 It was a local business owner that said, you know Jason, you took this company from one to 70 million, awesome, cool story. Taking it from 70 million to 100 million, it's cool, but it's not as cool as doing something that impacts 100,000 people. When you grow a company from 70 to 100 million, you might affect the CEO and the leadership team and maybe you're 150 employees, but the stuff that you could be doing for the city would affect 200,000 people for generations to come. This What Works City certification is really important and they give you a nice little framework on what you need to do to get this certification. Every step along the way is basically relating to data and data governance, building a data governance team, engaging with citizens using data, making your data visible and open to the public and accessible. What are some of the metrics? Things to do with crime, pool attendance, that's passionate for people. That kind of shows how your parks and rec and culture is doing. Ambulance response time, fire response time, a lot of public safety type of things, like the number of building permits and the valuation of building permits. I think that's a good indicator for the trend to show that people are investing in the city. Population, sales tax growth. For us, citizen engagement is all about the user experience. A lot of people's philosophies do the bare minimum that's required and we always try to exceed that. Boom, what's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host Alan Sokian. We are onsite in the beautiful Sioux Falls, South Dakota. We are now going to be talking about innovation in Sioux Falls. We have Jason, right store for joining us on the show. Hi Jason. How you doing? Thank you so much for coming on. You bet. So pumped for this conversation. Congrats on the new role with the innovation in the city of Sioux Falls. Thank you. So pumped for this convo. Those who don't know Jason's background, he's the director of innovation and technology in the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. This includes making the city of Sioux Falls one of the smartest cities in the country by leveraging data to make decisions. And you can find the links in the bio below SiouxFalls.org as well as Jason's Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Jason, let's start things off by asking you one of our favorite questions. What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? Oh man, it's, I'll just say that I think the direction is heading towards polarization. It seems like everything's just hot and cold and hot or cold. And I think there's lots of people who live in kind of the middle ground, but they're not the ones that are talking. Like so I think that's the huge majority that kind of lives in the middle and the compromising space, but the people that kind of have the platform and the voices are on polar opposites. And so I'd love to see that head back towards the center a little bit more. Yeah, and one of these like first principles is that it really starts with our own inner adventure of consciousness and our own ability to commune with the divine and bring our own gifts forth and see other people as unique that can bring their gifts forth. But then once you start trying to dehumanize other people and things like that, that's when you get into really bad. We don't want that in society. And so like this first principled understanding of life, of how beautiful this adventure is for us all and to really treat that as like the divine experience it is, it'll like help us get away from some of the stuff. I'm like a golden rule guy, you know, and I think there's lots of different cultures that have a variation of, if you just do nice things to others, you know, they'll do nice things to you and I think that's where a lot more of us should live. Yeah, Jason, who were you growing up? How did you get interested in what you care about today? So really always kind of been in the Midwest, my family is from the Worthington, Minnesota area and we moved to Sioux Falls when I was five. So I've been a Sioux Falls resident pretty much my entire life. Went to high school here, went to college here, met my wife here in high school. We're high school sweethearts. So we've been together since we were 16 years old, you know, dated since we were 16 and so. What was your elementary, middle, high school and college, which ones? So Hayward Elementary and Axel Park Middle School. I think we're one of the last classes at Axel before they build Memorial Middle School. And then I went to Roosevelt High School and in Augustana for college. We've had, my wife and I have had, I bought my very first house. I was really into real estate. We bought my first house when we were going to Augie, sold that, bought a house and built a house which was about a mile from her parents and a mile from my parents. And so just back to our roots on the kind of the West Side of Sioux Falls. And now we've since built three new houses and they've all been within five miles of each other. So we're kind of stepping up through the property ladder but we love the West Side of Sioux Falls. And so we've been here forever. Both of us really have. And you guys had two kids. Two daughters. Two daughters. And they're active. And so I spent as much time as I possibly can coaching them in their sports or whatever they want to participate in. And so yeah, it's great. I consider myself a Sioux Falls through and through kind of guy and love it here. I think it's amazing city. I just, I love the people. I love, you know, it's big enough to have real events but it's small enough to still have kind of a little bit of a hometown community feel. And so yeah, that's me. Both of our parents were kind of a working class. It didn't seem like we had, it seems like we were fairly poor growing up but we never were without anything. And so I know my parents both were two and three jobs throughout our entire childhood but still found a way to get us to every single sporting event or music event or whatever else we were participating in. So just a good true working class family growing up and I think that's a big chunk of who I am today which is like still really working class at the heart even though we're doing some cool innovative things. And at Augie, how did you pick up what you care about? So I went to Augie, my wife is actually one year ahead of me in school and she decided to go to Augie first. So that naturally, that made my decision more clear when I was choosing where to go. I actually really wanted to go out of state and get out of Sioux Falls. But when she chose Augie, I wanted to stay close to her. I actually went to Augie on a choir scholarship. I was a decent high school football player and both the University of Sioux Falls and a couple of other schools offered me football scholarships but Augie offered me a music scholarship to be in the choir. And I heard they were going to China and Ireland and I'm like, dang, the football team's gonna go to Orange City, Iowa for their big trip. So I'm like, take it a little more easy on the body and do music and travel to different places was kind of the direction that I went. And when I was going to Augie, I was really studying to be, I wanted to be a math teacher and a football coach. I loved coaching. I coached six years in the junior football program for fifth through eighth graders. We had those boys over to our, before my wife and I had kids, we had those boys over to my house. We played Nintendo and PlayStation or whatever. And I just loved that age of kids. And I felt like I had an impact on them because they trusted me and they believed in me and they worked really hard for me. And so I thought that being a teacher and a coach would be a way that I could impact in a future generation. And so that's really the direction that I was going at Augie, but being a Sioux Falls guy, like I had a job and it was actually, one of my first jobs was selling cell phones and it was right in the heart of the boom of from cellular to digital. And I was making so much money