In this 141st in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about Portland, which has been our home town for four years. It is a city that we are now leaving. Portland has amazing nature, culture, food and people. But Portland is falling apart, despite a strong tax base, and amazing ingenuity in its people and businesses.Get a “Keep Portland WEIRD” shirt at our store: https://www.darkhorsestore.org/product-page/keep-portland-weird...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, livestream number 141.
I am Dr. Brett Weinstein, this is Dr. Heather Hying, and you may notice that we are back in the Portland studio.
We did, in fact, move.
I came back earlier to start, well, not start, we've been packing.
I came back and was packing.
Heather joined me a couple days later.
Zach is now sitting in the producer's chair for what will be the last broadcast from here.
Here we are in our Portland studio, our final live stream from Portland.
We'll be breaking down the studio as soon as we finish here, and coming to you next week and in the future from our new home, about which we will talk about today.
So today is going to be dedicated to talking about Portland, which has been our home for four years and which we love, but which is doing a very poor job of staying awesome, even though it still has a lot of awesome bits.
So that's our plan for today.
We are not going to do a Q&A today, but we will next week.
We encourage you to go to our store in talking about what we're talking about today.
We will point you to some new merch there, but just at the moment say you can find our store at DarkhorseStore.org, that's where it is.
Come find me at Natural Selections, my substack, where this week I posted a piece that I called Misunderstanding Science, speaking to the question of how it is that so many people who are highly educated and appear to be highly intelligent
seem to have no understanding of what science is and say things like follow the science and are quite certain that those of us who don't agree with the rapidly formed consensus on some of the modern things that ail us must be conspiracy theorists as opposed to approaching the world scientifically.
So that's this week on Natural Selections.
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The chat's live on Odyssey.
We will, of course, show up on all of the usual places shortly, in short order, Spotify and Apple Podcasts and every place.
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Especially given that some among the big tech have demonetized us, we are largely audience supported.
Right, which is in fact the meaning of that sword back there, which will have to be moved.
The sword of Damocles, which hangs still above the dark horse.
We put that there when we were demonetized by YouTube, and because of course they have just simply let that stand, even though they are now putting ads on our podcasts.
In any case, that sword will have to be moved with the podcast.
Yeah, it's interesting, actually.
I mean, we're still just in intro territory here, but a number of people have commented that in the last week or so there have been even more ads in the middle of and during YouTube versions of our podcasts.
And I went and looked, and it's true.
We're not seeing any of that money.
So, YouTube is advertising on our show while keeping us fully demonetized, and part of the reason they told us they demonetized us was that our content was incompatible with their sponsors.
Clearly, that is not true.
They would simply prefer that we not see any profit from their profit.
Well, more to the point, as was clear from the beginning of their demonetization, they are punishing us and they are punishing us for saying things that they don't want said, but they are perfectly happy to make revenue from the podcast because, of course, there's nothing, you know, what we're saying makes sense and so people listen and it's a perfectly viable place for ads.
I do want to make one technical announcement.
We have had the failure of the computer that runs the podcast this morning, and that means that we are running from a different computer and have no backup.
Should the podcast go off the air during, we will not be able to reboot the stream in all likelihood, and so just know that that is what has happened.
We don't expect it at this point, but it could.
It could occur.
So we appreciate you subscribing, liking, sharing, sharing the material.
And if you are in a position to support us in additional ways, we have Patreons where we do a private monthly Q&A on mine.
We have Brett has conversations on his and on both of them, you can access our wonderful Discord server.
And, of course, we have sponsors.
We carefully pick and choose the sponsors who are brought to us by our wonderful ad broker.
And what that means for you is that if you hear us reading an ad, and you can always know if you're watching that this is a paid promotion when you've got that green perimeter around the screen, If you hear us reading something, that means that we have actually vetted directly, or in a couple of cases, including one of today's sponsors, because we have no ability to vet it directly, had someone we are close to vet it directly, and we actually stand by this product.
So if you hear us reading a script for a product or a service that you have been wondering about, you can be certain that we are actually vouching for it.
Whether that means that it will be right for you, that's for you to decide.
So without further ado, here are three Sponsors for this week, Seed, MD Hearing Aid, and All4.
Our first sponsor this week is Seed.
Seed is a company focused on bacteria and the microbiome, and they have a terrific probiotic called DS-01 Daily Synbiotic.
That's with an N.
There are a lot of things that you can do to enhance your health.
Our sign-off here at Dark Horse includes three of them.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
But a lot is hidden in those words.
What, for instance, constitutes good food?
Good food is real food, whole food, food that has been alive recently and was grown with care and conditions as ancient as possible given the constraints of the 21st century.
But even when many people who eat such a diet... but even many people who eat such a diet are missing something.
We contain multitudes.
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Our second sponsor this week is MD Hearing Aid.
This is not a product that we ourselves need, so we asked a good friend who does, and you will hear her testimonial mid-ad here.
MD Hearing Aid was founded by an ENT surgeon who made it his mission to develop a quality hearing aid that anyone could afford.
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Here's a testimonial from that friend of ours who has substantial hearing loss and who relies on hearing aids.
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Our final sponsor this week is Allform, a company that makes terrific custom sofas.
We like them so much we have two of them.
In fact, during last week's live stream, we were sitting on one of them.
Some people commented on how nice it looked.
Well, as nice as it looked, it feels even better.
What makes this sofa so terrific?
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All right, that is our ads for the week.
So this is our last podcast in our Portland studio.
This is the waning days of us being residents of Portland, and it is bittersweet to be sure.
We are very, very sorry to be going.
Where should we start?
Well, I wanted to start... We're going to focus on Portland today.
I have a lot of photos that will cue us to talk about various things that I know you and I both want to cover, but I wanted to start with a story, which I hope will not strike people as odd.
When I went to spend an hour on Tucker Carlson's program, and I got a chance to speak with him.
This is a year ago, over a year ago.
And he asked me, as we were sitting down preparing, he said, where are you living?
And I said Portland, and I expected the usual reaction that one gets from conservatives.
I expected a snide comment or something like, geez, that must be rough, something like that.
And that's not what happened.
I said that Heather and I live in Portland, and he got wistful.
He said, ugh.
I love Portland.
And I thought, you know, this is really the problem is that Portland has become a caricature.
Yeah.
And it shouldn't be.
Portland is a tragedy because it is a marvelous city failing to live up to its amazing potential.
And I was heartened to hear that he had a relationship with, he's kind of an outdoorsy guy, a do-it-yourself sort of person.
And the fact that, you know, he'd been here and, you know, this is a great American city and he registered it as such gave me a certain kind of hope.
That said, you know, you and I, I feel I still love Portland.
It's not even that I loved it when we moved here or loved the idea of moving here.
I still love it.
But it does not feel tenable.
It feels less tenable with every passing month.
Yeah, it does.
And, you know, we aren't the sort of people who see signs coming from the universe, but I have to say the fire apocalypse that's happening in Oregon right now and is causing the skies to be, you know, deep orange-gray when the weather app assures us that it's sunny out and the sun is a glowing orb of Angry red orange.
You know, hopefully this doesn't become what happened two years ago, just about now, where, you know, Portlanders and lots of people in surrounding areas were basically, you know, if you were lucky enough that it didn't come so close that you had to evacuate, and a lot of people did, locked in your home hoping that you had good air filtration because the air quality was the worst in the world for, gosh, I think it was over a week.
It was bad.
And, you know, the air is thick now.
You can sort of taste it.
It's, it's, it's smoky out there.
And it feels like, yep, there is a lot to recommend the culture, actually, and the nature of this place.
And both of them are failing in some rather extraordinary ways.
Yeah, they are failing, and it's a step remote from what we want to talk about.
But even the fact of unmanageable fires in the West is the result of naive fire policy in large measure.
And so there's a way in which naive policy is really the problem, as we've talked about before.
Portland actually, not only could it function brilliantly, and I should tell you the slogan of the city is the city that works.
It's increasingly ironic because it really doesn't work.
But the point is, not only could Portland work, But Portland is in a position to benefit from the failure of all of the other West Coast cities, right?
All it has to do is not make those mistakes.
