or beer together, which are you going to pick, right? And I, you know, I love the fact that we're able to do this because we've lowered the barriers to connectivity to such a degree that we can do this. But we also have to recognize that there are other temptations out there or, or, or, or, I hate to say obligations as temptations, but the point is that, you know, when, when your local boss comes at you, your distributed boss tends to fade to the background a lot quicker than the one who is banging on your door saying, do this, do that. So I was just wondering if you had any thoughts about how you overcome that because, you know, this has been a constant struggle. I mean, theoretically, we're doing it already. We have everything we need. We've been doing it since the pandemic in a, at a real scale in some cases, but it's always this struggle and every group I've ever been involved in has to fight this fight. So. Do you want me to pick up? Sure, Dominic. I have some thoughts, but please. Um, our, in, in our sort of first chapter, we, we talk about 12 rules and in fact rule number one is act local, but harness the cloud. And effectively it's around exactly that duality, right? How do you get the best of the cloud and the sort of remote and all that kind of stuff, but also of local. I think one point I would make is that generally our technology drift is, is really left brain oriented and that's hurting right brain activity. And that's part of, I think, um, anxiety and mental health and, and all sorts of bad things, right? One of the benefits of acting local is to re-energize right brain thinking. Um, I'll give an example. There's a group in the UK that is taking teenagers that have gone through the criminal system and as part of trying to get them not to go back in there, they're doing a lot of work in nature and that sort of recalibrating and sort of giving them a new, new way of doing stuff. And so part of what we're kind of saying is, um, you know, if you are in a life where you're commuting, you know, three hours a day, you're an expensive city, you have no room for maneuver, you're just going to work, you're coming back, you're having dinner. If you are able to move to a small town and recalibrate your personal balance sheet, you free up time, you're not having to commute so long and that allows you to sort of rediscover nature. Uh, and that's where we want to sort of point people to, um, and, and so to try and sort of solve this in place thing and give people more time outside of the computer so that when they're on the computer and they're connecting like we are now, um, they're really engaged, but sort of achieving that balancing. Well, the only thing, yeah, the only thing I would add to that is, uh, we spend, uh, a good portion of the book talking about, uh, the knowledge town as rich and social capital and then a knowledge enterprise is maybe the, the most important or the apex, uh, third place in a community. So I think we're very, very attentive in the book to, to social capital, to, to place, but not necessarily place, uh, connected to work and labor. It's, it's sort of funny that way and, and Dominic, you're right. We do talk about to act locally, but harness the cloud. I think the local is as much about the quality, uh, the quality of life. Social capital more than financial capital. Well, I like, I like that way. You just put that with, uh, places, places, uh, not labor, but yeah, I like that a lot. Um, yeah. So in terms of connecting though, the communities, because I think that's a critical part of your picture. Is it not that these communities are not islands on of themselves? Cause we've always, we've had that, right? So the innovation, the new thing is the connections between the communities. How do you, what kind of tools do you need? And I put in the chat, you know, I think one of the reasons the right brain side of things is not as engaged. And I certainly struggle with this myself is that we, the tools are somewhat limited in terms of being able to do that sort of stuff. But I use Miro for instance, extensively. Yeah. When I'm facilitating things, when I'm teaching remotely, because of I'm trying to engage that right brain side of things where people draw out their ideas as opposed to type them out, right? So that's another part of that visual side of things that I've definitely tried to engage whenever I'm, particularly when I'm doing this, because I realize that this, this is a lot like a long distance phone call without the charges, right? Right. But also it's, it's, it's, it's visual though. I mean, this is, I mean, not just that we have the, we have the video feed of people so I can, you know, I can see your smile, Tom. I can see Dominic thinking and this is, but also we have the visual layout, you know, so we can look at, you know, at different tabs and everything else. It's much, much richer, much more replete than a long distance call. So the only thing I'll add in a slightly different way is that another part of when we talk about act local and harness the cloud is the idea of broadband access. And so we spent a little bit of time talking about the role that the knowledge enterprise, the college can play in bringing and extending broadband to the, to the community. That's a huge problem in Ohio. You go outside the big cities and connectivity