part-time at Augie, something that my family had not really experienced growing up that I kind of was geared towards that. And so I kind of, I went away from being a teacher and more into the business mind, basically financially minded, just saying I can make so much more money in the business world than I can in teaching. And so that's kind of where my career first kind of started to stray away from what I really intended to do and into the business sector. And then maybe even to be able to do things like take what financial resources you accrue and then be able to make what you want to help people at a more widespread ability with those financial resources than maybe that you could without them and just teaching. So it's always interesting thinking about how to most effectively be altruistic. We talk about that quite a bit. Okay, then how did you end up, what did you end up picking up in this business world as you continued getting all the way up to Wiser? Wiser distributing was this big one that you most recently, yeah. I spent, I actually spent seven years playing poker for a living. Like I, we were paying the house payment based on my poker earnings. That- Texas Holdem. Yeah, Texas Holdem. I traveled all around the country to all the major tournaments and played and actually online poker at the time was legal. And so being in South Dakota, that's where a lot of my time was spent on online poker. But the thing about poker that really related and correlated into business is that for me, I'm a math guy, a math major type of mind. So it was all about the numbers but the secondary part of poker was about the people and the relationships and being able to communicate effectively with people and being able to manage your money. I mean, to be successful, you couldn't just like gamble all the time. And so there's so many of the principles that I learned playing poker that really applied to business. Risk tolerance, negotiation and risk analysis, a lot of those things. And so for poker, I actually went into the restaurant business and ended up being the assistant general manager at Benagon's for a couple of years and then into a local pizza franchise, Boss's Pizza. And for me, that was really where I got my first experience into business, leading teams, setting schedules, managing vendor relationships, taking care of inventory, the budget piece, P&L, that's where I really started to understand what P&L. Profit and loss. Yeah, profit and loss, cash flow management, all those things. So a lot of the principles that I kind of had first exposure to in poker really started to translate into the restaurant business for me. And then ultimately from the restaurant industry, I helped a friend of mine who I had known for lots of years in the poker circuit start up or really grow the business that is why you're distributing, where we started with three of us in his garage and took it from an age old auto body tool truck, where it was just one man, one truck going shop to shop, selling auto body tools into a top 50 Amazon seller over the course of seven years. So it was an interesting path to get there, but yeah, that was the start of this thing. So, okay, so in seven years then, let's start with, it's cool how you were giving us how these skills from playing poker can be applicable to the business world, or a lot of times we talk on the show about kids that are playing video games, they learn a lot of real world applicable skills as well. Resource management, teamwork, like build strategies, these types of things. And so it's cool how you brought that up with poker too, I think that's really key. And then, okay, and then so then you were gaining these skills, especially in the restaurant sector, and that's a big one too, is when you get really immersed in the restaurant sector and especially in a managerial role, you start seeing how the operations work and you gain deeper empathy and better understanding of business. And then, okay, so then you find yourself with Weiser and so then you guys are, you have sort of auto body parts. Yeah, the business at the core started as auto body tools and supplies. So, polishes and waxes and sandpaper for painting your car or restoring your car, that's what the business started as. We took that age-old business of auto body tool sales and put it all online. Online, yeah. But not, or is it both on the domain that you owned as well as Amazon or did you migrate most of the sales to one of the? Yeah, we started as both and we were actually really agnostic when it came to the channel, whether it was our site or eBay or Amazon or whatever. We just wanted it to be available for anybody. We were really good at shipping. I had a personal side gig along the way of selling baseball and softball equipment and so I was really, really comfortable with eBay, really, really familiar with the best practices on how to ship and how to get good feedback and how to interact with customers. That's how I got involved in this Weiser Distributing. When Eric Weiser was the son of the founder of the company, was gonna take it over, he really wanted to find efficiencies in how to ship these things all over the world so that was really my background and his business that merged and really focused on being able to sell these things to anywhere in the world. So we were doing like a million dollars in sales locally in Sioux Falls. By the end of I think the second or third year we tripled that online. Yeah, yeah. And so our reach just became really, really wide. And- Because it became online about seven years ago. Yeah, we really migrated online 2011. That's when I started with the company. And that just opened up the world for us. And so while we started as auto body tools, we now, I say we, because I'm still a little bit involved in terms of advising the company, we are now into hunting and fishing, toys and outdoor games, doll clothes, I mean, everything. Interesting. The scope of the SKUs are the number of products is I think when I started we had 300 items and now I think they have 40,000 items. And so all different verticals, all different markets, all different vendors. 40,000 SKUs to manage that is crazy. What were some of the shipping best practices that you implemented? So Amazon was kind of the king of customer service and their standards of fast and free, we really brought that into our business. eBay had like their requirements was three to five days, but we, our goal was to always exceed it. And so we wanted to mirror Amazon's best practices of two day shipping into a three to five day environment. And nobody else was doing that. And so I think our customers recognize the fact that, dang, these guys really deliver above and beyond what the expectations are. And so for that, that just remained a focus. And so our best practices is, if the order came in before two o'clock, we wanted to get it out that same day. And our shipping team and our warehouse team bought into that strategy and it really served us really well moving forward. So kind of, I think a lot of people's philosophies do the bare minimum that's required and we always tried to exceed that. And so that was kind of the best practice for us. We also utilized the USPS, the US Postal Services flat rate system, which I don't think a lot of other people were doing. A lot of people were shipping via UPS and FedEx and just kind of paying whatever. The rate, we figured out the items that fit best in this fixed rate deal. And so if we could condense the most money into a fixed rate box, like that went straight to the bottom line. And so we really found a ton of efficiencies and customer satisfaction through some of those best practices. Yeah. It's crazy thinking about how to take 40,000 SKUs and be able to take a purchase order in and then just be able to really quickly identify where it is in the inventory and put it in a box and ship it to the right person. Is that kind of what you guys were doing and trying to automate that process effectively? We started in a garage and so the inventory was just laying on the floor