And if it did that, it would collect so much revenue that it could actually work really well and, in fact, benefit all of the people that we pretend in Portland are the center of this policy fiasco, the reason that we are doing these things.
There will be a lot of people listening.
You know, we know we have a lot of audience in Portland because we're approached by you and we appreciate that.
And we are sorry about not to be sharing our city with you anymore.
But for people who've never lived on the West Coast, and you know, if you're watching Dark Horse, You're either liberal and disenchanted and disenfranchised, or you're conservative.
And so many people who've never lived on the West Coast wonder why anyone would at this point, right?
And at some level, you have to have experienced the West Coast, the natural beauty, and the culture, and the DIY ethos, and you know, just a lot here.
That is not found anyplace else we've been.
You know, there's a lot of places in the world we haven't been, and I actually haven't really spent any time in the American South, but I've spent time in all the other quadrants of this country, plus a lot of other countries.
And the West Coast of the United States is a particular kind of awesome, and as we are going to come back to, we'd like to keep it awesome, we'd like to keep it weird, as you said on, I don't know, a recent podcast.
You know, Keep Austin Weird, Keep Portland Weird, was adopted from the Keep Austin Weird, and that suggests a kind of alternative, you know, artsy, let's-look-at-things-differently approach.
And the whole West Coast is looking like it's sort of throwing up its hands at the whole endeavor, going, eh, the West was fine while it lasted, but never mind anyway.
Right, the West, well...
The West is somehow the core of the problem, rather than a prototype that has not fully reached its potential.
Yeah, no, I wasn't quite done there.
You said a number of things before that I wanted to respond to, and I've forgotten some of them now.
But there's one thing in particular that you said, that the motto of Portland is apparently the city that works.
And I feel like it's also the Rose Sea.
There's a lot of things that identify cities, so I don't know exactly.
I'm not going to claim to know that that is true, but I've heard that before.
That is something that is said about Portland.
It's on all the trucks.
Okay.
That are running?
Or the ones that are broken down by the side of the road?
No, no, the ones that are struggling to keep Portland barely functional.
Yeah.
Well, so we were at dinner last night and sitting outside on the patio.
Of an amazing restaurant.
We'll talk a little bit about some of the places that we love here and recommend, but I'm not going to do that right now.
We were in Slab Town, for those of you who know Portland and Northwest quadrant of the city, and there's a homeless guy outside.
There's like a patio with sort of some barriers, and he's on the sidewalk right on the other side of the patio, and he had a clipboard, and he was appearing to take notes, and sometimes he'd just like scribble furiously, and sometimes he'd like look at the cars and take notes.
This guy's cosplaying as a municipal worker!
This guy's acting like he's a city employee, but he has no idea what that would actually involve, and I have no idea what was wrong with him, or was he involved in some kind of performance art?
He was having a conversation with someone that we could not see, and he was jotting things down on his clipboard.
Now, I will say, we are not making fun of this gentleman.
He did appear to be Quite happy.
This is not an angry homeless person.
He did.
And he wasn't accosting people on the street.
But I would also point out what he was doing.
It's not going to work, but it's no worse than what the city government is doing, which is also not working.
Ah, yes.
You see what I'm saying?
Yes.
So maybe he heard the motto or saw one of those tracks and went, oh, the city that works.
Well, I'm in the city.
I guess I'll get to work then.
Let's put it this way.
If you told me that he was running for mayor and you didn't tell me anything else about him, if he was running against the current mayor, I might have to vote for him.
I mean, he's at least got a clipboard.
Okay?
I'll bet Wheeler can source himself a clipboard.
I bet he... Right, but...
I think he would probably destroy it as a measure to decolonize the city from the Western clipboard orientation, or I don't know what it is that he would do.
Clipboards are probably a sign of the patriarchy or something.
Yeah, it's definitely, it's part of the problem.
They demonstrate the hegemonic unification of the, I don't know the words anymore.
Yeah.
I'm free enough of that landscape.
You know, time was.
I could put together some sort of word salad postmodern crap, but all I got right now is hegemony.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Which I would pronounce differently, but that is… Hegemony?
Hegemony.
Hegemony.
Oh, right.
I turned it into the noun form without correcting where the syllable went.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm going to, since you don't know what photographs I've got here… No, I don't.
I was with you when you took some of them, but I don't know what you got.
Zach, would you start with the first photograph?
We will describe these for people who are just listening.
I don't think you actually need to see them.
First thing I wanted to say is that I think I didn't really understand what Portland was until we moved to the Pacific Northwest.
Portland feels like a coastal city.
It is not a coastal city.
Portland is actually a city defined by two rivers.
This picture that we have up is the Willamette River, which runs through the center of Portland.
It literally divides West Portland from East Portland.
And it is a beautiful river.
It is a river on which you can have a lot of fun.
You do a lot of paddleboarding there.
I went out on my last paddleboard yesterday morning on it.
There are these uninhabited islands that you could pull up on and sit and write.
It's gorgeous.
It's lovely.
It's gorgeous.
We have kayaked on it, we have kayaked to dinner, that's something that we've done here.
It's really quite lovely, and even if you're... You have to put the kayaks on a rack and put it behind a car and everything to put in, but anyway... It's a pain in the butt, but it's worth it.
But anyway, the point is, even if you're on land, the rivers have an important impact on life here.
Portland, it's funny, I was struggling with the question, is it a beautiful city?
The other river, as you said.
The other river bounds the north, which is the Columbia, the now tame, once mighty Columbia River.
Which separates Oregon from Washington.
Right, which is on the border between Oregon and Washington, and it is at the north edge of Portland proper.
But it has, unless you're at that very edge, which is where the airport is, and I guess there must be industrial stuff there, but most people don't have a regular interaction with the Columbia, but most Portlanders have somewhat, I would think, certainly we do, have nearly daily interactions with the Willamette.
Yes, exactly.
And so I was struggling with the question of is it a beautiful city, and what I concluded is Portland is not a beautiful city because there's nowhere to look at it from.
About the only time I ever feel like I'm looking at Portland is the bridges, which especially at night when the city is lit up, it's very stunning.
It's gorgeous.
But it is not a city that you can look at from anywhere.
But living here, the air is clean, the water is excellent.
I think it's a beautiful city.
I think that's a strange...
Standard.
Like most cities don't have a place where you can see the city and go like, oh, look at that.
Well, you know, it's funny because we grew up in LA.
I spent a lot of time at the observatory.
Griffith Observatory.
Yeah, there is a place you can look down on LA.
That's a very particular situation.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
All right.
In any case, it is a city that is quite far inland, but feels like a coastal city.
I mean, it's Portland, right?
It's got two rivers that have ports on them, so it is a city that is defined by the commerce largely logging originally.
The nickname of Portland is Stumptown, which doesn't evoke anything.
Iron as well, I think.
Yeah.
Stumptown, and you mentioned Slabtown, where we dined last night.
Slabtown is a reference to these large wooden slabs that people make things like tables out of.
Slabtown doesn't have any mills in it anymore, but once upon a time that's what was done there.
But anyway, it's the ports that defined the place and caused it to be here.
But they are ports for ocean-going vessels, but it is definitely a town on rivers, which has an impact on it.
It is not like San Francisco or L.A.
or San Diego or Seattle.
Or even Seattle, even though Seattle's not on the ocean, but it's near enough to the entrance to the Puget Sound or the street of San Juan de Fuca that it's closer to the source.
All right, next picture, Zach.
Nansen's Summit, and I just put this in there because this is the nice part of Portland, right?
This is a tiny little summit in a neighborhood.
This is last night.
It's a sunset last night.
And this is a place that on any- You can see how much particulate matter there is in the air.
Yeah, you can already see the fires are- You don't get a glorious sunset like that unless you got a lot of stuff in the air.
Yeah, but people go up there any summer night and often nights during other parts of the year.
It's a great place to watch hummingbirds.
There's, you know, bees have become uncommon in the Western world probably as a result of neonicotinamide pesticides, but there's still lots of bees up at the summit.
But anyway, it's a summit.
It's about a thousand feet.
Off the Willamette, which is about at sea level.
And, you know, this is a place people quietly gather.
