Mexico City | Far Flung

Summary

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TED Talks Daily: Far Flung: Mexico City

Release Date: September 22, 2025
Host: Salim Reshamwala (Far Flung), cross-published on TED Talks Daily
Featured Guests: Jorge Cáñez ("Peatónito"), Gabriela Gómez-Mont

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Episode Overview

This episode, airing during National Hispanic Heritage Month, transcends the usual TED Talk formula by spotlighting Mexico City—one of the world’s largest and most complex urban environments—and its extraordinary civic creativity. Guided by host Salim Reshamwala, the episode explores how citizens, artists, and government visionaries work together to harness “the imagination of the masses” to solve everyday urban problems, from protecting pedestrians to crowdsourcing public transport data and constitution-writing. Through personal stories and innovative initiatives, listeners see how community spirit is Mexico City’s superpower.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Meet Peatónito: Mexico City’s Real-Life Pedestrian Superhero

• Who is Peatónito?
  Jorge Cáñez, a former activist and now public servant, dons a luchador mask and cape to advocate for pedestrian rights in a city shaped for cars.
• Origin Story:
  • His journey started as a joke, inspired by Mexican wrestling (“lucha libre”), until he realized the power of visual activism to boost awareness.

    “It all started like a joke, like, yeah, let's do it just for fun... And then suddenly it became a great idea to communicate the message.” — Jorge Cáñez [05:46]

  • Costume and symbolism matter: his mask (designed by his brother) and cape (sewn by his grandmother) are decorated with crosswalk stripes, making pedestrians visible and their cause memorable.
• On-the-Ground Tactics:
  • Escorting vulnerable pedestrians, painting crosswalks and bikeways, physically removing (pushing back) cars blocking pedestrian areas, even climbing on cars to make a point—playfully but powerfully.

    “My mother tells me not to do this anymore, but, you know, it's only walking on the top of the car. Only to transmit the message that that's the space of the pedestrians and cars are not welcome here.” — Jorge Cáñez [11:29]

• From Activist to Public Servant:
  • Joining government offered new perspectives—and frustrations.

    “The first thing that you learn in the government is that there's no power and there's no budget. You have to figure out how to make everything by your own.” — Jorge Cáñez [12:12]

  • His time inside city hall increased his humility and understanding of the bureaucracy–citizen divide.

    “Every advocate should work at least once in the government to know how this interaction... works.” — Jorge Cáñez [12:47]

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2. The Lab for the City: Channeling Collective Imagination

• Gabriela Gómez-Mont’s Vision:
  A journalist and artist turned city official, Gabriela founded Laboratorio Para la Ciudad (“Lab for the City”), a government group designed to infuse civic management with creativity, data, and grassroots ideas.

  “Half [the team] came from the urban and political sciences, and half…from humanities... everything that we did sat in between.” — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [13:07]

• Challenging Old Assumptions:
  • Language as an Entry Point:
    The lab emphasized language—provocations instead of policies—to attract and activate civil society.

    “If we did not manage to create a space that became fascinating to people outside of government, everything was going to implode in our hands.” — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [14:32]

  • Purpose:
    To reframe government as a “Ministry of Imagination”—inviting citizens to co-create city life.

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3. Crowdsourcing Urban Solutions: Mapatón and Beyond

• The Pesero Problem:
  • Mexico City’s informal bus system ("peseros") includes over 30,000 buses with no official map—navigation relies on word of mouth.

    “As a user… the only way of actually figuring out how to get from one point to another is… asking five people and then averaging out answers or who looks more trustworthy. But there's no bus map whatsoever.” — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [18:42]

• Mapatón: The Game-Changing App
  • Rather than top-down mapping, the Lab built a participatory game: riders use an app to document routes, earning more points for longer, less-frequented journeys.

    “Kind of like if Pokémon Go actually helped you get somewhere.” — Salim Reshamwala [19:48]

  • This yielded the city’s first comprehensive map of the sprawling pesero system—and fostered pride and community.