is a real problem. Part of our strategy is that that's a role played by the knowledge enterprise. I don't know if you want to add to that, Dominic or Tom? Well, a couple of comments. One is the cost of everything in a sort of suburban sprawl model is typically twice as much as in a sort of inner city. And so there's real benefits to a certain level of density. And so one of the things we advocate for is to redensifying the center of small cities. And that doesn't mean to build skyscrapers. It means to build, you know, what's called gentle density four or five stories walkable places, but by building a more compact center and sort of allowing it to stretch out a little bit, you get a lot of economic benefits and it makes it easier, for example, to have high fiber and another sort of services, right? So there's an economic model that is essentially that I think to the connection between different networks. There's a couple of ways, right? One is, you know, we'd encourage small cells to form and start solving problems, right? So maybe a group of four or five people decide to set up a micro college, which is one of David's great innovations and let's say they succeed. But maybe that idea could be then taken to another location. And so those ways of sort of taking those concepts that work and spreading them geographically. The other one is even more tangible. Like one of the ideas we advocate is let's say you sort of imagine a place that is incredibly successful and over the next five or 10 years, it triples in size and it doesn't want to get any bigger. It's sort of densified as much as it can. It doesn't want to go beyond four or five stories and it doesn't want to get too far away from nature. And so then you say, well, maybe we can build a satellite. Let's build a satellite five miles away. But let's connect that satellite by transit, by bike paths. So we don't always have to go by car. And that's another way of thinking about connection as well as the virtual version of it. I'm thinking of some science fiction stories right now. But it's not science fiction. No, I know it is. This reality, right? I mean, in Copenhagen, they've now built commutable bike paths that are protected that go 50 miles. I mean, people commute every day, 40, 50 miles into the city. And if it's raining, they take the train, they put the bike on the train. They really figured it out, right? So none of what we're saying is science fiction. Almost everything is being done. It also helps that Denmark is incredibly flat. Right. But with e-bikes, that problem has gone away, right? So I think... Well, e-bikes have some other problems. But Tom, thank you as always for a great question. And thank you gentlemen for the very, very lovely set of answers. We have, I think, time for one great big question. And this comes from our good friend, Giselle Doros. And Giselle asks a question. This is, I think, Dominic, I think it's aimed right at you to start with. But I think both of you really need to address this. It's a question of how to make this work. Giselle asks, who do you envision will be the person or group that will ignite and execute this change? And she suggests businesses, governors, state work, workforce board, board of regents, parents. So who's going to make the knowledge talents come to life? Do you want to... I'll give a quick answer. No, I'll give a quick answer, Dominic, and then I'll let you extend. So this is a good question. And we run through a number of scenarios in the book. So, you know, what can a mayor do? What can a university president do? What can an entrepreneur do? So there are different answers to that question. We identify many different people, leaders that could be doing this, including university presidents. Dominic, I know you have a lot of thoughts on this. One of the things we try and do is give nobody any excuses to not do anything, right? And therefore, we say wherever you are, if this matters to you, there's an approach, right? So if you're just a regular citizen, what we would say is get together with other regular citizens that have commitment to the place that our builders that want to make things happen and just start working together. There are groups like Main Street.org that actually are willing to sort of fund you and subsidize you and you get going and you start that way, right? And maybe over time, other people, you know, the town managers start to see what you're doing and you can build on that, right? So you don't have to be a person with power. At the other extreme, let's say you're the head of a $30 billion endowment and you're patting yourself in the back because you had a really good year. We say your job is not done, right? You have to pay it forward. And you're concentrating all this wealth in your tiny little college and you're ignoring what's going around your community. You're failing to really pay it forward even though you're getting tax subsidies. So you don't have an excuse either to say, well, it's not my thing because all I'm doing is investing in hedge funds and I'm doing a fine job and therefore, I don't have to do it. We sort of say everybody has a role here and, you know, if you are in a position of power it potentially move really fast, right? If you're somebody that is decisive, you're in a position of power, you can actually make