You can't see it right now, but you're looking west, obviously, because it's sunset out over the coast range, beyond which is the Pacific Ocean.
But that's, what, about 100 miles away.
Something like that.
Maybe it's a little less than that.
This is a favorite spot.
And you know, there was a young couple in love up there yesterday.
There was an established couple sitting on a bench talking about I don't know what.
But you know, this is just a nice little spot.
There was us apparently eavesdropping.
Yes, apparently we were eavesdropping.
All right.
So anyway, that's part of the, you know, the air is clean except for smoke sometimes.
The water is good.
And you know, it's a good healthy climb up there on your bike.
It's a nice, healthy way to live.
A lot of people value being outside and not taking orders from larger entities about how to run their lives.
Yep.
All right.
Advance at one.
And here, this is a living mural on the side of a building that has an excellent Cuban restaurant in it.
Palomar.
Palomar.
And so what I mean by living mural is that it's a mural, it's a fanciful rendering of a woman.
But her hair is alive.
Her hair is plants, and this is a gigantic mural, in fact.
Yeah, this is what, a six-story building, something like that?
Yeah, something like that.
During the pandemic, when eating outside was preferable to eating inside and understood to be so, the restaurant limited its menu and it moved the roof, which was glorious.
It had some trees up there, and they... And sweeping views, like... Oh, yeah.
360 views.
You couldn't get 360 in one spot, but you could walk around and see Entirely around the building, which is on the east side of the river, but not too far.
So you can look across the river to the west side to downtown, to the Pearl, and you can see all over the east side as well, out to Mount Hood.
Yep, and it was always windy and warm and windy up there in the summer during COVID.
And you could look down on this mural from above, which was cool.
Could you?
Yep, absolutely.
Absolutely.
You could stand right there behind the lights and look down.
Couldn't really see much of it though.
No, you could.
It was quite distorted at that proximity.
But anyway, it's a very cool place.
And you know, it It again speaks to the good part of Portland, right?
It's a provocative image, an interesting one to look at, and the idea of doing it with, you know, that's got to be a hell of a lot of work to water those plants on the side of that building, and yet somebody has thought to do it and maintained it and it looks great.
You want to go one more?
And here again is a nice, this is looking out into Pioneer Square.
This is a statue, a metal statue of a guy with an umbrella, of course, in allusion to the weather, which although the summers are always beautiful here, it's pretty constantly rainy for, you know, I don't know, nine months.
This is an old enough statue that he's hailing a cab, which you don't really do anymore.
Right.
No, he's not hailing an Uber, that's true.
But it's wonderful.
So that's, sorry, go back there for a second, Zach, if you could.
He's up on this raised part of Pioneer Square where there are always three or four food trucks.
And if you're standing around, either waiting to order your food or waiting for your food to come out, Because for a year or so, we had an office right overlooking Pioneer Square.
And so we would go to Fried Egg I'm in Love, the food truck.
Man, that was good.
And when you're waiting around, no matter how many times you see this statue, you catch this guy in the corner of your eye like, oh, is that?
Oh, it's a statue.
What's that guy?
Oh, it's a person.
It's incredibly lifelike.
Yeah, it's a great statue.
You mentioned Fried Egg I'm in Love, which is a really cool food truck.
We don't have a picture of it, but Fried Egg I'm in Love not only makes an incredibly Incredible series of sandwiches, but every sandwich is a wicked pun based on music of the 80s, right?
So the title of the restaurant is obviously an allusion, I think, to The Cure.
But in any case, So it's playful, right?
It's exactly what Portland should be.
And the food culture in Portland is amazing.
Like I said, we're going to keep on mentioning restaurants that we've loved, but a food truck culture is real in Portland.
This is one food truck of many in the middle of Pioneer Square that not only are they making amazing food, sourcing local ingredients, well made, thinking about the food, but they're also having fun with language.
Yeah.
Totally, and it's a marvelous place.
But then this is, like, literally, this statue, and, you know, this statue, that statue is actually looking out towards the Ninth Circuit, right?
The important court building for the Federal Circuit.
It's not right there, is it?
It's a block or so away.
Well, I actually think it's right there.
No, no.
Go to the next picture.
So this is actually... Oh, yeah, there's the courthouse on the right.
Yeah, but I think the Ninth Circuit... Go to the next... The Ninth Circuit may be a block down, but nonetheless, it's right there.
But here's the dark side.
You have this historic Portland... So this is a building that fronts Pioneer Square.
Right.
This is... Like, you could see that dude, the umbrella-holding, taxi-hailing statue dude from If you were looking that statue in the face and you looked up this is what you'd see.
This is a beautiful historic brick building in the center of downtown and it is defaced with this graffiti.
It's a white brick building that has been defaced with this Unfortunately, we are obscuring some of the most defacing part of it at the moment, the way our screen is.
But on the left, it seems a little subtle to me looking at this.
When you're there looking at the building, it's so obviously defaced.
And the only positive sense I have is like, well, that took some tenacity.
How did they even do that?
It did.
It's impressive.
It's been up there for a long time.
Well, it hasn't even been up there.
They have cleaned it, and it's going to be done.
They clean it, and it goes back, and they clean it, and it goes back.
And this is part of the problem, is that civilization depends on you being able to drive up the costs of those who are violating its rules.
That's what the laws are for.
And we are now making excuses for lawbreakers, right?
Well, maybe the graffiti artist is trying to say something, and maybe they don't have an opportunity to do it, and so maybe they can go deface this important part of Portland, and that's their right, and then we'll clean it up.
And in fact, we will come back to this pattern.
But it is the excuse-making For people who are not living up to our collective agreement with each other that is actually driving Portland to the brink of failure.
No, that's right.
And that's what's happening in all the Western cities.
And frankly, I think, you know, increasingly all the American cities, but especially all the West Coast cities.
And go on.
Well, I just want to point out that there's a loophole in that, which will be discovered.
It will be rediscovered because it always is.
And the loophole is a city that does not do anything to solve the problems that ultimately cause that wave of malcontent.
A city that just simply turns brutal, right?
That arbitrarily punishes people who have fallen on hard times will drive them out to other cities that don't do that.
And that city will become marvelous, because it doesn't have those problems, as a result of its brutality.
So the point is, some city is about to become brutal, and in so doing, reap the benefit of every other city making excuses.
Well, I mean, I feel like this is maybe the wrong point to make with this particular image.
I was going to say, at one level, this is a purely aesthetic violation, right?
I do think that Portland is a beautiful city from almost many of the vantage points, although east of the river, there are many fewer of them increasingly because you have these just endless homeless encampments.
Some of which are in tents, some of which are in vehicles, and just, you know, destruction all over the place.
This is in downtown, just west of the Willamette, and as I said, it's purely aesthetic, and there's a hell of a lot going on in the city.
You know, the murder rate is up, the The illegal street racing, wrong way on streets, not responding to 911.
There's a lot wrong with the city that is actually putting life and limb in danger.
And this is merely aesthetic.
On the other hand, what is it that drives people into a place?
Why would you move to a city like Portland?
And if they can clean up all the rest of it, which they don't show any signs of doing, then the claim can be, well, at least you're less likely to die here than you were in 2021, right?
But what you want is a city that fills you with intrigue, with the impetus to explore, to be surprised around a corner with images of public art.
And there is a fair amount of public art, but much of it Is defaced the you know the elk statue got ripped down because elk are racist.
You know, it's it's completely insane.
Well, you mentioned two things that are really opposites that that lead to the same result, right?
We have a city government that makes excuses for criminals, right?
And we saw this throughout the the riots.
Yep, right.
We saw people who people were not arrested and on those rare occasions when they were arrested they were immediately Turned back to the city.
They were they had people supplying legal funding They had a district attorney who refused to prosecute and so anyway There's that and the city allowed the police to be demonized as you'll see a little later The idea that all cops are bastards and that frankly in Portland you can spray paint on a wall kill all cops and this is taken to be an aesthetic flourish rather than a threat
All of this results in a city that is increasingly lawless and you're right this is an aesthetic violation but the point is it's about the fact that we don't punish people instead what we do is we clean up after them.
And so go to the next.
You shouldn't be cleaning up after your five-year-old when, in order to make a point, he tips over his apple juice, right?