all the way around the garage. And so there was no automation, there was no like SKU, we were not tracking SKUs, we just, the orders would come in, we'd print it off and we'd walk through the garage and try to figure out where this thing was. And so that was the early days. And then quickly we figured out, like if this thing is gonna grow, we need to have appropriate space. And so we bought our first warehouse and we set up, at the time, we still laid all the inventory around along the walls of the warehouse. It was just a bigger warehouse and we had one shelf. And that was like our hot shelf where our fastest moving items just fit onto one shelf like you'd find in your garage. But that quickly turned into like 350 hot shelves. And so we actually then had to figure out a way to catalog the inventory and just like basic, basic inventory management stuff that we were just learning as we went. We always said we were writing the blueprint as we were building the house for that business. And I think that's true of a lot of entrepreneurs that are just like get in and figure out. We failed a lot, but we failed fast. And we just, we evolved really quickly and adjusted. And so that was just like the mantra of this business. And we tried to, our big, I always told people, I have no idea what we sold specifically. I never worried about the products. I was, there was plenty of people in our organization that worried about the products. I was worried about the people and the process. And that was exactly what I worried about in the restaurant business and all the other businesses. If I could figure out the people and make a process that was sustainable and scalable, then the products didn't matter. We could sell doll clothes or we could sell auto body tools. It did not matter. We just, we focused on hiring really great people. Yeah. Stellar people in process. Yeah. How did it end up coming up this innovation in technology and Sioux Falls gig? And how did you end up being like, okay, it's time to make this transition? So that was interesting. So about a year ago, our current mayor, Paul Tenhaken was, he was going through his campaign. And so we invited him out to our business as one of the fast growing businesses in South Dakota. And he was interested in seeing kind of what our operation was. And so we invited him out to our warehouse and we talked him through our process and we kind of told him like how fast we were growing. He was really interested in that piece. And that was really the first time that I had met him and had any discussions with him. And from there, he goes on to be elected mayor and he takes a class through the Harvard Bloomberg initiative on city leadership. And it was at that class that he really started to be exposed to this idea of innovation and I teams in cities. And the Bloomberg program was really supportive of some of these cities that are trying this method of innovation, city innovation. And so when he got back from that leadership initiative, he called me up and said, hey, I wanna rebrand this department in Sioux Falls that used to be central services. And it was kind of the central dumping ground for all issues. Like IT lived there and multimedia support lived there, which is basically just a place where all the problems started to flow to you. And he's like, I wanna take this department and really turn it from being reactive into being a strategic partner city-wide. And he said, would you be interested? And actually I said, that's amazing. I think it's a great idea. Let me know how that goes for you. And so he kind of let that settle. And then a few weeks later, he called me. So I am gonna move forward with doing this. And would you be interested in being the director of this department? And I'm like, no. He called me on the day that I was golfing with the CEO of Why Is It a Share? Like, I'm like, oh, the mayor's calling and answering. So he's basically asking me if I wanna do this while I'm sitting next to my partner in the business. And my first response was no. Like I'm in a great place. We're a fast growing company. We're killing it. And he's like, well, you know, if you think about it, I'd like to talk to you one more time about it. And we ended up having one more lunch conversation. And we just talked about the impact that this position can make and the goals and the objectives and the type of work that it would be doing. And I really had this deep down pit of my stomach service minded approach. I was, I'm currently the president of my church council. And our church went through a really tough phase where a lot of people left the church and I was just called to bring these people back in and be involved. And so I had this thing in my stomach that just told me I wanted to be doing something more meaningful than dropping money to the bottom line of a fast growing business. And so that lunch where he ends up saying, you know, I want you to do this. I said, I don't know anything about technology. I don't know anything about innovation. He's like, you don't have to worry about that part. You just need, I need you to lead a team. And I'm like, leading teams I can do. I know how to build teams. I know how to be a great leader or try to be a great leader. And you knew something about innovation technology with doing wiser. I mean, that's... The work that we were doing there was some of the same work that we would need to be doing in the city of Sioux Falls. And so I had, I went through a little period of discernment where I talked to my pastor and talked to some people that I trusted and it had to be outside my circle of wiser distributing because I didn't want to like get into a negotiation with him. It wasn't about the money really. It was really about the call to serve. And I can't remember. It was a local business owner that said, you know, Jason, you took this company from one to 70 million. Awesome, cool story. Like taking it from 70 million to 100 million, it's cool, but it's not as cool as doing something that impacts 100,000 people. You know, when you grow a company from 70 to 100 million, you might affect the CEO and the leadership team and maybe your 150 employees, but the stuff that you could be doing for the city would affect 200,000 people for generations to come. And so when I started to wrap my head around the fact that this type of work could be really impactful for a huge chunk of people that maybe can't fight for themselves, that's really what made me take the leap from private sector into the public sector. So I've been doing that for 10 months now. It's been a fast ride this last year, but. Yeah, this is huge. Okay, so all right. So now let's endeavor into what this all is. So you kind of gave us this idea at the very, you mentioned this like Bloomberg is now looking at fast growing like mid-market cities and they have kind of their eye on helping those cities that are geared towards this not reactive problem solving, but rather strategic development of innovation inside their cities. And Bloomberg is like taking the mayors and bringing them to these leadership development. So it's like, again, for like working with you guys on this thing called What Works City, WWC. And so this is like, there's 51 checkpoints or milestones that these cities can have and that if you get 26 of them done, you get this first round of certification. So is this kind of then, this is kind of like, would you say that like the template for innovation and technology inside of growing cities? Yeah, so we, for us in Sioux Falls, this department did not exist 10 months ago, 12 months ago. So we're basically birthing this thing from scratch. Making the blueprint as you go. Yeah, we're building the innovation blueprint as we build the innovation house. We recognize that lots of cities that are working towards this What Works City certification are doing work that would translate to Sioux Falls in a meaningful way. And instead of just kind of using gut instincts to make decisions, these cities are starting to use data to drive decision making. Everything from budget