True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 248: City Authentic
Aired: 2022-09-05
Duration: 01:26:31


=== Authentically Liz (01:58) ===

[00:00:00]  I feel like if it was 1998 to 2002, I could have a show called Authentically Liz.
[00:00:15]  And it was like, authentically, comma, Liz.
[00:00:21]  Liz, I want to be clear with you right now.
[00:00:25]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:00:25]  He's like, yeah.
[00:00:27]  No, you actually, what would the content of Authentically Liz?
[00:00:30]  I don't know.
[00:00:30]  I think it's like maybe a little Nickelodeon, right?
[00:00:33]  Okay.
[00:00:35]  Yeah, but it's like for like, it's like, authentically Liz.
[00:00:38]  And it's like, maybe it's like, oh, she's kind of like goofy and weird, but she's authentically Liz.
[00:00:42]  That's true.
[00:00:43]  And it's like, oh, through trials and tribulations, maybe she sometimes gets it wrong, but in the end she'll always make it right.
[00:01:16]  But also it's like Mary Tyler Moore opening.
[00:01:19]  Yeah.
[00:01:19]  But then it's like, you know, she like throws the habits, me doing it with like a soda and then it splashes on my face or something.
[00:01:25]  Yes, no, I can picture this actually perfectly.
[00:01:27]  Like you walking out of like a like a liquor store on mission and like slipping a little bit on like a candy wrapper and like the soda goes you walking a dog when it gets tangled up in a guy another guy's dog leash.
[00:01:41]  Yeah, but then I just fall over.
[00:01:43]  Yeah.
[00:01:43]  Like you dog runs away.
[00:01:45]  You turn around in a in a swivel chair at work, but you're on the phone.
[00:01:49]  Yeah, totally.
[00:01:50]  And then I get like caught and tangled.
[00:01:52]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:01:53]  And there's like everyone's kind of confused and I can't get out of it and it's like taking way longer than it should.

=== Create Your Own Escape Room (07:44) ===

[00:01:58]  Yes.
[00:01:59]  You're like your card getting declined at a restaurant and then like another one where you're like being arrested for tax fraud.
[00:02:06]  Authentically Liz.
[00:02:07]  Yeah.
[00:02:07]  And then this other one where you're the first person executed for tax fraud.
[00:02:11]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:12]  Hello.
[00:02:12]  My name is Liz.
[00:02:14]  My name is Morpheus and I offer you a choice where you take this pill where authentically Liz exists.
[00:02:22]  You're back in 1998.
[00:02:24]  You're 14 years old and you just smoked salvia.
[00:02:29]  Or will you take this pill where it's 2022 and I'm introducing you to our producer, Jon Chomsky and the podcast Truanon.
[00:02:36]  Looks like you made your choice.
[00:02:40]  I wonder if our listeners could, would they take the Liz pill or the Brace Pill?
[00:02:43]  Okay.
[00:02:45]  Let's unpack that a little bit, shall we?
[00:02:47]  Should we take the pill of the woman who would go, ew, I don't want a pill when offered a pill?
[00:02:51]  Or should we take the pill of the guy whose nickname is literally Mr. Fentanyl, a guy who has.
[00:02:57]  Well, wait, no, I don't think anyone should take that one then.
[00:03:00]  Not even cancer patients should take it, huh?
[00:03:03]  Is that what you're saying?
[00:03:04]  You don't even think palliative care.
[00:03:05]  Liz, you think palliative care should be banned?
[00:03:08]  Oh, you're so annoying.
[00:03:09]  End of life, you should walk them out and shoot them on the street like a dog?
[00:03:13]  Like you should do for the dogs?
[00:03:15]  I'm sorry for what?
[00:03:16]  You think you should just take old people out on the street and shoot them like you're supposed to do with dogs?
[00:03:20]  Oh my god.
[00:03:21]  That's what you think?
[00:03:22]  No.
[00:03:23]  You think you should have sex with them?
[00:03:26]  Like you should do with dogs?
[00:03:27]  Okay, finish it up.
[00:03:29]  I can't.
[00:03:31]  Because the next thing is more graphic.
[00:03:33]  Let's talk about what we have.
[00:03:35]  To completion with the dog?
[00:03:37]  Today, for our listeners.
[00:03:38]  Uh-huh.
[00:03:39]  We're talking about cities.
[00:03:40]  Cities.
[00:03:41]  Cities.
[00:03:42]  What are they?
[00:03:43]  Who makes them?
[00:03:44]  Where are they?
[00:03:45]  And why?
[00:03:47]  The thing I love most about cities, Liz, has to be the buildings.
[00:03:50]  What do you like?
[00:03:51]  I love food halls.
[00:03:53]  Oh, my God.
[00:03:54]  Check this out.
[00:03:54]  One of my main attractions to cities, the people.
[00:03:57]  I'm crazy about like, if you could just get, okay, imagine like, I don't know, maybe like a, not even a whole block, city block, but like a quarter of a city block.
[00:04:09]  A micro block.
[00:04:11]  A micro block.
[00:04:12]  And then just like one entrance of like an oversized, a little slightly oversized door.
[00:04:18]  Oh my God.
[00:04:19]  And then let's say 3,000 people all looking for new kimchi that they heard about on Instagram.
[00:04:32]  They were like, oh my God, Alison Roman had a pop-up at the kimchi spot.
[00:04:39]  We got to go.
[00:04:40]  Now that to me, heaven.
[00:04:43]  First of all, let me interrupt you after the fact.
[00:04:46]  I've had a couple of pop-ups to Alice and Roman myself, if you know what I mean.
[00:04:50]  That doesn't even matter.
[00:04:50]  Alice and Roman pop-ups, I guess you might say.
[00:04:53]  Second of all, check this out.
[00:04:56]  Check this out.
[00:04:56]  To me, a city means this.
[00:04:58]  Escape room.
[00:04:59]  To me, a city means I meet some freaky deaky chickadee in the food hall.
[00:05:09]  We're both eating another end of a lobster.
[00:05:12]  A full-scale food hall.
[00:05:14]  Food hall.
[00:05:14]  Yeah.
[00:05:16]  You know what?
[00:05:18]  Wait, here's the question.
[00:05:19]  Or just fully interrupting, okay?
[00:05:21]  It's a double interrupt.
[00:05:22]  No, because I just had a great idea.
[00:05:23]  What is it?
[00:05:24]  When you said escape room.
[00:05:26]  Now imagine this.
[00:05:27]  A city that is an escape room.
[00:05:29]  Escape from New York.
[00:05:30]  No, but just like the whole city that we all live in is one fucking escape room.
[00:05:35]  Fuck, dude.
[00:05:36]  Think about it.
[00:05:37]  Yeah, you're a social theorist.
[00:05:38]  This is what I'm thinking.
[00:05:39]  New development concept.
[00:05:41]  Here's the thing, fellas.
[00:05:42]  Live, work, escape.
[00:05:45]  We're red-pilled out here now, fully since last episode.
[00:05:47]  Sure.
[00:05:47]  You need to make your apartment an escape room.
[00:05:49]  Yeah.
[00:05:49]  So when you are like, oh, my tummy hurts on the date, like, can you give me some type of abysmal at my apartment?
[00:05:55]  Yeah.
[00:05:55]  You get there.
[00:05:56]  She's like, how do I get out of here?
[00:05:59]  And then she's like, I can't escape.
[00:06:02]  And you're like, riddle me this.
[00:06:03]  Yeah.
[00:06:04]  You got to find the clues.
[00:06:05]  Yeah.
[00:06:05]  That's the thing.
[00:06:06]  We would love to find the clues in your apartment on how to leave.
[00:06:10]  And your stomach hurts.
[00:06:11]  So you're not helping or hindering.
[00:06:13]  You're just your tummy hurts.
[00:06:14]  And so you're like, oh, I don't know if I can get up.
[00:06:16]  Yeah.
[00:06:19]  Anyways.
[00:06:21]  I realized after we recorded this episode, because we're doing the intro, we recorded this after.
[00:06:25]  Why'd you tell them?
[00:06:27]  Well, I don't know, but it's, it's everything we're describing that we hate about cities, we're just talking about Austin, Texas.
[00:06:34]  You know what, though?
[00:06:35]  Yeah.
[00:06:36]  This shit, Austin.
[00:06:38]  Okay, first of all, we need to stop Austin from being weird because it got too weird.
[00:06:43]  It's too weird.
[00:06:44]  It's too weird.
[00:06:44]  And it's weirdness went everywhere.
[00:06:46]  Yeah.
[00:06:47]  And all these big companies were like, oh my God, do you know what Susan down in Accounting loves?
[00:06:53]  What?
[00:06:53]  Fucking Austin.
[00:06:54]  What if we made our store that we're opening in boom, Cities Across America just like Austin?
[00:07:02]  You know what?
[00:07:02]  You know what a guy from Austin loves?
[00:07:04]  Barbecue.
[00:07:06]  He loves good, though.
[00:07:07]  I know, but he's like, he like loves barbecue.
[00:07:09]  No, you know what Austin loves?
[00:07:10]  They're like, we love live music everywhere at all.
[00:07:15]  I mean, granted, I've only been to Austin for two reasons, both of which involve music festivals I was playing.
[00:07:20]  Do you wanna do the airport?
[00:07:21]  They've got fucking bands playing in the airport.
[00:07:24]  My fucking Annihilation Town once ran into ZZ Top at the airport there, actually, which is pretty cool.
[00:07:29]  Yeah, at Austin.
[00:07:31]  It's actually a nice airport because it's like one long line.
[00:07:33]  Yeah, I've never been.
[00:07:35]  But you know what?
[00:07:36]  You know, ZZ Top, two of the guys with the famous beard?
[00:07:38]  Sure.
[00:07:39]  The guy without the beard.
[00:07:40]  Seriously.
[00:07:41]  His name is Beard.
[00:07:42]  His last name is Beard.
[00:07:43]  No way.
[00:07:43]  Yeah.
[00:07:44]  Yeah.
[00:07:45]  Clean.
[00:07:45]  Did they do that on purpose?
[00:07:46]  I mean, I think that he was just named that.
[00:07:48]  But maybe they're like, don't grow one.
[00:07:50]  Yeah.
[00:07:50]  It's because that will, but that's a little easy to do.
[00:07:52]  I like that.
[00:07:52]  It's a little negative, positive.
[00:07:54]  A little relationship.
[00:07:55]  I'm telling you, this, they love live music.
[00:07:57]  They love barbecue.
[00:07:58]  A breakfast taco.
[00:07:59]  It's like, brother, give me a break.
[00:08:01]  What you should be eating in the morning is this: cereal with water.
[00:08:05]  For lunch, what you have is just this.
[00:08:07]  You have a little, a crepe with nothing in it.
[00:08:10]  You just have the pancake kind of the crepe.
[00:08:12]  And then for dinner, you know what you have?
[00:08:15]  You know, I really was thinking, though.
[00:08:16]  I was like, I was like, man, Austin was one of the first cities that really branded itself.
[00:08:23]  Yeah, my God.
[00:08:24]  We should have got into Austin with, but we didn't.
[00:08:27]  But you know what we did get into?
[00:08:29]  everything else.
[00:08:44]  Hey, listeners!
[00:08:46]  Do you live in a mid-to-large size metropolitan area?
[00:08:49]  Perhaps somewhere like Atlanta, Georgia, or Albany, New York.
[00:08:54]  We're here to present to you a 50-minute slideshow verbal presentation about why your city needs to immediately build an arts district with a large food hall that showcases many of the culinary and gastronomic delights from your city.
[00:09:10]  Would you like lobster grilled cheese?
[00:09:12]  Perhaps a lobster roll sandwich?
[00:09:15]  Maybe even lobster sushi?
[00:09:17]  Well, in the next close to an hour-long period, we will be joined by Professor David A. Banks of the Department of Geography and Plants.
[00:09:27]  What are those plans, you might ask?
[00:09:29]  Well, let me tell you before he does, we are building a fucking arts district in your town.
[00:09:35]  Then we're going to put up those things on the fucking polls that say, like, welcome.
[00:09:38]  You know what I'm talking about?
[00:09:39]  The little flags where they have an ad on like, welcome, welcome to Sacramento.