    “When you create a narrative that people want to be part of, people will come.” — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [20:28]

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4. Crowdsourcing Democracy: Mexico City’s Constitution

• Constitutional Challenge:
  • Mexico City only recently gained the ability to draft its own constitution.
  • Fear of elitism: How do you prevent a constitution from being disconnected from its people?

    “You need the people to believe in it, for them to feel like it's their own, not just a piece of paper handed down from above.” — Salim Reshamwala [22:01]

• Public Involvement:
  • The lab developed an online platform where residents submitted and campaigned for constitutional ideas. Supported petitions got presented to the drafting assembly.
  • Results? Social inclusion (LGBT rights, disability rights), environmental guarantees (minimum green space per resident), and, crucially, a sense of ownership.

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5. Space for Children: The Peatoninos Program

• Rethinking “Averages”:
  • Official stats show Mexico City has lots of green space overall—but it’s unevenly distributed.

    “Averages can be tyrannical.” — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [23:51]

  • Many children, especially on the outskirts, lack access.
• Peatoninos:
  • In response, the lab launched “Peatoninos”—closing streets for play and socializing, reviving urban space for families.

    “We thought, can we do a small experiment... closing down streets on a regular basis? And so we'd go on a Sunday... and like a Pied Piper, kids would start coming out of everywhere.” — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [24:32]

  • The initiative fostered community ties and made children—5 million strong in the metro area—visible in urban planning.

    “Children are not the future of Mexico City. They are Mexico City.” — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [24:32]

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6. Lessons for Other Megacities

• Urban Crowds as Superpowers:
  • The biggest takeaway: cities must tap into citizen wisdom—not just treat residents as “mouths to feed.”

    “Your community is your superpower.” — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [27:04]

  • Government should move beyond just delivering services; it must orchestrate the talent and initiative already present.

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On Creativity in Governance:

  “We saw from the very beginning a palpable paradox... the huge loss of potential when government cannot necessarily tap into citizen talent.”
  — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [13:26]

• On Becoming a Government Official:

  “It makes you more humble, because when you're an advocate, you are always... criticizing the government. But when you are inside the government... you are in charge of taking the decisions. And it’s not easy.”
  — Jorge Cáñez [12:28]

• On Urban Participation:

  “You can view Mexico City as 21 million mouths to feed or 21 million minds to learn from.”
  — Gabriela Gómez-Mont [28:18]

• On Local Superheroes:

  “You basically have to make your community superhero for your community.”
  — Salim Reshamwala [28:08]
  “Exactly.”
  — Jorge Cáñez [28:14]

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Notable Timestamps

• 05:46 — Introduction of Peatónito and origin story
• 09:20 — Peatónito’s tactics: masking up and taking to the streets
• 12:06 — Moving from activist to government
• 13:07 — Gabriela Gómez-Mont on building the Lab for the City
• 15:12 — Language, imagination, and the “Ministry of Imagination”
• 18:42 — The problem with mapping Mexico City’s unregulated buses
• 19:48 — Mapatón: The crowd-mapping game
• 20:56–22:18 — Mexico City's new constitution and crowdsourcing the process
• 23:51 — “Averages can be tyrannical” and the genesis of Peatoninos
• 24:32 — Closing streets to reclaim play spaces for children
• 27:04 — “Your community is your superpower”—reflections for global cities

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Summary Takeaway

Mexico City’s story in this episode is a testament to the untapped power of civic imagination and collective action. Whether it’s through a playful luchador mask, crowdsourcing transportation data, or rewriting the rules of democracy, the city’s resiliency stems from the willingness of everyday people to step up, reimagine problems, and co-create solutions—often in joyful, creative, and unconventional ways. The message resounds: in megacities everywhere, the minds of the many are every bit as valuable as the city’s material resources.