You know, that's one thing if there's an accident, but at the point that your five-year-old looks you in the eye and says, what are you going to do?
You teach that five-year-old that he is going to be responsible for his own actions.
Somehow we've got a city of people who apparently were never parents or were such terrible parents, they never understood that actually teaching people to be responsible for their own actions is one of the first roles of a good parent, a good municipal leadership, a good anything, right?
You can't do this this way, so we're gonna need to have this screen be smaller in order to see it.
Scoot that to the right.
This is graffiti on a downtown building, a boarded up building, and there are a lot of boarded up buildings in downtown, and the graffiti here, which is actually visually kind of stunning, The art here is actually impressive.
It's competent.
It's 3D.
Yeah, not above.
Above is the usual tagging and such, but the word on the bottom, which says decolonize, is actually really interestingly done.
It's beautifully done, and it's done actually on boarded up windows, so it's not defacing real property.
Right, though they would.
Um, but it also the incoherence of decolonize as a claim.
Uh, I want to revive a story we may have talked about it before, but I remember there was some, uh, There was some discussion about Latin America and Columbus Day and the offense of Columbus Day.
And actually, I do believe that there is reason of all of the things that we celebrate, there is reason for us to rethink how we celebrate Columbus Day.
But the Latin American person who was responding to the idea that Columbus Day was just simply an affront was saying, look, We understand, we in Latin America understand that this is the anniversary of something terrible for us, but it's also our birthday.
So, you know, here's the thing.
You've got Portland, you've got people who would tear it down, who wouldn't know the first thing about what to do if it wasn't here, right?
They are simultaneously attacking it and dependent on it.
And so the idea of decolonize, well, what does that even mean?
Right?
Careful what you wish for, right?
Well, yeah, it is.
I mean, especially in the summer of 2020, we were talking about this a lot, but the people who are the most outraged at the terrible life that they are able to have in the United States, I predict, are the least likely to have been anywhere else, right?
They're also very likely, frankly, to be from the privileged classes.
The protesters were actually a mix of Portlanders in the summer and fall of 2020.
The rioters who reliably showed up or started doing their rioting after dark for over 100 days straight.
We're much more represented a much narrower demographic and it was much more likely to be, you know, white kids, basically upper middle class well off white kids who were, you know, make a trouble.
Yeah, they were punks.
Yeah, they were punks.
And my guess is that as interesting as this art is, you know, if this word was something different, you know, we actually drove by this.
We were driving and just paused, stopped, parked, didn't just pause, parked to take a picture of this.
And again, this is last night.
And it's really well done.
But the message is incoherent.
The message is incoherent.
Decolonize.
Yeah.
So I also want to point out something.
There's an uncomfortable fact here.
The taxes that we pay here in Portland are through the roof, which I don't think, you know, through the roof isn't good.
It's not rational policy.
But I don't think either one of us would be troubled by high taxes.
We knew that the taxes were high when we moved here.
Right.
And we have always been interested in paying our way and paying our share.
For services that are promised in return for what we're paying.
Right.
And the idea that what we have is a city government that has actually allowed the police to be so antagonized that the police are now reluctant to respond to 911 calls, it's like you're paying for your own persecution.
Right?
And that is a wholly different matter.
So yes, there's a way in which it's odd to find us complaining about taxes, but the point is, Taxes are for something, right?
Imagine going to a restaurant where they just give you the bill.
There's no meal.
You just get the bill, right?
Do you keep going back?
Or maybe they make you wash dishes, and then they give you the bill, right?
That doesn't make sense, and it doesn't make sense for a city either.
All right, you want to go ahead here?
All right, this is this marvelous truck we ran into yesterday, which sort of explains the confusion of Portland.
It's going to be a little hard for us to read it at this distance.
I don't know that we should be showing this.
I think you should take this off, Zach.
I don't think we should be, I mean, it's not, okay, that's fine.
Yeah, I just, there was most of a license plate on that truck.
Oh, right.
All right, sorry, my bad.
So what we have here are... I can't read any of these, but there's two on this side that struck me as interesting to have next to each other.
On the bottom right... Read the bottom right one, Zachary.
The woman with her back to us?
Yeah, yeah.
Have you been catcalled?
What do you do?
And three options are killed.
Okay.
The woman, attractive young woman with short hair with her back to us, with a speech bubble, I think, says, have you been catcalled?
What do you do?
Kill, kill, kill.
And then on the same back of a truck, on the lower left, I think what it says, and again, we can't, we don't have a very good look at this, it says, have you tried empathy?
Well, I'm not advocating for catcalls.
I've certainly been catcalled, and it's not cool.
Those two in counterpoint with one another are remarkable.
It is being able to have those two things in your head enough that you can put them next to each other and not experience cognitive dissonance strikes me as some of the same mental acrobatics that allow for the mass formation we're experiencing society-wide right now, right?
Actually, the person who just catcalled you, you know, maybe a psychopathic killer.
Might be a, you know, latent rapist.
Almost certainly not.
You know, maybe just a, you know, dude hanging out with other dudes and it's really about the other dudes and not about you at all.
That's ugly.
That sucks.
Maybe he's really interested and he doesn't know anything about you.
Either, you know, except for the, like, psychopathic killer option, This is a human being who is not showing you respect at the moment, but maybe getting into their head a little bit as opposed to saying, have you tried empathy lately?
And consider killing those who catcall.
It's, again, incoherent.
On the first Rogan that you and I did together, I said that catcalling is not a compliment.
It's an insult, right?
It's an insult.
Killing is not the proper response to an insult, right?
This is a Pistols at dawn might be.
Yeah, perhaps, at least if you both have the pistols.
And then, you know, there's another couple things on here.
There's something, a weird image of something, love lock, where somebody's got somebody in a headlock.
That's an image that doesn't belong anywhere.
And then in the upper right hand corner here, there's another little sticker that's, you know, is like a cutesy little girl praying, please kill my enemies.
Right?
And, you know, it is this, it's this incoherence, this juxtaposition of things that tell you that you're actually not thinking clearly, right?
Yeah.
All right.
You want to move on?
Now this one, I don't know what to make of it.
Wow, where was this?
I didn't see this.
This is over near City Liquidators.
So this is east of the river.
For those just listening, not watching, it's a tent.
Was someone living in it?
Or is this a workman's tent?
No, this is a homeless tent, and you can tell it's sitting on pallets, which are used to keep it from getting cold.
And it's up against a wall that's interesting, like there's some nice mural and there's some graffiti and it has either painted or it's there's like a flag.
There's a flag on the tent that says Trump 2020.
Did I say 2020?
That's too many 20s.
He's going to be long dead by then.
Trump 2020, keep America great.
Wow, that's bizarre.
Isn't that amazing?
I'm not even sure what to make of it.
I don't know if this homeless guy, if it's ironic.
Well, this guy might actually have a point, like he might be sick of the mismanagement of Portland and the other West Coast cities, or this may be ironic.
I have no idea.
But you saw this in 2022.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's amazing.
So incidentally, City Liquidaries, which is a terrible name for a store, is an amazing basically two, I think, city blocks of giant warehouses with furniture and taxidermy.
Oh, and some weird antiques.
It's a strange shop.
And signs.
Oh, old signs.
Antique road signs and such.
It's amazing.
Yeah, and I think there's a Bob's Big Boys statue in there.
There's all kinds of weird artifacts.
It's a very interesting furniture store.
I highly recommend wandering around City Liquorators.
But again, actually, that is what Portland should be, right?
City Liquorators, yep.
The interesting furniture store with the crazy artifacts.
Yes, totally.
All right.
Okay, now I thought there's a pair of little graffiti murals here that I thought summed up Portland really, really well.
Where is this?
I don't recognize this.
This is in the Springwater Corridor.
This is on the bike path on the east side of the Willamette.
And I think I actually saw the guy Who was doing this over the course of a couple days.
So doing the totem-like thing in the middle?
Yeah.
Okay.
So what we have here is a hybrid between some kind of psychedelic graffiti style and the highly stylized Salish art that one sees in the Pacific Northwest.
And in the next image you'll see it even better.