=== Invented Authenticity (15:27) ===

[00:09:43]  I know he's got a cute little nickname, too.
[00:09:45]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:46]  Sacktown.
[00:09:46]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:09:47]  Like, well, that's not that cute of a nickname.
[00:09:48]  Well, but Sacktown?
[00:09:49]  What do you think it is?
[00:09:50]  That's what they call my lips.
[00:09:56]  Anyway.
[00:09:56]  Hi, good to be here.
[00:09:58]  Let me finish.
[00:10:00]  Listen, Professor, let me finish the introduction.
[00:10:03]  Let me finish the introduction, please.
[00:10:05]  Thank you.
[00:10:06]  Author of The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America.
[00:10:11]  David, welcome to the City Show.
[00:10:15]  Oh, it's a wonderful to be here.
[00:10:17]  Thank you.
[00:10:18]  Thanks so much for coming.
[00:10:20]  So, David, Bray.
[00:10:23]  Your book introduces us to three concepts.
[00:10:27]  Will you list those out for us?
[00:10:30]  Yeah, sure.
[00:10:32]  One is that cities are bad.
[00:10:35]  Yeah, that's one of them.
[00:10:36]  No, no, the city authentic in general, right?
[00:10:40]  The title of the book is in reference to what I say is like basically the third movement of cities.
[00:10:48]  The second one, we'll go backwards, being the city beautiful, which you might have heard about if you ever took like a class in college that had the word urban in the title.
[00:10:59]  Didn't, but I know what beauty is.
[00:11:01]  Right.
[00:11:02]  And then in the middle is in between the city beautiful and the city authentic is the city efficient, right?
[00:11:09]  Which is usually a reference to a reference that is less often used, but is usually to refer to like making cities, well, more efficient, right?
[00:11:21]  So you install highways, you professionalize every part of how a city runs.
[00:11:26]  You might hire a city manager instead of an elected official or something like that.
[00:11:32]  And in general, the city authentic is meant to describe this third wave of cities where everything is centered on, yeah, like finding a cool nickname for your city, being just corked up enough that people will show up to try your lobster bisque that you can only try in that one place, stuff like that.
[00:11:54]  But what's sort of more disturbing, I think, is like different from the first two movements is that this one is very psychological.
[00:12:02]  That the part that makes the city interesting, that authentic feeling, comes from a lot of searching that people have to like, why am I going to live where I live?
[00:12:15]  Right.
[00:12:16]  Because you can live in a big city for usually the reason you're going to live there is for a job.
[00:12:22]  Yeah.
[00:12:23]  Right.
[00:12:23]  But it's like, okay, but it's really expensive.
[00:12:25]  It's hot.
[00:12:26]  Like this guy's staring at me.
[00:12:28]  Like, why do I, why am I putting up with this?
[00:12:30]  Yeah.
[00:12:31]  Right.
[00:12:31]  And no space.
[00:12:32]  It stinks.
[00:12:33]  The usual rats.
[00:12:35]  Rats.
[00:12:35]  Yeah.
[00:12:36]  Crawling on my ankle.
[00:12:37]  That happened the other day.
[00:12:38]  Oh, no.
[00:12:39]  Yeah.
[00:12:39]  But, you know, it did.
[00:12:41]  And it's like, why is this rat crawling on my ankle?
[00:12:44]  Why bother with this?
[00:12:45]  Right.
[00:12:45]  It has to be something deeper.
[00:12:47]  There has to be a deeper meaning for all this.
[00:12:49]  And so while you're saying that to yourself in the shower, right?
[00:12:54]  You think of like, well, you know, like, I don't know, you know, famous people lived here.
[00:13:00]  Or like, this cool thing happened here this one time.
[00:13:03]  Right.
[00:13:03]  Or, you know, only in the only in the big apple can I make it this way.
[00:13:08]  Right.
[00:13:09]  But if you live in like a smaller city, right, that question becomes even harder to answer.
[00:13:15]  Right.
[00:13:15]  Because it's not New York City.
[00:13:17]  It's a place where you usually have to say like, oh yeah, it's 20 minutes away from a place that more people know about.
[00:13:23]  Right.
[00:13:24]  And that, and once you start having to answer that question, it becomes more about where, why would you come there?
[00:13:36]  And it has to do with, well, maybe there's something back in the history of the city that was really interesting or can't be exported somewhere else is basically what you're looking for is something from the city where you live that can't be exported because everything else can be.
[00:13:53]  And so usually it's identity or a history or something like that.
[00:13:56]  And that's what the city authentic is kind of trying to get at.
[00:14:01]  So give us some examples.
[00:14:03]  So you, this is something I neglected to mention in the 45-minute intro for this episode, but you live in Troy, New York, right?
[00:14:13]  And there's a lot of Troy references in this book.
[00:14:17]  I've never been to Troy.
[00:14:19]  I don't know.
[00:14:19]  Liz, have you been to Troy?
[00:14:20]  No, I don't totally know.
[00:14:22]  I mean, after reading your book, now I know where it is, but I wouldn't have been able to tell you where it was prior to that.
[00:14:27]  Yeah.
[00:14:27]  Well, did you know that's actually where like collars were invented?
[00:14:30]  Like the collars?
[00:14:31]  No, it's true.
[00:14:32]  They used to put on shirts.
[00:14:33]  The detachable shirt collar is invented in Troy.
[00:14:37]  David told me that while we were walking up the stairs.
[00:14:39]  Yeah, it is actually connected to the very first women's union, the Collar City laundry.
[00:14:45]  Of course, women would be making them collars.
[00:14:48]  That's old as time.
[00:14:49]  I'm guessing that many of our listeners have lived in small or mid-sized towns, although now they have moved to New York to pursue a career at Beacon's Closet or some such second-hand vintage store.
[00:15:00]  Correct.
[00:15:02]  What, like, you know, a big part of this is like how these kind of smaller places really sell themselves to get people to move there.
[00:15:08]  And so, like, give me some like Troy-specific examples of that, just to connect people, this like academic concept to some real life stuff that our listeners might recognize.
[00:15:16]  Yeah, so I mean, one thing that you would definitely recognize is when you go maybe on like a daycation, you know, like or something where there's a cute little art thing on the sidewalk, and there's like lots of different kinds of ones that are painted differently.
[00:15:31]  So it's like a, oh, wow, look, there's like a bison that, like, yeah, and someone painted it to look like a cat.
[00:15:40]  That's crazy, right?
[00:15:41]  Stuff like that.
[00:15:42]  In Troy, we have Uncle Sam.
[00:15:44]  Apparently, Sam Wilson, the war profiteer, sold some, like, was in Troy for a while.
[00:15:51]  That was a guy?
[00:15:52]  Yeah, it's based on, it's supposedly based on a guy named Sam Wilson.
[00:15:57]  I don't know if I feel comfortable about him wanting me.
[00:16:00]  Yeah, right.
[00:16:01]  That lends a new meaning to that post.
[00:16:04]  Yeah.
[00:16:04]  Yeah.
[00:16:05]  But there, you know, we, we, they, like, the business improvement district made little Uncle Sams, and like all the different businesses could paint their Uncle Sam differently.
[00:16:14]  And like a bar had, you know, like the big stovepipe hat was like a Beer Stein or something like that.
[00:16:19]  Right.
[00:16:20]  And so there's, there'll be things like that, something to get people thinking about whatever brand you want the city to be or whatever little icon you want associated with your city, right?
[00:16:31]  So that's going to be one big like city authentic kind of thing is to get people invested in something usually pretty benign or stupid, but say like, oh man, only in Troy, right?
[00:16:43]  Or only in Dubuque.
[00:16:45]  You know, it's just like something that someone can, when your friend comes in from out of town, be like, oh man, I bet you've never seen a, like, put ground beef on macaroni or something, you know, whatever weird culinary thing your neighborhood does, your city does, or whatever.
[00:17:00]  So it's usually things like that.
[00:17:03]  So I have a question because when do you think that our, this obsession with authenticity as a, before we talk about the developers, because we're going to have to talk about the developers.
[00:17:14]  Love talking about developers.
[00:17:15]  From a like person who moves around position, the urban citizen, when did our, when did that become the kind of, I don't know, like that was the thing that we were searching for when we were searching for a place to live?
[00:17:31]  Yeah.
[00:17:32]  Yeah.
[00:17:32]  This problem goes back quite a long ways, right?
[00:17:37]  So I trace it back to at least Napoleon III and the rebuilding of Paris.
[00:17:44]  Interesting.
[00:17:45]  Because before Napoleon tells his friend Baron Hausman to basically bulldoze Paris and rebuild it as a triumphant city for a giant empire.
[00:18:04]  It has to be literally awesome.
[00:18:06]  make you say oh right um in order to make that right he had to bulldoze the entire city and rebuild it with these grand boulevards right like Like the famous Parisian cafe.
[00:18:20]  It's hard to put barricades up in, too.
[00:18:24]  Yeah, it's one, it's hard to put up a barricade so you can't do the Paris Commune.
[00:18:28]  You want to prevent the Paris Commune, but you do want to be able to ride a ton of horses abreast, like down a giant boulevard.
[00:18:36]  So the city's really easy to control from the top down when it's built that way.
[00:18:40]  But it's also a city designed to be seen in.
[00:18:45]  It's a kind of social media where these, again, these little Parisian cafes have these big plate glass windows, which is a new invention.
[00:18:53]  But it's also like, you know, like, why would you do that?
[00:18:55]  Right?
[00:18:55]  Like, why would you make it so easy to get into a cafe or something by throwing a brick at it?
[00:19:02]  Right.
[00:19:02]  There has to be something really good for wanting to do this new expensive.
[00:19:06]  You can advertise itself.
[00:19:07]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:07]  And so, yeah, so you can advertise yourself and like, ooh, look who I am.
[00:19:11]  Interesting.
[00:19:11]  Look at who I am.
[00:19:12]  Look at what I'm wearing.
[00:19:13]  Look at who I'm with.
[00:19:14]  And there's like this poem from Baudelaire that describes, is that how you pronounce it?
[00:19:21]  Baudelaire?
[00:19:23]  Yeah.
[00:19:23]  Baudelaire.
[00:19:24]  Yeah.
[00:19:25]  I've only read his name.
[00:19:26]  Baudelaire.
[00:19:27]  You know who I'm talking about or you don't.
[00:19:29]  It doesn't matter.
[00:19:31]  But he has this one about this couple sitting at a little table in Paris.
[00:19:37]  And there's like this family that presses their face against the window and this poor family.
[00:19:44]  And the boyfriend is like, oh my God, I feel really guilty.
[00:19:49]  He feels liberal guilt, right?
[00:19:51]  It's invented in this moment.
[00:19:52]  This guy has the first liberal guilt feeling.
[00:19:55]  And then his girlfriend across from him goes, oh, gross.
[00:20:00]  And wants the manager to get rid of them.
[00:20:02]  And so now in that one moment, you see like the two on the liberal spectrum, like reactions to poverty, right?
[00:20:12]  It's feel bad for them or kill them, right?
[00:20:14]  Or remove them, right?
[00:20:15]  Extermination.
[00:20:16]  And this is the classic setup of the Parisian boulevard.
[00:20:22]  And what kind of goes forward for all cities afterward is that you're constantly being seen and seeing others that are in different positions than you, right?
[00:20:33]  Some are poor, some are rich, some are pretty, some are ugly, right?
[00:20:37]  And New York, some are models.
[00:20:39]  Yes, yes, exactly.
[00:20:40]  That's a big thing here.
[00:20:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:42]  Some are like hot, ugly, right?
[00:20:44]  Is that what you're doing?
[00:20:47]  The real red pill is when you realize that models kind of look like alien greys for the most part, but they have long legs.
[00:20:52]  Yeah.
[00:20:53]  Oh, that's it.
[00:20:54]  If we ever get a chance to talk about selling the OC or selling Sunset or anything, I'm down for talking about those lizards.
[00:21:01]  But yeah, so now that that's all set up, basically ever since then, and the historian Peter Hall puts the city beautiful movement, it begins it with that new Paris and ends in Hitler's Germany, actually.
[00:21:17]  He ruins it for everyone because it's a little too much now.
[00:21:21]  But through this middle period, yeah, you build the city to be seen in, to do things in in public.
[00:21:29]  Yeah.
[00:21:30]  Right.
[00:21:31]  And because that happens, you also have this fear in you that's like, what if I do this wrong?
[00:21:39]  Right?
[00:21:40]  Like, what if I make a bad performance in this?
[00:21:44]  Ah, the anxiety of performance.
[00:21:46]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:46]  And this is basically when FOMO starts to actually build up, right?
[00:21:50]  Because now everyone can see what everyone else is doing.
[00:21:52]  You get like the calling cards.
[00:21:54]  You're like, oh, this person came here, that goes there.
[00:21:56]  I'm at the brasserie.
[00:21:57]  The gourmand's table's full.
[00:21:58]  I'm forced to sit amongst the rabble.
[00:22:01]  Exactly.
[00:22:01]  While he eats a rare bird.
[00:22:03]  And what if I order the wrong rare bird?
[00:22:05]  And he might snatch it off my plate.
[00:22:08]  And worse yet, right?
[00:22:10]  People will see you do all of those things.
[00:22:12]  Everyone will see it.
[00:22:13]  Yeah.
[00:22:14]  And so I usually talk about like the Paris Boulevard.
[00:22:17]  I tell my students that the Paris Boulevard is kind of like, it is social media, right?
[00:22:22]  And now it's way too late to say, it's like your Facebook feed, right?
[00:22:25]  Because it's analogous to the fact that it's a sort of like a public place to like judge and be judged and to sort of like express yourself in this very public way in order to like see yourself reflected off of others.
[00:22:40]  Yeah.
[00:22:40]  So then the obsession with authenticity, to get back to the heart of Liz's question, right, is that you want to sort of tell people who you are, even if all the contingencies of the world never happened, right?
[00:22:57]  If you had full control over your life, which you never do, right?
[00:23:01]  Like what would you be?
[00:23:03]  You'd be like some like Jacusto like scuba diver with cool with a cool accent or are you know, are you do you just like smell weird, right?
[00:23:11]  You know, like whatever your thing would be, right?
[00:23:14]  And the city sort of gives you these opportunities to just like briefly show who you are, who you would want to be, but most of the time you just are who you are.
[00:23:25]  Right.
[00:23:26]  And there's actually some really interesting writing in tourism studies, which is believe it or not, a thing, right?
[00:23:34]  Where they do like sort of typologies of different kinds of authenticity.
[00:23:38]  Yeah.
[00:23:38]  Right.
[00:23:39]  So, like the first one, I'm going to be citing Ning Wang's 1999 article, if anyone cares about that.
[00:23:46]  Oh, my God, I'm crazy about Ning Wang.
[00:23:48]  And when that first came out, it was the only thing anyone was talking about.
[00:23:52]  So, she has these three different versions, right?
[00:23:55]  There's objective, which is like what an art historian does, right?
[00:23:58]  They authenticate, right?
[00:24:00]  Is this an actual Monet or whatever?
[00:24:02]  Yeah, gotcha.
[00:24:02]  Yeah.
[00:24:03]  And then the second one is more like subjective or socially constructed sort of stuff.
[00:24:08]  This is where, you know, the woo-woo.
[00:24:10]  Is this man like an authentic member of like the surrealist movement?
[00:24:14]  Yeah, no, this is where the postmodern sirens should be going off, right?
[00:24:19]  No, in this one, it's really about meeting expectations, right?
[00:24:23]  So you get advertised to that a Hawaiian vacation involves getting, you know, like a lay put on you.
[00:24:31]  There's white sand beaches.
[00:24:33]  You drink from a fruit, right, substance or drink.
[00:24:37]  Big, like, muscly guy, but who somehow kind of has short legs is like, this beach is for locals, man.
[00:24:41]  Right.
[00:24:41]  Yes, that's going to happen to you.
[00:24:44]  Right.
[00:24:45]  And then that all that happened actually happens to you.
[00:24:47]  You've, you've, you've authenticated those expectations.
[00:24:51]  So it's kind of a judgment, really.
[00:24:52]  Yeah.
[00:24:53]  Well, but it's, but you can, because it's constructed, right?
[00:24:57]  It has no connection to that first authenticity, the objective one, right?
[00:25:01]  It's just whatever people are fucking saying to each other about what it should be.
[00:25:05]  And then if those expectations are met, we're done.
[00:25:07]  We're good.
[00:25:07]  That's awesome.
[00:25:08]  Is this like, because what's that goddamn thing?