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Transcript

[A]

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For coverage you control, plan on and ICHRA. Learn more at ambetterhealth.com ICHRA support for Ted Talks Daily comes from the Financial Times. Every day brings an avalanche of headlines. Some are noise. Some are designed to distract. So how do you know what's worth your attention? That's where the Financial Times comes in. The FT's journalism delivers clarity, depth and independence. No spin, no hidden agenda, just reporting you can trust. It's why leaders in business, policy and culture rely on the FT as their source of understanding of what's happening now and what's coming next. So if you want to see the bigger picture and truly grasp why it counts, stay informed with the Financial Times Source Understanding Source Clarity Source FT this message is brought to you by Apple Card. Each Apple product, like the iPhone, is thoughtfully designed by skilled designers. The Titanium Apple Apple Card is no different. It's laser etched, has no numbers, and it earns you daily cash on everything you buy, including 3% back on everything at Apple Apply for Apple Card on your iPhone in minutes, subject to credit approval. Apple Card is issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA Salt Lake City Branch terms and more at applecard.com Happy Sunday, Ted Talks Daily listeners. I'm Elise Hu. Today we're bringing you another one of our Sunday picks where we share an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. It's currently National Hispanic Heritage Month in the US and many people use it as a time to celebrate their roots across Latin America. So this week we're traveling to a city known around the world for so many things it's art, food history. It also happens to be one of the largest cities in the entire world. Harnessing the creativity of a megalopolis isn't easy, but Mexico City shows us how it's done in this episode. Episode of Far Flung, host Salim Reshamwala brings us along for a wild journey to learn about the sights, sounds and rich history that make up this incredible city. Follow a real life superhero who dons a luchador mask and a cape to protect his fellow residents from speeding cars. Learn how citizens are hacking their way to a better public transport system and see what it takes to crowdsource a constitution from a city with 21 million hearts and minds. To hear more thought provoking ideas from history, listen to Far Flung wherever you get your podcasts and learn more about Ted's [e-mail] Now onto the episode right after a quick break, Today's episode is brought to you by Wayfair. As the weather starts cooling down and days get shorter, I find myself wanting to make my space every day extra cozy. And Wayfair is exactly where I go to make that happen. I recently gave my kitchen a much needed upgrade with Wayfair's non slip kitchen mats and a colorful outdoor rug for entertaining. 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[B]

So I started Pito like 6 years ago as a defender of the right to walk the city. It all started like a joke, like, yeah, let's do it just for fun. Go out to the streets with. With my cape and my mask. No, like, like luchadores, like wrestlers. And then suddenly it became a grape idea to communicate the message.

[C]

That's Jorge Kanez. And in just a minute, we'll get to the message that made him put on a literal cape. I'm Salim Rashemwala and from ted. This is far flung. In each episode, we visit a different place around the world to understand ideas that flow from there. Shout out to women. Will a grow with Google program for sponsoring this week's episode. This week, a giant Mexico City.

[D]

Mexico City is possibly one of the hardest cities in the world to describe.

[B]

I think it's a huge city. It's a very compact city. It's full of surprises. It's a very diverse city. There's a lot of density.

[D]

It's very open. Mexico City is, as you probably know, one of the largest cities in the world. It's the largest in the western hemisphere. It's 21 million people on the metropolitan area. So everything in Mexico City is in the superlatives. Once upon a time, when the Spaniards came into the city, it was called the city of palaces, for example. And it was like this floating, too good to be true, magical space. And nowadays, I think you can find a layer and traces of every city that Mexico City has been throughout the years. So you will find pyramids, but also our colonial past as well as incredibly contemporary Mexico.

[C]

That last voice is Gabriela Gomez Mont. She's been a journalist, a visual artist, and a documentary filmmaker. But then one day, she got what she called the wildest offer, basically a blank slate to propose any type of city department that she could envision. And so she proposed and became the head of Laboratorio Parla Ciudad, the laboratory for the city, which is an amazing name. We're going to hear much more from her in a bit. She's a perfect example of what we're looking at this week, how citizens in Mexico City have figured out ways to channel the imagination of massive crowds in one of the most crowded places on Earth. And we're tackling one big Question. How might a city's thinking about those crowds change when artists and creatives get involved in government directly? So Mexico City, 21 million citizens strong, and a laboratory full of ideas on how to get things done with huge numbers of people. But first, back to our lone superhero.