to where they build fire stations to what works in libraries and best practices and stuff like that. So this What Works City certification is really important and they give you a nice little framework on what you need to do to get this certification and every step along the way is basically relating to data and data governance, building a data governance team and engaging with citizens using data, making your data visible and open to the public and accessible. And so our goal is to achieve this certification within the next year. And so we've got like nine out of the 26 steps done, we think, to their satisfaction. And so we're putting a really focused effort to achieve those next 15 to 20 things that help us get this certification. Not only because the certification kind of gives you a little check mark and a status symbol, but because if we accomplish this, we will have actually been using data to drive decisions. And I think that's really important in a world where there's limited FTEs or full-time equivalents. There's limited capacity in workers. You can't just like keep hiring people. We're a unionized environment like with our civil service employees and there's just rules. You just can't add and take away people like you can in the private sector. And so we have to do more with the same or less people. And normally in the private sector, if you wanted to do a new initiative, you just hire that person, you'd send them on their way. Well, you just can't do that in the public sector. And so for us, data is gonna be crucial to maximize the use of our people and to make those decisions easier and more clear. And so we're really committed to this What Work City certification plan. I love the making decisions based on data and really building like this, this data refinery in a sense, actually being able to take in all these streams of data inputs and then make sense of them and make the best decisions. Eve, this example where with like city planning stuff, it was just whatever a couple of people that would get together in a room and just talk about it. And only three people would show up versus when you actually took the conversation and brought it online and then you had 10,000 views, you had people engaging in the comments and then it was roads, potholes, and what was the third one? Yeah, so just basically infrastructure. Infrastructure in general was what people wanted to be solved and then the city planning was able to move forward with that instead of just what three people in a room were talking about. So basically what you're doing is you're getting to what is happening at the edge in these more, you're closer to what's happening in people's real lives because you're bringing them into the equation and then they're then able to contribute to what developments they want to happen. I make a lot of correlations to the private sector and what we did for our best practices on fast and free, basically that means making the user experience better and bringing the user closer to what their desired outcome is. And so for us, citizen engagement is all about the user experience. And that's actually, it was debatable. I'm in the room with a bunch of people from all over the country that are doing this type of work and a lot of these people are 20 and 30 year veterans in the industry and in their cities and I'm sitting here with 10 months under my belt saying, why am I here, like why am I, but I'm so close to being one of those end users that I think that's an advantage. And so the newer you are kind of in this role, it helps you understand like what these users wanted. And so for me personally, like my favorite way to interact was not to go down to the library and sit in a town hall to participate. My favorite way to interact was through social media, through Facebook, through Twitter, through whatever and listening to podcasts and interacting and watching shows. I was not interested in sitting through a six hour seminar on public works, right? But I could engage in a way that was easy and efficient for me. And so that's what we're trying to do with our citizen engagement too. We're trying to bring the issues into your living room so you can make it, you know, everybody's busy. And so we don't want you to drive down the library and sit in this meeting, we want to bring it to you. And so when the mayor, he's got a great following on social media. When he raised up, hey, what do you guys think we should do with our budget next year? The comments just started, it was just a common, every other one was roads, roads, roads, potholes, potholes, streets, infrastructure. We went through a phase where we built a lot of cool things in Sioux Falls like the Aquatic Center and the Premier Center. Those are great venues to go, but at the end of the day, people wanted to take care of what we've already got. That was just a common theme. And so through social media and through these social engagements, that became a priority for us in our budgeting. And 85% of our budget next year is gonna be spent on roads and infrastructure. We're not buying new things that are cool and exciting. We're taking care of what we've already got. That was all made possible through the citizen engagement tool that we're using. So this is great, so we engage citizens and then we take the data stream that we get from the engagement and then we close the feedback loop by acting on what they want, which is in this case, it was roads and potholes and infrastructure in general. So then what were some of those nine other ones that you guys have out of the 51 and then what works? A lot of it had to do with public facing dashboards. And so we take that data and we built the dashboard. That was a quick win that we got early in my role is to create a citizen dashboard that lives right on our main page. And we've kind of got nine KPIs that we think are important that citizens are constantly asking about. Like if you were on a desert island, how could you tell how your city of Sioux Falls was doing? Hopefully this dashboard tells that story. And so that was kind of the first, that was one of the nine things. What are some of the metrics that are on that? So like things to do with crime, things to do with pool attendance, that's passionate for people is pool attendance. That kind of shows how your parks and rec and culture is doing. Ambulance response time, fire response time, a lot of public safety type of things. The other thing that's on there is like the number of building permits and the valuation of building permits. I think that's a good indicator for the trend of building permits to show that people are investing in the city. Population, just some of those type of things. Sales tax growth, that's like we're funded, the entire city is funded through sales tax really. And so keeping an eye on that, the effects that our local sales tax climate has had based on some rulings that they've made on online sales tax has actually proven to be a little bit of an accelerator, which we kind of knew that it would be. But if there was a huge dip in sales tax, we knew that we'd maybe have to make some changes in the future budget cycles that are more conservative. But with sales tax growth being positive, we can be a little bit more aggressive in some of the initiatives that we're pushing out. So those are the, and then each one of those things has a more info button where you can, we wanted it super easy for Joe, Joe Average user to be able to take a visual, but we also wanted accessible for the debt geeks and the data nerds that wanted to dive in deeper. And so each one of those opens up to a deeper trailing history and so we focused a lot on that. And we're gonna actually try to roll the concept of dashboards into all the different departments. We think it's a really good accountability tool. If you don't measure it, you can't really manage it. And so if all of our departments had their own dashboard streets, for example, like number of potholes and number of road miles and whatever, if they have that dashboard accessible to them, it's