=== Judgment Through Consumption (05:32) ===

[00:25:10]  What's it?
[00:25:10]  Paris syndrome that people get?
[00:25:12]  Harris syndrome.
[00:25:13]  Oh, yeah.
[00:25:14]  Yeah.
[00:25:14]  We're like talking about that.
[00:25:15]  Yeah, you get there and everyone's like, ah, shit.
[00:25:16]  It happens a lot with tourists.
[00:25:19]  Yeah.
[00:25:19]  Japanese tourists.
[00:25:20]  Japanese tourists.
[00:25:21]  And, you know, they get to Paris and it's, frankly, I can't remember whether it exceeds their expectations and they're so taken in by it or actually like it doesn't have meet any of the expectations they have from media.
[00:25:33]  Yeah.
[00:25:34]  And it invokes this like tremendous sense of like vague loss in people and it can break you.
[00:25:40]  Yeah.
[00:25:41]  Yeah.
[00:25:41]  It was, yeah, it's because like, oh my God, if that's, I'm here and the thing that I wanted that was always like somewhere else.
[00:25:47]  Yeah.
[00:25:48]  Right.
[00:25:48]  I'm here now and it's not here.
[00:25:49]  So like, where the fuck is it?
[00:25:51]  Like, where is this cool thing?
[00:25:53]  Yeah.
[00:25:53]  What's fascinating is that kind of anxiety, because I'm thinking about, okay, how that manifests and like really just in my own brain right now.
[00:25:59]  I'm walking everyone through my thoughts.
[00:26:02]  Thinking about how, you know, like where that's kind of manifested in my life, et cetera, et cetera, whatever.
[00:26:07]  Right.
[00:26:07]  But like thinking about, you know, Paris syndrome or whatever, or exactly what you're explaining that you're talking about in tourist studies, this sort of like second kind of judgment of authenticity or whatever.
[00:26:19]  It's like trying to think about how that kind of came about before social media.
[00:26:24]  Because what I would say is that then social media has put all this stuff on like crazy hyperdrive.
[00:26:30]  Sure.
[00:26:31]  And how that social media has completely like just, I don't know how else, like blown out everyone's expectations of like what an authentic vacation looks like, you know, to stay within tourist land or whatever, or what an authentic apartment for this type of person looks like, or what this authentic, you know, all of those types of, the way we conceive of our experience and spaces has just radically, radically, I don't know what, like,
[00:27:01]  it's like, I don't know.
[00:27:03]  No, no, I totally blown up.
[00:27:05]  I agree.
[00:27:05]  I think that, like, especially in terms of like, you know, prior to social media and this sort of like seeing your peers or people who might be marketed as your peers, like having these experiences, most of the time you would have seen this stuff on TV or read it in books in this very like stage managed way that you kind of like part of you knows is stage manage, right?
[00:27:25]  And it's this like fairy tale sort of stuff that you see.
[00:27:28]  Whereas now you might see like people you actually know in real life sort of presenting this very curated like view of what their vacation was like.
[00:27:36]  And you, you might, I mean, you know, you could be like a savvy normal person that like isn't like totally fucking fried from looking at the internet too much and even still internalize a lot of that and be like, this is what I have to do when I'm on vacation.
[00:27:50]  And like this like constant comparison to your like subconscious comparison to what you see other people doing because you see their experience, like you see these sort of snapshots of their experience and like that kind of gets like marked as the authentic vacation in your head.
[00:28:03]  I mean, again, speaking like strictly to tourism stuff.
[00:28:05]  Well, so now the third one is what she calls existential authenticity.
[00:28:11]  Oh my God.
[00:28:11]  Right.
[00:28:11]  Yeah.
[00:28:12]  That sounds.
[00:28:13]  I think I have that.
[00:28:13]  That sounds like the whole point is everyone knows that.
[00:28:16]  Yeah.
[00:28:16]  No, I think you gotta get essentially authentic.
[00:28:18]  Yeah.
[00:28:19]  Well, in that one, it's um uh it's you you do something that makes you feel like the real you, right?
[00:28:25]  So you're you're uh going to a broad, going to a Broadway play, right?
[00:28:30]  Yeah.
[00:28:30]  Like I'm a very cultured individual and now I'm finally doing it.
[00:28:34]  Right.
[00:28:34]  Or, you know, I'm rolling around in the gutter and like that's who I am.
[00:28:39]  I've always wanted to be.
[00:28:41]  When I was younger and I was like, I remember, I vividly remember, and I, audience, forgive me if it was mentioned this probably on the show before, but I remember one time I was in my apartment and I was like shooting some dope up, listening to television.
[00:28:56]  And I was like, man, I'm a rock and roller.
[00:28:59]  Oh my God.
[00:29:00]  It sounds like a very adolescent way of experiencing the world.
[00:29:03]  And it is, and this is sort of a memory is very embarrassing for me to, I mean, I can do it kind of like a self-afasing way now.
[00:29:09]  But like, it is so juvenile, but it is such like a, I think, I mean, I was an adult when that happened.
[00:29:15]  And I'm sure that I do things that are similar, if less like, you know, obviously embarrassing now even.
[00:29:21]  Well, Hegel called this, right, the freedom of the void.
[00:29:24]  Yeah.
[00:29:24]  Yeah.
[00:29:24]  Where they like, he pull you, modernity pulls out this like really comfy part of you, right?
[00:29:30]  Where like you feel self-assured of like what you should do for all eternity, right?
[00:29:34]  Your last name is Smith, so you're gonna be a blacksmith.
[00:29:36]  It doesn't matter if you're good or bad at it, it's just what you are, right?
[00:29:39]  Banker, for example, right?
[00:29:41]  Um, fan jack and uh um and and so like you didn't need to like try to be somebody, right?
[00:29:53]  You you were you were bestowed it from birth, right?
[00:29:56]  Which might be bad if uh you don't like that thing, right?
[00:30:00]  But at least you have something very specific to rebel against or whatever, right?
[00:30:05]  But here's just like this empty, it's a void, right?
[00:30:07]  And you have and it's nearly impossible to fill it, and so you just feel adrift.
[00:30:13]  And so, yeah, you do things like, oh, I think I saw this on social media once and that became an aspiration for me.
[00:30:19]  And now it kind of feels like I'm doing it too.
[00:30:22]  This feels very authentic, right?
[00:30:24]  Because on, if you go on Instagram, I actually don't recommend anyone do this, but if you go on Instagram and you search for live authentic.
[00:30:32]  Yeah, I did that after I read it in your book, and I was like, this is not one that I've seen before.
[00:30:37]  And then I read that part in your book.
[00:30:39]  I had not heard of that, but I want to search for it.