[B]

Walking in Mexico City, like any other big city in the world, is almost like an extreme sport. You have to be careful in every corner. Four people die every day in the streets of Mexico City due to road crashes. Two out of those four are pedestrians. We have built cities for the cars and not cities for the people, and that's not good for anyone. We have to start to think how to build cities for the pedestrians first.

[C]

Jorge was involved with some pedestrian advocacy groups that would paint crosswalks and bike lanes, but without government permission.

[B]

One day, I went to the lucha libre, you know, the Mexican wrestling arena, and I said to myself, why not buy a mask, buy a cape, and go out to the streets as a vigilante of the pedestrians?

[C]

And here's where we get to a superhero alter ego. So Jorge, I mean, Puerto Nito, would run into traffic, escorting people through intersections, directing that traffic, running over tops of cars parked on sidewalks. I can't emphasize this enough. He literally climbs on top of cars and sort of flexes on them. He's not hugely muscular or anything, which makes the visuals extra amazing. He basically acts like a superhero to help pedestrians and motorists interact safely and with kindness. Tell me a bit about this costume. And the moment the costume stopped being a joke, what does the costume look like?

[B]

I started with a normal mask that I bought outside of the wrestling arena, but then I asked my brother to design a mask with a crosswalk and a pedestrian. And also I talked with my grandmother, and she made my cape with the pedestrian stripes, the black and white.

[C]

And what's a day of fixing the streets looks like if you wake up and you're like, okay, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna be Pietonito today. How's that day start? And what do you do during the day?

[B]

Let me tell you what I do as Pietonito in the streets. I go out and I help pedestrians to cross the street, especially elder people or people with disabilities. I paint pedestrian crosswalks. I paint sidewalks. I paint bike lanes. I push cars that are blocking the pedestrian crosswalk, so I push them backwards. I walk on the top of the cars that are parked in the sidewalk. My mother tells me not to do this anymore, but, you know, it's only walking on the top of the car. Only to transmit the message that that's the space of the pedestrians and cars are not welcome here.

[C]

Pertonito, by the way, means little pedestrian, which is a very cute name for a luchador who helps pedestrians. But even a Mexican wrestling superhero can only do so much for his country alone. So in addition to guarding the streets, Pertonito joined the government.

[B]

I started as an activist, and then I became a public servant. I was like, all right, let's do it. I'm going to have power and some budget. And the first thing that you learn in the government is that there's no power and there's no budget. You have to figure out how to make everything by your own.

[C]

What surprised you positively about working in government?

[B]

It makes you more humble, because when you're an advocate, you are always, like, shouting to the government and criticizing the government. But when you are inside the government, you are on the other side of everything. Now you are in charge of taking the decisions. And it's not easy. It's not easy. I think that every advocate should work at least once in the government to know how this interaction between the government and the citizens work.

[C]

Which brings us back to Gabriela Gomez Mont, the woman who got that chief creative officer dream job and created Laboratorio.

[D]

Para la Ciudad, which translates roughly into Lab for the City. I had a team of 20 people. Half of them came from the urban and political sciences, and half of them came from humanities. So it was everything from urban geographers, political scientists, social scientists, data experts, et cetera, et cetera, working hand in hand with artists, designers, filmmakers, historians, philosophers, writers, activists, and everything that we did sat in between. We saw from the very beginning a palpable paradox that I believe is very much the essence of Mexico City. But I see the world over, which is this huge loss of potential when government cannot necessarily tap into citizen talent. After we decide on what we called our first provocations, which was kind of like the questions that led to whole research agendas at the lab, as well as the more experimental and implementable facet of it all.

[C]

I love the language you're using. Those first provocations is such an unusual term to think about in describing a project that's associated with the government. And I saw the Laboratorio referred to as the city's Ministry of Imagination, and I love that name as well. Could you tell me a bit about why you're so engaged in these terms of imagination and provocation? Why the language around. Around the laboratorio is kind of distinct.