But here you have a kind of totem pole with an owl-like creature On top and some demonically grinning creature in the middle with some guy emerging from his mouth and then a crazy frown with the googly eyes in the bottom.
It's weird.
It's a weird distortion of that art.
And you know, I don't, I don't... How big is this?
What are we looking at?
It's about the height of is about what a guy could reach.
I think he did it pretty wide.
Yeah, it's not a pole.
It's a concrete pillar holding up the bridge above.
Oh.
So this is where you're going under the bridge.
Okay, now go to the next one.
This is a different pillar.
Same artist as far as you know?
Yeah, I think it's the same artist.
So again, this hybrid of Coastal Salish art with psychedelics, like Ralph Steadman maybe?
Yeah, exactly.
I also think I see in here there was a cartoon when we were kids in which there was a demonic shark.
I don't remember who the shark... Was it a Pink Panther character on one of the... Something.
There was a demonic shark and I think this might be an homage to the demonic shark cartoon.
But anyway, it's... Look, I don't... I am now so sick of graffiti that I find it hard to accept even the stuff that is obviously the result of extreme talent.
But this is on concrete that was going to be bare concrete.
Right.
Still, we can't live in a society where you get to pick which bare concrete gets to have what on it.
But nonetheless, this was obviously a talented person, and what they say is something I actually find... Oh, you talked to them?
I did talk to them.
Okay.
But what he's saying visually here is, I'm not sure I like it, but I find it worth my attention.
There it is.
Art isn't supposed to make you all fuzzy inside, inherently.
Some art will, but art ought make you think.
And this makes you think.
It makes you think.
Keeps you looking, draws your attention, probably drew your attention long enough for you to remember it when you were thinking about what photographs to show today.
Yep.
All right.
Advanced one.
Okay, now here is a plant, an abandoned industrial plant on the shores of the Willamette.
There are a number of these.
I think this may have been a concrete plant, I'm not sure.
But it doesn't really matter.
This is also off of the Springwater Corridor?
Yeah, off of Springwater Corridor, right as you get towards the Telecom Crossing.
And this one had a graffiti on it.
You might be able to make it out if you're watching the video here.
But it says something like, naïve, antsy.
And BLM.
And I thought that this was almost like a free association that reveals the mindset.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe that means something I don't know.
But at some level, okay, naive, antsy BLM.
Like, man, you captured it.
Inadvertently, probably.
But you captured it, right?
So anyway, these things kind of speak to what the weird, buzzy, unhappy, but lashing out kind of strange ethos that has increasingly taken over the city.
Yeah, you're not talking about, because it's weird and buzzy.
can also have a positive valence.
And so I said eclectic, you know, artistic, exploratory, interest in serendipity, you know, there's the Keep Portland Weird crowd is interested in making, you know, this is one of the places where maker culture, you know, really took off.
And, you know, we have craft, we've crafted everything, all the craft food possibilities, the beers and the And the ciders, and the ferments, and the coffees, and the baked goods, and the everything, and all sorts of more lasting products as well.
But what's getting publicized, what was so public in the summer of 2020, is the opposite of making.
It's breaking.
It's unmaking.
They're creating an unmaker space.
Even the tax regime that we were talking about, Has this as almost it's a central effect so there are businesses here really significant ones in some ways obviously you know intel and nike but there's also a golden west billiards there's chris king headsets and hubs.
There's high camp trailers.
Yeah, there's a bunch of these businesses where people are doing interesting, high quality things, innovative things.
But, you know, frankly, I don't know how you run a business in this tax environment because you're up against all of these people who aren't paying such punitive taxes elsewhere.
And so it just seems to me like It's really got to take something to stick it out here in Portland.
Well, and especially I mean, I know I heard from a number of people that especially during the nightly riots, when downtown businesses, you know, first had had to be shuttered for COVID reasons for lockdown reasons.
And then they were being destroyed.
There was just damage happening every night, not to individual businesses for the most part.
But I remember, and we talked about this at one point, walking around downtown on some beautiful morning and seeing these shop owners out front cleaning off the mess from the night before.
Like, this should be their job.
It shouldn't be their job at all.
So for any of these businesses that are running out of Oregon at all, but especially Portland, having a high tax base without the benefits from it or having a high tax rate without the benefits from it is a big deal, but especially for the small business owners based in downtown.
And they started going to Mayor Wheeler at some point and saying, we're going to leave.
We have to leave.
How is it that you expect us to run a business when, you know, when all of this is happening?
And at some level, you know, winter came that first, you know, and, you know, probably November, December of 2020.
The riots picked up again briefly after the election.
Like incoherently again.
Well, you remember the they went after the Democratic headquarters and they came out with a sign.
This is what we were trying to tell those who thought that this Antifa BLM group was actually on their side.
The sign correctly said we are ungovernable.
That's right.
That's right.
And the point is, look, just listen to them.
They're telling you.
They don't want to be in a society.
And you don't clean up the messes of the people who say we're ungovernable.
You don't offer them gift baskets and have them ask for space whips, which I wrote about in Natural Selections.
When what they're clearly doing is being facultatively homeless and taking resources.
And you don't leave the sheriff's.
Hold on.
And you know, certainly not everyone is facultatively homeless, but some number of people are saying, this is the life for me.
And it's coming at the cost of everyone else.
And most of the homeless people you run into and you see have had a series of bad luck, and or they are dealing with mental illness, and or they are dealing with addiction, and or they are dealing with city services that are actually making it harder for them to pull themselves out of the problem rather than making it easier.
But there was a story in Willamette Week, which is the free news rag that Portland publishes, which I did donate to them monthly for a while until they started going after us, at which point I thought, maybe I won't anymore.
But they published this piece that I wrote about in Natural Selections about a...
Homeless person who appears to think they're trans because he is wearing pearls and makeup, who is having his homeless encampment moved across the river and the local school said, oh, that doesn't, I don't know.
You know, can we get at least get a perimeter where there's no like, I don't even remember what it was like panhandling or something within 200 feet.
I'm making up numbers here.
And some city official responded by saying, that's racist.
These are white people, for one thing.
What are you talking about?
And the school apparently responded to that like, oh god, someone called us racist.
That's terrible.
Let's offer all of the facultatively homeless people gift baskets.
And at least the person interviewed in this story, which I wrote about, asked to receive in a gift basket a space whip, which is a toy they use at a rave.
So yeah, this is not someone who needs shampoo or a blanket or a tent or a place to lay his head down at night.
This is someone who wants toys.
A 30-ish year old person who, upon being covered in the local newspaper for being homeless, proudly says, yep, I asked for a space whip.
Yep.
I'd forgotten I had something I wanted to add, but I don't have it.
All right, you want to advance one?
So I did want to talk a little bit about what I think is the emerging taxonomy of homelessness, because I'm now beginning to see that it's multiple different things.
So what the image here is of is of something that has become very, very common in Portland.
This is not the most common version of it, but this is a derelict vehicle.
I guess it probably still runs.
Many of them don't, but this one looks like it does.
Many of them don't.
This one looks like it still might.
The windows may be busted out.
I don't know.
They're certainly down.
There are blankets up over the windows.
This is better than a tent because it offers more security.
But basically the idea is just as people have adopted tents to protect themselves in their homeless condition, people have now adopted vehicles.
And increasingly, over the last couple of years, that has transitioned from derelict cars to derelict RVs.
And so there are places in the city, many of them, in which you'll have a line of RVs.
And all of the trash from the lives that these people are living strewn out.
It just takes over sidewalks.
It takes over empty lots.
And it's disgusting.
It's obviously a hazard, a fire hazard.
But in any case so I see that there is a There's like a permanently homeless population, which as we have discussed has a lot to do with addiction and mental illness and Then there are a couple of populations, which I wonder you know Homeless is kind of a euphemism in that case because homelessness is not the driving factor even though people swear that it is it's not enough homes that rent is too high and the point is no this is about a kind of dysfunction and
Schellenberg does a great job of analyzing this, and I can't remember what it's called, like the Homes First or Houses First movement, which has just taken over as the only movement you're allowed to talk about being part of if you're trying to eradicate homelessness.