=== TikTok Blocks Phenomenon (15:55) ===

[00:30:43]  Yeah, there's a lot of gems in there.
[00:30:46]  Yeah, it's like a little bit of a sounds almost dated as a hashtag.
[00:30:49]  It is.
[00:30:49]  It absolutely is.
[00:30:50]  Oh, people still hashtag in it.
[00:30:52]  Hello, nurse.
[00:30:54]  Hello, nursing.
[00:30:55]  I got a whole hospital of them here.
[00:30:57]  Yeah, so it's like thirst trap nurses, or it's like, or it's like someone hand feeding a giraffe or like stuff that is like not, obviously not real, but it is like somehow authentic, right?
[00:31:10]  And so what is that authentic thing?
[00:31:13]  What is it authentically?
[00:31:14]  Right.
[00:31:14]  It is just like this sumptuous consumption, consumptive moment.
[00:31:20]  Totally.
[00:31:21]  Where you just get to be like the most of this one thing, right?
[00:31:25]  Well, so it's one thing for this to be happening on the boulevards of Paris, right?
[00:31:30]  But it is quite another for this to be happening, like we're saying on social media.
[00:31:35]  And then not just, you know, you yourself looking at that hashtag on your phone, but then that person taking that photo or that video in a real space in the real world and that having then ramifications on that physical space and how that then changes, right?
[00:31:51]  Yeah.
[00:31:52]  But something I noticed, this is like a little, this is like the new thing that I, well, it's not new, actually.
[00:31:59]  It's been a couple months that I've been really obsessed with this, but there's this fucking phenomenon that I'm calling like TikTok blocks, where there's entire blocks in cities around the globe, right?
[00:32:11]  We live in a globalized world with fake flowers everywhere.
[00:32:16]  Yes.
[00:32:18]  I call it like a, it's like a virus because it's spreading on these buildings.
[00:32:23]  But what I had kind of put together the other day that I was looking at, like, I don't know, I was like on West Broadway, which is like the fucking belly of the beast for TikTok world.
[00:32:32]  Just like Soho needs to be completely blown off the, anyway.
[00:32:36]  So the colors of these flowers and these like installations on the outside of buildings, which are clearly meant to attract people to the businesses for creating content that will then be shared on social media, which will be free, whatever, whatever, right?
[00:32:53]  The way that these, like now, these like either restaurants or cafes or you know, boutiques, whatever the ice creameries, whatever the fuck all these places are, the colors are so hypersaturated.
[00:33:07]  And I realized like there's this like really like deep, bright magenta that's used because of how it pops on the camera.
[00:33:14]  Or there's like, there's framing.
[00:33:17]  What?
[00:33:17]  No, I was saying she's spitting.
[00:33:19]  That's true.
[00:33:19]  No, it's true.
[00:33:21]  But like also the types of, you know, the certain types of like ceramics that are used and cutlery at certain cafes or like the way that certain layouts are done for spaces are optimized now for social sharing in a way that has,
[00:33:40]  I think for people, like we're on our podcast, we constantly are like, I think like annoyingly reiterating the fact that like there is no real like hard boundary between the internet and real life.
[00:33:51]  You know what I mean?
[00:33:52]  Absolutely.
[00:33:52]  But like this is like really very much so where you see the very like porous nature and how these, these, you know, what we call the real world and what we call like a digital space, like how they're kind of co-produced and, you know, and change one another constantly.
[00:34:11]  Yeah.
[00:34:12]  In a former life, before I was doing a lot of stuff on cities, I did a lot of internet studies stuff, which is, I think, pretty clear in the book eventually.
[00:34:23]  Right.
[00:34:23]  That the two come together.
[00:34:25]  But yeah, me and several others were trying to grapple with this idea of like online, offline.
[00:34:32]  Is it a useful distinction anymore?
[00:34:34]  And of course it became less and less of a useful distinction as phone, you know, as phones got more powerful.
[00:34:40]  You carry around a pocket computer.
[00:34:42]  And yeah, there is like this, yeah, this really porous relationship between the digital and what you can touch with your hands, right?
[00:34:50]  Yeah.
[00:34:51]  And the, and you're absolutely right that, you know, yeah, they're like places that design to be the backdrop or the subject of like some sort of social media post or whatever, right?
[00:35:02]  And like, and even like before that, there was like the Instagram playground.
[00:35:08]  Right, right.
[00:35:08]  Which was a very LA thing.
[00:35:10]  Are you talking about like the Museum of Ice Cream kind of thing?
[00:35:12]  Yeah, stuff like that.
[00:35:13]  Yeah.
[00:35:13]  And it makes sense that like originally that was like, yeah, you would have like a place to go to, much like you would go to your computer in the house and like dial up.
[00:35:25]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:35:26]  Right?
[00:35:27]  RatemyPoo.com.
[00:35:29]  Almost like it's like a purposeful native space almost for it.
[00:35:33]  Right, yeah.
[00:35:33]  And so, yeah, and so the Instagram playground would be like a purposeful place that you would go to to make content for your followers or whatever.
[00:35:43]  But now that's sort of like taken over much of the city space, which even in Troy is the case, which is a big part of the book, is that these little places don't just mimic the bigger ones.
[00:35:54]  They actually have to innovate pretty a lot to deal with the smaller market.
[00:36:02]  Absolutely.
[00:36:03]  They have to be more, they have to be more approachable to the average person, right?
[00:36:09]  Because not everyone outside of, well, I'll just say New York City, right, has like the same brainworms as everyone inside New York City, right?
[00:36:17]  So some people have to walk up and be like, oh, what's that?
[00:36:19]  Is that a thing from the TikTok?
[00:36:21]  I think I've seen that before, right?
[00:36:22]  So, you know, which is not to make people outside of cities seem provincial, but there is just like, just, you know, you find out you find less simple if you're not.
[00:36:31]  Yeah, right.
[00:36:31]  Yeah.
[00:36:31]  You're not going to be able to do that.
[00:36:32]  They're dumb.
[00:36:33]  Most of these kind of ideas are being like honed and kind of perfected and exported from city centers.
[00:36:40]  It's only natural for then the places outside of the cities to be performing them almost in like overcompensating, right?
[00:36:48]  They're trying to understand that the logic that generates these ideas.
[00:36:52]  And so they're doing it in a kind of, you know, it ends up being maybe a bit more cartoonish than it would have, you know, coming from the original source.
[00:37:01]  Yeah.
[00:37:01]  And then there's also like a pretty practical reason for the way that they do it too, which is that, you know, digital networks have an urbanizing character to them.
[00:37:13]  And what I mean by that is like, for example, in Ulster County, right, which is just sort of.
[00:37:18]  I do know where that is.
[00:37:19]  Yeah.
[00:37:19]  Yeah, there we go.
[00:37:20]  Right.
[00:37:20]  And it's a part of England.
[00:37:21]  I saw it.
[00:37:23]  They're like northwest of the city, New York City.
[00:37:27]  Right.
[00:37:28]  A lot of fairly well-off people like fled from COVID.
[00:37:33]  I remember all those everyone's like is it ethically wrong for me to live in my parents three bedroom vacation home right in the house What I'm thinking of is like, it's like a guy who looks like he owns a cafe in the nicest overalls you've ever seen.
[00:37:53]  Yeah.
[00:37:53]  Being like, I can't get my faucet to work.
[00:37:55]  I call him the gentleman farmer.
[00:37:56]  Yes.
[00:37:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:57]  And yeah, and that became sort of like, it was this interesting phenomenon where like there was all these people in the city.
[00:38:04]  In California, I feel like people did it also, but with like Sonoma.
[00:38:09]  For me, I think it's Nevada City.
[00:38:11]  I think for San Francisco, Nevada City became a big grass.
[00:38:14]  Utah, actually, also.
[00:38:15]  Utah as well.
[00:38:16]  And then down south, it was people became desert folk.
[00:38:19]  Right.
[00:38:19]  But it's a lot, I think that's like a lot cheaper than the East Coast.
[00:38:21]  Well, there's the kind of bug out tendency too of the Silicon Valley type.
[00:38:25]  Right.
[00:38:25]  Yeah.
[00:38:25]  Buy a nuclear silo.
[00:38:28]  I'm thinking of more like the urban, the urban, like someone who would have been called a hipster 12 years ago, like a little aged out of it.
[00:38:34]  They're married now.
[00:38:36]  And like this sort of homesteading that they did.
[00:38:39]  And then there was these sort of like countless articles in like the New York Times about like the trials and tribulations of these people, which I enjoyed reading because it's nice to read about somebody who you instinctively, reflexively don't like, who's having a bad time.
[00:38:50]  But like it became like, and you could tell these people were sort of searching.
[00:38:54]  Like it was somebody who's probably lived in Brooklyn for 25 years, moving out to the country in search of, and they even would say it baldly sometimes, like authenticity, right?
[00:39:04]  Like this is how you're really supposed to live.
[00:39:06]  And I think, I think a large urge from that is because a lot of the people I feel like feel like interlopers in a city.
[00:39:13]  Maybe they moved to a big city to become like, again, somebody works at a cafe and does art, like whatever.
[00:39:20]  Maybe they moved there like 25 years ago, but they never truly felt like at home.
[00:39:24]  Like I'm not really from BK or whatever.
[00:39:27]  And it's this search.
[00:39:30]  Like now it's like, it's this ruralization program for the aging hipster.
[00:39:34]  And it's really, it's interesting because I feel like it's, it does play into this, like this decades long that I've witnessed obsession with authenticity that people have.
[00:39:45]  And being in San Francisco, I've seen it so much firsthand because San Francisco has like a very, you know, gold rush and then kind of like, you know, the fire and then like the rebuilding in the 20, you know, all this stuff.
[00:39:57]  Or like until like the 20s and like San Francisco's history with the hippies and the beatniks and all.
[00:40:01]  And then.
[00:40:02]  And a shit ton of money, too.
[00:40:04]  Exactly.
[00:40:05]  And then like to see all of that, much like gay Paris demolished and then sort of rebuilt in with references maybe to the past, but with this new sort of veneer of authenticity that actually like is supposed to attract people that despise what actually made San Francisco sort of the subjective, authentic San Francisco and the objective, authentic San Francisco.
[00:40:32]  And it was just like, I mean, I just remember, I mean, within my life, feeling so at home somewhere.
[00:40:38]  And then one day being like, I don't feel like I, I don't belong here.
[00:40:43]  I am the, I felt more alienated than I've almost ever felt in my life just walking down the street.
[00:40:47]  I didn't recognize a fucking thing.
[00:40:48]  Yeah.
[00:40:48]  It's streets that I've walked on since I was a child.
[00:40:51]  And there's a specific kind of alienation that you can only get from like a place that looks or you know used to be home and now isn't.
[00:40:58]  Like there, that hits way deeper.
[00:41:00]  Yeah, it's uncanny.
[00:41:01]  That's uncanny.
[00:41:01]  It really drove me a little bit.
[00:41:02]  It's the exact right word.
[00:41:04]  Yeah.
[00:41:04]  But to get back to the point about like digital networks urbanizing, right?
[00:41:08]  Is that in Ulster County, I spoke to this real estate agent that built an app.
[00:41:16]  It's called Upstate Curious.
[00:41:17]  You can look it up.
[00:41:18]  Upstate Curious?
[00:41:19]  That's the name of the app.
[00:41:20]  It's in your book.
[00:41:21]  Yeah, it's in the book.
[00:41:21]  Yeah.
[00:41:22]  Why not Up Curious?
[00:41:23]  That doesn't sound right.
[00:41:24]  Yeah, Liz, I think maybe workshop that way.
[00:41:26]  We'll work on it a little bit.
[00:41:27]  But the idea is basically to provide that word of mouth kind of like, oh, I'm walking down Broadway and I found a cool new, adorable little tapest bar.
[00:41:38]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:41:39]  And so you can't do that serendipity on country roads, right?
[00:41:43]  Unless like you just drive around aimlessly like David Lynch character.
[00:41:46]  Ton of businesses just randomly on country roads.
[00:41:49]  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:41:50]  You really have to go look for, and also because like there's this just another one of these brainworms in authenticity where it's like, it should be a little hard to get to.
[00:41:58]  And it's like, oh, oh, it's like a speakeasy, but there's no, you're not going to ever get arrested.
[00:42:04]  It's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:42:06]  And so they make this app to try to like find all the cool shit in Ulster County, right?
[00:42:12]  That's that, that's the whole point of this app.
[00:42:15]  Like a Pokemon Go for, like, yeah, like, but it was also like a next door-ish app kind of thing.
[00:42:22]  But it becomes like a, it's, it becomes like a curated list of the authentic Ulster County experiences.
[00:42:26]  Exactly.
[00:42:26]  Yeah.
[00:42:27]  Which is actually, it's not the, the objective authentic, right?
[00:42:32]  It's the existential authentic, right?
[00:42:33]  Yeah.
[00:42:34]  It's like, I finally ate a pizza in the woods, right?
[00:42:37]  Yeah.
[00:42:37]  Like, this is the existential experience of living the gentleman.
[00:42:41]  Gentleman farmer.
[00:42:42]  Gentleman farmer.
[00:42:43]  Yeah.
[00:42:43]  Just like, just like John Adams, right?
[00:42:45]  Totally.
[00:42:46]  He would leave Philadelphia and then eat a pizza in the woods.
[00:42:49]  I mean, yeah, I mean, to, I guess, do like the relate this to California thing.
[00:42:54]  And again, like, you know, listeners, I'm sorry.
[00:42:57]  I've lived my entire life in major urban areas.
[00:42:59]  So if you don't relate to this, then I'm sorry.
[00:43:02]  Maybe you should have gone to Pratt.
[00:43:04]  This is actually the first time in my life I've lived in not in major urban areas.
[00:43:08]  Yeah.
[00:43:09]  That's true.
[00:43:10]  Actually, Liz lives on a barge.
[00:43:11]  No, but I mean, so like, I apologize.
[00:43:13]  Like, I have, you know, I don't apologize, but like, I have lived in San Francisco almost my entire life.
[00:43:19]  And so it's like, I, that, the, the experience I can relate are mostly related to that.
[00:43:23]  But like, a big thing that I noticed when I was younger is like, I would see people like kind of have this freak out in the city and then they'd move to the desert and then sort of like inhabit this like character of like, I'm like a desert like 60s burnout kind of person.
[00:43:38]  Like the chicks would all get like kind of fringe jackets and witchy hats.
[00:43:41]  And like sort of presage the, I always want to call it the Ouija board movement, but like the tarot kind of person.
[00:43:46]  When I lived in LA, a lot of expats to Joshua Tree.
[00:43:50]  Exactly.
[00:43:51]  Yeah.
[00:43:51]  Oh, I'm going to open up a vintage store.
[00:43:53]  It's like, no, you're not.
[00:43:53]  Yeah.
[00:43:54]  But no, they will.
[00:43:54]  They will.
[00:43:55]  They will.
[00:43:56]  They'll get around to it.
[00:43:57]  It's going to be in an Airstream trailer.
[00:43:59]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:44:00]  And then they actually live in Joshua Street.
[00:44:02]  And they're like, damn, it's kind of freaky over here.
[00:44:04]  Like, yeah.
[00:44:04]  Yeah, these mountain folk do a lot of meth.
[00:44:07]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:44:07]  And you know what?
[00:44:08]  We city folk do too.
[00:44:10]  But like, it's, and it was, I, I, I couldn't figure out why it bugged me so much when I was younger.
[00:44:15]  And I realized it was that, like, these people were trying to create this new authenticity.
[00:44:20]  And oftentimes, interlopers like in these areas were trying to kind of create this new authenticity.
[00:44:25]  And I, I feel like now, with some, like, you know, I sound very judgmental, but now I really do recognize that like people are searching for a sense of self and for a sense of like true, like real concrete identity and feeling like a human being and like a person.
[00:44:41]  And I feel like the thing is, like, you aren't going to, you aren't going to, maybe you will, but I don't think you're going to find that by opening up a vintage store in Idle Wild.
[00:44:48]  Like that is something that like might actually just be robbed from you by the way that society like is structured right now and by like, by the technologies that, like you know, sort of govern many of our not governed but like um, strongly determined, strongly determine many of our like you know your social relations and your, you know your, your emotional, romantic relations with people, and it's like I I, I get that like need, that like desperate search for authenticity that so many people have um,
[00:45:16]  but it's interesting that so much of it like falls to people kind of like seeking out the, the rural life.
[00:45:22]  I don't care, I don't care really what anybody does, but it's what.
[00:45:25]  What I found fascinating about your book is well, that's literally not true.
[00:45:28]  I'm actually straight up lying.
[00:45:30]  I'm.
[00:45:30]  We've got hater number one hat I am, I am.
[00:45:34]  The only television i've ever related to was the Dave Chappelle thing, where those guys were mean to people back in time and I was like I would love to have a time machine so I could be cruel to others, perhaps in the 17th 16th 15th, even 14th centuries.
[00:45:47]  But uh I, you know it's.
[00:45:49]  What I found interesting about your book too is that like these cities, these smaller cities, like it is like they have to come up with these like sort of new creative ways to like advertise themselves as like hey, we're just like the big city, you know, I mean, but smaller and more homey, and like it.
[00:46:04]  It really actually robs the place of like true authenticity and it kind of creates this like facsimile of like, you know, New York.
[00:46:11]  Like New York, Troy becomes like a little New York City.
[00:46:14]  Well, we were called the uh, the New Brooklyn for a very long time.
[00:46:18]  Really yeah yeah they, everyone tried to make that stick.
[00:46:21]  They should make an ad that's that has a list of all the, all the towns that have ever been called the New Brooklyn yes, and then wipe them All off the map here.
[00:46:30]  No, but you're right, Brad.
[00:46:33]  It's like, like, it is, I have like serious empathy for people.