[D]

From normal policy language, language was for us an entry point, a different way of framing the conversations. And since from the very beginning our main or one of our main missions was to become a strange attractor, if you will, to civil society, if we did not manage to create a space that became fascinating to people outside of government, everything was going to implode in our hands. And at the time, I was the first one surprised when this started working because the battle between civil society and government, government is so historic and so entrenched, you actually have to be able to paint a vision that people want to be part of. So narrative and language for many of our projects, such as, you know, Mapaton.

[C]

Mapaton is a project where several thousand people signed up to help crowdsource information on the informal bus system of Mexico City. We'll explain more in a moment.

[A]

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[E]

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[C]

So back to Mapaton. Let's start by telling you about a problem involving that massive informal system of buses. They're called Peseros.

[D]

Imagine a clunky looking metallic white and green little beast like covering the city because there are more than 30,000 of these across in Mexico City and they are a world of their own. The only thing is that this bus system actually nobody knows or nobody knew what was really happening on the ground. As a user of the bus system, the only way of actually figuring out how to get from one point to another is let's say, asking five people and then averaging out answers or who looks more trustworthy. But there's no bus map whatsoever.

[C]

And so the lab assembled a really diverse team to try and figure out how on earth they could get citizens accurate and up to date information on all those chaotic bus routes.

[D]

The superpower of Mexico City is its community. So how do we bring in people to actually help solve this? We put out a call to Mexico City citizens and said hey, like help us map this.

[C]

So rather than create a map for those bus lines, which would have taken years and a lot of money, the lab came up with an app, mapaton, which got the bus riders to help map the paths and made it a city wide real world game that people could play. Kind of like if Pokemon Go actually helped you get somewhere and what would.

[D]

Happen is that every time that you mapped a route from point A to point B, you would get points. The app had a smart algorithm in there that would basically give points for the longest route. Just created an incentive system if you will. So that people would map out a lot of routes and do the toughest ones first. And so Mexico City, thanks to very passionate people, was able to actually have its first go at a map of the bus system. And when you create a narrative that people want to be part of, people will come.

[C]

So mapping the seemingly unmappable with a crowd and an app is one thing, but the city has gone even bigger in its civic engagement. They sort of crowdsourced the backbone of their democracy.

[D]

One of the most fascinating projects, experiments, and conversations that we held at the lab, I believe, was around Mexico City getting its first constitution.

[C]

Okay, some background. If you're thinking, wait, I don't think my city has a constitution, you're probably right. Mexico City used to be a federal district. So it operated in kind of a strange in between, neither city nor state, without much autonomy, a lot like Washington.

[D]

D.C. so we did not even have representation on a national Congress.

[C]

And as it morphed governmental form, it gained the right to a constitution. And that needed to be written scratch.

[D]

So basically, the mayor and many people from other political parties decided to put together a team of 28 notables, as they call them, that were comprised of people from very different walks of life that were supposed to do the first draft that the mayor would then hand over to the Constitutional Congress.

[C]

But then the mayor hit a challenge, because a new constitution needs experts, sure, but for it to mean something to the people, for them to care about that new constitution, you need the people to believe in it, for them to feel like it's their own, not just a piece of paper handed down from above.

[D]

So the lab got entrusted with creating a way of getting more people involved in the process.

[C]

They set up an online forum. But, nah, in case you want to try this, you can't just write a constitution via the comments section of a website. This is the government. You have to have some rules. So they made it into another kind of contest. If you had an idea you thought was important enough to include in the Constitution, you had to create a petition and get other people to support it. Petitions that got a lot of support had the chance to present their ideas to the 28 notables and even to the mayor himself. Some of these ideas that were crowdsourced in this way were more broad things, like making sure the Constitution included LGBTQI rights and rights for people with disabilities. But some were more specific, like guaranteeing a minimum amount of green space per resident. And it was all driven by the idea that everyone has the right to the city.

[D]

Believe it or not. Mexico city has almost 5 million kids in a material metropolitan level. So this is a whole Finland just of kids, and we have never addressed children.

[C]

Speaking on those very young folks, could you tell me a bit about the Peato Nino's street play program and what it was and why you had to make it so?

[D]

One of our tiny projects that became very dear to everybody's hearts was a project called Catoninos.