a tool that can help them maintain accountability. We want that to exist for all the departments in the city. I love that the visualization of data, making it clean, making it accessible, making it transparent and then being able to act on it fast, what about some of those other ones? A lot of it is the storytelling component, having a governance, having a team built to work on this, having the mayor's, some of it as simple as having your mayor tweet or publicly endorse the support of this program. And they want it to really be like a top-down approach in terms of support. And so again, we started with some of the easiest things, like simple things of just having the mayor being involved. One of them is design a process that uses data to make policy. And so that's the one we're working on right now. It's not checked off yet, but when you start to get to that level that says, based on this data, we're gonna write this policy, city ordinance that says this. And so we're getting there. Like, yeah, you gave me some other examples on proactively inspecting buildings that would have prevented 85% of fires. This is kind of, this is really critical stuff, so you can actually crunch data to predict. In a sense, this is like building pathology or something you could call it, like the disease of buildings over time and their fire sensitivity and proclivity for fire to occur. And so if you can then manage that and prevent it, then you can save lots of money, save lives, et cetera. The fire department has a certain amount of FTEs dedicated to building inspections. They can get to X number per year, just period. And it's not 100% of the buildings in Sioux Falls. They cannot get to all of them. And so our team set up a table of data that cross-referenced square footage, age of the building, proximity to fire hydrants, like a lot of different data points. And we figured out which ones were the most impactful and we used that data and we said, if we, instead of just canvassing the whole city in some random order, if we were intentional about the inspections based on the priority that the data says that we should, we could have taken those same two FTEs, prioritized them into the high-risk properties, not inspected the ones that had zero risk of fire based on the data. And we could have inspected 85% of the fires that happened over the last 10 years proactively. And maybe would have prevented some of those fires by making code enforcement improvements or things like that. And so there again, it's like, it's taking a limited resource, which for us is personnel, ours, and deploying them intentionally rather than just random. And so for us, that's the predictive analytics piece that we're really trying to incorporate into lots of different departments. We're limited on resources, we're limited on budget, it's taxpayer money, and so you've gotta get the most bang for your buck. That's what the innovation team is really working on. I'd love to say that we're working on flying cars and back-to-the-future type of stuff, but... One day. Someday we will. Right now, we're trying to solve old problems with new ideas and new ways of doing things. Something that, and all these departments are so busy that they don't really have time or energy to focus on that type of thing, which is exactly what the innovation team is focused on. And a really simple one is like the city's growing. Like, where do you put the next fire station? Where do you put the next high school, right? How do you figure out where to do these things? Yeah, we're hoping, and we're gonna partner with a couple of the area colleges, we're gonna partner with the USD, and we're gonna partner with Augie. Both of those schools are working to build up a data analytics course and program, and we're gonna partner with them to make some of those decisions and help us make some of those decisions, and that's why we worked so hard on making our data open and accessible so that anybody can be able to take those data sets and apply it towards a project or technique. And I think it is important because you don't wanna just guess where a fire station should go. Like, there should be some real justification based on data, based on proximity, whatever the key metrics are, so that you're really intentional about, and then building the right size fire station and, you know, like all those things. So it's basically taking like the gut instinct of things and being intentional about it. You guys also built an app that geo-located potholes, which I thought was great as well, so you can do something as simple as just take a picture, and then that way it's geo-located, and that way the Public Works Department knows what if it's a pothole, what it looks like, how they can go out fast and fix it. There can be a conversation with the person that took it. It's like engaging again. There's these little wins that you guys have had. We really wanted to focus on some low-hanging fruit to build some credibility for our department and build some trust for other departments that kind of proved that what we were working on was important. And this pothole, it's not really a pothole app. It's an app that you are able to report potholes. That's the majority of the issues that are reported are potholes, but it can do everything from like, if you see graffiti on a public building, snap a picture and somebody will address it, or if the neighbor's grass is too long and instead of calling in for a code enforcement, you can just snap a picture of it and it'll work into the right departments. This was a game changer for us for a couple of different reasons. One, the citizens were yearning for something that was more efficient than calling in. Most people don't even have home phones. And so like the process of looking up the number and dialing in and talking to somebody and trying to explain it just is, it's not a good use of anybody's time. And so at their leisure, they could just snap a picture and hit one button and boom, it's in our system. And not only is it our system, but somebody from the city will respond to you. And people love the fact that there's this two-way communication. You can go back and forth. And so if somebody takes a picture of a traffic light that says this light sucks, it's too slow at this spot. Our traffic engineer will actually come in and have a conversation with you and say, well, here's why and yeah, we can work on this or maybe we should do this. And so there's this back and forth interaction, two-way communication. That's been a huge win. For the streets department, by actually being able to see a picture of the issue instead of having somebody describe it over the phone, they can then deploy the right type of equipment to the scene. So a lot of people describe what they think as a pothole that's actually a frost boil. I have no idea what the difference is, but somebody in the streets department does. And so if I would call in and describe a frost boil as a pothole, the old method is that they would send the pothole crew, but they wouldn't be equipped to fix that issue. And so this has really helped us be efficient with our people and our resources. And not only that, but it's geolocated. So instead of having a grandma call in and say, it's over near 85th and whatever, it's actually geolocated and they can drive right up to it and know exactly where it's at. And so that for us, super low cost, low implementation timeline. Engaging. And it checks a lot of the boxes of citizen engagement and creating efficiencies. And so we're looking for those kind of things. That's an example of actually applying technology towards innovation. Yes, and a low hanging fruit that you guys got to say that, hey, we got this one in and it was solid. And then how about, let's talk about, as you know, you're going for these bigger ideas as well, because you've done this process of building credibility and trust. So you have the public transit thing is kind of interesting. Like so many of the cities, especially in the United States, the United States is such a large country that