=== Wine Bar Authenticity (15:38) ===

[00:46:39]  They're like, I don't, something feels wrong, right?
[00:46:42]  And like, this world doesn't feel right.
[00:46:44]  And maybe it's where I am or like what I'm doing for money and or like, you know, what kind of clothes I'm wearing, what sort of affectation I give.
[00:46:54]  Right.
[00:46:55]  And it goes beyond sort of like the like the high school click, like, am I a goth or am I kind of thing, right?
[00:47:01]  It goes into this, like, well, like, where, what should I, um, what, what's the purpose of living, right?
[00:47:09]  There's like, it's just the very most fundamental questions.
[00:47:12]  And unfortunately, it usually gets worked out because so much of our lives are like mediated by commodified bullshit.
[00:47:20]  Yeah.
[00:47:20]  Right.
[00:47:21]  That these really serious, earnest questions come out in the goofiest, most like unrespectable ways possible.
[00:47:29]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:47:31]  Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:47:31]  Or it's just like, I'm going to pretend to be a lumberjack.
[00:47:35]  Like, that's not.
[00:47:36]  That was a really interesting moment.
[00:47:38]  Yeah.
[00:47:38]  Whereas it's almost like that Twitter joke, right?
[00:47:41]  Like men will literally become a lumberjack instead of going to therapy.
[00:47:45]  But the funny thing is, they won't literally become a lumberjack.
[00:47:47]  No, right.
[00:47:48]  No, that's correct.
[00:47:49]  Yeah.
[00:47:49]  They won't ever take down a tree.
[00:47:51]  But everyone will, for some reason, wear buffalo check shirts for 20 years.
[00:47:56]  And you see, this fucking me right here, you know, I'm literally for the, I mean, I know this a podcast, you can't see me.
[00:48:01]  I'm wearing nothing but an adult diaper.
[00:48:03]  And I've clear-cut probably thousands of acres of forest.
[00:48:06]  You pull it off, really.
[00:48:07]  And I get no credit for being like an authentic rural guy.
[00:48:12]  So we've spent some time now talking about the cities trying to attract people to move there by taking on these kind of authentic, I don't know, creating these brands for themselves.
[00:48:22]  I mean, that's really what it is.
[00:48:23]  That is exactly what it is.
[00:48:24]  But on the flip side of that is like, you know, almost an even bigger portion of this whole conversation and kind of stretching all this out or is like, or, you know, figuring all this out, is that the cities are trying to brand themselves for development dollars.
[00:48:39]  Yes.
[00:48:40]  Because they're all, especially the smaller ones, are in big competition to get basically whatever they can.
[00:48:47]  Yeah.
[00:48:48]  And you do, I think, a really great job in the book of kind of, you know, dipping into David Harvey's work of explaining how crucial uneven development is for like for capitalist expansion to continue a pace and in fact, like, you know, increase and for cycles to speed up in the pace that they need to.
[00:49:12]  And so for every like Troy bottoming out and like New York rising, like, you know, that kind of, that kind of unevenness is kind of essential to capitalist developers like finding new places and new untapped cities to, you know, develop and, you know, get more people to move and then make bigger cities.
[00:49:39]  And then, of course, that undermines its own so-called authentic brand, which we can get to in a little bit.
[00:49:46]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:46]  So yeah, you mentioned David Harvey.
[00:49:48]  I lean heavily on this book, Urban Fortunes by two authors whose last names are Logan and Mollich.
[00:49:55]  That's all I remember.
[00:49:56]  The book is about as old as I am.
[00:49:58]  Right.
[00:49:59]  And I still, and I. 300 years old.
[00:50:01]  300 years old.
[00:50:02]  Yeah.
[00:50:02]  I moisturized really well.
[00:50:04]  I'm wet.
[00:50:08]  And I had it assigned to me as an undergrad in the 1700s.
[00:50:14]  And I assign it to my students today because I'm lazy and I don't want to read another book.
[00:50:18]  No, all good.
[00:50:21]  But actually, the real reason I assign it is because all those problems still exist.
[00:50:24]  It is completely unchanged.
[00:50:26]  We have not solved any of these problems.
[00:50:28]  And the problems that the book Urban Fortunes describes is this will to grow, just what they call the growth machine, where just every city and everyone that is in charge of it, all they have to do, their entire job is to grow the city on every metric imaginable.
[00:50:46]  Like physically bigger, bigger economy, more people, physically larger people.
[00:50:52]  They want giants to move out.
[00:50:53]  Yes, right?
[00:50:54]  No.
[00:50:55]  Board foot nine.
[00:50:56]  Yeah, Glacius conundrum.
[00:50:58]  Yes, yeah.
[00:50:58]  One billion Americans.
[00:51:00]  Right.
[00:51:00]  Yeah.
[00:51:00]  Yeah.
[00:51:01]  I didn't, I never read that book because why would I?
[00:51:03]  But I feel like there's something connecting there.
[00:51:08]  I would love to open up that guy like a hawk.
[00:51:11]  That'd be crazy.
[00:51:12]  See what's in here?
[00:51:14]  What's that thing?
[00:51:15]  It's just tinier ones.
[00:51:16]  Yeah.
[00:51:16]  Oh, I got one million.
[00:51:19]  That'd be crazy.
[00:51:20]  One million.
[00:51:20]  But just like without peril.
[00:51:23]  He's like, I told you.
[00:51:24]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:51:26]  But no, every city has to grow in all these different ways.
[00:51:33]  And it does always, every single time, undermine everything that you actually want a city to be, right?
[00:51:39]  Livable, affordable, something that you recognize, you know, the cheers kind of feeling.
[00:51:45]  You want the trains to run on time.
[00:51:47]  You want the trains to run on time.
[00:51:48]  Yeah, no, but you want someone that feels like a community, but that also works for you to live in and isn't a fucking hassle every time you walk down the street.
[00:51:54]  Right.
[00:51:55]  But what ends up happening is that your city never has any money for any of that stuff.
[00:52:00]  There's a reason for that, right?
[00:52:02]  It has a lot to do with Just the hit the contingencies of history of how we just kind of like blew out cities, usually to you know, to the detriment of black people or immigrants.
[00:52:14]  And we just like literally pick jobs up and move them as far away from these people as possible after they have, you know, they've been used up as much as we wanted.
[00:52:23]  Right.
[00:52:23]  Yeah.
[00:52:23]  We can just like find cheaper labor somewhere else.
[00:52:25]  Yeah, deindustrialization.
[00:52:26]  Yeah, deindustrialization.
[00:52:28]  Right.
[00:52:28]  And so what ended up, but even in like cities that benefited from that, sure, like in the 70s and 80s, right, eventually those jobs moved again thanks to Bill Clinton.
[00:52:37]  Right.
[00:52:37]  Yeah.
[00:52:37]  Like Bill Clinton got rid of them in NAFTA and all that, but that's overturned now, right?
[00:52:42]  Trump forgot about that.
[00:52:43]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:52:44]  Remember they were like, we're opening an air conditioner factory.
[00:52:46]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:52:47]  That was it.
[00:52:47]  And then it kind of just like, I think it never happened.
[00:52:50]  I think, yeah, I think it eventually did, but just like wasn't.
[00:52:53]  It opened everything.
[00:52:54]  Especially if it did.
[00:52:55]  I mean, yeah, the box is Pandora's box is open.
[00:52:58]  There's no way you can't put it back in.
[00:52:59]  And so what ends up happening is that city officials just go out and look for just some something.
[00:53:07]  You know, like when Amazon was trying to find a second headquarters and they were, you know, they were going, ooh, I don't know where we're going to put it.
[00:53:13]  Gosh, maybe it could be your city.
[00:53:15]  I forgot about that.
[00:53:16]  That was one of the most humiliating mayoral periods in the world where every mayor was like, I will, I'll suck your dick, dude.
[00:53:24]  Just like move it here.
[00:53:25]  We will build you.
[00:53:26]  They were like, I'm a live mayor.
[00:53:28]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:53:29]  Like, dude, you can text my wife, bro.
[00:53:31]  Like, it's like, but it was crazy.
[00:53:33]  What are the cities do for the Olympics?
[00:53:36]  Yes.
[00:53:36]  It's the same kind of process.
[00:53:38]  Yeah, the thing they do for, what I say for like the Olympics or the World Cup, right?
[00:53:41]  Any of these moving slaves, dude.
[00:53:47]  It just puts a deadline on as much growth as possible.
[00:53:51]  Right.
[00:53:51]  And so, and that deadline opens up a bunch of stuff that, and it also excuses a lot of things.
[00:53:57]  I mean, for San Francisco, that was one of the big nails in the coffin when there was the big deal for Twitter to move in.
[00:54:03]  And that was...
[00:54:04]  Thank you, Jane Kim.
[00:54:06]  Yeah, when was that?
[00:54:07]  I don't remember exactly the year, but I remember being at work at the fucking Brothers Papadopoulos Flowers and my bosses, like, who made like $12,000 a year.
[00:54:16]  And I were standing there like, how come they don't have to pay any money in taxes, but we do?
[00:54:20]  You know, we didn't really pay taxes.
[00:54:22]  And that's really what that was like the big, I don't know.
[00:54:25]  That destroyed it.
[00:54:26]  I mean, no, no, it wasn't.
[00:54:27]  Blew the damn out.
[00:54:28]  Yeah, that was, that was San Francisco's one of countless instances of San Francisco politicians really just being like, here, have this.
[00:54:36]  We'll fucking pay you to have this.
[00:54:39]  And then just destroy this neighborhood, remaking your image.
[00:54:42]  And now if you look at where the Twitter headquarters is on market, I mean.
[00:54:45]  It's on, what, fifth and market?
[00:54:47]  Yeah.
[00:54:47]  Yeah, I mean, it is.
[00:54:48]  Sorry, it's like fourth.
[00:54:50]  Or no, no.
[00:54:51]  No, it's up there.
[00:54:52]  It's like on the other side.
[00:54:53]  And it was like in an old scare quotes historic building, right?
[00:54:57]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:54:58]  Oh, they all have to be.
[00:55:00]  They all have to be in like, you know, whatever the equivalent in San Francisco is of like a flat iron building.
[00:55:04]  To have that, so then it can be like, like you say, authentic looking.
[00:55:07]  Right, well, like space.
[00:55:09]  It is really crucial, especially for social media companies, right, to inhabit these iconic buildings.
[00:55:14]  Yes.
[00:55:14]  Because it, one, I think it, my theory is that it kind of like makes them feel like they've always been there.
[00:55:18]  Yeah.
[00:55:19]  Right.
[00:55:19]  Which is, which is, I think, is useful for a company that's like, we are your community.
[00:55:24]  Yeah.
[00:55:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:55:27]  But it's all, but it's also like, they're just, they have so much fucking money for no reason, and they don't do anything with it because they hire like 12 people or something.
[00:55:35]  I've seen those TikTok videos.
[00:55:36]  Yeah.
[00:55:37]  You know what's so funny?
[00:55:39]  So I saw one just the other day.
[00:55:41]  You're talking about the day in the life.
[00:55:42]  Yeah.
[00:55:42]  You know, you see these like 20-year-olds.
[00:55:44]  So it's like, so I get up and then I get my assay bowl and then I'm like, hey, what's up, Courtney?
[00:55:48]  And then we go to like a team building.
[00:55:50]  And then I'm like, oh my God, I'm tired.
[00:55:51]  And then I go into a statement.
[00:55:53]  I go into cryostasis for 45.
[00:55:56]  I kind of like, you know, welcome to Uber, Chicago, or whatever it is.
[00:56:01]  And I think too many people are kind of like incredulous about it.
[00:56:04]  And they're like, I can't believe this is what kids these days.
[00:56:06]  And it's like, this person obviously works in HR and this is like part of their marketing budget.
[00:56:11]  Also, I saw one like a couple days ago.
[00:56:15]  And it was so funny because it was like retweeted by one of those like right-wing, I don't know, who knows what accounts, like Caesar icon or whatever.
[00:56:23]  And it's like, you know, all these, yeah, like bug eaters of San Francisco.
[00:56:30]  Like, you know, they're so like decadent, whatever the whole thing was.
[00:56:34]  And it was this girl in Dallas at Deloitte University.
[00:56:38]  And I was like, okay, Deloitte is not Airbnb.
[00:56:42]  Right.
[00:56:43]  Deloitte is one of the largest fucking private equity accounting slash, I don't know, business consulting.
[00:56:51]  I know they fire you.
[00:56:52]  That's like what they do.
[00:56:53]  Yes, Deloitte and McKinsey, right?
[00:56:54]  I mean, that's what they're doing.
[00:56:56]  That's what I was going to say.
[00:56:56]  But what I was saying is, like, it's so funny seeing these like older companies now taking on these attitudes of these start, these startups, you know, and kind of putting that same kind of marketing stuff out there.
[00:57:06]  Right.
[00:57:07]  And people being a little, you know.
[00:57:09]  They realize that like they too, like, don't have a tangible good.
[00:57:11]  Right.
[00:57:12]  And so they're like, oh, yeah.
[00:57:13]  So we just need to like look cool.
[00:57:15]  Yeah.
[00:57:15]  Like that's, that is our, that is our job, right?
[00:57:18]  It's like the public-facing version of it is just to look really fucking cool so that at least like you'll, your guard will be down for like the first two days that we are involved in your life.
[00:57:29]  And then and then the third day you're homeless.
[00:57:31]  Yeah.
[00:57:32]  Right.
[00:57:33]  But like these two days, it's like the same thing.
[00:57:34]  There's some great poke balls.
[00:57:36]  Yeah.
[00:57:36]  Business training conference, you know, oh, you have to go through McKinsey training for two years, normal shit for consultant world or whatever.
[00:57:43]  But it's so funny now to see it rebranded as like, hey, what's up, world?
[00:57:47]  It's Google, Chicago.
[00:57:49]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:57:50]  7 a.m. getting my oats.
[00:57:52]  Matcha latte.
[00:57:54]  Something that, like, something that sort of struck me is like, all right, so there's this sort of search for the city authentic that a lot of these cities themselves are like, they're like the city boosters, the business district or the council, you know, the fucking chamber of commerce, chamber of commerce, all these things are sort of like city boosters, right?
[00:58:09]  But like the money to interest behind the city, the people who actually stand to gain from people moving there is, or like really at the end of the line, gain.
[00:58:17]  But something that's like really funny about that is like the whole city efficient period that came between city beautiful and city authentic.
[00:58:24]  The city efficient period, especially in America, especially with like highways, really demolished a lot of the beauty in a lot of these cities.
[00:58:31]  Like, I mean, I remember when I was 15 and finally actually seeing America.
[00:58:37]  Like, I had not left the Bay Area all that much as a kid.
[00:58:41]  And my band was on.
[00:58:42]  We did a two, two and a half, three-month tour when I was in high school, which was a long story.
[00:58:49]  But I remember like going through all these towns and be like, wait, everywhere just is a subway.
[00:58:54]  And like, everyone's just like, it's just like a freeway and then a subway.
[00:58:58]  And then like, wait, you mean subway sandwiches?
[00:59:00]  Subway sandwiches.
[00:59:00]  Yeah, there's no, no, no, no, there's no public transit.
[00:59:04]  Are you kidding me?
[00:59:04]  Only sandwiches.
[00:59:05]  Only shitty sandwiches.
[00:59:06]  No public transportation.
[00:59:07]  There's like two cities in America with a subway.
[00:59:11]  But I remember seeing that and be like, wait, what?
[00:59:14]  Like, I thought these were all like, I'd like just seen old movies that took place in towns outside of San Francisco.
[00:59:20]  I was like, how come it's not like that?
[00:59:21]  I remember going to LA.
[00:59:22]  I'm like, this is just freeways.
[00:59:24]  And like, it's funny because so much of these cities, like the authentic heart and soul of these cities was really demolished during like that period of like, you know, massive adoption of cars.
[00:59:34]  And like, and I'm not even like a big anti-car, don't get me wrong.
[00:59:37]  I love fucking badass hot rods.
[00:59:39]  Not that I can drive them.
[00:59:41]  But, you know, it's crazy because now it's like this search for like authenticity.
[00:59:45]  And it's like, well, we actually demolished all the things that made this like town or city unique 40 years ago, 50 years ago.
[00:59:52]  But like, here's a picture of it.
[00:59:55]  And like, I've been to so many like speaky, actually, I haven't, to be honest with you, but I've been to one or two brew pubs by accident in my life in like a mid-sized city, and they'll just have a picture of how cool the street used to look.
[01:00:05]  Right.
[01:00:06]  Those are classic.
[01:00:07]  And then if you go.
[01:00:08]  It's like ORIPA is named after that.
[01:00:10]  Exactly.
[01:00:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
[01:00:13]  Yes, no, yeah, that is a crucial part of the city authentic is naming Something that you can buy for some like ridiculous price named after something that used to exist that we demolished for a highway.
[01:00:25]  Or like where when I describe like the city authentic like taking form in Troy, I describe this wine bar that's gonna start up.
[01:00:34]  Oh, yeah.
[01:00:35]  Which, but the uh, this wine bar, right, um, is getting all this buzz, this local buzz.
[01:00:41]  And he names it the confectionery, which doesn't make any fucking sense because it's a wine bar.
[01:00:46]  And not a candy store.
[01:00:48]  Yeah, right.
[01:00:48]  Yeah.
[01:00:48]  But there was a there is no difference.
[01:00:51]  But there was a candy store there in like 1875 or something.
[01:00:56]  Right.
[01:00:56]  If he had called it what was in there just before it was a wine bar, it would be like the Troy Insurance Company and wine bar.
[01:01:05]  Yeah, sure.
[01:01:05]  But you don't want that, right?
[01:01:06]  So you have to find the perfect little foof thing.
[01:01:08]  Actually, I'll be honest, Troy Insurance Company Wine Bar is a fantastic name for a wine.
[01:01:13]  I've never been to a wine bar, but if I was to go in one of them.
[01:01:15]  This would be so funny in 40 years.
[01:01:16]  They were just like, oh, this is my wine bar, McDonald's.
[01:01:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:01:22]  The wine bar insurance company.
[01:01:23]  Yeah.
[01:01:24]  You can just go all the way around.
[01:01:25]  Yeah.
[01:01:26]  But yeah, Brace, it's interesting you describe that because I had kind of the opposite experience where I grew up in South Florida, which is like the cultural equivalent of a cornfield.
[01:01:36]  I was just there, brother.
[01:01:37]  I know.
[01:01:37]  Oh, you were?
[01:01:38]  I was exactly in South Florida.
[01:01:41]  It was Miramar, Florida.
[01:01:43]  It's in between Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
[01:01:46]  I went to the Keys recently.
[01:01:47]  Oh, right.
[01:01:48]  Yes, I saw.
[01:01:48]  I did see that.
[01:01:49]  Yeah.
[01:01:49]  Yeah, I'm sorry.
[01:01:51]  I actually, there was a lot of authenticity, weird go-on.
[01:01:55]  Yeah.
[01:01:55]  No, I'll connect you with some fun people in South Florida.
[01:01:59]  But no, the thing about South Florida, right, is that, yeah, it goes from the coast, right, inward.
[01:02:05]  Yeah.
[01:02:06]  So if you're on the, where I grew up on the southeast coast, right?
[01:02:09]  You can, it's like a rings on a tree, right?
[01:02:12]  Like the thing that is west is newer.
[01:02:15]  Right.
[01:02:15]  And you can just like watch it change.