[C]

A phrase that Gabriela mentioned that stuck with me was averages can be tyrannical. When she said it, she was talking about how, on average, Mexico City has a ton of green space, but most of the parks are located in the city center. Huge chunks of the city have hardly any green space at all. So averaged across the city, there's a lot of green space, but that average is deceiving. Lots of those 5 million kids don't really have a place near home to play. That led Gabriela and her team to develop Peatoninos. It's a simple idea. Closing down streets to create outdoor play areas for families.

[D]

And Peto Ninos is born out of a sense of this need in many different neighborhoods. Like the places that most need. This community bonds, this being able to meet face to face, because many times there are the most dangerous places. So we thought, can we do a small experiment of basically taking these best practices from the 70s of being able to close down streets on a regular basis? And so we'd go on a Sunday already with the support of the community there and close down the streets, and like a Pied piper, kids would start coming out of everywhere. The comment that we heard so often was like, I had no idea that there were so many kids here. So to this point about having 5 million kids on a metropolitan area and the invisibility of kids on a policy level, I do think that because we never think of a megalopolis as a city of children, which it actually is, it's not the, you know, children are not the future of Mexico City. They are Mexico City. What we need is to reimagine the space and the scope and the language and the way that government activates the city and it activates its communities around it to really think that your community is your superpower and that then so many things can be readdressed.

[C]

Could you tell me what lessons Mexico City has to teach other megalopolises struggling with overcrowding? Specifically, if you, you know, if you sat down with someone from one of those cities and they were looking to you for advice on how to start on this path, like, what Would you advise them?

[D]

Much of the work that we did at the lab is how do you take the Excel sheets and make them speak in very different ways. This, I think, is the big challenge in any megalopolis that it's so easy for us to be an anonymous mass. But I also think that the inverse is also possible, as I mentioned, like the sheer civic energy that can just travel the city and create so much momentum. But for that to happen is where I believe a very fundamental shift needs to happen of the government. Yes, providing services and doing things with the complaints it receives and keeping peace, but also orchestrating citizen talent. There's so much wealth to be tapped into in these cities. And even though, again, like Mexico City might seem insurmountable in its challenges, I do believe that the resources that the city has, when seen under a different optic, is also just as gargantuan as any type of challenges that the city faces.

[C]

A big part of what Gabriela's work with the lab was trying to do was to reframe the way people see crowds. And while the lab didn't survive the most recent change in city government, many of the people on Gabriela's team are still working in government, continuing those ideas both in Mexico City and internationally. Like Gabriela said, your community is your superpower. And since we're talking superpowers, some advice from just in case you were thinking of being a luchador in the streets of your city, he wants you to know that you've got to make these ideas your own.

[B]

I have a great friend in Sao Paulo and he decided to make his own custom personalized for his city. His alter ego name is Superando, and he dresses like a Brazilian superhero with the Brazilian colors. So that's better in Brazil. So it depends where do you go? It depends how people will react with your custom and your activities.

[C]

That's great. So you basically have to make your community superhero for your community.

[B]

Exactly.

[C]

The thing that struck me in all these conversations was a sort of trust in the imaginations of masses of people. We talk a lot about big data, but it's easy to underestimate all that individual creativity. At one point in our conversation, Gabriela said, you can view Mexico City as 21 million mouths to feed or 21 million minds to learn from. From here's to Minds, y'.

[A]

All.

[C]

Far Flung with Salim Rushmwala is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsome of Magnificent Noise for ted. Our production staff includes Sabrina Farhee Andaluja.

[D]

Noel Solo, Huete Gitana, Elise Blennerhasset Kim, Naderfeyn Peterson, Angela Chang and Michelle Quint.

[C]

With the guidance of Roxanne hi Lash and Colin Helms. Our fact checker is Alejandra Vazquez. Ad stories are produced by Transmitter Media. This episode was mixed and sound designed by Luis Gill. Our executive producer is Eric Newsome. Special thanks to our sponsor, Women Will a Grow with Google Program. I'm Salim Rushemwala.

[E]

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