we have cities, especially in the suburban areas that are quite widespread. Where basically you have to have your own personal vehicle to get around from place to place because it's inefficient for your time to use public transit. It's also just like we were just talking about, there's like a person at a time riding these buses that are on these kind of more older routes. And so this program in the city, what is it that it's, we spend $9 million on the transit system and we only bring in 600,000 in fare. So it's kind of like, what do we do about this behemoth and how do we innovate and update it? That was, I went to one of the first luncheons that I went to that the mayor was speaking at. Somebody asked him a question and he said, we've got this $9 million transit system that's failing and that's the first thing I'm gonna drop on Jason's desk on his first day of work. And I was like, what? I don't know, anything about transit. I've never even ridden one of our buses. I have no idea about anything. And so we actually, it is a mammoth behemoth monster that several task force have worked on over the last few administrations and nobody's really come up with a good solution for this. And so yeah, talk about like high expectations on day one, that's what happened with this. But we were supported through the Harvard Bloomberg team and they actually sent us a design coach that taught us the principles of human-centered design. And so I built a team that was made up of 12 different departments in the city or 10 different departments in the city, made up of 14 people. Intentionally, they had no history or knowledge of transit because we wanted to approach this with a mentality that was totally fresh, totally clean. So my requirements were, you had to have high energy, you had to be really open to change and you couldn't be the type of person that said, this is how we've always done it before. Like that's a game changer. It kills the game in the innovation world. If you come to the table and just say, we can't do that because that's not how we've always done it before. Like that's completely the opposite of what our department's goals are. And so we built this team and we studied the transit system. We figured out that we had these routes from 20, 30 years ago over the same routes and they were just- I just want to say there's so many potentials for like combinatorics in terms of ideas and where you could go. And so just drop that from your mentality, this idea of like, oh, the way that we've been doing it is best. It's like there's so much more future options that could be better. And so like to creatively explore those is so critical. I think very similar to that thinking is the rules say that we can't do that. And so we can't do that. And my approach is, so can we change the rules? Can you rewrite policy? Can you lobby for new laws so that the rules aren't this thing that limits you? And I'm not saying we should just go out and change a bunch of rules or break rules or anything like that, but like when people fall back on that's not how we can't do it because of this or it's not how we've always done it. That stifles innovation and creativity and everything right there. And it's just over. So that's my mantra. My team knows that. It's like, do not come to me and say we can't do this because of that. Like we have to tell me why we can do something. Not why we can't do something. And so this team approached it like that having no experience and we figured out that this $9 million a year system was only bringing in 600,000 in fares. We could literally, we figured out on day one we could literally give everybody that rode the bus a free Uber ride. We could pay for their Uber ride and we could save like $3 million a year. And so it's just because Sioux Falls you can get anywhere you wanna go in basically 15, 20 minutes, right? If you have a car, you can leave your house and get anywhere you need to go in 15, 20 minutes. And so public transit because we're kind of a sprawling city the fixed routes have not grown as the city's grown. They've been centralized. And so all the services we figured out through the human and center design process and interviewing riders that actually use the system that it was failing them in a way that the services were getting pushed to the edge of town affordable housing and healthcare clinics. We interviewed one of the large employers in town they said that the people that they hired had to go get drug testing at a facility that wasn't covered by a public transit route. And these people didn't have vehicles. And so for what they wanted was for us to create a fixed route that would loop people into that thing. Well, the cost of adding that fixed route is enormous and we're never gonna bring enough fairs to cover that cost. And so we had to really think about it from a completely different angle. And what our group came up with through tons of engagement with riders and stakeholder interviews and talking to people at the car lovers that are never gonna use it no matter what, you know, that was a stakeholder group we still wanted their opinion on and employers and school district and everybody. We had tons and tons of these meetings. We figured out that it didn't operate where people wanted like it doesn't run on Sundays. Well, one of the biggest users of our transit system is in the hospitality area, the housekeepers of hotels. Their number one day of the week for work is on Sundays. And so the people that needed it the most were not using it on the day that they needed it the most. And so we tried to solve it from how do we get more coverage, more times a day, more frequency, some of these people we figured out we're spending an hour and a half on these loops to get to their appointment. Well, if they're doing that twice a day they're basically burning three hours of their life every day. Where they could just be doing 20 minutes. Right, and so our goal was to, could we find a system that had more coverage, more times, faster and do it for as much or less as the current system? And what we came up with is this idea to take our existing fleet of buses. We have like 23 buses in the city that run on 12 different routes. Could we use those almost like a shared lift or a shared Uber? And there's lots of cities across the country that are exploring the ideas of microtransit and transit on demand. And we kind of came up with a hybrid approach that we could use our existing fleet, which we own so we don't have any extra costs or whatever. We could use our existing drivers. And instead of driving around the city with empty buses for people that aren't riding, we just park the buses until somebody needs it. And we just go pick them up. And along the way, if they're similar people on a similar route, you could start to like, find some efficiencies in having this shared bus route. And so we- It's almost as though that it should just be, you already own the buses. So I understand that that is an asset that is owned already. But there's so much inefficiency with driving a bus for a single person that's trying to take the bus versus if the single person was in a, just a car being driven by a person. But then you'd have to purchase those assets and stuff. But this is interesting that more cities that are more spread out, they're potentially more efficient for the city to almost do like a shared Uber system for public transit instead of potentially buses. Whereas when you're in like metros, people are stacked on top of each other. And so the population density is there so that you can have the route that's right that has a building that block has maybe 10,000 people living on just that block. And so it makes more sense to have a bus, the buses going through there versus here, it's like what, like, you know, maybe like a hundred people live on a block. So we're actually, again, hoping to use data. So that's gonna be our, you know, whatever technology that we implement here, one of the rules or one of our demands is that we're gonna have, we're gonna own the data, the ride