=== Everyone Hated The Bay Area (05:10) ===

[01:02:17]  Right.
[01:02:17]  And so you can actually look like on Google Maps, like watch the buildings get bigger, like the homes get bigger, like that, they turn into cul-de-sacs instead of on a street grid and stuff like that.
[01:02:27]  But they were never, but there was never like really any culture there.
[01:02:30]  Yeah.
[01:02:31]  It's just World War II ranch style houses as far as the I can see.
[01:02:36]  And I saw in movies, again, like what you were saying, Bryce, right?
[01:02:40]  Of like places that made out of bricks.
[01:02:43]  Yeah.
[01:02:43]  You know, right?
[01:02:45]  And I'm like, holy shit, that looks crazy.
[01:02:47]  Me too, dude.
[01:02:48]  We don't have bricks in San Francisco.
[01:02:49]  Yeah, I was like, that looks nuts.
[01:02:51]  You build a whole building out of that?
[01:02:52]  That's crazy.
[01:02:54]  And then when I moved for grad school to upstate New York, I'm like, everything is so fucking old.
[01:02:58]  This is so wild.
[01:03:00]  Stuff still made out of like wrought iron.
[01:03:01]  And like, is this going to stand?
[01:03:04]  And the answer was not really, but we were really close there.
[01:03:08]  Right.
[01:03:09]  But yeah, and so it was really funny then to then watch everyone fall in love with all this stuff that I had just seen.
[01:03:18]  And I'm like, weren't all you motherfuckers like living here the whole time?
[01:03:21]  They're like, yeah, and it's beautiful.
[01:03:23]  We love it.
[01:03:23]  I'm like, I thought everyone hated it here.
[01:03:25]  Like, this is like the blown out industrial cities that all of a sudden just some people really, really like.
[01:03:33]  But then, of course, there are like other people who, yeah, like that actually have lived there for a long time.
[01:03:38]  Well, you know, like authentic Troy or Albany or whatever kind of people, right, who still fucking hate it there, which I think is really probably the only authentic experience you can have with a place is hating it.
[01:03:49]  That's right.
[01:03:50]  You have to hate where you live.
[01:03:51]  And I don't think a lot of people really like that.
[01:03:54]  Yeah.
[01:03:54]  Right.
[01:03:55]  They want to go to a place that like creates that warm, fuzzy feeling.
[01:03:59]  But, and I don't think people want to really think about the fact that maybe like the most authentically of a place you can be is a place that you hate.
[01:04:07]  And I'm just gonna, I like, I keep coming back to that, to be honest.
[01:04:10]  Like that's not in the book, but because I don't want to put that down on paper.
[01:04:15]  I'll put it in a podcast.
[01:04:16]  But like, I can't, that really just seems to be the only people that feel like they are where they should be is someone that's sitting there like, my taxes are too high and I fucking hate the teachers at these schools.
[01:04:27]  Yeah.
[01:04:27]  Like, that's it.
[01:04:28]  Like, that means you are where you should be.
[01:04:32]  I mean, I think something I really like kind of come back to with that because like I would, it's funny because like everyone I know from the bay kind of hated the bay because like we really like are from the like the last gasp of like when you could live there as a normal person.
[01:04:49]  You know what I mean?
[01:04:50]  Like we witness in our lifetimes, like you and I, like how that just like changed and ended, essentially.
[01:04:55]  Right.
[01:04:56]  In large part, obviously there's still lots of normal people that live in the Bay Area, but you know what I mean?
[01:05:00]  Like the, the, the, before it became what it is today.
[01:05:04]  And like everyone I know kind of hated it.
[01:05:05]  You know what I mean?
[01:05:06]  Like you hate it, but you also like within that hate was like flashes of like pure, absolute like unadulterated electrical like love for for the bay and for for for the city for a lot of people.
[01:05:17]  I can say it.
[01:05:18]  You can't.
[01:05:18]  Exactly.
[01:05:19]  And so that's the whole thing.
[01:05:20]  It's like people would move to the Bay Area.
[01:05:22]  And I remember me and Max are always talking about this and like bitch about it.
[01:05:25]  We're like, who the fuck gave you, you little cocksock.
[01:05:30]  You think you can fucking move here and complain about crackheads?
[01:05:34]  The things I complain about?
[01:05:35]  Like I get to complain about those things.
[01:05:37]  Those are my friends.
[01:05:40]  And like that.
[01:05:41]  You don't even know where he pisses.
[01:05:42]  All right.
[01:05:43]  He doesn't even piss in that place most of the time.
[01:05:45]  Exactly.
[01:05:45]  You will, one time he pisses there this month and you complain about it.
[01:05:49]  And like to me, it's like, I think so many people, like, especially in this sort of like the digital age, like, I think that has really like so many social forces, not just fucking the internet, but like so many social forces have really made people like a lot of people.
[01:06:05]  And again, like obviously there's fucking millions, tens of millions of people in America who do not feel this way whatsoever.
[01:06:11]  But for like a huge urban middle class cohort, I would say, there's this like deep sense of like uprootedness or like no roots at all.
[01:06:20]  Like not even from where they're from.
[01:06:22]  And like that, I think has like a devastating like effect on the psyche of a huge amount of people in this urban middle class that like actually in a large part decides on much of what happens in the culture and like the culture writ large, you know what I mean?
[01:06:38]  Like social mores and stuff like that.
[01:06:40]  And so you have all of these like deeply neurotic people sort of running around major cities and just like insane, but also like they're all the journalists and stuff.
[01:06:51]  Well, it's interesting too, right?
[01:06:53]  Because all the jobs that this kind of like, you know, if you're thinking about one sort of like, you know, in San Francisco, right?
[01:06:58]  The kind of like professional, usually tech, adjacent worker that kind of came in and all of the offices and these, you know, all of the development that was built had all of the ennities of like a minor town inside of them.
[01:07:15]  It was like, here's your restaurants, here's your gyms, here's your yoga, here's your whatever else you would need.
[01:07:23]  And possibly like three non-denominational churches or something like that.