He argues in San Francisco that if we called the population something else, and not unhoused, not just moving the goalposts because it's fun to do so, but identified that actually there are other things that got them here, and there may be something that they share, but there are, exactly as you say, different populations.
The people who had bad luck and a medical bill or the death of a breadwinner sent them over the edge into not being able to pay their rent or their mortgage anymore and now they find themselves on the street with their family or whatever.
Those people definitely exist, and it is the responsibility of a weird society to take care of them.
But they are, I think, a very small fraction of the homeless people that we are seeing.
Well, I think they're a small fraction of the homeless people that we are seeing.
Increasingly, I am, and partially this is something that our move has revealed to me, is that they- Our move to Portland?
No, I moved from Portland.
The fact that we are using storage facilities to juggle materials has revealed something to me that I had not understood, which is what I think I am seeing.
I don't know that this is what I'm seeing, but after many, many interactions at these things, often late at night, you pack and you do whatever business you need to do during business hours, and then late after things are closed, you take stuff to the storage locker to get it organized.
One thing you're about to elide though, I haven't been, is that the storage lockers officially close at 10.
So if you get in before, you can get in before 10, but then you can't get back in.
So it's supposed to sort of shut down after 10.
And so you've been there sometimes finishing up stuff as the doors closed from the outside.
Right.
And what I think I see is people Using these storage lockers, who appear to be driving vehicles that are in terrible condition.
And what I think I'm understanding is people are using this as a stopgap.
I think they may be living in storage facilities.
And you can imagine the trouble that causes.
Some of these facilities don't have a bathroom.
None of the things that you would rent have electricity.
But they are climate controlled.
And so that a person who can make themselves- And it's a lot cheaper than rent.
Right.
A person who can make themselves unobtrusive can utilize this.
It's surely safer than living on the street.
And it's month to month.
So, you know, if you're like, Oh God, you know, I couldn't pay that last bill.
I lost my apartment.
I need to hold on to my job.
Right.
I can get a storage unit for an amount that's a third my rent, and any moment that I get back on my feet, I can move back into a real place.
Yeah, so these people are marginal.
In terms of the economic fringes of society.
Marginalized.
They are not earning enough to live in a way that most of us would recognize, but they are not on the street because they have cleverly utilized this resource.
But in any case, Nobody has said this to me.
It's just, it is what one puts together if you watch the traffic at these facilities and you begin to detect the patterns of who's showing up, when, and all of that.
So anyway, I guess the point is, look, you've got the tent homeless.
You've got the derelict vehicle homeless.
You may well have the storage facility, barely functional car homeless.
And there are, of course, people in shelters and such.
Shelters have been defunded in service of creating other kinds of housing opportunities, many of which, again, as Schellenberger outlines, are a failure at the policy level.
But certainly shelters do still exist.
Yeah, they do.
And my sense is that people use them sometimes.
Bad weather will drive people to shelters and things like that.
All right, can we move ahead here?
Oh, now this actually, we saw this last night, this is Portland State.
Portland State University.
This is the campus, you drive right through it, it's in downtown.
And the inscriptions on the windows, they have officially put signage in the windows here that says... Change isn't a maybe, it's a must.
It's a must.
And there's also a BLM sign in the floor above in somebody's window.
Somebody's put it in their office window, I guess.
But anyway, this struck me because it reveals a kind of conclusion.
I mean, confusion.
The confusion is to say change is a must.
There's a way I can defend that statement.
I mean, I've called myself a reluctant radical because I don't think we can afford not to change.
But you have to say more than that.
Change for its own sake is insane, right?
When you have something that functions at all, just simply changing so that you're changing is crazy.
And to have, you know, our local university broadcasting this message that We are about change without suggesting what sort of change it might be that they're interested in or suggesting that you support.
And it suggests you follow that to its logical conclusion and there is no state which will be satisfactory.
Right?
If change is a must, no matter what, you know, if there's no qualification of conditions, then there is nothing to which you can aspire from which you wouldn't want to change.
And that is, again, incoherent, but also incredibly bleak.
It's incredibly, this is one of the blind spots of the left and it's like a permanent blind spot, all right?
That once you realize that you want change, you're not doing the hard work of thinking about what change you want or what would be enough, you know?
At what point will you have achieved the thing that would then cause you to stop demanding change because you want the thing that you were demanding?
It's like, no, no, I'm a change demanding person.
Right.
So I would say that I'm a liberal who wants to live in a world so functional I get to be a conservative.
And that's meant to cause you to think.
But the point is, look, either you are asking for something because you think it would be good, at which point you should try to conserve it once it's there.
Or you're not.
Or this is a fashion statement.
And there's way too much of this liberalism as fashion statement.
And you know, it's driving the city to tremendous dysfunction.
Indeed.
All right, you want to move ahead here?
So here's just more homeless encampments.
They're everywhere.
This one's under the entrance to the Tilikum Crossing Bridge, which I think is the next picture.
Yeah, Tilikum Crossing is lovely.
It's, I think, the newest bridge in Portland, and it's only open to transit and to bicyclists and pedestrians.
And it's gorgeous.
It's sort of off the northern tip of Ross Island, just north of the Ross Island Bridge.
And it's visible from most places along the waterfront, along the Willamette, within the city.
And it's really just very striking.
Yeah, and again it strikes me as, you know, the tragedy of Portland is all the greater because the things that indicate the direction it should go are here, right?
This wonderful bridge that encourages people to, you know, to ride their bikes or walk or whatever other mode of locomotion or use public transit which can cross the bridge, right?
And it, you know, it looks good.
It emphasizes the river.
There's everything good about this thing.
But at the same time, the decolonizers would tear it down and then wonder why they can't get across the river.
You know?
Yeah, indeed.
All right, move ahead.
Ah, so this is... That's a beautiful picture, Brett.
Yeah, I took that from my bike riding down.
This is the Riverview Cemetery, which is a gorgeous, you know, it's I would not have imagined myself really loving a cemetery, but I love this one for several reasons.
One, it's absolutely beautiful in all seasons, and the way the seasons change in the cemetery is so lovely.
And the cemetery, which doesn't have to, has made A way for bicyclists to use it to avoid the dangerous roads that you would otherwise have to use to get from the upland to the river.
Yeah, so this is in the southwest quadrant of Portland, which is where we happen to have bought.
We didn't know much about what we were doing when we bought, and we bought in just the right place.
Just the right place.
But in order to get down to the river from here, it took a while, but we, and then mostly you, figured out a number of back roads, And then you get to the entrance to the cemetery, and then they have, as you said, opened up one route, so you're not allowed to bike on all of the roads in the cemetery.
It's a vast cemetery, but you can bike down to the river to get to the Selwood Bridge from here.
It is gorgeous.
And they've made those allowances despite the fact that there's obvious liability concerns but they've done it and the bicyclists, you know, try to respect the cemetery.
This is the cemetery in which the bald eagles, the pair of bald eagles who lost their nest where their tree fell down and they built a new area and a second tree that I covered on some podcasts.
It's in the center of the cemetery.
Anyway, it's a very beautiful place and the fact of The juxtaposition of the dead with these very living, fit cyclists coming through, again, speaks to something surprising and hopeful about the way Portland works.
Yeah.
Before we move on to another photograph, because of the way things worked here and the tech, we don't have any pictures from me in this slide deck.
But, sort of, you and I biked Riverview Cemetery a number of times, but you did a lot more than I did.
You started doing this, well, both going down to the nature area down there, which is called Oaks Bottom, and also you did the River to Summit, the Nansen Summit that we started one of the pictures at.
You would go down and then go all the way up, and it was more than 1,000 feet because there were ups and downs, right?
More than 1,000 feet vertical climb.
Total.
And then back down to our house, which is about halfway between the two elevations.
I often spent mornings at the Japanese Garden, Portland's Japanese Garden, which I don't have pictures of here, but it's fairly famous and it's stunning.
And if you're a member, you can go early and get in before the crowds arrive.
And from there, you can park up there and then walk down through the Rose Garden, Portland's Rose Garden, which is stunning.
And then you walk down through Washington Park and get into the Northwest, District Northwest 23rd, and you walk all the way to the Pearl, walk to downtown, walk to the waterfront, and all the way back.