things happen because you have a lot of assets and you have disposable. But if you're an ordinary citizen, you know, you can start a small revolution. So everyone's involved. David, did you want to add more to that? No. Well, Giselle, thank you for the great question and Dominic, for the inspiring answer. We have time for two more questions then. One comes from my namesake, poor fellow with a terrible, terrible typo in his first name. Brian Devo asks, with climate migration, I wonder if climate refugees be welcomed in the knowledge town. They provide capital of all sorts, social, linguistic, cultural and sociological. Yes, no question. Absolutely. We take an expansive definition of talent or who has talent, yes. Sorry, Dominic. And in fact, what we would say is the cities should be recruiting people. They should be figuring out how do I identify people with talent and ambition. Many people who've immigrated to this country have built businesses, I think 40% of the businesses in Silicon Valley are from immigrants. And so it can be anybody, right? And it's almost more like it's not just about letting them in. It's about going and finding people. Yeah, we use the term brain gain in one place to describe our overall strategy, which I know for a lot of small colleges, rural areas, small towns, brain drain is the issue. Ours is I think a strategy of brain gain. Is this then also a cultural attitude? I'm reminded of Brian Kaplan's recent book on immigration, a very pro immigration book illustrated wonderfully by Zach Wintersmith. And he makes the kind of libertarian case for immigration being great for communities and all ways. And most demographers think this is the best way to have a healthy population. And yet we have plenty of examples from East Asia to much of Europe to definitely the U.S. where communities including college towns are either just not thinking about these immigrants or they're actively hostile to them. I could imagine a college town that says, yes, we're going to support bioengineering and we're going to have great projects about language learning and so on. But we're just not going to welcome the climate immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. Yeah, unquestionably. And I think we address probably not as deeply as we should. I think we talk about sort of culture clashes, especially when you're talking about rural areas, for instance, we know that there are culture clashes. I found something very instructive in some consulting that I've engaged in. So this is another institution in Ohio, in a small town. The city manager who might very well have had a very different, say, political orientation than those who were there at the local university, nevertheless said, we have a state university here in our town. Who wouldn't want that? I thought that was really very inspiring, very telling. Oh, I'm glad to hear that. You've both laid out a very, very compelling vision of how we could reconstruct, not to put it too lightly, academia as well as most of American life. Thank you, and thank you for answering all of our questions which have come at you from all directions. Of course, everyone, you can grab a copy of the book on the bottom left of the screen, but let me ask you both. How can we keep up with your work? Starting with you, Dalvik, how can we keep up with your work and trying to nurture these kind of communities? Probably the best thing is to follow me on LinkedIn, so I'm at Dominic Endicott at LinkedIn, so I post quite a bit. And we've created KnowledgeTowns.com as a site where we're starting to post some stuff. So it's right now just a landing page, but we'll hopefully have more. Very good, excellent. LinkedIn's very good for me. And in addition to the website, we also have a Knowledge Town LinkedIn profile. Excellent, excellent. Well, everybody will have to keep up with those. Dominic, David, thank you both so much for all of this exciting work and for being great guests. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks very much, Brian. But don't go away yet, friends. We have to point you at where we're headed for the next few weeks. Thank you all for the great questions. I just think it's phenomenal to see how all of you managed to put together responses to complex ideas and how you approach them from multiple points of view. It's just a great example of this kind of collaborative, collective thinking. If you want to keep talking about this, we already have some action on Twitter, just please use the hashtag FTTE. You can at me or at Shindig events on Twitter. You can follow me at Mastodon. There's my giant long handle there. Or, of course, on my blog there, BrianOxEnder.org. If you'd like to go into our previous sessions talking about town-gown relations and how to reimagine higher education, just go to tinyurl.com. If you want to look at our other topics, coming up every week, we hit a different topic, including sexual assault, faculty data, humanities assessment, campus economics. Just go to forum.futureofeducation.us and you can see more. And again, thank you all for thinking together. Thank you all for being great interlocutors. I hope everybody's well. We're coming closer and closer to May 1st, a big holiday and a big turning point of the year. We hope you're all safe and sound and we'll see you next time online. Bye-bye.