=== Suburbs Become Tech Campuses (02:54) ===

[01:07:28]  I don't know.
[01:07:28]  And I think that that will only, you know, as they're trying to like kind of figure out how to attract workers, right?
[01:07:37]  Because they're all competing with each other between Apple and Facebook and Twitter and all those guys and Google, of course.
[01:07:45]  You know, they all had to kind of ramp up what they were able to offer.
[01:07:48]  And so they're in a little arms race and building these kind of campuses and campuses.
[01:07:52]  The problem was that none of these people want to live actually in Palo Alto, or not even Palo Alto, I mean, Gwen, but like, you know, live in the suburbs.
[01:08:00]  In the suburbs.
[01:08:00]  They want to can the city.
[01:08:02]  Now, of course, COVID happens.
[01:08:06]  Yada yada yada.
[01:08:08]  I loved it.
[01:08:09]  And now everyone's like, oh no, we can't live in the city because it's all criminals.
[01:08:17]  Yeah.
[01:08:17]  Now I want to be in the suburbs.
[01:08:19]  Now you're trapped in here with me.
[01:08:20]  Yeah, right, yeah.
[01:08:21]  You know, and there's this entire like cultural shift.
[01:08:24]  Yeah.
[01:08:24]  And this happened.
[01:08:25]  This isn't the first time.
[01:08:26]  It's happening.
[01:08:26]  Really?
[01:08:26]  It's a taste.
[01:08:28]  You know, a shift in taste.
[01:08:29]  The yuppies did this too, though.
[01:08:30]  Yeah.
[01:08:31]  They fucked off to like Vermont for a while.
[01:08:34]  Also, like this happened.
[01:08:35]  And then there's also this figure in 80s movies that it's in Christmas vacation, but also most obviously Beetlejuice.
[01:08:44]  Which figure?
[01:08:45]  The figure of Beetlejuice?
[01:08:50]  No, the Dietses, right?
[01:08:53]  This yuppie family.
[01:08:56]  Because he gets his pool in Christmas vacation.
[01:08:58]  That's why he gets his pool.
[01:08:59]  Yeah.
[01:08:59]  Well, I love that pool.
[01:09:01]  Well, in Christmas vacation, I'm thinking of the neighbors.
[01:09:05]  Julia Louise Dreyfus, yeah, right, yeah.
[01:09:07]  Where they're just like, they're too hip.
[01:09:10]  They have terrible taste, or at least tastes that like normal people hate, right?
[01:09:14]  Yeah.
[01:09:14]  And it's this figure.
[01:09:16]  No, Margo.
[01:09:17]  Exactly.
[01:09:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:09:19]  And it's just like this gross person that wants to, well, in the case of Beetlejuice, right?
[01:09:25]  They actually did want to turn this small town into a theme park.
[01:09:31]  Right.
[01:09:31]  And it's this will to take the place that you're just a normal person in and like, have this person show up and be like, oh you're, this is so adorable, let me put a glass jar over it and sell you to people right.
[01:09:43]  Like that, that feeling um happens over and over.
[01:09:46]  Like that move happened several times in America.
[01:09:49]  It happened in the in about the 80s.
[01:09:51]  It's happening again now.
[01:09:52]  It happened uh, you know, actually right after, right after, even suburbs excerpts yeah yeah, and it actually happened after the the, the last big um pandemic the the the, the flu, the 1918 flu.
[01:10:04]  Like people people yeah, people like left New York City and uh, and went and lived in all the places that they're now trying to resettle again.
[01:10:11]  That's why there's all these cute little uh, Victorian farmhouses is because we, they built them from the with built-in painting couches yeah well yeah, damn.

=== Mass Produced Culture (09:26) ===

[01:10:22]  So in some ways crazy.
[01:10:25]  So it really is.
[01:10:25]  It does kind of feel like like, like the, the culture, trying to digest yeah, all this shit that it made and yeah, it's digesting shit.
[01:10:33]  Let's, let's keep going with that.
[01:10:34]  And I would say it's like actually kind of like happening private, like happening without even realizing it and and mimicking a lot of cycles of capital that's moving around, right.
[01:10:44]  Right, because you have to sink it.
[01:10:46]  You have to put it into something, because it's frothy and it's going.
[01:10:49]  It's moving around too much.
[01:10:50]  Yeah, you're right, and so right.
[01:10:52]  When there's there's nowhere else to develop and there's no money to actually put into cities anymore, it has to go somewhere else, right.
[01:10:59]  Then they start developing, new developments happen, new places emerge yeah, and people go and find them yeah.
[01:11:04]  Or, or you you uh, bulldoze the mall that you built in the 70s in the middle of the city and then put yeah yeah, you put up something that's called like live work environment or something creepy like that.
[01:11:15]  I will say this though, the food hall man.
[01:11:18]  I first found out about these little fucking cocksucking inventions like fucking I don't know.
[01:11:22]  Four or five years ago.
[01:11:24]  I went to some town And it was just like all of their food was in a hall.
[01:11:28]  And I was like, what?
[01:11:30]  What on earth are you thinking here?
[01:11:32]  This is crazy.
[01:11:33]  And it was like, you had to walk around and there's just a food court.
[01:11:36]  You have to, it's a food court.
[01:11:38]  It's the mall food court.
[01:11:39]  Exactly.
[01:11:39]  And like, it's crazy.
[01:11:40]  It's a food court for and by bon appetite.
[01:11:43]  Yes, but like all these, like, all these like towns now, every town has an arts district.
[01:11:48]  And what you're really looking at there is a deconstructed mall, right?
[01:11:51]  A deconstructed mall for somebody who would live in, you know, in BKL YN if their job wasn't out there.
[01:12:01]  You know what I mean?
[01:12:02]  And so it's like, you have your like lobster bisque or whatever, lobster ravioli and all these places.
[01:12:07]  And that's, by the way, you're really focused on the lobster.
[01:12:11]  I'm saying here, the way to eat lobster is a true Epicurean is this.
[01:12:14]  Okay.
[01:12:14]  A bib.
[01:12:17]  What's the gravy boat?
[01:12:18]  What's this called?
[01:12:19]  A gravy boat.
[01:12:20]  It's a bit like a gravy boat worth of butter.
[01:12:24]  The tiniest fork in human history.
[01:12:27]  And a female with delicate hands.
[01:12:29]  In fact, a spider-armed female with delicate hands and six forks to put them right on your tongue.
[01:12:37]  So, but like all these food courts, just like ravioli, and then there's like all, you know, there's, you can buy like arts and craft.
[01:12:42]  There's tchotchki stores.
[01:12:43]  That's something I noticed that open up.
[01:12:45]  Like a place that sells like cards, but candles too.
[01:12:47]  And then also like a few books and like, just, but it's like nice kind of and like expensive votive things they sell there.
[01:12:54]  And it's like, I realized like, oh, I'm just looking at an entire neighborhood now that is a mall.
[01:12:59]  And like every, because malls are kind of gauche and like not like artistic and they're not authentic enough.
[01:13:03]  Right.
[01:13:04]  I think people really were like, this is not authentic.
[01:13:06]  This is too like mass produced.
[01:13:07]  They're all chain stores.
[01:13:08]  Now we sell like shirts that say like have like a bear holding California and an outline that says Yosemite on it, but it's done cutesy 80s cartoon style.
[01:13:18]  And like that mass produced like sort of mass, not mass indie, like we might.
[01:13:25]  But it is kind of mass.
[01:13:26]  I call it predictably unique.
[01:13:28]  Yes.
[01:13:28]  In the book.
[01:13:29]  Yes, yes, yes.
[01:13:30]  And like, and the and the brew pub and the fucking crazy ass burger.
[01:13:34]  And like, but that it just sucks.
[01:13:36]  Right.
[01:13:36]  And like, it's like a burger that's like, it's got everything.
[01:13:40]  Yeah.
[01:13:40]  It's like, we put a rugler on it.
[01:13:42]  Has anyone ever done this before?
[01:13:47]  Yeah.
[01:13:47]  I mean, it's just like, and it's just all, and it just, it just drives me nuts.
[01:13:52]  Yeah.
[01:13:52]  And it's like, and it's crazy because all, all these towns in America now just like have the same thing.
[01:13:58]  Just like all cities basically have the same thing.
[01:14:01]  All these like smaller cities and smaller towns now also just literally have the same thing.
[01:14:05]  It's a subway.
[01:14:06]  Okay, everyone still has subway, which is, by the way, the worst fucking food establishment.
[01:14:11]  Someone tells me like subway.
[01:14:13]  I immediately take down their information from when the purge happens, you're a fucking my list is thousands long, disgusting, the stench of it.
[01:14:21]  But like all these small towns just look the same.
[01:14:23]  They have the same fucking thing.
[01:14:25]  All these big cities look the same.
[01:14:26]  They have the same fucking thing.
[01:14:27]  And they all sell it the same exact fucking way.
[01:14:30]  Where if you live here, you will feel authentic.
[01:14:32]  You will feel at home.
[01:14:33]  You will feel like a human being.
[01:14:34]  And it's a lie.
[01:14:35]  You never do.
[01:14:36]  You never, ever, ever even come close to feeling like a human being.
[01:14:40]  And I think that drives everyone insane.
[01:14:42]  Absolutely.
[01:14:42]  And that's why mass shootings happen.
[01:14:45]  I want to paint a really disturbing picture for you, right?
[01:14:49]  I think we'll put all this together.
[01:14:50]  Yeah.
[01:14:51]  Yeah.
[01:14:51]  Right.
[01:14:52]  So there's a building in Troy.
[01:14:54]  It's really big.
[01:14:54]  It's called the Headley Building, which is funny, right?
[01:14:57]  But it has painted on the side a mural of Arrow shirt collars, right?
[01:15:05]  Because as we talked about earlier, a detachable shirt collar comes from Troy, right?
[01:15:10]  And so it was manufactured in this building.
[01:15:12]  So they've made a mural of what used to happen inside the building on the side of the building.
[01:15:20]  The rest of the outside of the building was rehabbed in the 90s to remove any trace of character at all, right?
[01:15:28]  It's just like pure, smooth, gargoyles.
[01:15:32]  Right, exactly.
[01:15:32]  You got to get rid of those.
[01:15:34]  And then once you go inside, first floor, food hall.
[01:15:37]  Yes.
[01:15:38]  It has a restaurant called Homicidal.
[01:15:41]  Yes.
[01:15:42]  Oh, they all have that.
[01:15:43]  They all have like dick sucking chicken.
[01:15:45]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:15:46]  Or like Death's Door Taco.
[01:15:48]  Yes.
[01:15:48]  It's always like, it's the liquid death type of food.
[01:15:51]  Exactly.
[01:15:52]  Yeah.
[01:15:52]  There is a coffee company up there called like Deathwish Coffee.
[01:15:57]  Yeah.
[01:15:57]  It tastes like shit.
[01:15:58]  It's awful.
[01:15:58]  Yeah.
[01:15:59]  But okay, but that's.
[01:16:00]  That's in the name, really.
[01:16:00]  Yeah.
[01:16:01]  So jokes.
[01:16:02]  Yeah.
[01:16:02]  It's not really their fault.
[01:16:03]  Take the elevator.
[01:16:04]  Five floors up.
[01:16:05]  You're in City Hall.
[01:16:07]  What?
[01:16:07]  Yeah.
[01:16:07]  Fucking City Hall.
[01:16:09]  No.
[01:16:09]  They rent.
[01:16:10]  Our City Hall rents above.
[01:16:12]  From this foothall, dude?
[01:16:13]  Yeah.
[01:16:14]  Yeah.
[01:16:15]  And they rented.
[01:16:15]  When I'm trying to get married to a model.
[01:16:19]  You go into the rental?
[01:16:20]  I have to bring my blushing bride through the food through lines of corpulent maggots looking for their lobster fucking ravioli, my thin-legged, beautiful, gorgeous, beautiful wife.
[01:16:34]  On the push side, your little reception afterwards.
[01:16:38]  Table for six.
[01:16:39]  That homicidal.
[01:16:41]  There you go.
[01:16:42]  Well, David, thank you so much for joining us.
[01:16:45]  I'm glad I could ruin your day.
[01:16:47]  We have with us Jose A. Banks.
[01:16:53]  I would like the way you look.
[01:16:54]  Oh no, that's Joe A. Banks?
[01:16:57]  Where's Joseph?
[01:16:58]  Joseph Joseph?
[01:16:59]  Why do I think he's cursing all of you?
[01:17:01]  Also, Young Chomsky corrected me earlier because he said, actually, it's Joseph A. Bank.
[01:17:07]  It's a singular.
[01:17:09]  This is a, that's a Bernstein-Bernstein situation for me instead.
[01:17:12]  Yeah, no, this is like Tyra, right?
[01:17:15]  Yeah.
[01:17:15]  Yeah, Banks.
[01:17:16]  Yeah.
[01:17:16]  Well, David A. Bank.
[01:17:19]  What's the A stand for?
[01:17:20]  Adam.
[01:17:21]  Oh, that's it.
[01:17:23]  That's it.
[01:17:24]  David Adam Banks?
[01:17:25]  Yep, that's awesome.
[01:17:25]  Shouldn't it be like as Aztec?
[01:17:29]  Sure.
[01:17:30]  Yeah, let's go with the Addiction.
[01:17:31]  So we have with us David Aztec Banks, a professor.
[01:17:35]  Not a professor.
[01:17:36]  My bad, brother.
[01:17:38]  The professor of geography and planning at university.
[01:17:43]  Check this fucking shit out.
[01:17:44]  University at Albany.
[01:17:46]  Yeah.
[01:17:47]  Never heard of this in my life.
[01:17:48]  Not of Albany?
[01:17:49]  I was going in for a labor management meeting because I'm an officer in the union, and we're going to a labor management meeting, and the administrative office has like the names that the university has gone by since like 1875 or something.
[01:18:02]  And they keep fucking changing it.
[01:18:04]  Is there any cool name?
[01:18:05]  I looked for the most authentic name.
[01:18:07]  Are there any cool ones?
[01:18:08]  The first one was like the Albany Normal School.
[01:18:11]  Oh, bro.
[01:18:12]  No.
[01:18:13]  You'll never catch me.
[01:18:15]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:18:16]  Well, then it was called like the Albany quirked up school.
[01:18:19]  Yeah.
[01:18:19]  And so on.
[01:18:20]  Albany Funky White Boy Academy.
[01:18:23]  That's the thing.
[01:18:24]  I want to be honest with our listeners for a sec.
[01:18:26]  I've always been authentic.
[01:18:28]  I have been since the day I came out of the womb, crawling like a damn soldier in freaking training on my hands and knees like a dog also.
[01:18:37]  Authentically, yes.
[01:18:44]  So we have with us today Professor David A. Banks, Department of Geography and Planning at University at Albany with his tome, The City Authentic.
[01:18:54]  How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America.
[01:18:58]  Out soon on The Traitorous University of California Press.
[01:19:03]  Yeah, that'll be out in probably April.
[01:19:05]  Only available, only, only available at the combination record store, bookstore, and coffee shops near you.
[01:19:15]  Which, by the way, let me get this off my chest real quick.
[01:19:20]  Business owners, small business owners, which do make up our audience, if you are starting a record store and you are combining that with some other type of establishment, I'm thinking particularly of a vintage or coffee store, I will never fucking go in there because I know that your shit sucks.
[01:19:35]  I will never fucking enter your establishment because you are not a real rock and roller.
[01:19:39]  So if you want a business where Brace won't be visiting you, make sure to establish a record store slash coffee shop.
[01:19:48]  Yes, don't do that.