data, the origin and destination data. We think that there's probably, we're hoping that we find reasons to downsize these buses, you know, and there's gonna be maybe be a mix of 10 huge buses and 10 half-sized buses and 10 shuttles or vans. And depending on where people are going and how many people are moving, like you deploy the right-sized vehicle, you know, to the right-sized situation. It'll be more efficient for people's time and saving money from the budget as well. It's quite interesting the way you can innovate on something that's like archaic, like that transit system. We think that there's gonna be room to bring the fixed routes back in based on the origin and destination. There's gonna be some fixed routes that make sense based on some density. And so we're looking at a heat map right now of the number of available jobs in relationship to where the affordable housing or low-income housing is and figuring out if there's justification for creating a route just between those, you know, those areas. And so we don't have any data now. That's the thing. This archaic system doesn't really have data that's useful. And so we're doing this not only to increase the coverage but to start to get some of that data that helps us make better decisions on where to put these things. So that's a really exciting program. It's mammoth. I have no idea if it's gonna, we really hope it's gonna work. But if it doesn't, we'll just have to pivot and find something else. Because at the end of the day, the people that are using the public transit now need it. They don't have access to a car. They can't afford a car. And so we have to make this accessible and we have to figure this thing out. And we're just hoping that we can exhaust all the options for this before we have to go to the council and ask for more money. Yeah, we believe in you the way that you're looking at tackling this is great. Yeah. All right, 5G, what's going on with Sioux Falls' passion for becoming one of the first mid-market cities with 5G technology? John Thune is a state senator. He sits on the committee that is really working on this. He's a home, Sioux Falls is his hometown. And so he was passionate about making his hometown one of the first mid-market cities to have 5G. So we brought in, he helped us facilitate conversations with FCC chairman and targeted Sioux Falls as an option. I'll just tell you that a lot of it is out of our hands. It's in the hands of the carriers that actually are gonna be putting up the towers. The role that the city can play and our innovation team can play is we're trying to do the best we can to facilitate ease of access to the permitting process and the design process. We're trying to take out as much friction as possible to streamline this process so that, I mean they're doing this in cities all over the country. The cities we are hypothesis is that the cities that are the best partners and make it the easiest for these carriers to deal with it are gonna be the ones that get it first. And so we have weekly updates and interactions with both major carriers and so we've actually got 18T and Verizon. Yeah, for Sioux Falls where we've got contracts with 18T and Verizon right now. We've got 10 tower locations actually in our permitted process and the plans are being reviewed and I think they're set to go up in the next few weeks. We're hoping that these go well and then they wanna do 500 more in the next year or so. I like how you explain that it's better for us to just help enable the more frictionless process for innovation and then that can then catalyze lots of other innovation and growth that happens in the city versus just trying to slow things down and have profiteer on some of the towers going up and whatnot. I do and have mentioned this on the show before just the importance of slowing down the sense of figuring out some of the longitudinal effects that 5G technology could potentially have on our biology and there's a lot of other things that funnel into this with Neurotech and Biotech and AI and the way that we engage with smart devices and then how we engage with each other. We just need to do a little bit more tests on how these things are affecting us prior to necessarily just running forth blindly into the transhuman transition that we're going through. Totally agree with you. We're definitely not the experts on the health or any of that type of thing but we also don't want to be, we don't want to come up with solutions to problems that we aren't sure exist. And so we just want to be a good partner in the process and we'll let the experts sort through some of those best practices. But the stark truth is that there's way more devices in this world than there are people. And that's growing exponentially. It is, the IoT era is coming. Yeah, tens of billions of IoT devices now. Everything from healthcare and doing surgeries remote and all those things. 5G really, a lot of people think of it like, oh cool, I can download a two hour movie in 14 seconds. Well, that's nice but the real fact of the matter is that we need more lanes for these devices to travel and so that we can start to communicate in real time. You know, this public transit thing probably involves some version of connected vehicles, autonomous vehicles in the future. 10 years ago we didn't have Uber and so we don't know what's gonna be here in another 10 years but we think that the benefits of 5G in a connected world, in a device world really outweighs the resistance for why not to do it. And so we're, again, we're just trying to like set the playbook up for success and be good partners with these people and so far there are feedback from the carriers that were like top notch city for hospitality and creating this frictionless process and so that's the track we'll take for the next several months as we implement this. I like how you also mentioned this to me, that there's this FirstNet which is the dedicated 5G channel for first responders and AT&T won that contract. I just like how we have at least the foresight to say that, hey, there should be a dedicated channel for first responding. Yeah, that's huge, it's foresight. We, and our city's contract is with Verizon but knowing that AT&T has this contract with FirstNet, we're at least testing it. There's 20 devices in the city right now in our vehicles, our police and fire vehicles that are testing the FirstNet system. So we're not, we're not, I am not a fan of like all or nothing. I love pilots, I love testing. I love, yeah, I love trying it and there's this like, there's this phrase that one of the professors that I listened to said that there's like this entropy of shittiness which is when you try to roll something out and it's like a two-year timeline for the rollout, by the time that it actually gets rolled out, things have changed so much that you don't roll out the right thing. And so instead of that, like being agile and testing and trying new things all the time, like I think is way better than setting this strict timeline that you're probably gonna screw up along the way and then rush to do this thing that's wrong. And We're newer technologies already out by that time. Yeah, so what is the harm in testing this thing and trying this thing and at least getting the information and so that's how it works. Cities are kind of like then like little permutations of different creative potentials and so to be able to run those like FirstNets and whatnot out. Okay, let's talk about what has been your relationship with the divine or with the source or God? What's been your relationship with that? So I'm ELCA Lutheran. That's my practice and we've kind of have been from, and I was baptized early age and we grew up kind of in the church and vacationed Bible school and Bible camp in the summer and so my relationship is I think fairly strong with God, my version of God. Like I don't, I think there's room for everybody to have their own beliefs and I really don't try to push certain beliefs a strong way but I just appreciate the fact that everybody kind of has their own opinions