I did that a few times specifically when downtown and the Pearl and even Northwest were kind of we're looking real dicey in the summer of 2020 and it just felt like I don't know if I want to leave my car unattended and still every time we go down there we see a lot of that you know the broken glass in the street that shows that someone took a hammer to someone's car window.
But parking way up in the Japanese garden and walking all the way down through, first through a lot of beautiful cultivated nature, and then some uncultivated nature, and then into some of the really, really beautiful commercial areas, including by Powell's, which is Yeah, one of the best bookstores on the planet.
It's all remarkable.
You can also, from there, get easily to the Portland Art Museum, which, you know, everything closed down during COVID, and the patterns that I was beginning to develop largely stopped.
So, you know, Portland Art Museum, being entirely indoors, did not open up as quickly again as did the Japanese Garden and the Rose Garden.
But all of these, oh, and for the first time, I finally went to the Piddock Mansion.
For the first time a couple of weeks ago, which is this historic mansion that was built on say around the turn of the last century by someone who ended up helping to create what would become Portland.
I think if memory serves, he ended up starting out like clerking and ended up owning One of the Portland newspapers, and so really contributed greatly to Portland.
And this is a historic mansion with beautiful grounds around it, also associated with Washington Park.
Which, you know, the other thing that we haven't said is that Portland has three massive, it has a lot of small parks, but three massive parks.
Washington Park is several hundred acres.
Tran Creek, which we're very near, which we can walk to.
is something close to 700 acres, I think.
And then Forest Park is like 5,000 acres, which we've spent almost no time in.
But these massive parks within the city that allow people to get out into nature without having to travel far to do so. - All tragically overrun by ivy, which again speaks to the promise and the tragedy of the place, because this invasive species changes the nature because this invasive species changes the nature of these parks dramatically.
It decreases it.
And, you know, there is still a lot of wildlife here in Portland, but it is distorted by the degree to which all of these parks have succumbed to this aggressive invasive species.
Yeah, at some point, I don't think today is the day, but at some point we might want to talk about what invasive species are.
And why it makes sense to talk about invasive species over in, say, plant land or mussel land or whatever, you know, non-human organism land, but not about people not belonging in particular places.
Okay.
It's a different ecological situation.
And English ivy does not belong here, and it outcompetes so much else.
I can go with the decolonized movement as far as English ivy.
Yes.
And Scotch broom.
So much else.
Yeah.
Alright, move along here a sec.
OK, so this.
Is a gentleman.
I stopped to talk to him.
He's a Latino guy who works... I forgot to check what the employer was, but this employer... Is he covering up the graffiti or making the graffiti?
And apparently it's almost a daily thing.
And this is recent?
Yeah.
So this says for people who aren't watching, there's like a teardrop with X's for eyes and arms and legs.
It says, kill cops.
And then it says Antifa with both of the A's as the anarchy symbol.
Antifa hearts you!
Sure they do.
And then there's the three arrows, the Antifa symbol.
That's the Antifa symbol?
Yeah.
Three arrows?
I didn't know that.
And anyway so this guy Has been hired.
I don't know what his job is supposed to be, but he comes out here and he cleans up the graffiti again and again and again and his employer he described effectively as weekly.
That is to say, with great weakness, simply accepting that this is happening and taking it upon himself.
Yeah, it's his employer's building.
His employer's building and his employer is spending money to have this guy repeatedly cleaning up.
The graffiti that gets written on there on a regular basis.
He said it was something like nightly.
Where is this?
This is again Springwater Corridor.
The tragedy of the squandering of this person's skill and labor on the cleaning up after people who think kill cops is a clever thing to write on a building.
Right.
Who and you know, who haven't understood that Antifa is somehow a malignant distortion of a very important concept.
Right.
Fascism is something we should oppose and be alert for.
And here you have these people who have turned it into a flex.
Right.
And they show signs of fascism themselves.
All right.
Why is this person's labor being squandered cleaning up after these fools?
It's just unconscionable.
But then again, here it is.
And I thought it captured the tragedy of Portland pretty well.
All right.
You want to move ahead?
All right.
So this, if you can scoot it to the right a little bit, this is another Of the hopeful signs in Portland.
This is one of our favorite restaurants.
This is where we were last night, G Love.
G Love.
Which, before they opened the sign on the door, I don't know if they still think of themselves that way, but they said, I think it was called a reverse steakhouse?
The logic being, as they said on the door, that the vegetables come first and the meats are available, but that it's vegetable forward, With meats for flavor as opposed to a steakhouse where maybe the vegetables are right when you get a side.
I don't know that they really think of themselves that way anymore but anyway I never even heard of the concept before and I was actively looking forward to them opening back in whatever 2019 when I was first walking the neighborhood.
So the thing is, it's a really, so if we haven't said it already, the food scene in Portland is unbelievably good.
It's unbelievably good.
The number of, you know, we grew up in LA, we've been to many of the great cities of the world.
We've experienced good cuisine, but nothing meets Portland just for the sheer number of different, really high quality restaurants and food trucks, but also the creativity of it, right?
This place has a menu that isn't like any other place on earth, as far as I can tell.
And this weird VW bus is their signature van.
We saw people dining in it yesterday.
I think you can special request or reserve it somehow.
But it's a really well-restored VW van.
But anyway, it's a lovely place.
It's very Portland-y, right?
If you look at the clientele, it's very Portland-y.
They have a beautiful bar, which I did not quite capture a picture of.
The bar is lovely.
Their bathrooms are crazy.
They have two bathrooms.
They're amazing.
Don't give it away.
I'm not going to say what they are, but they are two radically different themes.
So if you've got to pee, you've got to figure out which mood you're in.
Yeah, different soundtracks even.
But it's crazy.
You step out of whatever meal mindset you were in, and suddenly you're in a very different place.
Anyway, it's a cool place.
And the food is out of this world.
It's dynamite.
It's so good.
And if you go?
Save room for dessert and get the Whippalicious.
Get the Whippalicious.
Which is a strange name, but it's a passion fruit thing that, oh my god, it is extraordinary.
If you can't stomach saying it, you can get somebody else to order it for you.
Or just say, like, can I have that passion fruit thing?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But anyway, it's a lovely place.
And, you know, if Portland just leaned into- And the staff are awesome.
Yeah.
Everything about it is just amazing.
Everything about it is great.
Their cocktails are excellent.
By the way, There's no better place that I've ever been for people who can't eat wheat.
Right?
Portland is excellent at taking care of you.
Nobody looks at you funny.
People know what doesn't have wheat in general.
There are Many restaurants that are either wheat-free or have a special wheat-free menu.
Anyway, it's a place, it's a foodie place, and it's a place that is not arrogant about its food.
It's really special, and that's one of the things that I will certainly miss about it.
Yeah, I mean, we never watched Portlandia.
I think we watched one episode before we moved here, and I'm like, eh, whatever.
But, you know, people take the food seriously here.
I don't think anyone has ever asked to go visit the Chicken or whatever before it's killed or whatever happens in that first episode of Portlandia.
But it's true, you know, if you're not interested in thinking about food at all, then you might view some of this as precious.
On the other hand, if you're really not interested in thinking about food at all, if you've got any health problems at all, maybe you ought to start thinking about food a little bit.
And the proximity in Portland to one of the best growing regions in the whole country You know, the Willamette River Valley has incredible agriculture, as does the East of the Cascades in Washington.
And we get incredible ingredients, and people really know what to do with them here.
Just the restaurants are extraordinary.
And I don't know, I've got a number of other... We would miss some, but maybe mentioning a couple other restaurants right now, unless you've got pictures of others?
I wanted to say one general thing.
Okay.
I don't have pictures of others.
Okay.
One general thing, which is that Portland also did really well.
It's not the only city that did this well, but at the point that people finally caught on that outdoors was okay during COVID, Portland did manage to move a lot of its restaurants so that dining started happening outside and they've kept it.
Yeah.
And so anyway, there's a lot of dining in the comparatively fresh air.
Yeah.
Which is also super nice.
One of the places that did that, for instance, was Ankeny Tap and Table, which has maybe the best burger in town.
Really incredible.