=== Boba Fett And Mandalorian Mysteries (05:31) ===

[01:20:05]  I know that every time I look at this poster that's on Young Chomsky's wall, I just read it as Boba Fett.
[01:20:12]  That is, that is, yeah.
[01:20:14]  Which I don't, what is that?
[01:20:16]  It says there is no Bafaet.
[01:20:17]  No, no, what's Boba Fett?
[01:20:19]  No, it's Bounty Hunter.
[01:20:20]  You don't know what Boba Fett, dude.
[01:20:23]  Here's my thing.
[01:20:25]  Dude, how on earth could you hate women?
[01:20:28]  You are fucking psych.
[01:20:30]  Who else is going to be like, what's Bob?
[01:20:33]  They are so beautiful and incredible.
[01:20:38]  Jesus Christ.
[01:20:40]  Boba Fett is a bounty hunter from Mandalorian.
[01:20:43]  No, he is Moba Glorian.
[01:20:44]  So Mandalorian.
[01:20:45]  He's from Mandalorian.
[01:20:46]  Wait, Mandalorian?
[01:20:47]  That's the cartoon?
[01:20:48]  No.
[01:20:49]  The Mandalorian is a Disney Plus television show that came out later.
[01:20:52]  Boba Fett.
[01:20:53]  Oh, wait, I'm thinking of the clones, Attack of the Clones.
[01:20:56]  That also wasn't a cartoon.
[01:20:57]  I think that was a movie.
[01:20:59]  But it was on the Clone Wars.
[01:21:01]  I never saw it, but that was either.
[01:21:03]  Cartoons are.
[01:21:04]  You just kind of absorb these things.
[01:21:05]  Yeah.
[01:21:06]  Wait, so Boba Fett's not in the real Star Wars.
[01:21:08]  So Boba Fett is in the real Star Wars.
[01:21:10]  He still stands behind.
[01:21:12]  Young Chompsy is gripping his knees right now.
[01:21:16]  You got to yell this so you can get in the mic.
[01:21:18]  What is it?
[01:21:18]  He was in Empire Strikes Back in the lineup on the Star Destroyer of all bounty hunters, and he looked so cool.
[01:21:24]  And people were like, oh, Boba Fett, and they brought him back in Return of the Jedi.
[01:21:27]  But then he was kind of like a fucking loser in Return of the Jedi.
[01:21:30]  Wait, but who was he in Return of the Jedi?
[01:21:32]  Tom Solo is blind, and they're like, Boba Fett.
[01:21:35]  He said, Boba Fett, where?
[01:21:36]  And he turns around and hits his jetpack.
[01:21:38]  He has a jetpack, famously.
[01:21:40]  And he flies and falls into the Sarlaq, which is like a vagina.
[01:21:44]  He does fall into a big pussy.
[01:21:46]  And that's the end.
[01:21:48]  I don't really remember that.
[01:21:49]  He escapes from Sarlacc.
[01:21:51]  Those are no longer canon.
[01:21:53]  But in the television show that they did make, The Mandalorian, he does emerge from the pussy.
[01:22:01]  He does, he, he, which I've never done.
[01:22:05]  So basically, he was just like someone that they were like, oh, all the fans love him.
[01:22:10]  So now we're going to make him a thing.
[01:22:12]  Yeah.
[01:22:12]  Background character, but his armor is super cool.
[01:22:15]  Like, you know how we have guests on sometimes and then we have him on again?
[01:22:18]  Yeah.
[01:22:18]  It's like that.
[01:22:19]  People are like, that guy was good.
[01:22:21]  Have him on again.
[01:22:22]  We should have David on again.
[01:22:24]  Which did we've had 50 Davids on?
[01:22:27]  The guy we just had on?
[01:22:28]  Yeah.
[01:22:28]  I would do that.
[01:22:29]  Only if we talk about Austin.
[01:22:31]  Boston, Austin.
[01:22:32]  What's the difference?
[01:22:34]  I think there's a big difference.
[01:22:36]  You know what?
[01:22:36]  I don't.
[01:22:37]  Where's the place you want to go?
[01:22:38]  Me?
[01:22:39]  All right.
[01:22:40]  I'll tell you completely honestly.
[01:22:42]  I would like to go.
[01:22:44]  I'd like to go to Italy at some point in my life.
[01:22:47]  Where?
[01:22:47]  In Italy?
[01:22:48]  I don't haven't really thought that far ahead.
[01:22:50]  I don't really.
[01:22:50]  I've been on one adult vacation in my life.
[01:22:53]  Yeah.
[01:22:53]  And it was to Syria.
[01:22:55]  That doesn't.
[01:22:56]  No, I went to Greece and Ukraine.
[01:22:58]  But I guess I'd probably go to Italy and figure out what's going on there.
[01:23:02]  Sure.
[01:23:03]  Select going on there.
[01:23:04]  The problem is, I always go.
[01:23:05]  Whenever I go on a vacation, I always go somewhere fucked up and miserable.
[01:23:08]  Sure.
[01:23:08]  I need to go somewhere normal.
[01:23:11]  Where would you go?
[01:23:12]  You know, recently I really want to go to Vietnam.
[01:23:19]  I've been having like a, I don't know, a fever dream about it.
[01:23:24]  But also, weirdly, India.
[01:23:26]  Huh.
[01:23:26]  Liz, like a fever dreaming.
[01:23:28]  Like, you're having like flashbacks.
[01:23:31]  No, I don't know what something is pulling me to Vietnam.
[01:23:35]  Is the sound of like bringing me back?
[01:23:42]  Liz was medevaced from Vietnam.
[01:23:43]  Liz was the only white white baby to escape during Operation Babylift.
[01:23:48]  Babylift.
[01:23:49]  Yeah, that thing was.
[01:23:50]  We should do an episode about that.
[01:23:51]  Yeah.
[01:23:51]  Lunchomsky, where would you go?
[01:23:54]  Well, just Portugal was very nice.
[01:23:56]  Lisbon was nice.
[01:23:57]  I would like to go to the Amalfi coast in Italy.
[01:24:00]  Uh-huh.
[01:24:01]  I have some things that I would like to do there.
[01:24:03]  Pause.
[01:24:04]  Do you have some people that you need to do you have some business to take care of?
[01:24:07]  Some fits that I would like to wear there.
[01:24:09]  Oh, okay.
[01:24:09]  Okay, pause.
[01:24:11]  Where else?
[01:24:13]  Israel again.
[01:24:14]  Okay, yeah, that you know what?
[01:24:16]  That's true.
[01:24:17]  Guys, what we honestly, well, you know, we went there last year and did those secret shows.
[01:24:22]  Sure.
[01:24:22]  We should do that again.
[01:24:24]  Because last time it was like kind of like we were responsible by the government, so it was like we couldn't really have like the full experience.
[01:24:29]  I think in order to make it cool, this is what bands always do.
[01:24:32]  They're like, we're going to play the Israel show because we want to like, we want Israelis and Palestinians to come together, and then we're going to play a show in Palestine or whatever.
[01:24:41]  Like, bands always do that.
[01:24:43]  Here's the thing: we're just doing Israel Palestinians only.
[01:24:47]  Here's my thing.
[01:24:47]  I don't want to do either of those, but I do want to do Riyadh.
[01:24:51]  Riyadh.
[01:24:52]  Yeah, we should.
[01:24:54]  We should.
[01:24:54]  You know what?
[01:24:55]  I've always wanted to do you know dog sleds?
[01:24:58]  I want one of those with people.
[01:24:59]  And I feel like Riyadh is where I could do that.
[01:25:02]  Yeah, or Qatar.
[01:25:03]  Or Qatar.
[01:25:04]  World Cup Baby, November.
[01:25:05]  Let's go.
[01:25:06]  Yeah, I do love football.
[01:25:08]  I love the football.
[01:25:09]  I feel like you first paused there for a second because you weren't sure which sport the World Cup was.
[01:25:14]  That's my problem, really, what they're doing over there.
[01:25:17]  Yeah, I mean, all right, yeah, we should go back.
[01:25:19]  All right.
[01:25:20]  You know what?

=== Riyadh Or Qatar (01:10) ===

[01:25:21]  Truanon Pact.
[01:25:22]  Next year, we're going back to Israel.
[01:25:24]  We're going back to Riyadh.
[01:25:26]  We're going back to Qatar.
[01:25:27]  We're going back to where other places people are like.
[01:25:30]  We're going back to Kiev.
[01:25:31]  We're doing that one.
[01:25:32]  But this time we're going armed.
[01:25:34]  We're going back to, you know what?
[01:25:36]  We'll leave it out.
[01:25:37]  We're going to Moscow.
[01:25:38]  We're going to go to Washington, D.C. as well.
[01:25:43]  Washington, D.C. With that being said, I love you.
[01:25:48]  I'm Liz.
[01:25:49]  I'm Brace.
[01:25:50]  We're joined by producer.
[01:25:53]  And this podcast, which was 95 minutes of us talking about whatever we'd like, is now over.
[01:26:00]  And it's called Truan.
[01:26:02]  Oh, wait.
[01:26:03]  We did that weird.
[01:26:04]  We did that weird.
[01:26:05]  Wait.
[01:26:05]  No, I'm going to save it because I'm going to say it doesn't matter.
[01:26:08]  We'll see you next time.
[01:26:10]  Bye-bye.
[01:26:22]  Jeffrey Lexter.
[01:26:25]  Jeff's got shooting.
[01:26:27]  Just Jeffrey Lexter.
[01:26:29]  Come out.
[01:26:30]  Come out.