on how things should go and I try to surround myself by like-minded, like-cultured people and for us my church, the fellowship of the people that go to my church is just this really strong support network. My dad was killed in a racing accident when I was 14 years old, so 25 years ago and so my mom instantly became a single mom of two kids that were active, you know, I'm 14 and 11 year old kids, no father figure and our church family really surrounded us with support and they helped get me and my brother to our events and so I said earlier, like this golden rule of do unto others as you'd like to be done unto you, I believe in that and so my faith and my relationship with God is in that vein. I like to be around, I like to help people, I like to be around people that like to help other people and I think like that grassroots effort of being nice to people and being kind is really powerful. So- And then tell us about this feeling of communion with a higher power, how does that feel like to you? I struggle, I'll be honest, I struggle with science as part of this, right? Like I'm a trust but verify kind of guy but there's been so many moments that just seem a little too coincidental to- You know, synchronicities. Coincidence, you know, and so my relationship, it's been like a back and forth struggle, you know, and like when you lose your dad at an early age, you have doubts and you like, but then like somehow you get rushed back into this thing and so I just, I trust, I just trust, I try to be very gracious for the things that I've been given and you know, try to, a lot of people I think pray in their worst moments but I think you should also pray in some of your best moments and so I like to, it's, I think it's just a constant evolution of learning and knowledge and relationship and so I don't have all the answers and so I think it's still yet to be determined but continues to evolve and I feel really good about teaching my kids, the messages and the stories that I've learned and hopefully that kind of a church relationship, faith relationship translates into your community relationship and so that's kind of where I'm at with that. Do you feel like consciousness emerges from the process of biological evolution or is there some spirit or soul that comes to meet the physical body for an experience? I've never been asked that question before. I say it one more time. If consciousness emerges from biological evolution or if there's some sort of a spirit or soul that comes and takes its seat in the body. I kind of think there's a little bit of a mix of both. It can be both, yeah. You know, like the biological, I watch both my kids be born and take their very first breath. I can't explain that, you know, even though I think the science and biology is really the catalyst for this but it's just amazing, like the way that the brain starts to fire and there's synapses and whatever just starts to fire immediately. It just seems like it's too complex to be random, you know, so I think it's a little mix of both. Where the biology like starts this, but you know, the spirit really like starts to light you up the first time, like you start to, the eyes recognize the parents' eyes and so I haven't spent enough time to answer that really well other than my gut instinct is I think there's a little bit of room for both. What would be a principle that you would recommend young people and adults moving into the exponential technology age? What could maximize people bringing their gifts into the world? I think that lots of people have really good ideas. And I talked about this earlier, the people that are living in the middle, I believe are the very minority in being vocal and sharing their ideas and sharing their opinions and starting these conversations. And so like if I could snap my fingers and change anything, I would change all these people that are sitting in their house on their couch and have an opinion but aren't sharing it to start sharing it and to start having these conversations. And I think that sometimes these polar opposites get to this standstill because they're just like so off of each other that if like the sensible middle ground would start to have some of these conversations, like we could merge some of these things and get a lot more things done. It just feels like we're at a standstill on things that we don't need to be at a standstill on and it's either A or B and there's nothing in between that can smooth out the middle. I love that, get the middle more empowered to spread its creativity and nuance out and try and bring people together. Do you think we're in a simulation? I do not. Tell us more, why? When I think of simulation, I think of the movie Matrix and I think this is real. I don't think that there's. What is real? Yeah, well I just know that my physical body probably is going to exist for about 78 years, right? And so all these things that are happening now, just like I don't think there's do-overs on any of these things, you know? So I think that this time on earth is the physical nature. This is your physical, one physical chance to have a life on earth. And beyond, I believe in heaven and I believe our souls go to heaven and so while I'm here, I don't really think it's a simulation, I just think it's a stage. There's like pre-birth and then birth and life and then death and post-life and I think they're all stages. What do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? I think the most beautiful thing is the hope of a child. They're so pure and I think of just the fact that they've never been predisposed of any notions. For them, literally anything is possible until it has been taken away from them and so just like that purity of the naivete of a child and the hope of a child and so I think that's really, when we're trying to solve things like the transit, it's not really for you and me, it's like for our kids and people that aren't even born yet and so it's for these future generations and- Selfless service. Yeah, the possibility you're kind of endless, I think that's awesome, just awesome. Love that purity likewise. Jason, this has been so awesome. Thank you so much for joining us on the show and teaching us about innovation in the city of Sioux Falls, it's been a blast. These 10 months have been a blur and I love talking about it and sharing it. 10 months ago this was not a real thing and now it's real and so I'm trying to try to tell as many people about it as possible because it's just like really cool and impactful work and- Future of cities. I think that that's, I think every city is dealing with some of the same issues that we're dealing with and so if there's other cities that see what we're doing and they can take pieces of what we're doing and put it in their city, I think that's super, super powerful. Totally different from the private sector where it's like you have these secrets and you keep them all to yourself. In the public sector, you want to share these things and collaborate as much as possible and so- Help each other in that sense. I love that aspect about it too. Openness and transparency in that sense. Thank you again for coming on. Super fun conversation. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Let us know what you're thinking about innovation in general, future cities in general. Check out the links in the bio below sufalls.org as well as Jason's Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Have more conversation with your friends, your families, coworkers, people online about the future of cities and the topics that we talked about. Also support the artist, the entrepreneurs, the spiritual leaders, the organizations in your communities that you believe and support them and help them grow support simulation. Our links are in the bio below to our PayPal, Patreon, Cryptocurrency. You can design cool merch and get paid. All those links are in the bio below and also go and build the future everyone. Manifest your dreams into the world. We love you very much. Thank you for tuning in and we will see you soon. Peace.