Another place that definitely reconfigured was, and I didn't look into this, so I'm going to get a little bit of this wrong, but Tasty and Sons, Tasty and Alder, Tasty and Daughters.
Tasty was sort of a mini-restaurant empire with extraordinary food.
I think Tasty and Alder was my favorite restaurant in Portland before COVID.
I remember taking John Wood Jr.
there when he was staying with us.
But the whole thing went belly up in COVID, as so many small businesses did.
But a couple of the people who were involved in Tasty then started another restaurant that they're calling simply Tasty, close to us now.
I think it may technically be in Lake Oswego, but it's either very southwest Portland or Lake Oswego, which is amazing.
Also, and like G Love and like a number of restaurants in Portland, and maybe this is happening more widely, but they do the small plates thing where you can order a lot of little things for the table.
Yeah, a lot of family style dining.
Family style sounds, I don't know, 70s, sounds different.
You could certainly order stuff for yourself if you want, but I think it frees up the kitchen tremendously not to have to be like, oh, we got to get those four plates out at the same time.
Right.
They can just it shows up, you know, and they'll the waitstaff will tell you at all these places.
Oh, Lechon, the Argentinian place down near the waterfront was amazing.
Kind of a steakhouse, but they also, you know, will, you know, you order stuff, and they'll come out whenever it comes out.
But as long as you ordered food, that's amazing.
It doesn't matter what shows up when.
So, it actually speaks to something, I think.
Maybe this is happening elsewhere, but to the extent that a bunch of our favorite restaurants, and there are a couple we haven't mentioned, are doing the small plate family style thing, it actually alters the way dinner works, right?
And it's not even, you know, Family style in the way Asian restaurants used to do it.
It's it all kind of comes out at once and you know there's a certain number of dishes and the this way.
A, it slows down the pace of the meal, right?
And B, it's definitely different.
Like, if you go to one of these places alone or you and I go alone, it's like, well, okay, it's many fewer things.
And the idea of a lot of different, you know, I guess tapas was always this way.
The idea of the variety that you get and you know sort of stop when you're done is it alters it alters dinner and it does fit with the Portland is an unusual kind of place even at the level of you know just dining at a good restaurant.
Indeed.
Gosh, there are a lot more.
I'm forgetting many, but I think two that definitely warrant particular mention because we spent a fair amount of time there are Rotigo on Northwest 23rd, which just does fabulous grilled chicken and turns that chicken into chicken parts.
Rotisserie chicken and sandwiches and they have... Actually Mama Bird does as well.
Yeah, Mama Bird also.
And then Lola's, which is in Lake Oswego for sure, south of Portland, but we've spent a lot of time there, and they do a number of things brilliantly, and the staff there are also fabulous.
Yes, the turkey Havarti apple sandwich is particularly good.
Yeah, it is.
All right, you want to move on here, Zach?
All right, this is Our cats who did not know they were about to move as they were about to move out of Portland.
This is them enjoying what is our very natural backyard wilderness for essentially the last time.
They are safely away from the coyotes now.
Yep, all right.
Here is Maddie who, uh, she's not an insecure dog, but somehow in us packing, she became concerned.
And so she climbed into the driver's seat of the car to make sure that we did not forget her.
It's kind of an interesting insecurity on her part.
So lest you guys be concerned, our younger son Toby, who I got started at the high school up, so we're moving, we haven't even said, we're moving to the San Juan Islands.
And Toby started up there now, he's got all the animals up there with him, and we'll be joining him shortly.
All right.
And here is Toby.
Now, I wanted to explain this image.
This is an image people will not be able to figure out, probably.
I can barely figure it out.
Toby is wearing a full-face helmet.
He is sitting on one pedal of his electric unicycle at night with the taillight shining at the camera and the headlight shining off forward.
And this image came to be Because Toby called me.
He was out riding his electric unicycle one night and he called me up and he said, um, Hey dad, why don't you get your camera and meet me at this spot?
He said, there are some owls and they're doing crazy stuff.
And this was actually just after my bike accident.
And although it was only a couple of blocks away, it felt like 10 miles away.
But anyway, I hobbled my way up there with the camera and there were indeed these owls.
I think it was a pair, a mated pair and, A baby owl learning to do owl stuff and they were right there and doing cool things.
But anyway, I thought that this also spoke to the promise of Portland.
Here Toby is out at night, no concern about his safety here other than that he might fall off that device.
And, you know, there's nothing normal about electric unicycles or, you know, a child exploring at night on his own, but this, you know, that's also, I've never seen anybody sit on their electric unicycle that way.
But in any case, this struck me as a pretty good image for keeping Portland weird, right?
It is actually in both senses of the term, right?
Portland's an unusual place and it fits a guy like Toby very, very well.
And it's also, as Heather was mentioning earlier, keep Portland weird is Kind of the dual theme.
We like both the fact that Portland is an unusual town, right?
And we also like the fact that it is a, you know, a testament to what Western civilization can be.
Yeah.
And the fact that it would jeopardize that over naive symbolism and gambling on the possibility that if you Wreck what works, that what will come back in its place will be even better.
It's just, it's mind boggling.
The tragedy is really hard to overstate.
So maybe that screenshot of the new shirt now.
Yeah, you want to show that?
Wow.
I'm going to miss so much about this.
Yep.
Keep Portland weird, the new shirt says.
And then in smaller font underneath, parentheses, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
Yes, that's our plea to Portland, right?
You don't want to give that up, right?
A prosperous city that is educated and has the benefits of Western civilization does aspire to democracy.
All of these things are Things that you will miss when they are gone, and we are risking them for nothing.
All right, you want to move ahead?
So just a couple more images here.
This is a not very beautiful image, but an interesting image of the belly of a ferry boat headed to the San Juan Islands.
So, we'll talk more about the San Juans.
Some of you will be familiar with them, and if you are, you will probably be thinking, oh, they're lucky.
It's an extraordinary archipelago.
We started going when Zach was a baby.
So, we've been going up there for 16 or 17 years.
Often multiple times a year, and I've always wanted to go.
And because it seems that Portland needs to fix a lot of things in order to remain weird, in both senses of the word, we are going now.
And so here's a ferry from Anacortes in Washington over to the islands, San Juan Islands.
All right, so now go to the last image.
And I actually had a dual purpose here.
So on the one hand, Dark Horse will absolutely continue, as you all know.
It will continue not in this studio setting anymore.
So this is not quite a sunset, I should tell you.
Wait, what picture are you looking at?
Yes, this is an unset.
This is an unset.
This is an unset, and I want to explain what an unset is.
An unset is when the sun has set but you are either moving yourself or you are on a moving object and it causes the sun to re-emerge from perhaps behind an island as it has done here.
Anyway, so this is the unset into which we are heading.
There is going to be a certain amount of dust in reconstructing.
Dark Horse we will continue to live stream but the studio proper will not be.
We're going to build a new studio but there's no even fiber to the place yet so we're going to be kludging it for a while.
Our new place is fiber deficient.
It is!
It's really backed up.
Yes, the contractor who puts in the fiber is backed up.
That's not his fault, I don't think.
No, it's not.
All right, in any case, that's about where we've landed.
Oh, man.
I'm sad.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah.
I'm sad, and if I was the kind of person who got angry, I mean, it's not that I never get angry, but if I was the kind of person who got angry easily, I'd be really angry.
Yeah.
Right?
This is needless.
Portland has what it takes to be a great city, and for it to gamble what it's got on nonsense fairy tales that anybody who knows how to build anything knows aren't true is obscene.
Yeah.
So we'll be coming back, and I hold out fantasies of moving back at some point, but we will see.
Let's see what happens to the world and to this city in particular, and see if we can't realize the goal of keeping Portland weird.
Absolutely.
I think we're there.
So we will see you next week from a makeshift space as we were in last week in the San Juans.
No Q&A this week, but we will be back next week with a Q&A.
Consider joining our Patreons, reading our book.
Our book's been out almost a year to the day.
By next week it will have been out a year and we'll maybe talk a little bit more about that.
Remember to keep Portland weird and you can find that shirt at our store which is somewhere.
That's gonna be at darkhorsestore.org.
That should be easy enough to remember, but apparently I can't.
Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
